Intellectual jokes

Doesn’t everyone go to college to be more of an intellectual? I know I did. Now you can do it more simply. Here is a fun Reddit thread on intellectual jokes.

This is the one that I keep telling everyone: 

Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French café revising a draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, “I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.” The waitress replies, “I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?”

On Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, he mentions a Bob Newhart joke that I also think forces you to think (probably Polish should be changed to something less offensive): 

Two Polish pilots are bringing their plane in a for a landing. The plane hits the run, but there isn’t enough room to stop and they crash into the terminal. One pilot turns to the other and say, “Man, that was a short runway.” The other replies, “But it sure was wide though.”

"Stop blaming professors"

This study made sense to me. Sure, professors are mostly liberal, but do we really indoctrinate our students and turn them into young communists? In fact, this sociologist, Kyle Dodson of UC Merced, found that students who spend more time with professors are more likely to be moderate, while students who spend more time with each other develop more extreme views.

It makes sense to me because students choose their own friends and clubs to a much greater extent than they choose their professors. Their friends thus tend to be people who have the same beliefs as them and when people who have similar beliefs come together, they tend to encourage each other's beliefs. For more on this, check on Cass Sunstein's book Going to Extremes.

By contrast, students choose professors but not typically because of the professor's beliefs. They choose professors who are good teachers (or entertaining teachers or easy teachers) and then end up being exposed to different political beliefs than their own. And further, when they interact a lot with professors, they (hopefully) start to see how complicated the world is, which also moderates their beliefs. 

So the advice in my book - get to know your professors - pays off in making your political beliefs more moderate. And as we know: "everything in moderation, including moderation".

Study Aids

With the new year school approaching (or for some already here), there have been a lot of interesting articles about the best practices in studying. I thought I would run through some of the best ones that appear to be based on actual research.

The NYT has a neat article showing how some of the standard advice for studying is wrong:

- For example, instead of always studying in one place (like your dorm room or library carrel), you should have multiple study spots because your brain makes associations between the material you are studying and the external environment.

- Also, instead of studying one thing intensely at a single sitting, it is good to study multiple subjects or multiple types of problems.

The British Psychological Society's Research Digest also lists 9 Evidence-Based Study Tips. A few of my favorites are these:

- Take naps
- Test yourself
- Believe in yourself
- Forgive yourself for procrastinating

Cal Newport

At the end of my book, I put a few suggestions for further reading. One of the people I regret not including is Cal Newport. I think his books are a perfect complement to mine because two of the things I didn't address in the book are his bread and butter: study skills (I assumed that good students knew these already) and finding the meaning in your studies (I thought that everyone brings their own perspective to this). Reading his blog has convinced me that most students do need to think about these issues and his books (How to Win at College and How To Become a Straight-A Student) are a great place to get this.

For a quick test of his approach, check out these blog posts and then go buy his books:

A Study Hacks Primer
The Study Hacks Philosophy on College
The Straight A Method

The Classics

In many classes, particularly in the social sciences and philosophy, you are required to read classic works ranging from Aristotles to Adam Smith, from Machiavelli to Max Weber. You might ask yourself why. Surely, modern research has superceded these works. What have professors been doing for the past hundred years or more if we haven't gotten beyond these works. Don't we know more about philosophy than Aristotles, more about economics than Adam Smith, and so on. In any case, most of these works are hard to read - they use a different vocabulary, address questions that are no longer topical. If we must read them, why not updated versions that give the spirit of their arguments, but in modern terms and with modern relevance. In other words, good distillations.

The answers to these questions aren't obvious and are in fact controversial. Two bloggers have recently weighed on these issues from the pro-classics and anti-classics schools and their arguments are worth reading. The next time you are moaning or exulting over Plato or Hobbes in the original, check out their views in these two posts (pro and anti) and then bring them up in class.

Death to Strunk and White

If you're like me, probably the one bit of grammatical instruction you got in college was an assignment to purchase and read Strunk and White's Elements of Style. This turns out to be a major mistake. As linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum puts it, "its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense." He characterizes the stylistic advice as "mostly harmless". Consider such classics as "omit needless words" or "be clear". This advice isn't bad, but it begs the important questions - what is clear? which words are needless? If it encourages you to go back over essays to look for unclear sections or overly wordy ones, great. But it doesn't show you how to do this.

Worse, however, is its grammatical advice which is often just plain wrong. Claims like the passive voice is bad, put statements in postive form, write with nouns and verbs, keep related words together, don't split infinitives, use the singular verb with none, or don't start sentences with however turn out to be at best misleading and at worst completely wrong. To prove it, just search for examples of these sins in the best writers of the past - say, Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain. Or actually just search through Strunk and White's own book because they constantly violate their own rules.

If a professor nevertheless insists on Strunk and White, send them these links to Professor Pullum's work where he debunks their work. Or invite Prof. Pullum to your university for a talk on these issues. And what to use instead? I've profited from Joseph Williams' Style which seems to me based on clearer principles and actually shows you how to construct a clear and elegant sentence, paragraph, and essay. I'll keep an eye out for Prof. Pullum's recommendations.

Going to graduate school

One of the chapters of the book describes the decision to go to grad school and particularly to a PhD program. My advice was short because I wasn't sure how many people would be interested, so I thought that I would link to a few more comprehensive guides.

Tim Burke's "Should You Go to Grad School"
Fontana Lab's "It's Six Years of Love and Music, Man"
Fabio Rojas's "Grad School Rulz"
Eszter Hargittai's "Ph.Do"

Kieran Healy sums it all up like this: "In academic environments, expectations are high and monitoring is low (but decisive when it happens). Many grad-student pathologies spring from a failure to deal with this problem."

Why so many liberal professors?

In the book, I mentioned how liberal the professoriate is and how that might affect your education. Some new research suggests just why the professoriate is so liberal. It claims that just as few men go into nursing because it is perceived as an occupation for women, so is academic life typecast as a place for liberals and hence unattractive to conservatives. You can find more details here, but the research leads to this interesting conclusion: “the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

There's a lie in my lecture

A great post about a professor who always includes one lie in his lectures and it is up to students to spot it. I will have to use this next semester.

Advice from elsewhere

I like to scour the web for the advice that other professors are giving their students. The Yale political scientist/economist Chris Blattman has a nice set of ten tips that he recommends to undergraduates interested in public affairs. I would second his recommendation to get a good foundation in statistics and mathematical modeling. It really is essential for working in public affairs. I noticed that he is a little less supportive of language classes than I am both because immersion is the best way to learn a language (very true) and because there are lots of opportunties for learning languages outside of college (somewhat true - more true if you decide to live abroad).

Appreciative thinking

The Berkeley psychology professor Seth Roberts has an interesting post on what he calls appreciative thinking (in contrast to critical thinking). He worries that students are too inculcated with the tendency to tear apart any academic they receive, to find its flaws. He suggests instead that students be taught to first appreciate what the work achieves because just about any published piece has some worth.

This is a good point. In my first reading of a work, I always try to give the author the benefit of the doubt and give it my most generous reading. But I do have two quibbles with his worries. The first is that I think it applies more to graduate students than undergrads who are often too appreciative, assuming that if we assign a work then it must be both correct and important. Second, I think appreciation is a good first step but needs to be followed by criticism. Almost all academic work challenges the conclusions of some previous work. If we simply appreciate, then it is difficult to know what to believe. If two scholars disagree, then at least one of them has to wrong.