Expect a lot of make work WFH bullshit soon.
@NEETzsche
To this day, I cannot wrap my head around why are universities trying to be 3 fucking things at once.
1) Education facilities (barely)
2) Scientific shit (however that is supposed to be connected)
3) Money extraction facilities for people who didn't have the "I wanna be an astronaut" talk with their dad at the age of 6.
And I hate it. 
Undergraduate programs are supposed to provide education. Postgraduate education, like masters and PhD programs are meant to conduct research, which is the discovery of new knowledge. The money extraction part is kind of a recent contrivance. It’s not that universities don’t perform any function – the first two are perfectly legitimate – it’s that the ones in the West went from absolutely world class to complete trash in my lifetime. It’s tragic, but it’s reality.
We’ll see if they ever recover.
@NEETzsche
Well, no.
If universities were about Education, it would not be locked into a credit system, and closed up. On the opposite, they would allow you to study every subject for years, from outside, and get certification about your abilities.
I am public about the fact, that I passed literally all classes and the final test. Yet, according to the UNI, I am an uneducated shithead, because they didn't like my batchelor thesis. Does that seem like an education institution?
It seems like an academy. All institutions are flawed. That’s never going to change. But there are certainly degrees of grift, of failure. My alma mater offered all kinds of fringe benefits to being a matriculated student, and I took advantage of them. Access to supercomputers I wouldn’t otherwise get access to. Access to the forge, which had sophisticated equipment. Courses on how to use it, which you really couldn’t learn except as a hands-on experience, making purely online courses a waste. You could get help on parts of the material that you were struggling with in a way that an online course does not really offer. Connections, job-hunting opportunities, the list goes on. You have to have an eye for these things but they absolutely are present.
But universities, today? All that shit is gone, at least in America. And it’s replaced with pure grift and ideology. It went from expensive but useful to even more expensive but basically valueless.
@NEETzsche
Also, just a weird question.
We all love to hate on Academia. It seems to be collapsing, and my personal opinion is, that scientific method does not contain a "peer review" step for a reason.
But, since you seem to be invested into the academic process, what do you think about Aydin Paladin's research videos?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eMLus4d8Vw
Peer review is a necessary evil because we’re talking about an institution. The scientific method is an approach to knowledge, but if you want to institutionalize it, you do need, well, an institution to review people’s work. The instant you add people into the mix, you are now in a social situation, not a purely intellectual one.
This isn’t to say that these institutions are automatically wrong, but it is to say that one should approach them with a degree of skepticism. Up until fairly recently, even people within these institutions did exactly that. Research universities did not always claim to be the final arbiters of truth as they do now. That they do now is a bad sign. Holding a credential used to mean that people were filtered on raw intellectual capability at the outset, and then it got honed through rigorous and/or sophisticated formal education over the course of years. Now it doesn’t mean that. Now it means you’re a member of a favored political class, like a certain race or sexual orientation or whatever.
I’ve noticed this sort of attitude among credentialed people that they think their word literally alters reality or some shit. That whichever person or entity with the biggest credential can just declare whatever and it becomes so. That the more credentialed a person is, the truer their words are by definition. This is a sign of decay and it’s partially why they put out such obviously false bullshit. If the institution’s aren’t tested by reality, but instead reality is tested by the institution’s claims, then the institution will naturally feel comfortable playing shutdown games on anybody who disagrees.
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, and it won’t be the last. But we are going to live to see these universities get reduced to status symbols for special interest groups to an even greater extent. The decline isn’t over.
EDIT: And I didn’t watch the video because I’m physically with someone IRL and it’s really long. Sorry about that.
@NEETzsche
Oh, sure. Focus on IRL friends first.
I used her video only, because she's the only person I know, that takes sociology seriously, and makes a great content summarizing an academic research.
