Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Educated Fools

newrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 281 posts

Re: Educated Fools

#81

Post by contingencies »

dluan wrote: post #36
petermcneeley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 years eh. I think one might argue that "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Shhh we're busy reinventing Marx as a new idea for the pundit brained technocrats. We need people like Elon and Andrew Yang to tweet it to us before it can be considered cool again.

How about generating a synthetic group of such personalities using ML with retweet and emotional conflict generation as feedback parameters? Then letting them loose on the public? Wait, that's already happening...

Re: Educated Fools

#82

Post by cleandreams »

I grew up in the author's city in the midst of long term economic abandonment and decline. It was terrifying, to be honest. I think the spread of this across the industrialized Midwest elected Trump. I have had many arguments with fellow liberals about the globalized economy. In a nutshell, I don't believe in it, if the result is an alienated wasteland where the old working class economy used to be. We, the elite (I include myself as I'm a well off and successful engineer), have destroyed the social contract by supporting and implementing outsourcing and automation. The result may well be the destruction of our democracy. Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price. The article is only wrong in downplaying the potential of bringing industrial jobs back to this country. That is essential, as a part of the overall change in priorities.

Re: Educated Fools

#83

Post by esoterica »

claudeganon wrote: post #30
salt-licker wrote: post #15

Great article that exposes many college-educated blind spots, in particular that education is not a panacea for inequality. But the proposed solution of more democratic workplaces — somehow convincing capital-holders that investing in human labor rather than automation is in their own self-interest — feels like swimming against the tide of history. Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so…

Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else. In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue…

>Is meritocracy a belief really held by elites though? It seems more a propaganda for the professional class to keep them from acting in solidarity with everyone else. > In material terms, people making high salaries at FAANG companies are still closer to their low-paid and contract working peers. But it’s important for them to think that they’re closer in position to the CEOs and Capital owners so that they’ll continue to administer the ownership class’ empires and bureaucracies. Thus the fiction of meritocracy.

Why do you think that the members of the professional class would personally benefit from more solidarity with the working class? Many high-earning professionals own millions of dollars worth of "capital" (shares, rental properties) and would not benefit from any kind of revolution that would tank the value of these assets. They also already possess many of the benefits that the working class are agitating for (good benefits, high pay), and don't need an overhaul of the economic structure to obtain those.

I'm not saying solidarity is bad, I'm just saying your derisive view of high-income professionals as dumdums brainwashed by the rich into acting against their own interests when they decline to participate in the revolution is not an accurate reflection of their actual incentives.

Re: Educated Fools

#84

Post by anonu »

The social trend discussed in the article has taken over the world. Not just the USA. I realized this a bit late with the "gillet jaune" uprisings in France. The working class from outside the cities were upset with the increasingly disconnected ruling class and "bobos". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_(socio-economic_group) (this wikipédia page really should be much longer)

Re: Educated Fools

#85

Post by hogFeast »

harimau777 wrote: post #75
rossdavidh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of college degrees that pay no more, or considerably less, than several of those jobs.

Sure, but those are generally degrees which are well known for having poor employment prospects (philosophy, art, history, etc.). Doesn't that just change the advice from "go to college" to "go to college in one of the majors with a track record or leading to a good career"?

Yep, some plumbers are making way more...even than grads in "majors with a track record" (whatever that means).

The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).

Re: Educated Fools

#86

Post by tengbretson »

voxl wrote: post #59
overgard wrote: post #43

I totally agree with the article, but to me the saddest part of all of this is I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful. (I say that with a four year CS degree). Most majors, to be blunt, are pretty useless in terms of real world skills. The argument is "they teach you how to think". I don't know how you would even measure that, but it doesn't seem that true, especially since colleges are…

This type of concern trolling makes me want to ramp up the "redneck" and "flyover state" rhetoric. If the group of people that idolize Steven Crowder and other PC anti-police can't handle the rhetoric they dish out then let Trump destroy there lives. Because that's the cruel irony, the educated and wealthy are not hurt by Trump nearly as much as the poor white trash are. If you went to University and all you can must…

If you have this kind of disdain for these people why not let them split off and govern themselves in their own country? What good can possibly come from letting two groups that hate each other take turns ruling over one another?

Re: Educated Fools

#87

Post by wwweston »

crdoconnor wrote: post #39
analog31 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard a fellow Democrat use the term "political correctness" to advocate a policy. This could be another fabricated wedge.

Racists don't use the term racist to describe what they do either. Language policing is still big in dem circles.

Language policing is big in every human circle where people realize language has impacts, whether it's a religion that has prohibitions on the name of God, a disgust-sensitive subculture that finds some words too vulgar, or a political culture that insists the United States is "A republic, not a democracy."

And when you zoom in on specific linguistic struggles, you often find that it's less a matter of one side being the police and the other being the anarchists, or cerebral philosophers accurately reckoning with the hazard of losing some ideas in a wide-ranging territory of thoughtful discourse, and more two sides with competing values they understand are promoted or eroded with certain language. For example, there's no "freedom" side in the fight over "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" (however much inflated), just two forms of "policing" with different implicit values.

Sometimes, of course, you do find topics where one side of a struggle is much more about restraint and the other side is struggling against restraint itself. See, for example, people who are upset that they can't tell racist jokes anymore without someone getting offended.

Re: Educated Fools

#88

Post by mar77i »

It made me realize that the reason "Learn to Code" was treated as such an insult on social media is exactly its topical proximity to this very discussion.

Re: Educated Fools

#89

Post by titanomachy »

acbart wrote: post #52
overgard wrote: post #43

I totally agree with the article, but to me the saddest part of all of this is I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful. (I say that with a four year CS degree). Most majors, to be blunt, are pretty useless in terms of real world skills. The argument is "they teach you how to think". I don't know how you would even measure that, but it doesn't seem that true, especially since colleges are…

I'm a university professor in CS. I don't teach people how to problem-solve, and I have never known what other people are talking about when they claim they teach that in their courses. I teach fundamental skills, and then I put my students in front of lots of problems. In an ideal world, they transfer that experience to new problems. My most important role is providing the motivation and structure to go tackle assig…

> assessments I wrote despite never having any classes on formal assessment design.

PG had a post here recently on (approximately) that subject. http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html

Very few assessments are well-designed.

Re: Educated Fools

#90

Post by mar77i »

wisty wrote: post #18

I think this essay is missing a discussion on the theories of what make university graduates better paid. The two main theories are: 1. Human capital. People learn stuff at university which makes them more valuable workers. 2. Credentialism. Universities select (or pass) people who were already going to be valuable. Now let's look at what we might mean by "valuable": 1. You can fool hiring managers into thinking you'…

To an employer, this seems kind of missing the point: you spent your time at college. Did you do real work yet?
Post reply on HN