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Concealed handgun license holders in Texas can carry their weapons into public university buildings, classrooms and dorms starting Monday, a day that also marks 50 years after the mass shooting at the University of Texas' landmark clock tower.
The campus-carry law pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican legislative majority makes Texas one of a handful of states guaranteeing the right to carry concealed handguns on campus.
Texas has allowed concealed handguns in public for 20 years. Gun rights advocates consider it an important protection, given the constitutional right to bear arms, as well as a key self-defense measure in cases of campus violence, such as the 1966 UT shootings and the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.
Opponents of the law fear it will chill free speech on campus and lead to more campus suicide. The former dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture left for a position at the University of Pennsylvania because of his opposition to allowing guns on campus.
Officials told the Austin American-Statesman it was a coincidence that the law took effect 50 years to the day after the UT shooting. Marine-trained sniper Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the 27-story clock tower in the heart of UT's flagship Austin campus, armed with rifles, pistols and a sawed-off shotgun on Aug. 1, 1966, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others before officers gunned him down.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Monday August 08 2016, @06:32AM
So, GED instead of a real highschool diploma? Yes, it shows.
Let's face it, liberalism as a position in itself is basically dead in the USA, in academia.
As an ancient Greek, and a philosopher, the anti-intellectualism of Americans has always surprised me. Yes, we should discount the claims of the upper classes to greater knowledge, since obviously they do not have it, and the Donald is the most recent example of the correct response to the "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?" question. So it should be the case that Americans, having repudiated a class-based system of higher education and instead having gone with a meritocracy, should at least respect the opinions of those who have risen through said meritocratic system. Not the fact that most of these are liberal should also not be a cause for surprise. John Stuart Mill once said, "While it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that all stupid people are conservative." We add to this that William F. Buckley is dead, George Will has left the Republican party, and all the right wing in America has left is Paul Ryan and Bikers for Trump, it looks really bad for the less educated. Oh, did I mention Donald Trump?
Now you may think that academia is a conspiracy to exclude conservative thought, and of course that is your right. But I submit to you, and all persons capable of rational thought, could it not be that conservatives are excluded precisely because they are not all that great on the "thought" issue? I have known several academics who identified as "conservative". This was mostly after the Bush disaster, when they could no longer identify as Republican without major embarrassment. But the consensus of the colleagues was that they were stupid, not that they held politically incorrect positions. I can see how, if you are not too bright, that these can seem like the same thing. But bear with me, since the right to bear on is right there in the Constitution.
The one thing that Universities teach is freedom. In fact, that is the entirety of the curriculum! So if you find anyone not able to think for their self, someone mimicking the pronouncements of some idiot on Right-Wing Douchebag Limberger Radio, they by definition have not achieved the ability to think for their selves. They actually call themselves "Dittoheads". So much for that. No if you find that those with some education lose patience with the idiots who also have a vote in America, and think that we really need to round up all these Mormon Sovereign Citizen Militia High-Colonic types into special re-education, or really, remedial education, you should not be surprised.
But the point still stands. The most education. How are you going to measure it otherwise? The ones with the most Pokemon? The ones with the most Green Stamps? (That's dollars, to you Yanks.) Or the ones who can recite, from memory, from all the works of Ayn Rand, especially the sex scenes, and , and, and.
Yeah, fucking losers. We in academia see your type every single day. But after the first semester, not so much. So go an vote for your grandson of a Gold-rush brothel manager, and see how well that services you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @05:02PM
I'm probably feeding a troll here, but what the hell, trolls need love too.
In terms of social class, the academic world (at least at the senior professor level) is generally regarded as being upper class as well. If you're only speaking of upper income class, the point is obvious but it doesn't particularly suggest that lower economic classes are smart either, or we'd be recruiting policy advisors from the alleyways of Detroit. Similarly, there isn't enough evidence to equate wealth with stupidity.
If the meritocratic system you suggest were truly meritocratic in any broad sense, that might have been true. There is a huge range of problems with this. First, we can consider that the typical Ph.D. has a soda straw narrowness of expertise; an expert in the reproductive cycle of yeast might be completely hopeless when asked about public health, let alone tax policy, international negotiations, energy policy, infrastructural design or any one of a number of concerns that come up on a daily basis in the business of government.
Another big problem is that the ability to get a Ph.D. has a lot more to do (in this day and age) with persistence than intelligence. Oh, to be sure, you need to have some intelligence to be able to construct new poetry in Ancient Greek, but that neither directly implies general intelligence, nor suggests that someone who devotes themselves to one tiny field might be capable of succeeding at many others.
A further problem is the observation that a lot of people in academia appear to have developed advanced skills at navigating the publish-or-perish waters, and demonstrated skills at writing grant applications, but their ability to communicate with a class of (presumably intelligent) undergraduates, let alone the general public, is obviously lamentable. The quality of typical academic writing is also hideously opaque; why should people at large respect a group that may be frightfully intelligent but hopelessly inarticulate?
Yet another problem is that whereas we might wish for, or expect, a strictly meritocratic academic social structure to be utterly open-minded and uncompromising in its defence of open-mindedness, the opposite is manifestly the case. Why should people in general trust the even-handedness of a group that is obviously not?
If you're trying to suggest that academia merits the respect of the population at large simply because its members did a lot of studying, that's about as sensible a position as suggesting that Donald Trump should be respected because of all the money he made - arguably less, since there's no requirement for the studying to have produced anything of any practical worth, whereas Trump can hardly make money in a complete vacuum (recognising here that his acumen has been called into question anyway).
It's not at all clear that Trump is a conservative, any more than it is that the republican party is the only institutional guardian of conservatism, or that conservatism is the only (or even defining) position of right wing adherence in the USA. Given the calls for substantial changes coming from the republican electorate, and the stay-the-course institutionalism coming from the democrats, one could make a strong case that the republicans are the more radical of the major parties, and the democrats the more conservative. Given, on a longer scale, the history of the democratic party as opposed to the republicans, and this should not come as much of a surprise.
If one wants a vote for business-as-usual right now, that vote is certainly for Hillary. Trump's biggest problem in that sense is that people who want to vote for radical changes have quite a few choices other than him; but he's not the institutional candidate. The republican establishment are running from his as quickly as they can without spilling their martinis.
