I think one of the difficulties here is that you're probably writing to mostly those who do and have done a lot of self-education. For them, lectures tend to be boring.
I taught for about 30 years in, let's say politely, less selective colleges and universities than our host.
Many of my students appeared, even the bright ones, unaware of even the possibility of self-education. If the materail wasn't put before them in digestible chunks chosen by the professor they had no idea of what to do,
One of my favorite comments on RateYourProfessor was "He assigns this huge text, only covers about half of it in class, gives no study guides, then on the tests expects you to know everything." It was a text to an intoductory course in American Government.
I still wear an analog wrist watch. I’m not interested it getting a smart watch or fitness tracker. My smartphone (which I use far more frequently than I like to admit) sits in my pocket when I’m not using it. My watch is a far more convenient device to know the time than my phone is. It may be an archaic “unitasker” but I like it.
I stopped wearing a wrist watch once I knew I would always be carrying a phone that told the time. Yes, the phone is usually in my pocket and I have to get it out to look at it, but that's a pretty quick operation, and now there's one less thing I have to remember to bring with me whenever I go somewhere.
I learned to appreciate ship's bells in the Navy, found my mind picked them up subconsciously and I was always aware of the time within half an hour. (Bells ring in a four hour cycle; one pair at 1, 5, etc; two at 2, three at 3, and four at 4; with the final pair replaced by a single half an hour before. ding-ding, ding-ding, ding is 2:30, 6:30, and 10:30.)
So I found an app for my phone and wrote one for my computers that dings out ships bells quietly enough that almost no one else hears it, but my brain still picks them up most of the time.
I had a watch in the navy, and one afterwards with a calculator, but I don't remember the last time I had one. I do have a pocket watch inherited from a great grandfather, but I never wear it.
Lectures habituate one to thinking seriously while physically around other people. This has a lot of different significant effects. It fixes or filters out people with severe agoraphobia or other such limitations. It teaches what acting serious and attentive look like. It teaches time management. When I was in University I always made a point to sit in subject matter specific common areas because overhearing the conversations of other students is a huge positive externality, but you can also ask students things, or answer questions from other students. In particular, this was the most effective way to find out about common career trajectories, internships and job fairs, and other such things not contained in lectures or textbooks.
Yudkowsky has said of obsolete social technologies that our excuses for them are rationalizations and that if we built directly for the market for those excuses what we would build would be quite different. I don't know what an optimized learning system would look like, but in a world in which almost nothing is optimized, learning to deal with suboptimality is a universal skill, it's impossible to improve any one thing assymetrically without failing to prepare people for this skill in other domains, and silly traditions just point to rational behavior in the absence of comprehensive coordination capacity.
I was seriously asking. I think the notion of "obsolete" is more complicated than it seems at first, to the point where I haven't completely settled on a definition of it in my mind despite having thought about it a lot. So I was wondering what others have come up with.
“… Colleges may be becoming obsolete as places to learn but they are an ideal environment for finding a mate and mate search is one of the chief activities of young adults.”
You may be correct about this - probably are - but far fewer young people are doing this than used to, as marriages are occurring significantly later amongst the college educated today versus 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago.
And young males in way too many colleges, especially young white males, have frequently discovered how dangerous 'dating' is for them in an institution where they and their "toxic masculinity" (i.e. just about any non-feminized behavior) are regarded as the worst enemies of current society and culture.
Before I retired I noticed fewer and fewr observations of male-female 'couples' anywhere on campus or the local hangouts. Young white males tend to be extremely cautious about dating.
Just as smartphones absorb the functionality of multiple physical tools into a single device, digital technology could theoretically allow citizens to manage society without traditional state apparatuses.
The "App-ification" of the State:
Just as a smartphone replaces cameras, GPS devices, and physical wallets, decentralization and blockchain technology could replace centralized government functions. Peer-to-peer contracts, digital voting, and open-source networks could manage public goods directly.
