rtikulit

I feel like you have changed the topic, or maybe this was your topic all along and I didn't pick up on the coding. So no, it is not obvious.

As topics, “teachers” is orthogonal to “structural racism”, and I suspect that blending them together will lead to less effective responses to real but separate problems in both areas. I was very much only speaking only to “teachers”.

I'm aware of Brampton and more besides, and I won't insult you by excusing, explaining or “interpreting” racist behaviour or structural racism. You and your family deserve (and are owed), an “average” Ontario school experience largely untainted by them.

What are you smoking? What darkest Ontario timeline do you live in?

I live in Ontario, was educated here, have kids in the system, hobnob with zillions of parents, interact with my kid's teachers and know a couple socially.

Teachers are not materially hated or loved any more than any other type of worker that the public interacts with frequently. They are just people, like the rest of us.

I file comments like yours under “haters gonna hate” and “cheerleading for the race to the bottom.”

Chesterton's fence applies. The seniority system has serious drawbacks, but it has the advantage of being simple and difficult to game. It limits the damage caused to organizations by manipulators who would use more sophisticated systems to rig the workforce for personal or political advantage. It means that the average Ontario kid will encounter an average and well-distributed selection of both good and horrible teachers. Ignore the value of that at your peril.

My kids are+were in the Ontario system. I pay attention to their quality of education. Across my parenting circles there are kids in every type of school and program conceivable. I could afford to send mine to private school if I thought it necessary. One of my kids is now at a competitive university with smart and hardworking kids from across the globe and he was well-prepared by his high school. In my opinion we are getting a good distribution of good outcomes, should consider ourselves lucky, and be careful not to take our system for granted, or accidentally break it through ideology or ignorance. And almost no one knows what works and what doesn't, but I believe that part of what works is treating teaching as the serious and challenging profession that it is, and letting them get on with it. You know, pretty much what we want from our stakeholders?

I am very much of the opinion that we must be all-in on one public school system, with explicit objectives: providing a good education, underpinning social cohesion, encouraging individual diversity, seeking equality of opportunity.

(I am not a teacher or in any union, and neither is anyone in my family.)

Many years ago I tried Super Lube® Multi-Purpose Synthetic Lubricant for locks exposed to weather 24x7, including one that spends 3 months a year buried in snow, and it is far superior to WD-40, as in multiple years of smooth operation without further maintenance. I might clean a lock with WD-40, but i am always going to lubricate outdoor locks with Super Lube. I have no idea if it works so well because of the base oils or the teflon additive or the combination, but it is really good stuff. This summer I used it to rehab my rusted grindy 38 year old Swing-A-Way can opener, which is now butter smooth, and to fix a seized outdoor A/C condenser fan. For both I had no direct access to the bearings and had to flood Super Lube down the shafts. Worked amazingly well.

I was developing designs in a complex problem domain, and I spent some time prototyping an ontology and inference thing to automate part of the design work. Didn't work out -- my time box circuit-breaker triggered -- but it helped clarify aspects of the problem domain in my head. I would say my "extra" compulsion over decades has enriched my career hugely, for both me and my employers.

You are making an amazingly important point. If one accepts "all models are wrong, some are useful" then it fairly directly follows that cognitive dissonance is essential and irreducible and when one encounters it maybe examine one's models? Aka how and why one thinks and feels?

Zen shout-out: This is non-dualism in another guise, and a key Zen practice is to confront irreducible dissonance and batter yourself against it until you are forced to develop and internalize higher-order cognitive and emotional models that can represent contradictions and reason/feel over them to produce useful results.

I guess I'm done with 1Password, then. The thousandth cut broke this camel's back (or something like that).

“A teacher when one is required, no teacher when one is not required,“ or something like that. :) The Buddha is an existence proof of the possibility of direct independent observation and understanding.

I am not a teacher. I have practiced irregular Soto sitting for many years. I do occasional and informal reading of Buddhist texts.