I don't think there's a conspiracy. It's more like tribal marking. Dismissing those who hold contrary positions as stupid is common enough, but usually it comes down to a question of personal values, and the financial structure behind academia strongly promotes a pro-government stance while the regulatory structure promotes a pro-authority stance. It is interesting that the pockets of less progressive thought in academia are generally in those fields where experts are more capable of getting lucrative jobs in their own right; engineering, financial fields and computer science spring to mind. It certainly fits the pattern that they are less beholden to government and its largesse.
In my (many years of) experience, universities do not teach freedom. They don't teach freedom of thought, and in fact they often discourage it. Making a strong case against a professor's preconceptions, even as a devil's advocate, can result in a failed course regardless of how right one is proven by subsequent events. (Real life example: arguing for multicore/internally parallel structures for performance as Moore's law runs out of steam and the speed of light becomes a major restriction in single execution stream architectures.) So no, advocacy for intolerance doesn't surprise me in the least. I will say that it disappoints me, but given that we already know that academia does not really constitute a meritocracy except as a degenerate case, it can hardly come as a surprise.
That's the pollster's conundrum. But you could insert other questions, intended to determine correlations, or do deeper analyses of a small subset of your polling population. Or you could do an in-depth analysis of academics to find out how broad their education really is, and compare and contrast that with academically trained professionals such as engineers and lawyers, and then with people whose fields of work suggest some academic as well as other sources of training such as composers, horticulturalists and nurses, and then with tradespeople of varying degrees of attainment, and then with businesspeople of varying degrees of attainment, and so on and so forth. If you really care to find the answers, they are out there.
I'm not quite sure how you got here, or how you determined that I might be a supporter of Donald Trump. I'm not - I don't care for him at all. Both major party candidates are about as appealing as rotten meat to me. Since I live in a safe state, any presidential vote I might cast would be supremely irrelevant anyway. Still, given your clear partisan hostility, don't you suppose it's possible that you are contributing to a reduced level of institutional education on the part of those you despise, and thus contributing to the (supposed) problem you deplore? It looks, from where I stand, rather self-defeating, unless your goal is to exclude them in an attempt to retain some kind of tribal position of superiority? This hardly seems to be a beneficial approach, as far as broader society is concerned.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday August 08 2016, @10:58PM
Feeding? Are you attempting to make troll foie gras? Such verbosity in response to a simple point can only mean one thing!
In my (many years of) experience, universities do not teach freedom. They don't teach freedom of thought, and in fact they often discourage it. Making a strong case against a professor's preconceptions, even as a devil's advocate, can result in a failed course regardless of how right one is proven by subsequent events. (Real life example:
I will not question your experience. But a major part of your experience is your interpretation of the experience. Most "conservatives" tend to think they fail university courses just because they failed to regurgitate the professor's opinion, because they were independent enough to buck the "echo chamber" of the ivory tower. This is not the case. There may be teachers like this, but usually the student fails because they do not understand the material. And not just not understand, but they do not understand even enough to comprehend that they do not understand, which makes scholarship seems to be mere opinion, rather than something objective. You cannot teach freedom of thought to those who fail at the level of thinking at all.
So why should we take your opinion on weapons on campus, when you so egregiously misunderstand what higher education is at all?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @04:31AM
So let me get this straight: if you echo back what you're given well enough to get an A on the test, you're being taught freedom of thought, whether or not you agree with it, or think about it at all beyond the effects on your GPA. If you challenge the professors and make them actually make their case rather than merely state it, then you're - what, disruptive? And if you use their own arguments to construct a path to a different conclusion, that they don't like but for which they have no counterargument save appeal to authority (their own) then learning freedom didn't work on you because you're too stupid. Am I more or less on the right track here?
I'm not a conservative, for what it's worth (on the conservative-radical axis I'm fairly middle-of-the-road), and I won't pretend to speak for them, but I find it deeply instructive that you aren't even addressing the question of how one could tell, even theoretically, that one's authority figures are wrong - and dogmatically so. And yet apparently that's the position that some (presumably conservative-minded) students find themselves in? What if (and I know this sounds insane) they're not all wrong all the time?
As for what higher education is, at this point the available evidence strongly suggests that it is a credentialling system, rather than anything involving education. In point of fact that I work in education. It is what puts food on my table, and I have a personal, day-to-day involvement with questions such as how to address different levels in Bloom's Taxonomy (yes, I know, it's not really a taxonomy, that's just what it's called) and I am deeply aware of the problems involved in fostering higher order comprehension of difficult points. I even spend quite a lot of time in front of classes of very dedicated people, helping them understand really tough stuff.
So, in summary, I'm not even right wing, I'm not a frustrated exile from the ivory tower, I'm not ignorant of the complexities of education, I have direct recent exposure to the situation of undergraduate students, and it's crystal clear to me that what is being delivered in the USA, under the heading of a university education, is really a sort of extended high school with a strongly preferred progressive slant. Given the nature of the incentives, it's hardly a surprise that this slant exists, or that it's deliberately fostered by the favoured party of the orthodox left.
I haven't (so far) taken up the question of weapons on campus, I merely took up the question of the link between educational level (inasmuch as it can be determined) and political leaning, because not only is the unspoken assumption that a (relatively) left wing stance is the probable outcome of education, as opposed to exposure to a dogmatic environment, not well supported by the evidence, but there's a solid case to be made that the bias has other foundations. Several of your utterances on the question (such as that universities teach freedom) are similarly ill supported by the available evidence, where not actually contradicted.
What is yet worse is that many academics, supposedly deeply educated people (but in reality often deep but narrow in their learning) feel somehow supported in their inclination to make political and economic proclamations far outside their field of expertise. Frequently the same people who publically heap scorn on physicists or mathematicians for voicing opinions on the topic of climate change are only too happy to express their views on the balance of payments, or international trade relations, or the meaning of supreme court judgements despite having no real background in any of those fields and getting many of the key concepts wrong - and worse yet, they demand to be taken seriously because of their years and years in academia, regardless of relevance.
This is a syndrome. It's a combination of arrogance, willful blindness, dogmatic fostering of a creed, all topped off with political patronage. The fact that right wing professors tell me of being hounded out, marginalised or given consistently cruddy duties, until they move into the private sector, is simply further evidence of the orthodoxy at work - since they made it all the way through postgrad and postdoc and all the other hoops you can hardly call them brain-damaged jetsam in the academic path. They made it through the engine that's supposed to teach them freedom - and somehow arrived at different conclusions. Is the filter not working, or is it indeed possible to come through and somehow think differently about the state of the world?
