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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^ PTID above....
My comment about BHP related to your standard-issue evidence-free assertion that market-based solutions somehow represent abandonment to forces that are corrupt, rigged monopolistic etc etc. |
No, that's not what I was saying, nor is it what I think! I've been clear on this point for a good few years now. You have to distinguish between (much) more and (much) less free markets. As I say, stocks and bonds are at the extreme end of free markets; "educations" are miles down the other end. And if even very free markets can become divorced from reality and go haywire, imagine what happens when you try to apply the same logics to education.
In other words, I'm only reiterating what happens when you import free market assumptions into very un-free markets such as natural monopolies. It gives you cronyistic pretend systems which damage service quality and transfer rents under the guise of something more noble, *without* the discipline of competitive pricing. Australia's low-density geography exacerbates this, hence the NBN schmozzle or the horrific airport charges and prices in many countries.
Public transport prices in the UK are horrific in a much denser population context than Australia in a country that desperately needs people to live beyond London. This is a massive fundamentalist planning fail.
Of course, nothing can compete with public transport in Seoul given both its density and the intimate connection between public transport and politics given shoddy privatisation of everything hasn't occurred yet, though it is underway.
In Korea, a 10 cent price increase is a major electoral issue as it would be in a proper competitive marketa prime example of a non-market system being more responsive to disciplinary signals than a fake market system where the monopoly operators get to hide behind layers of sub-companies and contracts, and still get to scapegoat the government.
The fact is, once you reduce something to limited bidding, you have cartel behaviour and corruption incentives built into it through the intrasnparency of negotiations. That's a competition bottleneck right there.
Of course, it's a natural bottleneck built into population geography and infrastructure economics, hence the term "natural" monopoly. There's no point running eight NBNs or six train lines between the same stations to give you competitive bidding and price discipline.
The market bottlenecks in the case of university supply include geography, but are far more related to two other variables of competition discipline: the variable of time and product comparability/substitutionability, and the way those things completely bugger up rational pricing.
Thus, x grade type y legumes are definable products, give or take a few factors. So definable you can actually run a futures market for them to enable risk management through hedging and the like (just repeating that for other readers; I know that's your field).
But a humanities degree is a what, actually? What's it as an entity that can be adequately measured? We can guess metrics, but we can't prove them with any sense of certainty because the pricing system is irrational. That's why we're reduced to really dumb things like "reputation", which is in turn based on further vague, degraded proxies like "entry score", "articles published in whatever ranking journals", etc.
Now, these types of metrics are actually the only proxies we have. I'm not complaining about that reality. But if you subtract their over-generalisation and funding effects, they might be massively distortionary for all we know. And even if they were perfect, we still have the substitution problem whereby we don't even know what the product is to measure it against a set of reasonable criteria.
So, by the time you think you're seriously assessing the merits of X course for Y job or industry, you've been sucked into a giant certainty black hole.
Next, throw the variable of time into the mix. Education has many longitudinal effects ranging from the appreciatory to the depreciatory (deprecatory? appreciative/depreciative?). An old degree still gives people benefits decades later, from actual education effects, to legal threshold requirements, and a resume halo. At the same time, certain knowledge decays and becomes old hat.
These things are extremely difficult to quantify in any useful way. How does a being familiar with the history of Western philosophy help a person's understanding of and engagement with the world? Interestingly, it is actually of much more obvious benefit now cognitive science and philosophy of mind are merging, and global diversity and interaction has exploded, dragging us into a postmodern era led by brain science and AI.
Are studies of culture and the environment, derived from studies of human and physical geography, including fieldwork, of benefit when trying to understand cultures in context on a planet marching towards 10B diverse peoples?
Are studies of religion and comparative religion, including looking at its roots in a classical language, of benefit when trying to understand Islam in the UK, or religious tensions in low-income countries when working for a development agency?
Are studies of the longstanding religion-science conflict of help when approaching the ongoing interface between religious and non-religious thought, and all it involves, from taxation issues to legislative lobbying?
Do studies of the geography sub-field of cartography help when using GIS software in business planning? Do studies in rhetoric help when writing marketing materials? Does combining studies in psychology and labour market geography help when coaching job hopefuls? Do general analytical skills help when working for a bank or business research firm? Does having studied urban planning theory and law and approaches to urban geographic analysis help when working for a municipal council?
On and on we can go; they're just examples I'm closely familiar with. How the heck can that be captured in language or measurements used in the study of theoretical free markets and highly-fungible assets?
