I didn't endorse Haidt or cite him for his views, I cited him in response to someone who asked for examples of social science departments that had explicitly adopted a social justice agenda as part of their mission. Haidt has collected many examples of that and provides them on his website.
Children Learn Best When Their Bodies Are Engaged in the Living World. We Must Resist the Ideology of Screen-Based Learning
In the real world, the choice is often between a bored and angry public school teacher barely out of the rubber room droning on for hours in a classroom full of other dysfunctional kids high on amphetamines vs "screen-based learning". Neither of those is "best", but one may well be a lot better than the other. Guess which one?
That sounds like a made up fact. In other words,...
Oh, look, an Serviscope_minor's Oxford education at work: "it sounds made up, that proves that it is made up!"
Out of interest did you vote for Trump?
No. I used to be a Democrat but left the party when Hillary started lying about her past support for gay rights, threw her weight around to take the nomination from Sanders, and laughed about killing people.
How about you? Did you vote for Hillary... illegally? Just out of interest.
I read that blog post and he has some weird ideas about social justice
I didn't refer to him for his ideas on social justice, but for for the facts he cites, specifically that American social science departments and universities that have declared themselves to be dedicated to social justice.
In practice if someone were to actually set up either of these I think they would both simply attract trolls.
How prescient: that, in fact, what many social science departments graduate these days.
Democracy is over-rated when the voters support wrong or abhorrent ideas.
Yeah, that's a key tenet of fascism.
There's a reason why the US is a republic, not a pure democracy.
Democracy is any form of government that originates with the people; that includes the US.
What was supposed to protect the US from authoritarianism was limited government, not representative government. Representative government without limits is even worse than direct, majoritarian democracy.
Exactly this. Whether fascism, communism, or any ism in between, one of the first steps in any new dictatorship of the modern era is to purge the academy.
Yes, purge the academi selectively of people critical of them, while elevating people who helped those dictators. If you look at Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, they and their reprehensible ideologies all were strongly supported by many academics and intellectuals, both in their countries and abroad. Intellectuals are not a bulwark against dictatorships, they are often complicit in them.
As for why you want to train people to think critically, well, if you don't like dictatorships & fascism then you want an electorate that thinks critically.
Yes, you do. Unfortunately, most liberal arts programs don't produce that. In fact, throughout the 19th and 20th century, academics and universities were often key institutions in promoting totalitarian ideologies.
I mean, ever notice how one of the 1st things a dictator does is go after the intelligentsia?
They don't go after "the intelligentisa", only after those intellectuals who are critical of them. The intelligentsia, on the other hand, has often been instrumental in bringing communists and fascists into power. Both Hitler and Stalin were powerfully supported by intellectuals, academics, and universities.
It's kind of funny his profession is the only one one has to go to school to have the capacity for insight, but all the rest can be learned through self-education like books and lectures.
What gave you that idea? Did I say that anywhere? If so, please point out where.
To be clear: you can study science and engineering on your own as well; you don't need to go to university either.
Government education shouldn't teach that all opinions are equally valuable. The Earth is not flat.
"The Earth is not flat" is an easily verifiable fact, not an opinion.
Education should primarily teach reason, logic, and the scientific method; secondarily, it should teach established, verifiable facts.
Opinion and value judgments of any form are not proper components of an education. But they are part of modern social science teaching, which pretty much is at the heart of what's wrong with modern social science teaching.
Jonathan Haidt gives a lot of references and examples, both of explicit mission statements and indicators (actually, he ranks a couple of hundred schools based on objective criteria):
Given the arguments made in sections 1-7, I think it is clear that no university can have Truth and Social Justice as dual teloses. Each university must pick one. I show that Brown University has staked out the leadership position for SJU, and the University of Chicago has staked out the leadership position for Truth U.
He says it's somewhat analogous to how universities split along religious/secular lines a century ago.
In 2008, my research teams at Duke and Harvard surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executives and heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies. We found that they tended to be highly educated, 92 percent holding bachelor’s degrees and 47 percent holding higher degrees.
Who knew! Upper management consists of people with little technical skills and good people skills! And if you want to be one of those people, by all means, don't get an engineering degree and get a social science degree instead.
But let's be clear about this: these people are by and large not successful because they understand the Enlightenment or good design, they are successful because they understand Machiavelli and politics, something that success in a social science environment prepares them for.
To create the amazing future that technology is enabling, we need our musicians and artists working hand in hand with our engineers. It isn’t either one or the other; we need both the humanities and engineering.
Whoa, what a jump. CEOs and heads of product engineering don't "work hand in hand" with people, they lead and direct.
