These subject tests already exist, they are called CLEP exams and there’s a foundation called ModernStates.org that provides test prep and then vouchers to take the tests for free. My daughter essentially tested out of her first year of college.
Now this issue with CLEP is that many private schools won’t take them but our state Flagship university had no problem.
As someone who attended an elite school for a BFA and then got a MA at a junky state school, I didn’t notice any difference in instruction quality. The huge difference is the network, both of fellow students and the doors that are opened by the university name.
A parallel system must include these.
We sent daughter to state flagship not for the things she will learn but for the people she will meet.
Networking is definitely an advantage, and one that is very difficult to replicate online. More broadly, young people want to be around other young people, physically. That is only natural.
It isn't so important if the schools accept open source standardized test credentials; what matters is employers. If employers accept, and even prefer, them, the schools will be forced to use them themselves. I discussed this in the essay linked at the end.
The problems really took off 50 years ago when the Supreme Court banned the use of IQ tests for job applicants in both the private and public sectors. Employers started to use credentials in place on smarts. Add in diversity quotas and suddenly everything seems worse, as competency was replaced.
That's correct. Disparate impact is at the root of university credentialism. However, the regimen I'm suggesting steps around that: employers aren't applying the test themselves; functionally, it's no different from requiring a degree.
Sooner or later we will all have to bite the bullet and take on the IQ issue and do so reelntlessly and with vigour.
There is no evading it. The cowardice on display on this issue, the refusal for people to call a spade a spade, to insist on honesty and a focus on reliable evidence of innate ability has handed victory to the enemy (the left, the oligarchs, the system etc). No one who is not prepared to argue in favour of the intrinsic value of IQ testing will ever do a scrap of good in relation to any educational initiative.
The bell-curve enables us to keep the bastards honest. Without it we are lost. The minimal standard of genuine social justice requires IQ testing and the re-arrangement of education to match ability.
Absolutely right. The conversation around the recent supreme court decision is completely devoid of any acknowledgement of actual differences in innate ability and as a result it is all completely inane.
Horror of IQ is shared by progressives and conservatives alike. Progressives fear evidence of variation in the incidence of intelligence amongst disparate races, while conservatives fear the possible demands that high IQ people from the lower classes might make. Both racial egalitarians and social conservatives are invested in regulating access to educational opportunity to achieve the maximum disadvantage for those who deserve it.
Contrived, overly complicated, and pointless arguments of the kind that we see about affirmative action are preferrable to the regime and its loyal opposition than the alternative.
The most likely force for change is rivalry with serious countries: China and Russia, both of which are keen on developing the human resources of their own people.
This is why they want to replace us out demographically before we figure out that not only do we outnumber them but we outsmart and outfight them too. Basically it's the Seven Samurai Scenario Writ Large.
Not just IQ tests, any tests that showed a disparate impact. So no competency testing at all. You have Fire Departments and other public services departments spending millions of $ and years to create tests to help decide who to promote and these get tossed. Get rid of Griggs v Duke Power (disparate impact) and employers can start to fix the problems.
Jun 21, 2022·edited Jun 21, 2022Liked by John Carter
Good ideas. Critics, defenders of status quo, will whine that education is more than assimilating knowledge, it's the immersion in academic culture which makes graduates superior human beings. Anybody with internet can be smart. They want conformity.
Elon is laying off salaried imployees, probably many with impressive credentials. He's not laying off wage employees, those who actually make his cars. We need more Elons. The problem isn't the elite academies, it's those who revere them.
A good set of ideas, well explained. I have see this described in academia as "competency based degrees" as I recall. The idea is that for many topics or courses you can have a standardized test that students must take to get credit, but they don't need to take the attached courses to take the test. In effect it is much like how many graduate exams are done, with a committee of professors drawing up the exam and grading them, and the students taking the exams without having necessarily had all the professors in class.
I have seen some schools doing this for undergraduates typically as a way to draw in former military or other students with work history as a way of limiting their investment. Worked in the army as an electrician? You can just test out of those classes on the way to an electrical engineering degree. I think you could build an entire credentialing system out of this, with competing credentialing groups doing the examinations.
As a side note, the fields where these tests would be most difficult, say philosophy or the other humanities, are exactly the fields there is no reason to have a credential in. You don't need a PhD to be a philosopher, you just need an audience that is willing to read your crap and pay you for it. Whether your philosophy is any good has no relation to credentials, as the entire philosophy profession amply demonstrates. What we need is a credentialing system for coders, engineers, builders, truck drivers... actual jobs doing actual things.
>the fields where these tests would be most difficult, say philosophy or the other humanities, are exactly the fields there is no reason to have a credential in.
Exactly. English professors don't write great novels, and the best writers don't have English lit degrees. Arts programs are essentially just elaborate scams.
