from Al0neStar@lemmy.world to sneerclub@awful.systems on 21 Feb 2024 15:49
https://lemmy.world/post/12230741
Some gems from the article.
… We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn. There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.
The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room.
(And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, you’ll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.)
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.
Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”
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So this is what we call a “career limiting move.”
it’s amazing how schools like these can graduate battalions of fools and people still take their diplomas as certificates of wordliness
If you’re talking about the “elite” schools - Ivy or otherwise - there’s a little bit more to it.
A resume is a really, really low bandwidth way to get a feel for someone. Of that’s all you have to go on for starters, it at least tells you which gauntlets they’ve already run. It’s like hiring someone who has worked at Apple or Google for ten years.
As a simplifying assumption, think of ability as a normal distribution - a bell curve. The average on Stanford grads may be higher than those of Liberty University, although there still may be enough overlap that you can’t say that any given candidate is better from one or the other.
If you’re talking about someone who transferred out of Harvard to go to Austin University or whatever they’re calling themselves, that opens up an entirely different set of questions.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I think it’s a bit rude to try to explain the concept of reputation. the only other content in what you’re saying seems to amount to “it’s not a noisy signal of workplace ability,” which (a) is only a fraction of the social power these degree stamps hold (b) is not true (c) apparently is supported by the summoning of a bell curve, the holy symbol of naive applications of statistics to concepts of ability
(EDIT: I apologize for being prickly, I’m not on much sleep so I hope you can cut me some slack on that)
No worries about the lack of sleep. I’ve been there and then some.
I do think however that you’re misinterpreting my argument to at least some extent.
First, it’s a completely noisy signal. It’s also, unfortunately, the only thing we have when a CV lands on our desk. It obviously decreases in importance as the number of positions held/publications made/other experiences increase. If someone were to have a dozen pubs in reputable journals and ten years experience working in what I’m interested in, I’m not going to take their school into account. The other, later work is much more relevant. If on the other hand they transferred from MIT to Liberty University and that’s the only data point I have, that’s what I am going to need to go off of. I have a lot of resumes to look at, and still have to do my regular full time job. I’m not arguing that it’s not noisy. I’m just pointing out that if we consider something like a weighted function in CV evaluation, the fewer items there are, the higher the weights assigned to non-preferred variables might be. I’ve collaborated with researchers from some of the most respected institutions in the world, and other than arrogance I can’t say that they had a whole lot in common.
Second, I do not think ability falls on a bell curve. I believe talent is a highly skewed distribution. It might get more normal the more you remove sources of variability - I don’t think you could pick someone at random off the street and ask them to write up a Bayesian classifier, but if you reduced the sample down to stats/ML grads, you’d probably find some are better and some are worse but you might see a meaningful average being drawn. I was just trying to make it easier to visualize. I am an actual data scientist (well, complexity theorist), and I am not naive about data.
In terms of social power, that’s absolutely one of the main reasons people pay the outrageous tuitions for those institutions. I do need to note for anyone reading along that those same institutions will waive tuition if your family income is below $150k or so, so do not write them off. We need more diversity.
well, I am one of those researchers at a top institution. all I can say is that I do not think the people at such places are actually on a different level than those at your more general R1. who goes where has a lot more to do with social clubs and research tastes than anything else.
I’m also a little puzzled because you write about tuition write offs (which I benefited from as well) but those are only really relevant to undergrads, who I think it would be questionable to describe as often being researchers.
Okay, I’m not going to push back on the social club aspect. That’s dead on. I’m also not going to get into what’s fashionable and how funding works. Like I said, I’m in the club. I mean, I’ve since sold out to work for a FAANG so I can have a lot of money going into retirement and run away to Europe in case the US really starts to go under.
I can go through my prejudice against MIT grads - I’ve met two whom were decent persons and one of them was from Sloan and zero were from Media Lab - and so on. The U of M folks in complexity theory, otoh, have all been wonderful.
And yes, I was talking about undergrads, but as we both know it’s easier to get into an elite grad program from an elite undergrad program. That’s the track. Plus, it’s rare to have to pay for a PhD program unless you’re coming in at baseline in an oversubscribed program.
Dawg you should put “mansplaining” on your resume
Completely tangential but I’m idly wondering now what are some domains where things being on a bell curve would be an intriguing thing to talk about.
it’d be only quantifiable things. first thought: # of hotdogs you can eat in 10 minutes.
number of eyes
.
Doctor Rockso Epistemology (nsfw) they just sparkle.
Very high ‘I’m being cancelled for my opinions… you know the ones’ factor.
My goodness, the cringe level. Be carefull y’all, he studied the blade 🤣
How can you not just laugh and leave when earing that.
My first response would be “that’s a rather shite superpower then, innit?”
I’m sorry, even putting aside that he absolutely could not, being able to kill anyone in hand-to-hand combat is extremely useless as far as superpowers go. Like, in what circumstances would you want to do that? You’re going to hit the streets and fight crime like Batman? You’re just gonna get shot mate. Or are you just going to crack the skulls of your 15 coworkers on openspace? Congratulations, you’re now in maxsec prison where you’re gonna act tough until you get shanked by 20 people, since your “superpower” doesn’t include stabbing damage immunity.
