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Old 13th July 2020, 15:23     #881
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by fixed_truth
I reckon a lot of that alienation would improve with a more participatory democracy.
6. The elites from (2) don't want participatory democracy, they want a way of making the social apes decide NOT to vote. Response from the guys with the tech in (5): "we can make that happen, enter your credit card number below"
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Old 13th July 2020, 17:16     #882
Nothing
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
Again, you prove the point. He didn't write that. Someone else did.
Yea, I think ^THIS^ misses the point, tbh.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
It's connected. This is the sort of rant I usually give after the third bottle on a Friday night but it's Monday and I'm not drinking at the moment so this feels kinda weird, but bear with me.

1. modernity transformed us all into active individuals on our own special journeys. The Protestant Reformation gave me a personal relationship with Jebus based on the penitence in my own heart. The Industrial Revolution made me and my clothing choices a driver of international change. Consumerism of the 20th century was based on convenience and customisation of goods and services based on what I personally want. HOLY SHIT I AM SO FUCKING IMPORTANT.

2. unfettered Friedmanesque neoliberal economics since the 70s has massively decreased social mobility and opportunity and created a new feudalism under which the few get an increasingly large share of the pie and more power in the system. GODDAMMIT I AM INSIGNIFICANT AND LESS INFLUENTIAL BY THE DAY.

3. 1&2 together cause massive anxiety and tension. They can't both be true. I was brought up getting told that I'm a modern autonomous agent, but now that I'm adulting the world treats me like a disposable object and the rich are just getting richer and richer while I can't even afford kids or a house or a job. IT'S NOT FAIR.

4. anxious and tense individuals seek reassurance and protection from their groups. We're social apes. So individuals become hung up on group identity and start focusing on the tribal displays that reinforce tribal status. Showing off in-group membership is the only thing that makes us not terrified that inequality is kicking us in our autonomous individual nuts. Hence why virtue-signalling social justice warriors.

5. Along comes a set of tech designed to amplify the anxiety of social apes, and the tech gets better at the amplification the more anxious the apes get.

armorking
OTOH, ^this^ is hilarious and in a lot of ways a pretty good high level summary of a fairly large swathe of recent history.

Quote:
Originally Posted by fixed_truth
I reckon a lot of that alienation would improve with a more participatory democracy.
Yes. I want that too.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cyberbob
the sheer fact that I don't want every uneducated, anti-science, anti-progress, racist, *-ist nut bag having the same weight as the most educated and most progressive people, makes me a terrible person. If a person in the public eye said that on Twitter, they'd have 35 million people seeking to destroy every facet of their life within 30 seconds.
I actually agree with you here, we don't just need a more participatory democracy, I think we need something like a participatory direct epistemocracy. Basically, everyone gets to vote on whatever topic they care enough to vote on, but if you become educated / qualified on a particular topic, your vote has extra weight, more so the greater your expertise.

Of course, with a system like that, education needs to be freely available on every topic that anyone could care to vote on.
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Old 13th July 2020, 18:47     #883
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
I am firmly of the opinion that education is about to get turned on its head - sorry, DISRUPTED - the same way that every other old-fashioned inefficient industry with huge profit margins and no accountability has been. What Apple did to the music industry and Amazon did to retail is about to happen to schools, universities first. And in the English-speaking West there are only five companies rich enough and powerful enough to do it.

Update: in case my implication isn't clear, two and a half of those companies are not influences I want anywhere near a child's brain.
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Old 13th July 2020, 18:56     #884
Lightspeed
 
Are you referring to the phenomena where people snooze through hundreds of hours of class, only to cram the night before assessments with the help of free Indian YT tutorials?
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Old 13th July 2020, 20:46     #885
Nich
 
The table couldn't be more perfectly set for disruption of education. Parents across the globe watching their children complete the day's school lessons in 90 minutes via Zoom. so what do they spend the rest of the school day doing?

Some of those parents are entrepreneurial product designers, teachers, or systems designers. These enterprising minds will be competing with most schools, which have all pretty much left the transition to online learning entirely up to their teachers. If this is the new normal for education post-COVID, it won't be difficult to make something better.

An anecdote, but probably the case for many teachers: My cousin was sent home and asked by her school to go buy her own laptop, monitors, and webcam... and figure out how to run her class online using whatever software she saw fit. A free for all, basically. Oh and to access her students emails she needed to be on the university campus network so she could query an Access database on S: drive created in 1990.