By inspection (eg. sitting, paying attention, etc!), I discovered that we both do and do not have an independent self, at the very same time. They form a non-dual—-each arises in the combination of both and are mixed together in a way that trying to fix the boundary between them is folly.

I believe it is a major error to practice with the objective or possibility of annihilating the self. The self is an observable phenomenon. To reject it is crazy, as crazy as rejecting non-self.

IMHO a major milestone in practice is to grasp deeply the reality of non-duals, and leave behind the attachment to a dualistic belief in the self. This is nothing like annihilation.

As I became less desperately invested in a simplistic sovereign concept of self, my “self” became more confident, natural and wild. It's not going anywhere!

I pretty much agree with you, but not because I think that "capitalism" is a thing with agency, or its agents are pursuing this as an explicit strategy. I think unrestrained capitalism progressively optimizes away people's options and choices--the means by which people find identity, fulfilment and meaning. It slowly reduces human meaning and purpose to "net present value".

People who are denied good options will get very creative and specialized in their search for personal meaning, and they aren't going to be fair and balanced in the process.

I like capitalism very much, as a practical economic mechanism. I don't much like it as a governing principle or absolute virtue.

She has her methods. Mostly grilling. I don't interfere. :-)

She loathes sous vide.

The nice thing about the Thermapen is that it reads so fast that it's easy to explore the temperature gradients in the food. It's a learning process, right? In my own cooking, I'm correlating the measurements with technique and results, and when I finally cook something well I can reliably repeat it.

(Full disclosure. I have the surface temperature version of the Thermapen and a 4-channel recording thermometer, and I've profiled the oven, the griddle, etc. :-) We now focus on improving other aspects of cooking, confident that temperature is handled.)

I bought my wife a Thermapen for Christmas and it’s revolutionized her cooking (and mine). She’s using it for everything except toast and boiling water. Chicken, steaks, roasts, fish, fudge, cakes, casseroles, anything where complete cooking can be determined by internal temperature. The margin between perfect and overcooked fish can be slim, and she likes steak as rare as possible. This thing lets her nail it every time with no fiddling around.

Yes, we have cheaper thermometers. The difference is night and day. More than anything, it’s the speed with which it settles, but the unit is also calibrated, which gives us confidence. (I spent some time looking for a cheap alternative, but didn't find anything with consistently great reviews. I decided it was worth the extra money to buy less hassle, and I went with Thermoworks. No regrets!)

There is no sense in which Facebook is inherently bound by the values and interests of its customers (either as individuals or in groups).

Given their power in mediating human-human communications at every scale, It would be an act of colossal self-harm to allow them to act opaquely and without constraint.

The exact nature of oversight and constraint is an evolving question, but I'm very confident the right answer isn't “none”.

Journey and destination are nondual.

It has been my experience that at the point I no longer crave something, I have the most power and freedom to obtain it. This has included significant others, influence, jobs, money, love, etc.

I think you can generalize this phenomenon to Buddhist enlightenment.

(PS. I believe the original teachings of Buddhism are essential and valid, and the Zen model of enlightenment should not be interpreted as contradicting them.)

I think the discussion and analysis of each company's prior behaviour is exactly on point--the question before humanity in the general case is "what are these companies really up to?"

Each (including Apple) has a hidden agenda. They can be both beneficial and harmful. They are not our friends! They deserve our scrutiny, suspicion and supervision.

A company is a system that was created to pursue an agenda. That agenda is nothing like the agenda of a typical human individual (except at absurd levels of abstraction) and is not necessarily net-beneficial to actual humans in the short or the long run.

It's an axiom of systems analysis that behaviour trumps speech when you are trying to figure out what a system is really up to. To say it another way, we would like to identify the actual operant utility functions of these companies, so we can predict what they are really working towards, and what their behaviour and impact might be in the future. Their prior behaviour is the best signal we have!

