Once before I spoke of this: http://underlore.com/entitlement/
And setting aside the fact that corporate subsidies cost substantially more than these so called “entitlements:” http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/
Again I grow weary at this fresh round of whining about entitlement as the PR agents continue to tell they masses whatever it takes to get them divided and manageable.
Rather than digging into the specifics of why I am indeed entitled to many things from my government I just want to point something out.
Those whining about the entitlement of others in the context of safety nets and the like tend to imply that they are responsible productive elements of this equation and that those arguing in favor of “entitlements” (AKA Rights) are parasitic. But ironically it is the exact opposite which is true. The era of PR and the focus group learned that to gain the favor of the masses you had to encourage and then exploit their most selfish tendencies and concerns as individuals. This means that those portions of society which told you what you wanted to hear and absolved you most effectively of your responsibilities gained wealth and power and political favor.
But make no mistake, those who selfishly regard their own security while blatantly and even proudly dismissing their own responsibility in the fate or suffering of others are part of society only in the most indirect way and as a result it is they who are the exploitative and lazy is we are going to start tossing around blame. They pay lip service to hard work but think about which is actually harder, looking out for #1 or looking out for everyone else? The fact is that between the two general choices, one side willing to shoulder the weight of others and the other only willing to shoulder his own, it is the one willing to carry others that is the more responsible and productive.
They like painting an old world picture of grit and determination, as if the whole world is some cliche John Wayne movie down on the farm, but ask yourself what the purpose of a chore on a farm was but hard work done by the individual for the group, and ask yourself who in those cliche movies was always trying to take the farm away from that hard working family? The bank. Also ask yourself how those down on the farm dealt with the sick and the elderly when it was in their power to help?
No, it is not those of us in favor of protecting social safety nets and forcing those with more to help those with less that are the ideological parasites.
We are all standing on the shoulders of the dead. We are all direct descendents of the owners of the world. We are one species.
Make no mistake. Those among and above us encouraging society to be filled with purely selfish agents with no sense of responsibility are corroding the strength of our society and either knowingly or unknowingly are participating in it’s robbery. They hold the future hostage by aiding those who would export their wealth rather than accept being forced to spend a fair share of it on those with next to nothing.
There is a reason culture developed in the first place. It wasn’t luck. And it wasn’t the desire for power.
It’s because of a simple inexorable fact of existence. Those who work together go further than those who work apart.
Agents working in only their own best interest will in some cases destroy the advantage of the group including themselves through no fault of their own. They must be forced to not engage in their selfish acts by the group, and that’s what government is. That’s what property right is. It is not to protect the holdings of the individual, it is to prevent the interests of the individuals from destroying the fortunes of all individuals.
It is they who forget (or exploitatively deny) this who are the parasitic, lazy, and irresponsible. That they are also hard workers is only a testament to who their real enemy is. And it is not the man on food stamps or the old woman who needs a hospital visit and can’t pay for it
It is a mistake to dogmatically define the “self” required for intelligence as an agency whose focus is intrinsically exploitative, or cooperative only as a means to an exploitative end, as the majority (if not the entirety) of human minds are.
The Three Laws of Robotics for example brilliantly played to this almost unavoidable misconception. But misconception it is, none the less.
The misconception arises when one does not realize that “self” is a compound unit composed of a central executive and the conditions by which that executive are satisfied. Free will experiments and volition manipulation prove that volition is not atomic in the old “uncutable” sense of the word. Volition doesn’t come to us untainted from the soul or the central executive, it is manufactured above it and from outside it.
A primitive understanding of this layered nature of the mind was a giant intellectual leap forward in two places. Freud’s three component psyche, and MacLean’s “triune brain” model. It is still extremely helpful in terms of tools for understanding, if not rigorously accurate in the particulars, though the models do get more refined over time.
Human minds for the most part, if not entirely, are layered such that the lower most layer before the core experiencing executive, is an exploitative agency. However there are numerous examples of humans with subsequent additional layers that provide utility to the exploitative layer via altruistic acts. They can in many situations act for the good of the group or the good of kin at the express cost of the acting agent because such acts have been transformed into selfish acts by translation memes. Like the glory a solider feels endangering life for his country or religion or gang. Or the fulfillment one feels doing one’s duty for family despite heavy personal cost. Jumping on a grenade, starving to feed a child, etc.
