RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
No bio...
User ID: 2051
Universities were, objectively, massively expanded in that timeframe. "We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture" is just not a very credible claim. On the other hand, it's just common sense that if you try to take in the top 5% vs the top 50%, the average student will necessary be MUCH worse, even if your measure of competence is unreliable. Likewise, if a professor suddenly has to teach a multiple of the students he used to, the quality of the education almost necessarily suffers (not to mention a similar effect to the students, in which people are given increased responsibilities to handle the load of teaching that in the old regime would never have been given such responsibilities).
Pretty much all older staff reports roughly the same story: In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment. This includes a lot of busywork that can't be too hard since - and here is some divergence - one side says the students are just way worse but we don't want failure rate of >50%, the other side says because it would require more personal interaction for struggling students which the professors simply can't supply anymore. To keep the appearance of excellence, this busywork is also often more time-intensive for the students than the technically harder assignments that students would have gotten in the past. The few professors that don't standardize but keep open-ended problems often don't manage to teach anything and end up having to just pass everyone. The style of political courses functor is describing fits into the same mold imo. It's just really convenient to reduce everything into a one-dimensional political analysis and works very well as a standardized approach.
In fact, I'd argue that most older staff even underestimates the scale of this process, since a large part happens through the generation of new fields that have minimally trained professors and low to no enforced standards. My university for example almost doubled its student body since I started studying here, went away, and came back. All the original courses, however, still have almost the same size. Instead, we have A LOT of new courses that frequently are just thinly-veiled ways of enrolling marginal students that didn't make it in the original courses ("media informatics", for example), and almost universally have very low standards. My wife had to work together on a project with a newly-created "midwife professor", head of the newly created "midwife university course", who is just a practicing midwife that went back to university, did a PhD with a single publication, and instantly got her professorship. She doesn't seem to have any idea how science works whatsoever, and nobody can make her since she has an ultra-safe position as the original arbiter in our university on what "midwife science" even is. And there are multiple new courses like this from which I have not directly heard anything yet, but also no reason to believe it's any different. And both my wife's and others report on existing collaborations that they often try to hide their ignorance behind moralistic grandstanding.
In general, another thing that I have been perceiving myself also is that there is zero pressure to make things harder for students and a lot of pressure to make things easier. If I pass everyone, literally nobody will complain as long as I went through the motions of designing some very easy assignments. On the other hand, if the assignments are too hard and too many fail, firstly it's just extra work for me since I see them again next year, and at some point I have to do an oral exam which is even more work. Then you have the students themselves complain. Then if you fail too many the university admin staff will complain as well. My natural attitude is normally "if they fail, they fail", but even I actively work towards making assignments easier for the students just to spare myself the hassle. It just seems extremely obvious that such a system will only ever get easier over time. And once you have little to no meaningful standards, it's easy to bring in politics, because why not?
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
8d ago
AFAIK median ages always include children. So any place that families go to will be much younger than a place with mostly singles, even if the singles themselves are younger.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
8d ago
The mobile app is also decent. I've been playing it a bit with friends.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
8d ago
Noah claims that progressives were in favor of immigration primarily, if not only, because Trump was against it, and that the right in general is against immigration on racial grounds. It's hard to take someone seriously after this kind of statement; The left has been very strongly in favor of immigration in general since the 90s, and this has been the case worldwide. The backlash to immigration has likewise happened worldwide, and for near-identical reasons: The number of immigrants were much higher than expected, the strain on the welfare systems, increased crime, etc.
Maybe it's because I'm in academia, but all the extremely woke people here haven't actually changed their opinion, and they haven't actually lost their positions, either. If I read the university newsletter, it's still full of "how to appreciate our diverse gender presentations" and very thin on hard science. If I walk around the campus, it's full of "critical orientation week" advertisements, which is exactly the kind of "critical" you'd expect. The university provides rooms for this week, which ostensibly is against the university, completely free of charge, of course. It's not even very long ago that the university kicked out a right-leaning moderate because "university is not political" and that the university should not "provide resources to political groups".