When parents ask me now what careers their children should pursue and whether it is best to steer them into science, engineering, and technology fields, I tell them that it is best to let them make their own choices.
Well, that is certainly good advice. Add to that the notion that government shouldn't pick winners and losers among academic fields and instead let the market decide.
A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability.
True enough. Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans. Social science departments at universities like Yale have explicitly defined themselves as institutions for political change, not institutions concerned with seeking truth. And that's why social sciences as taught in academia are pretty much worthless these days.
Fortunately, you don't need to be a history major (or minor) in order to learn these things, there are plenty of excellent books and online lectures, and I encourage everybody to listen to them. But listen critically and distinguish between indoctrination, advocacy, and scholarship.
In most societies today, it is accepted that we must be identifiable to appropriate authorities under certain conditions (consider border crossings, traffic violation stops as examples).
It's ironic that many governments wanting this capability aren't even capable of identifying who crosses their borders and have millions of people living illegally in them. And, of course, in the US, many people throw a hissy fit when asked for identification on the street.
The ability to track, "differentially identify", and punish people for unwanted speech only works for law abiding citizens in the first place. And the net effect of putting more of such laws into place will be to breed more and more contempt for government and the rule of law.
It's not surprising that this proposal comes out of a workshop in the UK; European governments have been trying desperately to deal with their revolting peasants who simply don't seem to want to comply with what Brussels and their own governments tell them to do. Both in the UK and in continental Europe, governments clearly want the ability to censor speech critical of government policies and to sow fear into the hearts of people critical of government policies.
What is charmingly naive about people like Cerf is that he thinks he can make this happen. The net effect of such a regulatory regime would simply be a shattering of the Internet, as people move to P2P platforms, encryption, and other tools to avoid government censorship of the kind he advocates. A good outcome would be that it would badly hurt platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
So, I say, bring it on, Vint, baby. Let's see whether the open source community can demonstrate what an authoritarian fool you are.
Indeed, I don’t speak for my fellow citizens, because I am not an elected representative. Here is the person that my fellow citizens have elected to represent them and he does speak for me and my fellow citizens:
The president didn't craft the bill and even if it represented his views, his views are not representative of those of the US as a whole. We don't elect absolute rulers, and the people we elect don't have a mandate for everything they do.
Now, here is what got Obama elected:
This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.
Unfortunately, he flip-flopped and then proceeded to undermine the privacy and civil liberties of Americans when in office. And, yes, Obama confused his election with a mandate to do whatever he decided he wanted to do.
Frankly, I am really growing a little tired of this exchange. You seem to be very opinionated on things you obviously don’t know anything about and that is hardly much fun for me.
I'm sure it seems like that to you. You, on the other hand, actually are very opinionated on things you obviously don’t know anything about. And it has been mildly amusing to see you make a fool of yourself.
I assume we agree that unregulated free markets produce large and growing inequalities, so let's take that as a given.
Since you wouldn't be asking if you already knew the economic principles, let me try to illustrate this with an oversimplified hypothetical economy: let's say there are only three kinds of wage earners in an economy, those worth $10/h, those worth $50/h, and those worth $100/h. The way government reduces that inequality is by taking money from high income earners and giving it to low income earners. What's the effect of that? In the short term, low income earners are getting more money. If I earn $100/h and you reduce that to $50/h in order to redistribute the difference to people making $10/h, high income earners are going to do one of two things: (1) they are going to leave the country for a country that pays them $100/h, or (2) they are going to reduce their productivity until they are worth only the $50/h you now pay them.
Again, that's an oversimplified example; real economies are much more complex, but the core is the same: you cannot pay people less than their labor is worth. If you try to redistribute from high income earners to low income earners, the economy will shrink overall and everybody is worse off.
Socialists and progressives actually recognize problem (1), which is why they talk about a "race to the bottom" and "global labor and tax standards". The East Bloc used to build walls to try to keep people from running away. But even if you could address problem (1), you still have to deal with problem (2), and no socialist or progressive state has ever figured out how to do that.
now, you can't have _excessive_ wealth for all. Excessive wealth is when it ceases to be material wealth and becomes _power_.
The point of free markets is to give exactly those people excessive wealth who satisfy needs that their fellow citizens have; and they excessive power they get out of it is to offer more products and services.
It's when you can control access to food, shelter, medicine, education and transportation such that you begin to decide who lives and who dies.
In a free market, nobody controls "access to food, shelter, education and transportation". It is progressives and democratic socialists who want to put into place a system that gives a small elite the power to control access to those essential services, a power that is invariably abused by them.
The fear that comes from knowing that could be you is a big part of how our ruling class keeps the working class divided among themselves.
