> Full blown math and science should be required for everyone.
I don't know the details of why quantum mechanics is inconsistent with general relativity. As I use neither in my day-to-day-life, or EVER directly, it bugs me only a little bit, and only normatively--I certainly don't expect everyone to know the answer. I would be happy with a world where it simply bugged everyone only a little bit, because people should love to learn and to understand the universe. But particular learning and knowledge should not be required in any field beyond a certain point, and the question is where that threshold should lie for math.
The more advanced the material we expect someone to have a broad spectrum knowledge of, the more resourced we are committing to generalist education at the expense of many other things.
For most people, it would be more useful to teach either statistics or financial math than calculus. We teach calculus because it's next in math or engineering education. But for ANY of the social sciences and several of the sciences statistics is more useful, and for life financial math is more useful.
However, with respect, your argument would be more effective if you didn't generalize to Americans. A lot of Americans DO value education and the fact that many of them are on slashdot reflects it.
(The extent to which they value schooling is another matter entirely.)
You don't reallly need precalc to do calc, but it may make it a tiny bit easier at the beginning. At my school, it was relatively challenging for the age group, so I assume it weeded some people out. (Probably harder than calculus, as it was taught a little more rigorously and you didn't have to worry as much about people not intuitively grasping it). It was mostly learning formulas for lots of different functions -- how do you do at coordinates x, length l, and width w, things like that. Plus a few unusual concepts like synthetic division of polynomials, etc...
You could also just build the cost of insurance into the cost of the car, which is what will happen if the auto manufacturer is liable. It's not like plaintiffs' lawyers aren't taking on insurance company lawyers now.
> Wikipedia still calls the USA a Democracy instead of a Tyranny. As far as I'm concerned, this is bias.
I am offended, as someone who cares about the Bill of Rights. I can still sue the government for violating my rights, and there are still rights they are required under law to give me. We also have checks and balances. They are not nearly as powerful as they should be, but they are not nothing. Ultimately, we do not have a tyranny because in the extreme, we can always vote someone out of office. Obama could not order all the Muslims rounded up tomorrow and thrown into gas chambers.
Also, Wikipedia has plenty of controversy and presentation of opposing viewpoints. There's not a lot that's extremely contrary to the norm--Chomsky-esque critiques, for example, which are fascinating because they are internally consistent but massively different than how everyone else views the world. But I would be very surprised if critiques of US policy weren't there.
a non credentialed individual can have just as much credibility and experience and knowledge as someone with an institutional education... And yet they usually don't.
They usually do, but in a subtly different field. A professional may be stupider or smarter than an academic, and may have more or less credibility, experience, and knowledge. The difference tends to be in exactly what they are studying, how they are studying it, etc...
A lawyer may have more knowledge of certain areas than a law professor; a law professor may have more knowledge of other areas. The same is true for a Comp Sci prof v. an employed CS Engineer. Factors in the specific comparison tend to dwarf broad institutional heuristics for determining credibility. I know people with an English Ph.D. who know a LOT more than I do about Proust or Shakespeare or Paradise Lost. But I also know people with an English Ph.D. who know a lot less and can't make it through the Hobbit. I bet they know at least a little more than me about whatever their dissertation topic was, though.
1) You will get more flies with honey. Ad hominem attacks tend to be poor and reflect a weakness in the underlying argument, but even when they don't they make you less likely to convince people who don't agree with you.
2) I disagree. A chart is not per se greater than anecdotal evidence. A chart would be better than anecdotal evidence if it contained more data points on exactly the same question. Otherwise, there is judgment or reason involved. See http://borkweb.com/story/global-warming-causes-pirate-population-decrease for example. A chart is simply different data. Whether that data is more or less reliable than anecdotes or reasoning depends on how you use the chart and what you are trying to determine, and it may be that they speak to different things.
For example, you could chart the information content of advertisements over the last seventy years and you would see that it decreased substantially over time. One could conclude that people care less about information today than they did then. But in reality, the decrease in information content is at least in significant part due to legal regulations on advertising making it much safer to advertise things without giving information about them. So people are careful to avoid stating anything positive and depend on non-informational content, which they have also gotten better at utilizing such content in advertisement.
Similarly, a chart showing that people are educated for more years does not necessarily mean that people are more intelligent or better-educated.
So your submarine is on fire, burning up your oxygen, underwater, while you're, say, launching nuclear missiles and being pursued by enemy subs, and your solution is to electrify it?
And some people forget, and they change things. The whole "new math" craze, for example. Or the language prescriptivist grammarians (and their modern analogues) have created to denote English terms in a way which makes it harder to learn. Students used to learn English fairly well by more reading and by learning latin, which helped them get the English grammar right. (Spanish serves much the same function, although probably a little less so because the language is simpler).