Harvard has decided to charge full price for their online degrees in the post-COVID world regardless of any proof they can deliver the goods online to the same quality standard of a pre-COVID degree.

Last edited by Nich : 13th July 2020 at 20:48.
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Old 13th July 2020, 23:32     #886
Nothing
 
I wonder what the relationship is, if any, between the quality of the education delivered, and the peer review system. Like, if a bunch of new providers delivering online learning spring up to disrupt traditional delivery, but they don't require their employees to be participating in publication that goes through the peer review process, will the quality of the teaching suffer?

Also, NZQA requires educational institutions to meet certain standards in order for their certifications to be recognised by NZQA, does that make it substantially harder to disrupt education?
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Old 14th July 2020, 00:00     #887
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nich

Harvard has decided to charge full price for their online degrees in the post-COVID world regardless of any proof they can deliver the goods online to the same quality standard of a pre-COVID degree.
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Old 14th July 2020, 00:31     #888
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nothing
I wonder what the relationship is, if any, between the quality of the education delivered, and the peer review system. Like, if a bunch of new providers delivering online learning spring up to disrupt traditional delivery, but they don't require their employees to be participating in publication that goes through the peer review process, will the quality of the teaching suffer?

Also, NZQA requires educational institutions to meet certain standards in order for their certifications to be recognised by NZQA, does that make it substantially harder to disrupt education?
Don't assume that the newcomers will attempt to get around statutory requirements. If one of the Big Five partners with a tertiary institution, it will tackle it like any other disruption opportunity. Apple-UCLA (or Microsoft-University of Washington or Amazon-Harvard or Google-Stanford or Facebook-Oxford or whatever) will meet its government obligations and will aim to be the best computer-assisted tertiary education in the history of the world. It'll have the financial resources and technical expertise of one of the world's most powerful companies and the educational cred of a top university. It will be in competition with every expensive tertiary institution in the world and it will be better than all of them. Every person in the world willing to pay for a tertiary education will be its target market. It will offer a better education backed up by analytics that prove it's better and it will become a premium brand overnight.

Everything that happens with market competition and actual performance analysis will happen to education - the teachers and administrators that are actually great will become superstars and will get paid accordingly and the useless deadwood will take early retirement. Schools will compete for the best teaching talent like sports teams fight over the best athletes. The schools that can afford the great teachers will become brands like Liverpool and McLaren F1 and the Lakers. The schools that are just good might stay afloat by being cheap alternatives for students who can't afford to go to one of the Big Five partner institutions, and niche providers to a specialist market (like music conservatories) might stick around. Average and shitty schools will burn.

(note:I know these ideas are not my own, pretty sure I've lifted them from NYU's Professor Scott Galloway)
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Old 14th July 2020, 02:10     #889
Nothing
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
Apple-UCLA (or Microsoft-University of Washington or Amazon-Harvard or Google-Stanford or Facebook-Oxford or whatever) will meet its government obligations and will aim to be the best computer-assisted tertiary education in the history of the world. [...] Every person in the world willing to pay for a tertiary education will be its target market.
Are the differences between governmental regulations from one country to another in education so trivial to comply with that such a hypothetical provider will easily be able to comply with all of them though?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
Schools will compete for the best teaching talent like sports teams fight over the best athletes.
Given the paragraph prior to the one containing this, I wonder what the word 'school' will even mean, anymore. What will it take for a school to continue to exist in this scenario?

Do you think it would be possible / desirable for governments to legislate in such a way that educational instutions are solely state-run? For a long time now, I've thought that a well educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient for a properly functioning system of governance. Do you think a corporate run education system would make an honest attempt to ensure citizens would by and large be informed well enough to participate in governance processes? Also, if education for profit turns out to be the model going forward, then what of the right to education?

Last edited by Nothing : 14th July 2020 at 02:12.
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Old 16th July 2020, 17:42     #890
Nich
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
I am firmly of the opinion that education is about to get turned on its head - sorry, DISRUPTED - the same way that every other old-fashioned inefficient industry with huge profit margins and no accountability has been. What Apple did to the music industry and Amazon did to retail is about to happen to schools, universities first. And in the English-speaking West there are only five companies rich enough and powerful enough to do it.

Update: in case my implication isn't clear, two and a half of those companies are not influences I want anywhere near a child's brain.
Back to School? “No Thanks” Say Millions of New Homeschooling Parents
https://fee.org/articles/back-to-sch...mpression=true
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Old 16th July 2020, 18:32     #891
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nothing
For a long time now, I've thought that a well educated citizenry is a necessary ingredient for a properly functioning system of governance. Do you think a corporate run education system would make an honest attempt to ensure citizens would by and large be informed well enough to participate in governance processes?
To your first point, I have always thought that too.