How can the benefit of having studied Islam in comparative religion be priced today, decades after studying it in a context when it wasn't a daily topic of social hysteria? How can that aspect of studying religion be priced into the original product twenty years before it a topic of populist importance?
Of course, I would argue being familiar with the history of thought, society, peoples, physical/human/economic geographies, power systems, religious systems, and such, helps inoculate one against hysterical nonsense, destructive ideas, urban furphy, pretend economics, Iraq War lies, and such, but I can't prove it to an extent that I can price its value.
And this is the take-home point I'm making: If you can't price, let alone define, the product, how can you assess those overseeing its delivery? What sane metrics aside from custom and best intuitions can you impose on those people as a funder or buyer?
And, let's not be be fooled into thinking other disciplines get us much further because they seem more "tangible". Most science degrees are miles off any specific market or career application. Most end up running stats and equations in engineering. But if we only have engineers, who is going to know anything about the underlying science of the engineered artifact? Who is going to change the conceptual framing of engineering to help it makes leaps rather than incremental improvements? Real scientists get to the heart of the forces and complexes of calculations which engineers depend on.
And what makes a great computer scientist? Is it learning the latest language which will soon age, or is it learning the principles of programming and the philosophy of language and logic generally, which ages at a much slower rate and is much more widely applicable in industry, but is far less amenable to definition, pricing and job description?
And what happens when you mix, say, marketing and programming? Does it help or hinder programming? Or, as is fashionably held in esteemed business schools in a different field, is an MBA enhanced by the humanities?
Or, take a more recent market curiosity. Why are so many tech leaders software geeks, and not just "general" business people? The old assumptions about "general management" skills being transferable are becoming shakier by the day because the threshold needs of specific business domains and markets have become so high, whether be in finance, IT, marketing, logistics and SCM, or whatever. How do business schools factor that new reality into their "product definition" and "pricing"?
When you run through all that and much more, you don't see anything remotely like the market for toothpaste or carpet, let alone complex services with complex SLAs such as IT systems development, or urban infrastructure planning.
You do see something that could very easily be misunderstood and messed up by market fundamentalists who apply religion-like, naive assumptions to something that isn't remotely like a free market because it is extraordinarily difficult to define, measure and price, especially in the present.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| stui magpie wrote: | Going to university doesn't mean you're any smarter than anyone else. You're going there to learn stuff.
Having been educated at uni doesn't mean you're now smarter, in actually fact you are exactly as intelligent or stupid as you were when you started, you have just attained more knowledge in the areas you studied, you didn't attain more intelligence.
Learning philosophy does not make you less dumb, nor do any subjects teach you how to think. If you couldn't think before you started you would have learned nothing.
What you can learn are different skills and techniques for how to approach a problem or issue from a different perspective. How to look for root cause, how to identify the problem from the symptoms. You learn ways to think through issues, not how to think. I've done short courses in problem solving techniques and it's a valuable skill to have, but isn't some freaking mystical power you develop from being at uni,
Someone who has gone to university to study medicine isn't by virtue of that any more or less intelligent than someone who left at year 10 and did an apprenticeship. They have a different level of learned knowledge, much of it considered to be a higher level of complexity so they do need to be reasonably smart to be able to learn it, but just having learned that makes you no smarter than anyone else. I'd no more trust a surgeon to be able to build a pergola than I would a chippie to do a knee reconstruction.
So any condescending kunts want to suggest I have chips on my shoulder against higher education are clear proof that stupid people can get tertiary educations too. |
I hold a very decentralised approach to learning and hate institutions, so I agree with a lot of what you say, but you do keep making one technical error with this. You somehow keep thinking content doesn't matter. You concede exposure to problem solving skills and frameworks matter, but I don't think you're up-to-speed with content yet.
Unless you have an unofficial source of content exposure such as x years of experience doing something, you cannot encounter the stuff of thought except through formal, intensive study.
Sure, you can do it yourself informally. But most people don't substitute the intensive learning of a degree taken seriously with something comparable. As mentioned, some people do have very good general life exposure, and had an optimal upbringing in this regard, but most people don't have that.
It doesn't matter how smart you think you are, unless you've studied economics or philosophy seriously, you're not going to be able to tell me much about them. Unless you've done comparative religion, you're not going to be of much help with Islam.
Unless you've put in a lot of hard yards, you won't know the history and present status of cutting-edge cognitive science and technology, hence you will say stuff about, say, AI which is dated and behind the present technical capability and trajectory of the field (which you have done on occasions, BTW  ).
