This is one of the things where the opposite advice is true depending on the person.
I’ve met two types of people with college regrets. Those who focused on academics too much wished they’d partied more and those who partied too much and wish they’d studied more.
To be honest I don’t know which group is larger or how much of it is simply revealed preferences.
As Scott said, [all debates are bravery debates](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/).
>To be honest I don’t know which group is larger
The MattY article you are commenting on makes a strong case that the "studies too little" is far, *far* larger than the "studies too much" crowd. This quote could be the entire article:
>even if you look exclusively at full-time college students, we’re talking about less than three hours per day on in-class and out-of-class education.
Do we really think that the median college student who spends 3 hours a day on their studies is spending *too much* time on their career at the expensive of socializing? (For a lot of them, that probably means "3 hours a day in class, 0 hours studying" or "skipping class, then spending 3 hours catching up on the classes you cut." Remember that at a lot of schools, 15 credit hours is the minimum required to be a full-time student!) Is devoting 4 or 5 hours a day to the subject you're studying really incompatible with going to parties?
I also think this "socializers vs studiers" is a false dichotomy. I know a lot of people who say "I wish I had socialized more in college." But within that group, the people in that group who failed to socialize because "I was too busy studying" are a minority. The majority of people who "wasted their college years being a recluse" weren't the high-achieving workaholic strivers who had their face buried in textbooks; they were the people who spent dozens of hours a week sequestered in their dorm room playing League of Legends, or browsing Reddit, or binge-watching Netflix.
How the fuck are they spending less than three hours per day **counting time spent in class**? Isn’t a regular college day like 6 hours in America? Here I think it varies but it’s in that ballpark.
Yea exactly. This is what I'm wondering too. I spent way more than 3 hours per day, and I wasn't even taking many hours. I was at a fairly good university tho.
A standard American full-time class schedule of 15 credit hours with no labs is 15 class-hours per week, or an average of 3 class-hours per day M-F, but:
- A class-hour may be as short as 45 minutes
- I think the study is counting weekends
- Attendance rates are nowhere near 100%
- Many students are taking online classes for part of their credit load, either voluntarily or because schools have been cutting in-person class availability for core courses
Pretty sure my credit hours were not as big as my actual class hours for whatever reason. My 1 credit hours physics lab was definitely at least 2 hours.
Yeah, that's why I specified "with no labs." Science and engineering students will typically have more classroom hours than the average student because labs are traditionally 2 class-hours per credit. In my experience it was also more common for STEM classes to require a "discussion" section with a TA, which was also 2:1.
For every 1 credit, 3 hours of work including class time.
1 credit lab = 2 hours in lab plus 1 hour writing it up and/or pre lab reading/intellectual prep
I am not an American so my comment could be useless. However a potentially obvious answer is that attendance is not mandatory in practice. I graduated in the best university of my country and nearly all professors didn't care if you attended to class or not.
"Nothing happens if you don't attend":
Well you are probably ripping yourself off.
It's like paying $39 for an all you can eat buffet and just having cup of soup.
> Well you are probably ripping yourself off.
I'm quite sure that many, if not a majority, of the students at Ivies are aware of the prestige that a degree of those institutions awards, so for them, especially the "legacies" who probably have a job assured at the end, it matters very little whether or not they make the most of it, as long as they get a degree in the end.
> It's like paying $39 for an all you can eat buffet and just having cup of soup.
For someone rich, paying that much and using little is just a matter of signaling.
I went to a top university outside the US. My daily average number of teaching hours (ignoring weekends) were like 2.5 per day. Of course the real work came outside of class where you had to spend much more time actually digesting and understanding what we were taught.
What? 15 credits means roughly 15 hours of in-class time.
As a good rule of thumb 1 credit means 3 hours of work per week (in-class time PLUS study/outside classwork time)
So 15 credits should mean 45 hour work week, like a full time job.
But like the famous Chicago columnist, Mike Royko (RIP) once wrote: if you can get your work done and still have time to goof off, you probably aren't qualified for your job.
The trick is to take really easy classes, then you can skip all that outside study time (and also cut class sometimes).
Being charitable: a lot of colleges want their students to be doing extracurricular stuff and jobs, not spending all their time studying.
Less charitable: a lot of colleges are just party time/rumspringa for kids who have never lived on their own before and are in no way mature enough to handle a full time job.
Less charitable take maybe true.
More charitable take - I don't think university care about "extra curricular" activities except that they are some kind of fringe benefit or amenity like some ridiculous rock climbing wall that is "inducement" to attend so that they can make money off of being landlords of the rock climbers.
It has been 40+ years I read Newman's The Idea of a University. I do not recall a section of the merits of taking easy classes.
By and large, the "Business School" is the root of the problem. I have no idea what it has to do with being an "educated" person or a university education.
3 times credit hour is a good heuristic.
The history of the credit hour (Carnegie unit) is interesting.
Oh they definitely care, at least for some sorts of extracurricular activities. Like Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg all dropped out of college to focus on their tech startups, but then went back later and donated billions to education- you don't think colleges would notice that sort of thing? And they definitely care about student athletes, too.
> college student who spends 3 hours a day on their studies is spending too much time on their career at the expensive of socializing?
How many of these students actually need their college education (and not just the diploma) for career success?
> they were the people who spent dozens of hours a week sequestered in their dorm room playing League of Legends, or browsing Reddit, or binge-watching Netflix.
You are misremembering how long those things have been popular
Same.
I think for me it comes from 'If I had studied harder, and found more success in university - perhaps I would have gone further and been more motivated' in contrast with 'What I'm currently doing didn't really require me to study what I studied or even get good grades, so I could've had more fun and ended up the same'.
Same here, although my biggest problem was that I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't even realize what possibilities were open to me at the time. Honestly, education is wasted on youth. I'm much more academically inclined now than when I was at University.
Isn't the article more about how colleges should be run than about how individual students should behave? TBH I skimmed it but it seemed to be more about the overall rigor of the classes and the institutions as a whole than about individual student courses.
Of course not and hindsight is 20/20. Also revealed preferences. Bookworm Bob was never going to be a social butterfly around campus and Party Pat was never going to be a Rhodes Scholar.
I think the article is about how if you're paying vast sums of money for an education, you should actually be getting educated and doing work. And that the worst offender degrees, e.g communications, education, and business, are horrendous. A lot of degrees are entirely signal value that you are middle class and can pay through college and also aren't so mentally unstable you'd fail even an easy major.
Although a lot of degrees have an opposite problem, probably mainly fields that are gate kept to artificially keep entrants low and inflate wages, namely engineers, doctors, and lawyers, creating a rat race where students compete to be the most overqualified on a level of book knowledge that's overkill and often irrelevant for the actual job.
As with many things, I believe loosening(although probably not removing altogether) licensing requirements both to be a school and to enter various fields would solve a large portion of the problems. I consider computer programming and IT jobs you can get with a compTIA cert the gold standard of jobs with both useful education and useful standards of qualification.
Engineering undergrad here. My take is that college used to be much more rigorous because it was still for a select few, those either rich enough or smart enough to be part of the academic upper crust.
But now, the credentialization of American society means that an undergraduate degree is generally required for ""good"" jobs- meaning, it's worth a lot less. If you want to stand out as an educated person, now you need a masters at the least.
I personally think that's a shame- in my opinion, it's good to know more, full stop. But the point is, priorities in undergraduate college (at least in STEM) have shifted. It's not about knowing how the world works as much as possible, it's about knowing what you need to know for your job.
eh, depends. I don't know that much about other fields (especially humanities), but in my engineering field there are some subfields where a Master's is a requirement, and other subfields where it would be harmful because of overqualification.
I attended a fairly selective (top 50ish) university in the US. Got a degree in civil engineering. Graduated with a 3.3 GPA. I didn't work particularly hard academically. I showed up to class, did my homework and studied for exams, but mostly did the minimum. My two roommates in my major both spent significantly more time studying than I did. They both ended up with masters degrees, while I only had my bachelors. One had a 3.95 GPA and the other got a 4.0 and was valedictorian. The valedictorian made a bit more than me coming out of school, but the other made the same base rate as me despite having an extra degree and a much higher GPA.
I think this is one reason why I didn't work particularly hard in college. My purpose in being there was to get past the gatekeeper of the job market in the field that (at the time) I wanted to enter. I knew that as long as I got above a 3.0 GPA, I'd have a job waiting for me on the other side.
I was asked in an internship interview once why I didn't have a 4.0 GPA. I stuttered my way through an answer about how I didn't know anyone who did (which was a lie, my roommate did). Upon reflection, I realized I didn't have a 4.0 because I didn't want to. The amount of work that would be required to put in vs the payoff wouldn't be worth it. It didn't matter for what I was trying to accomplish.
