✧✦Catherine✦✧
i agree that this is depressing, but i don't think AI is the _cause_. this problem started when we collectively decided to gatekeep social and physical mobility with higher education
i went to university ~15 years ago. a naive idiot, i thought that i'm there to learn. eventually one of my parents casually admitted that university is for getting connections--i think the parent who was doing a PhD at the time, too
✧✦Catherine✦✧
a year or two after that i discovered that you need a diploma to be considered human for the purposes of immigration. after that point, higher education ceased to have any meaning besides "a ticket to survival". having to learn was an unpleasant byproduct
at the time, AI didn't exist and i also didn't know how to cheat. would i cheat my way through today? without hesitation, yes. academic integrity means nothing when the other end of scale is "being treated by a bureaucracy like you matter".
✧✦Catherine✦✧
in a way, i am glad that it is unraveling: this whole system is biased towards granting basic rights to people who got lucky with their family. it is manifestly unjust and should not exist in its present form. anybody who cheats through university to get a blue card is jusified in doing so
at the same time, i wish there were places i could go to where i could learn from people dedicated to their field, at my own pace and without going into debt
would be nice, wouldn't it
✧✦Catherine✦✧
(i still don't have a diploma. i got _incredibly_ lucky that my skillset happens to be considered equally if not more valuable in the UK for the time being. i was not so lucky before & it might run out, but i'm very glad i have it right now.)
Cara
@whitequark same feels. Germany basically has me shut out of most pathways. I run up against this constantly here despite having more than 25 years of experience and a constant habit of self learning. Student debt was a super unappealing option but now it feels like being stabbed in the back by my own pragmatism.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@cararemixed I'm really sorry. it's awful
Cara
@whitequark I mean, we’re in similar boats. Thanks for sharing your story too.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@swetland yup. I might get one if I manage to get less disabled somehow :)
Brian Swetland
@whitequark Never finished my degree, instead diving into the career that I thought I would need said degree for... 30 years later it turns out it never mattered for that... but *now* it might be desirable to live in another (hopefully less broken) country (something that never had any urgency in the past) and, yeah, that'd be simpler if I had got the piece of paper back in my 20s...
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx i completely agree
??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx there are people doing independent research and non-academic publishing who are doing excellent work, but... it's not a lot, the funding is heavily skewed to those who excel at form over function (the nilered problem), and you just don't have the resources to do certain things this way
how much molecular biology is being done that way? you could probably count the people on one hand
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@krans yeah. it's kind of what I'd probably do in an alternate universe where PTSD didn't completely prevent me from being able to learn
Peter Brett
@whitequark An alternative anecdote: I went to university 20 years ago. I thought I was there to learn, and I did learn a lot, and I had a great time learning. I didn't spend my time “getting connections” — I'm still in touch with exactly 2 of my peers. I have no regrets.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@parzivalwolfram that is incredibly grim
nobody's ever asked me for a degree for a job but i guess my skill is exceptional so i get to skip that
ParzivalWolfram
@whitequark unfortunately the pathways into any career without one appear to be long closed, I got spat out of HS at 19 directly into COVID and tried to get a degree, but literal server fires I couldn't control took my one chance via federal funding and I have spent the next six years waiting for my life to begin as a bachelor's and six years of experience became required to do the most menial jobs that used to be the typical entry into a career. A degree isn't just a requirement to be considered a person for immigration, at this point a master's is required at home as well.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx i used to keep contact with more people doing this kind of stuff, but when the AI explosion happened some of them got completely, cult-level brainwormed about it and i just gave up
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx i think one thing large, slow institutions provide is inertia that prevents you from doing shit like "sell everything and move to sf because singularity is about to come and all research that isn't ai research is literally worthless". small groups are much more vulnerable to it
or maybe this is wishful thinking
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx yes yes this
i don't really... have "community". i tried finding one within the trans demographic but what i got was an extreme degree of cruelty so many times i gave up by now. i don't really care much for technical (as in software programming) spaces; even in those where the level of argument is above the toddler stuff like "This syntax is bad and I'm objective about it because I am" it just... doesn't click
i know a good number of individuals doing excellent work on...
??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx programming languages but it doesn't feel like a field i can participate in. i build and maintain on a programming language that people really like! i do it in a state of isolation where the most community i get is reading old papers
i am much more interested in non-software stuff (which feels way more fulfilling to _just do_, as opposed to do _for a purpose_ like how i make git-pages to kill github pages) but ...
