Costanza comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: Costanza 05 January 2011 07:10:29PM *  8 points [-]

comments by gwern and Desertopa upvoted, their links read.

How long can this go on before the whole thing* comes crashing down? Those of us who are Americans are ruled mostly by people who were "lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions" and then became lazy rich graduate students getting J.D.s or M.B.A.s from prestigious institutions, having been admitted based on their supposed undergraduate accomplishments.

The only thing to hope for, it seems, is that our supposed leaders are still getting cheat sheets from underpaid, unknown smart people.

* My impression is that higher education in the hard sciences in America is still excellent.

Comment author: SilasBarta 05 January 2011 08:27:28PM *  7 points [-]

I've complained before about the same thing. My only answer is "it'll pass eventually, the only question is how much we'll have to suffer in the interim".

Fortunately, these ghost writers basically give us a rosetta stone for identifying the lost and valueless fields: anything they consistently produce work on and which can escape detection is such a field.

(Btw, change your last * to a \*.)

Comment author: Costanza 05 January 2011 09:11:10PM *  1 point [-]

(Btw, change your last * to a *.)

Thanks! Fixed!

[NOTE SilasBarta's point about formatting is right and appreciated -- too meta to warrant a whole new comment.]

Comment author: SilasBarta 05 January 2011 09:14:02PM 4 points [-]

That's not what I said! ;-)

Just so you know: the backslash escapes you out of Markdown, so to produce what you quoted, I put a double-backslash wherever you see a \.