Facts are freely accessible these days compared to the past. A large part of Education in the past wasn't designed with that in mind.
So Education IS changing to meet that reality but its still a work in progress. Consensus is still developing on what the best route ahead is.
You are right that expertise is only possible through the accumulation and quick recall of facts. That said, the time it takes for an expert in Physics to become an expert Programmer or vice versa is much more than it takes for an expert Physicist to find and collaborate with an expert Programmer. So in a networked society, Educations focus is shifting to collaboration and healthy communication at an early age rather than producing mediocre experts in all subjects which is what past education systems have produced in great volumes.
You should be able to make that case to your prof. You would probably get points for it :)
Some profs are subject matter experts who have no actual understanding of Pedagogy. So they pick up whatever rules someone else tells them to use, and then with time figure out what works and doesn't from feedback (which students are always very hesitant to give).
> Humans are notoriously good at coming up with bullshit explanations
This is true, but bullshit stories have benefit not just to one side but both sides of the relationship more often than not, which is why evolution hasn't got ride of lying - its not a bug its a feature (for certain class of problems)- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/lying-ho...
Uh, could you point out what part of that article you think supports your claim that "bullshit stories have benefit not just to one side but both sides of the relationship more often than not"? I just read it and didn't see anything that indicated that.
In the past few years I've worked pretty hard on building habits of honesty. Not from an ethical perspective--I'm an atheist and don't see any inherent reason to follow any prescriptive ideology--but from a self-benefit perspective. Cooperation is highly beneficial, moreso perhaps than at any time in history, and honesty allows a deeper level of cooperation with my peers. It's surprisingly difficult, as someone who viewed themselves initially as an already-honest person, but it yields major benefits. In the long term, I'm not even convinced that lying benefits the liar, let alone the person being lied to.
I just want to "second" this message. It's an attitude I've adopted and has been highly beneficial. It might seem like an uphill battle at first, with plenty of challenges, but ultimately has none of the challenges once the habit is steady. Rather, there are no challenges regarding honesty, because there is only one course of action available.
Some people may respond to it poorly, but I've learned to see this as a test of character. People worth interacting with and investing in will appreciate that honesty. People that don't appreciate it will likely be a source of conflict sooner or later anyway.
Perhaps the only valid "challenge" is learning how to be honest in a productive and beneficial way, but this challenge is distinct from challenges that _result_ from being honest.
Doesn't the pie chart show to make others laugh, to protect others feelings, to maintain social norms, for economic/personal advantage (usually benefits family), to escape harm (again usually benefits your family when you don't get yourself killed while dealing with evil) etc
Both honesty and lying are tools. You choose how you use them. Whether to benefit others or to take advantage of others is a choice you make.
But there will be situations where the tool of honesty wont work, and if you walk into those situations having convinced yourself that lying isn't a tool available, then people who don't think that way will be better prepared than you to handle those situations.
Basically be aware where lies can be used. Don't just dismiss it totally as only useable for evil.
During Hitler's rise people like to point at the Honest folk who stood up against him like Carl Goerdeler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there were people like Wilhelm Canaris who lied day in day out and did all kinds of damage and saved a whole lot of lives.
> Doesn't the pie chart show to make others laugh,
I'd question whether this actually is lying. Lying implies intent to deceive. For a scientific study, it makes sense to include this in the data, but I'm not sure it counts as lying. I'm not sure a priest, rabbi, and imam have ever walked into a bar together, but I'm pretty sure nobody is worried about whether it's true when I say they did.
> to protect others feelings,
As I've pointed out elsewhere, I don't think this actually helps the person being lied to in the long run.
> to maintain social norms,
Is there even an argument that this benefits the person being lied to?
> for economic/personal advantage (usually benefits family),
Doesn't benefit the person being lied to.
