nerdspeak

@Bobby_2021 instead of breaking up they should have done things more like Deng in China. But with the spike in oil prices the Soviet leaders got greedy, and Gorbachev was very naive. China also learned a lot from the USSR breakup. Hindsight is 20:20.

USSR had serious flaws, but if you account for where Russia was in 1917, and all of the war and craziness, by the 1970s they accomplished a lot. Most Soviet citizens had guaranteed access to basic food, shelter, medical care, and education, which we still haven’t achieved in the USA.

Not especially, but as Leo says, motivation and attraction to novelty rapidly decreases. In my twenties I’d feel impulses to learn or research new things just for the hell of it, even if not related to my work at all. Now, I only learn new stuff directly related to my research or other work projects. Part of that is context and life demands, but some of it is biological for sure.

@Fluran Alex Karp is not a socialist. 3rd generation Frankfurt School is not socialist, it’s to the right of the current SPD in Germany. It’s interesting that a Frankfurt School person ends up head of a US national security state project, given the many ties between the earlier Frankfurt School and the CIA, which promoted Marcuse and Adorno as controlled opposition. Adorno published in CIA-funded journals and Marcuse even had a handler.

I didn’t call the countries social democracies, just that the Swedish Social Democratic Party was in power for a long time. It’s also not really proper to lump them all together, there are a lot of differences.

Swedish model is increasingly more like neoliberal statism. Becuase the social democrats were in power for so long, people expect the state to do stuff for them, but for the past 15 years the elites have drunk the New Public Management kool-aid hard. So, while keeping state provision, they privatized the delivery of the public services either using the market or market-like scoring indicators, and it's created crazy shortages (as well as a lot of rent-seeking). One of the reasons you have so many problems integrating migrants in Sweden is that the waiting lists for schools are several years, so a refugee who comes at 14 from Syria might not start attending school till 17. Of course it's a much better place to live than the US or UK, but the idea that Social Darwinist market survival-of-the-fittest should be our political horizon is pretty silly (although understandable if you live there). Imo, given where they started, the Chinese model is a lot more impressive.

@Ninja_pig They charge high tuition because that's what it costs to provide a US-style university education, and the public funding base has been cut drastically. Even at the most expensive schools, the private liberal arts colleges like Amherst or Williams, the $85k tuition (bear in mind, avg tuition paid is $15k because of financial aid) doesn't fully cover the college's cost per student. They make up the shortfall through income from their endowment investments. There is administrative bloat (with Vice deans of xyz), but the main issue is it's expensive to educate people, which is why there needs to be public funding. Most students don't end up at rich private schools like Williams. We could make it cheaper by reducing quality. E.g., I'm in Belgium right now, and the university's cost per student is more like $10k (each student pays close to $0). Why so cheap? Average class size is ~500 at undergraduate level and over 100 even at master's-level No office hours for direct interaction with professors -- this starts only at PhD level Libraries are open 9 am - 5 pm on weekdays only Athletics faciltiies and university-sponsored student life basically doesn't exist This is in Belgium, one of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. So, if there weren't student loans, public universities in the US would be more like this (lower quality). It didn't use to be this bad in Belgium but the system is different -- university budgets are directly provided by the regional government -- and, guess what? Center-right and far-right parties have been working hard to defund the universities for the past 30 years. As societies get richer, it makes sense to spend more on education. It's better if the rich pay for it directly rather than through bizarre back-door student loan schemes like we have in the US, but it's a creative adaptation andit could be worse.

Half of what it spits out for me is wrong, misleading, or too ambiguous to be useful. I’m better off doing the work myself.