I'm skeptical that most jobs require any sort of generalized education. In fact, maybe no jobs require it. I can't think of a reason that each job that has real educational requirements (i.e. you wouldn't be able to perform the job without the education and learning on the job isn't feasible) wouldn't be better off with an educational pathway specifically tailored to that job. I've been through such a program, and it did a remarkable job preparing me. Everything else, not so much. Maybe some pathways could exclusively consist of passing standardized tests, but not all (as you note). I think the biggest obstacle to your proposal is that fact that the largest employers are very much a part of the cathedral. The current "educational system" serves the cathedral by making it very difficult for ideological dissidents to get that paper. The paper demonstrates loyalty both ideologically, and economically. Those that took on debt to earn the paper can be counted on to serve the system that calls them legitimate. Without the system, they have no marketable skills, just a heaping pile of debt. They can be counted on not to rock the boat. The entire credentialed class will fight this, so what is needed more than anything is dissidents within the ranks. Unfortunately if people like you, the bad cat, eugyppius etc. can all be cowed into remaining anonymous, then what hope is there for lesser men to openly defect? I'm concerned that some of the worlds best and brightest minds have been sequestered and neutered within the halls of academia pursuing projects that have little to no hope of making the world a better place. Searching for knowledge that no one is capable of appreciating fueled by the same debt that corrupts every other industry that has been consumed by the cathedral the dissident voice is caught in the throat and neutralized. Given my libertarian ideological bent, I like to think that if access to printed money was cut off, industry would be forced to make tough decisions as to what education was really required of their employees. The debt that your employees carry has an impact on the cost of their labor, after all. Smaller companies are more likely to pursue such a strategy. Larger organizations put a huge premium on loyalty to the system. For them, the incompetence of their employees makes them easy to control, and often outweighs the cost. It doesn't matter that they're incompetent if your profitability is mostly a reflection of government subsidy and a favorable regulatory environment that stifles competition at your behest.
>The entire credentialed class will fight this, so what is needed more than anything is dissidents within the ranks. Unfortunately if people like you, the bad cat, eugyppius etc. can all be cowed into remaining anonymous, then what hope is there for lesser men to openly defect? I'm concerned that some of the worlds best and brightest minds have been sequestered and neutered within the halls of academia pursuing projects that have little to no hope of making the world a better place. Searching for knowledge that no one is capable of appreciating fueled by the same debt that corrupts every other industry that has been consumed by the cathedral the dissident voice is caught in the throat and neutralized.
That cut right to the bone, man. Hit the bullseye. That's exactly what academia does. I've had more than one sleepless night staring at the ceiling wondering what the point of it all is.
I think there is a point, but that such pursuits are luxuries that can only be enjoyed sustainably in a healthy society. Since society is dying of dysentery I think our best hope is if the best and brightest were focus on applying the knowledge they've diligently gained thus far towards answering the question of how to heal. The way I see it, you all don't have much of a choice but to defect eventually. All of the anti-American ideologues masquerading as scientists have transformed institutionally based knowledge acquisition from "wheat from chaff" to "needle in haystack". The only people that are even exposed to the knowledge you produce might not piss on you if you were on fire if they knew you didn't share their politics (maybe not in your field, but definitely eugyppius). If you all defected simultaneously, then it would make academia illegitimate. Right now, it isn't completely illegitimate. After all, you're still there doing some real work are you not? On that note, since across the world there are no doubt legit scientists doing serious work, maybe if they came together to create an interdisciplinary science journal with a focus on RHB type synthesis of current bleeding edge concepts could provide a counterbalance to the LHB dominant status quo? That would be dope, but you guys can't do it if you're all anonymous, you would need to flex your credentials. I would read it, and I'm sure I wouldn't be alone. Folks that lament the lay public's lack of interest in science couldn't complain without broadcasting their bad faith. You would all expose yourselves to risk of retaliation for ideological non-conformity, but it would be difficult for them to fire all of you without looking really bad/illegitimate. What do you think?
I think you're onto something. Been playing with similar ideas myself for some time now. Affiliation of scientists with universities provides the latter with legitimacy; indeed, this can be seen as our primary function inside that system. That's something I've wrestled with for years now, and I know I'm not the only one.
A synthesis movement, with a flagship journal, could be potentially impactful. Liberation of science from the straight jacket of field specialization, grant proposals, and academic respectability is, in my view, absolutely essential - and this will require precisely the defection you suggest.
The main stumbling block is funding. If people are to dedicate their lives to scholarly work, they have to eat. This is the main thing keeping scholars inside the ivory tower, in my opinion. Working out a profit model that enables independent scholars to make a living as participants in the swarm rather than subjects of managerial feudalism has occupied my thoughts for some time now. It's precisely those considerations that led to the subject of this essay, in fact.
Jun 23, 2022·edited Jun 23, 2022Liked by John Carter
This might not sound appealing, but I think funding will need to come in part from the individuals within the swarm working side hustles and continuing to draw a paycheck from the institution they're affiliated with, but having a fall back that is robust enough that they won't starve if they get fired. I think a combo of a non-profit trying to attract patronage from big money donors interested in this kind of thing and applying individual skills to the market for some extra income would work, but it definitely wouldn't be as nice and comfortable. Approaching it the same way artists who make a living in spite of not making much on their art might better reflect the reality of the current situation. The added benefit of this is it would get scholars to interact with the market in a meaningful way, which is probably essential to develop the kind of RHB dominant understanding of how all the pieces fit together. I agree that funding is keeping scholars inside the ivory tower, but I'm skeptical that the most competent among you wouldn't be able to make ends meet without institutional support, it would just be hard work, and a different kind of hard work at that. Don't think I'm talking from experience, I've been suckling at the teet of Uncle Sugar my entire adult life, but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out if I get weaned by force due to my vax status. I bet you and others like you are the same. Online tutoring comes to mind as something that might apply to most academics, but everyone has their own strengths and skills that they might be able to leverage for a paycheck. Ideally this would be supplemented by bourgeois elite patronage, but I'm not sure this model couldn't work without that. The messed up thing is that those of us with families especially sense the current market volatility, and we're all trying to ensure we maintain the based of the pyramid to use Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. At a certain point, individualists are going to need to demonstrate faith in themselves as individuals to make shit work without institutional support, and that includes me.
