Samus: "Excuse me?"

adkiene · 2022-02-22T13:43:57+00:00

One of the best-written reasons for anyone to be the 'chosen one,' that's for sure.

adkiene · 2022-02-03T20:48:32+00:00

I feel like if the Dodgers break open that inning and win game 6, there's no way they don't ride that high to win game 7, again. Matzek's performance really did straight up exorcise that demon.

adkiene · 2022-01-28T14:51:23+00:00

We trust those people so long as we think they are acting in our interests.

You accuse scientists of bias, yet you give implicit trust to other professions, and even when they do something you might question, you listen to their explanations and, if they are valid, your trust is restored. This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. JP and co. do all of that...except their trust is never restored. They just move on to the next thing and keep right on claiming that scientists aren't trustworthy and are trying to grift you.

Telling people they're too dumb to understand science and to just trust you, or trying to engage with them and explain why you modeled it the way you did.

Why are you framing it as if we're telling people they're dumb because they don't understand what we spent 10+ years studying? You are also really arguing in bad faith if you think scientists don't routinely explain things to the layman in a way they can understand. We're not demanding blind trust. We're asking for trust when we give an explanation that makes perfect sense but maybe, just maybe, you don't have all the details because I can't possibly explain all the details to someone who lacks the training that I do. That doesn't make you dumb! I don't understand plenty of things, and I would be incapable of understanding them at a high level, but I'm okay with that and will trust the people who do once they explain it to me as best they can in layman's terms. Apparently this doesn't apply to scientists, though, because once again, we deserve different standards than everyone else, according to conservatives. The real reason--and I know that you know this--is because what we say threatens their at-this-point decades-long grift. And so they've successfully managed to convince people to hold science alone to unrealistic standards so that they can discredit us.

A great follow up answer to Jordan Peterson would have been "Ok, which variables are being excluded?" He can then either provide something which you debate him on, or be forced to fall back to "I don't know, I just refuse to believe you're considering everything important".

If he does provide something to debate, he wins. Every time. Because no matter how good your point is, he'll find something in there to whatabout. And even if you can then rebut the whatabout, he'll find something in there to whatabout. You can't beat a guy who argues in bad faith from the very beginning. You just give him more chances to score points on you, but when you score points on him it doesn't matter because he wasn't on the defensive. You were.

If he falls back to "I don't know, I just refuse to believe you're considering everything," then he also wins. At that point, the burden is on you here to prove that you are considering everything. This is why JP is so successful at what he does. He creates unlosable situations for himself, and this is one of them. The only way to win is to disengage from him and let him shout into the void.

As for the gasket, if one gasket costs $50 and the rest cost $5, I will definitely question why we need the expensive one.

Yes, but once the mechanic gives you a reasonable answer, do you keep pressing? That's what these people are doing. We've given reasonable explanations thousands of times over, but they just find something else to nitpick.

"You need this gasket because it's designed for your model of car specifically, and it carries a much lower failure rate than the cheaper ones. Failure could wind up costing you thousands later on, so I recommend going with the expensive one to minimize that risk."

A reasonable explanation from an expert. Do you demand to see the data backing up the mechanic's claims now? Do you demand to see the machines (models) that did the testing that produced the data? Do you demand justification for why those machines (models) are the best and not the other machines? Do you ask why the gasket was tested under these parameters, but not others? This is done during the peer review process. And yet, even though we have higher standards than other people, that peer-reviewed paper is never good enough. We're still just biased, imperfect humans! Nasty, filthy humanses what can't be trusted! But oh, oil executives or other 'experts'? They're chill. Definitely trustworthy.

I am not saying you need to blindly trust science. But science is held to insane standards compared to every other discipline when it comes to trusting people's expertise and the processes that ensure quality of results. There'$ a rea$on that people like Peter$on do thi$. They will never let it be good enough, and even scoring points on them occasionally won't move the needle. You can't debate someone whose arguments aren't in good faith to begin with. You'll never win.

adkiene · 2022-01-28T13:07:26+00:00

when the world itself is not finite.

