Wisconsin Plan to eliminate Liberal Arts at the University of Wisconsin

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

30 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I have a weird question that is somewhat tangential to this discussion.  Do you (you being those of us participating in this discussion) believe it is possible for all things to be known, that knowledge is finite?  Or, will knowledge forever create new knowledge from the questions new findings and scholarship prompt, is knowledge infinite?

I believe there are limits to human cognition which inherently places limitations on the human capacity to either know or circumvent those inherent limitations through other means. (I spend too much time working in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

I believe there are limits to human cognition which inherently places limitations on the human capacity to either know or circumvent those inherent limitations through other means. (I spend too much time working in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.)

But that is a different question.  I agree.  The question is not whether we as humans can know everything that can be known, but, whether knowledge itself, known by humans or not, is finite or infinite?

[Larry of the Lawn]

10 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that is a different question.  I agree.  The question is not whether we as humans can know everything that can be known, but, whether knowledge itself, known by humans or not, is finite or infinite?

I think knowledge would have to be infinite.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

28 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that is a different question.  I agree.  The question is not whether we as humans can know everything that can be known, but, whether knowledge itself, known by humans or not, is finite or infinite?

I'm not sure whether "knowledge" is something that is inherently measurable or quantifiable.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

26 minutes ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

I'm not sure whether "knowledge" is something that is inherently measurable or quantifiable.

Alright, what about “information”.  We quantify information in bits and bytes.  Do you believe the information that makes up the Universe finite, or infinite?

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

6 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Alright, what about “information”.  We quantify information in bits and bytes.  Do you believe the information that makes up the Universe finite, or infinite?

I don't know.

[Suttree]

16 hours ago, King Ned Stark said:

I don’t know.  It seems to be first and foremost the destruction of the coal industry (which I have no connection to) with no answer for their immediate poverty or how to provide energy to the majority of the us as cheaply as coal. 

Wait...you stated quite confidently that the left's solution is "farcical" and now you're saying you don't know?

In terms of environmental regulations, they had almost nothing to do with destruction of the coal industry.

In fact, the Clean Air Act helped keep old facilities around.

Quote

In the first decade of the new millennium, productivity gains — this time in natural gas — generated a fundamental shift in which coal was no longer clearly the cheapest fossil fuel. At the same time, solar and wind have made significant inroads into electricity generation, again providing a competitive threat to coal. Productivity gains, in coal, gas, and other energy sources, have been a primary force of change.

This buildup of pressures has finally resulted in the retirement of very old coal-fired generating units that were built before most Americans were born. Ironically, many of these retirements would probably have occurred long ago except for the Clean Air Act’s preferential treatment of old coal plants.

There are two questions we asked at the beginning of this brief: What happened to the coal industry? And what happened to coal jobs? The coal industry expanded dramatically from 1950 to 2010 and has declined moderately for the past few years, for the very clear and logical reasons articulated here.

What happened to coal jobs is even simpler. It is the same thing that happened throughout much of the country — productivity gains led to fewer workers needed to produce the same output.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

I don't know.

Neither do I. 

But the belief in an infinite versus a finite universe can impact the way we perceive the search for knowledge.  While I do not know with certainty I believe the information that makes up the universe is infinite.  I agree with David Deutsch that we, as people with the ability to search for knowledge, are always standing at "The Beginning of Infinity" as we acquire that knowledge.  I think, in part, the search for and acquisition of knowledge is what makes humans different from other species we have encountered.  

[IheartIheartTesla]

Human knowledge, by the very nature of the way the question is framed, is finite. if you think about it, we collectively have a finite number of cells in our brains, or CMOS devices in a computer or what have you, so we can only store a finite amount of information.

On the other hand, the knowledge in the universe can be postulated to be infinite. For instance, assuming an infinite universe (not the known one, but including the unknown one), you could ask what the location, or temperature of each point was (assuming a point was defined in some coarse-grained fashion, say a Planck's length). That's an infinite amount of information or knowledge.

In my humble opinion, the real question is whether we can map an infinite amount of information or knowledge on to a finite set. For instance, think of the set of natural numbers, which is infinite. We can call it N, and once we define N, basically we have 'stored' or coded an infinite array of knowledge into a small set of operations that we can memorize.

So can we map infinite knowledge onto the finite. I dont know.....and its ok to be agnostic about this because we can never whether we have succeeded or not.

[The guy from the Vale]

We can't, and we know we can't. That's basically the statement of Gödel's incompleteness theorem: That there are always true (i.e., in the terminology so far, knowable) but not logically deductible (i.e., finitely reducible by the finitely many rules put up so far) statements in arithmetic (i.e., the study of countably infinite algebraic structures in general and the natural numbers in particular).

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

22 minutes ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

We can't, and we know we can't. That's basically the statement of Gödel's incompleteness theorem: That there are always true (i.e., in the terminology so far, knowable) but not logically deductible (i.e., finitely reducible by the finitely many rules put up so far) statements in arithmetic (i.e., the study of countably infinite algebraic structures in general and the natural numbers in particular).

Godel’s theorems are fascinating to me.

[GAROVORKIN]

9 hours ago, baxus said:

Read my post once again, but try to understand it a bit better this time around.  

I will reread it . Unfortunately , I have a bad habit of posting before I read .

[Altherion]

Even if information is not actually infinite (and it might be), there is so much of it that anything which runs into the limits of it would not be human -- to us, it would almost certainly be completely indistinguishable from God (not a god, but God).

