/lit/ - Literature

>>4598592
When I saw Michael Jackson... music today is all... its all bad now and now people are bad they don't understand the old philosophers. Its just all real bad because of the... no respect for the old philosophers. Michael Jackson music. Oh, christ I'm so... I can't believe it...

Marxism, cultural relativism, political correctness, and "social justice" becoming relevant in the universities (ie LGBT, feminism, etc)...But really I think the problem is with the students. Young folk simply can not think critically. This is thanks to the new media - Twitter, ThoughtCatalog, etc - all avenues of low brow entertainment that serve only to shorten attention spans and make fools more steadfast in their beliefs.

>>4598615
>Marxism, cultural relativism, political correctness, and "social justice" becoming relevant in the universities

This is only a problem because of this

> Young folk simply can not think critically. This is thanks to the new media

Tenure.

>>4598615

it's like hbloom and jfranz had a child

>>4598615
>>4598622

>>4598615
>>4598622
>>4598627
The owners of western society want people who will be obedient but also increase the GDP. That's all that matters. The owners don't give a shit about history or math or anything.

They do have to maintain some sort of pretend devotion to learning, of course

Some really ridiculous beliefs and attitudes can be held by college professors because it doesn't matter if they teach the truth about literature or not, because those things are irrelevant in the hyperreal capitalist world. Maybe if you came up with strategies to market products in literature, they would care..

the fact that we have to read YA fiction for literature class

>>4598624
Tenure has some problems, yes, but creating an over-competitive environment is also bad.

>>4598632
Part of the problem is the propaganda campaigns that push the idea that going to college gets you a good job. No, college should be about learning, making it about earning money encourages game theory and laziness.

Of course, trying to create an overabundance of pharmacy techs or programmers does help corporations drive down wages.

In any case, too many parents think their child is a special snowflake who should go to college and get a 6 figure salary and be just great, despite being a highly nonfunctional and anti-intellectual person. So, colleges have to dumb down curriculum, to fit these sorts of people.

>>4598603
How can we see if our eyes arent real?

Expecting kids to care about learning at an early age and plot out their direction in life by the time they are a highschool freshman. (yes im whining about my personal shortcomings).

>>4598646
I experience this firsthand. I attend a school that is comprised of mostly business/finance/accounting majors, and you should hear them moan when assigned a mere 5 page paper to be completed over a week's time. They are more concerned with "muh stocks, much wall street!" than learning something that doesn't have an immediate effect on making them money. It's despicable, but such is the product of living in a hyper-consumerist society..

Academia has become a sort of mindless thing, hasn't it? You just go to college, nevermind that you're going to learn something. The experience trumps the original purpose of the institution. And it's that experience that some colleges sell. Very rarely do you receive college pamphlets which list the accolades of their professors and their various research projects. It's mostly about getting you there, making sure you believe that you're having the "experience", and getting you out. Even grades and exams yield to this illusion, the nature of American exams being that you can receive an 'A' without understanding the material conceptually. Yes, even in STEM.

Whatever all of this is rooted in, it hardly seems to have to do with what is *taught*. It seems more to do with the attitudes prior to college and the fantasies of life after college. It seems more rooted in a mass anxiety than in a curriculum. It's certainly very difficult to teach people who are already many years into a program of cheating, cramming, procrastination, all of which are necessary in order to have the college "experience."

>>4598592
Morals and ethics are placed before science.
We can't look into this because we might find something we don't want. May it be racist, against feminism or something else we can't talk about.

The science is so heavily influenced by politics instead of being independent and just trying to push boundaries of science, preferably in physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics.

>>4598694
What exactly is racist or anti-feminist in science that is being held back by morals? And what exactly does that have to do with how science is taught?

If anything, there seems to be more of a bias toward the status quo in things like evolutionary psychology. And genetic correlations to IQ tests are notoriously bad science.

>>4598694
>ethical boundaries of math

>>4598615
I'm not even a little bit convinced that "new media" has hurt critical thinking skills. It just makes people who would have had poor thinking skills anyway more noticeable.

The problem is more people going.

>>4598686

This is what it is. Academics are imprisoned by it just as much as the students they teach -- if they bother to teach at all instead of just parroting material in between working their asses off at the drudgery of writing that is their real occupation. Students meanwhile can hardly spare the time to care about learning, they are navigating the bizarre and poorly-organized experience of transitioning from adolescent to pre-adult that takes place during one's 20s in the west. College is more of an accessory to this transition than it is a place you go to learn.

>>4598721
Correlations and other stats are just bad, low-tier science in general; rather than trying to find out exactly why certain things are why they are, some would just like to say x correlates to y; it reduces determined things to probability, ie: there is a 70% chance someone who wears sweaters and collared shirts goes to a top-tier school.

>>4598592
I think one problem is that they are trying to get everyone in to higher education, then they have to lower the standards to that people succeed. Academia is filled with people that should not be there.

>>4598725
>ethical boundaries of the LHC

>>4598627
You forgot Allan Bloom.

>>4598592
This is what you need, OP. It builds upon >>4598615.

http://www.amazon.com/Closing-American-Mind-Education-Impoverished/dp/1451683200

>>4598721
Differences in genders is not something people like to talk about, ever. We have scientists that flat out refuse to believe that there are differences in the male and female brain. They are even respected.

Talking to people about differences between a black women and a white mens ability to take up different medications and you will find yourself in a bind. Because there are differences, that's why we make medicine depending on things like that.

In Sweden we voted against more nuclear power decades ago but we also banned all research on anything nuclear. Decades of research lost.

>>4598725
Yeah that sounded funny, the last part was just what I wanted more research to be done in, not what's limited.

>>4598615
>>4598630
>>4598632
>>4598646
>>4598668
>>4598669
>>4598686
>>4598694
>>4598739
>>4598745
>>4598760
All of these things. Let's summarize:
>College has become a place to increase your monetary income, not gain knowledge.
>The masses of people looking for a fat paycheck can't focus or engage in critical thinking because they're bombarded by constant streams of "news" and "entertainment" and "advertising" all hours of the day.
>This has built a "college culture" that centers around an "experience" instead of an education, a place to party and drink and have sex because that's what's expected of a college student now.
>Meanwhile, because everyone has unrealistic expectations about going to college, but not everyone is talented or even interested, the value of a degree plummets and debt skyrockets.
>The original fields like science, math, literature, philosophy, etc. have been denigrated in favor of social engineering projects and idealistic "education" about new social values like diversity and equality.
>Because the focus has shifted away from education, there has been an opportunity for ideology to be injected into previously subjective fields like the sciences, holding them from their true pursuits. Other fields like literature are taught by ideological cranks because they are seen as less valuable.
>The campuses are now caught in a position where they must continually spend time and money to appease the liberal arts social justice monsters they have created at the cost of the university's original purpose.
>The students are caught between an expectation of "do whatever you want, party and get a worthless degree in college" and a larger expectation that they need to be productive citizens at any cost, without any idea what truly good citizenship entails.

>>4598721
Ask yourself this: If research came out suggesting a strong correlation between brain size and intelligence (or worse, race and intelligence) do you think it would be published? Do you think it would go anywhere other than the hell of "bigoted" science? The narrative has become so ingrained that any evidence to the contrary must be purged, prevented or ignored.

>>4598760
Nuclear power.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankef%C3%B6rbudet
Sorry no english wikipedia page.
Sweden were very good at this but lost lots of good expertise and position as one of the best on this kind of research.

>>4598769
Might get published on some obscure platform but everybody would rip it apart, looking for any details to discredit the report or the scientist.

>modern academia
>different from past academia
Ha ha, no.

Well, at least here in my country people say that the thing wrong with it is that most people nowadays see universities as a way to ascend socially. So people go there for the money and the prestige instead for the true love for science.
Here if you don't have an university degree you are almost sure to become a miserable middle-low class nobody for the rest of your life

>>4598760
>Differences in genders is not something people like to talk about, ever.

I'm pretty sure chromosomal differences are still taught in middle school, and hormonal differences in high school. The difference between the male and female brain is a rather complex thing to teach, if only because 1) there is no standard male brain or female brain and 2) there is no clear research about what these differences means. Meaning, there's no reason to believe that a female brain couldn't reason out problems that a male brain could. Neural connections still form and break, each person has their own neural topography which is more relevant than their sex.

>>4598787
Well, this anon raises a good point. Part of reactionary propaganda is to make the less progressive past seem more great.

However, I still think it wouldn't be hard to make some good changes to the system

>blaming the Education system

Here's a boring cliche, be the fucking change you want to see in academia. Not paying enough respect to the old ways? Well read up on what the old was and apply it yourself.

>>4598769
>Ask yourself this: If research came out suggesting a strong correlation between brain size and intelligence (or worse, race and intelligence) do you think it would be published?

But those studies *have* been published and discredited for a multitude of reasons that have nothing to do with politics. For one, the correlation of brain size and intelligence was already empirically refuted (falsified). Secondly, race and intelligence "research" always depends on proxies to stand in for both "race" and "intelligence." Some studies use IQ as a proxy for intelligence, some use skin color as a proxy for race. But the problem occurs when we find that IQ *doesn't* represent intelligence and that skin color *doesn't represent race. They are just stand-ins and make for very hazy science.

>>4598803
You'd have to get a lot of people to agree with you first, presumably by appealing to reason. Best of luck.

>>4598732
Why exactly are we all in agreement that there is a "problem" with academia in the first place? It would seem that all of the necessary tools are there for us to receive a great education, what is stopping us?

>>4598820
Ourselves, our own intellectual laziness and anger that our words aren't laws.

>>4598801
Agreed, misogynists and racists love to mock up and play up differences in biology to explain everything, which is just ridiculous.

On the other hand, any notion that all people are the same, and all options equal will stabilize to purely equal representation in all walks of life is absurd. I know it's rather elementary to say, but often equality requires holding back a stronger individual.

I'm not fully satisfied either that sexism can adequately explain why men do what men do and why women do what women do.

To anyone who says that social justice is ruining academia, who exactly are they accountable for this? The last such "incident" I've heard of was that guy who said he wouldn't give PhDs to fat people and even Bloom would agree that that's pretty unprofessional.

>>4598832
>but often equality requires holding back a stronger individual.

Like murderers, crooks and thiefs?

>>4598769
Research linking genetic or environmental inferiority to certain social groups should not be published, It would only cause scorn against science. It should be used to aid research into things like eugenics; so whenever a sentient human being is brought into the world their personal growth, wherever they wanted to direct it, would only depend on their will. If this were going to succeed, values like diversity could only exist on a skin-deep level(skin color, fashion, taste, living location, social status) or through choice of what their interests are (if someone was genetically "rigged" to have the intellectual talent and drive to do well in their field, their would be no competition)

>>4598839
*to whom are they accountable

>>4598832
>holding back a stronger individual
What do you mean by "stronger"?

>>4598832
As >>4598842 implied; diversity and equality cannot coexist as values.

>>4598842

>whenever a sentient human being is brought into the world their personal growth, wherever they wanted to direct it, would only depend on their will

This is a completely ridiculous pipe dream, come on. Nothing we know about ANYTHING, let alone genetics, suggests that you are even describing something possible.

