It's not just that it requires recall. It's that it requires no non-trivial thought beyond recall.
1,167 karma · joined April 11, 2018
As a human, you'd expect to fail either because you didn't know a category member (e.g. as a non-American I have no idea WTF "Citgo" is; I could never get the answer to the first question because I have never seen that name before in my life) or because you weren't able to bring it to mind; the mental act of looping over all members of a category is quite challenging for a human.
Admittedly this is something an AI system could in principle be REALLY good at, and it's interesting to test and see that current ones are not! But it seems weird to me to call what's being tested "reasoning" when it's so heavily focused on memory recall (and evaluating whether a candidate answer works or not is trivial once you've brought it to mind and doesn't really require any intelligent thought).
(If the questions were multiple-choice, eliminating the challenge of bringing candidate answers to mind that is the main challenge for a human, then I'd agree it was a "reasoning" test.)
Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.
There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.
For instance, there is a 15-point question for which you have to answer that your worst grade in high school was in Science, and a separate 15-point question where you have to answer that your worst grade in college was in History/Political Science; picking any of the other options (each question has 5 possible answers) means 0 marks for that question. Collectively, these two questions alone account for one eighth of all the available points. (Many questions were red herrings that were actually worth nothing.)
But then the same blacks-only group that had lobbied internally to get the questionairre instituted (the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) leaked the "correct" answers to the arbitrary questions to its members, allowing them to get full marks. Effectively this was a race-based hiring cartel. Non-blacks couldn't pass; blacks unwilling to join segregated racial affinity groups or unwilling to cheat the test couldn't pass; but corrupt blacks just needed to cheat when invited to and they would pass easily, entering the merit-based stage of hiring with the competition already eliminated by the biographical questionairre.
(A sad injustice is that blacks who wouldn't join the NBCFAE or cheat the test, and so suffered the same unfair disadvantage as whites, are excluded from the class in the class-action lawsuit over this whole mess. Since the legal argument is that it was discrimination against non-blacks, blacks don't get to sue - they lost out because of their integrity, not their race, and they have no recourse at law for that.)
See the questions at https://github.com/kaisoapbox/kaisoapbox.github.io/blob/main... or read an account of the story at either https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... (short) or https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa... (long).
(You may be right about the government "pressure" being grossly overstated, I dunno. But the censorship itself happened.)
(Right? I have no insider information, here, but as far as I understand it none of the above is controversial.)
I don't know the exact content of the messages the FBI sent (I don't think they've been published), but on its face it seems perverse to me to characterise that sequence of events as the FBI not saying "anything about the Hunter laptop story" to Facebook. They presumably were referring to the Hunter laptop story, and Facebook correctly recognised that this was the case when the story broke, so in what sense are was the warning not "about" that story?
(Indeed, this one specific date gets said the American way even in British English. We Brits don't do that for any other dates - we say "fourth of July" instead of "July fourth", for instance - but "September 11th" aka "9/11", uniquely among all dates, is written and said the American way in all dialects of English on the planet due to its significance to American culture.)
No, you can't really, especially if the recurring meetings go on more than a few years into the future. If the time zone rules themselves change (e.g. if the user's country abolishes or introduces DST), then the timestamps you stored will become wrong in light of the change.
But I would also like to make sense of what the actual risk alleged to exist in Euston is, and how Gareth Dennis or the ORR inspector thinks it should be mitigated. And I cannot figure it out, at all.
In Dennis's comments quoted in The Independent, for which he was fired, he attributes the risks at the station to the increased number of trains coming in and out of the station. That seems to imply that the crush or trample risk he perceives to exist is in the main lobby area of the station, not on the platforms or the ramps leading down to the platform gates, since if it were the latter then the risk would exist regardless of the number of trains coming in and out of the station.
This seemed surprising/implausible to me because all the dense crowds I've ever seen (and felt concerned about) in Euston have been on the ramps or the platforms, NOT in the lobby area which is massive. I struggle to imagine how a crush or stampede could ever happen anywhere besides the ramps and platforms. So I dug a bit further.
The press release associated with the improvement notice (https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/rail-regulator-requires-c...), on the other hand, says that over summer 2023, there were three instances of "crowding reaching unacceptable levels and a lack of crowd control in place" resulting in "minor injuries" with potential for worse. They also complain of a lack of risk assessments for two unspecified "pinch points" in the station "where crowding is most concentrated", inadequate "control measures", and unacceptably poor "layout" and "signage" to help with flow control.