To get back to the topic of education, here's an interesting article in The Atlantic:

Quote

Now a third wave in education and training has arrived, argue economists, educators, and workforce-development officials. The level of preparation that worked in the first two waves—adding more time to education early in life—does not seem sufficient in the 21st-century economy. Instead the third wave is likely to be marked by continual training throughout a person’s lifetime—to keep current in a career, to learn how to complement rising levels of automation, and to gain skills for new work. Workers will likely consume this lifelong learning in short spurts when they need it, rather than in lengthy blocks of time as they do now when it often takes months or years to complete certificates and degrees.

...

If training and education become a lifelong pursuit, the big question is how to pay for it. Many people enter the workforce already in debt from college. Student debt has doubled since 2009 to $1.3 trillion. Given these circumstances, few people have money for further training. In response, some states offer Lifelong Learning Accounts, a 401(k)-like plan that allows employers and employees to contribute to an account for retraining purposes.

Michael Horn, a higher-education consultant who has written extensively on the future of training, recently suggested similar plans that he dubbed “renewable learning funds.” They would be paid for by an alternative form of financial aid called income-share agreements. Such agreements provide students money to cover college costs, and, in exchange, students agree to pay back a percentage of their future income rather than take on a fixed amount of debt.

So instead of the arrangement most of us have today (in which one's employer offers on-the-job training), they want to keep taking money from everyone (presumably for certification as learning something complicated enough to warrant paying for it as quickly as the article suggests requires a skill very few people possess). These people don't appear to realize they're playing with fire...

[Yukle]

I recall reading that there are some theories that that basic unit of information in the universe is information, rather than matter. I didn't really understand it, though, beyond the basics.

It's why I hope that somebody like @Starkess reads this thread and posts in it...

... just in case, you know, she wanted to contribute. Hypothetically.  

[maarsen]

On 3/27/2018 at 10:00 PM, Yukle said:

I recall reading that there are some theories that that basic unit of information in the universe is information, rather than matter. I didn't really understand it, though, beyond the basics.

It's why I hope that somebody like @Starkess reads this thread and posts in it...

... just in case, you know, she wanted to contribute. Hypothetically.  

Yukle, I just came back from a vacation in Cuba, and guess what book I took along to read? The Mathematical Universe by  Max Tegmark. In it he explains that quantum mechanics, if taken to its logical conclusion, does indeed have the universe, and all that is in it, just composed of information. It was quite the interesting read.

[maarsen]

On 3/27/2018 at 8:41 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I have a weird question that is somewhat tangential to this discussion.  Do you (you being those of us participating in this discussion) believe it is possible for all things to be known, that knowledge is finite?  Or, will knowledge forever create new knowledge from the questions new findings and scholarship prompt, is knowledge infinite?

Scot, I am late to the discussion but Cuba does not have the best internet access. In theory knowing the position, momentum and constituency of every particle in the universe would require a computer equally as big as the universe so not really a doable thing. Consider mathematics though. Will we ever get all mathematical knowledge? again the answer is no due to Godel's Incompleteness theorem. There are statements that can be unknowably true or false and can never be proved so. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, maarsen said:

Scot, I am late to the discussion but Cuba does not have the best internet access. In theory knowing the position, momentum and constituency of every particle in the universe would require a computer equally as big as the universe so not really a doable thing. Consider mathematics though. Will we ever get all mathematical knowledge? again the answer is no due to Godel's Incompleteness theorem. There are statements that can be unknowably true or false and can never be proved so. 

You inital comment highlights Max Tegmark’s speculation that we are actually living in a massive computer simulation.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 3/21/2018 at 2:16 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What the heck?  Here's the article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/03/21/university-of-wisconsin-campus-pushes-plan-to-drop-13-majors-including-english-history-and-philosophy/?utm_term=.b7730dc89d89

From the article:
 

This seems SO Wisconsin, but I think it might soon be a trend, and it's a bit the fault of the humanities departments too. Smart departments are adapting right now, as we speak, and it's possible Wisconsin schools are adapting yet still facing scrutiny, which doesn't surprise me.

But what I see at my place of employment is a department of isolated specialists. You might have, for example, an 18th Century Amercanist, and really, he/she does not have expertise to teach or do much else. This has been the model for a long time, but we're seeing it increasingly fail across the country.

Some schools are finding ways to link themselves with other departments. For example, if you require incoming students to take two English writing courses, then all those courses should have a common syllabus that is taught to help students succeed in academic writing (not English class). This requires the English department working with--and understanding--other writing disciplines and what the students need at their particular university.

In addition to this, enrollment rates are way down for grad programs in the humanities. The specialized field of professors can't offer diversified enough classes and degrees to students to be attractive. I jumped over to social sciences--a heavily research based program--when I decided on a path for doctoral studies, though the article linked notes social sciences are part of the cuts too. That seems to me a broad cut. Liberal Arts seems a broad definition too.

Either way, I've always thought the first to go would be the English departments that refused to change, yet here we have a massive slash to all humanities. That's shocking to me. It shows education is viewed primarily as a vehicle for employment. Nothing more.

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, maarsen said:

Scot, I am late to the discussion but Cuba does not have the best internet access . . . . 

Where in Cuba did you go?  Did you go as part of a program of your institution?  What kind of program would that be, if that's what you did.  Very interested, as I'm someone who has been going to Cuba a lot since 1990, and though on occasion doing lectures and so on for other people's programs there, have not gone myself as part of an academic thing.

 

 

[maarsen]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Where in Cuba did you go?  Did you go as part of a program of your institution?  What kind of program would that be, if that's what you did.  Very interested, as I'm someone who has been going to Cuba a lot since 1990, and though on occasion doing lectures and so on for other people's programs there, have not gone myself as part of an academic thing.

 

 

I am Canadian. I go to Cuba to drink the beer and enjoy the beaches and escape the cold weather.  I did go to visit Havana this time.