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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   27655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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They can and have been beaten into submission.

The people who still believe in academia are currently at the highest seat of power: everyone whose parents benefited from the GI Bill (which was itself a horrific "eating the seed corn" event because it would precipitate this problem- and yes, that was passed under FDR, of course), and for whom academic credentials still meant something.

Those generations that came after academia transformed itself into a destructive welfare system won't rise to power for another 20-30 years; you'll never convince the Boomers that universities or management tracks need to be destroyed because they were the generation who primarily benefited from both the credential boosting their station, and the fact it served as their meal ticket into a new welfare system. These people are responsible for things like high school education rates being targets, and they'll never see the results of Goodhart's Law (that has resulted in swaths of illiterate populations), because illiterates can wipe Boomer asses just fine in the nursing home (and if they die due to medication mix-ups, they'll be too old to do anything about it).

The problem is that academia has stopped producing accurate results, which means it will eventually stop believing in itself.

Academia still produces welfare checks in a time of economic contraction; it is continuing to produce results.

Not everything is economic redistribution. For a society to work it needs a sense making apparatus, if only because the weapons it needs to defend itself have to actually work.

Now sure Academia is well able to produce sinecures, but can it reliably produce or attract and retain the sort of people who worked in the Manhattan Project, designed the F-15 or landed on the moon? And can they actually make their voices heard in crucial matters?

Of course not, those people go where competence is actually rewarded, and so they work for Elon Musk and technocapital now.

Now sure Academia is well able to produce sinecures, but can it reliably produce or attract and retain the sort of people who worked in the Manhattan Project, designed the F-15 or landed on the moon? And can they actually make their voices heard in crucial matters?

There's still people working for Space-X; they're coming from somewhere. I tend to suspect this is simply because STEM got eaten last, but got eaten it did, so this will be the last bunch.

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