I suspect you're right. Thing is that so long as life inside the ivory tower is more comfortable than the uncertainties of life outside it, scholars will gravitate to the former. The stultifying nature of political correctness provides a certain degree of impetus to leave, but not enough to make a difference except on the margins.
Significant change will only come with powerful economic incentive. I suspect that's coming. Hyperinflation, market collapse, and economic depression are going to hit universities right in the endowments, just at the time at which enrollment is likely to decline due to demographic constriction combined with growing skepticism among the young about the value of a university degree. Positions will be harder to get; grants will be harder to get; it is quite probable that many universities will face bankruptcy, meaning even those with tenure will be out of work. Such conditions will create the necessity that mothers invention.
Forgot to include this, so here goes. One way forward is to secure sustainable financing. At the grassroots level (local and state governments, school boards etc) should steer dollars towards demonstrated educational attainment: success in independently administered competitive exams. Tie funding (at least in part) for education to success in passing competitive exams. The way to do this is to start small and let momentum build. Home-schoolers should lobby to get reimbursement for maths and STEM tutoring, contingent upon success in competitive exams.
Thanks. Any solution that fortifies institutions will fail. The key to progress is to address the confusion between institutions and concrete functions/achievements. Normies still assume an automatic connection between 'schools' and 'colleges' and education, learning, intellectual life. If we are ever to serious about skills or education, we must focus on these. Future generations, suitably formed, may chose to rehabilitate or renew the existing systems. We do not have that luxury. The more we focus on demonstrable attainment, the harder it is for the enemy to make any kind of a case without being exposed.
Government's 100% back universities with the threat of lawsuits if they try to hire on any other basis.
If you refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have a university degree or didn't go to Harvard... that's 100% legal and the government supports it... you cannot be sued for the disparate racial impact of only hiring university graduates
However, If you refuse to hire anyone who doesn't score a 115 on an IQ test or rigourous skills examination, you will be sued into oblivion because black people and women will not pass the examination at a rate proportionate to the percentage of the population.
Hiring based on shitty classist university degrees is presumed non-discriminatory, hiring based on anything else is presumed discriminatory.
You think the universities have been able to stay in business this long based on what is in essense an IQ test... because Corporations couldn't figure out how to administer IQ tests!?
They're in business because the government will deploy armed men to take all your property if you hire on the basis of anything else.
Kulak's Axiom: For everything in society that doesn't make sense, there is an obscure government program enforcing it with lethal violence
You should really read "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy". The makers of the SATs had very similar ideas. One of the big things they wanted was to bring in smarter kids who had not grown up rich to try and positivity influence the rich kids. They also wanted to make standardized testing much more pervasive. Being in a field with lots of standardized testing, it's not the paradise you'd think it would be. You open up testing to off shore people who sometimes value rote memorization at the expense of understanding. Also, questions are often as badly worded as legal contracts. I lot of thought would need to be put in to make it work.
Part of the problem is that not every subject lends itself well to standardized testing. Mathematics, science, and so on, to a certain degree history, and languages insofar as grammar and vocabulary go; one's skill at composition, however, is very difficult to test in this fashion.
The rote memorization aspect is certainly a potential weakness. Particularly when one hears stories of the Chinese taking the SAT weeks after it has been administered in the US, during which interval they simply memorize the answers. At that point you're not testing for anything useful.
All that said, the SATs correlate much more strongly to post-secondary performance than high school GPAs do, so there's a lot to be said for standardized tests.
Outstanding! An original contribution to a field long ago exhausted by efforts made to pour old wine into new bottles.
It occurred to me that one way to expedite change would be to disseminate and normalise overseas curricular material (especially in STEM). Educational testing firms could use the standards set in Singapore or Russia. They could market their services to home schoolers and pod schools etc. Publishers could translate and publish text-books and old exam papers etc. Freelance tutors could establish a marketing niche y being able to offer services pitched at overseas standards, something of enormous utility for the globally mobile.
Philanthropists and community groups could raise money to send qualified students who are ineligible for affirmative action to countries with affordable and high quality higher education.
Employer groups and chambers of commerce could sponsor competitive exams in core disciplines.
Readers interested in pursuing educational issues might be interested in this 34 minute video by Andrei Martyanov discussing the extraordinary lack of rigour in US education (especially physics and mathematics). Martyanov points out that things were bad in the 50s and have gotten way, way, worse since then. No one who likes POSTCARDS FROM BARSOOM will be disappointed by Martyanov.
To the question of hard to measure studies; perhaps a board of evaluators in the field chosen by a combination of popular voting of students and executive input based on interviews of candidates , changing on some kind of regular interval( 1 year?). I don’t see a way to guarantee consistency in “ soft” fields, but the need to avoid entrenched cadres is paramount.
