Due to low birth rate, Japan abolishes social sciences, STEM for all.

[Eddie Teach]

Most cities in the US aren't like that because the land is too valuable so the buildings get torn down and replaced. The exceptions tend to be mid 20th century industrial centers with declining populations, mostly in the Midwest. Also, small towns that lost their reason for being.

[Admiral Yi]

Group projects in college are inane.  In the real world, you have a manager with some level of authority overseeing everyone's contributions, so in a non-dysfunctional workplace, free-riding is limited.  In college group projects, it's anarchy and a game of chicken.  The one who cares the most about the grade will be the first one to yield and actually get shit done.

So true.

[alfred russel]

Group projects in college are inane.  In the real world, you have a manager with some level of authority overseeing everyone's contributions, so in a non-dysfunctional workplace, free-riding is limited.  In college group projects, it's anarchy and a game of chicken.  The one who cares the most about the grade will be the first one to yield and actually get shit done.

I got 1 B in graduate school.

It was in a class where 90% of our grade was a final group presentation. The group would get a grade, and it would be adjusted up or down based on the anonymous feedback from other team members.

My group sucked. Our analysis was obviously wrong--calculations that based on math had to be equivalent were not--in 30 seconds our professor would know we fucked up the basics. So the night before, the rest of my group was like, "whatever, fuck it." I was too embarrassed to present the shit we had, so I stayed up all night--by myself--and got the analysis right.

So we come to the presentation the next morning. Because I was the one that re did it all the night before, I was the only one that knew what we had in our presentation, and had to present about 75% of it.

Our project seemed to have gotten a baseline of an A-. I was the only one in our group that got adjusted down to a B.

[DGuller]

Well, you obviously didn't get the point of working in a group.

[The Minsky Moment]

It's really hard not to ask, "How would you know?" 

It wasn't that hard now, was it?   

If I had been wiser back in my college days I would have hung around more pre-professional types; as it happens though, an unusually high proportion of people I know from college became profs, in a variety of fields, in a variety of institutions.  Those I keep in touch with , while not thrilled with the politics of academia, eem to be doing interesting research and generally report positive interactions with students.  Anecdotal, but suggestive.

[Admiral Yi]

It's really hard not to ask, "How would you know?" 

It wasn't that hard now, was it?   

In fact it was impossible. 

[The Minsky Moment]

Well, I think economics is special, and not merely a "social science" It by its nature is a very quantitative field, and the fact that's it's not a hard science yet is more due to the fact that it's still in the dark ages rather than because it is an inherently social science field. 

.

Econ is very much a social science.  It will never be a hard science and if there is one glaring flaw in the discipline on the macro side at least, it is too much reliance of formal mathematical modeling.

that's the only example, then I'm not convinced.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with others to comment intelligently, although my impression is that there is some pretty rigorous work done in psych.  Kahneman and Tversky were both psych profs.

[mongers]

It's really hard not to ask, "How would you know?" 

It wasn't that hard now, was it?   

If I had been wiser back in my college days I would have hung around more pre-professional types; as it happens though, an unusually high proportion of people I know from college became profs, in a variety of fields, in a variety of institutions.  Those I keep in touch with , while not thrilled with the politics of academia, eem to be doing interesting research and generally report positive interactions with students.  Anecdotal, but suggestive.

There was a time when you weren't wise?

[Ideologue]

It's really hard not to ask, "How would you know?" 

It wasn't that hard now, was it?   

In fact it was impossible. 

[Ideologue]

It's really hard not to ask, "How would you know?" 

It wasn't that hard now, was it?   

If I had been wiser back in my college days I would have hung around more pre-professional types; as it happens though, an unusually high proportion of people I know from college became profs, in a variety of fields, in a variety of institutions.  Those I keep in touch with , while not thrilled with the politics of academia, eem to be doing interesting research and generally report positive interactions with students.  Anecdotal, but suggestive.

Not too terribly suggestive, given the following factors:

1)Professors have a financial interest in professing.
2)People in general that aren't me apparently attempt to spin things as rosy, even when they aren't.  Likewise, people are often sufficiently biased that they prefentially process positive information.
3)Students who interact routinely with professors tend to be more likely to report positive feelings about it, since if their reactions were negative, those interactions would probably cease.
4)Students still currently enrolled are a pretty suspect group from which to draw any data, even anecdata, about the attitude of college graduates.
5)Even college graduates who wind up underemployed can suffer a bit from a mild kind of false consciousness where they attribute their failures--and not without supporting evidence--to agencies outside of themselves and the academy (which they enjoyed), particularly the economy and a business culture that doesn't value their prospective contributions.  This probably feels better than understanding that they made a personal mistake, and were encouraged in this by people they respect and trust.)

Anyway, I'd bet the closest you get to slumming it is that one time you met a lawyer who went to Duke.

[The Minsky Moment]

As a matter of fact, I had a friend who was a law prof in South Carolina a few years back . . .

It's convenient to take the position that everything other then yourself suffers from irremediable cognitive biases.  But not very convincing. 

[Ideologue]

Meh, I have biases.

(Anyway, law profs are almost uniformly derived from high-elite backgrounds.  This was less true in the past, so your pal may not fit that bill exactly, but these days it's really ridiculous how few schools produce almost all law academics, boiling down to mainly HYS with maybe a few token Columbia and Chicago grads thrown in.)

He was at USC, right?

[Capetan Mihali]

Hey Ide, check this out.  I just got this a minute ago on the listserv as I sit here waiting for the trimester to start:

Help make it easier to find film and video in libraries! Contribute to an experiment to explore extracting structured data from free text in MARC!

OLAC (http://www.olacinc.org/) is working on project to make the process of finding film and video in library catalogs better. We plan to take data from MARC records and map it to structured data that can

*         drive more effective discovery interfaces

*         is easier to maintain

*         is in a form that can be used for sharing as linked data.
We are working on automating the interpretation of statements of responsibility in MARC records. Please help us create a pool of correct answers for training a computer program by annotating some film and video credits at http://olac-annotator.org/ It only takes a few minutes to make a contribution. We want to annotate as many credits as possible over the next month.
You can help by

  *   Annotating movie credits at http://olac-annotator.org/ (identifying the names and roles or functions they performed)
  *   Translating movie credits into English from languages ranging from Chinese to Spanish to Urdu at
http://olac-annotator.org/
  *    Identifying and documenting patterns in credits that will be challenging for a computer to interpret by copying examples of problem credits to the spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16dhQTw7Us2r7nSyrfAKgf725vvYifq4NtYv8sApyOvk/edit?usp=sharing (http://tinyurl.com/p2o3m8l)
Go to http://olac-annotator.org/ to get started.

It's got tech, movies, higher education, and rote repetition all rolled into to one. 

EDIT:  And thanks for the shout-out.

[Ed Anger]

They aren't. Man up millinials.

I find the whole concept bizarre.  I wouldn't even know about that shit if wasn't fore Spellus.  You know what wasn't microagression?  When some asshole came at me with a fucking bat calling me a kike.  I'm not even a Jew!

A website you might enjoy:

http://everythingsaproblem.tumblr.com

[Razgovory]

It's like looking into the abyss.