This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture. The standard for "skilled trade" should be world-class skills (Hyperbaric Welding, Robotics, Civil Engineering; ie. "skills an advanced society would export") and not work that can be exported to the developing world. These, "advanced skills" require a level of critical thinking that requires college education. We're beginning to forget that we can't have an advanced society without a well-educated and informed voting populace.
First, we still need plumbers, painters, and tradesmen of all sorts.
Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.
Third, the demand for degrees — due to the idea that everyone must go to college, and misguided subsidies to make that happen — already far exceeds what colleges are able to supply while still being achievable by the majority of their customer base.
The result has been degree inflation, cost inflation, and a huge number of useless workers with useless degrees unable to pay off their crippling college debt.
>Second, not everyone is equipped to earn a PhD by significantly advancing our knowledge in a useful field. In fact, the majority of people are not.
And even if equipped (whatever that means exactly) many simply have no interest in doing so. I assume I could have gotten into a PhD program of some sort had I had my heart set on it. (I did get a couple of Masters--and mostly quite enjoyed them.) But had very little interest in getting a PhD--and find the idea retrospectively even less appealing today.
If you broaden the historical context the result has been an advanced economy with computers and high speed communication. It's going to be this kind of anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist rhetoric that ends up killing innovation in the United States.
We're rich enough (for now) to import innovation; we don't need an educated populace. We have a robust military that makes us untouchable geopolitcally.
Do you see how dangerous this kind of bullshit is? Do you see what happens when enough of the people in your country don't value things like degrees and institutions of higher learning? The Athenians fell because of their hubris; not because they valued poetry and art.
It's not a question of if we value it - we have yet to automate trades, and we still require tradespeople to carry out the day to day work of construction and manufacturing. There's nothing wrong with that, as there are many people who'd rather work with their hands as opposed to sitting in front of a computer.
So long as people have ready access to a trade education if they want it, the wages afforded to various professions should be sufficient to handle the distribution of students into the future - clearly, degrees are still desirable enough to the alternative that trade wages will have to go higher before more people start moving into it.
What a curious line to draw, between "some Catholics think that postsecondary voc-ed might be a good idea" and "anyone with glasses might be an intellectual, best kill them just in case".
> This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture.
I’m Swedish and this is the ideology Sweden is based on. But I’ve come to see it as backwards, even immoral.
There’s a dream on the left side of the political spectrum that everyone is borne a blank slate that society can fill with whatever it wants. By this logic a rich country can fill their blank slates with wonderfully productive and innovative PhDs, because all it takes is economic resources invested in education.
But that’s simply not true. Highly challenging, creative, innovative thinking doesn’t work that way. Take Srinivasa Ramanujan as an example. With no formal education at all he wrote himself into the history books of mathematics. He’s an extreme example. But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.
I have one brother that has a mild intellectual handicap and one that has a PhD in medicine. The former makes sandwiches for the kids in a local school and works in a stable. The latter makes equipment for medical research. They are both perfectly happy with their stations in life. But taken to the extreme this ideology means that if they were borne in different countries then their positions may very well be switched. Nobody benefits from this. It would make them both miserable, the sandwiches worse and (probably :P) the medical research equipment less useful.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case I think that means every country on earth is going to have some brilliant innovators, and some skilled craftsmen. They’ll need both to stay rich.
> But consider e.g. the distribution of scores on the Putnam: top scores are around 125, and most years the median is zero(!). Those with a zero score do not in general lack education.
This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.
Skilled craftsmen exist because there are things that require a combination of capital in the form of tools and knowledge in the form of training on a small scale. Think about an electronics repair shop: they will pretty much always exist (and should) because as sophistication increases in electronics, when they break they always result in a unique snowflake of a situation that is basically impossible to automate the repair thereof. Repair also requires spare parts and tools that they buy one time and use many times.
In a dynamic economy both will exist, but it doesn't render the argument that we should want more Nvidias and fewer Subways any less valid.
> This is a bad example; the Putnam is designed as a competition and scored in a way to distinguish the 90th percentile from the 99th, not the 40th from the 50th. The median = 0 just means that the scoring system throws away everything below the median to better score everything above it.
Another example of such a competition is the global innovation economy. If you’re in the 50th percentile of GPU companies then you’re not nVidia, and economically speaking you can just go home.
I understand it sounds harsh, and it is. But it’s the truth.
Sure, but college attendance is very high now and wasn’t back when we had a “more informed electorate”. Educational achievement is not a catch all for actually being a thinking and critical person.
Also, not everyone has equal potential, and the people who do have it may not want to use it. Having many trade paths, not just elite ones helps our society to match achievement and desire. We certainly need the full spectrum and should encourage the development of more choice.
I need a plumber. And I don't care what plumbers in Vietnam charge, because I need a plumber here. And if everyone I know made twice as much money, we'd still need plumbers, maybe even more so, and we'd just pay more for them.
Consider though that, "consumerism" is a very important part of modern economies. People tend to buy things that send social signals to other people (conspicuous consumption) which in turn drives demand for high quality items (hopefully) which creates real incentives for innovation and growth. At the same time I can agree that, "keeping up with the Joneses" has created a social nightmare for many.