>>4598856
More capable.

>>4598863
Certainly they can, depending on how you define both of those things.

I don't think for instance that diversity is necessarily incompatible with equality in the specific sense of political equality before the law and in political representation.

The simple fact that it was originally an elitist institution and it no longer is one. It should be a rubber stamp for geniuses that forces them to contribute to knowledge, not a warehouse full of twentysomething teenagers who have some vague idea of being a teacher. Standards are dropped for the mass of middle class students (functionally literate peasants). Professors encourage students to write the kind of safe, soft garbage they write to keep the journals pumping every six months, articles about what kind of shoes people wore in response to the AIDS epidemic, or a thousandth interpretation of four lines of Ovid that concludes with a gussied up version of "but I guess the first guy's interpretation in 1875 was basically right and I'm just jerking off here". Magisterial scholarship is nonexistent because the answer is always to write a slightly better makework paper, or dig a slightly deeper hole into our understanding of a meaningless subject. For every three people trying to become good academics, who appreciate their fields for themselves and might actually have contributed to them, there are a thousand people just going by the numbers. It's impossible for the former to realise their potential and not get dragged along with the tide.

It's a diploma mill, it encourages conformism, and it turns genius into 9-5 factory work. Everything else, like academia attaching itself permanently to bourgeois values, is just a symptom. If you're meritocratic in the slightest you should be terrified that the top echelons of your country's intelligentsia are forced to sit through years of ideological training and seem to come out the other end as money-grubbing whores. In an attempt to cage the 19th and early 20th century's scholarly culture, we lopped its head off.

>>4598868
Why would you want to do that? Are you saying good students are being told to dumb down their papers to protect the feelings of the average students?

>>4598879
This exact thing happens at my university, but you also ought to look into tall poppy syndrome.

>>4598863
It's always been a law of human society that might makes right. It simply could not be any other way, because whoever holds the power is the one with the power. It's a tautology.

Many of the phrases surrounding equality are ambiguous, such as "equality of opportunity". What does it mean to have equal options? How would one even meter such a distinction?

You essentially have the left and right dichotomy on this issue, in which the right says some identifiable sets of people will be more capable and will succeed more. The left says that no identifiable set will be more capable and outcomes between sets should roughly equalize.

I have no fucking clue which view is correct, but I think what is definite is both sides are too adamant about structuring society around the logical moral extreme of their assumption.

>>4598879
No, because that would be reducing a complex social organization to a simple rule.

>>4598876
Academic proles produce more valuable work than unacademic proles.

>>4598867
given equal genetics and environment the only other variables that would prevent someone from achieving would be flaws in their decisions made, or other variables outside of the system of their environment, ie: Mike lost his leg, so he cannot run as fast as the others.

>>4598881
And I suppose you are one of the clever ones? ;^)

>>4598886
Give me one Mommsen and a million farmers any day.

Is there something inherently wrong with "social justice" is the academia?

I'm an intellectual historian with a speciality in modern American social thought.

Every scholar brings some kind of "moral framework" to their work. The act of selecting a particular subject of study (at least in the humanities) is a political statement. Which one should they select? What should guide scholars?

Keep in mind that objectivity is a noble goal and not an absolute.

>>4598887

This is what I am talking about, if you think that "equal genetics" (what in the actual fuck is this supposed to mean?) or environment are even possible then you have smoked a thousand times too much crack and/or are envisioning a society in which everyone is a identical clone living in an identical climate-controlled cube.

>>4598876
Another conclusion can be reached from similar reasoning about the switch from elitism to integration and it's pretty nihilistic. Perhaps it's always been the case that whatever a society values has always been arbitrary, whether it's the result of a few bluebloods in ivory towers or proletariat wanking. Meaning that things weren't necessarily better before, there were just clearer masters.

>>4598891
There is nothing wrong with it being a possible idea for college students to try, explore, and decide if it suits them after some critical thinking.

But to make that idea a mandated requirement, and to ban dissent or disagreement, is an absolute perversion of what academia is supposed to be.

>>4598890
We have no use for 1 million farmers, we have use for 1 million cubicle monkeys today and you can still have your Mommsen. Things have changed, keep up.

>>4598896
>But to make that idea a mandated requirement, and to ban dissent or disagreement, is an absolute perversion of what academia is supposed to be.

Where exactly is that happening?

>>4598896
And that has happened? Proof please.

>>4598899
>>4598900

He does not have a source, he is complaining about tumblr and not about college at all.

But it should be worrisome anyway, because some of the people who are making his butt hurt on tumblr now will be teaching college in twenty years or even less. Will they moderate their opinions on freedom/security or won't they? I can't see what will make them do so.

>>4598903
How old are you? You sound like my grandfather.

Has academia ever been "right"?

>>4598869
you are talking out of context, in >>4598842 the premise is that diversity is defined as differences in looks, life style, personality, etc. but genetic and environmental equality would play significant role in shaping these things, at the very least the equality given to genetics and environment would greatly limit diversity.

>>4598896

I consider myself to be on the left. I study class in American social thought, so obviously my politics have shaped how I study history and what I write about history.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with this.

Although academia is in a dismal state we should not then throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The threat to academia is not from liberal professors but rather from commodifying education, customer satisfaction..etc...

>>4598910

I am your grandfather, keep up bitch.

>>4598913

I'm going to keep asking this until you answer it, because until you provide me with some alternative I'm just assuming that you don't know a single fucking thing about genetics: what is "genetic equality"? Why is it desirable? How is it to be achieved?

>>4598899
>>4598900
Not that poster, but:

- I've been mocked in front of a classroom for saying I disagreed with feminism.

- My friend was banned from participating in tutorials for a Humanities class when a girl wrote an anonymous complaint after the class ended (of course) regarding his flat statement that he "didn't agree with feminism". He's an idiot, he doesn't have complex ideas on the subject, that's ALL he said.

- My university just issued a reprimand to one of my girlfriend's professors and made him apologise to his class because he called a small volcano a "sissy volcano" and a gay student took offence and (of course) filed a complaint behind his back.

Sometimes it's not an outright ban but there is an atmosphere of coercion.

People in this thread should go read the paper "The Theory of the Second Best". Many of the ideas of equality can be understood in economic terms, as equality is mostly an argument ABOUT economics, and that paper is a fairly good argument against the types of abstractions that are made in order to satisfy a model.

I know this is a cop out, but simply put, we don't know what's moral (as much as everyone likes to claim they are the gatekeeper, no one actually knows). And in literally every scenario, the arguments about morality rely on massive assumptions - similar to both left and right wing economics. For instance, the model for a free market is true - mechanically, a free market is perfectly optimal. So why then, are we not basing everything on that model? Well, because, it's a model, and relies on assumptions of behavior and other ideas to work. So when you apply it to reality, you find it has massive negative effects.

This is the theory of the second best - the idea that "we created a model that works, so the closer we bring society to that model, the better we will be" is a dangerous one, that should be avoided if at all possible.

>>4598915
So, you finally discovered the Internet, how is life treating you oldfart?

>>4598903
Eh, that's too large of an assumption for anybody to get anxious about. Lots of people passionately believe in the Illuminati, but I'm not worried about my son coming home from school with Jay-Z records to analyze.

But similar to the Illuminati thing I do think a lot of revolutionary energy has been distracted/misdirected due to identity politics. It's certainly kind of irritating when you begin to notice how much certain people *love* to get into arguments over FB about how Ke$ha isn't a slut and you're sexist for thinking that and how "nice guys" suck, etc. Those things may be true, but why talk about them endlessly?

>>4598914
>I don't see anything wrong with making my ideas mandatory.
Yeah you sure are on the left.

>>4598920
These are all social conventions and institutions covering their ass. not academic dispute. Also you should be very wary of a 22 year old handwaving a field of study, without having studied it because he has edgy opinions. Opinion shouldn't determine academia.

>>4598922

I slightly disagree. We do need a point towards which we can direct our actions. This is not to say that we need some utopian model, but we do need some type of telos.

>>4598927

I'm not sure how you deduced that claim. I said so such thing.

>>4598931
I'm more wary of an institution banning disagreeing with a field of study than a 22 year old benignly giving his earnest opinion on it.

And exactly. Academic dispute is impossible in an atmosphere of SJW political correctness where everyone is terrified of lawsuits.

>>4598931
>opinions shouldn't determine academia
>but if you disagree with my opinions, you're just "edgy"
Christ.

>>4598936
You know, SJWs are only a minor part of the problem. I think the real issue is careerism.

>>4598914
And liberal professors...

I agree with everything you have stated, but nearly every liberal professor I have had, has been extremely narrow minded. Dismissing of even any other possible outcome.

Also their academic journals and papers they push for so hard are a terrible unwelcoming medium. This does not facilitate change or information dissemination, but rather a stagnant pool of knowledge only applicable to those who already within the realms of academia.

Also you can preach all day about how much capitalism sucks, but int he end you are preaching to a quire that gets a hard on for imagining a different economic system. But who are too lazy and naive to actually go out and start changing things themselves.

>>4598941
The REAL issue is people IGNORING the other real issues in favor of fucking identity politics

>>4598903
So I guess the only thing left is to prove all this and write up a workable response to reverse this trend. As for me, I'm not interested in doing that, so I sure hope those complaining here on 4chan get to it, because otherwise they're no different from the whining social justice warriors they seem to revile.
>>4598920
So you have one dumbass teacher and a decision maker somewhere that is desperately trying to avoid LGBT "issues," which this wouldn't have turned into, meaning the decision maker in question was also a fucking idiot (or a penis puffer). The downfall of academia, indeed. Excuse me if I don't recommend that you write a letter to your country's ruling body for these questions, because we're not exactly talking about large-scale policy and censorship here.

>>4598936
>22 year old benignly giving his earnest opinion on it.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but his opinion is worth shit and he should learn the virtue of humility.

>>4598914
Psychology and behavioral economics are more valuable tools for building workable models of society than are your views on history, regardless of how much you've stored in your memory.

By the way, I should clarify and point out that the pop-science chicanery you have read on these topics should not be used to judge them as a whole. If there's anything valuable that's been produced out of 21st century economics, it's the calming new idea that "economics is fucking hard, we really don't know that much so stop trying to act like you can solve life's problems with a simple fix".

Insert traffic light rules change here.

>>4598920
>My friend was banned from participating in tutorials for a Humanities class when a girl wrote an anonymous complaint after the class ended (of course) regarding his flat statement that he "didn't agree with feminism". He's an idiot, he doesn't have complex ideas on the subject, that's ALL he said.

If this actually happened, your friend would have a great case for indoctrination, leading to all kinds of shit for that university. I have a feeling some details were left out.

>>4598933
Absolutely yes, but my point is simply that "everything should be equal" arguments are extremely susceptible to fallacy.

>>4598943

I don't think capitalism "sucks"! It's an enormously creative system.

I also despise the liberal utopians in the academia. If you argue for potential in the status quo you are brandished an "apologist" or "co-opted"

>>4598947
What real issues?

