Mr. Knox I can’t tell if I’m a midwit because I literally haven’t read a word of Enlightenment thinkers and have no familiarity or idea about their ideas or if I’m le “I’m ackshually shmart I jusht don’t try” due to my high ACT.
I refuse to take an IQ test, because if it’s lower than expected I’ll be retarded and limit myself, but I fear I may be a high-ish midwit.
Frankly if I had to guess I have a brain that would have been the average college-goer white-collar job caliber brain 80 years ago, but am now considered smart because I’m simply not a retard.
The average student wastes over a year of schooling. The average 115 IQ (what most people would call “high midwit”) wastes a staggering 3-4 years. The average 145 IQ genius could be in college by fourth grade. This is all done for the sake of 90 IQ students who will never remember or use anything past the 7th grade anyways. Public education is unironically the biggest money sink in human history. This is also why so many people think they are special for being told they have a reading level above their grade. It’s because even the average Joe is learning stuff meant to be learnable by a half-retard, and understandably exceeds that. Can you imagine a world, where only 50% of people attend high school, and classroom sizes could be halved? A world where we only have to waste 3-4 days in school a week, and where many people can have private tutors just like the Greeks? And we would have money left over for other things. Think of how much of our lives we could have gotten back, how much of our lives our children can get back. The best part of our lives, at that. But it’s only going to get worse from here, because of the rising tide of color.
Oh 🍯… No… Just, no… How can you claim to understand Faustian civilization if you don’t like Calculus? It is the lifeblood of the Faustian extension into the infinite. Calculus is not, like, abstract either. Pretty much everything you do in calc classes can be analogized to the real world.
I’m not sure, personally, if I’m a Faustian mathematically… I think there’s a good case to be made for rational realism. Irrational numbers and the infinite exist in the realm of forms but I don’t know if they can really be called numbers… Maybe I am more Grek in mindset.
I knew you would be upset as soon as I wrote this. I am so sorry my dear Sectionalism. I just cannot find it interesting. It is why I had to change from an astrophysics major...
Its so fucked up that the peak of achievement in our school system is being able to humble brag (i forgive u) about how little effort it inspired you to output.
It would be demoralizing to the lower iq kids (goyslave feelings arent like ours dw) but there needs to be better access to climbing through classes at the pace of the learner. Being in classes for a year that I knew could be learned within a week or two made my efforts feel completely pointless. I knew that my day would be devoted to meaningless garbage everyday and that my grades would be good enough for college apps with or without studying.
They needed to let me take whatever classes i wanted as long as i passed a test for the pre req material. They needed to let me treat it as a race. The human spirit is competitive
They actually hate kids advancing so much. I recently learned my parents and teacher tried to move me up a grade from 3rd to 4th grade only for me to be denied due to “emotional immaturity.” (I was a literal 8 year old)
It's actually the opposite. The constant insistence that men are made equal and that dimwits just need to "study harder!" is a source of major anguish to at least half the American population. Most of the population is meant for simple lives, with clear direction and possibly skilled, but not necessarily educated labor.
The ones I remember being told growing up was that "You'll need to do cursive in middle school onward.", "You won't be able to get away with not studying in hs/university.", or "You'll have more homework next year." Only the last one was true in high school, and that was just maths. It mostly came off as fearmongering to me back then, but I couldn't understand why they would bother. However, I did see a lot of students (almost always women) in my degree freak out/stress over tests that they spent hours studying for, so maybe it was warranted for them.
I'm pretty sure women actually enjoy stress because if you watch female group dynamics they sort of deliberately complicate everything in order to maximize the amount of stress they feel.
Are there any studies on the chemistry of stress in men vs women? Perhaps their stress feels more like the thrill a man feels skydiving or hunting apex predators.
In undergrad computer science and electrical engineering, at least at my school, it operates almost exactly like high school, just way more focused by the time you get past the gen ed classes. I don't think STEM fields are conducive to the socratic method since they are more defined by "natural law" especially at the level you'd be at in undergrad, and it's no surprise to me that I've never been in a class that used it. It's much different debating the different world views and principles of enlightenment thinkers, compared to "debating" how a charge behaves in an electric field. We've pretty much got that down.
