Super Volatile

Stanford “free” classes aren’t free. Stanford students have to pay for them. The fact that I’m paying for them doesn’t bother me, the fact that people who aren’t paying for them have changed the class more than the ones who have, does. I’m sorry, but if I’m going to have to pay $50,000 a year to go to Stanford then the classes should be tailored to fit the students – not a working professional who wants to learn a little machine learning on the side. That is why I propose that they should separate the classes. Then if the assignments aren’t clear enough or whatever, the online public version can tailor to suit their needs and the in-person version can tailor to suit the students.

A critical perspective on free online courses published by Stanford University, like this one.

If a space traveling entity approached you with an opportunity to visit any celestial object from any distance and allow you bring one scientific instrument of your choosing, where would you go and what would you bring? The size of the instrument does not matter, but keep in mind the farther away your object of choice is, the more it may have changed (i.e. if you hoped to visit the recently discovered supernova SN 2011fe, you would arrive 21 million years after the event).

neiltyson: I'd bring my iPhone, as the most compact representation of modern culture there is. And I'd visit a civilization on a galaxy 65 million light years away. Assuming I can get there instantaneously, I would look back to Earth with their presumably super telescopes and witness the extinction of the dinosaurs - the light of which is just now reach them.

Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed by the readers of Reddit. Buried in the answers is the link to this excellent video interview with out-of-character Stephen Colbert.

He, like so many educational theorists, wants to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn’t want to teach so much “boring stuff” in school.  But he also doesn’t want to lower standards.  He no doubt wants our kids to do just as well in math and science…just without all that studying, which unrealistically requires ADHD kids to pay attention.

So now, when everybody on this planet has seen Ken Robinson's talk, it's worth reading a thoughtful analysis of real consequences of this talk's proposition.

So there is no mistake, let me describe the bottom of this slippery slope more forthrightly.  You are opposed to knowledge as such. You contemptuously dismiss experts who have it; you claim that books are outmoded, including classics, which contain the most significant knowledge generated by humankind thus far; you want to memorize as little as possible, and you want to upload what you have memorized to the net as soon as possible; you don’t want schools to make students memorize anything; and you discourage most people from going to college.

In short, at the bottom of the slippery slope, you seem to be opposed to knowledge wherever it occurs, in books, in experts, in institutions, even in your own mind.

Wikipedia co-founder warns against increasingly popular neglect for the sources of knowledge supposedly outdated by the internet: formal education, books and experts. Somehow surprisingly, it's the nerds themselves who are in the avant-garde of this deeply anti-intellectual movement.

Brain Gym is a schools program I’ve been writing on since 2003. It’s a series of elaborate physical movements with silly pseudoscientific justifications: you wiggle your head back and forth because that gets more blood into your frontal lobes for clearer thinking; you contort your fingers together to improve some unnamed “energy flow”; they’re keen on drinking water, because “processed foods” – I’m quoting the Brain Gym Teacher’s Manual – “do not contain water.” You pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for Brain Gym, and it’s still done in hundreds of state schools across the UK.

This week I got an email from a science teacher about a 13 year old pupil. Both have to remain anonymous. This pupil wrote an article about Brain Gym for her school paper, explaining why it’s nonsense: the essay is respectful, straightforward, and factual. But the school decided they couldn’t print it, because it would offend teachers in the junior school who use Brain Gym.

After all, it was a lesson for the kid: that conformism triumphs truth. A lesson funded by public education system.

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

Scott Adams shares the story of his college education.

In the chapter "Can we fix things?" Cowen offers the following policy prescription: "Raise the social status of scientists."  And by social status he seems to mean something like: "do something that makes doing science something more young people aspire to.

Interesting question that raised more discussion on Hacker News than on that blog itself. signum temporis.

To the greatest extent possible, do whatever is most fun, interesting, and personally rewarding (and not evil). External constraints, such as the need to go to school or make money are simply obstacles to be hacked. Be skeptical of external authorities, as they are often manipulating you for their own benefit, or for the benefit of the institutions they represent (often unknowingly, as they were already captured by the same systems which are attempted to ensnare you).

Interesting article on external vs. internal motivation from the Googler who invented “Don't be evil” motto. However, that it's easy to abuse his argument to ignore schooling completely. Though Buchheit discards school as merely an “obstacle”, he still to got to the top 10% of his class. Not everybody is as smart as he is and can afford equally flamboyant attitude.

There is surely no more oxymoronic profession than the tenured business-school professor, and yet these job-squatting apostles of the free market are rife and desperate. Potential students should take note: if taking a professional risk were as marvellous as they say, why do these role models so assiduously avoid it?

Extremely harsh critique of MBA programmes. Unexpectedly coming from a magazine that publishes an annual MBA ranking.

Second, you seem to think that we might censor a student's thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work. Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values.

Despite the pressure from banks Cambridge refused to censor its student thesis. Well, it's heartening.