domain:alexepstein.substack.com
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
15m ago
Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.
That's curious; I'd find myself skipping Perrin, Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve POV chapters out of boredom to get to the climax with Rand. Almost all the moments from the series that stick with me a decade or so later are with Rand: Picking up Callandor (and trying to revive the dead child), Rhuidean, cleansing saidin, using the True power against Semirhage for the first time, his epiphany on dragonmount.
I suppose as a teen I was even more of an uncultured swine than I am now.
phailyoor
16m ago
What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade.
That's exactly my point. The kids will just goof off for 90% of the semester and just cram it all in before the exam. If so when what's the point of even having the rest of the semester.
using chatgpt to write personal introduction
Even if it's busy work, using chatgpt to do something that would take literally 5 minutes is just a retarded move.
SkoomaDentist
16m ago
I cherished those moments during my university studies when I could spend half the assignment laying out in detail why I considered it a shitty assignment while also acing it far beyond any reasonable expectations. I suspect doing that every week in one course was half the reason said professor later hired me as a research assistant (the other half was that I emailed him about a beyond-state-of-art research topic with ”I have been working on this idea…”).
bonsaii
29m ago
First time hearing about the Timmy-Johnny-Spike classification. I'm not super familiar with MTG, but I don't really get the distinction between Timmy and Johnny, since it sounds like both prefer flashy plays to purely optimizing for the highest win probability. Is Timmy optimizing for largest point differential over win probability (e.g., rather win by 10 with 51% probability than win by 1 with 55% probability) while Johnny wants to play unorthodox or off-meta sets?
ulyssessword
33m ago
Well it doesnt hurt them at all, otherwise it wouldn't be cheating.
??? It's completely possible to cheat ineffectively and harm yourself in the process. Just look at exercising: you can use bad form to inflate your numbers, but that increases injury risk and decreases gains. It both hurts them and is cheating. Is the same true of academic dishonesty? Maybe.
zeke5123a
39m ago
I find all of what those kids did so distasteful. It’s weaponized empathy. Sorry but being able to handle stress is part of the test. Learning disabilities suck but so too does having a lower IQ. Life isn’t fair. Why is cosmic fairness the standard?
roystgnr
43m ago
Most financially literate people understand that it is irrational to insure your TV or phone against breakage, yet claim it is reasonable to insure anything bigger.
By the time you get up to the scale of home insurance, they're correct. That's how diminishing utility of money works. You have a risk r of losing v value from your total wealth of w, and your utility is generally an affine transform of log(w). r·log(w-v)+(1-r)·log(w) < log(w-r·v) for 0<r<1, so if somehow you could find someone who would insure you with no transaction costs or expected profit then you'd want to take it every time. Transaction costs c are roughly constant and expected profit P scales like p·v, though, so now your right hand side is log(w-c-(r+p)·v) and (for p>0 and c>0) you only get the same inequality for large enough v.
Gambling that you won't lose a few days' pay is a better bet than gambling that you won't lose (for the median homeowner considering home insurance) the majority of your net worth, even if the odds and the profit margins you're paying for are the same in each case, because bigger gambles are worse. This is the same reason why it's a good idea to invest most of your money in a stock market index, a worse idea to invest the same money in an average stock, and a crazy idea to invest most of your money in stocks at 4x leverage. It's one way to derive the Kelly criterion. For the same expected returns, less volatility is better, and since it's not infinitesimally better, it's still better even if it comes with slightly reduced expected returns. Your house burning down doesn't have to threaten your existence to be worth insuring against, it just has to be worse in expected utility than paying an insurer. You don't even have to pay a slimy one.
hooser
46m ago
Maybe they live in different time zones. Also, they may not be human (AI-robo-calls?)
Pitt19802
48m ago
It's not and it won't.
It's one of the many really poor habits that formal education engrains in you.
With all due respect, I think you're being quite Panglossian about the education you received.
zeke5123a
49m ago
I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come. There is an SAT cut off plus a requirement to have some AP. Three year intensive with only core classes needed (you should be able to do the requisite credit hours in 3 years if you have sufficient AP and a single summer night class). Internships required. After the first couple of classes succeed in getting hired at strong firms, you flip the switch and start charging 50k a year.
Shrike
54m ago
This is uncharted territory.
I don't think this is entirely true – my understanding is that a lack of population growth is considered a contributor to the decline of the Roman Empire, and I suspect (although I haven't put intense study into the issue) that similar factors may have contributed to poor French performance in the Second World War as well. I think there are distinguishing factors in all of these cases, but to the extent that we have historical analogies, they give us cold comfort.
they are consistently graduating more and more highly educated workers
And yet it is unable to employ all of those workers – the United States has a better youth employment rate than China (even after China "recalculated" their data to make it look better). Perhaps you and Faceh are focusing on the wrong Chinese employment problem.
zeke5123a
55m ago
Sure of course. But if all they are doing is adding a mens rea requirement, then there is less chance of randomly being jailed.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
There's so much money on the table for whomever can convince employers they have a better credential than Ivy League schools. And given the level of corruption and bloat, it probably wouldn't even take that hard a push.
