Tag: education

The cost of educating women

Not only have the proposed benefits manifestly failed to manifest themselves, but the opportunity cost of future generations has begun to become readily apparent everywhere from Europe to Asia. One wonders how low birth rates have to fall in civilized countries before the elites begin to realize that the Taliban may not, in fact, be the stupid ones with regards to this particular matter.

I address a recent article on the correlation between female education, the declining Japanese fertility rate, and the reported collapse of the collective Japanese interest in sex at Alpha Game:

Throughout this period Japan experienced a sharp decline in the total rate of fertility. After a sudden downswing in the early 1950s, the birthrate continuously declined until the mid-1980s, when it began to drop rapidly, and by 1997 it fell to 1.39. In light of these findings, it is plausible to suggest that there is a relationship between the increase in women’s access to a higher education and the decrease in the fertility rate.

As one commenter there noted, if Nicholas Kristof read the post, his head would probably explode. But there is no empirical evidence indicating that female education is societally beneficial, and there is an increasing amount of evidence that correlates it with a broad range of societal ills. The Japanese birthrate has continued to fall, hitting a historical low at 1.26 per woman in 2005. In 2012 the number of deaths exceeded births for a sixth straight year.

Far from being the 21st century superpower that my university professors taught that it was certain to become, it is a literally dying society.

No society that wishes to survive should convert all of its prospective mothers into worker drones any more than it should convert all of its prospective farmers into doctors or telephone sanitizers. Sure, it takes longer for a society to die out demographically than starve, but the end result is the same.

Just ask the Shakers, another equalitarian society that believed in the importance of educating women.

The end of the liberal arts major

The bottom is dropping out of their employment-of-last-resort:

Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

It doesn’t require health insurance.

Don’t think of it as the enemy of baristas, insists Kevin Nater, CEO of the company that has produced this technological marvel. Think of it as an instrument people can use to create their ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for “out-of-home coffee drinkers”—Nater’s phrase—sick of an “inconsistent experience.”

Think of it as the future. Think of it as empowerment. Your coffee, your way, flawlessly, every time, no judgments. Four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup in a 16 oz. half-caff soy latte? Here it is, delivered to you precisely when your smartphone app said it would arrive, hot and fresh and indistinguishable from the last one you ordered.

In a common area at the University of Texas at Austin, the Briggo
coffee kiosk, covered in fake wood paneling and a touch screen and not
much else, takes up about as much space as a pair of phone booths. Its
external appearance was designed by award-winning industrial designer Yves Behar,
with the intention that it radiate authenticity and what Briggo says is
its commitment to making coffee that is the equal of what comes out of
any high-end coffee shop.

The kiosk at the university is the second version, the one that will
be rolling out across the country in locations that are still secret. It
needs just 50 square feet (4.6 sq m) of floor space, and it can be
dropped anywhere—an airport, a hospital, a company campus, a cafe with
tables and chairs and WiFi just like Starbucks. It’s manufactured in
Austin.

Inside, protected by stainless steel walls and a thicket of patents,
there is a secret, proprietary viscera of pipes, storage vessels,
heating instruments, robot arms and 250 or so sensors that together do
everything a human barista would do if only she had something like
perfect self-knowledge.

 Robo-baristas may be what finally pops the higher education bubble.

Mailvox: alternative credentials

ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.

 Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been
fascinating.  I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science.  At
the time, our program had about ten women.  As it happens, two of them
happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes.  They were
both mediocre programmers at best.  From what I gathered they graduated
by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and
omega males working on their own projects.

I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a
software engineer.  By that time IBM had long been infected with the
diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in
the global economy.  There were hundreds of women in my division and
while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly
as project managers or testers.  The women that started out in actual
software development positions did not last long.  They were frequently
promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.

There were two notable exceptions.  In the mid to
late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers.  The
universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to
educate programmers in sufficient numbers.  IBM decided it would offer
it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house
programming school.  Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions
from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers.  Since
IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the
graduation rate.  The goal was to create functional programmers.  In
talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging.
 The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my
time at IBM graduated from that program.  Both of these women were
exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers.  Even though
the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory.  In fact
women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved
something meaningful.

