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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

> "America does not have enough people with those skills."

Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed.

What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".

There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse.

I don't know, but it frustrates me that the truth is the US doesn't have the know how that its companies require anymore, and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.

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> in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed.

"Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children.

These used to just be a fringe group. Now it feels like about half the people I know are buying into that stuff. Even some college-educated professionals think only their field is valid, and everyone else is part of "them."

> There's a growing group that believes ... certain fields are "in on it" ... some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing

I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years:

1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.

2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005.

3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat.

4. Snowden revelations.

5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions.

6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access.

You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.

> Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.

My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.

Since Vietnam the war community has wanted one do over after another. To prove that war has a useful role in foreign policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Syndrome

Isn't it an effect of a feeling caused by governments using experts in a way letting (too often and a too large part of) the public think that they, at worst, are all (gov & experts alike) pushing their own short-termed and only self-beneficial agendas or, at best, nearly always devise some "Grand Plan" which then appears to cost much more than budgeted, gives less than promised and has unwanted unexpected side-effects?

There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects.

It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy that's been ongoing since the 80s. An entire political party's ideology is based on the idea that government doesn't work and when in power they set out to prove it by making government dysfunctional by defunding agencies and confusing their mandates.

That same party politicized clean air regulations, climate change, and wearing masks. This has crippled expertise because if one side can just pay anyone to say anything, whats the point?

From a non-US perspective, you described the dominant ideology of both your political parties. I'm not saying they are 'the same', but they both are extreme neoliberale market proponents. They also both embrace a tight intertwined government and enterprise regimen to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell who owns who, or whether it is just one organisation.

Sorry, no, that is not the dominant ideology of both parties. You didn’t say “both sides are the same” but you are equating neoliberalism with anti-science. Go bang that “neoliberals bad” drum somewhere else.

Neoliberals are pro-market, and markets are inherently anti-science.

If they weren't anti-science they wouldn't spend so much time running campaigns to discredit objective scientific research that harms their financial interests - from the effects of tobacco to lead in petrol to opioids to big oil to climate change.

The historical record on this is absolutely crystal clear and unambiguous.

Wow, that's quite a logical pretzel you've twisted yourself into. Congratulations.

Elected officials from both parties have failed us. Yes the Republicans have made it painfully obvious just how little they care about the goals of the American experiment these last 4 years, but the Democratic party isn't fundamentally any better.

The founders set the entire western world down the path of a bastardization of a republic and a representative democracy out of fear that voters are stupid. That choice has inherent risk that leaders will be corrupted and that those elected will move further away from what is in the public's best interests. The founders simply believed that this wouldn't arise, that the system could correct course and weed out the bad actors.

All the Republicans have done since 2016 is shown how that belief fails. We don't have a true democracy, and what semblance of one had been chipped away at for years. The Republican Party of old wasn't wrong in wanting small government, the best way to keep corruption out of a representative system is to keep power out of those representatives' hands. They simply joined the Democratic Party on the side of big government and massive budgetary spending with a different target audience (big business and banks rather than citizens).

The Democratic Party can't be ignored though. They have made a career of spending money they don't have and creating social programs that aren't sustainable and can't properly be defined on the scale of 300M+ citizens. Their solution for any problem is more control and more intricate rules, but that just leads to a less resilient system that is more dependant on the idea of leadership having every answer and solution.

The cities and States with the worst public education systems and the highest crime rates have been run by one party, the Democrats, for 50+ years. Some 100+!

They can and have continued to raise taxes and subsequently squander any money they collect. Any attempt to break that stranglehold, such as changing teachers union hiring practices or allowing for charter schools, is met with total resistance.

You’re right that government is the problem, but get it right which party is responsible.

Thats just utterly untrue and the reverse of whats actually true.

"states that were coded as blue based upon results from the 2004 presidential election were significantly higher in education funding than were states coded as red. Students in blue states scored significantly higher on outcome measures of math and reading in grades four and eight than did students in red states."

