I love the writing of the frisson-filled frisky and felicitous feline known as “the bad cat”. His style is great, as is the content and insight he produces.
His recent piece on the university system (and education in general) contains some observations and arguments that are well-worth spending some time pondering.
He lays out the argument that education is largely about indoctrination and higher education is about the establishment of a credentialed class and that the new dynamic of more collaborative working (with some AI thrown in for good measure) across the internet has the potential to upend this system. His conclusion is actually a bit stronger
the university as we know it is about to die (Malus Cattus)
I am not as optimistic on that score, but I hope he’s right, because the university system as it stands is long-overdue a complete overhaul.
We saw how well this credentialed class performed during covid. A rag-tag collection of folk across the internet - the ASS KICKERS1 - wiped the floor with them. In covid terms we might suggest that the fomite infections of the ‘experts’ were sterilized by the sanitizer of the ‘conspiracists’.
Of course, this rag-tag collection of folk contained many credentialed people as well as those without credentials who distinguished themselves by (a) having a brain and (b) actually using it.
But only the credentialed people who agreed with The Narrative™ were given significant air time and remained free from the threat of censorship.
In the non-UK university where I was working when covid hit it was made very clear that if I were to publicly dissent from The Narrative™ (on social media, for example) I would have been summarily ejected and sent back to Blighty within 24 hours.
We did the mask/PCR test thing for a bit and then went online - all lessons and exams etc were done remotely. It was a disaster. Despite using (at great expense) supposedly “cheat proof” online examination tools, students went from being decidedly average to stellar, as most of them suddenly discovered they could score well over 90% on a test. Obviously not cheating - just the power of online teaching methods.
Yeah, right.
The university eventually noticed the problem and decided to conduct final exams on campus - with all appropriate “Covid Safe™” measures in place. I would say that well over 50% of my colleagues thought the whole covid pantomime was a huge steaming pile of bullshit, but a significant number seemed to have swallowed The Narrative™.
When we changed back to final exams on campus we had a (virtual) meeting. Some were worried about the ‘danger’ of handling the exam scripts. I suggested that we should soak them in bleach for 2 hours before marking them. But, they said, won’t that dissolve the writing?
They had forgotten to recharge their sarcasm detectors obviously. They actually thought I was being serious - despite my reputation as a snarky bastard.
The how and the why of how clearly intelligent people could be so fooled by a so obviously moronic set of statements and policies on covid is probably worth a PhD thesis on its own.
This is but a small example of how a bunch of obviously smart people (they were good at physics) could be so captured and deluded by an ideology. In this case it was the official covid ideology, but many academics have been captured by the current crop of equally insane and delusional ideologies sweeping the ‘west’.
Before we start revising the university system, however, we’d best answer some very important questions
What is a university for ?
Who pays for them ?
If they disappeared overnight would we be better or worse off ?
Who should be going to a university, and why ?
What is education for ?
I am not sure I can answer any of these questions adequately to my own satisfaction.
Putting my cynical hat on I would suggest that the ‘elite’, those who believe they have the right, the privilege, and the talent to direct the lives of others, do NOT want a population comprised of utterly clueless morons. It’s probably not a good idea to have too high a fraction of your population incapable of not pissing on their shoes. Equally, however, they do NOT want a population comprised of people who can think properly and are able to see through their bullshit.
It’s an optimisation problem; where do you ‘set’ things to achieve the best mix of minimally necessary functionality combined with maximum control?
Don’t set AI on that problem.
One of the things that El Gato Malo doesn’t address is that of experimental research. As I was reading his piece (and it IS an excellent piece) I was trying to think about how his ideas and arguments played out in my own discipline of physics.
One of the papers I’m most proud of having written contained an idea for the transfer of entanglement. You take an optical cavity with ‘nothing’ in it (technically, the quantum vacuum state). You fire an excited two-level atom through it such that the flight time through the cavity gives a 50% chance of spontaneous emission. Then you fire another two-level atom through the cavity, but this time in its ground state such that it has a 50% chance of absorbing any photon in the cavity. What you end up with at the end of this process are two entangled atoms. They have never directly interacted.