You discuss alternative credentialing systems much
like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence.  How do you foresee these
systems withstanding the “need for diversity”.  Certainly no such
system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.

There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.

Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.

Au contraire, mon ami

I think Captain Capitalism read a bit too much into yesterday’s post in concluding the college credentialists got me:

A well written and charty-goodness post, but he still considers the education/college degree gap a “real” gap. There are two brief points I shall make as I’m trying to knock out a chapter per 4 days of my book:

1.  Women earn the majority of EASY DEGREES.  When it comes to engineering and anything that requires significant math men beat them at a ratio of 4:1. 
When it comes to Masters in Farting Unicorns and Doctorates in Feelings
with Minors in Oprah, yes, women dominate.  But for the stuff that
matters in the world, men by far outcompete women.

2.  Women are NOT going to be ahead in the world for this.  It is NOT a
good thing for women that they are earning the majority of degrees
because they are buying into a bubble.  It’s like having women
purchasing 70% of the housing in early 2007 and citing that as an
example of some kind of performance gap.

The college degree gap is real. The fact that the degrees are worthless is irrelevant. Captain Capitalism appears to have forgotten that I am not a credentialist, and moreover, I was one of the earliest commentators to point out the increasing irrelevance of the college degree. Consider what I wrote on the subject in 2004:

“The universities abandoned their Christian roots over a century ago.
Beginning in the ’60s, they abandoned their commitment to intellectual
development as well. Having already purged their collective Borg-minds
of almost every vestige of religion and non-leftist thought, the tenured
faculties that dominate the academic asylums have ensured that the
devolution of the academy will continue, until eventually the idea of
sending your child to college for intellectual development will seem as
absurdly counterproductive as watching ABCNNBCBS to learn what’s really
going on in the world.”

I wrote a few more columns on the subject, and in the 2012 WND column entitled “Education is not an investment“, I pointed out five flaws in the various “return-on-investment” calculations used to justify college degrees, such as the failure to take student loan debt into account.

“The Payscale study concluded that the average 30-year ROI was $387,501;
however, the study did not take into account that the average 2010
college graduate owed $25,250 in college loans upon graduation. And
since this debt figure does not include the 40 percent of non-graduating
students and the rate of defaults on student loans has risen to 8.8
percent, it should be readily apparent that the interest owed on that
seemingly small amount of debt will tend to considerably reduce average
ROI from the estimated $387,000. Note that at the current Plus Loan
interest rate of 7.9 percent, the 30-year value of that $25,250 in debt
is $247,118.”

Ironically, one could build a solid case for a young man being better off financially by lending his $25,000 college fund to college students while going off and working instead of getting a degree, so long as he is able to earn more than $4,680 per year for the next 30 years in addition to collecting his federally guaranteed debt-tribute.

What Captain Capitalism failed to realize is that I don’t see the growing preponderance of women in higher education as evidence that women are going to run the world. To the contrary, I see it as evidence that higher education is in the late stages of collapse. Because women ruin everything. The final stage will be reached when Title IX is successfully applied to the STEM degrees, which is already federal law, and math and the hard sciences are sufficiently dumbed down to permit women to receive what is determined to be an equitable number of those degrees.

By that point, men will have likely created alternative systems to the university credentials that are as unpalatable to women as the universities once were, and successful businesses will be increasingly prone to utilize those systems. Some sort of online achievement-based system like those popular in the IT world would appear to be the likely candidate, especially as the availability of online degrees from prestigious institutions continues to increase. Once 50,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese are graduating with degrees from Harvard, its social cachet will plummet.

The real gender gap

From AEI: The chart above shows the huge college degree gap by gender for the class of 2013. Based on Department of Education estimates, women will earn a disproportionate share of college degrees at every level of higher education this year, and overall, women in the class of 2013 will earn 140 college degrees at all levels for every 100 men. Over the next decade, the gender disparity for college degrees is expected to increase, so that by 2022, women will earn 148 college degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men, with especially huge gender imbalances for associate’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men) and master’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men).

It’s actually likely to be considerably worse than projected. Associates and Masters degrees are already hitting the 60/40 female-male ratio that college admissions officers have observed tends to accelerate the process of men declining to attend colleges.  The media, with its myopic focus on the female imperative, generally reports this “dangerous ground” as being a problem due to the inability of women to be happy with the amount of male attention they are receiving, but the real problem is that most men simply don’t want to be in a predominantly female environment even if it theoretically improves their chances with women.

