A wonderful essay, though it had the unintended effect of reigniting my PTSD from years of exposure to well-intentioned bureaucrats. I'm going to curl up under the covers with a flashlight and a Terry Pratchett novel and try to forget.
A fantastic essay. Thank you for writing it. I suspect nationalisms, religious fervour etc are variants of bureaucratic psychosis. They are all underpinned by the notion of us and them and that it is more acceptable to be less fair to them.
"Some people have a supernatural ability to repel pointlessness. ... They un-distort reality wherever they go, making some people very upset." I still hold onto the first person I ever met with this superpower, and will often ask her to use her X-ray vision on things that I desperately want to be true, but am uncertain of.
Rings true. I keep thinking about all the privacy officers at all the hospitals in America, wagging their collective finger at all the theoretical HIPAA violators.
this might be the least interesting part of the essay (which I enjoyed, by the way!), but selfishly, I'm curious why you think getting a MS at Oxford is a scam. I'm thinking of going to LSE to get my masters, and I've heard from other folks too that they're just cash cows. :)
Yep, I would say the same. My under-informed understanding is that the British higher education system relies on foreign students paying steep tuition bills to keep all the lights on because they are barred from charging domestic undergrads the actual cost of their education. That incentivizes universities to offer a bunch of junk master's degrees. My MPhil was a bunch of bad lectures from faculty who didn't care that much. I met with my advisor like once every 3-6 months, and this seemed standard. Although she was very nice (she came to one of my improv shows!) she didn't actually advise me on anything, and in her final evaluation she congratulated me for completing an MSc (a one-year degree) instead of an MPhil (a two-year degree), which is what I actually completed.
There's no real reason for students to complain about this, because they come to realize that any benefit they get from a master's degree is really the people they meet and the credential they get, and the classroom stuff is really just a diversion between the library and the pub. Very technical degrees might be an exception to this, if you're learning to code or something.
Case in point: one of my friends somehow ended up on a committee in her department that oversaw the degree programs. Somebody proposed adding a new masters-by-research degree, and a professor spoke up: "But we're all fully booked, nobody can advise these students." And the dean said in reply: "These are research students, they don't take any time."
All that said, living in the UK for a couple years is great, especially if you're close to London airports and can see the rest of Europe on the cheap. If you're footing the bill yourself, I think there are better ways of spending ~$60,000, or whatever it is. But if someone else will pay for you to get a silly master's and fart around London for a year or two, by all means do it, and spend as much time having fun as you can.
I'm in the UK academic system. Your intuitions are correct. One point you're missing is that at the bottom end, a "master's degree" is a cheap way to a UK visa for someone who may, factually, be incapable of speaking or writing English. It's all money to the university, so we are forbidden from pointing this fact out when it happens.
Thanks for the response -- very insightful. I went to a no-name small liberal arts college in Northern California so *part* of the motivation to go is to get the credential, but not all of it. I think the program cost about $28k, not including housing and other costs, etc.
The program I got into is their comparative political economy MSc, which might not be all that useful professionally, but it sounds interesting :)
The observation about fixing things with addition has an interesting correlate in computer programming. Given a programming task to do, where the actual time to completion is, say, 4 weeks, I have found that the maximum number of lines of code is reached at about the 3-week period. Therefore, if the code was 1,000 lines on the 21th of the month, the code delivered at the end of the month is less than 900. This is usually due to the fact than when you spend enough time with the problem, you think about how to rewirte it more elegantly. This is especially true if your debugging is going the way it should. As often as not, the fix for a software bug is not to add code to correct the fix, but to throw out and rewrite that function to do what it was supposed to have done. And typically that rewrite is more elegant since you know know the context and the subtleties.
I found that too when I was a software engineer. The more you know about what you’re doing, the more concise your code. (That goes for writing too.) Conversely, the way to fix really bad code is to chop most of it out. But you probably end up rewriting it from scratch when you realise that what it was supposed to do would only take about a fifth as much space as the original garbage.
I am one of those people immune to bureaucratic psychosis. It’s not a blessing. I’m not a popular person. On the other hand, I can look at myself in a mirror and it doesn’t crack. At my last job I was informed I would not be reappointed, and then watched how all the unpopular suggestions I had made get implemented after I left when management realized I was right.
While this is all reasonable advice, I prefer social distancing to the jab as a preventative measure. Or, to mix metaphors, I am an advocate of the abstinence-only approach. I just stay the f away from bureaucracies as much as humanly possible.
I love this article, it is so sad bureaucratic psychosis is the norm for so much of the world we are required to interact with. I too spend as little time in it as possible- it frankly exhausts the hell out of me.
> ... organizations separate people with... “psychological distance.”... bureaucratic psychosis proliferate because people have a predilection to solve problems with addition...
TL;DR more papers != more efficient education for the majority != addressing "special needs" students
A wonderful essay, though it had the unintended effect of reigniting my PTSD from years of exposure to well-intentioned bureaucrats. I'm going to curl up under the covers with a flashlight and a Terry Pratchett novel and try to forget.
