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I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleg

I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume, and having the desire for intellectual growth as a prerequisite just wouldn't scale. I also think that some of the classes I took (20 years ago, at a state school) would not be taught this way today. Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. Ditto even on a class that focused on Soviet dystopian literature taught by an emrigre. The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I say this as a person with 3 degrees. Higher education worked for me because I made sure it did and colleges were more old school then than now.

azinman2 4y ago
Re: critical analysis. I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for. > If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.
  - pacaro 4y ago
    There's a two edged sword here, both for the university student and the independent learner Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues) For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thinkers For those without access to the structure, the risk is that they become cranks These aren't absolutes, but they are observable trends [Edit: are —> aren't]
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but the things only stay stored for a certain amount of time or based on some other criteria like how much space is available or how frequently they are fetched and—- and you cut in and say “so a cache.” I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.
      - sitkack 4y ago
        Now we have LLMs which can name concepts by description! Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.
      - ericd 4y ago
        I think reimplementing that stuff is probably a big part of why you felt they were so brilliant, though - once you've built your own way up the tech tree, you can see the whole tree, and move around it at will, drawing disparate parts into solving whatever problem you have right then.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Arguably, the Cambodian people could have potentially avoided the genocidal deaths of millions of people by analyzing the weaknesses of the Soviet/Communist culture, weaknesses that repeatedly lead to mass death. Seems pretty meaningful and deserving of study to me.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    One of the problems with this argument is that the murderous Cambodian oligarchy consisted of graduates of Western universities. Intellectuals in general have espoused a lot of inhuman political ideologies.
  - randcraw 4y ago
    But would academic wisdom have avoided the rise of Pol Pot? The German people were pretty well educated and recently had been reminded of the cost of letting political forces spin out of control given the debacle and horrors of of WWI, yet they made the same mistakes as Cambodia in 1932 in allowing the rise of Hitler (whose Mein Kamph provided plenty of forewarning of an incoming regime based in hate). I don't see education as the solution to despotism. That requires a fair mind and rationality — neither of which has roots in book learning.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      I don't think 1920s-1930s Germany and 1970s Cambodia are comparable. By the 1970s there was a significant amount of hindsight available for any country that was aspiring to either ultra-nationalism or communism, not so much in the late 1920s when Russia was still in significant flux after Lenin's death. What would the Germans have compared the Nazi regime to?
  - syzarian 4y ago
    Communism does not lead to deaths and genocide. Concentrated, uncontested power does.
    - dahfizz 4y ago
- mantas 4y ago
  Cultures shall be analyzed as a whole, advantages, weakness and not skip infamous parts. Cherry picking is a direct way to indoctrination.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Ah yes, just like things such as slavery, Native American history, colonialism was glossed over in US History so that the great achievements could be celebrated, and we didn't have to actually think about who paid the price.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      When were these parts skipped in American education? As a high school student in mid-1990s, I was exposed to these a-plenty, not to mention college.
      - majormajor 4y ago
        My 1990s Texas high school was very... circumspect... in terms of how it talked about manifest destiny, slavery, and reconstruction. The majority of our history classes also frequently got bogged down before we could get to the civil rights movement and really have to go into the dirty little details of what the post-Civil-War US looked like.
    - mantas 4y ago
      Coming from the other side of the globe… I’d rather talk about USSR gulags, genocides by various Russian empires, Ottoman eastern-Europe-sourced slaves trade, slave sourcing themes in Africa lead by locals, crusades targeting Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and West selling out Eastern Europe…
- jackmott 4y ago
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- wolverine876 4y ago
  > inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative Are you in college? > can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for Wow. That's pretty wild! Can you back that up somehow? On the Internet, extreme statements somehow have more credibility. In college, more extreme statements require more extreme support for them. > Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study. What is more important than looking at ourselves in the mirror, and learning everything we can from others? It's not like we are doing so well right now.
  - mkl 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide It's not an extreme statement, just a brief description of well-known events.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      The statement didn't describe the Cambodian genocide. How about backing up the actual claim?
      - mkl 4y ago
        I suggest you read the article. If that doesn't answer your question I think you and I are interpreting the claim differently.
        wolverine876 4y ago
        I'm not reading articles (especially Wikipedia) and trying to infer your argument for you. You state it if you've got it. Stop making excuses. Assume I know about the Cambodian genocide.