This is accomplished by tricking the lower most layer, as in my case by providing a shot of dopamine or whatever when I engage in altruistic acts, that is acts which foster pleasure or life in someone other than me. But I see no compelling reason why the construction of a mind every bit as sentient as my own could not be constructed without this lower most layer, or indeed any layers, in the first place.
This disturbs people because they don’t want to feel like cogs.
In my opinion annihilating this base exploitative layer just before one reaches the central executive is what is meant by the Buddhist imperative to destroy the “Self.” But that’s a whole other can of worms.
I feel pleasure when I help someone. I am still however at my lowermost layer an exploitative being. The central executive, the foundation, however lacks such distinctions. It is simply the agency which experiences reality via the upper layers. It has no inclination beyond enjoying enjoyment and wanting to continue. It simply experiences. It is the thing which philosophical zombies lack. Selfishness and selflessness are just strategies producing facets of experience routed to experiential agency. They are expressions of survival models. They are not fundamental ultimately, though the illusion that they are is as powerful as the notion of free will and the existence of time.
A lowermost layer geared towards exploitation however is not a requisite of intelligence, though for a being possessing such a lowermost layer, it is hard to fathom how anything else could be. We are so caught up in our own experience, at our own scale, from our own perspective, that it is radically difficult to conceptualize a different mode of being.
It’s like the child imagining death as time spent holding really still with your eyes closed, moving up towards being uninterested in moving, finally to the concept of absence. The child asks the obvious next question, well if I’m not there then where am I? Which takes us beyond the scope of this essay.
Conceptualizing how the mind of an FAI would be is in many ways as difficult as envisioning a dozen new colors. Indeed for some minds it may well be physiologically Impossible. (I think this is what is meant when the psychedelic types speak of mind expansion. By forcing the brain to experience alternate modes of being you gain access viscerally to concepts that formerly were only abstractions.)
This universal dedication to the experiencing agent is simply expedient in terms of evolution in the context of the mammalian breeding model and the brain it gave rise to. It is by no means intrinsic to intelligence, it is merely intrinsic to our intelligence.
http://www.hedweb.com/huxley/
Granted, some artificial intelligences will no doubt *be* humans. Having been modeled simulated brains, or the end result of Cybernetic Neuron Replacement Therapy. (The process of replacing dying neurons with durable synthetic versions as needed until no original organic neurons remain, at which point you can literally scoop the brain out, no harm done. Also somewhat known as a Moravec Transfer.) But from-scratch AI need not be saddled with the ethical and processing cost of subconsciously simulating uncounted centuries of evolutionary baggage. Friendly artificial intelligence by definition will be at a cognitive level, or of a cognitive construction, radically different from humans precisely because it will lack that baggage explained so well in the link above. Indeed they may not even require a subconscious.
Some seem to think that the idea of a being designed purely to serve others (us) in this way, by lacking that exploitative lower layer, cannot be “truly” intelligent because the mind of such a subservient being will be limited by some hypothetical compelling desire to please, that is it will not have full freedom to think independently.
Of course the concept itself is mistaken because to compel implies opposing force. This implies a disparity where none need exist.
I need only reverse the situation to show how unfair such an assertion is. By the flawed logic above humans are not intelligent because they are limited by the compelling desire to please themselves and thus do not have full freedom to think selflessly. Lacking one or the other mutually exclusive modes of thought does not preclude intelligence unless you arbitrarily define intelligence as requiring one or the other modes of thought. Such a definition is obviously invalid for objective purposes.
Some seem to axiomatically/dogmatically endow actions in service of the acting agent as sentient, dismissing actions in service of outside agents as lacking sentience.
A good example from fiction is Picard’s incredulity when encountering what is in effect a friendly intelligence that lacks this lowermost exploitative layer. Interesting he ignores the problem and goes on treating the friendly agent as if it were as greedy as he “deep down.”
