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I don't grok the insidious creep of social credit policy or the gross invasion of student privacy. You're attending a lecture at a college. You're not in a pri

I don't grok the insidious creep of social credit policy or the gross invasion of student privacy. You're attending a lecture at a college. You're not in a private location. Traditionally, what the beacons were doing would be done by TAs taking attendance, class participation grading, or simply by having trivial pop quizzes during class. Adding bluetooth beacons just makes the process more efficient (and makes it easier for students to fool the system), but it doesn't change its essential nature. Making lecture attendance a part of your grade may seem like bad policy or infantalizing to you, but that doesn't make it an invasion of privacy or social-credit policy. Your tangential advocacy about "social understanding" missing the negative consequences of that approach. In particular that inconsistency of rule application creates a hole you can drive a truck through for all kinds of unfair and biased consequences (literally exactly what is brought to the table by a "feeling" application of the rules), and with little gained. While thoughtful empathic responses can be very helpful in a lot of situations, I don't think you've made a good case for this one.

mod50ack 7y ago
(relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like that. It's true that unwritten social rules aren't 100% fair. They're not entirely consistent either. But the foremost one I was thinking about was the increased acceptance of human margin of error in accounting: humans, unlike computers, don't count down the the nanosecond. I've had assignments automatically marked as late because they only finished transferring over the network a second after the due time. A human would never say that's late. Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Thankfully in all those cases I've been manually marked not late. But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions.
- cbsmith 7y ago
  > A human would never say that's late. You don't know humans very well then. A human might say it's late even if you turned it in on time. Heck, a human might say you never turned it in. > Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Hey, I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from thirty years ago. I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from a HN comment from weeks ago. It's nice wanting things. That doesn't make them good ideas. A computer might try to make corrections right up until the last nanosecond, but a human might wisely recognize they need to get their corrections out of the way well ahead of time and stop looking for typeohs after they've handed in their assignment. ;-) > But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions. That's absolutely true, and in those cases you'd expect a different approach, regardless of whether there was a machine keeping time or not. I just don't think you've found such a case here.
- cbsmith 7y ago
  As a human, not referring to a machine... when network delays made you late... how did you know when you submitted it that you got it done in time? ;-) Were network delays not something that needed to be factored in if you were submitting via network, much as postal delays might need to be considered when submitting via mail?
  - mod50ack 7y ago
    At the very least, the timestamp on the file (although, yes, timestamps can be spoofed, etc., etc.). In any case, I've always been pardoned when the "lateness" is three seconds' worth of processing. But if I were waiting on line at the deadline to hand in a physical assignment (the closest analogy I can make), I think that most reasonable profs would not take issue with me if I didn't happen to get to the end of that line by the nanosecond specified. Of course, it's _possible_ that a prof could be a real stickler, with a huge digital clock on the wall and a hand on the submission box. But that, again, to me reflects only an extension of the way people are treated in huge classes (often largely freshmen) in college. If there are a handful of people in a seminar, "deadlines" have never in my experience been a thing in the same way.

mod50ack 7y ago

(relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like that. It's true that unwritten social rules aren't 100% fair. They're not entirely consistent either. But the foremost one I was thinking about was the increased acceptance of human margin of error in accounting: humans, unlike computers, don't count down the the nanosecond. I've had assignments automatically marked as late because they only finished transferring over the network a second after the due time. A human would never say that's late. Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Thankfully in all those cases I've been manually marked not late. But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions.

cbsmith 7y ago
> A human would never say that's late. You don't know humans very well then. A human might say it's late even if you turned it in on time. Heck, a human might say you never turned it in. > Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Hey, I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from thirty years ago. I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from a HN comment from weeks ago. It's nice wanting things. That doesn't make them good ideas. A computer might try to make corrections right up until the last nanosecond, but a human might wisely recognize they need to get their corrections out of the way well ahead of time and stop looking for typeohs after they've handed in their assignment. ;-) > But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions. That's absolutely true, and in those cases you'd expect a different approach, regardless of whether there was a machine keeping time or not. I just don't think you've found such a case here.
cbsmith 7y ago
As a human, not referring to a machine... when network delays made you late... how did you know when you submitted it that you got it done in time? ;-) Were network delays not something that needed to be factored in if you were submitting via network, much as postal delays might need to be considered when submitting via mail?
- mod50ack 7y ago
  At the very least, the timestamp on the file (although, yes, timestamps can be spoofed, etc., etc.). In any case, I've always been pardoned when the "lateness" is three seconds' worth of processing. But if I were waiting on line at the deadline to hand in a physical assignment (the closest analogy I can make), I think that most reasonable profs would not take issue with me if I didn't happen to get to the end of that line by the nanosecond specified. Of course, it's _possible_ that a prof could be a real stickler, with a huge digital clock on the wall and a hand on the submission box. But that, again, to me reflects only an extension of the way people are treated in huge classes (often largely freshmen) in college. If there are a handful of people in a seminar, "deadlines" have never in my experience been a thing in the same way.