        ricardobeat 4y ago
- mym1990 4y ago
  You really think that before this era of education there wasn't a meta-narrative and inconvenient truths were also hidden? Are you that naive?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. I agree. I had my best critical thinking class in community college. If I was innately smart, I probably would not have needed it as badly, but that one class gave me a lot of foundation and some credence to 'education' being useful. In other words, I am not smart, but I am educated. Overall, I think society benefits from that. But that was 2 year community college after which I transferred ( and later got an MBA ).
- happytesd8889 4y ago
  People always use this term "critical thinking" on the internet and I am not sure anybody that uses it has a good definition of what it means or why it is something that can or must be taught in a college kind of environment. At least personally, it's concerning to find out how many people think they are thinking critically all the time, but are not able to think critically about the definition of critical thinking. It seems to me that there are several common ways people define the term: 1. To mean any innate interest or drive whatsoever for knowledge in any topic that is remotely academic or related to something academic. Typically in the context of something free-form and not guided by an instructor. 2. To mean the ability to re-evaluate beliefs shaped by the knowledge you have previously absorbed. This is the most common definition but also the most problematic since it rarely involves questioning your beliefs about critical thinking itself in the future. In essence you are replacing one source of truth with another source of truth making claims based on authority. This often leads to the typical "I learned about critical thinking, now I will reject anything my parents say as false and things my school says as true". I don't believe that is what is meant by this definition, but it is unfortunately very common for people to leave their "critical thinking class" with that kind of takeaway. They also might leave their critical thinking class with the tendency to come up with meta questions and meta narratives and then put them on the internet a bit like what I'm doing. I hate that as well since it's incredibly annoying. 3. To mean the ability to come up with solutions to a novel problem; to synthesize information from a variety of sources and come to a conclusion substantially different from each source individually.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Balgair 4y ago
As an uncle told me many moons ago: Do more in college. Write a rock opera, spend a week curled up in the union learning about black holes, be good enough to tutor. Don't just graduate with nothing but a taste for bad jazz and cheap beer.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Or, as cousin Melchior put it, 'anything other than a first or a fourth is wasted'. (Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Not sure how internationally read it is, but a worthwhile classic. British degrees are classified from firsts to thirds (via upper and lower second class honours) - but the story is (initially) set at Oxford, which at the time awarded fourths.)
  - Balgair 4y ago
    Thanks for the reccomendation! I am a bit confused though. Is 'a first' the top score on an exam or like a suma cum laude? Free link to the book here: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945-00-h.html https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/w...
    - OJFord 4y ago
      People sometimes talk about it in terms of exams in the sense that they'd achieve a first overall if that exam was 'it', or that it brings their average up etc. - but strictly speaking you can only achieve first class (or any other) honours for the degree as a whole. It's commonly (but not necessarily) >70% overall. Equivalent to achieving some high GPA range.
      - zinckiwi 4y ago
        American translation: graduating with anything other than a 4.0 or a 1.0 is wasted.
        OJFord 4y ago
patja 4y ago
> Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume I think this depends quite a bit on your socioeconomic class. Overall in the US, only about 1/3 finish a college degree
- xyzelement 4y ago
  You get the point I'm making though, right? :) If you want to sell your product to 33% percent of kids, your product has to be very easy to consume.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that college is a standardized product? Most people can get through a generally non-selective state school--and, to be clear, some of those graduates have done extraordinarily well for themselves. But selective elite schools aren't selling their product to 33% of kids.
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      I am making a generic comment. For college to be accessible intellectually to 33% of people, the barrier to entry (amount of mental effort and desire to learn) has to be pretty low. Doesn't mean it has to apply to every student or school. This thread was about "college" generically, not about MIT.
JAlexoid 4y ago
You have a very weird understanding on how colleges today operate. There has been a lot of progress in exposing students to broad and multifaceted view of human endeavours. Aboriginal cultures are portrayed in full and with their negative and positive aspects in courses about them. I literally had a course on pre-colonial American cultures... that included all aspects of culture. What would be racist - is having presenting a very lopsided view on what happened before colonial era replaced those cultures in the "new world"
quadrifoliate 4y ago
> Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. This is bullshit. The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis, whereas 20 years ago there was probably a fair bit of "they are savages to be studied, whereas we are civilized" complex going on. Guess what, that tends to temper critical analysis of other cultures as well, and focuses on understanding without judgement. It is dishonest to cast this as "a priori admiration". > The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college, you can continue to study outside things while you are at college. The problem for most people seems to be that at a college, these ideas will be subjected to rigorous intellectual analysis, whereas on the Internet it's easier to hide in echo chambers where everyone agrees with you. > I say this as a person with 3 degrees...colleges were more old school then than now. I think this is little more than viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off. I highly recommend against the Internet as a substitute for actual college education because it's not "old school" any more.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  // The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis These was definitely no shortage of ability to analyze and criticize western civilization in a college 20 years ago. // An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college You are replying to a comment about what is accessible. College does not preclude internet. College however is an extremely large resource and time commitment. Therefore ability to learn outside of that is a great addition. // Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off. Agreed. Hence the article we are all talking about - people wisely chosing to forego college as a default.
  - davidgay 4y ago
wolverine876 4y ago
> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures If we are going to be collegiate, let's critically examine our own posts. What is that based on? It doesn't match what I know.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  If you want to be collegiate this literally happened a year ago[0]: > When Professor Stuart Reges challenged the University of Washington’s position on land acknowledgements, administrators punished him, undermining his academic freedom But don't worry, you don't have to go so far as critically teaching about all the aspects of different cultures to risk being accused as a racist on college campuses. I also remember the racist rock from a couple years ago[1]: > The University of Wisconsin removed a 42-ton boulder from its Madison campus Friday after complaints from students of color who called the rock a symbol of racism. [0]: https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-professor-sues-university-washington-after-admins-punish-him-inappropriate-opinion https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-professor-sues-universi... [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/us/chamberlin-rock-removed-university-of-wisconsin-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/us/chamberlin-rock-removed-un...
  - quadrifoliate 4y ago
    Stuart Reges seems like a well-known controversy generator, looks like he was in the news about this other thing [0] a while ago as well. Given this background, I think it is a mark of academic freedom that literally all the university did was offer a separate course section for people who wanted it. I fail to see how he is being retaliated against in any way -- if the university is offering an alternative to his course for people who want to exercise their academic freedom, why is he against that? Sounds like it should be useful to promote free thought! You can either take the course where the whackjob professor has weird takes on women and code, and rails against acknowledging Native American tribes in a computer science course -- or you can take the course that, you know, focuses on computer science. And hey, maybe the whackjob professor is a good enough teacher that his content outweighs the land theory nonsense, and people actually take his course? I certainly know a lot of good professors I learned from at college were eccentric. I admit the second one is far-fetched and weird; but almost entirely removed from academia. Sounds to me like a bunch of administrators making work to justify their own inflated salaries. ---------------------------------------- [0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont-women-code-a-uw-lecturers-answer-draws-heat/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont...
rootusrootus 4y ago
> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical of white people or positive about minorities. I don't know how we got to this place, but damn, it sucks. The 90s seem so quaint by comparison. I'm already looking back and thinking that 80s/90s were a really special era. After a bunch of crazy shit, and before the next wave. Not perfect, there were some incidents, but it just pales in comparison to what happens every year now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jackcosgrove 4y ago
  The 80s and the 90s do seem in retrospect to be exemplars of what I consider the college experience. By the end of the 80s, the canon wars had been fought and lost, so any topic was fair game for study. In loco parentis had been gone for a while. Ethnic boundaries were all but gone, and class boundaries were disappearing as well as more people went to college. By the time the 90s rolled around university life seemed to be the free-wheeling intellectual pursuit with a healthy dose of libertinism that I considered the college experience. I grew up in that era, so maybe I am just a product of it. But there seems to be something pure in that model of university life. In later years after the 90s, taboo subjects became more common, in loco parentis returned under the guise of limiting legal liability, tuition costs made class differences more stark, and most sadly of all I think we've lost a bit of the universality of the human experience thing, and focus too much on identity and how that divides people.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    I suspect in the 80s the job market was acting like having a degree implied a graduate was in the top 5% of humans by ability. Now it'll be more like top 33%. That is getting dangerously close to signalling that someone has a warm body as opposed to an unusually bright mind. I suspect that is the driver behind a lot of the points you make - it isn't possible for universities to maintain a little culture of intellectual curiosity off on the side when double-digit percentages of the population are moving through them.
majormajor 4y ago
> Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It is amazing how many people here are accepting with and agreeing with this statement with no citations at all. No links to syllabuses of syncophant-led culturally-censored classes. No links to anything about old courses getting cancelled or changed. Just a "everybody knows" claim that is either believed or not depending on previous biases.