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED503486.pdf

Is there any correlation at all between increased school funding and better educational outcomes? For instance, Utah spends $5k per student per year while Baltimore spends $25k per student per year. Utahan children have higher graduation rates, better GPAs, and better standardized test scores. It's the same across the US from NYC to LA.

I'm growing more and more skeptical that throwing more and more money into the furnace that is the US education system is suddenly going to produce better outcomes. How much more must Baltimore spend? $30k a student? $50k a student? $100k a student? Where's the magic number?

According to [1] Utah spends $10,510 per student per year and according to [2] Baltimore spends $16,184. Where did you get your figures?

[1] https://auditor.utah.gov/audit_reports/public-education/

[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...

I got it from the Annual Survey of School System Finances, U.S. Census Bureau, though on checking it again it's between $6,000 and $7,000 (I was recalling from memory). So not what I put in my comment exactly, but doesn't change my main point in any way.

It could be four things:

  - Comparing two statistical flukes.
  - Socio-economic factor: Utah has better wealth distribution.
  - Socio-economic factor: Utah has affordable housing and Baltimore so the effective wealth gap is lower.
  - Baltimore has other issues.

That’s the most facile thing I’ve ever read. Did it control for cost of living? Did it control for demographics?

In 2019, and I’m using this because you can explore it at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/states/groups?... , Mississippi’s 8th grade math mean score was the same as New Hampshire’s, when comparing white students. Mississippi is just way less white than New Hampshire. California, also near the bottom overall, has better white performance than New Hampshire, but not as good as Massachusetts, which has always had a lot of smart people moving to Boston.

The ranking there is simply a diversity/brain drain ranking. Mississippi and California are way more diverse, so they rank low. States with nothing to attract or keep smart parents, like West Virginia, rank low too.

Yes, the whole puzzle becomes much simpler to think about when you consider the possibility that the school scores primarily reflect the quality of students admitted, and not the quality of the education administered.

I note that koolba's comment was evidence-lite and really rather partisan. So it is probably incorrect.

However, claiming the reverse is true is also evidence-lite. That paper looks like it was a fairly cursory piece of work and didn't account for population size or characteristics (eg, number of disadvantaged students) in the correlation work.

I suspect what it really shows is that political affiliation isn't the biggest driver of outcomes. Looking at the table at the end of the paper and thinking about population, I suspect the aim would be more of what Massachusetts does and less of what California does (both Democrat states) if possible.

I wouldn't blame the government here, but the media. Their job is literally to represent experts and their true image to the general public - as in, they're supposed to research and tell us whether the expert seems credible, and if the government is lying about experts (or anything else) it's the media's job to call them out on it.

I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering.

CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side.

Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.

Interesting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes.

So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.

Fox News has been doing this literally for decades, to the point where they have zero journalistic credibility anymore. CNN is rather tame by comparison.

Sure, but their goal has always been to simply appeal to their base rather than to evangelize the gospel of the GOP. They're far too partisan an institution to be attempting a shot like that.

The difference is that the left-leaning news institutions make up the bulk of the "mainstream media" and they're now just a mirror-image of fox news. And their winning strategy in 2020 is not to become the clone of the right's repugnant rhetoric. The winning strategy should be to convert the moderates or those slightly right of center; yet the more they assume the shape of Fox News the less disingenuous they appear, which makes this task ever less likely. I literally have friends who were life long liberals 4 or 5 months ago who got sucked into some strange corners of the conspiratorial right wing web and many of their grievances are against the mainstream media. Many of which are hard to argue against.

What can the media do when people would rather read a literal propaganda piece on facebook, watch some quack on fox news, listen to conspiracy theories on AM radio, or hear their preacher spew bigoted nonsense every sunday? We aren't taught how to continually educate ourselves about the world after school, so we would rather lean into things that confirm our biases rather than expand our perspective.

