The Intellectual Rot of the Industrially Necessary University

https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-intellectual-rot-of-the-industrially-necessary-university/

by WaitWaitWha • 2 years ago

11 7 2 years ago

epsilontheory.com

rossdavidh• 2 years ago

Well, I'm not paying for the second half, but the first half is rather thought-provoking.

BandButcher• 2 years ago

Haha yup... It was worth... my time

but i also understand the author as i recently pursued a master's degree 2 years ago, made it halfway through the classes, rushed to publish one completely bs paper, gave a presentation on it during a virtual research conference (one of several hundred that happen every year), received a "good job"/"atta boy" , was then asked to continue to write more papers and become an aid for the professors... So forth.

You really can lose passion for a subject you love when the machine of academia is only concerned with climbing the ladder, a la corporate world, politicians...

_Nat_• 2 years ago

It's difficult for me to appreciate how works in such fields might be "intellectual".

I feel like they're doing LLM-like opinion-pieces and acting as though the results are deeply meaningful. But the mechanics and results seem shallow and uninteresting.

In fields like Physics and Engineering, there're plenty of cranks who say crazy things. But in such fields, reality tears those people down -- their works fail; their perpetual-motion machines don't tend to generate infinite-energy; their snake-oil doesn't seem to open people's latent-psychic abilities; their mathematical theorems fall apart. Reality is a harsh blade that cuts them down without mercy. And people in those fields learn to be harsh/critical themselves, as to survive the constant assaults from reality's judgement.

But the softer fields lack such harshness -- they're comically tolerant. It's like they're all whimsy; there'd seem to be little incentive for an academic to even bother with the extreme costs associated with rationality, as they'd just get out-competed on the metrics that they're actually judged by.

I mean, I don't care to see what (the early versions of) ChatGPT have to say of math; while chatbots might spit out a lot of junk, their rantings would be shallow and disinteresting. Why ought we have any more regard for the same mindlessness in other fields?

Point being that it seems off-topic to discuss such matters in terms of intellectualism -- unless we're using "intellectual" so loosely as to include stuff like ChatGPT-generated content.

anotherhue2• 2 years ago

It's basically fancy SEO spam for job security. Not that they get any until tenured.

WaitWaitWha• 2 years ago

But the softer fields lack such harshness -- they're comically tolerant.

Anecdotally, I think the field of psychology is in getting the public ire recently because of this. I read more and more complaints that certain highly touted (published?) therapies are failing and destroying individual lives. The other sub-field I see it is the societal impact of, again, highly touted & published psychology hurting entire classes of people.

The more bombastic the claim, the more likely it becomes de facto "reality". As you describe it, there is no simple & quick way to rationally disprove, and why would they - it is fashionable.

anotherhue2• 2 years ago

An idea I chew on, which is no doubt naive in ways I cannot even imagine, is a fixed limit on the ratio of administration to students (or workers or citizens or...). A sort of Duty Cycle codified in whatever the founding document is.

It's plain to me that the administrative class grows without bound, in almost any organisation. It doesn't have to.

303uru• 2 years ago

Blah blah blah blah blah.

Seriously, it's astonishing to me the level of dissecting when it comes what these elites are doing at universities but when it comes to why do these Republican elites want to destroy them, there's silence.

The Intellectual Rot of the Industrially Necessary University

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