>>4598945
>I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but his opinion is worth shit and he should learn the virtue of humility.
So the only opinions worth anything are those that conform to your ideas? Anyone who disagrees or speaks out needs to "learn the virtue of humility"? What on Earth is wrong with you?

>>4598922

Proponents of economic theories approach those theories like religious institutions. In fact let us go the whole hog and just say that economics as it is practiced today is religion - heresy, or schism, within the religion of capital. It does not matter that the models don't apply to reality - the faith of this age is directed towards them. After all, what medieval Christian never broke one of Christ's commandments? The behavioral models of law religions are NEVER possible to perfectly adhere to, so why bother with the unattainability of Perfect Economic Model of Choice when you can just trumpet it to the heavens?

Even if economics as a discipline changes its tune, the public understanding of the economy won't change because of how wrapped up it is in right-left politics. To the public, the economy is the god to which the sacrifice must be made, every four years.

>>4598947
Identity politics is evil because it encourages selfishness and encourages people to create invisible divisions between each other.

Remember, it's much easier to control what people say and do when you get them fighting among each other instead of working together to actually solve problems.

>>4598946

Don't reduce the practice of history to rote memory and I won't reduce the study of economic models to pop-sci.

Straw-manning other fields is not the way to go.

>>4598951
I agree

>>4598945
Are you a fucking retard? In a tutorial format, where discussion is MANDATORY, and a stupid guy gave his earnest opinion when asked, he was banned from talking. You don't seem to understand the issue. The issue is that someone was banned from speaking because they had wrongthink. The other details don't matter in a society that values free speech and discourse.

Humility is fine. He could have been totally wrong. But you don't ban someone from talking because his opinion is uninformed. Do you ban suffragettes and women seeking higher education from voicing their opinion because their political knowledge and experience is inferior to male politicians and scholars?

It's just mindboggling to me when anyone from a non-totalitarian state defends abuses of free speech. That's the one thing you're supposed to remember from grade school social studies: we are the ones with the free speech, the Nazis/reds were the ones without it.

>>4598951
creativeness has nothing to do with capitalism.
Marketing and advertisement are more important than innoviation in the modern capitalism.

Just look at Apple.

>>4598960

I've been on 4chan since 2009 and this is the first time I've seen someone genuinely agree with someone else.

>>4598953
The simple fact that the student probably doesn't know shit. If someone challenges established assumptions they should know what they are talking about. Edgy opinions doesn't cut it in academia.

>>4598964

Marketing and advertisement: totally unrelated to capitalism. 10/10 post.

>>4598964

Creativity (broadly construed)

Don't tell me that the development of the iphone isn't both an act of creation and marketing.

>>4598961
>You don't seem to understand the issue
The issue here is that of a single teacher or school director. You cannot, or at least haven't, in any way managed to connect your friend's situation to any new widespread corruption of the academic world.

>>4598954
You have a point. Ironically, nearly every single person thinks that everyone else are the fallacious thinkers, and not themselves.

Economics has basically shown most left-wing economics policies are bunk. Fiddling with things simply causes problems. That being said, there are changes that can be done well.. For instance, it's possible to set up rules that actually do properly create incentives for corporations to not pollute.

However, as much as I may agree with the perceived right-wing view on economics, I do hate modern capitalism. I simply hate it's cultural proselytizing. Corporations are always forcing themselves into every activity humans do, and frankly, it's maddening.

>>4598955
sellfishness is the product of agressively individualist capitalistic ideology

>>4598966

>The simple fact that the negro probably doesn't know shit.

Okay, in order to make it clear to you why freedom of speech - even "dumb" or "uninformed" speech - is the most basic principle that underlies all notion of equality in our society, I have cast it in a racial light. The dumbest opinion is exactly as worthy of being expressed as the least dumb.

>>4598966
>le edgy face XDD
If he's in an academic discussion environment, that would be the opportunity to teach him and help him understand your point of view. What does muzzling him accomplish, other than make him more resolute? Why are you so intent on quashing dissent against what is "established"?

>>4598961
Read the post again that's not what happened.

>>4598974

Would you agree that economic inequality is a problem?

Which model(s) could we use to deal with it?

>>4598975
Yes, and it is one of the more severe problems currently in our society

>>4598974

"Fiddling with things."

So we should just let the immutable laws of economics play out?

Wasn't this fallacy exploded over a century ago?

>>4598975
It can be a product of that as well as of many other things.

>>4598967
>>4598971

Most of technology we use wouldnt exist if goverment wasnt interested in developing it.
Private companies dont contribute to the technological progress that much, they take technology and create product, but thats all.

>>4598966
>The simple fact that the student probably doesn't know shit. If someone challenges established assumptions they should know what they are talking about. Edgy opinions doesn't cut it in academia.
"The simple fact that the nigger probably doesn't know shit. If some nigger challenges established white supremacy they should know what they are talking about. Nigger sympathy doesn't cut it in academia." - You, circa 1850

>>4598988

I never reduced capitalism to the functioning of private companies. I realize that modern capitalism is much more complex than that.

>>4598978
That he got reprimanded for being an idiot is a good thing and should be encouraged more in modern academia. I'm not saying you cant be allowed to be wrong, but that you can't say things like "biology is total bullshit" with no consequence to protect people's precious feelings.

>>4598989
Nice sophism, have you thought about majoring in communications?

I think that other anon was right: no one is more "stupid" these days or less educated, it just appears that way because new media has given everyone an equal platform with which to disperse their ideas. So this idea that all of humanity is somehow regressing because the rise of Facebook strikes me as bullshit because the people who say and do dumb things *always* did so - we just get to hear about it now on a much larger scale. I actually tend to believe the rise of new media is overall a force for good as it gives those who do seek knowledge (and yes, lots of people do) an absolutely massive library of it that can be accessed from virtually everywhere.

>>4598988

This is true but a total non sequitur. Marketing and advertisement are where capitalism is MOST creative, not a completely unrelated creative process.

>>4598993
Competence encourages innovation, capitalism itself not.
Competence can be important part of the capitalistic economy, but its naive to say that capitalism encourages innovation.
There are cheaper ways to get rid of the competitors than innovation.

>>4599008
The point is that marketing and advertisement are useless, its a waste of human potential

I get this is 4chan so even on /lit/ I'm probably the outlier by stepping forward and saying I'm an arts graduate but, as much as I hate to admit it, most of what you guys say about that area is true. I was told to be an engineer in high school because it would be a good job; I get there, found the subject really boring and hated all the people around me - I know autism is a buzzword but it's the best way to describe basically everyone I met. Told by all my advisors that I'd need a degree of some kind to get a job, I switched to Film Studies.

The thing that hit me immediately was how I was the only person on my course who seemed to actually be interested in film. During an early lecture, the tutor asked how many people had seen an Alfred Hitchcock film and I was the only one who said yes, for example. The arts have become a self fulfilling prophecy because they've been used to get more students in and in doing so, it's warped into being a field of 'soft subjects' because it has to be understandable to the lowest common denominator. In the final year, I missed nine out of ten lectures in a subject because of an error in the timetabling system and still finished near the top of the class.

Now I'm on the other side, I actually work for a film company and I see my former classmates on Facebook and either they're just stupid, graduated with 2:2s (or worse) and now just do stuff like work in pubs and supermarkets or others who now work in offices or, in the case of one guys, a concierge in a big hotel. Why were these people even in the university system if they didn't want to learn about the subject they were signed up to? Even if you work to the modern idea of university as just to enhance employment, it makes no sense, and it's killing the arts.

>>4598919
>What is genetic equality?
The capability to provide "to be conceived" humans with an entitlement to equality of genetic products (intellectual capacity, athletic capacity and aesthetics), and the option for the born human to change any of these to what they desire after birth.
>Why is it desirable
This should go without saying but it is very likely that nothing is inherently desirable, desire is a human emotion, it is the push for you and me to write what we are writing to appeal to our reason, another human construction, the desire to provide all humans with equality is desirable because it results in emotional capital for all humans; if it is more reasonable to provide the neurotic human with inequality in their favor to satisfy their need to "be better" than someone, or the larger emotional capital of the entire human population is technically unanswerable.
>How is it to be achieved?
Research into eugenics and environmental effects on child development seem like a good start.

>>4598980
Economic equality is a goal we can (and I think we should) work toward.

It's important to avoid utopian ideas of society, to think that someday poverty and irrational choices can be eliminated is childish. The right tends to overemphasize the poor choices the poor makes to become poor, and the right tends to ignore them. But they are there, the poor often do not make appropriate decisions. The left loves to blame this trend on education, but, I think that idea is somewhat silly and misses the point. If making rational choices isn't a value someone pursues, they aren't going to make the proper choices to learn well, either.

But you see, I have no idea what your intended goals are for equality, and whether they are reasonable. If you start out with a principle such as "50% of CEOs should be women, let's work towards that" then you've established that you're working towards a highly dysfunctional economic model, for a large and unexpected variety of reasons.

>>4599014

How are they any more useless than "innovation" would be? Without marketing and advertising, our society would probably collapse.

>>4599010

Jesus Christ, man

Cheaper ways to get rid of competitors than innovation?

Ok, so we're changing the topic?

>>4598977
>>4598978
Teachers don't have an obligation to reach out to every student. If that student really wanted to discuss the issues, I don't think the teacher would have shut him down outside of class. But you have to understand that teaching isn't just about fostering an "open discussion" among students, even if we would like that to happen sometimes. The teacher doesn't have an obligation to "privilege" your viewpoint and waste time refuting it in class. That isn't what other students are paying for, anyway.

>>4598984
Fiddling isn't bad, but the left tends to focus on certain types of fiddling that are particularly negative.

Canada has subsidized electricity. In the argument that it helps the poor. Which, strictly speaking, it does: the poor pay less for electricity. However, that subsidy also applies to the rich - you would think a flat rate would make things level out, because you think, great, now they will all spend less on the electricity they use.

But will it work out like that? It turns out, when you subsidize electricity, the rich love to take advantage of that fact and their use of electricity skyrockets, because, well it's so damn cheap. And they already spend a much lower portion of their income on electricity, so they have some to spare. And in the end, Canada is giving a larger subsidy to the rich than to the poor. So a flat subsidy for electricity - or in other words, fiddling with it's price - isn't actually helping the poor.

>>4599028
TEACH THE CONTROVERSY! INSTEAD OF LEARNING ACTUAL METHODOLOGIES OF THE FIELD YOU SHOULD DISCUSS CREATIONISM AND ARGUMENTS FOR DESIGN ALL DAY!

>>4599023

Ehh, I agree with you. Although I believe that the study of history can (can, not will) give us a "useable" past which will help (HELP, NOT DICTATE) our projections into the future.

As of now I'm studying the emergence of social democratic thought in the Gilded Age in order to recover a logic of social thought which, I argue, we have lost.

I'm not sure how academia has "fallen". It didn't seem to produce that many robust critical thinkers in the past. Hell The Baptist University of Chicago did little more than serve as propaganda for Rockefeller which he called the best investment he ever made. Sure feminism and the like are the most "popular" things there are other things going on which are unfortunately hard to find because people talk about little else other than feminism or something related to it.