Also, anyone with a 10 dollar hammer can kill everyone on a bus.
@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That's why you need the good guy with a hammer!
I was thinking the same, especially if it only works on busses.
Shot:
Chaser:
Garnish:
I almost feel sorry for Ralph…
I know. I almost cried seeing him want to go to the pool and his response to not being able to go in there. Also the pro-immigrant response made me feel like he was more human than most of the people at that “college.”
Dude will be in for a rude wakeup call if his buddies get into power, what with being an immigrant and all…
Wait, is this not satire?
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Richard Hanania, one of the featured speakers mentioned in the article:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e1a169e8-a911-451d-84e4-3fc29e592993.jpeg">
Good morning 😏
They let 14 year olds be featured speakers? That dude looks like he just got out of a kindergarten class.
I think many 14-year-olds would have vastly more valuable thoughts to share than this dick
Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one’s gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that’s for darn sure.
Not saying good morning because you are homophobic: ✋😔
Not saying good morning because you avoid human interaction in general: ☝️😊
“It would be hard to abuse a law that forcibly sterilized everybody with an IQ under 90 provided that the person scored that low on an objective test blindly graded.” —Richard Hanania
I thought I was terminally online but clearly I’ve missed something, his what now
They have a website and an instagram page with 100K+ followers but the content of the courses is not specified yet.
Im personally looking forward to a lesson on how to interpret my dreams: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f366d42c-c11a-431e-90b4-a95be59d68d7.png">
What the fucking fuck?
I haven’t checked but I wouldn’t be surprised if this came from the period when he was taking so many substances it fucked his health
It’s from Maps of Meaning, per the caption, so no this is from his original theory of everything.
Nonetheless, to be perfectly honest, I honestly can’t complain that he put something weird like that in the book as such. What, after all, is actually wrong with it, assuming a certain amount of charity about context relevance? That it’s gross to recount weird sexually charged dreams you had about your grandmother?
For a psychologist in the tradition of Jung, and therefore to a great extent Freud, such material might actually be quite useful! Amongst the worst things therapy culture - and perhaps the whole ideology of post-Freud psychology/iatry/therapy - does is to rehabilitate prudishness about what it is and is not acceptable to talk about in our psychic lives, when liberation from those oppressive norms is precisely the best achievement of those aspects of Freud which remain uncontroversial (not to mention those which are only controversial for bad reasons).
You know the whole thing: “we don’t talk about that wanting to have sex with your mother stuff”, well why on Earth not? Amongst the most obvious things in the world is that people are incredibly weird and complex. Why cave in to propriety and ignore it?
Lots of people have experiences like this, and therefore by definition it’s important to discuss them - non-pathologically - if you want to understand (and improve) people’s psychic life.
re source - fair, I haven’t really looked into it (because I prefer to limit how much brainpoison from these dipshits I allow into my own head)
the spirit of my comment was in the lines of “people have been known to have surreal visions/thoughts/ideas amped up by compounds”, albeit it’s on me to not have worded that out well (and to be clear here, this isn’t said in judgement of taking compounds, either). and with aphantasia I guess my reference of perception is a bit slanted, too. as to the rest of your post, broadly I agree with that stance. a lot of things in this world would be better if people weren’t fucking shamed for talking about 'em
Yeah, I kind of used you to grandstand about a broader point that I hoped other people who had the “yuck” reaction would see, and I still haven’t figured out how to tag people (i.e. the person above) on this janky site
Depends what client you use, but it’s roughly markdown-ish link format with the bit in () being the username (incl. domain)
Originally I had a longer and more nuanced gut response that was along the lines of: “ok people have weird dreams and whatever, sure, but why would you publish this instead of just talking about it in therapy?” which you have answered more or less
Imagine gong into debt to go to Meme and Nut Academy.
If I go to school and take “Forbidden Courses” I BETTER be coming out with necromancy and demon summoning. Otherwise we gonna fight.
Necromancy is a dying art.
you son of a bitch, lol
I think they’ve already summoned demons, judging by the speaker list at least…
Or even better, levitation.
Better not fight on the bus; that’s where he’s at his most deadly.
.
Pour one out for Street Epistemology, I guess. Now I’m wondering if Anthony Magnabosco, the guy who does those Street Epistemology videos for Youtube, is also a chud.
Boghossian deserved to lose his job, though. It’s one thing for scientists — mathematicians, physicists, etc. — to sneer at soft sciences by mocking their lack of empirical rigor; it’s another thing entirely for a non-tenure-tracked philosopher to do it. And Portland State was relatively gentle with him, telling him that he had to take a course on ethics of human experimentation before continuing to publish; he quit himself out of a decent teaching position because he wanted to be a proud crybaby. May he never move back to Oregon.
Yeah, I long considered Street Epistemology to have some thought provoking ideas about discourse with people holding steadfast views - there really aren’t a lot of other popular approaches to this.