This was subsequently experimentally confirmed (it’s not an easy experiment to do. For example, you need to generate a close approximation to one of these idealized 2-level atoms - which you can do using Rydberg atoms. But it ain’t easy).
But here’s the thing. The bits and pieces necessary to do the experiment are bloody expensive. Who should pay for that? And with finite budgets available, who gets to decide which experiment gets funded?
It takes a considerable amount of education and experience to generate the expertise necessary to do this kind of experiment - and it requires a significant amount of expertise. This is not something that can be “done over the internet”.
The best physicists - of both theoretical and experimental varieties - have a hard-earned and much-deserved reputation. Outside of something like a school/university system I’m not sure how we could ever generate enough of this kind of (genuine) expertise.
But universities (and schools), particularly ‘western’ ones, DO have some very serious systemic flaws - many of which are currently being “baked in” by the woke insanity. How do we address those without completely buggering up the (few) things left in the system that are worthwhile?
I read a lot of articles about the ‘state’ of academia and how it has been completely captured by the DIE insanity. Some of the examples quoted are unbelievable. I don’t mean they’re not true (they are) but that it’s almost impossible to believe that this kind of stuff is actually happening (it is).
One problem is that we’re fast-moving to a model where a hierarchy of competence is being replaced by a hierarchy of diversity.
Questioning this, by suggesting something like “the best person for the job should be hired” for example, is said to be racist. Universities and their administrations have changed course from being truth-seekers to being sin-seekers.
I don’t know why we’ve let things get so out of control, or how much a role these new delusional ideologies play (a lot I would suggest), but the example of covid in which the ASS KICKERS demolished the ‘experts’ does not point to anything but a broken system2.
The good news is that the cat is well and truly out of the bag. There’s no going back if things continue as they have been. Too many people have seen the Emperor’s dangly bits - the ugly ball sack of corruption is too plain to see and even the finest of propaganda cloths can’t convince us otherwise any more.
We’re at something of a critical juncture, I feel. The ‘elites’ are well aware that their corrupt and putrid ball sacks are on display - they know that the ASS KICKERS were far more effective than the elites ever imagined they would be.
They’re introducing all sorts of programs and techniques to limit the damage; online ‘safety’ bills, anti-misinformation campaigns, the censorship industrial complex etc. The one thing we need to preserve is our ability to kick ass.
They’re trying to put the cat back in the bag - and it’s imperative we do not allow them to do this.
Anti-Science Seditious Knowledge-Inspired Covid Kooks Engaging Real Science
If your aims are control and indoctrination you’d probably say nothing is broken; everything is working exactly as planned
One thought that found its lonely way into my head is that, while the new dark age will doubtless greatly damage the hard sciences and retard their progress, I think they will continue to exist and be transmitted to students in a recognizable form.
I’m not so sanguine about the humanities, however. I worry that once the last cohort of decently trained academics ages out, there will be effectively *nothing* left but ignorant, malicious, bullying morons who spend their pampered careers desecrating their fields with identity-politics screeds and purges, and enforcing total Current Thing conformity on each other and, as far as they’re able, on the rest of us. I don’t know how we come back from that.
Is the problem the indoctrination, or that we disagree so heartily with what values are being conveyed? Go back and read the founding charter of any great old university (or just look at its motto) and it becomes clear that these institutions have, since their founding, existed to pass on a set of moral and social values as well as practical skills to benefit society. This DEI stuff, the religion of the “secular” elite, may just be what that dual purpose looks like when you remove God and add a technological revolution. If we can identify a time when academic freedom flourished in universities and they produced capable young people, was it because no indoctrination was taking place or because we were instilling them with a different set of values? And where do— or should— those values come from?