mishellaneous

i agree with you that this is a technique that is used to make people give up. not only in the context of this discussion ("how is the economy doing"), but in many discussions. i see it being effective often enough for it to be worrying. i guess it's as they say, this is why you need a population that is indeed educated (on which these techniques would supposedly be less effective) for democracy to work.

the Wikipedia page on Europe you cite lists average, not median wage in Germany.

the average household income for Mississipi is given as $76,305/year by this US census link: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S1901?q=S1901&g=01... (which is cited in the Wikipedia page you cite)

there is also another question. the figure you cited for Germany is gross wage. net wage would be €3,324/month, or $45,536/year. is "income", in the US survey, after taxes? i wasn't able to find the definition of "income" in the American Community Survey, but i notice that besides "income", they also have "earnings" (which is higher).

finally, we need to correct for cost of living. i think that would explain a lot of the difference.

we were explicitly talking about people who went to university "for the joy of learning", instead of, as was cited as one of the examples, to prepare themselves for a good career, and how the latter can detract from the experience of the former.

physics students were cited as examples of people who went to university "for the joy of learning". i mentioned the existence of a path from a physics education to a very well-paying career which is moreover not generally considered intellectually stimulating, which suggests (though certainly not proves) the existence of (some -- though certainly not necessarily all) physics students who are not really there "for the joy of learning" -- which again, was one of the concerns i originally cited.

if you are or know a physics grad who studied physics "for the joy of learning" and then worked on finance and you think i'm not correct (say, because finance is actually intellectually stimulating, or that you were really into learning when in school but now are more focused on your career (i actually know a bunch of people for whom this is one is true, now that i think of it), or...), then by all means feel free to share your story, as this is literally what my question was about.

certainly questions can be raised about "corruption" and "nobility", as you did, but i did not intend to do that.

good to know, thanks. it does make sense.

there's still the professors though. the courses may not necessarily be different from their point of view.

also, what do you make of physics grads going to work on finance? doesn't strike as very "scholarly" of them, at first.

so, essentially, you and the other commenter are arguing whether it is everyone that has a little fault for being naughty, or is it just a couple of psychos who are fucking everyone else over.

but even if it was just a couple of psychos that were responsible, it'd be hard to justify stealing from the grocery store, because you are not guaranteed to do damage to the psychos directly -- maybe what'll happen instead is that the grocery store employees will not get a nice raise due to the decreased revenue.

and this is why i think actions of this type are so dangerous to society. it's hard to find who is the victim and who is the criminal. so people feel like they are a victim a little, and then justified in being the criminal in a crime with invisible victims anyway. and so society degrades more and more in a vicious cycle and more people give up. it's disgraceful.

while i agree that this "doorman fallacy" happens, and i also agree that it can happen in the context of restaurant servers, i completely disagree that this is an example of it.

problems cited: people ordering at the same time (limited by presence of a single QR code). splitting the bill, knowing what was items were already paid for or who already paid for it (made difficult by interface).

these are examples of problems where the tech solution can easily be much better than the human solution.

for example, you'd just need a larger number of QR codes. or, i'm under the impression that nowadays some phones can read QR codes even at weird angles; in this way even a single QR code could be read by multiple people in parallel. meanwhile notice that human servers can only take one order at a time.

and obviously super simple modifications to the interface solve your problems with the bill. but it's more often than not an ordeal to arrange with other people and the server to pay for 1/4 of the fries and 1/2 of the salad or something like that (unless the server themselves has access to a tech solution).

ways that the server could be better than the tech solution would be, for example, explaining dishes (ingredients, size, taste) or making suggestions.

so you go to university just for the joy of learning?

to be clear, i think that's cool, and i might try it at some point.

but how do you deal with the fact that university, in practice, is not "for the joy of learning"?

for most people there, students and professors, it's more like "just a job". and this does have an effect. colleagues that only want to pass the test and are watching out for their careers (or even worse, don't even care about anything and are there because of societal expectations) do not make good learning companions. professors who are very dispassionate about the subject don't want you taking up their time with fancy questions and administer dumb tests such that studying for the test is useless beyond passing the course.