Back on point, I heard all that shit you talked about from my early calculus, physics, and engineering communications professors. "Now you're REALLY gonna have to LOCK IN and start creating a wholistic understanding for yourself, not just memorize and regurgitate." That is a complete load of horseshit, the only difference is they have 4 months to teach a subject instead of 8. The lecture > homework > exam structure of the classes hasn't changed, and that fundamentally makes it so you have no time to get a "view from above".
Because of academic integrity, exams don't let you use the resources you'd actually have in a real-world setting. They also test you rigorously over a very specific subset of problems. Because of how important exam grades are, you'd be a fool to do anything but memorize and regurgitate in ~1 month chunks of content.
In my opinion, STEM needs more labs and (solo) projects, where you are expected to throw yourself at an open-ended problem and solve it as best you can. For my computer networking class we had a project that replaced one of our midterms, the prompt was to write a basic peer to peer communication program with extensibility and longevity in mind. This was so much better than any of the other exams and projects (most of which were basically fill in the blank), because it led to a more natural discovery process and for me, made what I learned really stick. Not to mention for software development, this process is pretty much the job.
I agree with a lot of your points (undergrad biomedical engineering). Maybe EECS is different than BME since there is still that memorization/physiology aspect to it, but I have had a class or two (very small number) that actually was taught purely Socratic method. "Flipped" classroom where classtime was purely discussion. Challenging class and my opinion is to teach that way for all of the classes. Could be difficult for math heavy classes like fluids or signals, but overall the SM is conducive to any type of learning, especially anything being applied which is what being an engineer is.
I cant relate too much to the "prepare yourselves" talk from underclassmen courses, but I have definitely seen it in others in my cohort. I agree about the labs and projects. Having to do a junior design paper(s) with a bunch of mumbling idiots who cant even speak english fluently made me want to kms. Even worse when labs are taught to the lowest denominator and there is no true emphasis on reaching full potential or really exploring and delving into a project. Our senior design is a team based and im not looking forward to it. I know that itd be more work alone, but id wager overall itd be better than a groups lol.
I do think SM does have value but like you alluded to later in your post, that depends entirely on the caliber of people you are dealing with. I'd love to be a part of an interesting, generative discussion about the subjects I'm studying, but the likelihood of that happening in a room full of noob EECS people is low and I think this is true across all rigorous STEM subjects. Like I said though, I go to a shit school with a 90+% acceptance rate. Take what I say with a grain of salt. As always, gatekeeping the retards is necessary and in that case I'd be down for SM, but the money dictates that we have to let retards into our field and eventually let them hawk their bullshit on our nice things (See: GNOME desktop environment).
Assuming gatekeeping is off the table, I'd rather listen to one person who knows what they're talking about ramble about their field for a few hours a week as opposed to listening to 30 people who really really don't know what they're talking about and are only speaking to get credit for a few hours a week. I'd prefer if I weren't forced to be dragged down by them and was allowed to work alone too. I know, there are retards in the real-world too. You have to get used to and learn how to deal with them, but that's what public school was for. I don't see how forcing me into a bona fide middle-management role (Every. Fucking. Time.) is enriching the nitty-gritty education I'm paying to receive.
Lastly, I agree with everything you said about labs. The fact that they're more often than not done entirely by TA's is ridiculous. In my experience, all they know how to do is give you a schematic and some electrical components and say "Look! you just demonstrated that thing you learned 3 weeks ago!". One of my physics labs' TA couldn't even articulate a derivative in the context of inductors and capacitors with AC signals. Ridiculous.
“It's much different debating the different world views and principles of enlightenment thinkers, compared to "debating" how a charge behaves in an electric field.” This is the most important and correct statement in your entire reply. The argumentative side of things only really exists in computational theory, but even still that’s pretty organized already. All that leaves left for students to really test their skills is projects.
Labs are definitely the most important aspect of a computer science major’s degree. If you want to go into SWE or any kind of development, it’s important to practice the cycle of going from an open-ended problem to an implemented solution.
