aqsalose

>Following this reasoning, all children would be subject the whims of their backwards city or rural enclave. Parents will have more of an ability to brainwash their kids, I suppose, but that's not what we usually mean by "liberty."

At least their whims affect only the children in the backwards city or rural enclave, which by definition is small.

How much liberty there is in a system where all schools are subject to whims of a national government, which you can't hope to affect with your single one vote? No chance even if you, your spouse and friends all decide to weigh in. Sounds positively totalitarian.

One can't even talk about tyranny of majority: In most Western democracies -- no matter if the electoral system is proportional or not -- the percentage of people who vote is so small that any government seldom was voted in by majority of the population, only by a plurality, anyway.

>They're already not working for the same money they could be getting in industry, now they also have to eschew prestige in their own communities, or else they're not driven by the pure intellectual pursuit of knowledge and science?

I think the common form of the complaint is that the prestige-generating mechanism has is too decoupled from the scientific advances.

Many pre-modern apprentices never became journeymen and even fewer a master.

In 17th century Leiden, 40% of surgeons' apprentices dropped out. In Utrecht's Coopers' Guild, only about 10% of apprentices became Masters.

On the other hand, getting rid of the guilds in the 1820s and replacing it with less formalized vocational training during industrialization didn't change the system for better:

>A lengthy contribution in the journal of the Dutch Society to Advance Industry in 1891 criticised the condition of Dutch training in detail: ‘Nowadays boys leave one boss after the other for the greatest triviality . . .. The boss continuously fears that the boy will leave him to use his acquired skills with another boss. Bosses therefore slow down training by putting boys to work at specialised repetitive tasks, so that they bring in the highest profits.’

https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/391011

His accusations in the web archive snapshot that I pulled are ... quite mild, concrete and specific enough: Nobody to talk about in the university about your projects or topics. First PhD student. No postdoc working on the same topic. Advisors who suggest to do a thesis on something else, less difficult or familiar ... and the project seems to be less and less about the hot buzzword in the advertisement or grant proposal.

This is spots on description of what happens if you waltz into some university department or research group intending to "do a PhD" in something that isn't the core competency your group. This is very common in "provincial universities" but also happens to lesser in top schools if you just happen to come in with expectations that are misaligned with the reality. It is a side product of the sad aspect of academic reality that finding funding for a PhD student is often much easier than finding funding for a post-doc or more senior member, even though that is exactly the wrong way to build a good research group.

Philip Guo's the PhD Grind describes many of the same challenges.

I also share a memory of older member of the faculty suggesting that your PhD is supposed to a formality to endure. "A driving license", not real real research with your own ideas. It was very depressing thing to hear, because I too went in with an attitude of "I shall study a question I was interested in my undergrad, but seriously this time".

Isn't the "go up by a factor of ten" pattern you describe more of your parents spending behaviors (until you are old enough to get odd jobs by yourself) than anything else?

The concept of "save money and put your loose change coins into a piggy bank" could be much older than how much disposable income kids[1] today have. My hypothesis: Maybe the intended lesson was more coherent with the reality a century ago.

Here is the first graph I found with a search engine of USD purchasing power: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1032048/value-us-dollar-... . After the Napoleonic wars until WW2 or so the purchasing power of 1 U.S. dollar spend most of its time increasing followed by sudden drastic drops in value during ... the Civil War and WW1.

[1] Or a random HN user got as a kid.

So, what if all the publishers in one country just so happen to decide that Mr. Solzhenitsyn's book "Gulag Archipelago" is politically very uncomfortable to the ruling elite and all decline to publish it? This was Finlandized Finland in the 1970s. (To be clear, government didn't formally ban it. All publishing houses were privately owned companies. Yet somehow the decision was made.)

Maybe nobody is entitled to book publishers providing "free reach" of publishing your book, especially in thousands of copies. Yet something went wrong there. I don't have a catchy slogan for it, but sometimes the decisions to prevent reach are functionally antithetical to the purpose of free press.

"Technologically superior" is kind of relative to comparison group. As a consumer who does not enjoy particularly high salary, "is it affordable" is an important consideration when buying any technological product.

What do I mean when I say "relative to"? When DVD became available, people bought DVD players, which were superior to VHS. And TV+VHS was a superior technology compared TV alone. And TV displays have become much better than they were when VHS was brand new.

I linked to part III in a series. There is also part I https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-g... and part II https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-victorian... .

For ontext, I was quite disappointed by this other recently posted article about Vicotrian values: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30894353 . It was short, not very analytical, and more than a bit moralizing in tone, with many unstated assumptions never made clear. (It rejects the claims of prude Victorian life as a fiction invented by the post-WW2 generations who have not truly got past prudery themselves. But there was a distinctively Victorian spirit for betterment of morals. Why again the Victorian moral project and supposed "prudery" was in the wrong, in the first place?)