> to escape harm (again usually benefits your family when you don't get yourself killed while dealing with evil) etc
Again doesn't benefit the person being lied to. It's also a bit of a stretch to extrapolate "avoidance" from the chart to what you're saying, and I'd argue that the situations where you're lying to evil that might kill you are pretty unusual. I'd absolutely have no qualms lying to Nazis during the Third Reich, but that's not a fact which has any bearing on my life right now.
Warning: Do not try this advice when your wife asks if the pants make her butt look fat. The benefits of lying have been proven over and over again in this scenario.
That's simply not true in my experience. I suspect you haven't actually tried what you're saying over any significant period of time to make the claim you're making.
You're lying to avoid a conflict which is simply not that large in the grand scheme of a lifelong relationship. If I think pants make her butt look fat, that's not necessarily even a problem: it doesn't mean I'm not attracted to her in those pants, or that you even need to be attracted to her in any specific pants, or that she should even base her clothing choices on your opinions. And in a more general sense, why is she asking questions she doesn't want an answer to? If your relationship can't handle communicating honestly about very minor things like this, you're totally screwed when it comes to real issues, like the changing nature of attraction as you age, or asking for what you need to feel fulfilled in a relationship, or concern for the person's health at their weight. If you can't communicate in a really insignificant situation like this, how are you going to communicate when there's anything of actual significance?
Honesty with kindness is a skill, and it's certainly not trivial, but lying isn't the kinder option, even in this case.
Coming at it from the other side of things: when someone lies to me to spare my feelings, there's a lot of times where I know they're lying, and that means I can't trust them to give me honest feedback when I really don't know. If I can't trust someone to tell me something negative, then I can't trust them when they tell me something positive either.
I'm honest much earlier in relationships about much more significant things, so it's highly unlikely that I'll end up married to someone who couldn't handle honest in this situation.
Well, that's gonna be complicated. The strategies are going to vary by situation. Honest communication is just a hard part of being a human. But it's worth the effort.
For example, with the "yes those pants make your butt look fat" conversation, that's an opportunity to set a boundary that improves your relationship: "Please don't ask me questions you don't want an answer to." Your relationship doesn't have to be a minefield, where she's quizzing you and any wrong answer could turn into a fight--that's not a pattern that's fun for either of you. Your wife probably just wants you to compliment her, so you can tell her that you'll make an effort to verbalize when you like how she looks or something she does. Those compliments will hold more weight, because she'll know that what you're saying is true. A compliment from someone who gives false compliments all the time is meaningless.
Some other general strategies:
1. Consider that I might be wrong, and if I was wrong, apologize. A side effect of being more honest with others is that I end up being more honest with myself as well, and I've often discovered that I believe some wrong things. Particularly with opinions, if you find that being honest about your opinions is offensive to people, consider that your opinions might be the problem, not the honesty. A lot of people who say "I'm just being honest!" when they offend people are actually just assholes. Lying wouldn't make them less assholes, it would just make them secret assholes.
2. Consider that my input wasn't wanted, and if I did that, apologize. A lot of the time the truth can just exist without being said. Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said now? Do I need to be the one to to say it? I'm particularly bad at this, personally.
3. Have a conversation with them about why I said what I said. A lot of times, like with the "yes those pants make your butt look fat" conversation, what the person is actually taking offense to is because they're assuming that what you said has other meaning. Just because I said the pants make her butt look fat doesn't mean that I don't love her, or that I'm not attracted to her, or that I think her butt looking fat is a bad thing. It may be that her negative reaction is because she's assumed one of those things, so clarifying would make her feel more secure.
4. This doesn't trivially apply to you wife, but in some cases, you can just stop wasting energy on the person. You can't please everyone, so don't try. If someone wants you to lie to them, that means they don't value what you have to say. Why would you want to talk to someone like that? But really, it rarely gets this far, because the reality is that most people don't take offense to the truth. Most people realize they have no choice but to accept reality when presented with it.
If Pepsi was heavily regulated in how they advertise, as the Alcohol Industry is in most parts of the world, then you would be reading about how Pepsi helps social bonding too. Marketing depts these days have hundred different ways of filling people's heads with garbage.
