North Korea is a world leader in one very dubious field. It’s the most accomplished forger of foreign currency in the world. To the despair of the US Treasury, the hermit kingdom can produce $100 bills that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Counterfeiting money is not a new crime, of course. “Clipping” coins is as old as money itself, and the authorities take it very seriously: it devalues the currency and risks catastrophic economic fallout. Which begs a question.
Why would any firm or institution that produces a very valuable currency of its own then want to debase it?
I’m talking about education, where the currency is the academic credentials it produces. The sector has begun to clip its own coinage, by allowing artificial intelligence (AI) into classrooms.
Well done there Mr Orlowski, well done there. Not just correct but very good indeed.
We can even take it further. Gresham’s Law – bad money drives out good. And further once again. The individual incentive is always to clip the money – devalue the degree – in order to gain that value while the overall effect is the ruination of the currency itself.
This sort of cascade can only be dealt with by fierce means. We used to hang people for “uttering” – passing on counterfeit money. We used to hang more people for that in a year – some years at least – than we did for murder. This sort of counterfeiting is, of course, concentrated in the more progressive ends of the humanities departments. Therefore we should hang the more progressive ends of the humanities departments.
There are indeed problems in this world that stem from a divergence between hte individual incentive and the general result. That’s the very reason that fierceness in the changing of the individual incentive is spo important. Sadly, it’s not always true that the necessary action is as objectively enjoyable as this one.
Debasement of the British degree was entirely intentional by Blair. Or at least, if he didn’t intend it, he was being incredibly dumb rather than evil — which is always a possibility with politicians.
The point is that it didn’t need AI. Or even large language models pretending to be AI. It just needed midwits who wanted a cushy life teaching other midwits to regurgitate slogans, and in all human history there’s never been a shortage of those. LLMs just mean that the midwits can do less work, so they’re really happy about it. And, because they can’t see the effect part of cause-and, they don’t realise that it’ll just make them unemployed. Or they assume that they’ll be comfortably retired by the time it does.
I always assumed that Blair’s degree inflation was just some clunking effort to keep 18-22 year olds off of the dole queue.
In the last few years I had begun to suspect that it was all a lot more sinister than that.
We used to hang people for “uttering” – passing on counterfeit money.
Oh, much better than that! It rated the drawing & quartering as well.
Otto,
I’m still going with stupidity and a way to keep middle class midwits of the streets.
During the debate I remember one of the leading advocates, an academic, being asked how many many people earned above the average wage and she thought a minute then said half of them. I think that was the point I realised we were in trouble.
Weren’t the universities set up for the no-hopers? The sons couldn’t cut it in the real world, so went into the church. Have they changed?
The huge rise in fee-paying overseas students has already debased the value of a degree. If you’re a UK student, you might need AAA; an overseas student can get in with BBC.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/11/york-university-lowers-entry-requirements-overseas-students/
Credentialism, too. When everyone has it, it means nothing.
I’m both proud and glad to have spent my working life in fields that require real-time performance. It sorts the men from the boys and there’s no escaping it. It’s a clean, honest and straightforward way to live. Apart from a degree in Fine Art I have no formal qualifications for anything I’ve ever done and have always been hired on proven ability, or personal recommendation from those who have proved their ability. I hire people on the same basis. It works.
The $100 bill has fewer anti counterfeiting features than the British fiver. Given it’s the currency of international crime I wonder if this is deliberate.
If all those dollars returned to the US it woulld spark hyperinflation. (Unless the US Treasury tracked the serial numbers or something.)
Orlowski is all about licensing journalists and otherwise limiting who can be one. So he does know which side his bread is buttered on.
Too bad he’s evil. A reporter is one who reports. No other qualifications necessary. Licensing them just means the licenser gets to pick what news gets reported.
I suppose he can call himself a journalist if he wants a fancy title.
Eventually many further education credentials will be worthless.
Eventually, eh?
I’m fairly certain North Korea has a better education system than the UK. It could hardly be more preeningly retarded.
I can remember an academic meeting where departmental colleagues were bemoaning a decline in academic standards. I pointed out that we had consciously done the same to our own standards because of the effect of competition. They denied that we had ever done any such thing. Talk about selective memory!
The way it works is this: Imperial College, say, makes it easier to get a First in Chemistry. So, fearing that this will tempt candidates to go to Imperial College rather than Cambridge, the Cambridge Chemistry department makes it easier to get a First. So, fearing that Cambridge science students will choose to do a Chemistry degree rather than some of the other sciences, they make it easier to get a First. And so it goes.
I suppose he can call himself a journalist if he wants a fancy title.
The ones that get up my nose are the ones who pretentiously call themselves “investigative journalists”. I once had a stand-up row in the British ambassador’s office in Cambodia, with one-such Mail-on-Sunday cunt who was trying to prevent me from talking to any other press on the grounds that his rag had paid for a flight for my ex-wife and daughter. What really cemented my hatred of the Mail swamp was someone phoning a friend (who at time I was sitting next to) asking if he could get him a quote from me about “his dead kid”.
I remember a few years ago there being a raft of press articles slagging off bloggers. At the time I found bloggers to be much more thought provoking and informative than anything that the Mainstream Media was churning out. I remember thinking that it must be worrying when amateurs are doing your job free of charge and doing it better than you are.
I thnk it was completely missing (or deliberately overlooking) the truism that correlation does not imply causation. They looked at society and correctly observed that all those nice middle-class and upper middle class people had degrees, and had created a prosperous high-trust society. “Right!” they thought to themselves, “we’ll make sure everyone can get a degree, and then they’ll all be nice middle- and upper middle-class!”
Obviously, they failed to note that the degree was (or had been) a marker for the habits and values (and ability, to be fair) that allowed the holder to establish a nice midle / upper life. Putting people without those habits, values and ability into a degree program did not transform them – it transformed the degree programs, See also, promotion of home ownership and the Community Reinvestment Act in the US: same good intentions, same lack of thought, and a similar outcome.
@ bis
No.
You are several centuries (probably a millennium, but I don’t know when the “Kind Hearts and Coronets” quip originated) out. Originally the universities were only for the most studious and taught theology, gradually extended to classical languages (needed for theology), philosophy, medicine and mathematics; “commoners” (non-scholars) were a much later addition.
For a long time to do Divinity it was required to know Latn, Greek and Hebrew.
Even until recently a certifcate in Latin was required to do a law degree.
I had a degree in History and worked in IT. In the late 80s, Computer Science was still not an esoteric subject and people who studied probably had three months advantage on those who hadn’t.
These days with a degree in Hist I probably wouldn’t get a sniff of an IT job except as a Relationship Manager or something equally gay.
The UK university system has some advantages. It identifies the people you definitely don’t want to employ.
I have no degree (No, really!). When I left the Army I joined IBM. They valued ex-service folks in a time when around 3% of people had degrees. Switched from helicopter mechanic to software. Worked with people with and without degrees. In most cases it doesn’t make much of a difference. Nowadays all manner of useless arseholes have mickey mouse degrees and they think degrees earned in the 3% era are of the same value as theirs.
dcardno: The same with selling council housing to tenants. “Home-owners vote Conservative, we’ll sell them their homes and they’ll become Conservative voters”. No, they went from Labour-voting tenants to Labour-voting home owners.
In the late ’80s I did “Computer Science”, and it was nothing at all what I thought “I want to do Computing” would be, and was about 15 years out of date of stuff I’d been doing six years *BEFORE* going to uni.
Further to “rhoda”‘s comments… When I were a lad, only about 5% of us went to university, and (from experience of only a couple of Russell Group establishments) they only awarded one or two (if, indeed any at all) “Firsts”. Nowadays, 50% of school leavers go to “uni” and they seem to hand out “Firsts” upon presentation of a couple of Cornflake-packet-tops, ie about 30%, and large numbers seem to go on to take Master’s degrees… On that basis I reckon that my LLB “Desmond” is at least the equivalent of a Doctorate today! 🙂
… and further to “Otto”, I spent my working life in IT despite having an LLB – for which I was a “mature student”, though I suppose that I’d cheated by having done a Physics degree straight from school and having worked for a few years. “Computer Science” hadn’t been invented until some while after I entered fully into the world of work.