Good Morning Richard,
Wow, this is fascinating. I have been filing a lot of these Threads, and I think I will have to separate this Discussion out into its own File so it doesn’t get lost.
I found your comments about the Declining Value of College Degrees to be a confirmation of what I had long suspected, that the Universities are now in the Business of Giving People Degrees. So when people go in for a Higher Degree, such as a Masters or a PHD, there seems to be some pressure put on the Faculty by the Business End of the University to ‘give the Customers what they are willing to pay for’. Of course the Tenure System is supposed to protect the Professors from such Worldly Concerns (Tenure, theoretically anyway, is supposed to be an Unconditional Guarantee of a Lifetime Contract, totally assuring a Tenured Professor that heorshe is completely safe from any Retaliation, either from the University itself or from the Outside). But perhaps Tenure has been weakened by the ability of the University Administrators to simply CLOSE certain Unprofitable Departments (therefore an Effective Tenure System would have to be backed up by a Funded Pension Plan which would pay just as much to the Professor for doing Nothing as doing Something). The way Universities had traditionally been funded was from Annuities, but that was back in the days before runaway inflation. Now the Universities are on a Pay as you Go basis. Probably the only Universities that retain standards are those that are in very high demand, where the Departments can readily flunk out underperformers because they have waiting lists of people who are begging to get in. In that sense, if you have a number of Universities in active competition for a limited number of Students, it is inevitable that standards would decline. Oh, wait, an effective System of Accreditation could help assure Quality, as well as companies using their Human Resource Departments to ‘grade’ the perceived Quality of the various Schools, and all of the Large International Corporations could pool their findings as a means of asserting some pressure on the University System to maintain a certain uniform level of Quality. The On Line Schools are still so new to me that I have no idea what to think. I do wonder how any one Professor can deal with so much Traffic. Then there is the Security of the System. Couldn’t there be a New Industry of Professional Test Takers. You could have One Person enroll for an On Line Course, but there is no telling who is actually turning in the Work and taking the Tests… but these are just uninformed thoughts… I really don’t know, and perhaps somebody has worked out all those suspicious Details.
Oh! What you say about the Declining Standards now makes something else for me make a great deal more sense. In the Old Days when it came to Politics, the College Educated Crowd would tend to vote mostly as a Block… not through any great sense of Self-Interest but because they were all trained to be Intellectually Discerning and would not have received degrees unless they had been able to demonstrably meet that standard. But modern polling data shows that many Degree Holders are voting right alongside the most backward and ignorant segments of the populace, which really is ‘deplorable’.
Oh, and then there is the problem that I have long suspected in regards to the Bachelor of Science Fields – that these Degrees are simply Glorified Vocational School Degrees. While a good Liberal Arts Degree can make a Scholar insightful about the Ways of the World, we have not nearly the same guarantee in regards to those who procure Specialty Degrees so they can hang up their various Shingles in the Marketplace. I suppose this is what gives us so many Scientists who are perfectly willing to work in fields where they are obviously weaponizing everything they can get their hands on, or pursing dangerous avenues of research that those with Well Rounded Educations find alarming and dangerous. One can almost conclude that a great number of ‘Brilliant’ Scientists are tunnel-visioned Bone-Heads. For instance, doesn’t the current American Administration have a Cabinet Member who is an actual Brain Surgeon but who can’t open his mouth, politically, without coming out with the most bizarrely stupid rants and meanderings?
