Topic: WTF is wrong with America? - page 2. (Read 6638 times)

My grandpa is a doctor. He owned his own clinic and practiced medicine for 30 years or something before going into psychiatry. He saved countless lives and did everything from consultation to surgery. (There wasn't alot of specialization when he was in the business.)
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is he told me when he first got into medicine he had no idea what he was doing. He went to medical school and was the top of his class, but he said that when he first started practicing he relied on the older nurses there for almost everything.
So experience is definitely irreplaceable.

But the other point is, doctors don't need to be perfect, and they don't even need to be the top of their class. Imagine if the government outlawed everything but Porsches. Sure, more people would get a Porsche, but most people just wouldn't have a car.
It's the same with doctors.

Who cares where they learned?  All doctors start somewhere.  There are either doctors with experience (let's call them "residents") and doctors with zero experience (let's call them "interns").   

I doubt most people would want an intern to operate on them.  However, if the doctor has experience and earned his residency, why would you care if he was a graduate from Harvard, University of Phoenix, or Basement Community College?  The experience earned during the actual internship is going to be much more important than which school they paid to read books at...

But this is one example of how people learn about things they previously did not know about; I don't know, nor have I ever heard of, a markowitz efficient frontier, but through a method outside of education, this time through discourse, I have learned what it is so that I may then research it (and I don't understand it, since I don't have any knowledge of finance )  Another example of learning without formal education; I know what a function is, though I'd never heard of it used this way outside of School House Rock, because I first decided I wanted to know how to program (and consequently found a book on C++ at my city library); I learned what programming was by reading on Wikipedia how software was created; I knew what software was through general knowledge of computers.  I never needed a school to tell me what a function was before I could know it existed (and I wouldn't have cared before I even understood what an IDE or a variable was, at that); likewise, if people are interested in finance, they'll stumble upon such concepts as you mentioned the more they learn about them.  If someone invented it, they likely, or someone else, wrote about it, for the professors themselves to ever know to teach it; school is not absolutely necessary to learn such things.  All people really need is a start, and there is never a short supply of knowledge from there, otherwise nobody would know of the concepts which did not exist in books or on the Internet, anywhere.  As proof this is not the case, I found this thing, showing us that the knowledge is freely available to anyone who cares to know about it.  To begin the road to this, I suppose someone would want to begin with an introduction to financing, else they'll stumble upon such a thing and not have any idea what it means, as was my case

I would not allow a doctor who learned from home to operate on me. I work for a medical credentialing company, so I can say that formal education is actually very important. You'd never visit a doctor again if you knew how many have made up educations, or haven't even got their license. There have been people that have applied who are about as good a doctor as you or I.

You can learn biology, A&P, and medical skills (IE: how to draw blood, insert a catheter, indicators, contraindicators, dx, rx, etc) at home.

You don't get the actual hands-on until medical school.  Good luck getting into one of those without a fancy degree from a University.

I learned more at my job than I ever did at the University where I got my degree... but my work said they wanted to pay me more if I got one of those pieces of papers that says I am smarter than the average bear.

Ask 'em.
Last time my conversation went like this;
-Call random middle east guy.
-"Hey Mr.NSA guy, may I draw boobies on my TV here?"
-"Haha, ya."
- I whip out my whiteout. (Not my penis, you're so immature.)
-"Ahright... And nipple there... Round that like so. Awesome."
(It was so good that every man, and some women, instantly got an erection. The headline in the paper the next week said, "Men get boners." to which Miley Cyrus remarked, "I already knew that.")
Anyway...
-*snickering on the other line* "Did  you do it?"
-"Ya."
-"Take a picture."
- I send the picture to Mr. Random Middle East guy.
- Mr.NSA Guy is laughing, says,"Hey Steve come see this.". Middle eastern guy is yelling some weird stuff on the other end. (They don't speak English in the Middle East right? If they do, their accent is HORRIBLE.)

Anywho, that's how that works here in 'Merica.


As for the whole education thing, maybe I can do a thought experiment. (SCIENCE!)

So we have two societies, in the one society no one is allowed to teach anyone anything. No instruction manuals, anywhere. People might get jobs based on their aptitude for learning, but that's it.

In the other society, everyone has to get a PHD in every job they do regardless of what it is. PHD's in burger flipping, PHD's in hotel room cleaning, etc.

In the first society, we have problems. Whenever someone dies or is replaced either someone that's already worked at that job (or a similar job) needs to be found, or else a total noobie needs to be hired.
Needless to say expanding a business is very difficult, and alot of the same mistakes tend to happen over and over again unless the process is made "stupid proof". (Idiot lights, red tape, auto-shutoff etc.)

In the second society everyone that wants to get into any job needs to have about 16 years of education. By the time a person is hired at the local Hotel, the employee has done an Electron spectroscopy on 20 different types of soap, knows several different ways to wipe off a table (and their scientific name), and at least several dozen ways to fold a towel.
Obviously, this society also has problems that they would have to overcome. The sheer amount of teachers and schools needed would be staggering. Every person from fetus to 24 would be removed from the workforce, and at least 1 more person per 20 would have to be allocated for their upraising and education. Much of the debt on many of these students would never be able to be paid off because the education they got does not translate into an equivalent increase to their productivity. (Lawn mowing, dishwashing, etc.)
There is also a huge lack of flexibility in the workforce. If a business wants to restructure it's virtually impossible.
Everything has to be planned essentially 6 years or so from completion to actually get workers for the relevant job.


