mrr54

>there are many great youtube channels packed with scientific content, like Smarter Every Day, Veritasium, Mark Rober, CGP Grey, VSauce, engineerguy, Physics Girl, Captain Disillusion, Mathologer, Numberphile, ...

That's what I was replying to. And those videos are not educational. They're 'interesting facts' or 'wow science is so coooooool!!!!!111 yeah science!!!11' channels.

>You don't need to receive a title or a credential to have received education.

Fun interesting facts are great for getting people interested in science, but they are not science! People coming away from a Mathloger video interested in maths? Brilliant. People coming away from a Mathloger video thinking they know maths? Not brilliant.

>47+53=107???

>Haha, okay I get it, it was a slip.

Yikes that's embarrassing. Yeah 47 + 3 to 54 - 3 obviously. Of course I brainfart exactly there. Should note that you messed up too: I said 47 + 54, not 47 + 53. :D

> At best they should be supplementary skills, and shouldn't be taught as the primary techniques

Absolutely 100% agree.

I fundamentally disagree. There's conclusive evidence that writing notes in lectures by hand leads to better recall.

And kids should not be dependent on these disgusting privacy-invading ad platforms we call computers to write things down.

That's begging the question. It's not an outdated skill if there are situations you need it! If I couldn't spell the things I were writing on the board in tutorials, it would quite reasonably look like I have no idea what I'm doing. Not a great look.

I don't see how your hand occludes what you're writing. It occludes what you've already written. But you've already written that bit, and you can move your hand if you really need to see it.

Maybe we should go back to what the Ancient Egyptians did and allow people to write in whatever direction they like!

Are teams not based on age in the United States? In New Zealand they're all categorised as 'under 9s', 'under 8s', 'under 7s' etc. They've also introduced weight classes to a lot of teen sports too to prevent them from being dominated by gigantic Samoan kids.

English spelling absolutely has rules. The famous 'ghoti' example (where supposedly it should be able to be pronounced 'fish' because of 'gh' in rough, 'ti' in 'nation', etc.) is nonsense because there's only one way that word can be pronounced in English and that's 'goatee'.

Irregularities don't mean it doesn't have rules. The most common 1-2k words are much less regular than the rest of the language, but learning how they're spelt is not remotely difficult for children (no adult that doesn't have a learning disability struggles to remember how to spell 'much' or 'about'). The rest of the language is pretty much regular.

Of course it's a bad thing! Imagine not being able to write your own language.

What are these 'common core math' techniques? I went to primary school in New Zealand. In around 2005 they introduced a new way of teaching mathematics that we referred to as the 'numeracy programme'. It wasn't very popular with students and parents obviously all thought it was crap because parents are naturally scared of change in education negatively affecting their kids.

But when we actually did it, it was basically fine. Obviously everyone still learnt the standard place value algorithms (by that point we already knew them, and they didn't stop teaching them to younger kids), but people also learnt other strategies like: if I'm adding 47 to 54, I can simplify that by instead adding 50 (47 + 3) to 57 (54 + 3), which is 107. It was about learning what you to terms like 47 + 54 without changing the value.

Another one I think I remember being mentioned was thinking of 124 x 52 as 100 x 52 + 20 x 52 + 4 x 52. Of course, that's exactly what you're doing with the standard algorithm! The 'algorithm' you learn when you're 5 is just the same as the 'strategy' you learn when you're 10, but presented as something you do on paper rather than something you do in your head.

I also remember learning about ways to approximate these sorts of things. So you want to work out 4241 x 1245 - well you can work it out, but you should probably also work out what 4000 x 1000 is and use that to check that your answer is of the right order of magnitude. And if you're just working something out quickly, then maybe all you need is 4200 x 1300, that's obviously close enough for any practical usage.

I don't remember exactly what I learnt then which to me is a sign it was probably very effective: I internalised the strategies, some of which I was probably already using, some of which I probably didn't remember but thought about again later. It all seems very obvious now, of course, but it's different when you're 10.

This sounds to me like someone saying "I have a pebble in my shoe so I hop everywhere on one foot" when they should probably just take the pebble out of their shoe.

Have you tried avoiding screens for a couple of hours before bed, and reading books instead? I had the same problem - found it difficult to get to sleep - and I have experienced MUCH better sleep since moving my last hour or two before sleep to some light reading.

I'm not saying it can't be inspiring. I'm sure youtube videos about mathematics have inspired quite a few young people to pursue mathematics! They can foster an interest, inspire people to learn, etc. But that doesn't make them educational.

The Magician's Nephew is the best one! You do need to read it after at least the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe though, or it's a bit of a spoiler.

Most of those channels you mention aren't really teaching anything beyond general knowledge and trivia.

You could watch every video on every one of those channels and you might know a lot of random facts but it won't make you a physicist or a mathematician or a biologist.

