3,379 karma · joined January 25, 2013
Routine research often is easier to get through funding committees and get published. Less "what journal does this fit in, I'm not sure our division should fund this, does the PI truly have the expertise needed to do research in this, this result doesn't clearly advance the field"
What sriram_sun said is entirely factual, and a lot of us get left out of the networks for various reasons. That's also just factual. The fact that folks here are all "oh you're just jealous, you're calling it nepotism" -- nah, it's just facts, and there is no need to get emotional about it. There is nothing inherently wrong about hiring people you know -- like any move in a game, it has knock-on effects. If you'd like to help broaden networks, just do it. And for those who feel defensive about it, consider the phrase "hit dogs holler".
Heck, I have been out of academia 4 years now and I still have minor revisions to a paper complete in the next week!
It's also worth acknowledging that elite social clubs have always had the ability to pick who they want -- the pretty people, the rich people, the well-connected people. Given that racism is suddenly (last 60 years) less popular/legal than it used to be in the US, is it any wonder that the elite social club of Harvard wanted to pick the most attractive candidates coming from groups previously denied admission? Now the end of "affirmative action" says that Harvard can no longer curate the class it wants to have its favored racial mix. Since this end of affirmative action is a direct strike at Harvard's ability to pick its elite the way it wants to, how do we continue to justify legacy status, again? "You can't pick people with the experiences you want; you just have to pick rich kids/according to heredity, that's the only fair way to do things." Really? Why?
America hasn't always hated racism, but it has always hated a hereditary nobility.
The US generally takes the approach that changing the curriculum or changing standards will change outcomes, but rarely invests in teacher quality, which would have very high impact (compare to Korea, Finland, etc.).
25 years ago I was part of my National Honor Society outreach committee. One of the things I and my committee co-chair did was go to all the "normal" (rather than IB) classes and tell students that with a good GPA they could join NHS (as NHS did have a demographic makeup that wasn't reflective of the school). Students had no idea. The outreach did make a difference. The Dallas experiment, and the tutoring discussion in the article, resonate deeply with my later experiences as a math prof as well. Pushing kids results in higher achievement.
1) A good public education should be available to all students, with reasonable transportation provided. This is an axiom for me.
2) Private schools do not seem consistently provide a better education, but they do enable siphoning and segregation of students. Students with disabilities of various types can be excluded; the education can be explicitly religious; private education can really enable exclusivity of many kinds. On one level all that is fine -- but I don't want taxpayer dollars to support it. Raise money thru your church to send kids to that stuff.
In addition, I think your premise is false. In the school district I live in, children can apply to attend any school in the district. Charter schools are available as well as public schools. Choice is available with a publicly funded model, and as a parent I am partaking in that and switching a kid from a high-scoring school that I'm nevertheless not fully satisfied with to another high-performing school that rivals the privates for about $30k less a year.
But in the end, I actually don't think competition forces improvement. The misalignment of incentives is too great. Individual teachers want to do their best for their kids, in general, and they also want to improve their income. To do their best, they try to help the visible high achievers if they can but they absolutely must take time on the kids acting out. Administrators have to deal with district edicts and teacher demands, but they don't have the money to support teacher development (which would be the #1 thing to help both teachers and kids). School districts/boards need to show they're "using technology" and "being equitable" and "being innovative" and all sorts of stuff that is not the same as improving outcomes. Everyone is supposed to do well on the tests, even when the tests are stupid (and whoo-hoo are some of them terrible). Schools have to deal with homelessness and hunger, because no other regional agency deals with all the kids in the area. Nothing lines up and so we end up with free lunch that's not so nutritious but does hit a calorie bar, attempts at equity without supports (putting kids with behavioral problems into crowded and understaffed classrooms), a bunch of teachers who are scared of math yet have to teach it, who would benefit most from upgrading their skills....
Ideally, as you say, folks should have full access to knowledgeable medical experts who can help guide them. Again, our mechanisms for delivery of care in the US don't allow that, and unfortunately our physician and nurse training doesn't facilitate that either. A lot of medical professionals insist that hormonal BC doesn't have side effects, many insurance companies don't cover experimentation to find the best method for a particular person, non-hormonal woman-controlled methods are underused in the US. Since medicine in the US is built around making money & defending against lawsuits, care gets lost.