Quoting the key definition:

"Bringing all these pieces together, we can now define our formal measure of intelligence for arbitrary systems. Let E be the space of all computable reward summable environmental measures with respect to the reference machine U, and let K be the Kolmogorov complexity function. The expected performance of agent π with respect to the universal distribution 2−K(μ) over the space of all environments E is given by Υ(π) := [unquotable latex expression]. We call this the universal intelligence of agent π."

It is an useless kind of mathematical object from any practical perspective. Sure, some formal object is defined, but all the actual important things to use it are left as difficult, possibly devilishly or impossibly difficult implementation details. How do you actually build a map from the physical reality to environment E? How the agent π is mapped to any real physical being? All the real work that would make the definition useful is left out.

It is like defining complexity classes without providing any algorithms.

edit. Further complaint: Here is how they present "examples":

>A very specialised agent. From the equation for Υ, we see that an agent could have very low universal intelligence but still perform extremely well at a few very specific and complex tasks. Consider, for example, IBM’s Deep Blue chess supercomputer, which we will represent by π_dblue. When μ_chess describes the game of chess, V π_dblue μ_chess is very high. However 2−K(μ_chess ) is small, and for μ != μ_chess the value function will be low as π_dblue only plays chess. Therefore, the value of Υ(π_dblue) will be very low. Intuitively, this is because Deep Blue is too inflexible and narrow to have general intelligence; a characteristic weakness of specialised artificial intelligence systems.

Why they need any formal definition of Y to express this if they don't bother fleshing out some features of μ_chess so that you could provide any bounds for K(μ_chess)? Without such work, all of the actual claims in the paragraph is all appeal to intuition. Nothing is proved, so any formal definitions are unused. The contents of the quoted paragraph could be expressed without referring to any equations or "definitions" at all, they are totally superfluous.

Funny, I thought his musics about "language games" was the part of his output more amenable to fashionable nonsense. I have met very few students who attempt to say anything about Tractatus, but quite many who espouse deep-sounding platitudes about "language is a game".

I am unsure if it tells more about any general attitude about "tools" or more about Broadway. Microphones are still not used in opera or classical music.

Olkiluoto 3 suffered significant delays and cost overruns. My impressions, based on recollection I got reading the newspapers during these two decades, are:

1. Bad management of construction project, almost near corruption level stupidity. Many constructions tasks outsourced to contractors who outsourced them to contractors who outsourced them to contractors, making it easy to take "cost-saving" shortcuts and difficult to supervise.

2. Failure of corruption to speed things up: Finnish nuclear safety authorities are not easily bribed, so when issues with bad quality of welds, concrete, boiler valves and safety electronics were identified (all this from memory, these were separate incidents), the issues could not be smoothed over and ignored with well-placed thick envelopes. The authorities would demand the construction crew to tear stuff apart and do again, properly. And if it didn't pass, then again. And again.

Most of the issues I have read about do not sound like "nuclear technology" failures, more about failures in building a big pressurized boiler power plant. The nuclear part comes in by authorities requiring high quality. They couldn't make good enough concrete bed on a first try, that isn't some super novel space technology.

It mostly reminds me of similar kind of mismanagement that plagues many big construction projects run by big corps managed by suits. During same time frame city of Helsinki wasted amazing amount of money in a "automated metro car" subway upgrade project they bought from Siemens, which ultimately didn't work and had to be scrapped.

(edit. City of Helsinki decided to "automate" city subway metro system in 2006, contract signed with Siemens in 2008, originally planned to be completed in 2011. Project was postponed several times and effectively scrapped in 2016. Tried googling most recent news, the lower district court had given judgement in 2021, parties likely to appeal.)

>EU members to assist in case of military attack

Treaty text specifies: Aid and assist. Likewise, the second paragraph specifies the NATO remain foundation of NATO member states' security.

It remains untested if "aid and assist" means fighter planes fighting sorties, boots on the ground, or nuclear umbrella. There is very little formal structure for EU military operations, because most member states coordinate via NATO structures.

North Atlantic Treaty is very clear: it says that all member states are in war if one is attacked and specifies use of armed force. While it hasn't been tested either, NATO has the genuine military organization, armed forces and nuclear warheads to implement it.

Was the activity found to be illegal by a court where the defendant had ability to defend themselves with assistance of an attorney of their own choosing?

How much of that totem pole exists just because kids are kids, or because of the arbitrary environment, imposed by the adults, wherein they find themselves?

Thing is, I don't think any individual investor is going to experience "on average" stock market patterns, they are going to experience a particular random walk. I think averaging is "better" if you are risk averse and concerned about worst case scenarios.