So have all sorts of things, both good and bad. Just because something has been around a long time doesn’t mean it should be assumed to contribute positively. The so-called “oldest profession” has been around far longer than almost anything too.
My point was that the assertion in the post I responded to, that the positive view of alcohol is a product of marketing, cannot be correct, because people have been enjoying alcohol long before propaganda was so easily and commonly disseminated in the form of advertisement.
I go to meet specific people, get specific questions answered, plan how to get specific things done over the next n months or whatever. Pull them into a room for a few hours for brain dumps. Very valuable compared to email/chat etc
Companies will outsource, move development centers elsewhere etc etc. Visa restrictions alone aren't going to save anyones job. The world is too competitive.
The whole fear of outsourcing is a myth companies use to deregulate immigration and it needs to stop being used as fear mongering to justify lax regulations.
If outsourcing was so good why hasn't all of SV packed and moved abroad already to cheap countries or even to cheaper states in the US instead of offering insane salaries at home?
Companies stay in the west because of the ecosystem comprised of stable government, generous financing and skilled workforce.
If Airbus wants to hire 300 software engineers, good luck finding them in reasonable time periods in Germany or France. Local small niche firms can survive. The larger you get the longer it takes to hit hiring goal.
You will understand that only after you spend time actually hiring people. Telling the boss well I can't do this locally in 3 months, I need 6 plus a budget to relocate people from other EU locations will just get you laughed out of the room for the simple reason someone else in the org has already done it through outsourcing and importing people.
> Companies stay in the west because of the ecosystem comprised of stable government, financing and skilled workforce
This is probably 10-15 year old rhetoric that isnt true anymore. There are now dozens of hubs worldwide that make it simple to hire large number of people fast. Just make a trip and look at the scale at which they function.
The EU is doing the right thing by trying to pull more people in.
>If Airbus wants to hire 300 software engineers, good luck finding them in reasonable time periods in Germany or France.
Airbus can't find 300 engineers in Germany and France? Come on! More like Airbus can't find 300 engineers in Germany and France willing to work for peanuts. It's always the last part that gets lost in the translation.
Has Airbus thought about training said engineers instead of expecting them to magic themselves out of thin air whenever they're needed? Looking at their margins it's not like they can't afford it.
>The EU is doing the right thing by trying to pull more people in.
The EU is doing the right thing for Airbus shareholders, not for the local workforce.
:) You will find Airbus managers who agree with you BUT they compete for reaources with Airbus managers who don't.
This is an old debate and it's more or less a settled one in large orgs with large requirements whether in US or EU - the managers who don't care how they meet their goals win. You don't have to believe me, you just need to spend time talking to people who have run large teams in the EU and ask them how they survive.
The world is not getting any less competitive and mgmt in large orgs spend most of their day reacting rather than proactively doing anything. Smaller orgs it's easier but again they too are under pressure in different ways.
During this phase where many things are in flux and unstable it's a safer bet to move to where the jobs are then expecting the govt or corp s to do anything radical. They are too trapped even if they have competent ppl...anyway that's just my experience and opinion and I hope I am wrong.
> If Airbus wants to hire 300 software engineers, good luck finding them in reasonable time periods in Germany or France.
Are you serious? Countries with traditions of engineering going back centuries, with some of the best schools in the field, will have trouble to find... 300 software engineers?
Because outsourcing fails and is abandoned after two or three years, when the real costs have become apparent. The bastards that thought it up have moved up and out on the strengths of the initial cost savings by the time those chickens come home to roost.
You don't have to see this kind of cycle too many times before you get a little cynical.
> Its not about the issues, its about who has better targeting. That's it.
Eh, it's never been about the issues. It's so rarely about the issues that we name political periods after it (e.g. Prohibition, Abolitionist, et cetera).
