tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2850462849314268040.post3091156994053201014..comments2024-03-10T00:26:57.262-08:00Comments on The Dance of the Hippo: What's an education worth?Karlhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11654006671545294361noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2850462849314268040.post-39899765301126259342018-03-21T04:14:24.436-07:002018-03-21T04:14:24.436-07:00Excellent!Excellent!Jason Antrosiohttps://www.livinganthropologically.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2850462849314268040.post-46588139231455973132018-03-21T03:28:47.928-07:002018-03-21T03:28:47.928-07:00As often happens, I start a reply to a comment you...As often happens, I start a reply to a comment you've left on my blog, and <a href="http://thedanceofthehippo.blogspot.com/2018/03/whats-education-worth-part-ii.html" rel="nofollow">it turns into a post</a>.<br /><br />Except in this case it turned into two posts, because the data note at the end itself became post-length. (Link at the end of the main item.)<br />DeleteKarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11654006671545294361noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2850462849314268040.post-81677516740455254742018-03-21T03:25:50.857-07:002018-03-21T03:25:50.857-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Karlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11654006671545294361noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2850462849314268040.post-68201845577603554412018-03-18T05:58:23.737-07:002018-03-18T05:58:23.737-07:00Interesting stuff! Reading it reminded me of a cou...Interesting stuff! Reading it reminded me of a couple things. First, the recent <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/There-Is-No-Case-for-the/242724" rel="nofollow">There is no case for the humanities</a>, which perhaps makes the same point in a very different way.<br /><br />Second, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's advice about what you should take in college:<br /><br />"If you ever took a (dull) statistics class in college, did not understand much of what the professor was excited about, and wondered what “standard deviation” meant, there is nothing to worry about. The notion of standard deviation is meaningless outside of Mediocristan. Clearly it would have been more beneficial, and certainly more entertaining, to have taken classes in the neurobiology of aesthetics or postcolonial African dance, and this is easy to see empirically. Standard deviations do not exist outside the Gaussian, or if they do exist they do not matter and do not explain much. But it gets worse. The Gaussian family (which includes various friends and relatives, such as the Poisson law) are the only class of distributions that the standard deviation (and the average) is sufficient to describe. You need nothing else. The bell curve satisfies the reductionism of the deluded." (I quoted this in a long reflection on <a href="https://www.livinganthropologically.com/black-swan-anthropology/" rel="nofollow">Black Swan Anthropology</a>.<br /><br />So I think we're pretty much on the same page.Jason Antrosiohttps://www.livinganthropologically.com/noreply@blogger.com