This is true. Unfortunately a lot of what goes on in universities is not education. It just gets called "education" by people looking to keep the gravy train of subsidized loans coming. It's most transparent in semi-fly-by-night for-profit operations like Corinthian Colleges, but there's a great deal of it going on in private non-profit and public universities too.
UC Berkeley's $10M/year diversity office could pay for 400 students' tuition at in-state rates at most places, but instead it just soaks up money coming up with new and interesting ways to be offended at life. But it's at a university, so it claims the mantle of education and asserts itself to be good.
Fake majors that provide neither marketable skills, nor the much-vaunted soft skills of critical thinking and ethical grounding are all over the place. Some train left-wing activists to make trouble. Others are more benign but soak up four years of time and provide no salary benefit, creating a large cohort of indebted people whose inability to get ahead has led them to become stunted and bitter adults ripe for exploitation by socialist demagogues. These are not a societal benefit. In fact, one could argue they are the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity on the horizon right now.
Exactly true. 1% of the time, hydrogen coalesces into stars. But it is fallacious to claim that hydrogen implies stars, because 99% of the time it doesn't.
Relativity. Let's say you're Arthur Eddington. Would you have an easier time deciding to go chasing eclipses if Einstein's 1905 papers were just a bunch of math that passed peer review, or if he'd made the point that relativity explains the observed precession of the orbit of Mercury?
Listen to Boghossian and Lindsay's interview with Joe Rogan. The point is precisely that laws and policies are beginning to be predicated on the conclusions of many of the SJW journal articles. That's the point being made. You wouldn't trust your medical care to a doctor who rejects biology, would you?
The world keeps on turning because most scientific publications are inconsequential. Nobody cares about a null result about the function of a protein nobody's heard of in a type of rat nobody uses for anything other than getting grad students out the door.
Except when it is consequential, like deciding whether hundreds of millions of NSF dollars or billions of NASA or NOAA dollars should go to pay for a new weather satellite, or probe to Jupiter. Imagine if we predicated the procurerment of GPS satellites or weather satellites on the decisions of people who have no problem letting a flat earth paper through the door in the same journal they use to back up their science cases for NSF or NASA grants, or capabilities of billion-dollar satellite systems.
Now imagine if we were to entrust our legal system or medical system to people who think men can get pregnant and women are on average just as fit to be loggers and firefighters as men, with any difference automatically being proof of criminal levels of harassment.
No, it's like getting a flat earth paper published in Nature.
You're right there are things we don't know about sexuality and psychology that are worth exploring, but if the answer that comes back is contrary to the observed and lived experience of something like 99 percent of the population, AND this is used as an argument to deconstruct that 99 percent's lived experience as merely socially-imposed convention, then you're no longer doing science, you're doing activism.
There are things we don't know about planet formation and the behavior of matter on the very small and very large scales. There are statistically significant deviations from Newtonian mechanics and there may be statistically significant deviations from Einstein's relativistic mechanics that we may find on larger and smaller scales than our instruments permit us right now...but if the theory that fits a subset of those measurements implies that the Earth is flat when extrapolated back to the macroscopic/human scale up from the subatomic or down from the extragalactic...AND you make the claim that the Earth really is flat based on these findings...then you're not doing science anymore, you're doing delusions.
The less exposure American companies have to the Chinese business culture of speech controls and pro-China mercantilism the better. It'll hurt the bottom line a little now, but it won't be Pearl Harbor twenty years down the line. Now about those 25% tariffs on consumer goods...
Don't bother. I know his type. They think milk comes out of a milk carton, cereal comes out of a cereal box, and that it's possible to live in 70 degree comfort year round at 45 degrees north with solar panels and AA batteries.
That's true, but wind the clock back in your head 17 years. We were attacked to the tune of 3000 dead and given the general lack of visibility we had into Iraq it wasn't implausible to think we'd get attacked again if we didn't do anything.
Why bother? If the cost of a little extra money is a loss of political control, why risk it when he's already underselling everyone else and making money doing it?
