throwawayjava

This is pretty off-putting, especially given a few glaring factual errors in your own post.

>> Nurses make good money.

> On average, no.

NP average annual salary: 95,523 USD

PA average annual salary: 98,180 USD

RN average annual salary: 67,490 USD

IDK what "good money" means, but ALL of these are paid much better than average for their respective levels of education. And certainly, beat out e.g. what a fresh BA/BS would make at a place like Edward Jones or Bank of America. Hell, my first SE job offers were lower than the RN average, and I certainly felt like that was "good money"!

>> Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird

> Weird is a strange way of saying "accurate".

Again, offputting.

Quants at hedge funds often have Ph.D.s in hard sciences from top universities. Comparing across vastly different pedigrees is no representative.

Why not compare apples to apples?

>> Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader

> Whatever that means.

Yes again, offputting.

What I meant is this.

Leader: Superintendents rarely make less than $150,000 and make up to $N00,000 which, especially with CoL adjustments, is often better pay than the 200,000+ salary ranges typical for quants at hedge funds.

Vendor: And those are just the public sector jobs. A LOT of money is made in selling education products. Do you really think the CEO of Pearson is living in the poor house?

Just like literal bankers (people who sit in banks) are a very small fragment of what we think of as "banking", literal teachers are a very small fragment of people employed in education and literal police officers are a very small fragment of people employed in law enforcement.

> Google 'largest banks', and assume annual profit to be about 10-20% of their assets. Over 94% of farms in the US are family owned, so I don't know what you think you mean by farming companies. I don't need to guess, I know that there isn't a single farming-related company one that comes close to the banks in terms of profits, assets, or valuation.

This is super offputting because you're taking on an extremely condescending tone and haven't even bothered to do the research yourself.

Cargill, for example, is family owned and pulls in 114.7 _B_illion in revenue. (For reference, BoA, America's largest bank, pulls down 87.352 Billion in revenue.)

"Family owned" doesn't mean what you think it means in American farming. Many "family owned" argi businesses (including actual farms) are really freaking huge operations.

> This disturbing feudal system is mirrored across multiple industries.

Wait. This is literally exactly the point I was trying to make in my original comment. The feudal system also exists in banking and in lawyerings, and the top rung of the education hierarchy is doing extremely well while the lowest rung of banking or lawyering is barely scraping by. Maybe if you'd engaged politely with me instead of getting pissed off...

This article compares "teachers, police officers, nurses, farmers" to "lawyers and bankers", claiming that the latter make much more money than the former.

In general, that's not actually true.

* Nurses make good money. E.g., NPs and PAs make six figures even in smaller cities with low CoLs. It's not hedge fund money, but then, 90% of people who work in banking don't make hedge-fund money either. Also, 90k in a small city is pretty comparable to 200k in Manhattan.

* Comparing teachers and police officers to hedge fund guys is weird. A couple of more apt comparisons:

- At the lower end of the salary scale: Teacher/police officer vs bank teller. The teacher/police officer make more.

- At the higher end of the salary scale: Education or law enforcement consultant/vendor/leader vs. hedge fund guy.

* Farming is also extremely lucrative -- the owner of a large farm can easily make out much better than the owner of a community bank. And the largest farming companies are just as powerful and profitable as the largest banks.

Even the title of the article -- why garbagemen should make more than bankers -- succumbs to this fallacy. Most bank workers are tellers and other low-level employees who ARE making a bit less (or not much more) than garbagemen!

Because taking away someone's freedoms is a serious thing. There should be a high economic cost to society for imprisoning people; it serves as a structural disincentive to over-use of prison.

Perhaps the morality of over-using prison should serve as a sufficient deterrent for society, but the facts demonstrate that this is not the case.

America's very serious incarceration problem needs economic disincentives because the status quo proves that this country is apparently not sufficiently motivated by morality.

And even if you don't accept this argument, it still does not follow that we should under-pay prisoners. We should at the very least pay prisoners market rates and then charge them for the true cost of their incarceration. E.g.,

National average salary for firefighters: $49,330 PLUS (good) health benefits.

National average total cost of incarceration: $31,000 INCLUDING (terrible) health care. And keep in mind that a well-behaved prisoner in a low or medium security facility -- likely the case for those allowed on firefighting crews -- will cost substantially less than the amortized per-prisoner cost.

