whateveridunno

I have to wonder if tenured philosophy professors are any more or less unhappy than, say, newly tenured literature professors or economists or chemists.

I ask because 1, 3, 4, and 5 seem like the most persuasive reasons, but they're also the ones that aren't specific to philosophy.

My question is why did the entire affair take over two hours.

So let me get this straight: your solution to labor's subservience to capital is for all the millions of working poor to get jobs as security guards while earning degrees in theoretical physics?

I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.

I agree it's an unfortunate word choice, but I couldn't think of a better way to word it without making the post significantly longer and I assumed most people would understand what I meant. If you have a better way to phrase it, I'd love to hear it- I don't say that sarcastically.

The fundamental issue with that line of thinking is that deal-making only works when one of the parties is not under duress. If your life is on the line, you will take terrible deals, because you have no choice.

Capitalism is a system where the companies hold all the power and labor holds none- because if labor doesn't take the deal, labor will die. You can't negotiate a fair deal under those circumstances.

Which is why you need the government- social safety nets give power back to labor. So do unions. But both have been severely cut back in the past few decades.

...which is exactly his point. People will do things that are objectively not in their best interest (become scientists, poets, or French poetry critics) because we've been strongly inculcated in that whole "do what you love" "everything is worth it as long as [you touch someone with your art] [your science is remembered after you die] [insert reason here]" philosophy. Which means those fields get a free pass to treat their members horribly, and people will still gravitate towards them in huge numbers, because "do what you love" is so strongly ingrained in us.

A perfect example is that game dev crunch article that was going around a few days ago: if you're complaining about 80 hour work weeks you don't really love what you're doing!

>The good stuff that has happened to poor people since 1945 mostly comes about through private innovation.

Would really like a citation on that.

I thought it was illegal not to have read Hamlet by 21?

Seriously though, give it another try. Shakespeare's wide-ranging enough that there's likely to be something to your taste. And with his comedies, especially, I'd recommend watching Shakespeare and not reading him- that's how his plays were meant to be experienced. Although it's nice to read an annotated version and discover all the (often dirty) jokes you didn't get.

Added benefit to reading Shakespeare: you'll understand about 40% more literary allusions (read the Bible, Ovid, Homer, and Virgil to get the rest).

If it was just a small minority of men in my program, I would have agreed with you, but this attitude seemed also prevalent- and I could be wrong about this- in companies and the larger tech world.

One thing I noticed in particular, was that a hell of a lot of "diversity initiatives" (stuff like code camps, scholarships to diversity conferences, etc) set up by companies like Square and Google and nonprofits like Grace Hopper gave their opportunities mostly to minorities who were already very successful, with internships in prestigious companies. If even the programs explicitly meant to increase the percentage of women/minorities in the industry go largely to very experienced people, I thought at the time, then there's really no hope for me at that point.

In any case, none of this is what led to me deciding I didn't want a tech career, it was just a contributing factor. I probably could have pushed through it, but I realized I didn't like tech enough to do so- I liked coding well enough, but I didn't like or value the work most tech companies were doing.

She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time.

Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.

>"Are selective schools overrepresented, or are nonselective schools underrepresented?" Those aren't the same ideas, but they're both true.

>"A significantly larger number apply" True, but that number is still vanishingly small relative to the number of college applicants as a whole.

I agree. However, my- or anybody's- personal opinion of a place should have no bearing on whether our judicial system decides to take an independent media outlet down during a court case involving one man.

Let me put it this way: I don't care for Gawker and wouldn't mind personally if it sank (though there are good journalists there doing good work); I do care for the potential chilling effect this could have on other media.

(And let me make clear that I do think Bollea should have been compensated and Gawker punished, just not with $115 million.)

Personally, I think that while Gawker wasn't right to release the tape, fining them $115 million isn't right either. $115 million could easily sink Gawker entirely. I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the place but it's a dangerous precedent to set for press freedom if a single editor's single bad decision can take down an entire site.

Of course, the amount is likely to be revised down in appeals.

Systems wherein the wealthy are the primary allocators of 'funds for common good objectives' have already existed. They were called 'aristocracies'.

They did not result in improved lives for the non-wealthy.