domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
ABigGuy4U
6hr ago
Why would it get dark
Because the people who control 99 percent of the wealth of the planet (which no longer requires human consumers or employees), and 100 percent of the military resources (which no longer require human soldiers) will decide that they don’t need 7.9 billion useless eaters crapping up their planet.
sockpuppet2
6hr ago
Or just compare standardized grad school admissions test scores to SAT scores. The problem is getting the data.
Alabasata
7hr ago
I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more
Go to any office supply store near you. Are TI-83s still for sale?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
7hr ago
Grading on the curve has always been a mark of intellectual laziness/lack of rigor in a feild.
It's nothing more than a means of convincing people with high verbal IQs and low mathematical literacy that students and professors dont actually have to do thier jobs (learn and teach respectively) to be "good" students or professors.
TowardsPanna
7hr ago
It's interesting that Blossom manages to be everyone's friend while being a highly skilled (I assume that's what "absolute gamer" means) player who gets held back by others, assumedly.
But at the same time it makes sense that the dead average player becomes abusive.
What is "keyboard turning"?
What did you cognize and conclude after being part of that group?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
7hr ago
That would require work and intellectual rigor on the part of the professors. Intelligent rigourous people with good work ethic don't go into academia, they go into buisiness.
lagrangian
8hr ago
How about MIT or Caltech?
What'd be really fun is if we could also access performance reviews over time, to better assess job performance rather than interview performance.
dr_analog
razorboy
8hr ago
So many tech companies have recruiting databases that could probably tell you pretty easily the fail rate of candidates by CS degree from each university.
Based on my experience interviewing, CMU and Stanford are the most solid. But this is mid-2010s era.
anti_dan
8hr ago
While I dont doubt this is true, I doubt it is the driving force behind universities stressing graded coursework over exams. Instead I think that is a student-driven phenomenon, particularly female students who are now the vast majority at 4 year universities. Students are the customers for these courses, and this is a demographic that largely loathes high stakes exams. They vastly prefer being able to submit some homework 20 times over a semester and receive 20 grades rather than risk it all on a 90 minute final. In addition, no one grading homework gives out failing grades for completed assignments, so these students also perceive that this method ensures they get a good grade in their courses.
bonsaii
8hr ago
Don't these mechanisms already exist? Internships are just an extended practical test for potential hires, graduate schools use GRE and other tests, law grads still need to take the bar, medicine grads still need to take their boards, etc.
No_one
8hr ago
(Also, I really don't expect to see decent neuralink tech by 2030. It's just too damn hard.)
AI researchers and if US becomes progressive about getting value out of the dregs of society, there's like 50,000 heavily tattooed but basically healthy people fit for human testing down at CECOT.
SnapDragon
9hr ago
Well, based on what I know of the Canadian indigenous peoples (who the current PC treadmill calls the "First Nations"), there's a lot of crime, misery, and unrest as a result. But hey, people addicted to videogames are less destructive than people addicted to alcohol, so we'll see.
(Also, I really don't expect to see decent neuralink tech by 2030. It's just too damn hard.)
SnapDragon
9hr ago
Definitely an important point. I agree that there is a real possibility of societal breakdown under those kinds of conditions. Hopefully, even if UBI efforts never go anywhere, people will still somehow scrounge up enough to eat and immerse themselves in videogames. (We're kind of halfway there today, to be honest, judging from most of my friends.) Somehow society and the economy survived the insane COVID shutdowns (surprising me). I have hope they'll be resilient enough to survive this too. But there's no historical precedent we can point to...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
I'm not actually American but in Australia for humanities/law/essay-writing exams, you're effectively rewarded for how many points you can make as well as their quality and I'm pretty confident it's the same there. Maybe you do maths or something where there's only a single answer and simplicity is rewarded, idk...
Two pages seems quite short to me for an essay.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation.
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition. You can get a decent fraction of c with antimatter.
Also, there's a huge difference between 'bird', 'propeller plane', 'rocket' and 'atomic rocket' in any realistic sense, with regards to what we're dealing with now. Is superintelligence capable of rewriting the fundamental laws of the universe like a real deity? No. Is that necessary to make vast changes to our lifestyle and existence? Absolutely not, just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
9hr ago
Hear hear!
I've tried to refrain from commenting on this myself but I found the middle of the WoT books to be tedious as often as not. I'm one of the ones that bogged down hard for the first time right around the bloody menagerie in TFoH. Nor did I particularly care for the style of rapid-fire exposition endings that were then revisited in excruciating detail in a subsequent book that evolved around that time, either, but Brandon Sanderson finished out the series so strongly that I liked it enough overall to go back for a re-read.
