What I'm hearing is that universities coast-to-coast should start "researching" Facebook.
That will be excellent research goal. World would be better place if we have output 10K PhDs in Facebook every year.
Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
171–180 of 551 posts
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#172the age old unspoken donation "coincidence" this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too, the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit... old money donates the new library and "hopes" for the best
> this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too That's the entire point and feature of these elite institutions (more specifically, their undergraduate division and business schools), to connect wealth with brilliant people. They are the traditional social institutions of innovation and entrepreneurship before incubators like YC were a thing. If you remove the wealth aspects, then the Ivies are no diff…
> brilliant people
I think you meant "people who'd like to join the wealthy ones, or maybe already have."
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
My partner works at a major U in the US. Top 200ish. They are solely focused on revenue. Teacher pay rarely raised, but that new upgrade for the stadium at a cool $120m, seems like a great idea. FFS, her dept went past the paper budget for one semester, about 5 years ago. The resolution? Do without paper until the next semester. That's what students insane tuition prices bought them. Apathy over education.
Why are they so focused on that? It seems like a great way to drive a school into the ground.
because the people controlling those endowments make tens of millions off of kickbacks and care a lot more about that than the school. additionally, all schools are operating in the same shitty way, they're all getting expensive and shitty and degrees are fairly non-optional for a lot of career paths so it's a captive market
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#174the age old unspoken donation "coincidence" this is how many rich people get their kids into Harvard too, the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit... old money donates the new library and "hopes" for the best
> the only reason parents got caught up in the varsity blues scandal was that they were too explicit they weren't rich enough to use the route that they used.
That's what "old money" means. They weren't old money.
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#175I just read that this morning. I'm interested enough in the outcome that I put a calendar reminder 6 months out to check what happened. Doing so made me wonder if there's a service that would email me updates about legal cases like this that I would like to follow.
There are services that monitors changes on webpages so you could plug the "official" page where legal/official information about that case lives and wait for a change, maybe it would even work with a search engine results page.
I set up cron to run urlwatch[1] once a day on a vps, and it emails me updates to pages. It supports CSS selectors, various filters (like html2text) and so on. Combined with a little elisp to diff highlight emails in Emacs, this has one of the highest usefulness/maintenance ratio of things I self-host.
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth. > And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it. Come on. Wealth is literally a creature of "law and regulations," and changes to them can definitely "solve…
We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse. Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
Mark Zuckerburg's wealth is absolutely a creation of laws. Almost all of his wealth comes from his ownership of a corporation. The corporation only exists because of laws. It is only a sale-able asset because of laws.
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it.
The good old "we have always been that way". If perhaps hard to imagine for you, there are tons of social structures where wealth cannot be used to purchase power (ie where currency buys you some stuff but not labor from other humans). See the recent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything . Very much a perspective changing book.
I’m going to guess that not many of those social structures achieved things like low infant mortality, not dying from randomly stubbing your toe, the internet, space travel, and the like. If I was presented with a choice, I’d pick a modern Western state any time, flawed as they may be.
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#178Maybe as an aside, but why should this research be done at university level? Is it expensive or require their resources? Obviously institutions are at risk of capture by special interests. We can call them non profit but doesn't stop the economics and human nature. Same is true for politicians so oversight could make things even worse as it would be even more centralized and easier to capture . So we should look for…
> why should this research be done at university level?
I think this questions is backwards. This seems very much in line with other research already done at universities.
> So we should look for smaller individuals and groups to conduct research.
Smaller individual and groups can be much more easily sued. It's much easier to spin a story about suing some rogue partisan non-profit than it is for suing academic researchers.
> Being public also creates a financial incentive. If your research indicates something is a fraud or very harmful you can short the stock to fund your research
These sorts of financial incentives provide the easiest and simplest way of discrediting these groups (aside from simply ignoring them). All Meta has to say is "Don't believe a thing they say, they're simply doing it since they're shorting us".
Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#179Re: Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
#180Maybe as an aside, but why should this research be done at university level? Is it expensive or require their resources? Obviously institutions are at risk of capture by special interests. We can call them non profit but doesn't stop the economics and human nature. Same is true for politicians so oversight could make things even worse as it would be even more centralized and easier to capture . So we should look for…
> Maybe as an aside, but why should this research be done at university level?
Why not? Universities perform research - typically free from outside interference (academic freedom). And there are good reasons for academic freedom (which I'm not getting into here). As a consequence, academic freedom limits the reasons to stop this research from happening at a university.
So what is it in the contents of this research that makes you think it is not at an academic level or a violation of ethical standards?