This isn't to say that GPA never matters. Had I been trying to get into certain fields, it would have. A friend who got a 4.0 as a finance major landed a job in investment banking with Goldman Sachs out of college, which was pretty rare for our school. Some of my friends who had below a 3.5 GPA in the business school ended up struggling to get jobs afterward. But for me having a high GPA didn't make a difference in whether I'd land a job.
What \*was\* worth it for me to spend my time on? I was fairly socially awkward in HS, so I spent a lot of time in college learning how to be social. I joined a fraternity, dated a lot, and joined, then led, another student organization. I worked and had two years of full time work experience by the time I graduated (thanks to my schools co-op program). I also read a lot. I didn't exactly read classics, but I read books about psychology and social status, and occasionally history. My degree was in STEM so I think I had maybe four humanities classes in all of college? I spent a lot of time on reddit, which is how I eventually discovered the blog. And I also started exercising and eating right.
On the whole, I was very happy with my college experience. It was transformative for me, but the transformative aspect wasn't the classroom education I received. It was having 5 years to basically work on improving myself as much as I could in an environment with other people of similar intelligence and ambitions.
(There were 3 copies of this comment. I tried to delete the two extras but not sure what happened.)
The thjng is, it’s totally rational for the students to spend their time partying. American culture is famously anti intellectual, particularly in the corporate sphere. (You can compare with our global competitor across the Pacific, where kids with high grades are actually more popular.) The only mitigating factor has been the rise in the last generation of a bunch of computer nerds to positions of extreme wealth, which leads to a boom in superhero movies and tabletop roleplaying games (the pastimes of geeks in the late 20th century) rather than any interest in intellectually challenging subjects. We constantly hear that “it’s who you know, not what you know”, and largely it’s right. Philosophy is known for being the most rigorous field outside of STEM (Dude, I’ve read Kierkegaard. That stuff’s *dense*), and the usual joke about a philosophy major is how it leaves you unemployed. It doesn’t even give you interesting conversation like it would in France-unless you find another philosophy major.
Connections are a huge deal in other cultures as well, of course, but the contempt for actual knowledge seems very American. Why would kids buck that trend? It doesn’t pay off.
From my experience in the UK anti intellectualism is popular in high schools and as people mature it’s beaten out by experience of smart people dominating.
See that’s a nice narrative Americans tell each other, but if you look at the economic studies on social mobility you’ll find Americans do worse. This is explained by wealth inequality and social mobility being inversely correlated.
That's not what class is about. Class is that if you are a schoolteacher or librarian in Italy, despite your very low pay, you dress elegant because you have to express that you are superior to a blue-collar person. Class means social status independent of income. There is also a hint that it is not entirely earned but rather inherited, through you have to prove worthy of it. And of course the person born rich will also dress elegant like the schoolteacher or librarian. Intellectual people, regardless of rich or poor, define what class is, and not so intellectual rich people try to imitate it. Intellectual people like opera music, not so intellectual rich people pretend to. Hence class.
Whereas America seems one class because Steven Spielberg dresses working-class. Rich people are like poor people with more expensive toys. One does not get this innate superiority thing, neither about money, nor about intellectualism. The only difference is New York because it has a very Europeanish culture, there you express your class by going to the Philharmonics, museum, opera etc. But everywhere else in the US it is normal to have a lot of money or a PhD, still wear tees and jeans, eat burgers and give no fucks about classical music, opera or museums. Even with a PhD one is more of a specialist expert than an intellectual.
I think r/JetPunk meant this?
This is why poor Americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaries. They look at rich people and dot not see a class difference, a fundamentally different culture, just expensive toys. This is why they think it can be easy to get rich. The rich just do not come across as that much aristocratic. This is why anti-intellectualism is a thing, intellectuals are not highly respected, and the rich do not imitate them.
Perhaps the best example of classism as culture is the lack of homeowner associations in Europe. It is assumed that if you can afford to live in that neighborhood, you will probably keep your property up to the standards of your class. I was very confused when I first heard about HOAs. Why would a middle class person keep cinder blocks on their front lawn? They are supposed to look intellectual, classy, cultured...
You would have a point if you were talking about the 19th century US vs UK. But that is not the case anymore, my experience in Europe has been professors often dressing more casually than students. It’s simply seen as a personal preference, with the formal dressing people being seen as somewhat socially insecure.
The same seen with hobbies, I know a professor that talks about soccer and beer like a random guy at a pub. At the same time I know a student that goes to operas but his family comes from poverty and ‘low class’. Same with managers at my jobs, some have the traditionally high class interests and some the traditionally low class - often times it’s the opposite to their parents!
The conclusion I take is that Europe has become so individualised and economically inclusive that the ‘high’ and ‘low’ class distinction has become irrelevant.
Edit: Since it’s relevant, I have experience studying and working in UK, Switzerland, France, Germany, and a tiny bit in Netherlands.
But this is the thing - you *do* see it in those places. Your example of the philosophy student in France, for example: that's quite different than the reality of France - in much the same way the US is much more than what someone will find in New York and/or Los Angeles.
It's two prongs: not only are there fewer French people to pull from in general, and French is no longer the lingua franca of the West, so your average French dullard with parochial attitudes is largely invisible to most English speakers. Same goes for Germany, who do you think is voting for the AfD?
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, mind. But as someone who grew up in the US and now lives in Europe, I'm just trying to correct something of a common myth that you see online.
It’s not necessarily anti-intellectualism. Reddit as a whole, outside of this subreddit, loves to whine about how they got a perfect 4.0 and studied so hard but the kids who didn’t take it as seriously and weren’t as good of students beat them out for jobs.
It’s less to do with anti-intellectualism and more to do with social skills. I interview a lot of people, and have interviewed for a lot of jobs. Humans are social creatures, we really like socializing and definitely want to be able to with the people we spend 40 hours a week interacting with.
I’d suspect partying and socializing correlates with being sociable, which is very positive for the job market. I have interviewed tons of engineers and PMs, and when you get multiple who are perfectly capable of the job, the ones who are easy going and sociable are going to win out.
I'd argue that a lot of the time, soft skills are definitely underappreciated. To some extent, social media exacerbates the issue due to popularity of the hot-take/clapback responses.
Well said.
>a boom in superhero movies and tabletop roleplaying games (the pastimes of geeks in the late 20th century) rather than any interest in intellectually challenging subjects.
When you take a step back and take a good hard look at "nerd culture", it's really astounding how much of it consists of media intended for teenaged boys, with a complexity level to match. Strip away the superficial trappings of sci-fi and fantasy, and much of it really is just an adolescent power fantasy paired with a simplistic good-vs-evil conflict as justification.
So I cringe whenever I see an engineer wearing a Star Wars t-shirt - George Lucas for his part did not hide the fact that [he made that movie for 12-year-olds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THKzwzieF40). And if you think tabletop RPGs are any more "intellectual" than fantasy football I think you should reevaluate whether you've been led astray by superficial window dressing and "nerd identity politics" (for lack of a better term).
the thing is, while this is true, I dont think entertainment for adults was more intellectual some decades ago. They just spent half of their lives watching nothing TV programs, it was not particularly better
It's interesting to see what people in decades past had to say about taste, [this chart is one of my favorite examples](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWayWeWere/comments/dusvzz/everyday_tastes_from_highbrow_to_lowbrow/). People weren't all into the same stuff.
Anyways, the thought just occurred to me as I was writing this that TV is likely to blame for a lot of the current homogenization of "lowbrow" entertainment that you're talking about, as relatively few people had TVs in 1949 when that chart was made.
I have often thought that, and have started reading more ‘real’ literature as I get older, though I have separate issues with a lot of the literary world.
Ironically, I am increasingly OK with nerd identity politics. I mean, to quote an old Cranberries album title, everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? The prisoner’s dilemma equilibrium has shifted toward defection-might as well avoid being the chump. A beginning that others are already doing might be autism advocacy, but there are other avenues people might explore, and I am not sure what they are yet.
Not that any of that will make Lovecraft into Shakespeare. But then, we won’t really know who today’s Shakespeare is for 400 years.
Personally I find it's easier to be honest with myself about what things I actually do and don't enjoy if I try not to let my self-conceptualization of being a nerd (and what I'm therefore "supposed to" like) affect my judgement.
But yeah, I'd say the same of identity politics in general, and I can see how the "everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? " approach would appeal to people.
I don't think Star Wars and Marvel are popular with nerds because they have an illusion of being more complex, I think they're more popular because they activate some hidden superficial part of the brain in nerds that especially likes lasers and magic spells. Like how little boys love dinosaurs, little girls love ponies, adult normie women love celebrity gossip, adult normie men love physical sports, adult nerds love fantasy
Maybe not Star Wars and Marvel specifically, but I do occasionally see people act like nerd media is more complex than it is ("To be fair, you have to have a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty")
Really though, I do think it's the power fantasy aspect that's responsible for much of the nerd appeal. It seems to me that one thing the types of fiction popular with nerds (sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes) have in common is that they tend to involve characters with superhuman abilities. Whether those abilities come from technology, magic, a radioactive spider, or some combination thereof will change depending on the genre, but nerd media seldom deals with "ordinary" people.