The class of 2022 estimate assumes that the rate of change will slow, but rom 1960 to 2013, the undergraduate gender ratio increased by 1.3 women per 100 men per year, as the ratio went from 77 per 100 to 145. However, if the admissions officers are correct and young men respond to imbalanced college sex ratios en masse the way they have to individual schools and the rate of change increases by 50 percent, the class of 2022 can be expected to look more like this.

Associate’s: 179
Bachelor’s: 150
Master’s: 168
Doctor’s: 127
All Degrees: 159

If this comes to pass, we can safely expect the New York Times to be lamenting the fact that fewer women are receiving PhDs compared to the number of women graduating from college, and Jezebel publishing one angry diatribe after another about the emergence of superplayers establishing open harems on campus.

And meanwhile, the college degree will become almost entirely irrelevant to employment anywhere but government and large corporations with female-run HR departments.

Rebelling against academic tyranny

A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison rejects the university’s right to subject him to mandatory re-education sessions. It’s encouraging to note that more and more people are becoming inured to being labeled by the Left and are no longer bothering to engage in the popular conservative appeasement dance of “but I’m not, I’m really not!”

    Dear Graduate Director Prof. Kantrowitz,

    Please forgive this sudden e-mail. I am writing to you today about the “diversity” training that new teaching assistants (TAs) are required to undergo. In keeping with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, I am also blind-copying on this e-mail several journalistic outlets and state government officials, because the taxpayers who support this university deserve to know how their money is being spent.

    As you are probably aware, all new TAs in the History Department are required to attend one orientation session, two TA training sessions, and two diversity sessions. Yesterday (Friday, September 20th), we new TAs attended the first of the diversity sessions. To be quite blunt, I was appalled. What we were given, under the rubric of “diversity,” was an avalanche of insinuations, outright accusations, and suffocating political indoctrination (or, as some of the worksheets revealingly put it, “re-education”) entirely unbecoming a university of our stature.

    Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and students at probably every other public institution of higher education in this country, have long since grown accustomed to incessant leftism. It is in the very air that we breathe. Bascom Hill, for example, is roped off and the university is shut down so that Barack Obama (D), Mark Pocan (D), and Tammy Baldwin (D) can deliver campaign speeches before election day. (The university kindly helped direct student traffic to these campaign events by sending out a mass e-mail encouraging the student body to go to the Barack Obama for President website and click “I’m In for Barack!” in order to attend.) Marxist diatribes denouncing Christianity, Christians, the United States, and conservatives (I am happy to provide as many examples of this as might be required) are assigned as serious scholarship in seminars. The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA)–which sent out mass e-mails, using History Department list-servs, during the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, accusing Gov. Walker of, among other things, being “Nero”–is allowed to address TA and graduate student sessions as a “non-partisan organization”. The History Department sponsors a leftist political rally, along with the Socialist Party of Wisconsin, and advertises for the rally via a departmental e-mail (sent, one presumes, using state computers by employees drawing salaries from a state institution). In short, this university finds it convenient to pretend that it is an apolitical entity, but one need not be particularly astute to perceive that the Madison campus is little more than a think tank for the hard left. Even those who wholeheartedly support this political agenda might in all candor admit that the contours of the leftism here are somewhat less than subtle.

    At the “diversity” training yesterday, though, even this fig leaf of apoliticism was discarded. In an utterly unprofessional way, the overriding presumption of the session was that the people whom the History Department has chosen to employ as teaching assistants are probably racists. In true “diversity” style, the language in which the presentation was couched was marbled with words like “inclusive”, “respect”, and “justice”. But the tone was unmistakably accusatory and radical. Our facilitator spoke openly of politicizing her classrooms in order to right (take revenge for?) past wrongs. We opened the session with chapter-and-verse quotes from diversity theorists who rehearsed the same tired “power and privilege” cant that so dominates seminar readings and official university hand-wringing over unmet race quotas. Indeed, one mild-mannered Korean woman yesterday felt compelled to insist that she wasn’t a racist. I never imagined that she was, but the atmosphere of the meeting had been so poisoned that even we traditional quarries of the diversity Furies were forced to share our collective guilt with those from continents far across the wine-dark sea.

