Kevin_P
1mo ago
I remember a well-known poster here (Tracing Woodgrains? Not 100% sure) having the same plan, then they took longer than a traditional degree to graduate because a large part of the university experience is social pressure and the WGU experience doesn't provide that part.
Kevin_P
11mo ago
I would expect most young people to have at least a driver licence if not a passport
Tangential, but I wouldn't be surprised if passports were more common than driving licenses, especially among young people.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
That's their "standard" rate, but they also have a 70% royalty rate (30% Amazon cut) that applies to most books in practice. You just need to price your book between $2.99 and $9.99 USD and allow it to be part of Kindle Unlimited.
(The reason for positioning the lower rate as the standard one is probably because a bonus for including the book in KU sounds nicer than a penalty for not including it, even when the practical effects are exactly the same)
Kevin_P
2yr ago
I remember some posts at the previous place talking about an Islamist (Taliban?) leader that was radicalized when he studied in the US and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.
Does anyone remember the guy's name and have a link and/or more details?
Kevin_P
2yr ago
“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro
I'd be interested to hear where you're coming from on this one. Is this the "social mobility hollows out the working class" / "desegregation destroyed Black America" argument or something different?
Kevin_P
2yr ago
52 weeks in a year, 26 bi-weeks, 26 * 16667 = 43,334 USD/year. Which is... pretty low, these days, even by startup standards.
You're out by an order of magnitude. It should be 433k, which seems unrealistic even in Silicon Valley.
What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act?
Or maybe just taking the maximum expected-value path towards becoming insanely rich?
The collapse was dramatic but it's a consequence of the same high-risk strategy that had FTX valued at 32 billion USD a few months ago. If that's the upside then their actions can be rational even if the chance of success was quite low.
EDIT: Also SBF may have lost most of his money but according to this article he's still worth around $600 million US. So even if the company failed, rationalism still seems to have paid off for him personally.
Kevin_P
4mo ago
It's included in the original grant amount. So you'd ask them for 155k, and the team at Prestigious University would ask for 170k for the same work, then the funder would theoretically take that into account when deciding where to spend their money. You also have to tell them how much is direct costs and how much is overheads, not just "we need 155k".
Kevin_P
2yr ago
I'd argue that the situation with the antivax movement supports the grandparent's point. Doctors and epidemiologists have always been against it but for the rest of the Blue Tribe the standard reaction was always "roll your eyes and move on" rather than TPTB doing everything in their power to crush it.
Obviously the red/blue coding isn't the only thing that's caused the change, but I don't think it's irrelevant either.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself?
Aside from the time savings that other people have mentioned, the other big advantage of Shutterstock is that it handles all of the relevant copyrights. Using AI art generation is probably OK from an IP rights perspective, but there's still a chance that a generated image will be close enough to the source material that the original artist could sue.
Using Shutterstock already insulates companies from the risk of traditional artists giving them a copied picture. I can see how people would see the same service as valuable for AI images too, at least until the legal issues get straightened out.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
One big advantage is the thing most posts in the thread have been complaining about: The Algorithm (TM)
I'm going to go against the consensus here and say that I actually quite like the suggested videos page. The results are far from perfect but if a video appears on my homepage there's a better-than-even chance that it will be relevant to my interests, vs a roughly 0% chance for videos on the front page in incognito mode. And I don't think the results have got noticeably worse in recent months/years.
Logging in also gives you access to other features, including the subscriptions feed that shows you new videos from channels you've subscribed to, the ability to make comments (yes, youtube comments as a whole are trash, but there are still certain pockets that have value), and being able to give upvotes that at the margin will encourage creators to make more of the sort of content you enjoy.
Kevin_P
3mo ago
We run into kids in the same uniform as the top school in China again at the market, furthering doubt that this isn't some universal high school uniform.
Not a universal uniform, but in recent years the government has been encouraging top schools to set up branches elsewhere. Some have set up quite a lot and they generally aren't on the same academic level as the original campus. So even if the uniforms say RenDaFuZhong or whatever, it might not be the "real" RDFZ.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
What are ways that the Trump contingent could bring such a conspiracy to light without sounding like schizophrenic conspiracy theorists?
Maybe I'm out of touch because I'm not American but I thought Clinton's Pied Piper Strategy to push Trump to the nomination in 2016 was an established fact. Or at the very least a widely accepted theory even in mainstream / leftist media sources.
"They're trying the same thing again" doesn't seem like it would be treated as an outrageous conspiracy theory. Although by the same token it wouldn't be a shocking revelation either, just the standard dirty tricks that happen every election.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
People here often bring up legal issues with relying on IQ tests etc but I don't think it's the real problem. The legal issues basically only apply to employers in America, but other countries without those laws are still experiencing the same sort of higher education signaling spiral.
