The state of universities

[Anonymous No.17059606]

This thread is for discussion of current /lit/-related affairs in academia. Graduate students, postdocs, and professors welcome (>implying there are professors on /lit/) Undergraduates with insights into their departments also welcome.

>English
What do these people even do these days? Do they still do critical and character analysis? Or is it just teaching "creative writing" courses to undergrads? I know someone who recently got a PhD in English, and her thesis was nothing but 250 pages of "poetry" that neither rhymed nor scanned, and her defence was 4 hours of her reading it. This was an Ivy League school too. WTF?

>Classics
It seems that most grad students in classics end up doing some hyper-specific project like "Upper class female funeral traditions in Bithynia in the mid-380s" or something which is 5 years of "research" entirely based on 3 tiny shards of poetry found at a dig. Half of them probably couldn't even tell you what century Trajan ruled in or what the works of Polybius are. A few weeks ago I heard that the University of Vermont was cutting their classics department and firing all their professors. I guess this is an accurate reflection of the state of the field, just utter decline and dissipation? Did they just run out of actual texts from the classical era? I guess all ancient Latin and Greek longer than a fragment has been translated and analysed 1000 times now?

>Philosophy
Is there such a thing as actual philosophy nowadays (apart from meme philosophers)? Or do "philosophy" professors just write long boring papers smugly making themselves the referees of retarded arguments between random people from 50 years ago that no one has heard of?

>History
Now my feeling is that this field might still have some life in it. At least, I know some people working on new translations of never-translated medieval documents, and bringing in new technologies and data analysis to actually discover new knowledge.

>Mathematics (yes it's /lit/)
Any good developments here these days? Are they getting any closer to proving the Riemann hypothesis?

>Physics (yes it's /lit/ too)
It seems everyone's just working in massive billion-dollar experiment collaborations to fine-tune the parameter uncertainties on the various theories. LHC, LIGO, etc. Is there anything more interesting going on? I guess supersymmetry is dead? And string theory is now a meme? What about astrophysics/cosmology, anything interesting apart from gravitational waves?

[Anonymous No.17059631]

>>17059606
Fuck wackodemia. Literally every grad student is a commie, I wish we could put them in fun happy work camps. The next generation of professors will be entirely bent on giving legitimacy to the global leftist industrial complex.

[Anonymous No.17059632]

just got my ass pounded by bbc, gonna go on twitter later and help minorities with my superior white mind.

[Anonymous No.17059684]

>>17059606
Yeah, universities now suck.

[Anonymous No.17059794]

Just glad I graduated 15 years ago. It wasn’t great back then, can only imagine what it’s like to be there today.

[Anonymous No.17059825]

>"Hey!. Going to university to study anything in the humanities is for cucks who want to get brainwashed by Jewish, crypto-marxists. Lol!
Am I doin it rite?"

[Anonymous No.17059833]

>>17059606
>Classics
It's dying because learning dead languages and learning about dead civilizations are seen as the epitome of non-utilitarian learning, which is absolutely verboten in our day and age where most people's highest aspiration is wanting to be a brick in the IT industry of California.

[Anonymous No.17059835]

>>17059794
Jesus fucking Christ! How old are you?

[Anonymous No.17059861]

>>17059606
>It seems that most grad students in classics end up doing some hyper-specific project like "Upper class female funeral traditions in Bithynia in the mid-380s" or something which is 5 years of "research" entirely based on 3 tiny shards of poetry found at a dig. Half of them probably couldn't even tell you what century Trajan ruled in or what the works of Polybius are. A few weeks ago I heard that the University of Vermont was cutting their classics department and firing all their professors. I guess this is an accurate reflection of the state of the field, just utter decline and dissipation? Did they just run out of actual texts from the classical era? I guess all ancient Latin and Greek longer than a fragment has been translated and analysed 1000 times now?
Can confirm, projects are hyper-specific, but usually the only people who lacks general knowledge are people educated in the UK or US. Continental Europe still makes a good job because they stuff notions upon notions down your throat to the point that you become a walking encyclopedia. Most times, they cripple you into being uncreative.
The problem of classics is that at this point research is so methodologically sophisticated that it is incredibly hard to say something new. On the other hand, modern literature studies of any kind look so methodologically frail from the perspective of classicists that it's impossible to have conversations with them. I have seen literary critics brought almost to the point of tears during conferences because of one or two killer objections brought forward by old classicists. I couldn't help but feel sorry for both.

[Anonymous No.17059866]

I took a staff job at my university during my master’s degree and ended up dropping out of the program. It wasn’t a lit program (econ) but i still work there and so I see a lot of the academia stuff up close. Philosophy at my Uni is a total joke. The philosophy department used to be respected but meeting with faculty and reviewing their publications, the the courses, what they advertise, it’s literally all a combination of “critical theory of race/gender”. That’s not a joke btw. Literally everything is looked at through that lens. You can “specialize” more in classical philosophy but even then you will absolutely end up having to color everything through critical theory or race/gender. The comp lit department is going away apparently. Idk about the others. I’m desperate to find a new job but this one is so flexible and I’m so professionally not ambitious that I haven’t been able to leave

[Anonymous No.17059872]

>>17059631
Not true. There is a good 35% of conservative students both in classics and philosophy. Literature is the only field where you meet almost no rightwing people, and you can see how the lack of objections and democratic debate is making them stupider by the day

[Anonymous No.17059882]

>>17059835
Late 30s. Consider how old this site is, there are plenty of older users at this point

[Anonymous No.17059890]

>>17059835
Not him but I graduated about 13 years ago.

[Anonymous No.17059891]

>>17059861
>The problem of classics is that at this point research is so methodologically sophisticated that it is incredibly hard to say something new.
Could you elaborate on "methodological sophistication"? What does that entail? The hermeneutics of classical philology?

[Anonymous No.17059900]

>>17059861
>On the other hand, modern literature studies of any kind look so methodologically frail from the perspective of classicists that it's impossible to have conversations with them. I have seen literary critics brought almost to the point of tears during conferences because of one or two killer objections brought forward by old classicists.
I'm intrigued, any examples?

[Anonymous No.17059908]

>>17059882
based oldfag, 29 year old here

[Anonymous No.17059938]

>>17059684
>tfw this man studied at my university
I wish he taught here

[Anonymous No.17059990]

>>17059891
>>17059900
Classicists are (usually) extremely aware of what they can bring into the discussion or not and why, while contemporary literary critics are not. Let's say I am working on a fragment from author X and want to connect it to author Y: in classics, a simple "they look similar!" doesn't work. You need to prove they are temporally compatible (when where they written?), linguistically related (do they use similar words? are concepts the same?), find traces of possible direct influences (are authors quoting each other? is a Z author saying something about a possible connection?) and indirect influences (is the concept I am trying to connect mediated by another author W?), and so on and so forth.
A literary critic can make an entire PhD process on X and Y just because they look alike, without ever establishing (or even questioning) a connection that goes beyond the purely conceptual. They are allowed to bring literally anything into the discussion to a terroristic extent, e.g. paragraphs starting with "Similarly, Foucault writes..." to justify an interpretation of something that is in no way explicitly related to foucoault. They read philosophy without understanding it and namedrop Plato and worse, Aristotle, with no idea of what they are doing. They usually read just myths from the first, and the Poetics from the second.
Philosophers have big problems with this because to namedrop an author who thinks "similarly" is akin to makin authoritative statements (i.e. "I am right because big guy over there says something similar to what I am saying!"). These kind of statements have no argumentative weight whatsoever in the mind of a philosopher - all they care is whether the argument is well built or not. So when they ask you "what is the relevance of bringing Aristotle into your discussion of X", what you have is the literary critic looking puzzled because for him making an analogy - and writing entire books which are analogies - is methodologically viable, while for classicists it mostly isn't, and for philosophers it definitely isn't.

