That's not entirely true; the Abrahamic religions started off as something in place of science/law/history
In my post I wasn't talking about specific religions and specific teachings within those religions. I was referring to more the more general concepts: the spiritual world and God.
There are good arguments to be made that some organized religions are theologically confused (either by accident, or intentionally to use religion for power). But there are some concepts, like that of a soul, that are intrinsically important to many people, and that exist throughout humanity (not specific to any one religion).
First, it predicts what things we will discover in future digs
There's a problem of bias in that experiment. Anything you find you can say either "evolution did it", or if it doesn't look like a "transitional fossil", you can claim that we just haven't found the other transitional pieces yet.
When you get down to specific enough questions and predictions that you eliminate that bias, then you have genetic theory.
By your reckoning, it sounds like thermodynamics isn't a proper theory since it's based on statistical mechanics.
Thermodynamics is independently testable.
There is a difference between theories based on other theories on the one hand; and conclusions based on theories on the other. Thermodynamics is a theory; global warming is a conclusion.
Notice that a theory stands on its own, independent of the theories on which it is based. If the theory is still making predictions repeatable by other scientists, it's still valid. Conclusions don't stand on their own: if the theories on which they're based fall apart, the conclusion is no longer valid.
Evolution is not testable in any kind of practical way, either. Genetic theory is very testable, and really should be the focus of this debate from a scientific standpoint.
In a criminal trial, scientific theories related to DNA may be useful. However, it's a jury -- an group of non-experts -- that decides whether the scientific theory applies to the specific case. If the DNA evidence was found on the bloody knife, it may lead to a conviction. If it was found in the defendent's bathroom, it won't be likely to change the outcome of the trial. The scientists present the abstract theory and the prosecution collects evidence and provides testimony, and the jury comes to a conclusion from that evidence.
Notice that it's no more useful to have a jury of scientists in a DNA-related trial than a jury of peers. Similarly, when answering a specific question such as "was evolution over millions of years the physical process by which humans developed eyebrows?", the opinion of an average person that makes themselves aware of the evidence is just as valid as that of a scientist.
The point I'm trying to make is that there's a fundamental difference between trying to decide what happened -- that is, a finding of fact or a conclusion -- and the scientific method of trying to show that a theory is useful for predicting future outcomes. It happens that sometimes scientists are more informed in advance, and can therefore make these decisions more quickly with less convincing. However, if someone does take the time to inform themselves, they don't have to be a scientist to have a valid opinion.
I think anyone who says they "believe in evolution" is seriously confused about science. Does anyone "believe in F=MA"? If you do, you're wrong, because that formula doesn't stand up to relativistic experiments. However, that doesn't mean that F=MA isn't useful, and it doesn't mean that the theory of relativity will always hold either. So you don't "believe" in science, you use science to develop theories that are useful and stand up to experimentation to arrive at conclusions. But those conclusions can be arrived at separately from participating in the scientific process.
Genetics is a theory. Evolution is a conclusion.
This confusion is also the source of confusion over Global Warming. Global Warming is used to mean many different thing, but is always some form of conclusion. Thermodynamics and fluid dynamics are a couple of the theories on which Global Warming conclusions are based, but Global Warming itself isn't a theory. Unless, of course, you have other planets to experiment with.
We, humans, know that god is fiction because he is OUR fiction. We invented him. We made him up.
God is a more general concept than a particular earthly description by a particular sect of a particular religion.
Your statement is more like saying that, because Mr. Picard is fiction, that the entire concept of am explorer is fiction.
The spiritual world can't be disproved, because any effects of the spiritual world on the physical world must be carried out through physical processes. It's important to people precisely because it deals with entirely unscientific subjective concepts, such as the concept of a soul; whereas science necessarily deals with objective concepts: those that can be independently reproduced and verified.
You can believe that a particular description must be wrong because of the religious bootstrapping problem you describe -- that is: once touched by imperfect humans, then passed on by imperfect languages, there is likely to be a mistake somewhere along the line. But you can't use that to refute the more general concept of God.
Then I attended my first class. Every test -- EVERY test -- was based on the bold letter definitions in the text book.
