mycomancy posted:

Sure am glad I finally got out of academia. That entire realm of life is dying and it probably should die. Sucks though, I wanted to go back for a Classics degree when I retired.

mycomancy posted:

When I was trying to organize a faculty into a union a few years back, we sent out a survey to the faculty with the blunt question "at this time, do you support a faculty union? Yes/no".

The nursing faculty voted 2:1 no. The only other department with a skew like that was the business school, and we still had a quarter of them in favor of a faculty union.

captainbananas posted:

many of academia's problems could be solved pretty easily if you could simply eliminate administrative staff positions and political boards of governors/regents without warning or cause. make dean a singular word again, etc.
[...]

Scarabrae posted:

50bps today?

SKULL.GIF posted:

it is genuinely shocking how incredibly bloated university administrations are. you can't really convey this to anyone who hasn't interacted directly with it. not like being a student or something, but trying to work with/within it

you could immediately slash every single administration's staff by half and it would still be turbo bloated

HallelujahLee posted:

theres always going to be a group of turds that probably arent worth wasting time on organizing because of how reactionary they are, but nursing overall should be organized and attempted to anyway its a vital organ of any society

webcams for christ posted:

also applies to most large Institutions that receive any amount of public funding. obviously Hospitals, but also even the Cultural Sector in Europe is overrun with overpaid admins, with dwindling salaries and stable jobs for employees that actually produce culture like musicians, artists, etc

SKULL.GIF posted:

it is genuinely shocking how incredibly bloated university administrations are. you can't really convey this to anyone who hasn't interacted directly with it. not like being a student or something, but trying to work with/within it

webcams for christ posted:

Jane Mcalevey has written extensively about organizing nursing unions in incredibly hostile environments for Christ's sake

Scarabrae posted:

50bps today?

captainbananas posted:

there does not exist a large institution that does not receive copious amounts of public funding whether that is in positive currency flows or tax rebates/credits/etc. but this poo poo is just as true in the "for profit" world. early-era microsoft people used to mock the insanely complex giza-sized corporate pyramid of IBM. doubt they're distinguishable now.

the phenomenon is a byproduct of misaligned incentive structures at different levels (individual, group, division, organization, etc.) of action within the organization-as-system. to the best of my knowledge it is never self-correcting outside of organizational death, and must always be fought against in a dialectic not unlike your bog-standard reactionary boug

Dolash posted:

It's not a particularly deep analysis, but I'm a professor now myself and so was my dad, and just comparing our jobs and their history directly, it's stark how much of a precarious job-training program academia has become. Not that it was rainbows and pure before, and there are some big obvious ways thing have improved (mostly on the bigotry front), but I think if we tried the whole "university is about broadening your horizons not jobs" song and dance now it'd go over like a lead balloon. Students are too on edge and precarious to put up with that posturing, and professors young enough to know tenure is over as a concept can't believably sell it.

Dolash posted:

It's not a particularly deep analysis, but I'm a professor now myself and so was my dad, and just comparing our jobs and their history directly, it's stark how much of a precarious job-training program academia has become. Not that it was rainbows and pure before, and there are some big obvious ways thing have improved (mostly on the bigotry front), but I think if we tried the whole "university is about broadening your horizons not jobs" song and dance now it'd go over like a lead balloon. Students are too on edge and precarious to put up with that posturing, and professors young enough to know tenure is over as a concept can't believably sell it.

net work error posted:

Just think of the potential bagholders that never were
https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1704479013723308403?t=AO_ouQxMdt4J67wOdcdqcA&s=19

captainbananas posted:

there does not exist a large institution that does not receive copious amounts of public funding whether that is in positive currency flows or tax rebates/credits/etc. but this poo poo is just as true in the "for profit" world. early-era microsoft people used to mock the insanely complex giza-sized corporate pyramid of IBM. doubt they're distinguishable now.

the phenomenon is a byproduct of misaligned incentive structures at different levels (individual, group, division, organization, etc.) of action within the organization-as-system. to the best of my knowledge it is never self-correcting outside of organizational death, and must always be fought against in a dialectic not unlike your bog-standard reactionary boug

webcams for christ posted:

