barry-cotter

> proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat.

If they don’t catch them they don’t have a business model. They have one job. The University of London, Open University and British Council all have 50+ years experience on proctoring university exams for distance learning students and it’s not like Thomson Prometric haven’t thought about how to do it either, even if they (mostly?) do computerised exams.

What a fantastic example of using “democratic” as a synonym for good and “not democratic” as bad. Thank you for illustrating the author’s point so well.

By the way, the term of art for what you’re doing, of defining democracy I like as real democracy and democracy I don’t like as not democracy is to call democracy I like “liberal democracy”.

> Democracy is superior not because some founders wrote some scripture, but because of its moral and rational foundation, that all are created equal, all have universal, inalienable rights that include liberty,

That is a really great formulation of the imago dei, image of God, doctrine.

> and thus nobody else has the right to tell them what to do without their consent.

And this is a generalisation of a principle that is downstream of the English yeomanry, of freeborn men who can kill a knight.

To see an Anglo proclaiming the universal destiny of all humanity to follow the Anglo culture is just such a stirring thing.

In 1980 when the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was founded Hong Kong had a GDP per capita of $5,700 as compared to $8,400 for the UK. Hong Kong was a first world country before China opened up for trade. Shenzhen was a fishing village of approximately 30,000 people. Hong Kong was a city state of 5 million. China didn’t become Hong Kong’s main source of imports until 1982.

The metro area, not the city. That extends into New Jersey and Connecticut.

> Their families and friends were already close because few, if any, of them left where they were from (except to get drafted into wars)

Your original text, edited for sequence and clarity while preserving your voice:

This doesn’t apply to the U.S. or Canada, nor has it ever since their foundings, possibly excepting some natives. The American frontier was declared closed by 1890, long before the post-WW2 population surge to California. Before that, New Englanders left farmland to settle the Midwest. Later came the Great Migration of mostly Black Southerners to northern cities. Anglophone North America has never been a peasant society where families remained rooted for generations.

Poland also didn’t and it’ll surpass Japan in GDP per capita this year.

Same things with statistical process management and quality control.

> all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention.

Hong Kong didn’t. Counter example disproves rule.

It’s really not surprising that people followed a successful model, given that people are fashion followers. See how there was so little variation in COVID response across countries.

תודה על הדעה. אני מסיים כאן

Completely irrelevant to whether the Polish language and cultural identity was suppressed. Most of historic Prussia is now part of Poland. No one claims that German was suppressed in East Germany.

> The only dead language that I can think of that was revived was Hebrew, but modern Hebrew is entirely different from that which was spoken millennia ago, and is a mixture of litigurical Hebrew, Arabic (plenty of Mizrahi influence along with the Sabra movement during the start of Israel), Russian (heavily used for mechanical terms), and German (heavily used to scientific terms).

Entirely different my ass. Modern Hebrew is closer to liturgical Hebrew than the language of Shakespeare is to that of Britney Spears. There are some areas with a great deal of borrowing of vocabulary but you could say the same thing of modern Russian or Japanese and no one would say they were “entirely different” from the language of 1800.

> Irish is different as it was largely dead by the 19th century.

Absolute bollocks. Irish is still a living language in daily use today , albeit the last monoglot almost certainly died before 1950. Of the Celtic languages Cornish is at best a zombie, revived on the basis of its incredibly close relationship to Breton. Manx has been on life support or at death’s door for 70 years, but there was still at least one fluent nerve speaker when it became something more passed on in classes than in daily life. Welsh is in relatively good health and Irish and Scots Gaelic are living languages used in daily life in small, marginal areas.

> On the other hand, Mayan languages and Nauhatul remain actively spoken across Southern Mexico and Guatemala.

Yes. The Spanish spread them with their empire after the empires that first spoke them were conquered.

> A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Ukrainian and Belarusian were both standardised and made official languages of education and administration under the early Soviet Union, with substantial state investment. Policies did later shift toward Russification, especially under Stalin, but even then Ukrainian continued to be used widely. There was no consistent Soviet attempt to “exterminate” Polish. Poland remained outside the USSR, and while the Soviets repressed Polish culture during occupations, they never pursued linguistic elimination in the way the Russian Empire once had.

> Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani was one of the main administrative and cultural languages under the Raj, particularly in the north. It coexisted with English and was used extensively by colonial authorities. Far from trying to wipe it out, the British helped entrench it across large parts of India. In Congress India, Hindi has been promoted heavily by the state, often to the frustration of non-Hindi speaking regions.

> I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

Agreed.

> For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them.

“Arguably.” In Ireland, British policy during the famine amounted to criminal negligence or depraved indifference, but not genocide in the strict sense. In Wales, there was systematic suppression of the language, especially in education, but nothing close to genocide.

Giving money to your local homeless shelter encourages homeless people to move near you (see San Francisco). Making a lot of risky investments in businesses encourages people to start new businesses. One of these has positive second order effects on economic growth.

Feel free to explain what you mean that you think of so obvious and obviously correct.

Culture fit questions everywhere. Wouldn’t want to hire someone of the wrong social class. They might “shoot hoops” or something similarly vulgar.

As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.

I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.

Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.

You don’t have a degree at the moment but in three to six months you can have a CS degree if you think it’s worth your time. It’s been done in three months.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25467900

The world is full of people who find things interesting that I don’t but that’s a fact about me, not the world.

It’s a Bedouin proverb, not an Arab one, and it’s me, not I.

> Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder.

No. Imagined communities are fake communities with none of the feedback mechanisms that make real communities resilient to elements that have extremely different priorities to the median member. See how the Swedish Social Democrats imported over 1% of the Swedish population in one year from Syria.

This reminds me of a tweet I saw in 2023, during the height of the Floyd Riots, that has since unfortunately been deleted, that said approximately that suburbanisation was a long term bet on the inability of the US State to keep order in urban areas. Basically, once a generation (last one before the Floyd riots were the Rodney King riots) the US has massive riots, everyone learns of remembers that if you don’t live in walking distance of an urban centre you’re safe from having your house burned down by a mob and after that there’s a durable uptick in desire for suburban rather than urban property.

Someone’s got to host the salon man. Alternatively someone organises “the gang’s[1]” nights outs and trips.

[1] Overwhelmingly it’s one guy and if they leave the nights out and trips just stop.

> If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.

I’m probably bottom quintile for social skills and I have done some extremely unwise things for one of my friends who was there for me when I needed a hand. The Hollywood idea of “close friend” is a great deal nearer to my own life experience than its representation of many other important relationships.

Right to Buy does not explain why the same trend is visible all over the Anglosphere, from Dublin, Ireland, to Wellington, New Zealand, to Sydney, Australia, to Vancouver, Canada.

The people don’t want housing built near them and the politicians listened. Lower supply than demand for decades leads to steadily rising prices. If you want to see the alternative look to Tokyo, Austin or Seattle. Build so much housing that the returns on investment are low and people can afford housing.

That sucks man. I hope things get better for you.

> Because eventually you plateau without proper foundations, and that's not fun.

This is a completely alien perspective to most people. Most people never even really try to be good at anything. That you think this quirk of your own psychology is the norm shows a deep disconnect with the mass of mediocre people who don’t care about being competitive because they’re not trying to get highs up on some leaderboard. https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

There are tens of thousands of people who love basketball playing right now and only 300 places in the NBA. Most people are average and never excel at anything, ever. Being 4th out of 20,000 is excelling and the proper response to someone using their own freakishly unrepresentative self as an example for normal people is to point out that they have no idea what it’s like to be normal.

That’s for the entire US population. If you look at the US population without even attempting to correct for demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all ages.