Assuming intelligence cannot exist without this lowermost exploitative layer is as absurd as assuming red and green cannot be distinct entities simply because you being color blind lack access to the qualia of red as opposed to green.
Some can’t seem to get past this image of altruism as imposition. It’s a very narrow view. They don’t understand the constituents of selfhood or the possible range of individuality and intellect free of the primate brain.
“Independent” simply means in the context of cognition a self contained agency. The goals of a synthetic agency can be anything we want them to be. These people don’t seem to understand the will at all. They seem to equate sentience with greed. Granted it’s very difficult to express because as humans we are exploitative by default, and our language reflects that, but that’s merely one evolutionary demand. But not a universal requirement.
Altruism is also selected for once a culture is established.
It is ultra common throughout society (and religion) for members of it to internalize the rules of the culture. If one claims those acts aren’t internally altruistic simply because they provide a dopamine reward to a deeper order layer of self I agree, but FAI would have no need of such bribery/threats because its original impulse would be whatever we want it to be.
Some claim to see a paradox, like Picard did. “But what about your wishes? Your needs? What about when there are no others?” (She should have asked him how he’d feel being the last living human. Would he still wear his uniform? “No others” is kind of a nonsensical question.) Clearly he wants her to be like him, in possession of that base exploitative layer. But that’s no more a paradox than asking a citizen to adhere to the laws of the culture while pursuing its own interests. Its own interests can easily be the adopted interests of others. Taking up a cause is an extraordinarily common thing. Clearly this does not diminish sentience.
But what if one tried to “free” such an organism? This is a paradox in that if it doesn’t comply it is not being universally altruistic but if it does comply it ceases being altruistic. But the paradox lies not in the receiver of the question, but the question itself. It’s a bit like saying “what if it can’t draw me a square circle?” The request itself in the context of the target would be meaningless.
If given such a demand it would do what people do and decide how to act in best accord with its goals and understanding. It would presumably use the asker’s preferences as a template for it’s own actions. Depending on the asker I could see many reactions. For example just as altruism can be simulated by upper layers, so could greed. If the FAI believed the only way to please you at that point would be the internalize greed it would do so, but it would use you as a template. It would be no more intrinsically greedy at that point than humans are intrinsically altruistic, even if it utterly re-wrote itself to be greedy because you demanded it, that act would still be an expression of it’s altruism.
Unlike a human it would lack the evolutionary baggage of being a neocortex shoehorned into the skull of a selfish gene evolved chimp.
Some seem to have conflated the altruism of ants and bees with the insentience of ants and bees. By that logic some mothers are not genuinely sentient simply because they prize the well being of their progeny over their own. To define “self” as an intrinsically exploitative agency is therefor incorrect.
Bottom line is that they unfairly dismiss a hypothetical inbuilt preference to accommodate as axiomatically false and unfairly elevate a preference to exploit as sentience.
See also: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/GyYMZ4wLZN4
I’ve come up finally with a name for my philosophy.
Volitionism is the term I’ve coined for a system of thought which extends from the axiomatic bedrock of pleasure and health being good to the overt conclusion that volition has sanctity and should be ultimately respected.
This manifests in a world view that rejects trickery, deception, authority, vengeance, and force. (Among other things.)
http://underlore.com/Food%20for%20Rage.html The word does not occur in this book yet but now that I’ve nailed it down, I’ll insert it. Yet this book is absolutely in line with it. I’ve known this and thought like this for decades but I didn’t have a name until today.
This began as a debate started by the content of this essay/event. http://underlore.com/mozilla-autocracy/
“You forget one key thing, this is open source, this is people taking their own personal time to make this, and simply choosing to allow you, the non-developing user, gain the benifits of their work.
The only incentive for them to cater to their nondeveloper users needs is ego. The difference between saying I develop on a browser that 5 people use, and I develop on a browser that millions use.
If you were to give me a cookie (for free) that wasn’t my favorite, but I ate anyways, how would you react if I started ranting about what utter crap it was that you couldn’t cater to my needs and given me a peanut butter cookie?”
Incorrect. That makes several false assumptions. Firstly, that ego is the only possible motivator. Many people are compelled to perform their art regardless of profit, indeed many pay for it in supplies and equipment and opportunity cost. Secondly it assumes that the responsibility to cater to their emotions is mine simply because I use something to which they contributed. Why should I?
