Robert Wright is unhappy with social media; Eric Topol is unhappy with COVID policy; Richard Hanania is unhappy with the blob; Brian Klaas is unhappy with the powerful; Heather Heying on higher ed
Heying seems to be mixed up about the telos of university education. You have the character-forming leadership schools that were intended to raise up elites in applied technology, politics, law, and religion (basically all the same subject), and then you have the post-1960s version of the institution which destroyed the vestiges of the old format. It could be argued that the post-60s version has absorbed much more time and government money than the old version while creating a more stratified and centralized society.
Heying is arguing for the post-60s university system, but without the bad things and only the good things. That seems to be the gist of the University of Austin project with which she's affiliated. Her characterization of undergrad syllabus requirements doesn't seem accurate to me. I feel comfortable arguing that almost every undergrad university in the humanities has virtually identical syllabi up and down the scale, with slight modifications for the capacities of each student body. That's part of the commodification that is challenging how these universities work. You can get a world class undergraduate education by just reading everything on the syllabus and reading the 'recommended reading' section in any professional textbook. The core issue is that the students will do the bare minimum reading, and that they aren't held to a high uniform standard through hard-to-fake examination mechanisms like oral exams. You cannot scale an institution meant to form the top 1-5% of males into regional leadership cadres and then turn it into an institution for educating 40%+ of the entire population. There's also the issue of 'filling a leaky bucket' by also educating large swaths of international students who will increasingly be returning home to China and India and not staying in the US.
So, my concern with Heying's view is that it misses that the old system failed not because of implementation, but because of bad thinking about what education can achieve at scale and what education is even for. If the goal is to prepare 40%+ of the population for the 21st century labor market, that's something that can be achieved, but we would have to look hard about how the system is structured, measured, and financed. The question has to be "how do we train a labor force efficiently, inexpensively, and in a reasonable period of time." That is what students, employers, governments, and parents want, but are not getting. The question of how to elevate the soul of mankind is not well suited to a megabloated public-private partnership.
I rolled my eyes at the empty unseriousness of, "Fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students" which is mediocre 'inspiration poster' material. Maybe she's been reading too much David Brooks.
$30,000 per semester to have your humanity believed in seems like a bad deal to me. Most undergrads are headed straight to middle management if they're lucky. A small fraction will be accountants, lawyers, 'scientists,' architects, and doctors, and many who enter but don't graduate will be struggling. This type of Age of Aquarius reasoning about self-actualizing education is one of the core reasons why there is so much angst about the system.
The sad thing is that there is a lot of practical knowledge and skill that can be imparted through education that middle managers should know to become the best paper pushers and meeting-schedulers that they can be. Instead the students bounce around like pinballs racking up points instead of just taking a practical 1-to-2-year program.
Topol has his moments but he is pretty unFIT in my view. And he is probably the most influential COVID policy doctor after Fauci, while maintaining a much lower profile.
Additionally, it's kind of absurd for Topol to complain about Becerra, who can't do anything unless and until the White House tells him to. This is the most centralized - excuse me, 'coordinated' administration in American history, and cabinet secretaries are mostly powerless figureheads who merely convey marching orders from the top to the troops. That's why they are the most anonymous and unknown set of secretaries ever - I bet even most 'informed' / 'very online' people would struggle to name more than two of then. And that's totally fair, because on anything that matters they aren't allowed to exercise any meaningful amount of independent judgment, authority, or initiative.
In American law, there are these great - and only rarely politically abused - treatises and reference works put out by the ALI called "Restatements of the Law'. They are often genuinely 'magisterial' on multiple levels.
Well, as soon as ALI publishes one of these books, it begins to slowly drift and deviate away from 'the law' which is constantly 'evolving', especially when judges want it to.
So, every generation or so, they try to take stock of all these accumulated changes and come up with a fresh restatement of that area of law. But they don't want to do this via a 'stamp collecting' approach to just listing all the new rough edges that stick out. Also, the judges who make this stuff up like to come up with rationalizations for why they aren't just fabricating new and out-of-joint stuff that, really, if you squint and look at it from the perspective of the latest enlightenment shared by all right-thinking people, is what the law really meant all along.
So they try to reformulate to incorporate, and make all that new stuff fit comfortably into a newly weaved tapestry of 'the general conceptual outline' of that branch of law, and in general, they do a pretty good job.
The same thing needs to happen for the US Constitutional scheme vs the way the government actually works in a practical sense. So, like the census or with redistricting we could just get the "Restatement Fourth of The Executive Branch: theory, practice, and process."
" Dr. Atlas tells the truth about the science and documents the media’s relentless campaign to suffocate it, which included canceled interviews, journalists’ off-camera hostility in White House briefings, and intentional distortion of facts. He also provides an inside account of the delays and timelines involving vaccines and other treatments, evaluates the impact of the lockdowns on American public health, and indicts the relentless war on truth waged by Big Business and Big Tech." in Amazon blurb
I sure wish somebody I trust would read the book and give me the highlights.
The war on truth is the war that, if lost, we lose the American Dream.
The Galef - Tetlock notes indicate why the famous names are likely to have been so wrong and so very very unwilling to be uncertain.
Trump's popularity is partly his certainty - but he's been far more right on the big issues than his critics or opponents: Covid, Election integrity, Ukraine, Russia Collusion Hoax, MAGA policies of pipelines & tariffs against China, Tax Cuts. Note that those who criticize Trump seldom are specific about any lies, corruptions, or terrible policy results. Most often just list insults.
