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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I thought, "What the heck!" and signed up to see what happened. We meet every couple of weeks and it has been great. I don't in general find philosophy's answers particularly useful, but the questions and the habit of questioning has been great.

I do get though, why systems of power want to defund things like philosophy and sociology. Good questions and good data are two things that run counter to the willful exercise of power.

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I want to say something along the lines of "they want to de fund critical thinking in general" but I fear I'm becoming too extreme. I'll go with what you said instead.

I do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is thought in university or college. In neither the humanities or STEM.

I think good professors that focus on that are the exception and not the rule, sadly.

> do not know how things look in New Zealand, but I would argue that, on average, very little critical thinking is thought in university or college. In neither the humanities or STEM.

I am in New Zealand

I have been through the university system here, my family still closely involved

A great deal of critical thinking happens in New Zealand universities

I'm a New Zealander. I got a degree in Philosophy and entered a Masters in Computer Science here. I definitely learned a lot about critical thinking. Both from humanities and sciences - I think the combination is probably superior to either in isolation

there is no unified "they" .. instead I think you are identifying a difficult fork in the road of education.. exploratory and associative free-will versus collective learned information up to disciplined obedience. A full society needs both! neither are inherently better ! It is indeed a difficult subject. People in the disciplined obedience camp do sometimes prioritize their own ways for funding, and vice-versa, for sure ..

I don't think there's a "unified 'they'" in the sense of, say, there being a Stamp Out Critical Thinking Council with meetings Tuesdays and Thursdays. But I do think that people who rise through power systems while seeking control are going to be averse to critical thinking in their underlings and their social lessers. I think that's in part because most systems like that select for that kind of person, but also because it's in both their personal interest and that of the system they've hitched themselves to.

So the "they" here isn't a unified, coordinated group. But you'll rarely find those in structural problems. But there is a "they" in the sense that we can define a set of people who will act to oppose critical thinking either through direct self interest or class interest.

I don't know about that. China seems to have found a middle ground that allows for a pretense of exploratory and associative free-will ("special economic zones", China even has billionaires) with people in reality being one wrong move away from the usual sudden and drastic crackdown you'd associate with its style of government.

On the other hand Western democracies largely seem to fund this kind of "exploratory and associative free-will" to the benefit of their aristocracies (i.e. wealthy people who hold a lot of social, economic and often political power but can not actually directly control the government itself despite often benefiting from selective enforcement) while at the same time clearly being aware that ideas like the state monopoly of violence (even in the US) or the "right for a country to defend itself" are vital to the state's continued existence and that democracy is a threat to that ulterior motive if taken too seriously.

China seems to be an example of a "disciplined obedience" system adapting to its economic environment (more the international one than the internal one) whereas "the West" seems to provide examples of systems creating layers of misdirection to hide their inherent "disciplined obedience" based nature that ensures their self-preservation.

Yeah, I suspect few of them directly want that. But I also think few of them are inclined to appreciate the benefits of it.

But it does happen intentionally that way some times for sure. E.g., the way the US's Dickey Amendment defunded gun research to prevent any inconvenient facts from coming to light.

Just for the sake of looking at what good intent might have caused this decision..

I would argue that, in periods of scarcity, it makes sense to prioritize public spending on what has a more tangible economic ROI. I recognize that I am extrapolating from the fact that STEM related jobs tend to be more remunerative than social science.

I could not find any literature regarding ROI of research programs.

We aren't particularly in a period of scarcity. New Zealand's a rich country with a stable GDP.

Also, ROI is the wrong frame to use for government activity. If something has significant short-term ROI, then normal commercial capital's a good match. If it has large long-term ROI, then that's VC's domain. It's government's job to make investments in public goods, things that don't have ROI in the sense usually meant here.

I don't really agree with your characterisation of ROI.

Every potential decision outcome has a ROI (which we mostly don't know in advance, though we can often guess). The investments for which we need governments are those that won't ever work in the private sector due to misaligned incentives (no company will pay out of its own pocket to educate young children, not because there's no ROI overall but because it's much too diffuse -- the ROI for that company is extremely low).