Humans can't flop their brains out and "just know stuff". This is just not correct. We have highly complex memories of experience, smell, shapes, faces, emotions, and so on, to run queries on even as we encounter new stuff. This is because before running calculations and applying logics, you have to know what you're looking at, and you need to frame it. That takes massive data and exposure to do without making major category errors and naive assumptions.
These learning algorithms are in turn directed by native categories we are born with. As discussed many a time, our strength as a species is that we're a genetic entity which can also extend itself and adapt through experience, training and learning.
So, to connect to Ronrat's post, your brain tells you the Swastika is a symbol of evil, and brings that information to mind when you encounter a Buddhist symbol of the same kind. Of course, you might be smart enough to calculate the cultural problem, but it helps to already know that and be expecting it.
Surgeons don't cut into your brain in the hope to sort something out on-the-fly using their superior IQs. Content matters because mapping and categorisation precede calculation as well as shape it. Logic, of course, helps (this culture is Buddhist and is very different, so that Swastika probably means something very different locally and might be thousands of years old), but it has limits, as our neurosurgeon would soon discover.
Experience, of course, matters greatly, but is extremely expensive to come by. Think of the unusual situations of Morrigu and I living overseas and traveling about; the decision to live such a life and gain that particular experience incurs many costs beyond just the financial sort.
This is why both fiction and non-fiction are handy because they expose us to facts and proxy experiences, building up our knowledge and oiling our brains by enabling us to run simulations of experiences. Then, when we combine that with our actual experience and toolbox of calculations and logics, we can become very knowledgeable in something.
Bless you if you had one of those golden childhoods rich in culture, exposure, ideas, discussion, and so forth. Or if you've sweated by candlelight informally studying as much as most people who've done degrees (seriously - not the bums). Or you're surrounded by smart folk who both bombard you with insight and ideas, and informally teach you.
But if that's not the case to a very impressive degree, I'm not sure where you think the content and experiences for areas outside your everyday domains are supposed to come from.
It's obvious you have very high-level general knowledge and reasoning, but you still heavily underestimate the point above, probably defensively. Stui, no one would ever think you're anything but a smart bloke with a very high aptitude in your areas of specialisation and well beyond that in life, drawing on a high level of general reasoning and knowledge. So you shouldn't worry about those wankers.
TP, the same applies to you! Don't worry about the degree-branded wankers, or past bad experience, as much as it hurts and gets to you.
Some of you guys seem have no doubt been discriminated against by degree and institutional brand wavers, and degrading parents or relatives. This pisses me off no end, too. My father almost ruined high school for me by humiliating me all the time if I didn't get perfect marks, the silly old fool. All that did was make me hate school and switch off.
But please note some of us value knowledge and experience from *any* source, but also think formal education is an awesome development experience that is not easy to duplicate in a run-of-the-mill routine.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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2 posts, 1 page! I vaguely remember my English teacher talking about padding! 
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| pietillidie wrote: |
It's obvious you have very high-level general knowledge and reasoning, but you still heavily underestimate the point above, probably defensively. Stui, no one would ever think you're anything but a smart bloke with a very high aptitude in your areas of specialisation and well beyond that in life, drawing on a high level of general reasoning and knowledge. So you shouldn't worry about those wankers.
TP, the same applies to you! Don't worry about the degree-branded wankers, or past bad experience, as much as it hurts and gets to you.
Some of you guys seem have no doubt been discriminated against by degree and institutional brand wavers, and degrading parents or relatives. This pisses me off no end, too. My father almost ruined high school for me by humiliating me all the time if I didn't get perfect marks, the silly old fool. All that did was make me hate school and switch off.
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I rarely cop anything directed at me as the wankers assume I'm part of their club, but it pisses me off seriously when one of them has a go at one of my staff. When some 30 year old Nurse starts talking down to a 60 year old Payroll clerk with a year 8 education who's busting their arse trying to pay people correctly, behaving like she's better because she's a qualified nurse and the payroll person is just a clerk, damn right I get defensive. The most pleasurable part is pretty much always being able to point out that the fault was not with the payroll clerk while I'm slapping them back into their box.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Haha, yes, TP. It would take me two good edits to structure that neatly and condense it, so please bear with me!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Tell me more about it. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Stui, I can imagine; at least you get to put them in their place. I would imagine recent university graduates are among the worst for that.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| think positive wrote: | | 2 posts, 1 page! I vaguely remember my English teacher talking about padding! |
Deserved better than this, though! Great posts, PTID, particularly the second one (ok, I'll get around to reading the rest of the first one later. ).