>That's a parenting issue not a computer issue. Teach your kids what's allowed and what's not, and check their browser history until they learn how to manipulate it, then check your router logs

Ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. There are things I saw on the internet as a child that I still cannot unsee. My parents having seen that I saw them afterwards would not have changed that.

I can't even comprehend how anyone could tune out constantly-running TV. Just turn it off!

In my experience they aren't different at all. Steam Workshop is just a distribution platform for mods. It's a mod installer and manager. It doesn't stop you doing it manually.

In practice mods are definitely released outside of Steam Workshop. I don't think I've ever used Steam Workshop for a Skyrim mod for example.

30% is a pretty small price to pay for money laundering.

If I'm looking for something I want to read trusted reviews of it, not ads.

And yet when I open Edge, I get a million ads for crappy tabloid news websites thrust in my face, while when I open Chrome I don't see any ads.

I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective. I don't think this article contradicts it.

>Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest: Under this assumption we can change the circumstances from a punishment to a reward. Instead of a gun, imagine a doctor has information about your health. If he tells you about it and you act on the information, you will certainly live a longer life. The doctor will only tell you about the information based the result of the quantum event. If the current assumptions are true, then you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment.

No I think this misunderstands the issue. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it exists. There are two types of 'timelines', if you like: those where your consciousness ends, and those where it doesn't. The only one you can possibly be in is the one where it doesn't. You can't 'extend' your life with QI. You won't live a longer life, you'll always life forever.

It's not quantum longeivity. It's quantum immortality. If the button you were clicking killed you on a random bit being 1 and not on the bit being 0, then you would survive clicking it.

OR, you would just not click on it. Because there're worlds where you click it, and worlds where you don't.

> While what you're saying has a truthful ring to it, I fundamentally disagree with your hypothesis. The theory behind insurance is that everyone pays a flat rate so that there is enough money in the pool to cover statistically rare events. It works for fire, flood, life insurance, anything really. And the great thing about it is that the premiums are generally substantially lower than people expect. There's enough room there to charge enough for insurance companies to make a profit and still have affordable premiums.

The point is that you amortise your risk. You pay small affordable amounts because that's more reliable than a small chance of having to pay extraordinary amounts.

The point is not that everyone pays the same rate, or that people pay what they can afford. If that's what you want, you introduce a tax and a government program: government healthcare, government fire insurance, government flood insurance, etc. Most places effectively have this at the edges: any large scale event there will be significant government assistance, and insurance ends up only having to cover small incidents.

Fire insurance should be more expensive in Queensland than in Oslo. Flood insurance should be more expensive in New Orleans than in Qatar. Insurance is amortisation of risk, not a wealth redistribution service.

>This has gone haywire in recent decades due to corruption. In their never-ending quest for more profit, insurance company lobbyists have bribed politicians to change the laws so that they can create new brackets. Now car insurance costs more for young drivers. Now people in the south find they have no flood insurance or that their coverage wasn't good enough to replace their home or that there is so much red tape that they have to sue their own insurance company to get paid. Or the company simply doesn't pay, and the US government has to bail everyone out.

What are you even talking about? You don't need a law change to be 'allowed' to make premiums higher for younger drivers or people with houses that are prone to flooding. The default situation is that you can provide insurance to people at whatever price you feel like giving them, based on whatever factors you have calculated affect their risk. It's a free market.

If you live in an area that's basically guaranteed to flood in the next 10 years, of course you're going to have difficulty getting flooding insurance! They're basically guaranteed to lose money unless you're paying 20% of the value of your house in premiums every year.

I suspect you literally don't understand the concept of risk.

>The fact that smoking is the single biggest discriminator in insurance premiums after age is a huge red flag that corruption is afoot. Here are a few things statistically more dangerous than smoking:

How do you measure whether someone texts while driving? How do you measure whether someone gets enough exercise or has a healthy diet?

What do you even mean by 'corruption' anyway? This is how insurance works everywhere, in every country, every jurisdiction, universally. It's how insurance works as a very basic concept. The entire point is that you pay based on risk, and higher risk = higher premiums.

Working in a blue collar job already is factored into health insurance premiums. Go ask employers what their insurance premiums are for their employees in the United States. Obviously places with significantly dangerous jobs will have expensive health insurance premiums because that just makes logical sense for the health insurers.

>Corruption just shifts costs onto the poor in the name of efficiency.

It literally makes no logical sense for this to happen. Insurance is a very competitive market. If they are overcharging people relative to their actual risk, then someone that can measure that risk more accurately and charge you less while still making a reliable profit should exist.

And in fact that is exactly what happens.

'Obese' implies 'unhealthy' but 'not obese' doesn't imply 'healthy'.

Haphazard CI and using email to track bugs and patches is a fine way to operate.

I find this (seemingly uniquely American) idea that it's wrong to discriminate in insurance quite strange. I'd love to understand your thought process behind it.