    It is hardly surprising that any of us hectorees would feel thusly. For example, in one of the handouts that our facilitator asked us to read (“Detour-Spotting: for white anti-racists,” by joan olsson [sic]), we learned things like, “As white infants we were fed a pabulum of racist propaganda,” “…there was no escaping the daily racist propaganda,” and, perhaps most even-handed of all, “Racism continues in the name of all white people.” Perhaps the Korean woman did not read carefully enough to realize that only white people (all of them, in fact) are racist. Nevertheless, in a manner stunningly redolent of “self-criticism” during the Cultural Revolution in communist China, the implication of the entire session was that everyone was suspect, and everyone had some explaining to do.

    You have always been very kind to me, Prof. Kantrowitz, so it pains me to ask you this, but is this really what the History Department thinks of me? Is this what you think of me? I am not sure who selected the readings or crafted the itinerary for the diversity session, but, as they must have done so with the full sanction of the History Department, one can only conclude that the Department agrees with such wild accusations, and supports them. Am I to understand that this is how the white people who work in this Department are viewed? If so, I cannot help but wonder why in the world the Department hired any of us in the first place. Would not anyone be better?

    There is one further issue. At the end of yesterday’s diversity “re-education,” we were told that our next session would include a presentation on “Trans Students”. At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students ‘choose their own pronouns’, how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer (“I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?”). Also on the agenda for next week are “important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities,” “stand[ing] up to the rules of gender,” and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: “Trans”: for those who “identify along the gender-variant spectrum,” and “Genderqueer”: “for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system”. I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up.

    Please allow me to be quite frank. My job, which I love, is to teach students Japanese history. This week, for example, I have been busy explaining the intricacies of the Genpei War (1180-1185), during which time Japan underwent a transition from an earlier, imperial-rule system under regents and cloistered emperors to a medieval, feudal system run by warriors and estate managers. It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day.

    It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion. I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation, nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing. To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own t
ime is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross.

    I regret that this leaves us in an awkward situation. After having been accused of virulent racism and, now, assured that I will next learn how to parse the taxonomy of “Genderqueers”, I am afraid that I will disappoint those who expect me to attend any further diversity sessions. When a Virginia-based research firm came to campus a couple of years ago to present findings from their study of campus diversity, then-Diversity Officer Damon Williams sent a gaggle of shouting, sign-waving undergraduates to the meeting, disrupting the proceedings so badly that the meeting was cancelled. In a final break with such so-called “diversity”, I will not be storming your office or shouting into a megaphone outside your window. Instead, I respectfully inform you hereby that I am disinclined to join in any more mandatory radicalism. I have, thank God, many more important things to do. I also request that diversity training be made optional for all TAs, effective immediately. In my humble opinion, neither the Department nor the university has any right to subject anyone to such intellectual tyranny.

    Thank you for your patience in reading this long e-mail.

    Sincerely,

    Jason Morgan

Mailvox: a secular religion

MP emails an account of a woman quitting Teach for America and notices its similarities to a religion… or a cult:

This is a fascinating account of the religion that is Teach for America and the women that inhabit it.  This passage was particularly interesting because it shows the religious nature of the TFA girls:

“I am shifting my weight uncomfortably in a plastic classroom chair on an Atlanta summer afternoon. Our adviser interrupts lunch by asking us to pause to spend a few minutes reflecting on what brought us to TFA in the first place. After the requisite reflection time, and after turning off the room’s lights, Alicia begins to share a story about growing up with a single mother, culminating in an emotional appeal to do whatever we can to help “our kids” in the future. Although I have always found Alicia to be rather stoic, she suddenly begins sobbing when relaying this story. After regaining composure, she makes it clear that we are meant to follow suit. One by one, until the 12th person has spoken, we deliver either tearful accounts of personal hardship or awkward, halting stories recounted by people uncomfortable with the level of intimacy. While talking to other TFA teachers from different schools over dinner, I learn that other groups had nearly identical sessions.”

