I haven't even heard of a study that says there is a significant wage gap for at least a decade. When accounting for career, hours worked, experience, etc. the worst I have heard is a 3% wage gap. When you factor in that women are known to negotiate less for salary the gap probably disappears completely.
The focus now needs to be on why women don't enter as many high paying fields (and whether that is even a problem at all). Focusing on the wage gap is pretty silly now.
I agree, but this doesn't mean they need a full bachelors degree. I know you didn't say that specifically, but it kind of sounds like you are implying it. A class for each of the following topics would create a very employable web developer IMHO:
Intro to programming - teaching the very basics in a language like Python Data structures and algorithms - one class can give a good enough to give an intro to data structures, sorting algorithms, etc. Intro to web development - teach HTML, CSS, and Javascript Advanced Javascript Intro to databases Design Fundamentals
I may be missing something, but just these 18 credit hours would train a hire-able student who knows enough fundamentals to allow their skills to grow throughout their career. The biggest problem is that the average student who is only looking for an associates degree is probably going to have trouble getting a job regardless of what they are taught. There are a number of life choices or other circumstances that led them down this path, and most of them will be looked down on by most employers.
Assuming that you see nothing wrong with comparing a Civic to a BMW 7-series purely on cost either, then your comparison is valid. Otherwise people might think that it was a wee bit skewed.
He said it was cheaper than a $30k car in the long run, not a BMW 7-series. I am sure the financial figures are more in Tesla's favor when compared to other luxury cars, but that wasn't what the post I was replying to was saying.
It only needs to recharge for 20 minutes. AND, in teh long run, the Total cost of ownership is way less than that "$30K" car. Difference is the cost basis is loaded up front. Look at what your monthly overall bills are for the life of your vehicle, including fuel and repairs, and you'll see that a Tesla is cheaper in the long run.
Well, considering repairs are usually more expensive for more expensive cars, I doubt that the Tesla saves you on anything but gas. And if driving 15k miles per year at 20 mpg while paying $4 per gallon, it would take 20 years to break even on your Tesla purchase. Considering you probably won't keep your Tesla for 20 years, I doubt it is cheaper in the long run.
Generally, older generations understood that we work to live.
The current generation seems to have it backwards. They live to work. So... they NEED a job that fulfills them. The problem is jobs don't do that. Working sucks. That's why someone is willing to pay you to do it!
The current generation doesn't have it backwards. It is called progress. It goes something like this:
1. Work to survive 2. Work to have a good life 3. Work for personal fulfillment
#3 is absolutely the most ideal situation, and it is hard to attain. But I cannot imagine a better way to spend your life.
Try SF some time. More squalor around the core downtown area than I have seen in any other american city.
I have only been to SF for conferences, but I have stayed after the conferences for vacations a couple times. I never felt there was that much squalor in the downtown area.
Are you including the tenderloin district as part of the "core downtown" of SF? Then I might be more inclined to agree with you, but that didn't seem like a core part of the city (just the poor area like the south side of Chicago).
If you have a family to support, stay put. You have a good, stable job. Your "boredom" is immaterial to providing for your family. In short, get over yourself. You are working for more than just yourself now.
If you don't have a family to support: Take it. Now's the time to make your mistakes. The worst thing that happens is that the company goes bust, you have some peanut butter and ramen days as you find another job. If it's just you, then it's no big deal, right?
I'm only in my early thirties, with my first child on the way, but I sure hope I never think like this. Parents don't suddenly become unimportant as soon as the kids arrive. I never let money be a primary factor in my career decisions before, and I don't plan on changing that once there are kids involved. You only have one life to live, and your career is a huge portion of that life. Unfulfilled parents can be far more damaging to children than lower middle class parents.
As long as this guy is able to meet the basic needs of his family, then he has every right to pursue a career that fulfills him. He isn't failing his family if he can only buy a $200k house instead of a $400k one because he listened to his passions instead of his bank account. And based on the types of jobs he is talking about, he is probably making very decent money at either job.
Now if the guy is living from paycheck to paycheck, with very little savings to speak of, and has a family, then I would agree he hasn't yet earned the right to pursue his dreams. But as long as he is managing his money well I see no reason why he can't make a decision based on his own desires instead of just the wants of his family.
