6d0debc071

> I find that amazing that the TelCos would even contemplate charging their customers and at the same time using them as products.

What are you going to do? Go to a TelCo that doesn't? It's a gamble, but considering the limited alternatives it's not much of one.

The bog standard basics presumably relate to more advanced areas, for the purposes of your argument. Otherwise the taxi driver would be unemployed, and out of luck, regardless.

Nonetheless, I've yet to be convinced of the necessity of meeting that standard, basic or not. If one is to look at the UK education system, which doesn't seem to produce measurably worse employment or lives for its participants than the US, then one will note that the maths being taught in the papers given by the person I was responding to in the US is not dissimilar to the lower stream maths GCSE - taken at around 16 - in which a C is a quite acceptable grade for most purposes. Even then, there are things there that would not show up in a GCSE paper - a kid wouldn't need to know scientific notation to pass that test with a C.

As for payday loans etc. The obvious answer is 'don't accept deals you don't understand' it's possible to sting people on a great number of things, based on your advantage in some area that they do not understand. If it's not maths it will be penalty fees hidden in the legalize. By the time you're up to needing scientific notation and square roots to understand your loan, it's a deal that someone ought not to have taken in the first place.

It does not seem unfair to me to ask: You describe it as basic, and threaten all these consequences if it's not taught... there are places where that level of performance is not expected, and these consequences do not seem any more in evidence. So, why should I buy into the idea that this knowledge is needed?

> Harmful? Really?

In my charity work I regularly interact with people whose education has been harmful to them. They failed, and from that failure gained the impression that they were stupid, and/or unable to learn specific subjects. Even putting aside the harm of taking up someone's time to no profit for themselves, you learn more than the information in the curriculum. You learn an attitude towards education, an assessment of how you relate to it. What many people learn is that it's not for them.

> Your idealistic answer seems to argue for changing the relevant topics. That's fine. That's an argument against the curriculum, not testing. All testing does is measure whether the curriculum is actually being taught.

A relevant curriculum is going to be different depending on what someone's interested in and what jobs are available - and what you measure and incentivise is what you get. Testing is not politically neutral.

There isn't anything wrong with testing, in principle, at some point you have to see whether someone can do the job. But the decision as to what to test, when, how... that influences what you're going to end up with. Just standardising the tests and running them often is a bad approach. That's what I'm saying.

> So you are arguing that we as a society need to lower our general education standards? Is this not the exact opposite of what we need to be doing? Math in particular is so important whether dealing with personal finances or simply thinking abstractly. What happens when the hypothetical taxi driver job goes away? If society didn't care enough to try and teach that person some general education when we had the chance, are we now going to do it in retraining?

I am arguing that as a society we need a different approach to assessing skills. That the incentive structure that the current model of teaching and assessment provides is not useful for providing the skills that our young and the labour market that they will hopefully become part of require in order to advance and profit. I am not necessarily saying that mathematics is not a valuable skill, but if it is valuable then it should show up in the course of teaching things that children are actually interested in - and if it is widely applicable then most of them should pick up a few mathematics badges here or there in the process of pursuing those interests. I do not believe that children will acquire and retain any great facility with a subject that they detest, or that bores them.

Is the taxi driver, with his five years experience of taxi driving and limited knowledge of mathematics, physics, law, medicine, et cetera; in other words the jobs that would be harder to automate entirely in the short and mid-term future (by which I mean the next 20 years or so); really going to compete with people who have been doing those jobs the last five years on the strength of half remembered mathematics, which he probably hated when he did them anyway? Especially since we don't have a system of retraining, at least not in any serious sense. There is no option to go to the local benefits centre, state that you are done with working in retail and want to retrain to be a programmer, and have funding and an education available to do so. I don't know of anyone, anywhere, that makes that sort of investment in people. If you want to retrain, you'd best have a bit of money.

The taxi-driver is probably better off not having taken a mathematics course (under the current curriculum) at school, if that subject did not appeal to him, and not thinking of learning the subject as an act of suffering, or operating under the impression that he cannot learn it based on failing a number of tests on the subject some time ago. I regularly work with people with a background in in low income industries, as part of my charity work, and a great many of them have the assumption that they are simply incapable of learning and trace the roots of this assumption back to their failures in the education system. They don't have a faith that they can learn, or an understanding that anything good for them will come from investing in subjects that they have previously hated. It won't have made him competitive with people who were actually interested in the subject in any case - and there's no clear route of retraining that would let him become so.