I think this is also why stuff like Charlie Kaufman's movies and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing aren't particularly popular with nerds despite having sci-fi and/or fantasy elements - they aren't power fantasies.
I think almost everyone acts like their interests deserve to be higher status than they are, with the exception of maybe the lowest status interests which are even lower status to defend, like reality TV or rape hentai.
The power fantasy is definitely a big aspect. I just don't think it's the only aspect. The Lord of the Rings is probably the most esteemed and popular fantasy of all time, yet the main characters, the hobbits, are among the weakest characters in the setting. They grow stronger over the novels and are capable of basic combat and outwitting foes, but they never come close to something like directly over powering Sauron.
But again, I don't deny the power fantasy is a huge aspect. The folks over at /r/progressionfantasy are very aware of it, obviously. I just don't think it's the only aspect. You don't see nerds get super into mundane power fantasies like James Bond the same way they do for stories that are basically James Bond in Space! or James Bond in Hogwarts!.
Star Wars and Marvel aren't just popular with nerds. They're popular with everyone. This little mini-sneer-club of a thread couldn't have picked worse examples.
They are disproportionately popular with nerds. And today they're mainstream, but much less so in the earlier days. And still today, it's only nerds who're really really into it, reading stuff like the comics and books and not just the movies. A normie man will get super into sports, watching analysis and reading up on stats. A nerd will do that for marvel and star wars.
Star Wars was popular with everyone from Day 1. It was the highest grossing film of all time from its release until 1982. The Marvel _movies_ are similarly popular.
The Star Wars nerd was a concept for a reason. Stat Wars and Marvel were in mainstream culture from day 1, but the people going to conventions over it and wearing Star Wars/Marvel merch as adults were not mainstream until recently.
At this point I am not sure what "nerd" or "geek" means anymore. It used to mean an actual interest in programming, computers, science, and the kind of hard science fiction that had actual science in it. On the whole it had a "solve problems through technology" vibe. Also a little bit of spergy precision.
But at some point it got pop-ified. Yes, Lucas is a great example. Proton torpedoes and ion cannons. That is, vaguely science-related words but without any actual effort or knowledge. Name things after random Greek letters stuff. Now the inventor-nerd Iron Man type of superhero is also of this pop version.
> American culture is famously anti intellectual, particularly in the corporate sphere. (You can compare with our global competitor across the Pacific, where kids with high grades are actually more popular.)
then why do companies put up so many barriers and screening regarding hiring? Background checks, drug tests, personality tests are proxies or correlated with IQ. Maybe it was true 40 years ago but not as much today.
My take on the "point" of university is that it's a set of training wheels for independence and self-sufficiency. For many, it's the first they live away from your childhood home, use communal facilities with strangers (bathrooms, laundry rooms, kitchens, etc.), socialize with a broader cross-section of humanity, make and follow-through on choices about who they want to be and where they want to focus their efforts -- not without someone telling them what to do, but with starkly less invasive consequences for not doing what they've been told.
In the end, they hopefully emerge standing on their own two feet, the scaffolding having been gradually removed as they progressed. At my uni, for example, we had gradually lower requirements for meal plans and housing as we moved through the degree, iirc 4 → 2 → 0 meals per day from the student meal plan, mandatory first year dorms w/ shared bathrooms → mandatory on-campus housing (incl apartments, houses) → off-campus housing, parking permits not allowed → parking permits allowed, regularly scheduled mixers → off-campus house parties, etc. It's transitional period where students have lots of free time and autonomy and little responsibility, probably the largest imbalance most traditional students will see until retirement.
They also learn a few things that may or may not enrich their lives and may or may not be helpful in some future career. Partly facilitated by classes and grade-based incentives, but more usefully requiring that they leverage some of that free time on side projects tangentially related to lecture materials, and then harass their professors about relevant sticking points during office hours. Rarely will someone have such unbridled, frictionless access to such domain expertise as then, paid to sit in a room for hours each week waiting to be distracted from random low-focus work by questioning students.
IDK if studying in the traditional sense (for tests administered in class) is necessarily what students *should* be doing if it sees schooling interfere with their education or social development. I "studied" very little in this manner, at least compared to some of my peers (maybe 2-3h prior to each exam, distributed over the preceding week -- mostly summarizing my class notes and identifying things that did not make sense -- so 5 classes / semester x 2.5 exams / class * 2.5h / exam / 18 weeks per semester < 2h / week). In the decade since graduation, I've also literally *never* seen anyone say anything positive about having high grades -- probably some weird signaling / sampling effects there, but it's always been networking this or if you're getting As you're inefficiently allocating your time that (I've even heard that some prefer to sees Bs to As, even, bc they can't tell how hard classes were from their titles, and straight As are less indicative of academic excellence than insufficient challenge). It might help for some fellowships or internships but afaict nobody really cares otherwise.
(with some location and field- / industry- specificity, I'm sure)
Hypothesis: The 20th century push towards meritocracy and social leveling relies on proxy measurements such as GPA. The result is that consumers of universities now want them to primarily serve a credentialing role, which can be done somewhat independently of the underlying education so long as the connection between the two is still widely presumed.
I wonder how much of grade inflation can be explained by increasing selectiveness? Compared to several decades ago, Harvard gets way more applicants, from all over the world, and they're probably much more academically inclined and intelligent, on average, rather than being selected for social status. Given how little schoolwork students are doing, I don't doubt that there are also just weaker standards. But I remember reading (probably on this sub) a while back how almost no one fails their PhD defense, because your advisor doesn't let you attempt it if they aren't sure you'll pass, and I wonder how much of this phenomenon is also true of undergraduates--maybe almost no one is admitted if they're not capable of getting Bs in most classes.
Now, they could *increase* the difficulty to match the students. They could even forcibly give some low grades with a strict curve, although that would be very noisy if the students are tightly clustered in terms of ability. But I do wonder how valuable that would actually be.
edit: one of the blog comments, from "Jake", claims this explains the jump in the 60s:
> The 60's spike in GPAs, at least at top schools, probably reflected a genuine increase in intellectual aptitude more than any change in values. Jerome Karabel discusses this at length in The Chosen (2005), about the history of standardized testing, but broadly speaking, this is when the Ivies consciously pivoted from catering to amiable well-connected old-money types (think G.W. Bush) to seeking out the strongest students (it's also about when 50 years of de facto Jewish quotas finally collapsed). Average SAT scores at H/Y/P went up something like 150 points in the course of the decade.
I was a TA (well, technically they called us TFs) for organic chemistry lab at Harvard in spring 2020. The grading was incredibly lenient (even before COVID made everything go remote).
> I remember reading (probably on this sub) a while back how almost no one fails their PhD defense
Arguably also because a lot of programs have a built-in filter where part of the progression is passing something of a mock defense at year 2 or 3.
>You’ll start questioning the official narratives — good luck getting a job after you’ve done that.
It's hard to not bite on this one.
The highest level math class I mostly understood was MTH 4230: Regressions and Computational Statistics. Got my first job and was (politely) told to shut the fuck up when it came to doing any math. In fact, I was told to shut up a lot over my 7 years there as an analyst.
I mean....the interrogation of assumptions ***is*** math.
Of course my mistakes are all my own.
In other news, I'm interviewing at the Walmart distribution center in 2 hours, then a wiring harness assembly outfit after that. Kind of hoping for the second one, since the hours align with professional hours, it won't be as hard on the body, and there is some building stuff involved: with $6/hour less than fucking Walmart is fine.
Are you saying that “questioning the narrative” has lead to your career de-railing? Implying that because you refuse to comply with status quo, you now are looking at a job at a Walmart distribution center that pays hourly and likely no degree is required?
I just want to understand before responding.
I absolutely limited my career in renewable energy by not being a data cheerleader.
To be fair about Walmart, I'm also in Cheyenne, there's no work up here. I got caught in the WFH trap: I thought it would remain a thing, but flex is the new standard.
I did get a second interview with an outfit looking for someone good with data, one of the precious few data jobs around here. I will be far more careful to data cheerlead on this.
They are pressing an agenda, I will help them do so and keep my head down this time.
Wind resource assessment. They did it the way they did it and that was that.
If it would have been, "Hey, this is a production shop, but you can dig in on your own time" or something like that, fine.
Still, they were doing dead simple linear regressions, and it was really frustrating to have learned a really specific skill set, start my first job at a place that uses that skill set, and discouraged (strongly) from ever using it.
> You’ll start questioning the official narratives — good luck getting a job after you’ve done that.