Which was a mistake that I was making because once again, I bogged down at the bloody menagerie and realized that regardless of how much I liked the series as a whole, life was too short for me to force myself to slog through those middle books all over again. I still think that the first four and last three books are tightly plotted and well written despite their length and I can only wonder at what might have been if Jordan had never gotten deathly ill with amyloidosis.
zeke5123a
9hr ago
The risk for the student is that they put off college for six months (hell they could apply for the following year). But having this fellowship would probably be a pretty big leg up on admissions. Is it that big of a risk for a student?
No_one
9hr ago
China is not stronger than the (hypothetical at this point) US-aligned alliance of democracies,
I have doubts about this. Much of that 'alliance of democracies' is EU and EU is an utterly hopeless project which would require a STEM-pilled / bureaucracy hating Stalin purging tens of thousands of people with extreme prejudice.
Chinese don't seem to be mired in bureaucracy and can 'just build things'.
Eugyppius recently noted a bridge that crashed in Dresden is not expected to be replaced until 2035! One fucking bridge over a shallow river, the kind that an engineering unit would build in 2 days! 2035! So when half or third of your 'strength' is in this kind of state, you have problems.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with US infrastructure issues, but it's not pretty either with e.g. Golden Gate bridge, where the new 'suicide nets' installed (400 million) cost a substantial fraction of the inflation adjusted cost of the entire bridge (supposedly 700 million $).
zeke5123a
9hr ago
Well, let me add a third — administrators don’t have equity in the school. Right now, schools are eating their seed corn (turning out shitty products but coasting on reputation). Since people still get jobs out of college people are still willing to go to college. But if that stops, then your second point no longer applies.
And hence my third point—management isn’t aligned with the long term incentive of the college.
No_one
9hr ago
Why would it get dark? Look at Australian Aboriginals. 90% of the pure blooded ones are economically irrelevant and yet they cope.
Sure their coping methods involve gasoline, glue and drinking but I like to think 130+ IQ Anglos are instead going to do something less self-destructive. And you'll probably be able to get some good mileage out of AI usesticking a lot of neuralink into your brain and directly interfacing with the AI through thoughts.
Also AIs are pretty easy to align so lot of people will likely just keep being economically and competitive useful by purchasing their own AGI and using it as an extension of their self.
No_one
9hr ago
Humanity as a whole wants good AI, but the attempts are split several ways and don’t individually have the ability to capture profit to sustain high burn rates when cheaper or free alternatives exist.
Guess what, governments exist to solve coordination failures. Even if yankees cannot solve the problem of 'how develop AI if it's going to cost billions and capturing the profit is hard', you can bet the Chinese Communist Party is going to bite the bullet, commission another few nuclear power plants and let the Huawei Ascends that they can't export bc US banned it be used for this purpose by the most promising companies.
Because they need AI. US needs it to and they'd probably also be able to
The rest of your comment is basically irrelevant fluff.
If we knew how good AI will be, the conversation would be a lot clearer. If AI plateaus at 2x human intelligence, then I doubt most people would claim it could trivially solve everything.
How do you even 'define' intelligence. If we go by IQ estimates, 2x human intelligence is von Neumanns by the server rack. And you can experiment on such much more easily to figure out how to organise them.
I'd say that would solve a lot of problems, if not majority of them, and create a few new ones.
Say a devops AI that auto-pushes code assumes humans will follow best-practices, but they don’t, and this results in a bug in a critical piece of infrastructure that causes a power outage for 12 hours.
With AI you can do an arbitrary amount of testing pretty easily so no, that won't happen.
All in all, I am not convinced at all.
zeke5123a
10hr ago
Is it? You’d be asking people to take a risk but (1) graduate a year sooner (so earnings start a year sooner) and (2) university is getting really expensive. When you NPV the benefits compared to the cost I’m not sure how large the payment would need to be.
anti_dan
10hr ago
They do not have such a hotline. This is a hypothetical. There are on-call states attorneys in big jurisdictions, but their job is boring stuff like reviewing charges, making sure witness statements are consistent, approving search warrants, etc
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
To me the answer is the way we structured the payment for college more than anything. There were two things that set student loans up to be a giant mess. First, because the government guarantees the loans, everyone gets one. There’s no reason not to admit anyone who applies because they can always pay the bills. The second was that students cannot discharge tge loans in bankruptcy. Which now removes any concern that the student needs any sort of real job afterwards, so the quality of the program doesn’t matter. Add this up, and essentially the school doesn’t lose money if they don’t demand students learn anything. In fact, since more students enter behind where they should be, it’s actually a negative to expect too much. If the students are washing out, you lose money.
I believe it works the same way in most of Northern Europe. Multiple canteens operated by companies providing subsidized meals for students and below market rate rental housing owned by various non-profit foundations and student unions, all with loose association with the universities (ie. you have to be a student in one of them to live in the housing / receive subsidization but the universities have no control over any of that).
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