I can only speak for myself but what is there left to comment on? I have outrage fatigue. Trump goes from one incredible gaff/goof/statement to another. The list of his incompetence, arrogance, lies, and stupidity is quite large. It does not surprise me in the least that this latest selfish, short-sighted move was made.
His supporters are incapable of critiquing him. They are impervious to logic and reason. I no longer care to hear about his crimes and incompetence. I no longer care what he does. He is the President the United States deserves. In response to having elected the most incompetent, corrupt, and stupid President in history the opposition party is going to nominate a senile dinosaur who has no desire to upend the corporate dominance of our elected officials.
You are correct. H.L. Mencken once defined puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having fun. The essence of this definition does well to capture the psyche of America. We Americans tend to be very vindictive and have an almost pathological need for revenge and punishment. We simply do not like it when the “undeserving” get something they don’t deserve. You see this in our legal system, our foreign policy, and in our healthcare system.
Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.
Demand is decreasing because prices have sky rocketed. This is very similar to private hospitals working in concert for price gauging. The only way to get this under control is state jumping in and introduce some real competition. Education doesn’t have to be expensive and everyone deserves education they want. From what I understand, demand for CS and general tech is as high as it has ever been but people can’t get in to quality providers with reasonable cost.
Your first sentence sounds plausible and could be true. Do you know that it is true? Do the demographics of the country support an increase in higher education capacity? Do the realities of what it means to become educated support a percent increase in the number of highly education people?
I currently teach at a community college and have taught at some major universities. What I consider passing today is far less than what I would have considered passing 25 years ago. My anecdotal experience is that too many people are going to college. Standards have decreased and we are passing people through the system who should not be graduating. Even so there is increasing pressure from administration and politicians to increase the passing rate.
At my college tuition is increasing because state funding is decreasing. We are advertising to a population who realistically aren't college material. But we need the enrollment and I need a job. So I pass people who shouldn't pass. I strongly disagree with the notion that we need more colleges.
EDIT: What I perceive as a degradation in undergraduate degree quality has led to the present state where a Master's degree today has the same intellectual signaling value that a Bachelor's degree had 40 years ago.
I'm very familier with these views and staunchly opposed to them. Here the idea is that only a small portion of the population is "college worthy" and only those elites should be going to college. This then implies we don't need "too many" educated people and economy perhaps can't even handle them. I don't subscribe to any of these.
I believe, education needs to be distangled from jobs. People should not be educated for the sole purpose of slaving away 8 hours a day somewhere. Education is about learning, deeper reflections, aquiring skills you enjoy, developing reasoning, identifying pitfalls, dealing with abstractions, practising scientific methods, becoming desciplined. Only as side effect of all these, you might be able to also do well at some job. This means everyone is entitled to the highest level of education. In an ideal world, all humans should obtain a PhD in something they are passionate about, something they believe in and something they are interested in.
Now here's the problem. We have mutilated our education philosophy to the extent that it is no longer recognizable from what it used to be. When you step in modern day institutes, the education is all about getting good grades and passing exames. I have met inenumerable humans, starting from Kindergarten to PhDs where they are forced to memorize things, instead of really understand things in order to pass exams. People who don't have great memory powers are forced out of the system. Other day I was looking at 1st grade history lesson on Columbus. What was the test exam questions? Name the ships! Why does name of ships matter at all? Why not teach kids instead reason he needed 3 ships?
My core hypothesis is that all humans are curious, we all want to learn something, we all have some interests. We destroy most of these attributes as we grow up by making it a massive memorization contest with prizes given as pass and fail. Then we make it all about jobs so folks are forced to learn things they were never interested in the first place.
Your goal is noble. I think it is believed by you because you don’t have extensive experience teaching in a classroom. Everyone talks about teaching concepts and whatnot. I used to think this way. But the reality of the classroom and the reality of what the average person is capable of understanding and what they are willing to try to understand is at odds with this noble view.