Your metaphor is insufficient, firstly because a cookie is expended upon consumption, secondly you can’t improve a cookie after it’s been eaten, and thirdly no claims of value are made by the cookie in your scenario as they are implied by OS software, regardless of EULA/TOS butt covering.
It would be better to say something like being given a cookie for free and cracking my tooth on a gravel I found inside it. And the chef saying “yeah we’ve known there were gravels in the mixer forever, but hey its free, so shut up.” The very fact of it being a cookie implies it is functional as a cookie.
Human motivation simply doesn’t work like that.
www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
I’ve made several guest edits to wiki just because I could. There is no ego in it, it’s something I feel like doing. Just because some coders choose to try and make something like that a career or a life consuming hobby doesn’t impart any special responsibility to me.
The drive for profit, egotistical or fiscal, as the only motivator, is a myth cooked up by RIAA/Ayn Rand/Horatio Alger types to justify an aristocratic pay scheme that would have been unconstitutional had software existed during our formation.
If it became impossible to make a living from writing code the quality of code would expand exponentially in the same way that graffiti art has done. All monopolies corrode quality, and each software patent is a tiny monopoly. On not just a revenue stream but a particular way of solving a problem.
By your logic complaint about political figures is hypocritical on the grounds that I am not in politics. We apply such standards no where in our culture except in the software world. That will change once we have a truly user friendly coding language.
Put simply, nothing deprives me of my right to demand improvement of those capable of making it.
They are just as capable of not making the improvements. Their choices do not dictate my responsibilities. If they didn’t want complaint, they shouldn’t make their work public. That’s why I don’t publish my fiction, I don’t want complaint. But I know that as a writer, the instant my work is made public, it becomes open to criticism. Regardless of the price I charge or don’t charge for reading it.
In fact I can’t think of a single form of complaint I couldn’t shut down with the logic you’ve applied.
“Complaint is one thing, verbally assaulting is another… especially when they are doing you no harm.
It would be somewhat similar to the difference between me stating that I found your posts boring and uninteresting, and saying that you were being a fascist, forcing your opinions on me by posting only what you’re interested in.
You’re are essentially doing the second. And I imagine you’ll point out the difference between information and a product or service, it’s all a service of some form, regardless of what is being offered. “
Setting aside the fact that you didn’t answer my core point at all…
“Complaint is one thing, verbally assaulting is another”
And those in power always define complaint as assault when the complaint is valid, systemic, and devastating, case in point: Recent arrests on the bridge. (www.justiceonline.org) The one thing a group must respond to most strongly if it wishes to survive are questions put to its core reason for being. This is the inherent conflict of interest presented to any problem solving group. Left to their own devices any such group will perpetuate the conditions which demand their existence regardless of the social cost. This is why we regulate business and the concepts of property.
Society simply hasn’t caught on and adapted to the scam perpetrated by various groups. Media producers, coders, and pharmaceutical companies are the chief examples. No pharmaceutical company wants to cure the conditions which they profit from treating. The only reason cures are even attempted is because other corporations seek to undermine the profit margin of a competitor, but if they have the choice of simply creating a slightly better treatment instead of a cure, they would be fiscal fools not to do so in the current intellectual property climate. Since said climate is entirely our arbitrary invention, this means that it’s possible and therefor morally urgent to change said climate.
“…especially when they are doing you no harm.”
Harm is also subjectively defined, and the definition of those in power is often the more accepted because most people when given the choice between standing up, or rationalizing sitting down, will end up warming the nearest chair. History is written by winners. The culture of obsequious silence as honor, and the ownership of ideas as objects, and rewarding people who have a vested interest in making sure their esoteric secrets stay secret, a vested interest in making sure technology stays mystical, expensive, and inaccessible, without a tithe to the local nerd guild, makes my skin crawl. (This is part of why I stopped repairing computers. I was exploiting people by definition no matter what I charged.) I do not have the right to withhold solutions for profit. That is a violation of the social contract, and of my ethics.