A "ruling class" is what Sanders wants to create. There is no "ruling class" in a free market.
You fight against single payer healthcare because you're afraid if the other guy has healthcare you won't get it. Only fear can make that work because it's been demonstrated multiple times that single payer healthcare works (Canada, Germany, France, all of Scandinavia, I could go on...).
The US healthcare system is completely broken. And I agree that adopting a system like Germany, France, or Scandinavia would indeed fix it. If that were on the table, I would fully support it because it is much better than what we have (though not as good as a free market system). We could do that tomorrow and finance it fully out of the existing Medicare/Medicaid budget, though the European way of financing it (and other social services) would be to raise taxes on the middle class by about 50% relative (about 10% absolute). How about doing that? How about adopting European "socialist" ways?
But that's not what's on the table. What people like Sanders, Warren, and Clinton are talking about is a massively corrupt system that pays off their political supporters, is financially unsustainable, and other than nominally being "single payer", has little in common with the European systems that you list.
Money is not necessarily power. It only becomes power when you can force someone to do something they otherwise would never consider doing.
Yes, and that is the kind of system that progressives and democratic socialists want to create. It is wrong and dangerous, and that is why we should oppose it in the strongest possible terms and instead make our markets as free as possible.
That's going to Afghanistan to fight for an oil pipeline we didn't need.
And how is an invasion of a foreign country, a decision made by government and paid for by taxes forcibly extracted from the people, in any way a consequence of free markets? Do you think any sane business would spend $2.4 trillion, like the US government did, just to clear the ground for a pipeline in a shithole country? That makes no business sense.
Of course, businesses may (legally or illegally) bribe politicians to do their bidding. But progressives and democratic socialists suffer from the delusion that you can fix that by putting unselfish and un-greedy people in charge of selfish and greedy people, and that is absurd. As you can see every election, government attracts selfish and greedy people like flies are attracted to a rotting carcass.
Senseless invasion of other countries, rule by an elite, and giving well-connected people massive amounts of unearned wealth is the kind of power progressives and democratic socialist want government to have. That is what free market advocates like myself oppose in the strongest possible terms.
And yet the microfilm machine is still widely used. It has centuries of lasting power ahead of it, and new models are still being manufactured.
The reason people don't want those ungainly machines is because they don't need them. You can get all the durability of microfilm storage without the bulk or complexity of the old-style camera or reader by using digital microfilm recorders and digital microfilm readers. A digital microfilm reader is about the size of a cigar box and hooks up via USB to your PC.
If you're preparing for a post-apocalyptic world, you can still always read those films with a simple handheld microscope.
The “state” as a group of representatives and public servants endowed by the democratic mandate has total control over the “financial system” already.
They have been trying to, but they haven't been very successful. Cash is part of the reason. And if cryptocurrencies catch on, their ability to track money or control the financial system evaporates completely. Personally, I and many other people think that would be a good thing. You're free to disagree.
The last American election was literally about “the state” giving people jobs, either through Trump with his protectionism,
Trump promised that he would defend the US against economic misconduct by China and Europe. You may agree or disagree with his reasoning (I think it's b.s.), but it in no way amounts to "the state giving people jobs". Trump has been a staunch defender of point point of view that private companies are the job creators and that government should stop getting in their way.
I and the wartest majority of my fellow citizens would like them to perform those duties as best possible
You don't speak for your fellow citizens. And if you were to take a poll whether they want to abolish cash or have every purchase tracked by the federal government, they would tell you "hell no". If you think otherwise, you live in a fantasy world.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't endorse Haidt or cite him for his views, I cited him in response to someone who asked for examples of social science departments that had explicitly adopted a social justice agenda as part of their mission. Haidt has collected many examples of that and provides them on his website.
The function of a court is to dispense justice. The function of a history department ought to be to teach history, not to push a political agenda.
Feel free to engage in whatever political activism you like, just don't pretend that it is science, education, or scholarship.
In the real world, the choice is often between a bored and angry public school teacher barely out of the rubber room droning on for hours in a classroom full of other dysfunctional kids high on amphetamines vs "screen-based learning". Neither of those is "best", but one may well be a lot better than the other. Guess which one?
Oh, look, an Serviscope_minor's Oxford education at work: "it sounds made up, that proves that it is made up!"
No. I used to be a Democrat but left the party when Hillary started lying about her past support for gay rights, threw her weight around to take the nomination from Sanders, and laughed about killing people.
How about you? Did you vote for Hillary... illegally? Just out of interest.
I didn't refer to him for his ideas on social justice, but for for the facts he cites, specifically that American social science departments and universities that have declared themselves to be dedicated to social justice.