>The alternative is if you really understand valuations, diversification, risk and market psychology, like I do, then you can consistently beat the market. Most people cannot and most people you pay fees to do it on your behalf won't.

There is also a catch: Suppose someone reads this, thinks "I think I could be as good as it as this HN user" understanding valuations and market psychology and whatnot.

Maybe you can. I am not sure if I can. But one thing I learned while trying, studying some companies and trying to find out where I could have relevant domain insight and then somehow coming up with an estimate for correct stock price when to buy/sell is a hugely time consuming hobby which isn't super fun.

Interesting language analysis, but I disagree with the conclusion. Authors merely stating "conclude" or "determine" instead "believe" or "feel" doesn't prove they actually were any more or less rational or logical. The latter use could be more truthful to ones internal thought process.

[If I write "I believe <blah blah>" because I believe something and state the reasons why I believe something, it is probably more informative than the output produced if I believe <blah blah>, then search Google for some random authoritative looking sources that say something that superficially matches what I want to say, and then write "these authoritative sources conclude <blah blah>"].

The observation indicates that popularity of some turn of phrase and "key words" over another have changed over time, which is interesting. But for determining how the actual "rationality" of content has changed, one should pick some set of random articles from different periods and actually analyze structure of arguments presented.

I must say, that line about "there is no force, only consequences", it does sound a bit ludicrous, not matter when it used. When other human being A willfully inflict a consequence on other person B because of past actions of person B, I thought such consequence is commonly referred to as a "punishment", especially if A has some sort of authority or official capacity.

Like, I live in Finland. Here is an illustrative episode from what I remember from school. In Finnish case, the first world war manifested as a brutal civil war where about 1 % population died. The interwar period was characterized by political instability and sectarian violence, where it was near always people aligned with the "White" anticommunist side (victors of the civil war) doing the violence. People who publicly professed communist or socialist ideas often got roughhoused and in some incidents were killed; many times, their printing presses were burned by right-wing activists. The government turned a blind eye to these actions, but it wasn't something government orchestrated -- the actual activities were genuine "grassroots" effort from a part of populace that found any idea of communist action as totally opposed their mental image of Finnish nation, and certain democratic norms were not running very deep. (During some specific moments, the politicians were often afraid of facing a popular right-wing coup.) And granted, some of the communist action during that time was supported by the Soviet Russia and was publicly agitating for an international revolution.

However, what I am trying to say is this: Sure, a galactic alien with all the tact and deep understanding of human behavior that Lt. Commander Data possess could describe the events as "phenomena where communists faced consequences for their freely exercised speech actions because they found out their speech was wildly unpopular with some other people, without government doing censorship", but any sensible human being would recognize that there was political violence with express purpose of limiting the political speech of the left side. If you think these people had right to express their political message, it was repressed, with violence.

Now, I write about this episode of Northeast European history exactly because it is a distant analogue about any current situation anywhere in the world. But one can not pretend that if you inflict any kind of cost to other people either because they did something or because you want to change their behavior, the costs you inflict are some impersonal "consequences" which somehow makes it so that any other context of situation does not apply -- for example, your purpose for inflicting the consequences.

India is much larger country than the others mentioned in this thread.

It is a quite old and often repeated claim, first made by Ronald Fisher in 1936.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Mendelian_parado...

>You don’t have to understand the intricacies of the finish educational system, but I bet that if you tried to emulate it, you’d get decent results.

You might choose to emulate the wrong parts and disregard parts of that contributed to the system's overall functioning and results. For example, it looks like Finland has problems successfully running the world famous Finnish educational system. Since the PISA success of the 00s, the Finnish education has gone downhill, fast. In recent national evaluation [1], the kids today have more difficulties with tests from 20 years ago.

[1] https://yle-fi.translate.goog/uutiset/3-12220417?_x_tr_sl=au...

> So did every piece of technology that was widely adopted change behavior.

>So what?

It sounds relevant if the pill was introduced and got legalized on the grounds that it would not cause that kind of change but e.g. only help married couples to plan their pregnancies.

>I took part of an effort to ship PPE to friends and family in Asia in January

Apropos, when the similar effort by the "patriotic Chinese emigrants" here got reported in press, one common angle was to present it as a hostile act by the Chinese state and also a failure of Finnish state of not restricting the PPE sales.

edit. Ah, a part was that the operation was coordinated by an official in the Chinese embassy. (Paywalled link in Finnish https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000007971030.html )

So took a chance to Google the quoted phrase attributed to Cotton. It comes from an interview to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, in context:

>In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.

>“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

>Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.

https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cott... via https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-cotton-slavery-necessa...

