throwawayjava

No one has figured out the whole "prosperity without scary periods of scarcity" thing yet.

> almost always tracing back to economic anxiety, even when masquerading as xenophobia or racism.

Xenophobia has a bit of a chicken-and-egg relationship with economic anxiety.

Does the xenophobia cause economic anxiety, or does economic anxiety cause xenophobia? I don't think the answer is so straight-forward, especially this time around history's block. It's not like 2016 was the 1930's... even economically depressed parts of the country were doing better than they were for decades.

Are people anxious because they're xenophobic and believe that "those people" are out to get them where it hurts (for them, the pocket book)? Or, are they anxious because they're afraid of losing their way of life and the objectively most likely cause of that loss is "those people", thus causing xenophobia?

...if only community colleges and branch campuses of state universities had VC marketing cash, we would hear these uplifting stories on the daily.

First, our intro-level courses are fairly stable but nowhere near as stable as Calculus or Physics intros. If you don't change your intro for a decade, it starts to show. Whereas I'm pretty sure my children will take more-or-less the same calc course that I took, and my calc book was pretty indistinguishable from my mother's. To really emphasize the point, my mother's CS course was done on punch cards...

And it's not just content. Student preparedness has been changing a lot lately. We reached "peak physics/calc" in high schools a long time ago (hell, my grandpa took calc in high school). But students showing up at university knowing how to program is relatively new for most institutions.

Third, enrollments have been increasing exponentially (yus, really exponentially) year over year (yes, every year) for close to a decade now (yes, a decade).

So. Yes, CS ed is very different from the more stable STEM fields, especially recently.

Although I agree with this sentiment, you have to realize that the alternatives are either a) worse, or b) don't scale.

I prefer the ones that don't scale (small number of students in a class who get real continuous feedback and fully participate in the lecture). It works really well, but this model is enormously expensive compared to the 500 person lecture hall.

500 person lecture halls suck, but what's the scale-able, better alternative?

MOOCs aren't the answer -- that's just the old 500 person lecture hall model with a pause button. Woohoo. Plus, it doesn't actually solve the real problem, which is that you need the humans running the course anyway. For a well-oiled machine of a course, maybe 10% of the actual time spent on teaching is spent in the classroom. And for non-well-oiled courses, creating the MOOC and keeping it up to date is a hell of a lot of up-front cost, and with a lot of risk.

> and instead get them engaged in research as assistants right away.

I can tell that you haven't worked with lots of undergraduate students on research projects.

Most undergraduate students aren't ready to participate in research. Of those that are intellectually prepared, few have the grit/persistence required. Of those with the intellectual preparation and persistence, fewer still have the imaginative faculties to actually do research (as opposed to e.g. acting as a tech).

This is true even in very applied areas. You'd be surprised how few CS undergraduates would succeed at implementing something as simple as an experimental change to a kernel or a tweak to an ML algorithm.

At some point you simplify the research problem enough that it's indistinguishable from a course project or homework assignment. In fact, that's even where some course projects and homework assignments come from. But at that point, you're not "involving students in research", unless "doing homework or programming assignments" = "research" that is.

> We need more science and less "publish or perish" politicians posing as professors engaged in grant grabbing.

At times I have certainly felt this way about academia! But I could say similar rude things about every profession.

> Tweed jacket welfare recipients if you ask me.

There are ineffective people in every field, and most of them manage to stay more-or-less employed throughout their working years.

You really think she would have drone bombed an embassy in the heart of fucking London? Come on. That's clearly delusional.

It just hit me that the Mythical Man Month might have entail pretty important consequences for the future of mass (un)employment.

Perhaps a best comparison is "cybernetics", which doesn't get funding these days except, of course, for the billions upon billions of dollars thrown at robotics, self-driving, factory automation, and so on.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/iceci/enforcementactions/warningletters/...

Just like people could learn how to drive a stick shift.