You can't expect a private sector media organization to "do the right thing." It's the old hoping for behavior B while rewarding behavior A. The only way to get a media organization that serves the public is to fund it with public money and make it an independent institution just like the judiciary and the central bank (and sometimes the statistics organization).

That's an interesting take as news organizations are not nonprofits. They are only businesses. The government is supposed to be acting as the central source of good information not a collection of for-profit companies. The issue we face now is our government is manipulating messages for political gain and the media is manipulating filters to further viewership both of which feed upon each other. I don't see how you place no blame on the government here.

I mean, it is hard to reason with you on your opinion, since anybody who doesn't echo what you say would be just classified by you as a member of this group and his opinion automatically dismissed. And this wouldn't even make you doubt yourself, since "half the people you know are buying into that stuff" already and you seem to be pretty confident that it is them who are fools buying into some cheap nonsense, not you.

However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious.

The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).

Doctors on average know more about medical subjects than non-doctors. Engineers generally know more about engineering than non-engineers. Climate scientists know more about what’s going on with the climate than non-climate scientists.

Facebook-educated woke people who think everyone is just some con man and they know more than them are simply people with too much confidence. Laying evidence out in front of them will only make them angry or mock it because it collided with their world views instilled by clownery they saw on TV or from equally “woke” people.

Are doctors wrong sometimes? Of course. Are some particularly bad doctors wrong a lot of the time? Yes. Are a massive group of doctors out there “hiding the truth” and people with no formal education have the real solutions, but their answers are being suppressed? No.

> I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them

I am curious about these opinions. Care to share some?

It's not that I wouldn't like to share some, but this question is simply too generic for me to be able to answer it like that.

The best I can think besides the usual suspects is a more rare one: "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" which is being read incorrectly as "why bother learning when everything is always wrong [describes 20 major problems with human race]". At that point, it is hard to follow.

I prefer the phrasing "the more you learn, the less you know".

> doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children.

From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions.

"But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).

I definitely agree with your central point that anyone can use any ideology to endorse their own personal beliefs, but it also has to be said that giving the same weight to the feelings of a person versus actual fact, spoken by an expert, is the literal degradation of our society.

And then you get the Replication Crisis[1], in which we find that a shockingly large number of studies in the social sciences failed to meet the bar for scientific fact.

There are plenty of "actual facts", spoken by "experts", which a few years later turn out to be absolutely false.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Many people lack the necessary expertise to recognize an expert when they see one.

They thus are left to resort to authority as the proximate measure accessible to them to assess how much credit to assign to the opinions of a particular expert.

To complicate matters, there are documented cases where in the past half century at least experts have be bought by special interest groups such as big tobacco etc. This eroded public trust in any experts and many people were brought up assuming every public discourse with expert opinions is rigged. That generation now 40-50yo and their world view is having a certain weight on current matters. (Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion, I'm not an expert. And even if I was many people wouldn't trust me anyway ;-p )

It’s easier to set up a system to provide nonpartisan funding and review of scientific work than it is to have everyone read and source all of the research.

It’s also easier to set up an apolitical body that makes recommendations based on research than it is to have everyone draw their own conclusions or devolve into “blue science” vs “red science”

These are mechanisms that cultivate public trust, and there are countries that do a pretty good job at it.

Until those apolitical bodies become institutionalized and perceived by some people as being an expression of an elite caste and then a new political current arises to galvanize people against "elites" and poasibly takes over one of the existing parties (or creates a new one, depending on the country specific political and election rules)

Agreed. Its frustrating that the idea that "college is useless and a bad deal" is not challenged more. I see a real difference in terms of rigor, discipline, and professionalism from college grads vs those that didnt go.

I don't understand China's educational strategy (no information), but their manufacturing strategy was highly decentralised. Shenzhen for example had a substantially independent government system with a modified tax code. They've been running a lot of independent experiments everywhere I looked, figuring out how to prosper.

