Well, the planet would be better off without Chinese middle class and elite flying around and buying stuff. Countries that are full of poor "uneducated farmers" tend to have much lower carbon footprint than richer ones, even with the higher birth rates. Despite its admirable investments in reneweable tech, China still keeps building new coal plants as well.
Carbon isn’t the only pressing environmental damage though. For example, Madagascar is an island full of poor “uneducated farmers”, and it is precisely their farming that has been deforesting the island through slash-and-burn agriculture, a practice that has accelerated over the centuries due to the high birthrates.
Good, the world doesn't need that many liberal arts graduates. Quality over quantity should be the focus in fields where there aren't that many employment opportunities and potential for successful entrepreneurship.
Besides, nothing prevents one from pursuing a career in most liberal arts without a degree, assuming you don't want to be a researcher. You can always be a nurse or an engineer with arts related side-job, but doing it the other way around is hard.
> the world doesn't need that many liberal arts graduates
If I were to make a list of the problems with the world, having too many people with liberal arts degrees would not be anywhere near that list.
Too few, yes. Too many business school graduates, yeah. Too many law school graduates, probably. Too many STEM field graduates, maybe. Too many graduates who look at people as a resource to be extracted, or an abstraction to be ignored. But damnit, we need more people who care about the quality of human experience.
I think the proper way to characterize the situation is as follows.
The university were founded largely for the sake of teaching the liberal arts, that is, the free arts (as opposed to the servile arts). I am using the traditional meaning of "liberal arts", and not the tragedy we have now. The university was supposed to educate the man, to mature him intellectually, to free him to be able to pursue the truth and to do so effectively which meant also the ability to draw from and participate in the tradition.
The feverish mission to push everyone through college is a fool's errand. It is not for everyone. The result is that universities had to change to make this possible, thus failing their founding mission. But at the same time, they aren't good at vocational training. So for most people, it's a waste of time and money.
We would be much better off with a system of vocational schools and apprenticeships. This would unburden universities and free them to pursue their original mission, and it would enable vocational schools/apprenticeships to provide excellent training for workers.
Primary education is, frankly, in an awful state as well, as it, too, is supposed to educate the man, and it is here where the vocational stuff is still not necessary to learn even for those who will eventually enter the vocations.
We're seeing some interesting developments in both primary education (with the spread of classical education) and the founding of small colleges that aim to avoid the failure of the university. Some try to combine intellectual formation with an apprenticeship program to try to reconcile the desire to form the man with the need to find a job. Apprenticeship is also used to cover at least part of the costs of the education.
Ballooning costs are a symptom of corruption and bloat. The mission is lost, so it's a numbers game now. There's no reason a university education should cost anywhere near what it costs today, especially given the mediocrity of the education. I don't really see much will to change the status quo among those in power, so we'll probably see a combination of hamfisted maneuvers like debt cancellation to maintain the status quo, but ultimately, probably a collapse of the system.
But why should educational instutions care? Education is a business, students are the customers (or in countries with state-funded education, the government). If AI helps people graduate faster, that's more money to the institutions, less effort to the students, and nice statistics for the governments.
At least in my country most degrees aren't worth much anyway, they just open you doors to internships where you really learn stuff. AI isn't going to make the situation any worse.
Because educational institutions aren’t in the business of selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time they’ll give you access to the course materials online at well.
What students are paying for is accreditation. It’s not just their name that goes on the piece of paper, it’s the school’s name. Cheating undermines that business entirely. If a school looks the other way long enough there will be cheating scandals in the news and the school’s reputation will be damaged.
> Because educational institutions aren’t in the business of selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time they’ll give you access to the course materials online at well.
Can confirm. When I was a senior in high school, a professor at Caltech even sponsored me as a visiting faculty member so I could check out books from the university libraries. No one in the administration even blinked an eye.
I ended up auditing several graduate aerospace classes like Ae105 & Ae121 and even worked on the AAReSt [1] thermal systems group project with several other graduate students who seemed to tolerate me most of the time. I still carry the ID around in my wallet as a keepsake.
When I was in college, I was dating a girl who was taking a philosophy class that was particularly interesting to me. One day we were hanging out before her class and she was telling me about their discussions, and it covered some ideas I really enjoyed discussing. Since I was in computer science, I never got the opportunity to take a lot of humanities like Philosophy and so I mentioned that I wished I could take this class. She had to go to class and just said "you can come with me if you want".
I went with her and just sat down. I took notes, I participated in discussion, and ended up going back for several weeks. I eventually stopped going as they moved onto another chapter. I popped back in a few weeks later and the only thing the teacher said when they saw me come into the lecture hall was "hey it's good to see you again". The prof knew I existed but either didn't realize or didn't care that I wasn't actually on the class roll.
That's fine though, and it's exactly how we would want it to be aka it's for the students but if someone is ernest they can just 'participate' in some thing. That's a positive outcome I can't fathom getting upset by that.
That said, showing up for a class isn't exactly 'an education' either.
True most of the time, but interestingly enough, this is not the case in China (even pre-COVID). The Tsinghua University gate had serious guards - you absolutely could not proceed onto campus without the proper authorization.
