Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
It's too big.
Nah, it's smaller than the last Harry Potter novel, which I have seen several times on buses.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
It's a subset of the type attracted to the discipline: intellectually brilliant, arrogant, utterly incapable of interacting with other humans.
Yes, autism is rife, but the recommended therapy for autism is not to reduce the range over which the person's mind operates. I say this from personal experience.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Medicine: pretty obvious
Then it won't take you a minute to explain why Grey's Anatomy isn't in the hands of every underprivileged commuter in the country.
Law (and others) : the qualification is evidence of your ability to to a job.
A job that comes down to reading a lot of cases and judgments, and knowing the law? Everyone could get themselves a piece of that at the library, or on the internet, who needs a whole school for that?
Arts: the qualification is evidence that you read a number of books.
Actually, Danyl, I didn't read a lot of books at all. What I did mostly was engage in dialectic, much like what we are doing right here. It is something that you can only learn by doing it, and that's not going to happen on the bus unless you're on a bus full of philosophers who are prepared to give you their time on it.
Through most of my life since then I've encountered technician after technician who has disparaged my Arts background, and yet found themselves strangely compelled to continue explaining their subject to me, and have admitted later on that they learned a lot from the process about their own subject, that it was actually a very good way of learning. Finance majors have been my bitches for years. They're seldom aware of quite how dogmatically they are trained.
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I had a very amusing discussion just last week with an American colleague. We have been working on the same project together for several months now, and I've been gradually pushed forward as the team leader, having at some point seized the initiative by taking a long view of what we were doing, seeing it wasn't progressing, and talking the 5 people who had set the whole thing up around to doing it a different way, which, once started, they all enthused about and took and ran and huge progress has been made, and the project is nearly finished.
In this discussion, it came up that neither of us was actually trained for what we decided to do in the end. I joked "I bet you never thought when you left college that you'd become a specialist in the SMTP protocol, and protocol design in general". He just laughed and told me his training was actually in rocket science. Quite literally, he was a rocket scientist. "Why did you change?" I asked. "It was really boring, the whole job is filling out reports". He laughed even harder when I said my degree was actually in Philosophy. Not because he was disparaging it, but because it rang true to him that the more general aspects of our respective educations had been some of the most valuable things we'd ever learned.
Highly technical training hardly needs training these days. Everything is about looking things up, with a modicum of testing the ideas against our deeper understandings of the subject matter. The important choices we make are almost all highly abstract, drawing upon critical thinking, articulacy, and particularly an ability to see when people are basing their thinking on dogmatic positions. I believe that philosophy taught me more about how to see these things than anything I learned in the 4 years of computer science I studied, and experience with a lot of the other computer science majors did a lot to confirm this - most of them totally lacked any initiative when it came to job seeking, or what they did in their jobs, because they had never learned to challenge the thinking handed down to them from above.
In my first job, my boss was quite explicit about why he'd hired me. Despite it being a job in a software house, he said it was the fact that I had been a champion debater that sold him. They were desperately in need of someone who could take on senior management and win them around to the merits of our rather strange product. Never did a boss make a better bet, my extended work for them in Australia saved the company from bankruptcy - the boss was pretty clear about that, and very dark about it when I resigned to chase better money over there.
Curiously, they had previously employed a PhD in computer science to do what I was doing, the amazing kudos that was supposed to bring was envisaged to be a real draw card to the people they were convincing. But it was a spectacular failure because the guy was hopeless, utterly hopeless at explaining anything. Furthermore his colossal ego resulting from his extended training was part of the reason they were nearly bankrupt - he demanded to be paid more than directors were paying themselves. This ego also meant he could never brook any criticism of his system, which was actually total shit, and would have wasted millions of customer dollars if they just put it in, the way he advised.
So you have to excuse me for not really buying into the genius and natural authority of the highly technically trained. Science is not at all immune to setting up dogmas and political factions and excluding alternative thinking. And I'm damned sure that Law isn't.
I do sort of agree that becoming extremely highly trained in the Arts might converge on this sort of thing, though. If your only background is studying politics, you're not well-rounded either. I have examples of this amongst my friends, one of whom boasted to me that Das Kapital was nearly the only book he bothered to read at University, and it could be applied to everything he studied. He was cross with me when I suggested that he'd squandered his general education completely, in that case.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Personally, I'd rather have 3-4 years student loan rather than six.
Personally I'd rather have no student loan. Then I could study what I'm interested in, and therefore good at.