My Grandpa could do trig better than most engineers or surveyors. But I think the one-room schoolhouse was still around where my grandmother grew up around then. The country is a lot more populated today than it was in the 1930s... it's hard to draw a trend from that.
You are speculating too. You are picking a chart and speculating that all other variables remain constant. Society changes.
My speculation is not vague, and I didn't say intelligent women no longer become teachers. I said a huge percentage of intelligent women go into other jobs, jobs that are more profitable and were closed to them years ago. Teaching was open to them at that point. Ergo many intelligent women who would have been teachers had they been born forty or fifty years ago are not teachers today. I have mostly anecdotal evidence of deterioration in the quality of education, because an analysis thereof isn't my field--look up the reading at risk report for one concerning trend, although not directly on point. (Just the first hard numbers that come to mind for concerning numbers in the field of education.)
All of my aunts and uncles learned much of the western canon, phenomenal European history, and lots of US history in the 70s in public school. A few years back I was in the rare documents section of one of the foremost colleges in North America, and two kids out of maybe thirty had any idea what the Concord Hymn was. They didn't even offer European history in my high school, and the New York State Global Studies curriculum is a six month course stretched out to cover two years. The New York City Public school system was the wonder of the world around 1900. Today I know a teacher who had to pull a kid off a female teacher's leg because the kid was humping it, and the kids beat up cops in front of the school.
You're assuming the quality of education remained the same over that time. It didn't. More years of education doesn't mean better education if people, on average, are reading less, using their heads less, and have worse teachers. People certainly have worse teachers today--which is not to say they don't have some phenomenal teachers. But forty and fifty years ago, teaching was one of the only good jobs an intelligent woman could get. You had a huge percentage of the brightest women in the country going into teaching. Today we don't. It makes for a more egalitarian society, but also one that isn't taught as well.
Slightly O/T, but in a related vein, is there a good political blog for intelligent people where stuff like this should be posted? At least something with some kind of good moderation system and user base, ideally that isn't too slanted?
> Don't CS grads have to write a compiler to get their degree like they did in the good old days? That's really all anyone needs.
Most. Useless. Class. Ever. Learned *nothing*. It was just "implement X. Here is the design of X. You must implement it this way."
It would have been much better if we had at least just been told "Implement X" and had to figure out how. As it is, the only thing we were able to do to make it slightly more tolerable was talking the professor into letting us do it in C++ instead of Java.
The class where we learned assembly and machine design and microcode was better. So was the VLSI class. Compilers not helpful.
... a country where the government actually works for the people most of the time, instead of a fascist country like the USA where all the government cares about is keeping their corporate benefactors happy... Obviously, Canada doesn't have such problems,
Hahahaha. Canada has lots of major problems. Maybe the MPs aren't all about fundraising like they are down here--I don't know that part of the government well enough up there. But government scandal is pretty common in Canada, government inefficiency is the rule by far. Like bilingualism as a requirement for government advancement regardless of whether it impacts your ability to do your job. I know someone who works maybe four days a week, three every other week, and it counts as a full time government job. Which is paid for by ridiculously high taxes. And while they are much better at public health, they are much worse at hard healthcare--it can take forever to see a specialist, and chances are by then it's too late to remove the cancer even if they're good enough to do it. They do have some good hospitals, but they're much rarer than they are down here.
Good point.:) (Assuming it is a fine despite being a civil case.) Mea culpa, I haven't actually looked at it in a while, and the cruel and unusual punishment section is the only part I ever hear discussed, usually in the context of supermax prisons or life without parole for juveniles.
...making the absurd assumption that everyone who hosts a song on a P2P network is somehow costing them...
No. Damages are not awarded based on what it *costs* the RIAA and media companies. This isn't a contract case (which would be closer to that model). This is based on a statutory damage award, where the statutory damages are hugely inflated. The theoretical reason they are inflated is to discourage people from pirating, and to make it worthwhile to enforce copyrights. Obviously those rationales don't apply when you're dealing with limewire to the extent they do when dealing with an individual defendant--as a result, the statute is ridiculous in this case. Unfortunately, there isn't a constitutional provision that laws have to make sense. It would be an interesting argument that money damages this high constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" of a corporation, but almost certainly wouldn't actually get you anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
> Stopping the Democrats from destroying this nation from the inside-out *IS* being productive.
Democrats say the same thing about Republicans. The virtue of divided government. :)
> Full blown math and science should be required for everyone.
I don't know the details of why quantum mechanics is inconsistent with general relativity. As I use neither in my day-to-day-life, or EVER directly, it bugs me only a little bit, and only normatively--I certainly don't expect everyone to know the answer. I would be happy with a world where it simply bugged everyone only a little bit, because people should love to learn and to understand the universe. But particular learning and knowledge should not be required in any field beyond a certain point, and the question is where that threshold should lie for math.