You can of course sneer at ineducable undergraduates. There's no shortage of those, even with our deliberately relaxed standards, but by the time someone has made it through the mill (and I've seen how undergraduates who have the temerity to disagree get treated - or rather maltreated) you can be pretty sure that they at least have higher order thinking up to, at a minimum, the rudiments of analysis down. The examinations usually test at least that much. Synthesis and evaluation generally are not requirements for an undergraduate degree (which is rather disgusting, when you come to think of it). What is your explanation for them? Just an anomaly in the process? Or they could fake it until they made it?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 09 2016, @04:52AM
So, in summary, I'm not even right wing, I'm not a frustrated exile from the ivory tower, I'm not ignorant of the complexities of education, I have direct recent exposure to the situation of undergraduate students, and it's crystal clear to me that what is being delivered in the USA, under the heading of a university education, is really a sort of extended high school with a strongly preferred progressive slant. Given the nature of the incentives, it's hardly a surprise that this slant exists, or that it's deliberately fostered by the favoured party of the orthodox left.
Ah, young paduwan! Who is the troll now?
Yes, all of my assertions are unfounded, groundless, without any reliable statisitcs to back them up. But none of that matters, since you clearly are incapable of understanding any evidence I could provide. So I say again: is it not amazing, in fact profoundly counter-intuitive, that the most highly educated, knowledgeable, and wise persons in American society are predominately liberal and Democrat? Wow! How can this be? Of course it must be, since the conservatives of which you do not claim to be one are constantly complaining about how they are being oppressed. Maybe they are just bonehead stupid, the ones you mentioned before that get a PhD out of pure stubbornness.
I will give you a bit more leash, since you do seem to be a persistant troll.
So let me get this straight: if you echo back what you're given well enough to get an A on the test, you're being taught freedom of thought, whether or not you agree with it, or think about it at all beyond the effects on your GPA.
if you are echoing, you have not understood. Education is not about information, a common mistake of Information Technology types.
If you challenge the professors and make them actually make their case rather than merely state it, then you're - what, disruptive?
You are doing it right now. When a student does not understand the point of the lesson enough to comment intelligently in a way that helps further the understanding of the entire class, yes, it is being disruptive.
And if you use their own arguments to construct a path to a different conclusion, that they don't like but for which they have no counterargument save appeal to authority (their own) then learning freedom didn't work on you because you're too stupid. Am I more or less on the right track here?
I am detecting the beginnings of comprehension. I suggest you work on it. If you think your Professor rejects your argument only because they "don't like it", you have very much to learn, especially in regards to respect for your teachers. I suggest you get a job in IT support, and take up a nice hobby, like fishing, or "rolling coal".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 09 2016, @05:35AM
Just from curiosity, why the respect for the teacher is a prerequisite for education?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 09 2016, @06:13AM
Oh, c0lo, you tread on dangerous ground! You call me "magister", and yet you ask this question? If a student does not respect a teacher, the teacher has no ground upon which to teach. If I say "this is the way", and you think that I am an imposter, a fraud, a Republican, why would you follow? So indeed, a student with no respect for his teacher is no student. This is why our AC fails. It is why all conservatives fail. A failure of respect for that which they do not understand. That is why they are conservative, they stick with what they think they understand, and respect it because of that, not realizing that what they do not understand is much more deserving of respect. This is why we are called φιλόσοφοι, lovers of wisdom, who, because they love, do not claim to possess.
This is what those not suited to higher education cannot understand. They think that knowledge is what those with the power to punish believe. And they believe that teachers punish. But this is not the case. Knowledge is what a free person understands for their own self, and they stand in an attitude of respect to those who have helped them on the way. I thank my teachers, I respect them, even the ones who were wrong! Why? Because they helped me to understand on my own. It was not what they taught, it was how. Secure this deep in you bosom, in your heart. Never forget. If you cannot respect your teacher, it is because you never learned. And whose fault was that?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 09 2016, @09:39AM
Of course. Like always.
It is raising questions that keeps one alive and getting answers that kills one mind. Thus, by asking you, I'm put myself in front of you in my most precarious position - give me answers which don't raise any further questions and you kill a bit of me.**
If all you give to your students are answers, then you are not a teacher, you are a trainer ("tamer" if you ask for respect of authority in return for your training) or a mystical guru. You don't build your students, you just shape them in your mold.
Indeed, if you do so, you are no better than that false prophet named BF Skinner and his "operand conditioning" preachings.
I won't follow because the authority of the professor, no - at most, I'll choose based on her/his authority on a probabilistic type of reasoning (better chances that s/he'll know what I want to understand).
I'll continue to follow based on quality of the arguments that s/he put on the table and how well I'm understanding them.
'cause there is a thing called "zone of proximal development" [wikipedia.org] - if the professor cannot adjust his teaching to the level of my understanding, then it's useless as a teacher for me.
I might respect her/him as a person, but at the same level of respect as anyone else. Mind you, I might respect more the janitor that brings the toilet I'm using in a squeaky-clean state - I'll be having more benefit from his work than from a brilliant mind which doesn't want to lower itself to a level which intersects my zone of proximal development.
Of course, if I'm really after that knowledge, I'll search other teachers and do my part of work to extend my ZPD.
One on top of the other, IMHO, respect and learning/education are orthogonal.
I see you got your answer.
How well does it serve to keep alive your understanding of them?
Are you still willing to engage a discussion with them and learn what they may be knowing better (or believing deeper) than you?
You know what? Me to.
Except that I'll put this extra bit: they get my respect after they taught me.
But of course!
(and, magister, uttering truisms is not teaching. D'you care to go one step more and tell what exactly respect for a teacher mean? Like... I don't know, an example... how does it manifests in your case?)
Huh! Fault you say? Strange choice of a word - it's like you are assigning a blame for failure to learn.
(look mate, take it like that: we may do business together - teach/learn - and again we may do not. What's the problem, isn't the world large enough?)
The cause of failure to learn will rest with both sides, as I argued above.
Note: me not respecting a teacher doesn't automatically mean I disrespect her/him - there a lot of people in this world that contribute to my life, most of them I don't and will never know. They get my gratitude for their contribution, but it doesn't mean they get my respect or that I disrespect them.
---
** don't worry. Fortunately, your answers bear a lot of subtle flaws for me to uncover.
This makes your posts on SN quite attractive to me, in addition to your talent with words (my hat off in front of you for that).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:07AM
Ah, first the responder becomes the troll, and now the student become the teacher?