How prescient: that, in fact, what many social science departments graduate these days.
Yeah, that's a key tenet of fascism.
Democracy is any form of government that originates with the people; that includes the US.
What was supposed to protect the US from authoritarianism was limited government, not representative government. Representative government without limits is even worse than direct, majoritarian democracy.
Yes, purge the academi selectively of people critical of them, while elevating people who helped those dictators. If you look at Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, they and their reprehensible ideologies all were strongly supported by many academics and intellectuals, both in their countries and abroad. Intellectuals are not a bulwark against dictatorships, they are often complicit in them.
Yes, you do. Unfortunately, most liberal arts programs don't produce that. In fact, throughout the 19th and 20th century, academics and universities were often key institutions in promoting totalitarian ideologies.
They don't go after "the intelligentisa", only after those intellectuals who are critical of them. The intelligentsia, on the other hand, has often been instrumental in bringing communists and fascists into power. Both Hitler and Stalin were powerfully supported by intellectuals, academics, and universities.
What gave you that idea? Did I say that anywhere? If so, please point out where.
To be clear: you can study science and engineering on your own as well; you don't need to go to university either.
"The Earth is not flat" is an easily verifiable fact, not an opinion.
Education should primarily teach reason, logic, and the scientific method; secondarily, it should teach established, verifiable facts.
Opinion and value judgments of any form are not proper components of an education. But they are part of modern social science teaching, which pretty much is at the heart of what's wrong with modern social science teaching.
What makes you think that I don't "listen critically and distinguish between indoctrination, advocacy, and scholarship"?
Or are you pointing out that I am engaging in advocacy? I am! Good for you to recognize it!
Jonathan Haidt gives a lot of references and examples, both of explicit mission statements and indicators (actually, he ranks a couple of hundred schools based on objective criteria):
He says it's somewhat analogous to how universities split along religious/secular lines a century ago.
Who knew! Upper management consists of people with little technical skills and good people skills! And if you want to be one of those people, by all means, don't get an engineering degree and get a social science degree instead.
But let's be clear about this: these people are by and large not successful because they understand the Enlightenment or good design, they are successful because they understand Machiavelli and politics, something that success in a social science environment prepares them for.
Whoa, what a jump. CEOs and heads of product engineering don't "work hand in hand" with people, they lead and direct.
Well, that is certainly good advice. Add to that the notion that government shouldn't pick winners and losers among academic fields and instead let the market decide.
It has nothing to do with me; I'm just relating how they describe themselves.
True enough. Unfortunately, a lot of the social sciences these days just teaches a view of history in which the Enlightenment, the Roman Empire, and technology are just tools of the male patriarchy to suppress women and Africans. Social science departments at universities like Yale have explicitly defined themselves as institutions for political change, not institutions concerned with seeking truth. And that's why social sciences as taught in academia are pretty much worthless these days.
Fortunately, you don't need to be a history major (or minor) in order to learn these things, there are plenty of excellent books and online lectures, and I encourage everybody to listen to them. But listen critically and distinguish between indoctrination, advocacy, and scholarship.
Ah, add some insults to your ad hominems and delusions! Good going! It's so typical.
It's ironic that many governments wanting this capability aren't even capable of identifying who crosses their borders and have millions of people living illegally in them. And, of course, in the US, many people throw a hissy fit when asked for identification on the street.
The ability to track, "differentially identify", and punish people for unwanted speech only works for law abiding citizens in the first place. And the net effect of putting more of such laws into place will be to breed more and more contempt for government and the rule of law.
It's not surprising that this proposal comes out of a workshop in the UK; European governments have been trying desperately to deal with their revolting peasants who simply don't seem to want to comply with what Brussels and their own governments tell them to do. Both in the UK and in continental Europe, governments clearly want the ability to censor speech critical of government policies and to sow fear into the hearts of people critical of government policies.
What is charmingly naive about people like Cerf is that he thinks he can make this happen. The net effect of such a regulatory regime would simply be a shattering of the Internet, as people move to P2P platforms, encryption, and other tools to avoid government censorship of the kind he advocates. A good outcome would be that it would badly hurt platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
So, I say, bring it on, Vint, baby. Let's see whether the open source community can demonstrate what an authoritarian fool you are.
The president didn't craft the bill and even if it represented his views, his views are not representative of those of the US as a whole. We don't elect absolute rulers, and the people we elect don't have a mandate for everything they do.
Now, here is what got Obama elected:
Unfortunately, he flip-flopped and then proceeded to undermine the privacy and civil liberties of Americans when in office. And, yes, Obama confused his election with a mandate to do whatever he decided he wanted to do.
