You mean, you don’t think that any belief-formation occurs during people’s graduate educations? Even if you don’t think grad school is all it’s cracked up to be, that can’t be quite right.
Not belief formation, but change. I think it unusual for a grad student to significantly change beliefs. So I think of the process more as a refinement, or sharpening, of existing beliefs—the formation of more fine grained beliefs that build on existing ones, rather than any major changes in the existing set.
Fair enough, in cases where students enter grad school with a moderately robust inclination toward some particular orientation on some important issue. I think I differ from you in my estimation of the frequency of these kinds of events:
(1) New grad student has some pre-existing but vague ideas regarding the issue; these are quickly replaced by the prevailing position at the graduate institution. Reasons for this could very well include increasing intellectual maturity, deeper/more complete study of issues at the graduate level, and the sense that it’s a graduate student’s responsibility to have positions on major scholarly issues (as opposed to undergraduates more frequently just being set up as “observers” of scholarly controversies).
(2) New grad student enters school quite literally without any inkling that some particular scholarly controversy exists, and upon being made aware of it, takes up the prevailing position at the graduate institution.
Anecdotally, I find both of these to be pretty common scenarios, whereas I don’t think you do. This could be related to the fields I work in (music history and theory).
Yes, I think you’ve nailed it. I have a romanticized view of things—where students pick fields/schools after some research, and avoid grad school if they don’t get where they want to be.
This makes intuitive sense; the two are processes seem mutually reinforcing:
X prefers (vaguely) point of view A over B. X goes to university Y because it’s known (to X, vaguely) to favor A over B. X’s preference of A over B is sharpened because of being exposed to preference of A over B in his environment (via confirmation bias and the like).
In other words, given that somebody leaned to an option in a “neutral” environment, it is intuitive that when exposed to an environment that favored that option they will lean harder toward it.
[ETA:] it the post terms, this means that if the two views (A&B above) are equally “wrong” or “right” (i.e., an approximation of the truth, but with comparable accuracy), the effect doesn’t make your opinion significantly more or less suspect. However, if one is closer to the truth, it would polarize “knowledge quality”: those with good initial “guesses” will be dragged closer to the truth, the others further away.
It seems to me that the latter situation is not as bad as (I suspect) it sounds: it should make it easier for outsiders (those not leaning towards either view yet) to “spot the difference”. That’s because instead of a continuum of worse to better views would congeal in an opposition of two “bad” and “good” views (in respect to how accurately they approximate truth).
Also, look at it from the point of view of the professors. If you have a list of students to choose from, which ones are you most likely to be interested in working with?
You mean, you don’t think that any belief-formation occurs during people’s graduate educations? Even if you don’t think grad school is all it’s cracked up to be, that can’t be quite right.
Not belief formation, but change. I think it unusual for a grad student to significantly change beliefs. So I think of the process more as a refinement, or sharpening, of existing beliefs—the formation of more fine grained beliefs that build on existing ones, rather than any major changes in the existing set.
Fair enough, in cases where students enter grad school with a moderately robust inclination toward some particular orientation on some important issue. I think I differ from you in my estimation of the frequency of these kinds of events:
(1) New grad student has some pre-existing but vague ideas regarding the issue; these are quickly replaced by the prevailing position at the graduate institution. Reasons for this could very well include increasing intellectual maturity, deeper/more complete study of issues at the graduate level, and the sense that it’s a graduate student’s responsibility to have positions on major scholarly issues (as opposed to undergraduates more frequently just being set up as “observers” of scholarly controversies).
(2) New grad student enters school quite literally without any inkling that some particular scholarly controversy exists, and upon being made aware of it, takes up the prevailing position at the graduate institution.
Anecdotally, I find both of these to be pretty common scenarios, whereas I don’t think you do. This could be related to the fields I work in (music history and theory).
Yes, I think you’ve nailed it. I have a romanticized view of things—where students pick fields/schools after some research, and avoid grad school if they don’t get where they want to be.
Maybe I’ve just been avoiding the territory. :P
This makes intuitive sense; the two are processes seem mutually reinforcing:
X prefers (vaguely) point of view A over B. X goes to university Y because it’s known (to X, vaguely) to favor A over B. X’s preference of A over B is sharpened because of being exposed to preference of A over B in his environment (via confirmation bias and the like).
In other words, given that somebody leaned to an option in a “neutral” environment, it is intuitive that when exposed to an environment that favored that option they will lean harder toward it.
[ETA:] it the post terms, this means that if the two views (A&B above) are equally “wrong” or “right” (i.e., an approximation of the truth, but with comparable accuracy), the effect doesn’t make your opinion significantly more or less suspect. However, if one is closer to the truth, it would polarize “knowledge quality”: those with good initial “guesses” will be dragged closer to the truth, the others further away.
It seems to me that the latter situation is not as bad as (I suspect) it sounds: it should make it easier for outsiders (those not leaning towards either view yet) to “spot the difference”. That’s because instead of a continuum of worse to better views would congeal in an opposition of two “bad” and “good” views (in respect to how accurately they approximate truth).
Also, look at it from the point of view of the professors. If you have a list of students to choose from, which ones are you most likely to be interested in working with?