virtuous_signal

Sounds nice in theory, but the whole idea behind the right to face your accuser is that people depend on their senses to judge if someone's lying or not by how he/she reacts to the confrontation.

I love seeing this phenomenon appear in the wild:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

In short: people can be correct when they notice an inverse correlation, because their world consists of people who got into the same university, or workplace, or club, as them. But the correlation is exactly the opposite in society as a whole.

Americans are generally sentenced to prison for committing specific crimes. Sure there may be some things you think the law should decriminalize (do vote), and also, sometimes innocents are imprisoned, which absolutely should not happen. But our prison system as a whole is not comparable to the indefinite detainment and reeducation of people purely due to their ethnicity or religion, which is happening with Uighurs.

A better comparison would be Japanese internment camps - I don't think anyone is defending those anymore.

I think there are multiple factors that will prevent the US from ever taking a united stance on it:

1) Republicans are probably louder about criticizing China but lose credibility when they don't speak up about (less severe, but still serious) issues such as police here brutalizing protesters. There also needs to be a reckoning with our own national overreaches after terrorist attacks such as the Patriot Act -- the Uighur camps were built in response to some attacks in the Xinjiang region, and I don't think Republicans have set a good example for how governments should respond to that.

2) Leftists and sympathizers who deflect with "But America..." with absolutely no sense of relative scale. This happens so much that it's a trope[1], and China is more than happy to feed this[2].

3) In higher education and tech, sheer numbers of moderately patriotic Chinese citizens mean there can never be consensus. See what happened at Warwick [3] earlier this year with a student vote about Hong Kong. CSSA is at every large university here and they know how to organize. For an example re: Uighurs, some Chinese who have been fed a steady diet of state media since birth actually consider this story fake news (blind discussion [4]).

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

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/868566978/in-george-floyd-pro...

[3] https://www.axios.com/hong-kong-british-university-chinese-s...

[4] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Did-you-know-about-China-and-...

>There is statistical data saying the opposite

Interesting study and really good discussion on HN at the time, but the opposite of "[Whiteboard interviews] often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance" would be something like "People who do well at whiteboard interviews tend to be worse performers at work." I don't think that's what the study said at all; rather that people do worse at whiteboard problems when they're being watched vs. not being watched.

Regardless -- I think it's a valid reading to say the "area between" say, g(x) = x and the x-axis from -1 to 1 equals 1. Only people who are trained would say it's 0. So I don't think something like that really measures "extended problem solving and deductive thinking skills" which is a pretty lofty goal for a test.

The second summand due to the sin^3 is not nonnegative (so you do need to use oddness to avoid the integral)

Right on the second part, my bad.

I think the following is poorly worded and possibly incorrect:

>What is the area enclosed by the function f(x) = sin²x - x²(sin³x)(cos²x) and the x-axis — between -π/4 and π/4?

Well, the second part is an odd function so we know its areas are 0 over symmetric regions, assuming "area" means "signed area". So we're left with sin²x which has a trick: the integral of sin²x and cos²x are equal over any of the quarter cycles of the graph -- same shape and everything. So we have that over our domain, pi/2 = Int(1) = Int(cos²x+sin²x) = Int(sin²x+sin²x) = 2Int(sin²x)... so the answer would be pi/4 (which doesn't appear).

I also suspect that some of the answers must be wrong, possibly in the counting or probability questions where it is extremely easy to make a logical error.

In my opinion the author should have a third party scrutinize his/her answers. I'm quite certain I didn't get 40% of the questions wrong. (I have a math PhD, taught calculus for 4 years, scored 170 on the quant section of the GRE, and went through this whole "test" very carefully).

>Assuming that every question in this 20-question test has only 1 right answer and you choose to answer each question randomly, what is the chance that you're so bad that you only get 4 questions right or less?

They probably mean for you to assume that 1) each question has 5 answer choices, and 2) you select one of them with equal probability. But given that this is question #2, assumption (1) is kind of a guess, and (2) should be explicitly stated... (the answer btw has to do with the binomial distribution - and you definitely need some heavy arithmetic, so are they testing your gut instinct?)

Well this is sad.

It seems to me that this should have been avoidable - along with others like airlines and cruise lines saying they're going to go bankrupt. Why is hitting "pause" for half a year such a death sentence? As an individual, while I don't have a lot of money and my income is 0 currently, I've reduced expenses and could live off my savings for the next couple years. Why can't businesses do a similar thing -- is there some competitive advantage, in better times, that motivates businesses to keep almost nothing in reserves?

Mormons are a vanishingly small percentage of all religious people. You asserted that MLMs are correlated with religion (with no qualifiers), and instead of backing up that assumption with data, you went right into sociologically theorizing of why it might be true. With even more unsubstantiated claims about religion. No downvotes from me, just pointing out flaws.

Perhaps law firms could invite people with smaller cases to cooperate as follows: everyone contributes some amount of money to a pool and gives the description of their proposed case. Then the law firm chooses the best action to pursue using the pooled money. Then if they win, the proceeds are shared by the firm, and everyone in the pool evenly.

Can public schools just mandate that kids wear masks, from a legal perspective? On the one hand, kids are much less... annoying about enduring inconveniences; but on the other hand, public schools can't play the private-business card that e.g., stores can. I have no doubt that some American parents with perfectly healthy children will insist that theirs shouldn't have to wear masks, because "oxygen" or whatever, and that really does jeopardize teachers' and other students' lives.

Even if the science on this isn't settled yet, it's such low hanging fruit that I can't think of any reason why the big N companies aren't already doing it. Besides, it would require less time from the interviewers (since they don't have to be present for the reading and thinking portion).