Biology major, things were basically the same. Lots of professors justifying their positions and wages by saying they teach you some unique synthesized package rather than raw facts and statistics. Which is sometimes true, and the conceptual classes were often by favorite ones. But there was a lot of raw memorization. Organic chemistry was half learning new concepts and mechanisms, and half raw memorization of different kinds of reactions. And I went to the best school in the state.
I never went to high school, so I couldn’t tell you what it was like, but throughout intermediate and middle school they definitely always hit everyone with the “it’ll get way harder real soon! You’ll have to actually try next year!” In their defense, middle school was vey academically difficult. But that’s because I had one first year teacher who had no idea what she was doing, one last year teacher who expected way too much from her students (and gave 3000-level college history assignments to 7th graders, I am not at all exaggerating), and one last year teacher who uniquely hated me and intentionally tried to trip me up and make me get things wrong.
Uh, basically, the point is: public school sucks!!!
The pitiful ease of highschool and gen-ed college has certainly hurt my study habits and discipline as a whole. I have had all A’s and B’s my entire life, one C in my first semester of college, due to a grudge by the professor I suspect but still don’t know for sure.
Anyway, I am getting to the point where I’m starting to find some of my classes difficult, or at least more difficult than easy enough to do well without applying myself. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to handle it. I find myself overwhelmed with papers and due dates since I’ve had no experience with this level of work. Very sad!
I've noticed this as well, though I'm definitely a STEM guy. I despise humanities for reasons that basically boil down to the fact that you can't reverse engineer questions that aren't math, so you have to actually remember things. The teachers always tell you things along the lines of "you can't do it like that in X" when in fact you absolutely can and it will work just as well as it did in elementary school. I don't take pride in this exactly but i never took notes or really even formally studied for anything outside of class, because i very rarely scored anything below an 80%, and i didn't want to do those things anyway.
I love philosophy, writing, reading, public speaking, and conversation, but it immediately becomes miserable any time it's graded because what's actually being tested is either how well your thoughts align with the teacher's or how well you can memorize a bunch of autistic grammar rules made up 3 centuries ago.
My thoughts exactly, I actually like writing as a hobby as evidenced by my presence here, but the moment I have to worry about being "professional" it sucks all the fun out of it
I’m undergrad for Econ rn, plan to go into Law school after. I did like 8 APs in highschool, and just like you, never studied and did fine. But I find it odd with college, not that it is difficult with how watered down it is, but that it’s so boring that I often struggle to find the urge to even do the busy work that counts for most of your grade in Uni.
I fear that law school will be similar as more and more dumbing down is added to twist the spigot of midwits (ie minorities) into a greater flow for DEI policies. Sadly, my Uni is violently leftists as I am a wagie and couldn’t afford more expensive university even with my decent scholarships. So, given that I expect my first law school lectures to follow the lines of your average episode of the View, I find myself wondering if maybe I shouldn’t waste my time. Much to ponder about!
So far I haven't really noticed law school being dumbed down, but I've only being doing an introductory course online. Real classes start the 12th. I think it may be hard to dumb down though so I have high hopes that it won't be entirely retarded.
Being a computer science major, it’s odd that this concept of “learning about learning” was never really discussed. We just cut the bullshit and got to the curriculum. It focused more on just giving you the content and you have to find a way to remember it. I guess this is because comp sci is more “concrete” of a subject than the humanities.
I’m in Accounting and I got no lectures about how grad school would be different, because for the most part it’s not. This is a major that basically is just memorizing, and besides one communication class and one ethics class it’s start-to-finish lectures. Lucky me!
Posted this from my drafts using the mobile browser version of the app cuz I forgot to post before work and won't be home for a while teehee.
Mr. Knox I can’t tell if I’m a midwit because I literally haven’t read a word of Enlightenment thinkers and have no familiarity or idea about their ideas or if I’m le “I’m ackshually shmart I jusht don’t try” due to my high ACT.
I refuse to take an IQ test, because if it’s lower than expected I’ll be retarded and limit myself, but I fear I may be a high-ish midwit.
