It's noblesse oblige, or rather an example of the end of noblesse oblige, that the super rich don't even have to pretend to do things for others any more. Which, I would suggest, is a short-sighted and ultimately hubristicaly stupid change...
I recently bought the DVD of Trainspotting, after finding no legitimate way to watch it online. The DVD cost less than an online rental would have. A lost world of owning your own things, and we only lost it yesterday.
That's absolutely what's happening already: write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader. At some point it will become clear how absurdly wasteful we're being (right now, we're being paid to ignore that waste).
> write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader.
It's funny though. For computer to computer conversation, we have invented (deflate+inflate) algorithms to save bandwidth, time and money.
On the other hand for human to human communication, we are in the process of inventing a (inflate+deflate) method and at the same time we are spending insane amounts of time, money & bandwidth to make it possible!
We need to come up with a catchy buzzword salad to market to executives. Something like "increased communication efficiency between workers by direct brain-email-brain interface"
The UK has been chronically bad at providing jobs and training for its young people. I saw that 20 years ago when I was there. That is a key reason, perhaps the primary reason, for its long term productivity malaise. And the response is to lean into a technology that will make this situation profoundly worse? It's another lazy quick fix that is neither quick nor a real fix. The UK needs to invest in its people, not funnel yet more money to big tech.
Patrick Boyle had I thought a very good youtube on what's gone wrong - not enough investment in productive capital and too much propping up house prices roughly https://youtu.be/T3neJOdknqc
I really enjoy Patrick Boyle's reports. Really high information content with very little fluff. I love how he sneaks in the deadpan snarky comment every once in a while.
It's a talent pool that many big employers want to tap into across a range of skills and industries. Cambridge is the best place to do bio-science and research. That is largely because the UK provides training and opportunities to its young people.
"I saw that 20 years go" is one data point that ignores the wider statistics. I'm not sure what else you can back your argument with.
That's rather the point: the UK has been great at educating a very narrow sliver of its population, decided at 18 years old. Pointing to Oxbridge as a success story is very much like pointing to London as a world city. Yes, it's world class -- now look at the rest of the country.
These rankings are meaningless. If you actually studied in the UK, you'd notice a massive change in the last 5 years. Universities do not teach anymore (perhaps with a few exceptions), they are facilitating visas for foreign students without any expectation they'll be learning anything and nobody cares. They pass the exams barely attending any lectures. Everyone is happy, except home students who get massive debt and no actual useful skills.
To push back on this, I actually don't think the real role of a university is to teach, per se.
The real role they play is something very different to everything that comes before in education, and a bit closer to everything in the world that will ideally come after: immersion in your field of choice in an environment full of curious peers who are variously a few steps ahead of you, all the way up to world class experts in the field doing research.
Parts of your interactions there may include being actively taught relevant things, but the more important goal is to let you explore this environment and the material (yes, with a bit of structure) and in doing so figure out how to learn on your own.
You absolutely should be able to get a degree with top marks without attending a single lecture, seminar, lab, whatever, just by reading the material and interacting with those around you less formally, and never being actively 'taught' anything.
Many in fact do something approaching this, particularly in the later years of a degree.
"You absolutely should be able to get a degree with top marks without attending a single lecture, seminar, lab, whatever, just by reading the material and interacting with those around you less formally, and never being actively 'taught' anything."
So people should pay 9k a year to get a glorified piece of paper, when they essentially have taught themselves?
I mean, yes, except for the framing of paying for the piece of paper.
The piece of paper is just the evidence that you've been through a journey successfully. What you're really paying for is access to the environment that facilitates that journey.
The journey is essentially transitioning from a system which is pricipally about executing diligently on well-defined instructions, to one which is about reaching more broadly defined and often even self-selected goals by whatever means you choose.
Obviously aspects overlap, the changes come in steadily over the years of a degree, and even in the most ideal case it's still basically just practice, but the journey is supposed to develop the higher order skills that at that age you are ready to develop, and must develop to succeed 'in the wild' so to speak.
Absolutely 100% one of those higher order skills, indeed maybe the most important, is being able to self-teach whatever necessary to fill in gaps in order to do something interesting, that won't be provided for you or made easy for you in any way. You have to figure it out on your own. Just as you will have to in more or less every single challenge you encounter in the world after university.
