7 ms·

Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I thought, "What the heck!" and signe

Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I thought, "What the heck!" and signed up to see what happened. We meet every couple of weeks and it has been great. I don't in general find philosophy's answers particularly useful, but the questions and the habit of questioning has been great. I do get though, why systems of power want to defund things like philosophy and sociology. Good questions and good data are two things that run counter to the willful exercise of power.

dgfitz 2y ago
I'm sure I'm in the minority here. When I see these kinds of comments, the first thing I think of the movie Good Will Hunting: You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a tutor. Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient just to hire an expert. That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't know. But I don't think that taking life advice from fictional characters is much better.
- asoneth 2y ago
  > You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence. I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts. Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
- cossatot 2y ago
  I've tought myself a lot of things over the course of my life and am a huge proponent of self-education, but a lot of the 'learning how to learn' had to happen in graduate school. There are few environments that provide the right combination of time, close involvement of experts and peers, the latitude to direct your research in a way that you find interesting and useful within the larger constraints of a project, the positive and negative feedback systems, the financial resources from grant funding, etc. The negative feedback loops are particularly hard to set up by yourself. At some point if you're going to be at the researcher level (construed broadly), you need help from others in developing sufficient dept, rigor and self-criticality. Others can poke holes in your thoughts with an ease that you probably can't muster on your own initially; after you've been through this a number of times you learn your weaknesses and can go through the process more easily. Similarly, the process of preparing for comprehensive exams in a PhD (or medical boards or whatever) is extremely helpful, but not something most people would do by themselves--the motivation to know a field very broadly and deeply, so you can explain all of this on the spot in front of 5 inquisitors, is given a big boost by the consequences of failure, which are not present in the local library. The time is also a hard part. There are relatively few people with the resources to devote most of their time for learning outside of the classroom. I spent approximately 12,000 hours on my PhD (yes some fraction of that was looking at failblog while hungover etc. but not much). You could string that along at 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, which is a 'serious hobby', but it would take you 24 years. How much of the first year are you going to remember 24 years later? How will the field have changed?
- goatlover 2y ago
  Assuming one has the self-motivation and ignores everything else that goes with attending a university. Most people aren't super geniuses who spend their days reading books from the library or online papers.
  - logicchains 2y ago
    Most people who aren't self-motivated will almost completely stop studying anything new after university anyway, and will still end up far behind the motivated people. Far better if they were put in a situation where they were forced to learn how to motivate themselves and study of their own accord.
    - goatlover 2y ago
      Who is doing this forcing? A college degree is more about getting a job and starting their career for a lot of people anyways.
      - wpietri 2y ago
        The forcing doesn't have to be particularly dramatic. One of the things I like having about a tutor is it "forces" me to make some progress on a regular basis. As a friend of mine put it, "Sometimes I need somebody to not disappoint."
globalnode 2y ago
I want to say something along the lines of "they want to de fund critical thinking in general" but I fear I'm becoming too extreme. I'll go with what you said instead.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Yeah, I suspect few of them directly want that. But I also think few of them are inclined to appreciate the benefits of it. But it does happen intentionally that way some times for sure. E.g., the way the US's Dickey Amendment defunded gun research to prevent any inconvenient facts from coming to light.
- Dansvidania 2y ago
  I do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is thought in university or college. In neither the humanities or STEM. I think good professors that focus on that are the exception and not the rule, sadly.
  - worik 2y ago
    > do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is thought in university or college. In neither the humanities or STEM. I am in New Zealand I have been through the university system here, my family still closely involved A great deal of critical thinking happens in New Zealand universities
  - peterashford 2y ago
    I'm a New Zealander. I got a degree in Philosophy and entered a Masters in Computer Science here. I definitely learned a lot about critical thinking. Both from humanities and sciences - I think the combination is probably superior to either in isolation
- mistrial9 2y ago
  there is no unified "they" .. instead I think you are identifying a difficult fork in the road of education.. exploratory and associative free-will versus collective learned information up to disciplined obedience. A full society needs both! neither are inherently better ! It is indeed a difficult subject. People in the disciplined obedience camp do sometimes prioritize their own ways for funding, and vice-versa, for sure ..
Dansvidania 2y ago
Just for the sake of looking at what good intent might have caused this decision.. I would argue that, in periods of scarcity, it makes sense to prioritize public spending on what has a more tangible economic ROI. I recognize that I am extrapolating from the fact that STEM related jobs tend to be more remunerative than social science. I could not find any literature regarding ROI of research programs.
- wpietri 2y ago
  We aren't particularly in a period of scarcity. New Zealand's a rich country with a stable GDP. Also, ROI is the wrong frame to use for government activity. If something has significant short-term ROI, then normal commercial capital's a good match. If it has large long-term ROI, then that's VC's domain. It's government's job to make investments in public goods, things that don't have ROI in the sense usually meant here.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    I don't really agree with your characterisation of ROI. Every potential decision outcome has a ROI (which we mostly don't know in advance, though we can often guess). The investments for which we need governments are those that won't ever work in the private sector due to misaligned incentives (no company will pay out of its own pocket to educate young children, not because there's no ROI overall but because it's much too diffuse -- the ROI for that company is extremely low). People can disagree about whether government should also make some investments that would also be made by self-interested people/companies.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      ROI is very much a business term of art. And that's how it's mostly used here in this little venture-capital supported niche. I agree one can broaden it to mean something much vaguer, using it metaphorically. But A) I think we at least have to explicitly distinguish that, and B) I think casting societal questions in business terms is a perilously wrong frame, one easily leading to all sorts of errors of thought, ones that have negative social implications. Just as an example, we could take Elon Musk's recent swipe at funding to fight homelessness. There he uses a common business framing and ends up with some conclusions that are deranged from the point of view of people actually working on the problem. Which wouldn't matter much if he were some random internet commenter, but here his error could have a significant body count.