The fact that every job on the planet requires a bachelors degree now has done a real dis-service to the entire education system. It spawned a whole host of new institutions that only want to pump out degrees that cross the absolute minimum threshold for accreditation.
The consequence of these diploma mills are that they are now competitors to normal universities and have caused other universities to dilute their requirements and courses in order to compete against the diploma mills. In the end, we have regressed to the lowest common denominator, making the Bachelor Degree barely more respected than a high school diploma.
and never get to learn about linear regression, bias and variance, cost function and gradient descent, regularisation and optimisation - all the good things taught by Andrew Ng in the amazing course he run 12 years ago just before creating Coursera.
I think people getting into AI today instead ask ChatGPT and similar models questions like:
> "What field of modern science relies heavily on "linear regression, bias and variance, cost function and gradient descent, regularisation and optimisation"?"
To dive into a particular topic:
> "Provide a course outline for a four week course, meeting twice a week, that focuses on linear regression in the context of machine learning and the relationship between inputs and outputs."
And to get to the actual material, zoom in some more:
> "Please expand Session 2: Simple Linear regression into an hour-long talk focused on Python coding approaches to the problem"
And again, to get some working code:
> "For topic #2, please provide an explicit code example of using numpy, pandas and scikit-learn to load a dataset, preprocess the data, and split it into training and testing sets"
Anyone can generate a course on any topic using this approach, with pretty good results.
With the rate of hallucination, learning via ChatGPT is questionable at best, especially when someone doesn't know enough to know when it is hallucinating.
Learning about those things isn't particularly relevant to learning how to use LLMs for NLP tasks.
Not saying they're not worth learning, but I think it's reasonable for them not to be included in the syllabus for that particular course.
Kind of like how learning memory management in C doesn't need to be a pre-requisite for a course on Python.
Note that learning about those things will likely make you a better LLM+NLP practitioner, in the same way that having a good grasp of memory management in C will help you be more effective at working with Python - but it's OK to leave them out of introductory courses.
Governments paying for education don't just want graduations, they want an educated workforce, because there are benefits from having that.
Instructors generally do not treat education like a business. On some level the institutions themselves often are business-like, but on the classroom level I don't think that's the case.
I'm an adjunct professor (I still work full-time in the engineering field, but teach part-time) and I can tell you that ~75% of the professors don't want to teach as much as they want to do research. Most of them are only in academia to do research, but they are required to teach a certain number of classes.
At least at our University, it is mostly a thinktank. We publish research and attend symposiums for research and are mostly motivated by the research. The teaching is a byproduct.
This is probably not the case at community colleges and smaller colleges that are mostly pumping out degrees. But large universities are mostly motivated by research and getting published. That is largely what motivates high quality professors to work there.
They care because this is massively disruptive to the way they teach at the moment. They have decades of practices in place for how they evaluate students which don't work if students can have AI do the work for them.
They can chose to reinvent everything about how they operate, or they can pay money to a company that promises to make that problem go away for them.
It's not surprising that many of them are trying the latter option first.
Yep, proper tires (ideally studded), reasonable speed and avoiding sudden movements is all there is to driving in snowy/icy conditions. Not doing any of these three things can get you into trouble.
Here in Finland statistically the most deadly months in traffic are in summer, when there's no snow or ice, and weather conditions are generally good. Holidays and great weather encourage people to drive fast, stay awake late, and drink alcohol.
Rural area isn't bad if you find the right place, hobbies and a proper house. Lots of opportunities for outdoor activities, such as gardening and trekking, which also help keep you healthy.
Yes, OP should look at something from 2005, or original Raspberry pi. I've used a 2011 Thinkpad for web development with IntelliJ IDE, no major issues.
I agree. I find it highly pointless to spend one's leisure time learning new tech stacks, working on hobby projects just so that you can show them to an employer. Finding actual real-world problems that you care about to solve, that's way more satisfying. Intrinsic motivation beats extrinsic motivation.
I loathe the process of grinding some questions or stacks for interviewing. At some points in my life, I decided to learn what I love and pick a suitable company instead. Not every has the desire to work at a certain company for the quote status.
Yeah, I think buying an used iPhone is the best value for money at this point. Depending on the model you get the same or more years of support than from new Android for similar price. The iOS UX is so smooth I had zero trouble switching from Android to iOS, even though I had never touched an iPhone before.
I'll reconsider Android phone only when manufacturers start providing as many years of software support as Apple does. Planned, premature obscolence is unethical and sucks.
Old Thinkpads are at least equally durable, though not sure about the newest generation. Been using a T520 from 2011 for a few years with Linux, no problems.
Macbooks are great if you get a model without some serious design fault - like screen protection peeling off, or butterly keyboard breaking.
I would argue that a tribe at least need some kind of a common identity to remain strong, which by nature excludes it from people who lack that identity. An extremely inclusive tribe probably won't be a strong one with a sense of community. An example could be citizenship - we may not relate that much with someone just because he happens to live in the same country, compared to him being also our neighbour or colleague.
