"Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children.
These used to just be a fringe group. Now it feels like about half the people I know are buying into that stuff. Even some college-educated professionals think only their field is valid, and everyone else is part of "them."
I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years:
1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.
2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005.
3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat.
4. Snowden revelations.
5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions.
6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access.
You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.
My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.
There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects.
It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.
That same party politicized clean air regulations, climate change, and wearing masks. This has crippled expertise because if one side can just pay anyone to say anything, whats the point?
If they weren't anti-science they wouldn't spend so much time running campaigns to discredit objective scientific research that harms their financial interests - from the effects of tobacco to lead in petrol to opioids to big oil to climate change.
The historical record on this is absolutely crystal clear and unambiguous.
The founders set the entire western world down the path of a bastardization of a republic and a representative democracy out of fear that voters are stupid. That choice has inherent risk that leaders will be corrupted and that those elected will move further away from what is in the public's best interests. The founders simply believed that this wouldn't arise, that the system could correct course and weed out the bad actors.
All the Republicans have done since 2016 is shown how that belief fails. We don't have a true democracy, and what semblance of one had been chipped away at for years. The Republican Party of old wasn't wrong in wanting small government, the best way to keep corruption out of a representative system is to keep power out of those representatives' hands. They simply joined the Democratic Party on the side of big government and massive budgetary spending with a different target audience (big business and banks rather than citizens).
The Democratic Party can't be ignored though. They have made a career of spending money they don't have and creating social programs that aren't sustainable and can't properly be defined on the scale of 300M+ citizens. Their solution for any problem is more control and more intricate rules, but that just leads to a less resilient system that is more dependant on the idea of leadership having every answer and solution.
They can and have continued to raise taxes and subsequently squander any money they collect. Any attempt to break that stranglehold, such as changing teachers union hiring practices or allowing for charter schools, is met with total resistance.
You’re right that government is the problem, but get it right which party is responsible.
"states that were coded as blue based upon results from the 2004 presidential election were significantly higher in education funding than were states coded as red. Students in blue states scored significantly higher on outcome measures of math and reading in grades four and eight than did students in red states."
I'm growing more and more skeptical that throwing more and more money into the furnace that is the US education system is suddenly going to produce better outcomes. How much more must Baltimore spend? $30k a student? $50k a student? $100k a student? Where's the magic number?
[1] https://auditor.utah.gov/audit_reports/public-education/
[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...
- Comparing two statistical flukes.
- Socio-economic factor: Utah has better wealth distribution.
- Socio-economic factor: Utah has affordable housing and Baltimore so the effective wealth gap is lower.
- Baltimore has other issues.In 2019, and I’m using this because you can explore it at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/states/groups?... , Mississippi’s 8th grade math mean score was the same as New Hampshire’s, when comparing white students. Mississippi is just way less white than New Hampshire. California, also near the bottom overall, has better white performance than New Hampshire, but not as good as Massachusetts, which has always had a lot of smart people moving to Boston.
The ranking there is simply a diversity/brain drain ranking. Mississippi and California are way more diverse, so they rank low. States with nothing to attract or keep smart parents, like West Virginia, rank low too.
However, claiming the reverse is true is also evidence-lite. That paper looks like it was a fairly cursory piece of work and didn't account for population size or characteristics (eg, number of disadvantaged students) in the correlation work.
I suspect what it really shows is that political affiliation isn't the biggest driver of outcomes. Looking at the table at the end of the paper and thinking about population, I suspect the aim would be more of what Massachusetts does and less of what California does (both Democrat states) if possible.
CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side.
Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.
So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.
The difference is that the left-leaning news institutions make up the bulk of the "mainstream media" and they're now just a mirror-image of fox news. And their winning strategy in 2020 is not to become the clone of the right's repugnant rhetoric. The winning strategy should be to convert the moderates or those slightly right of center; yet the more they assume the shape of Fox News the less disingenuous they appear, which makes this task ever less likely. I literally have friends who were life long liberals 4 or 5 months ago who got sucked into some strange corners of the conspiratorial right wing web and many of their grievances are against the mainstream media. Many of which are hard to argue against.
