thelock85

> Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.

There’s no need to construct a hypothetical when there is actual data to dissect. For example, in the cited links, the 25th percentile SAT score for Harvard students is ~200 points greater than the highest mean nationwide score. The middle 50% of all students (25th-75th) range is ~100. And on 7 out of 10 students admitted included SAT scores in their application. So one would have to make additional assumptions (I’m not sure what they are) to claim one’s groups scores lead to penalty and another’s leads to advantage. It could be true, but I don’t see it as a fact, hence my original position that other assertions don’t necessarily need to meet some bar.

Just to add more context to the provided data. It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.

Also a per capita comparison assumes that the number of qualified applications follows similar distribution, no? I'm not sure if this is reflected in the provided data.

Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective. Even so, two schools skew the data for Black students (75% of Ivies are <1x per capita for Black students) and of course there is no mention of Hispanic students (one of the fastest growing demographics) which is mostly underrepresented on a per capita basis.

And then it doesn't get into international students and if/how they assimilate into a "race". Nor does it reflect stickier topics such as whether Hispanic students culturally assimilate into "White", effectively lessening their numbers under a per capita comparison (it does this for Jewish students).

I appreciate what the data brings to the conversation, but don't believe others' assertions have to take any of it into account considering the number of assumptions one must make to follow a "per capita" AND population SAT = sample SAT comparison.

Came here to say this... The Black Count was such an illuminating read. It's surreal to think that Dumas' own father was the inspiration for writing Count of Monte Cristo.

The wildest part of this is that Tan mimicked a lyric from a diss song (Hit Em Up), ostensibly in jest. Never mind that the release of that song was part of a conflict that ended with two rappers (2Pac & Biggie) dead.

Of all the diss tracks, he picks the one with allegations of sleeping with someone’s wife, making fun of someone’s health conditions, demeaning women, and of course repeated threats of death that eventually manifested in real-life murders.

> Ultimately parents and perhaps schools have to educate children on realistic dangers they can face both online and on street corners and supervise them until they are ready to responsibly use these spaces alone.

Agreed but I believe this is maybe 50% of the effective solution.

Ideologically I’d like to say 99% but the defense (educating children) is always reacting to the offense (predator tactics).

To affect the offense, the rules must change and that power rests with Meta (and to a lesser extent, one’s ability to ignore Meta products).

The Israeli govt can and should halt establishing new settlements or expanding existing settlements, especially when expansion is zero-sum with further displacement (e.g. Hebron). It can also enforce the criminality of extrajudicial settler violence.

Agreed any real solutions are a nonstarter in current situation, but a lack of imagination or will about how to move forward just further normalizes the illegality of it all.

Mech.E + Econ here. As I recall after Intro to Micro and Macro, it was all calculus and statistical modeling.

STEM majors were 38% of Yale 2022-23 undergrad degrees. STEM + Econ - 48%. Arts & Humanities - 24%. Social Sciences - 38%

https://oir.yale.edu/data-browser/student-data/degrees/bache...

I'm not really sure what the point is here, especially when +/- 500 enrolled is the only separator (actual enrollment, professor, section and scheduling are just a few other factors that I imagine would affect final grade).

Nonetheless, it makes sense that less objective learning is graded on level of effort and exploration, instead of correctness. And that effort would be more inherent in students seeking out niche courses where they want to...wait for it... explore something fuzzy and interesting.

Of course there are students looking to mail it in, but in my experience those students are looking for the lazy professors and charitable TAs for the courses that fulfill the foundational degree requirements outside of their major (this is just as true for Eng students who need a writing credit, for example, as it is for English majors who need a quant credit).

Most interestingly, if a gender studies course was graded more objectively, I'm guessing there would be push back for excluding any opinions outside of the defined parameters of success. It's a lose-lose situation that devalues gender studies but I feel that's for the customers (students, alumni, major donors) to decide.