The more advanced the material we expect someone to have a broad spectrum knowledge of, the more resourced we are committing to generalist education at the expense of many other things.
For most people, it would be more useful to teach either statistics or financial math than calculus. We teach calculus because it's next in math or engineering education. But for ANY of the social sciences and several of the sciences statistics is more useful, and for life financial math is more useful.
I agree regarding semesters and math courses.
However, with respect, your argument would be more effective if you didn't generalize to Americans. A lot of Americans DO value education and the fact that many of them are on slashdot reflects it.
(The extent to which they value schooling is another matter entirely.)
You don't reallly need precalc to do calc, but it may make it a tiny bit easier at the beginning. At my school, it was relatively challenging for the age group, so I assume it weeded some people out. (Probably harder than calculus, as it was taught a little more rigorously and you didn't have to worry as much about people not intuitively grasping it). It was mostly learning formulas for lots of different functions -- how do you do at coordinates x, length l, and width w, things like that. Plus a few unusual concepts like synthetic division of polynomials, etc...
You could also just build the cost of insurance into the cost of the car, which is what will happen if the auto manufacturer is liable. It's not like plaintiffs' lawyers aren't taking on insurance company lawyers now.
>> Give me three coconuts, a piece of string, MacGyver, and your bank account numbers.
> That won't work what you really need are two palladium plates...
Silly. I never said what the coconuts were made of.
A DiY neutron beam? Sure. Give me three coconuts, a piece of string, MacGyver, and your bank account numbers.
And OMG Ponies. Please, for the love of God.
PS - Act now and I'll sell you the Brooklyn bridge at a 12% discount.
> Wikipedia still calls the USA a Democracy instead of a Tyranny. As far as I'm concerned, this is bias.
I am offended, as someone who cares about the Bill of Rights. I can still sue the government for violating my rights, and there are still rights they are required under law to give me. We also have checks and balances. They are not nearly as powerful as they should be, but they are not nothing. Ultimately, we do not have a tyranny because in the extreme, we can always vote someone out of office. Obama could not order all the Muslims rounded up tomorrow and thrown into gas chambers.
Also, Wikipedia has plenty of controversy and presentation of opposing viewpoints. There's not a lot that's extremely contrary to the norm--Chomsky-esque critiques, for example, which are fascinating because they are internally consistent but massively different than how everyone else views the world. But I would be very surprised if critiques of US policy weren't there.
a non credentialed individual can have just as much credibility and experience and knowledge as someone with an institutional education... And yet they usually don't.
They usually do, but in a subtly different field. A professional may be stupider or smarter than an academic, and may have more or less credibility, experience, and knowledge. The difference tends to be in exactly what they are studying, how they are studying it, etc...
A lawyer may have more knowledge of certain areas than a law professor; a law professor may have more knowledge of other areas. The same is true for a Comp Sci prof v. an employed CS Engineer. Factors in the specific comparison tend to dwarf broad institutional heuristics for determining credibility. I know people with an English Ph.D. who know a LOT more than I do about Proust or Shakespeare or Paradise Lost. But I also know people with an English Ph.D. who know a lot less and can't make it through the Hobbit. I bet they know at least a little more than me about whatever their dissertation topic was, though.
1) You will get more flies with honey. Ad hominem attacks tend to be poor and reflect a weakness in the underlying argument, but even when they don't they make you less likely to convince people who don't agree with you.
2) I disagree. A chart is not per se greater than anecdotal evidence. A chart would be better than anecdotal evidence if it contained more data points on exactly the same question. Otherwise, there is judgment or reason involved. See http://borkweb.com/story/global-warming-causes-pirate-population-decrease for example. A chart is simply different data. Whether that data is more or less reliable than anecdotes or reasoning depends on how you use the chart and what you are trying to determine, and it may be that they speak to different things.
For example, you could chart the information content of advertisements over the last seventy years and you would see that it decreased substantially over time. One could conclude that people care less about information today than they did then. But in reality, the decrease in information content is at least in significant part due to legal regulations on advertising making it much safer to advertise things without giving information about them. So people are careful to avoid stating anything positive and depend on non-informational content, which they have also gotten better at utilizing such content in advertisement.
Similarly, a chart showing that people are educated for more years does not necessarily mean that people are more intelligent or better-educated.
So your submarine is on fire, burning up your oxygen, underwater, while you're, say, launching nuclear missiles and being pursued by enemy subs, and your solution is to electrify it?
Awesome. All your base...