While this thought experiment is gloriously silly it demonstrates one very important thing;
Somewhere between that first society and that second society is a line you cross, where more education translates into worse living conditions for the society as a whole.

Notice that in the second society everyone with a PHD gets a higher salary than those that don't have a PHD (Since people without a PHD can't get hired at all.) And that even when the educational system in this society is crushing it, teachers could still tell their students that getting a PHD benefits them.

So we can't just dumbly stand around chanting, "More education. More education. More education." because we always have to be cognizant of that line I demonstrated to you.

How do you "fix this"? You don't. The first society clearly demonstrates that there's a place for educational sources, but the free market can handle it. Cut out all the stupid subsidies, and let people decide what's best for them given the career choice they make. Not be suckered into thinking that everyone needs to get a Bachelors degree in some field or they're not hireable.

And when you look at the "rankings" of educations by country, it's not necessarily the case that the more educated society is better off. They very well could have crossed that line into "too educated".

EDIT:
TLDR:
Knock knock
Who's there
Door says, "NSA"

No education stops technological progress, too much education stops capital accumulation. Somewhere there is a line YOU SHALL NOT PASS.
Free people acting in a free market can decide where that line is.
Don't worry about the stupid "education rankings".

Edit 2: Also, boners were mentioned.

So then isn't a formal education necessary? Even your Japanese example can't be learned solely from home. You can fire up the Rosetta Stone and "learn" the language but until you've actually been there you are not truly qualified to have a diploma based on the language.

You can't learn a lot of things at home. One thing I learned from getting my "education" is that there are a whole lot of things that we simply don't know about without someone actually telling us that they exist and are relevant in the first place. You can't Google something if you don't even know what it's called. (Example, "markowitz efficient frontier." I wouldn't have even been able to begin to search for such a thing, let alone learn what goes into it, before a professor told us about it and why it was relevant to investments)

Uneducated people trying to convince themselves they don't need what they don't have?

It would not. There are certain skills that can and cannot be self taught at home.

How would this process work with doctors? You can't learn medicine at home.

Hmm... But what about the NSA? Will they allow it, I don't want to go to prison.

Ya, but when people make those lists, they're doing it based off of "years in school", or do you know xyz (which could be totally irrelevant to their work.) which is why I don't care if we're #1 or #4,384.

Real jobs in the real world don't fit into a neat educational hierarchy.

Tests that actually show that somebody knows some skill in particular are fantastic. We don't have enough of that.

Like what? What skill does not require education? Even hookers have to know how to count their money.

And by the way, there are specialized schools for almost any kind of job.

I agree that education system worldwide is rotten to the core: bribery, favorism, elitism, people paying for their degrees, horrendous pricing, crazy rules, bias all around, using students in any possible way imaginable. I have avoided going to any university because of that, and I am somewhat self-taught in the result of it.

BUT - you will never become a good (let's say)doctor without a balding leftist troll's help for example. Not all skills can be acquired that easy. There are good teachers and professors, whose job is to increase your learning process to the max.

I only wish there was a process like this: you learn (let's say) japanese on your own, at home. You go to the nearest university - pass a very complicated series of tests, pay ~200$, and if score is good enough - you get a diploma.

Yep, word for word.

With the public education system shoving "education is important" down your throat year after year for a decade, and public school teachers showing us how much more money people make with degree's, and telling us how high school is just to prepare us for college, it's a wonder that anyone in the United States has enough critical thinking skills to say that maybe "education" isn't the most important thing in the world. I mean, those kind of people must be like the top of the top, the one's with the biggest brains and dongs, and get all the girls. They must be intellectual giants, raining down brilliant insights and critiques upon their inferior peers. Just out and out pretty cool guys.

But ya. If you want to see a subject in the United States that has propaganda, look at education.
Ever increasing subsidies, increasing attendance, increasing diplomas, and increasing salaries for college professors all because "education" is important.
Meanwhile we have increasing numbers of dropouts, increasing college debt, increasing tuition costs, and overall a less educated society for our efforts.
Why? So people can have pretty pieces of paper from fancy insitutions? (Much like discharge papers from an insane asylum.)

Why don't we just cut out the middle men and give everyone a Ph. D at birth?

See, the point is that diploma's and ancient centralized structures of learning are antiquated ideas that don't make adequate use of the technology we have available to us today. Getting information out to people isn't hard anymore. Lecture's aren't valuable when you have video camera's. Books aren't useful when you have the internet.

If you want to learn something, don't get an "education". Get a skill. Learn something you can actually improve the world with. You don't need a balding leftist troll in an ancient building telling you bullshit and charging you an arm and a leg to do that.

DumbFruit's Resume

Name: DumbFruit
Education: Doesn't matter

Don't say what Americans believe when you aren't even right. Most Americans do believe in education, and it is a minority that don't.

http://www.publicagenda.org/press-releases/index.php?qid=27
http://pdkintl.org/programs-resources/poll/

Only when I do it at the TV store.

Wow!
I bet when you put that on your resumé, your employer was very impressed.

Well, you proved your point that you don't care about education, that's for sure. But maybe you should care, since I didn't have to make up that number or look it up.

Isn't that illegal?

The only difference being, that any action US government takes kinda affects every other government in the world.



There are 3 kinds of people: ones that can count and ones that cannot.