Curt Doolittle

Theme: Education

  • PREVALECE OF CORRUPTION : ASIANS AND EDUCATION (low trust society) (corruption)

    http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/asian-immigrants-and-what-no-one-mentions-aloud/CULTURAL PREVALECE OF CORRUPTION : ASIANS AND EDUCATION

    (low trust society) (corruption) (education)

    The author doesn’t take the time to put in the references to the empirical work, but he does talk a bit about Asian performance.

    1) high test scores

    2) hard work for them

    3) pervasive cheating

    4) not matched by college performance.

    5) not matched by performance in real life.

    6) Colleges are discriminating against admission of asians.

    I don’t much care really. Because NORTH EAST asians assimilate and really, except for their slight weakness in verbal skills, they end up as pretty good citizens, behaviorally indistinguishable from us, with all the right status signals. And, if what I’ve read is correct, they lose the pervasive asian corruption fairly quickly. Within a generation or so.

    I wish we could get everyone else to work hard and conform. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-24 03:56:00 UTC

  • TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM? EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME Highe

    http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/arena/result/the-future-of-higher-education#comment-1091995003WILL TECHNOLOGY UNDERMINE THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM?

    EDUCATION WILL REMAIN THE SAME

    Higher education filters us and produces signals. It does not teach us very much. And that’s just what the evidence says. There is very little chance that higher ed will be replaced by technology. Technology is not a high enough cost to perform any filtering, and if it was high enough cost, then people wouldn’t use it.

    THE EXAMPLE OF FLIGHT SIMULATORS

    Pilots joining the armed forces usually must have a considerable number of hours in at-home flight simulators to compete against their entry level peers. Technology may have the same effect on entry into those institutions. Technology may be the way we ACTUALLY LEARN SKILLS instead of are filtered and sorted, and stamped with approval for signalling purposes. But it is unlikely that without the high cost of education, the personal associations that form in educational institutions, the cultural conformity and behavior that comes from working in a college environment, meeting expectations of the professor, and cooperating with peers, that individuals would learn what businesses actually hire them for: not their knowledge, but their ability to understand, solve and execute problems regardless of industry in which those problems occur.

    UNIVERSITIES ARE VALUABLE FOR FILTERING NOT FOR TEACHING

    In that sense it matters very little what we learn at university. We are being schooled in the one thing that matters: problem solving and execution without supervision. Because, the human pay scale is determined by the degree of supervision, or lack of it, that is necessary to perform different levels of work given decreasing amounts of known information about how to do it.

    For these reasons, technology CANNOT REPLACE the classroom. It is not what we learn but how we learn and how hard the assignments are (from social sciences in the trivial, to computer science, economics, mathematics and physics at the difficult end).

    College is an obstacle course for testing and eliminating performance. It doesn’t teach you much, we don’t remember much, we don’t apply much, and we won’t even apply it if we have the opportunity to. (see Caplan)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 08:10:00 UTC

  • Is It True, As John C. Drew Asserts, That He Is “the Only Ph.d. Level, Published Political Scientist Contributing Comments At Quora”?

    I don’t know if he is the only PhD, since there are a lot of PhD’s in Political Science.  You must realize that in America that a PhD does not mean that  you have mastered a field, but it means you have mastered the art of RESEARCH in your field.  And I am fairly sure that most questions are better answered by Pollsters, statisticians and Political Economists than political scientists. I am not sure that those of us who write political philosophy, even the philosophy of political economy, are any better at it than any of the other groups. 

    But, that hedging said, by and large, very few specialists post here, and most of the questions are fraudulent attempts to promote leftism by asking critical questions.  See “The Critical Theory” and “The Culture of Critique” as means of undermining western moral and social structures through obscurantist criticism.

    I tend to only answer questions here if they sound reasonably intelligent and honest, and thats a high bar for this forum.  And it’s getting worse.  Democracy is a pretty good way of peaceful transfer of power, but not a good way of understanding much of anything. It’s a race to the bottom in most cases.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-as-John-C-Drew-asserts-that-he-is-the-only-Ph-D-level-published-political-scientist-contributing-comments-at-Quora

  • Is It True, As John C. Drew Asserts, That He Is “the Only Ph.d. Level, Published Political Scientist Contributing Comments At Quora”?