That might carry over to education. The biggest mistake the US seems to be making is centralising and standardising a whole bunch of functions (education, healthcare, etc) at the federal level. Then if the anything goes wrong there is no escape. And the US federal government doesn't seem to be up to the task on a good day.

The US has always had a big ignorant population dragged along by a small core of ingenious, often foreign, visionaries. That doesn't seem to have changed recently.

A big part of the Chinese education strategy has been to send lots of students to US universities to get advanced degrees and take that knowledge back to build China.

And to ensure that manufacturing moved to China!

Or at the very least, proximate to its geographical sphere of influence.

Honestly, it was a brilliant move on their part.

Everybody seems to focus on university, but there is a lot of very hard-won know-how at the technician level of the manufacturing sector. Most of this is difficult-to-impossible to codify, and tends to pass both cohort-to-cohort, and via professional networks.

> A big part of the Chinese education strategy has been to send lots of students to US universities to get advanced degrees and take that knowledge back to build China.

>> And to ensure that manufacturing moved to China!

Of course they did. But, to be fair:

1) Those students were not educated for free. They paid big money for it, and the universities were happy to grab the money fast

2) Some of this people were forced to go after their student visa expired. They could not work in US without a permit and were forced to exit. How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?

They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.

> They paid big money for it, and the universities were happy to grab the money fast

And how. International students in the US pay outrageous tuition fees.

> Some of this people were forced to go after their student visa expired.

That's what happened to my wife.

By comparison, my visa in Japan was dead simple. No lawyers required.

The message that the US sends to international students is something like: "Thank you for ponying up all that money, for spending a year learning the language well enough to go to school, and for spending four years integrating into our language and culture. Now get the fuck out."

> How to blame them for using their degree or creating a company in their own country later?

Um... who is blaming who for what? I don't follow.

> They shouldn't be seen as neither serfs nor slaves; technically they don't owe anything to US.

Why would anybody think that international students owe anything to the country where they studied?

My hypothesis is that the US is a victim of its own success: several generations of living in a prosperous, stable society reduces the need for the average citizen to develop survival skills. Here I use the term 'survival skills' very generally: it includes specialized education and expertise in some area, financial planning and risk management skills, inter-personnel and conflict resolution skills, emotional resilience etc.

I suspect that the education problem may be on the demand side (due to the above reason) rather than on the supply side (even though the prohibitive higher education costs do play a big role).

I think that’s an insane answer. We’ve divested in public schools over a prolonged period of time, plain and simple. The public schools that have not experienced that magically are in the wealthy “rich” neighborhoods. The system is working as intended. You want an educated population? Make sure schools have the proper investments. None of this 30 kids per classroom bullshit. Do 10-15 and see what kind of students you churn out.

I think it's insane not to consider that we're getting too comfortable as a society. According to Nielsen, the average adult spends over 11 hours a day consuming media. I imagine a lot of it is passive, but that nevertheless must have an impact on our productivity.

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/time-fli...

Public education spending as a percentage of GDP is at an all time high. I dont think people appreciate the cost of public schooling in the US. According to data provided by the federal government, public schools in the US spend on average $15,500 per child per year. That is an enormous amount of money and it is only climbing ever higher year after year.

Averages are skewed by extremes which feeds into my point that the wealthy neighborhoods spend far more on public schools than in poorer communities.

Even with all that, it also means we’re spending nearly $500000 on a classroom in which a teacher makes 40-50k (let’s round that up to 60-80k for the payroll taxes). Where is the rest of the money going? We could have a hard cap on 20 kids and for teacher pay to be more competitive for less money than we spend today.

It depends on the area. It's been particularly divested in California, which falls short of the average per child spend despite having the highest GDP. In CA, per child spend has fallen 15% from 1970-1997.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11701044/how-proposition-13-transf...

> "In CA, per child spend has fallen 15% from 1970-1997."