Frankly if I had to guess I have a brain that would have been the average college-goer white-collar job caliber brain 80 years ago, but am now considered smart because I’m simply not a retard.
Nothing wrong with being midwit as long as you aren't Reddit about it really
The average student wastes over a year of schooling. The average 115 IQ (what most people would call “high midwit”) wastes a staggering 3-4 years. The average 145 IQ genius could be in college by fourth grade. This is all done for the sake of 90 IQ students who will never remember or use anything past the 7th grade anyways. Public education is unironically the biggest money sink in human history. This is also why so many people think they are special for being told they have a reading level above their grade. It’s because even the average Joe is learning stuff meant to be learnable by a half-retard, and understandably exceeds that. Can you imagine a world, where only 50% of people attend high school, and classroom sizes could be halved? A world where we only have to waste 3-4 days in school a week, and where many people can have private tutors just like the Greeks? And we would have money left over for other things. Think of how much of our lives we could have gotten back, how much of our lives our children can get back. The best part of our lives, at that. But it’s only going to get worse from here, because of the rising tide of color.
School is like slaverey but for gamers
It’s a jobs program that runs off of the anguish of children. It’s like the real life adrenochrome
“Hitlers speeches will continue not being subtitled (only thing ever not subtitled btw) in next years golocaust class”
Oh 🍯… No… Just, no… How can you claim to understand Faustian civilization if you don’t like Calculus? It is the lifeblood of the Faustian extension into the infinite. Calculus is not, like, abstract either. Pretty much everything you do in calc classes can be analogized to the real world.
I’m not sure, personally, if I’m a Faustian mathematically… I think there’s a good case to be made for rational realism. Irrational numbers and the infinite exist in the realm of forms but I don’t know if they can really be called numbers… Maybe I am more Grek in mindset.
I knew you would be upset as soon as I wrote this. I am so sorry my dear Sectionalism. I just cannot find it interesting. It is why I had to change from an astrophysics major...
Ehh, I get it. I like linear algebra better anyways, but I’m better at calculus.
For me personally I think the issue is that it is not abstract enough. Also it is detached from people usually and I think I am a statesman at heart.
Its so fucked up that the peak of achievement in our school system is being able to humble brag (i forgive u) about how little effort it inspired you to output.
It would be demoralizing to the lower iq kids (goyslave feelings arent like ours dw) but there needs to be better access to climbing through classes at the pace of the learner. Being in classes for a year that I knew could be learned within a week or two made my efforts feel completely pointless. I knew that my day would be devoted to meaningless garbage everyday and that my grades would be good enough for college apps with or without studying.
They needed to let me take whatever classes i wanted as long as i passed a test for the pre req material. They needed to let me treat it as a race. The human spirit is competitive
They actually hate kids advancing so much. I recently learned my parents and teacher tried to move me up a grade from 3rd to 4th grade only for me to be denied due to “emotional immaturity.” (I was a literal 8 year old)
Bruh
It's actually the opposite. The constant insistence that men are made equal and that dimwits just need to "study harder!" is a source of major anguish to at least half the American population. Most of the population is meant for simple lives, with clear direction and possibly skilled, but not necessarily educated labor.
The ones I remember being told growing up was that "You'll need to do cursive in middle school onward.", "You won't be able to get away with not studying in hs/university.", or "You'll have more homework next year." Only the last one was true in high school, and that was just maths. It mostly came off as fearmongering to me back then, but I couldn't understand why they would bother. However, I did see a lot of students (almost always women) in my degree freak out/stress over tests that they spent hours studying for, so maybe it was warranted for them.
I'm pretty sure women actually enjoy stress because if you watch female group dynamics they sort of deliberately complicate everything in order to maximize the amount of stress they feel.
Are there any studies on the chemistry of stress in men vs women? Perhaps their stress feels more like the thrill a man feels skydiving or hunting apex predators.