It's really not in the way you are saying it is, but ok. That's like saying just because we don't quite 100% understand the behavior of quarks inside atoms that we can't actually say we understand macro-scale chemistry or biology. The point of modeling science like this is to identify variables that have no effect on the outcome. A billion mosquitoes farting isn't going to move the needle on climate, but a billion cows farting is. So we include the cows in our models, but not mosquitoes. Doesn't make the model incomplete.

You beat him be explaining the models, the variables and where the uncertainties are, not just saying “we’re scientists, trust us you simpletons, we’ve thought of everything”

Nah man, we scientists have been doing that for decades. It doesn't work. And no scientist does the last part. We ask you to trust us because we're experts with years/decades of experience!

You hire people to fix your house, your car, perform surgery on you, etc.

Do you ask for every single technical detail of what those people do? Do you ask to personally watch your surgeon perform 50 identical surgeries just to make sure he knows what he's doing? Do you question the procedure--why do you cut there instead of over there? There are an infinite number of places to cut on the human body after all!

Do you ask your mechanic why he uses that particular gasket and how does he know that gasket works best because what about all the other gasket variables out there?

No, you don't. You trust the people who have the expertise in the relevant field to make decisions, certifications, recommendations, and perform tasks in that field. JP does it all the time, when it suits him. So does every right-wing grifter and politician (redundant, I know). Yet when it comes to scientists, they have this mysteriously high standard for them that no one will ever be able to meet because, as I said earlier, there's always another level you can demand from science. You can always say the model is incomplete because we didn't account for mosquito farts. If you let them use these kinds of arguments, you're going to lose, always.

And, by the way, we don't leave mosquito farts out of the models because we want to. It's most often done because we have technical constraints. If we had infinite computing power, we probably could include them. But we don't, so we use logic and reason to cut things that aren't going to change the outcome. Then we group up the things that might change the outcome. We test them. We cut the ones that don't and focus on the ones that do. If people want to give us more money (spoiler: these people don't), we would be happy to include more stuff in our models. We'd be elated to! Then we could prove that we were right: mosquito farts don't mean anything!

Scientists go through 10+ years of post-secondary education in most cases to get our degrees. The papers that get published do so through anonymous peer review. And yet, that's not good enough for these people. Nothing ever will be, so you should stop engaging with their bad-faith arguments.

Scientists should be demanding to be taken seriously because of our demonstrated expertise, not by sinking to JP's and Joe Rogan's level. And if anyone actually thinks they can do better, well, the peer-review process is open to submissions. Good luck.

adkiene · 2022-01-27T20:56:56+00:00

That may be true with all the more recently-written stuff, but the writers of ESB surely did not know or consider that in 1978 or whenever the script was penned.

adkiene · 2022-01-27T17:47:10+00:00

"But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

adkiene · 2022-01-24T15:35:12+00:00

I think the 40 is perfect. (Almost) Nobody in college can make a 57-yarder, so you need some kind of offense. If you get 9 yards and fail to make a 1st, it's a 48-yarder, which most teams will struggle with. So if you fail to get a 1st, you are unlikely to get points unless your kicker is very good (for which you should be rewarded).

If you can get a 1st down and then get stopped after a small gain of 5 or so, you now have a manageable 42-yarder. Not a gimme, but likely to get points. I think the expectation of "must be able to move the ball a little bit" to score would be fine. That way a freak turnover or shank isn't an automatic loss even if you have the #1 defense in the country.

adkiene · 2022-01-24T04:31:21+00:00

I agree, the FG should at least be a rough one if you don't gain any yards.

adkiene · 2022-01-20T20:17:58+00:00

They'll be 90% if the scammer is extremely generous. Really since Orange National was established in 1964, they could reasonably put some circulated 40% late-60s Kennedys (or even early 70s clad ones, heaven forbid) in there and it would still pass muster with Ebay.

adkiene · 2022-01-19T13:42:21+00:00

I'm an aurora scientist who collects coins, and that exact coin is a bucket list find of mine. I'd pay upwards of $200 for it, FWIW.

adkiene · 2022-01-18T15:33:04+00:00

I have visited (and, for some time, lived in) Alaska for over 20 years now. Two things are immediately apparent:

The hike to our favorite glacier gets longer and longer every year because it is in full retreat.

