Plus MOAR, as I provide (some of) this week's lecture highlights: How do we shift education to cope with technology? This has been a problem since the year -3000, if not before. Are there useful...
On the last point - this is why Ozempic and the other GLP-1s are so revolutionary. They correct for our natural inclination towards high calorie overeating. It seems to me like a no-brainer that most people will be using something like that over time.
Agriculture as "mistake". It may have made life rather tough for peasants, but the sendentary lifestyle made possible civilization and all that entailed. The problem today is trying to eliminate the negative effects of civilized life, while retaining the positive ones.
A decade ago it was obvious students were copying from the internet as they would copy the same sentence from the first link of a Google search. And copying is academic dishonesty at UC.
In the modern context, in-class exams are not a kind of cognitive task you will ever perform again in your lives. Not necessarily. Consider this situation: You’re arguing a motion for summary judgment. You’ve prepared as best you can and tried to anticipate questions from the bench. You’re standing there at the podium without access to any way to look up the answer to unanticipated questions. And the judge may have very different ideas from yours of what the important questions are. I submit that a closed book exam isn’t a bad analogy for that scenario.
Touché... But doesn't that suggest that law schools should hold many, many more moot courts and have many fewer in-class closed-book issue-spotter exams?
Lawyers, especially litigators, have to think on their feet. It's not just the courtroom. When you get that fax at 4:55PM on Friday, you might only have until 4:59PM to respond. There is no time to look stuff up. It's worse in court in front of a judge or at a disposition. You may only have a few seconds. (Lawyers still use fax as a transport protocol even if the "fax" machines are all online. In some ways, especially now when fax machines are rare and the fax protocol obscure, it might even be more secure than ever.)
This is true in a surprising number of fields. If you are running a server farm or a chemical reaction, understanding the situation and reacting quickly and correctly is imperative. There's no time to google "403 error accessing application" or "spreading white glow". If you work retail, support or dispatch, odds are you will be trained and tested as in school. You'll have to know the system, what can go wrong and how to respond.
You might want to point out to your students that Diamond is egregiously wrong when he says that "It [hunter-gathering] is a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.” and that "Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”
Anyone with the mildest acquaintance with political philosophy knows that Locke, and even more strikingly Rousseau, do not think the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short as Hobbes does. On the contrary, the central thesis of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality is that what he calls the "revolution in agriculture and metallurgy," (the neolithic revolution), brings about civilization but also an epochal loss of freedom, equality, and happiness (and even health). To quote: "from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops....Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilized men, and ruined humanity." I would say that is fair summary of the view Diamond adopts and which seems to be main takeaway of your class.
"Sex, Death, and Data" is a stroke of marketing genius. So it's nice that the content is as good as its title!
IMO the "fine chancery hand" of programming languages is Julia (https://julialang.org/). I wouldn't ask students to learn it because students are going to want to be able to say that they know some language that everyone else uses, like Python. But for recreational programming (or serious high-performance STEM programming) it is unbeatable. I like being able to use the greek letters in my formulas directly as variable names - no more spelling out mu's and sigma's and lambda's. It just looks beautiful on the screen.
Accounting is definitely underrated. I ran a soft drink operation for a student club, and with inventory, user accounts, cash on hand, and bottle returns, the only way to make sense of things was to reinvent a subset of double entry bookkeeping though I didn't realize it at the time. Years later, I wrote some accounting training software for the Harvard Business School and learned how the professionals do it.
Try an experiment, Brad. Show the kids that first chart on femur length and adult stature. Tell them that each point in that series is a central value of a (hopefully) normal distribution (of people's femur lengths) at the time. Brief them about what we know of NET nutrition's role in human physiological growth. Now ask them about what hypotheses they would formulate for a chart like that. Would love to see what they say.
"To a large degree, the food industry as it exists today is not friend beyond a point that we reached long ago. How much of what we spend our time doing is similarly the result not of our choosing to live wisely and well, but of people hacking our brains for their financial benefit and not for our well-being?"
