I do agree with this. I've come to think that not teaching basic logic at an early age has put a lot of our education on a very sinking-sands basis.
Historical note: In medieval universities, logic was part of the "first three" most basic subjects (taught around age 14-15), otherwise known as the "trivium", from which we get our word "trivial". And yet for modern students, this trivial subject is never directly encountered, just assumed.
"Would he be better at his job if he knew how to integrate?"
Does he really need a college degree at all to do his job? (For many people I've known running businesses similar to your relatives, the answer would likewise be "no".)
Is college education essentially about getting a job?
Wow, someone has not been paying attention. I mean: I donated and phone-banked for Obama in 2008. But his record on Constitutional issues is uniformly abysmal. I am now convinced that he has no moral principles at all.
(a) Our demonstrations and protests are cracked down on pretty fiercely here -- http://www.businessinsider.com/occupy-report-nypd-violated-rights-of-protestors-2012-7 (b) Our simple-majority voting and non-parliamentary system basically ensures that just two parties can nominate a candidate (see Duverger's Law), and both of them are equally moral-free spineless shits, so we're just structurally completely screwed. (c) What you're seeing is the slow decline of an imperial republic, where the citizens are fundamentally decadent and pain-averse. I don't think revolution ever comes from the center of the empire, it's always forced from without, isn't it?
I don't believe that. This kind of stuff is far, far too common on the part of U.S. prosecutors to wave it off as an anomaly. That's wishful thinking.
More generally, the fact that U.S. prosecutors are entirely immune from charges for malfeasance (not from any law, but by fiat from courts run by ex-prosecutors), means that prosecutors have nothing but incentive to accelerate their career by running roughshod over anyone's rights with impunity. Immunity for prosecutors is definitely a structural flaw of our government in its entirety.
"As for the 'precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere nitpicking'? Maybe it is, really?... The minority who find the theory itself fascinating and want to learn more math for the sake of learning it are the ones who will probably move beyond whatever Khan Academy teaches, and consult other sources. If you know enough math to get correct answers to the problem you encounter as part of your daily life or job, then that's likely ALL the math you really need to know."
"Precise explanations" are not the same as "theory itself". Personally, I consider properly understanding the vocabulary of math -- being able to read and write -- as more fundamental than numerical calculations. When disagreements arise (perhaps on what practical action to take based on calculations), then the conversation always boils down to who doesn't recall what particular terms mean.
An example from my community-college statistics class: Everyone is happy to calculate a probability, P = f/N. But then I ask a question about what probability is telling you: If an event has a 40% chance of occurring, and we run a thousand experiments, roughly how many times will we expect the event to occur? Usually only about half the class will get that correct (even after practice with similar problems): Common answers are routinely "zero", "forty", and "one thousand". I will ask this multiple times over a semester; students dislike and resist and are uncomfortable with actually using the probability that they calculate (yes, it seems truly ludicrous to me since I discovered it). But without this skill, they have no hope of actually understanding a scientific article with confidence intervals or P-value statements, etc.
In a professional's life, does one read more science papers, or write them? Clearly the former, so I think that understanding what the hell someone else reporting is even more critical than making your own calculations. (I may be biased by my particular subject.)
"Look, I don't even think most teachers are going to disagree with this - the public school system doesn't allow for adjustment and experimentation - it just can't."
As a community college teacher (somewhat informed of education issues -- I deal with the depressing product), I will disagree with that. A major problem with American education is too much adjustment and experimentation -- education PhDs and textbook publishers are incentivized to "churn" their offerings regularly, and produce new pedagogies and new textbooks which are incompatible with the old ones (generating new sales). This, regardless of whether they're scientifically established to improve results or not (preferably above the level of placebo/pygmalion effect from self-interested researchers).
One thing that I really like about my own job is being able to interact with students and get statistics on what helps and what doesn't, and refine my presentations over and over again every semester. But elsewhere I see big, sweeping, politically-charged changes every few years that leaves teachers and the system constantly at sea.
"Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong. Nerds care about choice, and nerds are such a tiny minority of people that nobody else much cares what the hell they think."
I think this guy just sold me my first Android phone. Also:
"If you want a platform to be commercially viable for third-party software developers, you have to lock it down."
Yeah, because no one ever could figure out a way to make money selling Windows software.
"For years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home. 3D printing, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology are all expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape over the next several years."
So now we can have manufacturing without jobs. Sweet! (But thanks for the disingenuous reference to "jobs" in the first sentence to try and trick people into thinking that this development provides a solution for that.)