>>4599026
Yes, if there are cheaper ways (like marketing and advertisement which dont really move our society forward) there is no reason to innovate.

Again, take Apple, or pharmaceutical companies who try to sell you same product each year claiming that even though the lastest product was full and the best, this one is fullest and bestest.

And its not changing the topic. am trying to disprove the thesis about "creativeness" of capitalism. Its as creative as creative accounting. It solves problems it made itself.

>>4599038

But is that even a leftist policy? Society has skewed so far to the right that a lot of things I see slammed as being 'lefty' seem a lot more centrist that anyone is willing to admit. I'd say the problem, in that scenario and many others, is there is no real left anymore to highlight these issues.

>>4599028
>>4599039
We have a conflict in education where science is slowly taking hold of every facet of thinking. "Opinions" about many of the topics presented also have large amounts of science behind them - it's not like the early 19th century anymore. It's a rather new condition in human society.

Still, it's highly ignorant and arrogant to think that you have the "right" opinion on human affairs. That doesn't stop people from doing it, though.

>>4599048

Capitalism. BROADLY CONSTRUED.

BROADLY. FUCKING. CONSTRUED.

>>4599028
I have been in more than my fair share of class room discussions. The teachers that tend to be most like dictators, are ironically liberal teachers who would be the first to raise their hand and shame a dictator.

"Lets think critically!" in reality means, "Lets regurgitate my own personal beliefs!".

Obviously this does not apply to EVERY teacher, just most.

>>4599040
Right, history can be used as a theorhetical test for models, and can teach us alot about humanity, historical bias aside. It's not an empty field, just one that is limited in it's nature. I didn't mean to offend you, if you're the Anon who was the historian.

>>4599058

Forgot to add:

I'm just arguing that the status quo over the past 200 years has give us a good deal of goodies.

Say that to some of my hyper-lefty colleagues that they will ostracize you.

>>4599057
Agreed.

>>4599055
Yes, it was pushed by the Canadian left, who insisted that taking away a subsidy that helped the poor was wrong.

>>4599017

>The capability to provide "to be conceived" humans with an entitlement to equality of genetic products (intellectual capacity, athletic capacity and aesthetics), and the option for the born human to change any of these to what they desire after birth.

But what makes you think that this will ever be possible in any way? None of the "genetic products" you mention are wholly genetically controlled, none of them can be reliably objectively measured. Even the possibility of using genetic techniques to "customize" humans during development is so far away from our current understanding that it might well be completely unattainable. We don't even have the ability to judge what genetically causes the desirable attributes you describe. Somatic gene therapy treatments are the closest thing to what you describe, but think how primitive those are, think how desperate circumstances must be for us to use them - and think how poorly they actually work.

>>4599057
Science often times is used as a means of justification for things that cannot be scientifically applicable, at least not in our reality.

For instance the social sciences. Just because something aligns with your obscure theory on anthropology does not validate your opinion as the only true answer.

>>4599055
Mind, that, right here, on this very site, you have people who believe that having a government is leftism. We have a long way.

>>4599063

No hard feelings.

Every field is limited. Historians hate producing models (models in the strict sense). But we love constructing patterns (interpretive schema...etc) and using theory to inform and frame our interpretation of the past.

I trust you would agree with me that mathematical economics, as opposed to historical economics, is also a limited field but one with great potential.

As far as the humanities go I would argue that history can potentially be the most expansive, productive, and creative.

>>4599066
Say that to 95% of any social science prof and you will be ostracized.

>>4598592
They're too comfortable. Academia needs to both teach and lead.

>>4599071

But just because they refer to themselves as the left and implement policies claiming to help the poor, that doesn't mean they're actually particularly left wing. That's the problem with party politics worldwide: besides for the right, who in the UK at least, don't try to hide their policies are just to get more money for them and their benefactors, the rest creep in the same direction while still claiming to stand up for their original voters. New Labour being the perfect example.

Commies, faggots, and feminista cunts.

>>4599082
>>4599066
>status quo over the past 200 years has give us a good deal of goodies.

How can a status quo run over 200 years? Has nothing changed?

>>4599078

It's reached the point where I can't tell who is a troll and who is serious anymore when I read posts about "degeneracy".

>>4599108
It's especially ridiculous when you're talking specifically about the last 200 years - when there's probably been more profound change than any other comparable period in human history. There are massive changes across that period in just about every respect.

>>4599098
Welcome to /lit/

>>4599108
Referring to a capitalistic economic structure.

>>4599108


I was hoping that no one would call me on that
:)

I'm just saying that progress (as it actually unfolded) was not all terrible.

I'm a pretty big leftist and It saddens me that I feel dirty for saying that.

>>4599076
Well, I agree that the social sciences are largely immature and overreaching, just as skull-measuring techniques of the 1920's were, but that doesn't mean that field of study is entirely worthless. Even then, we can't say with any real exactness that skull-measuring techniques actually are worthless, because, well, we have an incomplete understanding of the brain - it's simply that, trying to extrapolate large and grandiose ideas from either - such as a perfectly equal society or a master race of humans, is simply pretentious.

You see, whether or not larger or smaller brains effects intelligence is largely irrelevant for most people, and has the troubling tendency to make people want to try eugenics and the like. That doesn't stop the hardcore racists from using it to project models for society.

There's a tendency for people to blanket all science as having the same level of validity, because it's under the umbrella of science. No, our understanding of neurology, while it is starting to become scientific, is nowhere near say our level of elementary mechanical physics - the two are incomparable in scale. Even then, it took us until the 1700's to get Newton - who knows when and if our understanding of the brain ever actually becomes comprehensive enough to make sense of ideas like intelligence.

I suppose, really, it's important to not listen to the loud voices who are trying to tell you how to live your life and do things.

>>4599121
Which has changed enormously over the past 200 years. People have always decried the status quo, that's about the only constant.

>>4599096
Sure, I'll grant you that politics are heavily dichotomized into groups that aren't necessarily opposed.

>>4599080
As a layperson in history, how do historians go about constructing patterns? I've always wondered. You also must have a close relationship to anthropologists

>>4599122
I know the feel. No matter the short term memory span of the general populace enormous feats have been achieved right under our noses that we simply have gotten used to.

>>4599123
you're not so bad for a tripbuddy

>>4599123
I completely agree.

>>4599057
It depends on the class, but teachers usually have a certain amount of material that they want (or need) to present. If nothing else, it's just more work to reformulate tests toward whatever material the class discussed. And universities usually restrict professors to a "canon" anyway. It's not that certain professors have a problem addressing a diversity of opinions; it's inherent to the academic process itself.

>>4599062
Some teachers see themselves as being in sort of a political position. It's rather hard to separate politics from education, though.

>>4599135
NO, THERE IS VERY LITTLE RELATIONSHIP TO ANTHROPOLOGY. ANTHROPOLOGY IS A FALSE SCIENCE THAT OVERGENERALIZES THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE!!!!!!

>>4599015
I don't think there's anything wrong with telling kids to make money by being engineers. Some people enjoy it, obviously, but even if you don't, it's possible to enjoy hard work in itself, and the prospects of building a better future for yourself and family. People like you are rare - people either willing to endure less money and worse financial prospects for the sake of a passion, or who have such confidence in their passion that they think they can somehow turn it into money.

The problem is that people like you should be cleanly separated, and allowed to be cleanly separated, from people who want to make money. Leave the trade schools to the tradesmen, and have schools for art and film and humanities etc. open to the passionate and willing.

Unfortunately, the simple matter is that there are few passionate and willing. This means that those schools have a difficult time turning a profit, and consequently integrate themselves into trades or interdisciplinary junk. That's why most of the people in your class didn't care: they weren't there for Film, they were there for an easy job and thought "teaching about watching movies" sounded like one. Those people are there to make money, which is fine in a way, but unfortunately they're choking out the people who could learn basic Latin in 6 weeks by forcing the system to accommodate their laziness, lack of talent, and lack of interest.

I think the real problem is that "honest labour" and the culture surrounding it (all those 30 year factory workers a generation ago) has been replaced by two alternatives: service industry and "educated" officework. The latter is unsustainable and no one looks to the former as a "career". We've exported all our labour to the third world, eliminated agriculture through technology, and all we have left is a bunch of people who work four summers as a busboy and graduate to a cubicle. There's no pride in it, there's no acceptance of one's honest fate as a worker. College has become about soothing this fear of never finding a meaningful career, by pretending to care about humanism.

>>4599154

>I think the real problem is that "honest labour" and the culture surrounding it (all those 30 year factory workers a generation ago) has been replaced by two alternatives: service industry and "educated" officework. The latter is unsustainable

I'd take it

>>4599154
This is a very well articulated post, and I agree wholly.

>>4599135

It's more of a technique than a strict scientific method.

Ideally, the historical craft is a constant symbiotic dialectic (excuse the hideous phrase) between reading primary sources, reading theoretical literature, reading secondary literature, and paying attention to the world around you.

The historian is constantly moving within the above spheres. Every sphere informs and helps shape the other.

In this sense history is a never-ending process of creation but one that is always grounded in the sources.

It's always a process of relating the particular fact to the larger structure/system/mode/form and then, in turn, relating the larger structure et al. to the particular.

Does this extemporaneous summary of my field make any sense?

>>4599170
Yes - it makes sense. It reminds me of the process of memory. It's easy to think that our memories are somehow objective, but often they are not - and in every case, a memory is an action in the present, and is thus affected by our mood, attitudes, and values of the present. In that sense, history does change because we might change how we view interactions or documents.

I'm glad people like you take the time to work on this, because I enjoy history

>>4599154
Not the guy you responded to. I sincerely believe we should reinvent a secular monastery-like institution were you are provided for, if you can prove to have discernible talent and passion for your field. I might be retarded, but I think we forgot about devotion to a field in our project of inventing and implementing humanism and the horrid bastard child it spawned, called careerism.

>>4599072
>But what makes you think that this will ever be possible in any way?
Many things are uncertain, what makes you think that it is impossible for you to be immortal given the appropriate amount of energy? The fact that science has taken an interest in eugenics is enough evidence; given science's brief history of massive discoveries it is likely that it will happen in due time.
>None of the "genetic products" you mention are wholly genetically controlled
That is where I mentioned equal environment in >>4598842.
>none of them can be reliably objectively measured.
Science exists to measure; finding out which genes are better for each can be scaled.

The rest of your post seems to imply that science does not have a future, and that anything that can be discovered already has.

>>4599154
Economics would disagree that "they're sending all our jobs away!!!"

Mostly that line is used as a scare tactic to make people feel their jobs are more scarce than they really are, so they will accept worse treatment from their employers.

>>4599185
>It reminds me of the process of memory.

Yeas being honest about your bias is the best way to fight it.

>>4599187

What I'm implying is that trying to make the progress of science dance to the tune of ridiculous fantasies about equality is completely useless.

>>4599196

I would agree. (historian anon)

We should think about equitability and fairness rather than equality.

>>4599187
>The fact that science has taken an interest in eugenics is enough evidence;

I would disagree, given that science is a methodology. There are people who were racist and tried to use science to justify their racism, which is a different idea I think.