So even if inmates should "earn their keep", the state is still pocketing on the order of 5 figures per year. Worse still, IMO that money would go a lot further preventing recidivism than any amount of rehabilitation or work ethic.

Before forming an opinion on the role that "Rehabilitation" should play in parole hearings, HN readers should talk with (or at least read about) someone who has been through that process. Even when the intent is sincere, the implementation in American prisons can be downright draconian. "Rehabilitation" means learning what you are supposed to say/do and saying/doing it in a convincing way. Including, e.g., believing in God [1].

Rehabilitation makes sense in the abstract, but its implementation often boils down to "learn how to lie convincingly about your true beliefs", sometimes even about beliefs that are explicitly enshrined in our constitution. Which is pretty much the opposite of what we should be going for.

Now consider the case where the intent is not sincere; e.g., the case of a prison chaplain or guard who was rubbed the wrong way by a particular prisoner's personality. Rehabilitation is effusive and basically boils down to "anyone have anything negative to share with the parole board?"

And all of this without considering civil disobedience. E.g., should MLK Jr. have stayed in jail until he publicly denounced his own Letter from a Birmingham Jail?

Must drug offenders publicly profess their undying allegiance to status quo drug scheduling laws before earning their freedom?

IMO we should always allow for the possibility that criminality and morality are not intrinsically linked. And the modern practice of considering rehabilitation in parole hearings too often runs counter to tht belief.

--

[1] http://www.kcur.org/post/court-says-atheist-inmate-s-religio...

1. "Rehabilitation" -- the actual implementation, not the abstract idea -- is insidious. How can anyone ever know for sure whether someone is truly rehabilitated? Especially given that prisons don't typically attract that best and brightest of the medical profession.

If you've ever talked to someone who spent time in prison, you'll realize that "rehabilitation" in US prisons mostly means "parrot what they tell you to say and don't be stupid enough to seriously engage. Just. Repeat. Your. Lines."

E.g., claiming you have no spiritual belief can result in denied parole [1]. Too often, "rehabilitation" is just short-hand for "brainwashing". In those cases, bodily punishment without the pretense of "rehabilitation" is actually a far kinder and just system.

Far from truly fixing the underlying problem, modern rehabilitation often amounts to an exercise in honing one's inner psychopath: lie without remorse or guilt, and lie well enough that you don't get caught, or be denied parole on the basis of your lack of religious faith.

2. What do we do with people who cannot be rehabilitated, but whose crimes do not justify a lifetime prison sentence?

3. what do we do about criminals who are very unlikely to re-offend but are not rehabilitated? I.e., what is the purpose of rehabilitation? A common answer is "limiting future damage to society". But this justification fails to explain why we should jail a bank robber who managed to hide $1 billion on a remote island and who we honestly believe will be happy living off of that $1 billion on some remote island in peace for the rest of his life.

4. What about people who commit heinous crimes but are easy to rehabilitate (e.g., due to a treatable mental illness)? How do we deal with vindictive families of victims who might want to take justice into their own hands?

Prison sentences serve many purposes: rehabilitation, protection of society, punishment, and a disincentive for criminal activity.

Rehabilitation is certainly the most in-line with enlightenment values (but can become draconian in the case where the crime is relatively small but rehabilitation proves impossible, or in the case where rehabilitation means "learn how to lie about your inner self").

And I will certainly agree that the US prison system does not come even remotely close to striking a good balance between these multiple purposes. But the other roles are also important, and "rehabilitation" isn't always all it's cracked up to be.

[1] http://www.kcur.org/post/court-says-atheist-inmate-s-religio...

I don't think the USA gets enough credit for inventing this hybrid economic development system. Good examples include:

* Military computing -> Intel, IBM, etc. -> Moore's law

* DARPA cash -> early networking/PC projects at universities -> hacker/hobbyist culture -> Microsoft and Apple

* Gov't really emphasized "finding information" in CS the 1990's -> NSF grants at Stanford -> Google.

* The Human Genome Project -> Illumina, Solexa, etc. -> Moore's law-shaped cost curve for sequencing

And less R&D heavy examples like the national railways and the interstate highway system.

This pattern continues today. Self-driving cars started as several decades of NSF-funded research projects that turned into a DARPA-funded competition a decade-ish ago that turned into an industry-funded goal rush today.