The union wants to keep people like you out. They think they can do it by insulting your intelligence.
Teachers are a mediocre, sub-average group. They want to present themselves as "educational experts," and they do this by taking a bunch of stupid classes and getting a degree.
The last thing a mediocre employee wants to do is compete with someone who's actually good. If enough people like you become teachers, you might start asking to be paid more than the incompetent teachers. Then their whole cushy system comes crashing down, and they might have to actually work.
the fact that it's foggy doesn't mean you can speed up.
The problem with your analogy is that, in your example, we know that driving more slowly in this instance has a very low cost (small amount of wasted time). With global warming, the cost of reducing significant CO2 output is very high.
The fact is, nobody wants to bring the economy to a halt, and hold down China and India from ever developing, because of some foggy computer models that say the sky is falling. If you want to globally put the breaks on a fossil fuel economy, you better have a lot more convincing story.
"Just fork it" is becoming less and less viable these days for larger projects. I think the last 'great fork' we'll probably see was Xorg.
I don't think Xorg will be the last great fork, but I agree that forking MySQL will not bear any fruit. I think the projects are different in a couple important ways:
(1) For MySQL, alternatives exist. Why fork when you could just use PostgreSQL or FirebirdSQL? Those projects are both under active development, and MySQL will lose too much momentum and effectively be at a development standstill for a long time. It just doesn't make sense to do anything to it except fix bugs.
(2) Development of Xorg doesn't involve as many tradeoffs, compromises, opinions, conflicting goals or long-term design implications as an RDBMS. For the most part, in Xorg, any patch by a good developer is a good patch. That's simply not true for an RDBMS.
A fork would lose so much momentum that no real new development would happen for a long time. Sure, they'd be able to maintain the last snapshot with bugfixes to a degree, but new users and developers would just jump to the other free databases, and existing users may migrate away from MySQL. The fork would go through a long cycle of trying to find qualified leaders and building a developer community. Most likely, that would never happen because good alternatives exist.
If someone forks, they better like the last snapshot of MySQL a lot, because the code will be pretty much the same for a long time.
Meaning, if MySQL AB changed their license to a closed source format people would just fork the last version that was open, which is the beautiful thing about GPL.
I think you're underestimating the effort in building an entire new community around a sophisticated project. Who will be the leader? Will 5 people all decide to fork at once? If not, is the first person to fork really qualified to lead development on an RDBMS?
Take a look at some success stories of community building. Mozilla built a community, but that took a long time, a lot of corporate backing, and most importantly the transition was controlled by the existing developers. Measure the time it took between the opening of the code and the point at which Mozilla produced a product that really competed with IE on the desktop. OpenSolaris (or OpenOffice, or any Sun open source project) is still mostly run by Sun. They didn't just throw the code to the wild.
GPL is nice and idealistic, but if you are forced to fork the code and lose all the social capital that's been built around the project, you have a lot of work ahead of you. It's only worthwhile when you have no viable alternative (and there are two alternatives available in this case: PostgreSQL and FirebirdSQL). MySQL AB could drop the hammer and stop releasing GPL code and set the development back so much that it would effectively be out of the race, and would likely never really accomplish anything other than bugfixes to that last snapshot to support existing applications.
You can make your own unsigned types in no time with PostgreSQL.
The reason it doesn't support them natively is because it's very tricky to find out what implicit casting rules to use for integer operations (not impossible, but there's a lot of room for problems). If you're using them as identifiers and not using lots of mathematical operations on them, it would be simple for you to create those types.
Here's a quote from one of the developers on the issue from a very recent posting:
The datatypes themselves are utterly trivial. The hard part, if you want them to be part of the numeric hierarchy, is figuring out what the type promotion and implicit casting rules ought to be.
So, it will work great for you, because you don't need implicit casting all over, you're just using them as identifiers. This is exactly what postgresql's extensible type system is for.
To close the source they would have to comb back through the contributions of other people over the years and take out all OS code that is what they didn't pay for in-house.
But MySQL AB owns the copyright on all the code, regardless of the contributor, correct? That means they can close the source, and they don't have to ask anyone or comb anything.