Inertia is powerful, but it's not all powerful.
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm. Even if it's just the Aztecs cutting out hearts to prevent the universe from ending, or the Carthaginians burning babies alive in honor of Moloch, the overlaps and distinctions in what they think human sacrifice will accomplish can be enlightening.
And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. You will probably even want to sacrifice your own children to Moloch, when the time comes. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.
One thing is for sure, though: I have a higher opinion of the moral and ethical foundations of an Aztec priest cutting the still-beating hearts out of the chests of POWs than I do of the sorts of people who teach ethics classes. At least the Aztecs had the excuse of not having access to better information, something that cannot be said of someone who works in a modern university.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
In Japan motherhood is still revered, and many girls see it as a definite goal, though the having-it-all delusion seems to have a certain foothold here as well. I appreciate your response in any case. Arguably many males also work absolute bullshit jobs as well. More to say but I gotta sleep.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
DradisPing
1hr ago
A lot of departments want courses in the core curriculum because it guarantees jobs lecturing. They don't particularly care if the students learn anything or if it provides any value. Forcing students to write papers on indigenous studies is just the easiest path to getting paid to write their own papers on indigenous studies.
So basically everyone involved is a fraud, and it goes forward because we've let colleges control credentialing.
The students just want the credential. The lecturers just want their money.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork.
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.
What they emphasize changes as you go from fields where harming anyone is proof of something going wrong and ethics is about avoiding it, to fields where people will be harmed regardless and ethics is about balancing it, to fields where harming people is the point and ethics is about managing it. The later can be all the more interesting for how they have to handle the simpler moral rejections that can suffice for the former.
Few classes / professors will ever frame these for you, which is why it will need to be self-driven. Bad professors can undercut even that. Still.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Did you read my post? I said a worse job market for women.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Women who aren’t passionate about some specific field of study or career in a for real way should just get married and have babies instead of worrying about pretending to care about a career field.
Obviously I’m not talking about nurses here, or even teachers. That cat is out of the bag. But there is a massive proliferation of pink collar jobs in modern western societies which just don’t do anything except 1) raise the female employment rate and 2) generate more bullshit for everyone else to process. We shouldn’t have more administrators than we did back in the days before copying machines and all that.
And a high female employment rate has externalities- industrial societies work much better when men have, on average, much better economic opportunities than women, because it drives up the marriage rate. In the US you can see this in towns built around the military and extractive industry, particularly the former where soldiers are directly economically incentivized to just buy the ring already. I think we can fairly point to behavioral issues with unmarried women as well, such as high rates of debt and getting way too into social justice.
None of this is blaming individual women for going to college and getting a job. She’s gotta eat, 18 year old girls are kinda impressionable, yachta yachta yachta. But the mentality of society overall on the issue is not healthy- housewives should be higher status than girlbosses, and a lot of both the degrees and the careers involved are, at best, a waste of resources. Bachelors in psychology in America really don’t involve much actual learning.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
As I've mentioned previously, I'm at a Finnish university right now, doing a new degree (PolSci) since the future in translation is, well, uncertain, and I'm seeing a potential niche in the "political implications of AI" field that could be potentially seized upon.
Since I already have a lot of old studies I've been able to take in to the new degree as credit transfers and since I no longer get subsidies and student loans I have to work while studying, so I haven't taken a lot of "actual" courses. What few I have had seem to be at some sort of a paradigm shift point regarding AI where it's still uncertain how it should be handled; mainly, I've taken two courses in Russian, and it seems to be taken as granted that the students will use AI to look up Russian words and their forms, but there's still a "preferably don't do this, and if you do, at least tell me" instruction for longer tasks. In any case, the Russian courses were pass/fail and otherwise the professors generally indicated that coursework isn't that important and would mostly count for edge cases regarding grading.
The book exams are done at a student's leisure by booking a room at a special exam class without phone and with computers that basically only allow the specific exam software to run and are done as essay questions, which is good compared to the old pen-and-paper exams, since my handwriting is atrocious.
Mantergeistmann
2hr ago
I have a hunch for the Navy Nukes it's less about creature comforts, and more about ensuring they can have undisturbed rest and privacy for better studying.
Corvos
2hr ago
IMO there are two serious barriers to widespread 3d printer adoption:
- Most people don’t need to make small custom objects regularly
- 3D printers produce striated plastic objects in primary colours and people don’t want those in their homes.
The latter could be considered a technological problem. Wood mills are much nicer but too loud and too messy, but there might be paths forward.
It wouldn’t eliminate the problem, but the proctored exams could filter out many of the people who wouldn’t be able to hack it but for cheating.
Or maybe even force them to learn how not to cheat.
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