I’ve heard of universities having their retiring professors copy all of their lecture notes so that grad student instructors can try to replicate their lectures.
Some 25 years ago (gawd! that long??) I majored in Comp Sci at a university in Silicon Valley. Most of my courses for the major were in a room with A/V equipment, because the university sold the tapes to area tech companies. Which was all fine and dandy until the time when I came to the first day of class for a Winter quarter course and was greeted with the sight of a grad student sitting next to a TV -- for our class, we got to watch the tapes of the professor teaching the class in Fall quarter. The grad student helpfully pointed out that if anyone had any questions, he could stop the tape and answer them.
Of course, the bright side was that all the tapes were also housed in the Math library and could be viewed in quick succession the week before the exam, freeing up loads of time for non-academic pursuits.
I'd say he's mature enough to realize that there's no point in putting out the effort to have a serious conversation with someone whose mind is already made up.
What a stupid game this is. First of all, Douthat never argues for exact equivalence -- he just points to a set of poll results that show attitudes flipping, adds a few examples that you've conspicuously ignored, and talks about the effects of partisanship in coloring political opinions.
Second, for partisans there's never any such thing as equivalence anyway -- whatever examples one might come up with are always dismissed because they're inevitably distinguishable *somehow*. The given person is less prominent, less politically connected, drawing from the wrong set of people, or isn't nearly as bad as the other first guy. It's always Calvinball, always about as productive as arguing about who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman.
Yeah, Fallows is definitely stacking the deck here -- he's arguing against a straw Douthat that supposedly claimed total 180-degree turns from 100% of liberals, rather than the actual Douthat who spoke of many/most rather than all (and specifically identified one of the same exceptions that Fallows offers to counter him, i.e. Greenwald) and who discussed what the partisan can "live with" under the appropriate administration.
>people put a lot of work towards becoming excellent at Guitar Hero, and ... a similar amount of work would make them decent at real guitar.<
If by "decent" you mean anything more than stringing together some basic first-position chords with some facility, then I think you're wildly overstating the amount of work that GH/RB require to attain excellence (at least, given a little rhythmic aptitude).
More broadly, I think the basic problem you're identifying is just the temptation to substitute an easier, shorter-time-horizon goal for a harder, more long-term goal, and it doesn't really matter whether the particular choice of the former superficially resembles the latter. I'm skeptical that there's any significant number of people who would have learned to play the real guitar had they just not gotten GH or Rock Band -- more likely, the time not spent playing those games would be replaced by time spent mastering some other video game.
I'm in the this-is-no-big-deal camp on the question in general, but I don't see what the practices of 10th-century muslims have to do with anything . Those who are expressing concern are worrying about the message that gets communicated to Islamic extremists (and perhaps would-be extremists, sympathizers, etc.) -- I'm guessing that those folks will interpret this in the light of their own contemporary understanding of their religion and the world, regardless of what anyone else might find in history or the holy texts.
In general, these questions are overwhelmingly (religio-)cultural, not historical or scriptural -- browsing through texts is not going to produce a relevant answer one way or the other.
something of this sort is virtually assured to be passed once there’s a Republican comeback.
I wouldn't be so sure. They could've done this anytime since 9/11 -- why wait till now, when it has no chance of passing? Reeks of political stunt rather than serious proposal.
I think the problem is that we're actually dealing with two axes but we blend them together. On the one hand, there's the question of where someone's political "center of gravity" is located on the scale from left to right; on the other hand, there's the question of the intensity of someone's ideological commitments.
I think it'd be helpful if we stuck to positional terms for the former (e.g. centrist, center-left, far right) and saved the terms "moderate" and "extreme" for the latter. I describe myself as a moderate because I think most of the big political issues don't really have right answers, just different sets of costs and benefits. I would call someone like Freddie "extreme" regardless of his particular political beliefs, simply because he believes passionately in the utter rightness of his views.
Yep, this is true, and it really sucks if you're an independent/moderate voter, because even if you're lucky enough to have a candidate to vote for that you're actually pretty happy with, s/he's not going to have much real power -- it ends up just being a proxy vote for the party hacks.
Of course. But simply claiming with no evidence that my own beliefs are written into the fabric of the universe doesn't seem any better, if the object of my coercion doesn't agree.
If we all acknowledged the absence of a universal standard, perhaps it'd make us a little more careful when deciding to force unwilling others to follow our rules.
Well, even if there is a Big Book O'Morals out there somewhere, it's inaccessible to us, so in effect everything *is* a "because I said so" morality. Except that in many cases we can avoid coercion by applying moral reasoning to shared (though unproven) fundamental beliefs.
When we do decide to coerce, it's essentially because certain of our normative beliefs are so important to us that we're willing to hold others to them even when they disagree. Notions of an absolute morality are just rationalizations.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Please Give to Your Alumni Organization!”
I’ve heard of universities having their retiring professors copy all of their lecture notes so that grad student instructors can try to replicate their lectures.
Some 25 years ago (gawd! that long??) I majored in Comp Sci at a university in Silicon Valley. Most of my courses for the major were in a room with A/V equipment, because the university sold the tapes to area tech companies. Which was all fine and dandy until the time when I came to the first day of class for a Winter quarter course and was greeted with the sight of a grad student sitting next to a TV -- for our class, we got to watch the tapes of the professor teaching the class in Fall quarter. The grad student helpfully pointed out that if anyone had any questions, he could stop the tape and answer them.