It appears as though the "niche" Sun is marketing this for is anything related to web serving, application serving, databases, storage, or hosting virtual servers. Granted, their marketing may be ahead of reality, but I don't think that's a "niche". The only things (that occur to me at this moment, anyway) left out are desktops/gaming, embedded (which isn't Intel/AMD anyway), and simulation/rendering.
So how much of the backend server infrastructure in the world can be better served by this chip in terms of performance, performance/$, or performance/watt? Is it really a niche or is it just a more specialized chip to help very common workloads?
(1) that some students are being deceived about the nature of the education they're receiving and (2) that receiving vocational training instead of a purely academic education is somehow inferior. I don't buy that #1 is happening at all and you've ostensibly gone out of your way to stress the importance of vocational education in contrast to #2. So I'm a bit confused.
There are several interested parties involved: (1) Students (2) Parents (3) Employers
I believe that students and parents are being deceived when they sign up for academic education and get a curriculum driven by industry.
Does the word "academic" have a meaning? If it does, why do we use it interchangeably with vocational education?
The reason is self-evident: those that do use the words interchangeably are either confused themselves, or intend to confuse others. Why else would there be such active efforts to perpetuate the confusion?
All I'm trying to do is draw a line between two words with different meanings, and it seems like there are many people who realize they are different, but still want to call them the same thing.
Students no doubt like having a curriculum that tries to prepare them for the work they'll actually be doing. They seek out the schools that offer that, with full knowledge of what they're getting. If there is a change in that regard, it's because the students are driving it.
There is a lot of demand for vocational education. I never disputed that.
If the definition of "academic" has changed, then what of it?
It isn't merely "changing," but disappearing. I think that the word "academic" is valuable in our language, and obviously you don't. I think that's the source of our disagreement.
By those terms, any discipline that is useful outside of the university is less deserving. Should we respect such degrees less, or charge more for them (irrespective of their instructional cost) because they have commercial value?
I didn't say either of those things. You have preconceived notions that "vocational" is worse than "academic". One is not better and the other is not worse, but they do have two distinct meanings. And we should use those meanings correctly.
Academic education should be free from some of the forces that might influence vocational education. It's not that academic education must be useless. It's not what is taught, but how it's taught. If the curriculum is driven by the industry, it's vocational.
I gave you a good indicator of the opposite: International trade balances are extremely good indicators of where the balance between producing and consuming lay
Read your statement again, you said: "If that were true, there would be a trade surplus, not the gigantic deficit of today..."
That is false. You CAN produce more than you consume without having a trade surplus. You didn't say anything about a "good indicator".
Your claim that the US consumes more than it produces requires a lot more analysis than you have provided, or a reference that substantiates the specific claim that: "on average, US citizens consume more than they produce". If it's a reference, please refer me to the specific page on which they make that specific claim.
I'm not trying to split hairs here. There's bound to be a little impurity in any academic education. The point of an academic institution though, is that it is somewhat removed from a set of forces that would normally influence an educational institution. For instance, if an academic institution teaches "industry standard" tools, the curriculum becomes tied to industry and it loses the academic qualities.
I am not saying vocational education is not important. Academic learning and vocational learning are mutually dependent, to a degree, so we need both. I am just trying to define academic education versus vocational.
The logical fallacy that I'm seeing over and over again here is:
Claim: We need vocational education Claim: We should provide vocational education at academic institutions Conclusion: Therefore, we should call vocational education at an academic institution "academic".
I can agree with those claims, but I don't agree with that conclusion. Vocational education is NOT academic education, and it's fraudulent to call it that.
Referring to the conflation as a "fraud" also implies that some great wrong is being done by associating the two.
Associating the two is not wrong, but calling vocational training (no matter how advanced) "academic" is deceptive and wrong.
You also keep implying that vocational education erodes academic institutions, but I don't see and clear reasoning why it would.
It doesn't erode the institution, it erodes the concept of academic education in general. I'm fine if the two are associated, and I'm fine if they even happen at the same place. But let's call things what they are: if you are training for a job, don't call it "academic".