The whole point of insurance, as I see it, is that you pay based on your risk. Of course whether you smoke changes your risk of having health issues! Of course whether you're rich or poor, or male or female, affects your health risks.

For example, it's no surprise to me that my car insurance premiums are more expensive than my sister's, even though she's a year younger than me. Young men are much much more likely to be involved in car accidents than young women. But I've seen many Americans claiming this should be considered illegal discrimination. Isn't this discrimination the whole point of insurance?

The problem isn't that they factor in whether you smoke. The problem is that it's binary. You should find an insurance company that will let you specify how much you smoke. The insurance company should be delighted with that information: it allows them to model your risk more accurately and offer you more competitive prices!

This isn't 'corporate control over our liberty and justice' and it certainly isn't 'oppression'.

Ironically the best way to care for their kids is to set a good example by eating and living healthily.

When was the last time you saw healthy parents with an obese child or obese parents with a healthy child vs. how often you see healthy parents with healthy children and obese parents with obese children?

Yeah right

Is this rendering Markdown to HTML on the fly in my web browser?

Just render the markdown to HTML once on the server and upload it for the love of God.

That being said, the article is entirely correct.

>Certainly there's merit in exercising a certain degree of rigour, much of scientific work can be boring, but yeesh, "not too bright" sums up the old boys' club right there doesn't it? If you can't be judged on merit, what will you be judged on, eh?

Who said people shouldn't be judged on merit? The point being made in the article is not that it's literally better to not be too bright, but that being intellectually capable of working on something than the Grand Unified Theory of Everything (or The Cure to Cancer or The Riemann Hypothesis or whatever the equivalent is in each field) is necessary if you want to have a good career in science.

Ultimately, the chances that a scientist at the beginning of their career will be able to make a significant contribution to such a big project that so many intelligent people have spent so many decades (centuries in the case of some mathematical problems) trying to solve. It's not a good career decision (or a good life decision) for a young mathematician to spend the crucial early years of their career trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis. 9999 times out of 10000 they'll fail to make any significant contribution to the problem, because they're not ready to yet, and then will struggle to build a career when they've just wasted years of their life, publishing nothing, contributing nothing, learning nothing.

Maybe you're a true genius and make headway on one of the grandest and most fundamental of problems. But most people, even most young academics, are not geniuses. They would be far better served working on smaller, more realistically achievable goals.

The point of the quote (that it is best to be "not too bright") is that there seems to be a gap between people that are "normal" enough that they're intellectually capable of working on something small and people that are "genius" enough to be intellectually capable of actually making progress on something huge. Between that you get people that are "too bright" to work on small problems but not actually smart enough (or lucky enough in their choice of approach or whatever other reason) to solve the Riemann hypothesis or P=NP or Quantum Gravity or whatever.

If you're a genius, you can do it. If you're a decently smart person that's not so smart they've never experienced failure in any academic endeavour, you won't try. But if you're in between it's not uncommon for people to feel like they're too good for the small problems, even when they're not good enough for the big ones. So they waste their lives and ruin their careers being too ambitious. Some of them give up, others become cranks when they can't handle the idea that they've failed and rationalise their failure as the system being out to get them, the world not being ready for their genius, etc.

Or in other, more concise, words: "to be effective in some scientific fields it’s actually best not to be too bright. Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems."

>And another thing: Only geniuses (or cranks) head straight for the grandest and most fundamental problems. You should multiply the importance of the problem by the probability that you’ll solve it and maximize that product.

This echoes something Terry Tao said:[0]

>There is a particularly dangerous occupational hazard in this subject: one can become focused, to the exclusion of other mathematical activity (and in extreme cases, on non-mathematical activity also), on a single really difficult problem in a field (or on some grand unifying theory) before one is really ready (both in terms of mathematical preparation, and also in terms of one’s career) to devote so much of one’s research time to such a project.

The "don't be too bright" advice matches what something Terry's said as well:[1]

>Does one have to be a genius to do mathematics?

>The answer is an emphatic NO. In order to make good and useful contributions to mathematics, one does need to work hard, learn one’s field well, learn other fields and tools, ask questions, talk to other mathematicians, and think about the “big picture”. And yes, a reasonable amount of intelligence, patience, and maturity is also required. But one does not need some sort of magic “genius gene” that spontaneously generates ex nihilo deep insights, unexpected solutions to problems, or other supernatural abilities.

Nowhere do they say that you shouldn't care about, think about, or try to solve big important unsolved problems. The point is that there is a lot of work out there that isn't the grand fundamental problems, that it's still really important work, and that you probably aren't ready to tackle those problems yet. Give them a go, but don't spend years of your early career trying to solve the Riemann hypothesis, because that's the route to publishing your work on vixra.

[0]: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurel... [1]: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

Mate I agree with you but people on HN don't appreciate this sort of way of speaking. Just tone it down a bit. You're making a lot of really good points and it'd be a massive pity to see you banned for making them in a way that is so antagonistic.