> 2)Why we need to work?
It's a status thing, right?
16,009 karma · joined April 25, 2013
It's a status thing, right?
Audiobooks have been a god send and then the Libby app manna from upon high. Free, high quality, adult-level infotainment?! I'll never go back.
One thing if do is up the reading speed. It takes time but I'm comfortable at 2.6x these days, even on the fragmented sleep a teething toddler grants you. For really in depth stuff I'll slow it down a lot, but a Stephen King dime store novel or John Grisham thriller? Oh yeah, speed it up no worries
Never meet your heroes is just great advice, same as it ever was.
It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.
No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.
Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.
Again, it's a weird little sub domain.
The way one of their employees told me it to me as like a dishwasher.
Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.
But it's essentially just a sprinkler.
Ain't no one going to to pay the cost of a new BMW for a dishwasher.
Same thing here for the laundro-bots. Their competition isn't against the time saved for a person to do it themselves. The competition is a maid that does your whole house for $70.
I know that they went out of their way to a company that does not store genetic info for their sequencing.
In talking with them, they are also very against any form of this screening. The risks of the disease are very bad, but they feel on a population level that the risks of abuse by insurances or governments are much higher, per what they have told me.
Sure, DNA seems like something that is 'real' and 'grounded', but once you get into the specifics of even sample collection and handling, those little errors in the Gaussian distributions start adding up (in quadrature!) and it is surprising how fast the error bars end up swamping any kind of knowledge.
Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services.
Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap.
Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted?
It's Prop 13.
TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices rise.
And med schools are quite focused on grades.
Same goes for Law Schools, which, again, Brown is an outlier for JDs.
Look, the professor here is right. But he's living in a different time. The students are under the gun here and are responding to their incentives. The prof's gripe should not be with the students but with the AMA or the Bar associations, ultimately.
Essentially, the system is sick, the kids and prof are caught in the middle of it. Don't fight each other, fight the power.
Seeing as the article was about Brown and their PLME program is famous for med school acceptance, then I think we should expect that the culture there is more about grades than a generic undergrad university's culture. Which, yeah, is also very grade focused.
The obvious problem with that is it is terribly expensive. You need Masters or Doctoral level people for long periods alone with students and you need to trust that these proctors won't be some form of -ist towards the students and also that their grades will be fair.
It is by design not something that scales.
But it seems that is where the path lies at this point.
Essentially, the aristocracy gets education again and the plebs get to fight/cheat it out amongst each other and paying to do nothing in the end.
Damn it
It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time.
Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP.
In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.
If it does correlate to some 'strong' degree [0], then i think we could use it as a bit of a prediction going forward.
[0] It's population stuff so really anything above r>0.35 is good enough
Democracy works exactly because of this?
We just poll all the people, including the dumb ones, and then average out the answers. The dumbs all cancel out in the end. (Yes, of course, I know it is a lot more complex than this)
The whole point of democracy is that we don't know what is the dumb or smart answer so we have these complex functions and dances to squeeze out the best one we can think of at the time. (Yes, I know that the reasons for states to turn democratic are complex)
It's really high for psych stuff. If you even get r=0.5, you've got a great result there.
But it is important to note, I feel, that SAT maps to only about 2/3 parts of the IQ score, and IQ score is also a quite fuzzy measure here for things like knowledge work job performance.
I do agree though, you get quite a bang for your buck just reporting these numbers.
But, if you explicitly tie money and compensation to the SAT score, man, that is setting up some very perverse incentives around it. If it adopts widely to do so, then you're gonna get some really strange interaction effects there.
Pay attention to the vibes and evidence in this thread.
Ask yourself how this community slots into your media diet.
Of those that use AI, most have finally cleared out their backlogs that were just never ending before AI. That took about 3 years to accomplish.
Now they have the time to do more ambitious projects. And many are doing just that.
I do not see AI taking jobs, I see it more as everyone got a great secretary/junior to offload 'busy' work onto.
Think of even the lower level employees now having access to some of the time saving labor that the old robber barons and fat cats had with legions of secretaries and go-get-em younguns.
Time will tell what becomes of all this, it still very early days, but I mostly see the effects of AI in my current life as like a tool. A great multi-tool, sure, but still just a tool.
