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

231–240 of 281 posts

Re: Educated Fools

#231

Post by watwut »

jacquesm wrote: post #219
hinkley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder how the mental model works for some people. They espouse a way to live that they think everyone should do, but that way includes not making your own food, hauling your own trash, or (at least for many of them) building your own things. If they got their way, they’d have to do all the stuff they look down on other people for being competent at. But I don’t think they want them to do these things, they…

Besides that, Joe the garbage truck driver may be a better dad than the people criticizing him.

He may be great dad theoretically, but if his job requires him to drive that truck for 12 hours a day and he is constantly in stress from lack of money or local crime and cant afford doctor to help him with back pain he got from the job, his ability to be that great dad is limited. Joe the garbage truck driver has limits just like anybody else.

The family growing up in "shitty neighborhood" likely means that kids are growing up seeing a lot of alcoholism or drug taking and so on and in them being in higher risk to internalizing that regardless of what parents do.

There are many people willing to do these jobs and not enough of these jobs - meaning people get overworked, mistreated and not much paid. There is this romantic idea of idyllic work-class families happy driving trucks that seem to ignore economic and physical realities of their situation.

Re: Educated Fools

#232

Post by pharke »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #146

I'm going to break slightly with the authors opinion here and say we do solve every problem with "be more like us" but that doesn't always mean college. Other solutions involve "why don't you just move", better mass transit / fewer cars, some form of retraining (not college per se) etc. There's a whole basket of diverging "elite" values such that even if they stopped telling people to go to college tomorrow they woul…

The problem isn't the choice of education or career (or job) that people wind up in. The wage gap between labourers and anyone capable of owning capital is so enormous that people on either side of it can rarely grasp its full measure. The wealthy still think of the poor as being essentially too lazy or stupid to better themselves since surely with a little frugality, hard work, education, and planning they could improve their position. They don't realize that even a well educated, disciplined and spartan individual can still barely improve their standing if they don't carry with them the trappings of the modern elite. Much of which depends on who you know, where you live, and the shibboleths you can recite.

"Go to college" or "just move" is very much the modern "let them eat cake" it is a complete and utter failure to understand the dire position that the Other is in. Likewise, the problem is not one of convenience, having no bread and so resorting to cake, but of necessity of life, working without receiving a wage that one can live on.

Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism speech is alluded to in the article but I feel like its spirit is not reflected in the writing. I would recommend reading the speech itself rather than the article about the speech that is linked to. The warnings and predictions it contains are very applicable to the times we are living through. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/12/06/archive...

Re: Educated Fools

#233

Post by Aperocky »

inimino wrote: post #140
Aperocky wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven’t even made baby steps with AI yet. All electronics as of today have 0 cognitive ability because they are all deterministic in nature. That’s right, exactly 0 cognition.

This is ridiculous. Essentially all modern machines have access to sources of "true" randomness, and determinism is certainly not what is holding back advances in AI.

It is not, all of the machine learning software existing do not truly implement randomness at all. Just because such exist doesn’t mean much. You had single celled organism since 3.5B year ago, does it infer AI to you?

Re: Educated Fools

#234

Post by ur-whale »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #146

I'm going to break slightly with the authors opinion here and say we do solve every problem with "be more like us" but that doesn't always mean college. Other solutions involve "why don't you just move", better mass transit / fewer cars, some form of retraining (not college per se) etc. There's a whole basket of diverging "elite" values such that even if they stopped telling people to go to college tomorrow they woul…

You seem to assume that higher education yields left-leaning people.

This strikes me as a perfect example of [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_principle

> Maybe I am being one of those dastardly, snobbish, grating coastal elites.

You absolutely are. The use of the words "lower class" in your post is a perfect proof of that.

Re: Educated Fools

#235

Post by goatinaboat »

wangii wrote: post #216
goatinaboat wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had they ever struggled to pay their bills? It’s a good question. The last genuine PM we had was John Major, the son of a gardener who studied at night school while working for his father during the day. Before him was Maggie Thatcher, an industrial chemist by trade. All since then have been career politicians from the political class. Blair went to Fettes, the “Scottish Eton”. Cameron and Boris were classmates at Et…

that's my issue. I don't think most of people here no longer need to worry about money, yet the leaders from either sides never worked a day in their lives. how could you vote for them?

how could you vote for them?