In undergrad computer science and electrical engineering, at least at my school, it operates almost exactly like high school, just way more focused by the time you get past the gen ed classes. I don't think STEM fields are conducive to the socratic method since they are more defined by "natural law" especially at the level you'd be at in undergrad, and it's no surprise to me that I've never been in a class that used it. It's much different debating the different world views and principles of enlightenment thinkers, compared to "debating" how a charge behaves in an electric field. We've pretty much got that down.
Back on point, I heard all that shit you talked about from my early calculus, physics, and engineering communications professors. "Now you're REALLY gonna have to LOCK IN and start creating a wholistic understanding for yourself, not just memorize and regurgitate." That is a complete load of horseshit, the only difference is they have 4 months to teach a subject instead of 8. The lecture > homework > exam structure of the classes hasn't changed, and that fundamentally makes it so you have no time to get a "view from above".
Because of academic integrity, exams don't let you use the resources you'd actually have in a real-world setting. They also test you rigorously over a very specific subset of problems. Because of how important exam grades are, you'd be a fool to do anything but memorize and regurgitate in ~1 month chunks of content.
In my opinion, STEM needs more labs and (solo) projects, where you are expected to throw yourself at an open-ended problem and solve it as best you can. For my computer networking class we had a project that replaced one of our midterms, the prompt was to write a basic peer to peer communication program with extensibility and longevity in mind. This was so much better than any of the other exams and projects (most of which were basically fill in the blank), because it led to a more natural discovery process and for me, made what I learned really stick. Not to mention for software development, this process is pretty much the job.
IDK maybe I went to a shit college.
I agree with a lot of your points (undergrad biomedical engineering). Maybe EECS is different than BME since there is still that memorization/physiology aspect to it, but I have had a class or two (very small number) that actually was taught purely Socratic method. "Flipped" classroom where classtime was purely discussion. Challenging class and my opinion is to teach that way for all of the classes. Could be difficult for math heavy classes like fluids or signals, but overall the SM is conducive to any type of learning, especially anything being applied which is what being an engineer is.
I cant relate too much to the "prepare yourselves" talk from underclassmen courses, but I have definitely seen it in others in my cohort. I agree about the labs and projects. Having to do a junior design paper(s) with a bunch of mumbling idiots who cant even speak english fluently made me want to kms. Even worse when labs are taught to the lowest denominator and there is no true emphasis on reaching full potential or really exploring and delving into a project. Our senior design is a team based and im not looking forward to it. I know that itd be more work alone, but id wager overall itd be better than a groups lol.
Just my thoughts, lmk what u think
I do think SM does have value but like you alluded to later in your post, that depends entirely on the caliber of people you are dealing with. I'd love to be a part of an interesting, generative discussion about the subjects I'm studying, but the likelihood of that happening in a room full of noob EECS people is low and I think this is true across all rigorous STEM subjects. Like I said though, I go to a shit school with a 90+% acceptance rate. Take what I say with a grain of salt. As always, gatekeeping the retards is necessary and in that case I'd be down for SM, but the money dictates that we have to let retards into our field and eventually let them hawk their bullshit on our nice things (See: GNOME desktop environment).
Assuming gatekeeping is off the table, I'd rather listen to one person who knows what they're talking about ramble about their field for a few hours a week as opposed to listening to 30 people who really really don't know what they're talking about and are only speaking to get credit for a few hours a week. I'd prefer if I weren't forced to be dragged down by them and was allowed to work alone too. I know, there are retards in the real-world too. You have to get used to and learn how to deal with them, but that's what public school was for. I don't see how forcing me into a bona fide middle-management role (Every. Fucking. Time.) is enriching the nitty-gritty education I'm paying to receive.
Lastly, I agree with everything you said about labs. The fact that they're more often than not done entirely by TA's is ridiculous. In my experience, all they know how to do is give you a schematic and some electrical components and say "Look! you just demonstrated that thing you learned 3 weeks ago!". One of my physics labs' TA couldn't even articulate a derivative in the context of inductors and capacitors with AC signals. Ridiculous.
“It's much different debating the different world views and principles of enlightenment thinkers, compared to "debating" how a charge behaves in an electric field.” This is the most important and correct statement in your entire reply. The argumentative side of things only really exists in computational theory, but even still that’s pretty organized already. All that leaves left for students to really test their skills is projects.