But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.
From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.
[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia
I do not mean to be glib here either or start a flame war. I am genuinely asking.
I made a scraper that searches through all the news and finds anything 'war' related. It then summarizes it and give me that new in the Star Wars crawl with music.
It is unfortunate that the Ivory Tower can't recognize it though. His path to tenure is closed at this point. Yet any school would have a gem if they prompted him.
His star really is rising and his reach is widening. I can;t wait until he gives up the ghost and decides to go to some think tank or another and really makes the dough.
I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein.
Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices.
I'm not an MBA guy, so I can't speak to the curriculum in Biz Schools, but I can say that what you say does come across with most MBAs I have met. In that they think similarly about their education being about the networking and not really about the material.
Which is a shame really for both of our sides of this all.
I think you are saying that the publishers are essentially paying for minimum words / word count. Which is the opposite of what any writing upperdivision teacher would tell you about writing. And I'm saying that you are getting busy work assigned from the professor in the first place (and then saying that i haven't experienced that).
The solution is to have the students take charge of their education and be less passive. If the assignments are bad (in selection or in writing) then the student should challenge the teacher on it.
Yeah, that's a harder way to do things, yes, but I think anyone out of school for anytime will agree that it would be a better way.
Thank you for sharing you experience with me all the same.
1 - When I was in grad school (before AI), we had to use Canvas for a class. One day, I got an obvious spam/phishing email in the internal Canvas system. It was so strange. The writer just would randomly hit the capslock button and keep typing away, no salutation, no signature, just a real mess. They were asking for a particular professor to come to their house to teach them about ... something? Again, real strange.
So, I email IT and say 'Hey, somehow a spammer got into the system, do your thing'.
They email back and go 'Nope, it's a student, that somehow managed to CC the entire system, sorry about that'.
Dear Reader, the message was pure garbage. Literally, it looked liked it was written by a 3rd grader without any shame. [0]
I happened to know the professor of the class. So later on, I talked with them over symposium coffee about it. They said that they remembered that particular email because of all the IT back and forth. It was for an upperdivision class in the Engineering department. The email itself was not particularly notable otherwise. In that, they saw such emails all the time, in terms of quality. This was a top 100 ranked (whatever that means) university, by the by.
Shocking.
2 - My grandfather was an officer and a mechanic for the USAF. A bit of an odd combo, but he was partly responsible for instituting many preventative maintenance checks and protocols, novel in those early days of the AF. His aptitude and memory were quite sharp for many mechanical things. Until the strokes from decades of smoking caught up, he could tell you exact measurements and torque values for a variety of airplane related things (I can no longer remember what exactly, the memory skills did not transfer to me).
I do vividly remember standing in that light blue garage of his and him all but yelling at me once. We were looking at the brakes on an old car he was 'restoring' (getting away from Grandma for a little bit). He pointed at the old drum brakes on the axel.
He asked me how tight the pads should be on the inner rim of it.
I had no idea.
So he asked where I might find out.
I figured I'd ask him.
But what if Grandpa wasn't there?
We'll I'd have to look it up somewhere (they had no internet).
Fantastic. Now, what about the next time you're working on the brakes?
Well, just make sure that the pads are at that spec.
And that when Grandpa hit me with the nugget of hard won wisdom: No, you look it up every time. Because these are brakes, and if you are wrong then they might fail, and they might fail when the driver has their whole family in the car at 100 mph. And then because you were lazy, half a dozen people die.
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These two times stand in my head when it comes to AI.
For the first one, yes, AI would be such a boon to that very clearly struggling student reaching out for help. It would get them back on the path to the real struggle of getting their degree. That level of assistance would be like a wheelchair to a paraplegic.
For the second anecdote, AI is condemning people to death. Using it in life critical situations and care, letting it hallucinate or skip over critical values, that's a recipe for disaster.
Where do we set the fine line of using AI and not? For brakes and X-ray machines, obviously not. For helping kids learn to write emails correctly? Sure, sounds great.
Unfortunately, I feel the old adage about regulations is going to be true here like it is with every new technology: The rules are written in blood.
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