I read it in a “first to market” unfair advantage type of way, not ethically unfair. Of course, there are larger societal questions around access to early learning opportunities but I didn’t read into it that way.

I respect what you are saying. I just believe that moral posturing as a pretense for more death of innocents is a compounding effect that is always greater than the initial sin. It would be much more honest just to say “well here comes the boom MFers” (which seems to be the posture of Israeli govt). Now if that same moral posturing was pretense for greater compassion or reconciliation (eg OMG we have come to this, something must change), then that would be ideal. But I think most like OP, especially those affected by the actions of Hamas (I include myself in that camp) would find responding with compassion to be absurd. Yet I believe the long tail of events will reveal these horrible actions to be yet another flashpoint, precisely because the shock of perpetual violence jumps from one tragedy to the next.

Placing moral or ethical judgement on an entire group based on the actions of a few is the most violent form of communication, and the basis for perpetual physical violence.

Agree with this analysis but it's no where near sufficient to comply with sanctions. Said companies would still need to institute solutions that interrogate the nature of active marketing campaigns to avoid running afoul. This just seems lazy and (perhaps unintentionally) cruel.

This hypothetical only holds true if so-called “tokenized” founders don’t have an inherit desire to succeed on the same level as any other founder.

I really can’t think of any founder I’ve ever met who would not take a pot of money because of certain strings attached (though I’ve heard of extremely privileged founders who can say yes/no based on track record or reputation). In fact, I see founders contort their vision every which way to meet specific investment criteria.

Similarly, I don’t know any VC who at least wouldn’t try to be in compliance AND find good investments. Maybe they would try and then default to the perspective you’ve described but I think it’s much more likely they would try to cook the stats (given the overall lack of accountability in the space) before propping up some “token” founder-in-name-only (again, an assumption I’d challenge).

Edited for spelling.

Serious question from a crypto outsider: is four months long enough to deter future grifts? Will Zhu’s detention increase likelihood of further prosecutions?

Ultimately a potential problem lies further downstream in the reduction of creation of original work and knowledge.

If you become an expert in performing via LLM, the LLM capabilities and underlying data represent the limits of knowledge creation.

To your point about calculators and open-book exams, part of the challenge is for educators to rethink learning objectives and assessments in terms of outcomes that are outside the scope of LLMs.

Respectfully, this seems like moving the goal posts.

Energy companies and governments are best positioned to hedge against future consequences of burning oil. It's exactly because we depend on them for a certain standard of living that they can shepherd change, but they serve stock prices not society.

It's a leadership problem where the actors with the most knowledge and resources to combat the problem can hide behind a version of "it's too big to fail" and then when it all falls apart leave everyone in the wind.

Fun Fact: Tyler Perry of “Madea” fame built his own studio outside of Atlanta, initially to support his desire to make movies/shows that were harder to sell in Hollywood. It’s 200 acres of diverse sets and backlots including an 80% scaled White House.

Fair enough. I'd never let my child roam on YouTube but my reality is that there are hundreds of millions of indexed videos and it doesn't take that much effort (compared to other parenting efforts) to find shows that match my value around socio-emotional development.

I don’t think screen time is beneficial, but it really depends on level of selection, supervision and coordination when it comes to whether it’s harmful IMHO.

I’ve seen my toddler completely zone out on a show and on the same day, transfer both scientific and socio-emotional concepts from the show to the real world. It really is mind-blowing as a parent.

Now being more aware (and having an M.Ed) I can easily design everyday learning activities based on the handful of shows I’ve (since) vetted.

At the same time, I have great empathy for parents who don’t have the privilege of being present due to work, multiple kids mental health, or otherwise. And I don’t want to judge those parents, understanding that I could be in a similar position with a few different outcomes.

Don't hate the player, hate the game...

It's difficult for leaders of legacy-built organizations to create space for common sense thinking, and when they see a room full of their employees creating and collaborating in new ways, then they pay to have you come back because for whatever reason they didn't have the time, skill or capacity to make their teams act more creatively and collaboratively on their own. Rarely is it transformative. Sometimes it's completely useless (especially when packaged into buzzword-y platitudes). Most of the time it's somewhere in-between just like any other process/culture/change improvement from leadership.