1) Health. Agree that talking to a doctor -- or a nurse, or a midwife, or a well-trained community health advocate -- is quite useful when understanding the practicalities of taking hormonal birth control. Talking to someone helps people understand this; I think you may overestimate the efficacy of an MD per se here.
2) Insurance as gatekeeper. The narrow windows to get a limited supply, whether you can get it locally or must mail order it or can't mail order it or can or can't get a refill -- none of this is medical. It's all insurance bureaucracy. I find no benefit to this bureaucracy.
Good education about the full range of options would be great (from pill to ring to IUD to condom). Universal health care availability would be a good mechanism by which to deliver that, it's hard to accomplish when it's all gatekept by insurance.
I got laid off recently & had a routine physical that took place 2 days after my health insurance thru Company ended, went anyway, got a bill for $552. This is for conversation only, haha, but the type of conversation one would need to get an annual renewal for birth control controlled by prescription.
The TLDR is that you can analyze the difference between stops on summer evenings (sunny) and winter evenings (dark) and detect a racial bias depending on whether officer can see the driver or not. The raw data is also available through Minneapolis' Open Data website, so you can repeat the analysis yourself.
Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.
For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).
Your does point out something, though, that really really bugs me from climate activists/politicians. The idea that you have to "believe" in climate change, like you'd believe in religious proclamations. I don't give a sh*t if you believe -- and making this ideological creates tribes where one group is like "I believe climate change isn't happening/is God's will/is natural, so I will run my F150's AC with the windows open and breathe in exhaust proudly because internal combustion and burning oil is what God has ordained as the pinnacle of human achievement". Belief whatever. I'm much more interested in action. Why does it seem good to some people to... just waste resources without much return? Irresponsibly manage our farmlands for short-term profit vs long-term yield? pin success to ownership of fossil fuels in specific places rather than a more flexible and less geopolitically fraught paradigm? There are a lot of visible problems to address, to your point, efitz.
All of you writing that if a Black kid gets admitted then some white or Asian kid gets bumped off are scrapping for the little bits the rich have left to you, while misunderstanding the fundamental mathematics at work. You're pawns. This is the genius of racism -- sow manufactured division among the "little people" so that those on top (of whatever color) can continue comfortably while no one else can rise.
I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.
And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.
In a rock band, you have a guitarist and a drummer and a singer and a bass player. Not everyone does the same thing. We all need to contribute in different ways at different times.
Plastics are indeed everywhere and have made some aspects of daily life better while making other aspects worse. Neither of the extremes of overemphasizing personal virtue and nihilism are useful.
I, though, like living in my neighborhood of single-family homes & small/medium size apartment buildings, with four coffeeshops, two independent grocery stores, restaurants, local shops, and more within walking or biking distance. I like being able to take a walk to pick up some bread and eggs and buy a present for a family member (no car) and bike to a major river area where I can hike for tens of miles if I like, or even go swimming and drown (it's wild enough for that if that's what you value).
People are driving in risky ways these days, running red lights much more than they used to, but it still does feel that in my city neighborhoods, folks are more conscious of pedestrians and bikes than in the suburbs I sometimes visit for friends/kid stuff/work. In the suburbs there seem to be many wide roads (4 lanes) separating areas of cul de sacs, with 35 mph speed limits but people actually going 50. Part of this is that the city streets are packed with parked cars and there are people visibly carrying out activities of daily living, while the suburban wide streets give this impression of being cars-only.
Digging deeper (as the comment above alone isn't worthy of HN, IMO): "People believe what they want to believe because of small sample sizes. When there isn't a black & white answer people go back to their personal experience, which is limited. They will not be right in the way you want to be right if you're practicing medicine." The family members are certainly exhibiting this. Are any of us, in this discussion?
Additional question: "Who is the patient? Is it the anxious family members who are being treated, or the person with fluid in the lungs?" The person with fluid in the lungs is the patient and the doc needs to be spending time on that person (the one who will die if not treated correctly). The family members are important but not in need of medical care. They can be handed off to an AI in the short term.
From my own vantage point, I've observed that the context switching between "caring for patient" and "dealing with family" can put a substantial drag on cognitive function for physicians. They do need to suck it up and deal with it since family members are the primary way in which patients receive post-release care in the US due to the non-existent safety net, and family member presence can really improve outcomes, but I'm not surprised that ChatGPT helps in producing the sort of bland prose that is well-received by family members.