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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

Kids who have wealthy/involved parents that push them will always outperform kids who don't. The government can do whatever they want to try to equalize that (except encouraging parents to do better), I just hope they waste as little money as possible and don't interfere with gifted kids.

FWIW my 14 year old is doing pre-algebra now, she struggles with math and the way they are teaching it seems insane. Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing. That probably results in relatively equal outcomes but she has no clue how to do things that fall outside of the frameworks they established.

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Someday a “reality check” situation happens. Might be writing a cover letter for their first job. Or trying to pass college-level calculus. But eventually, if someone doesn’t actually know how to read, write, or think logically it comes to a breaking point.

It doesn’t matter if a high school gave someone all As and a college gave out a degree in Community Building. The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people.

After all, if you had to hire someone, are you going to offer a job to someone who writes in broken emoji-gibberish and can’t multiply?

One time I got a resume from someone at a fairly well-regarded college for an internship, and the cover letter was a single run-on sentence without any capitalization. How could this person possibly succeed? How much money did they spend getting to this point of obvious failure? Very sad

> barring nepotism

this is a pretty big issue, though. even here on hn, many folks claim the best or only way to get a good job is by networking

Getting a first job is very helpful with nepotism. But to sustain being a negative employee - one that brings no value if not hurts the organization - I have only seen with the children / relatives of executives, and in the government.

I got a job as a "student worker" when I was in college, because my dad wanted to hire me in his graphics studio office.

I was lazy one month and he wrote me up, gave me a PIP. I worked harder after that. :-)

The best part of it was that I got to take walks with my dad during the lunch hour every day.

Most networking is not nepotism.

networking != nepotism

This isn’t true except for at the most extreme examples. Plenty of people have been promoted “out of the way”.

>The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth

That's when the the miseducated majority will find that the market is unjust. All goes according to plan.

> barring nepotism,

And that's where Woke comes in.

Sure, you're utterly incompetent but you have the Approved Believes, support the Approved Causes in the Approved Way, and you ticked the right superficial Identity+ checkboxes we needed.

You're hired.

The really sad thing is that the once the markets stop rewarding woke-ism, all these people will be out of a job AND lack the skills to make it in the real world, because these companies have coddled them their entire working lives and stifled any growth opportunities to defend a "safe space".

Believe me, if it were that simple, I wouldn't have spent 3+ months looking for a job.

In any case, what check boxes are you specifically referencing? Appearance?

If you're a straight white male, have you tried identifying as LGBT for oppression ladder points? If I was an American in need of a job I'd do it for sure.

That "reality check" will never come for some people because they will get government jobs where the hiring process depends more on ideology than competence. For example, do you believe that working in the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing requires thinking logically?

Do you believe that so many government jobs that would completely ignore results exist that will absorb our entire society’s yearly group of young adults entering the job market or do you maybe think that’s an extremely niche situation even if we accept at face value that they target ideology over all results?

> The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people.

false in the general case, you're basically invoking a just world hypothesis without actual proof for it.

For a counter example, please see slavery - slaves were not paid anything, despite obviously producing something of worth. Furthermore, there was no difference in the salaries between slaves, despite there presumably being differences in output.

For another counter example, you can look into the variation in programmer salaries based on country, or more generally location. The same job will pay anywhere from $180k in SF to $8k in India, due to differences in cost of living, which have a priori zero effect on programmer 'worth', which I presume would be how good the programmer is at writing code and delivering business value.

It is true that at a certain point, 'real skills' matter - eventually, if you're working as a software engineer, you need to write code. However, it is false to assume there is anything besides a maybe a very mild correlation, if any, in the salaries of software engineers and their ability. You can have a Polish dev with 15 years of experience making less than a new grad in California, and that has nothing to do with skill, but everything to do with regional differences in salary.

You're missing the point. OP is generally right. It's a hard world out there, and you have to be educated to succeed at anything more than a trade or service industry job.

> It's a hard world out there, and you have to be educated to succeed at anything more than a trade or service industry job.

this is true.

The market isn't fair however, nor does it pay everyone what they are worth, and I would rather correct that common falsehood when I see it.

The market pays what their skills are worth given the demand for their skills in that location. That's all. If someone is in India they will not be paid a SF salary for many reasons. But the market sorts all of it into a quantifiable price for labor. If you want to voluntarily pay more than what the market demands, that's more akin to charity.

this may be a difference in definition of worth that we have.