(to be clear i'm not criticizing these people directly. obviously, i understand that bills have to be paid -- after all, i took some fun electives, not a degree in fun)

personally, during my time in university i did try a lot of elective courses "for the joy". it forced me a schedule, which was good, because it's something i struggled with self-studying. a few times, professors offered some real gems of knowledge which i wouldn't have found otherwise. and obviously, in practical classes, i got to play stuff i otherwise wouldn't. but the battle against the bullshit took up most of my time and energy.

my impression is that inside these niches, people know each other personally, or are only separated by a small number of degrees. reputations form, etc. so any paper they end up reading, most likely does not have completely unknown authors from completely unknown institutions. without this information, yeah, it'd be harder to judge. surely anyone can find out anyone else's (using full name and institution) academic background online today, but it'd not be so easy to judge it without being an insider.

> I'm with you until I remember how expensive medical school plus internship is in the US.

in that case you should double check your math, because it doesn't work out like that

> If doctors cannot pay back their student loans, it doesn't matter.

this is plain dishonesty. there have been actual discussions on how a significant number of physicians in the USA retire or semi-retire in their 50s!

a friend of a friend who did a stint in biomedical academia told me that the researchers in their field did not hold research coming from the medicine community in high regard

in that case, it's a question of proportion. we cannot automatically conclude that a (supposed) "good handful" doing good research makes up for "most students" doing bad research.

> An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad.

that's a really good point, actually. in every situation i can think of where someone is looking at your grade (always admission to the next step in the ladder, in whatever form), you are being compared to people "from the same time" as you.

and i'd like to reiterate how difficult it would be to have a "stable" standard of mastery, no matter how nice. technical fields change a lot, and fast, these days. all across STEM, in 20 years everything changes. everything's so niche, as well, sometimes it may be hard to compare two degrees with the same name of different institutions. maybe we could do it with the fundamentals (mathematics and physics)? but look at a textbook from 100 years ago (say, Whittaker and Watson) and you'll find that even this changes. and even if the field doesn't change, the world does: i'm imagining how old-timers could claim that in their time information wasn't so easily accessible.

> I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.

assuming that by "steelman" here you mean "the justification", i believe the point is that a curved grade shows how you compare to others. the idea is that "getting 40% of the answers right" is meaningless if you don't know how hard the test is, so you'd rather have a grade that says "top 5% of the class".

this what i see as the justification, at least. not an endorsement of the idea

> Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately

it's crazy to see that mentioned so non-chalantly. my expectation is that the teacher, when they grade, is meant to be impartial, as if they were doing nothing more than taking a measurement of the student's work, you could say (this is why, i believe, we value standardized tests in some settings, even though they are worse in other aspects). it's the student who is responsible for the grade. a teacher not being allowed to give F's to everyone suggests a corruption of the system to me.

can you share more? what pressures teachers not to do this, for example?

> Yes, in positivist sciences 20% intending to stay would be very high by historical standards.

i'd be interested in a source for this. i did not find in the article you cite mention of historical trends.

> When folks come home from a hard day of work they don't want HBO.

that's hilarious, since today, as many other days, i am literally looking forward to watching HBO when i get home from work

somewhere else they were discussing how to use a 555 to time 55 years, and how for such a long period you'd need impractical resistance and capacitance values. easy workaround would be to set a more reasonable period, say, 1 sec, and use a counter to know when you hit 55 years. coincidentally, 55 years is 2 ** 30.7 seconds, so it'd just fit in a 32 bit register.

though i take you were thinking about counting clock cycles or something in which case surely your register would overflow

yes, from the point of view of an individual programmer, there is no difference between code created by AI or by some other programmer.

but from the point of view of the company as a whole there is a difference: code created by some programmer is understood by that programmer, while code created by AI is understood by nobody

some people would, in this case, prefer the unrefined version

that would slow down the process considerably. it would also not be of much use to the professionals, which i guess make up the majority of those involved most of the time, and so, i guess, would not have much support.

IMO a good middle ground could be attained by everyone having some understanding of the legal system. we could use school for that. i mean, we cover calculus and ancient history, it's not like covering law to some extent would be harder

> Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents.

at that point why not just use something precise like a programming language? have there been efforts in that direction? genuine questions