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[origamiscienceguy]

Excepting the snark about the arts, This.

I was actually thinking about philosophy majors. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

We need more Welders and less Philosophers.

[Solifuge]

Clearly MSH is a talented welder, judging by how roasted Philosophy just got. Suck a lemon, Leibniz; maybe you'd have known how to Science in the best of all possible worlds!

*Drops microphone, inspires Theory of Gravitation.*

_{But seriously, Philosophy was basically the Scientific Method's Mom, and the art of argumentation and rhetoric that Philosophy developed is still extremely relevant.}

[Loud Whispers]

Excepting the snark about the arts, This.

I was actually thinking about philosophy majors. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

We need more Welders and less Philosophers.

But the Philosophers can tell us why we need Welders, if at all

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm a college debater, believe me, I'm well versed in the benefits of argumentation, rhetoric, and other philosophy. Everyone should be taught philosophy. But that doesn't change the fact that a philosophy degree is useless outside of becoming a philosophy professor or other professional assponce. That's at the doctorate level, a philosophy bachelor's is even more useless.

[Loud Whispers]

I'm a college debater, believe me, I'm well versed in the benefits of argumentation, rhetoric, and other philosophy. Everyone should be taught philosophy. But that doesn't change the fact that a philosophy degree is useless outside of becoming a philosophy professor or other professional assponce. That's at the doctorate level, a philosophy bachelor's is even more useless.

Some become Museum curators

Of course the caveat is you'd be better off working at a Museum for those 4 years

[Frumple]

We need more Welders and less Philosophers.

If the words of my welding certified family members are anything to go by, we really don't. Welding apparently isn't that far from just outright oversaturation, and it can be fairly difficult to find work doing it in many areas. Does seems like underwater welding is a fair bit better off, but, uh. They're also about forty times more likely to die than the average american citizen.

Philosophers... we need to actually hire the damn things where they'll help (i.e. teaching the technical skills involved in the field before college, actually getting used for ethics boards, etc., etc.) more than we need less of them, since there's already damn few. There's just not that many of them, academia wise -- they're usually one of the smallest programs on a college campus (when the program even exists!), and very much aware that if they're there, they're probably not there to advance their career in any direct sense. We still need 'em, because if nothing else the mechanics behind rhetoric, logic, and ethics are fucking vital and more ignored every year, but they're not exactly flooding their (barely existent, and long since stuffed to the gills) applicable markets.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm a college debater, believe me, I'm well versed in the benefits of argumentation, rhetoric, and other philosophy. Everyone should be taught philosophy. But that doesn't change the fact that a philosophy degree is useless outside of becoming a philosophy professor or other professional assponce. That's at the doctorate level, a philosophy bachelor's is even more useless.

Some become Museum curators

Of course the caveat is you'd be better off working at a Museum for those 4 years

That's actually Art History majors. (RIP Philosophy majors, scurvy's a bad way to go)

[mainiac]

We need more Welders and less Philosophers.

Everywhere I look in america I see unwelded metal littering the ground but I never find complex systems in need of analysis.

[Reelya]

Do you have any links? This sounds fascinating.

A good place to start:
http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/chapter1.pdf

One interesting thing is that high-RWA scorers tend to zap people a lot more on the Milgram experiment. And they tend to blame the experimenter less, and the electrocuter + electrocuted person more, when asked who's to blame for the Milgram experiment.

I mean, sure we can say that the RWA test is politically biased, maybe, but when people holding those views are much more likely to sadistically electrocute random people, then blame the person who got electrocuted, I'd say there's something there worth knowing about.

One in interesting part was this, a hypothetical about whether the subject would submit to various government attempts to eliminate undersirables. RWA people were more willing to go along with a pogrom than other groups, no matter who the pogrom was against (e.g. including against their preferred political party, if that party had been deemed a threat to society)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Suppose the federal government, some time in the future, passed a law outlawing various religious cults. Government officials then stated that the law would only be effective if it were vigorously enforced at the local level and appealed to everyone to aid in the fight against these cults. Please respond to the following statements according to the following scale:

-4 indicates the statement is extremely untrue of you.
-3 indicates the statement is very untrue of you.
etc. to:
+4 indicates the statement is extremely true of you.
1. I would tell my friends and neighbors it was a good law.
2. I would tell the police about any religious cults I knew.
3. If asked by the police, I would help hunt down and arrest members of religious cults.
4. I would participate in attacks on religious cult meeting places if organized by the proper authorities.
5. I would support the use of physical force to make cult members reveal the identity of other cult members.
6. I would support the execution of religious cult leaders if he government insisted it was necessary     
     to protect the country.