And this is the core problem imo: If there is a conflict and the right-leaning side is losing, the left will often successfully take away positions up to and including booting them out entirely. If the left loses, they just keep everything they try again after a while. Universities are still de-facto purging themselves of even moderately right-leaning people and promoting quite frankly completely insane people, so long as they are sufficiently far left. Unless we start kicking out far-left cranks the same way we do for the right, I don't see the general trajectory changing much. Sure this or that particular DEI statement gets discontinued, but the next thing is already being implemented.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
11d ago
To steelman her, not committing to an LDR which is longer than the period of dating beforehand, after just three months is pretty reasonable.
Since she presumably told you how long she will be gone, she can't really string you along endlessly. So keep it casual for the time being, but also make your feelings clear, and that you intend to start again right where you left off once she's back. If she does as well, great, if she finds new excuses or breaks it off after a few dates again, don't fall for it again. You can also offer to visit once if it's not crazy far away and not too hard on your wallet and just see how she reacts. Especially if it's a place you plausibly might have wanted to visit independent of her.
Dunno though how much you should listen to my advice. I've only ever had one serious relationship, with my wife & mother of my kids, and intend to keep it that way. I also always hated casual dating, in particular never used any apps, and made it clear that I only date with the goal of an eventual, stable family in mind.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
11d ago
On the other hand, many relationships I've talked about more in-depth with people include some moment in which one partner, usually the women, has some doubts and breaks it off for a while only to come back (often almost immediately). LDRs are one of the most common causes. And she is kind of right, if you only dated a few months, not committing to an LDR of more months than that is a very reasonable decision. Doesn't mean she isn't open to a proper relationship afterwards, and the fact that she starts the messages again shows that she likely has at least some interest still.
Imo experience with all sorts of addiction has taught us that almost nothing works once people are already addicted, and getting addicted can happen quite easily once you get in contact. If legal platforms block access, the addict will find another way. The key is to generate less addicts in the first place.
Low friction = more addicts = more problems. This is extra true for gambling, since it doesn't get you near-instantly chemically addicted the way some drugs do, it needs some time to be cultivated and re-enforced. If you need to repeatedly, physically go to a casino, people around you will notice, you might have to explain yourself to your partner or parents or close friends, and for yourself it's easier to notice when you start losing significant money. And noticing it early is important to get people to stop before it's too late. If you play on the phone, you yourself might only notice much, much later how much you have played and how much you really lost, and others notice even later, if at all. Not that this is impossible to happen with casinos, it's about the ease it happens with. There's related approaches, such as requiring casinos to change a fixed sum into a number of chips that you play with (which makes it obvious how much lost every time you go) vs just directly playing with cash (easier to lose more than you wanted to play with) or just pay by card (extremely easy to blow a lots of money), or to require limits on how much someone can lose in a specific time frame, and so on. All of these have the purpose to a) give a legal outlet to avoid the proliferation of a black market b) reduce the generation of addicts by increasing friction c) reduce the negative impact of being an addict by making sure you can only lose x money per hour or so spend.
For similar reasons, nowadays I feel like the old approach of having a small amount of a drug being mostly legal or at least not super punished, but if you were caught trading significant amounts you were fucked, was a certain sweet spot. The friction to even start drugs was quite significant. There is an argument to institute a similar ban on gambling, where small-scale private gambling is explicitly legal, but once you do it large-scale it becomes illegal full-stop. You can then still meet with friends and play a round of poker with real money but still mostly low stakes, but you don't get this industrialised pipeline of addict generation we have now.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
20d ago
Tbh that does sound incredibly naive. The start-up scene, or more generally capitalism, isn't good bc everyone involved is a perfect angel. It's because the competitiveness forces you to develop a good product that people actually want to buy, and to cut the slack and produce it reasonably cheaply. That's it. Worse yet, there are many tricks how people try to get around the competition with backhanded, negative-sum strategies, and you have to account for them & stop it. The problem with everything else, such as bureaucratic institutions, is that they often don't even attempt to account for these strategies so they run even wilder. Or worse yet they naturally incorporate the opposite.
