And it's possible to acquire the equivalent of a PhD through the vast wealth of information and literal college courses online. Degrees don't mean what they used to.
The dilution of quality caused by profit based perverse incentives, the cultural issues grounded in grievance studies, and the enormous wealth of high quality material and alternatives to formal education have radically changed what academia means to society going forward.
Gatekeeping for profit and not discriminating between the value of a degree in mathematics and a degree in underwater basket weaving, eliminating political, ideological, and epistemic diversity have resulted in a world where degrees increasingly mean you simply paid money to exist in the presence of other folks with paper over a sufficient length of time that all parties involved felt satisfied with the kabuki show.
Accreditation through a legitimate culture of intellectual peers in which institutional academia has earned the respect and dedication of its members approaches the ideal case. Few, if any, American institutions pass muster. They're not without value, and some departments are world class, but they exist in relation to near total institutional failure, and they are infecting the rest of the world.
Academic journals, outdated pedagogy, DIE gatekeeping, woke babysitting and infantilized students are just the most obvious rot.
American academia has a lot of soul searching and hard work to do, or it's going to be displaced by something better that serves the need for legitimate accreditation in society. I personally don't want that to be private corporations, and I'm rooting for the professors and alumni who want to preserve the integrity of their institutions.
Some perspectives still hold that degrees are critical, but unless it's from less than a handful of the top programs in a field, the degree is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Degrees are useful to get into corporate work, but having industry experience, a competent body of work, recognition from your peers, and a demonstrated work ethic can get you into almost any type of job at a competitive rate of pay.
In some cases, degrees can be harmful by elevating incompetent, ignorant, entitled graduates to positions they shouldn't have, particularly in middle management. Getting a degree is not paying your dues or putting in time toward something useful. It can be, but it depends on the individual, so degrees fail as a shibboleth for utility.
Yes. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, it's nice being able to use them and not be subject to connection issues or server outages, or developer whim.
The model and attention mechanism produces Bayesian properties, but transformers as a whole contain non-Bayesian aspects, depending on how rigorous you want to be in defining Bayesian.
Transformers do learn and abstract. Not as well as humans, but for whatever definitive of innovation or creativity you wanna run with, these gpt models have it. It's not magic, it's math, but these programs are approximating the human function of media synthesis across narrowly limited domains.
These aren't your crazy uncle's Markov chain chatbots. They're sophisticated bayesian models trained to approximate the functions that produced the content used in training.
The dilution of quality caused by profit based perverse incentives, the cultural issues grounded in grievance studies, and the enormous wealth of high quality material and alternatives to formal education have radically changed what academia means to society going forward.
Gatekeeping for profit and not discriminating between the value of a degree in mathematics and a degree in underwater basket weaving, eliminating political, ideological, and epistemic diversity have resulted in a world where degrees increasingly mean you simply paid money to exist in the presence of other folks with paper over a sufficient length of time that all parties involved felt satisfied with the kabuki show.
Accreditation through a legitimate culture of intellectual peers in which institutional academia has earned the respect and dedication of its members approaches the ideal case. Few, if any, American institutions pass muster. They're not without value, and some departments are world class, but they exist in relation to near total institutional failure, and they are infecting the rest of the world.
Academic journals, outdated pedagogy, DIE gatekeeping, woke babysitting and infantilized students are just the most obvious rot.
American academia has a lot of soul searching and hard work to do, or it's going to be displaced by something better that serves the need for legitimate accreditation in society. I personally don't want that to be private corporations, and I'm rooting for the professors and alumni who want to preserve the integrity of their institutions.