Finding out what works in education would have greater leverage than nearly any other research. The field is treated as worthless: a self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in little worthwhile work attempted.
Nearly all the research is on K-12 education. Universities exempt themselves from study? They are assumed competent, where everyone accepts that K-12 is a swamp. Contributes to their slide into mere credential-granting.
A further step: the research on university level education is nearly all on undergraduates. I did a literature search recently on graduate school ed research (for obvious reasons). There’s practically nothing.
Most people now doing science add negative value. Some shouldn’t be scientists; some should have been better educated to do the job better.
How are scientists trained now? Empirically, no one has a clue. What would work better? Any good professor tries, but just by guessing.
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[NSFW-ish maybe] The beguiling yakshini (wood-nymph) who made her way from Maharashtra (central India) to Pompeii, shortly before burial by Vesuvius in 79 C.E.
There was extensive material trade and cultural exchange between India and Rome then.
Even the earliest known Buddhist temples were ornamented with yakshini sculptures that were unambiguously erotic, unambiguously Buddhist, and predate tantrism by centuries. What are we to make of that? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakshini
Wikipedia quotes some guy from 1967 who at least points out that there’s a problem here. (His two proposed solutions seem improbable to me.)
Outstanding 🧵 by @The_Lagrangian explains what is wrong with probabilistic/Bayesian rationalism, and what is so attractive about it that so many people adopt it despite its defects.
@The_Lagrangian Probabilistic analysis can be extremely powerful, but technically it has prerequisites that are *never* satisfied in macroscopic reality.
You have to make a small-world idealization in which you pretend it applies, and then do all this stuff meaningfully:
@The_Lagrangian You can always make up arbitrary numbers and hope that’s better than nothing, and sometimes it is, but it’s more likely garbage-in/garbage-out, and a way of fooling yourself into greater confidence than is warranted:
🎙 Two very different, worthwhile podcasts about the decaying university system:
🎙 @MeganMOConnor with @eriktorenberg on the unbundling of vocational/technical education. Universities aren’t well-suited for the current main purpose, educating people who want mainstream jobs. Megan and Erik discuss promising alternatives. spreaker.com/user/10197011/…
🎙 @PsychRabble on @fourbeerspod discussing the political corruption of academia, particularly social psychology.
The anecdotes are troubling, but as an outsider, I can’t tell quantitatively how bad this is. The hosts push back some at the end.
The problem with orthodox opinion is not that it bans contradiction, it’s that it makes people uncomfortable saying anything other than whatever the orthodoxy has designated as the most important thing to say today.
Let us now read the catechism aloud in unison
More obviously I’m subtweeting political twitter, which encourages contradicting the Bad Tribe, but only concerning Trending Topics.
Less obviously, I’m subtweeting Buddhist twitter, which is terrified to say anything that might not be sufficiently holy.
Western Buddhists’ dysfunctional relationship with authority combines rejection of respect for mere humans who have great depth of understanding, with pathetic deference to absurd and obsolete doctrines.
The former are “no better than anyone else,” the latter “ancient wisdom.”
When white people rant about how racist and awful all white people are, maybe they mean something by “white supremacy” other than the official definition.
Some anti-racism is not about race... what actual experience of white people does it express?
Spending time in many different countries and cultures lets you see how sex and gender work differently. America is more rigorously egalitarian than almost all, yet many women feel they live in a rigidly oppressive patriarchy.
Returning to the US after months away, I’m immediately struck by how uncomfortable American gender relations are. We’re doing *something* exceptionally wrong.
Calling that “patriarchy” is misleading if taken literally, but it expresses real pervasive legitimate revulsion.