8 ms·

I read the New York Times article on this yesterday and discussed it with my wife (neuroscientist). Our discussion went like this: Wife: "This is bonkers, the

• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Are you millennials? Because if so, welcome to the generation of older folks complaining about the younger folks.
  • qeternity 4y ago
    I find this bizarre. Nearly all of the systemic issues faced by Millennials are because Boomers feel entitled to a house that appreciates massively, and retirement account that only goes in one direction, etc. Boomers have massive economic entitlement. Gen Z have massive social entitlement. And Millennials are caught somewhere in the middle not feeling entitled to either, but struggling nonetheless.
    • reaperducer 4y ago
      The only difference between Boomers and Millennials is chronological. They both have the same sense of entitlement. They both have the same obsession with money. They both have the same persecution complex. And they love to blame each other for everything rather than face up to the fact that life isn't fair.
      • voisin 4y ago
        No, there are other, objective differences. Boomers, at the same age as millennials now, commanded a much, much larger proportion of the national wealth than millennials do now. This has been true, at the varying ages over time, of Boomers since they hit working age all the way through now to retirement age. If you don’t recognize the impact this has on both groups’ psyches, then I’m not sure what to say.
        • reaperducer 4y ago
          Boomers, at the same age as millennials now, commanded a much, much larger proportion of the national wealth than millennials do now. There's that obsession with money I mentioned. Moreover, Who cares? Lots of generations had less money than Millennials do now and still did great things. Are you under the impression that Millennials are entitled to a certain amount of money? There's that entitlement complex. Who told you that life is fair?
          • voisin 4y ago
            > Are you under the impression that Millennials are entitled to a certain amount of money? There's that entitlement complex. > Who told you that life is fair? All I said was that these facts have an impact on each group’s psyche and world outlook. Is that controversial to you?
      • vixen99 4y ago
        Attributing attitudes with feelings of entitlement, money obsession and persecution complex to millions of people in either group surely demands some evidence. Does this exist in some reasonably objective survey or is it assumed that if you're a Boomer or Millennial, you inevitably carry such baggage with you? It reads well but is it in fact valid to talk about internal states of mind in this way on the part of so many?
    • jmull 4y ago
      LOL, older people complain about the younger generation… and the younger generation complains about the older generation. You should realize: your problem with boomers is that they exist and act like human beings. It might be time to let this one go.
      • stonepresto 4y ago
        OK boomer ;)
      • kcplate 4y ago
        >You should realize: your problem with boomers is that they exist and act like human beings. It might be time to let this one go Hope you don’t mind, but I am saving this lovely little nugget of wisdom.
    • api 4y ago
      The problem is mostly housing: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...
    • spywaregorilla 4y ago
      Well as one of the last (meaning youngest) millenials, I grew up constantly being told MY generation was the entitled one. Participation trophies being the gold standard strawman argument, which was ironic given they were thrust upon us by the accusers. To turn around and now call Gen Z the entitled one seems stupidly forgetful.
  • AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
  • looprtq 4y ago
    One can go back to the ancient Greeks to find that pattern, but does it hold? If one subscribes to the theory that culture moves in cycles (hedonistic Weimar Republic, WW2, conservative backlash in the 1950s, left backlash in the 1960s, conservative backlash in the 1980s/1990s, woke backlash in the late 2000s), then sometimes the complaints are valid. Gen-Z has an unprecedented cancel power, anonymous reports, controlling speech of Gen-X. It has never been like this before. Certainly Gen-X disliked their older generations, too, but they didn't have the tools or the self-righteousness to openly intrigue against them. Gen-X is too soft to fight back, to the detriment of our society.
• Frost1x 4y ago
  >This is bonkers, the entire point of orgo is to cull the pre-med students. But why? Seems silly you use the mechanism of education as a filter and make a course obnoxiously and unnecessarily difficult for that purpose. Why not... filter pre-med students by simply limiting admission into the program? The earlier you make people seriously consider things the less time they waste and headache they endure. How many practicing medicine today actually use organic chemistry regularly? Most don't at least from the pool I've worked with (surgeons, internal medicine, pharmacists, nurses, etc.). Pharmacy is the closest but most rely on database systems outside of hospital pharmacists or active researchers in drugs.