My point here is that even following a big Kuhnian paradigm shift you're still going to have the same human psychologies to deal with and that's precisely where, "consumerism" lives-- in consumers; the idea that, "consumerism" is somehow driven by ideology or how capitalism structures society seems to be naive in my view. Conspicuous consumption still takes place in supposedly, "destratified" societies-- see the Kim family of North Korea or rich Saudis.
I disagree. It's worth remembering that current trends in AI are taken from taking a model from the 1970's and adding huge amounts of data and compute power to make these models robust enough to classify high resolution photographs. It isn't the necessary outgrowth of the cognitive science(s) as is commonly touted.
It's a magic trick which preys on a person's lack of scientific understanding; neural networks seem to anticipate, "brains in vats" but we're still in the midst of learning what, "brains" "people" and, "minds" are and nothing in ML space seems to shed any meaningful light on these pressing questions. This might be partially because the questions of Mind(s) and Self(s) are open philosophical problems.
An easy refutation that, "ML can model meaning" from recent Chomsky talks: consider that a neural network can be trained on any statistically meaningful corpus of text; this includes Klingon and Elven; it also includes jibberish'. It also includes semi-random presses of a key by a person typing with their dick or the like; nothing meaningful is being captured. We have a machine that is capable of statistical analysis. This isn't a new invention.
I'll make you a bet that in the next 5 years we have high resolution video generation through DALL-E or the like and it's primary use case is going to be auto-generating pornographic advertisements. The Internet was developed with lofty ideals in mind; what is AI's lofty ideal? The end of labor? The end of creativity? The commodification of innovation?
You've got 50 meaningful social problems you've got to solve (education, inequality, globalization, power laws) before you've got a kind of society that can integrate automated systems into itself without creating easy to predict problems. Given historical realities it's far more likely that the great wealth created by a theoretical, "AI Summer" will be unevenly enjoyed by most people; again this is the historical norm.
The invention of the tractor didn't liberate farmers from labor. The Phoebus Cartel, "invented" planned obsolescence in modern design and we still consume, "limited life" lightbulbs partially as a result of their thinking, and for the most part the Internet hasn't fostered a generation of scientists and engineers by, "democratizing" information.
but info is democratized. tractors (wheat threshers) helped create a surplus of food and there is way less backbreaking labor present today. our standard of living is better because of technology.
I'm literally writing this from a computational biology conference where researchers are presenting on how ML accelerates the development of therapeutics to reduce human suffering:
https://www.iscb.org/ismb2022-program/abstracts/mlcsb
Your favored poor "professional engineers" whose greatest claim to fame is being able to follow an ISO certification to build a bridge. They can wallow in poverty (and stay out of politics).
You're missing an important caveat of your own argumentation; if you believe in Liberalism you must by extension have some skepticism concerning the ability of authoritarian states to, "keep up" with freer states in terms of innovation and cultural robustness. Otherwise you're arguing for an arbitrary terminal struggle between competing world cultures. (try reading history). You're basically scared by the current war in Ukraine and are willing to take on an ugly foreign policy position to feel safe.
It's going to be a bunch of software developers wearing t-shirts and shorts that eventually bring us to nuclear war. You know, "to keep their daughters safe."
Authoritarian states have been the default for most of human civilization. Freedom is a good, but it doesn't "auto-win". It can lose, and in fact it has lost, over and over and over again, throughout human history.
Native American tribes were arguably more free than Europeans at the time the new world was discovered. Unfortunately, they didn't have guns and horses, and the Europeans did. I would prefer not to end up on the side without the guns and the horses the next time a paradigm changing military technology is discovered.
If we want to keep the society we prefer, we have to fight for it. That's not because we like fighting, that's simply the only way it's been made to ever work at any point in history.
I think it would do well for America's national security if non-experts didn't give their opinions publicly and this was enforced through our legal system.
I don't disagree modern wars will result in whole classes of equipment being found obsolete or not cost effective, but this strikes me as odd:
[quote from the article]
> "The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune."
Well, none of those types of missiles are fundamentally new, and have existed in one way or another for decades (e.g. the HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet anti-ship missile during the Falklands War in 1982!). More importantly, they work because the Ukrainians are fighting a war of resistance against an invading force; were they to go on the offensive (hypothetical, imagine they -- like the Soviet Union in WWII -- were to advance into Moscow and decapitate its leadership) they would need tanks, and airplanes, and other allegedly "obsolete" equipment.
The Ukrainian defense works where they are given support and weapons by foreign powers and because of a Russian mismanaged offensive.
Say -- again for the sake of argument -- the invasion was a coordinated effort by NATO against an hypothetical Ukrainian rogue state. How long would they last with their Stingers and Neptune anti-ship missiles?
As a devil's advocate against my own argument, Afghanistan ended up "defeating" the US in the very long run, for reasons not directly related to the weapons they used. And what weapons did they use, anyway? (Good old) Stinger, RPGs and AKs? No Neptunes in sight.