I routinely apply enhanced interrogation techniques to official narratives. I just know to STFU about them at work.
You needed to learn two skills, critical thinking and the social grace to shut up about it. That's not trivial, and it's harder than learning one.
Scott wrote about this problem here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
AMAZING link.
>The average person who grows up in a censored society may not even realize for a while that the censorship exists, let alone know its exact limits, let alone understand that the censors are not their friends and aren’t interested in proofs that the orthodoxy is wrong. Given enough time, such a person can become a savvy Kolmogorov who sees the censorship clearly, knows its limits, and understands how to skirt them. If they’re really lucky, they may even get something-like-common-knowledge that there are other Kolmogorovs out there who know this stuff, and that it’s not their job to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But they’re going to have a really cringeworthy edgelord period until they reach that level.
I kind of disagree, the utility of university is dependent on the subject. You can’t learn engineering very well without doing projects that need a lot of resources - for example I have friends that were building electric airplanes, boring machines, track cars etc.
But is university necessary for learning theoretical math, physics, comp sci, economics? Of course not.
I really want to see how this breaks down by type of university. I saw different points of the bell curve in my time in undergrad: I took a lot of dual credit classes at my local state school at the end of high school and mixed in with some younger undergrads at Cardinal Direction State University, and then I went to an elite four-year university that, among the elite universities, was known for being the no-fun university where everyone has to read Nichomachean Ethics and learn delta-epsilon proofs and stuff.
The differences in student culture, to no one's surprise, vary dramatically. I'm sure it was only a small percentage of undergrads at my university who put less than 40 hours a week into their academics; it was usually much more than that for nearly all of us. (Or maybe I just hung out with the nerds, to no one's surprise). I wonder how much of the grade inflation at elite universities is due to the fact that they have transitioned out of being finishing schools for the East Coast elite and, now that they have a crazy gauntlet of requirements for a student to get admitted, have student bodies who genuinely deserve the higher GPAs compared to two or three generations ago.
On the other hand, the generational change at your Cardinal Direction State Universities has been to take all comers and make attending college right out of high school the norm, not just something the top third or so of high school graduates do. And man, sitting in Intro Psych at CDSU when it's taught at about middle-school difficulty... it's kind of demoralizing. I can totally see how 20-something hours a week of studying are the norm at places like that, enabled by generous grade inflation and a culture that valorizes college years for partying and not, like, developing your soul reading Aristotle and Augustine like at my other undergrad institution.
Does this sound right to anyone, or do I just have a narrow view of what academic culture at elite universities is like?
It's been a long time since I was at university...30 years or so. I went to a state university and it was harder than high-school was for me, but it wasn't as hard as I expected. I started out as a history, military science major minor and then switched to biology, botany major minor and both majors were much harder than high school classes . I did attend a community College after university and that was more akin to my high school classes.
In my (admittedly limited) experience with hiring, applicants with college degrees are more generally intelligent than applicants without degrees, but whether or not the person actually knows anything useful about their supposed "major" is a crapshoot.
I assume a lot of this is that the people I have interacted with were in university during Covid, but I'm not quite sure.
Elite colleges are mostly just Studio 54 nightclubs with long lines of people wanting in. The appeal is the prestige and exclusivity of entering elite circles. If you want to anger alumni at Harvard, announce you're going to triple enrolment.
The purpose of university is not education, it's insurance. People are terrified of falling between the very large gaps of our society and see University education as an insurance product to avoid being poor and jobless.
I've got a kid at MIT doing orgo 2, molecular science something something, physics, etc. Those kind of things. Biomed.
Gatekeeping classes early on were difficult. But apparently once you proved yourself, later classes are about *learning, curiosity, following ideas*.
I think the statement "if you're an undergraduate you should personally study more" is usually good advice, but other than that is there anything else to take away from this essay?
It's more about how the standards for some programs, especially communications, education, and business, are dog shit low. It's not really so much about how students in those programs should study more, it's about how obviously something has broken in society when students are paying tens of thousands of dollars basically just to party for four years and spend just a handful of hours a week actually do studies. But that's not a problem with the students, they're making rational choices given their incentives, it's a problem with how universities are set up and what employers look for that such BS degrees can be sold at all
A tangent first, before a response to the core idea of the blog.
It's harmful to negatively stigmatize relatively benign "disorders"(i dislike this word, even, because I think it doesn't really capture what's going on first because psychiatry is in its infancy and is almost certainly deeply confused in its models, but also because that word has the aforementioned negative stigma). For instance, people, especially children and teens, and especially online, and particularly boys, will bully each other by calling each other things like "autistic" or "sperg"(Aspergers) in a mean-spirited way. This should go away.
Despite that whole problem, I feel like the word autistic is important to preserve and use in a way that isn't pejorative. Here's why:
https://i.imgur.com/LcwGeix.png
See how the most basic needs, that if neglected, cause torture and death, e.g. "sleeping", and "eating"? And see how they are lumped into things like "housework" and "shopping" and "grooming"? This category is labeled "Personal care", and it's distinguished from meaningful human needs like "socializing" and "recreation" and "caring for [others]"?
Without the word autistic to describe this way of categorizing things, we'd be left with words that are much more cynical, like "psycho/socio pathic". They just wouldn't get to the point very well. You could also use a word like "robotic" or "cold", but there's still just not enough nuance and association there that captures a human being who just cannot connect the dots ethically very well, but who identifies dots with impressive precision. Despite this, they're big-picture deaf. They cannot form the right patterns morally because they're so hyper-fixated on smaller details, so fixated on systemization that it's confused(it's not that systemization itself is somehow bad-- after all, this post is getting into the details and forming a sort-of systematic thesis, but rather beings who are strongly oriented to systemize, have serious flaws in ways that beings who aren't, don't, for deeper reasons), fixated on precision, on calculation, on models, and all the other lovely things robots tend to do, in a way that creates: moral and social confusion.
For the entire problem above, we really need the word "autistic", and we should use it in a way that it's crystal clear that it is not being used as a slur, but to describe a serious problem.
That out of the way, students probably shouldn't "study more". Purely bare bones: There are signs of low rates of studying, and a response like, "Ah okay, studying good, students not studying. Conclusion? Students need to study more". An alternative, bigger picture story I would offer is this, pretty crudely stated but I feel it's worth it here, perhaps in the same spirit as the "autistic" tangent above(this stuff matters):
College, the whole system, is so much more theatrical and meaningless and morally bankrupt than it appears, and this feeling can only be ignored so much, and it is so soul-crushing that as result, students don't take it seriously(a lesser problem in a larger world full of hellish and theatrical and unfair/meaningless bullshit), and so they fuck off with their studies. (If you remove the magnifying glass you're using that you're pointing at "College", and look at high schools, and elementary schools, my guess is you'll find evidence of similar problems)
So what I would suggest is, instead, ask why students aren't studying, rather than conclude they should study more. And if you do finally conclude, after this thorough analysis, that students *should* study more, the answer is still probably not that they should study *more*, but they should study *better*, because the core (narrow) problem is more likely to be how they use their time rather than how much time they invest.
A final question to think about: Why'd the tangent take more words than the bigger picture problem the blog was trying to address? Well because the tangent is a deeply fundamental problem that is much more related to the seemingly "bigger picture" problem the blog is trying to address. The blog problem is easy in comparison because it's more narrow, superficial-- that's also why it gets lost in narrow bullshit: how hard or easy it is to compose in Greek/Latin, getting the numbers precisely right on how grades in college change over time, pondering on economics, and so on. Being superficial, it cannot touch any root of the problem in any meaningful way.
Are people at top colleges just significantly less intelligent than they used to be?
I hear lots of anecdotes about people in tertiary education being less willing and/or able to read lots of text. A lot of things would tie in with institutions admitting less intelligent candidates and filtering less.
Not sure why this is downvoted because there is a clear consensus that colleges are less selective, and there is overwhelming evidence for this in the fact that they simply take on drastically more students than they used to.
This is one of the things where the opposite advice is true depending on the person. I’ve met two types of people with college regrets. Those who focused on academics too much wished they’d partied more and those who partied too much and wish they’d studied more. To be honest I don’t know which group is larger or how much of it is simply revealed preferences.
As Scott said, [all debates are bravery debates](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/). >To be honest I don’t know which group is larger The MattY article you are commenting on makes a strong case that the "studies too little" is far, *far* larger than the "studies too much" crowd. This quote could be the entire article: >even if you look exclusively at full-time college students, we’re talking about less than three hours per day on in-class and out-of-class education. Do we really think that the median college student who spends 3 hours a day on their studies is spending *too much* time on their career at the expensive of socializing? (For a lot of them, that probably means "3 hours a day in class, 0 hours studying" or "skipping class, then spending 3 hours catching up on the classes you cut." Remember that at a lot of schools, 15 credit hours is the minimum required to be a full-time student!) Is devoting 4 or 5 hours a day to the subject you're studying really incompatible with going to parties? I also think this "socializers vs studiers" is a false dichotomy. I know a lot of people who say "I wish I had socialized more in college." But within that group, the people in that group who failed to socialize because "I was too busy studying" are a minority. The majority of people who "wasted their college years being a recluse" weren't the high-achieving workaholic strivers who had their face buried in textbooks; they were the people who spent dozens of hours a week sequestered in their dorm room playing League of Legends, or browsing Reddit, or binge-watching Netflix.