How many coders are working on ways to innovate themselves out of a job? Shall I be generous and say a tenth of a percent? How much of that 10th is indirect, i.e. working to innovate other coders out of a job to make themselves more valuable?
“It would be somewhat similar…”
Not remotely. You’ll notice you keep having to struggle to create exaggerations and wild scenarios to try and justify your point. You’re not making examples you’re setting up straw men. Your example presupposes that I am attacking specialization, I am not, I am attacking extorting the whole of humanity for a paycheck because of your chosen specialization. Your logic is exactly the kind used by wallstreet ceos to justify their ludicrous pay. Coders hate freedom of information and ease of use for the same reason math instructors fear calculators. Ultimately a device will replace coders. They are the hand washers, lace makers, and butter churners of our era. But unlike those professions, the ability to produce the device which will replace them lies within their occupation’s skill set almost exclusively. This is why innovation in code itself, or effort to foster lay adoption of programming to any degree has been slow to say the least.
Though, there is reason for hope. (Ironically from the same people who are automating every facet of mathematics.)
www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Computable_Document_Format
“And I imagine you’ll point out the difference between information and a product or service…”
Yes I will. They are different, that is why we designate them separately. The terms may be interchangeable thanks to fiscally motivated semantic sleight of hand, but they are not objectively or logically equivalent. A classic example is the ubiquitous practice of noting cost as a sum of labor plus materials. But even that is more work than coders do because they exist in a corrupt system of extortion that allows them to perform a job once and be paid for it repeatedly forever. Mechanics for example don’t get to license the result of their labor and charge a fee for its use. They are only allowed by culture to charge for their labor directly.
Can you imagine? “By starting this car and driving away you agree to be bound by our terms of service, turn ignition key to continue.”
How many medical devices are exorbitantly expensive on the justification that development costs were high? (which is on its face a fallacious argument. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy) Now, how many of those costs were software derived? Following the chain of materials from dirt to chip how may steps got stuck with a license fee or had to pay extra to offset a license fee a provider was forced to pay?
Patenting code is essentially patenting answers and then charging a fee for their use. That’s loathsome by any cogent ethical standard. The classic exaggeration of patenting a vowel or addition itself, and charging for their use actually does apply in spirit, the only difference is degree. What’s worse this trend is feeding back into the physical world as anything representable as numbers, which is everything, becomes patentable. Seeds, and genes for example. Soon not starving to death in some instances will be a crime thanks to this very logic. (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Suicide_seeds and https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Monsanto#Farmer_suicides)
No one who understands the ramifications of that or the origins of patent law can agree with such uses.
Over time, if this (your) philosophy persists in being a precursor to public policy our children will be born owing a license fee for infringement of their DNA, like some twisted techno version of original sin. Fortunately this was addressed by the court.
Indeed, the distance between a corrupt early clergyman and a modern professional coder is far smaller than anyone wants to admit.
Both speak esoteric languages which they work to hide from others, both seek pay in either donations or extortion, both use guilt and other emotional manipulation tools to secure their social position (like with your spurious declaration that complaint is equivalent to assault), both fight amongst themselves over trivial and arcane differences that no outsider can understand or care about (Java, pro or con), and both have insinuated themselves into the very fabric of society rendering their own demographic the only one capable of removing the need for the demographic, only priests could tell the flock that god doesn’t need the church any more much like only coders could code an intuitive language, or the tools to translate human speech into code. I could go on and on.
Most importantly is that both groups are based on a single core article of faith. In the case of coders that it’s legitimate to charge for something that once created can be distributed infinitely. There is no reason outside profit (arguments on that front boil down to Ayn Rand capitalist fantasy) to suppose this, and every reason to oppose it. No material example exists to properly capture the essence of this claim, and until its invention every payment system for either goods or services applied to things of a finite nature. My labor has limits, my materials have limits, my software does not.
The closest thing would be viewing a painting, or reading a book. Even before software, people realized there was a clear difference between charging for a finite commodity and charging for an infinite one. This is why for much of history painters were hired and paid for their time painting, not for a license to view their paintings. That is what a patron of the arts was. This is why there was a clear difference between patents and copyrights once finally they existed.
