141–150 of 263 posts
Maybe there's a deeper reason it's good, but I'm skeptical.
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Then one should prefer the universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Students from those countries outclass everyone else on every level of the education system. Just look at PISA results and TIMSS -- it is almost scary how good they are. In fact, one should avoid all American colleges since American students are quite a bit below the international average on those rankings!
Students in elite American universities (ivy-plus) come from the top 1% of all American students in their cohort, not to mention other countries. However dismal American performances in PISA/TIMSS and other tests have been, the top 1% of roughly 3 million students every year are still bound to be generally smarter and more motivated than the average Singaporean or Japanese student.
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This would be true if the only listeners you’d encounter were computers. But we live in the world of people, and demonstrating proficiency in only one insistent cultural mode because it is the most dedicated to rationalism is an impoverished worldview.
And "the world of people" needs to be driven by a coherent set of principles. So far the western world subscribed to rational thought and the socratic method. The question is, to what extent the current shape of humanities is aligned to those principles?!
Court cases are won or lost, but sometimes overturned on appeal. Even Supreme Court rulings can be overturned by later rulings.
Artists create art that can win or lose in the marketplace. Art can also gain or lose status based on how it appears to critics. Artists can be popular, notorious, or obscure.
Similarly for writers. Politicians win or lose elections. Nations win or lose wars.
Winning and losing in competitive situations seems more fundamental than falsification. (Take evolution for example.)
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I really enjoy his lectures but people should be aware that he's been in the middle of some controversy over LGBT legislation in Canada and has attracted a following of vocal red pill types. The comments on his YouTube videos are kind of disturbing. His psychology lectures are great and I mostly share his views on post modernism, but I wouldn't want to be associated with his fan club.
Don't forget Peterson's claim that only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries. His view is problematic because some VCs grill female founders not on their products but on their motivation level and how they will take care of their kids. Most power couples I know hire nannies. It's common enough where people shouldn't ask. Anyway, I concede people can be good in one way or another…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q
... in which he says that high-powered careers are very unpleasant due to hyper-competition among people who are exceptionally willing to tilt their work-life balance way toward work, and that most (but not all) of such people are men. Which doesn't sound like that unusual a claim, really: it's a fairly mainstream belief that women average more family-focused than men, and you only need a small difference in means between populations to get a big difference in representation at the far tails of a trait's probability distribution. (I would have preferred that he make the point with less bluster and more graphs, but that's just a matter of taste.)
Is that what you were alluding to, or does he somewhere else contradict this to make the crazy and very different claim that "only men have high enough motivation to be successful in competitive industries"?
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The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…
> But they are not falsifiable. I disagree. Historians are constantly making predictions of events happening today, based on their knowledge of history. Some are accurate, some are not. They can then take this output, and use it to refine the views of history. This doesn't even cover how history is written by very unreliable narrators, and historians have to do more than learn the "what" to uncover the "how". Your ar…
Could you provide some examples?
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…
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PLs arguments are very rarely falsifiable, if that's your criterion. I mean, yes, a programming language has to work in some sense, but that's a pretty low bar; C and Lisp work and have for decades, so we could just say we're done, disband the research field. The rest of PLs exists because they claim that they're building something that is in some way "better" than C or Lisp. But that's a pretty fuzzy argument, diffi…
I basically agree with you, but we're arguing to different ends. What I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with these arguments or with using them usefully. What is wrong is when nothing is falsifible or able to proven, either. So in other words, arguments are useful, but it does matter if it has to agree with scientific experiment. Programming does, at the end of the day, agree with fundmantal truths for it to…
Of course, it has to work. But a sculpture has to "work" too in the sense that it shouldn't collapse. Structural integrity is only part of the goal. Similarly for programs.
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The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…
But falsifiability is not the purpose of liberal arts creation is. This is one of the reasons I don't believe that it belongs in an academic discipline were critical thinking seems to be of higher value than constructive thinking.
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The charactetization is incorrect. The liberal arts do teach “how.” Creative writing or political philosophy or history teaches you skills you can use to analayze scenarios and communicate with people in different ways to different effect. Where the author is correct is that in those fields the output isn’t falsifiable. Your math skills allow you to construct proofs that can be verified. Your study of history allows…
Keep in mind that mathematics is only falsifiable in that sense because it is built entirely on assumptions. Mathematics isn't really a science.
The author was quite harsh on the soft sciencies and humanities and I'm going to attempt a defense. First, he characterises these subjects as merely what, facts to be learned, instead of how, skills to be mastered. Let's take history, which seems very what, full of dates and names. A great course in history teaches you how to think differently and with deeper context about world events and your country's politics. I…
Compared to what? Clearly he doesn’t know how to make a historical argument — perhaps he considers such arguments beneath him.