  • ironSkillet 4y ago
    It's harder to gauge someone's ability when they come from outside the institution initially. Plus, since org Chem is not a freshman class typically, you give students some time to immerse themselves in the culture and standards of the school, and then give them a chance to prove themselves. My undergrad math program was the same - there was a difficult abstract linear algebra class that was the gate to being a pure math major.
  • what-the-grump 4y ago
    Don’t forget you the student get to blow money on this as well. Then professors get to call you entitled. The mental gymnastics that go in colleges are bonkers. I’m paying for my education, tell me exactly how hard, and what’s required, but don’t set up the ‘product’ to fail.
  • tsbischof 4y ago
    Part of it is to ensure that your medical students are not terrified by "chemicals". Plus, doing organic chemistry instills into you the idea that reactions may not be pure, and that enantiomers are both real and potentially problematic (see thalidomide). It is at minimum a way to get you to be able to ask critical questions when needed, even if there is already an infrastructure to answer those questions for you. It is sort of like learning C but programming solely in Python: you can get your job done, but when one of your abstractions breaks it is worthwhile to be able to at least identify the root cause and talk to the right people.
• lettergram 4y ago
  While I somewhat agree… For people who disagree with this, I ask them the following: “Think of the average person in generation / group <insert>. Would you want them defending you on trial for murder? How about fixing your break lines?” Young 20 somethings can do that today, but far fewer than a generation ago. Regardless, I actually think it’s far simpler. If I pay $60k/year, I can’t fail out. If the uni does fail me, they lose future revenue from donations and potentially my enrollment for future years.
  • rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    > If I pay $60k/year, I can’t fail out. That's some serious entitlement right here. Why can't you fail? What's the point of education then when all one needs to do is to pay some money and do their time?
    • what-the-grump 4y ago
      /s missing? Isn’t that what education is? Paying someone money and putting in the work?
      • cassianoleal 4y ago
        Of course not. You still need to actually learn the subjects and pass the exams. Putting in the work is not enough. The people who fail usually should fail. When I was doing CompSci most people would fail discrete maths 2-3 times until they managed to get it. It's a good thing that they failed the first few times. I don't see how that's bad, they didn't understand it at first.
      • rad_gruchalski 4y ago
        > Paying someone money and putting in the work? Yes. That's what it is. But it isn't "paying someone money and feeling entitled to finish because I paid the money".
        • what-the-grump 4y ago
• atonse 4y ago
  I never took orgo but had friends that did and even I remember how hard it was for them, it’s one of my memories from college.
• reaperducer 4y ago
  Yeah, I read this in the Times over the weekend, too. It's one thing for art or philosophy students to want an easier class. This is doctors. I don't want someone doing surgery on me who couldn't handle the workload and took the easy way out. Everything described in the article sounded just like my experience at two different colleges, and I wasn't in for something as important as medicine. If you can't handle the work, then maybe it's time to look at yourself and think that maybe you shouldn't be a doctor. There are plenty of other professions out there.
  • voisin 4y ago
    I don’t think anyone suggests that med school should be easy, but the difficulty should be in the core stuff that the end practitioner will need day to day, not something tangential to the practice.
    • reaperducer 4y ago
      I'm not a doctor, so I can't say what is tangential and what is not. But I don't want my doctor to only understand the core basics of medicine. I want her to understand how to diagnose any crazy thing I might show up in her office afflicted with.
      • voisin 4y ago
        You realize these decisions don’t come without cost, right? Your desire to ensure every doctor is an expert on organic chemistry means there are fewer doctors and those that make it through the gauntlet are paid more due to this scarcity despite the fact that they may be a general practitioner that almost never need organic chemistry skills in their practice. Everything is a trade off. If organic chemistry keeps your family doctor from diagnosing you with confidence, they can pass you to a specialist whose practice needs organic chemistry more regularly.