Now, on the Next Thing where you argue that Cognitive Bias can be a Good Thing where there are Argument Producers and Argument Evaluators exercising a kind of blended and merged ‘Division of Labor’. Well, I find that kind of optimistic. In the Legal World this is Called “Adversarialism” which in effect works by one lawyer telling an extreme lie which conforms to what few small facts are known that supports his Client’s Story, and the other lawyer makes up an equally bold face lie that supports his own Client’s Story. The Theory is that the Truth is Somewhere in Between, but that is a Logical Fallacy, isn’t it? When everyone is Lying, then the Truth may be Inside or Outside of the Mendacious Arguments. So I don’t believe that the Researchers of that very fine Paper took into account just how far Self Interested People would go in their Production Arguments (with the proviso that I may have missed such a presentation in my too rapid glance over that Paper). Also the Researchers were using Ad Hoc Groupings of people for their Studies. Well, you can’t really Study Society using arbitrarily rounded up clusters of people who are only thrown together for 20 minutes and know they will never see each other again. Real World Social Groups are not like that at all. I was recently reading a dusty old Konrad Lorenz book that I had to buy on the Used Market, where he put forth the Argument that in Real World Social Groups, of primates, there is a very distinct Bias for Following the Leaders. He spoke of one experiment where the monkeys were given a very complex machine that would spit out bananas but only if a Monkey was able to pull levers and push buttons in a specific sequence. One low status Monkey was taken aside by the Researchers and given a Weekend Seminar on how to make the Magic Machine Spit Out Bananas and so he was able to go back to the Group on Monday morning and make the Machine give him a banana. Well, the Leader Monkey beat him over the head and stole his banana and then started waling on the machine with a stick to make it give up its bananas. So that is what all the other monkeys did also. Time and again the poor beaten down monkey would go back to the Magic Machine and go through his trained process to get a banana, and all of the other monkeys completely ignored him, except to steal his bananas, and then they would go back to waling on the Machine with their sticks. Now, if one were to have only read that Paper that we have referred to, you would expect that the Leader would have argued for beating the machine with a stick, and for the low status monkey to argue for giving all the monkeys some general ‘monkey see monkey do’ instructions on how to work the Machine in its own terms, and perhaps a third monkey would have argued to allow the Magic Monkey to keep his bananas while being coaxed in a friendly manner to procure bananas for everybody else. But that is not what happens. For the Leader to concede to an Underling would be to reassign Status, which he clearly resisted doing. We can infer that Real World Social Groups prioritize their collective decisions in regards to concerns that are not always entirely practical in the material sense, and that Social Groups often make their Decisions for merely Social, Status Related ‘reasons’.
A good example of this is in the Human Workplace. Don’t you wish you had a nickel for every time you heard anybody complain about “workplace politics”? Basically that kind of complaint is fueled by the perception that the Low Status Monkeys are being beaten up, get their bananas stolen by the Boss, and that the boss ignores all good sense because he prefers to operate the Business by beating the Machines with a stick, which is supported by all the brown-nosing kiss-butt monkeys, who get all the promotions. Now, yes, it is not like that everywhere. I have been in Good Organizations and I have been in Very Bad Organizations. I need to say that the Good Organizations are only about 20% of the Mix. Most Human Social Groups aren’t much better than the ordinary bunch of monkeys.
Oh, as an aside, you and your very interesting paper got me to thinking about the very First serious Historical Writing, that is, Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War” (of course there was Herodotus with his “Histories” which really did come first, but there were so many funny intriguing Stories and so many really strange ‘facts’ that I often wonder about his status as “Father of History” and not just the first ‘Screen Writer’ to do the ‘Based on Facts’ thing where any connection to actual facts had only to be loosely suggestive, such as getting all the Names right but all the Actions wrong). What we get in Thucydides is a great many of Debate Reconstructions (couldn’t have possibly been factual in the strict sense) which show a blend of the Social Group at least attempting to Decide upon matters rationally, while still allowing the truth to come through about the Clash between various Social Interests. But Thucydides did learn enough from Herodotus that his book also traces the careers of various very interesting ‘heroes’. You can easily realize that while 99.9% of Greek Literature disappeared out of Lack of Interest, Thucydides was transcribed and reproduced in so many libraries that it survived. Herodotus and Thucydides, though ostensibly writing None Fiction, wrote the first ‘Best Selling Page Turners’ in History… and it was about History. You need to wonder why no ‘Jane Austen’ turned up who could have really kicked their butts.
Well, enough for this Morning. My Math Table calls (though now I wonder what I am busting my butt for since I will be guaranteed at least a B when I finally do show up at College, where the hardest part will be just ‘showing up’… Oh, I remember, I actually want to TEACH Math. Math Courses for those who want to Teach are quite different from taking Math Courses because they are the ‘Gate Keeper’ Course Prerequisites for Vocational Engineering or Vocational Medicine, where one Engineer in 10 or one Doctor in 20 ever actually use any Advanced Math. You know, they say Artificial Intelligence is still years away from being as Smart as the Human Brain, but I would argue that I never yet heard a computer say that it took Calculus 10 years ago and now doesn’t remember a thing.