Where did you get that? From the graph in your article it looks like it grew by almost 20%

You're going to have to break the $15,500 apart to answer the question: what's wrong with that. How much is "administrative"?

Counterpoint: I grew up in a third world country where class room sizes were between 30-40. Facilities and teacher qualifications were spartan at best. Good textbooks cost an appreciable fraction of an average person's monthly income.

For this to be a counterpoint you'd need to demonstrate how this lead to good eductional outcomes, or at least provide an anecdote.

Until recently (I joined a startup), I was VP Engineering for a Fortune 100 corporation, leading the development of a system that ran an appreciable fraction of the company's revenue (over $50B) through it. Before that I developed trading systems software for two of the world's largest stock exchanges. Largely self-congratulatory and anecdotal, yes, but that seems to be what you wanted to validate the counterpoint.

> Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think

I think a lot of it is pricing and the debt model we use to fund it.

> Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore

The returns on that investment just aren't as good as they used to be, couple that with the required debt above, and stagnant wage growth in these industries and I'd say it's clear they aren't valued anymore.

> and has to either outsource the work or import workers who do from elsewhere.

That's actually seems more like part of the reasons for the above issues than it is something that follows from it.

Combine all this with the fact that total self-employment and other measures of entrepreneurship have been trending downwards lately while the level of corporate integration and mergers have been increasing and it's a recipe for the destruction of middle to middle-upper class incomes and careers.

> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".

This is a symptom of a sick system, and when the system is sick, it's inhabitants become sick as well.

It's because people being educated has become 'being elite'. Even in our own profession, I find it difficult to communicate with smart people who lack foundational knowledge, falter, ask for help and then ask me how I knew the right answer.

I've had more than person tell me that there's no way this was taught at a university (threading, OS knowledge)

The US has always had a big regional divide in skill levels as well as respect for knowledge, with the out-of-the-way places having a problem with both.

The problem is political dynamics meant that the attitudes of the backward parts of the country have actually set policy for quite a while. That benefited American corporations in the short term - lots of CEO probably think for-profit, student-loan-driven education is a great idea. But it's harmed the US and even US corporations as these policies show their longer term results.

> The US has always had a big regional divide in skill levels as well as respect for knowledge, with the out-of-the-way places having a problem with both.

There are a lot of really good schools in flyover states. Looking at the top 10 engineering schools in the US, depending on your definition of "flyover," there's CMU, Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, and UT.

Yeah, even Alabama has high rated universities.

But it also has a broad problem of lack of quality of high school level education. Maybe a few good suburban school but the average is terrible.

Tuscaloosa is education center of Alabama, having the university of Alabama but secondary education is bad enough stop companies locating there.

"Around the late 1980s/early 1990s Saturn chose not to locate a plant in Tuscaloosa because of the performance of the public schools, and by 1993 the city leadership wanted Mercedes-Benz to build a plant there."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscaloosa_City_Schools

I'm guessing Saturn's concern was specifically with workers with just a high school diploma?

What makes this amusing is Saturn was probably looking to open plants in the South because most of the states are right-to-work states that are more business friendly and have fewer worker protections. The less-government approach that attracted them there also drove them away because less government also meant worse schools and worse workers.

I have a BS in CS. 90% of the concurrency I know is self taught, 98% of the I/O I know is self taught , 85% of the networking I know is self taught.

I went to RPI, which is not an ivy school but it is a good engineering school.

Is some of this a failure to distinguish between software engineering and computer science? Some famous CS person quipped that "CS is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." That's fine for studying applied information theory and whatnot, but it seems like maybe the time has come for a formal bifurcation of the fields.

Aren’t the fields already bifurcated? Software engineering degrees exist. The fact that many software engineers have a more theoretical degree in computer science isn’t that unusual; you see the same pattern with business and economics.

Computer science needs renaming - like you said, computer science is not about computers, and it's obviously not about science either (it's closer to maths).