So again, the environment in which you develop those skills (along with so many other benefits) is what you're paying for and the piece of paper, such that it is, is just the evidence you succeeded in that.
THe majority of university courses don't require one to be in the environment - e.g. medicine does in contrast.
Employers frankly don't care about that - what they care about is 'are you going to be productive?'. Therefore what Universities have failed to understand is that students don't even care about the experience anymore - they want confidence that by the time they are 21 they will be employable.
Essentially what I'm pointing at - that you are missing - is that the University system is one-dimensional whilst not addressing the issues re. the bridge to the labour market and what employers demand. Something else, something much better is necessary that re-organises and disrupts the existing university model. I actually have a solution in mind, however, it's going to cause so many prof's who just collect a pay-cheque to lose their job that it'll cause a riot so I don't see people willing to push it through.
FYI I have spoken to many CEO's across a myriad of firms of varying complexities and sizes - they all fall on the same conclusions as I've stated. They simply do not care and want people who will be productive, particularly in-line with specifics of what the job entails, from day one. There is very little patience and resource allocated towards training anymore than years-past.
I agree with most of what you're saying in this reply but I also think we're now talking about a different thing, like how well does any of it prepare you for real world jobs.
That's separate from the question of being taught, self teaching, and the combo of the two, I think. That's more to do with just the material itself and the goals you're set.
I do think though, all else being equal, in a business you're going to want to prefer people who have demonstrated the kind of higher order skill and agency to be able to adapt and self teach.
I get that in a lot of businesses the difference might not be material, stuff turnover is high, focus is practical and short term and not about how this or that graduate will develop within the business over a long period of time and so on.
But still, of two people with the requisite hard skills to get going quickly you're probably always going to favour the one who seems better able to also adapt to changes and learn new skills in a totally self directed way, right?
Particularly in today's environment - I can hardly imagine a point in history where this has broadly been more important.
I broadly agree with you, but universities have been trending in the opposite direction - becoming more like high schools - and students seem to be cheating in increasing numbers and more profoundly. Meanwhile, the cost keeps going up.
Training is one thing, but wage compression is another. Why study for many years, miss out on life if you can get warehouse job with little training and you won't be meaningfully worse off? You get smaller flat, less organic food and a car few years older than your engineer peer.
These talks about productivity always miss the elephant in the room - why people bother to show up in the first place? It's the money. If there is no money, then you can lead horse to water...
Even if you get paid well, the tax cliff at 100k-170k where it makes sense not to work and reject promotions to be eligible for childcare is outrageously stupid.
Ah yes, now we are getting to the heart of the issue.
Universities as they exist are not fit for the year 2026. THe year 1990? Yes, absolutely! The world has changed massively since then. It is less attractive to sacrifice years of earnings - which bring much greater experiences than what you get at uni + debt repayments of student loans to finance tuition fee's which have grown sharply from 3k/year to 9k/year and so on.
The etiquette, even at the bigtech place I work, has changed so quickly. The idea that it would be _embarrassing_ to send a code review with obvious or even subtle errors is disappearing. More work is being put on the reviewer. Which might even be fine if we made the further change that _credit goes to the reviewer_. But if anything we're heading in the opposite direction, lines of code pumped out as the criterion of success. It's like a car company that touts how _much_ gas its cars use, not how little.
The executive class are out to get as much as they can as quickly as they can while the music plays, then retire to whatever luxury boltholt they can prepare. It's FIRE with private islands, and without even a figleaf of noblesse oblige any more.
>The executive class are out to get as much as they can [...]
This is just hollow populist anti-elite rhetoric. Who do you think sold them the tariff refunds? They're not buying them from granny who didn't know any better. They bought it from other executives who knew, or at least ought to know what was at stake.
Jesus Christ, how pathetic you are. I severely doubt you’re just a bored billionaire, which leaves only the option of a bootlicker. Why do you simp for them? Do you expect a bread crump to fall off the table? Or are you a temporarily embarrassed millionaire thinking you belong to them?
A stat that shocked me recently is one third of people in the UK use chat bots for emotional support: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6xl3ql3v0o. That's an enormous society-wide change in just a couple of years.
I recall chatting with an older friend recently. She's in her 80s, and loves chatgpt. It agrees with me! She said. It used to be that you had to be rich and famous before you got into that sort of a bubble.
Am I right that chrismarker.org used to host the early, but it's since lapsed?
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