The problem I see is that academic institutions are supposed to be somewhat removed from some types of pressures. That's the reason tenure exists: to remove the pressure of pleasing others in order to keep one's job. Certainly we can't remove all external pressures and I'm not saying that academic learning is more effective than other types of learning. All I'm doing is trying to pull the definition of "academic" back to the real meaning, which I think is a valuable part of civilization.
What's happening to erode academia is that we're reintroducing those external pressures: companies, fads, products, and technologies driving the curriculum which destroys the academic aspect of the education.
The two are already combined in most of North America, and that's precisely the source of confusion.
Agreed. My point was that if we do combine them, we should distinguish them, and right now we don't distinguish between academic and vocational.
There are reasonable arguments for having one institution that teaches academically and vocationally. For instance, academics and vocational education are mutually dependent, and also the same people often want both at the same time.
If that were true, there would be a trade surplus, not the gigantic deficit of today...
Not true. Your standard doesn't even pass the most basic reasoning. For instance, the trade balance of the planet Earth is exactly zero. Does that mean that humans always consume exactly as much as they produce?
Science/engineering majors will be subsidizing do-nothing arts majors for the rest of their lives in the real world.
In the US, for the most part, people produce more than they consume. This includes liberal arts majors, even if the liberal arts education itself doesn't help them produce.
If we were more of a socialist country, then we would need to coerce people to make productive choices (which is why socialism and freedom are mutually exclusive). However, this is an argument to eliminate socialist institutions, not an argument to coerce people to make choices that we believe are more productive.
I'm guess I'm asking why you think going to school to start a career in the business world is any less important than going to school to a start a career in academia.
Where did I say that? You must have got that from your preconceived notions that vocational training is inferior to academic education. It is precisely those preconceived notions that cause this confusion.
Vocational education is very important. However, we should not let vocational training compromise academic institutions, because that's a slide from which we can't recover. Calling training or vocational school an "academic education" is a fraud.
Maybe we should even combine the two at one institution, but we should clearly distinguish between the two in order to be honest.
College students have to be able to pay back their loans and make as much as they can within a short few years after graduation or they can literally go bankrupt while still young people.
Regardless, that's not an academic education, that's a vocational education. My point was that there are many people trying to confuse academics with training, and we shouldn't let that happen. If we let training infiltrate academia, we will have no academia left.
Your point is entirely separate. If you think there should be more vocational training, that's fine, just don't call a trade school a university, because that's a fraud.
...how horrid the system is now, it's a total race to the bottom, looting all the way...
I think you should look at some positive information as well. Humanity is not over.
Most of these sorts of schools already provide a lower quality of education in those fields, and now they want to raise their prices as well.
I don't understand your argument. If a school raises the prices without raising the quality, students are likely to choose other schools. If the research dollars that the school attracts were enough to pay for the engineering schools, then they wouldn't need to charge any tuition at all.
But the facts are pretty clear: engineering education is expensive, and that cost is not made up for by the research done by undergrads. So, they are raising the price. If we really want to encourage more engineers, we should do that through government grants, not have liberal arts majors subsidize the whole thing.
One reason for the education system is to provide knowledgeable people into the labor market.
I think you mean "one reason for vocational school".
Pricing for degrees should be based on how much society needs that degree holder.
Based on what arbitrary definition of "need"? We don't "need" anyone, it's just a matter of benefits and costs. The only objective way I know of to measure "need" is the value in dollars of the person's labor when they hold the degree.
Majors like english(non teaching) should be very expensive since they arent very useful to society as a whole and should be discouraged as much as possible.
You're trying to force your particular wants on other people. Whatever discouragement is necessary already exists through the low expected value of an english major's labor.
The one labor shortage you hear about every year is teachers.
What "shortage"? Shortages exist when there are artificial restrictions in place preventing the price from rising. If a school wants a teacher, they can get one by offering enough money to attract the teacher they want.
When you "hear about" shortages, what people are really saying is "I want X, but I don't want to pay the full price". You see the same thing with engineers: a company says that there is a "shortage" of engineers, and use that to justify work visas. That allows the employer to get the engineer without paying the full price of an American engineer. I'm not saying that foreign labor should be disallowed, I'm just saying that there's no "shortage" of anything.