In other words, the various ways we're being had? The kids will fill you up nicely on that issue. :)
On the last point - this is why Ozempic and the other GLP-1s are so revolutionary. They correct for our natural inclination towards high calorie overeating. It seems to me like a no-brainer that most people will be using something like that over time.
Agriculture as "mistake". It may have made life rather tough for peasants, but the sendentary lifestyle made possible civilization and all that entailed. The problem today is trying to eliminate the negative effects of civilized life, while retaining the positive ones.
Re: Student copy stuff of the internet.
A decade ago it was obvious students were copying from the internet as they would copy the same sentence from the first link of a Google search. And copying is academic dishonesty at UC.
In the modern context, in-class exams are not a kind of cognitive task you will ever perform again in your lives. Not necessarily. Consider this situation: You’re arguing a motion for summary judgment. You’ve prepared as best you can and tried to anticipate questions from the bench. You’re standing there at the podium without access to any way to look up the answer to unanticipated questions. And the judge may have very different ideas from yours of what the important questions are. I submit that a closed book exam isn’t a bad analogy for that scenario.
Touché... But doesn't that suggest that law schools should hold many, many more moot courts and have many fewer in-class closed-book issue-spotter exams?
It probably does.
Lawyers, especially litigators, have to think on their feet. It's not just the courtroom. When you get that fax at 4:55PM on Friday, you might only have until 4:59PM to respond. There is no time to look stuff up. It's worse in court in front of a judge or at a disposition. You may only have a few seconds. (Lawyers still use fax as a transport protocol even if the "fax" machines are all online. In some ways, especially now when fax machines are rare and the fax protocol obscure, it might even be more secure than ever.)
This is true in a surprising number of fields. If you are running a server farm or a chemical reaction, understanding the situation and reacting quickly and correctly is imperative. There's no time to google "403 error accessing application" or "spreading white glow". If you work retail, support or dispatch, odds are you will be trained and tested as in school. You'll have to know the system, what can go wrong and how to respond.
You might want to point out to your students that Diamond is egregiously wrong when he says that "It [hunter-gathering] is a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.” and that "Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”
Anyone with the mildest acquaintance with political philosophy knows that Locke, and even more strikingly Rousseau, do not think the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short as Hobbes does. On the contrary, the central thesis of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality is that what he calls the "revolution in agriculture and metallurgy," (the neolithic revolution), brings about civilization but also an epochal loss of freedom, equality, and happiness (and even health). To quote: "from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops....Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilized men, and ruined humanity." I would say that is fair summary of the view Diamond adopts and which seems to be main takeaway of your class.
"Sex, Death, and Data" is a stroke of marketing genius. So it's nice that the content is as good as its title!
IMO the "fine chancery hand" of programming languages is Julia (https://julialang.org/). I wouldn't ask students to learn it because students are going to want to be able to say that they know some language that everyone else uses, like Python. But for recreational programming (or serious high-performance STEM programming) it is unbeatable. I like being able to use the greek letters in my formulas directly as variable names - no more spelling out mu's and sigma's and lambda's. It just looks beautiful on the screen.
:-)
Accounting is definitely underrated. I ran a soft drink operation for a student club, and with inventory, user accounts, cash on hand, and bottle returns, the only way to make sense of things was to reinvent a subset of double entry bookkeeping though I didn't realize it at the time. Years later, I wrote some accounting training software for the Harvard Business School and learned how the professionals do it.
Try an experiment, Brad. Show the kids that first chart on femur length and adult stature. Tell them that each point in that series is a central value of a (hopefully) normal distribution (of people's femur lengths) at the time. Brief them about what we know of NET nutrition's role in human physiological growth. Now ask them about what hypotheses they would formulate for a chart like that. Would love to see what they say.
"To a large degree, the food industry as it exists today is not friend beyond a point that we reached long ago. How much of what we spend our time doing is similarly the result not of our choosing to live wisely and well, but of people hacking our brains for their financial benefit and not for our well-being?"
In other words, the various ways we're being had? The kids will fill you up nicely on that issue. :)
Lovely to see you start the discussion with that first chart from one of my favorite people.