[Anonymous No.17059992]

>>17059882
yeah but why do you stick around here so long?
i certainly hope that in two years I wont have to visit this place ever again. The only problem is finding the great breath of people who discuss such a wide arrange of topics irl, but once one has found at least some one and starts to focus on that, this place has become redundant and shit.
it will have been 7/8 years then total

[Anonymous No.17060027]

>>17059606
Mathematics isn't /lit/ you fucking retard and no one is even close to (or attempting to) prove Riemann's hypothesis because the tools needed for it don't even exist. It will be the last millennium problem to be solved, likely decades from now.

[Anonymous No.17060061]

>>17059992
Not him but I have been here for around five years and I found myself routinely returning. The place has not gotten worse: it only gets redundant after you get used to it.
I got off this the first two or three months when I had a girlfriend, but each time I slip back into lonely periods of my life I end up on 4chan. I don't love it, but it's better than discussing on social media, and you can find gold averagely every couple of weeks if you skim through the toxicity

[Anonymous No.17060199]

>>17059861
>>17059990
The notion that nothing remains to be done within Classical Philology is objectively false. Anyone who claims otherwise is either unacquainted with the field or shamelessly lying.

[Anonymous No.17060271]

>>17059606
Your assessment of the Classics is honestly quite good. Unfortunately, universities and the classics departments themselves feel like they all need to do research and have hot takes on their texts, rather than recognizing that their position now is to pass on the classics to next generations (archaeology is different for obvious reasons). They fail in this way too. As someone who study Latin and Greek for 6 years now, and who can read and write both at a level/speed almost up to par with my English, I can say that there is no one in the Classics who is genuinely fluent in either language. It's a disgrace. No one would claim to be an expert on German literature who doesn't speak German, so why the fuck does this lazy, complacent, midwit professors believe that they don't need to be fluent in Latin and Greek?? The result now is that every student is reading text way above their proficiency and it's clear they don't actually understand the language.

[Anonymous No.17060273]

>>17060061
yeah it's better socializing on 4ch than '''talking''' to the people on facebook you don't care about a whit and they don't care about you either.
atleast here you don't sugarcoat it.

[Anonymous No.17060287]

>>17059825
you're an outsider, shoo

[Anonymous No.17060299]

>>17059606
I think theoretical physics are in a state of waiting till the next big find.

[Anonymous No.17060303]

I'm going to college just to have sex with art hoes lol

[Anonymous No.17060334]

>>17060303
Good luck lol

[Anonymous No.17060338]

>>17059606
>Is there such a thing as actual philosophy nowadays (apart from meme philosophers)?
No.

[Anonymous No.17060346]

>>17059606
Solid state physics is exciting and you don't even have to go to Geneva.

[Anonymous No.17060356]

>>17059992
Why not? At worst this place is funny, at best I might see something interesting I haven’t heard of yet and put me down another reading rabbit hole. I haven’t done FB etc since around 2012 and Reddit doesn’t go as deep. As far as a site to browse to kill a few minutes here and there, one could do a lot worse.

[Anonymous No.17060365]

>>17059908

brother..

[Anonymous No.17060382]

>>17060334

This was definitely ghostwritten by a white person.

[Anonymous No.17060394]

>>17060382
Well Obama is 50% white, so I guess you're right.

[Anonymous No.17060433]

>>17059606
>English
Should have purpose and should be tied into Linguistics or some framework that makes English degrees advance the language (making it more expressive and efficient) and translating older works in this manner or being an historian of English. With no founding it it just becomes subjective nonsense.

>Classics
I don't get the point of this being a separate field. If it's just on literature they should also be tied to linguistics but w the goal of showing essential forms in literature and how those influence history and have a framework for the future.

>Philosophy
It needs to be trying to found everything. That's its only purpose.

>History
Is trash and assumes chronology as an axiom. Should create different historicisms and see which best explain events.

>Math
It needs to be founded, working on that. There's no point to it and it will cease at some point if it continues

>Physics
Same as math.

[Anonymous No.17060434]

>>17059606
I had an interest in academia before depression and also seeing the nepotism that went on made me give it up. My ex is also the daughter of a professor and knows a lot about what goes on behind closed doors in academia.

Based on our collective knowledge, academia is entirely about money and being mouthpieces for specific companies, governments or agendas which pay for certain research to be produced. There’s obviously a lot of this going on in the humanities and social sciences (my preferred field), but my ex likes to talk about how this goes on in STEM too. Results of experiments can easily be modified in order to promote specific drugs or technologies pushed for by big companies. If the system of power is a religion, then the academics are their priests in the pulpits. Neither of us wanted that for eachother, so we’ve both just decided to look for jobs rather than go to grad school.

Also, the work load in academia is ridiculous, even for some undergrads. My ex hasn’t quite graduated yet, but she’s being bogged down by tons of completely pointless assignments per week to the point that it’s driven her to suicide attempts several times from the sheer stress of it. She tells me that it’s likely the work volume is so high because they’re trying to train students into becoming compliant workers as proof that they can do menial jobs.

[Anonymous No.17060512]

Universities are nothing more than diploma mills stuffed to the gills with intellectual failures preying upon stupid teenaged kids with their student loans. They deserve a thorough assraping by whatever extremist government the US will have in a decade or two.

[Anonymous No.17060513]

>>17060434
You don't have to construct the issues, it's analytically in the framework of universities in a capitalist system.

[Anonymous No.17060633]

>>17059606
>History
>Now my feeling is that this field might still have some life in it.
Guess again. From what I can tell it's got the same problems you noticed in classics departments. Old-school historical methodology is in the process of being replaced by critical theory and psychoanalysis. All the new stuff being written is either hyper-specific or way too broad, and the writers like to bring up concepts like collective memory that allow them to say whatever they want to without having to prove anything. There are still a bunch of grumpy old male holdouts, but they won't live forever and for now they're forced to earn their pay by teaching elective survey courses to students who either don't give a shit or expect the entire field to be like a Paradox game.
Schools are cutting funding for their history departments, there are fewer and fewer professorships available, and the public's trust in academia is (rightfully) so low that there's no point in getting into the field anymore. The best thing a historian or archivist can do right now is to work on digitization and other ways of making historical sources freely available to the public, so that a new generation of disinterested amateurs can take over when academia inevitably grinds to a halt.
At least that's how I see it from an outsider's perspective, I'm not a grad student or anything.

[Anonymous No.17060796]

>>17060633
>All the new stuff being written is either hyper-specific or way too broad

I've noticed this too. It's like there's no middle ground between midwit "basically the history of everything" sort of dreck and "power, performance, and gender in the jalayirid sultanate" sort of shit that not a single soul will ever read. From what I can tell it's because any sort of non-specific work that attempts to synthesize several things and see them holistically are thought of as methodologically quaint. So yeah, the natural course of action is to cast off all the chains of the past, historicism, rigor, early annalesian bottom-up approach, and disinterested research, and infuse it with cutting-edge science like critical theory and psychoanalysis.