I don't really care that much about soft fields for the simple reason that they can't be quantified, and should not be credentialed. The best writers never have MA's from lit programs. The most interesting philosophers rarely even studied philosophy as undergraduates. Status in such endeavors should be demonstrated as it always has been: by opinion from those who care.
Knowledge quantification is only really important in cases in which employment hinges on subject matter mastery.
Agree. Pretenders always abounded in soft fields but are now rampant in the harder sciences, as you note. Covid made their presence in medicine much more evident to me.
Yes, this is essentially why degrees have become meaningless. Their value has been diluted by posers. This is almost universally true in the humanities.
Pete P is right, what you suggest is probably illegal. The supreme court banned use of tests for employment unless the test was highly specific to the job. e.g. having an electrician demonstrate wiring a breaker box. a general algebra test couldn't be required.
As an employer you'd be put in the position of saying I only like to hire people who have completed subject tests x, y and z, how would that be different than requiring a nonspecific test
Briggs v Duke Power banned the use of aptitude tests by employers, but that's not *exactly* what I'm suggesting here, which is simply to provide objective rankings of subject-matter mastery specific down to the level of courses. What employers choose to do with that is up to them.
However, that particular decision needs to be challenged, especially now that the Supreme Court has come down against racial preferences in university admissions.
As it stands, the entrenched DIE bureaucracy in HR will be moved not a bit by standardized tests, since they are already in the habit of hiring purely on the basis of skin colour and genitalia. What I'm proposing here would not affect that directly, but it WOULD provide a reality check on the competence level of graduates of elite universities, very probably eroding their aura of eliteness.
Allow me to say that it is a great honour for my spelling to be corrected by the great John C. Wright. I'm a huge fan of your work - my bookshelf (and Kindle library) has a great many of your books. I flew through the Count to a Trillion series a couple of years ago. One of the best Hard SF series I've ever read.
"Allow me to say that it is a great honour for my spelling to be corrected by the great John C. Wright."
If you have seen how many typos are in my books, my dear sir, the honor would not seem as great. My spelling is atrocious -- a shameful admission for any man who lives by his pen. However, I am flattered by your kind words, and will pass your compliments along to my muse, next time I see her. I take no credit myself for the quality of any books.
Allow me to return the kindness: I am a fan of yours, Captain Carter, as a fellow Virginian, and am most pleased to see you declared warlord of your planet.
On behalf of Earth, I apologize for the 2012 biopic made of your life: unforgiveable details were added or subtracted, particularly your skill as an Indian fighter.
And this was a good column! Our elder brother world of Barsoom still produces wisdom, I see. I posted a link on my blog directing my reader here.
As you are now a self-published writer, having I presume been cancelled by the Morlocks of oldpub, you can be and indeed have been forgiven the occasional typo (which I've noticed, and shrugged at), None of us are perfect and your occasional failures in proof-reading are more than compensated for by the delightful breadth of your vocabulary and your incredible powers of descriptive imagination. Or, at any rate, compensated for by the influence of your genius loci.
In truth I did not find the 2012 treatment to be so terrible, despite its many interpolations such as the encounters with the Therns, and the shameful way in which said Therns were made out to be anything other than frauds. Nevertheless it was an enjoyable flick, one that I suspect would have done much better in the box office had they gone with the proper title, 'A Princess of Mars', which is far more evocative and eye-catching. Then again given the vandalism that has been enacted on every corner of our imaginarium these last years it is probably a mercy that the franchise failed to take off.
Many thanks for linking my blog for your readers! That explains why there has been a sudden influx on this essay.
"As you are now a self-published writer, having I presume been cancelled by the Morlocks of oldpub"
No, sir. I had far more typos in my oldpub works than now. In fact, just today I spotted an embarassing gaffe in THE GOLDEN AGE, which was my first novel length work published.
" I suspect would have done much better in the box office had they gone with the proper title, 'A Princess of Mars',"
It would have been both better at the box office, and better in every way.
Imagine if the film RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK had been named HENRY JONES, JR.
That is probably more a commentary on the stunning useless of an editorial staff more interested in representational curation and sensitivity reading than on their craft. Although to be fair I've suspected for some time that word processors have had a deleterious effect on our editorial skills. There is something about the screen and the keyboard that makes it more difficult to concentrate, as compared to the printed manuscript and the pen.
This is already in the process of happening with stuff like Kahn academy. You are correct that a standard metric for cross evaluation outside of the idealogical capture of the state and academia would be useful.
These subject tests already exist, they are called CLEP exams and there’s a foundation called ModernStates.org that provides test prep and then vouchers to take the tests for free. My daughter essentially tested out of her first year of college.
That's really interesting. In that case it may just be a matter of promoting and expanding these.
Now this issue with CLEP is that many private schools won’t take them but our state Flagship university had no problem.
As someone who attended an elite school for a BFA and then got a MA at a junky state school, I didn’t notice any difference in instruction quality. The huge difference is the network, both of fellow students and the doors that are opened by the university name.
A parallel system must include these.
We sent daughter to state flagship not for the things she will learn but for the people she will meet.
Networking is definitely an advantage, and one that is very difficult to replicate online. More broadly, young people want to be around other young people, physically. That is only natural.