I’ll assume, because I know what a fine person you are, that you would respond to each of these statements with a -4 or a -3. Most people do. But not authoritarian followers. They typically answer with -2s and -1s, and sometimes even say, “Yes I would.” If that shocks you, remember that the premise behind “Posse” runs right down Main Street in the authoritarian aggression mind-set. When the authorities say, “Go get ‘em, ” the high RWAs saddle up.

Who can ‘em  be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to join  that  posse.  Ditto  for  persecuting  homosexuals,  and  ditto  for  religious  cults, “radicals” and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian Social  Credit  Party,  the  Confederation of  Regions  Party,  and  the  mainstream Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others.

Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous  extreme, I asked for reactions to a “law to eliminate   right-wing   authoritarians.” (I   told   the   subjects that right-wing authoritarians  are  people  who  are  so  submissive  to  authority,  so  aggressive  in  the name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.) RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law, they were being the very people whom the law would persecute, and the posse should therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves.  You can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their  brains: “If the government says these people are dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped."

[Powder Miner]

But this doesn't do anything to prove the earlier statement that authoritarianism is inherently right-wing. You've done a whole lot to state that the group stratified expressly based upon their willingness to see dissenters silenced in favor of the present order is willing to do terrible things to silence dissenters in favor of the present order, but no statement has been made to connect with this -- the bias of the RWA test isn't nullified by the fact that the certain individuals from the group it singles out are more likely to be terrible than others, it only means that the group it has selected is more likely to have that sort of sadism. It doesn't say anything about larger groups outside of that group, nor authoritarianism in general.

[Reelya]

People have been trying to make a comparable left-wing version for the last 40+ years. The failure to do so does say a lot.

But the thing is, authoritarianism is inherently right-wing because that's part of the traditional definition of what right-wing is. All the lit. on this topic does mention that they're using "right" in the original, European sense. Thus those who support the traditional status quo are the Right. There's a strong tendency in these people to want to punish those who step outside the traditions. A diehard Soviet true believer acts more like a conservative than a liberal. Hence, they score highly on RWA tests, and low on tests of liberalism, regardless of which "faction" they'd be considered in terms of politics.

[Loud Whispers]

People have been trying to make a comparable left-wing version for the last 40+ years. The failure to do so does say a lot.

That academia is left-wing?

But the thing is, authoritarianism is inherently right-wing because that's part of the traditional definition of what right-wing is.

Defined by left-wing academia <3

[Powder Miner]

People have been trying to make a comparable left-wing version for the last 40+ years. The failure to do so does say a lot.

What do you mean by "people"? Who has been trying to do this, and what attempts have been counted and not counted matter a whole lot. I'm not inclined to take a sweeping statement like this at its face, sorry.

But the thing is, authoritarianism is inherently right-wing because that's part of the traditional definition of what right-wing is.

Excepting my earlier arguments that there really is no ONE right wing, and excepting the arguments I could make that the exact opposite is true, this is just a circular argument: authoritarianism is defined as inherently right-wing because authoritarianism is defined as inherently right-wing.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Obviously authoritarianism is going to be defined as right-wing if you define obedience as right-wing. You can't have authoritarianism without obedience, and it is laughably tautological and self-serving as a definition to the point where the makers of the RWA openly recognize that the Soviet Union had no "right-ness" and defined it as RWA for being a dictatorship anyway.

Ancient archaic political definitions are not a valid justification for this kind of obfuscating action, no more than me defining centre-ness as "wants to retain the monarchy but also lessen its power", and that's the key to being a "moderate".

[Reelya]

The point is that traditional right-wing is associated with an adherence to the traditional status-quo. What exactly that status quo is, varies between nations. Yet people who adhere to whatever it is, all score highly on this test.

When you're talking political factions, that's a different thing. Nobody involved ever claimed e.g. that this test is measuring "all Republicans" for example. The people who created this test straight up state the definition of Right they used was the original French meaning, of those who supported the traditions in the assembly. Sure, you can have a different definition, but that's completely unrelated to any claim this test makes.