    I don’t know if he is the only PhD, since there are a lot of PhD’s in Political Science.  You must realize that in America that a PhD does not mean that  you have mastered a field, but it means you have mastered the art of RESEARCH in your field.  And I am fairly sure that most questions are better answered by Pollsters, statisticians and Political Economists than political scientists. I am not sure that those of us who write political philosophy, even the philosophy of political economy, are any better at it than any of the other groups. 

    But, that hedging said, by and large, very few specialists post here, and most of the questions are fraudulent attempts to promote leftism by asking critical questions.  See “The Critical Theory” and “The Culture of Critique” as means of undermining western moral and social structures through obscurantist criticism.

    I tend to only answer questions here if they sound reasonably intelligent and honest, and thats a high bar for this forum.  And it’s getting worse.  Democracy is a pretty good way of peaceful transfer of power, but not a good way of understanding much of anything. It’s a race to the bottom in most cases.

    https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-as-John-C-Drew-asserts-that-he-is-the-only-Ph-D-level-published-political-scientist-contributing-comments-at-Quora

  • pretty public about the fact that I think Boettke is our best. So this is a sham

    http://www.economicthought.net/blog/?p=5163I’m pretty public about the fact that I think Boettke is our best. So this is a shameless plug of the failure of the mainstream to understand Hayek’s contribution. Prices and knowledge are making a slow comeback. Specifically that prices DISTORT knowledge accumulation, not just incentives, and that this process accumulates and is expressed in our theory of the business cycle.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 09:28:00 UTC

  • a profession that earns its salary teaching MBA students could ask for no better

    http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.kr/2013/10/gene-famas-nobel.html” a profession that earns its salary teaching MBA students could ask for no better result than to find that better knowledge and training lead to better investment management. Too bad the facts say otherwise.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 09:25:00 UTC

  • + ELOCUTION + POETRY Bring it back. Today. Daily

    http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ajd1102.0001.001/2?page=root%3Brgn%3Dfull+text%3Bsize%3D100%3Bview%3DimageORATORY + ELOCUTION + POETRY

    Bring it back. Today. Daily.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 16:22:00 UTC

  • ON CONSERVATIVE LITERATURE (books on rational conservatism) –See reading lists

    http://www.propertarianism.com/MORE ON CONSERVATIVE LITERATURE

    (books on rational conservatism)

    –See reading lists at www.propertarianism.com Then “Reading Lists” from the menu–

    My last post was just too narrow so I thought I’d forward this canon on rational conservatism. It doesn’t hold a candle to Libertarian theory because it’s fundamentally an emphasis on the normative rather than political or economic economy. But that’s precisely why we should study it. Conservatives ‘get it’. Even if they can’t talk about it rationally or intelligently. ARATIONAL != IRRATIONAL.

    MORE ON THE ANALYTICAL AND HISTORICAL APPROACH

    Jerry z Muller :

    _Conservatism_

    http://www.amazon.com/Conservatism-Anthology-Political-Thought-Present/dp/0691037124/

    _The Other God That Failed_

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-that-Failed-Deradicalization/dp/069100823X

    “Us and Them : The enduring power of ethnic nationalism”

    http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63217/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them

    “Capitalism and Inequality : What the right and the left get wrong”

    http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality

    George H. Nash: _Conservative Intellectual Movement in America_

    http://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Intellectual-Movement-America-ebook/dp/B0055PNMQ4

    Robert NIsbett : _The Quest for Community_

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558150587?ie=UTF8&creativeASIN=1558150587

    F.A. Hayek : _The Constitution of Liberty_, _The Road to Serfdom_

    RESTORATION SCHEMES

    Mark R Levin : _The Liberty Amendments_ (Restoration)

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Liberty-Amendments-Restoring-American-ebook/dp/B00CO4IP5M

    (Levin’s ideas are solid but the Genii is out of the bottle. Secession is the only power we have to force a rewrite, and that would simply lead to organized dissolution.)

    Richard M Weaver : _Ideas Have Consequences_ (Philosophy/Ideology)

    http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Have-Consequences-Richard-Weaver-ebook/dp/B00BN4YIGY

    (Weaver’s Philosophical attempt at Restoration.)