Majed is in Lebanon thus university is likely free or very inexpensive. However, I want to point out that this anti-student debt discourse in the US is quite destructive. 1. Federal student debt (through Dept of Education) has very lenient repayment terms (basically if you're not making a lot of money you pay 0) and it's forgiven after 20-25 years depending on the plan you're on. Yes, private student debt is terrible and predatory, but you can avoid it. 2. Studies show people who try to avoid student debt by working through school get worse grades and are much more likely to drop out. Of course, it would be better if university were free or close to it in the US, but the political situation makes it almost impossible to boost funding back to Cold War levels. Thus the govt and higher ed bureaucrats have figured out this patch solution through the Dept of Education student loans. I know Elon wants to abolish it lol but it's never going to happen. Even if you accept his philistine neoliberal logic, the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem is based on commodifying the basic research done at the University of California and Stanford, and they're both funded heavily by DoE. Why doesn't the US government communicate how lenient the DoE student loans are? Again, it's for political reasons -- they don't want to expose it to attack from the right. It is basically a direct transfer payment program to young people who qualify, and the more libertarian side of the Republican party hates it. You saw how Biden trying to do some moderate reform resulted in these attacks through the courts that threw the whole system in disarray. If you do university, go to the best place possible to learn what you need to learn. Then figure out how to pay for it. I say this as someone who (1) is an academic; (2) who tried to be clever and minimize student debt It would have been easier if I just used the system how it's intended, a bit more US federal debt would not impact my life at all and would have made my path way more straightforward, quicker, and fun.

Even calling it AI is a bit silly. LLMs are not AI. I work in a qualitative field in academia and LLMs are almost useless. Even with sophisticated prompt engineering, their analysis is very generic. Good enough to pass an intro-level course? Maybe. Good enough to write something that could survive peer review? You have to be kidding.

LLMs just makes programmers (and other symbolic analysts) 20% more productive. Did Microsoft Excel eliminate accountants? No, it just meant they could more work faster. If you read history, the same cycle repeats every time there’s a big new invention. “Omgz, all the people will have no jobs.”

I only do things I enjoy. Working only for money is terrible -- almost unbearable -- once you have basic security. Ok, when I was broke, it was somewhat motivating, but once I accumulated a couple years worth of living expenses in savings, it became almost impossible to get myself to keep doing what got me there. One caveat: there is a certain wheeler/dealer type of person for whom making money through trade, sales, and financial schemes is enjoyabe. For those people following the money is its own reward. But, doing something very technical and demanding like programming, with no intrinsic interest just so that you can sell your labor time for money, is a really bad idea. I am not saying you can be a professional rapper, but probably if you try (and most likely fail) there will be something related that emerges that you can make work economically. When you really commit to a thing you enjoy, various opportunities start emerging seemingly from nowhere. When you do things only for money the whole world becomes this very tiring, draining place, and you might as well not be alive.

Most of my Ukrainian friends have gone back

It's flaws are increasingly obvious, so it's becoming more authoritarian.

@RendHeaven In tribes or villages sex is also regulated, in ways that would prohibit the sort of harem you describe. You could only get what you describe in contexts with major power imbalances, eg, warlords who start to control the surplus production in coercive ways. Even now, I can only imagine it with a major power imbalance in place, even if it was fully consensual. I can’t imagine Leonardo DiCaprio keeping a harem of big-name female stars, but I’m sure he could keep a harem of entry-level aspiring models.

When I was younger and dumber coming from Western hookup culture, I lived in a middle-income (not even poor) country and unintentionally had what a previous poster called a “harem.” By that I mean, multiple women who must have known I was seeing others since we met max once every two weeks, but for whom I was their only partner (as I found out later). I actually felt really bad when I later figured this out, since I wasn’t even helping them financially, beyond paying for our dates. I didn’t really know I had an obligation to communicate clearly what the rules were, etc., and it eventually caused some drama. For the women I guess it made a kind of sense, in that they thought by being faithful to me without discussing commitment, they created a kind of resource/emergency assistance debt back from me, since the state and their families couldn’t reliably protect them. These women were otherwise very middle-class in their presentation, with masters degrees, jobs, etc. In poorer countries, where being “independent” in the Western sense is not really possible (to the extent we actually are is a separate convo), people spend a lot of time organizing mutually dependent relationships and ideally becoming dependent on a powerful patron. I dont think we can generalize from poor countries to the West, or from West to poor (or even middle income) countries too much.

This is some rap video fantasy. No, the women will resent the man using their economic leverage to “buy” an asymmetric relationship, and end up dating others anyway. Some financially insecure women would agree to it initially, but it will not last.

You cannot convince anyone to try this — okay, maybe if they’re still under 22 or so. If you want it you need to date poly people. Or you can try playing games and bait and switching, but the resulting drama can ruin months of your life.