To force the discussion to revolve around "laws" and "right" is to pretend that current ethical positions and laws are optimal and can't be gamed. A superficial inspection will show these premises are false.

The ongoing work of governance is to try to figure out economic, social and legal rules that "work" for some consensus definition of "work". That requires a clear understanding of what is actually happening, and good scenario analysis for the range of possible outcomes (including unintended consequences). Maybe that's unrestricted free markets, maybe sometimes it isn't. Maybe it's the law as it currently stands, maybe it isn't.

Ah, wow. My personal definition of music is "intended sound". (Needs additional qualifications, but most are obvious. "Intended sound that is not purely functional"?)

The entrenched economic powers will (as they always do in these economic transitions) capture a disproportionate share of any productivity gains resulting from a mass change to remote work. And their spirits don't care if you win a low stakes battle. They are winning the war. (Just a metaphor, folks!)

They have their hands on the levers. The have the resources to arbitrage or withhold or defect or take hostages (economic!) until they get what they think they can get.

Same thing will happen with self-driving cars.

The peons will capture just enough value so the new life seems a bit better than the old life.

(Long long time remote worker, since before my 17 year-old was born. Love being at home with my kids, love the efficiency and flexibility.

Doesn't change the ultimate macro outcome.)

I take your line of argument as meaning "there are no legitimate medium or long-term interests for countries, for societies or for humanity". Or, alternatively, "the pursuit of short-term interests will always result in long-term good outcomes."

I really don't agree.

Were I ungenerous, I could interpret "I see no reason to pay more so you can make money off the rest of us" as "If local conditions permit me to loot someone else's future for my own present benefit, I will do so."

Furthermore, "trade is always beneficial to both sides" is clearly false, unless you define trade as "that which is always beneficial to both sides."

(I agree as a matter of fact that free trade and free markets are in general the most effective way to allocate capital, decide prices, maximize the realized value of goods, and provide individual economic autonomy. I do not, however, see them as end-goals in and of themselves. I do not see them as infallible in fulfilling personal or human values. I do not see them as especially resistant to having their function subverted.)

In the 70's, in high school, I taught myself APL (mostly TOPS-10 APL SF and a bit of IBM APL SV) well enough to grasp the fundamental functional approach and write real programs (and the obligatory game of life in 1 line :-)) At the time I was also using PL/I and the difference was mind expanding.

I'm quite sure I don't have an 30 extra IQ points. Mostly I was just mildly obsessed (and these days I find persistence is a workable substitute).

It is incredibly valuable to have experience across the range of programming paradigms.

Except we didn't prosecute and convict the builders.

Around 1990 I had to do some interviewing and I used this kind of intentionally underspecified simple problem to weed people out. (It seemed radical at the time.) Did they realize the problem was underspecified? Did they try to elicit the underlying “why”? Did they collaborate with me to complete the spec? Were they able to restate the spec coherently? Could they articulate a workable implementation in some technology domain? Basic stuff. Interesting thing is that there were people who really didn't do very well, who we hired anyway, who went on to be reasonably productive and reliable developers. In retrospect I concluded the cognitive and social basis of their ability was incomprehensibly different from mine. But I'd still do those questions today.

Overall similiar to this, except I get a pencil and a couple of sheets of 11x17” paper and I incrementally build concept maps[0]. These help me memorize entities and relationships, identify abstractions, chunk details, etc. I also use Visual Understanding Environment[1] and there are other good concept mapping tools available.

IMHO mind maps are a more recent, dumbed-down subset of concept maps. I don't use them. My daughter has been using the 11x17” paper and pencil approach for the past few years to ace science and other subjects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_map [1] https://vue.tufts.edu/

The risk is that the naive and opportunistic application of decision-making, “judgement” and “ethics” embodied in AI systems will lead to the well-intentioned accidental regulation of important domains of human life, stifling those with relentless automatic gatekeepers and negative feedback loops which are pervasive, inscrutable, unaccountable, inimical to the fertile chaos of human negotiation and hostile to human social and political evolution. They will take human activity that is currently diverse and distributed and will force it through narrow channels controlled by self-appointed gatekeepers.