However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious.
The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).
Facebook-educated woke people who think everyone is just some con man and they know more than them are simply people with too much confidence. Laying evidence out in front of them will only make them angry or mock it because it collided with their world views instilled by clownery they saw on TV or from equally “woke” people.
Are doctors wrong sometimes? Of course. Are some particularly bad doctors wrong a lot of the time? Yes. Are a massive group of doctors out there “hiding the truth” and people with no formal education have the real solutions, but their answers are being suppressed? No.
I am curious about these opinions. Care to share some?
From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions.
"But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).
There are plenty of "actual facts", spoken by "experts", which a few years later turn out to be absolutely false.
They thus are left to resort to authority as the proximate measure accessible to them to assess how much credit to assign to the opinions of a particular expert.
To complicate matters, there are documented cases where in the past half century at least experts have be bought by special interest groups such as big tobacco etc. This eroded public trust in any experts and many people were brought up assuming every public discourse with expert opinions is rigged. That generation now 40-50yo and their world view is having a certain weight on current matters. (Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion, I'm not an expert. And even if I was many people wouldn't trust me anyway ;-p )
It’s also easier to set up an apolitical body that makes recommendations based on research than it is to have everyone draw their own conclusions or devolve into “blue science” vs “red science”
These are mechanisms that cultivate public trust, and there are countries that do a pretty good job at it.
That might carry over to education. The biggest mistake the US seems to be making is centralising and standardising a whole bunch of functions (education, healthcare, etc) at the federal level. Then if the anything goes wrong there is no escape. And the US federal government doesn't seem to be up to the task on a good day.
The US has always had a big ignorant population dragged along by a small core of ingenious, often foreign, visionaries. That doesn't seem to have changed recently.
Or at the very least, proximate to its geographical sphere of influence.
Honestly, it was a brilliant move on their part.
Everybody seems to focus on university, but there is a lot of very hard-won know-how at the technician level of the manufacturing sector. Most of this is difficult-to-impossible to codify, and tends to pass both cohort-to-cohort, and via professional networks.
>> And to ensure that manufacturing moved to China!
Of course they did. But, to be fair:
1) Those students were not educated for free. They paid big money for it, and the universities were happy to grab the money fast
2) Some of this people were forced to go after their student visa expired. They could not work in US without a permit and were forced to exit. How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?
They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.
And how. International students in the US pay outrageous tuition fees.
> Some of this people were forced to go after their student visa expired.
That's what happened to my wife.
By comparison, my visa in Japan was dead simple. No lawyers required.
The message that the US sends to international students is something like: "Thank you for ponying up all that money, for spending a year learning the language well enough to go to school, and for spending four years integrating into our language and culture. Now get the fuck out."
> How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?
Um... who is blaming who for what? I don't follow.
> They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.
Why would anybody think that international students owe anything to the country where they studied?
I suspect that the education problem may be on the demand side (due to the above reason) rather than on the supply side (even though the prohibitive higher education costs do play a big role).
https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/time-fli...
Even with all that, it also means we’re spending nearly $500000 on a classroom in which a teacher makes 40-50k (let’s round that up to 60-80k for the payroll taxes). Where is the rest of the money going? We could have a hard cap on 20 kids and for teacher pay to be more competitive for less money than we spend today.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11701044/how-proposition-13-transf...
Where did you get that? From the graph in your article it looks like it grew by almost 20%
I think a lot of it is pricing and the debt model we use to fund it.
> Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore
The returns on that investment just aren't as good as they used to be, couple that with the required debt above, and stagnant wage growth in these industries and I'd say it's clear they aren't valued anymore.
> and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.
That's actually seems more like part of the reasons for the above issues than it is something that follows from it.
Combine all this with the fact that total self-employment and other measures of entrepreneurship have been trending downwards lately while the level of corporate integration and mergers have been increasing and it's a recipe for the destruction of middle to middle-upper class incomes and careers.
> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
This is a symptom of a sick system, and when the system is sick, it's inhabitants become sick as well.