Centralization is Outdated:
Physical libraries full of books represent a centralized, gatekept way to access information in the internet era. Similarly, physical capitols, courthouses, and massive bureaucracies are seen by critics as clunky, slow "gatekeepers" that are no longer necessary in a hyper-connected, digital society.
Efficiency and Friction:
Governments often require citizens to navigate slow, paper-heavy systems. If you can update your driver's license, vote on legislation, pay taxes, and access vital services with a few taps on an app (similar to global "super-apps"), the traditional, geographically-bound state begins to feel like a relic of the industrial age.
I suppose one reason for the continued popularity of mass lectures is laziness. Students may attend such lectures in the hope of obtaining all the essential knowledge about a subject while avoiding to read much of the required literature.
“Buildings called libraries can still be useful as places for students to study or children to play but for their old function they are obsolete, fossils.” I live in the county seat of the reddest, most rural county in Maryland. Population around 4,000. Our town library has gone through the same transformations as everywhere else and forced to find new ways to be relevant to us, and they made one decision that I found fascinating. They devoted themselves to collected and preserving every thing they could — books, periodicals, photographs, recordings — about the history of the town and its inhabitants, and provided a large space where anyone can go examine and study it. (That and the kids can go there after school to play Minecraft. 😂)
I completely agree with Mr. Friedman. Indeed, many things that were 'irreplaceable' in the past have become obsolete today, true 'fossils.' However, regarding books specifically, although you are right about the infinite digital archive available on the internet, many old, limited-run works by serious philosophers and high-level thinkers end up lost to time because they are not digitized. Hence the critical importance of libraries and personal collections in preserving these rarities. Furthermore, viewing the physical book as a 'fossil' is rather melancholy. Physical contact with paper plays an irreplaceable cognitive, motor, and mental role in the intellectual and sensory development of children, youth, and adults. Frankly, it is sad to think that future generations, following your observation, might view the physical book merely as something 'old' or 'archaic,' ignoring that the experience of touching a page and feeling its texture offers a cognitive depth far superior to just reading letters on a computer screen.
I have heard that neckties are one of various men's garments whose original purpose, or at least partial original purpose, was to show that it would be relatively difficult for the wearer to quickly undress, and that this served as a kind of chivalrous gesture by putting women at ease. Relatedly, I have heard that men's doffing of their hat to women evolved as a gesture saying "Don't worry, I'm not really so tall and imposing, see? My head actually ends here."
I don't know if these explanations are accurate, and they do seem a bit ridiculous, but I also appreciate their logic.
Still, I note that neckties do serve as an obstacle to undressing, and some women may be uneasy by the prospect of a man being able to quickly undress, so on some level, in some instances, the necktie might retain this function.
Actually, you don't need the chivalry aspect at all; much formal attire basically shows "this took extra time and care to put on", because it also requires extra time and care to take off. Doing all this unnecessary putting on and taking off is a way of signaling solemness and taking seriously the event one is wearing the formal garb to.
Neckties are not an obstacle to undressing; it only takes a few seconds. Much faster than unbuttoning a shirt. And if the danger is rape, a necktie can be used to tie a woman up or choke her, so wearing it signals more danger, not less.
I don't usually think of neckties as mutually exclusive with buttoned-up shirts, except maybe for Donkey Kong. Generally a necktie is an add-on, thus an extra thing to take off, even if that only takes 2 seconds. This leaves room for the possibility that the necktie could be meaningful just as a symbol.
I am not confident in this origin story anyway, merely appreciated its logic. I like what you said about surviving on literary merit.
I used to use a suit and tie to stand out in work meetings. It worked well, at least when I was younger. Of course this was when most colleagues were still at least wearing dark trousers and a white shirt, albeit open at the neck - There is as sartorial "Overton Window" and, whilst it's good to be at one end of it, you can go too far - I wouldn't have worn it if my colleagues were in jeans and tee shirts.
Lecturing at university likely has benefits for the lecturer. When speaking to an audience, if you pay attention, you can learn a lot.
See when they are engaged, see when they're not. See when they smile, look confused etc.