The greenhouse gas hypothesis is readily explainable to elementary school children. Explaining the actual mechanisms is, obviously, far more complicated.

But the same is true for evolution. Origin of the Species pre-dated the discovery of DNA by nearly 100 years. Even a not particularly bright Biology undergraduate has a better understanding of evolution than a hypothetical re-animated Darwin.

A thorough explanation of our best knowledge about evolution requires a graduate-level course in genetics (and a few other things). A thorough explanation of our best knowledge about climate science requires a graduate-level course in mathematical modeling (and a few other things).

> It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work?

I've actually implemented toy versions of some of these models so that I could have a better understanding of the relationship between computer models and raw data. I have a graduate-level understanding of ODEs, PDEs, and numerical analysis, but was still in pretty far over my head.

My take-away form that experience: unless you have the time to devote to getting (the equivalent of) a PhD in climate science, you likely don't understand these models well enough to comment on them.

So I actually do think it's just objectively true that:

> Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate.

Which, as you note, is a serious problem. But the way I see it, each citizen has three options:

1. Get a Ph.D. in climate science.

2. Superficially engage with climate science.

3a. Trust that people who spend a lot of time studying these probably have well-informed opinions (an appeal to an appropriate authority).

3b. Trust some other authority (e.g., the PR experts working for conservative senators and fossil fuel companies, who are admittedly better communicators).

Obviously, option 1 is ideal.

Option 2 isn't necessarily better than Option 3a. How do you know what you don't know? How do you know when you come to a terrible conclusion based upon a misinterpretation of data?

Let's take me as an example. When experimenting with these models, I'd often find surprising results. But then I'd ask a climate science friend only to find that I had made some subtle but in fact ridiculous mistake. And they'd be able to explain to me what that mistake was, because I have lots of experience with ODEs/PDEs and enough experience reading scientific literature that I could read the papers/datasets that used to justify their assertion that I had chosen an unrealistic value for some parameter or another. And enough experience with statistical modeling that I could apply some common "validation" tricks and notice that I could reproduce some of the critiques of my mistakes.

How do you do that if you don't have a Ph.D.-level understanding of dynamical systems, plenty of programming experience, AND a climate science Ph.D. friend? Not to mention no family and plenty of free time...

That leaves Options 3 -- both appeals to authority. However, not all appeals to authority are equally fallacious. Listening to a quack pot cult leader and listening to a trained nurse are both appeals to authority; however, only a fool would believe these are equally inadvisable.

If you don't have the time to seriously engage with modern science, is trusting your own judgment really more advisable than listening to experts? I don't think the answer is quite as clear cut as you make it out to be. When I see arguments like yours, that Emerson quote always comes to mind: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

I.e., just because you avoided a "logical fallacy" doesn't mean that your mode of reasoning is more likely to result in Truth. See also: the millions of "proofs" that Sqrt[2] is rational. On this question, the person who listens to the blind authority of the mathematician has a strictly better route to truth than the person who believes their own mistaken reasoning despite (or, more typically, to spite) expert testimony.

I submit the same is even more likely to be true for more complicated issues, such as climate science or evolution.

Although I agree with you, it's worth noting that this sentiment is not a new one. There were plenty of people who believed that WWI marked the end of war, at least in Europe.

Even after WWII, Pax Americana (in Western Europe) was not an inevitability. Today's relative stability in that part of the world was the result of enormous investments in intentional policy. As well as a fair bit of luck.

> Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day

This sentence is a bit of a tautology [1]. But in any case, it's worth remembering that those incursions always find their way back home. Consider the most recent wars. The European migrant crisis has its roots in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, the USA will eventually feel the economic impact of those two wars. The fact that [2] could happen while the USA ran up enormous deficits (completely unrelated to that growth) is deeply worrying; what will happen in even a slightly less dynamic domestic economy?

> China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically.

This view of the world also has a time-honored tradition. Thomas Jefferson was an early proponent of the view that national power flows from economic might rather than hard power. It's worth noting that the policies he actually implemented while in office diverged substantially from his ideological beliefs.

I agree with you about what the future of conflict between the US and China will most likely look like. I think most people do. The question is how you hedge that bet: is the alternative military&economic peace (because military conflict is unimaginable)? Or, is the alternative military conflict on top of the existing economic conflict?

I think the latter is more likely.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

[2] http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/virtually-768...