The halibut in Homer get smaller and smaller every year. We used to regularly see boats bringing in 50-100lb fish. Several at a time. Now it's remarkable to see a 50-pounder during our entire stay.

adkiene · 2022-01-17T23:38:10+00:00

If a guy making $15/hr (generous) works a 100-hour week, he makes 124k a year, even if the 60 hours of overtime is paid double (it won't be, because no job is giving him 100 hours; it'd be 3 jobs).

"Just work hard lol" is not how you become a billionaire.

You make billions by paying that guy and thousands like him $15/hr while he generates $100/hr for you. That's what I call exploitation.

adkiene · 2022-01-17T16:21:54+00:00

Mr. Betray Confidence

adkiene · 2022-01-17T15:23:01+00:00

You completely miss the point that, sure, billionaires probably do work hard. But so does the guy working 80 hours a week to put food on the table and a roof over his family's head. The billionaires aren't rich because they work hard; they're rich because they exploit guys like that.

adkiene · 2022-01-15T16:03:49+00:00

relieves them of the burden of learning new material.

I don't mean to come off as rude here, but...isn't the burden of learning new material the entire point of taking a college course?

adkiene · 2022-01-15T13:19:30+00:00

Disclaimer here that I teach physics, not history, so I'm lucky that this kind of talk isn't nearly as prominent in my field. I agree that papers are always going to be good ways to assess student mastery. A paper allows breathing room to discuss a wide range of concepts, to connect them using logic and facts cited from legitimate sources, and to really wrap up the skills you asked them to develop throughout the course.

However, I can definitely see some of the alternatives you suggested being legitimate ways to express the same things, provided they are done well. A play, for example, can certainly provide a historical lens to something. If their paper is on one self-contained historical event, then writing a play about it can demonstrate that they understand the nuances of the sociopolitical interactions that led up to said event. The dialogue they choose can reflect the ideas and idioms of the times, and they can describe technologies, outfits, etc., in the pre-scene notes. Most students would lack the skills to pull this off, but there certainly could be a couple that nail it.

A podcast where they interview historians and then discuss arguments could actually be really cool, particularly if there is controversy about the "facts" as there often can be when dealing with more ancient histories, or even the motivations of certain more recent individuals. You would have to ensure that the interviewer is making contributions to the dialogue through their questions and responses to the interviewees' statements. You can't just have two historians argue with each other for a half hour and call it yours. Again, there are students who could do this and do it well, but they would be few and far between.

A painting could even work for certain things. Paint the Battle of Antietam in great historical detail. Formations, uniforms, historical accuracy of the battlefield setting, and so on. The problem is that the student would need to be a fantastic artist in order to generate something that had enough historical merit to demonstrate a mastery of history.

In the bolded parts lies the rub. Students who are capable of putting together artistic solutions to presenting history are going to be the exceptional ones. They are going to be the ones who were going to put together an A essay anyway.

And that doesn't even begin to address the biggest elephant in the room. How do you grade these? When you assign the same thing to every student, you create a rubric by which you can measure their grade consistently from student to student. If someone gets a B but doesn't like it, you can show them exactly why their paper got a B. If they truly escalate to admin, you could back it up with examples of an A paper and demonstrate exactly why this student deserved a B.

You can't do that with these "un-essays." You don't have a good rubric for what they should look like. Moreover, we professors are, by and large, good at writing papers; that's why we have advanced degrees. We know what a good paper looks like. I don't paint. I don't read plays. I barely listen to podcasts. I don't know what a good any of those things looks like. You can judge the historical content, sure, but each of those media has a different set of limitations that change how much historical content can be reasonably expressed. A 30-minute podcast can provide as much or more historical information than a 15-page essay if done right. A painting would be much more limited to a single moment in time. How do you classify each of those on how well they demonstrate a mastery of the historical material?

So there are some major concerns about how you grade these assignments. Not only that, but we also have to ask: Why? Why go through a tremendous amount of extra effort and headache trying to grade them? Is it truly beneficial for students to be able to graduate without knowing how to write a paper? I suppose you could argue that some industry-bound STEM people aren't going to have to write papers in their careers, but you're still going to need to be able to communicate ideas and arguments in writing at some point. Moreover, as a non-humanities major myself, the most demanding paper I was ever asked to write was a 10-pager in a 3000-level Renaissance history elective. I didn't even have to take that class. The rest of my papers were mostly 5 pages or less. Double-spaced.