Then if they want to create a talk to give at conferencea or decide which topic to write a mass market book on, they have more info than they could have gathered from books. Even if they don't have commercial interest in the information, they will at least have a better idea of how to explain their area of expertise at a dinner party.
The benefit to the student is that they only see the material that the lecturer is likely to put on the exam. After all, most people are in university for the credential, not the education.
I completely agree with Mr. Friedman. Indeed, many things that were 'irreplaceable' in the past have become obsolete today, true 'fossils.' However, regarding books specifically, although you are right about the infinite digital archive available on the internet, many old, limited-run works by serious philosophers and high-level thinkers end up lost to time because they are not digitized. Hence the critical importance of libraries and personal collections in preserving these rarities. Furthermore, viewing the physical book as a 'fossil' is rather melancholy. Physical contact with paper plays an irreplaceable cognitive, motor, and mental role in the intellectual and sensory development of children, youth, and adults. Frankly, it is sad to think that future generations, following your observation, might view the physical book merely as something 'old' or 'archaic,' ignoring that the experience of touching a page and feeling its texture offers a cognitive depth far superior to just reading letters on a computer screen.
I agree with most of this. I rarely wear a tie and no longer wear a watch. Although I find it a bit disconcerting that most of the clocks have disappeared that used to appear everywhere; I feel there’s something missing.
Lectures used to put me to sleep, I had real difficulty in keeping my eyes open. I stopped attending them on graduating from university in 1975. (Actually, I stopped attending most of them before that.)
I haunted libraries as a child, because they were free and I had no money. I no longer use them, in particular because I live in Spain and also because I prefer e-books.
If you take casual snapshots and do little or no post-processing of them, I suppose a camera may have little advantage over a phone; and a phone is smaller and lighter. I continue to use a digital camera for all my photos, because I take the raw file (not the JPEG) from the camera and process it on my computer. A camera raw file contains 14 bits of data per color per pixel, whereas I think phones offer you only JPEG files, containing 8 bits per color per pixel. I can do much more useful processing with 14 bits than with 8.
Also, camera lenses and sensors are technically better than those in phones, but maybe only nerds can tell the difference.
I wore a necktie when I gave Vernor Vinge his lifetime achievement award for the Libertarian Futurist Society. It had a Warner Brothers cartoon print, with Bugs front and center, as a little nod to the Rabbit in Rainbows End. The next time I wore a tie was when C and I got married, after 31 years of cohabitation (to the day); the point there was to mark this as a serious business agreement (after all, it had financial consequences) between two adults. (For similar reasons, we used a cut down version of the Book of Common Prayer rather than writing our own vows.)
I have cards from two libraries: the city library (free) and the state university library (less than $100 annually). Economically both are much better deals than buying all those books would be (even in ebook versions, which aren't that cheap). And the university library, at least, gives me access to some much older books that aren't readily available in print OR ebook. Finally, for me at least, there's a sensory pleasure in holding a physical book in my hands that just isn't there in looking at a screen.
I wear an analog wristwatch. It's much handier to turn my wrist than it is to fish my phone out of my pants pocket, or go into another room to look at it. And it's easier to see the numbers on my watch than to read the tiny digits in the corner of my iPhone screen, which don't allow for aging eyes.
I can't rationalize lectures, though. If I want to learn something I look for a book. I don't think I've ever listened to a podcast; I might have watched one or two online videos, but they don't seem to have much substance compared to a printed page.
I think one of the difficulties here is that you're probably writing to mostly those who do and have done a lot of self-education. For them, lectures tend to be boring.
I taught for about 30 years in, let's say politely, less selective colleges and universities than our host.
Many of my students appeared, even the bright ones, unaware of even the possibility of self-education. If the materail wasn't put before them in digestible chunks chosen by the professor they had no idea of what to do,
One of my favorite comments on RateYourProfessor was "He assigns this huge text, only covers about half of it in class, gives no study guides, then on the tests expects you to know everything." It was a text to an intoductory course in American Government.