Anyway, my basic point is that you don't need to spend money - particularly other peoples money - to read Tolstoy. In my case all you needed was a job with a long commute.
You also don't need it to read Law and Medicine books. Why aren't our buses full of people poring over those things, then just slipping in to ace the exams at the end? Because actually when you study things with rigor you need help. That's why schools exist, why the country doesn't just cheap out and get everyone to home school kids once they've learned to read.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
We certainly don't require our science students to be well rounded. Looking at Auckland and Otago, neither do they.
The last time I looked at Auckland's Science Degree requirements, which was last week, there is a requirement that at least 3 different science department's subjects must be studied included in the degree, and between 2 and 4 courses taken from outside of the sciences altogether.
I find most of them are though, because if someone is intellectually curious they'll read books of their own volition rather than pay a humanities lecturer to tell them what to read.
I find they aren't. Where does that leave us?
At the risk of stating the obvious, it's the social contract. If training for these disciplines is subsidised then there's broader equality of opportunity
Yup, so why doesn't that apply to access to the Arts?
I think the intellectual life of the country is already pretty class-based
I'd agree, but the cause of this has 2 possibilities. Either the very existence of paid study in Arts has caused this, or it hasn't. Considering that society was more class based when all education was private, I'd have to say that the first possibility seems like bullshit.
I'm going to make a huge judgement call and moot that the proportion of people from low-income backgrounds that decide to go to university and study Foucault and Gramsci is tiny compared to all the children from privileged middle and upper-class backgrounds.
Feel free to go ahead and prove that. Perhaps also check out the level of privileged and middle-upper class kids studying Law and Medicine. Compare and contrast. Just for laughs, ask me how many Maori were in my computer science classes, compared to Philosophy classes.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
or find an expert in the field to explain it to him; but advances in post-modern philosophy are simply opaque to him as a non-expert, and no one in the field can explain them in meaningful terms. All they CAN say, seemingly, is that their work is very, very important, and requires public funding.
Yeah but not everyone in the Arts is postmodern, man. In fact, it's the main place the very worth of postmodernism is discussed, and for that matter, just about the only place where the term is even understood. That doesn't mean it's all shit. It could also mean it's more cutting edge than what the general population, and even the educated population, are used to. Personally I'm not much of a fan of it, but I think it's bloody important that it exists, if only to highlight exactly what the alternatives to it are, what the assumptions that underlie modernism are.
Furthermore, fuck all people understand modern physics. Chomsky might think he can have it explained to him and get it quickly, but that could just show that the man has a great deal of scientific training, which is actually true, he is one of the worlds most famous scientists. He might also fail to get postmodernism (as I do to a large extent), because he just hasn't put the hours in. My memory of his words on this is that he hasn't put those hours in because he finds it boring (as do I). I also haven't put the hours into understanding quantum physics for similar reasons.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
I quite laek that thar William Faulkner feller, etc - just questioned the wisdom of paying for people to dabble in them.
So you think that science should drop "General Studies" altogether? Or should science students pay extra for that because it's that selfish, publicly worthless thing called a general education that you shouldn't be paying for? I'm led to believe that other faculties also have similar requirements, that students be "well rounded".
I think the most obvious reason that what you're saying is total bunk, Danyl, is from the end result perspective. None of the "practical" studies even need ongoing funding. Lawyers and Doctors and Scientists and Architects and Engineers etc, all get jobs fast, typically with very high incomes. Why the hell should I be paying for those people to enrich themselves? But some societally vital forms of thought and study are extremely difficult for individuals to justify even to themselves when the question of paying for it comes up. Your solution is simply to kill the Arts, or make it the sole domain of the very wealthy. You're advocating a highly classist access to the intellectual life of the country, which will couple with the highly classist access that already exists to the technical life that you think is so much more important.
I'm surprised at you carrying on with this line, to be honest and I originally thought you were just winding everyone up. I'm not convinced that you're engaging in this argument in good faith at all, considering that you have highly socialist tendencies in other matters.
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A few years back, I had dinner with a friend and his friend in the revolving restaurant in the Sky Tower. I'll never forget at one point when I was just idly gazing at my hometown rolling below me, fondling the curves of the familiar roads and coastline with my eyes, that the friend of the friend said "Isn't it awful? All these people living on top of each other. Give me the country any day". I felt then that he could never really be my friend. But then I remembered he was a country boy, and forgave. We've all been imprinted in different ways.
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