I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears.
Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis.
Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something.
But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense.
Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test.
It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.)
The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes.
Stopping standardized tests--which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status--seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable.
I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity.
(I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)
Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning.
(A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed...
Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?)
The list could go on for a long time, but the point is:
What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.
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Techno-optimism is the only good solution to our current problems.
Unfortunately, somehow expressing optimism about the future has become a radical act.
Take climate change. Some people seem to prefer shaming others into doing as little as possible and not having kids, instead of pushing for technological breakthroughs that can deliver limitless, cheap, clean energy.
But most people want “more and better”, not “less and worse”, and technological progress is how they get it.
We should demand technological progress, and the funding and talent it requires, and relegate austerity and pessimism to the depressing corners they deserve.
Soon, AI tools will do what only very talented humans can do today. (I expect this to go mostly in the counter-intuitive order--creative fields first, cognitive labor next, and physical labor last.)
Great for society; not always great for individual jobs.
Using artists as an example, when anyone can create amazing art, there will be incredible upside for humanity, but downside for most individual artists.
(On the other hand, totally new kinds of art will be possible, and the skill that will matter will be imagination.)
Artists will be much more productive and have new capabilities, but the barrier to entry will be much lower.
And as the tools get better, "regular people" will be able to do almost anything they want themselves.
There are two ways to reduce economic inequality—you can work to lift up the floor, or work to lower the ceiling.
(Notice the extreme streak of authoritarianism that often accompanies the latter.)
Said another way, you can either believe
1) the pie can grow a lot (and so, e.g. we should encourage trillionaires and the creation of far more wealth), or 2) it can’t (and so, e.g., we should abolish billionaires and divide up everything we have now equally).
The former leads to continual improvement in quality of life for most people; the latter is a one-time improvement for most people and then ongoing stasis where we sacrifice long-term excellence in the name of short-term equality.
No matter what you think about Worldcoin, I think some of the ideas in here are likely important to the future of privacy: worldcoin.org/privacy-by-des…
I think Worldcoin is more privacy-preserving than centralized services we use today. All Worldcoin, or anyone, could ever tell is if someone has already signed up for the service.
The hash is cryptographically decoupled from the wallet and all future transactions.
Experimentation with new approaches to privacy and identity seem good to me. Everyone can decide what they want to use and not use.