Jane Mcalevey has written extensively about organizing nursing unions in incredibly hostile environments for Christ's sake

Dolash posted:

It's not a particularly deep analysis, but I'm a professor now myself and so was my dad, and just comparing our jobs and their history directly, it's stark how much of a precarious job-training program academia has become. Not that it was rainbows and pure before, and there are some big obvious ways thing have improved (mostly on the bigotry front), but I think if we tried the whole "university is about broadening your horizons not jobs" song and dance now it'd go over like a lead balloon. Students are too on edge and precarious to put up with that posturing, and professors young enough to know tenure is over as a concept can't believably sell it.

SKULL.GIF posted:

does anyone have the post from the previous economics thread about how American bullish optimism is cancerous and toxic? I thought I'd saved it but I can't find the file.

gradenko_2000 posted:

quick update to this story from July

https://twitter.com/heligobooks/status/1702641010495341026



"actually, the people pointing out that I had faked research data are irrational conspiracists on the same level as QAnon and antivaxxers"

Zodium posted:

it is true everywhere because the system is wholly integrated and interconnected now. for a long time institutions like education, or the military, were still significantly characterized by their historical origins in the feudal era and existed as quasi-independent systems, but since the 70's and especially 90's have been completely absorbed into Capital as a system, with the high bourgeoisie at the core. for example, since the funding process is simply not sensitive to methodological critique, it has proven almost impossible to make substantive progress through struggle within the system on the replicability crisis in the behavioral and medical sciences, because the methods that produced the crisis are the methods that produce results which serve the purpose of the system: to reinforce and maintain the stability of Capital.

webcams for christ posted:

consigning entire population segments / professions to un-organizable "chuds" is neocalvanism

captainbananas posted:

also but if i am honest about my own biases i am not sure if police are salvageable

gradenko_2000 posted:

this one would come preinstalled with the phone

captainbananas posted:

also but if i am honest about my own biases i am not sure if police are salvageable

webcams for christ posted:

consigning entire population segments / professions to un-organizable "chuds" is neocalvanism

webcams for christ posted:

I just checked, they don't actually have souls so they categorically don't count

HallelujahLee posted:

police never count they're class enemies and traitors

mycomancy posted:

DaysBefore posted:

Yup. Programmers, systems engineers, podcast hosts, mom and pop landlords, these are the modern day factory workers and coal miners (both chuds) and are therefore the only valid non-chud profession

DaysBefore posted:

Yup. Programmers, systems engineers, podcast hosts, mom and pop landlords, these are the modern day factory workers and coal miners (both chuds) and are therefore the only valid non-chud profession

Martha Stewart Undying posted:

White people aren't mentioned at all because they're the baseline for medical treatment

anonumos posted:

This is the tragedy of modern medicine and something I am continuously astonished hasn't been fixed yet. They've known about it for decades...

anonumos posted:

This is the tragedy of modern medicine and something I am continuously astonished hasn't been fixed yet. They've known about it for decades...

mycomancy posted:

I'd also like this article. I got shouted out of the MtG thread because a couple cardboard hoarders couldn't understand what "toxic optimism" means.

The Oldest Man posted:

I re-watched The Big Short the other day and had something of an epiphany about this and maybe why our society is so catastrophically bad at undervaluing risk and overvaluing optimism.

When you 'go long' on a stock (or buy into/espouse/act in accordance with) the notion that something will be better in the future you are effectively making yourself a prophet of good news. This thing is good, and specifically, I (and you!) can benefit from my foresight on this subject. There are many ways that prophetic foresight manifests social value, like "buy these stocks and you'll make money" or "buy a house, you'll have a secure future" etc. but the basic premise remains the same: I know something is going to be good, and I can use that foreknowledge to profit myself by joining that venture and by sharing my insight so that others join as well. The social utility of people who display this behavior is obvious; you don't have much of a community or society without people banding together for common benefit.