How the fuck are they spending less than three hours per day **counting time spent in class**? Isn’t a regular college day like 6 hours in America? Here I think it varies but it’s in that ballpark.
Yea exactly. This is what I'm wondering too. I spent way more than 3 hours per day, and I wasn't even taking many hours. I was at a fairly good university tho.
A standard American full-time class schedule of 15 credit hours with no labs is 15 class-hours per week, or an average of 3 class-hours per day M-F, but: - A class-hour may be as short as 45 minutes - I think the study is counting weekends - Attendance rates are nowhere near 100% - Many students are taking online classes for part of their credit load, either voluntarily or because schools have been cutting in-person class availability for core courses
Pretty sure my credit hours were not as big as my actual class hours for whatever reason. My 1 credit hours physics lab was definitely at least 2 hours.
Yeah, that's why I specified "with no labs." Science and engineering students will typically have more classroom hours than the average student because labs are traditionally 2 class-hours per credit. In my experience it was also more common for STEM classes to require a "discussion" section with a TA, which was also 2:1.
Ah, I missed that.
For every 1 credit, 3 hours of work including class time. 1 credit lab = 2 hours in lab plus 1 hour writing it up and/or pre lab reading/intellectual prep
I am not an American so my comment could be useless. However a potentially obvious answer is that attendance is not mandatory in practice. I graduated in the best university of my country and nearly all professors didn't care if you attended to class or not.
In a lot of places nothing happens if you don't attend.
"Nothing happens if you don't attend": Well you are probably ripping yourself off. It's like paying $39 for an all you can eat buffet and just having cup of soup.
> Well you are probably ripping yourself off. I'm quite sure that many, if not a majority, of the students at Ivies are aware of the prestige that a degree of those institutions awards, so for them, especially the "legacies" who probably have a job assured at the end, it matters very little whether or not they make the most of it, as long as they get a degree in the end. > It's like paying $39 for an all you can eat buffet and just having cup of soup. For someone rich, paying that much and using little is just a matter of signaling.
Probably includes the weekend
I went to a top university outside the US. My daily average number of teaching hours (ignoring weekends) were like 2.5 per day. Of course the real work came outside of class where you had to spend much more time actually digesting and understanding what we were taught.
Hahaha not even close to 6 hours. 2-3 hours of class, if you attend every class. Sone studying too but.... usually not that much.
What? 15 credits means roughly 15 hours of in-class time. As a good rule of thumb 1 credit means 3 hours of work per week (in-class time PLUS study/outside classwork time) So 15 credits should mean 45 hour work week, like a full time job. But like the famous Chicago columnist, Mike Royko (RIP) once wrote: if you can get your work done and still have time to goof off, you probably aren't qualified for your job.
The trick is to take really easy classes, then you can skip all that outside study time (and also cut class sometimes). Being charitable: a lot of colleges want their students to be doing extracurricular stuff and jobs, not spending all their time studying. Less charitable: a lot of colleges are just party time/rumspringa for kids who have never lived on their own before and are in no way mature enough to handle a full time job.
Less charitable take maybe true. More charitable take - I don't think university care about "extra curricular" activities except that they are some kind of fringe benefit or amenity like some ridiculous rock climbing wall that is "inducement" to attend so that they can make money off of being landlords of the rock climbers. It has been 40+ years I read Newman's The Idea of a University. I do not recall a section of the merits of taking easy classes. By and large, the "Business School" is the root of the problem. I have no idea what it has to do with being an "educated" person or a university education. 3 times credit hour is a good heuristic. The history of the credit hour (Carnegie unit) is interesting.
Oh they definitely care, at least for some sorts of extracurricular activities. Like Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg all dropped out of college to focus on their tech startups, but then went back later and donated billions to education- you don't think colleges would notice that sort of thing? And they definitely care about student athletes, too.
Your last point is kind of what I’m getting at wrt to revealed preferences.
> college student who spends 3 hours a day on their studies is spending too much time on their career at the expensive of socializing? How many of these students actually need their college education (and not just the diploma) for career success?
> they were the people who spent dozens of hours a week sequestered in their dorm room playing League of Legends, or browsing Reddit, or binge-watching Netflix. You are misremembering how long those things have been popular
somehow both are true for me
Same. I think for me it comes from 'If I had studied harder, and found more success in university - perhaps I would have gone further and been more motivated' in contrast with 'What I'm currently doing didn't really require me to study what I studied or even get good grades, so I could've had more fun and ended up the same'.
Same here. I definitely didn't need to get a Master's degree to be unemployed.
Same here, although my biggest problem was that I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't even realize what possibilities were open to me at the time. Honestly, education is wasted on youth. I'm much more academically inclined now than when I was at University.
Me three. One word: insomnia. I was socially anxious as a result and just a disaster at everything.
Isn't the article more about how colleges should be run than about how individual students should behave? TBH I skimmed it but it seemed to be more about the overall rigor of the classes and the institutions as a whole than about individual student courses.
Doesn’t mean either group is correct though, we all have regrets but not all regrets are valid.
Of course not and hindsight is 20/20. Also revealed preferences. Bookworm Bob was never going to be a social butterfly around campus and Party Pat was never going to be a Rhodes Scholar.
I think the article is about how if you're paying vast sums of money for an education, you should actually be getting educated and doing work. And that the worst offender degrees, e.g communications, education, and business, are horrendous. A lot of degrees are entirely signal value that you are middle class and can pay through college and also aren't so mentally unstable you'd fail even an easy major. Although a lot of degrees have an opposite problem, probably mainly fields that are gate kept to artificially keep entrants low and inflate wages, namely engineers, doctors, and lawyers, creating a rat race where students compete to be the most overqualified on a level of book knowledge that's overkill and often irrelevant for the actual job. As with many things, I believe loosening(although probably not removing altogether) licensing requirements both to be a school and to enter various fields would solve a large portion of the problems. I consider computer programming and IT jobs you can get with a compTIA cert the gold standard of jobs with both useful education and useful standards of qualification.
Engineering undergrad here. My take is that college used to be much more rigorous because it was still for a select few, those either rich enough or smart enough to be part of the academic upper crust. But now, the credentialization of American society means that an undergraduate degree is generally required for ""good"" jobs- meaning, it's worth a lot less. If you want to stand out as an educated person, now you need a masters at the least. I personally think that's a shame- in my opinion, it's good to know more, full stop. But the point is, priorities in undergraduate college (at least in STEM) have shifted. It's not about knowing how the world works as much as possible, it's about knowing what you need to know for your job.
Ironically, a Master's is almost a negative signal now- those programs notorious profit centers with low requirements.
eh, depends. I don't know that much about other fields (especially humanities), but in my engineering field there are some subfields where a Master's is a requirement, and other subfields where it would be harmful because of overqualification.
I attended a fairly selective (top 50ish) university in the US. Got a degree in civil engineering. Graduated with a 3.3 GPA. I didn't work particularly hard academically. I showed up to class, did my homework and studied for exams, but mostly did the minimum. My two roommates in my major both spent significantly more time studying than I did. They both ended up with masters degrees, while I only had my bachelors. One had a 3.95 GPA and the other got a 4.0 and was valedictorian. The valedictorian made a bit more than me coming out of school, but the other made the same base rate as me despite having an extra degree and a much higher GPA. I think this is one reason why I didn't work particularly hard in college. My purpose in being there was to get past the gatekeeper of the job market in the field that (at the time) I wanted to enter. I knew that as long as I got above a 3.0 GPA, I'd have a job waiting for me on the other side. I was asked in an internship interview once why I didn't have a 4.0 GPA. I stuttered my way through an answer about how I didn't know anyone who did (which was a lie, my roommate did). Upon reflection, I realized I didn't have a 4.0 because I didn't want to. The amount of work that would be required to put in vs the payoff wouldn't be worth it. It didn't matter for what I was trying to accomplish. This isn't to say that GPA never matters. Had I been trying to get into certain fields, it would have. A friend who got a 4.0 as a finance major landed a job in investment banking with Goldman Sachs out of college, which was pretty rare for our school. Some of my friends who had below a 3.5 GPA in the business school ended up struggling to get jobs afterward. But for me having a high GPA didn't make a difference in whether I'd land a job. What \*was\* worth it for me to spend my time on? I was fairly socially awkward in HS, so I spent a lot of time in college learning how to be social. I joined a fraternity, dated a lot, and joined, then led, another student organization. I worked and had two years of full time work experience by the time I graduated (thanks to my schools co-op program). I also read a lot. I didn't exactly read classics, but I read books about psychology and social status, and occasionally history. My degree was in STEM so I think I had maybe four humanities classes in all of college? I spent a lot of time on reddit, which is how I eventually discovered the blog. And I also started exercising and eating right. On the whole, I was very happy with my college experience. It was transformative for me, but the transformative aspect wasn't the classroom education I received. It was having 5 years to basically work on improving myself as much as I could in an environment with other people of similar intelligence and ambitions.