At the BA level in Europe, there are so many students per professor in the first couple years that the only way to teach is to just drill the rote basics and have the students feed it back on the exam. It doesn't mean the professors are dogmatic as people -- they're not. They just have very little time per student and want to make sure they get the basics.

Studying academic philosophy at a small liberal arts college -- like Reed, Williams, Wesleyan, Oberlin -- is probably a lot better than at a big research university like UCLA. Profs at small colleges are less attached to scholarly one-upmanship and more into the subject matter itself, and the teaching of it. That said, I was taught mostly by boomers, who had a much more chill and exploratory education than people educated after the 1973 oil crisis. GenX and millennial professors had to go through so much angst to get their jobs, that even Reed profs are now probably ruthlessly careerist and highly specialized like the profs at R1s.

Don't you think the dialectical process of arguing with professors and other students is useful? Even with Claude AI -- yes, okay, I admit, I will upload chapters I don't want to read closely, ask it to make argument maps for me, ask it to point out logical flaws, etc. But, I wouldn't really know how to prompt it properly if I hadn't learned the skills directly in class. And it's very hard to find intellectually honest people to have debates with outside of university. Most people in everyday life -- even smart ones -- don't want to work hard, don't know how to structure their thoughts, and will straw man your arguments and get emotional, rather than have a real discussion.

Anything is possible. The question is, will it help you. Whether it will help you think/contemplate deeply, depends on your definition of thinking/contemplating deeply. Really, what it will do is help you clearly articulate premises and arguments about things in a structured way, that allows other people to challenge them. It will not help you learn to meditate or enter altered states or anything like that. Philosophy in the US and UK (again at BA level) is mostly about learning to challenge other people's arguments and build your own, while sign-posting to communicate clearly and without being unfair. Basically, it's about learning to build argument maps like those described by Desgupta (a Berkeley prof who teaches their methods course) here - https://shamik.net/teaching/materials/dasgupta a brief guide to argument mapping.pdf. It's not about pondering the nature of reality or anything like that, necessarily. Of course it could be, since philosophy can be about anything as long as you follow the rules of argument. You can choose to take courses in metaphysics that deal with that, but that's almost incidental to the skills they're trying to teach you. You can take an intro course at a community college for a few hundred dollars, why not try it and see if you like it.

I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy and later switched to politics for grad school. A few thoughts. By itself it won’t get you a job, but employers like philosophy majors if they also have a vocational skill. When I worked in finance, we preferred to hire philosophy majors over business majors, as long as the philosophy majors could prove they knew some finance basics. While it gets very dry at graduate level, undergraduate-level philosophy is about learning to structure and communicate your thoughts in an honest way. All humanities degrees are like this to a degree, but philosophy is more rigorous than English or history. You can only learn to do this by practice — writing papers and I’m seminar discussion. These are active skills, and very useful ones. You will miss out on these skills if you only watch YouTube. Even better than Teaching Company to get a sense of real classes are the Berkeley iTunesU lectures from the late 2000s that are still on Internet Archive. I recommend David Ebrey’s Ancient Philosophy and Hubert Dreyfus’s Existentialism in Literature and Film (from 2008, before he got too senile).

You can approximate it — I’m basically on a 15-hour workweek — but it takes years and a lot of knowledge and skill. The idea that the average person with no business experience or specialized knowledge can do this right away is silly. What I did — and what Ferriss actually did too — is: 1. Come in with a fair amount of knowledge developed through working for others, in a field chosen because it’s fairly easy to do as a self-employee person 2. Experiment with a lot of things while working quite hard for several years, and failing a lot 3. Finally found a good niche, kept working very hard to to afford to build infrastructure, and then gradually hired and outsourced to reduce the owner’s time investment over 2-3 years You can’t just read his book and do it lol. Although a lot of what he says is true — many clients / customers are not profitable so it’s key to avoid them, you can hire very good people in developing countries, usually 1 offer will make a disproportionate amount of your profit, etc.

To make this work, the unions need to be represented in govt through a labor party that can act to prevent offshoring. Both the Labour Party and the British unions made a lot of mistakes in the 70s.