[Anonymous No.17060847]

>>17060433
>>Philosophy
>It needs to be trying to found everything. That's its only purpose.
>>Math
>It needs to be founded, working on that. There's no point to it and it will cease at some point if it continues
>>Physics
>Same as math.
Why do physics and math need to be founded by itself when philosophy's purpose is to found everything?

[Anonymous No.17060901]

>>17060847
Yes they should be mixed, all of them should eventually. I've found nothing that takes more than a year of self-studying w my idiosyncratic frameworking. If education was done more foundationally you could teach all this crap before hs or at least before it ends.

[Anonymous No.17060944]

>>17059794
Class of '05 here as well. Went to UCLA; where'd you go, anon?

[Anonymous No.17061689]

>>17059606
>English
Ummm, actually it's the "department of literatures in English" now sweatie

[Anonymous No.17061928]

>>17059872
I'm in literature, and I consider myself right-wing/ nationalist. Not a grad student (yet) though. I'll start grad school in a year or so.

[Anonymous No.17061959]

>>17061689
Stop complaining about this kind of stuff and start enjoying it. What you need to understand is that 9 times out of 10, female professors who are really into deconstructing literature and School of Resentment style theory are BEGGING to get fucked by Big Canonical Cock. I am being serious. I am not being ironic. For my survey course of English lit from Beowulf to 1800, my professor fit this trope exactly; she was about 28, fairly cute (not an art hoe, but with shorter brown hair), and very into “fighting back” against traditional views of medieval literature. Queering Langland, "there were black people in the Middle Ages," all of that. On the first day, we discussed the concept of a literary canon, which she argued inherently favored those works produced by people in power. Needless to say, I disagreed. Because I happened to have a class in the next room right before her course, I was always the first to arrive, usually about 5 minutes before anyone else. We would have brief conversations, first about whatever material we were going to cover that day and then about random topics- other books and poems, little details of our lives, etc.

Slowly I began to realize she was dropping small hints of her sexual availability. Nothing too risqué. She would say things like "Old English poetry (she never said Anglo-Saxon because that was a 'white supremacist dogwhistle') is so elegiac, it always makes me lonely" or "anon, you might like this article on the York mystery plays, I found it very stimulating," etc. What's more, these hints always came after I said something to defend the canon or canonical authors and traditional interpretations. For example, one day I happened to namedrop Harold Bloom during a conversation about Shakespeare's use of the carnivalesque. She made a face, and I said "Love him or hate him, you have to admit Bloom presents a useful analysis of poetic influence across the history of English literature (or words to that effect)." She bit her lip, and for a second I wasn't sure if she was going to criticize our guy or what, but instead she mentioned that the Taming of the Shrew was playing at a local theater, subtly indicating she wished to go with me. We did end up going, and it was particularly fun to watch her watch Petruchio tame Katherine. She clearly loved it; I didn't bring it up, of course, but only a few days before she had said the play was irredeemably misogynistic. Needless to say, we had an enjoyable night.

[Anonymous No.17061978]

>>17059606
>anthropology
hahahahahaha actively committing intellectual suicide with a smile

[Anonymous No.17062113]

>>17059631
>wackodemia
hehe gott'em

[Anonymous No.17062130]

>>17059606
I am a creative writing professor in the mfa program of an ivy league institution. Formerly I was a white collar criminal defense attorney.

Ask me anything.

[Anonymous No.17062178]

>>17062130
seems too based to be true...

[Anonymous No.17062286]

It's obvious that if Universities were designed to actually be useful institutions none of these departments would even exist
It would exclusively be dedicated to stuff like developing alternate energy sources you know things that have major immediate tangible benefit zero theory whatsoever

[Anonymous No.17062350]

>>17062286
But they are useful. Read Derrida on the eyes of the university

[Anonymous No.17062508]

>>17060271
Do you think its possible to reach your proficiency with Latin and Greek if you teach yourself through books? I don't want to go to university

[Anonymous No.17062538]

>>17060271
Can confirm this. Classics PhDs even at the elite level are extremely hit and miss, as are the instructors. It's an open secret and running joke. If I had to nitpick I would disagree that "fluency" is a valid or useful category when thinking of classical languages, but overall I agree and get what you mean.

The really passionate and dedicated people even at elite institutions are most likely to be the autists who won't get jobs, lol. Not that there are any jobs to go around anymore.

>>17062508
Teaching yourself through books is all it ever is, anyway. An instructor helps to provide structure and guidance especially at the early stages, but past a certain point, classes are basically excuses to close-read difficult texts "alone, together," and the institution is there to give you maximum access to experts who can clear up problems and recommend things to you, like how to specialise better or dive deeper in a specific area or how to learn useful side skills like paleography and so on. You can absolutely become Greek and Latin literate at a high level through self-study. It's like asking "can I be good at maths without going to university or getting a PhD?" Of course. Many people in university are shit at maths, and PhDs are for specialist training and undertaking specific research projects with mentorship, not just acquiring "the next level" of expertise. No one and no institution has a monopoly on "mathematics."

Just make it a part of your life.

[Anonymous No.17062543]

>>17062350

anon using someone like Derrida to justify why these departments are useful is like asking the Pope what he thinks of the bible

[Anonymous No.17062554]

I am a PhD at North American top university in computer science. I am doing pretty well for myself but I hate the environment and would like to quit.

Computer Science nowadays is just a vehicle for the big cloud providers to recruit zealots and the remaining work is self-serving wankery.

Peers are mostly boring, uninteresting people and most of their inspiration comes from the fact that they want a job and a green card in the US. Everything is min-maxed and our job is to shit out papers and move on to the next one. There is no long-term maintenance of projects or aspiration to work on something for years to come. Everything is pump and dump.

On top of that identity politics are also infesting public discourse. Recently, there was a big upset about about machine learning and Google again and a bunch of people got cancelled in its wake.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/

It actually resulted in the head of the AI division at NVIDIA calling to cancel anyone that liked the tweets of their ideological enemy. Absolutely bonkers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25419844

Thankfully, my research area is too boring for identity politics, so no one bothers me. Although we recently had requests to change the "master" branch on some of our Github projects to "main" because master is an offensive word now. I just ignored those requests but not sure how long I can still do that.

[Anonymous No.17062585]

>>17059606
Idk i got engineering degrees a decade ago from a school that did not have a language department. Add to that it was 70/30 men to women and most engineers are right wing so I never came across any woke agenda even though the Dean was a black woman.

[Anonymous No.17062666]

>>17062130
Do you feel like you did more evil in your previous job or your current one?

[Anonymous No.17062673]

>>17059606
>>Classics
I went to a classics conference in the US last year and one of the profs gave a talk about the future of this discipline in the states. Needless to say, it was grim. The amount of students enrolling in this program has been declining rapidly in the past two decades and it is looking even more morose for the ancient Greek section, which has less than half of those specializing in Latin. He stated how the future of the classics would eventually disappear, like other literary departments, in favor for a more practical allocation of funds to STEM etc. It seems like the classics will only flourish in Europe and, more recently, in China where they are booming with students who are doing comparative studies with Western antiquity and their own.

t. frog

[Anonymous No.17062720]

>>17059825
Yeah, bro! You're based and redpilled (that's how we say it on 4channel) hahaha. Universities are leftist indoctrination barracks, you know? I didn't have any formal education aftee high school and I know more than all of these arrogant wankers in academia. It's like, you go through all this indoctrination for a diploma and leave the university a marxist militant, you know? Like, I study and all, but we have all the knowledge we need on the internet. Nobody needs universities anymore, they're for conformist cucks hahahahaha

[Anonymous No.17062747]

>>17062666
>those digits tho

[Anonymous No.17062774]

>>17062720
You know nobody criticizes uni for that right? Idk who you're hearing these arguments from but there are clearly nepotistic and capitalist and liberal issues w the framework. Whatever your opinion of a uni is, you can clearly see issues and if someone does respond like that you can know it's a cultural opinion and not usually some egoist opinion much less an exegesis of the system.