I've had more than person tell me that there's no way this was taught at a university (threading, OS knowledge)
The problem is political dynamics meant that the attitudes of the backward parts of the country have actually set policy for quite a while. That benefited American corporations in the short term - lots of CEO probably think for-profit, student-loan-driven education is a great idea. But it's harmed the US and even US corporations as these policies show their longer term results.
There are a lot of really good schools in flyover states. Looking at the top 10 engineering schools in the US, depending on your definition of "flyover," there's CMU, Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, and UT.
But it also has a broad problem of lack of quality of high school level education. Maybe a few good suburban school but the average is terrible.
Tuscaloosa is education center of Alabama, having the university of Alabama but secondary education is bad enough stop companies locating there.
"Around the late 1980s/early 1990s Saturn chose not to locate a plant in Tuscaloosa because of the performance of the public schools, and by 1993 the city leadership wanted Mercedes-Benz to build a plant there."
What makes this amusing is Saturn was probably looking to open plants in the South because most of the states are right-to-work states that are more business friendly and have fewer worker protections. The less-government approach that attracted them there also drove them away because less government also meant worse schools and worse workers.
I went to RPI, which is not an ivy school but it is a good engineering school.
Sharing memory between processes was a mess before that. Java green threads (emulating threads in user space, which often blocked badly on IO) were horrifying.
Python threading implementations were even worse of a joke till fairly recently.
It doesn't help that we are expected to have T-shape skills. We need to be both deep in one area and broad in other areas at the same time.
> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
It's because outside of a few exceptions(tech in particular), you would earn more money being a businessman than being employed, academic or professional.
People always say that we should value teachers, nurses, etc. But it's all just lip service.
Money and salary are what society uses to indicate how much they truly value you.
I don't know about access in other countries, but the quality of education is dropping like a stone pretty much in every developed country right now. (And it's not a recent trend, it's been years in the making)
* Inflation of people with college degrees. From 5% in 1940 to 35% in 2019. This dilutes the quality of both the student pool and of the professorial pool.
* Distance from the last major war, all the way back in 1945. Educate like your life depends on it has long faded from memory. In medicine, in engineering, in hard sciences.
* The mismatch between skills taught in academia and job market skills. By now everyone is jaded at the notion that the main point of education is the diploma, seen as a key to unlock the job market. Of second importance, networking, get into an Ivy to rub elbows with the right crowd. Knowledge and critical thinking come as a distant last.
* Or perhaps, even simpler, the dilution of the male spirit which sees competitiveness in excellence as an inherent moral good. Our forebears wore educational attainment as a peacock plumage. These days peacocks are outright vilified.
Hannah Arendt was probably an exceptional professor in 1955, but I wonder how this compares to a final exam for a first-year political science class at an exceptionally good university today? https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1297545059466907650
I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.
That's not what kids want to hear these days. They want life to be easy, and a big government ready to issue a wide safety net for them if they make bad choices in life. Perpetual childhood.
“Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years.
None of that is true now. It’s drilled into high school kids that they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything. Then when they graduate they discover an awful jobs market. As for buying a house... better wait for a relative to die and hope they were generous to you in the will because there’s no other way you’re ever going to make that deposit.
The idea that young people today and spoiled and rely on handouts is a nonsensical meme.
Except if those kids would get degrees in the right areas (like the thread is complaining they aren't), they would absolutely be able to get excellent jobs upon graduation. The unemployment rate in engineering has been almost nil for years. Even fields like civil and biomedical engineering, previously at the bottom of engineering in terms of prospects and pay, are now a lock for jobs, with employers desperate to hire anyone they can get. And of course computer science is now doing even better than all of them despite being much easier, frankly.
> "they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything."
Except that high school graduates have the option to do 2 years of community college (~5k) and 2 years at a state school (~13k). Generally possible to most while living at home for no additional rent. CS jobs are in high supply and 100k+ out of college. The college cost would be paid off in a year.
Then there's the fact that many positions are not requiring a college education at all.
Isn't this only true in a few select cities?