It isn't so important if the schools accept open source standardized test credentials; what matters is employers. If employers accept, and even prefer, them, the schools will be forced to use them themselves. I discussed this in the essay linked at the end.
The problems really took off 50 years ago when the Supreme Court banned the use of IQ tests for job applicants in both the private and public sectors. Employers started to use credentials in place on smarts. Add in diversity quotas and suddenly everything seems worse, as competency was replaced.
Testing is incompatible with affirmative action.
That's correct. Disparate impact is at the root of university credentialism. However, the regimen I'm suggesting steps around that: employers aren't applying the test themselves; functionally, it's no different from requiring a degree.
Sooner or later we will all have to bite the bullet and take on the IQ issue and do so reelntlessly and with vigour.
There is no evading it. The cowardice on display on this issue, the refusal for people to call a spade a spade, to insist on honesty and a focus on reliable evidence of innate ability has handed victory to the enemy (the left, the oligarchs, the system etc). No one who is not prepared to argue in favour of the intrinsic value of IQ testing will ever do a scrap of good in relation to any educational initiative.
The bell-curve enables us to keep the bastards honest. Without it we are lost. The minimal standard of genuine social justice requires IQ testing and the re-arrangement of education to match ability.
Absolutely right. The conversation around the recent supreme court decision is completely devoid of any acknowledgement of actual differences in innate ability and as a result it is all completely inane.
Horror of IQ is shared by progressives and conservatives alike. Progressives fear evidence of variation in the incidence of intelligence amongst disparate races, while conservatives fear the possible demands that high IQ people from the lower classes might make. Both racial egalitarians and social conservatives are invested in regulating access to educational opportunity to achieve the maximum disadvantage for those who deserve it.
Contrived, overly complicated, and pointless arguments of the kind that we see about affirmative action are preferrable to the regime and its loyal opposition than the alternative.
The most likely force for change is rivalry with serious countries: China and Russia, both of which are keen on developing the human resources of their own people.
This is why they want to replace us out demographically before we figure out that not only do we outnumber them but we outsmart and outfight them too. Basically it's the Seven Samurai Scenario Writ Large.
Not just IQ tests, any tests that showed a disparate impact. So no competency testing at all. You have Fire Departments and other public services departments spending millions of $ and years to create tests to help decide who to promote and these get tossed. Get rid of Griggs v Duke Power (disparate impact) and employers can start to fix the problems.
Yes, that is the case that really has done great damage to the country.
Good ideas. Critics, defenders of status quo, will whine that education is more than assimilating knowledge, it's the immersion in academic culture which makes graduates superior human beings. Anybody with internet can be smart. They want conformity.
Elon is laying off salaried imployees, probably many with impressive credentials. He's not laying off wage employees, those who actually make his cars. We need more Elons. The problem isn't the elite academies, it's those who revere them.
Mike Rowe for President!
A good set of ideas, well explained. I have see this described in academia as "competency based degrees" as I recall. The idea is that for many topics or courses you can have a standardized test that students must take to get credit, but they don't need to take the attached courses to take the test. In effect it is much like how many graduate exams are done, with a committee of professors drawing up the exam and grading them, and the students taking the exams without having necessarily had all the professors in class.
I have seen some schools doing this for undergraduates typically as a way to draw in former military or other students with work history as a way of limiting their investment. Worked in the army as an electrician? You can just test out of those classes on the way to an electrical engineering degree. I think you could build an entire credentialing system out of this, with competing credentialing groups doing the examinations.
As a side note, the fields where these tests would be most difficult, say philosophy or the other humanities, are exactly the fields there is no reason to have a credential in. You don't need a PhD to be a philosopher, you just need an audience that is willing to read your crap and pay you for it. Whether your philosophy is any good has no relation to credentials, as the entire philosophy profession amply demonstrates. What we need is a credentialing system for coders, engineers, builders, truck drivers... actual jobs doing actual things.
>the fields where these tests would be most difficult, say philosophy or the other humanities, are exactly the fields there is no reason to have a credential in.
Exactly. English professors don't write great novels, and the best writers don't have English lit degrees. Arts programs are essentially just elaborate scams.
I'm skeptical that most jobs require any sort of generalized education. In fact, maybe no jobs require it. I can't think of a reason that each job that has real educational requirements (i.e. you wouldn't be able to perform the job without the education and learning on the job isn't feasible) wouldn't be better off with an educational pathway specifically tailored to that job. I've been through such a program, and it did a remarkable job preparing me. Everything else, not so much. Maybe some pathways could exclusively consist of passing standardized tests, but not all (as you note). I think the biggest obstacle to your proposal is that fact that the largest employers are very much a part of the cathedral. The current "educational system" serves the cathedral by making it very difficult for ideological dissidents to get that paper. The paper demonstrates loyalty both ideologically, and economically. Those that took on debt to earn the paper can be counted on to serve the system that calls them legitimate. Without the system, they have no marketable skills, just a heaping pile of debt. They can be counted on not to rock the boat. The entire credentialed class will fight this, so what is needed more than anything is dissidents within the ranks. Unfortunately if people like you, the bad cat, eugyppius etc. can all be cowed into remaining anonymous, then what hope is there for lesser men to openly defect? I'm concerned that some of the worlds best and brightest minds have been sequestered and neutered within the halls of academia pursuing projects that have little to no hope of making the world a better place. Searching for knowledge that no one is capable of appreciating fueled by the same debt that corrupts every other industry that has been consumed by the cathedral the dissident voice is caught in the throat and neutralized. Given my libertarian ideological bent, I like to think that if access to printed money was cut off, industry would be forced to make tough decisions as to what education was really required of their employees. The debt that your employees carry has an impact on the cost of their labor, after all. Smaller companies are more likely to pursue such a strategy. Larger organizations put a huge premium on loyalty to the system. For them, the incompetence of their employees makes them easy to control, and often outweighs the cost. It doesn't matter that they're incompetent if your profitability is mostly a reflection of government subsidy and a favorable regulatory environment that stifles competition at your behest.