>>4599196
Science doesn't have a will of its own that you can interfere with. Science is a tool that can be used to measure stuff with acceptable epistemological certainty.

>>4599154

All of this makes sense but only within the modern ideal that everything has to make money, which is a big part of what's causing the problem in the first place.

>cornell's most famous alumnus is thomas pynchon
>who went back in the 1950's
>yet cornell nowadays still tries to push its ivy status/"well known alumnus" to high schoolers so they would come to the university even though it might as well be considered a SUNY
>i don't know if anyone else experienced this but u of chicago bombards prospective students with advertising and one current student even tried to sell me with "richard feynman" even though feynman went to mit

we americans pay the most amount of money for higher education and it's quite unsustainable. what's depressing is that even if young americans decide to boycott all the private schools, it's not going change anything- the private schools will merely start accepting more international students from asia who will pay full price

>>4599199
That's all good, but the debate isn't really about this if you really look, often it's a debate of how an idea like fairness or equitability can be quantified, or measured.

Feminists in the west, given the propaganda that has trained many to believe worth and success are measured by wealth, and who assume that men and women are equal by nature and shaped by unnatural forces (alot of these ideas don't quite make sense to me) should earn the same amount. Meaning that until those equal wages are established, fairness and equitability don't yet exist.

This is where the terms start to become meaningless and hard to follow.

As a side note: amnesty international recently stated that they said it was their stance that prostitution should be legal, with some justification that, when properly regulated, it is a safe outlet for men's sexual desires. Many western feminists gave an outcry over this, and it's an interesting to try and formulate an opinion as to why.

>>4599210
U Chicago's marketing game is incredibly on point, not just to prospective students but in general, and has been for probably the last 10 years, and it's pretty clearly paid off in terms of their admissions numbers, public rankings, public visibility, etc. Which pretty clearly illustrates the nature of the system, I think. And I agree that the system is probably unsustainable. I mean, this stuff has no real relationship to educational quality, or even really to the actual character of the schools being advertised. But that's the game you have to play, I guess.

>>4599196
>useless
you make it sound like humanity is working to an ultimate goal, the vast amount of emotional capital is the reward for what humans work for. Equality in genetics and environment removes the common angst caused by incapability.

>>4599211

This is where the study of history can help.

For example: the historical development of gender
historical notions of equitability (which is what I study!)

More specifically, I study the emergence of social democratic thought in the late nineteenth century. Social democrats argued that the emerging corporate capitalist political economy could be socialized in such a way as to assure an equitable society.

They developed a coherent grammar of social thought in order to figure out how the new political economy could be directed toward equitability.

I'm trying to resurrect this grammar. It's really fun. It also shows me just how theoretically barren much of the discourse on the left and right is.

>>4599211
>Meaning that until those equal wages are established, fairness and equitability don't yet exist.

No it's equal pay for equal workload. Most people agree that a factory owner should earn more than the worker, since not everyone could do his job. Almost no one is for equal pay, most are for fair pay. Stagnated wages for workers while is productivity is at a all time high is the problem here. Only the CEOs are getting raised because they have direct effect on the value of the company at the stock market which is all that matters nowadays.

>>4599223
>They developed a coherent grammar of social thought in order to figure out how the new political economy could be directed toward equitability. I'm trying to resurrect this grammar. It's really fun. It also shows me just how theoretically barren much of the discourse on the left and right is.

That sounds really interesting - any links / recs for information on this?

>>4599223
You are doing Gods work anon. Capitalism ought to work for society not leech of it. The left really needs a resurrection.

>>4599204

Which is why it is ridiculous to promulgate utopian fantasies about "genetic equality". It makes science into a messianic entity that will cure us of social ills, ignoring the fact that this isn't how science is practiced at all and has nothing to do with the real limits of scientific inquiry. It is just proposing fantastic bullshit.

>>4599226

http://www.amazon.com/Uncertain-Victory-Democracy-Progressivism-1870-1920/dp/0195053044/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1393188257&sr=8-1&keywords=uncertain+victory

Here's is an incredible book by the Harvard historian James Kloppenberg.

Social democrats were trying to develop a "middle path" or "via media" between state collectivism and laissez faire individualism.

They saw tremendous potential in the status quo and worked out a body of social and political thought that strove to develop that potential. This is what utopians fail to realize. The status quo is always latent with potential.

>>4599200
Let me restate that.

The fact that the science community has taken an interest in eugenics is enough evidence;

Funding for research of eugenics is likely, as it is "practical" and can help people.

>>4599224
How do you measure workloads? The problem isn't the models you're proposing, it's in the practice of actually applying them.

>>4599238
I will definitely try and track that down. But does it get specifically into the stuff about grammar and conceptual vocabulary for social thought that you say you're trying to revive? Because that in particular seems fascinating.

>>4599229

Thank you.

I agree. When Obama says we need a system that "works for everyone" he is getting at a really substantial claim. At face value it seems like trite but it really a pregnant claim.

>>4599240
Well, you're going to have to accept that genetic modification is an inevitability of scientific progression.

>>4599245
That's the problem. Many companies have applied models. Some solves it by implementing "one man one vote" bodies of decision making in the firm combined with the ideal that the man on the grounds wage determines all other wages, finance gets 5x the wage of the worker and CEOs 15x so if you give raises because the company turns greater yields it gets "equally" or fairly distributed as a collective effort. This is just one example, but it's a very hard question.

>>4599247

Kloppenberg is a god among intellectual historians, and like the best intellectual historians he grapples with the very conceptual (epistemological and ontological) foundations of social thought.

Intellectual history, I would argue as an intellectual historian, can be tremendously fruitful.

>>4599251
I would say it's rather trite, you know he has a troupe of writers that make those things up, those phrases that sounds very nice but don't mean anything.

I mean, so Obama thinks we need a system that "works for everyone". Well, first off, you're never going to find a system that "works for everyone", because there's always going to be someone who dislikes it. But moving on, what "system" is he talking about? It's a vague term, which people may take as an economic system or whatever, but, being vague gives him plausible deniability to having actually meant that. It's just sophistry.

>>4599251

Sorry for my shitty grammar. I'm overly caffeinated and trying to write a paper while I post on 4chan.

>>4599258
I agree! I think it's fantastic. Again definitely going to try to track that book down although I may need to try and ILL it.

>>4599259
This isn't specific to Obama, though, this sort of approach to language and way of talking about things is massively prevalent in our politics.

>>4599260
Same here. I'm not bringing my A game either. No worries.

>>4599259

It is sophistry. But I would argue that if you frame his trite claim within the logic of social democratic thought it becomes meaningful.

Social democrats were all about socializing (democratically) the vast productive capabilities of corporate capitalism.

>>4599267

SD thought was the philosophical father of new deal liberalism.

>>4599271
New Deal liberalism was probably the high point of American history. Not that many Americans know about the important changes, they just know about the trivialities from their high school history class.

>>4599254
That was the point that I was trying to make; Science's brief history of massive discoveries and the science community's interest in eugenics is evidence to almost make it certain that genetic modification will happen, and then one of the foundations of equality in society, I suppose the term "equity" that you used is better. The other variable for equity would be an equal environment; of course there are other near unpreventable tragedies outside of the system that could occur, like brain damage, loss of limbs, etc. Science would find a way to make those more preventable though.

>>4599271
SD thought is really the "if you can't beat them, join them" strain of socialism. It's all about making sure capitalism at least works for the betterment of society.

>>4598842
The problem with this is that you are holding the people who need help back. Here boys do worse in school and it's thought to be because grow up slower mentally during the early years and it might be up to a years difference. If we wanted to sort this out we might need look into the possibility of dividing certain subjects at a certain age.
Personally I think this is more humane because it gives everybody the best possible future.

Now what if we found differences between the learning abilities between Asians, Jews or Indigenous Australians.
Should we not try and help the weak ones?
Not helping them would probably lead to a bigger difference because they might get worse jobs and we know the connection between socio-economics and education.

So no I think the more humane option is to help the weak instead of not doing anything for the fear of whatever it is that you are afraid of.

>>4599282
Also concerted efforts to help people creates purposeful jobs.

>>4599280

Yes, exactly. See the potential in the system, and work within the system to realize it. It can be done. The New Deal is proof of that.

>>4598694
>Morals and ethics are placed before science
Not sure if this applies to the rest of your post, but I this is a good thing. Morals/ethics > everything else.

>>4599218
absolutely. whether it's personalized advertisement or statistic manipulation of the us news rankings, one cannot deny the structural changes between "classic higher education" and contemporary universities.

one of my pet peeves if this "re-glamorization" of a "21st century education" ie: the culture of TED talks, jquery websites, non serious charities, emphasis for study abroad just so "students can discover themselves". i mean it seems like every other school nowadays is trying to emulate the "stanford brand" because they know (naive) young people are most attracted to the "stanford experience".

>>4598732
>I'm not even a little bit convinced that "new media" has hurt critical thinking skills. It just makes people who would have had poor thinking skills anyway more noticeable.
I think the problem is that anybody can go online and find impressive sources to validate their retarded ideas. There's a greater access to information than ever, but that's not all good information, and you end up having confident idiots mouthing off.

>>4599287

We're beyond the stage of purposeful jobs. Mass unemployment is a hot button issue now but if everyone were in work, the output increase would be tiny because of automation and other efficiencies.

>>4599282
At this point getting the public to accept racial differences in genetic attributes (if there are any) before innovations in eugenics is futile. Also if for some reason racial differences were accepted by the public how do you figure it would help the children? They would feel inferior, teen suicide might spike if science begins to publicly measure these things.

>>4599312
People have become more culturally isolated and spend more time in echo chambers, which is sad really.

>>4599336
I hope you appreciate the irony of the setting of this conversation.

But yes, this is very sad. I've caught myself indulging in things like Cop Block that just serve to reinforce and strengthen my current ideas.

>>4599314

Why doesn't the government just mandate that everyone's working hours be cut in half, and that half be given to the people who currently don't have jobs? Seems like a win-win for the elites, they pay exactly as much to the workers and the workers lose the complaint of not having a job.

>>4599347
I feel that in many ways, /lit/ is the least isolated I can be when I'm isolated. But to be fair, I also work full time in a social environment and go to school, so I feel I do have a healthy balance of face-to-face contact.

>>4599336
Are you sure this is the case. I mean, wasn't people more isolated before the Internet? Now I can choose to circlejerk with you guys, but I can also read a ton of different news outlets with differing emphasis. My point is that we might be more exposed to differing opinions than ever before, we are just not fulfilling its ideal possibility for maximum enlightenment. Exactly because it feels better to read stuff you agree with which is a undeniable fact, but most of us are aware we are doing it.

>>4599356
/lit/ isn't too bad, you're right. I meant 4chan in general

A large part of the problem, as has been mentioned, is the idea that college is something more than a place of knowledge.

College has, in the minds of many, become a step on a career path, and a degree is now just a token to get a job. People saw that the college-educated made more, and then went to college with the sole purpose of increasing their salary.