dgfitz 2y ago

I'm sure I'm in the minority here. When I see these kinds of comments, the first thing I think of the movie Good Will Hunting: You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a tutor. Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient just to hire an expert. That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't know. But I don't think that taking life advice from fictional characters is much better.
asoneth 2y ago
> You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library. Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence. I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts. Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
cossatot 2y ago
I've tought myself a lot of things over the course of my life and am a huge proponent of self-education, but a lot of the 'learning how to learn' had to happen in graduate school. There are few environments that provide the right combination of time, close involvement of experts and peers, the latitude to direct your research in a way that you find interesting and useful within the larger constraints of a project, the positive and negative feedback systems, the financial resources from grant funding, etc. The negative feedback loops are particularly hard to set up by yourself. At some point if you're going to be at the researcher level (construed broadly), you need help from others in developing sufficient dept, rigor and self-criticality. Others can poke holes in your thoughts with an ease that you probably can't muster on your own initially; after you've been through this a number of times you learn your weaknesses and can go through the process more easily. Similarly, the process of preparing for comprehensive exams in a PhD (or medical boards or whatever) is extremely helpful, but not something most people would do by themselves--the motivation to know a field very broadly and deeply, so you can explain all of this on the spot in front of 5 inquisitors, is given a big boost by the consequences of failure, which are not present in the local library. The time is also a hard part. There are relatively few people with the resources to devote most of their time for learning outside of the classroom. I spent approximately 12,000 hours on my PhD (yes some fraction of that was looking at failblog while hungover etc. but not much). You could string that along at 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, which is a 'serious hobby', but it would take you 24 years. How much of the first year are you going to remember 24 years later? How will the field have changed?
goatlover 2y ago
Assuming one has the self-motivation and ignores everything else that goes with attending a university. Most people aren't super geniuses who spend their days reading books from the library or online papers.
- logicchains 2y ago
  Most people who aren't self-motivated will almost completely stop studying anything new after university anyway, and will still end up far behind the motivated people. Far better if they were put in a situation where they were forced to learn how to motivate themselves and study of their own accord.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Who is doing this forcing? A college degree is more about getting a job and starting their career for a lot of people anyways.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      The forcing doesn't have to be particularly dramatic. One of the things I like having about a tutor is it "forces" me to make some progress on a regular basis. As a friend of mine put it, "Sometimes I need somebody to not disappoint."

globalnode 2y ago

I want to say something along the lines of "they want to de fund critical thinking in general" but I fear I'm becoming too extreme. I'll go with what you said instead.

wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, I suspect few of them directly want that. But I also think few of them are inclined to appreciate the benefits of it. But it does happen intentionally that way some times for sure. E.g., the way the US's Dickey Amendment defunded gun research to prevent any inconvenient facts from coming to light.
Dansvidania 2y ago
I do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is thought in university or college. In neither the humanities or STEM. I think good professors that focus on that are the exception and not the rule, sadly.
- worik 2y ago
  > do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is thought in university or college. In neither the humanities or STEM. I am in New Zealand I have been through the university system here, my family still closely involved A great deal of critical thinking happens in New Zealand universities
- peterashford 2y ago
  I'm a New Zealander. I got a degree in Philosophy and entered a Masters in Computer Science here. I definitely learned a lot about critical thinking. Both from humanities and sciences - I think the combination is probably superior to either in isolation
mistrial9 2y ago
there is no unified "they" .. instead I think you are identifying a difficult fork in the road of education.. exploratory and associative free-will versus collective learned information up to disciplined obedience. A full society needs both! neither are inherently better ! It is indeed a difficult subject. People in the disciplined obedience camp do sometimes prioritize their own ways for funding, and vice-versa, for sure ..

Dansvidania 2y ago

Just for the sake of looking at what good intent might have caused this decision.. I would argue that, in periods of scarcity, it makes sense to prioritize public spending on what has a more tangible economic ROI. I recognize that I am extrapolating from the fact that STEM related jobs tend to be more remunerative than social science. I could not find any literature regarding ROI of research programs.

wpietri 2y ago
We aren't particularly in a period of scarcity. New Zealand's a rich country with a stable GDP. Also, ROI is the wrong frame to use for government activity. If something has significant short-term ROI, then normal commercial capital's a good match. If it has large long-term ROI, then that's VC's domain. It's government's job to make investments in public goods, things that don't have ROI in the sense usually meant here.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  I don't really agree with your characterisation of ROI. Every potential decision outcome has a ROI (which we mostly don't know in advance, though we can often guess). The investments for which we need governments are those that won't ever work in the private sector due to misaligned incentives (no company will pay out of its own pocket to educate young children, not because there's no ROI overall but because it's much too diffuse -- the ROI for that company is extremely low). People can disagree about whether government should also make some investments that would also be made by self-interested people/companies.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    ROI is very much a business term of art. And that's how it's mostly used here in this little venture-capital supported niche. I agree one can broaden it to mean something much vaguer, using it metaphorically. But A) I think we at least have to explicitly distinguish that, and B) I think casting societal questions in business terms is a perilously wrong frame, one easily leading to all sorts of errors of thought, ones that have negative social implications. Just as an example, we could take Elon Musk's recent swipe at funding to fight homelessness. There he uses a common business framing and ends up with some conclusions that are deranged from the point of view of people actually working on the problem. Which wouldn't matter much if he were some random internet commenter, but here his error could have a significant body count.