Theme: Education

  • Can Professors At Universities Teach And Have Opinions That Are Very Much Contrary To The Scientific Community At Large?

    THE BEST ANSWER YOU WILL FIND

    All university departments hold biases, and the careers of the members of the department depend upon upholding those biases, because of the incentives to publish, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the university and departments that was inherited from the church – which invented the university.  There is very little practical difference between the practice of ideology and the practice of academic research in this regard. In practice, ideas die with their originators and sponsors, not when they are disproved. The investment is too high. The incentive to over-invest in a paradigm to retain one’s position is too high.  This is why students must choose departments based upon what the department members publish.

    Sowell’s recommended “fix” is to financially and organizationally separate research departments (that do not serve the interests of students whatsoever) from teaching departments (whose only concern is the students) but the administration (serving neither the students or the researchers) is currently consuming all the vast investment americans are making in educations (that have questionable return, and in some cases negative return.)  Realistically if undergrad students paid teaching professors, not researchers, for their education, and we regulated administration and capital acquisition to 20% of fees, education would be absurdly inexpensive, and students would leave with little debt.  We could then ask grad students and phd students and the government to bear the costs of research, rather than the undergrads. And we would shrink the administration back to it’s necessary and sufficient size.  (Financially, academia now has absorbed all the costs originally saved by eliminating the church.  For all intents and purposes, we have merely replaced academia and church with academia. In fact, I am pretty confident that academia is far more expensive than the post-enlightenment church was in every form of capital consumption.)

    But the university system is not designed for students and their careers, it is designed to provide economic rents to researchers and administrators, by selling faulty products to students,  that in any other industry would be open to class action lawsuits for fraudulent representation, and possible only because of inflationary pressure on by the government, in the same way that the government created inflationary pressure on the housing industry leading to the 2008 crash.

    See Sowell’s work and Caplan’s work.  Caplan is always someone you must be skeptical of nearly everything he says, so his his empirical work is what you can appreciate, but you must ignore all his conclusions. (Sort of like reading Marx.)

    https://www.quora.com/Can-professors-at-universities-teach-and-have-opinions-that-are-very-much-contrary-to-the-scientific-community-at-large

  • How Can I Know How People View Me As A Person?

    Stop having ignorant, liberal-ed twits write bot-like questions that do nothing more than persist postmodern pseudoscience?

    Learn something empirical. Ok?

    https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-know-how-people-view-me-as-a-person

  • ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS Don’t pay c

    ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS

    Don’t pay college tuition for trade school education. Get a major in something that is the maximum extent of your abilities, and then minor in or take basic courses in your trade.

    In this case I’m referring to a young relative of mine that I love who is too smart for the career she has targeted. I would suggest that if you are a woman and can handle the nursing curriculum then whether or not you choose to be a nurse you can always downgrade if you can’t hack the program. If you do hack it, the entire healthcare field is open to you. Furthermore you can get an advanced degree such as Nurse Practitioner, and and within this generation, nurses will approach doctor salaries. NP is a great career for a smart woman who wants to participate in care-taking fields.

    I will also put out that when you are a young woman you are probably very ignorant about the world, and certainly too ignorant of the world to know in high school what career you should follow. And to make matters worse, you also have raging hormones in your body making you extremely sensitive to care-taking stimuli. By the time you are in your late twenties to mid thirties these hormones will decline in influence and you will care very much more that you are working with people who think about the world the way that you do, and are interesting than you will about care taking of yet another of the same problems that you have seen a thousand times. You can let your hormonal influences in youth determine your mid and late life circumstances, but if you do you will end up as one of the many unsatisfied people in the world who dreams of being what else she could have been.

    In general if you want to have the most fulfilling life, you should always try to operate at the limits of your ability, and associate with people at that same limit. You will constantly make each other better. If you associate with people who have 95-105 IQ’s they are ‘normal’, but if you associate with people 105-115, it’s a very different world you will live in. For example, in the medical field, doctors are usually above 125, and often much higher, while almost all workers in medical administration and service are below 100. If you want to know why doctors act the way they do it’s because it’s very frustrating to talk to people more than 15 points different from you. You don’t see it usually in your education system, but as you mature, you rapidly understand that at 15 points is a standard deviation, and that our social classes (if not our economic classes) are structured by IQ, and that it is much more rewarding for you to work with the people at the top of your spectrum rather than with people below it.