One common historical argument (I think I got it from H. W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin that I read recently), is that there would had been no union at all if the southern states (with slavery) were not accommodated.

Of course, any decision about a school curriculum excludes other curriculums, unless one chooses to deliberately cover all aspects of debate of any debated school subject, or take an anarchist attitude of no imposed curriculum by the state, giving total control individual teachers or maybe parents themselves.

In Finland, teachers have quite much autonomy as long as the minimum standards of vaguely specified curriculum is adhered to, which is more "free speech compatible" in some sense, but that comes with failure modes too. (I had quite professional teachers in my time, but I recall reading a complaints about politically partisan teachers. System like is prone to have issues because while government schools are, in theory, part of the democratically governed system, the actual decisions about education and choice of teachers are quite many hoops and levels of hierarchy removed from the kids and the parents themselves.)

It is difficult to give a comprehensive answer in a fly-by HN comment.

Very brief answer: It was complicated. It is complicated.

Slightly less brief answer: Define reconciliation. I doubt any kind of perfect, ideal reconciliation was ever reached. It is not like there were two sides who agreed to something: there were many political actors, with different opinions. It was a mess, and it still is a mess. Many people who had first-hand experience of the war or the terror or its consequences remained bitter. The distinction between the Red and the White social sphere continued for a long time (Anecdote: there were Red and White country-wide sports unions SVUL and TUL until 1993.)

Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter and legacy of Mannerheim and which was worse, the White terror or the hypothetical Red terror if the Reds had won.

Another anecdote. A couple of years ago a student chapter at one university put a portrait of Mannerheim on the wall of their club room. One professor made a very angry public complaint. I don't know what happened afterwards, but there were lots opinions in newspapers and social media, for a moment.

If we define "reconciliation" as "why there was no further violence, at least not much", one reason was that some of the political leaders on White pushed through torpparilaki (a land reform). SDP could participate in the elections, and due to efforts of some centrist politicians on White side, could once enter a government. Economy was good, the Great Depression wasn't as bad as in many other places. When Winter War happened, many regular people on the Red side felt their lives were improving and were distrustful of Stalin's clumsy propaganda moves (it helped that many Reds who "escaped" to the USSR during 1920s-1930s were shot or imprisoned with other ethnic Karelians and Finns in Stalin's purges; the word eventually got back that the USSR was not a paradise). The Reds were divided: non-communist socialists like SDP leader Väinö Tanner enjoyed electoral support among the working class, but were also quite hated by the pro-Soviet left. Maybe the White-aligned political police simply was very efficient at suppressing the would-be revolutionary left (some true believers on the Red side attempted to continue underground pro-Soviet / revolutionary efforts, not very successfully.)

Other part of the answer is that there was a lot of ...not-exactly-reconciliation for several decades.

Remember, some on the Red side continued with not necessarily reconciliatory political efforts? Some on the White side were actively not pleased about this at all, and some objected to any leftists being allowed to participate in politics at all. Feeling the legacy of their Independence War Victory was being squandered. In the 1920s/30s, for several years, some white extremists burned leftists printing presses, kidnapped and roughhoused lots of perceived communists, killed some, and the state apparatus turned a blind eye. Eventually they proceeded to kidnap bourgeois politicians not deemed anti-communist enough, including the ex-president Ståhlberg. At some point the danger of a genuine coup / intra-white civil war was real. (Google for Mäntsälän kapina.) In the end, after the parties and politics to the left of SDP were effectively banned, the extreme right lost its steam.

After the WW2, many outright communists and other on the Red side of left who had spent 1920s-1930s out of politics or in prison were able to enter the politics (thanks Finland mostly losing the WW2 to the Soviets) in force. In some respects, they got some amounts of revenge, when the most bourgeois party, Kokoomus, could not enter the government for decades because of Soviet objections. Google for Kekkonen and Finlandization.

Only thing I can think of is eminent domain. Here it using it requires either a specific decree by the national government (as in, the prime minister), zoning plan approved by the elected municipal government, or in some limited cases, apparently involving electric power lines, an agency. The owner is to be informed of the proceedings before they take effect.

The random clerk does not get to do write off your property belonging to someone else, unless your elected representative had a change voice an opinion in a proceedings where a clear public decision by the elected representatives to specifically take away someone's property was made.

In civilized countries, it requires a specific decree or order by some government body, possibly after appeals.

Not just random clerk writing a line in a book when random stranger comes and tells they own a piece of land and are going to sell it.

It was a retro-chair already in the 1970s. See here Aalto's Armchair 406 (made and sold by Artek) from 1939.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Armchair+406+aalto&iax=imag...

I think the bookshops with fake bookself printouts on the wall look a bit silly.