People can disagree about whether government should also make some investments that would also be made by self-interested people/companies.

ROI is very much a business term of art. And that's how it's mostly used here in this little venture-capital supported niche.

I agree one can broaden it to mean something much vaguer, using it metaphorically. But A) I think we at least have to explicitly distinguish that, and B) I think casting societal questions in business terms is a perilously wrong frame, one easily leading to all sorts of errors of thought, ones that have negative social implications.

Just as an example, we could take Elon Musk's recent swipe at funding to fight homelessness. There he uses a common business framing and ends up with some conclusions that are deranged from the point of view of people actually working on the problem. Which wouldn't matter much if he were some random internet commenter, but here his error could have a significant body count.

if we define direct ROI as the canonical monetary gain that private entities tend to optimize for, and then _indirect ROI_ as something that might cause monetary gain because of second or nth order consequence, then I was mostly referring to indirect ROI.

I tend to agree with you that public spending would be wasted or even misdirected in optimizing for direct ROI (EG prison system, education, healthcare...)

I should have better specified in my original response.

I'm sure I'm in the minority here. When I see these kinds of comments, the first thing I think of the movie Good Will Hunting:

You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

I've tought myself a lot of things over the course of my life and am a huge proponent of self-education, but a lot of the 'learning how to learn' had to happen in graduate school. There are few environments that provide the right combination of time, close involvement of experts and peers, the latitude to direct your research in a way that you find interesting and useful within the larger constraints of a project, the positive and negative feedback systems, the financial resources from grant funding, etc.

The negative feedback loops are particularly hard to set up by yourself. At some point if you're going to be at the researcher level (construed broadly), you need help from others in developing sufficient dept, rigor and self-criticality. Others can poke holes in your thoughts with an ease that you probably can't muster on your own initially; after you've been through this a number of times you learn your weaknesses and can go through the process more easily. Similarly, the process of preparing for comprehensive exams in a PhD (or medical boards or whatever) is extremely helpful, but not something most people would do by themselves--the motivation to know a field very broadly and deeply, so you can explain all of this on the spot in front of 5 inquisitors, is given a big boost by the consequences of failure, which are not present in the local library.

The time is also a hard part. There are relatively few people with the resources to devote most of their time for learning outside of the classroom. I spent approximately 12,000 hours on my PhD (yes some fraction of that was looking at failblog while hungover etc. but not much). You could string that along at 10 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, which is a 'serious hobby', but it would take you 24 years. How much of the first year are you going to remember 24 years later? How will the field have changed?

> You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

Does the rest of the movie support that claim? Will Hunting had book smarts but required significant effort from several people to get him to the point where he was ready to meaningfully apply his intelligence.

I've hired a handful of folks who learned solely by self-study and while none of them required the level of support Will did, they all took significantly more effort to get to the point where they contributed productively than hires who attended university or had previously collaborated with experts.

Not saying that requires a degree, but even the most brilliant people benefit from collaborating with like minds.

Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a tutor.

Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy's wrong and I'm right." So much of what I needed to know to make sense of philosophical arguments is either hugely scattered or not written down at all. It was vastly more efficient just to hire an expert.

That's not to argue for the $150k education; I wouldn't know. But I don't think that taking life advice from fictional characters is much better.

Assuming one has the self-motivation and ignores everything else that goes with attending a university. Most people aren't super geniuses who spend their days reading books from the library or online papers.

Most people who aren't self-motivated will almost completely stop studying anything new after university anyway, and will still end up far behind the motivated people. Far better if they were put in a situation where they were forced to learn how to motivate themselves and study of their own accord.

Who is doing this forcing? A college degree is more about getting a job and starting their career for a lot of people anyways.

The forcing doesn't have to be particularly dramatic. One of the things I like having about a tutor is it "forces" me to make some progress on a regular basis. As a friend of mine put it, "Sometimes I need somebody to not disappoint."

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