ari_ormstunga (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ari_ormstunga) wrote2022-01-18 06:32 am
ari_ormstunga) wrote2022-01-18 06:32 am
Disregard Your Own Experiences!
I didn't attempt higher education until I was on the cusp of being "middle aged". It was a good, if overpriced, experience and I don't regret it, even though due to vaccine mandates and the creep of Woke-ism into "my field", I'm not sure I'll ever have the career I was aiming for. I studied hard and did quite well in college, although it was entirely on-line and I have no idea how my education would stack up against someone who went to a traditional brick-and-mortar type school.
One of the very first things I learned in college was that, from a scientific standpoint, all of one's own experiences were essentially meaningless and must be ignored. Any sort of "folk wisdom", any events that didn't fit the rationalist paradigm the institution was striving to inculcate, anything we thought or saw that was outside what we were being taught, was to be disregarded, because it wasn't objective and scientific information.
When encountering information, we were trained to immediately assess it's credibility by checking to see if it was an authoritative source. Those included government websites, official peer-reviewed scientific papers written by experts, and expert authors. Ignore your own experiences and immediately defer to authority. Got it.
The Replication Crisis was hot news around the time I started college, and statistics was one of the earlier courses I took. So as I continued my studies, I kept in mind the things I learned about evaluating scientific studies. Lo and behold, the vast majority of the papers I encountered in the school's database were basically garbage. I was studying the social sciences, and almost all of the papers used unrepresentative, tiny samples (usually, they were studies of college students and unrepresentative of the broader population to say the least). Many other papers had the same or other limitations. Granted, psychology is a "soft science", but some of these were comically bad. It wasn't just my school; the databases we used were pretty commonly used in other institutions of higher education.
As a nearly 40 year old man, I also knew that "science" as product as opposed to process had some major problems with it, and that just because the government slaps a .gov on its websites, doesn't mean that it has credible and politically neutral, accurate information on it. It's probably better to get the higher education indoctrination going earlier. It's harder to ignore the flaws in the models they teach when you have decades of experience navigating the real world.
I graduated around the time the Coronapanic kicked in, so I've had a fair amount of time to reflect upon and deconstruct the education I received. It's perverse but typical of me that, after investing years and thousands of dollars in an education, I look it over and deem the bulk of it it a steaming pile of horse shit, but here we are. If you want to churn out unthinking drones indoctrinated to conform to some orthodoxy and defend it like angry bees, "higher education" as it stands now is just swell. If you want broadly educated thinkers with a diverse knowledge base, people capable of thinking their own thoughts, I can't recommend it for most people.
Perhaps ironically, the first few critical tools that I learned in college enabled me to hold what I was learning at arm's length and recognize it as the indoctrination it was. I learned a lot, but a fair amount of it wasn't what they were trying to teach me. The most useful thing I got out of the experience was sheer persistence; I had to really strive to stay on top of school, full-time work, and parenting.
The tendency of the Professional-Managerial Class to ignore any "unofficial data" and to deem information from "unapproved channels" misinformation is likely due to this crafty indoctrination of the "smart ones" in college. It's great if you want a bunch of conformist worker bees to bulk up your bureaucracy, but maybe not so great if you want original, critical thinkers.
Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? This question is in circulation in circles that question the institutional "experts" who have been tasked with running our society. For too many people, unthinking obedience to a bunch of academic hacks and partisan activists with advanced degrees is not only lauded, but is a requirement to advance in the academic and corporate world. This has had clear consequences for society, and few of them seem very positive from where I'm sitting.
One of the very first things I learned in college was that, from a scientific standpoint, all of one's own experiences were essentially meaningless and must be ignored. Any sort of "folk wisdom", any events that didn't fit the rationalist paradigm the institution was striving to inculcate, anything we thought or saw that was outside what we were being taught, was to be disregarded, because it wasn't objective and scientific information.
When encountering information, we were trained to immediately assess it's credibility by checking to see if it was an authoritative source. Those included government websites, official peer-reviewed scientific papers written by experts, and expert authors. Ignore your own experiences and immediately defer to authority. Got it.
The Replication Crisis was hot news around the time I started college, and statistics was one of the earlier courses I took. So as I continued my studies, I kept in mind the things I learned about evaluating scientific studies. Lo and behold, the vast majority of the papers I encountered in the school's database were basically garbage. I was studying the social sciences, and almost all of the papers used unrepresentative, tiny samples (usually, they were studies of college students and unrepresentative of the broader population to say the least). Many other papers had the same or other limitations. Granted, psychology is a "soft science", but some of these were comically bad. It wasn't just my school; the databases we used were pretty commonly used in other institutions of higher education.
As a nearly 40 year old man, I also knew that "science" as product as opposed to process had some major problems with it, and that just because the government slaps a .gov on its websites, doesn't mean that it has credible and politically neutral, accurate information on it. It's probably better to get the higher education indoctrination going earlier. It's harder to ignore the flaws in the models they teach when you have decades of experience navigating the real world.
I graduated around the time the Coronapanic kicked in, so I've had a fair amount of time to reflect upon and deconstruct the education I received. It's perverse but typical of me that, after investing years and thousands of dollars in an education, I look it over and deem the bulk of it it a steaming pile of horse shit, but here we are. If you want to churn out unthinking drones indoctrinated to conform to some orthodoxy and defend it like angry bees, "higher education" as it stands now is just swell. If you want broadly educated thinkers with a diverse knowledge base, people capable of thinking their own thoughts, I can't recommend it for most people.
Perhaps ironically, the first few critical tools that I learned in college enabled me to hold what I was learning at arm's length and recognize it as the indoctrination it was. I learned a lot, but a fair amount of it wasn't what they were trying to teach me. The most useful thing I got out of the experience was sheer persistence; I had to really strive to stay on top of school, full-time work, and parenting.
The tendency of the Professional-Managerial Class to ignore any "unofficial data" and to deem information from "unapproved channels" misinformation is likely due to this crafty indoctrination of the "smart ones" in college. It's great if you want a bunch of conformist worker bees to bulk up your bureaucracy, but maybe not so great if you want original, critical thinkers.
Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? This question is in circulation in circles that question the institutional "experts" who have been tasked with running our society. For too many people, unthinking obedience to a bunch of academic hacks and partisan activists with advanced degrees is not only lauded, but is a requirement to advance in the academic and corporate world. This has had clear consequences for society, and few of them seem very positive from where I'm sitting.