The utility of correction and the death of credentials.

This week, for me, is primarily about peer review. Not generating peer reviews, but dealing with comments from peer reviewers. Fixing errors they have found. I don’t like this, but it is necessary and needed. The questions and comments lead to a better, more nuanced, and more appropriate paper.

You cannot check your privilege when you are wrong.

CH has the principle.

Being “questioned” is not an aspect of disrespect in and of itself. Without discussions involving questions as to the efficacy of any given proposal then you just have echo chambers. Men question each other constantly. I can’t say I typically enjoy being grounded by reality when I have what I feel to be a great idea. No one likes getting shot down. The world ain’t nice. If a person doesn’t like getting shot down, the only way to avoid it is by learning to dodge bullets, improve tactical responses to any given situation and accept that you’re not correct all or even most of the time because of the equipment between your legs.

Sunshine has one application of the same…. (but see below)

The problem is that in our modern society, the job market is more credential-based than it is skill-based, at least for higher status jobs. For example, it doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are, you can’t teach without first getting a four-year university degree and a state teaching license. Skill is secondary to credentials, and our university degree programs prepare people to be credentialed but don’t prepare them very well with actual skills. This is so for several reasons.

First, students have to take a lot of mandated classes in the “diversity” subjects. These classes rarely present a balanced discussion of women’s issues or racial issues nor do they provide students with actual skills. Instead, they are a form of societal welfare for the far left. Radical (usually Marxist) politics is de rigeur for these professorships; you will be hard pressed to find any diversity of social or political thought among most college professors.

Second, degree programs have to prepare students to pass credentialing exams. The percentage of students who pass these exams reflects back on the program, so naturally there is some “teaching to the test” at the expense of teaching real skills.

And finally, there are simply too many people going to college. The last two towns I lived in were Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti; in both these university towns, nearly everyone with a job has or is working on a degree. Your barista who serves you your morning latte, the secretary at the DMV, your garbage man – they’ve practically all got degrees.

Do you really need a degree to pick up trash? Of course not, so why did the garbage man get a degree? Because he was told relentlessly that getting an education would get him ahead in life, but in truth the only people who are really helped by getting a degree are people with a certain level of intellect and drive. The average person simply doesn’t have that level of intellect and drive nor is that a problem. The world only needs a handful of English professors; it needs far more trash collectors and baristas.

And the next revolution will simply take half if not all those credentialed jobs away. I’m seeing this already: I live in a university town and I know too many people cleaning and serving coffee with nursing and teaching degrees because they have the credentials, but all the jobs are taken, and if you don’t get the (rare) probationary year jobs you will miss out as in a year the following crop of graduates will undercut you for the same position.

You now need to have a certain degree of flexibility and the ability to continually relearn and improve. This is built into my family: My father still teachers (relieving, in sink primary schools, in his 80s) and also understands liquid nitrogen and how to clone cows, preserve sperm and do high tech cattle breeding: my brother’s main qualification is his heavy transport licence but has taught himself how to sell and administrate as he has become more senior in his firm, and I’ve leveraged my clinical skills by continually staying close to the bleeding edge on meta analytic techniques.

Because the generic degree is now without utility. What matters is skills.

Employers want skills, rather than credentials. There may have been a time when a credential had a tight correlation with a skillset that an employer sought in a new hire, but that has weakened over time, given the dynamic nature of most jobs, and the dilution of rigor in attaining the credential that most degrees have become. Furthermore, technology makes many skillsets obsolete, while creating openings for new ones. With the exception of those with highly specialized advanced degrees, very few people over the age of 30 today, can say that the demands of their current job have much relevance to what they learned in college, or even what computing, productivity, and research tools they may have used in college. Furthermore, anyone who has worked at a corporation for a decade or more is almost certainly doing a very different job than the one they were doing when they were first hired.

Hence, the superstar of the modern age is not the person with the best degree, but rather the person who acquires the most new skills with the greatest alacrity, and the person with the most adaptable skillset. A traditional degree has an ever-shortening half-life of relevance as a person’s career progresses, and even fields like Medicine and Law, where one cannot practice without the requisite degree, will not be exempt from this loosening correlation between pedigree and long-term career performance. Agility and adaptability will supercede all other skillsets in the workforce.

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them. If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college. If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree.

It is better to look at open source to see the future. It does not matter who you are, what matters is your code. You do not even have to be a nice human being: you have to be able to code and deliver. Your credentials are as useful as your suit: you may need it for the interview, but once you are there what matters is what you have done.

In short, what your peers think of your productivity, your code.

What cannot be made generic, what requires judgement. All else will not be outsourced, because even low wage people are expensive. It will be automated.