The problem is, the college-educated made more because their education was robust and allowed them to see the world more clearly. You cannot get that kind of education if all you are thinking about is how much cash you can make.

On a non-/lit/ front, you can see this in computer science. Plenty of Comp Sci degrees nowadays are pretty much just "HERE IS HOW TO WRITE ENTERPRISE-TIER JAVA/C#/MAYBE PYTHON", with no actual computer science. This has resulted in legions and legions of extremely shitty programers.

The other huge issue is the censorship of discussion. While plenty of people (such as those in this thread who are trying to yell about the correlation between brain size, race, and intelligence, something which has already been scientifically refuted) are wrong, they aren't even allowed to speak in most modern colleges. That is disgusting. College is a place of discourse, not some fantasy "safe space" where nobody can be challenged.

>>4599355
Why don't the world governments just institute full communism and we get over all the current economic "issues"

>>4599363

Why don't we all just set up a communitarian agrarian anarchy and live in swag holes in the ground and blaze it every day? makes you think.

>>4599317
But we help people with reading problems by giving them extra assistance in school, same in other subjects. Do they have higher suicide rate? I don't know. If they are higher, should we stop with it?

Is it only acceptable when we point out that this individual have a harder time then the rest, but can't do it if it's a group. Is it okay to keep an extra eye on children who had parents who drank, smoked or took drugs during the pregnancy that might have some effects so that if something is wrong, then we can act quickly. Diseases that might have an impact for future learning problems, is it wrong to keep and extra eye on them to make sure that they can keep up with the rest?

Or is it just any group that we can identify by their appearance or gender that we can't help?

>>4599360
>where nobody can be challenged.

The people ITT with dated ideas evidently scream oppression when they are challenged for their idiocy.

>>4599369
Which is a big part of the problem, of course. It's easy to write off people with legitimate complaints as "just another /pol/tard" (or misogynist or racist or whatever)

>>4599357
You may have a point. I don't really know. It seems that people who are socially awkward have an easier time isolating themselves this way, which may change how we interact, because you tend to not practice eye-contact and appropriate facial expressions online. But we do transfer ideas at an increasingly fast pace

>>4599359
Oh, yeah, I suppose. /a/, /v/ and /pol/ are the worst really, /lit/ is probably the best. /lit/ actually has polite discussions like these..

>>4599364
>Why don't we all just set up a communitarian agrarian anarchy and live in swag holes in the ground and blaze it every day?
Like I said, full communism.

>>4599378
/a/, /v/ and to a lesser extent /mu/ all have board canons, it gets pretty bad

>>4599374
I have replied to several posters before with the "GB2/POL/" reply, when they're going on about the Jewish conspiracy in the left and other ravings. As long as you make calm arguments I don't mind your reactionary views, but if you maintain an irrational perspective and don't really address any views, then I will ignore you or invite you to leave.

The problem is though, I find most reactionary view rather irrational, so often I'm wishing they would stop posting.

>>4599378
Yeah I'm sure you are right, the interaction we are having here are very poor transaction compared to most means of social interactions. I think that recluses can have a place to belong on the net and a voice in the "global village" which they have never had before.

>>4599394
/lit/ does too, but the thing is, the board canon on /lit/ would take years of studying to fully understand, because literature is fantastic and deep and there's alot to say. Truly, anyone who thinks video games or anime are an equivalent art form to literature hasn't really experienced literature.

I'm not here to say that anime and video games are not art, but, their merits often are simply aesthetic, and the plots are very much tertiary to other trivialities of production. Books are about ideas, and I love ideas, so I find myself attracted to media dense with ideas. Anime and video games generally aren't dense with ideas.

>>4599400
>The problem is though, I find most reactionary view rather irrational, so often I'm wishing they would stop posting.

I think to my self that they think the exact same of me, before I proceed to post gb2/pol/.

>>4599357
Actually it seems to be the opposite, that people over all get a smaller range of news. They get news about what they find interesting biased from their point of view.

This would be the majority, might not be your friends.

stop with the idealism guys, we (aka /lit/ hipsters) have always been a small percentage of the population- the vast majority of society has never cared about academia and has never romanticized it the same way we did.

american universities in the early days were a symbol of wealth- a finishing school for boys before they entered high society. i mean just look up history and you'll find the reason why upper class women went to college was to meet future upper class husbands.
then the demand for education picked up and when it was no longer a symbol of upper class-ness to merely have a degree, activities like studying abroad in europe and exclusive frats became the new status symbols for the upper class. now literally everybody studies abroad or "goes to teach english in a third world country" and frats have become an integral part of college. what is trendy to the upper class nowadays? "entrepreneurship and rejecting the traditional model". it's now the hip thing to roll your eyes at actual education, instead seeing universities as "creativity/start up clubs"

>>4599409

Maybe it's just that you have put in the years of study for one of these things and not the others. If you think anime isn't dense with ideas, you probably don't watch anime critically - which makes you no worse off than most people who watch anime, but still not as far off as you could be. read some Azuma.

>>4599403
There's merits to both sides. On here I can easily have a discussion about an idea I had while reading Camus, but on the other hand, having this easy outlet for reading discourages me from wanting to find an outlet for what I read in the real world, so I may be missing out on even more satisfying interactions. But that's okay, I think, I don't want to do something as immature as completely criticize this social engagement. I'm probably just feeling stressed right now because I am putting off doing my math homework, and so I'm being biased.

>>4599414
Do we have some actual hard data on this or is it inferred from the effort to tailor information to user needs combined with knowledge of human cognition?

>>4599412
I don't know, I used to hold some extreme reactionary views, and I feel there's a difference in attitude the right holds for the left and vice versa. I've gone back and forth and really tried to adopt some political extremes when trying to find answers, and all I found is that I know very little and if I try to assert a political doctrine then I make an ass of myself.

Point being, /pol/ doesn't seem to mind making an ass out of itself.

>>4599420
Well I haven't really watched anime in depth at all, so my criticism is a weak one at best. But I'm an impatient person and I hate watching television because there's nothing I can do to make it go by faster, so I'm biased against anime I suppose. Reading is better for me because I can read a chapter or a passage, and then I have some new content to ponder over and really consider the meaning of. I guess maybe in that sense, it's a question less of ideas than one of interpretation and application. I don't really know why, but for some reason I can't stick with watching something

Do you guys ever have a racing mind? I often find myself pacing through thoughts and working out problems I don't care about when I'm feeling stressed out.

>>4599449
>On here I can easily have a discussion about an idea I had while reading Camus

That's also why I come here.

>Do you guys ever have a racing mind?

I relax by filling my head with thoughts instead of emptying it as meditation prescribes. I have gotten the best ideas i have come up with from doing this.

>>4599419
Enlightenment is an ongoing process.

>>4599015
>Why were these people even in the university system if they didn't want to learn about the subject they were signed up to? Even if you work to the modern idea of university as just to enhance employment, it makes no sense, and it's killing the arts.

I found myself wondering this. Whether it was the silence of peers in seminars (separated by the occasional mumbled answer, or a pseud talking for too long), or just the general lack of interest of friends and housemates to engage with anything beyond the moribund carapace of the university/college 'experience' (which other anons have discussed - drink, sex, sports, 'banter', ad nauseam) outside of these classes, it's all depressingly blank. There are very few who truly engage with their subject beyond seeing it as a menial weekly schedule, and there are few who take an interest in disciplines and their applications outside of their chosen course, or how they realte to their life generally.

Not everyone can be a polymath, but I think the ideal of an individual who seeks to better themselves and seek expertise in a variety of areas and subjects is sorely lacking in today's society - to suggest it, for some, is tantamount to rising above one's station and committing a gross act of arrogance.

>>4599433

not the dude you were asking, but theres evidence that things arent much better with the internet than before. hard to do a 1:1 comparison between mediums, but long tail graphs (concentration of usage between one or two big players with a steep decrease and then a giant "tail" of a million players nobody visits) are common for cable tv, websites, netflix movies, and a buncha other things.

essentially, there are unlimited options, but people have only (and will only???) access a select few.

sorry for grammar etc. im on my phone on a greyhound bus

>>4599506
People are too afraid to be wrong. My first experience in university was like that - I never asked questions, never spoke out, never learned.

I'm back again and this time I try to have fun and participate - not only do you learn more, but your professors treat you better, too. Don't be afraid to participate, because, in some sense it's better to be "that guy" than the invisible guy.

I'm taking a creative writing class right now, and it's been fun. Nothings more based than writing a scream into a one page story in class and actually screaming during the part, especially when it catches the whole class and the professor off-guard.

>>4599524
This is good advice, I feel like we are very much alike. Frighteningly alike. I find that if you actually make an effort to know your field, your fellow students will actually respect you and so will your instructors. I think you still should be aware not coming off as a know-it-all even though you sometimes actually feel like one (hubris). Only speak if you are genuinely interested and never to show off your knowledge, that is my principles, fuck the haters.

>>4599506
This is far too bias towards an attitude that defines university life as academia; as though the pursuit of betterment is without simple pleasure.

I don't believe you're correct. Whatever experience you've had with University life, while there are an abundant amount of unmotivated students who attend purely out of career benefits, there is a strong minority that is attempting to define their position in current and future society. The relevance of this being, they are taking it upon themselves to challenge the opinions of a previous generation, and develop further through education, even if there are those otherwise.

This is also only applicable to Undergraduates.

And who says a bit of banter now and then isn't fair.

Academia has always been precisely what it is; an institution concerned, primarily, with itself.

It favors correctness over clarity, rules over reality, and protection over production.

Anyone who didn't begin striving to separate themselves from it at young age is already lost.

>>4599559
Said the anonymous individual on 4chan.

>>4599559
>It favors correctness over clarity, rules over reality, and protection over production.

You're describing general society here.

>>4599541
Yeah, it's not about showing off, it's about having a real passion for the subject that transcends social boundaries.

Last semester I took macro and micro econ even though it's not my major of focus, but I still learned a vast amount, despite that the class was geared a little toward pro-America propaganda. Still though, I was able to talk about international trade and currency valuation and talk about China's attempts to keep it's own currency devalued so it can maintain it's exports. The fact that I had knowledge of the subject outside of class and wanted to connect it to the course material made the professor ecstatic, presumably because he rarely sees people who actually tried to care about these things outside of the classroom. Then again, there were many times I asked questions and was way wrong, and I let the professor explain to me why I was wrong. It is, after all, the professor's class room, and I respect his authority when I'm in his classroom.

I suppose, though, that there's a chicken and egg scenario - the only reason I could speak and make connections is because I have a passing interest and try to read and learn up on these things, which requires some literacy. It doesn't seem to me that other people want to take the time to learn definitions for words to understand what they read more thoroughly. Many people simply don't trust themselves to be able to read a wikipedia article and actually learn from it, or maybe they don't practice comprehension enough.

>>4598744
>stats are just bad, low-tier science in general; rather than trying to find out exactly why certain things are why they are, some would just like to say x correlates to y

So, uh, how exactly are we supposed to find out why things are the way they are if we don't know the way they are? I mean, if you're coming up with a theory for why x correlates to y, it's usually nice to have first established that x does, in fact, correlate to y. Also, the issue with the "it reduces determined things to probability" argument (besides quantum mechanics) is that we aren't Laplace's Demon, so something's being determined doesn't mean we know it to be so - if we start with no clue, being 70% sure is still an improvement.