[Anonymous No.17062780]

>>17059606
Physics research isn't all astro and particle physics. Quantum computing is a popular research area right now, and is being worked on both theoretically and experimentally. Regarding physics as a whole: lots of people will suggest that there needs to be a paradigm shift before the "next big thing" in fundamental physics, but that doesn't mean current research isn't interesting or worthwhile. Big universities have a wide variety of projects going on, and you're exposed to even more than that through guest lectures. Even the tiny physics department where I did my undergrad had a variety of interesting work being done.

My undergraduate thesis had me modelling the input-output combinations of arbitrary numbers of photons based on how distinguishable they were, then representing the output in terms of symmetry properties. Now I'm doing my master's, and my project is slated to be about the response of strained graphene (strained: stretched in one dimension to change symmetry properties) to high frequencies of light. Neither of these are billion-dollar projects; the first one was done all on me and my supervisor's home computers, and the latter might require me to book time on a supercomputer, but that's it. Of course, neither of these projects are ground-breaking, nor are they revealing any "secrets of the universe", but they're fun and they can pave the way for further research with enhanced applications.

Please don't talk shit about physics unless you actually bother to look at a variety of current research. Likewise for math.

[Anonymous No.17062795]

>>17059833
I thought it was dying because of le eurocentrism meme. It's not like the kind of person who'd go into classical studies cared at all about doing something economically valuable. I'm mostly clueless on what I'm talking about, but I have the feeling that this new mainstream narrative of criticising eurocentrism, promoting this so-called decolonisation in the new world, and maybe also the narrative that promotes humanities as 'disciplines for critical thinking where we study the injustices of our society :)' drifts humanities students more into things such as African Studies, Latino Studies, critical theory and so on. Not shitting on these fields, by the way.

[Anonymous No.17062812]

>>17062774
Haven't you ever talked to one single blue collar right-wing schizo?

[Anonymous No.17062837]

>>17062780
Fuck physics for being solely materially-causative and taking math as an axiom.

[Anonymous No.17062851]

>>17062812
Not in years anon. I was raised in Texas but I hardly assume ppl make those arguments except in analogy of what they really mean. If you use socratic dialogue you can actually get a good conversation going particularly if you're good at bringing up good points.

[Anonymous No.17062873]

>>17062795
Not him but I'm shitting on them and classics. Seriously what's the point of any of those fields that can't be covered more productively (i.e. appealing to more foundational truths that can limit sociological truths) in other fields?

[Anonymous No.17062962]

>>17062543
Yes I obviously would ask the Pope about the Bible, who am I to ask, 4chan atheists? At least he fucking read the thing, while none of you stemfags have ever read a sentence by Derrida.

[Anonymous No.17062984]

>>17060633
javascript:;

[Anonymous No.17063124]

>>17062666
I was in fact more evil in my previous job as a lawyer.

The evil of white collar criminal defense (or most of the legal profession, unfortunately) cannot be overstated. The true extent of the wealthy's depravity is mind-boggling. They live in an unrecognizable world, and they know it. 100% of my clients spoke and acted like they were utterly alien to the human race. In the rare instance we went to a jury trial, it was nearly impossible to present them as likeable. They oozed smugness and contempt for the public. But we still won our fair share. And I defended them (for 10 years) while making excellent money. Rewarded to perpetuate an inherently immoral system (research some D&O cases, if you wish) vs. making someone's short story slightly better. The former more evil indeed.

[Anonymous No.17063167]

>>17062873
I like reading papers and essays on Hesiod

[Anonymous No.17063215]

>>17062837
How would you rather it be done, faggot? It's a system of descriptions, and so relies on causative effects, and needs some language to be described. Have you ever done any physics in your life, or are you just another undergraduate loser who thinks he's got all the problems and answers figured out? What do you think physics is failing to capture in the way its carried out now?

[Anonymous No.17063221]

philosophy is unironically dead

[Anonymous No.17063234]

>>17059872
It's probably higher than 35, people just aren't open about it

[Anonymous No.17063258]

>>17061959
Based larper

[Anonymous No.17063259]

>>17063124
what were some of the terrible things people did? embezzling 401k's?

[Anonymous No.17063321]

>>17059606
Current Classics PhD. Absolutely no way I'll ever become a professor. Just milking it to learn the ancient languages and also German and French while hopefully going to Europe and digging a bit.

Most professors are fucking shit and are just awful liberal, necrotic types

[Anonymous No.17063358]

>>17059990
ACtually I find classics to be methodologically bankrupt

[Anonymous No.17063389]

>>17063321
>Just milking it to learn the ancient languages and also German and French while hopefully going to Europe and digging a bit.
Based.

[Anonymous No.17063416]

>>17063389
Lol yah, I think so. Obviously professor is a extremely comfy job, especially in archaeology, and I'm envious of the people there but god bless them

My research area is okay, but I'll probably go the way of some adjuncts I knew who became researches in the Canadian government starting at a 6 figure salary. Honestly not even looking for tenure based on those dudes. Objectively better scholars than I will ever be and could not land a job. Why get stuck at $30-40k shitter jobs when you can just bail and go into research.

It's probably a bit soul-crushing but it could not be worse than what contemporary academia is like with the uselessness of assignments and the condescending nature. This people only read NYT best sellers when they aren't reading their specific fields lit (though I have known a couple of based professors).

[Anonymous No.17063817]

>>17060356
Based take i agree

[Anonymous No.17063839]

>>17063215
It's constructive, falsificationist and empirical in descending order of my issues w it.

[Anonymous No.17063870]

>>17062554
>STEM postgrad
>reddit spacing
>link to reddit thread
>link to ycombinator news item

Talk about living up to the stereotype.

Anyways, while I agree with your distaste for identity politics and the current tech scene, you should still consider lurking more before posting. I guess we should at least be thankful you didn't use a tripcode.

[Anonymous No.17063894]

>>17059606
>>English
There is still some serious critical analysis and literary historical context. However a lot of it is real leftist buzzwords. A lot less thoughtful discussions about philosophy and craft, it feels like sometimes everyone wants to pipe in and prove that they're not racist/sexist/homophobic.

Creative writing classes feel a little like baby-sitting. I have dreams of walking in and yelling in Lindsey's (they/them) face "GO WRITE STEVEN UNIVERSE FANFICTION ON YOUR OWN FUCKING TIME. WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN IS NOT LITERATURE."

[Anonymous No.17063921]

physics phd here
>>17059606
>It seems everyone's just working in massive billion-dollar experiment collaborations to fine-tune the parameter uncertainties on the various theories.
this is maybe 10% of physics graduate students. most of physics is not done in these large collaborations
>>17062780
basically this. I'm doing AMO experiment where we're probing similar things as the LHC but with a budget of only a few million max.
we have to get an idea where to look for a "new paradigm" and theorists have already cooked up so many potential ideas that experimental physics is extremely important to test each of these and point us in the right direction.

that and each proposal we write has to have some "quantum information/quantum computing" inclusion since that field is so incredibly hot right now

[Anonymous No.17063940]

>>17063839
What's your problem with that? I get the impression that you think physics is approaching its description of reality from the wrong direction, but I don't see a better method. The fact that we're limited in the observations we can make means that verifiable science has to follow those limitations, sadly.