And all this brought about by Texas allowing guns on campus! Who would have thought?
But, c0lo, point well taken. I have a hard time trying to get through to some here on SoylentNews. As for failure, indeed it could be mine. But then, teachers have to be solicited. And I mean real teachers. Someone may have knowledge you want, and you may enter into a transaction to get that in exchange for a gift of dried meat (Analects, 7:7), but it is only by making the way yourself that wisdom is won. Yes, more truisms, but Confucius, not mine.
Teachers are vulnerable. They wait upon good students. But they cannot coerce them. Even in an institutional situation of power, a teacher cannot force, she is at the mercy of students. But the students have to want to learn, to solicit the teacher, and indeed they take a risk in doing so, for truly a student does not appreciate a teacher until after they have learned, and often then it is too late for thanks, and respect is not enough. But enough about my experience.
Confucius is a model here. He was the first teacher of China, no small thing. But he had the tragedy of seeing his best student, Yan Hui, die before he could become a teacher as well. So to all those who think that they have wasted their time with teachers who they could not learn from, I say you have no idea what it is like to have a student who did learn, and then is lost. But again, enough about me.
Thanks, c0lo, you make SN worthwhile to me as well. Ἐπαινῶ
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 09 2016, @03:06PM
Life's wonderfully surprising, isn't it?
True. The teacher also bear responsibilities in the game. She must dance this minuet by the rules...
One of the rules: don't lift the entire curtain (Analects, 7:8) over the coffer holding your truths... Some/many of your truths may be valuable antiques. Others may well be, in their nature, chamber pots used by Louise-is-good-to-be-the-king-XV after getting to know - again and again - Madame de Pompadour; as unique and decorated it may be, it's still a piss pot, fer God sake.
And it's inevitable that you'll get some** of these no matter how hard you tried to avoid them in your own journey.
To put it in another way: the greatest teachers are the ones who make their students want to ask relevant questions.
Knowledge and skills delivered/acquired in the process are secondary (and perhaps perishable), they are just means to reach the goal - a mind capable of looking the reality in its face and asking pertinent questions.
Far from my intention of acting as a teacher.
Take it as a view from outside of you (my view, as such it may be wrong, most probably is) : both AH and you have from time to time... mmmm... let's call them "temperamental reactions".
The kind of those originated in hypothalamus, mediated by hormones, dressed by the cortex in some words of irreproachable taste, but still an instinctive reflex and devoid of any rational/critical substance; in your case, it mostly happens in reaction to what you, the usians, call "conservatives".
Ok, so, what we had here... in one corner, a "conservative" AC pours his poor soul over pages (must have been an effort to do it, perhaps s/he felt is important enough to make the point) and raises a question. Perhaps not the most relevant, highly probable not even framing the real problem in correct terms (there is a real problem***)
In the other corner, we have our Greek philosopher on-duty... who does what? Weelll, he takes the answer of "Forget maieutics, enough with those stupid questions, read my lips while I'll be reciting from John Stuart Mill and Stephen Colbert". Then he uses this answer as a club and hits the AC guy... repeatedly... for the sin of asking a question.
Thanks (wow, surprising. It feels it really meant a lot to me).
----
** One example of "unique, well decorated but still a piss-pot" idea - that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Reality doesn't give a f..k about what the liberals or conservatives think they understood about the world.
Of course some models of reality are in a better agreement with the reality, but pretending one is sooo muuuch better than the other is like saying the Voyager space probes are sooo muuuch closer to the galaxy centre than the Earth.
*** a real problem in tertiary education
- "you don't get a job without a degree, so go get a degree" is a poor motivation towards learning for the student. S/he's not there to learn, s/he's there to get a fucking piece of paper which seems to matter to a clueless recruitment agent
- as the demand for graduation papers (thick enough to be useless even for wiping one's ass) climbs, of course the modern Confuciuses (read the title of the current thread) don't accept just dried meat anymore. What's worse than that: those Confuciuses start confusing education with graduation, because... you see... "if you question our academic authority, you are wasting our time. Look, young padwan, we don't have time to deal with your anxieties, there are lotsa sheeple out-there willing to pay their silver for that paper and the silver of others are as good as yours. Believe us and respect us. Our way or the highway... you have the freedom to choose".
Call this a "reality with a liberal bias" if you dare.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 09 2016, @08:51PM
In the other corner, we have our Greek philosopher on-duty... who does what? Weelll, he takes the answer of "Forget maieutics, enough with those stupid questions, read my lips while I'll be reciting from John Stuart Mill and Stephen Colbert". Then he uses this answer as a club and hits the AC guy... repeatedly... for the sin of asking a question.
So, too harsh? I do not recall the AC asking a question. And you far underestimate the danger of the anti-intellectualism manifesting in the US of America! Remember, this thread is about allowing firearms to carried on campus.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:37PM
(is this the day the magister started to ask questions? Given what follows, it may be a rhetorical one, but it is a question anyway and I always treat questions with respect)
Harsh? Yes, it was.
Too harsh? What do you think it happens (today) if you club him with your answers and he clubs you with his answers and there's no a trace of intent to find any alternative explanation for what happens in reality?
Are you so sure about your thinking as being infallible, so that you have the ultimate undeniable answers? Aren't there any bits of truth in what the other party says? Maybe they are misguided and their questions (or questionings) are deeply flawed, but what makes them raising their point? How come they got (yesterday) to raise this point?
If the answer is so ultimately human and inscrutable, why does it happen in some places (America) and it does not in others (say, Finland. Or Switzerland. Or Iceland)?
Where this answer-clubbing leads to? Assuming the answers of one party (your party) win, then what happens (tomorrow)?
Are those answers going to hold water forever? If not, will the winning party be able to shed them aside and come with others or will they transform in the "new conservatives" and defend them to death?
Let me assist [soylentnews.org] you [soylentnews.org]:
and respectively
The way I see his point (however malformed): can education be measured? Is there a single best way in which education can happen and we are already doing it? (if so, how come I still have questions? Where is my freedom to raise them?)
Could Skinner have been right, education is just about reflex training, stick and carrot, thinking doesn't/mustn't happen because it cannot be measured and what cannot be measured doesn't exist?
And what was/is the error of intellectuals that caused (or allowed) the others to attack them? Are the intellectuals blameless?
How come it happens in America and doesn't in other places?
Ah, magister, but of course... one mustn't go outside the bounds of a given context, otherwise anything that s/he says becomes irrelevant and can be ignored.