As another poster already mentioned, you are confusing your problem domain with programming. Your argument is little different than someone saying programming requires a significant amount of accounting knowledge just because they work for Intuit.
Programming itself rarely includes more math than simple algebra. There are of course very specialized fields of software engineering that need quite a bit of math, such as data science or other research oriented fields. But at the risk of making up statistics, I doubt more than 5% of programmers use more than a 10th grade level of math in their entire career.
And regardless of your young and naive view of the software development industry, writing line of business software is rarely just a front end to a database. That may be true for many SMB projects, but things are much different at the enterprise level. I have done research in academia and have helped design global software systems used by millions of users in almost a dozen countries, and I can say the level of complexity can be just as high in either specialty. One field does require a lot more math though.
e are not talking about public schools (which is what we refer to when we speak of public schools) we are talking about colleges.
No need to be a jerk. We are talking about colleges here, so it is not a stretch to assume I was talking about public colleges. 72% of post-secondary students are attending public schools.
The price of public colleges is rising much faster than private schools, because private schools never obtained much money from the government. And private schools have another price pressure pushing the prices up: the scarcity of elite talent. Any field that attracts the best of the best has seen salaries and fees rise much faster than inflation (medicine, law, sports, higher ed, etc).
Who pays for the four to six years of the first crop of graduates?
Easy. Colleges would take out the loans instead. They would probably have to be initially subsidized by the government, but eventually colleges would obtain a form of credit rating that shows how lucrative their graduates are.
Who pays for the students who go to university and don't graduate?
The student. Colleges would probably charge by the credit hour completed. Someone who completed only 12 credit hours would pay 0.25%, but someone who completed 120 credit hours (and got a degree) would pay 2.5%.
What happens with perpetual students? You know, the people who have been in school for the last ten to twenty years and haven't received a degree. What happens with them?
College loans already have the same "problem". I didn't have to start paying them until after I graduated, so I could have just stayed in college forever. There are safeguards such as limiting the total amount you can get in Stafford loans, and we could put similar safeguards on new programs like this as well.
What is to stop someone from going to a university until they are one class shy of graduating, moving out of state or even out of the country, and then finishing their degree and never falling under the tax?
What stops someone from doing the same thing with student loans? I am sure if you are willing to be a fugitive for the rest of your life and live in a non-extradition country, you could avoid paying for college too.
I have to point out that this is program would remove all barrier to college entry.
I don't see how it removes many barriers of entry. It just shifts students from college loan payments to progressive taxes.
If anything it may add barriers of entry, because some colleges may be more restrictive if they think prospective students will not get good jobs after graduation. But hopefully that can be solved by higher tax rate agreements for those students, similar to how people with bad credit ratings get loans.
If there is no cost to start education, and not finish it, then there will be millions of people who do so.
This is easily solved by charging students per semester taken instead of per degree attained. If you only finish 1 semester you might only pay 0.25%, but if you finish eight semesters and get a degree you pay 2%.
Also the STEM, medical and business students will end up subsidizing the fine art, journalism and french medieval poetry students and their professors. This already happens to a degree.
The proposed change would improve this dramatically. Colleges now make money on anyone they can admit, so they have no incentive to limit the number of liberal arts students they can attract. But once they only make money on successful students, they will have a strong incentive to produce only successful students. Or they could charge higher tax rates to students in lower paying majors or who had poor high school grades / SAT scores / etc.
This is a wonderful way to let market forces improve our schools with very little outside effort. Once a student sees they are paying 10% tax to go into journalism but a 2% tax to go into mechanical engineering, they may start making some better decisions. It still has the flaw of expecting students to think about the future, but it takes away some of the uncertainty of exactly what a fine arts degree is costing them in future opportunity.
The reason the cost is so high is that the government guarantees student loans.
Not true at all. We have cut funding for public schools by over 50% and then wonder why tuition has skyrocketed. Even worse we blame rising prices on efforts to make college more affordable.
Tuition should tail the inflation rate or the median income.