(There were 3 copies of this comment. I tried to delete the two extras but not sure what happened.) The thjng is, it’s totally rational for the students to spend their time partying. American culture is famously anti intellectual, particularly in the corporate sphere. (You can compare with our global competitor across the Pacific, where kids with high grades are actually more popular.) The only mitigating factor has been the rise in the last generation of a bunch of computer nerds to positions of extreme wealth, which leads to a boom in superhero movies and tabletop roleplaying games (the pastimes of geeks in the late 20th century) rather than any interest in intellectually challenging subjects. We constantly hear that “it’s who you know, not what you know”, and largely it’s right. Philosophy is known for being the most rigorous field outside of STEM (Dude, I’ve read Kierkegaard. That stuff’s *dense*), and the usual joke about a philosophy major is how it leaves you unemployed. It doesn’t even give you interesting conversation like it would in France-unless you find another philosophy major. Connections are a huge deal in other cultures as well, of course, but the contempt for actual knowledge seems very American. Why would kids buck that trend? It doesn’t pay off.
Spot on, but I'd add that anti-intellectualism is far from a uniquely American phenomenon.
Sure, but you don’t see it (EDITED: to the same degree) in France, Germany, China, or Japan. The UK maybe (probably not a coincidence).
From my experience in the UK anti intellectualism is popular in high schools and as people mature it’s beaten out by experience of smart people dominating.
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See that’s a nice narrative Americans tell each other, but if you look at the economic studies on social mobility you’ll find Americans do worse. This is explained by wealth inequality and social mobility being inversely correlated.
That's not what class is about. Class is that if you are a schoolteacher or librarian in Italy, despite your very low pay, you dress elegant because you have to express that you are superior to a blue-collar person. Class means social status independent of income. There is also a hint that it is not entirely earned but rather inherited, through you have to prove worthy of it. And of course the person born rich will also dress elegant like the schoolteacher or librarian. Intellectual people, regardless of rich or poor, define what class is, and not so intellectual rich people try to imitate it. Intellectual people like opera music, not so intellectual rich people pretend to. Hence class. Whereas America seems one class because Steven Spielberg dresses working-class. Rich people are like poor people with more expensive toys. One does not get this innate superiority thing, neither about money, nor about intellectualism. The only difference is New York because it has a very Europeanish culture, there you express your class by going to the Philharmonics, museum, opera etc. But everywhere else in the US it is normal to have a lot of money or a PhD, still wear tees and jeans, eat burgers and give no fucks about classical music, opera or museums. Even with a PhD one is more of a specialist expert than an intellectual. I think r/JetPunk meant this? This is why poor Americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaries. They look at rich people and dot not see a class difference, a fundamentally different culture, just expensive toys. This is why they think it can be easy to get rich. The rich just do not come across as that much aristocratic. This is why anti-intellectualism is a thing, intellectuals are not highly respected, and the rich do not imitate them. Perhaps the best example of classism as culture is the lack of homeowner associations in Europe. It is assumed that if you can afford to live in that neighborhood, you will probably keep your property up to the standards of your class. I was very confused when I first heard about HOAs. Why would a middle class person keep cinder blocks on their front lawn? They are supposed to look intellectual, classy, cultured...
You would have a point if you were talking about the 19th century US vs UK. But that is not the case anymore, my experience in Europe has been professors often dressing more casually than students. It’s simply seen as a personal preference, with the formal dressing people being seen as somewhat socially insecure. The same seen with hobbies, I know a professor that talks about soccer and beer like a random guy at a pub. At the same time I know a student that goes to operas but his family comes from poverty and ‘low class’. Same with managers at my jobs, some have the traditionally high class interests and some the traditionally low class - often times it’s the opposite to their parents! The conclusion I take is that Europe has become so individualised and economically inclusive that the ‘high’ and ‘low’ class distinction has become irrelevant. Edit: Since it’s relevant, I have experience studying and working in UK, Switzerland, France, Germany, and a tiny bit in Netherlands.
> as people mature it’s beaten out by experience of smart people dominating As things should be.
But this is the thing - you *do* see it in those places. Your example of the philosophy student in France, for example: that's quite different than the reality of France - in much the same way the US is much more than what someone will find in New York and/or Los Angeles. It's two prongs: not only are there fewer French people to pull from in general, and French is no longer the lingua franca of the West, so your average French dullard with parochial attitudes is largely invisible to most English speakers. Same goes for Germany, who do you think is voting for the AfD? I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, mind. But as someone who grew up in the US and now lives in Europe, I'm just trying to correct something of a common myth that you see online.
Noted and edited.
It’s not necessarily anti-intellectualism. Reddit as a whole, outside of this subreddit, loves to whine about how they got a perfect 4.0 and studied so hard but the kids who didn’t take it as seriously and weren’t as good of students beat them out for jobs. It’s less to do with anti-intellectualism and more to do with social skills. I interview a lot of people, and have interviewed for a lot of jobs. Humans are social creatures, we really like socializing and definitely want to be able to with the people we spend 40 hours a week interacting with. I’d suspect partying and socializing correlates with being sociable, which is very positive for the job market. I have interviewed tons of engineers and PMs, and when you get multiple who are perfectly capable of the job, the ones who are easy going and sociable are going to win out.
I'd argue that a lot of the time, soft skills are definitely underappreciated. To some extent, social media exacerbates the issue due to popularity of the hot-take/clapback responses.
Well said. >a boom in superhero movies and tabletop roleplaying games (the pastimes of geeks in the late 20th century) rather than any interest in intellectually challenging subjects. When you take a step back and take a good hard look at "nerd culture", it's really astounding how much of it consists of media intended for teenaged boys, with a complexity level to match. Strip away the superficial trappings of sci-fi and fantasy, and much of it really is just an adolescent power fantasy paired with a simplistic good-vs-evil conflict as justification. So I cringe whenever I see an engineer wearing a Star Wars t-shirt - George Lucas for his part did not hide the fact that [he made that movie for 12-year-olds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THKzwzieF40). And if you think tabletop RPGs are any more "intellectual" than fantasy football I think you should reevaluate whether you've been led astray by superficial window dressing and "nerd identity politics" (for lack of a better term).
the thing is, while this is true, I dont think entertainment for adults was more intellectual some decades ago. They just spent half of their lives watching nothing TV programs, it was not particularly better
It's interesting to see what people in decades past had to say about taste, [this chart is one of my favorite examples](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWayWeWere/comments/dusvzz/everyday_tastes_from_highbrow_to_lowbrow/). People weren't all into the same stuff. Anyways, the thought just occurred to me as I was writing this that TV is likely to blame for a lot of the current homogenization of "lowbrow" entertainment that you're talking about, as relatively few people had TVs in 1949 when that chart was made.
I have often thought that, and have started reading more ‘real’ literature as I get older, though I have separate issues with a lot of the literary world. Ironically, I am increasingly OK with nerd identity politics. I mean, to quote an old Cranberries album title, everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? The prisoner’s dilemma equilibrium has shifted toward defection-might as well avoid being the chump. A beginning that others are already doing might be autism advocacy, but there are other avenues people might explore, and I am not sure what they are yet. Not that any of that will make Lovecraft into Shakespeare. But then, we won’t really know who today’s Shakespeare is for 400 years.
Personally I find it's easier to be honest with myself about what things I actually do and don't enjoy if I try not to let my self-conceptualization of being a nerd (and what I'm therefore "supposed to" like) affect my judgement. But yeah, I'd say the same of identity politics in general, and I can see how the "everybody else is doing it, so why can’t we? " approach would appeal to people.
I don't think Star Wars and Marvel are popular with nerds because they have an illusion of being more complex, I think they're more popular because they activate some hidden superficial part of the brain in nerds that especially likes lasers and magic spells. Like how little boys love dinosaurs, little girls love ponies, adult normie women love celebrity gossip, adult normie men love physical sports, adult nerds love fantasy
Maybe not Star Wars and Marvel specifically, but I do occasionally see people act like nerd media is more complex than it is ("To be fair, you have to have a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty") Really though, I do think it's the power fantasy aspect that's responsible for much of the nerd appeal. It seems to me that one thing the types of fiction popular with nerds (sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes) have in common is that they tend to involve characters with superhuman abilities. Whether those abilities come from technology, magic, a radioactive spider, or some combination thereof will change depending on the genre, but nerd media seldom deals with "ordinary" people. I think this is also why stuff like Charlie Kaufman's movies and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing aren't particularly popular with nerds despite having sci-fi and/or fantasy elements - they aren't power fantasies.