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ Actually, both were well worth reading and considering. When you drop the Keatingesque attack-dog rhetoric, PTID, you make formidable and interesting points. There is much I can agree with in your post, and of course some that I cannot.
The main point where I demur is that service intangibles (such as a degree) may not be as relatively uniform as legumes are, but they are still valued by consumers (and the employers of consumers) and they have providers - so supply and demand can tell us important things about how to value, price and supply them. It seems you don't feel that.
It is, however, far harder for supply and demand to value (say) what Wittgenstein wrote at Cambridge, or what Einstein developed in the Swiss patent office, and for those types of activity, markets are useless. Yet we need those, too, partly because they generate new practical things, but also because they intrinsically ennoble humanity no less than the Olympics, or singing.
So while i do not agree with all of your post, it was intellectually engaging, generous and stimulating to read, and I found myself nodding at most of it.
On British public transport, btw, agreed, it is insanely expensive - but it was when it was state-owned prior to 1994, too. The only difference was that it was both very expensive and appallingly unreliable, back then !
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Two more flags before I die! |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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A welcome defence of the humanities from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/opinion/dont-turn-away-from-the-art-of-life.html
| Quote: | | The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations subjective but also moral and philosophical that bathe all literature. A new technology like GPS provides us with the most efficient and direct route to a destination, but it presupposes we know where we are going. Finding an address is one thing; finding ones way in life is another. Even our smartest computers or most brilliant statisticians are at a loss when it comes to mapping our psychic landscapes. |
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Oh a web page. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| David wrote: | A welcome defence of the humanities from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/opinion/dont-turn-away-from-the-art-of-life.html
| Quote: | | The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations subjective but also moral and philosophical that bathe all literature. A new technology like GPS provides us with the most efficient and direct route to a destination, but it presupposes we know where we are going. Finding an address is one thing; finding ones way in life is another. Even our smartest computers or most brilliant statisticians are at a loss when it comes to mapping our psychic landscapes. |
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He, funny you quote the New York post. I'm trying to work out how many days I need there, people keep telling me more more more, I'm looking at the guide book and their is 50 million museums! The museum of skyscrapers, the museum of sex, museum of American finance, Jewish children's museum, the new museum! the museum of everything under the sun! I'll go to three, the one in the movie a night at the museum - the American museum of natural history (those dinosaurs look so cool!ill be disappointed when they don't play fetch I'm sure!) the aerospace one with the battleship, space shuttle, submarine etc,- the intrepid air sea and space museum, and the 9/11 one!
Depending on time might go to the one in philidelphia so I can run up the rocky steps. Maybe the Smithsonian in Washington if we have time, and there is a walking dead museum in Atlanta I hope to get to.
"Don't dead, open inside!"
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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| think positive wrote: | | David wrote: | A welcome defence of the humanities from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/opinion/dont-turn-away-from-the-art-of-life.html
| Quote: | | The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations subjective but also moral and philosophical that bathe all literature. A new technology like GPS provides us with the most efficient and direct route to a destination, but it presupposes we know where we are going. Finding an address is one thing; finding ones way in life is another. Even our smartest computers or most brilliant statisticians are at a loss when it comes to mapping our psychic landscapes. |
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He, funny you quote the New York post. ...... |
TP, David was quoting the New York Times.
_________________
“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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Haha. Yes, a slight difference there, one might have thought.  Think The Age (back when it was still worth reading) vs The Herald Sun and you're halfway there.
Hope you have a good time in New York. Just remember that much of the content of the museums you visit will have been found, curated, analysed and written about by people with humanities backgrounds. To continue the line of argument in the article I posted, there's no point digging up a bit of ancient crockery if you don't know what it means or why it's important.
(Best wishes, David, national segue champion 2016.  )
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| watt price tully wrote: | | think positive wrote: | | David wrote: | A welcome defence of the humanities from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/opinion/dont-turn-away-from-the-art-of-life.html
| Quote: | | The regime of information may well sport its specific truths, but it is locked out of the associations subjective but also moral and philosophical that bathe all literature. A new technology like GPS provides us with the most efficient and direct route to a destination, but it presupposes we know where we are going. Finding an address is one thing; finding ones way in life is another. Even our smartest computers or most brilliant statisticians are at a loss when it comes to mapping our psychic landscapes. |
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He, funny you quote the New York post. ...... |
TP, David was quoting the New York Times. |
it was early, i doubled the word post, it was the new york bit i was grabbing, but yeah, ta!!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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