Tuition will rarely follow the inflation rate since it is an industry that requires employees that have an above-median education level. Every long established occupation that relies on highly educated labor has had fees rise greater than inflation over the past 30 years. Young fields like software development don't always follow this trend but still often do.
In addition to this, public schools have had their public funding cut over the past few decades. I believe it has dropped by just over 50% in the recent decades, but I don't have time to find citations. If true, tuition could have almost doubled (adjusted for inflation) over the past 30 years and it wouldn't be because of colleges at all.
If we accept that taxation is they way to fund education, the smart move is to do it through general taxation. Since everyone benefits from education, everyone pays a share.
By having colleges only gather funds from existing graduates, they have an actual incentive to provide a real education to their students. If a college is crappy then their students will earn below average wages and the college will have their funding reduced. This is a very good thing. It would encourage colleges to spend more efforts on job placement and on career development as well. I could even imagine a world where colleges employ recruiters to help former graduates find higher paying jobs.
On the flip side, it could make colleges much more selective over who they admit. Some would consider this a good thing, and some a bad. "Lower quality" students would likely be forced into more community college or trade school-like environments where less money is spent on a shorter education. It would be very similar to what happens in many European countries, but this time shaped by market forces.
You could also see students having a rating similar to a credit score that affects their taxation rate. Straight-A students may be accepted with a 2% tax while C-students would be accepted with a 10% tax. This would give good schools an incentive to spend an adequate amount of resources to actually help poor students earn a good living so they can collect huge taxes on these riskier students. I would hope for this scenario.
If "education" is about filling up brains with facts, we don't need teachers at all.
Children need role models and human teachers who look them in the eye and care about them as human beings.
It looks like we agree on almost everything, except perhaps the solution. I agree that the filling up of brains with facts and skills does not require as much teacher interaction as it does now. I also agree that teachers should be spending more time understanding students, motivating them, guiding them, and supporting them. Instead of just lecturing facts.
But my solution is to use more automated technology to impart facts so teachers can be freed to be more like personal coaches to the students. Why do we need 50,000 unique 5th grade math lectures on fractions each year, each taking up 50,000 man-hours per day to perform, when a few dozen lectures should handle many ranges of learning techniques and methods? I would love it if in 20 years teachers forgot that in the past teachers were actually expected to waste their time lecturing instead of having more human and personal interactions with their students.
To adapt your cereal example: Say your favorite sugar cereal has 100 different types of marshmallows in it. But you don't like some of them. So you pick out the 10% that you like the least. But wait, there are still some that aren't as good as others! Okay, take out some more. And more. You can eventually proceed to the point where your cereal no longer fulfills its original purpose (there isn't enough of it to fill you).
Yes, go ahead and adapt my example in any strange way you want and then use that strange example to somehow say that my original argument was strange. Why didn't you add some unicorns into your adaptation and then argue that unicorns aren't real so my example doesn't hold water?
I agree that he was using a form of the slippery slope fallacy. That is exactly what I was pointing out. I figured just saying it was a slipper slope fallacy wouldn't help at all since he pretty obviously thinks that using this tactic is useful and wouldn't take it as a criticism.
A one time firing of the worst teachers in a school is not stack ranking. It is acknowledgement of past failures in hiring and incentive policies and an attempt to solve that problem.
but the simple method of firing 10% of the worst teachers and reassigning their students to the rest does more to improve schools than anything else.
If such a simple method always worked then you could apply it recursively to improve results further. Clearly, many schools need more than 9 teachers therefore the reality must be more complex than you claim.
Just because a problem is complex doesn't mean that you have to throw out simple solutions. Many complex problems can be helped with simple solutions. Usually not 100% fixed, but certainly improved. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good.
If eating 10% of a box of cereal with make me full and content
That's the thing though it won't. Not always. If you're already full, eating that won't work. If you're really hungry you'll need to repeat several times.
But I said that eating 10% of the box will make me full. I defined a theoretical situation where that is true. So I don't know what sense it makes to say that it wouldn't make me full.
You defined a hypothetical situation where removing the 10% worst teachers would improve schools. You then tried to say that if this was true, removing another 10% MUST also help improve schools (implying that if this isn't true, then removing the first 10% didn't really improve schools). My hypothetical situation was used only to show that repeatedly performing an action that solves a problem does not always continue to improve the situation.