In an analogy to censorship, consider a world where “prior restraint” and “chilling effects” apply to every aspect in our lives, where deviations from the ideal are reliably detected and rejected, where we would not be able to earn credentials, get a job, find a partner, buy a home, evade surveillance, obtain necessary health care, or safely express a political opinion unless we either conform to or cheat the prevailing machine inference gatekeepers. What an insane additional cognitive burden this will be for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

This kind of AI is a mechanized, high-speed race to the bottom. And it will operate to discover undreamed-of bottoms to race to.

In the name of a few extra percent of efficiency we will doom our children to a rigid and lifeless dance with pattern matching algorithms.

I find it hard to do my actual job, which is often boring. So what I do instead is I find something else to do, that is even more valuable than my actual job and significantly more difficult, but which is inherently interesting to me. Then i go all ADHD hyperfocus on it. I've been lucky... management goes “wow, initiative, thanks!”

Many of my ADHD friends say something similar... they can't follow orders, so they have to make sure they find something in the work that they can obsess over.

Not my experience at all. Took Vyvanse and Dex for a few years. Able to stay at the therapeutic dose, had no temptation to exceed it. 10-15 mg equivalent of Dex changes my day, and will do so month after month after month. Under psychiatric supervision I did go as high as 40 mg, but that was too much. Side effects are not great, makes me jittery, elevates my heart rate, but the mental benefits are amazing. The stuff completely calms me down. (I have ADHD, for real.)

I have been on and off stimulants many times, short, medium and long intervals. The worst that happens is when I go off I've got no energy at all for 3 days.

When I would restart stimulants I would get the euphoric effect for a time, and then it would fade away over a few weeks. I have never been tempted to chase it.

Everyone's mileage is different.

I have the opposite experience. I am formally diagnosed with ADHD, none of my friends would dispute the diagnosis. When I am on stimulants (Vyvanse and Dex) I have a ton more patience and emotional equilibrium. I pay attention to other people longer and more deeply... aka empathy. I can sustain an outward focus without distraction. When I am off meds I am distracted by my own free-running cognitive and emotional processes, and I have to spend effort looking inward to manage them.

I have had no temptation to abuse the stimulants. I don't really enjoy them, on the balance, but they make an incredible difference that meditation, high quality diet and physical activity can't even begin to approach. They really calm me down.

My wife prefers me medicated. I'm apparently nicer, more patient, more even-tempered and easier to get along with.

Broadly speaking, measuring things good, measuring people sometimes good, sometimes very bad.

There are two things I would very much like to avoid. One, weaponized behavioral models that allow bad actors to cheaply, anonymously and pervasively manipulate people, groups and societies.

Two, having my life, or my children's life, become an exhausting and soulless rat race of conformance to the behavioral models deployed by various gatekeepers in society.

For me “bad actors” includes all bad actors—-whether commercial, governmental or otherwise. They are all potential snake pits and they need to be scrutinized. :-)

But they are what we have to work with. To me it is irrational to refuse to use part of the toolkit (laws and regulation) because ideology.

Mandatory radical transparency is probably a part of any effective mitigation strategy.

We have to be realistic. The “system” cannot be perfected, and trying will cause horrible unintended consequences. It will always be gamed. There will always be charismatic sociopaths and selfish assholes. There will always be injustice and suffering.

But we can try to use the available tools judiciously to keep their negative impact down to an acceptable level.

The issue is the Internet has provided bad actors (including rent-seeking entrenched interests) with the ability to anonymously, cheaply and pervasively spread lies and propaganda. They can precisely manipulate emotionally vulnerable segments, bury informed discussion, manipulate Overton windows, and subvert law and policy making for their own purposes.

Individual choice is of almost no help in managing the problem.