What it's about, what it's always been about, is identity. And targeting, at its best, lets one efficiently drive an identity message. (At its worst, it lets one send diverging messages to diverging groups. But that tends to backfire, eventually.)
Given identity is multifarious (common identities are forged on class, race, ideology, religion, dialect, et cetera), there is room for creativity as politicians craft their image to collect a coalition.
Another interpretation of this is that it is even more about issues, though. At the end of the day, you're targeting people based on their interest in / feelings on particular issues. Everyone wants to be so alarmist about all of this, but the reality is that this is democracy functioning as intended. Candidates are trying to fit even more tightly to what the voters want.
Unfortunately that’s not true. If you look at the thorough reporting of Cambridge Analytica’s operations for example, it shows that their targeting was not based on issues but on psychological profile, which they determined with personality tests. Specifically they focused their attention on people exhibiting signs of neurosis and anxiety, and then experimented with various content designed to amplify their fears. Once they got the right level of “engagement”, they hammered crucial electoral districts in swing states with a deluge of weaponized propaganda. In that election the issue (“payload” would be a better term) boiled down to “Hillary Clinton is corrupt and belongs in jail”. The point is not to convince millions of people to change their minds, but to manipulate a few tens of thousands of crucial undecided voters into distrusting one candidate without really knowing why, just enough to change their vote (or perhaps just stay home - Cambridge Analytica had conducted vote suppression campaigns in other countries as well).
This is essentially large scale human experimentation. We have to accept the fact that it works, and is not at all politics as usual. To expect to be targeted with “issues” is to expect to be treated like a human being. But to be targeted in this way is to be treated like a lab rat.
> Unfortunately that’s not true. If you look at the thorough reporting of Cambridge Analytica’s operations for example, it shows that their targeting was not based on issues but on psychological profile, which they determined with personality tests. Specifically they focused their attention on people exhibiting signs of neurosis and anxiety, and then experimented with various content designed to amplify their fears.
Sure, that was their marketing pitch. But we have no evidence that anything like that actually worked, or was meaningfully implemented at scale. Secondly, what does it mean to "target people with anxiety or neurosis"? Were they shifting their opinions? Or were they just saying, "Hey, are you afraid of stuff? Well, we've got the candidate for you". My guess is it's the latter, and if it's the latter, that's just another way of communicating issue alignment of their candidate.
I don't think there is any substantial evidence at all that CA or anyone like them was actually shaping opinion. As far as I know, all the evidence indicates that they were finding the issues people cared about, and explaining why and how Donald Trump aligned with them on those issues.
The underlying fact that nobody seems to want to face is that large numbers of people aligned with him on many important issues. Not because they were tricked, but because that's what they truly wanted.
Overall I agree. The left was ecstatic about Obama’s ground breaking use of social media and analytics in his first presidential campaign, but now are crying foul because the right has caught up and even pulled ahead. I’m not entirely happy about the tactics due to the privacy implications, but that’s a separate issue.
What does worry me is that the messaging being targeted in this way is often disingenuous. Parties will target one message at one demographic and a contradictory message at another demographic. So if a consistent message is simply being targeted effectively that’s fine, but deceptively tailoring the message to the target is a legitimate concern.
You’re making a false equivalence. The Obama campaign hired savvy analysts and marketers to run a modern web and email campaign. A lot of what they did was pioneer what is now standard in almost every campaign: heavy use of email follow-ups to keep supporters engaged; recruiting and coordinating canvassing teams nationwide; using social media as a primary channel of communication rather than a gadget.
What the Trump campaign did was go to Paul Manafort, the guy who fixed Ukrainian campaign using black ops disinformation campaigns on behalf of Putin, and hire him to run his campaign!
The only thing those campaigns had in common is that they used the Internet efficiently. But they used them very differently to achieve different goals. To compare them as equivalent is irresponsible.
You keep implying differences, while not actually stating them. Who was hired is not a salient difference, in this context. The tactics employed by each are essentially the same: Heavy internet advertising with effective, outcome-based targeting. For all of Cambridge Analytica's marketing puff pieces, I see no evidence they were doing anything fundamentally different.