If such a simple method always worked then you could apply it recursively to improve results further.
That is a very odd statement. If eating 10% of a box of cereal with make me full and content, doing that recursively will not improve results. It will make me stuffed and very uncomfortable.
However, astrology is more commonly believed on the left than on the right end of the political spectrum as measured by self-identified conservatives or liberals.
Irrational people are not monopolized by either political party. Irrational liberals are more likely to believe in astrology, and irrational conservatives are more likely to believe in the flying spaghetti monster (or whatever they call their favorite deity).
This would be a reason to worry less if it were a single data point. But this sort of explanation doesn't help explain the apparent increase over time unless you think people are getting less careful about reading questions or using context recognition.
Others on this thread have mentioned that people may simply not be as familiar with astrology as they were in the past. If the percentage of 18-24 year old adults who even know what astrology is is dropping steadily, then the number of people who mistake astrology for astronomy would probably be steadily going up at a similar rate. If a survey was already focusing on scientific concepts, I could see myself confusing the terms. Although in the context of "Is astrology a science" I would probably notice the difference since why would anyone ask if astronomy is a science?
" Dyson also came up with a better hand-dryer and he's even topped it with one with the hand-dryer AT the faucet"
Ah , of course! *Obviously* anyone who comes up with a new dryer and connects it to the plumbing is the #1 go-to man to develop bleeding edge AI! Watch out all those teams at MIT and Harvard and elsewhere who've been working on this problem for decades - our Jim will have it sorted as soon as he's come up with his wall mounted potato peeler.
Are you kidding with this? He isn't using this money to pay himself to solve the problem alone. He is spending it on hiring those software engineers from MIT and Harvard and elsewhere who've been working on this problem for decades.
Anyone willing to spend money to fund this research is a good thing. Any time that money is spent by a company with a good track record of creating innovative products is even better.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't even heard of a study that says there is a significant wage gap for at least a decade. When accounting for career, hours worked, experience, etc. the worst I have heard is a 3% wage gap. When you factor in that women are known to negotiate less for salary the gap probably disappears completely.
The focus now needs to be on why women don't enter as many high paying fields (and whether that is even a problem at all). Focusing on the wage gap is pretty silly now.
I agree, but this doesn't mean they need a full bachelors degree. I know you didn't say that specifically, but it kind of sounds like you are implying it. A class for each of the following topics would create a very employable web developer IMHO:
Intro to programming - teaching the very basics in a language like Python
Data structures and algorithms - one class can give a good enough to give an intro to data structures, sorting algorithms, etc.
Intro to web development - teach HTML, CSS, and Javascript
Advanced Javascript
Intro to databases
Design Fundamentals
I may be missing something, but just these 18 credit hours would train a hire-able student who knows enough fundamentals to allow their skills to grow throughout their career. The biggest problem is that the average student who is only looking for an associates degree is probably going to have trouble getting a job regardless of what they are taught. There are a number of life choices or other circumstances that led them down this path, and most of them will be looked down on by most employers.
No, schools can lose accreditation for expanding.
They can, but rarely do. If University of Phoenix is still accredited then you probably have to actually kill your students to lose it.
Assuming that you see nothing wrong with comparing a Civic to a BMW 7-series purely on cost either, then your comparison is valid. Otherwise people might think that it was a wee bit skewed.
He said it was cheaper than a $30k car in the long run, not a BMW 7-series. I am sure the financial figures are more in Tesla's favor when compared to other luxury cars, but that wasn't what the post I was replying to was saying.
It only needs to recharge for 20 minutes. AND, in teh long run, the Total cost of ownership is way less than that "$30K" car. Difference is the cost basis is loaded up front. Look at what your monthly overall bills are for the life of your vehicle, including fuel and repairs, and you'll see that a Tesla is cheaper in the long run.
Well, considering repairs are usually more expensive for more expensive cars, I doubt that the Tesla saves you on anything but gas. And if driving 15k miles per year at 20 mpg while paying $4 per gallon, it would take 20 years to break even on your Tesla purchase. Considering you probably won't keep your Tesla for 20 years, I doubt it is cheaper in the long run.