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That's not entirely true; the Abrahamic religions started off as something in place of science/law/history
In my post I wasn't talking about specific religions and specific teachings within those religions. I was referring to more the more general concepts: the spiritual world and God.
There are good arguments to be made that some organized religions are theologically confused (either by accident, or intentionally to use religion for power). But there are some concepts, like that of a soul, that are intrinsically important to many people, and that exist throughout humanity (not specific to any one religion).
First, it predicts what things we will discover in future digs
There's a problem of bias in that experiment. Anything you find you can say either "evolution did it", or if it doesn't look like a "transitional fossil", you can claim that we just haven't found the other transitional pieces yet.
When you get down to specific enough questions and predictions that you eliminate that bias, then you have genetic theory.
By your reckoning, it sounds like thermodynamics isn't a proper theory since it's based on statistical mechanics.
Thermodynamics is independently testable.
There is a difference between theories based on other theories on the one hand; and conclusions based on theories on the other. Thermodynamics is a theory; global warming is a conclusion.
Notice that a theory stands on its own, independent of the theories on which it is based. If the theory is still making predictions repeatable by other scientists, it's still valid. Conclusions don't stand on their own: if the theories on which they're based fall apart, the conclusion is no longer valid.
If it's not testable, it's just a conjecture.
Evolution is not testable in any kind of practical way, either. Genetic theory is very testable, and really should be the focus of this debate from a scientific standpoint.
In a criminal trial, scientific theories related to DNA may be useful. However, it's a jury -- an group of non-experts -- that decides whether the scientific theory applies to the specific case. If the DNA evidence was found on the bloody knife, it may lead to a conviction. If it was found in the defendent's bathroom, it won't be likely to change the outcome of the trial. The scientists present the abstract theory and the prosecution collects evidence and provides testimony, and the jury comes to a conclusion from that evidence.
Notice that it's no more useful to have a jury of scientists in a DNA-related trial than a jury of peers. Similarly, when answering a specific question such as "was evolution over millions of years the physical process by which humans developed eyebrows?", the opinion of an average person that makes themselves aware of the evidence is just as valid as that of a scientist.
The point I'm trying to make is that there's a fundamental difference between trying to decide what happened -- that is, a finding of fact or a conclusion -- and the scientific method of trying to show that a theory is useful for predicting future outcomes. It happens that sometimes scientists are more informed in advance, and can therefore make these decisions more quickly with less convincing. However, if someone does take the time to inform themselves, they don't have to be a scientist to have a valid opinion.
I think anyone who says they "believe in evolution" is seriously confused about science. Does anyone "believe in F=MA"? If you do, you're wrong, because that formula doesn't stand up to relativistic experiments. However, that doesn't mean that F=MA isn't useful, and it doesn't mean that the theory of relativity will always hold either. So you don't "believe" in science, you use science to develop theories that are useful and stand up to experimentation to arrive at conclusions. But those conclusions can be arrived at separately from participating in the scientific process.
Genetics is a theory.
Evolution is a conclusion.
This confusion is also the source of confusion over Global Warming. Global Warming is used to mean many different thing, but is always some form of conclusion. Thermodynamics and fluid dynamics are a couple of the theories on which Global Warming conclusions are based, but Global Warming itself isn't a theory. Unless, of course, you have other planets to experiment with.
We, humans, know that god is fiction because he is OUR fiction. We invented him. We made him up.
God is a more general concept than a particular earthly description by a particular sect of a particular religion.
Your statement is more like saying that, because Mr. Picard is fiction, that the entire concept of am explorer is fiction.
The spiritual world can't be disproved, because any effects of the spiritual world on the physical world must be carried out through physical processes. It's important to people precisely because it deals with entirely unscientific subjective concepts, such as the concept of a soul; whereas science necessarily deals with objective concepts: those that can be independently reproduced and verified.
You can believe that a particular description must be wrong because of the religious bootstrapping problem you describe -- that is: once touched by imperfect humans, then passed on by imperfect languages, there is likely to be a mistake somewhere along the line. But you can't use that to refute the more general concept of God.