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As for the importance of mathematics to "thinking abstractly", I will observe that it is an old chestnut trotted out whenever one wants to justify a subject, and that as such I've ceased to take it seriously. That you claim it to be a particular virtue of mathematics, and others will claim it to be a virtue of English literature, philosophy, history, and so on and so forth. Indeed, it is hard to think of any subject that has not claimed it is a virtue of its own. At some point we simply have to stop taking the excuse seriously or accept that it is a general enough skill that you can pick it up in a wide range of subjects, and that as such it is not a great argument for retaining any specific subject.

If it is important to "think abstractly", and if we eventually come up with a way of understanding quite what people mean when they say that, then we may well profit by separating that skill out from the particular application of it and teaching the skill specifically. I understand that there are people trying to make a study of how one learns rationality, and that if one wish to teach the skill one might perhaps consult them and see what their methods were.

> For the people who don't need to realize that a 20% discount on $37.50 is $30, why bother sending them to school past 6th grade at all? Now that I see your argument more fully, it seems less like an argument against testing and more like an argument against wasting resources on unneeded education. Do you believe the people who don't need the specific topics you mention actually do need education beyond grade 6? If so, why?

It's an argument against a specific form of testing. Frequent standardised tests; testing the same things across all the schools and all the students; using that as your measuring stick, shapes the fact that you're going to get a lot of unneeded, even harmful, education. And the more frequently you run those tests, the better your 'data' is (data which is not politically neutral, as some might think) the more pronounced the effect. Test scores are the incentive.

There's two answers I can give to your question. One is the practical answer, as things stand at the moment. The other is the idealistic answer, as things could stand.

For the practical answer, the most that I can say about someone who matches that pattern persisting in education, in the current system, after grade 6 is that they may be getting something else out of some of the other subjects that they study there. If you were a parent, and you couldn't afford to educate your child yourself, then it would probably still make sense to send your child to school beyond grade 6. If you don't do so, they won't have the qualifications to get by particularly well in life, and they may learn something useful in the process (though I wouldn't bet too much on it.)

Besides, you still need some where to stick your children while you're at work. If nothing else, education is free child-care for poor people.

That's not a good argument, nor is it an argument for the current system over the potential alternatives, mind. It's just saying that sometimes crap's the best thing on the menu.

For the idealistic answer: What I'm advocating for is a different model of testing, in which the statement that someone would need an education 'beyond' grade 6 is not as meaningful. There are different skills, different areas of expertise that they could go into, but it would be very difficult to rank those skills: Is someone who we've certified can refit a central heating system more or less skilled than someone who we've certified can rewire a house? Someone with both is more skilled than someone who only has one, but at the same time are they a better electrician than someone who only has one? Is someone who understands the mathematics underlying musical theory more or less skilled than someone who understands the mathematics underlying computational complexity? If you can apply Bayes Theorem, are you more or less skilled than a frequentist statistician? It's a lot harder to rank people when you throw out the idea of 'this year,' or grades, and just have specific skills and people who can or can't do the job.

Ideally I'd be able to answer your question by saying that children are given the chance to immerse themselves in a wide range of different subjects and projects - to follow those that appeal to them as far as they can go so that when they leave they have a wealth of ability that carries them through their lives. That if you're interested in mechanics, for example, you should be able to study mechanics all the time you're at school. Wouldn't we have some fantastic mechanics if they'd been learning on cars and lorries and boats and so on every week day for five or ten years under coaching appropriate to their skill level? Wouldn't we have some fantastic builders if they'd been learning building under that setup? Fantastic artists, fantastic musicians. Especially when we could focus on those who were interested. And who knows, they might - as they get further in that area - discover that maths is useful, and then they could go and get some maths badges when they've got a passion and a reason to drive their learning, (rather than it being something forced down their throats with no real promise of a relationship to their actual interests materialising.)

But I can't - and so the former answer is what we're saddled with. Do you need it? Sure. Unless you've got reasonably well-off parents, you've got to go through the paces. Should you need it, in that form? No.

> Since you seem to think the test covers too many topics, perhaps you can read it tell us concretely which ones should be removed?

