Some gems from the article.
ā¦ We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn. There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.
The studentsā demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room.
(And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, youāll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.)
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of whatās to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity weāre going to experience at UATX. Weāre going to grapple with big issues. Weāre going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. Weāre going, he says, to do something called āStreet Epistemology.ā
What is Street Epistemology? Heāll demonstrate. Itās one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. āI donāt have a life,ā he says. āI talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.ā But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
āYou gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. Iām telling you.ā Peter did jiu-jitsu. Itād changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. āI could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. Itās a superpower.ā I thought this over.
Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Petersonās forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and ādiscouraging her from seeking mental health care,ā per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to āthe atrocities of the 20th century.ā And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Policeāsour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to āfree and open inquiry.ā
āI could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. Itās a superpower.ā
My goodness, the cringe level. Be carefull yāall, he studied the blade š¤£
How can you not just laugh and leave when earing that.
My first response would be āthatās a rather shite superpower then, innit?ā
Iām sorry, even putting aside that he absolutely could not, being able to kill anyone in hand-to-hand combat is extremely useless as far as superpowers go. Like, in what circumstances would you want to do that? Youāre going to hit the streets and fight crime like Batman? Youāre just gonna get shot mate. Or are you just going to crack the skulls of your 15 coworkers on openspace? Congratulations, youāre now in maxsec prison where youāre gonna act tough until you get shanked by 20 people, since your āsuperpowerā doesnāt include stabbing damage immunity.
My first response would be āthatās a rather shite superpower then, innit?ā
I was thinking the same, especially if it only works on busses.
Also, anyone with a 10 dollar hammer can kill everyone on a bus.
@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek Thatās why you need the good guy with a hammer!
@raoul Strong āthat kid at primary school who took a few weeks of karate lessons then told you he could easily kill you so he had to be careful not to lose his temper nowā vibes.
I did jiu-jitsu In middle school. We had two guys who were perhaps about 20 years old as assistant coaches. Pretty impressive belt colours and to us kids really cool and good at jiu-jitsu. I donāt remember their names, lets call them Jim and Peter.
So nearing the end of a class Jim and Peter gathers us for a bit of pep talk. Jim: Good work everybody! Peter: We will soon end class, but first one thingā¦ Jim: No? No, that was the last thing? Peter: Everyone, get Jim! Jim: What? No!
And I can tell you Jim was no match for two dozen ten year olds with white belts.
I almost feel sorry for Ralphā¦
Richard Hanania, one of the featured speakers mentioned in the article:
āIt would be hard to abuse a law that forcibly sterilized everybody with an IQ under 90 provided that the person scored that low on an objective test blindly graded.ā āRichard Hanania
They let 14 year olds be featured speakers? That dude looks like he just got out of a kindergarten class.
I think many 14-year-olds would have vastly more valuable thoughts to share than this dick
Not saying good morning because you are homophobic: āš
Not saying good morning because you avoid human interaction in general: āļøš
Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No oneās gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, thatās for darn sure.
Imagine gong into debt to go to Meme and Nut Academy.
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of whatās to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity weāre going to experience at UATX. Weāre going to grapple with big issues. Weāre going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. Weāre going, he says, to do something called āStreet Epistemology.ā
Doctor Rockso Epistemology (nsfw) they just sparkle.
Very high āIām being cancelled for my opinionsā¦ you know the onesā factor.
Shot:
One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and ādiscouraging her from seeking mental health care,ā per an official university statement.
Princeton Universityās Board of Trustees voted Monday to fire Joshua Katz, Cotsen Professor in the Humanities, effective immediately.
The university said in a statement that the dismissal followed an investigation initiated in February 2021 after Princeton received a detailed written complaint from an alumna who had a consensual relationship with Katz while she was an undergraduate under his academic supervision. That relationship was the focus of a 2018 disciplinary proceeding against Katz, which resulted in a penalty of unpaid suspension in 2018ā19 and three years of probation following his return, Princeton said. The unnamed alumna did not participate in or cooperate with the 2018 disciplinary proceeding, according to Princeton. But when she came forward in 2021, she provided what Princeton called ānew information,ā triggering a new investigation. The second inquiry did not revisit the policy violations for which Katz was previously punished, according to Princeton: āIt only considered new issues that came to light because of new information provided by the former student.ā
āThe 2021 investigation established multiple instances in which Dr. Katz misrepresented facts or failed to be straightforward during the 2018 proceeding, including a successful effort to discourage the alumna from participating and cooperating after she expressed the intent to do so,ā the university said. āIt also found that Dr. Katz exposed the alumna to harm while she was an undergraduate by discouraging her from seeking mental health care although he knew her to be in distress, all in an effort to conceal a relationship he knew was prohibited by university rules. These actions were not only egregious violations of university policy, but also entirely inconsistent with his obligations as a member of the faculty.ā
Garnish:
Katz has previously denied that he engaged in any conduct beyond that for which he was suspended in 2018. Heās argued that Princeton wanted to fire him because of his political speech, including for a 2020 essay in Quillette which he referred to a Black student group as a āsmall local terrorist organization.ā But Princetonās dismissal announcement sheds new light on what the 2021 investigation was about; contrary to Katzās public statement that he was being effectively retried for the same violations for political reasons, Princeton was now looking at a different set of allegations from the former undergraduate student herself, in part because Katz had (according to Princetonās apparent findings) prevented her participation in the first investigation.