After all, S/N is not a site on which we come to waste our time in learning what happens around the world; we must stay relevant in the context of the posted news and show some kind of results.
My apologies for daring to do something different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 10 2016, @09:09AM
This is the question?
The way I see his point (however malformed): can education be measured? Is there a single best way in which education can happen and we are already doing it?
That is not a question, it is a trap. He is asking to measure what he does not understand. This never ends well, but is currently what all the cool kids are doing. Accountability, because "I am not being taught what I want." Spoiled children.
And what was/is the error of intellectuals that caused (or allowed) the others to attack them? Are the intellectuals blameless?
How come it happens in America and doesn't in other places?
Ah, but it does! You have heard of Turkey? Germany? Spain? Italy? Don't make me half-Godwin again, I think I hurt my back the last time.
Are you so sure about your thinking as being infallible, so that you have the ultimate undeniable answers? Aren't there any bits of truth in what the other party says?
Infallible? Me? You have the wrong philosopher! But yes, the other party is disingenuous, so the truth is laden with poison. Best to just hit it over the head so it can feel justified. Next time you hear someone saying something like "I learned nothing in collage, it was a waste of time" (the mispelling is a dead give-away), or "My professor failed me just because I would not toe the party line", please hit them over the head for me, OK? And if it is in a place that authorizes weapons, against the better judgment of the faculty, well, better safe than sorry.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 10 2016, @09:40AM
Yes, it's a trap. Not for the reasons you mention, though.
And high chances you are already inside that trap together with the poor unhappy conservative troll (which may feel genuinely unhappy about the educational system failing him; and he'd be partially right).
Did I say "happens only in America"? If so, I'm in error.
What's so special about Switzerland/Iceland/Finland that it doesn't happen there?
Good to see you are able to notice the poison.
Not so good seeing you unable to get the poison aside and see the tiny fragment of truth which perhaps is valid (and maybe, just maybe, could hold the clue for the education system's mistakes towards them).
I promise I will not do as you asked me to, my apologies for that (see Analects 7:8 why).
What I can promise is that I'll say: "Really? Are you sure?... I can't believe it, maybe we'll chat about it one of these days, but now I'm busy. Sorry, gotta go". Because, you see, I'm only a software developer, what do I know about teaching and education?
(unless that person is dear to me, in which case I can promise I'll use a keisaku. Vigorously if necessary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @03:56PM
Not accurate. That is a subsidiary point to the central question of that part, which is related to the implications of the observation that (supposedly) better educated people (by a measure of questionable value, with little bearing on education in the policy-relevant disciplines) tend to (at a roughly 2:1 ratio) align themselves with the democrats, and whether or not there might not be alternative explanations to the implied analysis that it's smart to agree with the democrats about the issues of the day, such as that a prevailing dogma has found fruitful recruiting grounds and that the people in those grounds don't know enough about the broader scheme of things to pick the dogma apart (which is consistent with the credentialing as measurement, deep but narrow educational attainment, client politics shaped environmental factors).
Again: not conservative. Pretty neutral on conservatism vs radicalism. Not reactionary either. In fact, pretty cool with much of the current democratic platform. Actually, I usually think they don't take it far enough.
If a teacher can not or will not establish a foundation for the purported truths they intend to communicate, or can not or will not analyse and correct counter-arguments, or can not or will not accept supported contrary ideas, that is not a teacher but a vessel of dogma. In a drill sergeant, this is generally satisfactory. At a tertiary level of academic study, where analysis, synthesis and evaluation are (supposed to be) the whole point of the course of study, these are fatal flaws. An erring student can of course be held to the same standard with respect to ideas held in error, but "That is not what my book told you." is not a competent response to "Reality doesn't work this way." This goes double in STEM fields where objective analysis is actually feasible.
I can't speak for others, but I attended universities for well-nigh a decade, and learned a lot. It was highly revealing that I learned more, in more detail and with greater breadth, outside the classroom (often in the library) than was ever taught in it. However, I often saw (rarely in my case, because I learned my lesson that parroting what I was told offered greater returns than actually pointing out the errors of professors) students getting failed, shouted down, mocked and driven out for pointing out professorial errors, inadequacies or simply raising questions that the professors did not feel like answering. Given that I ended up tutoring no few of these people (hence my own segue into education) I can warrant that many of them were highly intelligent and frustrated and that the needs of academia and society at large were ill-served by this regular exercise of academic ego. The case was in fact worse in the humanities where you'd find an A student, passing with flying colours, receiving consistently crummy marks from one professor, and that one professor only, with a history of animus between them. I wish I could say this were rare, but in actual fact what I saw amounted to a long lesson in learning not to challenge, but neither to respect petty tyrants.
Mercifully, not all professors were like this. I remember kindly one professor, busy with a full class schedule but also with an international reputation in his field, who was a shining example. He had the confidence in his material to answer objections keenly, the humility to accept when an alternative idea was coherent and consistent with available evidence even when the textbooks did not agree, and the generosity with his time and skills to assist students in their pursuit of knowledge. Would that they were all like that. To this day I regret that circumstances did not enable me to enter postgraduate studies under his guidance, rather than elsewhere.
But let's return to the specific point of a correlation between advanced education and support for the democratic party: As I earlier observed, there's also a correlation between impoverished education and support for the democratic party, whereas median education levels tend to correlate with support for the republican party. Moreover, the level of support among the highly educated for democrats is greatly reduced when you look at those fields where academics are not financially beholden to the state, and as a client body, to the largesse of the democrats. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that you have a self-propagating client group, fostered by the democrats as a tool giving them ideological legitimacy, especially in the light of the observation that most of the client group's members are not educated in fields that would enable them to evaluate the public policy implications of supporting one party over another. Even if we accept as a foundation for the argument that advanced credentials are clear and sufficient evidence of both advanced intelligence and broad education (in actual fact very dubious positions) are we to assume that the third of professors who do not support the democrats are all wrong? Or are they right on weekends, while the majority are right during the week? Or they're the sinister fifth column supporting a diabolical rearguard action by the forces of fascism? At best, the analysis appears to suggest that reasonable people can reasonably disagree on points of policy, and that on average people who have spent much time in academia tend to find the democrats more congenial. Claims to the fundamental rectitude of the position that academic support for the democrats is sufficient evidence of the value of their policy prescriptions need to, at least, give a cogent explanation for the dissenters.