Only because you can only vote for the candidates on the ballot paper and the two main parties have already been captured. There are other parties of course, but they are loons or worse.

Ironically Boris has done much more real work in his life than Corbyn, but neither has very much in common with the average voter-taxpayer.

Re: Educated Fools

#236

Post by ur-whale »

jayd16 wrote: post #70
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 unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful. How is this a question? How many high school grads have you interviewed and thought you could spin them up to the usefulness of a graduate from nothing in a reasonable amount of time/effort? Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.

> Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.

It all depends what your definition of "Education" is. If you mean a college degree, then I'd agree that in most cases (depending on your major), it's indeed not particularly useful.

Re: Educated Fools

#237

Post by pjkundert »

harimau777 wrote: post #27
sandoooo wrote: post #23

As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people doing those jobs shouldn't need to spending four of their most productive years not working and accumulating debt. They should just start four years earlier, or get vocational training for a few months to a year. Instead of college for all, what's needed is an a…

Those jobs tend not to pay as well as jobs that require a career focused college degree (e.g. business, engineering, computer science, and even teaching).

This is primarily because manufacturing has been moved, and there are no manufacturing apprenticeships.

A low-wage manufacturing job can lead to high-wage automation and tooling maintenance and eventually design positions, or shop steward, training or mentoring.

And “learn to code” should be a basic school curriculum topic! It is well, frankly, disgusting that such a universally powerful, useful and accessible skill has been withheld from the vast majority of students, and now made almost into an “epithet” meaning disrespect toward lower-skilled people. I don’t know any job, no matter how menial, that couldn’t be improved by some automation of it’s most repetitive book-keeping tasks.

Re: Educated Fools

#238

Post by dbsmith83 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #212
supernova87a wrote: post #113

The problem of modern liberal America is not a divide between educated / less-educated, or race, or any of that. Those are just symbols that make it easy for someone to try to pin it on those false issues. The problem is that many liberal-thinking people, having believed that they (or the country) has solved many of the material and quality of life needs in their little pocket of the world (and told thus by the daily…

Honestly it sounds like you’ve been watching too much TV/Twitter. No one I know in real life is concerned with that stuff. Another article on the site talks about the “exhausted majority.” Indeed.

I agree with you that the majority is exhausted, but unfortunately there is a very vocal minority in the liberal sphere, and they are not particularly known for being reasonable people. It makes it seem like the average person's problems and concerns are getting put on the back-burner, while the liberal favored special interest group of the day gets the spotlight. How can someone not be resentful?

I also want to point out that it's not just twitter/tv. You can see true policy changes happening in the schools and workplaces--at least within the west-coast liberal strongholds.

Re: Educated Fools

#239

Post by astura »

yodsanklai wrote: post #207
mixmastamyk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could and should, but probably won’t.

I don't know in the US, but during the 5 years it took me to graduate, I usually had about 30-40 hours of classes a week, plus a lot of personal work (especially in maths), and that for 5 years. If you want to do that by yourself, you need to: - decide what you need to learn, and find what are the best resources to learn it - keep motivated for many years, without feedback that you're on the right track - convince yo…

I went to school in the US and my experience is identical to yours. During the school year I'd spend much more than 40 hours a week on schoolwork, I recall taking a software engineering course where my team and I would meet on both Saturday and Sunday for 10ish hours each day for a couple months to get our project done.

I also couldn't have done that myself because I was only able to do it with access to student loans, as I had to (at the minimum) eat and have somewhere warm to sleep, which I certainly had no money for, so I had to take out loans for food and rent.

Re: Educated Fools

#240

Post by strongbond »

barrenflats wrote: post #124

This one really hits home for me. I’m at a cross roads in my life right now and kind of lost. I had a great job working as the number 2 at a small business that I lucked into, but for various reasons beyond the control of the corporation, had to close. I’m in my late 20s, and as this article puts it, merely a high school graduate. I can code and do IT work, coordinate problem solving between businesses, read scientif…

When I last looked, https://www.compose.com/ did 'blind hiring' - they judge you by a small, representative work task rather than the credentials you boast. OK, you'll spend quite some time if you want to nail it. But hey. Edit: I got quite far in their little puzzle-box of a recruitment process, but didn't quite make it.
Post reply on HN