You seem to equate "worth" with "market price"/"business value".

I equate "worth" with "how much money they make the business".

So in my defintion/worldview, an programmer in India that increases the click through rate on $AD_TECH_GIANT's ads by 1%, raising the ARR from $1 billion to $1 billion, $10 million dollars is worth $10 million, and a programmer in San Fransisco who accomplishes the same is worth the same.

In your worldview, how much value they bring to the organisation is irrelevant, and they are worth what the market pays them... which honestly doesn't strike me as a particularly useful mental model if you're trying to get rich, but if it works for you, keep using it.

To quote Warren Buffet: "price is what you pay, value is what you get."

I try to find things with a good value/price ratio. Using your model, the value of a thing is it's price, so... not really sure how you can make purchase decisions thinking like that, honestly.

For more thoughts on the matter: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/

By that definition, a business has to always pay someone less than what they're worth in order for hiring them to be a value proposition.

If I'm paid what I'm "worth" why would a business spend any time/effort interviewing and hiring me -- the best that can happen is they will break even through the deal.

It would be like buying a stock you know will flatline at the purchase price for the next 20 years. No monetary loss, but no gain either -- that's almost the definition of opportunity cost.

everything you have used as an example is not a free market, it is government interference.

1) slavery was enforced by the government who had use of force to compel. There was no voluntary two party agreements.

2) countries are governmental constructs with barriers enforced by use of force. A polish programmer cant work in the US due to governmental interference.

Now that the borders are wide open expect to see programmers exploiting the work loopholes to get work visas that allow them to work at market wages.

there is no perfect information and there will always be mismatches. But in a free market those mismatches are temporary. Also the market may be valuing things other than technical prowess (e.g. english proficiency, understanding of cultural norms etc)

Voluntary two party agreements work because they are enforced by a government.

Markets only exist in the presence of government. Read David Graeber's Debt if you want a history of how markets and money work - generally speaking, they are things created by governments, to ease the work of figuring out taxation. Those quarters and nickels and dimes only have value because you know that come tax season, Uncle Sam will knock on your door and ask you for some, and if you don't give them to him, he'll toss you in jail. This creates a demand for those coins, and therefore a market for them, so now Uncle Sam can pay his soldiers in coin, the soldiers trade it with civilians for food and lodging and boom, it's a market!

You seem to be doing that thing where you want to believe the world is fair, so you invent this magical free market to be able to pretend that life is fair.

To paraphrase Dan Luu: markets are people, all the way down.

you can read https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ and https://danluu.com/talent/

for more info.

I am sitting here thinking exactly the same thing. The wealthier (and even middle class) kids with parents who understand will learn the material as always, and the rest of the kids without this stewardship will be even more disadvantaged than before.

Every culture values different things. I'm Asian and grew up bottom middle class.. I'd say 80% of our Asian parents pushed us hard to succeed. I have friends who aren't Asian and well.. I recall their parents were happy their kid got a C ("oh well at least you tried") at best or in general just didn't care.

How have the different parenting approaches resulting in adult happiness and success? I’d love to hear your take.

It’s hard for me to be unhappy when I check my bank account and future prospects when it comes to jobs. My upbringing definitely didn’t make me happy at the time. But as an adult I see why my parents pushed me. They had absolutely nothing then they scraped together something all for me to do better than them.

If entrepreneurship doesn’t work out worst case I’ll be making 250k plus somewhere, or 400k plus at big tech.

And if I don’t want to do that I could just learn something new since I learned how to learn. Yo dawg.. jk but seriously I can’t complain. Given our socioeconomic circumstances (dad was making like 30-40k and once my mom was able to get work authorization she could only find temp or part time jobs) I couldn’t have asked for a better set of parenting and parents.

I can imagine an objection being "happiness is not just about money" - and that's true!

But it seems to me that if one (subconsciously, maybe) worries about money, one will be better off psychologically, compared to someone who has so little to worry about that they start to worry about things that they can't control.

The only people who say that are either well off, or have no chance at ever getting out of poverty (any one of the billions of people who aren't in 1st world or in major tech hubs in 3rd world, who we won't see except on documentaries about how f'd up situation is in xyz country).