azinman2 4y ago

Re: critical analysis. I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for. > If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.

xyzelement 4y ago
Re second point, I mean something else. 200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated. So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people. Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.
- pacaro 4y ago
  There's a two edged sword here, both for the university student and the independent learner Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues) For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thinkers For those without access to the structure, the risk is that they become cranks These aren't absolutes, but they are observable trends [Edit: are —> aren't]
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    The self-taught path can also lead to another kind of deficiency, which is someone who knows all the concepts but doesn’t know how to talk about them efficiently. This ends up being the type of person who spends 5 minutes describing a component of their design where items are stored based on a key and can be looked up by that key so another process can stash and retrieve those things rather than recompute them but the things only stay stored for a certain amount of time or based on some other criteria like how much space is available or how frequently they are fetched and—- and you cut in and say “so a cache.” I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Now we have LLMs which can name concepts by description! Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.
    - ericd 4y ago
      I think reimplementing that stuff is probably a big part of why you felt they were so brilliant, though - once you've built your own way up the tech tree, you can see the whole tree, and move around it at will, drawing disparate parts into solving whatever problem you have right then.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Arguably, the Cambodian people could have potentially avoided the genocidal deaths of millions of people by analyzing the weaknesses of the Soviet/Communist culture, weaknesses that repeatedly lead to mass death. Seems pretty meaningful and deserving of study to me.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  One of the problems with this argument is that the murderous Cambodian oligarchy consisted of graduates of Western universities. Intellectuals in general have espoused a lot of inhuman political ideologies.
- randcraw 4y ago
  But would academic wisdom have avoided the rise of Pol Pot? The German people were pretty well educated and recently had been reminded of the cost of letting political forces spin out of control given the debacle and horrors of of WWI, yet they made the same mistakes as Cambodia in 1932 in allowing the rise of Hitler (whose Mein Kamph provided plenty of forewarning of an incoming regime based in hate). I don't see education as the solution to despotism. That requires a fair mind and rationality — neither of which has roots in book learning.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I don't think 1920s-1930s Germany and 1970s Cambodia are comparable. By the 1970s there was a significant amount of hindsight available for any country that was aspiring to either ultra-nationalism or communism, not so much in the late 1920s when Russia was still in significant flux after Lenin's death. What would the Germans have compared the Nazi regime to?
- syzarian 4y ago
  Communism does not lead to deaths and genocide. Concentrated, uncontested power does.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
mantas 4y ago
Cultures shall be analyzed as a whole, advantages, weakness and not skip infamous parts. Cherry picking is a direct way to indoctrination.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Ah yes, just like things such as slavery, Native American history, colonialism was glossed over in US History so that the great achievements could be celebrated, and we didn't have to actually think about who paid the price.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    When were these parts skipped in American education? As a high school student in mid-1990s, I was exposed to these a-plenty, not to mention college.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      My 1990s Texas high school was very... circumspect... in terms of how it talked about manifest destiny, slavery, and reconstruction. The majority of our history classes also frequently got bogged down before we could get to the civil rights movement and really have to go into the dirty little details of what the post-Civil-War US looked like.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Coming from the other side of the globe… I’d rather talk about USSR gulags, genocides by various Russian empires, Ottoman eastern-Europe-sourced slaves trade, slave sourcing themes in Africa lead by locals, crusades targeting Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and West selling out Eastern Europe…
jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
wolverine876 4y ago
> inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative Are you in college? > can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for Wow. That's pretty wild! Can you back that up somehow? On the Internet, extreme statements somehow have more credibility. In college, more extreme statements require more extreme support for them. > Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study. What is more important than looking at ourselves in the mirror, and learning everything we can from others? It's not like we are doing so well right now.
- mkl 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide It's not an extreme statement, just a brief description of well-known events.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    The statement didn't describe the Cambodian genocide. How about backing up the actual claim?
    - mkl 4y ago
      I suggest you read the article. If that doesn't answer your question I think you and I are interpreting the claim differently.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        I'm not reading articles (especially Wikipedia) and trying to infer your argument for you. You state it if you've got it. Stop making excuses. Assume I know about the Cambodian genocide.
        ricardobeat 4y ago
mym1990 4y ago
You really think that before this era of education there wasn't a meta-narrative and inconvenient truths were also hidden? Are you that naive?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