These leaders hire these companies and consultants because they were resting on their laurels instead of actively building culture while the legacy org was doing fine. Then comes a crisis or paradigm shifting moment and there is no recourse.

With visionary leadership and proactive management toward better culture and talent (which is hard to do consistently), said "cottage industry" would be much smaller.

Definitely one of the worst classes I experienced was Thermodynamics where I had to tip-toe around calling out gibberish in the 1st edition book authored by my professor. He was a real hard ass that would make you feel like the idiot for asking why the book and the whiteboard don't match.

> Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations.

I''d break this into two statements with "public schools" being part of both:

1. Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools because they are not mandated to serve every student and can therefore siphon off failing or behaviorally challenged students back to the public system. Find me a charter system serving special needs and at-risk students better than the public system at the scale of a public system, and I'll change my mind.

2. Public schools have been hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations because their funding structures are controlled by politics and culture wars instead of targeted research and practice on what specific kids need. I'm not a fan of teachers unions or bureaucracy, but who else takes the heat for teachers who are under-resourced, under-paid, and over-worked?

> Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations is not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes away.

100% agree on the affirmative action part, but to fix K-12 schools you need new or other institutions to pick up slack on supporting students. The reason that "Deputy Assistant Senior Manager of Cognitive and Emotional Development" exist is because the law is pretty clear about how a school district is responsible for a student with XYZ cognitive and emotional developmental challenges. To get rid of that administrator, you also need to transfer (operationally and legislatively) ownership of that responsibility.

This is true now, but over the long arc a paper trail of complaints lay groundwork for legal and political challenges. Historically that has been the meaningfulness of such busywork —no one cares today, but what if someone does in the future?

Now if you are saying there is no willpower to follow through over the long arc aka this fight is over and lost, then I disagree but could be wrong.

Was in Rio for a very short stint and couldn’t get around the absence of a CPF to use iFood, but almost every place I loved would take my order via WhatsApp and let me pay the delivery man using a mobile CC reader. It was comically informal and easy compared to the experience with US food delivery apps.

My friend and I often talk about the analogous situations between police officers and teachers in urban centers.

Both really hard jobs that suffer with retention and recruitment. Both fraught with union agreements that make it really difficult to fire bad actors.

But where the analogy breaks down is around funding vs performance & accountability. Poor crime stats are usually followed by a conversation around policies and lack of funds that hamper police activity, whereas poor test scores are usually followed by school closures, reduced salary negotiations, and state/federal oversight.

It’s interesting that educators always get the blame and providing more resources is met with some version of “we already spend more than X”. But police often get sympathy and no push back for more resources even though US LEO get more funding than any other country and spends a greater % of GDP than most countries. (even in the face of massive police reform protests over the past decade).

I hold the opinion that education produces greater positive network effects on society than incarceration does, so this disconnect is really mind-boggling.

Recently met two ATCs and got some interesting perspective: new ATCs are trained on COVID levels of air traffic. So as things ramp back up (still not at pre-COVID levels across the board) there are a myriad of issues. The fact that flights are being cut instead of throwing new ATCs into the unknown is actually refreshing even if frustrating.

It took roughly a century to go from constitutional amendment to legislative enforcement for equal treatment under the law. In 2023, for political points, state and local leaders are banning critical race theory in schools (even though it’s an academic legal theory).

However one feels about “race”, it’s a current theme, not a relic, politically, economically or legally. And that shouldn’t be at odds with the individual choice to treat others equally.

> which implies it was a random homeless person

any other sources supporting this notion? it sounds reckless which is understandable from an emotional point of view, but nonetheless demeaning for homeless people and unproductive for justice.

This is smart for the times and perhaps useless in the future. I wonder what is the level of support amongst parents and teens in Utah.