benjeapes
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Commented on Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
Sorry to be late to the party. There's a wonderful little book Knowledge for the Growing Boy by Sid G. Hedges, first published in 1941, which takes a similar attitude to self-abuse though doesn't go quite as far as the...
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Charlie Stross commented on
Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
More to the point, the current higher education bubble is going to do for the academic title as a status-indicator sooner rather than later. Unless something is done about it ......
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scentofviolets commented on
Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
@229: More to the point, the current higher education bubble is going to do for the academic title as a status-indicator sooner rather than later. Unless something is done about it ... Why would devaluation of the academic title as a status symbol be a bad thing? I just don't see it....
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scentofviolets commented on
Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
@ 228: Academic titles. At least in certain professions, where they have become a mostly meaningless exercise in filling pages with words. Yeah. Even in a "good" school it's quite possible to walk away with a PhD for doing little more than, say, typing up your advisor's old notes into a modern modern format like LaTeX. The fact of the matter is, the big thing the degree signifies is employability, and it's been used by countless employers over the years as a way to screen qualified applicants on the cheap. We're into the end game now and about to reap...
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scentofviolets commented on
Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
@ 233: re: grade inflation, it'll come down to other distinctions. The first thing I look for in an academic's "pedigree" is not the title but the institution. I'd trust the opinion of a graduate from $GOOD_COLLEGE over that of a professor from $BAD_COLLEGE. [cough] - George Bush! - [cough] The myth of the Good School is largely a myth, and which helps - surprise! - those institutions who win the PR tourneys to be designated Good Schools. Also a surprise of course - funny how it always seems to be the same few schools over and over. The truth,...
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scentofviolets commented on
Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
Ah, those last three posts got me to speculating: maybe in fifty years we'll see a resurgance of bureaucracy, Confucian style. Because while I'm not all that on credentialism as a stand-in for competency, I do like the notion that anyone can take graded qualifying exams, for example, the acturial exams of varying levels of difficulty. Maybe in 2080 it will be all about passing the Level IV Mechanical Engineering Exams that will be the needed qualifier for working on space habitats, and not a PhD in mechanical engineering. The same would go for other professions like lawyering and doctoring,...
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