But most people (at least in the US) don't know how to drive in a stick shift or how to navigate snow without ABS and TCS.

...northern Wisconsin gets its fair share of snow.

> ABS is usually the only thing they have

I think you've just agreed with me. ABS and TCS are exactly the systems I was referring to, and most of today's drivers have never encountered a car that doesn't at least have ABS.

I've driven a car without ABS or TCS in the snow. It's extremely difficult. Kind of similar to driving a stick shift for the first time. The idea is simple, but getting it into muscle memory enough that you're not constantly making mistakes is non-trivial.

- Your stopping distance can effectively change every few feet

- A foot of snow accumulation may be transferred from the roof of the car in front of you to the windshield of your car with little to no warning

The following are hard planning problems:

- Lane lines cease to be a thing, even if you can see them, you're better off not following them

- Stoplights also mostly become a guideline, it's sometimes safer to run them than spin out

But these are just damn hard and probably the true limiting factors:

- Signage or signalling may or may not be visible at all

- Other cars or pedestrians may or may not be visible at all even in daylight

But I'm not an expert on perception so... maybe that's my bias showing.

The rest of your post fails to substantiate this claim. Concretely, the "this" that you claim is orthogonal to capitalism is that:

>> When [social benefit of a service is completely misaligned aligned with the profit of realizing that benefit], they may pretend to do a job while they are actually doing a very different one.

Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not reward profit-making. It is certainly true, as you note, that there are other ways in which the distribution of reward warps behaviors even in systems that aren't organized around profit-making.

But the problem of social benefit being misaligned specifically with profit-making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem. Witness e.g. the fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and attempting to solve this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about your own biases and value systems. People who grow up and are successful in other political/value systems tend to say similar things about their own milieu.

The only method I've seen work for a large set of students is to show lots of examples of what "good" and "not good" versions of "show your work" look like. Preferably on problems that look similar to the homework problems. And emphasize this during lectures.

E.g. after doing a derivation on the board: "by the way, this is what I expect to see when I say 'show your work' on a <insert problem type> problem."

In particular, for a TT professor at an R1, odds are extremely good that they've NEVER taught anything below calculus and may have never even been the instructor of record even for calculus courses! They were hired to do research and teach graduate/upper-level undergraduate courses.

Teachers that know how to explain and assess everything in a graduate analysis course with perfect clarity might not know how to handle the situation where a student doesn't know what it means to "show you work" in the context of calculating a derivative or solving a linear equation. In fact, they might not have even thought about learning/teaching that material themselves since early high school or maybe even middle school. This doesn't make them a bad teacher. It just makes them a bad calc I/college algebra teacher. Which is okay -- teaching those courses is not their job and is not what they were hired to do.

So this is somehow a bit like complaining that a web programmer isn't particularly adept at kernel hacking. That doesn't make them a bad programmer, it just means they focus is elsewhere.

Again, most universities do hire experts in teaching the lower-level courses. They're just not typically tenure-track professors.

Turns out that "how to get rich" (as opposed to stay rich) in American beer making between 1999 and 2018 was 100% to copy the German model. Regional and microbreweries soared from ~4 bbls ~22 bbls between 2004 and 2017.

And that definitely wasn't the result of "government intervention". It was the result of people realizing they should be able to make and drink good beer without flying to Germany with empty suitcases...

This is an amazing skill I only learned during a PhD, and only after burning out half way though.

Obviously, step 0 is clear boundaries and reasonable work hours. Clock out at 5 or 6 (or 7 or whatever -- point is, put in your 40 hours and leave).

After that, things get more difficult.

For me, the answer was to work out directly after work (so before the commute home even!) and to listen to an interesting audiobook/podcast during my workout.

That way, when I got home, I would have something on my mind other than work. Fortunately, my personality is such that as long as the audiobook/podcast was interesting, that's what I will focus on/think about the rest of the night.