The bulk of the interstate highway system was built between 1960 and 1980.

> I always wondered why public roads would opt for awful toll plaza back-ups over increasing the gas tax.

Open-road tolling with a combination of transceivers and a "pay online later" solves this problem. Toll plazas (and the people who work them) are entirely unnecessary.

Unfortunately, many corporate tax breaks are created to compete with the municipality next door for economic activity that would occur in any case. The key point is that even if all municipalities banded together and agreed not to TIF, then the economic activity would still occur.

Concretely, here's a list tallying the value of Wal-Mart TIFs: http://www.walmartsubsidywatch.org/state_tallies.html

Now, here's the key question: would Wal-Mart (or a competitor) have built all those stores and distribution centers without TIFs? I.e., is Wal-Mart profitable without tax subsidies?

The answer is obviously yes: those stores would still be enormously profitable, so Wal-Mart would still build them. Which means these tax breaks are not creating new value or spurring economic activity that would otherwise not occur! These TIFs are simply a wealth transfer from local taxpayers to Wal-Mart executives and shareholders, orchestrated by playing municipalities off of one another.

Hundreds of millions of Americans pay extra taxes and/or receive inferior services because municipalities won't cooperate in a game of prisoner's dilemma. Great for the Waltons, though.

TL;DR: because allowing municipalities to compete using TIFs results in wealth transfers from local communities to large corporations without creating new economic activity that wouldn't have occured anyways.

People see salaries of FAANG engineers and think that those companies pay well in gneeral, and furthermore that the tech industry pays well in general.

I've seen this first-hand: people were super excited about an Amazon distribution center being built in a town I used to live in. The thought process goes something like: "Amazon says they'll be hiring hundreds of people and that they will train people on the job. Also, Amazon engineers make 100k. Therefore Amazon will hire me, train me, and I'll be making 100k!"

I think the ship has now sailed on Amazon; people today realize that an HQ full of engineers is different in kind from a distribution center.

But the cycle continues with other low-skill and medium-skill "tech" jobs. For a particularly striking example, see some of the rhetoric around the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin...

As I've already stated,

>> The sad irony, by the way, is that your perceived downsides are rare and GPA hacking backfires

Choosing to learn employable skills is important, but there's no upside to viewing education as "simply a method of acquiring the credentials necessary to get hired".

You seem to have missed the fundamental point of my last two posts: your view of how to approach education is self-defeating even if you view education purely as a way of increasing lifetime earnings!

You got nothing out of your humanities courses. The fault was not in your courses but in yourself. You certainly could have chosen to improve your prose, refine your theses, and strengthen the presentation of your arguments. Instead, you chose to GPA hack.

One of the great things about university is that you get what you put into it. Students who choose to invest in credentialism get credentials. Students who choose to invest in an education get an education. You got what you very explicitly chose to get!

The sad irony, by the way, is that your perceived downsides are rare and GPA hacking backfires. I have never heard of a faculty member refusing to write a letter for an engaged student just because they received a B or even a C; however, I've heard plenty of stories about faculty writing lackluster letters or even refusing to write letters for students who were very clearly GPA hacking.

Perhaps most importantly, your original post was written as an indict of humanities courses. In my post, I pointed out that GPA hacking is also possible in STEM fields. Your latest post justifies GPA hacking by appealing to the credential-granting role of higher education. Your argument justifies GPA hacking not only in the humanities but also in STEM fields.

A common saying in education is that cheaters mostly rob from themselves. IMO the same is true for GPA hackers.

One final tangential note about this excerpt from your post:

> With the high cost of tuition (especially in the USA), you want a good return on your investment, not waste your time engaging with the material at the detriment of your chances of success... It seems a far better strategy to maximize your GPA while spending the least possible amount of time on the assigned material, in order to have time to pursue your own interests and be able to more effectively learn the things you want to learn.

Doesn't this place you in a bit of a double bind? If you know better than the faculty, then GPA hacking isn't required because you already know the material. If you don't know better than the faculty, then it's very likely that you are frittering away your time on fads instead of focusing on fundamentals.

It sounds like you prioritized maxing your GPA per unit of effort instead of engaging with the material in the way that's most beneficial to you.

Why on earth would you ever write an essay that's just meaningless jargon to you? What on earth were you expecting to learn?

