I can only speak for myself but what is there left to comment on? I have outrage fatigue. Trump goes from one incredible gaff/goof/statement to another. The list of his incompetence, arrogance, lies, and stupidity is quite large. It does not surprise me in the least that this latest selfish, short-sighted move was made.
His supporters are incapable of critiquing him. They are impervious to logic and reason. I no longer care to hear about his crimes and incompetence. I no longer care what he does. He is the President the United States deserves. In response to having elected the most incompetent, corrupt, and stupid President in history the opposition party is going to nominate a senile dinosaur who has no desire to upend the corporate dominance of our elected officials.
You are correct. H.L. Mencken once defined puritanism as the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having fun. The essence of this definition does well to capture the psyche of America. We Americans tend to be very vindictive and have an almost pathological need for revenge and punishment. We simply do not like it when the “undeserving” get something they don’t deserve. You see this in our legal system, our foreign policy, and in our healthcare system.
Your goal is noble. I think it is believed by you because you don’t have extensive experience teaching in a classroom. Everyone talks about teaching concepts and whatnot. I used to think this way. But the reality of the classroom and the reality of what the average person is capable of understanding and what they are willing to try to understand is at odds with this noble view.
Your first sentence sounds plausible and could be true. Do you know that it is true? Do the demographics of the country support an increase in higher education capacity? Do the realities of what it means to become educated support a percent increase in the number of highly education people?
I currently teach at a community college and have taught at some major universities. What I consider passing today is far less than what I would have considered passing 25 years ago. My anecdotal experience is that too many people are going to college. Standards have decreased and we are passing people through the system who should not be graduating. Even so there is increasing pressure from administration and politicians to increase the passing rate.
At my college tuition is increasing because state funding is decreasing. We are advertising to a population who realistically aren't college material. But we need the enrollment and I need a job. So I pass people who shouldn't pass. I strongly disagree with the notion that we need more colleges.
EDIT: What I perceive as a degradation in undergraduate degree quality has led to the present state where a Master's degree today has the same intellectual signaling value that a Bachelor's degree had 40 years ago.
Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.
I think no sufficiently intelligent person thinks that hospitals deciding who lives/dies will be done capriciously or by cruel doctors. But on the other hand there were large numbers of fools in the U.S. who thought the ACA would create death panels. So maybe for the U.S. your point is valid.
A withdraw means they still have to pay for the course and given that student loan debt is largely not dischargeable in bankruptcy I won’t ask them to withdraw. My college has not gone with the option of pass/fail. I’m giving all of my students a grade and no grade will be lower than a C this semester. I don’t have the ability to let someone take a course without paying for it.
Millions of people have suddenly lost their jobs. Millions are ordered to shelter in place. Millions are going to go stir crazy. Child abuse and spousal abuse will increase. Mental health issues will be exacerbated. I have no desire to contribute to someone’s anguish or anxiety in such a time as this.
If they fail the next course because they don’t know this semester’s content then they’ll probably need to retake my class. Which is what they’d have to do if I fail them. If they pass the next course then they shouldn’t fail my class regardless of the work they put in this semester.
My college switched classes to an online format and we closed the college for two weeks to give faculty time to make the switch. So in addition to hastily converting classes to an online format we lost two weeks. I’m passing all of my students. There’s no way I’ll fail someone. I’m keeping my courses open until 2021 and will answer emails from current students until then so that they can get help with the course content they need in the classes they take in Fall 2021.
I know some of my colleagues don’t share this view. At least, they don’t openly share this view. Administration is making a show about keeping up standards and rigor but this is simply not doable in the present situation. Help those students who have the time, means, and luxury to continue their studies and don’t punish the ones who don’t.
Here is why the situation in the U.S. does not nearly perfectly mirror Zimbabwe. One word: confidence. People have far more confidence in the dollar than they do Zimbabwe's currency. As the global financial system is currently setup losing confidence in the dollar is highly unlikely. You might lose confidence in the dollar and buy gold and I might do the same but we aren't the people whose confidence the dollar's value relies upon.