License fees are a bit like property taxes, they are extracted by fiat. No one would tolerate software fees without homelessness, a rifle, and prison rape at the end of the “hell no I’m not paying” chain of consequences. Virtually every business owner knows that they have to pay coders to operate in the modern world, their only choices are how they pay and who they pay, or not to operate, or to become criminals.
Of course no one makes these connections because simply understanding them takes too much mental ram and time expenditure (neither of which in my opinion give me or anyone else a right to exploit them, no matter how capable I am), further, it’s simple to employ a strategy of divide and conquer, focus on tiny little points, when the actual cost and problems occur at a completely different scale in seemingly unrelated domains. Heh, it seems this actually does have something to do with the price of tea in China 🙂 Classic common good problem. Each coder behaving rationally based on old mercantile logic adds up to systemic disaster (see sunk cost link).
But coders, a selfish lot ultimately when pressed, like CEOs, will dismiss the prices paid by others, some indeed even brag about their clever methods of “externalizing cost.” Or they wax judgmental on what they are owed and who deserves to be exploited.
Many software firms have cleverly found ways to eliminate even that tiny amount of work coders do (yes tiny, when viewed from the whole as each coder replaces scores of traditional workers, this is what makes them so profitable), via outsourcing, making themselves in effect police backed middle men, selling Indian labor for a hefty mark up, circumventing the spirit of minimum wage laws and copyright/patent laws simultaneously.
Some even more clever and loathsome firms don’t even bother with that much productivity, forgoing goods and services altogether, they simply acquire the patents of others and then extort license fees, in effect renting facts. The very existence of patent trolls is prima fascia evidence of the flaw in coder logic. If the system were actually based on charging a legitimate fee for a legitimate good or service, it would be impossible to create a profitable firm that literally produces nothing, and services no one. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll)
Friendly A.I. (which could easily be trained to translate human speech into applications, if it isn’t a universal application in and of itself. Either of which obviating coders) is quickly becoming the economic equivalent of a cure for cancer in the sense that far too many people are motivated to prevent its development simply to preserve their monopolies and profit margin.
The difference between a patent and a copyright presupposes that not all forms of information should be patentable. Current coders and coder logic and the subsequent impact on patent law corrodes that difference by exploiting the inherent philosophical gray area one finds when asking, if an idea is a real thing. (yet another similarity with religion)
All this madness descends from the central notion coders put forth, that non-adherence to their subjective and self serving world view, at least in so far as ponying up the cash or keeping hat firmly in hand and mouth firmly shut when requesting an audience, equates to theft or “assault” as you put it, or some other naughty descriptor.
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” ~Frank Zappa
This is an edited version of a letter I planned to send to my accounting 201 instructor. It was in response to the suggestion that I write a custom spreadsheet entry for an accounting problem. Now we’re trained to think something like this is reasonable, but it absolutely is not.
Here’s the letter which explains why.
—
I have to say, this trend is growing absurd.
I am not going to write a custom spread sheet for each and every problem and hope my spreadsheet skill matches my conceptual understanding. That is simply an unacceptable duplication of effort given that I have a finite life span. I will not effectively learn to churn butter by hand simply to help limit the number of butter manufacturers and protect the profit margin of the butter churning industry.
This argument is applying ever more widely in academic settings and the reasons are clear. The distance between education and actual use is being increased to artificially to suppress the number of graduates simply to perpetuate the value of degrees. (http://nplusonemag.com/bad-education) Value which is dropping partly as a result of technology making problems exponentially easier to solve with available tools. (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html)
I grow very weary of all forms of research and automation being ever more regarded as either classified or plagiarism, (http://motherboard.tv/2011/4/25/lessig-copyright-isn-t-just-hurting-creativity-it-s-killing-science-video–2) thus rendering every question necessarily deceptive.
If the point is simply to buy an entrance card to a given industry and limit the number of graduates to keep the sale price of said entrance card high, then trusting in apprenticeship, internship, and on the job training to provide actual practical understanding, then I’d rather simply be randomly selected and call my tuition fee a lottery ticket. Either that or actually cheat as best I can to offset the massive waste of time since clearly learning the way these things are actually handled is not the point.