Don't think like a westerner, think like a strongman.
Now let's say you're Xi Jinping. Put yourself in his place. If Chinese companies can barely keep up with demand at home, and are making many tens of millions of Chinese wealthy in their growth, why on earth would you make any concessions to western governments that might upset the decades-long streak of double-digit growth and the ensuing social stability in China? Out of the goodness of your heart?
That's not possible with such a drastic asymmetry between the two sides. What's in it for us is cheaper stuff today at the expense of poverty later. What's in it for them is the difference between abject poverty and not. They have an existential crisis that's real to them now. We have one that's slow-rolling and easy to paper over with pleasant-sounding words. We are at a structural disadvantage because of that asymmetry and they are not. We cannot predicate our trade deals on the assumptions that we're dealing with a mirror image of ourselves.
It would. And given that we've tried and failed, I conclude that we have not won it yet, therefore we should not predicate our policy prescriptions on the presumption that we have.
So the sky is falling. Definitely. For sure. And you know this for sure because....some groups of guys who did read Asimov and fancy themselves real life Hari Seldons told you so.
He's an outsider, he ran as an outsider, and he talks and acts like an outsider. He's part of the government the same way that the vanity press that publishes a poorly xeroxed socialist newsletter is part of the news media.
No, I'm just not one of those people who read Isaac Asimov as a kid and get a full head believing the future really can be predicted to ten decimal places of accuracy.
That's a smokescreen. Both of your statements cannot be true at once. If it were robots, it wouldn't be China. Given that it is China, it cannot be robots.
You're not the first Westerner to tell me with a straight face that it's really automation that's killing manufacturing. Another time, it was a PhD student at a highly ranked tech school here in the US. I whipped out my cell phone and told him that it was assembled by hand in China. He had no answer, because he too grew up in the 1990s in an upper middle class cocoon where the prevailing wisdom was that everyone should be white collar and somehow someone somewhere would make the stuff.
He was kind of like you in his thinking. He was so deep in the mindset of not caring about how stuff got made so long as he could order it in Amazon that he truly believed that western societies shouldn't care or want to make their own stuff. He truly believed, as you seem to, that this was sustainable. The appeal to nonexistent automation was just a smokescreen for not having to ever have thought deeply on the subject.
Incidentally, the Germans make all sorts of stuff that you might not think of as "high end" like kitchen knives and frying pans. They also invest in automation and vocational training. Because they believe in taking responsibility for making the shit they use, unlike the US where the aforementioned ruling classes who need someone to plug in their TV for them and believe making shit is dirty and undesirable.
That's what we've been doing, bilaterally and multilaterally for over twenty years. The result is that factories and people who used to be making stuff here are out of work and the Chinese are pocketing the difference. They have raised a generation of optimists (which I don't begrudge them) who believe there is no way to go but up and their system of government can do no wrong.
The cost of that is that we have raised a generation of pessimists who don't see any way but down, and don't believe in making things anymore, don't believe in taking responsibility for the material wealth they still enjoy, don't believe in making the hardnosed decision to trade hard work for prosperity, cutting down a forest to make room for people, building a factory at the expense a pretty landscape.
Meanwhile folks like yourself (and we have no shortage of them here as well) who are white collar, whose parents were white collar, who've never worked the soil with their own to two hands or built anything other than a pile of papers and meaningless abstractions, who practically need to hire an electrician to plug in their TV, they still think it's 1991, that America and the West are strong and victorious, and that by merely telling the Chinese to open up, they will. Twenty years ago, that was a defensible position. Even maybe ten years ago that was a defensible position. That is no longer a defensible position. The Chinese do not mind hard work and their government has been playing hardball on their behalf for a quarter century with generally good results to show for it. The inveterate diplomats and statesmen on our end do not seem to believe in hard work, they believe in outsourcing and they are isolated from the negative effects of their kumbaya-we-are-all-one-people policies while a large number of Americans are not.