The same thing happens in STEM courses. Three examples:

1. Projects. If your project incorporates the professor's research priorities/interests you can get away with way less work, but will also get less out of the course.

2. Programming assignments in CS. Professors rarely assign open problems; they're almost always assigning variants of important solved problems. Students will often look up the paper or wiki article where the original solution was described and then copy the algorithm and/or proof. This often results in high marks for low levels of effort.

3. There's an even better analogy in Mathematics, where students sometimes learn how to parrot the structure/rhetoric in proofs instead of actually learning the mathematics. Professors often don't do a careful enough job grading and give these proofs high marks because they sound correct and are mostly correct. However, it's clear from a second glance that the student has no idea wtf they're saying.

Students prioritizing low-effort parroting instead of seriously engaging with the material is pervasive in CS and Mathematics.

Some of that blame lies with the professor, and when students never learn that parroting/memorization is bad, I guess that's a huge failure of the entire education system (K-12 through higher ed). But IMO students who know that's the game they are playing (e.g., writing jargon-laden essays instead of writing in a way that is true to their own voice) don't have a lot of room to then complain that all they learned was how to play the "max GPA for min effort" game...

I majored in Math and CS and took a smattering of other courses (one course away from a minor in each of Religion, Philosophy, and Economics).

The CS courses were by far the most useless. Perhaps 50% of the material I had taught myself before started undergraduate: everything up to and including data-structures as well as the pragmatic aspects of databases, OOP, and Networking courses. Another 40% I could've taught myself without much guidance (non-theoretical PL, non-optimizing compilers, and a non-proof-based algorithms course). The other 10% was project-based or independent study where the forcing function to work with people who were both above and below my skill level was the most valuable aspect of the coursework. (pre-college internships and freelancing gave me lots of experience working with others, but almost all of them were far above my skill level or else were completely non-technical).

The Mathematics coursework was by far the most useful. The lower-level content courses (Calculus and Linear Algebra) are essential for accessing most of the interesting parts of the software industry (self-driving, robotics, research software engineer, etc.). Also, the proof-based coursework is full of useful thought patterns. Most of the difficult/economically important problems I've solved in my life were all relatively trivial extensions of proof techniques or theorems from my undergraduate Analysis, Algebra, and Logic coursework.

The humanities courses sit right in-between CS and Mathematics in terms of usefulness. The value of regular practice writing and communicating, with a professional feedback mechanism, was extremely valuable. I don't often use the content knowledge at work, but the writing skills are extremely useful. Learning to write well without regular professional feedback is difficult.

The content knowledge from my humanities courses was not immediately useful in an economic sense. However, that well-roundedness did get me an amazing spouse and extremely interesting friend group, though. I'm not sure how to put a dollar value on either of those things.

So economically, Math > humanities > CS. CS is more economically valuable but the CS education isn't more valuable because the core content knowledge that's necessary to get a well-paying job doesn't require formal course-work. Basic programming, SQL, and web frameworks are definitely accessible to passionate middle schoolers.

In career dimensions beyond net worth (i.e., interesting work), Math > CS > humanities.

In non-career dimensions, humanities >= Math > CS. My marriage and friends are mostly a product of the humanities aspect of my education and are each easily worth the $20k I paid for undergraduate.

YMMV.

> I think we need to create two tiers of higher-education

FWIW there are at least 4 tiers:

1. Vocational: Community College and most for-profit universities/educational programs (including bootcamps)

2. Advanced Vocational BA/BS: "industry-tracked" degrees at traditional universities. E.g., many universities have both a CS degree and an SE degree. The physics/engineering split is comparable. Theoretical technical courses are replaced with pragmatic technical courses and the more pure humanities courses are replaced with business/econ/industry-specific communications coursework.

3. Traditional BA/BS

4. Traditional BA/BS at elite academic institutions (e.g., top 10 CS programs tend to have bachelors degrees that are different in kind from small branch campuses of most state university systems)

The article discusses the fact that there are things beyond happiness that are important to humanity/humans. The author mentions self-determinism ("...a dystopian nightmare wherein humans are reduced to automatons") as well as seredipity and randomness ("...value of searching, browsing, being bored, being lost, failing, missing out, daydreaming, being surprised, going off script...")

My own opinion is that a liberal mindset of the form Wallace discusses in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water is important.

