111–120 of 163 posts
To me it's pretty obvious that the social "sciences" are science in name only. Operationally they are more akin to astrology or numerology than physics. They serve a social function of allowing people to believe that we know more about the world, that we have have more predictive power, than we do. They let our governments pretend that they are more powerful and effective than they really are. It's frightening to thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, there is a huge problem in school funding. School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. > There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may n…
> we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. Source? I'm surprised to hear that. > The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations. I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse…
In the top spending districts there are two extremely good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii) are generally well known as terrible.
LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on there
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so much. The common factor between these districts is rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)...
Eliminating rubber rooms is finally coming to NYC:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out what to do about University. (Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)
>> focus on making high school much much better Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid we can, for 'fairness'
If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities.
I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom.
It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them.
It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots o…
I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not…
No, they don't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm attacking myself as much as you, I have this problematic tendency to latch onto interesting sounding ideas.
universe is infinite, brains are finite. ergo, brains find compression irresistible, to the point of self-dosing reward juice when a delightful morsel of smartly collapsed reality is encountered. even our signal processing wiring, with each lopsided neuron merging many inputs into a single output, is biased toward obligate compression.
Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots o…
> Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? The mistake was assuming "going to college" was the goal and not "learning something useful." Too many kids spend years of their life and earnings studying completely useless degrees. > Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so t…
Viewing non-stem stubjects as a lesser course for "those who could not complete STEM degrees" is simultaneously idiotic and elitist, which is pretty impressive.
I also completely disagree with the naive assumption that non-vocational degrees are "useless degrees", there is a big difference between something being "useless" and you, personally, not understanding the use.
Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots o…
I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not…
What year did that right begin?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to make economists less greedy they should be paid less How about we tax billionaires, and pay our academics real wages? I was an academic once, and I made near minimum wage. It's insane to set up a reward structure that punishes thinking people and rewards the randomness of birth.
Looking over the list of top billionaires, well under half appear to have been passive beneficiaries of birth randomness.
From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually the thing we want to reward in our tax code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to make economists less greedy they should be paid less How about we tax billionaires, and pay our academics real wages? I was an academic once, and I made near minimum wage. It's insane to set up a reward structure that punishes thinking people and rewards the randomness of birth.
I'm very much in favor of taxing inheritance at much higher levels, but I think there is a debate to be had whether the marginal dollar is best spent on social science research or academia writ large.
I want to live in a society of thoughtful intelligent people. I pretty much don't care what you study. I don't care if it has immediate industrial impact like STEM. Higher education is tied to all sorts of benefits, including lower crime rate, better health outcomes...
I think if someone wants to attend college, and they've got the aptitude, then I want that person to do it. I don't want them prevented from learning because of cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I vehemently disagree. Education is a value in itself, whatever its impact on the economy or on technology is. People have an innate right to be as educated as they want (and can handle). Of course, it doesn't follow that they have a right to be considered researchers or publish papers afterwards, and the plethora of bad research may be a real problem. However, it should be noted that academic pseudosciences are not…
But does education need to look like universities and colleges? Education used to look (for most people) like apprenticeships, which is more like a tutoring approach without study of anything unnecessary to your trade. Maybe a better system in modern times would be a combination of mentoring with official recommendations and travel (to broaden horizons).
Those classes covered things which I have never encountered in my _trade_, but which formatively affected my views on how one should treat others (or treat oneself). I feel like the stereotypical "liberal arts" education, in which one studies things that are not just focused on your trade, has an intrinsic value which is hard to articulate.