The English language, in fact nearly all human languages, have an extensive vocabulary to describe all manner of cognitive biases and sloppy thinking. This is because we have had tens of thousands of years of behavioral modernity to see it all play out, to categorize it, and to name it. The names that are appropriate here are "echo chamber" and "solipsism." All my friends who went to Harvard Law and make six figure salaries think it's OK to outsource dirty smelly manufacturing to China, mandate 100 mpg vehicle milage, import tens of millions of low-wage workers to cut our lawns and scrub our toilets from south of the border, and ban plastic bags if we can preen about how green and woke our laws are. If anyone complains, well they didn't go to Harvard Law, did they? They don't live in the right zip codes, do they? They're just dumb and racist and sexist and the faster we kill them off by attrition the better.
I didn't used to think people actually thought that way in any significant numbers. But Trump brought out the worst in a lot of people, and I no longer think that that caricature is just a scary story we righties tell our children before bed. It's real, if not always articulated in quite those terms, and it has real world consequences. And they aren't good for us. They're great for the Chinese though.
"the sky is falling so do as I say" or "the sky is not falling so guard your liberty jealously" I'll pick the latter every single time. Good on Trump for expressing skepticism of the AGW-government-academic-industrial complex.
You know what...I'm okay with playing that game of chicken. If we win it, better for us. If the Chinese do, then that's OK too. Better than the self-imposed death by a thousand cuts that "one way free trade" with China over the past twenty years has imposed on us.
And the first bundle of bills that "gorilla" (Orangutans are orange, Gorillas are black...get it straight) signed was congressional reviews and rejection of the previous administration bundle of executive orders. I keep getting told to separate what politicians say from what politicians do. Trump says a lot of shit, but most of what he does is A-OK by me.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true. Unfortunately a lot of what goes on in universities is not education. It just gets called "education" by people looking to keep the gravy train of subsidized loans coming. It's most transparent in semi-fly-by-night for-profit operations like Corinthian Colleges, but there's a great deal of it going on in private non-profit and public universities too.
UC Berkeley's $10M/year diversity office could pay for 400 students' tuition at in-state rates at most places, but instead it just soaks up money coming up with new and interesting ways to be offended at life. But it's at a university, so it claims the mantle of education and asserts itself to be good.
Fake majors that provide neither marketable skills, nor the much-vaunted soft skills of critical thinking and ethical grounding are all over the place. Some train left-wing activists to make trouble. Others are more benign but soak up four years of time and provide no salary benefit, creating a large cohort of indebted people whose inability to get ahead has led them to become stunted and bitter adults ripe for exploitation by socialist demagogues. These are not a societal benefit. In fact, one could argue they are the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity on the horizon right now.
Exactly true. 1% of the time, hydrogen coalesces into stars. But it is fallacious to claim that hydrogen implies stars, because 99% of the time it doesn't.
Relativity. Let's say you're Arthur Eddington. Would you have an easier time deciding to go chasing eclipses if Einstein's 1905 papers were just a bunch of math that passed peer review, or if he'd made the point that relativity explains the observed precession of the orbit of Mercury?
Listen to Boghossian and Lindsay's interview with Joe Rogan. The point is precisely that laws and policies are beginning to be predicated on the conclusions of many of the SJW journal articles. That's the point being made. You wouldn't trust your medical care to a doctor who rejects biology, would you?
The world keeps on turning because most scientific publications are inconsequential. Nobody cares about a null result about the function of a protein nobody's heard of in a type of rat nobody uses for anything other than getting grad students out the door.
Except when it is consequential, like deciding whether hundreds of millions of NSF dollars or billions of NASA or NOAA dollars should go to pay for a new weather satellite, or probe to Jupiter. Imagine if we predicated the procurerment of GPS satellites or weather satellites on the decisions of people who have no problem letting a flat earth paper through the door in the same journal they use to back up their science cases for NSF or NASA grants, or capabilities of billion-dollar satellite systems.