>>4598744
>implying statistics are not real math

Are you from 1950 ?

>>4599573
um, isn't micro/macro econ a necessary requisite for all business related majors? of course it's full of apathetic "average" types- the ones who are more ambitious and intelligent would have done the intelligent thing and taken ap micro/macro in high school, gotten a 5, gotten college credit and moved onto higher level classes.

>>4599564

I also part-time as a person in real life.

>>4599570

I could be describing any number of people here.

Possibly even your Uncle John.

Currently, I am not describing any number of people, though.

Or your Uncle John.

I am describing how I see Academia.

>>4599573
>It doesn't seem to me that other people want to take the time to learn definitions for words to understand what they read more thoroughly. Many people simply don't trust themselves to be able to read a wikipedia article and actually learn from it, or maybe they don't practice comprehension enough.

Please don't confuse the reality of the educational environment and societal condition with a personal perspective. And there's no dichotomy between having a 'real passion' and 'showing off'; this is a mundane view of student interaction and implies that the willingness to learn is a barometer.

Don't project your views as the reality of things.

Treating it as a career requirement instead of a place to share ideas and increase human knowledge.

>>4599618
You're a part-time real person?

It doesn't show, considering your bland over-assumptive guesswork on the state of an institution you don't even claim to understand.

>>4599409
I prefer written works to either video games or anime, but I'd say that there are works in both those genres (less so in video games, simply because of the novelty of both the medium and the interactive factor, but still some, and I read more books and watch more anime than I play games, so I'm biased) that have artistic merit beyond their aesthetic ones. Also, since you mentioned plot, I'd like to point out that there are a whole lot of books that don't have plot or where the plot is of lesser importance - for example, people read Lolita primarily for the prose - and those genres where plot is of paramount importance are typically frowned upon by "patricians" for being pleb.

The increased worthlessness of liberal arts degrees is one of my key complaints on modern academia. I'm not claiming that LA degrees are worthless an sich, but the point is that a good understanding of the LA would only be possible for a very limited percentage of very motivated students, and even then it would take years and years of intensive study. But instead LA degrees have rapidly grown to become the ultimate garbage can of modern academia.

>>4599409
>Video games and anime must be understood in relation to their plot
Don't compare incomparable mediums through what you consider an exogenous variable; it does nothing but distorts each medium's respective field and creatives an obvious hierarchy.

I'm sure I nave yet to 'experience literature', but I can say with certainty you have not 'experienced video games' at all.

>>4599559
>favors correctness over clarity
Not sure what you mean by this. Are you accusing academics of making vague and unfalsifiable statements, or of being esoteric and not clear in what they say? Because the latter, at least, as much as people dislike ivory tower attitudes, strikes me as perfectly acceptable - if your goal is knowledge, making that knowledge easy to understand isn't necessarily your job.

>>4599573
>Many people simply don't trust themselves to be able to read a wikipedia article and actually learn from it
Haven't you entertained the possibility that perhaps *some* people are aware of more reliable scholarly sources than your third-rate Wikipedia? I don't see how showing some adequate skepticism towards such sites necessarily equals to a learning disability. But if that positively coincides with your style of learning -- surrendering your judgment to Wikipedia articles without reading anything else on the subject -- by all means do it, but don't accuse others of having weak reading comprehension or other contingent cognitive weaknesses.

>>4598592
>dat neck fat

>>4599544
>This is far too bias towards an attitude that defines university life as academia; as though the pursuit of betterment is without simple pleasure.

I don't think it should be a 24/7 obsession with your chosen area of academia, it's just too few are are interested in taking their subject beyond the attendance record and sufficient input in coursework and exams.

>I don't believe you're correct. Whatever experience you've had with University life, while there are an abundant amount of unmotivated students who attend purely out of career benefits, there is a strong minority that is attempting to define their position in current and future society. The relevance of this being, they are taking it upon themselves to challenge the opinions of a previous generation, and develop further through education, even if there are those otherwise.

I recognise that this, give or take peculiar circumstances, is the status quo for most universities. I know there is a strong minority; I did not deny its existence. But if one has entered university/college and has not considered their choice of academic discipline, when push comes to shove, as their primary focus overall, why go in the first place?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy going out, doing my sport, drinking, contributing to banter (inverted commas as it's lucidly defined), but for too many it's this and this foremost.

Impractical degrees. Education should offer at least some distinct utility.

Too many people go to college. It's just a contrived badge of conscientiousness, the majority who hold BA's end up working in careers where their education does not at all assist their competency or relate to training.

Too much indoctrination. More than would be expected from basic self selection. "Muh sameness", "muh envy", "muh dogma". Academia would be much, much better if there were vast diversity in dispositions and viewpoints. We have to drop the disgust of the other that leads the modest majority into banning everyone else and making their preferences law.

>>4598769
You have some points, but

>implying ideology hasn't been injected in education since basically there is such a thing as standardized education.

University has never been much less ideologized than it is now.

Also:

>If research came out suggesting a strong correlation between brain size and intelligence (or worse, race and intelligence) do you think it would be published?

You seem to be assuming that a research on such an ambiguous subject can be crystal-clear an easy to interpret. But, first there's the problem of what you define as "race" (it is by no means an agreed-upon concept in biology, and a scientifically appropriate definition would have to vary depending on the problems you're considering) and "intelligence", then the problem of how you test those factors. Finally, even if you had such a correlation, there is the problem of interpreting it. It seems that African American have on average a lower IQ than the average population (but again, according to which IQ test ? and with or without accounting for socioeconomical difference ? frankly I don't know). Black people in Canada, however, seem to have an higher IQ than average. Results in these kinds of matters are never as cler as you seem to be making them out to be.

>>4598592
Nothing. It's fine.

>>4599644
Hey, I'm >>4599636, not the guy you replied to, but I was wondering - how would you attempt to understand video games (as opposed to in relation to their plot)? Because, as I said in my previous post, I and many others don't necessarily understand books in relation to their plots, either, but rather in relation to a combination of their thematic elements and their formal elements - and of course the formal elements of video games are vastly different from those of novels, so I'm not particularly well-equipped to approach video games from that angle. So, what types of things do you use to judge a game, and what games would you qualify as particularly worthy of attention from an artistic perspective (most people I know have pointed to either Shadow of the Colossus or, more recently, Spec Ops: The Line as examples)?

>>4599661
Not that guy, but don't make a rebuttal based on a basless conjecture simply because you dislike an attitude. I don't agree with the prick, but it's just as toxic when you do nothing but devalue another's opinion because you can project with confidence an implication that is seemingly true.

>>4599678
>metaphysical possibility backed up by logic
>baseless conjecture

Go back to your Modal Logic class, sport. Your ENTIRE fucking post is EXACTLY of what you accuse me of.

>>4599591
>>4599600
I said it was low-tier not useless. What you described was a way it is good, a lot of people on here (/sci/) feel that they can explain all arguments away with a correlation without going more in depth.

>>4599671
>Academia would be much, much better if there were vast diversity in dispositions and viewpoints

2+2=5 is just as valid as 2+2=4?

>>4599689
Causation are the darnedest thing to established and are usually firstly hinted by correlation.

>>4599690
The real world is not as certain as math

>>4598882
>It simply could not be any other way, because whoever holds the power is the one with the power.

That's a rather gross simplification. Power is a property of human relationship, not some concrete thing you hold absolutely. It's not so much about definite physical might than about network of influence that can shift and transform over time.

>>4599690
>>4599690

Oughts are not solely a matter of logic. Individuals vary a lot in temperament. My ideal world is very likely different from your ideal world, as my physical framework of benefit/harm (my brain!) is distinct and (largely) unique.

>>4599700
So teachers should focus on methodology and not results and let the students themselves explore and form their own conclusions based on methodology only supervised by the teachers? How do you make that into a multiple choice test?

>>4599629

If real people can't be said to be bland and over-assumptive, who else would I be?

I am, and always have been, uniquely uninteresting - so I'll readily concede to accusations of blandness.

I'm not sure what those other bits are meant to mean, though.

Over-assumptive seems to imply that there is a level of assumption which is okay to have. At what point does one step over that line?

I'm also not certain what determines an opinion to be the result of guesswork. Or, especially, how you came to that conclusion - since my opinion was presented briefly and given without the associated reasoning. Would you like to hear my reasoning? Admittedly, you don't sound very interested in it, but it's only fair to offer.

If I claimed to understand academia (which would be a very vague claim, I think) would that make my opinion more... whatever it is you think it should be?

>>4599690
You know there are perfectly valid sets in which 2+2=0. And the study of those sets can even yield practical applications over the long run.

Oversimplification is truly the bane of science.

>>4599690
>the self-contained and self-provable imaginary world of numbers has undoubtable and certain truths, and this is applicable in any way to fields that deal with the complexity of real life

>>4599697
Then they should look for the cause by looking for published research or doing their own. Difficulty is not an excuse to look.

>>4599712
>sets
>having the property of being valid

>>>/settheory101/

>bothering with academia one way or the other

pyrrho grab the wheel im finna atarax out of control

>>4599722
Lel it really depend on the phenomenon you are looking at. It's really not that simple.

>>4599709
Tests are usually about the methodology, unless its history. History could be previous peoples discoveries, although anything is open to be disproved if someone finds a hole in laws or theories.

>>4598694
>mathematics
What are you referring to here? Math is, in the present day, probably the least political of all fields, along with technical (and non-metaphysical) philosophy. Political correctness has, to my knowledge (and I could be wrong), had fairly little impact on contemporary math. Like, Perelman and others have accused mathematicians of favoring friends and being intellectually dishonest and such, but that has more to do with who gets the credit than with suppressing valid conclusions, and it's more of an egotistical thing than a widespread political bias.
>>4599297
I think they meant it in the sense of "dogmatic beliefs are held at the expense of truth," not in the sense of "there aren't enough people being tortured in the name of science."
>>4599673
I think you're missing the point on that second part. You're arguing against the assumption of the hypothetical - which is rarely a good idea - rather than disputing the (implied) conclusion.

I think the guy who posted that would be okay with our assuming that the study was reputable and well-conducted and that it posited an innate difference in intellectual ability connected to race (and yes, race is terribly defined, but I think you know what is meant by it here - for the sake of the hypothetical, let's say the study implied major genetically-based differences in mental ability stemming from divergent evolution after the diaspora out of Africa).

Now, to that person, I think it would be published, actually. There would be a huge outcry from the non-academic community, obviously, and it would probably be subjected to greater-than-usual scrutiny and attempts to pose alternative conclusions from within the academic community, especially since (as someone else said), such conclusions have historically been poor science and driven by bias, but if it was actually a significant result suggesting such, it would be published. And then fifty researchers would attempt to disprove it, of course, but the conclusion would be there for people to think about.

>>4599744
>technical (and non-metaphysical)
Silly and uneducated assumption. Many results within Mathematical Logic yield philosophical implications and interpretations.