I'm not really sure anger or violence works that way. Some would say that tolerating violence leads to more, or more severe violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

I think you're touching on a more general trend. People are waking up to the fact that punishments and jailtime are often excessive for criminals. And also that for too long people got away with saying terrible (but not illegal) shit. We're course correcting, but it does make for some strange comparisons. For instance, I would guess that many of the same people who pile on when someone's old tweets are found, (essentially ensuring that they lose/never get a good job again) would also be in favor of ban-the-box laws or donating money indiscriminately to bail funds.

One could probably extrapolate from the statistic mentioned in the article (below). It seems plausible that the US visa system ends up taking in more people of high castes.

>In 2003, only 1.5 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits or members of lower castes, according to the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. More than 90 percent were from high or dominant castes. About 2.5 million people of Indian descent live in the country, including those born here.

Does anyone think this happens nowadays in interviews? I am not in favor of any kind of “standardized test” for software engineer interviews, but it seems like the practice of picking just 1 or 2 problems could easily be used to reject an undesirable candidate, under the veneer of meritocracy.

I see this sentiment expressed a lot, but I can think of edge cases where it fails. One case is regular sexual harrassment from a peer (say 2 students in a class). It's not technically a crime, but it's easy to see that the educational experience of the victim is worsened. In that case, I would say it's the university's responsibility to investigate and step in.

The matter is not as simple as "Devos is against it, so we must support it"; also one could say recent revisions aren't attempts to "dismantle" it. Criticism has come from all sides:

AAUP: https://www.aaup.org/article/trouble-title-ix

Harvard Law: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-titl...

More law professors: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/17/professors-ur...

How easily could this story* happen in other fields besides University faculties? Could this all be avoided by just not telling anyone that you are in the running for a job, until you have the written offer in hand?

*(1:frenemy finds out you are a candidate for a job; 2: frenemy anonymously send unsubstantiated rumors to decisionmakers; 3: decisionmakers take the rumors seriously)

The author makes the point that the investigator was sympathetic, but had to follow policy. It's the policy that is defective:

>Melanie also hadn’t been able to locate a current student named Rebecca James in Marta’s department, but she said that the name could always be an alias, and she was still obligated to investigate Marta now that a “credible” accusation had been made.

>“Good question,” Melanie responded, her voice bright again. “Because of the funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”

At least for sexually reproductive species, your first objection could be addressed by defining the species relation as the transitive closure of the relation A ~ B if A can reproduce with B. (so for instance male1 ~ female0 and male2 ~ female0 by the original definition, and then male1 ~ male2 via the closure)

I think anyone who has experience playing old video games can intuit the first 1/3 of the article from this experience. Think of one of those spaceship games played on a 2D screen, where you can exit out the right side and re-enter through the left, at the same vertical coordinate. That's a 2D torus, or R^2/Z^2. And one can easily extend this by one dimension to generate a possible physical universe. The generalization is that now you are in a 3D room shaped like a cube, where you can fly into the ceiling and come out the floor (same with the left/right, front/back walls). This is R^3/Z^3, the simplest space like ours that isn't "infinite" (while finite, it might still be very big, and that's why we shouldn't expect to be able to detect this situation by simply shining a light and waiting to see it from behind).

Similar? In my opinion this is much faster, easier, and less burdened by notation.

Thinking about this and going down the wikipedia rabbit hole of inventions scares me. I've heard the Dark Ages happened in part because society collectively forgot how to re-create the advanced technology from ancients, so once things inevitably broke, people just became that less efficient. Another area which strikes me as complex as metalworking is textiles. What if we forgot how to use the machines for harvesting cotton, spinning it into threads and then weaving it into clothes? I wouldn't be able to help at all in such a catastrophe, despite holding advanced degrees. I'm afraid I wouldn't even know how to fashion a spindle, or operate one. Hopefully the internet has enough information that this doesn't happen again?

Results like this make me wonder what news from sociology or psychology can really be trusted. It seems that every finding I've heard about that has entered the mainstream (stanford prison experiment, the importance of "grit" and "growth mindsets" e.g.) ends up either debunked or at least shown under replication to have vanishingly small effects.

During my time in my PhD program in science, I (voluntarily) went to two talks for my department and for the wider university about stereotype threat. It was a fascinating, compelling subject. But alas.

Contrast that with results in math or laboratory sciences. I'll read about something like the Sensitivity conjecture in Quanta or Scientific American and it might not be as inherently interesting, but at least I can somewhat trust that the result is "true". But that kind of scientific result never enters the mainstream where literally everyone in-the-know has heard of it.

One good thing to come out of certain rating systems, like Uber and Airbnb, is that the users get rated too. If someone is a terrible customer, then they can probably make things a lot worse for the driver or host than vice versa, and without these scores, drivers might not be able to warn other drivers about them. I would hope that with other modern customer service jobs, that reverse-ratings are always employed. It is a measurable way to improve the jobs of customer service workers.

Even as a grad student, my teaching evaluations couldn't negatively affect me. The only people it could have real, negative consequences for were instructors, who work on contracts. As an example, my department head (perhaps unintentionally) sent everyone an email saying any scores of less than 3.73 on a 1-7 scale were grounds for termination of that instructor's contract. I did not envy them at all, basically being highly educated customer service workers.

I don't know if "motivation" per se is studied in this context, but the genetic links for at least "self-regulation"[1], "self-control"[2], and "political ambition"[3] have been studied:

[1]https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000224

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...

[3]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1