IMO more than the academic prowess, the key positive is that the newly elected representatives will have different priorities and perspectives, and be younger. I can’t help but thinking that young people that went through high achieving secondary studying must have internalised delayed gratification and long term thinking by necessity, and be at least trying to improve things for the longer term rather than short term gain.
Then again, I might just be hoping it is so. Given that, sadly, similar movements elsewhere (perhaps with not as much laurel leaves) have quickly fallen apart. (5 star movement in Italy and Piraty in Czech Republic come to mind)
Hopefully the Serbian youths learned from them.
Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.
In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.
Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.
Not exactly academics but as they were mentioned somewhere in this thread, physicians follow this same sort of path. It's actually a lot less uncertain than academia, it's almost impossible to screw up if you're a mediocre but somewhat bright "good" student. There were people I met in medical school who basically never had to take decisions in their life (which is sort of crazy as they take decisions about the lives of others).
In all honesty almost all exams are gamed by studying question patterns, studying previous years' papers, etc. There's nothing wrong in that whatsoever.
BUT it is such a toned down, dwarfed down version of what a holistic education should look like. It probably looks like that in undergrad CalTech Physics, maybe. Not much in most places.
People outside think it's so high and holy to be a PhD. It's not for most people.
Most people also go to academia because they can't find other jobs.
Things in Humanities are much worse than STEM, as there are much more subjectivity, favouritism, nepotism, groupism involved.
'Research' nowadays in most fields and institutions is nothing like whatever grand vision people tend to have: Faraday or Bell Labs, Maxwell or Bohr, Feynman or Bletchly Park.
I share your hope. I, too, am aghast at the "dumbing down," and "lowest common denominator" approach of populist politics.
I would like to mention that when I was young, I figured that if young people ruled the world, then things would be much better. I was pretty sour on the bitter, cynical old farts that didn't have a stake in things, and had basically ruined our world.
Sound familiar?
After seeing what's happened in Silicon Valley, which is pretty much my "utopian dream," I have come to realize that young people can be much, much worse than "old farts."
Maximilien Robespierre was an intellectual.
The US was founded originally with a much narrower electorate in mind. John Adams essentially argued that people who didn't own property were too dependent on other people to be trusted with important decisions that affected the future of the country.
I think this populist race to the bottom you are describing is a symptom of voting simply being a button to press to enrich your own specific financial interests. This happens on both the left and right of the aisle.
I don't really know how to reconcile this in the current system. Elected representatives seem to be more concerned with career-making and personal enrichment than actually advocating for the people they are supposed to represent.
I'm not advocating for stripping rights, but I am a little bothered that perhaps Adams had a point. As an outsider to Serbian politics, it seems like an academic movement is perhaps an attempt at a nuanced solution to this problem.
"Populist" is whatever the other side wants. "Nuanced and complex" is my side. My point is, "muh boomers" is a pretty populist reddit-brained take.
Silicon Valley is worse than average because they're mostly techies and techies are people that on average love things more than people and have low empathy. They also lean isolationist/libertarian and are the perfect victims for "bootstraps" mentality.
I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.
You need to spend a lot of time publishing, studying etc to become an academic it's not a highly social pursuit. In fact techies in order to achieve anything mostly have to operate in a team and it's not the zero sum ruthless game of academic careerism (only so many tenured spots available).
Also the output of tech companies is ideally something tangible not just the careerist publish or perish mindset of academics. Academics are not exactly principled either they will go to exactly where the funding/grants are.
> love things more than people
Society hated techies until we started getting ridiculous amounts of money and women figured out that they could marry a techie and instantly go up the social hierarchy. Now that this isn't happening anymore, society is back to hating techies. Tech always attracted people who were in some ways social outcasts - I've spent my formative years being bullied and now I'm supposed to love the society? I pay taxes to maintain public infrastructure while normies vandalize and misuse it when bored and I'm supposed to love that? Truly baffling.
> low empathy
Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.
> "bootstraps" mentality
The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.
> Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.
Programmers do that because distribution is free, production has a fixed cost that's relatively limited compared to actual industrial equipment and the output directly benefits THEM.
If they would really be as altruistic as you say, software made by companies started by devs would be AGPL or even freer.
> The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.
Q.e.d.
This assumes that a teacher that's paid 1/5th of a dev is "vibing".
You couldn't have explained it better!
I'd probably be fine with the average opinion of silicon valley workers. Even accounting for the overabundance of priveliged white men that leads to a libertarian/fascist undercurrent. It's the sociopaths that rise to the top by fucking everyone else over that are a problem.
The 5 star movement was exactly the opposite of a group of highly educated people, I don't how you came to think of them
fair enough, the analogy for me is in the age ^^
I think it was more older than young people; but it's true that initially there were a lot of young people, sadly.
It was the first Putin-supported party in Italy
> youths learned
Ha! <knee slap> <snort!> Good one!
All youths do is learning... is it so bad to hope that a bunch of doctors learned the right things? :)