Yes. A huge part of the value add of teaching is forcing you to pay attention. This is economically irrational but cry about it
I still wear an analog wrist watch. I’m not interested it getting a smart watch or fitness tracker. My smartphone (which I use far more frequently than I like to admit) sits in my pocket when I’m not using it. My watch is a far more convenient device to know the time than my phone is. It may be an archaic “unitasker” but I like it.
I stopped wearing a wrist watch once I knew I would always be carrying a phone that told the time. Yes, the phone is usually in my pocket and I have to get it out to look at it, but that's a pretty quick operation, and now there's one less thing I have to remember to bring with me whenever I go somewhere.
I learned to appreciate ship's bells in the Navy, found my mind picked them up subconsciously and I was always aware of the time within half an hour. (Bells ring in a four hour cycle; one pair at 1, 5, etc; two at 2, three at 3, and four at 4; with the final pair replaced by a single half an hour before. ding-ding, ding-ding, ding is 2:30, 6:30, and 10:30.)
So I found an app for my phone and wrote one for my computers that dings out ships bells quietly enough that almost no one else hears it, but my brain still picks them up most of the time.
I had a watch in the navy, and one afterwards with a calculator, but I don't remember the last time I had one. I do have a pocket watch inherited from a great grandfather, but I never wear it.
Lectures habituate one to thinking seriously while physically around other people. This has a lot of different significant effects. It fixes or filters out people with severe agoraphobia or other such limitations. It teaches what acting serious and attentive look like. It teaches time management. When I was in University I always made a point to sit in subject matter specific common areas because overhearing the conversations of other students is a huge positive externality, but you can also ask students things, or answer questions from other students. In particular, this was the most effective way to find out about common career trajectories, internships and job fairs, and other such things not contained in lectures or textbooks.
Charlie Munger donated money to build student accomodation at a university, on the condition that his designs for the accomodation would be used.
He made it an undesirable place to spend free time, with the idea that the best things students can do is go out and fraternize with other students.
I suspect he's probably right.
(I don't remember where I heard this story, if I have it completely wrong please correct me)
Yudkowsky has said of obsolete social technologies that our excuses for them are rationalizations and that if we built directly for the market for those excuses what we would build would be quite different. I don't know what an optimized learning system would look like, but in a world in which almost nothing is optimized, learning to deal with suboptimality is a universal skill, it's impossible to improve any one thing assymetrically without failing to prepare people for this skill in other domains, and silly traditions just point to rational behavior in the absence of comprehensive coordination capacity.
Use of archaic technologies is sometimes a formal marker of seriousness. Consider such things as oaths of office and spoken testimony in trials.
Will you define "obsolete technology" please?
No
Please, he said please. Respond with No, thank you, please. It would please me, thank you very much.
I was seriously asking. I think the notion of "obsolete" is more complicated than it seems at first, to the point where I haven't completely settled on a definition of it in my mind despite having thought about it a lot. So I was wondering what others have come up with.
Wonderful! That triggered nostalgia in me.
Maybe 10+ years ago, when I was still teaching, the only people wearing jacket and tie were the Black security guards and me.
I still wear an analogue wristwatch. Without it, I feel naked.
A smart phone is like a flush toilet. It's extraordinarily useful to have one, but one doesn't want to be sitting on it all day.
“… Colleges may be becoming obsolete as places to learn but they are an ideal environment for finding a mate and mate search is one of the chief activities of young adults.”
You may be correct about this - probably are - but far fewer young people are doing this than used to, as marriages are occurring significantly later amongst the college educated today versus 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago.
And young males in way too many colleges, especially young white males, have frequently discovered how dangerous 'dating' is for them in an institution where they and their "toxic masculinity" (i.e. just about any non-feminized behavior) are regarded as the worst enemies of current society and culture.
Before I retired I noticed fewer and fewr observations of male-female 'couples' anywhere on campus or the local hangouts. Young white males tend to be extremely cautious about dating.
The State is a Fossil
Just as smartphones absorb the functionality of multiple physical tools into a single device, digital technology could theoretically allow citizens to manage society without traditional state apparatuses.