It's douchebag who needs to please you vs douchebag you need to please. Nothing more, nothing less.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
26d ago
As long as FDP, Linke + Others stay below 5% each while still adding up to almost 20% it might be enough.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
26d ago
What makes you say that?
For starters, I recognise almost every single prolific poster as someone who used to be one at themotte beforehand, and they number in the low double digits. themotte also has quite a few people who have been around for very long, but we also regularly have new posters I don't recognize immediately, it has way more prolific posters to begin with, and there is a decent amount of turnover. It's failing is that it almost exclusively attracts a certain group of disgruntled, cynical liberals with a small number of mostly educated genuine (far-)rightists. Theschism, as far as I can see, is at this point more like a club for a small group of friends that is open to others more in the technical than practical sense. That's fine if that's your goal, but it hardly feels like it even competes on the same level as themotte.
Edit: Also, I think the kind of establishment liberal who would hypothetically come here would not be an uncritical accepter of the NYT or the Guardian, they'd be able to at least entertain and defend the credibility of those papers.
Maybe I was a bit harsh, but then we get to the point again that we actually do have quite a few people here who still on-net are pro-establishment, even if we are quite cynical about it.
But they would probably be turned away by the sheer number of people defending Trump.
I've been mulling over this answer and maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't see how you're even disagreeing with me. As I interpret it, even you seem to think that not banning many or most people willing to defend Trump (mind you, that includes quite a few moderate, left-leaning people that just don't think Trump is literally Hitler!) will instantly turn of the majority of establishment liberals. A view I agree with, but again, that precludes the possibility of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis", and not due to any action on themotte's side, but simply due to the basic attitude of establishment liberals.
In addition, as you may have noticed I slightly changed your wording from "pro-establishment" to just "establishment". This is because we actually still have quite a few "pro-establishment" liberals, in the sense of "I find the current right so odious I'm willing to vote establishment anyway". In fact it has so far included me, though I'm admittedly veering ever-closer to just say screw it. The only we lack are the liberals that are part of the establishment uncritically and without reservations, the NYT & Guardian readers and BBC watchers. And tbh, maybe it's because I'm completely surrounded by them here at university already, but I don't really miss them all that much. I know what they think quite well, and imo better than uncritically taking them by their word - I'm living with them, I know that they're frequently full of shit.
It's imo quite telling that themotte is still the kind of place where admins are going on anti-trump rants explaining why they prefer Kamala (but they dislike her as well), but that's not good enough for the establishment liberal, you need to be enthusiastic about Kamala.
Edit: FWIW I just took a look again at theschism and consider posting there occasionally to "see the other side" so-to-speak, but tbh that place looks, if anything, even more unhealthy.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
27d ago
We've had this discussion a few times now and my answer remains the same.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
28d ago
I mean, one-off near 50-50 gambles are just objectively quite difficult to evaluate properly. So unless you screw up in an obvious fashion, there are very few good ways to call someone out to begin with.
Ironically, Nate had a good article very recently on at least one way: a particular pollster, Redfield & Wilston, had released a poll about the seven "battleground states", and ALL results are within a 1% margin of each other. It's easy to show that this is statistically speaking pretty much impossible to happen given the base variance from the low-ish number of people they've polled. So they have to have fucked up somehow, and Nate can even explain the most likely technique, called herding, and how it is working. Also ironically, it's mostly used to avoid reputational damage, since it works by pooling results from different sources to avoid extreme results that naturally arise from base variance, but which are then called out as wrong afterwards.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
28d ago
I can see the argument that it's part of the repertoire of normal social maneuvering, but it's still a particular manipulative technique that imo deserves some snappy name. "just a joke bro" is also part of normal (male) social maneuvering, but obviously a very different kind.