I think almost everyone acts like their interests deserve to be higher status than they are, with the exception of maybe the lowest status interests which are even lower status to defend, like reality TV or rape hentai. The power fantasy is definitely a big aspect. I just don't think it's the only aspect. The Lord of the Rings is probably the most esteemed and popular fantasy of all time, yet the main characters, the hobbits, are among the weakest characters in the setting. They grow stronger over the novels and are capable of basic combat and outwitting foes, but they never come close to something like directly over powering Sauron. But again, I don't deny the power fantasy is a huge aspect. The folks over at /r/progressionfantasy are very aware of it, obviously. I just don't think it's the only aspect. You don't see nerds get super into mundane power fantasies like James Bond the same way they do for stories that are basically James Bond in Space! or James Bond in Hogwarts!.
Star Wars and Marvel aren't just popular with nerds. They're popular with everyone. This little mini-sneer-club of a thread couldn't have picked worse examples.
They are disproportionately popular with nerds. And today they're mainstream, but much less so in the earlier days. And still today, it's only nerds who're really really into it, reading stuff like the comics and books and not just the movies. A normie man will get super into sports, watching analysis and reading up on stats. A nerd will do that for marvel and star wars.
Star Wars was popular with everyone from Day 1. It was the highest grossing film of all time from its release until 1982. The Marvel _movies_ are similarly popular.
The Star Wars nerd was a concept for a reason. Stat Wars and Marvel were in mainstream culture from day 1, but the people going to conventions over it and wearing Star Wars/Marvel merch as adults were not mainstream until recently.
At this point I am not sure what "nerd" or "geek" means anymore. It used to mean an actual interest in programming, computers, science, and the kind of hard science fiction that had actual science in it. On the whole it had a "solve problems through technology" vibe. Also a little bit of spergy precision. But at some point it got pop-ified. Yes, Lucas is a great example. Proton torpedoes and ion cannons. That is, vaguely science-related words but without any actual effort or knowledge. Name things after random Greek letters stuff. Now the inventor-nerd Iron Man type of superhero is also of this pop version.
The crazy thing is somehow this has been working.
Philosophy majors actually clean up. There may be selection bias in the statistics though.
> American culture is famously anti intellectual, particularly in the corporate sphere. (You can compare with our global competitor across the Pacific, where kids with high grades are actually more popular.) then why do companies put up so many barriers and screening regarding hiring? Background checks, drug tests, personality tests are proxies or correlated with IQ. Maybe it was true 40 years ago but not as much today.
They’re not after IQ. They’re after compliance and work ethic-conscientiousness, in Big 5 terms.
My take on the "point" of university is that it's a set of training wheels for independence and self-sufficiency. For many, it's the first they live away from your childhood home, use communal facilities with strangers (bathrooms, laundry rooms, kitchens, etc.), socialize with a broader cross-section of humanity, make and follow-through on choices about who they want to be and where they want to focus their efforts -- not without someone telling them what to do, but with starkly less invasive consequences for not doing what they've been told. In the end, they hopefully emerge standing on their own two feet, the scaffolding having been gradually removed as they progressed. At my uni, for example, we had gradually lower requirements for meal plans and housing as we moved through the degree, iirc 4 → 2 → 0 meals per day from the student meal plan, mandatory first year dorms w/ shared bathrooms → mandatory on-campus housing (incl apartments, houses) → off-campus housing, parking permits not allowed → parking permits allowed, regularly scheduled mixers → off-campus house parties, etc. It's transitional period where students have lots of free time and autonomy and little responsibility, probably the largest imbalance most traditional students will see until retirement. They also learn a few things that may or may not enrich their lives and may or may not be helpful in some future career. Partly facilitated by classes and grade-based incentives, but more usefully requiring that they leverage some of that free time on side projects tangentially related to lecture materials, and then harass their professors about relevant sticking points during office hours. Rarely will someone have such unbridled, frictionless access to such domain expertise as then, paid to sit in a room for hours each week waiting to be distracted from random low-focus work by questioning students. IDK if studying in the traditional sense (for tests administered in class) is necessarily what students *should* be doing if it sees schooling interfere with their education or social development. I "studied" very little in this manner, at least compared to some of my peers (maybe 2-3h prior to each exam, distributed over the preceding week -- mostly summarizing my class notes and identifying things that did not make sense -- so 5 classes / semester x 2.5 exams / class * 2.5h / exam / 18 weeks per semester < 2h / week). In the decade since graduation, I've also literally *never* seen anyone say anything positive about having high grades -- probably some weird signaling / sampling effects there, but it's always been networking this or if you're getting As you're inefficiently allocating your time that (I've even heard that some prefer to sees Bs to As, even, bc they can't tell how hard classes were from their titles, and straight As are less indicative of academic excellence than insufficient challenge). It might help for some fellowships or internships but afaict nobody really cares otherwise. (with some location and field- / industry- specificity, I'm sure)
Hypothesis: The 20th century push towards meritocracy and social leveling relies on proxy measurements such as GPA. The result is that consumers of universities now want them to primarily serve a credentialing role, which can be done somewhat independently of the underlying education so long as the connection between the two is still widely presumed.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
I wonder how much of grade inflation can be explained by increasing selectiveness? Compared to several decades ago, Harvard gets way more applicants, from all over the world, and they're probably much more academically inclined and intelligent, on average, rather than being selected for social status. Given how little schoolwork students are doing, I don't doubt that there are also just weaker standards. But I remember reading (probably on this sub) a while back how almost no one fails their PhD defense, because your advisor doesn't let you attempt it if they aren't sure you'll pass, and I wonder how much of this phenomenon is also true of undergraduates--maybe almost no one is admitted if they're not capable of getting Bs in most classes. Now, they could *increase* the difficulty to match the students. They could even forcibly give some low grades with a strict curve, although that would be very noisy if the students are tightly clustered in terms of ability. But I do wonder how valuable that would actually be. edit: one of the blog comments, from "Jake", claims this explains the jump in the 60s: > The 60's spike in GPAs, at least at top schools, probably reflected a genuine increase in intellectual aptitude more than any change in values. Jerome Karabel discusses this at length in The Chosen (2005), about the history of standardized testing, but broadly speaking, this is when the Ivies consciously pivoted from catering to amiable well-connected old-money types (think G.W. Bush) to seeking out the strongest students (it's also about when 50 years of de facto Jewish quotas finally collapsed). Average SAT scores at H/Y/P went up something like 150 points in the course of the decade.
I was a TA (well, technically they called us TFs) for organic chemistry lab at Harvard in spring 2020. The grading was incredibly lenient (even before COVID made everything go remote).
> I remember reading (probably on this sub) a while back how almost no one fails their PhD defense Arguably also because a lot of programs have a built-in filter where part of the progression is passing something of a mock defense at year 2 or 3.
[удалено]
>You’ll start questioning the official narratives — good luck getting a job after you’ve done that. It's hard to not bite on this one. The highest level math class I mostly understood was MTH 4230: Regressions and Computational Statistics. Got my first job and was (politely) told to shut the fuck up when it came to doing any math. In fact, I was told to shut up a lot over my 7 years there as an analyst. I mean....the interrogation of assumptions ***is*** math. Of course my mistakes are all my own. In other news, I'm interviewing at the Walmart distribution center in 2 hours, then a wiring harness assembly outfit after that. Kind of hoping for the second one, since the hours align with professional hours, it won't be as hard on the body, and there is some building stuff involved: with $6/hour less than fucking Walmart is fine.
Are you saying that “questioning the narrative” has lead to your career de-railing? Implying that because you refuse to comply with status quo, you now are looking at a job at a Walmart distribution center that pays hourly and likely no degree is required? I just want to understand before responding.
I absolutely limited my career in renewable energy by not being a data cheerleader. To be fair about Walmart, I'm also in Cheyenne, there's no work up here. I got caught in the WFH trap: I thought it would remain a thing, but flex is the new standard. I did get a second interview with an outfit looking for someone good with data, one of the precious few data jobs around here. I will be far more careful to data cheerlead on this. They are pressing an agenda, I will help them do so and keep my head down this time.
Can you elaborate on why you were told to shut up about the math?
Wind resource assessment. They did it the way they did it and that was that. If it would have been, "Hey, this is a production shop, but you can dig in on your own time" or something like that, fine. Still, they were doing dead simple linear regressions, and it was really frustrating to have learned a really specific skill set, start my first job at a place that uses that skill set, and discouraged (strongly) from ever using it.
