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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 f

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.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - hamburglar 4y ago
        No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch when it could have been pulled off the shelf wasted a lot of time debugging and running into mistakes that other people had already run into and solved. His brilliance meant we succeeded in spite of this stupid habit.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    I think pre-U education should focus on didactics and metacognition, philosophy, logic and the scientific method. To really focus on the thinking behind the thinking, to never do it by accident. University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school. As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :) We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      You just end up kicking the can around the same problem. While college education being dumbed down is a typical topic, the exact same is earlier education - and also for the exact same reason. Here [1] is an 8th grade exam from 1912. Good luck! The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable. [1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...
      - pdntspa 4y ago
        How dumb is your expected audience if that test required a "good luck!" It's like basic math....
        bumby 4y ago
        >it’s like basic math Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties? I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    The narrow thinkers / cranks dilemma is beautifully described, thank you. You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently. One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.
    - Animats 4y ago
      > One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks. One word. Derrida. ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        Speaking of blithering, you are only parroting some Internet tropes in an echo chamber (which is probably where you learned them). You know by now that such things are nonsense; they are a waste of time and a poison to knowledge and reason. And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days. What have you read recently?
        Animats 4y ago
        > What have you read recently? "Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)
        runlaszlorun 4y ago
        I’m going out on a limb here… but did they all tell you about how hard ‘hell week’ was?
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities). Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.
    - pacaro 4y ago
      So not only have I studied at a university (a canonically prestigious university FWIW), I have also had the good fortune to work closely with academics and researchers in my career. I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation. How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either) I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        > How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible. > I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own. Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    As far as generalizations go, this is as good as it gets. Well put. To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different. As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  I get what you are saying, but most people couldn’t afford the journal subscriptions necessary to get a graduate education, or to learn any field in depth. Hopefully open access obviates this problem. The other value of being on campus is having access to professors. Not clear how to find the same master-apprentice relationship outside of academia for some fields.
- psyklic 4y ago
  > Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my choosing This is true, but in practice few people do it. Most people will not have much time left for study alongside a job. And without the "friction"/motivation college brings, most people will not learn anywhere near as much.
- dr_kiszonka 4y ago
  > I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment Genuine question: how do you get those people to talk to you? (I am assuming you are not famous or wealthy enough to pay them to talk to you; I am neither.)
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?

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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      No, the brilliance was evidenced elsewhere. The fact that this person was unaware of (or didn’t appreciate) prior art and had to invent everything from scratch when it could have been pulled off the shelf wasted a lot of time debugging and running into mistakes that other people had already run into and solved. His brilliance meant we succeeded in spite of this stupid habit.
- sitkack 4y ago
  I think pre-U education should focus on didactics and metacognition, philosophy, logic and the scientific method. To really focus on the thinking behind the thinking, to never do it by accident. University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school. As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :) We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    You just end up kicking the can around the same problem. While college education being dumbed down is a typical topic, the exact same is earlier education - and also for the exact same reason. Here [1] is an 8th grade exam from 1912. Good luck! The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable. [1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      How dumb is your expected audience if that test required a "good luck!" It's like basic math....
      - bumby 4y ago
        >it’s like basic math Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties? I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  The narrow thinkers / cranks dilemma is beautifully described, thank you. You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently. One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.
  - Animats 4y ago
    > One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks. One word. Derrida. ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      Speaking of blithering, you are only parroting some Internet tropes in an echo chamber (which is probably where you learned them). You know by now that such things are nonsense; they are a waste of time and a poison to knowledge and reason. And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days. What have you read recently?
      - Animats 4y ago
        > What have you read recently? "Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)
        runlaszlorun 4y ago
        I’m going out on a limb here… but did they all tell you about how hard ‘hell week’ was?
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities). Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.
  - pacaro 4y ago
    So not only have I studied at a university (a canonically prestigious university FWIW), I have also had the good fortune to work closely with academics and researchers in my career. I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation. How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either) I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible. > I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too. Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own. Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.
- klabb3 4y ago
  As far as generalizations go, this is as good as it gets. Well put. To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different. As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?
avidphantasm 4y ago
I get what you are saying, but most people couldn’t afford the journal subscriptions necessary to get a graduate education, or to learn any field in depth. Hopefully open access obviates this problem. The other value of being on campus is having access to professors. Not clear how to find the same master-apprentice relationship outside of academia for some fields.
psyklic 4y ago
> Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my choosing This is true, but in practice few people do it. Most people will not have much time left for study alongside a job. And without the "friction"/motivation college brings, most people will not learn anywhere near as much.
dr_kiszonka 4y ago
> I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment Genuine question: how do you get those people to talk to you? (I am assuming you are not famous or wealthy enough to pay them to talk to you; I am neither.)

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?