It sounds like you were teaching calculus or maybe college algebra ("they should know" is actually good advice for the higher level mathematics courses -- most departments have a whole course that's more-or-less about how to write proofs).

At research universities, the tenure-track professors rarely teach anything below Calc II, and might not teach any Calculus courses at all. Certainly nothing below Calc I.

If you ad junct again, consider asking the other ad juncts/instructors instead. They're more likely to have lots of exposure to that university's demographic in a relevant course.

The argument is that using expensive colleges/universities to fill course-length gaps in K12 education is a poor use of resources.

Society should not pay PhD-trained analysts or algebraists to teach FOIL...

That's totally fair. In that case, I think this is a difference in wording/failure to communicate more than it is an actual substantive disagreement.

I agree with the problem that you identified. I don't think that the correct solution to that problem is to start teaching middle school math in universities.

Night classes and/or GED prep courses are a better option for people who need to re-do high school.

Of course, fixing k12 education would be an even better option...

>> if a state managed to arrange an associate's degree program paid by taxes, the programs would teach that which should have already been taught in high school. These college programs aren't college.

Emphasis added.

I provided a concrete example of where this is already happening in higher ed: the mathematics course that a huge percentage of students take in college are covering material that's supposed to be covered in high school.

For many students, this is the only mathematics course they take for their degree and they fail/drop multiple times before finally succeeding. For those students, their mathematics course in college is quite literally a repeat of high school.

It's worth noting that many colleges have even more remedial mathematics courses, which (no joke) cover elementary school stuff. E.g. the standard algorithm for division...

So in some sense I would agree with Dowwie's concern, but also point out that we already have this problem anyways, so there isn't much to lose.

> What percentage of the population is able to take advantage of the free college?

About 30%. Note that this is roughly the same as the percentage of Americans with a college degree.

So it's not some crazy cut-throat system and is not a lottery. Basically, people who know they want to go to college, plan ahead, and apply themselves, can mostly do so. People who want the opportunity sometimes don't get it, but that's true everywhere.

And there are a ton of stories of people moving from the non-university track into the university track even later in life. So there's a lot of mobility if you apply yourself.

> What are the job prospects like for those who don't go to college?

See the example OECD dataset here for "upper secondary; non-tertiary": https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rates-by-education-... tl;dr: quite good. Better than or comparable to the US.

I don't think this solves the problem at all.

You don't need to be in the pocket of big corporations to want to have their high-paying jobs in your state.

Most of the cities and counties that give TIFs to walmart et al. are not in the pocket. They're just behaving rationally given the structural incentives they're being dealt.

Does your grad program require a theory course and a PL course?

But again, the problem is that it takes until mid-career to really assess lifetime earning potential, and that's an extremely late indicator. If the winds change, we have to wait 10 years to find out.

We need a more fine-grained model of how those high earnings are happening and a way of tracking progress/bottlenecks along those tracks. E.g., I suspect the law job/salary crunch should be far more worrying than near-term earning potential of humanities majors.

It's also worth pointing out that salary isn't everything and our society would be utterly screwed if everyone optimized for lifetime earnings. Fortunately, plenty of people are optimizing a multi-objective function that includes QoL and job satisfaction; see e.g. teaching in particular. I'd have a hard time telling a teacher that they made a bad career choice by not going into tech or becoming a plumber, and I'd have an equally hard time arguing that teachers shouldn't be college educated.

I agree with the idea that higher ed should have "skin in the game", which is I think what you're trying to find mechanisms to achieve?

But I think the best way to achieve our overall goals (affordable and appropriately accessible higher education) is to force it to be democratically accountable by publicly funding nearly all higher education (maybe except $300 or $500 a semester just to force some "skin in the game" from students).

The "appropriately accessible" part is what makes this so difficult. The highly educated and deservedly successful petite bourgeoisie is going to have a tough time hearing that their second child who needed multiple tries to make it through "College" Algebra and could never make it through even a ridiculously watered-down Calc I course don't belong in universities at all...