Generally, older generations understood that we work to live.
The current generation seems to have it backwards. They live to work. So... they NEED a job that fulfills them. The problem is jobs don't do that. Working sucks. That's why someone is willing to pay you to do it!
The current generation doesn't have it backwards. It is called progress. It goes something like this:
1. Work to survive
2. Work to have a good life
3. Work for personal fulfillment
#3 is absolutely the most ideal situation, and it is hard to attain. But I cannot imagine a better way to spend your life.
Try SF some time. More squalor around the core downtown area than I have seen in any other american city.
I have only been to SF for conferences, but I have stayed after the conferences for vacations a couple times. I never felt there was that much squalor in the downtown area.
Are you including the tenderloin district as part of the "core downtown" of SF? Then I might be more inclined to agree with you, but that didn't seem like a core part of the city (just the poor area like the south side of Chicago).
If you have a family to support, stay put. You have a good, stable job. Your "boredom" is immaterial to providing for your family. In short, get over yourself. You are working for more than just yourself now.
If you don't have a family to support: Take it. Now's the time to make your mistakes. The worst thing that happens is that the company goes bust, you have some peanut butter and ramen days as you find another job. If it's just you, then it's no big deal, right?
I'm only in my early thirties, with my first child on the way, but I sure hope I never think like this. Parents don't suddenly become unimportant as soon as the kids arrive. I never let money be a primary factor in my career decisions before, and I don't plan on changing that once there are kids involved. You only have one life to live, and your career is a huge portion of that life. Unfulfilled parents can be far more damaging to children than lower middle class parents.
As long as this guy is able to meet the basic needs of his family, then he has every right to pursue a career that fulfills him. He isn't failing his family if he can only buy a $200k house instead of a $400k one because he listened to his passions instead of his bank account. And based on the types of jobs he is talking about, he is probably making very decent money at either job.
Now if the guy is living from paycheck to paycheck, with very little savings to speak of, and has a family, then I would agree he hasn't yet earned the right to pursue his dreams. But as long as he is managing his money well I see no reason why he can't make a decision based on his own desires instead of just the wants of his family.
As another poster already mentioned, you are confusing your problem domain with programming. Your argument is little different than someone saying programming requires a significant amount of accounting knowledge just because they work for Intuit.
Programming itself rarely includes more math than simple algebra. There are of course very specialized fields of software engineering that need quite a bit of math, such as data science or other research oriented fields. But at the risk of making up statistics, I doubt more than 5% of programmers use more than a 10th grade level of math in their entire career.
And regardless of your young and naive view of the software development industry, writing line of business software is rarely just a front end to a database. That may be true for many SMB projects, but things are much different at the enterprise level. I have done research in academia and have helped design global software systems used by millions of users in almost a dozen countries, and I can say the level of complexity can be just as high in either specialty. One field does require a lot more math though.
e are not talking about public schools (which is what we refer to when we speak of public schools) we are talking about colleges.
No need to be a jerk. We are talking about colleges here, so it is not a stretch to assume I was talking about public colleges. 72% of post-secondary students are attending public schools.
The price of public colleges is rising much faster than private schools, because private schools never obtained much money from the government. And private schools have another price pressure pushing the prices up: the scarcity of elite talent. Any field that attracts the best of the best has seen salaries and fees rise much faster than inflation (medicine, law, sports, higher ed, etc).
Who pays for the four to six years of the first crop of graduates?
Easy. Colleges would take out the loans instead. They would probably have to be initially subsidized by the government, but eventually colleges would obtain a form of credit rating that shows how lucrative their graduates are.
Who pays for the students who go to university and don't graduate?
The student. Colleges would probably charge by the credit hour completed. Someone who completed only 12 credit hours would pay 0.25%, but someone who completed 120 credit hours (and got a degree) would pay 2.5%.
What happens with perpetual students? You know, the people who have been in school for the last ten to twenty years and haven't received a degree. What happens with them?