For me it's that 85% of the time I use networking, you're using something that I learned by myself. But that 85% accounts for only 10-15% of the knowledge. So there are a lot of concepts that I learned in school (like DNS, link/physical layer, microarchitecture, etc) that I rarely use. But just because I don't use a lot of the stuff often doesn't mean I never use it. And even the things that I really never use (like programming an FPGA) aren't things that I regret learning.

Any good concurrency resources you recommend?

Maybe those were older people? Threads came about in 96 and became default in the linux kernel in 2.6 (released in 2003).

Sharing memory between processes was a mess before that. Java green threads (emulating threads in user space, which often blocked badly on IO) were horrifying.

Python threading implementations were even worse of a joke till fairly recently.

Or could it be that the amount of information needed to be competent in our fields is getting too high?

It doesn't help that we are expected to have T-shape skills. We need to be both deep in one area and broad in other areas at the same time.

> Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think. Seems being educated, knowledgeable, having expertise, learning about science and technology, medicine and law, just isn't valued anymore, in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed.

> What I see instead is people pushing for anti-intellectualism and valuing the "college dropouts".

It's because outside of a few exceptions(tech in particular), you would earn more money being a businessman than being employed, academic or professional.

People always say that we should value teachers, nurses, etc. But it's all just lip service.

Money and salary are what society uses to indicate how much they truly value you.

Imagine how we'd operate if people were truly free to do their calling, and all the scientists and poets and musicians posing as businessmen and HR reps came out of the woodwork. We'd be commenting in this thread from Mars by now.

> There's also just the quality and access to education seems it's getting worse and worse.

I don't know about access in other countries, but the quality of education is dropping like a stone pretty much in every developed country right now. (And it's not a recent trend, it's been years in the making)

Some thoughts:

* Inflation of people with college degrees. From 5% in 1940 to 35% in 2019. This dilutes the quality of both the student pool and of the professorial pool.

* Distance from the last major war, all the way back in 1945. Educate like your life depends on it has long faded from memory. In medicine, in engineering, in hard sciences.

* The mismatch between skills taught in academia and job market skills. By now everyone is jaded at the notion that the main point of education is the diploma, seen as a key to unlock the job market. Of second importance, networking, get into an Ivy to rub elbows with the right crowd. Knowledge and critical thinking come as a distant last.

* Or perhaps, even simpler, the dilution of the male spirit which sees competitiveness in excellence as an inherent moral good. Our forebears wore educational attainment as a peacock plumage. These days peacocks are outright vilified.

What do you mean by quality here? I'd say the quality of the teaching has been going up as the quality of the students has been going down (precisely because access is going up). The focus is increasingly on the lowest common denominator which requires a lot more effort from teachers.

I imagine the situation is country-specific and I’m not aware of any good studies that try to measure it. But anecdotally, as a university student around 2010, I noticed that the standards expected of undergraduates in old textbooks, exam papers and theses seemed higher. Maybe it’s just that these sources gave me the false impression of an ideal student, but a lot has changed in recent decades. As well as the growth in the student population, by 2010 it was pretty common for “full-time” students to work part-time as well.

Hannah Arendt was probably an exceptional professor in 1955, but I wonder how this compares to a final exam for a first-year political science class at an exceptionally good university today? https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1297545059466907650

There's a lot of "follow your heart", "live your dreams" stuff going on around there.

I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.

> I say work a job that pays, and that you can tolerate, then do what you enjoy in your free time.

That's not what kids want to hear these days. They want life to be easy, and a big government ready to issue a wide safety net for them if they make bad choices in life. Perpetual childhood.

older generations always think younger generations are completely rotten for some reason

Well I know me and my peers were not asking for that when we were 20. Culture changes.

Give me a break.

“Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years.

None of that is true now. It’s drilled into high school kids that they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything. Then when they graduate they discover an awful jobs market. As for buying a house... better wait for a relative to die and hope they were generous to you in the will because there’s no other way you’re ever going to make that deposit.

