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jhuffman comments on [SEQ RERUN] Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Individual IQ differences are, in general "not okay"; racial IQ differences are downright verboten. I won't discuss either in certain company for fear of attracting any number of labels, with the exception of the effect of lead on IQ, which is a soapbox I mount often.
As ArisKastaris points out, those labels should adhere to you more often than not. I tend to think that this is because the rest of us have never developed a decent realm of discussion which includes IQ. I get the same feeling with the "not everybody should attend college" crowd, since it too often seems to consist of high status inviduals from elite schools vastly overstating their case. That is, signaling their status. (In fact, unless you're super interested in becoming a professor, you probably shouldn't attend college in the same way non-priests shouldn't have taken up seminary.)
Well, really, there are different classes of people who should attend college: would-be professors, poor autodidacts, akrasics, people who need separation from society for a few years. Probably others. The irony is that the people I thnk should be least interested in college are often those that are most interested in explaining why they but not others should attend.
College is a good idea if you'll have more job opportunities and get paid more for having gone. In other words, before you can convince me that I don't need a college degree you'll need to convince a few million hiring managers in my field of the same thing. The fact that their opinion may be poorly supported by evidence doesn't change anything for me.
Depends, you have to make sure that the extra pay is enough to offset the cost of your student loans.
Downvoted for motivating an aggressive sort of skepticism: you've denied context agreement and therefore sent us straight to the pyrrhonic depths.
I don't understand
1) What your position is the value on going to college in the top comment (and from lessdazed's comment, I'm not the only one)
2) Whether you disagree with jhuffman
3) Why you downvoted (context agreement? aggressive skepticism? pyrrhonic dephts? what?)
Either you're overestimating how much other people understand what you wanted to say, or I'm particularly stupid.
(1) It is a bad idea for everyone to go to college, at least as college is currently (4 years, etc.). College is foremost a technology for learning; it has advantages and disadvantages. If you need the advantages of this model, then go. However, it's a well-known fact, at least in the arts, that it is not ideal; that field also contains "schools" and "institutes" with differing educational models and environments.
The problem with Huffman is he has decided here to break with the plain meaning of my statement within the context of the debate; when people discuss this topic, they do not track through adversarial dynamics involving job markets. Instead, you cut straight through to the optimal outcome where if college is not good for everybody, then it is something we shouldn't demand, either, unless it really is the only/best source of a skill set.
(2) I don't, but his comment is also an irrelevant extension of what we're discussing. It's as if I was trying to model the orbit of Mars well enough to find it with a telescope only to have someone criticize that Newtonian mechanics is superseded by relativistic mechanics. It's true, I agree, but it is not important to what I'm doing and just makes things unnecessarily complicated therefore. This habit is common amongst analytical people, it should be guarded against.
(3) Context agreement is where we establish a limited domain of possibilities before proceeding. This is why when I talk say "endian" in a programming course, I don't need to worry much that a hand will shoot up to ask "do you mean Native Americans or people of the Subcontinent?" In conversation, it limits confusion; in argument, it prevents global skepticism because when I say "I know I'm in Los Angeles" we agree that we're talking in a "naive" sense and there's no need to interject with "but how do you know you know?"
When we break context agreement in an argument, we must constantly and hopelessly reconstruct justifications. These are the pyrrhonic depths. After the sort of skepticism. I consider this to be "aggressive" in that it rapidly makes conversation unworkable; other types just create hidden problems we can safely ignore or introduce avenues we need, albeit with potholes we'll need to grin and bear for a bit. "Aggressive skepticism" simply opens a sinkhole which swallows the whole town.
This is a good explanation but I think your comments on college were extraneous to begin with - that itself is reason enough not to respond to them but I don't really agree we had clear context for the discussion.
If you want to talk about whats wrong with the expectations that individuals and businesses have of college its odd to start by singling out classes of people that "shouldn't go to college" in a hypothetical world where it didn't have the present instrumental value.