College loans already have the same "problem". I didn't have to start paying them until after I graduated, so I could have just stayed in college forever. There are safeguards such as limiting the total amount you can get in Stafford loans, and we could put similar safeguards on new programs like this as well.
What is to stop someone from going to a university until they are one class shy of graduating, moving out of state or even out of the country, and then finishing their degree and never falling under the tax?
What stops someone from doing the same thing with student loans? I am sure if you are willing to be a fugitive for the rest of your life and live in a non-extradition country, you could avoid paying for college too.
I have to point out that this is program would remove all barrier to college entry.
I don't see how it removes many barriers of entry. It just shifts students from college loan payments to progressive taxes.
If anything it may add barriers of entry, because some colleges may be more restrictive if they think prospective students will not get good jobs after graduation. But hopefully that can be solved by higher tax rate agreements for those students, similar to how people with bad credit ratings get loans.
If there is no cost to start education, and not finish it, then there will be millions of people who do so.
This is easily solved by charging students per semester taken instead of per degree attained. If you only finish 1 semester you might only pay 0.25%, but if you finish eight semesters and get a degree you pay 2%.
Also the STEM, medical and business students will end up subsidizing the fine art, journalism and french medieval poetry students and their professors. This already happens to a degree.
The proposed change would improve this dramatically. Colleges now make money on anyone they can admit, so they have no incentive to limit the number of liberal arts students they can attract. But once they only make money on successful students, they will have a strong incentive to produce only successful students. Or they could charge higher tax rates to students in lower paying majors or who had poor high school grades / SAT scores / etc.
This is a wonderful way to let market forces improve our schools with very little outside effort. Once a student sees they are paying 10% tax to go into journalism but a 2% tax to go into mechanical engineering, they may start making some better decisions. It still has the flaw of expecting students to think about the future, but it takes away some of the uncertainty of exactly what a fine arts degree is costing them in future opportunity.
The reason the cost is so high is that the government guarantees student loans.
Not true at all. We have cut funding for public schools by over 50% and then wonder why tuition has skyrocketed. Even worse we blame rising prices on efforts to make college more affordable.
Tuition should tail the inflation rate or the median income.
Tuition will rarely follow the inflation rate since it is an industry that requires employees that have an above-median education level. Every long established occupation that relies on highly educated labor has had fees rise greater than inflation over the past 30 years. Young fields like software development don't always follow this trend but still often do.
In addition to this, public schools have had their public funding cut over the past few decades. I believe it has dropped by just over 50% in the recent decades, but I don't have time to find citations. If true, tuition could have almost doubled (adjusted for inflation) over the past 30 years and it wouldn't be because of colleges at all.
If we accept that taxation is they way to fund education, the smart move is to do it through general taxation. Since everyone benefits from education, everyone pays a share.
By having colleges only gather funds from existing graduates, they have an actual incentive to provide a real education to their students. If a college is crappy then their students will earn below average wages and the college will have their funding reduced. This is a very good thing. It would encourage colleges to spend more efforts on job placement and on career development as well. I could even imagine a world where colleges employ recruiters to help former graduates find higher paying jobs.
On the flip side, it could make colleges much more selective over who they admit. Some would consider this a good thing, and some a bad. "Lower quality" students would likely be forced into more community college or trade school-like environments where less money is spent on a shorter education. It would be very similar to what happens in many European countries, but this time shaped by market forces.
You could also see students having a rating similar to a credit score that affects their taxation rate. Straight-A students may be accepted with a 2% tax while C-students would be accepted with a 10% tax. This would give good schools an incentive to spend an adequate amount of resources to actually help poor students earn a good living so they can collect huge taxes on these riskier students. I would hope for this scenario.
If "education" is about filling up brains with facts, we don't need teachers at all.
Children need role models and human teachers who look them in the eye and care about them as human beings.
It looks like we agree on almost everything, except perhaps the solution. I agree that the filling up of brains with facts and skills does not require as much teacher interaction as it does now. I also agree that teachers should be spending more time understanding students, motivating them, guiding them, and supporting them. Instead of just lecturing facts.