[Anonymous No.17063972]

>>17059631
I have defended Hardin and Linkola in an environmental ethics class, and both of my TAs not only didn't disagree with me, but one of them told me that Linkola is a unique and brilliant thinker. This is at a big 10 school.

[Anonymous No.17063978]

>>17060633
My experience is similar. The rankean methodology is on its way out, replaced by...nothing.

[Anonymous No.17064000]

>>17059606
would it be worth it to get my undergrad in my passion field (history/sociology) just to get a normie desk job? this would be at an in state public college and parents would take some of the financial burden so i wouldn't be too bad with loans.

[Anonymous No.17064006]

>>17060901

> If education was done more foundationally you could teach all this crap before hs or at least before it ends.

While I agree, I'm guessing you're a grad student who in philosophy working on set theory, so I actually disagree.

[Anonymous No.17064017]

>>17063940
It didn't before. Besides empiricism, those haven't always been how science has been done nor math.
I'd prefer a more analytic physics where experiments are almost useless unless you're confused and trying to jerry-rig a foundation or don't know where you're at.

[Anonymous No.17064025]

>>17064006
I'm better than that, I've been to college for half a semester and get regularly confused for a PhD student or professor just in breadth and depth of a subject. I've only been reading for a year or two.

[Anonymous No.17064043]

>>17064006
>>17064025
By the way, orders of precedence aren't simply a set theory thing. There are tree proofs, there are models, mathematical induction. The concept of orders is ubiquitous in every field.

[Anonymous No.17064068]

>Medieval Studies MA student
My department is pretty great. Lots of good research and original work being done. Of course we have our theorists but the department has a very strong focus on Latin and learning the vernaculars. This year alone I'm taking Old English, Latin, and Middle Welsh. But the department also offered Old Norse and Old French. Profs assume we can read French and to a lesser extent German. The standards are pretty high in terms of output. You won't get away with simple gender or historical materialism readings. If you bring up Marx or Butler you need to prove their relevance to your topic. We also get the chance to take grad courses from many other departments in the university which makes for a diverse student body. Seminars are filled with people who all know so much about other fields that it makes for deeply insightful discussions. Reading of primary texts is highly emphasized. I just finished writing a term paper on Horation commentaries and most of the primary sources are untranslated. It's been great working with Latin texts so closely (it has really helped facilitate my knowledge). That said, the Old English course I'm taking is in the English department and the difference in quality of analysis if OE texts by English students and Medieval Studies students is huge. So overall grad school is good in my field but it's not like this everywhere. Hopefully they accept me for the PhD next year.

[Anonymous No.17064087]

>>17064017
I think you're severely underestimating the complexity of modern physics. That said, not everything is immediately tested experimentally: there's plenty of work done entirely theoretically that's trusted as sound. Of course, given the complexity of the tasks that modern physics has to deal with, our theoretical methods are necessarily approximations. I'd like it too if physics could be done entirely analytically, but there's a practical limit.

[Anonymous No.17064096]

I was a history major and graduated from a "respected state school" 2.5 years ago. I can say that most of my professors and TA's were actually impartial when it came to classroom instruction and were more into finding and interpreting the facts in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Now I'm applying to get a MA in history from a known conservative leaning college, and I'm a lefty(though not in the twitter sense). Hopefully it's not totally shit.

[Anonymous No.17064099]

>>17064068
where do you go to school
My school's Medieval/Renaissance Studies department seems pretty good, but I don't know much about it as an undergraduate Classics major who's only taken one course of medieval Latin and a two semester sequence on basic medieval history from Augustus to the Renaissance.

[Anonymous No.17064104]

>>17064043
>>17064025
Bro I'm currently working on degrees in math and phil, you don't need to tell me.

[Anonymous No.17064113]

>>17064104
>>17064043
>>17064025
Also, studying philosophy and actually reading the material makes you look like a genius compared to the typical half wits taking a sub 300 level humanities course.

[Anonymous No.17064116]

>>17064068
This sounds based af. Can you give any hints where you are at?

[Anonymous No.17064118]

>>17064068
>>17064099
I go to CMS at University of Toronto. The medieval Latin undergrad courses here really didn't do it justice. They were significantly easier than the Latin Classics courses I did. But the graduate level Latin II course I'm taking offers far more difficult and interesting texts.

[Anonymous No.17064135]

>>17064087
>underestimating complexity of physics
That's an a posteriori statement. It's "complex" now because the university system pays ppl for nonsense theories they can't disprove if it lets them sell books or get press. It was more intellectually diverse in physics in a meaningful way in the early 20th century. Now, especially since the Spock self-conscious movement of the 60's, magazines try and interview arrogant ppl who bought into the "he's smart but doesn't apply himself" garbage. That and stupid Hollywood scifi films.

Even what you said implies the analytic portion is more prominent necessarily. You haven't defined a practical limit but even by your statement I would say a more properly analytic physics would bear more fruit.

[Anonymous No.17064140]

>>17064104
>>17064113
Agreed and isn't that a shame. I took a real mensa I'm not even that smart.

[Anonymous No.17064167]

>>17064135
not the guy you're talking to but we're reaching technical limits that didn't exist in the 20s. that's the problem. your idea of experimental design doesn't really work when these experiments can cost upwards of millions of dollars for even "basic" experiments. why would we set up something like that if there wasn't any motivation to suggest it would be useful?

[Anonymous No.17064169]

>>17064118
I honestly feel the same way about my medieval Latin class, though I'm disappointed with my Latin classes in general. The class however has inspired me to take the medieval Latin paleography class offered in this coming Fall.
Do you have a series of text I should read to get into medieval Latin and learn Medieval thought? My course had us read Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (it's late antiquity I know, but our professor wanted to use it as a stepping stone to medieval), bits of Benedict, bits of Hildemar, and bits of Alexandreis. I was pretty disappointed with the selection and thought that I hardly represented the corpus of medieval Latin. I was thinking that Isidorus' Etymologiae is probably a good start but I would love to hear your opinion.

[Anonymous No.17064183]

>>17064135
Physics PhD student here, on one level you are absolutely 100% right. There are tons of people who spend 60 hours a week fiddling on Mathematica with enormous meaningless integrals they got from the latest fad paper from hep-th. But on another side, there do exist some physics researchers who are doing nothing more than honest data analysis and/or mathematical modelling on various human-scale projects. They aren't pretending to do anything profound, and their work is perfectly respectable on an intellectual level.

[Anonymous No.17064191]

>>17064167
>why it be wrong thing if we do it
Uhhh money? Everything I just said? Yes I think at the very least you and I can agree that any field isn't perfect by epistemic uncertainty justifications. That's not a very good argument you made but if my point doesn't suit you I leave you with Lord Kelvin's quote.

[Anonymous No.17064197]

>>17059606
English major here: both undergrad and masters.

Legit a cult, full of indoctrination of your paint-by-numbers liberal progressive ideology... feminism, critical race, etc.

