To those who believe that learning is its own end, like me, I don’t see any problems with this.
that’s low key why universal basic income would be good. it’s somewhat important to have people like that who just want to preserve and teach history and they shouldn’t necessarily be forced to find an industrialized application for that in order to have a decent life.
I don’t think UBI helps with this much. This might be controversial to hear, but UBI solves different problems related to fulfilling needs and doesn’t solve problems with incentives inherently. So if studying history is on par with doing no work at all, then a history major will only be able to afford the new ground floor of our society.
What would probably be better is to fix our grant systems and provide destinations for studying history. So UBI allows anyone to study it but grants still encourage people to do so and gives them a destination to work towards.
If you’re teaching history, that’s already provided for cuz you can paid for teaching. UBI would just enable the case of a person learning things without then teaching those things to others or doing anything of value with the knowledge.
I don’t see a problem with it if the person can afford it.
But if you’re a young person starting with nothing, starting your life in tremendous debt that won’t increase your earnings is going to be rough. It doesn’t make you a bad person or anything, but if you went and got a a job and read about Egypt in the library, you might be a much happier, less stressed person in 5-10 years.
Easy solution: be born in the civilized world. Higher education is pretty much free, now!
This isn’t one of those pyramid schemes you’ve heard about. We use a different model - the trapezoid!
There’s a joke in the industry:
Q: Whats the first thing an egyptology major says when he graduates?
A: You want fries with that?
Back when I was a philosophy grad student there was a joke going around:
The head of the chemisty department goes to the dean and asks for money to buy some new lab equipment. The dean shakes his head and goes, “No, you are asking too much here. Why can’t you be more like the physics department? All they ask for in their budget is pencil and rubbers… or better yet the philosophy department - all they ask for is pencils!”
Lol, a society economic system with absolutely no respect for knowledge or humanity anything that offers no immediate shareholder value.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
A phrase that would bounce around when I was in grad school.
I find this phrase rather demeaning. I am a damn good Instructional Designer, but I would eventually like to teach this to others.
Yeah that’s so out of context that it speaks to the intelligence of students repeating it. It came from the old trades and people retiring into teaching after they literally couldn’t do it anymore, not that they weren’t once capable. Very similar to the “Bad apples” quote.
Hey that’s what I did with philosophy. It’s great to adjunct for three universities and get no health care. Definitely worth it!!
Maybe philosophy is so needlessly wordy and impenetrable because it’s just people that weren’t smart enough to see it as a dead end trained enough to make it seem esoteric and meaningful, to keep their heads just above water and their hands on books instead of chef knives.
Maybe philosophy is so needlessly wordy and impenetrable because it’s just people that weren’t smart enough to see it as a dead end
Quite a few philosophy undergrounds go on to law, business, and marketing, because the underlying concepts tie so well together. Lots of philosophy grad CEOs and heads of Law Firms. Some of the richest people in the country majored in philosophy.
Egyptology is significantly more niche. But it should be noted that we used to have a significant amount of money going towards archeological research. That’s money state governments and private institutions have pulled back fairly recently.
We get to play this game with a lot of niche professions. There’s a huge demand from back in, say, the 80s or 90s and then a huge structural shift to stop doing astrological research or civil engineering or sociology or education or whatever. All the money gets dumped into state subsidies for bitcoin miners. And then we call the folks who matriculated through those real professions “stupid” while smugly insisting the future is in digitally jerking ourselves off.
While there are massive important fallacies to explore in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of “moral objectivism” in Atlas Shrugged, I did agree with the her implication when she wrote how John Galt, Francisco D’Anconia, and Ragnar Daneskjold (the most “capable” men in her fictional world) double-majored in Philosophy and Physics.
As somebody with a PhD in the subject, there’s some truth to this. Ever read Derrida or Deleuze? Some of thise continental guys are especially full of shit.
I still love the subject, though. When else do you get to just think about the big topics and work through fun arguments about them? We’d all be poorer if nobody did that.
Naw, all that matters is making money. Don’t bother thinking about big, important things. Just know your place, keep your head down, and crank out $$$.
what is a pyramid but a temporarily embarrassed disk