I write a very specific way that does not have mass appeal at the moment. (I am a stay at home mother, not monetized , and not interested in winning anything. I like engagement.)
A few years ago, someone in the Jewish publishing world told me that either I could do x and have a large audience, or do what I'm doing now and have a tiny audience.
Now, I have a tiny audience - but not as tiny as that person predicted. It is less than two years, and I haven't been all that successful, and yet I have over 200 subscribers. More importantly, I get real world feedback. It's interesting to see where this goes.
We are in Star Wars- A New Hope. We are about to begin The Empire Strikes Back, but the Death Star is the apparently indestructible U.S. Government. I predict that 20 years from now, Substack will be a subsidiary of Google where the only contributors are the AI Chatbot versions of David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and all the other NYTimes and WaPo writers of today. Twitter will be owned by a consortium of non-profits like Harvard, Planned Parenthood, and the DNC. Elon Musk will have been deported back to South Africa.
"Harvard is not going to fix itself". If I - a natural pessimist - were to indulge in a dreamscape, it would be this: that the humanities and social science parts of academe are currently on a self-destruct trajectory. (Students increasingly voting with their feet etc.) Not holding my breath yet though.
I have no clue on the future of social sciences and humanities. I don't think anyone else does either. It might just be an exception but I think the research arm of economics has strengthened significantly.
I get that universities have an strong affirmative action for hiring women and minority engineering faculty but other than more focus on environmental and renewables (and less on fossil fuels) I don't see a lot of other changes in engineering, physics, and math. And I don't expect those disciplines to leave research universities. I don't really see chemistry, biology, and some other sciences leaving research universities either but I'm less familiar with how much DEI/woke/etc. has infected infected them.
I wish it were only the humanities and social sciences. I fear that they are well into the takeover of the sciences as well. Recent events at MIT have been extremely disappointing, even scary.
Is education Harvard's main product? Or is the product credentialing? It seems to be all about selecting the kind of kids who are smart and pushy, or will become leaders of organizations in the future.
Having a long history of doing that well will be hard to beat if they don't dilute their basic selection-criteria being a point.
I guess it's possible to attack them with a very pointy focus on a particular specialization, but even that would be tough, because some credentialing institutions already have a narrower focus.
As someone who finished both an in-person undergraduate and an online post-graduate degree in the post-Covid era, it seems inevitable that online higher education or a hybrid model will eventually overtake legacy higher education. For self-motivated students there really isn't much difference between attending lectures and reading textbooks in-person or online. Like with newspapers, I think schools like Harvard will be able to leverage their prestige to have an early lead. But as you've mentioned these legacy institutions are squandering their prestige in other ways. In an online environment, people will probably start to realize that having a prestigious name attached to the website you are getting your news or degree doesn't make it significantly better than the other hundreds of competitors. These institutions won't carry the same authoritative weight as they did in the pre-digital age that led to them becoming noteworthy brands in the first place.
None of us knows whether daily newspapers will survive but I see the framing of one or the other just as misguided as saying we can only have written or spoken news sources.
Until a chatbot enforces attendance and sends grades to parents, I’m pessimistic that they’ll upend the current system. Even with a professor present, learning anything serious requires a lot of self discipline.
I thought Venezuela would reform years ago. Now I don’t, until the Big Leader dies or leaves. Harvard will exist in 100 years.
At some point, Republicans will publicize that Harvard is illegally discriminating against hiring Republican professors, and decide to change that. Like a new Diversity requirement that all colleges must have at least 30% Republicans and 30% Democrats to be eligible for tax exemption.
So many big orgs are addicted to govt benefits, which can be cut administratively, that there’s huge govt soft power in all big business, including threats of increasing regulation.
Like the Dem deep state used to censor the truth in 2020.
Note that most elite articles on “misinformation” fail to mention this, nor 2 years of NYT lies about the Collusion Hoax, but instead talk about Fox or Trump.
Truth doesn’t always win. But often does in the long term.
Hope alt-ed quickly reduces prestige of current colleges.
If there is any hope, it's that a lot more of the craziness than we think is more fragile than we think and propped up only by government spending that it will soon to be too bankrupt to continue.
Snoop recently complained that his royalties rate from Spotify was only a dollar for 20,000 streams. Perhaps its better than the alternative of zero dollars per million streams, i.e., easy, costless piracy. It seems the money in that business is increasingly in merchandising and live appearances, but that's just a wild guess.
That was a really interesting read.
I write a very specific way that does not have mass appeal at the moment. (I am a stay at home mother, not monetized , and not interested in winning anything. I like engagement.)
A few years ago, someone in the Jewish publishing world told me that either I could do x and have a large audience, or do what I'm doing now and have a tiny audience.