Then I attended my first class. Every test -- EVERY test -- was based on the bold letter definitions in the text book.
The union wants to keep people like you out. They think they can do it by insulting your intelligence.
Teachers are a mediocre, sub-average group. They want to present themselves as "educational experts," and they do this by taking a bunch of stupid classes and getting a degree.
The last thing a mediocre employee wants to do is compete with someone who's actually good. If enough people like you become teachers, you might start asking to be paid more than the incompetent teachers. Then their whole cushy system comes crashing down, and they might have to actually work.
the fact that it's foggy doesn't mean you can speed up.
The problem with your analogy is that, in your example, we know that driving more slowly in this instance has a very low cost (small amount of wasted time). With global warming, the cost of reducing significant CO2 output is very high.
The fact is, nobody wants to bring the economy to a halt, and hold down China and India from ever developing, because of some foggy computer models that say the sky is falling. If you want to globally put the breaks on a fossil fuel economy, you better have a lot more convincing story.
"Just fork it" is becoming less and less viable these days for larger projects. I think the last 'great fork' we'll probably see was Xorg.
I don't think Xorg will be the last great fork, but I agree that forking MySQL will not bear any fruit. I think the projects are different in a couple important ways:
(1) For MySQL, alternatives exist. Why fork when you could just use PostgreSQL or FirebirdSQL? Those projects are both under active development, and MySQL will lose too much momentum and effectively be at a development standstill for a long time. It just doesn't make sense to do anything to it except fix bugs.
(2) Development of Xorg doesn't involve as many tradeoffs, compromises, opinions, conflicting goals or long-term design implications as an RDBMS. For the most part, in Xorg, any patch by a good developer is a good patch. That's simply not true for an RDBMS.
A fork would lose so much momentum that no real new development would happen for a long time. Sure, they'd be able to maintain the last snapshot with bugfixes to a degree, but new users and developers would just jump to the other free databases, and existing users may migrate away from MySQL. The fork would go through a long cycle of trying to find qualified leaders and building a developer community. Most likely, that would never happen because good alternatives exist.
If someone forks, they better like the last snapshot of MySQL a lot, because the code will be pretty much the same for a long time.
Meaning, if MySQL AB changed their license to a closed source format people would just fork the last version that was open, which is the beautiful thing about GPL.
I think you're underestimating the effort in building an entire new community around a sophisticated project. Who will be the leader? Will 5 people all decide to fork at once? If not, is the first person to fork really qualified to lead development on an RDBMS?
Take a look at some success stories of community building. Mozilla built a community, but that took a long time, a lot of corporate backing, and most importantly the transition was controlled by the existing developers. Measure the time it took between the opening of the code and the point at which Mozilla produced a product that really competed with IE on the desktop. OpenSolaris (or OpenOffice, or any Sun open source project) is still mostly run by Sun. They didn't just throw the code to the wild.
GPL is nice and idealistic, but if you are forced to fork the code and lose all the social capital that's been built around the project, you have a lot of work ahead of you. It's only worthwhile when you have no viable alternative (and there are two alternatives available in this case: PostgreSQL and FirebirdSQL). MySQL AB could drop the hammer and stop releasing GPL code and set the development back so much that it would effectively be out of the race, and would likely never really accomplish anything other than bugfixes to that last snapshot to support existing applications.
I keep asking why each time when I read something like this, but I didn't get a good answer.
Seconded. Please show a few things that postgresql can do to make it easier for new users. Constructive criticism leads to better software.
The reason it doesn't support them natively is because it's very tricky to find out what implicit casting rules to use for integer operations (not impossible, but there's a lot of room for problems). If you're using them as identifiers and not using lots of mathematical operations on them, it would be simple for you to create those types.
Here's a quote from one of the developers on the issue from a very recent posting:
So, it will work great for you, because you don't need implicit casting all over, you're just using them as identifiers. This is exactly what postgresql's extensible type system is for.
To close the source they would have to comb back through the contributions of other people over the years and take out all OS code that is what they didn't pay for in-house.
But MySQL AB owns the copyright on all the code, regardless of the contributor, correct? That means they can close the source, and they don't have to ask anyone or comb anything.