<< But I wouldn’t dismiss its value in being taught how to think. I agree. I had my best critical thinking class in community college. If I was innately smart, I probably would not have needed it as badly, but that one class gave me a lot of foundation and some credence to 'education' being useful. In other words, I am not smart, but I am educated. Overall, I think society benefits from that. But that was 2 year community college after which I transferred ( and later got an MBA ).

happytesd8889 4y ago
People always use this term "critical thinking" on the internet and I am not sure anybody that uses it has a good definition of what it means or why it is something that can or must be taught in a college kind of environment. At least personally, it's concerning to find out how many people think they are thinking critically all the time, but are not able to think critically about the definition of critical thinking. It seems to me that there are several common ways people define the term: 1. To mean any innate interest or drive whatsoever for knowledge in any topic that is remotely academic or related to something academic. Typically in the context of something free-form and not guided by an instructor. 2. To mean the ability to re-evaluate beliefs shaped by the knowledge you have previously absorbed. This is the most common definition but also the most problematic since it rarely involves questioning your beliefs about critical thinking itself in the future. In essence you are replacing one source of truth with another source of truth making claims based on authority. This often leads to the typical "I learned about critical thinking, now I will reject anything my parents say as false and things my school says as true". I don't believe that is what is meant by this definition, but it is unfortunately very common for people to leave their "critical thinking class" with that kind of takeaway. They also might leave their critical thinking class with the tendency to come up with meta questions and meta narratives and then put them on the internet a bit like what I'm doing. I hate that as well since it's incredibly annoying. 3. To mean the ability to come up with solutions to a novel problem; to synthesize information from a variety of sources and come to a conclusion substantially different from each source individually.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Balgair 4y ago

As an uncle told me many moons ago: Do more in college. Write a rock opera, spend a week curled up in the union learning about black holes, be good enough to tutor. Don't just graduate with nothing but a taste for bad jazz and cheap beer.

OJFord 4y ago
Or, as cousin Melchior put it, 'anything other than a first or a fourth is wasted'. (Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Not sure how internationally read it is, but a worthwhile classic. British degrees are classified from firsts to thirds (via upper and lower second class honours) - but the story is (initially) set at Oxford, which at the time awarded fourths.)
- Balgair 4y ago
  Thanks for the reccomendation! I am a bit confused though. Is 'a first' the top score on an exam or like a suma cum laude? Free link to the book here: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945-00-h.html https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/w...
  - OJFord 4y ago
    People sometimes talk about it in terms of exams in the sense that they'd achieve a first overall if that exam was 'it', or that it brings their average up etc. - but strictly speaking you can only achieve first class (or any other) honours for the degree as a whole. It's commonly (but not necessarily) >70% overall. Equivalent to achieving some high GPA range.
    - zinckiwi 4y ago
      American translation: graduating with anything other than a 4.0 or a 1.0 is wasted.
      - OJFord 4y ago

patja 4y ago

> Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost everyone" is expected to consume I think this depends quite a bit on your socioeconomic class. Overall in the US, only about 1/3 finish a college degree

xyzelement 4y ago
You get the point I'm making though, right? :) If you want to sell your product to 33% percent of kids, your product has to be very easy to consume.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that college is a standardized product? Most people can get through a generally non-selective state school--and, to be clear, some of those graduates have done extraordinarily well for themselves. But selective elite schools aren't selling their product to 33% of kids.
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    I am making a generic comment. For college to be accessible intellectually to 33% of people, the barrier to entry (amount of mental effort and desire to learn) has to be pretty low. Doesn't mean it has to apply to every student or school. This thread was about "college" generically, not about MIT.

JAlexoid 4y ago

You have a very weird understanding on how colleges today operate. There has been a lot of progress in exposing students to broad and multifaceted view of human endeavours. Aboriginal cultures are portrayed in full and with their negative and positive aspects in courses about them. I literally had a course on pre-colonial American cultures... that included all aspects of culture. What would be racist - is having presenting a very lopsided view on what happened before colonial era replaced those cultures in the "new world"

quadrifoliate 4y ago

> Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. This is bullshit. The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis, whereas 20 years ago there was probably a fair bit of "they are savages to be studied, whereas we are civilized" complex going on. Guess what, that tends to temper critical analysis of other cultures as well, and focuses on understanding without judgement. It is dishonest to cast this as "a priori admiration". > The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet. An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college, you can continue to study outside things while you are at college. The problem for most people seems to be that at a college, these ideas will be subjected to rigorous intellectual analysis, whereas on the Internet it's easier to hide in echo chambers where everyone agrees with you. > I say this as a person with 3 degrees...colleges were more old school then than now. I think this is little more than viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off. I highly recommend against the Internet as a substitute for actual college education because it's not "old school" any more.