Kevin_P
7mo ago
You're both overstating and understating the situation.
On one hand, it goes way beyond just literature and philosophy. Open up the STEM box and you'll find that it's only really the T and E parts that lead directly to careers. There might be more demand for PhD graduates in the sciences but the majority of students stop with a bachelors and there aren't really any more jobs that specifically need a degree in e.g. biology than those that need you to have studied history. High school teacher is basically the full list.
But on the other hand, you're missing the generic value of a degree. Pretty much all white collar jobs these days need you to have a degree and most aren't particularly picky about what you studied. Yes, maybe a lot of that is just signaling, but the signal is a real thing (earning a degree proves that you have some combination of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is also valuable to an employer) - so playing the game is rational for both students and companies.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Based on the page history at archive.org the "certain hospitalized patients" line was added in May 2020, with the "should only be used in a hospital or during clinical trials" part being added around a month later. At the time it seemed plausible that it would work.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
The article is talking about charitable foundations rather than individual donations. Rich people set them up then hand over the management to professional charity administrators. The article argues that the money then gets diverted to standard leftist causes, regardless of the original donor's intentions, and that this is especially true for foundations that are set up to continue after the original donor dies.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
The great majority of romantic fiction read by women, fan-fiction or otherwise, is heterosexual pairings with the OP, a female character from the setting, or a stand-in for the OP.
My priors were strongly in the opposite direction, at least in the fanfiction space, so I checked the numbers on Archive of our Own, (the most popular fanfiction site).
They confirmed my suspicions: M/M pairings are almost twice as common as M/F (4.7 million fics vs 2.4 million). They're also read a lot more, the most popular M/M fic had 8.2 million hits vs only 2.7 million for the top M/F fic.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
I noticed that nobody has mentioned this yet so I'll throw it in for context: Margaret Thatcher abolished tenure in the UK back in the 1980s. The circumstances were pretty similar to today - the object-level issues were different but the basic layout of the situation was the same. It didn't create the sort of disaster that doomsayers are predicting but also do much to stop academics criticising the government, as far as I can tell things went on pretty much as they did before the change.
Kevin_P
2yr ago
Latest scientific studies indicate that the share of gaming consoles owned by women (PDF, page 9) ranges from 42% to 52%.
I checked that PDF link and the data was 86% male which completely contradicts what you claimed.
Not sure if that was your point and you were trying to set up a contrast between "the science" and Nintendo's actual sales figures, but if so that didn't come through in the post.
I really don't like the narrative around this incident.
In particular, this:
a girl who studied economics in the U.S., with no prior medical background and minimal entrance exams, obtained an MD from China’s top medical school in just four years
.. seems completely normal to me. Lots of places have 4-year medical degrees if you start with a bachelor's. The intellectual ancestor of this forum is Scott Alexander, who did exactly that - undergraduate degree in philosophy followed by a 4-year graduate-entry medical degree.
The difference is only one less year vs a standard 5-year medical degree, and the 4-year program doesn't include compulsory courses like English, politics etc, so they're probably spending about the same amount of time on the actual medical training.
The comparison to a regular medical course as 5+3 years also seems misleading because graduates of 4-year degrees also need to do the same 3 years of residency training. It's not 4+4 vs 5+3, it's 4+4+3 vs 5+3
I'm not saying the story doesn't raise real concerns. But the thesis plagiarism and skipping two thirds of her residency are the real issues here, not graduate-entry medical degrees.
[Edit: And of course also the part where a surgeon left an anesthetized patient on the operating table for the best part of an hour while he chased after his lover. Focusing on Dong's academic credentials feels like fixing blame on the mistress rather than the actual guilty party.]
Kevin_P
2yr ago
Here's an inverse conspiracy theory that's also technically a conspiracy: Flat Earthers don't exist.
It's held up as the archetypical example of conspiracy theory believers, but I'm convinced that pretty much everyone who expresses support for Flat Earth theories - well over 99% - is knowingly playing along in a giant hoax, for a sense of community and the amusement of getting ridiculous stories published in serious newspapers. (Some of them don't actually realise this and think that only they themselves are roleplayers while the rest of their group are serious).
I can't find anything about Jewish attitudes specifically but here's something at least. +13% net favorability among the US general population (as of September 2022), broken down to 27% favorable / very favorable, 14% unfavorable / very unfavorable, 27% neutral and 32% unaware.
There are crosstabs by race, gender, political party etc, but nothing specifically for jews
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