If we leave human rights in-tact and preserve the 40 hour work week (or less), there's no shortage of personal freedom, serendipity, randomness, and wonder to be found in this world. But if these things do not happen naturally, then we'll need to teach them.

I suppose we all would've spilled less ink if you had just led with "might makes right" :-)

> the activities you cite are so far faring badly. Putnam and Murray (Bowling Alone/Coming Apart)...

There are two problems with Bowling Alone.

1. Bowling is boring; I'd rather grab a cappucino.

Putnam and Murray suppose that the social institutions and conventions of 1910-1940 were a platonic ideal and therefore ignore the myriad of new ways that people socialize and engage in their communities.

To pick just one relevant example, hackerspaces only existed in a few major cities when I became interested in them 10-15 years ago. Now there's at least one in every major city as well as many in smaller communities. But hackerspaces are just an example; there are thousands of other examples of the same phenomenon: popular and thriving community forums that didn't even exist in 1910-1940.

This form of community engagement is the sort of thing that Putnam and Murray completely miss in their analysis because, for them, "community engagement" means regular contact with one of ten or so institutions they happened to have statistics for when they wrote their book.

I spend less time at church potlucks and bowling nights than my grandparents. But then, my grandparents never met friends at coffee shops or hung out at hackerspaces.

2. Far more damning, Putnam and Murray weren't even correct for the tiny subset of community engagement metrics they chose to form their best-selling "darn kids born after 1940" thesis. See e.g., Everett Lad's critique of Bowling Alone.

So not only did new forms of community engagement pop up in response to changing times and interests, but traditional forms of community engagement continued to thrive!

Your second point is already addressed: learning a new field of mathematics or science can be deeply frustrating and requires grit. The automation of daily chores does not necessitate the death of annoyance or grit.

Just like people still work hard every day even though farming highly automated.

The idea that modern annoyances (sitting in traffic, waiting in checkout lines, searching/browsing for information) are somehow essential to the human experience is super weird given that most of these things have only been around for 50ish years in their current form and less than 1,000 years in any form.

If I didn't have house chores or a commute, then I could spend a lot more time learning new pieces of Mathematics. Or work through the rest of the half-finished anatomy textbook on my bookshelf. Or finally get around to building a digital simulation of a human heart. Or start a garden. Or just hang out with a coffee at the hackerspace or coffee shop or church basement.

There are a lot of opportunities for serendipity, many ways to build grit, and infinite opportunities to socialize.

Sitting on a 1950's style cement highway for 30 minutes to go to a mall where I stand in the 1960's style Macy's checkout line is not the end-all and be-all of what it means to be human. That lifestyle an odd cultural aberration unique to the 20th and early 21st century.

The idea that doing dishes or vacuuming or driving a car in rush hour traffic are necessary to experience serendipity or frustration or boredom is a truly tyrannical vision of what it means to be human.

It's certainly true that we're not headed for a tech utopia (or dystopia), and that new technologies will have unintended and probably negative consequences (in addition to positive consequences).

But I'm not worried about ending commutes or killing the modern grocery shopping experience. Those things are inessential to the human experience and a net drag on society.

Geographic distribution of voting power is not an essential component of Republicanism. Although unequal voting power was a feature of traditional Roman Republicanism, that distribution was a hereditary distribution, not a geographic distribution.

More to the point, the US system is so different from the patrician/pleb system of Rome that calling our system Republican while calling (our system minus geographic distribution) not Republican is a pretty freaking arbitrary line in the sand.

Also, it's worth noting that Cicero's greatest effect on Roman politics was foiling a somewhat Haysian rebellion.

> I'm not sure why you brought up that most people arguing about something tend to pick the side that benefits them. I live in New York City. This does not benefit me.

I won't presume to know your political beliefs, but it's worth noting that you could increase the power of your preferred coalition while weakening your own vote.

On the one hand, you say we shouldn't give other minorities extra power because without geographic distance jealousy/tension would overwhelm the political system.

I can't help but point out that you're making this claim on a thread attached to a story about a violent rural rebellion against urbanites! I.e., geography doesn't defuse those tensions.

So given that those tensions exist no matter what, is there any justification?

> It might not be a reasonable, logical justification, but it exists.

So to be clear, there's no reasonable justification for giving geographic minorities extra voting poewr that doesn't also justify giving other minorities extra voting power.