I think no sufficiently intelligent person thinks that hospitals deciding who lives/dies will be done capriciously or by cruel doctors. But on the other hand there were large numbers of fools in the U.S. who thought the ACA would create death panels. So maybe for the U.S. your point is valid.
My college switched classes to an online format and we closed the college for two weeks to give faculty time to make the switch. So in addition to hastily converting classes to an online format we lost two weeks. I’m passing all of my students. There’s no way I’ll fail someone. I’m keeping my courses open until 2021 and will answer emails from current students until then so that they can get help with the course content they need in the classes they take in Fall 2021.
I know some of my colleagues don’t share this view. At least, they don’t openly share this view. Administration is making a show about keeping up standards and rigor but this is simply not doable in the present situation. Help those students who have the time, means, and luxury to continue their studies and don’t punish the ones who don’t.
I see no problem with giving the students the option of going Pass/Fail instead of a grade, but passing everyone no matter what?
For some subjects, it would be difficult to take the next class (like Diff-EQ) with out first really understanding the previous classes (Calc 1 and 2). How can you justify passing everyone?
Millions of people have suddenly lost their jobs. Millions are ordered to shelter in place. Millions are going to go stir crazy. Child abuse and spousal abuse will increase. Mental health issues will be exacerbated. I have no desire to contribute to someone’s anguish or anxiety in such a time as this.
If they fail the next course because they don’t know this semester’s content then they’ll probably need to retake my class. Which is what they’d have to do if I fail them. If they pass the next course then they shouldn’t fail my class regardless of the work they put in this semester.
Well, you can give them a "Pass" or "withdraw" with the option of going on to the next class, or taking it again (for no charge). That may be the best compromise.
A withdraw means they still have to pay for the course and given that student loan debt is largely not dischargeable in bankruptcy I won’t ask them to withdraw. My college has not gone with the option of pass/fail. I’m giving all of my students a grade and no grade will be lower than a C this semester. I don’t have the ability to let someone take a course without paying for it.
Here is why the situation in the U.S. does not nearly perfectly mirror Zimbabwe. One word: confidence. People have far more confidence in the dollar than they do Zimbabwe's currency. As the global financial system is currently setup losing confidence in the dollar is highly unlikely. You might lose confidence in the dollar and buy gold and I might do the same but we aren't the people whose confidence the dollar's value relies upon.
I'm not an economist but as far as I understand these things we won't get hyperinflation as long as there is confidence in the dollar as a currency.
I think your point could be stated better but the sentiment behind is worth exploring. If the economy collapses there will certainly be an increase in misery, spousal and child abuse, suicides, and murders. This may be a time where hard choices need to be made. Maybe we really are confronted with a "lesser of two evils" type situation.
It's a false choice. Allowing a pandemic to run rampant would wreck the economy for a lot longer than an effective lockdown. Especially now that a lot of younger people are showing up in ICUs.
China is already done with the hard part. Lock down, get the virus under control, make a lot of test kits, and before long you can rely on mass screening, contract tracing, and targeted isolation, and get people back to work.
It may be a false choice now but it might not be a false one in the future. At any rate, it is worth exploring the idea and it’s an interesting question regarding the circumstances that must be present in order for it to longer be a false choice.
Making guns illegal will do little if it is not accompanied by getting rid of the existing guns. People are poor judges of risk and it would not surprise me that cops are more fearful of guns than they are of cars even if it ought not be that way.
You may be right in the direction of causation that questioned. I look at it this way. Suppose we create a more prosperous, egalitarian society and find out the cops are still jerks. The experiment shows you are correct but at least we'd end up with a better society in other ways. There does not appear to be any harm in performing the experiment.
I'm suggesting that it's possible that corruption, and particularly unaccountable police forces historically infused with racism, might be among the primary barriers to achieving such a society, and that a plan to directly engage with this problem might be a necessary precondition to any such movement.
I feel sure the vast majority of Police officers are doing upstanding work, so it's a matter of identifying and punishing the bad apples.