Money means you can eat and have a roof over your head. More money means you can do more after those needs are met.

that's interesting, because for the small amount of exposure I have had to common core math that has been pushed federally was actually the opposite. it seems to eschew the simpler methods to "just get the right answer" in favor of more long-hand methods that help with understanding of the concepts.

This is not the same as common core. Common core for the most part was pretty well designed AFAICT and was grounded in real pedagogy.

Like you point out, common core was focused more on understanding concepts as opposed to reaching answers.

What the California standard appears to be doing (full disclosure, I’m basing this on second hand accounts all of which have been negative) is simply eliminating certain fundamental math altogether.

common core is not methods at all. Common core is only standards. Like be able to solve 3 digit addition. Or be able to estimate the the product of 3 digit numbers

The methods themselves can be any methods. I agree that the methods Ive seen associated with common core are designed to help people understand how the math works. Like why when you add fractions do you not just also add the denominator. However it is a tough balance between just memorizing how to do the problem and understanding why you do it a certain way.

The big push I see is word problems in lieu of worksheets. The huge issue is word problems take a long time and kids havent done enough worksheets to become fluent in the techniques. Teachers call worksheets drill and kill and want to "teach to the whole child".

The big problem is that people in education are simply not very smart. The education researchers are also not very smart. Ive seen data that shows that stem teachers are ok, but I dont think those are the majority of education academics.

The way math education has evolved is the same way software development has evolved. Infinite naïve abstraction and checklist-ification that obscures the necessarily complexly defined cognitive work essential to real improvement. I think it would improve in either case that more time was dedicated for respectively teachers and engineers to set their own agendas rather than such being under control by managers/institutional hires.

> Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing.

Maybe this raises the floor of math education? The majority of US high school graduates are not rated as proficient in math and a small minority are actually ready for college level math. That's been true for a very long time now.

It appears that there's a belief among educators (or whoever comes up with the curriculum decisions), that it's better for society to raise the floor than the ceiling on math. Given how poorly math education outcomes have been for a long time now, I'm all for them trying something new (it would be insane to continue to do what clearly hasn't been working for a long time now). That said, I'm pretty conflicted on it meaning that more gifted students lose out on access to learning anything more than the floor level. I don't understand why they need to make that tradeoff at the expense of those who have above average mathematical aptitudes during their school years.

Suppose a team was given a goal of reducing variance in latency on an API.

Getting to the root causes of variance and fixing them is hard.

Injecting extra latency on the fast queries is easy. Even if the query returns in 80ms, we just wait until 800ms have passed before returning the result.

These are the same incentives given to administrators tasked with improving equity.

No one can lower the true ceiling. Our nation is large enough that statistically, there will always be people who outperform.

What is happening is that everyone in the middle is being dragged down.

I think this model is wrong. The so-called understanding is a realized pattern matching that comes from deep memory of many things. I have a very good memory (I recall my car's VIN) and it mostly comes from practice at reading large volumes of material.

Understanding came rapidly for me as I grew up - arising primarily from seeing repeated patterns. Isomorphisms are natural to pick up once sufficient data is shoved into the mind.

I will try the same with my children. The real lack in the US is that most children here consume small quantities of information. The few who are pushed or permitted to push themselves succeed greatly.

pretty much this. My 15 year old is in precalc and everything is memorization of steps. So I explain everything to her so she doesnt have to memorize how to solve the problems.

For example in trig they define quadrant I, II, III, IV and whether sin, cos, tan, sec, csc, cot are positive or negative. Im sure they briefly taught why, but for the problems it is just memorization. Most in the class dont understand the relationship between sin/cos and X and Y coords in the unit circle.

I told her it can be faster to memorize, but understand it so you can double check to make sure things are right.

There is no way a poor student can get through precalc unless they are way above the average because their parents likely cant help them at all.

Kids that have only 1 or no parents in the home are at a significant disadvantage compared to kids that have 2 parents. Spending per pupil, income level, education level of teachers, teachers per pupil - all that is in the noise compared to this one factor.

> Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing. That probably results in relatively equal outcomes but she has no clue how to do things that fall outside of the frameworks they established.

Do you have some examples of these frameworks that eschew understanding?