I realized this was all a scam going into the second year of my MA, so I busted my ass to turn this sinking ship around: did my thesis on a professional writing topic instead of fuckery Romantic Poetry. Did three internships over 14 months: one in creative writing, one in technical writing, and one in business writing/analysis.

Once I graduated, I began adjuncting at a local community college teaching English and then sent in TONS of resumes over 2 months (my rate was 20 per day after I graduated and was sitting at home doing nothing all day).

Praise God that I got a entry-level tech writing job in the engineering sector and now I manage all the proposals and BD in my company's local office.

In all honesty, English is terrible unless you focus on technical/business writing or marketing. Relying on teaching, library science, or publishing is a fucking dumb move.
You need to know how to market yourself because you do not transfer easily into the job market. For example, I decided to put all my eggs in the "professional writing" basket and marketed my self that way, especially on my resume and my portfolio. I at least got some early job offers to do medical writing at a hospital, underwriting at an insurance company, copywriting at a marketing agency, etc. Based on the above offers, you can see how wide I was casting my net for potential jobs.

My biggest recommendation is to go for a professional writing degree instead of an English degree and flush all that useless novel-poetry-literary shit down the toilet. At least I get paid a decent wage and only have to work 40 hours a week.

Honestly, get a professional writing minor along with a major in biology, chemistry, etc. and walk yourself into a technical writing job. Tech writing is a great sector: it's tedious, but it's honest and easy work with good salaries. You won't be a millionaire, but I enjoy my life overall and where I ended up, thank God.

This is all based on my experience in the northeast USA, fyi. Good luck y'all.

[Anonymous No.17064207]

>>17064183
I'm not trying to throw out the whole field as I'm a predicational monist. I just don't think the field's metaphysical commitments (by Popper, Comte etc) can mature to be better than a new metaphysical direction particularly one that founds it. Any person who says a field can't be founded should simply stop grouping these subjects into physics and go play dungeon and dragons or whatever these fairy linearly-infinite faggots do.

[Anonymous No.17064211]

>>17064183
I always got the sense that the pop science/ scientism stuff is bullshit especially the neil degrasse Tyson "We live in a simulation" bullshit.

>>17064140
Same, never got tested, but if I had to guess, in terms of IQ I'm the definition midwit ~120 iq.

[Anonymous No.17064212]

>>17064191
I have no idea what your greentext is meant to be implying. I jumped into this discussion for one post, did you mean for your quote to be ironic?

[Anonymous No.17064216]

>>17063124
I'm in the military and I'm looking at going to law school on the GI Bill when I get out, meaning I won't have any loans and can more or less do what I want. Is there any way to realistically fight the good fight in law today, or is it a waste of time?

[Anonymous No.17064217]

>>17064211
popsci is not science. and never listen to a physicist's views on metaphysics, just like you don't listen to Richard Dawkins talk about anything other than evolutionary biology

[Anonymous No.17064222]

>>17064118
eyy i almost went to CMS. enjoy skating across queen's park every time there's even a mild freeze?

[Anonymous No.17064223]

>>17064216
I am also interested in this question

[Anonymous No.17064228]

>>17064169
Isidore is great for vocabulary and pretty easy reading overall.
I'll break some texts down by genre.

>Poetry
The Carmina Burana are pretty easy and a lot of fun
The poetry of Bernardus Silvestris is a little more difficult but enjoyable and easily accessible.
I personally enjoy Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova a lot. But I like reading about grammar and rhetoric so if you don't ignore this one.
I also recommend reading Statius and Virgil in Latin. They have a huge influence on medieval poetry.

>History
Gildas, Nennius, and John of Fordun are all a pleasure to read. The Getica is supposed to be good but I haven't read it. I also recommend Orosius and Paul the Deacon.

>Philosophy
Aquinas and Duns Scots are both fairly easy to read in Latin. Augustine and Abelard are slightly more difficult. Boethius is probably the most enjoyable but he's quite difficult.

>miscellaneous stuff I enjoyed
Martianus Capella is a lot of fun but quite difficult (probably the hardest Latin I've read). The Life of St Columbus is a great read too.
For anyone who is just beginning Latin the Gesta Romanorum is a great collection of texts for learning.

Everything above is just texts I've enjoyed.

[Anonymous No.17064231]

>>17064212
I was being uncharitable but I don't think saying "it's different now - why would we spend a lot of money on it if it's wrong" is a very good response to what I was saying.

[Anonymous No.17064240]

>>17064222
Luckily none of my classes happen across queens park. But I feel bad for the undergrads. Used to have to run from AH to SS in the winter term.

[Anonymous No.17064248]

>>17059606
wtf you listed exactly the reason university has destroyed all my aspirations and thus my will to live

[Anonymous No.17064257]

>>17064228
Also Beeson's Anthology of Medieval Latin is a good introductory anthology.

[Anonymous No.17064272]

>>17064212
I can give an example of where experiments are useless but still used because of lack of a good framework. To find the "god particle" (it really speaks for itself where the issue is), they had to have a framework for it. The framework found it. When they found it it proposed nothing new. It was effectively a media science show. I think the media is kicking themselves that this wasn't developed by a minority so they could jerk off about it and make a blockbuster dramatization of it. It's just all shit. The stupid multiuniverse crap, the 500 end of the world scenarios involving infinity. It's just crap. I'm only grateful math isn't that retarded rn.

[Anonymous No.17064274]

>>17064228
>Gildas
Hol up, I remember this guy, didn't he write a massive rant about muh evil pagan Saxons that was filled with slightly-off quotes from the Vulgate? Because that was an intense read, occasionally hilarious, and the Latin was brutal (iirc).

[Anonymous No.17064276]

>>17064217
Never listen to the philosophical ideas of a physicist/scientist who entertains the idea of being a pop scientist. While I agree that the state of physics nowadays is abysmal in terms of the philosophical depth of those who study it, there are physicists of the past (both ancient and modern) who are well-versed in philosophy like Roger Bacon, Pierre Duhem, Alhazen, Boltzmann, Newton, Erwin Schrodinger, Niels Bohr, Einstein, etc and there also are a select few we have now that show philosophical maturity like Roger Penrose. Personally, I think the illiteracy in philosophy of modern scientists is due to their general ignorance of the foundations of science but their knowledge of praxis. Who cares about the philosophical underpinnings of science when they're getting grant money to find results.

[Anonymous No.17064281]

>>17064228
Awesome thanks for the list

[Anonymous No.17064283]

>>17064272
>'m only grateful math isn't that retarded rn.
Inter-universal Teichmüller theory has entered the room

[Anonymous No.17064289]

>>17059825
Yeah lol, my god lit is full of pseud retards and polfaggots

[Anonymous No.17064292]

>>17064207
You're a fool
Founding anything is impossible, and therefore meaningless. Popper said the final word on epistemology.

[Anonymous No.17064297]

>>17062538
>The really passionate and dedicated people even at elite institutions are most likely to be the autists who won't get jobs, lol.
Can confirm. Was at a faculty meeting where they made us throw out the autists application because he is an autist (the authoritative source in his field) and the other candidate was a well connected midwit.

[Anonymous No.17064301]

>>17064292
>Popper said the final word on epistemology.
based. retarded, for sure, but still based.

[Anonymous No.17064302]

>>17064283
Those are actually based on something more fundamental than physics can in any sense be based on. In this sense if the math works then it implies something but the inductive conclusion or assumption can be wrong.
That and I wouldn't care unless I see even one article that media shits out in the vein of physics that they have to retract after a week or so. It's thankfully incapable of that because liberals are all hylics.