Frankly, the only answer to advancing intellectual property and automation is socialism.
Joe, Bob, and Frank should make the decision on whether their interests align (i.e. to unionize and bargain collectively), not you or I with abstract arguments. Historical and present-day evidence shows that unionization increases wages, benefits, and working conditions across the board. "United we stand, divided we fall" and all that.
"...watching another human demonstrate the information is much often a faster and deeper way to communicate the same concepts."
Well, I just flat-out disagree. I've tried to go through at least two online video courses, and for me video is insanely slow and frustrating. I can't efficiently see where to skip ahead when someone is blathering on about obvious things (to me), and I can't search for key words or definitions. This is purely personal opinion, but I am truly boggled at the idea that anyone finds video better than a book.
Counterargument: Why bother taking that risk for a custom one-off project for a single client? If you've already got the development contract, then there seems to be little upside in doing something unexpectedly revolutionary (and as you say, "it's a riskier proposition").
Now, if you're making a product for mass-market consumers, who will make a purchase decision at a time much later than design/development -- like a Ford automobile, or Google or Facebook or entertainment media -- then that's a different story.
Some initial points of agreement: (1) Americans take foreign shows and remake them in a way that violates the whole point. (2) American producers are obsessed with dumb-ass human interest stories (Olympics unwatchable for me) (3) Reality shows are usually their own perfect "essence" in their first season, and interesting as participants try to learn the rules on the fly; and then shows go downhill, violating their essence with the need to vary challenges/ surprise/ shake things up in later seasons.
Compare to the summer show Wipeout, which has some similarities but is American-specific (I think). I adored it in the first season; after that, borderline unwatchable. The problem here is that in the first season, the challenges were at least conceivably doable; if 24 people ran through them and mostly got demolished, maybe 1 or 2 very athletic people per show would dash through them successfully, and it was exciting and awesome to watch ("sasuke", I guess you say). I would applaud. There was a nice narrator arc every episode starting out snarky, and then near the end complimenting and praising the finalists.
The problem is in the second season they started fetishisizing the failures, and the challenges were made so hard as to be impossible. I don't think in the last 2-3 seasons anyone has successfully made it through the first round of the show. There's no drama to it, it's just a dumb-ass repetitive series of people getting dunked. I don't mind competition, but there has to be some chance of something different happening or it's repetitive boring bullshit.
"On that note, isn't that the American spirit? That everyone has an equal opportunity to rise to the top, proportional to your efforts, and there is no zero-sum game?"
How could you possibly think such a thing? America is fundamentally about classical-mercantile business expansion and profiteering/exploitation. "The business of America is business", etc. It's one in which inequality between winners and losers expands over time. It's a culture based on the lottery.
"Think about that when you're standing next to the coughing homeless person at the train station or one of your kids gets diagnosed with antibiotic resistant TB."
(1) "Ruled exactly" is not the same thing as ruled "in essence". They did not actually rule that Filburn had to buy wheat from anyone; they ruled that he couldn't grow extra wheat, which happened to have some other consequences. (IMO, IAMNAL)
(2) Even if it was overturned, Congress could come back the next day with a tax-based penalty for the same thing, and Roberts would be fine with that. That's probably how a lot of regulation will run in the next century, possibly.
3. Now that's the $10 trillion question if anyone can answer it. I think that a lot of it is attributable to our Chicago school of economics (Milton Friedman, et. al.) which provided the rhetoric for a 40-year concerted propaganda effort by right-wing corporatists. See: Washington Consensus, criticisms, etc. But of course the general nature of a classically-liberal, commerce-driven nation predates that.
"SCOTUS accepted the government's theory that it was a tax... SCOTUS rejected the first claim (proving that they do see limits to the commerce clause sometimes), and accepted the second claim."
That's not true. The count is: - 4 found it unconstitutional - 4 found it a legitimate use of the commerce clause - 1 found it to be a legitimate taxation.
But one, the majority accepted the first claim and rejected the second.
Slashdot Mirror
I do agree with this. I've come to think that not teaching basic logic at an early age has put a lot of our education on a very sinking-sands basis.
Historical note: In medieval universities, logic was part of the "first three" most basic subjects (taught around age 14-15), otherwise known as the "trivium", from which we get our word "trivial". And yet for modern students, this trivial subject is never directly encountered, just assumed.
That's a really good point. Thanks for posting it. (Ties into my belief that not teaching logic circa age 14 is a great loss.)
"Would he be better at his job if he knew how to integrate?"