I think you've somewhat missed the point, though I'm happy enough to play that game.

My question would be which adults need to know those things? You ask me, "Which students don't need to be able to compute 3 x (3/4)?" And I would be inclined to answer anyone who doesn't want to go into some field that uses a lot of mathematics; accountancy, physics, computer science, biology, et cetera et cetera. Outside of the education system, for a lot of people, that knowledge has no value. And it's the same with the questions upon angles, the questions about area... people who aren't going to be working in particularly quantitative professions do not need to know these things.

Your secretary does not need to know (taken from the sheets you posted) what an angle given by a line bisecting two parallel lines is. They don't need to know what 833,000 is written in scientific notation. They don't need to know what 2 over 3 to the power of four is, or which of the following: the square root of 144, the square root of 16, the square root of four, the square root of three - is an irrational number. They don't need to know what a 20% discount on a price of $37.50 is, it will be marked on what they want to buy. They do not need to know what has the same value as 5 to the power of 6 multiplied by 5 to the power of -2. Or what (jk)^-5(jk)^3 is. They do not need to know what the value of 4 to the square root of X is when X is 100. Or which graph shows that Y is equal to minus X squared.

These things all have a use, but they don't have a use to everyone. They don't have a use to nearly everyone. Most people do not work in a profession where that sort of maths is useful.

Your taxidriver does not need to be able to understand algebra, your secretary does not need to be able to understand geometry, your customer service representative does not need to be able to do calculus. And it is a waste of time, effort, money, and passion to try to teach them to do so if they are not interested.

I would suggest, in the place of general standardised tests, a system more similar to the badges given out for scouting: pass fail assessment of a particular skill, voluntary participation, fine-grained certification. You have kids in a school, and if they want to go for their level 1 geometry badge, or whatever, then you help them do so. You retain the absolute basics that everyone has to have in order to get by in society, like addition, multiplication, division. And everything else you take out into a much finer-grained system that vouches for specific skills.

That would allow both a better analysis of the sort of skills that are being promoted in particular areas by particular schools and it will allow children to pursue their aspirations rather than being shoehorned into a process that is not suitable for everybody and manages to say very little with respect to specific careers. People shouldn't end up shit-listed for life because they ended up studying a bunch of stuff they had no interest or passion for but which unfortunately, because of the way the system was set up, is the only way that their employer had to assess anything about their education.

> You have to ask, "is this stuff that a graduate of the system should be able to do?"

Uhm, I don't feel like I do? Or at least insofar as I do, that set feels like it should be really small, because: Which graduate?

There are many things that we'd like a graduate to do, but we don't need for every graduate to be able to do. I would quite like my CS grads to understand big O notation - I would not attempt to teach it to everyone. I would quite like my history grads to be able to perform independent research - I don't really care if my receptionist can.

There are basic low level things that everyone should be able to do. Addition, multiplication, subtraction, division. But that set is quite small, and it beggars belief that one needs a hundred plus tests to figure out where someone is with respect to those things.

Structured within that context, the idea that it's a good model to teach the tests; to have a list of things that you'd like graduates to be able to do and if they don't do that they're failing and the school's failing (and so on); seems supremely wasteful. If the students do some maths in the mean time and discover a passion for some particular element of it, great, but it's not useful to attempt to make them meet some idealised standard that doesn't reflect reality, rather than focusing on teaching people where their inclinations and skills lie.

I'd imagine that Google has acquired a right, rather than a duty, to serve advertising through their partnership agreement and in trade has given partners a right to some of the money from that. Certainly I wouldn't impose a duty upon myself unless I absolutely had to - and Google is likely to have had the majority of the leverage in any individual negotiation.

In any case though, I imagine that the agreement would be far more acceptable given an only slightly modified version of business as usual as the alternative, than it would given an ultimatum between this and death.

> What would you do?

Pay content creators who don't participate and are on monetised accounts as if the Red views had been seeing adverts, show adverts to everyone else.

I'd extract money from the red customers for the no advert feature, who would be more invested in the feature because their favourite channels would be on it. The Red customers would extract value from viewing that user's content. I'd still be getting paid for the adverts seen by everyone else. The content creator would still getting paid.