    Next, in the same vein, when you are young, and female (with lower dominance than males) the idea of managing people is harder to imagine than doing a job that does not require a lot of collaboration. But if you are smart, then the only rewarding job as you mature is that which requires a lot of collaboration. If you are smart enough that bad customer service, organizational disorder and inefficiency bother you, and wise enough to understand that people must do things differently because they are each equipped differently, then it is wise to look at careers with management responsibility.

    If you don’t like what this says to you then I am sorry for you – because life will teach you this lesson even if you do not want to learn it. Associate with the best people you can. That means the people who constantly challenge you to improve yourself. You will make them better and they will make you better.

    The opposite is also true. If you associate with people less able than you are, in a career that is less challenging than you are capable of, you will be both socially and occupationally bored, and constantly frustrated by what you see as pervasive incompetence and error. And you will rapidly find yourself a prisoner of that little world in which you have walled yourself.

    Money is not everything. Once you make over 60K, happiness does not improve – you just buy more expensive houses, cars, clothes, and ‘stuff’. But this is a misleading statistic. Because once you make over say, 90K, the quality of people you associate with on a daily basis increases dramatically. Fulfillment in life comes from your family, your friends, but the people you spend the most time with are those at your work. So just as you would be careful with friends, careful selecting a mate, it is wise to be careful selecting a line of work where you are with people who fulfill you rather than frustrate you.

    If you are smart – smart enough to graduate in the upper 10 or 20% of your class, make sure that you are not consigning yourself to your parent’s social class, and the kinds of careers that are easily understood among your family, friends and associates. If you live in NYC or SF you are more aware of the many careers available. If you live in a small town somewhere rural you are not. It helps to read help wanted advertisements in big cities if you want to understand the world. Employment offers are the map of the world as it is. Whatever people tell you is largely mythology.

    So my advice to everyone at every level of ability is to shoot for the most complex degree in one of the most complex fields with the greatest quantitative demands that you can handle. And to consider trade school your last option. You can always switch from harder degree to less hard degree. But if you work hard you will not. But if you are going to pay that much money for an education, do not pay for trade school expecting a college education. It’s a recipe for debt and an unsatisfying life.

    Affections.

    Curt


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 10:47:00 UTC

  • The Cathedral places a burden on academics that intellectuals outside of the Cat

    The Cathedral places a burden on academics that intellectuals outside of the Cathedral do not bear = conformity.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-08 09:33:00 UTC

  • JUST TEN? ARE YOU KIDDING? Sean Ring, Johannes Meixner, Michael Parley Griffith,

    http://www.propertarianism.com/reading-list/BOOKS, JUST TEN? ARE YOU KIDDING?

    Sean Ring, Johannes Meixner, Michael Parley Griffith, Robyn Harte-Bunting Vincent Wolters, Brian Ó Caithnia, Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski.

    There is a difference between books that affected me emotionally, books that affected my thinking, books I learned from, and books that I recommend. I keep a book list on Propertarianism.com that references all the books I recommend. But those are the books whose arguments and ideas are correct, not the books that affected me intellectually, emotionally or spiritually.

    Durant was wright that there are few answers in philosophy. Philosophy tells us of intellectual history, and makes one’s mind fit. That is all. It is the wishful thinking of man, not the evidence of man. Instead, history provides us with evidence of man to work from. History, Economics(cooperation) and evolutionary biology provide answers that philosophy does not, but only if our minds are fit enough to tell the difference between possible truth and possible fallacy.

    HEROIC MAN AFFECTED ME MORALLY, EMOTIONALLY AND SPIRITUALLY

    Heroism is the central western proposition.

    The Iliad, the Odyssey, The Greek Myths, Aesop’s Fables. Pinocchio. Beowulf. Le Morte D’ Arthur. Shakespeare’s Henry V, Macbeth.Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. Ivanhoe. Howard’s Conan stories. Starship Troopers, A Wizard of Earthsea. Harlan Ellison’s stories. Time Enough For Love. Hobbit/LOTR. Dune. Snow Crash, and Neuromancer. (Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Frazer’s The Golden Bough).

    The principle pagan arguments are is the worship of the earth and the personal virtue of the heroism of man, and the political virtue of aristocracy as prevention against tyranny – under which the earth is not worshipped, man is not heroic, and the best do not rise for us to imitate their behaviors, and aspire to their achievements.

    BOOKS THAT AFFECTED MY THINKING

    The books that affect you are determined by where you were in your intellectual development. That is why the books that affect each of us are somewhat different. These are the books that I remember very much rearranging or influencing everything else that I understood at the time.