And some people forget, and they change things. The whole "new math" craze, for example. Or the language prescriptivist grammarians (and their modern analogues) have created to denote English terms in a way which makes it harder to learn. Students used to learn English fairly well by more reading and by learning latin, which helped them get the English grammar right. (Spanish serves much the same function, although probably a little less so because the language is simpler).
My Grandpa could do trig better than most engineers or surveyors. But I think the one-room schoolhouse was still around where my grandmother grew up around then. The country is a lot more populated today than it was in the 1930s... it's hard to draw a trend from that.
You are speculating too. You are picking a chart and speculating that all other variables remain constant. Society changes.
My speculation is not vague, and I didn't say intelligent women no longer become teachers. I said a huge percentage of intelligent women go into other jobs, jobs that are more profitable and were closed to them years ago. Teaching was open to them at that point. Ergo many intelligent women who would have been teachers had they been born forty or fifty years ago are not teachers today. I have mostly anecdotal evidence of deterioration in the quality of education, because an analysis thereof isn't my field--look up the reading at risk report for one concerning trend, although not directly on point. (Just the first hard numbers that come to mind for concerning numbers in the field of education.)
All of my aunts and uncles learned much of the western canon, phenomenal European history, and lots of US history in the 70s in public school. A few years back I was in the rare documents section of one of the foremost colleges in North America, and two kids out of maybe thirty had any idea what the Concord Hymn was. They didn't even offer European history in my high school, and the New York State Global Studies curriculum is a six month course stretched out to cover two years. The New York City Public school system was the wonder of the world around 1900. Today I know a teacher who had to pull a kid off a female teacher's leg because the kid was humping it, and the kids beat up cops in front of the school.
You're assuming the quality of education remained the same over that time. It didn't. More years of education doesn't mean better education if people, on average, are reading less, using their heads less, and have worse teachers. People certainly have worse teachers today--which is not to say they don't have some phenomenal teachers. But forty and fifty years ago, teaching was one of the only good jobs an intelligent woman could get. You had a huge percentage of the brightest women in the country going into teaching. Today we don't. It makes for a more egalitarian society, but also one that isn't taught as well.
You make it sound as if re-election is a foregone conclusion....
Reelection rates are in the high nineties percentage-wise:
http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php
Slightly O/T, but in a related vein, is there a good political blog for intelligent people where stuff like this should be posted? At least something with some kind of good moderation system and user base, ideally that isn't too slanted?
Hire retired tax evaders, maybe. Ones who are looking for work next year in tax evasion should not be hired to write the tax code this year.
Good to know.
> Don't CS grads have to write a compiler to get their degree like they did in the good old days? That's really all anyone needs.
Most. Useless. Class. Ever. Learned *nothing*. It was just "implement X. Here is the design of X. You must implement it this way."
It would have been much better if we had at least just been told "Implement X" and had to figure out how. As it is, the only thing we were able to do to make it slightly more tolerable was talking the professor into letting us do it in C++ instead of Java.
The class where we learned assembly and machine design and microcode was better. So was the VLSI class. Compilers not helpful.
... a country where the government actually works for the people most of the time, instead of a fascist country like the USA where all the government cares about is keeping their corporate benefactors happy... Obviously, Canada doesn't have such problems,
Hahahaha. Canada has lots of major problems. Maybe the MPs aren't all about fundraising like they are down here--I don't know that part of the government well enough up there. But government scandal is pretty common in Canada, government inefficiency is the rule by far. Like bilingualism as a requirement for government advancement regardless of whether it impacts your ability to do your job. I know someone who works maybe four days a week, three every other week, and it counts as a full time government job. Which is paid for by ridiculously high taxes. And while they are much better at public health, they are much worse at hard healthcare--it can take forever to see a specialist, and chances are by then it's too late to remove the cancer even if they're good enough to do it. They do have some good hospitals, but they're much rarer than they are down here.
Good point. :) (Assuming it is a fine despite being a civil case.) Mea culpa, I haven't actually looked at it in a while, and the cruel and unusual punishment section is the only part I ever hear discussed, usually in the context of supermax prisons or life without parole for juveniles.
...making the absurd assumption that everyone who hosts a song on a P2P network is somehow costing them ...
No. Damages are not awarded based on what it *costs* the RIAA and media companies. This isn't a contract case (which would be closer to that model). This is based on a statutory damage award, where the statutory damages are hugely inflated. The theoretical reason they are inflated is to discourage people from pirating, and to make it worthwhile to enforce copyrights. Obviously those rationales don't apply when you're dealing with limewire to the extent they do when dealing with an individual defendant--as a result, the statute is ridiculous in this case. Unfortunately, there isn't a constitutional provision that laws have to make sense. It would be an interesting argument that money damages this high constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" of a corporation, but almost certainly wouldn't actually get you anywhere.