This is the classic “testifying” step in poor fundamentalist Christian church services  in which the various converted sinners are invited to testify about their sinful past and how low they were before they “came to Jesus”.  They recount all the bad things in their past and how it all changed when they “came to Jesus”.  Each person who is testifying get kudos and respect for how deeply they had fallen and therefore how much farther Jesus raised them from sin and degradation before they were redeemed. Lots of weeping and wailing, and “Praise Jesus!”, particularly by the women in the congregations.

It reminded me of accounts I’ve read of both Womyn’s Studies classes and Maoist reedcuation sessions. You really have to read the whole thing. It is like music to the ears of those of us who anticipate the collapse of the public school system; one would feel bad for the young women being so perfectly set up to fail if they weren’t such a poisonously destructive collection of mindlessly self-perpetuating leftbots.

Always fight back

Badger considers two means of addressing bullies:

I was in elementary school when the educational ministers began
preaching that fighting back against bullies was not to be tolerated. It
was insisted that responsive violence only begat more violence and that
the way to stop bullying was to “not respond” and to “demand the bully
respect you,” or some horseshit like this. This went along with a bunch
of programming about creating an “inclusive environment” and a bunch of
other malarkey that imagined if we could all listen to “Free To Be You And Me” together nobody would get picked on when we went out for recess.

To this day, I want to know what they were smoking. These folks spent
their entire adult careers allegedly studying the social behavior of
young children and yet never realized that “Lord of the Flies” was a lot
more than a fictional fantasy novella. They went about fighting
bullying in exactly the wrong way – by criminalizing the physical
aspects rather than disincentivizing the psychological aspects of
bullying, they ensured the “negotiating” between bully and victim took
place in the psychosocial realm where the bully had already secured an
advantage, and imposed a moral equivalence that shamed victim for daring
to fight back. The establishment seems to want to think of bullies as
the fat stupid kid who has no other way than his fists to express
himself (a la Moe from Calvin & Hobbes), however the bullies I dealt
with had great social savvy and were able to bamboozle the teachers
into believing they were the victim instead of me. Thus, any one-on-one
verbal discussions that were supposed to “resolve conflict” were simply
an extension of the bullying process – just as, for example, a
negotiation with a corrupt businessman is itself structurally corrupted….

The frame I’ve come to believe in with regard to bullying is that,
yes, a bully is trying to exploit a power differential, and that the
faster you demonstrate strength to close the differential, the more
quickly the bully will leave you alone and find someone else to
victimize (if the demonstration of strength wasn’t enough to humiliate
them entirely). Generally speaking, that means you’re going to have to
get physical at the middle or high school level. Once you’ve shown
you’re not going to be fucked with, the spell of dominance is broken and
the bully no longer sees you as someone to victimize.

As the smallest and smartest kid in my grade most years, I had to put up with a fair amount of bullying from first through eighth grade. My first pair of glasses were broken on the playground by getting punched off my face; I got in a shot or two but was whipped pretty conclusively by a kid nearly twice my size. I was a good athlete, so as I reached junior high age, I was protected to a certain extent by my teammates, but I still had to deal with the occasional hallway attack as well as the incessant shoving and verbal threats. The other thing that helped was my ready willingness to stand up for myself; in both seventh and eighth grade I accepted challenges from bigger guys more than capable of beating me up and “went outside”; on both occasions, the other boy decided it wasn’t worth the risk of losing once we were out there with the usual circle of boys and girls around us.

But the low-grade stuff didn’t stop until I broke one boy’s ribs after he shoved me into a locker, and smashed another boy’s face into the floor when he tried to tackle me.  After that, only one kid, a persistent troublemaker, was ever a problem, and he gave up after he saw me go through the open window of a moving bus to break the nose of a kid from another school who tried to spit at me. After that, he wouldn’t even try to pick on other kids in front of me since I made it clear that I was more than ready to pay him back for cracking one of my ribs after soccer practice one year.

Ender has had to deal with some attempted tormentors over the years, but no one even tries to mess with him anymore, not since he put down the star of the soccer club and the kid’s best friend at the same time when they tried to play dominance games with him. Of course, he’s been doing judo for years and he plays outside defender with a controlled fury that his coach and all the other dads appreciate, so even the biggest kids are openly respectful despite him being the weird smart kid.