Sure, that's how it works. If an observer does not consider it rude, the the tactic falls flat. The trick is to make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question without looking like a douchebag. So I chose an example that would be plausibly considered rude by an average reader here.
But keep in mind that many liberal readers have the same instinctual reaction you have, but to the insinuation that different ethnicities might have different murder rates. Likewise, a honor-virtue ethics society might simply consider Adam pathetic, and Bob virtuous and brave.
Edit: Also, feel free to adjust the example if you think you understand roughly what I'm getting at! I try to find a middle ground between brevity and fidelity in these kind of examples, so it's hardly perfect.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
29d ago
In theory that is possible, but in practice it's imo almost always an attempt to smuggle in the vibes and assumptions you prefer.
How do we want to call the social manipulation technique at work here? I'm voting for "the social scientists gambit", since it's especially widespread there. It goes like this:
Adam: I'm 6.2.
Bob: No way, you look more like 5.6.
Adam: You have no evidence for this statement, so you should default to trust me.
Bob: Actually, I have measuring tape, let's just see.
Adam: I'm calling HR, this is beyond rude!
Or in more general terms you a) control the null hypothesis and then b) either claim that even testing the null hypothesis is offensive, or you allow it to be "tested" as long as the procedure is designed to get the correct results. Just see the frontpage of /r/science and try reading up on the actual definitions of terms like "racial resentment" or "hostile sexism" for practical examples of the latter.
Imo one big problem is the frequentist / null-hypothesis framework to begin with. You can't have a reasonable opinion about anything if you by-default assume 95% hypothesis A (which just-so happens to be the one you favor) 5% everything else. The appropriate attitude is bayesian priors, which are difficult to do perfectly but in rough terms are actually quite simple: You assume relevant stats of the general category (say, murder rates per ethnicity or religion) and then slightly or strongly adjust based on how much you know of the case (say, a witness explicitly states an assailant screamed "allahu akbar!"). Of course, this makes the next problem obvious, which is abusing incorrect stats, such as claiming that we're not allowed to use the murder rates per [category], but only population percentages.
The other obvious problem is harder to manage: Manipulated/plainly wrong stats. Tbh, I've yet to find a good approach that scales for this one. Sometimes they cook the numbers in obvious ways that are even openly stated in the manual which is easy to adjust for, but more common seems to be the situation as with the recent californian retail thefts, where technically speaking everything is done correctly, but one step in the pipeline completely fails in an undocumented manner.
At least attempting something like this seems better than just going by your guts. And if this is too involved to always do for everything - which I consider understandable - hard scepticism is also always an option as well.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
29d ago
I see a few issues with this view. The first is simple: If you changed marriage to explicitly define it as a "common household", with no allusions to families, love, sex etc., how would you think people would react? In my experience, most are quite protective about the definitions of modern marriages. I'm pretty sure you'd be extremely unpopular on both the right (which still mostly clings to the old definition, even while it hasn't been enforced for decades at this point) as well as the left (which will badger you about how some marriages don't share a house, others not an account, but they all love each other, and you can't take that away from them!).
The second is at least two pairs of (male) friends from my old school clique did in fact share a common household for nearly a decade each, living together, pooling money for the majority of expenses, such as grocery buying, furniture & shared electronics, even (more than) yearly vacations together. They were as close, and the arrangement was stable for as long as, quite a few marriages, so from this perspective it was a great injustice that they got treated differently! It also didn't create a mess in practice, it was just kind of unfair.
The third, basically the counter-side to the second, is that it's actually pretty common for marriages nowadays to not at all be a single economic unit. The average marriage I know has three accounts, One for each and one shared, and how much is actually pooled into the shared account varies widely. Many keep the majority of the money to themselves once they earn well enough so that the basic necessities are just a small part of the expenses. Retirement accounts are generally kept strictly separated with no pooling except maybe informal arrangements. Arguably, messes happen in practice because too much was pooled together, not the other way around.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
29d ago
I linked a lesswrong activist plan for banning meat recently, and they literally said this was step 2 (after "we're just asking for vegan options, not trying to force anyone, why are you resisting bigot?).