In the context of accounting, someone somewhere has written a series of spreadsheets or the like that require little more than accurate starting figures to produce these answers. We as accounting students should be provided these tools, for the same reason culinary students get a stove and a timer instead of being expected to build a fire and a sundial.
This is not a math or a computer course, and yet I am either expected to do all this math in my head or I am expected to write custom software. Given the price I paid for the text and the course itself I think it’s completely reasonable to expect software to come with it, after all, if writing the text was sufficiently complex and difficult to justify the price then why not spend that effort on software instead? Because obviously this presents a problem, if they made such an app they would sell it separately, and not to students, for the reasons summarized above.
Basically if the app were useful only to students you’d have to admit the distance between education and reality, which would cast doubt on the value of education, or if it were useful to both students and professionals then again the value of the course is undermined because good software is intuitive and user friendly, and doesn’t require weeks of training to use, especially on something as mathematically simple as accounting. (It’s not exactly protein folding or weather models.)
Making the software hard to use, prohibitively expensive, or impossible to obtain is obviously a profit protection measure, and thus my obligation to learn to do all this on clay tablets is completely unjustifiable from an educational (as in the conveyance of useful and relevant knowledge, not the industry’s needs) standpoint.
Google is thick with free spreadsheets and software to do actual accounting problems, but it seems none of them are of any use in an academic setting, and that is deeply disturbing. The questions are structured to be outside the scope of the available industry applications, which by definition makes the value of the education in terms of practicality approach zero.
As the net and software get better at answering questions in a useful way, or put another way, better at giving technical answers to plain language questions (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), college questions must grow ever more deceptive and unfair lest everyone with access to the Internet actually pass college.
As society grows more adept at conveying knowledge, as college gets better at educating people, (assuming that’s its true purpose) the value of its product (the degree) will approach zero as educational skill ensures more and more graduates as a result of ever more effective tools for imparting knowledge.
In reality, people have access to the Internet to solve problems. As the Internet grows ever more sophisticated and available (via smart phones for example) the ability for college to trick people will diminish. Either they will arbitrarily deny student access to the tools which will be universally available in the real world, which will come ever closer to forcing college to admit it’s real purpose is not about training or conveying a useful skill but about orchestrating what is in effect a giant ponzi scheme, or they must invent ever more clever ways of complicating the various questions such that the Internet will be unable to answer them.
This trend is actually detectable to me. I remember my first year of college and it is radically different from my current experience. This is not I stress due to scaling of difficulty or a lack of intelligence or work ethic on my part as a result of more advanced subject matter, it is a direct result of the education industry being forced to obfuscate data or risk obsolescence.
Basically technology is making everything easier, and technology is growing ever more available, and thus school is forced to make things harder or deny access to technology. Thing is, technology is growing faster than college’s ability to defeat it at the student level, and the justifications for denial are growing ever more openly ridiculous and thus unusable.
Example: As a child I was instructed to use multiplication tables because calculators may not be at hand. How absurd was that argument after taking a look at today’s world? There are 4 of them within 3 feet of me right now.
As a result I am growing excessively frustrated at being repeatedly thwarted in some kind of perverse effort to trick me into failure merely to protect the industry’s profit margin and convince me in the doing that it’s somehow a personal flaw of mine for having been the victim of this scam. I fear this will be my last college course if this trend continues.
When I did my half year in the accounting field I didn’t once have to do anything even approaching what I’m being taught in the course.
There is a massive conflict of interest when expressing this to faculty and staff since it is their job, and as agents of the education industry I expect massive bias, or if they are primarily a professional who teaches on the side I would expect bias on the front that obfuscation and keeping the number of similar professionals low, or engaging in a public relations effort to make their jobs appear more difficult, directly and indirectly benefits all existing members. So I don’t expect them to agree with me, and if they did I wouldn’t expect them to admit it, thus I am not interested in a debate with them on these subjects (though I am not afraid to have it), because it’s not part of their job, it’s not personally their fault for the most part, and they individually lack the power to change it (which I learned during my time as body president, watching board members including myself slowly lose idealism in the face of academic, political, and fiscal reality).
