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Is it low? That the issues of quality and rigor are being discussed is a good sign in my opinion. The expectation of continual progess at some constant, quantif

Is it low? That the issues of quality and rigor are being discussed is a good sign in my opinion. The expectation of continual progess at some constant, quantifiable rate is what has been most at fault with industrial science, but that expectation is now diminishing. Also, I think that the wider public now has a greater appreciation that vigourous debate and disagreement is to be expected amongst the scientific community and that it's a good thing too.

shrimp_emoji 2y ago
Trust of academia is low and decreasing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-hig... > Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%). Not surprising when all academic institutions are politically captured by one side which suppresses and promotes ideas to further its agenda. Recently, student support for Hamas after October 7 was a spectacular flower that could only grow in an ideological hothouse like what academia's become, and I don't think that's helped. They seem to be getting the idea a little with Ivies now doing away with their creepy diversity statement requirements.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  I think it's fairer to say that the other side has abandoned the academia. In the traditional Western culture, classical education was basically required for being part of the elite. If you could not participate in a refined discussion on topics elites were expected to know, other elites would not take you seriously. But over time, the society became more meritocratic and education became more narrowly focused on employment. Today you can be a CEO without knowing classical Greek and Latin. You can call yourself a conservative without having liberal arts education. When social sciences and humanities are no longer something inherently appealing to conservatives, those fields are left to people with other motivations for studying them.
  - nuc1e0n 2y ago
    I suppose education being a sign of prestige was a symptom of knowledge being difficult to replicate. Books used to take a lot of knowledge and skill to reproduce and were therefore rare and expensive. So the greatest benefit of attending a university was access to its library. In today's information society it's now hard for anyone to prevent the copying of what can be stored in computer files. Because information was difficult to obtain, what was actually useful wasn't easy to identify and students relied on authority figures to tell them what was and what wasn't. Those authority figures themselves often had unsystematic and biased viewpoints which they then passed on to the next generation. Years ago, Latin grammar was the gold standard by which all other languages were judged (perhaps as a legacy of the Roman empire). English grammar, along with that of most other world languages, is somewhat structurally different to Latin and difficult to shoehorn into the Latin model. In my opinion this has had a detrimental effect on multinational relations. Linguistics as a whole has only in the last few decades escaped from the missteps caused by classical education, with the rise of computer science and computer assisted comparative linguistic models. Google switched to other methods than those of traditional grammar for Google Translate and saw greater utility for end users as a result. Perhaps the results aren't especially idiomatic to the target language, but they have been very useful. Maybe classical education was never that useful relative to what's available now and those who prize it have stockholm syndrome, perhaps with some rationale like "I had to go through it in my day, so students of today should too". I think any attempt to maintain a scarcity of knowledge artificially now would be counter productive.

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

Trust of academia is low and decreasing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-hig... > Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%). Not surprising when all academic institutions are politically captured by one side which suppresses and promotes ideas to further its agenda. Recently, student support for Hamas after October 7 was a spectacular flower that could only grow in an ideological hothouse like what academia's become, and I don't think that's helped. They seem to be getting the idea a little with Ivies now doing away with their creepy diversity statement requirements.

jltsiren 2y ago
I think it's fairer to say that the other side has abandoned the academia. In the traditional Western culture, classical education was basically required for being part of the elite. If you could not participate in a refined discussion on topics elites were expected to know, other elites would not take you seriously. But over time, the society became more meritocratic and education became more narrowly focused on employment. Today you can be a CEO without knowing classical Greek and Latin. You can call yourself a conservative without having liberal arts education. When social sciences and humanities are no longer something inherently appealing to conservatives, those fields are left to people with other motivations for studying them.
- nuc1e0n 2y ago
  I suppose education being a sign of prestige was a symptom of knowledge being difficult to replicate. Books used to take a lot of knowledge and skill to reproduce and were therefore rare and expensive. So the greatest benefit of attending a university was access to its library. In today's information society it's now hard for anyone to prevent the copying of what can be stored in computer files. Because information was difficult to obtain, what was actually useful wasn't easy to identify and students relied on authority figures to tell them what was and what wasn't. Those authority figures themselves often had unsystematic and biased viewpoints which they then passed on to the next generation. Years ago, Latin grammar was the gold standard by which all other languages were judged (perhaps as a legacy of the Roman empire). English grammar, along with that of most other world languages, is somewhat structurally different to Latin and difficult to shoehorn into the Latin model. In my opinion this has had a detrimental effect on multinational relations. Linguistics as a whole has only in the last few decades escaped from the missteps caused by classical education, with the rise of computer science and computer assisted comparative linguistic models. Google switched to other methods than those of traditional grammar for Google Translate and saw greater utility for end users as a result. Perhaps the results aren't especially idiomatic to the target language, but they have been very useful. Maybe classical education was never that useful relative to what's available now and those who prize it have stockholm syndrome, perhaps with some rationale like "I had to go through it in my day, so students of today should too". I think any attempt to maintain a scarcity of knowledge artificially now would be counter productive.