The idea that young people today and spoiled and rely on handouts is a nonsensical meme.

> “Kids these days” have their eyes wide open. Just a few decades ago you used to have access to an affordable college education with good jobs on graduation. With a modest level of saving you’d have enough for the deposit on a house within a few years.

Except if those kids would get degrees in the right areas (like the thread is complaining they aren't), they would absolutely be able to get excellent jobs upon graduation. The unemployment rate in engineering has been almost nil for years. Even fields like civil and biomedical engineering, previously at the bottom of engineering in terms of prospects and pay, are now a lock for jobs, with employers desperate to hire anyone they can get. And of course computer science is now doing even better than all of them despite being much easier, frankly.

Further, GP notes

> "they must take on a punishingly expensive college education or they’ll never amount to anything."

Except that high school graduates have the option to do 2 years of community college (~5k) and 2 years at a state school (~13k). Generally possible to most while living at home for no additional rent. CS jobs are in high supply and 100k+ out of college. The college cost would be paid off in a year.

Then there's the fact that many positions are not requiring a college education at all.

> 100k+ out of college

Isn't this only true in a few select cities?

I don't think the average programmer is getting paid that (the AU equivalent) much here in Australia outside of maybe some companies in Melbourne and Sydney and maybe Adelaide.

The article and thread was talking about the US, which has the highest software salaries worldwide and where I was referring to for the 100k+ compensation.

While I don't know too much about the Australian market, positions all across the US are 100k+ entry level. Not just in a few select cities, but probably in almost every state. Like Nebraska, Texas, and Tennessee with median house prices just 2x that entry level compensation.[0][1][2]

[0]https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Software+Engineer+$100,000&l=O...

[1]https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Software+Engineer+$100,000&l=T...

[2]https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Software+Engineer+$100,000&l=T...

> Then there's the fact that many positions are not requiring a college education at all.

Tell that to companies who still are filtering applicants based on their college education.

Of course there are. There are still many companies that aren't and software engineers are still in very high demand.

Not everyone can be an engineer (IQ aside, there literally isn't enough jobs like that), but everyone needs a house. How do you square that circle?

One other issue here is the disparity of salaries of finance/software folks make vs other engineers. This has caused a lot of folks to not pursue careers in aerospace, chemical, mechanical etc and just get software or finance jobs.

It’s hard to justify not working for a FANG and taking a pay cut.

Part of the story here, too, is that relatively few Americans make up the populations of top graduate programs. An undergraduate degree or less might be sufficient to build a great advertising business, but it's unlikely to be enough to make major advancements in AI, quantum computing, semiconductors/photovoltaics, superconductors, etc.

> Seriously, I feel the US has a big education problem, with part of it being cultural I think.

Could be true but it’s far less important than the brute fact that advanced study is a loser, monetarily. A very big loser. If you can get a doctorate you can get an MBA or a JD in less time and earn a lot more money. Less likely to damage your mental health, far less likely to end in failure and drop out, job market is either better or much, much better.

China’s funding for science and research to reach 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2019: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2189427/chin...

A documentary by WIRED UK done in 2016 explains many cultural and legal reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY

China has hardware industries that work similar to how open source software works.

An article on effects of expiring patents on 3D printing (2013): https://qz.com/106483/3d-printing-will-explode-in-2014-thank...

90 Minutes a Day, Until 10 P.M.: China Sets Rules for Young Gamers: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/business/china-video-game...

Many Asian countries have already taken strong steps for digital addiction (which will be the next important problem to tackle after covid, I bet).

China’s sustainable urban transport revolution: https://dialogochino.net/en/infrastructure/11025-chinas-sust...

https://www.citymetric.com/transport/no-hong-kong-has-best-t...

> Overall, 79% of people between the ages of 12 and 24 in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia say they feel optimistic about the direction of the world, compared to only about half of those in far more well-off places like Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. In the United States, the number is 63%.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90241302/where-in-the-world-are-...