The only justification is grounded in realism: a fear of jealous-inspired violence toward neighbors that geographic distance would presumably prevent.

How does the very article we're commenting on not completely refute this argument?

> MA isn't that much of a special case, as it's the case in the majority of states and Federally.

It's a special case in the majority of land mass (this is just a tounge-in-cheek joke ;-) )

Federally, I disagree. Democrats won the popular vote in the Senate and Presidency but control neither. That's largely attributable to urban voters in states that allocated their electoral votes to (R).

It's clear that Twitter et al. are more interested in users who don't currently know who Alex Jones is; they clearly believe that the number of people who haven't been exposed to Jones is much larger than the number of people who have been exposed but are "on the fence".

IMO Twitter et al. are probably correct at least on this point. Jones isn't exactly an "on the fence" kind of guy.

Supposing we are purely concerned with the efficacy of these bans, as opposed to their moral/ethical/social implications, the question is: does banning Jones substantially reduce the number of people who see his content?

I don't have an answer to that question, but IMO it's the right question to be asking (again, from a purely "supposing your goal is to shut down Jones, is this action effective?" viewpoint).

> There seems to be a dumbing down of America, where we expect corporations to be the ones to decide things are right or wrong

I see exactly the opposite. There seems to be a heightened awareness and importance of social/political issues, where we demand corporations implement our own notions of what is right and wrong.

My hope is that the ultimate effect is that corporations effectively remind us that their property is private property and that this reminder renews interest in preserving the commons and enabling individual ownership.

Jealousy is not a particularly sound or convincing ideological justification.

> And actually, yes, most of this anger is linked to a feeling that people in rural areas have too little representation compared to major population centers, where most people live.

It's worth pointing out that MA is a bit of a special case nationally. In most of the Midwest, for example, the resentment (and power/money) flows the other way.

Sometimes the material is important enough that you want to make it as easy to understand as possible. Sometimes the material is a chance to teach your students how to problem solve. Or how to teach themselves new material. Or to help them become mathematically literate (i.e., able to read a book or paper on their own without your help).

A good course/curriculum does both. Some definitions are carefully explained at an intuitive level so that students can struggle with things beyond the defintion. Sometimes the definition is an opportunity to teach students how to go from a formal definition of an intuitive understanding. Or come up with extensions to the definition on their own. Or explore the implications of a definition on their own.

In short, are you teaching the definition of a Markov Chain as key content knowledge, or is this being presented as an exercise in mathematical creativity and mathematical problem solving? There is no "right" answer without more context; a good course will do the former with some topics and the latter with others.

So this is not a topic-level question. It's a course-level or curriculum-level question.

Interestingly, misunderstanding the fundamental tension between "explain well" and "teach people how t learn for themselves" is the source of many public debates on education. E.g., common core Mathematics. Are we teaching students how to add numbers or how to problem solve? Well, ideally both... but the debates always become an either/or.

After reading through theorems and proofs for dynamical systems theory, and especially considering applications of that theory, I came up with basically two practical take-aways:

1. Complexity matters and the curse of dimensionality is real.

2. All those nice theorems (stability, convergence, splitting, invariance, bifurcations, ...) are stated with respect to a state space and make assumptions about the dynamics on that state space. So if you code up a state space representation that is history-aware with respect to the dynamics you really care about, then:

a) you might lose some theorems that hold for the original process, and

b) you sometimes realize the theorems lose a lot of power when they're telling you something about a tuple of things you care about instead of the actual thing you care about.

If I ever teach people about random dynamical systems, this explanation will come immediately after the definition of a Markov process and I'll continually remind my audience throughout the course. Understanding what goes wrong when a system is "technically" Markovian is probably the best way to obtain a deep intuition. Or at least, it was very helpful to me.

"...and if I were the CEO of a company, I would abstain from deploying that company's resources in this fashion."

Including Google. If I were the CEO of Googe, I would do this.

Don't avoid the question. In your mind, does this statement provide sufficient evidence to prove that I obviously intend to work in the interests of whichever country my ancestors immigrated from?

I would not work on autonomous weapons or mass surveillance technology, and if I were the CEO of a company, I would abstain from deploying that company's resources in this fashion.

In your mind, does this statement provide sufficient evidence to prove that I obviously intend to work in the interests of whichever country my ancestors immigrated from?