    ON ‘THE FALL’

    (Criticism is good. It’s just not an answer to the problem)

    Richard Epstein : _How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution_

    http://www.amazon.com/Progressives-Rewrote-Constitution-Richard-Epstein-ebook/dp/B004XOZ658/

    Whittaker Chambers: _Witness_

    http://www.amazon.com/Witness-Whittaker-Chambers-ebook/dp/B0028085JS/

    Thomas Sowell : _The Vision Of The Anointed_

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-Social/dp/046508995X

    ON SENTIMENTAL AND ANALOGICAL CONSERVATISM

    (What I want to get away from.)

    Before about 1990, the scientific knowledge did not exist to support conservatism. And the speculation generated by the pseudo-sciences of the 19th century by Marx, Freud, Cantor, The Frankfurt School, the American Marxist Movement, and the American-European Postmodern movement, were successful, particularly in the 1970’s in creating anti-rational ideas in the masses via universities.

    Leo Strauss : _History of Political Philosophy_

    Russell Kirk : _The Conservative Mind_

    ____________ : _The Politics of Prudence_

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Prudence-Russell-Kirk-ebook/dp/B0055PKEX8

    Michael Oakeshott (everything)

    Ostwald Spengler : _The Decline of the West_

    Francis Yockey : _Imperium_ (romantic vision of totalitarian recreation)

    GOING FORWARD – REFORMATION CONTINUES

    The connection between christianity, high victorian language, germanic manners, and our morally loaded aristocratic poetry and literature, is still present in these works. We have, slowly, converted most of our language to that of science, models and the study of incentives and cognitive abilities and biases. We have learned a great deal, slowly, about the institutions, traditions, memes, morals, ethics, manners, myths and metaphysics of western civilization. But most importantly, we have learned enough about political economy, and the influence of norms on that political economy, to discuss ‘the pagan and christian west’ in ratio-scientific rather than ratio-philosophical terms.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 15:33:00 UTC

  • ON EDUCATION (Brilliant. Concise) Caplan is the best critic of expensive and ine

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/10/the_iron_laws_o.htmlCAPLAN ON EDUCATION

    (Brilliant. Concise)

    Caplan is the best critic of expensive and ineffective university educations.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-18 08:29:00 UTC

  • AND EXCELLENCE? I wish it was true. Cold shower. Reality. Knowledge and Decision

    http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131015132333-272091362-no-diversity-no-excellenceDIVERSITY AND EXCELLENCE?

    I wish it was true.

    Cold shower. Reality.

    Knowledge and Decisions:

    The fact is, that diversity comes with high friction outside the upper quintile. All of us in the upper strata of educated people rely less on social peer groups and more on abstract knowledge and personal problem solving than the rest of society does. But the rest of society relies on habits, norms, and peers, within their race, culture, and class, for translating the ideas of the upper quintile into practical and actionable use.

    Politics:

    Diversity promotes political conflict. When any demographic segment reaches ten percent of the population the members tend to seek rents via political or cultural means. And any benefits that come from diversity are actually from either (a) increases in immigration that create opportunity merely by increasing density and (b) the tendency of urban and intellectual centers to concentrate high talent in small geographic areas.

    Academic and State Incentives:

    Academia and government have economic incentives to promote diversity. Academia because it does not measure outputs, and because academia seems to sort and filter but not teach anything of value. So the more that can be put through the system, and merely filtered – at high cost to the individual and society for skeptical results, the better for academic businesses. But moreover, the failure of academia to do more than sort, without measuring output criteria, allows the individual to blame society, or race, or some other factor, rather than his or her having invested in an education that did not in fact educated him or her. But instead, created absurd debts for him or her to pay off, so that academic institutional employees can continue to sell defective products, while blaming the failure of that product on ‘society’.

    Government has the same incentives. To increase dependency upon the state so that members of the state bureaucracy can extract higher incomes from people who earn wages, organize production, and produce innovation.

    The Bubble Is Bursting Right Now.

    The education bubble is bursting. And with it, will go the bubble of diversity. That is what the data tells us. And it’s only logical that without artificially inflated wealth from the temporary technical advantage that the west had over the rest of the world, that a great levelling will continue to take place. And without the lubrication of wealth, those political and cultural frictions will become, as we see in politics today, overwhelming.

    The west requires universal adoption of the nuclear family in order to retain the high trust civil society. Family structure is the source of all differences in moral codes. And the destruction of the nuclear family has been sufficient to destroy the high trust society.

    NOPE

    You can’t have it all. YOu can have redistribution without diversity. Or you can have diversity without redistribution. But you cannot have both at once.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-16 09:47:00 UTC