Now, I have a tiny audience - but not as tiny as that person predicted. It is less than two years, and I haven't been all that successful, and yet I have over 200 subscribers. More importantly, I get real world feedback. It's interesting to see where this goes.
We are in Star Wars- A New Hope. We are about to begin The Empire Strikes Back, but the Death Star is the apparently indestructible U.S. Government. I predict that 20 years from now, Substack will be a subsidiary of Google where the only contributors are the AI Chatbot versions of David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and all the other NYTimes and WaPo writers of today. Twitter will be owned by a consortium of non-profits like Harvard, Planned Parenthood, and the DNC. Elon Musk will have been deported back to South Africa.
Have a nice day.
"Harvard is not going to fix itself". If I - a natural pessimist - were to indulge in a dreamscape, it would be this: that the humanities and social science parts of academe are currently on a self-destruct trajectory. (Students increasingly voting with their feet etc.) Not holding my breath yet though.
I have no clue on the future of social sciences and humanities. I don't think anyone else does either. It might just be an exception but I think the research arm of economics has strengthened significantly.
I get that universities have an strong affirmative action for hiring women and minority engineering faculty but other than more focus on environmental and renewables (and less on fossil fuels) I don't see a lot of other changes in engineering, physics, and math. And I don't expect those disciplines to leave research universities. I don't really see chemistry, biology, and some other sciences leaving research universities either but I'm less familiar with how much DEI/woke/etc. has infected infected them.
I dunno, all the girls now majoring in “marketing” seems to me a step down from when English was the American girl major.
But that’s been many decades ago now.
Psychology or its even dumber stepchild “child development” was the dumb girl major when I was in school.
I wish it were only the humanities and social sciences. I fear that they are well into the takeover of the sciences as well. Recent events at MIT have been extremely disappointing, even scary.
Is education Harvard's main product? Or is the product credentialing? It seems to be all about selecting the kind of kids who are smart and pushy, or will become leaders of organizations in the future.
Having a long history of doing that well will be hard to beat if they don't dilute their basic selection-criteria being a point.
I guess it's possible to attack them with a very pointy focus on a particular specialization, but even that would be tough, because some credentialing institutions already have a narrower focus.
As someone who finished both an in-person undergraduate and an online post-graduate degree in the post-Covid era, it seems inevitable that online higher education or a hybrid model will eventually overtake legacy higher education. For self-motivated students there really isn't much difference between attending lectures and reading textbooks in-person or online. Like with newspapers, I think schools like Harvard will be able to leverage their prestige to have an early lead. But as you've mentioned these legacy institutions are squandering their prestige in other ways. In an online environment, people will probably start to realize that having a prestigious name attached to the website you are getting your news or degree doesn't make it significantly better than the other hundreds of competitors. These institutions won't carry the same authoritative weight as they did in the pre-digital age that led to them becoming noteworthy brands in the first place.
None of us knows whether daily newspapers will survive but I see the framing of one or the other just as misguided as saying we can only have written or spoken news sources.
Until a chatbot enforces attendance and sends grades to parents, I’m pessimistic that they’ll upend the current system. Even with a professor present, learning anything serious requires a lot of self discipline.
I’m going to put “Ponder Arnold’s NBU idea” at the top of my to-do list.
I thought Venezuela would reform years ago. Now I don’t, until the Big Leader dies or leaves. Harvard will exist in 100 years.
At some point, Republicans will publicize that Harvard is illegally discriminating against hiring Republican professors, and decide to change that. Like a new Diversity requirement that all colleges must have at least 30% Republicans and 30% Democrats to be eligible for tax exemption.
So many big orgs are addicted to govt benefits, which can be cut administratively, that there’s huge govt soft power in all big business, including threats of increasing regulation.
Like the Dem deep state used to censor the truth in 2020.
Note that most elite articles on “misinformation” fail to mention this, nor 2 years of NYT lies about the Collusion Hoax, but instead talk about Fox or Trump.
Truth doesn’t always win. But often does in the long term.
Hope alt-ed quickly reduces prestige of current colleges.
If there is any hope, it's that a lot more of the craziness than we think is more fragile than we think and propped up only by government spending that it will soon to be too bankrupt to continue.
want to fix it. fire the oloigarchs that currently own the content; control the narative. Control our thoughts.
happy Hooidays and peace....where the hell is it/
Snoop recently complained that his royalties rate from Spotify was only a dollar for 20,000 streams. Perhaps its better than the alternative of zero dollars per million streams, i.e., easy, costless piracy. It seems the money in that business is increasingly in merchandising and live appearances, but that's just a wild guess.