Learning to live with irrationality

"No matter how great their teachers, few students genuinely yearn for the life of the mind" [Bryan Caplan]. Most people don't use the Internet/AI for intellectual enrichment. Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly frustrated by the inconsistency and irrationality I encounter in everyday life. But how should I deal with that frustration? How can I become less angry at people for being, well, human?

With someone who doesn't enjoy thinking, increasingly sophisticated arguments often accomplish nothing. At that point you're not having an intellectual conversation, you're trying to make someone interested in having an intellectual conversation. That's usually a losing proposition.

To preserve sanity, one must deliberately construct an intellectual ecosystem: books, a few curious friends, challenging projects. Let the rest of the world be the rest of the world... Not out of superiority, but out of boundary setting.

Once you repeatedly observe irrationality, it's very easy for "People behave irrationally" to become "People are idiots." The first is a useful empirical observation. The second gradually poisons your relationship with humanity. Try "What mechanism produced this belief?" Now the phenomenon becomes interesting. Was it:

• conformity/tribal loyalty?
• status seeking?
• fear?
• lack of information?
• incentives?
• being tired/poor?
• cognitive overload?
• low energy/laziness?
• childhood conditioning?
• an experience you don't know about?

You move from judging the output to understanding the system that generated it. Of course, understanding the reason does not mean that you have to approve of it or become close friends. Just don't annoy them too much, so they don't turn against you. Don't try to change them, set boundaries and move on.

You can give someone an excellent teacher, books, a university, the Internet/AI and enormous amounts of information, and they may still prefer entertainment. That's frustrating if you regard intellectual development as one of the great things humans can do. But perhaps the healthier conclusion isn't "Why don't people appreciate this?" It's "I'm lucky that I do." That turns the same observation from an indictment of humanity into gratitude for your own curiosity.

See also:

• Thinking Fast and Slow
• Why do people believe true things?

The University Incentive Problem

I recently had a chat with a friend whose daughter is studying in Bilkent Computer Engineering. She is a highly capable student, ranking in the top 0.01% of the Turkish university entrance exam (YKS) but received shockingly low grades in her calculus courses, despite studying hard. It was not just her, the class average was 30/100. Note that this is not a one-time occurrence, it has been going on for years in Bilkent. Experiences are similar with physics and even English and Turkish courses.

It is especially depressing when you consider that mastery of calculus, physics, English or Turkish is not the primary goal of a Computer Engineering degree. The university is a place to enjoy learning, work on projects and make social connections, not to grind and be miserable. Students have already proven that they can work hard by getting into a top-tier university. Give them a break!

From the students' perspective, the system feels unnecessarily punitive, if not outright hostile. There are, however, some rational explanations for this:

1. Professors are assessed by how many papers they publish, not by how well they teach. Students are a nuisance for them, taking time from their paper writing.
2. Professors never learned to teach in the first place, teaching is often something professors are expected to learn on the job.
3. In fields such as Computer Engineering, industry can offer substantially higher salaries, which makes it harder for universities to maintain faculty quality.
4. Some universities treat first- and second-year courses as weed-out classes. The instructor likely views themselves as an unyielding gatekeeper whose job is to "filter out" students rather than educating them.

Because of these factors, a good teacher is the exception, not the norm. I hear that ODTÜ Computer Engineering is challenging too but not as hostile as Bilkent. If your aim is to become a good engineer, not an academic, you might consider switching from Bilkent to ODTÜ.

The German Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences) system provides a different model. Faculty are hired with a much stronger emphasis on practical and professional expertise, and the institutional mission places greater weight on applied teaching. Faculty bandwidth is spent on curriculum development, lab coordination, and student mentorship rather than grant writing and journal production. The goal is to build functional engineering intuition, not to test students on formal, hyper-abstract edge cases under high-pressure exam conditions.

When the institutional incentives are misaligned, students can end up being rigorously tested on things that don't meaningfully improve their ability to engineer. It boils down to theory in service of engineering vs. theory as an academic filtering mechanism. The Fachhochschule model is an example of an institution designed around an objective more closely aligned with what an engineering degree is supposed to achieve.

See also: The Case Against Education

Music: Rammstein - Mein Herz Brennt