We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn.
So this is what we call a ācareer limiting move.ā
itās amazing how schools like these can graduate battalions of fools and people still take their diplomas as certificates of wordliness
If youāre talking about the āeliteā schools - Ivy or otherwise - thereās a little bit more to it.
A resume is a really, really low bandwidth way to get a feel for someone. Of thatās all you have to go on for starters, it at least tells you which gauntlets theyāve already run. Itās like hiring someone who has worked at Apple or Google for ten years.
As a simplifying assumption, think of ability as a normal distribution - a bell curve. The average on Stanford grads may be higher than those of Liberty University, although there still may be enough overlap that you canāt say that any given candidate is better from one or the other.
If youāre talking about someone who transferred out of Harvard to go to Austin University or whatever theyāre calling themselves, that opens up an entirely different set of questions.
Iām not sure what youāre getting at. I think itās a bit rude to try to explain the concept of reputation. the only other content in what youāre saying seems to amount to āitās not a noisy signal of workplace ability,ā which (a) is only a fraction of the social power these degree stamps hold (b) is not true (c) apparently is supported by the summoning of a bell curve, the holy symbol of naive applications of statistics to concepts of ability
(EDIT: I apologize for being prickly, Iām not on much sleep so I hope you can cut me some slack on that)
No worries about the lack of sleep. Iāve been there and then some.
I do think however that youāre misinterpreting my argument to at least some extent.
First, itās a completely noisy signal. Itās also, unfortunately, the only thing we have when a CV lands on our desk. It obviously decreases in importance as the number of positions held/publications made/other experiences increase. If someone were to have a dozen pubs in reputable journals and ten years experience working in what Iām interested in, Iām not going to take their school into account. The other, later work is much more relevant. If on the other hand they transferred from MIT to Liberty University and thatās the only data point I have, thatās what I am going to need to go off of. I have a lot of resumes to look at, and still have to do my regular full time job. Iām not arguing that itās not noisy. Iām just pointing out that if we consider something like a weighted function in CV evaluation, the fewer items there are, the higher the weights assigned to non-preferred variables might be. Iāve collaborated with researchers from some of the most respected institutions in the world, and other than arrogance I canāt say that they had a whole lot in common.
Second, I do not think ability falls on a bell curve. I believe talent is a highly skewed distribution. It might get more normal the more you remove sources of variability - I donāt think you could pick someone at random off the street and ask them to write up a Bayesian classifier, but if you reduced the sample down to stats/ML grads, youād probably find some are better and some are worse but you might see a meaningful average being drawn. I was just trying to make it easier to visualize. I am an actual data scientist (well, complexity theorist), and I am not naive about data.
In terms of social power, thatās absolutely one of the main reasons people pay the outrageous tuitions for those institutions. I do need to note for anyone reading along that those same institutions will waive tuition if your family income is below $150k or so, so do not write them off. We need more diversity.
well, I am one of those researchers at a top institution. all I can say is that I do not think the people at such places are actually on a different level than those at your more general R1. who goes where has a lot more to do with social clubs and research tastes than anything else.
Iām also a little puzzled because you write about tuition write offs (which I benefited from as well) but those are only really relevant to undergrads, who I think it would be questionable to describe as often being researchers.
Dawg you should put āmansplainingā on your resume
Completely tangential but Iām idly wondering now what are some domains where things being on a bell curve would be an intriguing thing to talk about.
itād be only quantifiable things. first thought: # of hotdogs you can eat in 10 minutes.
If I go to school and take āForbidden Coursesā I BETTER be coming out with necromancy and demon summoning. Otherwise we gonna fight.
I think theyāve already summoned demons, judging by the speaker list at leastā¦
delivering lectures at both UATX and Petersonās forthcoming Peterson Academy
I thought I was terminally online but clearly Iāve missed something, his what now
They have a website and an instagram page with 100K+ followers but the content of the courses is not specified yet.
Im personally looking forward to a lesson on how to interpret my dreams:
What the fucking fuck?