Badger is right. Negotiation and seeking to understand bullies is irrelevant or even counterproductive. There is only one answer: hit back and hit back harder.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t turn the other cheek, I’m saying you can’t choose to turn the other cheek if violence is not even an option. I forgo retaliation on the soccer field on a regular basis. But it’s my choice to do so, it’s not a necessary consequence of either cowardice or an inability to respond.

The short answer: not so much these days

A PhD candidate quits academia and explains how professional academics have ruined science:

(1) Academia: It’s Not Science, It’s Business
I’m going to start with the supposition that the goal of “science”
is to search for truth, to improve our understanding of the universe
around us, and to somehow use this understanding to move the world
towards a better tomorrow. At least, this is the propaganda that we’ve
often been fed while still young, and this is generally the propaganda
that universities that do research use to put themselves on lofty moral
ground, to decorate their websites, and to recruit naïve youngsters like
myself.
I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic
prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest –
first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own
work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty
appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly
after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too
honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s
shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are
taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be
strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it. Preference is given
to good presentation over good content – a priority that, though
understandable at times, has now gone overboard. The “evil” kind of
networking (see, e.g.,http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/networking-good-vs-evil/)
seems to be openly encouraged. With so many business-esque things to
worry about, it’s actually surprising that *any* scientific research
still gets done these days. Or perhaps not, since it’s precisely the
naïve PhDs, still new to the ropes, who do almost all of it.
(2) Academia: Work Hard, Young Padawan, So That One Day You Too May Manage!
I sometimes find it both funny and frightening that the majority of
the world’s academic research is actually being done by people like me,
who don’t even have a PhD degree. Many advisors, whom you would expect
to truly be pushing science forward with their decades of experience, do
surprisingly little and only appear to manage the PhD students, who
slave away on papers that their advisors then put their names on as a
sort of “fee” for having taken the time to read the document (sometimes,
in particularly desperate cases, they may even try to steal first
authorship). Rarely do I hear of advisors who actually go through their
students’ work in full rigor and detail, with many apparently having
adopted the “if it looks fine, we can submit it for publication”
approach.

Apart from feeling the gross unfairness of the whole thing – the
students, who do the real work, are paid/rewarded amazingly little,
while those who manage it, however superficially, are paid/rewarded
amazingly much – the PhD student is often left wondering if they are
only doing science now so that they may themselves manage later. The
worst is when a PhD who wants to stay in academia accepts this and
begins to play on the other side of the table. Every PhD student reading
this will inevitably know someone unlucky enough to have fallen upon an
advisor who has accepted this sort of management and is now inflicting
it on their own students – forcing them to write paper after paper and
to work ridiculous hours so that the advisor may advance his/her career
or, as if often the case, obtain tenure. This is unacceptable and needs
to stop….

(8) Academia: The Greatest Trick It Ever Pulled was Convincing the World That It was Necessary
Perhaps the most crucial, piercing question that the people in
academia should ask themselves is this: “Are we really needed?” Year
after year, the system takes in tons of money via all sorts of grants.
Much of this money then goes to pay underpaid and underappreciated PhD
students who, with or without the help of their advisors, produce some
results. In many cases, these results are incomprehensible to all except
a small circle, which makes their value difficult to evaluate in any
sort of objective manner. In some rare cases, the incomprehensibility is
actually justified – the result may be very powerful but may, for
example, require a lot of mathematical development that you really do
need a PhD to understand. In many cases, however, the result, though
requiring a lot of very cool math, is close to useless in application.

This is fine, because real progress is slow. What’s bothersome,
however, is how long a purely theoretical result can be milked for
grants before the researchers decide to produce something practically
useful. Worse yet, there often does not appear to be a strong urge for
people in academia to go and apply their result, even when this becomes
possible, which most likely stems from the fear of failure – you are
morally comfortable researching your method as long as it works in
theory, but nothing would hurt more than to try to apply it and to learn
that it doesn’t work in reality.

This is written by a PhD candidate at a European university, but the problems he cites are, for the most part, imported from American universities, in which the problems are reportedly even more severe.  It is worth recalling that most of the great scientific discoveries throughout history were made by amateur scientists, not the professional academic guild that tries to claim ownership of a method and a knowledge base that long pre-dated it.

