I'm an academic and its difficult for me to imagine what the fuck deans do that is worth ~3-4 times as much as the people actually teaching and doing research. Fire them into outer space, I say.
> I'm an academic and its difficult for me to imagine what the fuck deans do that is worth ~3-4 times as much as the people actually teaching and doing research. Fire them into outer space, I say.
I'm also an academic. To me, the primary role of a dean is to insulate me as much as possible from upper admin. I've had deans who are good at this job, and those who either aren't good at it, or think that their job is something else. The ones who are good at what I think their job is ... I'm not sure I'd want to see them get 3–4x my pay, but I'm definitely willing to pay a premium to have someone else deal with upper admin.
So it’s a management layer created to help protect people who actually provide value from the OTHER management layer. Sounds like a made up problem to me, and also an example of what everyone complains about when it comes to higher education: too much admin pushing costs higher.
I mean this is an issue in private industry as far as I've seen as well. as a company grows layers of middle management are added to translate and implement policies from other management layers
My relative is an administrator. One of the things he does is to manually process the flood of requests to override this or that policy because the system for enforcing the complex course selection and graduation requirements (e.g., prerequisites etc) doesn't work perfectly. The other is to adjust those requirements on a real time basis to comply with this or that complex, contradictory, and unclear mandates handed down from above (such as getting rid of all traces of wokeness).
Pay him his professor salary, and he'd never have stepped up to the role.
"All complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time." What this means is that systems operate with some of their automatic controls bypassed, and with those processes being carried out manually. The Gimli Glider took off with two broken fuel gauges.
My thought about bureaucracy is that you can automate complex human processes only to a certain point, and then the system needs some manual override capability, and possibly human interfaces, to work. This is what bureaucrats do. The reason why its seems chaotic and inefficient is that the easy stuff has been automated away, leaving only the hard stuff.
I can't vouch for every bureaucratic process, and bureaucrat, being optimally efficient or necessary. But in the past few months, I've observed the hard lesson of what happens when you think you can deal with bureaucracies that you think are wasteful by taking a chainsaw to them. I don't believe in that approach any more, even for dealing with systems that I hate.
Everyone is the value police, though, at some level. It is either cowardice or willful ignorance to pretend you don't have judgements about how other people behave, some of which might compel you to act in some way.
The US is a place where if you don't make it into or stay in at least the middle class your life sucks. You can't get healthcare, you have to work three jobs, you're treated like shit.
If you want less helicopter parenting you have to create a more supportive society in general, one where there are chances to recover from failure, and one where failing to compete at the top is not a sentence to a life of penury.
Kinda thing only sheltered people say. When I was unemployed and on free gov't health insurance (medi-cal), I got all my healthcare for free and most of my appointments like MRIs were next-day. Not as good as tech company insurance, but "can't get healthcare" is not a thing in the US.
> you have to work three jobs
Plot the number of people working multiple jobs vs time and you'll see a flat line that has no correlation with the stuff mentioned in the article: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
Medicaid is a poor substitute of a proper PPO plan. The reimbursements are low, so there are fewer providers, and it requires you to not have any assets.
I think its hubris to believe that you can formulate the correct game theoretic model to make significant statements about what is and is not inevitable.
I guess, but there are significant differences between the laws of physics and a game theoretic description of human behavior. Fundamentally, you cannot game theoretically predict the future without a model of the participants and, as you perhaps have noticed, there is no single model for the behavior of human beings because, fundamentally, human beings are an abstraction which covers ~9 billion distinct globs of cells with different genes, gene expressions, culture, personal experiences, etc.
As a physicist I think people are more sure about what an electron is, for example, than they should be, given that there is no axiomatic formulation of quantum field theory that isn't trivial, but at least there we are in spitting distance of having something to talk about such that (in very limited situations, mind you) we can speak of the inevitable. But the OP rather casually suggested, implicitly, if not explicitly, that the submitted article was wrong because "game theory," which is both glib and just like technically not a conclusion one could reasonably come to with an honest appraisal of the limitations of these sorts of ways of thinking about the world.
This is the worst kind of post. If you read it carefully it barely says anything and the thing it does say is highly suspect or just wrong. I suspect most of the time when someone wins a race, for example, they aren't exerting zero effort, although the author has found an anecdote or two to the contrary, for example.
I agree and note that what people are responding to here is not an essay but an advertisement. It really doesn't merit that much deep thinking! The guy just wants to sell you a course for $250.
As for the topic, getting good at anything requires repetition, attention to detail, and discipline. At the same time, "you're trying too hard" can sometimes be useful advice.
The author's idiosyncratic definition of "effort" is banal and unhelpful.
I'm pretty sure that wealth accumulated by the very rich at the expense of the poor is bad for total economic development because we drastically under-estimate the value of properly developing human beings.
We see enormous flourishing in society whenever labor is given more power for whatever reason (usually mass deaths) because this increases the amount of resources which flow towards raising children, who then become productive members of society. In times of weak labor power, average people are squeezed tight and less resources flow to children, which fucks shit up.
I think we are seeing that right now in the U.S. - education is nickle and dimed to shit, wages aren't enough to support children, let alone let them flourish, and the general "vibe" is so bad that people don't even want to have kids.
It isn't a zero sum game, but people still get rich at the expense of the poor, sometimes. There are different ways to accumulate wealth and some are better for society than others.
I object to the observation "wealth isn't zero sum" being used to sop up every possible objection to the way the system currently works.
> This leads to the erroneous assumption that making the rich less rich will make the poor less poor. That's obviously not the case.
Taking more money from the poor makes them more poor.
Taking more from the rich 'harms' them less because of the margin utility of money: taking $1k from someone making $160k is qualitatively different from someone making $60k. Taking 20% from someone making $160k ($32k) is qualitatively different than taking 20% from someone making $60k ($12k).
So if you want to have X revenues for funding government, you can take it from those who have more marginal need of it, or those who have less.
You'll note you've not rebuked what you've quoted from my previous comment, you've argued something different altogether, and used tautologies and fallacies, too.
It not even related to the original comment I replied to about becoming rich the exoense of the poor...
I've argued that, given the need to fund government, the point of marginal tax rates is to not to make the rick less rich, but to not make the poor any more poor, but rather to take the money from those who can better afford to have it taken from.
I.e., to take money from those who have (more) money.
Marcos are only very appealing to tyros. Most old salt Lispers avoid them. I would argue that a macro is only appropriate if you are adding a genuine syntactic feature to a language (one hint that this is the case is if your macro involves binding variables).
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