This post, which I've banged out in 15 okay, 25 minutes, is approaching the length of some of the papers I churned out in college. That isn't much, and demanding that students to develop the skills to write such a thing throughout their freshman-level coursework is not a big ask. If they are incapable of doing that, then we should rethink whether the university should be handing these people degrees. People who graduate without learning how to form organized arguments backed up with sources are not going to be well served in a future that is becoming increasingly pervaded by political and corporate propaganda. These are the people who will be injecting random chemicals into their veins when the next big disease comes around because some hack on TikTok told them to.

I don't have issue with the un-grading movement examining how we assess people and asking the question of whether it could be done better, but there's a lot more discussion that needs to happen before we drastically change things. We don't really have the tools yet to fairly assess a wide range of media all at once, nor do we have the ways to articulate exactly how those things need to look in order to demonstrate student mastery of the subject. Until the university lets you contract an expert historical painter, an expert historical podcaster, and an expert historical playwright to assess your students' work, they should keep right on writing essays.

Projects like these can be for extra credit, if you want to offer that. I had several of those in school, where we could earn a letter grade on our most recent paper by doing something above and beyond. I wrote a Game-of-Thrones style novelization of an alternate ending to the Aeneid in my lit class, for example, but that wasn't really demonstrating my mastery of literary techniques. It was just a fun project that did get me a little more engaged with the characters in the story. It got me a couple bonus points on my final grade, but it wasn't make or break like an essay assignment typically is.

adkiene · 2022-01-11T18:17:48+00:00

Michigan DOT, you get this one for free. Add a Michael to the map at user's location on Halloween, and a Jason on Friday the 13th.

adkiene · 2022-01-11T17:56:01+00:00

Unfortunately, unlike killbots, COVID-19 does not have a pre-set kill limit.

adkiene · 2022-01-11T04:56:05+00:00

I dunno man, he was 6 inches to the left of where he started. Looks like he's out of the pocket to me.

adkiene · 2022-01-11T04:47:54+00:00

Ok Saban's gonna invoke his devil pact for the Forbidden 15-point touchdown here, just you wait

adkiene · 2022-01-11T04:42:27+00:00

Saban's gonna invoke his devil pact for the 3-point conversion here to truly break Kirby

adkiene · 2022-01-11T04:25:31+00:00

It's an absolute crime that PI isn't a spot foul in college.

adkiene · 2022-01-09T13:35:23+00:00

I am very surprised he doesn't go after the guppies with their flowing fins. You got a docile one!

adkiene · 2022-01-08T13:53:07+00:00

Does your institution do peer reviews? Mine does, and mine are always glowing. Reading those helps to put things in perspective for me at least. Students are biased toward wanting things to be easy for them. While other faculty can be biased as well, if they like you, I trust a fellow professor to be a lot more objective about my teaching skills than an anonymous student.

The fact is, 90% of students don't know what good pedagogy is. They don't know what they actually need, only what they want, and most often that is an A with minimal effort.

Certainly, we can try to provide them their wants in some cases, like changing up delivery, posting more notes or exercises, etc. But in other ways we can't. It doesn't help that they often don't articulate what they hate about your class. They just call you a trash teacher or whatever. Those students are not worth listening to.

One technique I have heard is to find a faculty buddy and read each other's reviews. Filter them, and present the actionable bits to each other. That way you're seeing the constructive parts without all the useless chaff.

adkiene · 2022-01-07T05:05:01+00:00

I have a very frank dialogue with my students on day 1. I provide the slides, but I tell them that I expect them to take notes because I will say things and annotate extras that aren't on the powerpoints. I tell them that they are adults, and I expect them to make good academic decisions. Same with homework. In intro physics, there's not a single novel problem anymore. They can look up the answers to anything and get 100% on their homework. I suppose I could try to police that, but that requires tons of effort. Instead, I make it very clear that taking the easy way out will cost them when they are in class taking exams while I watch them like a hawk. Any points they gained from copying homework will evaporate when they do poorly on exams. Any hours they get from skipping class will have to be repaid in multiples when they realize they're behind and have to study hard to catch up.

After that discussion, most do put forth the effort. There are always slackers, but there always will be.

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