And, since aristarchus made the plea above to consider the case of firearms on campus (not my original point), we can take a quick look at that. Given that available evidence doesn't really support a claim that the outspoken left wing supporters of academia are invariably right about things in general, let alone public policy, any more than that the outspoken right wing (a beleaguered minority in most institutions) are right about things in general, we end up having to decide what the particular merits of the case are in Texas. It would appear that the state has decided that the right to keep and bear arms can not be logically withheld from qualified individuals, under the state's definitions, on a college campus. Fair enough; that is a governmental prerogative. Given the attitude in the USA that the states are the laboratories of democracy, and campus carry bans are more common than not, if it is to be permitted anywhere, even as a trial of the policy, then Texas seems to be a logical place to do so. The fact that this happens to be an area where the prevailing orthodoxy militates against permitting firearms at all does not render the policy fundamentally untenable, and I could see a reasonable position to the effect that the attendant risks are relatively minor, given the nationally recognised statistical finding that permitted concealed carriers are massively unlikely to actually commit felonies, and that it makes more sense to openly permit something that is known to quietly occur anyway as a matter of rational policing. The fact that this disappoints or alarms some academics has to be balanced against the policy, policing and constitutional arguments in the other direction. In my view this is as unsurprising, but also as irrelevant as the reactionary resistance in Colorado and Washington to legalising recreational marijuana. Both sides have passionate adherents (such as the city fathers of tiny rural settlements who despise marijuana and the filthy hippies who smoke it) who are swept along by a larger policy shift. If we permit a professor of poetry's plea for disarmament on campus to be the last word on the matter, then we must similarly allow the big dogs of backwater hamlets to declare their zones of control somehow untouchable, or be hypocrites ourselves. So even taking the strongest plausible interpretation of aristarchus's original observation strictly for the sake of argument, it does not follow that college campuses should be excluded from otherwise rational statewide policy-making. This then reduces the case to whether or not permitting concealed carry of weapons is a good idea in general. It might very well not be, but any attempt to apply that judgement to Texas would again have to be balanced against the validity of democracy in policy-making as implemented within that jurisdiction, as opposed to a majority of academics making determinations for the whole state. If the majority of academics made the determination, Texas might well be a gun-free zone, or at least very heavily regulated, but that's not how things turned out.
I suppose my position amounts to: wait and see how it all turns out. But I'm really not expecting the end of the world. Even if the policy shift is a bad idea (which remains to be seen), poorly constructed arguments such as a veiled appeal to authority are poorly constructed regardless of the conclusions they purport to support and should be rejected as such. If aristarchus has a well-supported argument against concealed firearms on campus then by all means let him make that case. Telling us that Ph.D.s are statistically more likely to support Clinton for president is not that argument.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 11 2016, @11:57PM
I like that plural which I emphasized, let's keep it this way.
So far, we have 3 - roughly sketched:
Of course the above are reductionist and of course many other hypotheses need to be generated and assessed before getting to the point of answering "what is the minimal source code change in the education program to put it back on track". There's no silver bullet, but there is a bit of positive feedback acting inside education, positive feedback which can be used.
I can't assess the validity of your observation, are you sure they are data and not anecdotes?
Besides, consistency with a hypothesis doesn't guarantee that hypothesis actually holds true (even if it may be so). Setting a single hypothesis on the table is a risky business - make you blind to other factors that don't fit your sole hypothesis.
Challenge for a start: a brief (20 words or less) description of the role of education (formalized as school or not) valid for any kind of society or social group large enough to need it. Hint: use words such as "propagate skills knowledge moral values generation next exclude undesired traits"
Then, re-examine and relate it with "self-propagating client group, fostered by the democrats as a tool giving them ideological legitimacy,". Do so by enlarging the time/history and geographical context see how it applies if you substitute the "democrats" variable with other values (e.g. enlightenment age exponents, present Talibans, surrealist/cubist/impressionist styles of painting, etc)
My apologies for being blunt, but I'm not interested on that**.
The same process of "sliding into dogmatic education" can be observed in other countries as well, countries where "democrats/republicans" and "the second amendment" does not exists - therefore I consider them irrelevant to the problem in general. There may not be common causes for this (and every country may be absolutely specific), but I have a hunch there is a common factor acting in all those countries particular contexts.
---
**(and the "look at that" doesn't seem to be as quick as you promise. Hint: make your point quicker, put in the minimal analysis that still support it "in the below" - there is a reason for which the sciency papers have an abstract and the news people shun the bury the lead [wikipedia.org] style)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @03:13AM
Lots of hits on Google. Here's one from the first page: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/higher-education-liberal-research-indoctrination [motherjones.com]
Yes, exactly. I provided a reasonable alternative explanation. One ostensibly consistent with the salient facts, insofar they could be determined - and a reasonable explanation why you might have lots of left-leaning academics without having to assume that they were right about much of anything outside their fields.
Education: prompt behaviour changes in the student body. (A common definition in the instructional design community, in case you were wondering. It covers everything from dog training to medical internships and research fellowships. In the particular context in question, you might expand it to specifically inculcate abstract reasoning skills or something along those lines depending on where you want to draw the line.)
Examining and relating to "self-propagating client group, fostered by the democrats as a tool giving them ideological legitimacy,": orthogonal concerns. The position of academics as simultaneously privileged with respect to ideological power while needy with respect to fiscal power simply fosters a quid pro quo relationship with whoever will pledge to support them. However, there's a long history of educational groups being either co-opted or suppressed (take your pick from religious schools, official credentialling for imperial exams in China, greek instructors in ancient Rome).
If you're curious about the analysis of fiscal power, ideological power and political power, I'd refer you to the field of political economics. There's a lot written on the topic, and analysis of sub- and supranational groups with respect to sources of power.
On the front of academics being tempted into being petty tyrants based on their ego and ideology, that's nothing new in human nature. If instead they were uniformly dedicated to a mission of dispassionate academic monasticism, that would be an anomaly in human conduct.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 12 2016, @04:57AM
I reject this as a definition of education. This apply to training, conditioning, taming dogs, but not education.
And this is what I see as one of the main reasons for the today's lame approach to education. It heavily relies on Skinner's dogma: in psychology (and learning) what cannot be measured does not exist - because we cannot manage it. The fact they grafted Bloom's taxonomy [wikipedia.org] into their "belief" doesn't alleviate their fault, on the contrary.
A very convenient model of learning for instructional designers, but a model and, as such, reductionist and incomplete**.