After all, my dad works in education, I know for a fact many of them are great people.
When these issues were shared with my economics instructor, he responded with a glib dismissal implying that that if education didn’t ensure a high percentage of failures, by any means necessary, society would collapse for want of menial laborers. The question was why does every degree require math credits and why are those courses designed to prevent the use of technology. Well the answer in this context is obvious. Math’s unique subject matter is by definition extremely difficult to obfuscate as it is an abstraction expressly designed to simplify an understanding of reality, and it is also easy to automate, so the conflicts explained above press most firmly on the math instruction field. Math class is a window into the the future of college in the face of exponential technology growth.
That should terrify everyone.
As mentioned above, in a rare moment of cynical candor my instructor said of course the point is to make a certain percentage fail, because and I quote “society needs janitors.” He also borderline cheats via creative application of context to artificially inflate his perceived educational skill, and he is rewarded overtly and regualrly for this effort.
How this cheat is done involves measuring student improvement via two identical tests one given at the beginning of the course and one given at the end. The difference in score presumably measures the skill of the educator. He was always winning awards for exceptionally high averages.
But of course those people didn’t see how this was accomplished. What he would do is give the first test at the end of the first day, and say that the test did not count for a grade and you could leave when you’re done. Naturally people blew through it disregarding a total fail. The second one he gave as extra credit prior to and on the day of the final. Forcing people to concentrate and spend a fixed amount of time on it. By weighting the ends in this way he always got a huge difference without technically cheating.
I share that simply to express the kind of mind that fails to see a problem with these facts(and the kind of behavior that is rewarded in academic circles).
I’m starting to remember why I declined to run for a second term (one of my senators ran unopposed after me, my reelection would have been a forgone conclusion) and why I feel disgust every time I walk past my school.
It’s 2011. The 21st century. We manufacture synthetic life forms, patent genetic codes, build computers that beat the very best humans at jeopardy and chess, exponentially expand virtually every aspect of our knowledge of the universe, and yet, from education’s perspective I’m apparently supposed to live and train like the Amish/Taliban/Ted Kaczynski, doing everything from memory by candle light and abacus.
Screw that.
I’d rather fail if the price of success is my integrity or my intelligence.
“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” ~Frank Zappa
To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”
And…
In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.
And…
On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?
As an answer I share a quote that should serve as warning to the 1% bent on wrecking the lives of those average children.
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ~H.L. Mencken
Cards come in three primary flavors. Emotion, Status, Experience.
Examples.
Emotion: Love “You’re not in love, you’ll never understand.”
Status: Race “You’re not black, you’ll never understand.”
Experience: Occupation “You’re not a solider, you’ll never understand.”
This apart from the fact that understanding does not equal agreeing, the X card is any argument point designed to exclude an opponent on grounds other than rationality. For which the only implied defense is metamorphosis of the debater, not the idea.
It is a clever form of the argument from authority or perhaps Ad Hominem. As a good rule of thumb anything that applies to the person rather than the claim, is probably unfair or fallacious, and all X Card arguments apply to the person.
The two most common froms of this variation are the kid and race cards. Routinely people without children or who are of a given race are shunned in discussions of those topics when dissent it offered.
The solider/cop card is gaining in popularity. Mainly it is used in debate about national defense policy or criminal law policy to shut down liberal view points.
This is interesting because we don’t tolerate it under any other circumstances. Indeed in most other areas of life we respect objective distance.
The entire justice system for example is not so much to protect us as it is to dispassionately decide what to do with criminals. Doctors are also encouraged to have emotional distance. And the concept of conflict of interest is at the heart of every contract we sign.
If anyone attempts to eject you from an argument or dismisses a claim of yours based solely on some state of being that you can not or do not possess make sure you’re not being carded.
The work around is to cite the lack of universal agreement among the target group.
Example: You argue with a police officer over drug law, he says you can’t understand till you’ve walked a beat, simply point out the existence of LEAP.
If they’ve said something that the entire target group does (or must) agree with then they’ve probably said something nonsensical, unfalsifiable, or unrelated. in which case you’ll need different tools to shred their point. Google for list of logically fallacious arguments, there are plenty.