Labs are definitely the most important aspect of a computer science major’s degree. If you want to go into SWE or any kind of development, it’s important to practice the cycle of going from an open-ended problem to an implemented solution.
ohhhhh ohh dunkey i need cheezcake i need chescek dunkey
I support homeschooling. Homeschooled co-ops generally have much more integration and flexibility.
Biology major, things were basically the same. Lots of professors justifying their positions and wages by saying they teach you some unique synthesized package rather than raw facts and statistics. Which is sometimes true, and the conceptual classes were often by favorite ones. But there was a lot of raw memorization. Organic chemistry was half learning new concepts and mechanisms, and half raw memorization of different kinds of reactions. And I went to the best school in the state.
I never went to high school, so I couldn’t tell you what it was like, but throughout intermediate and middle school they definitely always hit everyone with the “it’ll get way harder real soon! You’ll have to actually try next year!” In their defense, middle school was vey academically difficult. But that’s because I had one first year teacher who had no idea what she was doing, one last year teacher who expected way too much from her students (and gave 3000-level college history assignments to 7th graders, I am not at all exaggerating), and one last year teacher who uniquely hated me and intentionally tried to trip me up and make me get things wrong.
Uh, basically, the point is: public school sucks!!!
The pitiful ease of highschool and gen-ed college has certainly hurt my study habits and discipline as a whole. I have had all A’s and B’s my entire life, one C in my first semester of college, due to a grudge by the professor I suspect but still don’t know for sure.
Anyway, I am getting to the point where I’m starting to find some of my classes difficult, or at least more difficult than easy enough to do well without applying myself. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to handle it. I find myself overwhelmed with papers and due dates since I’ve had no experience with this level of work. Very sad!
I've noticed this as well, though I'm definitely a STEM guy. I despise humanities for reasons that basically boil down to the fact that you can't reverse engineer questions that aren't math, so you have to actually remember things. The teachers always tell you things along the lines of "you can't do it like that in X" when in fact you absolutely can and it will work just as well as it did in elementary school. I don't take pride in this exactly but i never took notes or really even formally studied for anything outside of class, because i very rarely scored anything below an 80%, and i didn't want to do those things anyway.
I love philosophy, writing, reading, public speaking, and conversation, but it immediately becomes miserable any time it's graded because what's actually being tested is either how well your thoughts align with the teacher's or how well you can memorize a bunch of autistic grammar rules made up 3 centuries ago.
My thoughts exactly, I actually like writing as a hobby as evidenced by my presence here, but the moment I have to worry about being "professional" it sucks all the fun out of it
I’m undergrad for Econ rn, plan to go into Law school after. I did like 8 APs in highschool, and just like you, never studied and did fine. But I find it odd with college, not that it is difficult with how watered down it is, but that it’s so boring that I often struggle to find the urge to even do the busy work that counts for most of your grade in Uni.
I fear that law school will be similar as more and more dumbing down is added to twist the spigot of midwits (ie minorities) into a greater flow for DEI policies. Sadly, my Uni is violently leftists as I am a wagie and couldn’t afford more expensive university even with my decent scholarships. So, given that I expect my first law school lectures to follow the lines of your average episode of the View, I find myself wondering if maybe I shouldn’t waste my time. Much to ponder about!
So far I haven't really noticed law school being dumbed down, but I've only being doing an introductory course online. Real classes start the 12th. I think it may be hard to dumb down though so I have high hopes that it won't be entirely retarded.
Being a computer science major, it’s odd that this concept of “learning about learning” was never really discussed. We just cut the bullshit and got to the curriculum. It focused more on just giving you the content and you have to find a way to remember it. I guess this is because comp sci is more “concrete” of a subject than the humanities.
I’m in Accounting and I got no lectures about how grad school would be different, because for the most part it’s not. This is a major that basically is just memorizing, and besides one communication class and one ethics class it’s start-to-finish lectures. Lucky me!
Very interesting observation. I’ve never considered this before.