    Encyclopedia Britannica. The Constitution and DoE. Biography of Samuel Colt. Durant’s Lessons of History. Karen Armstrong’s: The Great Transformation. Ceram’s Gods, Graves and Scholars. Mallory’s In Search of Indo Europeans. Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation. The Third Chimpanzee. Guns Germs and Steel. Kahneman’s Thinking fast and slow. Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Keegan’s History of Warfare. Fussel’s Class. Rand’s aesthetics. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and essays on Knowledge. Popper’s CR and Open Universe. The many papers of the economic calculation argument.

    BOOKS I RECOMMEND

    Ricardo Duchesne: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization

    JP Mallory: In Search of Indo Europeans

    John Keegan: A History Of Warfare

    Joseph Campbell : The Hero’s Journey

    Karen Armstrong : The Great Transformation

    William Tucker: Marriage and Civilization

    Emmanuel Todd: The Explanation of Ideology

    Emmanuel Todd: The Invention of Europe

    Daniel Hannan: Inventing Freedom

    Alan MacFarlane : Origins of English Individualism

    Gregory Clark: A Farewell to Alms

    Matt Ridley: The Red Queen

    Dale Petersen: Demonic Males

    Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature

    Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Francis Fukuyama: Trust

    Sam Harris : Lying

    Steven Pinker : The Blank Slate

    Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind

    Stephen Hicks : Explaining Postmodernism

    Hans Hoppe: Democracy The God That Failed

    BOOKS I LEARNED FROM

    Well that’s too many to list, so I’ll just point to my web site:


    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-01 05:11:00 UTC

  • The Mere Mortal's Journey To Economic Literacy

    1) -The Single Idea-
    Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt : Economic thought, unlike Moral thought, asks us to think about equilibrating consequences, and opportunity costs. If you understand the “one lesson” of the broken window fallacy, then that teaches you economic thinking in a nutshell.

    2) –The Application of The Single Idea To The Civic Society–
    Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell : Basic Economics applies this single principle.

    3) –The Application of the Single Idea To Production Distribution and Trade–
    Principles of Micro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Micro Economics textbooks deal with patterns of cooperation (business).

    4) –The Application of the Single Idea To Monetary, Fiscal, Industrial and Social Policy–
    Principles of Macro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Macro economic textbooks deal with the impact of fiscal policy (government spending) and monetary policy (issuance of new money or credit) on the economy, in the government’s effort to keep us all busy.

    5) –The “Missing Link”: The Operations of the Financial System that connects political policy with production, distribution and trade.–
    Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and;
    Nial Ferguson’s History of Money

    The book that is missing between Micro and Macro, I do not think has yet been written, which is how the financial sector services the relationship between micro and macro. I think that book has not been written. In the meantime Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and Nial Ferguson’s History of Money, are the best and most accessible works. (Others might disagree). Rothbard was a terrible philosopher, but his works on money and banking are still the best I have found.

    6) –The Study Of Applications, Eddy’s And Flows-
    Most advanced (niche) applications of economics are useful for professionals, but not terribly meaningful for citizens.

    Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t get this stuff in high school.

  • The Mere Mortal’s Journey To Economic Literacy

    1) -The Single Idea-
    Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt : Economic thought, unlike Moral thought, asks us to think about equilibrating consequences, and opportunity costs. If you understand the “one lesson” of the broken window fallacy, then that teaches you economic thinking in a nutshell.

    2) –The Application of The Single Idea To The Civic Society–
    Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell : Basic Economics applies this single principle.

    3) –The Application of the Single Idea To Production Distribution and Trade–
    Principles of Micro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Micro Economics textbooks deal with patterns of cooperation (business).

    4) –The Application of the Single Idea To Monetary, Fiscal, Industrial and Social Policy–
    Principles of Macro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Macro economic textbooks deal with the impact of fiscal policy (government spending) and monetary policy (issuance of new money or credit) on the economy, in the government’s effort to keep us all busy.

    5) –The “Missing Link”: The Operations of the Financial System that connects political policy with production, distribution and trade.–
    Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and;
    Nial Ferguson’s History of Money

    The book that is missing between Micro and Macro, I do not think has yet been written, which is how the financial sector services the relationship between micro and macro. I think that book has not been written. In the meantime Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and Nial Ferguson’s History of Money, are the best and most accessible works. (Others might disagree). Rothbard was a terrible philosopher, but his works on money and banking are still the best I have found.