The "App-ification" of the State:
Just as a smartphone replaces cameras, GPS devices, and physical wallets, decentralization and blockchain technology could replace centralized government functions. Peer-to-peer contracts, digital voting, and open-source networks could manage public goods directly.
Centralization is Outdated:
Physical libraries full of books represent a centralized, gatekept way to access information in the internet era. Similarly, physical capitols, courthouses, and massive bureaucracies are seen by critics as clunky, slow "gatekeepers" that are no longer necessary in a hyper-connected, digital society.
Efficiency and Friction:
Governments often require citizens to navigate slow, paper-heavy systems. If you can update your driver's license, vote on legislation, pay taxes, and access vital services with a few taps on an app (similar to global "super-apps"), the traditional, geographically-bound state begins to feel like a relic of the industrial age.
Somebody has to be supreme decider over a territory.
> GPS devices
Well GPS satellites are still maintained by the state.
Not the ones Musk owns.
I suppose one reason for the continued popularity of mass lectures is laziness. Students may attend such lectures in the hope of obtaining all the essential knowledge about a subject while avoiding to read much of the required literature.
“Buildings called libraries can still be useful as places for students to study or children to play but for their old function they are obsolete, fossils.” I live in the county seat of the reddest, most rural county in Maryland. Population around 4,000. Our town library has gone through the same transformations as everywhere else and forced to find new ways to be relevant to us, and they made one decision that I found fascinating. They devoted themselves to collected and preserving every thing they could — books, periodicals, photographs, recordings — about the history of the town and its inhabitants, and provided a large space where anyone can go examine and study it. (That and the kids can go there after school to play Minecraft. 😂)
You are describing a museum, not a new use for a library.
Actually what I’m describing is a miniature, satellite, niche-interest Library of Congress.
I completely agree with Mr. Friedman. Indeed, many things that were 'irreplaceable' in the past have become obsolete today, true 'fossils.' However, regarding books specifically, although you are right about the infinite digital archive available on the internet, many old, limited-run works by serious philosophers and high-level thinkers end up lost to time because they are not digitized. Hence the critical importance of libraries and personal collections in preserving these rarities. Furthermore, viewing the physical book as a 'fossil' is rather melancholy. Physical contact with paper plays an irreplaceable cognitive, motor, and mental role in the intellectual and sensory development of children, youth, and adults. Frankly, it is sad to think that future generations, following your observation, might view the physical book merely as something 'old' or 'archaic,' ignoring that the experience of touching a page and feeling its texture offers a cognitive depth far superior to just reading letters on a computer screen.
I have heard that neckties are one of various men's garments whose original purpose, or at least partial original purpose, was to show that it would be relatively difficult for the wearer to quickly undress, and that this served as a kind of chivalrous gesture by putting women at ease. Relatedly, I have heard that men's doffing of their hat to women evolved as a gesture saying "Don't worry, I'm not really so tall and imposing, see? My head actually ends here."
I don't know if these explanations are accurate, and they do seem a bit ridiculous, but I also appreciate their logic.
I don't know either. One of my rules is to distrust any historical anecdote that makes a good enough story to have survived on its literary merit.
Still, I note that neckties do serve as an obstacle to undressing, and some women may be uneasy by the prospect of a man being able to quickly undress, so on some level, in some instances, the necktie might retain this function.
Actually, you don't need the chivalry aspect at all; much formal attire basically shows "this took extra time and care to put on", because it also requires extra time and care to take off. Doing all this unnecessary putting on and taking off is a way of signaling solemness and taking seriously the event one is wearing the formal garb to.
Neckties are not an obstacle to undressing; it only takes a few seconds. Much faster than unbuttoning a shirt. And if the danger is rape, a necktie can be used to tie a woman up or choke her, so wearing it signals more danger, not less.
I don't usually think of neckties as mutually exclusive with buttoned-up shirts, except maybe for Donkey Kong. Generally a necktie is an add-on, thus an extra thing to take off, even if that only takes 2 seconds. This leaves room for the possibility that the necktie could be meaningful just as a symbol.
I am not confident in this origin story anyway, merely appreciated its logic. I like what you said about surviving on literary merit.