I don't think the average programmer is getting paid that (the AU equivalent) much here in Australia outside of maybe some companies in Melbourne and Sydney and maybe Adelaide.
While I don't know too much about the Australian market, positions all across the US are 100k+ entry level. Not just in a few select cities, but probably in almost every state. Like Nebraska, Texas, and Tennessee with median house prices just 2x that entry level compensation.[0][1][2]
[0]https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Software+Engineer+$100,000&l=O...
[1]https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Software+Engineer+$100,000&l=T...
[2]https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Software+Engineer+$100,000&l=T...
Tell that to companies who still are filtering applicants based on their college education.
It’s hard to justify not working for a FANG and taking a pay cut.
Could be true but it’s far less important than the brute fact that advanced study is a loser, monetarily. A very big loser. If you can get a doctorate you can get an MBA or a JD in less time and earn a lot more money. Less likely to damage your mental health, far less likely to end in failure and drop out, job market is either better or much, much better.
A documentary by WIRED UK done in 2016 explains many cultural and legal reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
China has hardware industries that work similar to how open source software works.
An article on effects of expiring patents on 3D printing (2013): https://qz.com/106483/3d-printing-will-explode-in-2014-thank...
90 Minutes a Day, Until 10 P.M.: China Sets Rules for Young Gamers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/business/china-video-game...
Many Asian countries have already taken strong steps for digital addiction (which will be the next important problem to tackle after covid, I bet).
China’s sustainable urban transport revolution: https://dialogochino.net/en/infrastructure/11025-chinas-sust...
https://www.citymetric.com/transport/no-hong-kong-has-best-t...
> Overall, 79% of people between the ages of 12 and 24 in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia say they feel optimistic about the direction of the world, compared to only about half of those in far more well-off places like Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. In the United States, the number is 63%.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90241302/where-in-the-world-are-...
> Of the top countries on our survey, China has developers that are the most optimistic, believing that people born today will have a better life than their parents. Developers in Western European countries like France and Germany are among the least optimistic about the future.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019
China is also much larger country than US. It has 3x more people than US. Those individuals are going to be at par with people in west at some point. There are so many interesting things to discuss and question.
Another big part of this is ego. We, collectively, have this massive Murica number 1 ego that we are unable to accept that we actually collectively have started sucking hard. We have elected numbnuts who don't have any desire to improve society and make it an engine of innovation instead of a society divided by issues of the last century.
In general, in the US, whenever you hear "there's not enough people to do X" it means "there's not enough people willing to do X for what I want to pay"
The truth is, in the US there's a ton of different well-paying careers. CS isn't like medical in US with artificial limits on the number of doctors that graduate every year. The only thing stopping more people from doing CS is money. If they offer enough money they will have a practically unlimited talent pool.
Tech CEO's are always whining about lack of tech workers so they can abuse H1B visas to get employees below market rates. Since they're basically indentured servants to their employers for years to decades until they can get a green card.
The lack of government money in CS research I think everyone in the tech field agrees with
It’s much easier to make money in trades or similar things these days than in most bachelor degree fields.
The reason is very simple, ruling party gets vores by fooling people. They announce the same monetary package year after year without actually giving the package and their media i.e. entire right wing funded media starts praising the package and hailing our supreme leader.
Pet rocks? Million dollar idea.
Water? As long as it's .00000000000000001% poison, it's a homeopathic remedy you can sell for $500 a vial. Add more water to make it more expensive.
Ever think about using the equity in your home to consolidate your credit cards and other debts?
Dumb dumbs spend more and expect less. Bad education is good for the economy.
Or maybe another smart phone? Probably been awhile since you bought one of those. Why not buy one again?
1 - 61% of US population above 25 has “some college” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_th...
Most people see science/engineering jobs as a path to a cubicle for a while with an OK salary before being laid off at 40. And for the most part, they're right.
They weren’t teaching coding to grade schoolers at scale 10 years ago.
Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed.
What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".
There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse.
I don't know, but it frustrates me that the truth is the US doesn't have the know how that its companies require anymore, and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.