When you 'go short,' the premise is inverted: you are making yourself a prophet of bad news. This thing is bad, you shouldn't participate in it, you should bet against it, you should avoid it. The thing is, this isn't symmetrically valuable to being the bringer of good news. There's no immediately obvious way that others can profit from a forecast of a bad outcome the way that they can from a forecast of a good outcome. So what's the value of the bad news bringer to the community? If everyone listens to them, and the thing they are warning about doesn't happen/bad outcome avoided, the obvious value is zero. Even if they were clearly, obviously correct (and that often isn't the case), you don't profit by listening to the guy who says the '08 housing bond market is hosed or who says the barn being raised is going to collapse (I'll get to short-selling in a sec) and staying out of it, you simply avoided some potential hypothetical losses - but the people tied to those endeavors are pissed because you kept others from supporting you. If no one listens and the event happens, everyone is pissed at you anyway because you knew and didn't stop them.

In the financial markets they had to specifically legalize short selling equities in the 30s because there was no incentive to step up and publicize even a very accurate forecast of bad news. Sure, you could avoid losses and maybe help others avoid losses, but avoiding losses is not a symmetrical incentive to gaining profits. Legalizing shorts helped balance that out by creating a financial vehicle for people to make huge piles of money if they were right (according to the market, in the future) that something was not going to work out. But there's something interesting about the way short sales are structured (partially fixed by options trading) that I think speaks to the asymmetry of optimism and pessimism in our society: if you go long, your gains are potentially unlimited but your losses are capped. If you go short, your gains are capped, but your losses are potentially unlimited. Betting a good outcome will occur is structurally less risky than betting a bad outcome will occur.

Now apply the same exact lens to poo poo like COVID or climate change. Where is the social or economic penalty for being wrong over and over and over on the side of optimism? It's extremely limited. Now look at the other side: you err on the side of caution (or hell, don't even make any errors but just talk about it a little too much) and you're a doomer, a chicken little, etc. Bottom line is, you can prognosticate incorrectly many many more times on the side of optimism and get away with it because we are socially conditioned to treat 'going long' and being optimistic as both more inherently valuable and less risky than 'going short' and being pessimistic. And when you can consistently profit from pathological optimism without suffering the consequences of your rosy view of the world, regardless of the actual outcomes, you can leverage that profit into greater and greater influence on the rules of the game - you can protect your bets by making it harder to bet against you. The status quo of our economic system is pathological optimists making pathologically optimistic bets and hiring other pathological optimists to run the optimist betting machinery, do PR for the bets being made, and write that no one could have predicted a bad outcome in the charred aftermath when those bets fail.
Pathological optimism at some point stops being the most profitable strategy and becomes the only acceptable strategy.

So what's the value of any of this navel-gazing?

In the 08 market collapse, the big optimistic betters almost all got cover from the government first to unwind their bets and then to sell off the crap they couldn't unwind when they turned out to be catastrophically wrong because our entire social and economic order is based on optimism being the default correct stance. Think about this for a second: we have baked in the correctness of pathological optimism into our culture to such a radical extent that even when we knew it was wrong to a degree that put the entire country's financial system in jeopardy of total collapse, the response was to pause the whole machine, change the rules, and make sure we protected the pathological (even fraudulently pathological) optimists from the consequences of their own terrible wagers before we started the machine up again.

That was in a system where the outcomes could be rigged to protect the gamblers when they were on the 'right' side. So what the gently caress happens when the system is the global climate or a pandemic and you can't bully it or cheat it or rig it so that the pathological optimist bet always pays out the way our society needs it to? In this society, anyone who says "things are going to get worse" becomes the equivalent of a crazed doom-saying prophet on the street corner because our society is no longer equipped to deal with the possibility of optimism being wrong. The prediction of the possibility (or likelihood) of a bad outcome is automatically apocalyptic because we can no longer prepare for or fix bad outcomes.

So don't be a doomer, you're really harshing everyone's vibe.

webcams for christ posted:

more education cuts like this incoming?

https://twitter.com/mkirschenbaum/status/1704263704475316464