Common Core math teaches how things work, it's just different, so people think it's wrong. But when you actually pay attention and learn it, it helps explain things better at a more fundamental level.

However, parents didn't learn this way, so it's bad.

Ah yes, just like the New Math.

It can, and it should. However, that doesn't mean that the books are doing it successfully, and the teachers understand the underlying principles.

Too many years ago, I was pleasantly shocked at looking at what was being covered in elementary education by tutoring a friend. They were teaching discrete mathematics, different numbering systems ... forcing the teachers to learn how think in a different system. It was inspired (and harder then I would have expected). However, the book author's did not seem to realize what they were doing or why. They were meeting the requirements without understanding why they were requirements. It unfortunately seemed far too appropriate for what would be happening in many grade schools.

There is a widespread misconception, especially amongst its critics, that Common Core prescribes how to teach. It generally just sets goals.

There are dozens of Common Core compliant math curriculums that teach in all sorts of ways, some are more "how" some are more "drill". The more trendy curriculums make a false promise of a painless "How" that ends up with kids neither learning How it Works, or How to get the right answer.

Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing.

Isn’t this how pre-undergraduate math education has been for the entire history of mass education?

How else would you describe everything from how to multiply two numbers to simplifying fractions to the chain rule?

Well you kind of have to take addition on faith, but everything else is pretty built up - subtraction is adding negatives, multiplication is repeated addition, division is repeated subtraction, fractions are division, decimals are fractions, and so on and so forth. Maybe some explanations were a little more handwavy than others, and certainly some algorithms could be better explained (took me quite some time to grok long division), but I can't think of anything that was just "trust me it works."

Do you need to understand that addition is commutative, or even what commutative means, to use the schoolboy multiplication algorithm?

How is that anything other than a “step by step methods that allow[s] you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing?”

The point is that math is not typically taught as just memorizing the schoolboy multiplication algorithm without being given an understanding that addition is commutative and what commutative means.

I challenge you to select a random high schooler and report back on his or her knowledge of commutativity.

If you ask them if A+B=B+A I'm sure they'd tell you yes for the most part. Quizzing on vocabulary is hardly the point.

And be able to explain why that must be true for schoolboy multiplication to work.

Come on, this argument is ridiculous. There was no golden age of mass mathematics education.

That is moving the goal posts to a different stadium. I don't think I could explain that now, there's no reason for a child to be required to do so.

Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing.

This is exactly what happens with multiplication (and simplify fractions and taking derivatives). That’s been exactly my claim all along.

Virtually no 16 year olds know why the procedure they were taught to multiply 123 x 456 produces the correct answer. Not today, not 20 years ago, not 50 years ago. They know how to execute the algorithm. That’s it.

"This argument is ridiculous" only because you keep shifting goalposts and refusing to actually back up anything you're saying while just repeating your personal belief that mathematics has always been rote memorization of algorithms.

If it was that way, there would not be so much variation between performance in math around the world, as they'd all just be having kids memorize the same stuff.

> Well you kind of have to take addition on faith

No you don't, addition is taught by making kids count up sums, not by giving them magic rules to follow. Addition has by far the strongest connection to reality and that connection gets hammered into every child. Basically everyone knows how to add by counting on fingers.

You can see that it works, but only because you have defined it to work that way. There is no explanation of why it works based on more fundamental principles. With a much more advanced math education you can derive addition from more fundamental axioms, but that is way beyond what a child should ever be required to learn.

> trust me it works

I can think of a couple. limits at infinity are thoroughly hand wavy, at least at the level they're introduced in high school or lower division college calculus. And I would say this even projects backwards into geometry, and even the Blurred overloaded operations of rational numbers and simple fractions. the notion of being able to add up an infinity of nothing and get a quantifiable something is just sort of taken for granted without elaboration.

The equality operator ( = ) is also presented as an implicit expression of truth when introduced, when it clearly admits to shades of true at best. 1*1 = 1 = 1^1 = 1^2 is one kind of true and a bunch of kinds of false. and although at a young age kids may not be sensitive to this, letting it go without explanation or curious challenge can be the source of inarticulate senses of doubt about what's really going on when they get introduced to higher levels of math.

> Isn’t this how pre-undergraduate math education has been for the entire history of mass education?

Yes. Not sure why you're in the negative ATM.

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