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx it's an even more dire situation there. i know, like, one professional chemist and she doesn't have community either. what the fuck are you supposed to do. sure i have the resources to do mildly interesting research (or at least learning) but doing it alone is just despair inducing, not to mention incompatible with my disability
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx the person who makes me the most excited about building weirdass contraptions with my hands, the thing that makes me feel alive and always did, is currently... an ex-convict who's uploading unhinged shit to youtube but somehow manages to be more rigorous about methods than half the published papers i read
but that's still pretty isolated
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx I started out kinda like that (when I ran away from "home" I had basically one friend, which quickly turned into zero for reasons I had no power over) and after something like a decade it drove me completely insane. specifically life lost all meaning when I'm doing it alone to the point I physically can't move my body sometimes if it's just for myself, and I end up lying on the floor in some corner for like 30-40 hours in a weird daze until I figure out how to stop
??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx I do work for public benefit because I like it but actually mostly because _not_ doing something like that feels like waterboarding myself continuously. it doesn't have to be for general public, it could be one random girl, but whatever source of purely internal motivation I once had I've completely burned out
this gets better if I'm not physically alone but I'm typically physically alone over 300 days in a year and I don't know that I'll make it thru the next decade if it's like this
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx I've had brilliant _individual collaborators_ (also mostly very burned out), which I've taken as an opportunity: there's no community but at least I can try and cultivate personal relationships with people I enjoy working with. it works... sometimes. it is nice when it works
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@evey oh man that's so unsurprising but also grim
Evey , XFS fanby
@whitequark ye on similar note I have noticed that MH care (at least in NL) seems to be a lot more willing and actually treating you like a adult if they know you have a masters degree. Like so stupid this matters but somehow it makes just a lot of stuff a lot easier :/
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx so the position i'm in is really weird and more complex than it sounds
i _am_ strongly self-motivated. almost all of the shit i do is extremely specific in ways that often go against the prevailing opinion and it is better for that. (not to say i've never bent over for someone but that rarely produces good results)
however, i cannot stand being alone. so if you take those two powerful drives and jam them together you get a weird situation where...
??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx ... I act like I'm doing it _for someone_ but that someone (real or imagined) is more of a cognitive tool than direct, immediate motivation. it does feel nice to have my work be used for the purpose it was produced, but I would never be able to do what I'm doing if it was that alone; I work because there is a way the world isn't and I want it to be
there is something atavistic about this whole situation, but I'm also not in a rush to fix it because someone giving a shit fr would be nice
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx (it's actually been kind of a problem because historically I've been in a lot of situations where I'm hired to do X which is bullshit so I just do Y instead because it is better. Y takes four times as long but I care about the quality of result and, usually, not so much about its commercial applications. turns out my skillset is valuable enough people mostly just tolerate that, but it still produces a lot of conflict)
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@maswan @evey my instinct would be to appear less educated than I am (to not appear like a threat to their competence) but maybe that's wrong
maswan
@whitequark @evey I've noticed change in how doctors regular healthcare treats me once I get to the point of talking with reasonably academically phrasing.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx like 75% of things i do in any given day are something i acknowledge as being basically a poor, barely-useful surrogate of receiving basic and necessary care. it is a deeply unpleasant situation to be in but despite no few attempts over the years all i got was new and exciting types of PTSD
i keep trying but it's starting to cost me a lot just to keep up at all
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@nyx matter of factly: it is quite difficult to scare me away with insanity (so long as it doesn't seem likely that you're intending to be cruel towards me specifically, which is obviously not the case here) and i take people at their word and treat it as seriously as anything else in life (which sometimes causes more problems than if i didn't)
not saying you have to explain yourself, just that i think it'd be fine
??? 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving:
Rastal
@whitequark It's game theory, game theory says people need to cheat to get ahead because the game is rigged against them. That's why psychopaths always dominate high ranking positions because they've learned to cheat the best.
ParzivalWolfram
@whitequark Unless you're being specifically sought out by name by employers, I'm not sure how, most applications I've seen aren't just "you need experience" but "you need experience we can verify, give us at least two managers we can call" because it has to be specifically part of a job.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@parzivalwolfram I was sought by name since uh... my first proper industry job, actually, but mot of those jobs were actually quite bad for my health so I've decided to only apply to jobs myself after the last one
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@parzivalwolfram (I realize this is an _indescribably_ privileged position; I don't know how I ended up in it really. but also neither Oxide, nor SCI, nor Jane Street, nor BeSport have cared about whether I have a degree)
dram🎀
@whitequark i was explicitly taught by two people that my whole purpose in life is to get the stupid paper.
it's not. they're just playing the sims with my life irl. i wish i learned that sooner.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@foolishowl i dropped out after 1.5 or so
FoolishOwl
@whitequark I couldn't handle college and gave up trying after six years. Every so often I hear someone talk about how college was effortless and it just makes me feel stupid.
I eventually did a practical program at a community college, but it's not the same.
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