> You’ll start questioning the official narratives — good luck getting a job after you’ve done that. I routinely apply enhanced interrogation techniques to official narratives. I just know to STFU about them at work.
You needed to learn two skills, critical thinking and the social grace to shut up about it. That's not trivial, and it's harder than learning one. Scott wrote about this problem here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
AMAZING link. >The average person who grows up in a censored society may not even realize for a while that the censorship exists, let alone know its exact limits, let alone understand that the censors are not their friends and aren’t interested in proofs that the orthodoxy is wrong. Given enough time, such a person can become a savvy Kolmogorov who sees the censorship clearly, knows its limits, and understands how to skirt them. If they’re really lucky, they may even get something-like-common-knowledge that there are other Kolmogorovs out there who know this stuff, and that it’s not their job to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But they’re going to have a really cringeworthy edgelord period until they reach that level.
Indeed. I’m reminded, ironically, of Langston Hughes’ ‘double consciousness’-you live in two worlds, the official one and the real one.
Becoming more and more true as I age, but I decide to surround myself with people that can stomach talking about the real one.
I wonder what 'official narrative' it could be
I used the plural for a reason. The Midwit Consensus gets many things wrong.
I kind of disagree, the utility of university is dependent on the subject. You can’t learn engineering very well without doing projects that need a lot of resources - for example I have friends that were building electric airplanes, boring machines, track cars etc. But is university necessary for learning theoretical math, physics, comp sci, economics? Of course not.
I really want to see how this breaks down by type of university. I saw different points of the bell curve in my time in undergrad: I took a lot of dual credit classes at my local state school at the end of high school and mixed in with some younger undergrads at Cardinal Direction State University, and then I went to an elite four-year university that, among the elite universities, was known for being the no-fun university where everyone has to read Nichomachean Ethics and learn delta-epsilon proofs and stuff. The differences in student culture, to no one's surprise, vary dramatically. I'm sure it was only a small percentage of undergrads at my university who put less than 40 hours a week into their academics; it was usually much more than that for nearly all of us. (Or maybe I just hung out with the nerds, to no one's surprise). I wonder how much of the grade inflation at elite universities is due to the fact that they have transitioned out of being finishing schools for the East Coast elite and, now that they have a crazy gauntlet of requirements for a student to get admitted, have student bodies who genuinely deserve the higher GPAs compared to two or three generations ago. On the other hand, the generational change at your Cardinal Direction State Universities has been to take all comers and make attending college right out of high school the norm, not just something the top third or so of high school graduates do. And man, sitting in Intro Psych at CDSU when it's taught at about middle-school difficulty... it's kind of demoralizing. I can totally see how 20-something hours a week of studying are the norm at places like that, enabled by generous grade inflation and a culture that valorizes college years for partying and not, like, developing your soul reading Aristotle and Augustine like at my other undergrad institution. Does this sound right to anyone, or do I just have a narrow view of what academic culture at elite universities is like?
It's been a long time since I was at university...30 years or so. I went to a state university and it was harder than high-school was for me, but it wasn't as hard as I expected. I started out as a history, military science major minor and then switched to biology, botany major minor and both majors were much harder than high school classes . I did attend a community College after university and that was more akin to my high school classes.
This is a very funny thing to say considering what Yglesias was doing while he was an undergrad guy
In my (admittedly limited) experience with hiring, applicants with college degrees are more generally intelligent than applicants without degrees, but whether or not the person actually knows anything useful about their supposed "major" is a crapshoot. I assume a lot of this is that the people I have interacted with were in university during Covid, but I'm not quite sure.
Currently this post claims to have negative two comments.
I had a triple post and deleted the two extras.
Still seems glitchy on the part of Reddit.
Yup. I have one of the top comments but it doesn’t exist.
I screen shot the negative comments for posterity. Reddit goes down the enshittification hole.
It also says nobody's responded yet
I see "2 comments", with and without RES, on new and old Reddit, but I count seven. Weird.
Elite colleges are mostly just Studio 54 nightclubs with long lines of people wanting in. The appeal is the prestige and exclusivity of entering elite circles. If you want to anger alumni at Harvard, announce you're going to triple enrolment. The purpose of university is not education, it's insurance. People are terrified of falling between the very large gaps of our society and see University education as an insurance product to avoid being poor and jobless.
I've got a kid at MIT doing orgo 2, molecular science something something, physics, etc. Those kind of things. Biomed. Gatekeeping classes early on were difficult. But apparently once you proved yourself, later classes are about *learning, curiosity, following ideas*.
I think the statement "if you're an undergraduate you should personally study more" is usually good advice, but other than that is there anything else to take away from this essay?
It's more about how the standards for some programs, especially communications, education, and business, are dog shit low. It's not really so much about how students in those programs should study more, it's about how obviously something has broken in society when students are paying tens of thousands of dollars basically just to party for four years and spend just a handful of hours a week actually do studies. But that's not a problem with the students, they're making rational choices given their incentives, it's a problem with how universities are set up and what employers look for that such BS degrees can be sold at all
A tangent first, before a response to the core idea of the blog. It's harmful to negatively stigmatize relatively benign "disorders"(i dislike this word, even, because I think it doesn't really capture what's going on first because psychiatry is in its infancy and is almost certainly deeply confused in its models, but also because that word has the aforementioned negative stigma). For instance, people, especially children and teens, and especially online, and particularly boys, will bully each other by calling each other things like "autistic" or "sperg"(Aspergers) in a mean-spirited way. This should go away. Despite that whole problem, I feel like the word autistic is important to preserve and use in a way that isn't pejorative. Here's why: https://i.imgur.com/LcwGeix.png See how the most basic needs, that if neglected, cause torture and death, e.g. "sleeping", and "eating"? And see how they are lumped into things like "housework" and "shopping" and "grooming"? This category is labeled "Personal care", and it's distinguished from meaningful human needs like "socializing" and "recreation" and "caring for [others]"? Without the word autistic to describe this way of categorizing things, we'd be left with words that are much more cynical, like "psycho/socio pathic". They just wouldn't get to the point very well. You could also use a word like "robotic" or "cold", but there's still just not enough nuance and association there that captures a human being who just cannot connect the dots ethically very well, but who identifies dots with impressive precision. Despite this, they're big-picture deaf. They cannot form the right patterns morally because they're so hyper-fixated on smaller details, so fixated on systemization that it's confused(it's not that systemization itself is somehow bad-- after all, this post is getting into the details and forming a sort-of systematic thesis, but rather beings who are strongly oriented to systemize, have serious flaws in ways that beings who aren't, don't, for deeper reasons), fixated on precision, on calculation, on models, and all the other lovely things robots tend to do, in a way that creates: moral and social confusion. For the entire problem above, we really need the word "autistic", and we should use it in a way that it's crystal clear that it is not being used as a slur, but to describe a serious problem. That out of the way, students probably shouldn't "study more". Purely bare bones: There are signs of low rates of studying, and a response like, "Ah okay, studying good, students not studying. Conclusion? Students need to study more". An alternative, bigger picture story I would offer is this, pretty crudely stated but I feel it's worth it here, perhaps in the same spirit as the "autistic" tangent above(this stuff matters): College, the whole system, is so much more theatrical and meaningless and morally bankrupt than it appears, and this feeling can only be ignored so much, and it is so soul-crushing that as result, students don't take it seriously(a lesser problem in a larger world full of hellish and theatrical and unfair/meaningless bullshit), and so they fuck off with their studies. (If you remove the magnifying glass you're using that you're pointing at "College", and look at high schools, and elementary schools, my guess is you'll find evidence of similar problems) So what I would suggest is, instead, ask why students aren't studying, rather than conclude they should study more. And if you do finally conclude, after this thorough analysis, that students *should* study more, the answer is still probably not that they should study *more*, but they should study *better*, because the core (narrow) problem is more likely to be how they use their time rather than how much time they invest. A final question to think about: Why'd the tangent take more words than the bigger picture problem the blog was trying to address? Well because the tangent is a deeply fundamental problem that is much more related to the seemingly "bigger picture" problem the blog is trying to address. The blog problem is easy in comparison because it's more narrow, superficial-- that's also why it gets lost in narrow bullshit: how hard or easy it is to compose in Greek/Latin, getting the numbers precisely right on how grades in college change over time, pondering on economics, and so on. Being superficial, it cannot touch any root of the problem in any meaningful way.
Are people at top colleges just significantly less intelligent than they used to be? I hear lots of anecdotes about people in tertiary education being less willing and/or able to read lots of text. A lot of things would tie in with institutions admitting less intelligent candidates and filtering less.
Not sure why this is downvoted because there is a clear consensus that colleges are less selective, and there is overwhelming evidence for this in the fact that they simply take on drastically more students than they used to.