I'm not an economist but as far as I understand these things we won't get hyperinflation as long as there is confidence in the dollar as a currency.
It may be a false choice now but it might not be a false one in the future. At any rate, it is worth exploring the idea and it’s an interesting question regarding the circumstances that must be present in order for it to longer be a false choice.
I think your point could be stated better but the sentiment behind is worth exploring. If the economy collapses there will certainly be an increase in misery, spousal and child abuse, suicides, and murders. This may be a time where hard choices need to be made. Maybe we really are confronted with a "lesser of two evils" type situation.
Making guns illegal will do little if it is not accompanied by getting rid of the existing guns. People are poor judges of risk and it would not surprise me that cops are more fearful of guns than they are of cars even if it ought not be that way.
You may be right in the direction of causation that questioned. I look at it this way. Suppose we create a more prosperous, egalitarian society and find out the cops are still jerks. The experiment shows you are correct but at least we'd end up with a better society in other ways. There does not appear to be any harm in performing the experiment.
I feel sure the vast majority of Police officers are doing upstanding work, so it's a matter of identifying and punishing the bad apples.
I strongly disagree that the vast majority of police office are doing upstanding work. Officers don't testify against each other. They refuse to help investigations of colleagues. The whole thin blue line mentality is a stain on the whole profession. As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing." Police officers that refuse to call out the bad apples are themselves bad apples.
I don’t see the lecturing and patronization that you referenced in your original comment with some of the examples you provided. That’s the part of your post that I disagree with.
In your Iraq war example I don’t recall bureaucratic experts being involved in support of it. General Shinseki famously thought Rumsfeld’s predictions were wrong and Hans Blicks (spelling?) was famously skeptical of Bush administration claims.
I’ll certainly agree that we’ve had crappy political leadership in the U.S. but I won’t agree that bureaucrats have let the nation down in matters of science. Experts get it wrong and consensus expert opinion is sometimes wrong. There will continue to be examples of where consensus expert opinion is wrong.
You can find individual experts who are patronizing and lecturing as you put it. It’s been rare in my experience that consensus expert opinions that aren’t motivated by money, greed, power, or fame are condescending or lecturing.
Do you have more than a single instance to point to in which expert bureaucrats are lecturing and patronizing while being wrong?
From my perspective it seems clear that the American public has been in the grips of anti-intellectualism for quite a long time. In 1980 Asimov made the following famous statement:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
I may be jaded and cynical but it seems to me that when people just write, "Correlation does not always imply causation" they are trying to demonstrate how smart they are and how dumb the authors are. I notice this comment come up a lot when papers by social scientists are posted on HN. It appears to me that the people who make such a comment are making a low effort attempt to discredit research by pointing out some trivial statistical fact.
I see comments of this type all the time on HN. People criticize posted research articles by pointing out some obvious reason why it might be false. As if this obvious roadblock wasn't thought of by the authors. Such people almost never read the actual article and have a tendency to believe that their non-expert opinion on a possible issue is sufficient to discredit the research article.
On HN it seems to me that most people commenting on research in the social sciences believe that their cursory understanding of a topic is on par with the knowledge of experts in the field.
What you say is true. I like the way you phrased things. What you write about the authors potentially having a bias that blinds them is nicely put. If someone has reason to think this I’d welcome reading their commentary.
I am tired with people just saying that correlation does not always imply causation. As if this is somehow insightful. Whenever I see this I think less of the person who writes it. It’s as if they don’t have enough common sense to assume that authors of a study that relies on statistical analysis don’t know this.
I don’t understand why this comment is made as frequently as it is. Do you think the authors of the paper aren’t aware of this fact? Do you think they didn’t think of this when they did their research?
His supporters are incapable of critiquing him. They are impervious to logic and reason. I no longer care to hear about his crimes and incompetence. I no longer care what he does. He is the President the United States deserves. In response to having elected the most incompetent, corrupt, and stupid President in history the opposition party is going to nominate a senile dinosaur who has no desire to upend the corporate dominance of our elected officials.