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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.
Many college kids can learn a computer game in an evening, order stuff online, backpack on another continent and drive a car through rush hour traffic. Yet they can't do long division which only requires repeating four simple steps. Someone who is mentally incapable of learning 332423/234 after 12 years of math training stands no chance when it comes to being able to buy cinema tickets in an app in five minutes or using a self checkout machine. People claim to be too low Iq to learn the times table yet are capable of memorizing other things.
School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have. Math is one of the toughest subjects to skip chapters in. If you haven't mastered one chapter in the book the next chapter is impossible. Kids develop an identity of being bad at math and society accepts this instead of forcing them to repeat the basics until they have mastered it.
To be fair, as a math enthusiast, I really dislike how high school "math" worked, which was mostly just training kids into executing algorithms, most of which have no application in real life for almost anyone.
Numeric skills were essential in the era before computers for a lot of people. Today they are not of much practical relevance. I dearly hope that anyone who encounters 332423/234 in their professional life will have the good sense to use a computer instead of trying long division.
I mean, basic numericy is essential. If you only encounter numbers as things which you enter into your calculator, you will not have a good grasp on them. So most of elementary school math is probably fine.
But mostly of what follows was 20% motivated by requirements of science classes, 20% stuff people should probably know, and 59% pointless algorithmic wankery for its own sake.
Take long division of polynomials, which is just long division on steroids. Now, there is a lot of interesting theory for sure, how the polynomials form a ring and how you can algorithmically factor out one known root. But this is not what we focused on. Instead, we solved toy problems "Here is a cubic polynomial. You magically know that x=3 is one root. Find all the roots."
Being able to solve quadratic equations is probably ok, because they often pop up in toy physics problems, but boy did we spend a lot of time on that. Just another pointless monkey-training thing.
Likewise linear systems of equation and Gaussian elimination. Again not completely pointless, but trained to the point of pointlessness.
Or take the unit about other bases than 10. There are only two cases here with any practical relevance -- base 2 to understand how computers work and base 16 which is commonly used to represent binary numbers. Of course base 16 was judged to hard for us poor kids, and while base 2 appeared occasionally, nobody thought to teach us about bitwise operations and shifts (never mind 2-complements).
Speaking of the failure of school to teach much more relevant CS topics, IEEE 754 came out in the year I was born. You would be forgiven to think that a school preparing me for a life where floating point numbers are everywhere would have tried to teach what catastrophic cancellation means and how to avoid getting wrong results when using calculators. But no, the only accommodation made to the existence of computers was that instead of having me find pointless analytic roots of quadratic functions was that instead they trained me to use my TI-82 to find pointless numerical roots of more general functions.
Mathematics is all about proving theorems, so you might think that I liked the section about induction more, but the opposite is the case. You take a beautiful mathematical concept and turn it in another rote exercise. "Take this pointless sum formula and apply the stored algorithm 'induction' to 'prove' it."
The TL;DR version of this whining about high school math is that basically, the test questions do not require you to think. It is sufficient to be able to apply the correct algorithm learned by rote. With any real world problem, it is very unlikely that you will have an algorithm in the cache which you just have to apply, apart from "write down the problem, think really hard, write down the solution".
If we want to torture students with pointless intelligence-linked tasks, my suggestion would be to get rid of 'math' and substitute puzzles such as Sudokus. At least when trying to solve NP-complete puzzles, you sometimes have to stop and think, or try different ways to attack the problem. Which is all not the case for typical high school math problems.
This is octal erasure
Damn right it is.
In a world where a byte is 6 or 9 bits, octal would be useful. But for obvious reasons world length tend to be powers of two. So we want a basis of 2^(2^n) for some n. The two choices closest to the base widely used by humans are n=2 (base 16) and n=1 (base 4), which can represent a byte in two and four digits, respectively. Relatively speaking, base 16 is closer to base 10 than base 4 is, so it is the obvious choice.
Let us say you are searching for an IPv4 address in a byte-aligned data stream. In hexadecimal, it will always be the same sequence of eight digits, for example 0xc0a810ff. Converting it to dotted quad is simple, network byte order is big endian, 0xff is 255, 0x10 is 16, 0xc0 is 1216 which is 364 which is 192, which tells us that 0xa8 is likely 168.
Now let us try the same in octal. If an oct digit ends with the least significant byte, the string we are looking for is (0o)30052010377. Otherwise, it might also be (0o)60124020776 or (0o)140250041774. Three different representation for the same sequence of bytes! (Yes, you could also use 3 digits to represent each byte separately, at the cost that 0o,000,377 +1 is not 0o,000,477 but 0o,001,000. At this point, the gains over denoting your words bytewise in decimal a la 192.168.16.255 seem slim.)
There are two reasons why programmers in this century might want to be slightly more aware of octal notation than of EBCDIC. Traditional unix file permissions (and umasks) use octal. But using chmod 755 should probably be replaced by the more verbose chmod u=rwx,go=rx (or setfacl) in any case.
The other reason to be aware of it is that it is a pitfall in C, C++. While the prefix K&R chose for hexadecimal numbers, 0x does not collide with common usage elsewhere, they made the terrible decision that octal integer constants should be marked with a leading zero of all things. (I imagine they got into a lot of disputes at gas stations when trying to pay $0060 with a $50 bill.)
Python here does the sane thing and straightforward forbids leading zeros in integer constants, instead telling you to use the 0o prefix if you really want octals.
There was a short period in 2005-2012ish where FPGA programming languages like VHDL and Verilog had to work on so badly constrained environments that octal bases were worth the obnoxious overhead, but either none of them retained support or no one uses that support for normal code this decade.
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It deserves to be erased.
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