>probably the least political of all fields
Mathematics per se has nothing to do with politics, it is de facto topic-neutral.

>>4599675

>a combination of their thematic elements and their formal elements

I'm not >>4599644, but I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with taking this view on video games either. But while you could maybe say that Shadow of the Colossus is praiseworthy in this sense, Spec Ops is definitely not.

Problem with Spec Ops for me is that it is thematically focused on critique of worldview of once-a-year AAA shooters without really doing anything that is different from them. The game essentially blows its entire wad on "whoa, CoD is jingoistic as fuck! 0_0! what America actually does with its military is creepy and not like videogames, including this one, at all!"

In other words it's the kind of thing that would only appear insightful to someone who accepts the propagandistic aspects of CoD and the like uncritically: what it says is obvious to anyone else. Add to that that it is in fact no different from what it is critiquing: a bland military shooter (complete with multiplayer) that expects the player to derive enjoyment from making a representation of a US soldier killing representations of Arabs, forcing its "subversive" narrative on the player through cutscenes in which it's revealed that those Arabs were innocent all along, and don't you feel bad now?

Well no, I certainly don't because they aren't real. This is a completely boneheaded direction from which to critique pro-US propaganda message of the AAA military shooter. It's trying to argue that war isn't a game IN A WAR GAME: everyone who could possibly hear the message either already knows and doesn't care, or just doesn't care. The Line is not an outstanding or even very good game, let alone art, let alone good art. Marathon Infinity is far more insightful about what makes people play shooters (hint: it's because they're fun), doesn't confuse player with character (really, a completely unforgivable sin in the modern age of videogames) and manages to have good gameplay into the bargain. But it's about killing cartoon aliens, so it can't be "art", can it?

>>4599675
I would argue that video games are best 'judged' according to their ability to utilize gameplay in providing an immersive experience.

In the whole, you're asking a larger question than can be answered in a 2000 post-limit, and attempting to reduce the explanation won't satisfy your answers. However, I can answer your last few questions literally with sparse relation to the overarching question you ask of what makes video games separate from literature.

If you're asking what I specifically use to judge a game, it'll be its ability to keep me entertained. Not its ability to offer profound insights and new methods of understanding reality. In lieu of this, I'm going to state that the 'artistic perspective' in the video game medium is not wholly like that of others. While the artistic perspective is concordant with that of literature and anime, in its assessment of the devices employed, within the work's medium, to serve an end and the degree to which these devices were effective, what divides the artistic perspective of each is the end it serves itself.

The implication of this being, in relevance to your question, the artistic perspective in the video game format is an assessment of a video game's ability to entertain. The purpose of the medium I believe is the defining factor of not only how you assess what should be considered a creatively artistic work, but also should be considered the differentia between each medium.

(Arguably, I've just got in a circle. In the previous paragraph, the implication is made that a medium comes to exist by presupposing the already existing end of a medium).

Honestly, literal examples of games that can help to define the artistic perspective would be those that have come to define their genre given a period of time. Call of Duty is part of this artistic perspective, and to a greater extent the origins of its work, all the way to the first of the fps-arena genre. Starcraft, for RTS is part of this artistic perspective, along with The C&C series. Grand theft auto, minecraft, ace of spades .49 / .51 version. The artistic perspective here is a personal one for each genre with regards to each game's ability to entertain me.

I seriously hope this answers at least something. From the conclusions you draw at the end of reading this, you'll have to fill in the arguments yourself if there are any errors / remaining unanswered questions. Asking 'what is the artistic perspective' of such an such can either be broadly and generally defined so as to provide a framework, but not detail, or to be given in the detail, but provide no framework for application. Being able to answer the questions you pose is the same as learning two languages. Only given one can you even begin to understand the other.

>>4599776
>Silly and uneducated assumption. Many results within Mathematical Logic yield philosophical implications and interpretations.

Those adjectives weren't even referring to math at all.

>Mathematics per se has nothing to do with politics, it is de facto topic-neutral.

Yes, of course. I was referring to the field of math, as in the studies of such, rather than the actual facts of math. Geology is also not by its nature political, but that doesn't mean creationism-evolution debates don't turn it into a political topic and attempt to feed political biases into it. Math is obviously distant from politics, but there have been times when the study thereof has become politicized, primarily because of the philosophical implications of it (which you mentioned).

>>4599819

The question of Spec Ops: The Line well illustrates what is fucked about the "are videogames art?" question: it doesn't matter whether the game is any good as a game, nor whether it is actually "saying" something of import -- what people want is to hear that the game references Heart of Darkness, that is to say shares in the respect and influence Heart of Darkness possesses in our culture. Hence you get shit like Bioshock: Infinite and Gone Home, which have learned that to the games-as-art crowd the substance doesn't matter: use Something Important as window dressing, flavor for the game, and you've already guaranteed yourself a dicksucking from "gaming journalists" on grounds of how intellectual your game is.

Shadow of the Colossus on the other hand doesn't need to wave its penis around about racism or homophobia, because it has its own thematic statement to make rather than being a cynical grab for social-justice-inclined audiences, a sly repackaging of the same old shit as games of yesteryear in the guise of Something Important. But it's still kind of boring a lot of the time and doesn't run too well. A good game, artistically far ahead of some, but not great.

>Universities become degree factories
>People wonder what went wrong
Make the academia a sacerdotal cast and you will solve the problem

>>4599836
>Make the academia a sacerdotal cast
what do you mean by this?

>that conversation where the guy offers his gum to the other guy
>"Ah man, it's your last piece, I don't want to take that!"
>tfw they stop
>tfw the door is right there
>tfw they aren't moving

>>4599154
This is what Goodman argues in Growing Up Absurd.

>>4599210
>>4599218
U. of Chicago had the nicest mailers and catalogues and things when I was applying to schools. Their marketing game is indeed on-point.

>>4599862
A book which is now 53 years old.

To what extent are the conclusions still relevant to contemporary circumstance?

>>4599218
Yeah, a few years back they hired a new Dean of Admissions who was, I think, Yale's before that, and suddenly their admissions started dropping. I think they got tired of not having Ivy League-tier brand recognition and decided to start playing the game.

>>4599210
This is slightly off-topic, but weren't Pynchon and Bloom in Nabokov's class together at one point?

>>4599870
They even sent me a free t-shirt.

>>4599922
omg lel i totally forgot harold bloom has a bachelors from cornell first. this always seems forgotten since i always associate him with yalie blandness

>>4599950
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he started claiming he'd gone to Yale for undergrad. His ego might not be able to stand people's knowing that he went to a lesser Ivy.

>>4599419
On a side note to your comment: the beginning of academia in the US was, in some areas, disastrous. If you consider for instance the university of Virginia, which was founded by no other than Jefferson himself, the first students were sons of rich farmers who came there with the explicit intent of getting drunk, playing cards and not studying too much. In the first years of the University, there were students protests (riots nearly) against the European professors (who were at the time the best game in town) that Jefferson had painstakingly convinced to go teach in his university. Fights between students were common. Some teachers were beaten on occasion. One teacher was even shot to death by a student (more like an accident than a murder, but said student was actually firing a rifle in campus with people walking near him).

In that light, the way universities are now is not that much a regression compared to the old days.

>>4599419
This. For fuck's sake, people, Thomas Hardy was complaining about the state of academia a hundred years ago. It's not a new thing.

>>4599689
>a lot of people on here (/sci/) feel that they can explain all arguments away with a correlation without going more in depth.

That's not statistics, just a shit way of using them. Actual statisticians are legit mathematicians. Dividing mathematical fields in "tiers" is rather useless and inappropriate.

The point of statistics is precisely to explore the heuristics of correlation (to say it in a pedant way). If we assume (as that's often the case in experimental sciences) that we can only have access to correlations, how far should we trust our conclusions based on these correlations ? It's important not only to obtain results from a mass of data, but also for providing a way to assess when guesswork is reasonable and when it's too far-fetched. Basically, proper statistics are a way to avoid the bad methodology you complained about. Being able to reasonably handle correlation in the absence of causation is extremely important in science. On top of that, it produces interesting results in such abstact fields as analytic number theory.

>>4600070
Don't universities generally have a department of statistics separate from their math department nowadays?

>>4599834
Racism and homophobia are bottom bottom bottom of the barrel in importance for good and deep storylines. Lowest hanging fruit

>>4599724
Valid as in "well defined AND interesting in the current state of mathematical practice". You can define sets in ways that produce annoying pradoxes (and that's why the axiom of foundation was introduced). You can also define sets that will be absolutely ininteresting to most mathematicians. The sets I mentionned don't fall into any of those two categories, so they are a good example of sets commonly used in mathematics.

>You're arguing against the assumption of the hypothetical - which is rarely a good idea - rather than disputing the (implied) conclusion.

I'm actually arguing against the validity of the whole implication. My point is that it rest on an idea of of scientific research that is not cogent with the way things are done nowadays. The results that are most likely to be considered politically incorrect belong to fields in which interpreting results and making sense of them is already a very tricky business. So the nature of the field considered (sociology mingled with cognitive sciences) is enough to explain controversy over results, and it will always be difficult to sort out the legitimate and purely scientific objections from the complaints informed by political bias.

Amusingly enough, as far as first order logic is concerned, proving that the hypothesis A is false is enough to prove that the implication (if A then B) is true. So, if we were really talking pure formal logic, arguing against the assumption of the hypothetical would be a good way to prove (and not disprove) the claim. But that's a sidenote, I hope you get my main point.

>>4600085
Not in my uni at least (which is pretty well-known in the field). And that wouldn't make sense either, as statistics relies on probabilities, which themseles rely on integration and measure theory, and as they have application to plenty of fields in mathematics (including, as a mentioned, arithmetics). So there are as much a part of the compound of modern fundamental math as anything else (except arithmetics and geometry, who historically have some special standing). As for the (many many) applications of statistics to empirical and social sciences, that's another thing, altough there are obviously links.

>>4599661
That's totally not even related to what I was saying.

>>4600193
Don't by hypocritical, now. Didn't you tell us about how good your reading comprehension is? Because that's *totally* related to what you were saying.

>>4600238
I was particularly talking about the set of people that don't put in any attempt to read about topics and learn, which would definitely exclude the scientifically literate set. If you sit around and read scientific literature when you want to learn a topic, good for you.

>>4599419
>entrepreneurship and rejecting the tradition model

I don't think of myself as terribly traditional -whatever edginess that may entail- but I don't understand why everyone is buying into this entrepreneurship and personal branding fad.

Self-start and initiative are great, but your start-up probably sucks. Only about one out of every few hundred is worth a damn.

>>4598842
>It would only cause scorn against science
so be it

>>4600332
where dis pic from?

>>4600042
Neither is cancer, would be nice if it got fixed though.

>>4599015
>I was told to be an engineer in high school because it would be a good job; I get there, found the subject really boring and hated all the people around me - I know autism is a buzzword but it's the best way to describe basically everyone I met
Good god this is so true. I'm in math and the people are weird, but they're nowhere near as annoying as engineers

>>4600332
they think they're the next google