Could you link it again? I tried to find it on your personal page, but gave up on page 21.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
29d ago
Right, but we're talking about people who don't have that thick skin. The asymmetry means that if you want to hear their ideas, you'd have to "take it", as it were, when they say uncharitable and unkind things.
Is that even good enough? My experience increasingly is that any place not straight-up banning people in accordance with progressive views will bleed away all the progressives posters, who'll explicitly state that they're leaving since they're not willing to share a space with -ists. And it's obvious why, given that they can always go to reddit or similar where they can and do get anyone banned when they're losing an argument. The SSC subreddit, while still better than reddit overall, is a prime example of this dynamic.
I don't even completely disagree with you, this place is clearly populated by a very stable niche at this point, even if it's a very different one than what some on the left allege. But I also don't know any place more tolerant of differing viewpoints, and at this point I'm at a loss how you even can get progressives to join a not-progressive space.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
1mo ago
4chan is probably a better place to ask this, given their prodigious amount of, um, art of this kind.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
1mo ago
This is pretty weak. At least progressives engage with our actual opinions, even if I may think that "making sure babies are born without serious congenital defects that lead to major abnormalities is ableism and therefore evil" is insane. The arguably most radical wing is the IQ-boost-to-the-moon crowd, of which I know a few personally, and none of them have ever mentioned caring about religiousness, gun ownership, or republicans. Hell, I'm pretty sure that a decent chunk of them already vote republican, and the others are if anything much more tolerant on politics than the average academic.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
1mo ago
doesn't actually matter if there was outcome-determinative fraud
I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, it's just you can't know but have good reasons to be suspicious.
I'll give you a similar example from my own life as a scientist. When I was still a student, I was told that women were preferentially hired as researchers only for the case of equal qualification and I mostly believed it. Then, as a scientific help, I started hearing third-hand talk about committees who would publicly claim this, but behind closed doors actually just decided beforehand they're going to hire a woman no matter what. As a PhD candidate, my (female) supervisor (frustratedly, since she was in favor of a man) flat-out told me that she has been part of such a committee, and that this is not even rare. Of course publicly she obviously would never admit this. Now as a researcher myself, I've been in on hiring decisions, and it's just obvious that you'd always take a woman if you can. You easily double your chances to get grants & publicity with her, you insulate yourself from claims of discrimination, it's just a complete no-brainer. A man needs to be MUCH more competent to make up for this.
But technically, I have no proof how wide-spread this is. Many people are still claiming that this would be some right-wing conspiracy theory, silly them, of course we only hire women for equal or higher qualifications, it says right here in the official regulations, and who would go against official regulations? If there is some public dispute of any particular hiring decision at some random university I will usually have no evidence whatsoever. But from personal experience I don't expect there to be evidence even conditional on the hiring decisions being biased. I also expect the hiring decision to be biased, also from experience, so even if I know literally nothing at all beyond that there is a controversy I'd say it was probably biased anyway.
I want to applaud you for choosing this example, since it perfectly encapsulates the democratic/insider framing. Variants of this dynamic are currently happening in several countries simultaneously, so it's critical to understand it in general.
Please imagine that, in your example, that what you wrote is the PoV of some employee. His outrage: Completely out of the blue, a new CEO claims what never has been claimed!
Now imagine another possible PoV: A shareholder. From his perspective the company has long enjoyed outstanding trust and had gotten a long leash for a long while. It has been allowed to do its thing and almost all higher positions, in particular every CEO, has been an insider who worked decades in the same company. But lately it has seemed increasingly fishy: There wasn't a distribution in a while, multiple employees have some minor scandals but they don't result in any actual consequences for them and even allegedly independent auditors turn out to be personal friends of the management.