Sun's processors are a niche market.
It appears as though the "niche" Sun is marketing this for is anything related to web serving, application serving, databases, storage, or hosting virtual servers. Granted, their marketing may be ahead of reality, but I don't think that's a "niche". The only things (that occur to me at this moment, anyway) left out are desktops/gaming, embedded (which isn't Intel/AMD anyway), and simulation/rendering.
So how much of the backend server infrastructure in the world can be better served by this chip in terms of performance, performance/$, or performance/watt? Is it really a niche or is it just a more specialized chip to help very common workloads?
There are several interested parties involved:
(1) Students
(2) Parents
(3) Employers
I believe that students and parents are being deceived when they sign up for academic education and get a curriculum driven by industry.
Does the word "academic" have a meaning? If it does, why do we use it interchangeably with vocational education?
The reason is self-evident: those that do use the words interchangeably are either confused themselves, or intend to confuse others. Why else would there be such active efforts to perpetuate the confusion?
All I'm trying to do is draw a line between two words with different meanings, and it seems like there are many people who realize they are different, but still want to call them the same thing.
Students no doubt like having a curriculum that tries to prepare them for the work they'll actually be doing. They seek out the schools that offer that, with full knowledge of what they're getting. If there is a change in that regard, it's because the students are driving it.
There is a lot of demand for vocational education. I never disputed that.
If the definition of "academic" has changed, then what of it?
It isn't merely "changing," but disappearing. I think that the word "academic" is valuable in our language, and obviously you don't. I think that's the source of our disagreement.
By those terms, any discipline that is useful outside of the university is less deserving. Should we respect such degrees less, or charge more for them (irrespective of their instructional cost) because they have commercial value?
I didn't say either of those things. You have preconceived notions that "vocational" is worse than "academic". One is not better and the other is not worse, but they do have two distinct meanings. And we should use those meanings correctly.
Academic education should be free from some of the forces that might influence vocational education. It's not that academic education must be useless. It's not what is taught, but how it's taught. If the curriculum is driven by the industry, it's vocational.
I gave you a good indicator of the opposite: International trade balances are extremely good indicators of where the balance between producing and consuming lay
Read your statement again, you said: "If that were true, there would be a trade surplus, not the gigantic deficit of today..."
That is false. You CAN produce more than you consume without having a trade surplus. You didn't say anything about a "good indicator".
Your claim that the US consumes more than it produces requires a lot more analysis than you have provided, or a reference that substantiates the specific claim that: "on average, US citizens consume more than they produce". If it's a reference, please refer me to the specific page on which they make that specific claim.
No scapel cuts cleanly here.
I'm not trying to split hairs here. There's bound to be a little impurity in any academic education. The point of an academic institution though, is that it is somewhat removed from a set of forces that would normally influence an educational institution. For instance, if an academic institution teaches "industry standard" tools, the curriculum becomes tied to industry and it loses the academic qualities.
I am not saying vocational education is not important. Academic learning and vocational learning are mutually dependent, to a degree, so we need both. I am just trying to define academic education versus vocational.
The logical fallacy that I'm seeing over and over again here is:
Claim: We need vocational education
Claim: We should provide vocational education at academic institutions
Conclusion: Therefore, we should call vocational education at an academic institution "academic".
I can agree with those claims, but I don't agree with that conclusion. Vocational education is NOT academic education, and it's fraudulent to call it that.
Referring to the conflation as a "fraud" also implies that some great wrong is being done by associating the two.
Associating the two is not wrong, but calling vocational training (no matter how advanced) "academic" is deceptive and wrong.
You also keep implying that vocational education erodes academic institutions, but I don't see and clear reasoning why it would.
It doesn't erode the institution, it erodes the concept of academic education in general. I'm fine if the two are associated, and I'm fine if they even happen at the same place. But let's call things what they are: if you are training for a job, don't call it "academic".
The problem I see is that academic institutions are supposed to be somewhat removed from some types of pressures. That's the reason tenure exists: to remove the pressure of pleasing others in order to keep one's job. Certainly we can't remove all external pressures and I'm not saying that academic learning is more effective than other types of learning. All I'm doing is trying to pull the definition of "academic" back to the real meaning, which I think is a valuable part of civilization.