To your second, no I don't.

Here's why: the model that you and I have of education - and I mean, teenage/young adult stuff like late secondary school and tertiary - no longer really exists in the USA, and it's there that these changes are going to happen first. The point of late-secondary and tertiary schooling is no longer to become educated; it's to get a job. In that sense American schools are certification authorities rather than places of learning. Give us a kid at one end, we'll push the kid out the other with a piece of paper with a seal on it, and that means the older and poorer kid now has the skills required for employment in this or that industry. That ain't education.

Look at this graph:



That widening gap represents a fat profitable industry just waiting to get disrupted. And think of the opportunities for the Big 5. Imagine if Google were to partner with, say, Stanford business school, and offer guaranteed employment and reimbursement of all student loans to every business major who graduates in the top 1% of the class. Overnight that would become the only business school in the world worth going to if you're really smart. Now imagine what happens to Google and its innovative accounting practices if every year it vacuums up the brightest 1% of accounting and tax graduates in the world. Google would never have to worry about paying tax ever again. Anywhere. Because the people designing Google's tax structures would be way smarter than the underpaid government tax agents chasing them for money.

The fact that (bites pillow) neoliberalism (/bites) has created a modern world where the best and brightest would never dream of working in public service is a big topic for another time. Let's just stick to my most direct answer to your question, which is: in the USA, which is where everything starts for the West now, late-secondary and tertiary institutions provide certification, not education. And they charge too much for it while delivering too little (see Jonas's comment above).
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Old 16th July 2020, 22:14     #892
Lightspeed
 
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Old 16th July 2020, 23:16     #893
Nothing
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
in the USA, which is where everything starts for the West now
See, if this had been prior to the Trump presidency, hell, perhaps even just prior to 2020, I might have agreed with that statement. But it is looking more and more like the US is just going full third world failed state mode at the moment. I dunno, maybe they'll turn it around at some point, but they've lost an immense amount of political capital on the world stage recently. People are currently looking at them and going "well, thank god we don't organise our society the way they do", not "Oh hey, look what America is doing, that seems like a good idea".

I see your point about education being ripe for disruption, but I question whether other countries will just hand over their education systems to corporations because America does it at this particular moment in history.

Last edited by Nothing : 16th July 2020 at 23:17.
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Old 17th July 2020, 00:13     #894
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nothing
...I question whether other countries will just hand over their education systems to corporations because America does it.
I really really hope that's true. But the conditions that have created shitty modern America exist in almost every Western country now. Thanks to neoliberal market policies and crappy mental models like "shareholder value", countries are increasingly taking a back seat to the needs of corporations. And corporations are everywhere.
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Old 17th July 2020, 01:32     #895
Nothing
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
I really really hope that's true.
Well, if you want it to be true, vote as far left as is politically feasible, and hope like hell National don't get in.

Last edited by Nothing : 17th July 2020 at 01:33.
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Old 17th July 2020, 15:51     #896
Nich
 
Maybe not "control means of production" sperg zone of the left. But rather a moderate left that believes privatization makes for suboptimal public goods. People who believe a central governing body is best positioned to decide what constitutes a solid education.

OTOH government initiatives (especially ones that require software dev, online services) almost always leave a lot to be desired. Even if a government miraculously came up with an alternate to "Google Home School", the fact remains that market forces are in play now. The government for the first time ever must provide exceptional customer service when it comes to education.

Personally, the utopian view is that we are freed from the tyranny of proximity and we will all have access to the best teachers and education services the world has to offer. The dystopian view is as Ab has outlined, we trade tyranny of proximity for tyranny of corporate mind-control.
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Old 17th July 2020, 16:33     #897
bradman
 
I like taking excerpts of nich's points and finding where he copy/pasted them from.
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Old 17th July 2020, 16:57     #898
Nich
 
As my bibliographer I'm glad you've found a way to be useful.
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Old 17th July 2020, 17:28     #899
Lightspeed
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by bradman
I like taking excerpts of nich's points and finding where he copy/pasted them from.
Care to share your findings? Or do we have to wait publication?
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Old 17th July 2020, 21:17     #900
Lightspeed
 
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Old 18th July 2020, 15:32     #901
crocos
 
I know this is very creepy for you, but I want you to relax: I am just a criminal, doing this entirely on my own dime and my own time, and you can have recourse to law enforcement later!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...federal-agent/

