domain:dualn-back.com
AvocadoPanic
11m ago
Me too. Tech before / during the dot com bust. Finance / investment banking, managed services, defense.
I think I may be seeing some geographic selection effects too. It could be the median candidate in London, UK is better than the median candidate in the Boston suburbs.
felis-parenthesis
19m ago
The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
AvocadoPanic
20m ago
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to the religious schools unfortunately many are sponsored by denominations that have embraced idpol or alphabetism. Also my wife would likely need to return to work to pay the tuition.
We're supplementing homeschooling with weekly foreign language (my wife's native language) in a classroom environment and The Russian School of Math.
I was identified as gifted in elementary school, the GATE program in the district as kooky as it was made school much more engaging.
dr_analog
razorboy
22m ago
Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.
I've been doing hiring off and on for about 20 years so I feel confident offering two quick thoughts.
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Have you done mock interviews with the rest of the team to try these questions out? How do your own people do?
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Is failing to complete the problem in time that big a deal? In general I find the journey of problem solving more important than reaching the end in the allotted time. You usually know after an hour if someone is too much of a dick to work with, or if they could finish if you gave them another 15 minutes. OTOH, if you and the candidate spend an entire hour struggling with what you thought would take ten minutes, that's probably bad.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
23m ago
The moral-scientific realization that humans are equal is not in the Bible
I'd say Matthew 25:40 gets pretty close.
Throwaway05
25m ago
is a meme. Is there any evidence that experts by and large find that the NYT misrepresents findings in their field?
It's absolutely a thing.
Any time a NYT article pops up on Meddit you'll see tons of discussion about how incredibly inaccurate the medical content is, often to the point where we can't figure out what the hell is supposed to be going on or what they are talking about.
And I'm not talking things that are political or if you squint have political content (although that stuff always happens) I'm talking full on "they are saying this patient was upset about her cancer but what they are describing isn't a malignancy???"
Cook
26m ago
I don't disagree. I think this is the thesis of Garrett Jones' "Hive Mind" book, but I haven't read it.
It would have to be genetic engineering, or embryo selection, or something like that. But selecting for intelligence is thought of negatively for arbitrary reasons.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
28m ago
The twitter link to the second video appears to be dead. anyone got a link to it?
DTulpa
35m ago
It's amazing what a 180 I've done on rap. True, there's a lot of artists and genres I listed to in my teens and early 20s that I've nearly dropped in the time since. I'm not without angst, but I can't really vibe along with Trent Reznor screaming about killing himself the way I used to, y'know. But I could still throw on an old NIN or Korn album for a long road trip and 'get into it' for a nostalgic romp with a friend or my brother.
I can't do Rap any more. I want it turned off immediately. I used to give Country a lot of shit for being unlistenable. And while I still think it's mostly shit, I have more tolerance for it now. It's like the polarities reversed.
I'm with you that my favorite Eminem was when he was young and funny. I think I liked the Slim Shady LP because it was so bizarre compared to The Chronic 2000 or whatever old Coolio album I had previously begged for because of 'Gangsta's Paradise'. Everything after that just felt too self-serious to me, like he had to prove something. TBF, I guess he had to. I can't argue with the man's career and success that followed with his maturation.
dr_analog
razorboy
39m ago
We have 4 children. They're all smart, but my middle son has tested as > 99.9% in math and taught himself to read somewhere between ages 3 and 4. Despite being in one of the more affluent districts in our state in the Northeast there are no services for gifted children. As long as children are performing at grade level asking for more academic rigor is met with shrugs. This is partially why we're homeschooling now.
One of my kids is like this. He taught himself to read at age 5 and he's about 3 grades ahead in math ability. He's supposed to start first grade in the fall but we're homeschooling him instead because, among other things, the public schools have no resources for gifted kids. We're in the PNW and not the Northeast. I'd try a private school here but they're all either religious or some woo woo hippie shit.
(I also think he'd go through a misanthrope period if he was forced to hang out with kids that much slower than him, like I did)
dr_analog
razorboy
44m ago
... switch out the variable names? E.g. "Every time the server reboots, it has to pull down a 450MB file over a 30MBPS connection before it can start serving requests. The server drops any requests that come in before it finishes booting. Assuming the system gets 3 requests per second, how many requests are dropped every time the server reboots?"
Okay I needed to write this one down, but only because you said megabits.
dr_analog
razorboy
45m ago
I can't really say. I've changed industries a few times the last 20 years. It certainly seems like more people are replying to job openings now. Like hundreds at a time. 2 years ago it would be tens. I don't have a read yet if the quality is higher though. E.g. a lot of these numbers could be blown up from layoffs, and the laid off people are probably not the cream of the crop.
quiet_NaN
47m ago
I for one would like to apply stricter standards to the prosecution.
For example, the fact that the defendant can misrepresent the facts as much as they want is not a good reason to also allow the prosecution the same leeway with the truth.
The standard for criminal trials is generally "beyond reasonable doubt". If A and B commit a crime, and prosecutor X convinces their jury that A was the mastermind, and prosecutor Y convinces their jury that B was the mastermind, and they both worked from the same evidence, then at least one of the prosecutors is grossly miscalibrated about what reasonable doubt should mean.
Prosecutors who try to convict people of of stuff they are actually guilty of will not show this behavior. OTOH, with this lower standard, you could have multiple persons be convicted for having fired the same gunshot.
SwordOfOccam
50m ago
He would not accept that many of us are color-blind meritocracy fans and recognize the factual reality of HBD. That combo just broke his brain. Perpetually misrepresenting the views of one’s opponents when explicitly corrected is shitty and intolerable behavior.