What's happening to erode academia is that we're reintroducing those external pressures: companies, fads, products, and technologies driving the curriculum which destroys the academic aspect of the education.
The two are already combined in most of North America, and that's precisely the source of confusion.
Agreed. My point was that if we do combine them, we should distinguish them, and right now we don't distinguish between academic and vocational.
There are reasonable arguments for having one institution that teaches academically and vocationally. For instance, academics and vocational education are mutually dependent, and also the same people often want both at the same time.
If that were true, there would be a trade surplus, not the gigantic deficit of today...
Not true. Your standard doesn't even pass the most basic reasoning. For instance, the trade balance of the planet Earth is exactly zero. Does that mean that humans always consume exactly as much as they produce?
Science/engineering majors will be subsidizing do-nothing arts majors for the rest of their lives in the real world.
In the US, for the most part, people produce more than they consume. This includes liberal arts majors, even if the liberal arts education itself doesn't help them produce.
If we were more of a socialist country, then we would need to coerce people to make productive choices (which is why socialism and freedom are mutually exclusive). However, this is an argument to eliminate socialist institutions, not an argument to coerce people to make choices that we believe are more productive.
I'm guess I'm asking why you think going to school to start a career in the business world is any less important than going to school to a start a career in academia.
Where did I say that? You must have got that from your preconceived notions that vocational training is inferior to academic education. It is precisely those preconceived notions that cause this confusion.
Vocational education is very important. However, we should not let vocational training compromise academic institutions, because that's a slide from which we can't recover. Calling training or vocational school an "academic education" is a fraud.
Maybe we should even combine the two at one institution, but we should clearly distinguish between the two in order to be honest.
College students have to be able to pay back their loans and make as much as they can within a short few years after graduation or they can literally go bankrupt while still young people.
...how horrid the system is now, it's a total race to the bottom, looting all the way...
Regardless, that's not an academic education, that's a vocational education. My point was that there are many people trying to confuse academics with training, and we shouldn't let that happen. If we let training infiltrate academia, we will have no academia left.
Your point is entirely separate. If you think there should be more vocational training, that's fine, just don't call a trade school a university, because that's a fraud.
I think you should look at some positive information as well. Humanity is not over.
Most of these sorts of schools already provide a lower quality of education in those fields, and now they want to raise their prices as well.
I don't understand your argument. If a school raises the prices without raising the quality, students are likely to choose other schools. If the research dollars that the school attracts were enough to pay for the engineering schools, then they wouldn't need to charge any tuition at all.
But the facts are pretty clear: engineering education is expensive, and that cost is not made up for by the research done by undergrads. So, they are raising the price. If we really want to encourage more engineers, we should do that through government grants, not have liberal arts majors subsidize the whole thing.
One reason for the education system is to provide knowledgeable people into the labor market.
I think you mean "one reason for vocational school".
Pricing for degrees should be based on how much society needs that degree holder.
Based on what arbitrary definition of "need"? We don't "need" anyone, it's just a matter of benefits and costs. The only objective way I know of to measure "need" is the value in dollars of the person's labor when they hold the degree.
Majors like english(non teaching) should be very expensive since they arent very useful to society as a whole and should be discouraged as much as possible.
You're trying to force your particular wants on other people. Whatever discouragement is necessary already exists through the low expected value of an english major's labor.
The one labor shortage you hear about every year is teachers.
What "shortage"? Shortages exist when there are artificial restrictions in place preventing the price from rising. If a school wants a teacher, they can get one by offering enough money to attract the teacher they want.
When you "hear about" shortages, what people are really saying is "I want X, but I don't want to pay the full price". You see the same thing with engineers: a company says that there is a "shortage" of engineers, and use that to justify work visas. That allows the employer to get the engineer without paying the full price of an American engineer. I'm not saying that foreign labor should be disallowed, I'm just saying that there's no "shortage" of anything.
I paid for my own degree at a public university.
I hope you mean you paid for your own tuition.