Does he really need a college degree at all to do his job? (For many people I've known running businesses similar to your relatives, the answer would likewise be "no".)
Is college education essentially about getting a job?
Wow, someone has not been paying attention. I mean: I donated and phone-banked for Obama in 2008. But his record on Constitutional issues is uniformly abysmal. I am now convinced that he has no moral principles at all.
(a) Our demonstrations and protests are cracked down on pretty fiercely here -- http://www.businessinsider.com/occupy-report-nypd-violated-rights-of-protestors-2012-7
(b) Our simple-majority voting and non-parliamentary system basically ensures that just two parties can nominate a candidate (see Duverger's Law), and both of them are equally moral-free spineless shits, so we're just structurally completely screwed.
(c) What you're seeing is the slow decline of an imperial republic, where the citizens are fundamentally decadent and pain-averse. I don't think revolution ever comes from the center of the empire, it's always forced from without, isn't it?
I don't believe that. This kind of stuff is far, far too common on the part of U.S. prosecutors to wave it off as an anomaly. That's wishful thinking.
More generally, the fact that U.S. prosecutors are entirely immune from charges for malfeasance (not from any law, but by fiat from courts run by ex-prosecutors), means that prosecutors have nothing but incentive to accelerate their career by running roughshod over anyone's rights with impunity. Immunity for prosecutors is definitely a structural flaw of our government in its entirety.
"As for the 'precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere nitpicking'? Maybe it is, really?... The minority who find the theory itself fascinating and want to learn more math for the sake of learning it are the ones who will probably move beyond whatever Khan Academy teaches, and consult other sources. If you know enough math to get correct answers to the problem you encounter as part of your daily life or job, then that's likely ALL the math you really need to know."
"Precise explanations" are not the same as "theory itself". Personally, I consider properly understanding the vocabulary of math -- being able to read and write -- as more fundamental than numerical calculations. When disagreements arise (perhaps on what practical action to take based on calculations), then the conversation always boils down to who doesn't recall what particular terms mean.
An example from my community-college statistics class: Everyone is happy to calculate a probability, P = f/N. But then I ask a question about what probability is telling you: If an event has a 40% chance of occurring, and we run a thousand experiments, roughly how many times will we expect the event to occur? Usually only about half the class will get that correct (even after practice with similar problems): Common answers are routinely "zero", "forty", and "one thousand". I will ask this multiple times over a semester; students dislike and resist and are uncomfortable with actually using the probability that they calculate (yes, it seems truly ludicrous to me since I discovered it). But without this skill, they have no hope of actually understanding a scientific article with confidence intervals or P-value statements, etc.
In a professional's life, does one read more science papers, or write them? Clearly the former, so I think that understanding what the hell someone else reporting is even more critical than making your own calculations. (I may be biased by my particular subject.)
"Look, I don't even think most teachers are going to disagree with this - the public school system doesn't allow for adjustment and experimentation - it just can't."
As a community college teacher (somewhat informed of education issues -- I deal with the depressing product), I will disagree with that. A major problem with American education is too much adjustment and experimentation -- education PhDs and textbook publishers are incentivized to "churn" their offerings regularly, and produce new pedagogies and new textbooks which are incompatible with the old ones (generating new sales). This, regardless of whether they're scientifically established to improve results or not (preferably above the level of placebo/pygmalion effect from self-interested researchers).
One thing that I really like about my own job is being able to interact with students and get statistics on what helps and what doesn't, and refine my presentations over and over again every semester. But elsewhere I see big, sweeping, politically-charged changes every few years that leaves teachers and the system constantly at sea.
"Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong. Nerds care about choice, and nerds are such a tiny minority of people that nobody else much cares what the hell they think."
I think this guy just sold me my first Android phone. Also:
"If you want a platform to be commercially viable for third-party software developers, you have to lock it down."
Yeah, because no one ever could figure out a way to make money selling Windows software.
Personally, I completely agree. If that had any political traction in America then I would be more hopeful.
"People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines."
This dogma over the last two decades or so has led us right to the edge of record-setting long unemployment and poverty.
What if there are no paying jobs that can't be done by machines? Because current trends seem to point to this being the case.
"For years, the U.S. has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China because of the vastly cheaper labor pool. But now, several different technologies have ripened to the point where U.S. companies are bringing some operations back home. 3D printing, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology are all expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape over the next several years."
So now we can have manufacturing without jobs. Sweet! (But thanks for the disingenuous reference to "jobs" in the first sentence to try and trick people into thinking that this development provides a solution for that.)