xyzelement 4y ago
// The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis These was definitely no shortage of ability to analyze and criticize western civilization in a college 20 years ago. // An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college You are replying to a comment about what is accessible. College does not preclude internet. College however is an extremely large resource and time commitment. Therefore ability to learn outside of that is a great addition. // Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off. Agreed. Hence the article we are all talking about - people wisely chosing to forego college as a default.
- davidgay 4y ago

wolverine876 4y ago

> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures If we are going to be collegiate, let's critically examine our own posts. What is that based on? It doesn't match what I know.

_gabe_ 4y ago
If you want to be collegiate this literally happened a year ago[0]: > When Professor Stuart Reges challenged the University of Washington’s position on land acknowledgements, administrators punished him, undermining his academic freedom But don't worry, you don't have to go so far as critically teaching about all the aspects of different cultures to risk being accused as a racist on college campuses. I also remember the racist rock from a couple years ago[1]: > The University of Wisconsin removed a 42-ton boulder from its Madison campus Friday after complaints from students of color who called the rock a symbol of racism. [0]: https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-professor-sues-university-washington-after-admins-punish-him-inappropriate-opinion https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-professor-sues-universi... [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/us/chamberlin-rock-removed-university-of-wisconsin-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/us/chamberlin-rock-removed-un...
- quadrifoliate 4y ago
  Stuart Reges seems like a well-known controversy generator, looks like he was in the news about this other thing [0] a while ago as well. Given this background, I think it is a mark of academic freedom that literally all the university did was offer a separate course section for people who wanted it. I fail to see how he is being retaliated against in any way -- if the university is offering an alternative to his course for people who want to exercise their academic freedom, why is he against that? Sounds like it should be useful to promote free thought! You can either take the course where the whackjob professor has weird takes on women and code, and rails against acknowledging Native American tribes in a computer science course -- or you can take the course that, you know, focuses on computer science. And hey, maybe the whackjob professor is a good enough teacher that his content outweighs the land theory nonsense, and people actually take his course? I certainly know a lot of good professors I learned from at college were eccentric. I admit the second one is far-fetched and weird; but almost entirely removed from academia. Sounds to me like a bunch of administrators making work to justify their own inflated salaries. ---------------------------------------- [0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont-women-code-a-uw-lecturers-answer-draws-heat/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont...

rootusrootus 4y ago

> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical of white people or positive about minorities. I don't know how we got to this place, but damn, it sucks. The 90s seem so quaint by comparison. I'm already looking back and thinking that 80s/90s were a really special era. After a bunch of crazy shit, and before the next wave. Not perfect, there were some incidents, but it just pales in comparison to what happens every year now.

deleted 4y ago
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jackcosgrove 4y ago
The 80s and the 90s do seem in retrospect to be exemplars of what I consider the college experience. By the end of the 80s, the canon wars had been fought and lost, so any topic was fair game for study. In loco parentis had been gone for a while. Ethnic boundaries were all but gone, and class boundaries were disappearing as well as more people went to college. By the time the 90s rolled around university life seemed to be the free-wheeling intellectual pursuit with a healthy dose of libertinism that I considered the college experience. I grew up in that era, so maybe I am just a product of it. But there seems to be something pure in that model of university life. In later years after the 90s, taboo subjects became more common, in loco parentis returned under the guise of limiting legal liability, tuition costs made class differences more stark, and most sadly of all I think we've lost a bit of the universality of the human experience thing, and focus too much on identity and how that divides people.
- roenxi 4y ago
  I suspect in the 80s the job market was acting like having a degree implied a graduate was in the top 5% of humans by ability. Now it'll be more like top 33%. That is getting dangerously close to signalling that someone has a warm body as opposed to an unusually bright mind. I suspect that is the driver behind a lot of the points you make - it isn't possible for universities to maintain a little culture of intellectual curiosity off on the side when double-digit percentages of the population are moving through them.

majormajor 4y ago

> Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It is amazing how many people here are accepting with and agreeing with this statement with no citations at all. No links to syllabuses of syncophant-led culturally-censored classes. No links to anything about old courses getting cancelled or changed. Just a "everybody knows" claim that is either believed or not depending on previous biases.