Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Lecture: 2015 Personality Lecture 13: Existentialism: Nazi Germany and the USSR" video.

  1.  @emperorstevee  ; i disagree. If education were truly run like a business, you'd get better and better education at lower and lower prices. What you're describing isn't really a business. You describe a RACKET. And the fact that we're all here discussing this wonderful lecture, and it's being delivered at zero marginal cost (cost of your Internet, essentially, but no additional cost for additional content, once the infrastructure's there), says that our institutions of learning are horribly dysfunctional. Year by year, we pay MORE for a product that is of poorer and poorer quality! If education were the purpose of our public school system, it wouldn't look anything like what it looks like, now. It is, instead, a means for the state to indoctrinate the youth, but MORE importantly, keep a lot of not-good teachers employed. Heck, even allowing that most teachers mean well and do an OK job, you see our institutions of learning as nothing more or less than a sinecure for incompetent administrators. They're the ones getting most of the money, and the only thing that grows in these institutions is the number and salaries of administrators! Get that office remodel. Gut the classrooms for safe spaces and administrators' private fiefdoms. Teachers buying their own damn materials so that kids can have paper to write on, and something to write with. No money for that sort of thing. Budgets are tight. But what we REALLY need is an office of diversity and equity that we got along fine without for centuries, and whose only purpose is apparently to go look for grievances and impose mandatory trainings in intersectionality and critical race theory. Total waste of everybody's time and taxpayers' money. And if they're successful with their equity and diversity, then students will be protesting their oppression! When college is closed down for a 'day of absence,' you have succeeded in your program, and all that remains is rooting out the last remaining white supremacists on campus, preferably with roaming bands of pissed-off students. Public education, as we know it, is nothing more or less than a ridiculously expensive jobs programs for school administrators!
    2
  2. The reason people think the subatomic world is probabilistic is because it's too small for us to see individual subatomic particles (too small and maybe too fast). We can't see the jellybeans, but we can weigh a bunch of them all at once, and theorize about the individual jellybean, through statistical inference, or simply by dividing by the total number of jellybeans after we observe them acting together. This is a big hang-up I have with the Bohr-Einstein debate. Bohr's quantum mechanics enabled us to make predictions, sure, but just because you can't see something doesn't mean that it is not behaving deterministically, or as Einstein would say "God does not play dice." I'm probably out in left field, but there are some artifacts of these probabilistic models, such as the bell curve, that according to the model, predict a very small - but positive - probability of ants that are 100 feet tall or elephants that are 1 inch tall. They're just out in the tail of the distribution. Now, take the fact that you're only ever dealing with billions or trillions of these objects. Small probability of it ever happening to any one particle becomes near-certainty, simply due to the large number of trials/particles involved. Maybe there's only a 0.00001 probability of an event, but run the experiment 1,000,000,000,000 times and the probability of that 0.00001 probability event becomes near certain. The infinite # of monkeys typing at random sort of deal.
    1