EDIT: Yes this is copy-pasta from The Twitterz, but I still find it an ironic take on the extrajudicial detention that is occuring in Portland.
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Last edited by crocos : 18th July 2020 at 15:34.
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Old 18th July 2020, 16:27     #902
Nich
 
At least the ones in Portland went to the army surplus store... check out these casual friday motherfuckers:
https://twitter.com/jaycieelynnn/sta...78074251780096

This kind of thing keeps me awake at night.
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Old 19th July 2020, 00:01     #903
Lightspeed
 
Sad

"American foreign policy applied domestically."
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Old 19th July 2020, 16:11     #904
Cyberbob
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lightspeed
Cue 'Europe - Final Countdown'
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Old 22nd July 2020, 16:47     #905
blynk
 
So by the sounds of it, Trump is finally taking covid seriously.

Re Launched his daily stand up on it. Was more serious, On task & actually said how serious it is.

However, I believe his tact will be - Now that the whitehouse has taken control of the situation we can tell you whats really happening.
And some BS about how Fauci was misleading.
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Old 22nd July 2020, 17:43     #906
StN
I have detailed files
 
Hmm - just saw on CNN that if you wash hands frequently, wear masks in public, and remain socially distant, the curve can be flattened and the outbreak contained. What evidence do they have for this?
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Old 22nd July 2020, 19:05     #907
crocos
 
Meh, fake news.
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Old 25th July 2020, 21:51     #908
The Edge
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by blynk
So by the sounds of it, Trump is finally taking covid seriously.

Re Launched his daily stand up on it. Was more serious, On task & actually said how serious it is.

However, I believe his tact will be - Now that the whitehouse has taken control of the situation we can tell you whats really happening.
And some BS about how Fauci was misleading.
Even if he starts screaming from the rooftops tomorrow about wearing masks etc, I feel it's far too late for him to turn things around. And by things, I mean his re-election prospects. He may still win, for sure - but this feels like desperation to me.
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Old 25th July 2020, 22:51     #909
Lightspeed
 
MSNBC's corporate masters have loosened the leash on Mehdi Hasan:

It’s time we use the F-word: fascism
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Old 31st July 2020, 01:57     #910
Lightspeed
 
Trump suggests delay to 2020 US presidential election

Quote:
Donald Trump has suggested November's presidential election be postponed, saying increased postal voting could lead to fraud and inaccurate results.

He floated a delay until people could "properly, securely and safely" vote.

There is little evidence to support Mr Trump's claims but he has long railed against mail-in voting which he has said would be susceptible to fraud.

US states want to make postal voting easier due to public health concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.

Under the US constitution, Mr Trump does not have the authority to postpone the election himself. Any delay would have to be approved by Congress.
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Old 31st July 2020, 16:00     #911
Lightspeed
 
November feels very far away right now.
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Old 1st August 2020, 08:43     #912
The Edge
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpIkl2QnJeI
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Old 1st August 2020, 16:12     #913
Nothing
 
Now he's banning tik-tok
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Old 5th August 2020, 01:37     #914
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Jesus christ the Axios interview is a doozy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaaTZkqsaxY

Summary and commentary:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/new...ectid=12353763
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Old 5th August 2020, 12:46     #915
blynk
 
Quote:
Trump: "Oh, just read the manuals. Read the books."

Swan: "Manuals? What manuals?"

Trump: "Read the books. Read the books."

Swan: "What books?"

Trump: "What testing does-"

Swan: "No, I'm sorry, who says-"
That was one of the standout for me.

"Read the books."
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Old 5th August 2020, 13:43     #916
Cyberbob
 
rEaD tHe tRaNsCrIpT
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Old 5th August 2020, 14:45     #917
StN
I have detailed files
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by blynk
That was one of the standout for me.

"Read the books."
Clearly the manual he was referring to was the Obama/Biden pandemic plan that they dismissed as soon as they walked in the door.
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Old 5th August 2020, 17:41     #918
xor
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nothing
So is the rest of world
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Old 5th August 2020, 18:26     #919
Lightspeed
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
Jesus christ the Axios interview is a doozy.
Did we learn anything tho? Or was it a demonstration of what we already know?
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Old 5th August 2020, 19:50     #920
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Didn't reveal anything I didn't already know about Trump. Revealed a lot about the sorts of reporters that the US media have put in front of him to date. One non-American prepped with facts and determined to ask followup questions and the Emperor looks naked.
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