The actual improvement notice, meanwhile, contains essentially no detail (https://orrprdpubreg1.blob.core.windows.net/docs/I-NWM-20230...), just some fairly meaningless boilerplate. The entire explanation of the problem is "You have failed to implement, so far as is reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston Station" and the remedy demanded is that the station needs to do a risk assessment and then implement whatever measures they come up with in the risk assessment.
My best guess at what this is all about, possibly completely wrong, is as follows:
* the two "pinch points" are two of the ramps, probably the one leading down to platforms 8/9/10/11 and the one leading down to platforms 12/13/14/15, which in my personal experience of the station are where most of the big surges happen
* the injuries happened due to crowds running down the ramps to the platforms once the platform number for their train got announced, either to beat other passengers to the seats or out of fear that they would not get on a late-arriving train before it departed at all
* the risk assessment concluded that the station should put up signs telling people not to run, and then they did that (I can't find any reporting about it, but if my memory serves me right, then those signs on the ramps at Euston appeared late last year which fits with the timeline)
So, IF I'm guessing correctly, there's probably a real stampede risk, with minor examples having already played out, but it's totally unrelated to the number of trains or the crowding in the lobby, the fired "whistleblower" is basically full of shit for suggesting a problem stemming from a larger number of trains, and the supposed "fix" is also meaningless compliance bullshit that will have no effect.
Of course, again, I could be guessing totally wrong; there isn't enough detail in the public documents or reporting for us to tell. So I publicly asked Gareth, the guy who got fired, to explain his concerns in more detail or point me to somewhere with detail. He... responded with indignation and contempt, pointed me to the Improvement Notice for one reason (the document with no detail about the problems, just a one sentence description that is probably copied and pasted boilerplate and makes no reference to any of the specific circumstances at Euston), then suggested I was mentally unwell in some way and blocked me. What a dickhead. Here's the end of the thread; I'd be grateful if someone not blocked by Gareth would stick it into Threadreader and post a link here so people not on X can read it: https://x.com/GarethDennis/status/1829179489043226778
I find it hard to fathom why someone sincerely concerned with safety would behave in this way - making unactionably vague complaints that a station is unsafe, then refusing to elaborate and lashing out at anyone interested in the detail for daring to question him. After the displeasure of interacting with the guy, it seems to me that this story has no heroes. But still, no matter how much of a dick he is or how useless his criticism was, it doesn't justify the firing. If you want a culture in which people feel safe speaking up about concerns, you have to indulge even stupid and incoherent concerns made by dicks; if you don't, everybody with something substantive to say will quite reasonably fear they will be viewed and treated in the same way you treated the dick.
Indeed it is basically incompatible with SemVer given that SemVer has its own way of marking unstable versions (or, equivalently, pre-release versions; SemVer conflates the two concepts). Unstable/pre-release versions under SemVer are indicated by a hyphenated suffix after the patch version - e.g. 1.2.3-alpha
Am flagging simply for the misleading title. This would be unobjectionable (though IMO not very interesting) if the title were fixed.
You present this as an argument for a shorter sentence. But from another perspective, it's an argument for never letting him out.
Prison isn't primarily meant to rehabilitate; you are almost certainly right that it will do the exact opposite in this case. Its power to deter is also limited. But what it can do, if we are simply willing to use it for that purpose, is contain dangerous people and prevent them from harming others again by simply not giving them the opportunity to do so.
Question: What I'm not clear on is whether the business-but-not-work restriction... 1. merely means that the purpose of your visit has to be business-but-not-work, or 2. requires that the visitor refrain from all "work" activities while in the US, even if they weren't the reason for visiting and would have happened anyway.
Concretely: suppose I am a programmer who works remotely from Europe for a US company. I visit the US to meet my colleagues face to face and attend a trade show with them (business, not work), but these activities don't take up 100% of my time. Rather than sit around idly during the downtime between "business" activities, I do some of my ordinary programming work, of the sort I would do back in Europe. Have I broken the law?
No, but it would make perfect sense for him to open a door at random and - if doing so reveals the car - tell you sadly that you've lost as a disappointed klaxon plays. Indeed this is almost the only possible way that the initial door opening could realistically make sense in a game show; if it works in any other way, there's no tension when the first door is opened since there's no risk!