I used to use a suit and tie to stand out in work meetings. It worked well, at least when I was younger. Of course this was when most colleagues were still at least wearing dark trousers and a white shirt, albeit open at the neck - There is as sartorial "Overton Window" and, whilst it's good to be at one end of it, you can go too far - I wouldn't have worn it if my colleagues were in jeans and tee shirts.
Lecturing at university likely has benefits for the lecturer. When speaking to an audience, if you pay attention, you can learn a lot.
See when they are engaged, see when they're not. See when they smile, look confused etc.
Then if they want to create a talk to give at conferencea or decide which topic to write a mass market book on, they have more info than they could have gathered from books. Even if they don't have commercial interest in the information, they will at least have a better idea of how to explain their area of expertise at a dinner party.
The benefit to the student is that they only see the material that the lecturer is likely to put on the exam. After all, most people are in university for the credential, not the education.
I completely agree with Mr. Friedman. Indeed, many things that were 'irreplaceable' in the past have become obsolete today, true 'fossils.' However, regarding books specifically, although you are right about the infinite digital archive available on the internet, many old, limited-run works by serious philosophers and high-level thinkers end up lost to time because they are not digitized. Hence the critical importance of libraries and personal collections in preserving these rarities. Furthermore, viewing the physical book as a 'fossil' is rather melancholy. Physical contact with paper plays an irreplaceable cognitive, motor, and mental role in the intellectual and sensory development of children, youth, and adults. Frankly, it is sad to think that future generations, following your observation, might view the physical book merely as something 'old' or 'archaic,' ignoring that the experience of touching a page and feeling its texture offers a cognitive depth far superior to just reading letters on a computer screen.
I agree with most of this. I rarely wear a tie and no longer wear a watch. Although I find it a bit disconcerting that most of the clocks have disappeared that used to appear everywhere; I feel there’s something missing.
Lectures used to put me to sleep, I had real difficulty in keeping my eyes open. I stopped attending them on graduating from university in 1975. (Actually, I stopped attending most of them before that.)
I haunted libraries as a child, because they were free and I had no money. I no longer use them, in particular because I live in Spain and also because I prefer e-books.
If you take casual snapshots and do little or no post-processing of them, I suppose a camera may have little advantage over a phone; and a phone is smaller and lighter. I continue to use a digital camera for all my photos, because I take the raw file (not the JPEG) from the camera and process it on my computer. A camera raw file contains 14 bits of data per color per pixel, whereas I think phones offer you only JPEG files, containing 8 bits per color per pixel. I can do much more useful processing with 14 bits than with 8.
Also, camera lenses and sensors are technically better than those in phones, but maybe only nerds can tell the difference.
I asked a photographer and that is what she said.
I wore a necktie when I gave Vernor Vinge his lifetime achievement award for the Libertarian Futurist Society. It had a Warner Brothers cartoon print, with Bugs front and center, as a little nod to the Rabbit in Rainbows End. The next time I wore a tie was when C and I got married, after 31 years of cohabitation (to the day); the point there was to mark this as a serious business agreement (after all, it had financial consequences) between two adults. (For similar reasons, we used a cut down version of the Book of Common Prayer rather than writing our own vows.)
I have cards from two libraries: the city library (free) and the state university library (less than $100 annually). Economically both are much better deals than buying all those books would be (even in ebook versions, which aren't that cheap). And the university library, at least, gives me access to some much older books that aren't readily available in print OR ebook. Finally, for me at least, there's a sensory pleasure in holding a physical book in my hands that just isn't there in looking at a screen.
I wear an analog wristwatch. It's much handier to turn my wrist than it is to fish my phone out of my pants pocket, or go into another room to look at it. And it's easier to see the numbers on my watch than to read the tiny digits in the corner of my iPhone screen, which don't allow for aging eyes.
I can't rationalize lectures, though. If I want to learn something I look for a book. I don't think I've ever listened to a podcast; I might have watched one or two online videos, but they don't seem to have much substance compared to a printed page.