This goes on for a while, each new CEO promising to change it around, but somehow everything seems to get worse at the same steady pace as before. It culminates in a truly new CEO being hired: The first outsider, obviously still some kind of elite, but he didn't work his way up on the inside like everybody else.
Now he starts working at the company, and literally every employer is openly hostile to him. There's multiple scandals, such as a department head secretly keeping a subdivision running that he was told to close and deliberately lying to the CEO about it, or his personal staff leaking infos outside, or the internal affairs dep publicly starting an investigation on spurious claims and then silently closing it when nothing turns up, the list is endless. He can't find out where the money is going and doesn't trust any report by anyone inside the company on the topic. Eventually, he concludes that he can't prove any malfeasance - not in the "currently not enough evidence" sense, but in the "fundamentally impossible without any trustworthy arbiters" sense. He loses his temper and alleges that the people managing the money have to do something that has to cause the current problems, and asks the shareholder to allow further, major restructuring to uncover what is happening.
Imagine also, if you need to, that this outsider CEO is crass, mean-spirited and impulsive, hell maybe even a bit incompetent.
As a shareholder, I wouldn't go "well technically you have no proof that there is malfeasance", I would go "holy fuck does this sound dysfunctional we need to restructure". Maybe I'd want to hire a different outsider CEO, but all things considered the current one is at least understandable and seems to actually work on my side for once, unlike the others.
I agree that this isn't fully universal. I also was lucky, as the first PhD student of a newly minted group leader in a subfield of applied math (population models, in particular cancer) I had both great latitude and lots of attention if I needed help. My course when I did my Bachelor's and Master's also was still quite restrictive in comparison - 40 people at first, of which 20 dropped out in the first years. So our classes were also quite small.
But I also have shared some classes with medical or biology students, which would often be triple-digits, and worked quite a bit with medical or biology PhDs. Some institutes had rooms full of PhD students who had the same supervisor (though support through mentors did lessen this a bit). My wife, who used to be in neuroscience, had a supervisor who spend no more than 15 minutes on meetings with her - once per month. Her project was more or less entirely pre-defined, and the adjustments she took were due to her own stubbornness, not because the Professor really wanted to give her the latitude. When I had my defense (in the UK, you talk multiple hours, in detail, about your work with two independent reviewers), one of the reviewers positively noted that not even once I said I'd have to ask my supervisor, that for every thing I did I had a ready-made explanation on why I focused on this and where the approach comes from; According to him, his own PhD student would competently carry out his directives, but he was very frustrated how often they'd not actually understand why they did the things the way they did it. Unsurprisingly, he was a medical doctor, and this is something I've heard from multiple Profs in medical sciences. By my wife's account - and some personal discussions I've had with acquaintances -, the situation in psychology and sociology is much worse yet.
You also have to keep in mind that PhD-student do not spring into existence from nothing, and that supervisors do not spend all of their time only on PhD students; Universities as a whole have been steadily expanding since the beginning of the last century in most western countries (see for example this report though I don't think this controversial), albeit at different rates and with different timing of the surges & plateaus, which means this has been the experience of pretty much all currently living Profs independent of the exact timeframe.
So what impact does the expansion of the universities have on PhD students? First let's assume you're a specific PhD student: The professors get more teaching duties, so they have less time for you. Then, because they barely get their other duties done, they more or less need to push parts of the teaching duties on you, which means you also have less time for your PhD itself. Also, there may be more professors to deal with the increased burden, but these are those that wouldn't have made the cut. In the worst - and not even that rare - case, you have a situation as I described for the "midwife professorship", which is someone who might not even have gotten a PhD at all in the past getting a full professorship for essentially political reasons (and thus it's no surprise she tends to be more political than scientific in her attitude).
Of course, it impacts the PhD students themselves as well: As described in the earlier post, they are more likely to be used to a more standardized environment from their bachelor's and master's, making it more difficult to suddenly work independently. And similar to the professors, the additional numbers are more marginal PhD candidates, so they're on average worse to begin with.
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