>The entire credentialed class will fight this, so what is needed more than anything is dissidents within the ranks. Unfortunately if people like you, the bad cat, eugyppius etc. can all be cowed into remaining anonymous, then what hope is there for lesser men to openly defect? I'm concerned that some of the worlds best and brightest minds have been sequestered and neutered within the halls of academia pursuing projects that have little to no hope of making the world a better place. Searching for knowledge that no one is capable of appreciating fueled by the same debt that corrupts every other industry that has been consumed by the cathedral the dissident voice is caught in the throat and neutralized.
That cut right to the bone, man. Hit the bullseye. That's exactly what academia does. I've had more than one sleepless night staring at the ceiling wondering what the point of it all is.
I think there is a point, but that such pursuits are luxuries that can only be enjoyed sustainably in a healthy society. Since society is dying of dysentery I think our best hope is if the best and brightest were focus on applying the knowledge they've diligently gained thus far towards answering the question of how to heal. The way I see it, you all don't have much of a choice but to defect eventually. All of the anti-American ideologues masquerading as scientists have transformed institutionally based knowledge acquisition from "wheat from chaff" to "needle in haystack". The only people that are even exposed to the knowledge you produce might not piss on you if you were on fire if they knew you didn't share their politics (maybe not in your field, but definitely eugyppius). If you all defected simultaneously, then it would make academia illegitimate. Right now, it isn't completely illegitimate. After all, you're still there doing some real work are you not? On that note, since across the world there are no doubt legit scientists doing serious work, maybe if they came together to create an interdisciplinary science journal with a focus on RHB type synthesis of current bleeding edge concepts could provide a counterbalance to the LHB dominant status quo? That would be dope, but you guys can't do it if you're all anonymous, you would need to flex your credentials. I would read it, and I'm sure I wouldn't be alone. Folks that lament the lay public's lack of interest in science couldn't complain without broadcasting their bad faith. You would all expose yourselves to risk of retaliation for ideological non-conformity, but it would be difficult for them to fire all of you without looking really bad/illegitimate. What do you think?
I think you're onto something. Been playing with similar ideas myself for some time now. Affiliation of scientists with universities provides the latter with legitimacy; indeed, this can be seen as our primary function inside that system. That's something I've wrestled with for years now, and I know I'm not the only one.
A synthesis movement, with a flagship journal, could be potentially impactful. Liberation of science from the straight jacket of field specialization, grant proposals, and academic respectability is, in my view, absolutely essential - and this will require precisely the defection you suggest.
The main stumbling block is funding. If people are to dedicate their lives to scholarly work, they have to eat. This is the main thing keeping scholars inside the ivory tower, in my opinion. Working out a profit model that enables independent scholars to make a living as participants in the swarm rather than subjects of managerial feudalism has occupied my thoughts for some time now. It's precisely those considerations that led to the subject of this essay, in fact.
This might not sound appealing, but I think funding will need to come in part from the individuals within the swarm working side hustles and continuing to draw a paycheck from the institution they're affiliated with, but having a fall back that is robust enough that they won't starve if they get fired. I think a combo of a non-profit trying to attract patronage from big money donors interested in this kind of thing and applying individual skills to the market for some extra income would work, but it definitely wouldn't be as nice and comfortable. Approaching it the same way artists who make a living in spite of not making much on their art might better reflect the reality of the current situation. The added benefit of this is it would get scholars to interact with the market in a meaningful way, which is probably essential to develop the kind of RHB dominant understanding of how all the pieces fit together. I agree that funding is keeping scholars inside the ivory tower, but I'm skeptical that the most competent among you wouldn't be able to make ends meet without institutional support, it would just be hard work, and a different kind of hard work at that. Don't think I'm talking from experience, I've been suckling at the teet of Uncle Sugar my entire adult life, but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out if I get weaned by force due to my vax status. I bet you and others like you are the same. Online tutoring comes to mind as something that might apply to most academics, but everyone has their own strengths and skills that they might be able to leverage for a paycheck. Ideally this would be supplemented by bourgeois elite patronage, but I'm not sure this model couldn't work without that. The messed up thing is that those of us with families especially sense the current market volatility, and we're all trying to ensure we maintain the based of the pyramid to use Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. At a certain point, individualists are going to need to demonstrate faith in themselves as individuals to make shit work without institutional support, and that includes me.