[Anonymous No.17064305]

>>17064272
>To find the "god particle" (it really speaks for itself where the issue is), they had to have a framework for it. The framework found it. When they found it it proposed nothing new.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Theories don't "find" anything. They need to be falsified or we need to find evidence for them. We very well could've not found the higgs and then had to go like "well fuck, there's that theory out the window."
You can craft up infinite numbers of theories that each correctly reproduce past observations. This is because for a theory to even be considered viable it needs to do this. Thus, the predictive power of theories is what's actually important.

Currently there are like 5 good theories to explain "dark matter." All of them are possible in the context of what we know. How do we pick between them? We have to find the evidence.

>>17064276
This is true, I was just talking about the recent big names that pop up in popsci. It's hard to become philosophically literate, to the point of producing any work of merit, when so much of your life has to be dedicated to the physics. That's why when people venture into the other side, their physics starts going to shit (see: sean carroll)

[Anonymous No.17064308]

>>17064292
Is that a founded statement? I wish you would inform your kind to just speak in increasingly disparate and particular words so you devolve into sputtering numbers and turning schizophrenic. But nope, you get away with saying stupid shit. That is my issue with the current university system. Nobody is allowed to prove someone else is retarded.

[Anonymous No.17064313]

>>17064308
>>17064305
>>17064302
>>17064301
>>17064292
will you faggots go back to /sci/? you're shitting up the thread

[Anonymous No.17064315]

>>17064274
Yes that's him.

[Anonymous No.17064324]

>>17064281
You're welcome anon.

[Anonymous No.17064340]

>>17064305
Damn you are so wrong that I hope you're not the physics student. Some theories carry more weight than others, it's not a numbers game because that would make life so much easier even if everything would simply be a line.

[Anonymous No.17064344]

>>17064313
Fuck board culture. We do science better here.

[Anonymous No.17064363]

>>17064000
You might look into getting your passion degree at a university in europe.
Many places have free tuition and offer courses in english.
If your parents are ok with it, you can ask them if they would help you to finance your second degree after that, as it wouldn't be that expensive. Tell them you have to do it to feel happy.

[Anonymous No.17064385]

>>17059606
I fucked up my undergrad by doing classics at a uni that didn't even require latin or greek fluency. I'm planning on working in an unrelated field until I am able to learn latin/greek alongside German and French. Then try applying for postgrad in some Euro university.

[Anonymous No.17064401]

>>17064385
>latin or greek fluency
that's unfortunately every university in NA. I don't know about Europe, though. The Germans seem to be the best in terms of European Classics but I could be wrong.

[Anonymous No.17064412]

>>17059606
If one starts with the Greeks (and wishes to go no further), should one tend a degree on the classics, archaelogy, ancient history or ancient philosophy?

[Anonymous No.17064417]

>>17064135
There are problems in physics that simply cannot be solved analytically. And my statement about wishing we could do all physics analytically wasn't a suggestion that it'd be more fruitful, or that computational work is meaningless, but rather that I think it'd be more fun to work in the field if it was reasonable to work through everything by hand. You're making philosophical arguments out of my depth, but I think you're making a critique of a field you know just nearly nothing about. You're now also picking at the supposed character of modern physicists, which is absurd.

Looking to my own research: the techniques I'll use to model strained graphene will be approximate and require a supercomputer to solve, i.e. there is no sane or practical way to solve the problem by pen and paper to any reasonable degree of accuracy. The results of these models will all be theoretical, but with the appropriate experimental methods they can -- and likely will -- be tested. I can't define for you a practical limit to what can be defined analytically, but you're a fool if you think there isn't one, even if it's not well-defined.

[Anonymous No.17064426]

>>17063321
Based, hope you have complete funding

[Anonymous No.17064437]

>>17064297
>the other candidate was a well connected midwit
Well, he does sound perfect for Academia

[Anonymous No.17064443]

>>17064401
yeah I'm in NZ actually, I went to Auckland Uni, though Otago was the better uni in NZ. But anyway I'm hoping to go a German uni.

[Anonymous No.17064459]

>>17064197
Seems like you made the right choices.

[Anonymous No.17064465]

>>17059606
I remember shit was fucked in my history class when the prof said that we can absolutely apply our own worldview and ideologies onto the past and that the prior notion that they could be different from us was false

[Anonymous No.17064477]

>>17064417
Have fun being a nobody. I'm founding math you're doing pencil-pusher crap. Enjoy being the not even 10 minutes of fame version of Kelvin.

[Anonymous No.17064505]

>>17059606
95% of my classics class consisted of tumblr/twitter women who only took the course to learn about sapphic poetry, including the professor. Didn't learn jack-shit about the actual classic works and studied everything from a intersectionality pov.

[Anonymous No.17064521]

>>17064477
What do you mean by founding?

[Anonymous No.17064529]

>>17064197
you're a fucking sellout

[Anonymous No.17064557]

Isn't there like some logical proof like that says no set of axioms like aren't complete like

[Anonymous No.17064559]

>searching for professor job openings in English
>"we are seeking applicants whose work deals with the [insert minority group] experience"

[Anonymous No.17064661]

>>17059632
Did (((you))) really learn to be this based just from academia?

[Anonymous No.17064734]

>>17064505
I wanted to major in classics before law school, but seeing that I live in Cali I decided against that one since I imagined every class being like that

[Anonymous No.17064737]

>>17060334
Obummer

[Anonymous No.17064742]

>>17064559
>he majored in English
What did you expect, honestly? The people who buy into that garbage are exactly the people who would major in English to begin with

[Anonymous No.17064771]

>>17064557
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

[Anonymous No.17064792]

Real question for those in Classics programs: how the fuck do you learn Greek and Latin in 1-3 years to the point that you can read and analyze difficult literature in their original language? I took French for a year and I might be able to read The Little Prince, not much more.

[Anonymous No.17064807]

>>17064557
yeah >>17064771
why?

[Anonymous No.17064828]

>>17059992
>yeah but why do you stick around here so long?
not him, but there's nowhere else on the internet like this. most places are heavily moderated, where wrongthink can get you banned real fast.

[Anonymous No.17064858]

>>17059606
Is this the end of academia? Maybe there are a few fields that haven't been totally exhausted yet, but it seems as if everything of significance that can be discovered, studied, written about, and debated already has been. Is it any wonder then that these fields are churning out nonsense?

[Anonymous No.17064896]

History might seem like it isn't that bad but it's actually completely shit 99% of the time. So much of it is just someone "discovering" something that's either been discovered before or has been completely fabricated. Every decade someone "discovers" that vikings came to north america before columbus when people have known that for more than 100 years. People find new evidence to support old claims that have been pretty much confirmed as factual but they market everything as some grand new discovery. Then half the other "discoveries" are blatent manipulation of data and misinterpretations of archeological finds. This is especially prevalent with anything to do with WWII. I don't even mean anything to do with the holocaust I just mean that you can't take anything written about WWII seriously because most of it is just false or contradictory.

[Anonymous No.17064913]

>>17064792
With effort and general linguistic ability and reading skills. Being proficient in another romance language will help you most of the way. In fact, proficiency in just two Indo-European languanges, of which one is English, should be enough to carry you most of the way. The large romance vocabulary in English from Norman and Latin influence will be the basis, while general linguistic intuition from experience with the differences and likeness of two related languages, will enable you to have both the knowledge and inutition necessary to decode cognates and thus enable you to read text without much trouble.