Of course, the bright side was that all the tapes were also housed in the Math library and could be viewed in quick succession the week before the exam, freeing up loads of time for non-academic pursuits.
On “Think Tank Wars”
I'd say he's mature enough to realize that there's no point in putting out the effort to have a serious conversation with someone whose mind is already made up.
On “Santa Claus’s Nested Traveling Salesman Problem”
Hmm, I don't see the nesting - there's no requirement within a city that he return to his starting point.
On “Fallows on Douthat”
What a stupid game this is. First of all, Douthat never argues for exact equivalence -- he just points to a set of poll results that show attitudes flipping, adds a few examples that you've conspicuously ignored, and talks about the effects of partisanship in coloring political opinions.
Second, for partisans there's never any such thing as equivalence anyway -- whatever examples one might come up with are always dismissed because they're inevitably distinguishable *somehow*. The given person is less prominent, less politically connected, drawing from the wrong set of people, or isn't nearly as bad as the other first guy. It's always Calvinball, always about as productive as arguing about who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman.
"
Yeah, Fallows is definitely stacking the deck here -- he's arguing against a straw Douthat that supposedly claimed total 180-degree turns from 100% of liberals, rather than the actual Douthat who spoke of many/most rather than all (and specifically identified one of the same exceptions that Fallows offers to counter him, i.e. Greenwald) and who discussed what the partisan can "live with" under the appropriate administration.
On “Notes on video games as culture.”
>people put a lot of work towards becoming excellent at Guitar Hero, and ... a similar amount of work would make them decent at real guitar.<
If by "decent" you mean anything more than stringing together some basic first-position chords with some facility, then I think you're wildly overstating the amount of work that GH/RB require to attain excellence (at least, given a little rhythmic aptitude).
More broadly, I think the basic problem you're identifying is just the temptation to substitute an easier, shorter-time-horizon goal for a harder, more long-term goal, and it doesn't really matter whether the particular choice of the former superficially resembles the latter. I'm skeptical that there's any significant number of people who would have learned to play the real guitar had they just not gotten GH or Rock Band -- more likely, the time not spent playing those games would be replaced by time spent mastering some other video game.
On “Posted without comment”
Has everyone seen this already?
On “The Symbolism of the Cordoba House Project”
I'm in the this-is-no-big-deal camp on the question in general, but I don't see what the practices of 10th-century muslims have to do with anything . Those who are expressing concern are worrying about the message that gets communicated to Islamic extremists (and perhaps would-be extremists, sympathizers, etc.) -- I'm guessing that those folks will interpret this in the light of their own contemporary understanding of their religion and the world, regardless of what anyone else might find in history or the holy texts.
In general, these questions are overwhelmingly (religio-)cultural, not historical or scriptural -- browsing through texts is not going to produce a relevant answer one way or the other.
On “We Are All Enemy Belligerents Now”
something of this sort is virtually assured to be passed once there’s a Republican comeback.
I wouldn't be so sure. They could've done this anytime since 9/11 -- why wait till now, when it has no chance of passing? Reeks of political stunt rather than serious proposal.
On “There’s more than one way to skin a moderate”
I think the problem is that we're actually dealing with two axes but we blend them together. On the one hand, there's the question of where someone's political "center of gravity" is located on the scale from left to right; on the other hand, there's the question of the intensity of someone's ideological commitments.
I think it'd be helpful if we stuck to positional terms for the former (e.g. centrist, center-left, far right) and saved the terms "moderate" and "extreme" for the latter. I describe myself as a moderate because I think most of the big political issues don't really have right answers, just different sets of costs and benefits. I would call someone like Freddie "extreme" regardless of his particular political beliefs, simply because he believes passionately in the utter rightness of his views.
On “Yes, Google is making me stupid”
multi tasking doesn’t really exist. At most we switch rapidly from one tasks to another
But that *is* multitasking -- a single CPU multitasks by rapidly (every X milliseconds) switching between "active" processes. Simulated simultaneity.
On “One Step Closer*”
Yep, this is true, and it really sucks if you're an independent/moderate voter, because even if you're lucky enough to have a candidate to vote for that you're actually pretty happy with, s/he's not going to have much real power -- it ends up just being a proxy vote for the party hacks.
On “A- still does not imply Anti-”
Of course. But simply claiming with no evidence that my own beliefs are written into the fabric of the universe doesn't seem any better, if the object of my coercion doesn't agree.
If we all acknowledged the absence of a universal standard, perhaps it'd make us a little more careful when deciding to force unwilling others to follow our rules.
"
Well, even if there is a Big Book O'Morals out there somewhere, it's inaccessible to us, so in effect everything *is* a "because I said so" morality. Except that in many cases we can avoid coercion by applying moral reasoning to shared (though unproven) fundamental beliefs.
When we do decide to coerce, it's essentially because certain of our normative beliefs are so important to us that we're willing to hold others to them even when they disagree. Notions of an absolute morality are just rationalizations.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.