I suspect you're right. Thing is that so long as life inside the ivory tower is more comfortable than the uncertainties of life outside it, scholars will gravitate to the former. The stultifying nature of political correctness provides a certain degree of impetus to leave, but not enough to make a difference except on the margins.
Significant change will only come with powerful economic incentive. I suspect that's coming. Hyperinflation, market collapse, and economic depression are going to hit universities right in the endowments, just at the time at which enrollment is likely to decline due to demographic constriction combined with growing skepticism among the young about the value of a university degree. Positions will be harder to get; grants will be harder to get; it is quite probable that many universities will face bankruptcy, meaning even those with tenure will be out of work. Such conditions will create the necessity that mothers invention.
"There’s no reason that such a system should require an expensive, unwieldy government bureaucracy to support."
Think of what you're saying, man!
Do you have a vest? Preferably Rifle Level.
Oh, and not dead raccoon, but dead skunk.
Crossin' the highway late last night
He shoulda looked left and he shoulda looked right
He didn't see the station wagon car
The skunk got squashed and there you are
............................
Take a whiff on me, that ain't no rose
Roll up yer window and hold your nose
You don't have to look and you don't have to see
'Cause you can feel it in your olfactory
...................
Yeah you got your dead cat and you got your dead dog
On a moonlight night you got your dead toad frog
Got your dead rabbit and your dead raccoon
The blood and the guts they're gonna make you swoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssSIKOrSNk
Loudon Wainwright III
Forgot to include this, so here goes. One way forward is to secure sustainable financing. At the grassroots level (local and state governments, school boards etc) should steer dollars towards demonstrated educational attainment: success in independently administered competitive exams. Tie funding (at least in part) for education to success in passing competitive exams. The way to do this is to start small and let momentum build. Home-schoolers should lobby to get reimbursement for maths and STEM tutoring, contingent upon success in competitive exams.
Not a bad idea at the public policy level.
Thanks. Any solution that fortifies institutions will fail. The key to progress is to address the confusion between institutions and concrete functions/achievements. Normies still assume an automatic connection between 'schools' and 'colleges' and education, learning, intellectual life. If we are ever to serious about skills or education, we must focus on these. Future generations, suitably formed, may chose to rehabilitate or renew the existing systems. We do not have that luxury. The more we focus on demonstrable attainment, the harder it is for the enemy to make any kind of a case without being exposed.
That's the core point, yes. Separate the institution from the function, and focus on the latter, because the former isn't serving it.
DISPARATE IMPACT ASSESSMENT.
Government's 100% back universities with the threat of lawsuits if they try to hire on any other basis.
If you refuse to hire anyone who doesn't have a university degree or didn't go to Harvard... that's 100% legal and the government supports it... you cannot be sued for the disparate racial impact of only hiring university graduates
However, If you refuse to hire anyone who doesn't score a 115 on an IQ test or rigourous skills examination, you will be sued into oblivion because black people and women will not pass the examination at a rate proportionate to the percentage of the population.
Hiring based on shitty classist university degrees is presumed non-discriminatory, hiring based on anything else is presumed discriminatory.
You think the universities have been able to stay in business this long based on what is in essense an IQ test... because Corporations couldn't figure out how to administer IQ tests!?
They're in business because the government will deploy armed men to take all your property if you hire on the basis of anything else.
Kulak's Axiom: For everything in society that doesn't make sense, there is an obscure government program enforcing it with lethal violence
Briggs v Duke Power has done more to distort American society than perhaps any other ruling.
You should really read "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy". The makers of the SATs had very similar ideas. One of the big things they wanted was to bring in smarter kids who had not grown up rich to try and positivity influence the rich kids. They also wanted to make standardized testing much more pervasive. Being in a field with lots of standardized testing, it's not the paradise you'd think it would be. You open up testing to off shore people who sometimes value rote memorization at the expense of understanding. Also, questions are often as badly worded as legal contracts. I lot of thought would need to be put in to make it work.
Part of the problem is that not every subject lends itself well to standardized testing. Mathematics, science, and so on, to a certain degree history, and languages insofar as grammar and vocabulary go; one's skill at composition, however, is very difficult to test in this fashion.
The rote memorization aspect is certainly a potential weakness. Particularly when one hears stories of the Chinese taking the SAT weeks after it has been administered in the US, during which interval they simply memorize the answers. At that point you're not testing for anything useful.
All that said, the SATs correlate much more strongly to post-secondary performance than high school GPAs do, so there's a lot to be said for standardized tests.
Outstanding! An original contribution to a field long ago exhausted by efforts made to pour old wine into new bottles.
It occurred to me that one way to expedite change would be to disseminate and normalise overseas curricular material (especially in STEM). Educational testing firms could use the standards set in Singapore or Russia. They could market their services to home schoolers and pod schools etc. Publishers could translate and publish text-books and old exam papers etc. Freelance tutors could establish a marketing niche y being able to offer services pitched at overseas standards, something of enormous utility for the globally mobile.
Philanthropists and community groups could raise money to send qualified students who are ineligible for affirmative action to countries with affordable and high quality higher education.
Employer groups and chambers of commerce could sponsor competitive exams in core disciplines.