A fantastic essay. Thank you for writing it. I suspect nationalisms, religious fervour etc are variants of bureaucratic psychosis. They are all underpinned by the notion of us and them and that it is more acceptable to be less fair to them.
"Some people have a supernatural ability to repel pointlessness. ... They un-distort reality wherever they go, making some people very upset." I still hold onto the first person I ever met with this superpower, and will often ask her to use her X-ray vision on things that I desperately want to be true, but am uncertain of.
Rings true. I keep thinking about all the privacy officers at all the hospitals in America, wagging their collective finger at all the theoretical HIPAA violators.
this might be the least interesting part of the essay (which I enjoyed, by the way!), but selfishly, I'm curious why you think getting a MS at Oxford is a scam. I'm thinking of going to LSE to get my masters, and I've heard from other folks too that they're just cash cows. :)
Yep, I would say the same. My under-informed understanding is that the British higher education system relies on foreign students paying steep tuition bills to keep all the lights on because they are barred from charging domestic undergrads the actual cost of their education. That incentivizes universities to offer a bunch of junk master's degrees. My MPhil was a bunch of bad lectures from faculty who didn't care that much. I met with my advisor like once every 3-6 months, and this seemed standard. Although she was very nice (she came to one of my improv shows!) she didn't actually advise me on anything, and in her final evaluation she congratulated me for completing an MSc (a one-year degree) instead of an MPhil (a two-year degree), which is what I actually completed.
There's no real reason for students to complain about this, because they come to realize that any benefit they get from a master's degree is really the people they meet and the credential they get, and the classroom stuff is really just a diversion between the library and the pub. Very technical degrees might be an exception to this, if you're learning to code or something.
Case in point: one of my friends somehow ended up on a committee in her department that oversaw the degree programs. Somebody proposed adding a new masters-by-research degree, and a professor spoke up: "But we're all fully booked, nobody can advise these students." And the dean said in reply: "These are research students, they don't take any time."
All that said, living in the UK for a couple years is great, especially if you're close to London airports and can see the rest of Europe on the cheap. If you're footing the bill yourself, I think there are better ways of spending ~$60,000, or whatever it is. But if someone else will pay for you to get a silly master's and fart around London for a year or two, by all means do it, and spend as much time having fun as you can.
I'm in the UK academic system. Your intuitions are correct. One point you're missing is that at the bottom end, a "master's degree" is a cheap way to a UK visa for someone who may, factually, be incapable of speaking or writing English. It's all money to the university, so we are forbidden from pointing this fact out when it happens.
Thanks for the response -- very insightful. I went to a no-name small liberal arts college in Northern California so *part* of the motivation to go is to get the credential, but not all of it. I think the program cost about $28k, not including housing and other costs, etc.
The program I got into is their comparative political economy MSc, which might not be all that useful professionally, but it sounds interesting :)
amen brother, amen.
The observation about fixing things with addition has an interesting correlate in computer programming. Given a programming task to do, where the actual time to completion is, say, 4 weeks, I have found that the maximum number of lines of code is reached at about the 3-week period. Therefore, if the code was 1,000 lines on the 21th of the month, the code delivered at the end of the month is less than 900. This is usually due to the fact than when you spend enough time with the problem, you think about how to rewirte it more elegantly. This is especially true if your debugging is going the way it should. As often as not, the fix for a software bug is not to add code to correct the fix, but to throw out and rewrite that function to do what it was supposed to have done. And typically that rewrite is more elegant since you know know the context and the subtleties.
I found that too when I was a software engineer. The more you know about what you’re doing, the more concise your code. (That goes for writing too.) Conversely, the way to fix really bad code is to chop most of it out. But you probably end up rewriting it from scratch when you realise that what it was supposed to do would only take about a fifth as much space as the original garbage.
I am one of those people immune to bureaucratic psychosis. It’s not a blessing. I’m not a popular person. On the other hand, I can look at myself in a mirror and it doesn’t crack. At my last job I was informed I would not be reappointed, and then watched how all the unpopular suggestions I had made get implemented after I left when management realized I was right.
While this is all reasonable advice, I prefer social distancing to the jab as a preventative measure. Or, to mix metaphors, I am an advocate of the abstinence-only approach. I just stay the f away from bureaucracies as much as humanly possible.
;-) so true. Keep up the reality orienting essay efforts!
I´m a little late to your essays, Mr. Mastroianni, but I´m super glad I discovered them. I feel embraced.
I love this article, it is so sad bureaucratic psychosis is the norm for so much of the world we are required to interact with. I too spend as little time in it as possible- it frankly exhausts the hell out of me.
> ... organizations separate people with... “psychological distance.”... bureaucratic psychosis proliferate because people have a predilection to solve problems with addition...
TL;DR more papers != more efficient education for the majority != addressing "special needs" students
Regarding nonbureaucratic learning methods e.g. tacit knowledge and clear language https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/prompt-engineering-for-humans https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/
Regarding "gifted education", Erik Hoel has a whole series. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/follow-up-why-we-stopped-making-einsteins https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-geniuses-used-to-be-raised