I honestly don't see any loser in that besides the content creator maybe not getting as big a cut as they would have if they chose to take the deal. If the Red deal was better than the ad-content deal then I'd be better off treating creators that way and letting them opt-out.

> That is a systemic problem, one which we don't have a good solution for.

Change the jury system/procedure to something better designed to generate trustworthy outputs. It seems simple enough in concept and there are many improvements that can be trivially suggested to improve the system even if we retained the idea of picking N people from the general population.

The Dean can of course want whatever she likes, without contradiction or with hardly matters since our wants are not rational. But the chance of getting it seems unlikely to lie with preaching to parents that they should let their children fail. Especially not in a nation with a very high culture of ambition where so many perceive failure as catastrophic.

If you are a gatekeeper to an area of high value, and if you set demanding test standards, then people are going to try to teach the tests. All the talking about good parenting in the world seems unlikely to change that.

In that position, one can either change the standard to support that which one desires, (Have a discussion that goes something like, “If we are interested in educating young men and women of resilience, how do we encourage and/or test for resilience?”) or one can complain. I've yet to seen any indication that complaining will improve matters in a situation where the majority of the incentive seems to lie on the side of those who act contrary to your desires.

It seems a bit rich for the Dean of an educational institution that demanded, during her tenure and after, the sort of qualifications and CVs that encourage this behaviour to protest it. If you don't want it around, stop providing the incentive for it.

The price that she quoted him was $15. It's not clear that that was $15 an hour, or whether it was $15 for the entire job (regardless of how long it might take.) Considering that the writer questioned whether she thought it would only take him one hour to complete the task, that would be the way that I would be inclined to interpret the way it was taken (if not necessarily the way it was meant): Five hours work at three dollars an hour.

People are going to try their luck in negotiations. That's what they do.

"Would $15 be fair to you for this category?"

Counter-offer with something that you think reflects the value you're going to provide. Will she take it? Maybe yes, maybe no - you get idiots in every line of work. If she doesn't take it, and you're dealing honestly, it's her loss.

At the end of the day though, you did let her open. That's kinda on you.

I don't care about portable. How often do I want to use a computer to make something somewhere that's not the office or at home? Never, in my experience.

"Well, you can hook it up like it's a desktop."

The laptop may be portable, but the monitors and peripherals definitely aren't. That setup isn't portable, only the laptop part of it. In the event that I hook it up like a desktop, I'm paying more for the privilege of having an under-powered desktop running whatever god-awful driver collection goes along with it's cruddy components and not infrequently pre-loaded with a bunch of bloatware as part of the install that has those drivers (often hard to find otherwise.)

For me, the desktop is the clear preference. If I want portable, I'm just consuming content - a tablet will do fine for that.

It's not that simple. Good communication is not about treating everyone the same.

"What do you think?"

Nine times out of ten, on non-trivial issues, I think that we shouldn't be making this decision here and now. The fact that you're prepared to just take an opinion (generally I have several things I can think of, none of which are held particularly strongly yet) without weighing up the pros and cons is somewhat terrifying to me.

I think: 'You're asking for my opinion of something important. And this is just not the way that one communicates on important issues - it's not professional. I will write you something, backed by appropriate research that will let me take a better guess at what's going on, so that we can make a good decision rather than us just pulling the decision out of our arse here and now.'

Sure, I'll meet you half way. Trivial issues, sure - simple question, simple answer. Complex issues? Brief me on what the meeting's going to be about beforehand and I'll put in some background reading first, we can hopefully have a decent discussion once everyone's done their homework. But... it's not a matter of just asking the question. There's significant investment in working well together there on both sides - in getting to know me, me getting to know you... us having that good working relationship that makes the question relevant and likely to be answered well.

These sorts of articles are a bit like an iceberg; a little bit above the water, lots beneath. Or the old, 'Elephant in a room surrounded by blind men.'

If you want to know what someone thinks, yeah ask them. But... you can't just ask someone the question and expect appropriate or desired output to magically appear. It relies on good relationships, correct incentives, certain power distributions, the people involved communicating in the right style, and so on...

If you know your teams, then getting input is not particularly difficult. You note how different people like to be treated and what seems to bring out the best in them. You've talked to them a lot, you've helped them develop their skills and careers. If you don't, then you end up with this sort of generalised response to something that worked for you.