Now imagine if we were to entrust our legal system or medical system to people who think men can get pregnant and women are on average just as fit to be loggers and firefighters as men, with any difference automatically being proof of criminal levels of harassment.
No, it's like getting a flat earth paper published in Nature.
You're right there are things we don't know about sexuality and psychology that are worth exploring, but if the answer that comes back is contrary to the observed and lived experience of something like 99 percent of the population, AND this is used as an argument to deconstruct that 99 percent's lived experience as merely socially-imposed convention, then you're no longer doing science, you're doing activism.
There are things we don't know about planet formation and the behavior of matter on the very small and very large scales. There are statistically significant deviations from Newtonian mechanics and there may be statistically significant deviations from Einstein's relativistic mechanics that we may find on larger and smaller scales than our instruments permit us right now...but if the theory that fits a subset of those measurements implies that the Earth is flat when extrapolated back to the macroscopic/human scale up from the subatomic or down from the extragalactic...AND you make the claim that the Earth really is flat based on these findings...then you're not doing science anymore, you're doing delusions.
The less exposure American companies have to the Chinese business culture of speech controls and pro-China mercantilism the better. It'll hurt the bottom line a little now, but it won't be Pearl Harbor twenty years down the line. Now about those 25% tariffs on consumer goods...
Don't bother. I know his type. They think milk comes out of a milk carton, cereal comes out of a cereal box, and that it's possible to live in 70 degree comfort year round at 45 degrees north with solar panels and AA batteries.
It won't confuse anyone. An electric truck would have to be that big in order to have enough battery to do a full day's work for a regular truck.
That was the caricature, yes. What I actually wrote though was that we attacked Iraq fearing it was another Afghanistan in the making.
That's true, but wind the clock back in your head 17 years. We were attacked to the tune of 3000 dead and given the general lack of visibility we had into Iraq it wasn't implausible to think we'd get attacked again if we didn't do anything.
Now make it an auction instead of a lottery...
Why bother? If the cost of a little extra money is a loss of political control, why risk it when he's already underselling everyone else and making money doing it?
Don't think like a westerner, think like a strongman.
Now let's say you're Xi Jinping. Put yourself in his place. If Chinese companies can barely keep up with demand at home, and are making many tens of millions of Chinese wealthy in their growth, why on earth would you make any concessions to western governments that might upset the decades-long streak of double-digit growth and the ensuing social stability in China? Out of the goodness of your heart?
That's not possible with such a drastic asymmetry between the two sides. What's in it for us is cheaper stuff today at the expense of poverty later. What's in it for them is the difference between abject poverty and not. They have an existential crisis that's real to them now. We have one that's slow-rolling and easy to paper over with pleasant-sounding words. We are at a structural disadvantage because of that asymmetry and they are not. We cannot predicate our trade deals on the assumptions that we're dealing with a mirror image of ourselves.
It would. And given that we've tried and failed, I conclude that we have not won it yet, therefore we should not predicate our policy prescriptions on the presumption that we have.
So the sky is falling. Definitely. For sure. And you know this for sure because....some groups of guys who did read Asimov and fancy themselves real life Hari Seldons told you so.
He's an outsider, he ran as an outsider, and he talks and acts like an outsider. He's part of the government the same way that the vanity press that publishes a poorly xeroxed socialist newsletter is part of the news media.
You tell me. He sure doesn't act like he's Bush, part 3 or Obama/Clinton part 2.
No, I'm just not one of those people who read Isaac Asimov as a kid and get a full head believing the future really can be predicted to ten decimal places of accuracy.
That's a smokescreen. Both of your statements cannot be true at once. If it were robots, it wouldn't be China. Given that it is China, it cannot be robots.
You're not the first Westerner to tell me with a straight face that it's really automation that's killing manufacturing. Another time, it was a PhD student at a highly ranked tech school here in the US. I whipped out my cell phone and told him that it was assembled by hand in China. He had no answer, because he too grew up in the 1990s in an upper middle class cocoon where the prevailing wisdom was that everyone should be white collar and somehow someone somewhere would make the stuff.
