In I, Robot, Alfred Lanning’s hologram has information for Detective Spooner, and is prepared to give it. The only catch: “My responses are limited. You must ask the right question.”
If you’re not asking the right question, you’re not going to get the right answer. You’ll get an answer, sure, but it’s not likely to be helpful. Neil Postman discusses political polling in Technopoly, pointing out that the responses are only as reliable as the questions that produced them.
We’re all aware of the fallacy in questions like, “When did you stop beating your wife?” But what we’re not aware of is the fallacies in the questions we ask every day. Like the standards about education: “How can we get make college more available?”; and “How can we make college more affordable?”
These, I think, are the wrong questions. The right question is this: “Is college a necessity?” If the answer is yes, the next question should be, “Why?”
The reflex answer is that the world is getting more complicated, technology is more complex, and people need more school to prepare for the workforce. But I don’t think that’s true.
Plenty of research has shown that, even as students are spending more hours and more years in school, they’re coming out less technically capable, less socially prepared, and less able to immediately perform on the job than previous (less-educated) generations.
What’s true is that college is long, expensive, and something which, for many people, is nothing more than an obstacle in their path to adulthood.
I think we should jettison the assumption that a four-year, liberal arts education is a necessity for future success, and start to ask questions about what training is necessary for those who want to enter the workforce quickly, what training is beneficial for those willing to make the financial and temporal commitments, and whether it is productive to maintain the idea that a B.A. represents the most basic requirements for a white collar worker.
In the end, we have to ask, “How can we make college less necessary.”
whakahekeheke:
gadgetry asked:
Apologies if you’ve addressed the subject before, but what are your religious views (if any)? What is your opinion of supernatural faith in general?
Don’t have any religious views by most definitions (institutions of organized religion, belief in canonical doctrine, etc.). I currently identify myself as agnostic, irreligious, and a Jesusist.
…
After doing labwork in cell bio and studying scientific methodology (specifically Popper) and epistemology (Wittgenstein, Feynman, etc.), I tempered my position and became an agnostic. I realized that “supernatural” was a non-concept: we have no empirical understanding that limits “natural” to anything. We don’t know all the laws of nature and are probably enormously ignorant of them.
The real issue is not what you believe regarding metaphysical speculations about “God” or or anything else, but rather what you believe is appropriate to do to other human beings. Here is where I think Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. are wrong. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Islamism or the Inquisition or the state atheism of Soviet Russia - the problem was not their position on “the supernatural,” but their ideological position on other human beings.
Well said.
I like most of the things the Q document Jesus is reported to have said (hence I’m a Jesusist)…
Why do you choose Q, rather than the Gospels themselves? I’m interested because as far as I know (I’m a seminarian with interests in historical theology and criticism) Q remains a hypothesis, contingent on other hypotheses: the priority of Mark, that Matthew and Luke didn’t know one another, and - most important - that external guidance (i.e. the Spirit) could not account for the similarities. It seems odd to refer to a document that has not even been confirmed to exist, when the documents that led to the hypothesis are known and accessible.
Theological debates bore me.
This isn’t a theological question, just a practical one.