But my solution is to use more automated technology to impart facts so teachers can be freed to be more like personal coaches to the students. Why do we need 50,000 unique 5th grade math lectures on fractions each year, each taking up 50,000 man-hours per day to perform, when a few dozen lectures should handle many ranges of learning techniques and methods? I would love it if in 20 years teachers forgot that in the past teachers were actually expected to waste their time lecturing instead of having more human and personal interactions with their students.
Both of your reputations are flawed.
To adapt your cereal example: Say your favorite sugar cereal has 100 different types of marshmallows in it. But you don't like some of them. So you pick out the 10% that you like the least. But wait, there are still some that aren't as good as others! Okay, take out some more. And more. You can eventually proceed to the point where your cereal no longer fulfills its original purpose (there isn't enough of it to fill you).
Yes, go ahead and adapt my example in any strange way you want and then use that strange example to somehow say that my original argument was strange. Why didn't you add some unicorns into your adaptation and then argue that unicorns aren't real so my example doesn't hold water?
I agree that he was using a form of the slippery slope fallacy. That is exactly what I was pointing out. I figured just saying it was a slipper slope fallacy wouldn't help at all since he pretty obviously thinks that using this tactic is useful and wouldn't take it as a criticism.
A one time firing of the worst teachers in a school is not stack ranking. It is acknowledgement of past failures in hiring and incentive policies and an attempt to solve that problem.
but the simple method of firing 10% of the worst teachers and reassigning their students to the rest does more to improve schools than anything else.
If such a simple method always worked then you could apply it recursively to improve results further. Clearly, many schools need more than 9 teachers therefore the reality must be more complex than you claim.
Just because a problem is complex doesn't mean that you have to throw out simple solutions. Many complex problems can be helped with simple solutions. Usually not 100% fixed, but certainly improved. We can't let perfect be the enemy of good.
If eating 10% of a box of cereal with make me full and content
That's the thing though it won't. Not always. If you're already full, eating that won't work. If you're really hungry you'll need to repeat several times.
But I said that eating 10% of the box will make me full. I defined a theoretical situation where that is true. So I don't know what sense it makes to say that it wouldn't make me full.
You defined a hypothetical situation where removing the 10% worst teachers would improve schools. You then tried to say that if this was true, removing another 10% MUST also help improve schools (implying that if this isn't true, then removing the first 10% didn't really improve schools). My hypothetical situation was used only to show that repeatedly performing an action that solves a problem does not always continue to improve the situation.
If such a simple method always worked then you could apply it recursively to improve results further.
That is a very odd statement. If eating 10% of a box of cereal with make me full and content, doing that recursively will not improve results. It will make me stuffed and very uncomfortable.
However, astrology is more commonly believed on the left than on the right end of the political spectrum as measured by self-identified conservatives or liberals.
Irrational people are not monopolized by either political party. Irrational liberals are more likely to believe in astrology, and irrational conservatives are more likely to believe in the flying spaghetti monster (or whatever they call their favorite deity).
This would be a reason to worry less if it were a single data point. But this sort of explanation doesn't help explain the apparent increase over time unless you think people are getting less careful about reading questions or using context recognition.
Others on this thread have mentioned that people may simply not be as familiar with astrology as they were in the past. If the percentage of 18-24 year old adults who even know what astrology is is dropping steadily, then the number of people who mistake astrology for astronomy would probably be steadily going up at a similar rate. If a survey was already focusing on scientific concepts, I could see myself confusing the terms. Although in the context of "Is astrology a science" I would probably notice the difference since why would anyone ask if astronomy is a science?
" Dyson also came up with a better hand-dryer and he's even topped it with one with the hand-dryer AT the faucet"
Ah , of course! *Obviously* anyone who comes up with a new dryer and connects it to the plumbing is the #1 go-to man to develop bleeding edge AI! Watch out all those teams at MIT and Harvard and elsewhere who've been working on this problem for decades - our Jim will have it sorted as soon as he's come up with his wall mounted potato peeler.
Are you kidding with this? He isn't using this money to pay himself to solve the problem alone. He is spending it on hiring those software engineers from MIT and Harvard and elsewhere who've been working on this problem for decades.
Anyone willing to spend money to fund this research is a good thing. Any time that money is spent by a company with a good track record of creating innovative products is even better.