    6) –The Study Of Applications, Eddy’s And Flows-
    Most advanced (niche) applications of economics are useful for professionals, but not terribly meaningful for citizens.

    Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t get this stuff in high school.

  • The Mere Mortal's Journey To Economic Literacy

    1) -The Single Idea-
    Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt : Economic thought, unlike Moral thought, asks us to think about equilibrating consequences, and opportunity costs. If you understand the “one lesson” of the broken window fallacy, then that teaches you economic thinking in a nutshell.

    2) –The Application of The Single Idea To The Civic Society–
    Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell : Basic Economics applies this single principle.

    3) –The Application of the Single Idea To Production Distribution and Trade–
    Principles of Micro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Micro Economics textbooks deal with patterns of cooperation (business).

    4) –The Application of the Single Idea To Monetary, Fiscal, Industrial and Social Policy–
    Principles of Macro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Macro economic textbooks deal with the impact of fiscal policy (government spending) and monetary policy (issuance of new money or credit) on the economy, in the government’s effort to keep us all busy.

    5) –The “Missing Link”: The Operations of the Financial System that connects political policy with production, distribution and trade.–
    Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and;
    Nial Ferguson’s History of Money

    The book that is missing between Micro and Macro, I do not think has yet been written, which is how the financial sector services the relationship between micro and macro. I think that book has not been written. In the meantime Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and Nial Ferguson’s History of Money, are the best and most accessible works. (Others might disagree). Rothbard was a terrible philosopher, but his works on money and banking are still the best I have found.

    6) –The Study Of Applications, Eddy’s And Flows-
    Most advanced (niche) applications of economics are useful for professionals, but not terribly meaningful for citizens.

    Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t get this stuff in high school.

  • The Mere Mortal’s Journey To Economic Literacy

    1) -The Single Idea-
    Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt : Economic thought, unlike Moral thought, asks us to think about equilibrating consequences, and opportunity costs. If you understand the “one lesson” of the broken window fallacy, then that teaches you economic thinking in a nutshell.

    2) –The Application of The Single Idea To The Civic Society–
    Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell : Basic Economics applies this single principle.

    3) –The Application of the Single Idea To Production Distribution and Trade–
    Principles of Micro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Micro Economics textbooks deal with patterns of cooperation (business).

    4) –The Application of the Single Idea To Monetary, Fiscal, Industrial and Social Policy–
    Principles of Macro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Macro economic textbooks deal with the impact of fiscal policy (government spending) and monetary policy (issuance of new money or credit) on the economy, in the government’s effort to keep us all busy.

    5) –The “Missing Link”: The Operations of the Financial System that connects political policy with production, distribution and trade.–
    Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and;
    Nial Ferguson’s History of Money

    The book that is missing between Micro and Macro, I do not think has yet been written, which is how the financial sector services the relationship between micro and macro. I think that book has not been written. In the meantime Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and Nial Ferguson’s History of Money, are the best and most accessible works. (Others might disagree). Rothbard was a terrible philosopher, but his works on money and banking are still the best I have found.

    6) –The Study Of Applications, Eddy’s And Flows-
    Most advanced (niche) applications of economics are useful for professionals, but not terribly meaningful for citizens.

    Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t get this stuff in high school.

  • Is It Good To Do A Ph.d. In Theoretical Computer Science (e.g. Complexity) If You Intend To Go To Work In The Industry?

    As far as we know, a PhD does not increase you earning capacity or your credibility and demonstrably harms it. The value of a PhD is either entirely personal (and expensive) or necessary as entry into the teaching field.  In practice a PhD is certification by a board of specialists that they can treat  you as a relative equal in the field – of teaching.

    Nearly all problems in computer science are not complicated, but instead, are bounded by hardware costs tolerable by the end consumer of the application (the imputed price).  Most innovation takes place in either adapting to new hardware capacity (software generations) or adapting to new hardware capability (user interface improvements). But the number of ‘problems’ we solve in computer science is still a manageable set, small enough to roughly refer to as design patterns.

    Furthermore the value of your earning capacity (working in the industry) is determined by your ability to learn and dispose of ideas, not by your expanding specialization in ideas. 

    (Personally, I would do it anyway. lol)

    https://www.quora.com/Is-it-good-to-do-a-Ph-D-in-theoretical-computer-science-e-g-complexity-if-you-intend-to-go-to-work-in-the-industry