He would avoid dealing with the concrete evidence provided for the reality and utility of IQ, and its correlation to racial groups. He would make deluded attacks on academia—where IQ is not so popular a metric—and fail to acknowledge the contradiction. This is not denying the underlying framework. It’s being retarded and illogical. Several people who don’t like HBD pointed this out at the time.
If he had been consistently retarded but polite on the IQ issue, he wouldn’t have caught the ban and his average comment quality would have been good. Civility and order break down when those with status consistently and flagrantly violate rules and norms and the mods’ hands were forced.
Personally, I don’t care whether he caught a forever ban or just a really long one. Redemption is nice when you can get it.
No_one
52m ago
I had a whole post written here but the gist of it is: this is bad, I dislike listening to it, but for a rap song it's pretty good because I merely dislike it. Generally rap especially of the thug type, especially if originated in Europe makes me feel downright genocidal.
Wondering if rap music fans feel that way about any genre.
DradisPing
54m ago
The semiconductor factories can be seen as a point against invasion. They are very easy to destroy, either purposefully or accidentally.
It'd make sense for Taiwan to blow them up itself. Would China have the stomach for an extended occupation and suppression if they weren't getting any value out of it?
DTulpa
54m ago
Chancellor Olaf Scholz posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he was “deeply grieved” and that the officer’s “commitment to the safety of us all deserves the highest recognition.”
...He was apprehending the stabbed man on the ground while ignoring the knife-weilding attacker that came back and put several holes in his head/neck. Without knowing any better, from the video it looks the officer (and his peers) were committed to the safety of Sulaiman right up until the worst, darkest case of ShockedPickachu.jpg I've seen from a video.
I do feel bad for the cops, alive and deceased. I can only imagine that their minds were so trained on the story and expectation of 'far right violence' that they literally could not process the images their eyes were sending upstream, and just assumed noise and commotion had to do with some Neo-Nazi provocation. But they still fucked up horribly. The dead cop did not die valiantly against a rogue gunman protecting innocent lives. Wether by personal failure or institutional instruction, he and his peers screwed the pooch hard and managed to make the situation worse, somehow.
I don't want to speak ill of the dead, nor do I feel the need to. And I know politicians are going to go for the standard lines. But the lionazation of the deceased in this instance makes me want to scream. If you didn't watch the video or read a detailed breakdown, and were left with just mainstram coverage and politicians' statements, you'd think some unidentified attacker just started stabbing people, the cops showed up, one died, but the day was ultimately saved by brave heroes.
That is not what fucking happened here, and anybody who wants to give that impression should.... Well, let's just say there are days I truly wish I believed in Hell.
How many UK politicians do you think can get the right answer?
52%, sample size of 101
That's actually so much better than I was expecting. Whew.
But broadly you're right. Talent is rarest resource in the universe and you can't make people smarter. But you only need one Newton or Haber to advance the frontier.
The frontier advancement is obviously important stuff, but still, having worked in orgs full of, say, approx 140+ IQ people and orgs that must be approx 115 IQ people, I can tell you the former is insanely productive and refreshing and the latter is almost oppressive and gets mired in stupid shit. I can't help but extrapolate to all of society and think how much harder better stronger faster the rest of the world would be if we brought the average up.
dasfoo
1hr ago
Hunter Biden is being prosecuted.
Only after a judge squashed the absurd plea deal that exempted him from all future prosecution.
It's a half-step removed, but isn't this guy paying Hunter Biden's back-taxes to benefit Joe Biden similar to Cohen paying Daniels to benefit Trump? Why isn't California coming down on this guy for FEC violations?
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
Even at 6 figures the quality is poorer than I recall.
I suspect it's the increased size of the industry that we're failing to produce the quality candidates at scale or there is insufficient human capital as a starting point.
dasfoo
1hr ago
The most relevant point is made in several places and deserves its own discussion:
Trump is accused of using personal money for a campaign purpose.
And without getting into the sleazy details, this is something that every sentient person assumes every candidate does to some extent, and Trump is the only one signled out for it.
Talk to any small business owner/gig worker, and the lines between personal and business spending are sort of vaguely (mis)understood and largely unobserved. You should see the uncomfortable faces when the bookkeeper in our local small business circle talks about this subject. Everyone is bad at this this. At times, it seems almost impossible to dilligently keep track of these things in accordance with the law. The general assumption is that small, non-malicious fudging of that line will be overlooked. This kind of petty gotcha on Trump on this subject is unlikely to substantively move the needle for anyone already sympathetic to him.
ikeaAI
1hr ago
I suspect the causality is reversed, if you were paying more you'd find your candidate pool to be better. The IT industry is way bigger and more competitive these days and talented individuals can find their way to six figure jobs pretty easily.
No_one
1hr ago
B-21 could very easily turn out to be the B-17* of the next world war.
Thermal imagers are getting very cheap right now (iirc 1024x768 IR sensors for $10k). Between stealth planes being detectable on long wavelength radar with notable imprecision, anything but stealth planes not showing there, and fighter jets all having FLIR that can detect other fighter planes at up to 50 kilometers and tell a 500kw decoy from a plane with 10 MW engine, it's quite possible that B-21 won't be able to do missions into actually contested airspace at all.
*it was 'sold' as a
- bomber capable of defending itself from enemy fighters
- bomber capable of accurately striking ships from 3-4 km up (above range of short-range flak that shreds planes)
It could do neither. Unescorted missions had ~5-10% loss rates.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1hr ago
Chitose, Tokyo? Go see the Asakusa area, maybe see sumo at Ryogoku if you time it right.
Chitose, Hokkaido? No idea, never been up there.
Hokkaido, I believe. It was a long shot though, thanks anyway!
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