Education Bubble.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/

This does remind me about the Darwin economy; everyone strives for good education to be better than others and eventually end up at the starting line again and you’re no better than anyone else. Yea, I do agree that higher education gives false hope and sense of security, and that ‘good’ education does not represent a ‘successful’ individual. I never thought of it as a bubble though. Just wondering if an education bubble burst would be the realisation that higher education is overrated resulting in a plunge in the perceived value of human capital (revamped recruitment processes, lower employment rates for top uni students etc.). Thiel sounds very righteous and principled. I like.

And the bubble problem will only arise if people are getting education believing that it would cover the cost of it in the future, non?

Perhaps. I view bubbles differently myself; I don’t see it as an issue of value per se, but rather the expectation of resale at a higher price. Depending on how you look at it, this could be identical to what you said in your comment; in both cases, the buyer expects to receive greater value in the future. However, in the former, the resale of the item reintroduces it into the market, while in the latter an education quite simply cannot be transferred in the same way. 

Also, I think what you’re describing is the Red Queen Hypothesis, where nobody is better off than when they started, which would be true if the only elements you’re looking at are employability and relative income. I wonder if companies genuinely benefit from employing those with nontechnical degrees in absolute terms, especially in cases where the course of study is mostly theoretical, with little or no overlap with what the job actually requires the graduate to do. 

I liked the 20 under 20 thing, actually. It’ll be interesting to see what these people go on to do, and if they’ll eventually go back to college/university at a later age.

Well, the main problem is when people take out massive loans to fund this education, right? I think what they are investing in is the human capital and future income, which depends on employment. In your context, the items that are ‘resold’ are services, skills, knowledge etc. If the perceived value of your services drops, this would result in lower pay which is not what you thought you paid for. And the loan won’t get paid, simply because the education was overvalued. Not so sure about how education loans works though; if governments make provisions for bad debts, because it is a sort of ~social welfare.

I guess the Red Queen Hypothesis has the similar concept. I think that there are subtle differences, but I can’t put my finger on it :/
It’s got a bit of game theory as well.

right, your view of higher education possibly being a bubble with regard to student loans makes a bit more sense. Thanks for clarifying that for me. 

I think I know roughly what you’re talking about. If I come across a better phrase for it I’ll let you know.

Filed under: Conversations, Meanderings, education, facebook

For the record.

I am an agnostic atheist. Some theists and atheists may find that statement to be an oxymoron, but I stand by it. The essence of such a worldview can be captured in this simple statement: I do not know if there is a god or not, but I believe that there isn’t one. Agnostic atheism can be contrasted with agnostic theism which does not claim to know but believes. The fact that I have liken atheism to form of belief system may irk some atheists but, in this context, I define beliefs as pragmatic facts and truths we live our lives by. As Dawkins would say, “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.” As I believe that the chair I sit on and laptop I am using is real, I believe that a omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent god does not exist.

The approach to life which I advocate is not atheism, but rationalism;  that truth and knowledge can be found deductively and intellectually and that it is the only reasonable interpretation of the world. Of course, human judgement will occasionally and at times inadvertently be clouded by emotions and we would need to make irrational decisions lest we die a death like Buridan’s ass. This, however, does not provide an excuse to act irrationally or avoid using our god-given intelligence as best as we could. I believe that there is always a degree of irrationality in everything we do, but we should nevertheless try to minimise it.

Atheism promises no answers to the mysteries of life. Being an atheist does not automatically mean that you believe in evolution, the Big Bang, or the multiverse theory. An atheist is simply someone who does not believe in a personal god and that is it. Atheism does not have a go-to guide book whenever you are having an existential crisis and neither does it offer prescribed answers to life’s deepest questions. I have little or no idea why some people insist that atheism provide answers to the question of morality or the origin of life since atheism is just a stance on a single issue.

With that said, I do know that it is not enough to deflect the questions which organized faiths attempt to answer. I have my personal worldviews and atheism is just one part of it. Perhaps, the next few posts, I will attempt to collect them and elaborate on them.

Part I: Philosophy of science

Part II: The moral compass and its origins

Filed under: Meanderings

Model-dependent realism

Reading through Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design, he brought up an amusing case in which the city council of Italy barred pet owners from keeping their goldfish in a bowls a few years. The council had claimed that it was cruel to keep goldfish in a bowl because it would give the fish a distorted view of reality. Being a paranoid freak that I would fall victim to false information, I proceeded to google it only to find 220,000 results in 0.18 seconds. Now, I am truly amused.

What is amusing about this is how we, humans, have come to assume that the world interpreted through our limited five senses is truly reality. Who are we to dismiss a fish’s ‘distorted’ view? Is the reality experienced through a bee’s compound lens less ‘real’ than ours? Maybe the curvature of the bowl is actually corrective. Hawking explains that if a fish lived in the bowl for its entire life and deduced formulas and theories based its observation of the world, it is perfectly valid. It is no different from our application of Newtonian physics in our everyday life despite the fact that it has been disproved. Mostly because it predicts accurate outcomes to a certain extent. This is what Hawking means by model-dependent realism and through model-dependent realism, he explains why physicists have not discarded either Newtonian physics or quantum mechanics despite the contrary premises of their respective theories.

“According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation … then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration.”

Filed under: Meanderings, Annotations