The question asked to someone else, and the manner it was asked in, may very well be entirely different. That's what gifted communicators do - not just pop magical questions but alter the way they're communicating to get the best out of people who are very different in the ways they think.

One of the huge limitations for text based interfaces is the same as the elephant in the room for people starting programming, especially when they start dealing with others libraries/modules: It's not easily discoverable if you don't know what to look for - there's no intuition. A GUI, at least one that's reasonably well-designed, you can play around in and learn fairly quickly.

Having seen the pain of many users even when trying to dig down through a GUI they're unfamiliar with, I think that while text based interface are often more powerful there's a long way to go before they're more popular.

I do, it's a very small expenditure of time and effort even if the probability of my vote making a difference is very small considering we live in a two party system with... conveniently... set electoral boundaries.

While some may not share this feeling, to me there's a constant sensation of pressure from not having enough space; from being too closed in with too many people. You go somewhere where there's a single building you own, in the middle of a nice bit of land, and you can go to town and not have to ram your way through the people, or go for a drive and not be sitting in traffic. That's relaxing to me. That's a pressure coming off... it feels almost like physically coming up from being at the bottom of a swimming pool.

I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment. Like I'll look at things I wrote in a high-density area and they look like insane ramblings.

That doesn't seem to be a 'well, you just need to find a nice high-density area' problem. I've lived in some very well-appointed flats in very nice areas before, and didn't care for the experience in the slightest. I don't care whether the flat's fantastically appointed with real oak furniture and good lighting[1].

And what are we offered in return for that unpleasant sensation? I don't care how many coffee shops or restaurants or whatever there are. I don't go to town unless there's something I can't buy on the internet or I need to go to work. There's little I'd value there. Rampant consumerism is not a society, nor is it a community. The ability to shop in a hundred stores is not the same as a high quality of life.

Ultimately, that is why I don't live in a high-density area despite being offered several multiples of my current wage to do so. I make enough to be comfortable here, it would be almost impossible for me to make enough to be comfortable there.

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1. Which, by the way, is very difficult in a high-density area. Good lighting means light from multiple directions in at least some of the rooms. Quite how you're supposed to do that when there's another building in the way I'm not clear on - the general answer seems to be that one doesn't.

If you've lived in a property with good lighting angles some practices, such as an open-plan setup seem rather like bad hacks.

To be fair, that seems to be much of how it functions in richer countries as well. It's not as bad if you're well educated, have other strengths and a bit of money laid up. But if you're a minimum wage factory operative or warehouse worker or one of the other relatively unskilled low-paid jobs, then the thing that you're good at vanishing can leave you in a very hard place; very limited funding to retrain and limited options for doing so even where such funding can be managed.

You have to actually do something to impose the correct incentives if you want entities to act in a particular manner. I'm not convinced that in the absence of CSR these incentives would have been imposed - which seems to be the lynch pin of the telegraph's piece - and see no evidence to support it.

> How do you get ideas for your side projects or any thing interested?

Speaking just for myself here:

It's a combination of curiosity and naivety. You know that kiddy question where someone's going "But WHY do it that way?!" That's me. Not on the outside, granted - but it's the same sort of impulse.

Of course, as you get older, you start to learn a lot of the 'whys,' and some of them are sensible. The outstanding 'whys' for your day to day life tend to get resolved to a level that allows you to function one way or another. More precisely, however, they're sensible within a specific context defined by the knowledge and assumptions that the parties involved bring to the table and the limits of the requirements they have for their answers.

So I read, I watch visually interesting films, I listen to talks of people who have interesting thoughts, I learn arts crafts and trades outside of my own to a reasonably functional level - (not quite to the level of making an artistry out of them but to the level where you can perceive why that person's good and you're not and some of the things you'd need to do to approach them.) I try to have a wide context to compare the answers to those 'why' questions to. Because what's sensible in one context isn't in another.

There are other skills involved. There are bits of knowledge that are general tools. For instance maths, formal logic - I'd be inclined to suggest a surprising amount of the study of workflows (not just in a user interface sense) is worth looking at because that's often generally applicable to the why of things, etc.

I digress: The majority of the 'why' questions have sensible answers. The world would not function acceptably otherwise. That's fine from the perspective of intellectual exploration. If you're wrong you get an answer that will let you ask more 'why' questions, and if you're right you get another answer - difficult to lose with those outcomes.