[Anonymous No.17064954]

>>17064792
It's truly up the individual's ability and effort. For example, some kids can pick up algebra quickly while others need to have it explained again and again to catch on.
In my case, as a burger, I was raised trilingual (English, Spanish, French) so picking up on the Latin vocab wasn't the hard part. The grammar was but luckily my professors were old school and demanded us to learn it by rote (writing out paradigms again and again), taught us a few mnemonic techniques, and gave us a ton of reading material going from easy to hard in order to get our brains used to the structure. On the other hand, I've heard the misfortune of other classics majors who spent the first year on Wheelock's and, by the second year, were expected to translate Virgil.
Thankfully, in the US, the rules for mastering the classical languages are lax, i.e. be able to read well while placing less emphasis on writing.
In the old days, schoolboys were learning this for a decade before they hit university where they were expected to write their essays eloquently in Latin like Cicero or in Greek like Thucydides.

[Anonymous No.17065418]

>>17063870
oh fuck off

[Anonymous No.17065513]

>>17059606
The Classics fell out of favor (in the US, anyway) because conservatives thought the field was not utilitarian and economically viable enough and the progressives thought it was a reactionary field dedicated to enshrining dead white guys. This is why a sizable amount of modern American classics scholarship is now NGO funded stuff where they try to prove the past was queer, ethnically diverse, and feminist in order to own the conservatives or something.

[Anonymous No.17065681]

>>17065418
you do sound like a pretentious ESL parroting off things you saw on /g/

[Anonymous No.17065716]

>>17065681
I'm not that anon
I just think your post did not contribute to this thread

[Anonymous No.17065725]

>>17059606
General studies chad here. Imagine unironically majoring in something. Topkek. I’m on track to graduate with a 3.9 taking only classes that I enjoy or that are super easy.

[Anonymous No.17065772]

>>17064792
Unlike living languages, Classics are more than vapid babysitting courses for people too rich to not go to university but too stupid to actually learn anything.
You could have gone to a French speaking country and lived there and enrolled in CC lit classes in your target language and instead you spent a year of your life and thousands of dollars. learning how to read The Little Prince. Greek and Latin programs already expect your type to have gotten filtered.

[Anonymous No.17065814]

>>17061959
>instead she mentioned that the Taming of the Shrew was playing at a local theater, subtly indicating she wished to go with me
kek, I believed your story until this part

[Anonymous No.17066189]

>>17059606
Archaeogenetics is booming. Really breathing life into what we knew about people of the past in terms of movements, migrations, and admixture. When it's paired with history and archaeology it is really interesting stuff. Not that it's not interesting on its own.

[Anonymous No.17066200]

>>17059606
>>History
>Now my feeling is that this field might still have some life in it. At least, I know some people working on new translations of never-translated medieval documents, and bringing in new technologies and data analysis to actually discover new knowledge.
Based. Yes, Medieval Studies is keeping the torch alive. If I had to choose my major again it would be in this.

[Anonymous No.17066205]

>>17059833
>>17062795
you're both right

[Anonymous No.17066207]

anon you have to realize all colleges are for profit enterprises. In the digital era historical classical and english scholars are obsolete. one person can distribute content to 10,000 people at the same rate as maybe 6-7 scholarls in 1950. Its for this reason colleges mill out degrees for funds and free money. Once they have colelctively created enough wheat from the farm all the other crops can pay them more even if they rot. humanities degrees are just assets who plant profitable ideas into peoples heads like seeds that with enough care can grow into profitable cattle heads on a lucrative farm.

[Anonymous No.17066217]

>>17064068
Wait, this is awesome. This is going on in TORONTO of all places??? I've legitimately considered getting doing a masters in Medieval Studies

[Anonymous No.17066387]

>>17063870
I have been on and off 4chan for many years. I cannot stress how much I do not give a shit about identifying with the website you browse. That is something only children and /b/tards care about.

[Anonymous No.17066600]

>>17063321
What will you do with your degrees, anon?

[Anonymous No.17066610]

>>17064363
Different anon, but any suggestions at where to look in particular for schools in Europe?

[Anonymous No.17066638]

>>17059606
>History
In a book on Japanese history until 1600, I read that history is a series of stories about the past intended to be true.
Thankfully, I can read some stuff from academics in my country, which is not as polluted by Western pathological thinking.

[Anonymous No.17066682]

>>17060434
>knowing anything about your ex
simp

[Anonymous No.17067262]

>>17066610
Germany is the best, Switzerland (Uni of Zurich, plus a few others) and Denmark (Uni of Copenhagen) are solid choices too. Finally I will also but the Netherlands in the top tier (Utrecht Uni, Uni of Amsterdam).

France is another choice, though you really have to commit to learning French in order to get a good experience at a French university or living in France in general.

Southern Europe has some nice universities but the student culture can be extremely apathetic and degenerate (think less than quarter of students graduating on time) so I wouldn't recommend that unless you are doing a PhD/postdoc and know it's a good research group/department.

If you're adventurous, try Poland or the Czech Republic. But no further east than that.

If you're non-adventurous, try Ireland, or even the UK, but then you're going to be running into the exact same demising Anglo university and diminishing standards that supposedly you want to avoid.

[Anonymous No.17067346]

>>17067262
>(think less than quarter of students graduating on time)
What's the rush?

[Anonymous No.17067495]

>mathphys
Loosely speaking I'm investigating cohomological TQFTs coming from extended supersymmetry and their nonperturbative dualities. We don't really pretend this has relevance to the real world, as adjoint matter does not exist. We just like connecting seemingly disparate topics in mathematics via U-duality and we essentially do enumerative geometry. The field is very vibrant. I will probably leave academia after my PhD because I don't want to go to post-doc hell and would like a family before I'm like 40. But yeah, "real world physics" is pretty much dead if you consider high energy physics. Many colleagues from say stat phys and cold atoms say half of their papers are bullshit and that's just how it's done.

[Anonymous No.17067567]

>>17064000
You won’t get a normie desk job with a degree in psych or sociology. I work at an agency that helps people get jobs. Major in something like business and minor or double major in your passion.

[Anonymous No.17067591]

Despite the poor state of the history field this thread makes me feel like giving it a shot again. Already dropped out though and I can go back if I want since Im 20 but I think Im not going to bother, fuck being american

[Anonymous No.17067743]

>>17060199
I never said that, though. Classics is actually one of the few fields that consistently produces new, verifiable and accurate information. The problem is that it tends to be hyper-specific and barely relevant to the general public, which is why department of classics are closing.

[Anonymous No.17067841]

>>17063167
Based, Hesiod is great

[Anonymous No.17067861]

>>17062554
Im also a CS PhD student in NA but I go to a not very good school. I’m in computer vision how about you?

[Anonymous No.17068072]

>>17059990
I've enjoyed reading your perspective mate, thanks.

[Anonymous No.17068083]

>>17060433
Christ almighty what a retard.

[Anonymous No.17068095]

>>17060513
yeah how bout you blow me

[Anonymous No.17068116]

>>17059631
>Literally every grad student is a commie,
I wish

[Anonymous No.17068135]

>>17061959
This is good.

[Anonymous No.17068184]

I did history in Australia and it was pretty pozzed but not unbearably so

[Anonymous No.17068619]

>>17064197
Soulless