netjiro

Then accelerated with removing national testing, removal of grading of younger kids, removal of the centralised bell curve grading, the "friskola" reform.

Each change is visible in general statistics from the early exams in the university programs if you look at statistics going back to the 60s.

The first few paragraphs are fun / scary.

Which schools? Good/bad? Most notable effects?

Is it worth spending 1h of the day learning new things then 7h teaching others? I say that is wasteful.

Last year of "gymnasium" (grade 12), right before I started my university masters program: I was travelling most of the year and only returned to school two months before graduation. I spent less than two months, on my own, reading up on a year's worth of what amounts to a specialised "science focused high school" program. Then testing through, taking all tests and assignments for a year, and got the top result from both schools in the city. 1000+ students graduating that year.

This was pretty insane, so I started digging. How was it possible to score so well after so little time, studying alone, when everyone else had 10 months of class. I'm not 200 IQ with eidetic memory.

So I started talking with teachers and professors I came in contact with. Very few actually had data available, but those who had... Wow!

Regardless of whether it's young children, high school, or university students the numbers were similar.

The top few are simply so much faster than the rest. I'm absolutely sure that good pedagogical methods have a huge effect on the students' learning. But even the best methods and tutors can't make up the difference.

The "5%", specifically, comes from two sources. A physics teacher and a math professor. They were both very interested in pedagogical methods and were experimenting and keeping detailed data on every student they had taught, over decades. Scoring them on a wide variety of tests and situations. Both had similar numbers, falling around 5-10x between the top 5% and the median.

My impression is that this is simply an issue that most societies don't want to know or deal with. It certainly is not hard to test for. Specifically, the physics teacher mentioned above told me that the municipal head of schools had threatened to fire him when he tried to discuss the data to improve the teaching for high capacity students.

Also not going so well for the top 5%. They develop much better if they are not stuffed in the same prison every day as the rest of the population. I'd guess the same would be true for the the corresponding slower slice, but I have seen no studies to that effect.

I think there was a study on this highlighted here on hn recently, but my google-fu is too weak.

There is no way "school" can equalise this. There is no reason to keep stuffing everyone in one box.

Way too easy to "seem" productive while actually being net negative for the project.

That said, I've had excellent agile projects that have delivered huge value to the customer at cost and time well below initial estimates.

These days I ask people who shout for agile to actually explain the fundamentals to me, as though I have no clue. Very rarely do I find anyone who can hit even one of the four original core ideas and values of "agile":

https://agilemanifesto.org/

And when I bring up the core ideas, and why they can work really well, I often see that the people who shout agile actually don't agree with the fundamentals.

Fun, tricky, tactical hacknslash tabletop/rpg. Played since 2008. A bunch of adventures and campaigns available. Uploading when I have time. Hundreds of hours of adventures in the repo already.

Let me know if you want to try it out. Happy to host a game (UTC+2 CEST). We usually play over maptool and mumble these days.

1) README

2) Adventures in Kingsland

3) basic rules and design ideas

4) Dungeon of Testing

5) Return of Uchly Namen

etc

Even on the very narrow definition of some GDP-per-capita-like metric. Assume that one country decides to implement the 65y-killswitch. Everyone who possibly can will move to some other country. You just lost the vast majority of your skilled workers.

? really? Are you actually proposing that killing off people when they retire is a good thing for society?

A risk. But it doesn't take much to get people on the right path.

1) trust your staff, give them autonomy and agency.

2) asynchronous transparent communication for discussions and decisions.

3) remove friction: few small tools for communication and collaboration, good audio, forum, wiki, git, etc. Services: shopping, childcare, etc.

And a bunch of smaller tricks. But trust, transparency, asynchronous coordination are the major points.

I've helped "rush" groups to full remote with less than 10h "training" during the last few months now that it suddenly became important to a lot of people. More time would have been great, but even a small bit can help a lot.

If you have experience of remote / distributed work, help out and teach others now that they really need it.

In my experience, less than 1/4 of the organisations and projects I help go remote / distributed do it for cost reasons. Most do it for brain power and efficiency. It's easier to recruit globally, especially when you're looking for very good people. We have strong data that asynchronous transparent communication increases efficiency, agency, autonomy, and decreases both the rate and cost of mistakes. It also drastically reduces the necessity of coordination management.

As an employee your primary obligation is not to your boss, but to the owners of the company.

If your boss is ordering you to do something that is detrimental to the company, you should fix the situation. But not necessarily follow the orders of your boss.

This is a very common misconception, imo.

But some plants are very tricky and costly.

I remember making my first transgenetic GMO in an afternoon back in the day.

https://usgreenchamber.com/how-iceland-is-revolutionizing-gr...

Slowly developing insulated indoor aquacultures, led lighting, robotic harvesting, perfect climate control, gas mixture, mineral and nutrients.

With near future robotics we'll see near zero carbon footprint production with near zero human work load for a fairly wide range of healthy foods.

But: we need to build low energy housing to manage climate change. That means there is very little waste energy available. Last house we built was 230m2, family of 5, had a total energy consumption, including everything from heating to water to home electricity, sitting at 8000kWh/y. That's in southern Sweden (N58deg).

There is no relevant amount of waste energy available.

This is the kind of housing we'll need to meet future energy targets.

And a lot of land area.

That last part tends to be the problem.

But I'm sure you can start there and find some interesting tangent that can very well turn out to be worth pursuing further.

It's not the absolute we have to watch out for. It's the rate of change!

Yes and no. It explicitly means that the average temperature, globally, is increasing. Drastically so.

Extreme weathers is just one of the side effects. Others include: ecological collapse, insane scale population migration, catastrophic sea level rise, etc, etc.

depends on where you happen to be at the time ...

Please don't use fossil fuel to run stuff like this.

When you rise to power you can take better care to promote the right people. But according to what "right"? This is not a one dimensional problem.

Then we have the issue of 70% of the population thinking they are of above average competence.

...

That said, if it's a significant issue at your current work place I suggest you start looking for a new, better, place. And highlight the issue. People will get angry, and you might loose your job.