Readers interested in pursuing educational issues might be interested in this 34 minute video by Andrei Martyanov discussing the extraordinary lack of rigour in US education (especially physics and mathematics). Martyanov points out that things were bad in the 50s and have gotten way, way, worse since then. No one who likes POSTCARDS FROM BARSOOM will be disappointed by Martyanov.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOjWBwPlbTQ&t=668s
To the question of hard to measure studies; perhaps a board of evaluators in the field chosen by a combination of popular voting of students and executive input based on interviews of candidates , changing on some kind of regular interval( 1 year?). I don’t see a way to guarantee consistency in “ soft” fields, but the need to avoid entrenched cadres is paramount.
I don't really care that much about soft fields for the simple reason that they can't be quantified, and should not be credentialed. The best writers never have MA's from lit programs. The most interesting philosophers rarely even studied philosophy as undergraduates. Status in such endeavors should be demonstrated as it always has been: by opinion from those who care.
Knowledge quantification is only really important in cases in which employment hinges on subject matter mastery.
Agree. Pretenders always abounded in soft fields but are now rampant in the harder sciences, as you note. Covid made their presence in medicine much more evident to me.
Yes, this is essentially why degrees have become meaningless. Their value has been diluted by posers. This is almost universally true in the humanities.
This is already done with programming jobs. Applicants are often given an online test.
Yep. Tech industry is ahead of the curve.
I know I’m coming in to this long after the original article, but this is an incredibly thoughtful take.
Thank you.
Pete P is right, what you suggest is probably illegal. The supreme court banned use of tests for employment unless the test was highly specific to the job. e.g. having an electrician demonstrate wiring a breaker box. a general algebra test couldn't be required.
As an employer you'd be put in the position of saying I only like to hire people who have completed subject tests x, y and z, how would that be different than requiring a nonspecific test
Briggs v Duke Power banned the use of aptitude tests by employers, but that's not *exactly* what I'm suggesting here, which is simply to provide objective rankings of subject-matter mastery specific down to the level of courses. What employers choose to do with that is up to them.
However, that particular decision needs to be challenged, especially now that the Supreme Court has come down against racial preferences in university admissions.
As it stands, the entrenched DIE bureaucracy in HR will be moved not a bit by standardized tests, since they are already in the habit of hiring purely on the basis of skin colour and genitalia. What I'm proposing here would not affect that directly, but it WOULD provide a reality check on the competence level of graduates of elite universities, very probably eroding their aura of eliteness.
" they are naturally the most suited to take society’s reigns"
typo: reins.
Allow me to say that it is a great honour for my spelling to be corrected by the great John C. Wright. I'm a huge fan of your work - my bookshelf (and Kindle library) has a great many of your books. I flew through the Count to a Trillion series a couple of years ago. One of the best Hard SF series I've ever read.
"Allow me to say that it is a great honour for my spelling to be corrected by the great John C. Wright."
If you have seen how many typos are in my books, my dear sir, the honor would not seem as great. My spelling is atrocious -- a shameful admission for any man who lives by his pen. However, I am flattered by your kind words, and will pass your compliments along to my muse, next time I see her. I take no credit myself for the quality of any books.
Allow me to return the kindness: I am a fan of yours, Captain Carter, as a fellow Virginian, and am most pleased to see you declared warlord of your planet.
On behalf of Earth, I apologize for the 2012 biopic made of your life: unforgiveable details were added or subtracted, particularly your skill as an Indian fighter.
And this was a good column! Our elder brother world of Barsoom still produces wisdom, I see. I posted a link on my blog directing my reader here.
As you are now a self-published writer, having I presume been cancelled by the Morlocks of oldpub, you can be and indeed have been forgiven the occasional typo (which I've noticed, and shrugged at), None of us are perfect and your occasional failures in proof-reading are more than compensated for by the delightful breadth of your vocabulary and your incredible powers of descriptive imagination. Or, at any rate, compensated for by the influence of your genius loci.
In truth I did not find the 2012 treatment to be so terrible, despite its many interpolations such as the encounters with the Therns, and the shameful way in which said Therns were made out to be anything other than frauds. Nevertheless it was an enjoyable flick, one that I suspect would have done much better in the box office had they gone with the proper title, 'A Princess of Mars', which is far more evocative and eye-catching. Then again given the vandalism that has been enacted on every corner of our imaginarium these last years it is probably a mercy that the franchise failed to take off.
Many thanks for linking my blog for your readers! That explains why there has been a sudden influx on this essay.
"As you are now a self-published writer, having I presume been cancelled by the Morlocks of oldpub"
No, sir. I had far more typos in my oldpub works than now. In fact, just today I spotted an embarassing gaffe in THE GOLDEN AGE, which was my first novel length work published.
" I suspect would have done much better in the box office had they gone with the proper title, 'A Princess of Mars',"
It would have been both better at the box office, and better in every way.
Imagine if the film RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK had been named HENRY JONES, JR.
That is probably more a commentary on the stunning useless of an editorial staff more interested in representational curation and sensitivity reading than on their craft. Although to be fair I've suspected for some time that word processors have had a deleterious effect on our editorial skills. There is something about the screen and the keyboard that makes it more difficult to concentrate, as compared to the printed manuscript and the pen.
This is already in the process of happening with stuff like Kahn academy. You are correct that a standard metric for cross evaluation outside of the idealogical capture of the state and academia would be useful.