Virtual Reality!

General Discussion
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I just read the most brilliant thing, it popped up on the side when I was checking the market:

Students are moving to the town where the college they want to attend (but maybe didn’t get in, or can’t afford it) is located, then taking the courses online, and participating in the social life of the college!

I’ve written before about Coursera, a program whereby, for example, my daughter, instead of our paying $250K for her to live at Penn, coulda taken all the same courses online, complete with exams and papers, for…well idk the cost, but it ain’t $250K!

I think the solution for the entire “student debt” problem is: let people complete all the requirements online, then pay a one-time fee for the diploma: like $5 or e=en $10K.

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I did a search for Coursera on Scanalyst but turned up nothing. Perhaps you had posted on the long-lost Ratburger. Coursera looks like an intriguing option for someone who needs the credential as well as the knowledge. Credentialism seems to be on the decline — and good riddance.

Another alternative is to go the Palmer Luckey route. He was homeschooled through his teens and took a few classes at community colleges but never with the intent to get a degree. Admittedly, not everyone can be a Palmer Luckey but I hear tell that some tech firms are caring less about formal credentials. Given the trends in conventional higher ed, such alternatives may become more practical. For those interested in more physical jobs, Mike Rowe lays out yet another alternative.

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AH, Ratburger: Land of Lost CONtent!

Anyway, I’ve felt ever since my kid was born that the 4 year residential collage system is just so asinine. It was ok back when you at least got room and board for the price of the tuition, but now you don’t. My BMD told me I had to stop saying that when our daughter was in high school, because c’mon, didn’t we want her to go to college? Well, yeah, it was a social marker, I mean, how would it look if our kid didn’t go?
It was what a high school diploma used to be. But it cost waaaay too much for that!

I’m vindicated now the rest of the country is catching up with my take on it.

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Hmmm! The on-line courses – yes! Trying to sneak in to the Young Socialists’ kegger – not so sure about that. :grinning_face:

But, but. but … we keep hearing that rents are now impossibly high. Can an “adjunct student” afford the rent close enough to campus to make the social life worthwhile without those sweet sweet student loans?

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Apparently they can. Anyway, they’ve gotta live somewhere once they leave home, so expense for rent is a constant.

…and that’s ANOTHER thing! When we delivered my daughter to her dorm room while she was at Penn, I always thought: if my BMD and I were shown this room in a hotel or motel, WE wouldn’t stay here even for one night! And I’m paying $68K for my kid to live here? It’s all beyond asinine.

I recently read something interesting about the academic schedule in the U.S. Our rural schools, were in session mostly in winter AND summer. Those are the not-busy seasons inthe agricultural calendar. Urban schools closed in summer because of the heat. Obvs the urban calendar won out. But it makes no sense, especially in elementary education. .

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Ya know there are those of us who were involved with education via online courses before it was cool.

Like 1975.

The PLATO Corrections Project for example.

Anyone give a rats ass what we came up with?

Anyone ever even heard of these things?

Of course not.

There’s a reason for that.

PS: This isn’t just sour grapes folks. I give a rats ass about kids unlike The Great And The Good. The Great And The Good are the ones who structured our institutions the way they are and it takes a while to suss out those structures and why the chew humans up and spit them out as compost. I get tired of repeating myself but I’ll say again: ALgorithmic Information Criterion For Macrosocial Model Selection.

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I am. Please tell me more.

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The two take-homes:

  1. Certification
  2. Socrates

Certification

The maximum security prisoners were striving for their GEDs. They didn’t much have to deal with people in pursuit thereof. The computers didn’t give a rats ass about their background or their ability to “fit in” to any institutional structure. The computers were fair and the prisoners could feel the fairness. Some of the biggest and toughest among them became physically protective of the PLATO terminals without anyone putting them in that role. Imagine that.

I identified with them because I didn’t fit in with the higher education system and could see I was probably going to end up without a college degree. There was nothing equivalent to a GED that would give me what amounts to a Life Patent of Nobility in our anti-Constitutional institutions. Don’t kid yourself – even a GED isn’t quite there either.

Why?

Because there is one thing a competency test doesn’t convey Crimestop:

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

I even suggested to the principle investigator that since institutions demanded the equivalent of Crimestop, that it should be considered one dimension among many upon which the victim, er, student could be objectively evaluated. (I didn’t call it Crimestop – but he and others openly discussed the psychological traits associated with obtaining The Life Patent of Nobility as being valuable to our institutions when I brought certification up.) This, of course, violated a central purpose of Higher Education: Hide from the “educators” what they were doing to the kids – including fucking the nubile just off the small rural town coeds.

Hence Maximum Security Prisons for those of us who can’t quite stomach hypocrisy.

Socrates

The Socratic method holds the student’s mind in such great respect that the teacher asks the student succinct questions that do 2 things simultaneously:

  1. Place the student, so that…
  2. The teacher knows what question to ask next.

This stands in opposition to the way LLMs interact with us.

We ask a short concise question.

The LLM spews forth a text book.

Try getting an LLM to behave like Socrates toward you.

It will try for at most one or two rounds of questions and then slide back into Professorial Slop.

The reason?

Because the damn billionaire morons creating these abominations think that decompression of knowledge is compression of knowledge.

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Cal State Long Beach, go 49ers!