He was kind of like you in his thinking. He was so deep in the mindset of not caring about how stuff got made so long as he could order it in Amazon that he truly believed that western societies shouldn't care or want to make their own stuff. He truly believed, as you seem to, that this was sustainable. The appeal to nonexistent automation was just a smokescreen for not having to ever have thought deeply on the subject.
Incidentally, the Germans make all sorts of stuff that you might not think of as "high end" like kitchen knives and frying pans. They also invest in automation and vocational training. Because they believe in taking responsibility for making the shit they use, unlike the US where the aforementioned ruling classes who need someone to plug in their TV for them and believe making shit is dirty and undesirable.
That's what we've been doing, bilaterally and multilaterally for over twenty years. The result is that factories and people who used to be making stuff here are out of work and the Chinese are pocketing the difference. They have raised a generation of optimists (which I don't begrudge them) who believe there is no way to go but up and their system of government can do no wrong.
The cost of that is that we have raised a generation of pessimists who don't see any way but down, and don't believe in making things anymore, don't believe in taking responsibility for the material wealth they still enjoy, don't believe in making the hardnosed decision to trade hard work for prosperity, cutting down a forest to make room for people, building a factory at the expense a pretty landscape.
Meanwhile folks like yourself (and we have no shortage of them here as well) who are white collar, whose parents were white collar, who've never worked the soil with their own to two hands or built anything other than a pile of papers and meaningless abstractions, who practically need to hire an electrician to plug in their TV, they still think it's 1991, that America and the West are strong and victorious, and that by merely telling the Chinese to open up, they will. Twenty years ago, that was a defensible position. Even maybe ten years ago that was a defensible position. That is no longer a defensible position. The Chinese do not mind hard work and their government has been playing hardball on their behalf for a quarter century with generally good results to show for it. The inveterate diplomats and statesmen on our end do not seem to believe in hard work, they believe in outsourcing and they are isolated from the negative effects of their kumbaya-we-are-all-one-people policies while a large number of Americans are not.
The English language, in fact nearly all human languages, have an extensive vocabulary to describe all manner of cognitive biases and sloppy thinking. This is because we have had tens of thousands of years of behavioral modernity to see it all play out, to categorize it, and to name it. The names that are appropriate here are "echo chamber" and "solipsism." All my friends who went to Harvard Law and make six figure salaries think it's OK to outsource dirty smelly manufacturing to China, mandate 100 mpg vehicle milage, import tens of millions of low-wage workers to cut our lawns and scrub our toilets from south of the border, and ban plastic bags if we can preen about how green and woke our laws are. If anyone complains, well they didn't go to Harvard Law, did they? They don't live in the right zip codes, do they? They're just dumb and racist and sexist and the faster we kill them off by attrition the better.
I didn't used to think people actually thought that way in any significant numbers. But Trump brought out the worst in a lot of people, and I no longer think that that caricature is just a scary story we righties tell our children before bed. It's real, if not always articulated in quite those terms, and it has real world consequences. And they aren't good for us. They're great for the Chinese though.
"the sky is falling so do as I say" or "the sky is not falling so guard your liberty jealously" I'll pick the latter every single time. Good on Trump for expressing skepticism of the AGW-government-academic-industrial complex.
You know what...I'm okay with playing that game of chicken. If we win it, better for us. If the Chinese do, then that's OK too. Better than the self-imposed death by a thousand cuts that "one way free trade" with China over the past twenty years has imposed on us.
Airline tries to make extra buck off passengers. zOMG the world is ending!
And the first bundle of bills that "gorilla" (Orangutans are orange, Gorillas are black...get it straight) signed was congressional reviews and rejection of the previous administration bundle of executive orders. I keep getting told to separate what politicians say from what politicians do. Trump says a lot of shit, but most of what he does is A-OK by me.