And it’s not just sour grapes from a non-finisher either. One commenter adds: “I agree with everything the author said and more. I am just extremely
disappointed at myself for not having seen it all this clearly earlier.
It took a Master’s degree, a Ph.D degree and a post-doc at the best
institutions in the world, until I started to see academia for what it
is: a paper publishing business driven mostly by people who care nothing
for the advancement of knowledge.”

I think this is why it is helpful to think about science in the tripartite terms I labeled in TIA. One should never confuse scientage or scientody for scientistry.  “Science”, as it exists today, is something of a bait-and-switch. What the PhD candidate is describing is scientistry, the practitioners of which have tried to elevate themselves on the basis of the public’s high regard for scientage and scientody. This has led to observably absurd statements such as PZ Myers’s claiming that “science is what scientists do”.

The answer is simple. Defund scientistry. Get rid of the third-rate bureaucrats and managers that have increasingly replaced the first-rate minds that used to dominate science. Return science to the technicians and the amateurs of an earlier, more successful, age.

Another commenter adds an important observation: “Science is NOT a business, science is a charitable venture funded by
government. And government is famously incompetent at getting ANYTHING
done efficiently or sensibly, because government is also not a business,
it lives off the taxpayer, few of whom even follow what their money is
being spent on. So science is a big charade where bureaucrats hire
committees of “respected” academics to make collective judgments on
distributing the government funds, so all the conniving and deal-making
and back-stabbing are a natural part of the process. It happens wherever
government spends money, not just in science.”

That also explains why so many scientists hate libertarians.  They know we see through their scam. 

Mailvox: I want to homeschool, but….

WK has a problem getting his boy to listen and obey:

 I have a 5 year old boy in a private Montessori school
because I failed to produce results at home.  I and my wife worked with
him using a montessori type home method. We spent quite a bit of time
and money getting the tools and setup right for him.  What is obvious to
me now is that he listens and pays more attention to other teachers in
his life other than us, the parents.  For example, I had been trying all
summer last year and this year to teach hold his breath underwater.  I
signed him up for swimming lessons with the schools in August.  He met
his teacher, an 18 year old girl, for about a minute.  She jumped in and
had my son jumping in the pool and holding his breath underwater in
about 10 seconds.  Talking with other parents I know, what I experienced
appears to be fairly common.  I am not sure if there is word for what I
described above, but there should be for this concept.  I quick search
through the homeschool blogs looking for answers and the most common
answer appears to be a shaming of the parent that they can’t get their
child to listen to them.

I quote: “You are the parent and it is your responsibility to
train your children to listen to you. Whether you homeschool or not,
they should be respectful and attentive to you.”

That’s
all fine and dandy, but I can’t be accused of not putting enough time,
research, love and effort into getting my child to listen to me and
homeschool.  I don’t have results from my work with my son.  You can’t
help but notice that at his montessori school he listens to his teacher
and does his work great.  (The school has an open door policy with
parents to come and see how their kids are doing).  I think that the
above must be a common problem for homoeschooled kids based on my limited experience.  How am I to get my kids to homeschool effectively? 
Otherwise I am going to be school poor sending my kids to private
school to avoid the slaughter at public school.  Quite honestly, a
private montessori school will still have its problems too.

I’m going to have to turn it over to the Dread Ilk on this one. I have no problem getting my kids to listen to me and neither does Spacebunny. Of course, I never had any problem getting 35 kids between 6-8 to do exactly what I told them to do at soccer practice either.
Since the kid is only five, it seems unlikely that rebellion is the issue.  My guess is that the boy knows his parents love him and he has reason to believe that he has veto on anything they tell him. For example, if my kids had resisted jumping in the pool, I’d simply have thrown them in. I don’t know if WK tried that or not, but I find it hard to imagine that anyone could spend months trying, and failing, to get a kid to jump in the pool unless he never just threw the kid in.

In most cases, a parental inability to command obedience is a parental failure to demand it.  I say this, not to shame, but to point out that the problem is likely related to expectations and communication. As long as the father offers the child a choice, he can’t fault the kid for choosing the option that the father doesn’t want. If it’s not your intention to let the child choose, then don’t pretend to give him an option.

And the correct response to “But I don’t want to” is “I didn’t ask for your opinion, I told you what to do.  Now do it.”