Heying seems to be mixed up about the telos of university education. You have the character-forming leadership schools that were intended to raise up elites in applied technology, politics, law, and religion (basically all the same subject), and then you have the post-1960s version of the institution which destroyed the vestiges of the old format. It could be argued that the post-60s version has absorbed much more time and government money than the old version while creating a more stratified and centralized society.
Heying is arguing for the post-60s university system, but without the bad things and only the good things. That seems to be the gist of the University of Austin project with which she's affiliated. Her characterization of undergrad syllabus requirements doesn't seem accurate to me. I feel comfortable arguing that almost every undergrad university in the humanities has virtually identical syllabi up and down the scale, with slight modifications for the capacities of each student body. That's part of the commodification that is challenging how these universities work. You can get a world class undergraduate education by just reading everything on the syllabus and reading the 'recommended reading' section in any professional textbook. The core issue is that the students will do the bare minimum reading, and that they aren't held to a high uniform standard through hard-to-fake examination mechanisms like oral exams. You cannot scale an institution meant to form the top 1-5% of males into regional leadership cadres and then turn it into an institution for educating 40%+ of the entire population. There's also the issue of 'filling a leaky bucket' by also educating large swaths of international students who will increasingly be returning home to China and India and not staying in the US.
So, my concern with Heying's view is that it misses that the old system failed not because of implementation, but because of bad thinking about what education can achieve at scale and what education is even for. If the goal is to prepare 40%+ of the population for the 21st century labor market, that's something that can be achieved, but we would have to look hard about how the system is structured, measured, and financed. The question has to be "how do we train a labor force efficiently, inexpensively, and in a reasonable period of time." That is what students, employers, governments, and parents want, but are not getting. The question of how to elevate the soul of mankind is not well suited to a megabloated public-private partnership.
I rolled my eyes at the empty unseriousness of, "Fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students" which is mediocre 'inspiration poster' material. Maybe she's been reading too much David Brooks.
$30,000 per semester to have your humanity believed in seems like a bad deal to me. Most undergrads are headed straight to middle management if they're lucky. A small fraction will be accountants, lawyers, 'scientists,' architects, and doctors, and many who enter but don't graduate will be struggling. This type of Age of Aquarius reasoning about self-actualizing education is one of the core reasons why there is so much angst about the system.
The sad thing is that there is a lot of practical knowledge and skill that can be imparted through education that middle managers should know to become the best paper pushers and meeting-schedulers that they can be. Instead the students bounce around like pinballs racking up points instead of just taking a practical 1-to-2-year program.
The same Eric Topol that was asking for the vaccine to be delayed until after the election? Yep.
I was going to post the same thing! https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
I just came here to make sure this got posted.
Topol has his moments but he is pretty unFIT in my view. And he is probably the most influential COVID policy doctor after Fauci, while maintaining a much lower profile.
Additionally, it's kind of absurd for Topol to complain about Becerra, who can't do anything unless and until the White House tells him to. This is the most centralized - excuse me, 'coordinated' administration in American history, and cabinet secretaries are mostly powerless figureheads who merely convey marching orders from the top to the troops. That's why they are the most anonymous and unknown set of secretaries ever - I bet even most 'informed' / 'very online' people would struggle to name more than two of then. And that's totally fair, because on anything that matters they aren't allowed to exercise any meaningful amount of independent judgment, authority, or initiative.
In American law, there are these great - and only rarely politically abused - treatises and reference works put out by the ALI called "Restatements of the Law'. They are often genuinely 'magisterial' on multiple levels.
Well, as soon as ALI publishes one of these books, it begins to slowly drift and deviate away from 'the law' which is constantly 'evolving', especially when judges want it to.
So, every generation or so, they try to take stock of all these accumulated changes and come up with a fresh restatement of that area of law. But they don't want to do this via a 'stamp collecting' approach to just listing all the new rough edges that stick out. Also, the judges who make this stuff up like to come up with rationalizations for why they aren't just fabricating new and out-of-joint stuff that, really, if you squint and look at it from the perspective of the latest enlightenment shared by all right-thinking people, is what the law really meant all along.
So they try to reformulate to incorporate, and make all that new stuff fit comfortably into a newly weaved tapestry of 'the general conceptual outline' of that branch of law, and in general, they do a pretty good job.
The same thing needs to happen for the US Constitutional scheme vs the way the government actually works in a practical sense. So, like the census or with redistricting we could just get the "Restatement Fourth of The Executive Branch: theory, practice, and process."
" Dr. Atlas tells the truth about the science and documents the media’s relentless campaign to suffocate it, which included canceled interviews, journalists’ off-camera hostility in White House briefings, and intentional distortion of facts. He also provides an inside account of the delays and timelines involving vaccines and other treatments, evaluates the impact of the lockdowns on American public health, and indicts the relentless war on truth waged by Big Business and Big Tech." in Amazon blurb
I sure wish somebody I trust would read the book and give me the highlights.
The war on truth is the war that, if lost, we lose the American Dream.
The Galef - Tetlock notes indicate why the famous names are likely to have been so wrong and so very very unwilling to be uncertain.
Trump's popularity is partly his certainty - but he's been far more right on the big issues than his critics or opponents: Covid, Election integrity, Ukraine, Russia Collusion Hoax, MAGA policies of pipelines & tariffs against China, Tax Cuts. Note that those who criticize Trump seldom are specific about any lies, corruptions, or terrible policy results. Most often just list insults.