Every so often a 'why' comes along where the answer doesn't make sense in the context that you've got, and then you've got an idea that's worth trying out. Seeing whether you can take the thing from that other context and put it in the context that seems wrong. Take one concept from one place and use it here instead. That just seems natural when it happens. Ideas seem like it's the other people who've gone off into crazy land, or missed something. For me, it's the same feeling from when I was little and the parents would go 'BECAUSE! Now I've got to go to work!'

And if that idea comes to nothing, no biggy. There'll be another idea along in a little bit.

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I'd reiterate I'm speaking just for myself there. It's a thing that seems to work for me, it may not be the optimal thing and it may not work that well or that way for others.

It's a good thing they don't have a GPS in your pocket already, or they'd be wasting a lot of money on getting that data.

Your fingertips give you feedback about the pressure you're applying, but they don't give you feedback about the desired outcome of the task. If you're drawing then you get feedback immediately - that line was darker or lighter, thicker or thinner, trailed off in this way. You can see it on the paper and that's associated with the feeling you get via your fingertips.

While I agree that most people would understand the concept of pressure sensitive interfaces. It's not clear to me that people have much practice with them, nor that what little practice many of them do have equips them to be particularly skilled with the things.

By way of illustration: can you imagine someone who hasn't learned to use a computer before learning on an interface such as this? It's hard enough reminding people that you choose the right mouse button to access particular parts of the interface, now you have to remind them that you press this button but only this hard (how do you even give them the knowledge of how hard to push to access the damn thing?) And it's not particularly discoverable, a lot of people don't even discover the right click menu for themselves, when there's a button just sitting there for them to press to find that out.

I don't think it would occur to people that the system would be expected to function in that way. Most of our tools don't seem to. Those that do manage to do so, and to do so well, seem to have extremely short feedback cycles between the use of input and the desired output state of the activity. It's possible that you might make a menu fade in, as someone presses harder on the screen to try to shorten the feedback cycle. That would make it more discoverable and allow people to work out how hard they need to press. The problem there would be that the menu would start showing up during routine use, (because if you made it only show up when someone pressed hard, it would have the same limitations of being on discoverable as the other system had.) Perhaps people would just get used to such a system, but I can see it being extremely frustrating to have a menu fade in as you were scrolling through a web page.

Use of pressure to control the behaviour of the tool there has:

A) immediate graduated feedback (perhaps a learning point for pressure sensitive interfaces here?)

B) is something that you have to learn to do well (an awful lot of people never do - most people aren't artists.)

> Just imagine if you had to conduct the search for applicants with a 10x larger pool of candidates. The sheer work involved is sure to cause problems of their own nature.

You can reduce the size of the pool of applications that you consider essentially arbitrarily. Shuffle the applications and throw a certain percentage of them into the bin without looking at them. The composition of the set of applications that you consider matters, but the number of applications, past a certain group size that ensures a reasonable cross-section of the application set, isn't particularly relevant.

Unless you know that university graduation is a good indicator of future work success, you may as well do that and get the diversity for free. You're under absolutely no obligation to consider a thousand applicants for one position or anything like that.

> It is highly correlated with successful application.

Almost axiomatically so if you make it a hiring criteria. The real question is whether it's correlated with good KPIs, (and the secondary question of whether your KPIs express your business needs.)

People's feelings aren't necessarily reasonable. If you grow up almost exclusively in an environment where failure can snowball fairly easily, which school is, and everyone tells you it's really important not to fail in that context, whether or not that's true, then that will be likely to be a large part of the pattern of emotion you have when confronting failures outside that context.

Specifically on risks of harm? Sure:

Faults in agreement include parties generating agreement that doesn't reflect their values and/or desires, and the illusion of agreement by one or both parties.

While there is potential risk of harm in many other areas of development - including other areas of agreement - the stakes are not usually so high. Getting an illusion of agreement for what movie to see, what restaurant to eat at, or (at a younger age) what toy to play with, will tend to have less severe consequences than an illusion of agreement over whether to sleep with someone.

It is not clear that someone gains the most from risking the most. Why is an agreement over sex the defining developmental step of the skill? Especially since there are so many easy ways to reach such an agreement if you're not particularly picky. (I believe the classical example is, 'You give me money and I sleep with you.')