> Of the top countries on our survey, China has developers that are the most optimistic, believing that people born today will have a better life than their parents. Developers in Western European countries like France and Germany are among the least optimistic about the future.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

China is also much larger country than US. It has 3x more people than US. Those individuals are going to be at par with people in west at some point. There are so many interesting things to discuss and question.

The optimism or lack thereof is mainly due to news and social media. Climate change, wars, criminality, cops shooting people of color, economic inequality etc. I've lived in a communist country and all the official news was boring propaganda in the lines of "our beloved leader went to <country> to visit his omologue, <name> where they deliberated about world peace". Then I saw a Gulf News newspaper from the UAE: only positive news, obviously propaganda. I'm not saying we shouldn't discuss these issues but western news has an overy negative tone, it keeps parroting the same issues and competes for our attention. Social media is even worse than news. My so keeps scrolling at insta posts and voices discontent about certain travel influencers going on vacation all the time while she has to work overtime and take a pay cut.

Part of it is inability to access higher education financially without getting into debt. Part of it is structural because we have forgotten to innovate in education by offering apprenticeship.

Another big part of this is ego. We, collectively, have this massive Murica number 1 ego that we are unable to accept that we actually collectively have started sucking hard. We have elected numbnuts who don't have any desire to improve society and make it an engine of innovation instead of a society divided by issues of the last century.

The US has a very capitalistic economy, maybe too much even.

In general, in the US, whenever you hear "there's not enough people to do X" it means "there's not enough people willing to do X for what I want to pay"

The truth is, in the US there's a ton of different well-paying careers. CS isn't like medical in US with artificial limits on the number of doctors that graduate every year. The only thing stopping more people from doing CS is money. If they offer enough money they will have a practically unlimited talent pool.

Tech CEO's are always whining about lack of tech workers so they can abuse H1B visas to get employees below market rates. Since they're basically indentured servants to their employers for years to decades until they can get a green card.

The lack of government money in CS research I think everyone in the tech field agrees with

In many ways they are right.

It’s much easier to make money in trades or similar things these days than in most bachelor degree fields.

This anti intellectual push is seen in India as well. The ruling party has worked over time to blame experts and mocking intellectuals on everything

The reason is very simple, ruling party gets vores by fooling people. They announce the same monetary package year after year without actually giving the package and their media i.e. entire right wing funded media starts praising the package and hailing our supreme leader.

Having a dumb population means you can make lots of money for very little effort.

Pet rocks? Million dollar idea.

Water? As long as it's .00000000000000001% poison, it's a homeopathic remedy you can sell for $500 a vial. Add more water to make it more expensive.

Ever think about using the equity in your home to consolidate your credit cards and other debts?

Dumb dumbs spend more and expect less. Bad education is good for the economy.

I don't think this is a very good take. There is a very clear correlation between GNP and education level in nations.

The U.S. is the exception, not the rule. We have a global, neoliberal economy. We don't need skilled americans. What we need is more useless watchamacallits! Would you like to buy some bottled water? It comes from a spring, I promise!

Or maybe another smart phone? Probably been awhile since you bought one of those. Why not buy one again?

The fact is it’s extremely valued, in the economy[1]. And that value - the resentment thereof - is why many without the education purposely elect buffoonish leaders that choose to be proud of ignorance

1 - 61% of US population above 25 has “some college” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_th...

Is it really? FAANG jobs are outliers. Some professional fields seem to do OK (medical), but others are atrocious on average (law).

Most people see science/engineering jobs as a path to a cubicle for a while with an OK salary before being laid off at 40. And for the most part, they're right.

“Most people” - pretty sure children of educated parents are focused heavily on education and being steered to jobs that require that education. That’s 40-60% of the US population.

They weren’t teaching coding to grade schoolers at scale 10 years ago.

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