I'm sure it seems like that to you. You, on the other hand, actually are very opinionated on things you obviously don’t know anything about. And it has been mildly amusing to see you make a fool of yourself.
I assume we agree that unregulated free markets produce large and growing inequalities, so let's take that as a given.
Since you wouldn't be asking if you already knew the economic principles, let me try to illustrate this with an oversimplified hypothetical economy: let's say there are only three kinds of wage earners in an economy, those worth $10/h, those worth $50/h, and those worth $100/h. The way government reduces that inequality is by taking money from high income earners and giving it to low income earners. What's the effect of that? In the short term, low income earners are getting more money. If I earn $100/h and you reduce that to $50/h in order to redistribute the difference to people making $10/h, high income earners are going to do one of two things: (1) they are going to leave the country for a country that pays them $100/h, or (2) they are going to reduce their productivity until they are worth only the $50/h you now pay them.
Again, that's an oversimplified example; real economies are much more complex, but the core is the same: you cannot pay people less than their labor is worth. If you try to redistribute from high income earners to low income earners, the economy will shrink overall and everybody is worse off.
Socialists and progressives actually recognize problem (1), which is why they talk about a "race to the bottom" and "global labor and tax standards". The East Bloc used to build walls to try to keep people from running away. But even if you could address problem (1), you still have to deal with problem (2), and no socialist or progressive state has ever figured out how to do that.
The point of free markets is to give exactly those people excessive wealth who satisfy needs that their fellow citizens have; and they excessive power they get out of it is to offer more products and services.
In a free market, nobody controls "access to food, shelter, education and transportation". It is progressives and democratic socialists who want to put into place a system that gives a small elite the power to control access to those essential services, a power that is invariably abused by them.
A "ruling class" is what Sanders wants to create. There is no "ruling class" in a free market.
The US healthcare system is completely broken. And I agree that adopting a system like Germany, France, or Scandinavia would indeed fix it. If that were on the table, I would fully support it because it is much better than what we have (though not as good as a free market system). We could do that tomorrow and finance it fully out of the existing Medicare/Medicaid budget, though the European way of financing it (and other social services) would be to raise taxes on the middle class by about 50% relative (about 10% absolute). How about doing that? How about adopting European "socialist" ways?
But that's not what's on the table. What people like Sanders, Warren, and Clinton are talking about is a massively corrupt system that pays off their political supporters, is financially unsustainable, and other than nominally being "single payer", has little in common with the European systems that you list.
Yes, and that is the kind of system that progressives and democratic socialists want to create. It is wrong and dangerous, and that is why we should oppose it in the strongest possible terms and instead make our markets as free as possible.
And how is an invasion of a foreign country, a decision made by government and paid for by taxes forcibly extracted from the people, in any way a consequence of free markets? Do you think any sane business would spend $2.4 trillion, like the US government did, just to clear the ground for a pipeline in a shithole country? That makes no business sense.
Of course, businesses may (legally or illegally) bribe politicians to do their bidding. But progressives and democratic socialists suffer from the delusion that you can fix that by putting unselfish and un-greedy people in charge of selfish and greedy people, and that is absurd. As you can see every election, government attracts selfish and greedy people like flies are attracted to a rotting carcass.
Senseless invasion of other countries, rule by an elite, and giving well-connected people massive amounts of unearned wealth is the kind of power progressives and democratic socialist want government to have. That is what free market advocates like myself oppose in the strongest possible terms.
The reason people don't want those ungainly machines is because they don't need them. You can get all the durability of microfilm storage without the bulk or complexity of the old-style camera or reader by using digital microfilm recorders and digital microfilm readers. A digital microfilm reader is about the size of a cigar box and hooks up via USB to your PC.
If you're preparing for a post-apocalyptic world, you can still always read those films with a simple handheld microscope.
They have been trying to, but they haven't been very successful. Cash is part of the reason. And if cryptocurrencies catch on, their ability to track money or control the financial system evaporates completely. Personally, I and many other people think that would be a good thing. You're free to disagree.
Trump promised that he would defend the US against economic misconduct by China and Europe. You may agree or disagree with his reasoning (I think it's b.s.), but it in no way amounts to "the state giving people jobs". Trump has been a staunch defender of point point of view that private companies are the job creators and that government should stop getting in their way.
You don't speak for your fellow citizens. And if you were to take a poll whether they want to abolish cash or have every purchase tracked by the federal government, they would tell you "hell no". If you think otherwise, you live in a fantasy world.
No, you are a totalitarian statist because you want to give the state total control over the financial system.
Well, let me try to put it another way.
When government takes from high income earners and gives to low income earners, everybody ends up poorer in the long run.