        • Turing_Machine 4y ago
          I'm pretty sure that passing undergraduate organic chemistry doesn't make you an "expert on organic chemistry".
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  > They have learned they should feel entitled to good things, like being treated well no matter their identity or background or whatever. Yikes? Everyone should be treated well, that's the default. I'm not saying the class should be simplified, but identity and background should not be a factor (educational background maybe, but that's assessed before people can attend uni).
  • anon84873628 4y ago
    I think they meant that is a "good" as in "acceptable" thing to feel entitled about, vs a "bad" or "unacceptable" thing to feel entitled about. (So there is a good or bad sense of entitlement). Not that "being treated well" is one of the "good things in life". A rather confusing way to state it.
• kristjansson 4y ago
  So basically stack ranking with a 33% attrition target? … I know, I know, it’s not exactly the same, but the logic is analogous. Hurting people so that an outcome matches some prespecified distribution is just lazy. Of course we should have hard classes, and of course some people that try a hard thing will fail, but they should fail on their own merit.
  • melling 4y ago
    “They weren't coming to class, that's for sure," said Jones. "They weren't watching the videos, and they weren't able to answer the questions."
  • dvt 4y ago
    Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Stack ranking is the laziest and, other than perhaps random sampling, the most idiotic way to "cull" a class. The only reason people are okay with it is the cycle of abuse: "I had to suffer through this, so, by golly, the next generation will have to as well!" You also see this in software engineering hiring processes ("well, if I had to whiteboard memoization, so will the new kids!"). The counter-example is trivial: suppose you have ten "Einsteins" in your class, but due to your dumb-ass stack ranked curve, you "cut" 4 of them. Congratulations, you just set back human progress 300 years. For the record, UCLA was equally-idiotic when it came to grading. Technically, getting an A+ (4.3) was possible, but they were virtually NEVER given out. Why? Who the fuck knows -- I asked multiple times what I could have done better. I only ever got a handful of A+'es (and basically had straight A's). As an aside, I wish I could nuke the entire educational system. It's corrupted by lazy and complacent professors (that clearly suck at their job: see the reproducibility crisis, p-hacking, etc.), a veritable swamp of administrators (syphoning six-figure salaries across the board), and bloated sports budgets. All while issuing unforgivable loans to record-high numbers of students.
    • zen_1 4y ago
      I'm not a chemist, but I'd imagine the ten Einsteins would all be able to pass undergrad orgo without too much pain (assuming they were interested in chemistry).
• kwhitefoot 4y ago
  I'm pretty confident that when I studied for my Applied Physics B.Sc. in the mid '70s that probably a third of all students in all disciplines in that university (Exeter, UK) either dropped out, failed to graduate, or barely scraped through with a pass degree. A significant minority dropped out after the first term, unable to cope with the need to push themselves instead of simply doing as they were told as they had done at school.
• fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  Disagree. I think calling this exchange “pretty insightful” is self-congratulatory, and the supposed insight speculative and conclusory. Generational reductionism aside, one has only to browse a few online forums dedicated to pre-med studies to note that organic chemistry continues to maintain its reputation as a “weed-out course” in practice and in reputation. It doesn’t strike me, based on their own words, that the current generation of students have any misapprehensions about the difficulty of the subject matter. The link between feelings of entitlement to basic social decency (which isn’t particular to any generation) and entitlement to academic success also wasn’t substantiated beyond the nominal misapplication of the words “explosion effect,” which isn’t a rigorous term appropriately derived from any science or art with which I’m familiar. Care to explain? I followed the benefit of the doubt through a few biological, psychological, sociological, and historical searches and found nothing that would apply to your conversation; unless you meant to reference quite literal chemical and physical explosions, which doesn’t follow in that context either.
• palmetieri2000 4y ago
  To summarize your point: "30% of class signs petition = Gen Z is spectacularly entitled" I see your prestigious ye olde education really heightened your critical thinking skills.