Reason I blame the behaviourism [wikipedia.org] and operant conditioning [wikipedia.org] approach: it sells the illusion that trainers can be in (total) control of the education, that they can do education with stick and carrot and nothing else matters.
Do you see in what you describe the "stick and carrot" wielded by what you call "liberal teachers"? Do you think if these were administered by "conservative teachers" would make education better? "Free-er" in your terms?
This is why I suggested aristarchus to look in other countries as well. Read a bit about education in Finland.
Just in case you aren't aware of alternative pedagogical currents, see constructivism [wikipedia.org].
You may also be interested in William G. Perry [wikipedia.org] - for the moment, both your and aristarchus' positions seem to be on a quite low level, towards the "dual thinking" (I'm right, therefore you are wrong").
--
** Even more, a risky model to be adopted, it makes the things actually harder due to "tell me how you measure me and I'll tell you how I'll behave" - see Cobra effect [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @05:58AM
Sorry, you're kind of wrong about a lot of stuff here.
First, modern education (and what I do) has nothing whatsoever to do with operant conditioning nor anything that derives from it. Even dog trainers have moved past that. Not even low stress herding of wild animals depends on that. Arguably some brainwashing techniques do, but even then the link is tenuous.
Bloom's taxonomy isn't part of an instructional design theory as such, but is a means of classification of levels of intellectual effort and capability (i.e. what you're attempting to help your audience achieve) that helps you figure out how to approach your instructional design.
Constructivism (of which I'm well aware, and which has some of its own deficits) does not inherently contradict the classification of mental endeavours outlined in Bloom's Taxonomy (or any of the competing organisational approaches) but is a parallel approach that is compatible in planning.
None of this has any bearing on my discussion of the problems visible in the political capture of our intellectual systems - political capture that would be problematic if achieved by radicals, reactionaries, conservatives, progressives, liberals or authoritarians. Currently progressives hold the dominant position, and that is not a good thing.
I'm actually curious now: where did you get the idea that a mention of Bloom or of modern instructional design would imply involving operant conditioning or any of its intellectual children? That's so badly wrong as to appear insane. Who's spreading that crap?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 12 2016, @08:04AM
Nothing wrong with Bloom's taxonomy, it's a powerful instrument in itself, everybody can use it, even the constructivists.
Correctly used, it will amplify the outcome of instruction (and education requires instruction, but is not limited to it).
Also measuring what you can measure in education has nothing inherently wrong. It becomes wrong:
- when you don't use your measures only to adjust your teaching specifically towards individual students (and mix statistics over large groups)
- when you use the results of you measure as reward/punishment
- when you start to believe what you cannot measure does not exist.
Isn't US one of the countries that has national/state standard tests? Isn't (federal/state) funding bound to the results in the test?
But of course it is [wikipedia.org]. Carrot-stick?
So, what the school must do to survive? Teach to the test. Don't tell me it isn't happening.
Today's teachers are yesterday's students. Taught to the test, were their mind able to outgrow the mould they were forced in?
Of course it's insane, but there's your answer in regards with who has done and it's doing it. It's called "standard based education".
Have you read anything about the education in Finland yet?
It doesn't? Really?
To me, it's irrelevant who captures politically the education, but it is infinitely bad that the education system can be politically captured.
And I blame standard based education for allowing this to happen - everything that doesn't fit the standard must/will be killed, everything conforming to the standard will flourish.
Don't tell me the above isn't the operant conditioners wettest dream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @04:18PM
Whether the US has standard testing or not has nothing to do with the question of whether or not Bloom's Taxonomy is tied to Skinner's theories, in educational practice, nor even whether it's in use in the US. And, as you say in your first paragraph, anybody can use it. Even constructivists. Even folk educators. It's simply a framework for discussion of cognitive complexities.
I'm no fan of the USA's primary and secondary educational system, but it's not skinnerite, either. Just the fact that they use standardised tests is not a sufficient criterion for describing what they do as being skinnerite in nature. In point of fact, even when Skinner was making some of his more grandiose claims he already received some criticism because nothing he proposed suggested how people could create new ideas, as opposed to fitting conditioned reflexes to stimuli. It was an inadequate explanatory framework from inception, and any hints of applying it were left well behind by at least the 1980s, to my certain knowledge.
Finally, I'm afraid that I must contradict your final proposition: followers of Skinner have no stake inherent to their position in the political capture (or susceptibility to political capture) of the educational system. After all, it could just as easily turn against them, and the mere existence of a punishment/reward dynamic is not inherently skinnerite. There are competing approaches to explaining psychological processes that also incorporate punishment/reward elements; in fact cognitive psychology addresses them when planning how to break people out of negative cycles.
As for Finland, yes, I've read a lot about it. And Germany, and Singapore, and so on and on.
You're trying to ascribe the ills of american education to a particular framework, and then misattributing the origins and nature of that framework. There's a lot going on that is wrong with american education (political capture at the tertiary level arguably being far from the greatest) but you seem to be out of touch with what's really going on under the hood.
If you really want to break the cycle of political capture in academia, you'll need to break the cycle of money, and strengthen academic freedom - in particular the freedom of professors from the interference of administrators. However, you would also need to restructure it so that students had a voice in their relationships with professors, so that professors had a metric of success related to the choices and successes of their students. I've toyed with the idea of a structure based on a library plus tutors rather than the current lecture based system. How that would work in detail I haven't completely sorted out, but it would also help to defuse the confusion between education and credentialling.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 12 2016, @10:34PM
I didn't say otherwise, we have noI'm no fan of the USA's primary and secondary educational system, but it's not skinnerite, either.
In intentions, maybe it s not. In fact, even unintendedly so, I argue that it is.
Ah, OK. We are quibbling over terminology.
I'm saying that stick-carrot makes them skinnerites even if they have absolutely no intention to follow Skinner.
You say as long as they don't follow Skinner formalism and the stick-carrot is incidental, they are no skinnerites.
Ok, then offer me a term that I can use to designate those peddling stick-carrot as the norm in education (no matter what other shiny wrapping they put on it).
Because funding based on the results at standardized tests is stick-carrot and pushes the same to the lowest level on everyday life in education. Do you contest that?
Ah! The emphasized is exactly my point: I wouldn't worry that much about the political capture of tertiary education by liberals, there are other illnesses that are going to cripple/kill it before.
But then, what do I know? I'm just a software professional, living down-under, who grew up under a communist regime somewhere in Eastern Europe.