I strongly disagree that the vast majority of police office are doing upstanding work. Officers don't testify against each other. They refuse to help investigations of colleagues. The whole thin blue line mentality is a stain on the whole profession. As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing." Police officers that refuse to call out the bad apples are themselves bad apples.
> I strongly disagree that the vast majority of police office are doing upstanding work. Officers don't testify against each other. They refuse to help investigations of colleagues. The whole thin blue line mentality is a stain on the whole profession.
I think this comes from a person based on ignorance, in that they usually have limited to no exposure to most LEO; or alternatively, they have vested interests in keeping that narrative up.
To this day I still cannot fathom not just how the 'blue line' practices holds true to this day given all the cameras, but they CAN AND DO PURPOSELY LIE and are allowed to do so with impunity in court. This is what is considered law enforcement in the US?!
Punishing them is limited in scope, you can at best get minor monetary compensation (which is tax derived) when they abuse their power, but as seen with this example they're allowed to return to their patrol in most cases, or given a paid leave of absence when its deemed too embarrassing to sweep under the rug.
>> How on earth is the on/off switch for the body camera under the officer’s control?
Honestly, plausible deniability; here is a horrid case in which you can see (Graphic/NSFW) they can use that to justify their violent behaviour as small/thin woman is forcefully strapped down, choked and repeatedly tazed by a group of officers claiming she was 'suicidal' but somehow that part wasn't recorded but is seen complying with the officers requests:
Worth noting, as it coincides with the quote above its not just police but also the Court system the enables their behaviour, the local State court ruled in favour of the police stating the use of force was justified; it wasn't until it was taken to the Supreme Court that it was exposed to the public what took place with body cam footage.
> The cops in prosperous, egalitarian places are generally pretty chill, so the idea is to recreate those conditions.
God, I'm just going to put aside how absolutely elitist this statement is, but consider that the case above took place in Boulder, CO. Where for a few years the average home price was well over $1 million dollars, and her initial arrest took place in the Downtown mall that's typically yuppy-centric shops.
Do you have more than a single instance to point to in which expert bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing while being wrong?
From my perspective it seems clear that the American public has been in the grips of anti-intellectualism for quite a long time. In 1980 Asimov made the following famous statement:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Here are some examples of dubious advice from experts: the Iraq war, regime changes throughout the middle east, interventionism in general, margarine instead of butter, fat is bad/sugar is good, antidepressants are harmless, medical doctors don't understand Bayes' rule, etc. etc. etc.
For the record, I'm not American, and not anti-intellectual.
Here's a better example of patronizing by experts from the current crisis: "The average person should not wear a mask. Not only it doesn't protect against the virus, but it actually may harm."
What they mean is: it may harm by giving a false sense of certainty. Clearly the average person is too stupid to understand the difference between perfect protection and "not quite perfect, but better than nothing" protection.
I don’t see the lecturing and patronization that you referenced in your original comment with some of the examples you provided. That’s the part of your post that I disagree with.
In your Iraq war example I don’t recall bureaucratic experts being involved in support of it. General Shinseki famously thought Rumsfeld’s predictions were wrong and Hans Blicks (spelling?) was famously skeptical of Bush administration claims.
I’ll certainly agree that we’ve had crappy political leadership in the U.S. but I won’t agree that bureaucrats have let the nation down in matters of science. Experts get it wrong and consensus expert opinion is sometimes wrong. There will continue to be examples of where consensus expert opinion is wrong.
You can find individual experts who are patronizing and lecturing as you put it. It’s been rare in my experience that consensus expert opinions that aren’t motivated by money, greed, power, or fame are condescending or lecturing.
His supporters are incapable of critiquing him. They are impervious to logic and reason. I no longer care to hear about his crimes and incompetence. I no longer care what he does. He is the President the United States deserves. In response to having elected the most incompetent, corrupt, and stupid President in history the opposition party is going to nominate a senile dinosaur who has no desire to upend the corporate dominance of our elected officials.