Just to be clear, you are willing to say on the record that the Obama campaign and Manaford, a convicted criminal who is known to have worked for a mass murdering autocratic regime as their expert electoral fixer, are “essentially the same” in their use of the Internet?
If so, you’ll have to find someone else to engage in debate with you. If you are capable of believing such a thing, we simply don’t have enough moral common ground to have a productive conversation.
I will say for the benefit of others who might read this, that how successful Cambridge Analytica actually was in manipulating US voters in 2016 is irrelevant to whether or not A) mass disinformation is a real threat to elections everywhere (it is) and B) the Trump campaign employed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate US voters using mass disinformation (they did).
> Just to be clear, you are willing to say on the record that the Obama campaign and Manaford, a convicted criminal who is known to have worked for a mass murdering autocratic regime as their expert electoral fixer, are “essentially the same” in their use of the Internet?
In their use of the internet in relation to their respective presidential campaigns, yes. Do you have specific evidence to the contrary?
> If so, you’ll have to find someone else to engage in debate with you. If you are capable of believing such a thing, we simply don’t have enough moral common ground to have a productive conversation.
So, just to be clear, at the first sight of a challenge and request for literally any supporting evidence at all, you're backing away, while pretending to do so out of contempt?
It's become quite clear that you don't actually have any evidence to back up your claims here. Though feel free to prove me wrong.
Politics isn’t about issues, it’s about ideology. You have no idea what the sausage maker that is Congress will churn out at the end of the day. But you know who agrees with you on the big picture principles of the universe. And targeting helps you find those people and get them to vote.
In a dark way, this is expected, right? Politicians often lie. But targeting now allows them to tell a different lie to different groups, each seemingly serving a sub-population's desires -- without groups hearing each-others messages.
Any time a presidential candidate has dominated in the mass media of the day, they've won the election. FDR did it with radio. Kennedy did it with television. Obama did it with traditional social media. Trump did it with guerilla social media.
I can't necessarily say these presidents weren't elected on the basis of issues, but beating the competition at getting your message on the popular mass media does seem to be a common factor in all these elections.
If there were a way to disrupt the economy of information that Cambridge Analytica types can manipulate democracies with, we still wouldn't break the whole cycle, but we would at least break this latest and most uncomfortable iteration.
They did act. Muilenburg was Chairman & CEO and they removed him as Chairman in October. It probably took the new Chairman a month or two to work out what shit Muilenburg was feeding the board prior to that.
The NYT didn’t have to be right, they only had to sell newspapers and clicks. The burden of evidence for publishing a hit piece is much lower than that for making an actual business decision.
I’m no fan of Boeing but the truth is, betting your entire business requires a much higher burden of proof than journalism does.
If they are wrong, their reputation won't suffer that much. They can just say, "We based our story on the best information available to us as outsiders."
Which, to me at least, is a perfectly legitimate thing for a newspaper to do. Yes, they should check facts and vet sources, but their primary responsibility is to do the best they can and get the information out there for the public.
When it comes to constructing narratives and interpreting the basic evidence, a newspaper is constrained only by the need to tell and sell a story, not by the need to choose a positive course of action in order to identify and solve the fundamental problems entailed. It's not about the basic facts, it's about what you do with them.
That certainly didn't play when Judith Miller [1] given the bull horn at the NYT allowed the Bush Administration to march us directly into a bullshit war. They are indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions.
> The burden of evidence for publishing a hit piece is much lower than that for making an actual business decision.
That's not reflecting reality at all. In a big enough company you don't really decide, you do both. Alternatively, you choose all three of the options. There's often no reason to fully go for one thing. This as in a big enough company there's enough resources that someone somewhere else does something else, likely the opposite of some other decision.
Eventually something will fail, or it'll succeed. The things which succeed will hopefully be implemented everywhere.