I may know a bit about forced and persuasive indoctrination, education under such conditions, the role of critical thinking in keeping your mind as your own in spite of indoctrination, how this thinking leads one to admit there aren't absolute truths in life, etc. Of course this doesn't make me knowledgeable about the internals of american education, all I can do is to come up with hypotheses.
I'm all ears (well... eyes) if you want to list some other wrongs in american education or what's going under the hood. Just don't expect me to swallow them as you present them, I didn't for aristarchus, I promise I won't for you.
Almost perfect. I would be interested to hear what it needs to be to reach "If you really want to harden academia against political capture of any kind, etc"
Don't just break the cycle once, without protection against a fall-back.
My only question: why did you tabled the capture of academia by liberals as a major problem?
To my mind, it doesn't matter who performs this capture, the results are equally bad.
---
** yes, I did say that the use of Bloom's taxonomy makes the matter worse.
The sense I intended: wrapping a piece of rotten meat in a nice pastry and cooking it to perfection will still let the dish toxic if ingested, but increase the chances of people willing to ingest it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:11AM
If you want to call things skinnerite that have nothing to do, structurally or philosophically, with Skinner's theories, just because they involve (positive or negative) incentives, feel free.
Just don't expect anyone else to know what the hell you're talking about without a lot of prior explanation. Bear in mind that anything involving an intelligence (human or not) also involves motivations and as such the whole world involves the satisfaction and frustration of those motivations - voila! Life is skinnerite! Except when it's not, which is basically all the time.
Yes. I agree that a funding incentive is ... well, incentive-based. However, the results are far from uniform. One of the things that has resulted from this is massive resistance against standardised testing, to the point that entire jurisdictions have simply tossed it aside and refused to cooperate with the federal level. Another result is a huge growth in private schools, charter schools, alternative schools such as Waldorf schools, and homeschooling. Putting it bluntly, both parents individually and entire communities are voting with their feet and their wallets as well as their ballots. Incentive-based structures are only powerful as long as there is engagement, and people are actively disengaging.
I didn't actually say that liberals had captured academia. I said that progressives had, and in fact I pointed out that they are often markedly illiberal. I mostly brought that up as a source of perspective on the purported preference of academics for ever tighter firearms regulations, especially on campus. It's a problem for the theory that academics are smart, and right, and insightful, and that as such their specific policy preferences should hold sway.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:46AM
Just as education will always involve not only the transfer of the positive values (knowledge, skills, moral value) from one generation to the other, but also repressing what the societal group sees as negatives.
Voila - imperfect freedom of thought is inherent to education.
So, in this imperfect world, what's the best one can expect from education as a system?
Why getting aside the punishment side resulted from lack of sufficient funding?
(this wasn't evident for me - at least until now.
I suspect aristarchus - bless his magisterial-authoritative soul - didn't see it either)
Would you mind to explain what you mean by 'progressives'? What's their specific difference when considering them and liberals?
By the same measure, maybe it would be good for me to see the specific traits of what you call conservatives?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @04:45AM
That's a moral question. Tell me what you find to be good, and I can answer what the best possibility is that I can see within your moral axioms.
I'm not ignoring it. It's implicit. If a resource is an implicit good, then the absence of that resource is an implicit evil. It's a symmetrical situation. Either way, carrot/stick combinations can deal with one resource being supplied or withheld, or two different reactions constituting reward and punishment - the nature of the situation is largely unchanged.
The definitions I use are pretty familiar in the field of political science.
Conservative is the opposite of radical. Radicals wish to make radical (i.e. striking at the roots) changes, big changes at once, and attach little value to continuity or consistency or the status quo. Many of Trump's proposals (assuming he actually means them) are in no way conservative, but rather radical. Conservatives tend to make small, incremental, carefully justified changes, and assume that the status quo has intrinsic value if only because large changes are dangerous, disruptive and hence costly. I, as I said above, sit between the two. Disruptions are costly, but there are circumstances where they are justified, or where a clean break is more efficient than incrementalism.
Liberals contrast with authoritarians. Liberals tend to maximise individual choice, favour personal responsibility and avoid dictatorial approaches to policy-making. Authoritarians are comfortable with dictating conduct, attach little value to individual liberty and instead value conformity, usually on the grounds that security and efficiency are easier to guarantee where conformity is assured; and thus also to justify oppression of nonconformists on the grounds that they put the efficiency and security of society at large at risk.
America's constitution is a pretty liberal document, because it outlines a lot of things government can not (or isn't supposed to) do. The official position of Singapore is quite authoritarian, and they justify it by referring to the blessings of a carefully managed society which has large and deep divisions.
Progressives are those who seek to implement and benefit from the insights and advances of the enlightenment and the industrial era. Notable progressives include Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill (a lot of people think of him as an imperialist - and he was - but he was also instrumental in things like disability pensions and similar workers' benefits, and in his writings he was quite clear about the benefits he saw in Progress as a social good) and Tony Benn. The opposite of a progressive approach is a reactionary approach perhaps best summarised as "old ways are best". Please note that progressive isn't anti-conservative, any more than reactionary is conservative. It's quite possible to implement a progressive platform in a conservative way, or to be a radical reactionary.
It's also important to observe that progressivism is often orthogonal to liberty as a value, or often antithetical to it. There are times and ways in which progressives and liberals were in agreement (constructing a classless society is one of those ways, hence the alliance of progressives and liberals in the civil rights movement in the USA) but there are times when progressives and liberals are completely at odds with each other (such as the debate around the CDA, or Tipper Gore and the PMRC). At these times it's quite possible to have a conservative, authoritarian progressive standing in opposition to a radical, reactionary liberal.
Since you say that you're in the computer field, you can doubtless see that there are three different axes of political description in play here. If I were to classify the broad sweep of american academia, politically, it would be radical, authoritarian and progressive. The progressivism is often bound to their optimism about their studies, the march of progress in diverse fields and so on, the authoritarianism appears to be a habit of telling others what to think and how to conduct themselves, and I surmise that the radicalism stems from being divorced from the immediate consequences of their own pronouncements. After all, academics mostly produce papers, and rarely are judged on their ability to carry extensive projects through. But that is only surmise on my part.
Hope that helps clarify it. If you want to know more, I recommend reading up on the foundations of political science. You could do this before or after your checking up on the three types of power I referred to above, as analysed in political economics.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 15 2016, @12:03AM
Thanks. Really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford