ILX University - first course?

in either sense; i'm more interested in learning than debating. the left-wing professors in my program could be hard to take when they had a political agenda to push.

Shouldn't the first course be a consomme?

bread, perhaps?

iirc I watched the first class or two of this one and 'good' and 'dry' are both adjectives I'd use...shiller's not a radical or very loud.

still looking at the wine list over here.

Financial Markets is the only one of these I feel genuinely insecure about not understanding very well, and i guess that's the whole idea behind this?

what is 77?

oh boy

intro to 77 (yale)

classes I've already basically taken:

General Chemistry (Berkeley)
European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present (Berkeley)
Intro to Computer Science (Harvard)

shit I would just, like, read a book about instead of taking a university-level class about it:

Intro to Roman Architecture (Yale)
Science and Cooking (Harvard)
Moral Foundations of Politics (Yale)
Evolution, Ecology and Behavior (Yale)

things I would prefer to study in a collegiate environment:

Intro to Hebrew Bible (Yale)
Financial Markets (Yale)

Financial Markets sounds awful to me which means it's probably the one that I should do but I don't wanna!

I prefer my university courses to be dry and information-dense rather than open-ended philosophical discussions

well none of them are going to be open-ended discussions; they're all lecture classes!

well the thread will be the open-ended discussion! ideally

"open-ended philosophical discussion" was mostly aimed at "Moral Foundations of Politics" since it has to do with morality

I just watch tons and tons of TED talks.

most interested in

Moral Foundations of Politics (Yale)

most in need of financial markets but it'd wreck me

don't forget advanced bikery

in what way do i need to know how to ride a bike

i am into all of them except for Evolution, Ecology and Behavior (Yale) b/c i think evolutionary biology is 99% poseur bullshit.

okay wait i typed the wrong word up there, meaning 'psychology' instead of 'biology' but i was kinda tempted to let it stand and let people think i was a closet creationist

lol yeah you scared me for a second

it was a proud decision on the side of maturity, but damn what a great opportunity it would have been to troll

"open-ended philosophical discussion" was mostly aimed at "Moral Foundations of Politics" since it has to do with morality

― I AM THE CROOT (crüt), Tuesday, September 27, 2011 12:49 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

y u hate fun

i am into all of them except for Evolution, Ecology and Behavior (Yale) b/c i think evolutionary psychology is 99% poseur bullshit.

I know the term "evolutionary psychology" is associated with tons of unscientific sexist/racist/etc bullshit but I'm inclined to think that human psychology is almost entirely based on how/under what conditions we evolved!

yeah I mean, considering the alternative explanations...

Intro to Roman Architecture....except I actually had it already!.

just a lazy vote here for not doing financial markets ones. like maybe it would be so great to do that at some point but i think the initial run should be something where getting used to the learning & lectures is offset by regaining a childlike sense of wonder at the world & its eternal questions.

Sorry, dudes, but I'm leaning heavily toward Moral Foundations.

I mean would take all this classes, but for poll purposes....

i think the most interesting ppl in academia are evolutionary psychologists of some sort (tho mostly they call themselves behavioral whatever or social psychologist whatever)

http://press.princeton.edu/images/k7040.gif

I gotta say all of these choices interest me on some level.

Financial markets sounds good too. I can't take any more philosophy, the internet has forever tainted my interest in it.

do financial markets imo, shiller is cool

voted for comp sci cause it was my nom but fully support financial markets or moral philosophy

we should just spin off the top two or top three

yeah I think we can make a decision based on the results.

I'd take any of these tbh, this is a great idea. Can't wait!

i don't know which to vote for! tempted to do CS just because i actually did start that one but never finished it but economics and architecture are two gigantic blind spots for me....hmmm.

Hebrew bible!

i frankly disbelieve a lot of the core(ish) evo-psych claims. they strike me as are specious and ultimately unsubstantiated, i.e. i don't countenance the assertion that in 2011 "gentleman prefer blondes" happens because younger healthier cavewomen with high chances of reproductive success tended to be more fair, and cavemen evolved a response to fair, slender, less-bearded ladies with a higher waist-to-hip ratio. i mistrust because, let's be honest, this is a highly culturally-based aesthetic, and innate psychological behaviors would tend to be applied with greater distribution and not just to substantiate current behaviors and preferences. a lot of of evo psych tends toward the teleological, and it's mostly non-falsifiable and non-testable. i don't doubt that in the whole field there are interesting and amazing things, but i also don't belief a lot of the chaff that's currently being bandied about. (i agree w/ crüt, for the most part).

let's play 'spot the typo' above.

surely there is, on some level, something that men find attractive about women that is related to evolution?

I think it's the vaginas.

don't forget the boobies!

obviously most (heterosexual-defined) men of reproductive age tend to be drawn toward women who indicate some potential for reproduction, even if there's no intention of reproducing. we're not attracted, by and large, to children and the elderly; to the sickly-skinny or morbidly obese. but the signifiers are many and varied, and individual, it benefits the continued success of the species to cultivate diversity in taste (and breeding partner) rather than depend on a few explicit indicators of beauty and reproductive readiness.

obv i am no expert in this stuff at all, i just took a course on it

I think this kind of caveman sociology gets a lot of attention but doesn't represent a lot of the field (at least in my experience). I also truck w/ the assertion that that kind of thing can sound a lot like, "1950s stereotypes of domesticity are actually authentic original human behavior!" But there's so much in behavioral psychology that doesn't make those claims and stuff like rationality/signaling/group dynamics are really interesting. Just stay away from the justifications for why women should stay in the kitchen.

Has anybody read 'Sex at Dawn'?

Tried to get it out of the lib the other day and they didn't have it, the bastards.

F0undations 0f fin@ncial m@rkets and instituti0ns

yah

there are a shit ton of books on that reading list! wondering how particularly key each is

by F4bozzi?

can't see it on a a a a a r g (up to five as now!)

I just googled its name + 'pdf' and stuff came up. I imagine any major college textbook is ~out there~

A.AAAARG.ORG.

still around - if you took out that first dot you'd get there

so there are two versions of the euro history course up, only seeing the syllabus for one. most of the course material is publicly available stuff that won't take long to collect links to. there is a textbook too, we might be able to find it.

what is aaaarg?

n@pster for t3xtb00kz

absolutely no moral qualms w/ that, college textbook market is pretty indefensible

My wife has shovelled out something close to $500 in textbooks for the one class she is taking at community college this semester.

Just bein' maybe paranoid, but we might want to deindex or go more private if we're in the ahem grey areas of textbook acquisition. Prob no thing but academic publishers can be aggressive.

otm

That is sound advice, woof.

i think i might be interested in doing a course when another one picks up but i think i don't want to do any of the ones listed on the first round! does anyone want to take the class called "death" from yale? lol

I watched about 60% of that like a year ago

some interesting stuff and a cool professor tho unfortunately no answer w/r/t meaning of life