Frankly, the only answer to advancing intellectual property and automation is socialism.
Joe, Bob, and Frank should make the decision on whether their interests align (i.e. to unionize and bargain collectively), not you or I with abstract arguments. Historical and present-day evidence shows that unionization increases wages, benefits, and working conditions across the board. "United we stand, divided we fall" and all that.
"...watching another human demonstrate the information is much often a faster and deeper way to communicate the same concepts."
Well, I just flat-out disagree. I've tried to go through at least two online video courses, and for me video is insanely slow and frustrating. I can't efficiently see where to skip ahead when someone is blathering on about obvious things (to me), and I can't search for key words or definitions. This is purely personal opinion, but I am truly boggled at the idea that anyone finds video better than a book.
"The Web was born at CERN in 1990, as a specific, visual protocol on the Internet, the global network of computers that began two decades earlier."
Also: a comma is not a semicolon.
Counterargument: Why bother taking that risk for a custom one-off project for a single client? If you've already got the development contract, then there seems to be little upside in doing something unexpectedly revolutionary (and as you say, "it's a riskier proposition").
Now, if you're making a product for mass-market consumers, who will make a purchase decision at a time much later than design/development -- like a Ford automobile, or Google or Facebook or entertainment media -- then that's a different story.
Thanks for the extra info!
Some initial points of agreement:
(1) Americans take foreign shows and remake them in a way that violates the whole point.
(2) American producers are obsessed with dumb-ass human interest stories (Olympics unwatchable for me)
(3) Reality shows are usually their own perfect "essence" in their first season, and interesting as participants try to learn the rules on the fly; and then shows go downhill, violating their essence with the need to vary challenges/ surprise/ shake things up in later seasons.
Compare to the summer show Wipeout, which has some similarities but is American-specific (I think). I adored it in the first season; after that, borderline unwatchable. The problem here is that in the first season, the challenges were at least conceivably doable; if 24 people ran through them and mostly got demolished, maybe 1 or 2 very athletic people per show would dash through them successfully, and it was exciting and awesome to watch ("sasuke", I guess you say). I would applaud. There was a nice narrator arc every episode starting out snarky, and then near the end complimenting and praising the finalists.
The problem is in the second season they started fetishisizing the failures, and the challenges were made so hard as to be impossible. I don't think in the last 2-3 seasons anyone has successfully made it through the first round of the show. There's no drama to it, it's just a dumb-ass repetitive series of people getting dunked. I don't mind competition, but there has to be some chance of something different happening or it's repetitive boring bullshit.
"On that note, isn't that the American spirit? That everyone has an equal opportunity to rise to the top, proportional to your efforts, and there is no zero-sum game?"
How could you possibly think such a thing? America is fundamentally about classical-mercantile business expansion and profiteering/exploitation. "The business of America is business", etc. It's one in which inequality between winners and losers expands over time. It's a culture based on the lottery.
"Think about that when you're standing next to the coughing homeless person at the train station or one of your kids gets diagnosed with antibiotic resistant TB."
Conveniently, Republicans hate trains.
"Well, American educational system in action. Someone on one side of country farted, half country in another are affraid to sleep."
Great example! (no articles; missing preposition; "affraid").
"Not going to happen. Not on our watch."
LOL. This piece of history (Ballmer's "watch") has already been written.
I don't see a lot of hope for change there.
(1) "Ruled exactly" is not the same thing as ruled "in essence". They did not actually rule that Filburn had to buy wheat from anyone; they ruled that he couldn't grow extra wheat, which happened to have some other consequences. (IMO, IAMNAL)
(2) Even if it was overturned, Congress could come back the next day with a tax-based penalty for the same thing, and Roberts would be fine with that. That's probably how a lot of regulation will run in the next century, possibly.
1. Yes, absolutely.
2. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmo
3. Now that's the $10 trillion question if anyone can answer it. I think that a lot of it is attributable to our Chicago school of economics (Milton Friedman, et. al.) which provided the rhetoric for a 40-year concerted propaganda effort by right-wing corporatists. See: Washington Consensus, criticisms, etc. But of course the general nature of a classically-liberal, commerce-driven nation predates that.
"SCOTUS accepted the government's theory that it was a tax... SCOTUS rejected the first claim (proving that they do see limits to the commerce clause sometimes), and accepted the second claim."
That's not true. The count is:
- 4 found it unconstitutional
- 4 found it a legitimate use of the commerce clause
- 1 found it to be a legitimate taxation.
But one, the majority accepted the first claim and rejected the second.