asoneth

69 ms·

691.
by asoneth 5y ago
I did admissions when I was teaching years ago, and I found standardized test scores helpful in ensuring a minimum baseline level of proficiency. I think the drive to ignore them entirely is misguided and will result in admitting students w
692.
by asoneth 5y ago
I suspect that many Duolingo users are not choosing between Duolingo and a formal language course. I suspect they're choosing between Duolingo and some other smartphone activity. I enjoyed my formal language education but four years of
693.
by asoneth 5y ago
It's a bit hard to use a consistent scale given the non-linear utility of money/intelligence/grit and the subjectivity of measuring the latter two. But another way of thinking about it is to look at the research on economic m
694.
by asoneth 5y ago
I completely agree. But I there's a middle ground between "nothing you do matters" and "you can accomplish absolutely anything if you put your mind to it". People at either extreme of the spectrum are more likely to
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by asoneth 5y ago
> Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital Agreed that these are important factors in success, but in practice they don't seem to be equivalent in importance. An unsuccessful person who lacks intelligence or co
696.
by asoneth 5y ago
I have only met one of the "world's richest people" on the list you linked and he is very hard working but I think the conclusions drawn from extreme outliers may not be applicable more broadly. I think perhaps we're tal
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by asoneth 5y ago
I would agree that do-ing is a major component of the delta, along with ability and a fair bit of luck. I guess my mental model would be that someone's socioeconomic status often comes down to: starting point + (hard work * ability * l
698.
by asoneth 5y ago
The quoted statement was referring to absolute socioeconomic status. I agree that relative movement is possible and I also know a lot of extremely hard-working people (both rich and poor) who have been successful and climbed a rung or two i
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by asoneth 5y ago
I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence. But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and
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by asoneth 5y ago
Giving 5s to your preferred candidates and 1s to your disliked candidates is not necessarily a problem, as others have pointed out, that's just approval voting and a good technique in its own right. If you want to avoid that, the runof
701.
by asoneth 5y ago
> where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases One major motivation for the runoff at the end in techniques like STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is to encourage voters to give different scores to candidates (assuming th
702.
by asoneth 5y ago
If the effects are minor I think it will be difficult to measure the impact on any one company given the number of confounding variables. In that case the only way to determine the correlation between these kinds of things and business succ
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by asoneth 5y ago
> The fact that people can't manage their calendars to allocate whatever time they need to prepare before a meeting If I wanted to manage my calendar in the way you suggest using my current calendar system it seems like I would manu
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by asoneth 5y ago
WoSD = "War on Some Drugs". (Primarily used by drug legalization advocates, presumably to convey the arbitrary distinction between legal and illegal drugs.)
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by asoneth 5y ago
I've noticed that as well -- no matter how engaged someone is, if there is a screen that they can see but others can't then it is an information imbalance that is disruptive to the normal flow of conversation. It's like heari
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by asoneth 5y ago
Reminds me of a quote from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting: "Some consider it noble to have a method; others consider it noble not to have a method. Not to have a method is bad; to stop entirely at method is worse still. One
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by asoneth 5y ago
That's a good point in general, though the product example I gave was primarily funded by government contracts and (at least based on the negotiations) the contracts were far more sensitive to price than quality. But I will say that my
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by asoneth 5y ago
> What people call 'equality warriors' I call bloodshed preventers. Seems prudent to support, even if you are born on level 50. The current system endures as long as most people feel like they still have more to gain playing by
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by asoneth 5y ago
I would point out that "the UX community" is no more a monolith than "the developer community" -- many UX designers do not spend their time chasing the latest UI fads and adding novelty for its own sake.
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by asoneth 5y ago
I agree that auto-closing bugs is unfortunate, but I understand the motivation. I've worked on legacy codebases with thousands of unresolved issues old enough to drink. Those issues were probably triaged and reproduced by the people wh
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by asoneth 5y ago
If you think life in prison is more inhumane than death then I could be convinced that prisoners with a life sentence should be allowed to voluntarily choose euthanasia. If you are concerned about cost then it's worth noting that execu
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by asoneth 5y ago
> accessibility is not hard This has not been my experience based on my involvement in accessibility efforts at two medium-to-large companies that decided to make their existing web-based products accessible to blind and low-vision users
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by asoneth 5y ago
Orbit looks like a way to publish content with accompanying spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a technique to efficiently improve long-term recall. The most accessible primer on spaced repetition I've seen is Nicky Case's int
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by asoneth 5y ago
> You seem to be imagining a ‘universal-ish intermediate language’ To clarify, I do not mean that each developer would be using a different language -- they would all be writing "Python", they'd just using a superficially
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by asoneth 5y ago
Yes. They'd be using the same language, but see different syntax styles.
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by asoneth 5y ago
Is it possible to losslessly translate from Hy or Python to the Abstract Syntax Tree and back? That is, is there way to have a code viewer that, instead of highlighting syntax, changes it to another syntax on the fly? Could each member of a
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by asoneth 5y ago
I think it depends on why you want to avoid junk mail. There's a lot of human effort and natural resources consumed in growing timber, cutting it down, shipping it, pulping it, printing it, mailing it, delivering it, recycling it, and
718.
by asoneth 5y ago
Good point -- I don't know how to estimate the marginal cost of delivering marketing mail but it's certainly not zero. Looking at the same USPS FY2020 financials [1] it looks like marketing mail constitutes a little more than half
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by asoneth 5y ago
In FY2019 the USPS earned $16.4 billion from marketing mail [1]. Estimating 121 million households that's ~$136 per household per year. The households that might choose to spend $136 per year to avoid junk mail are probably wealthier t
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by asoneth 5y ago
> A small child has zero degree of caution. As a parent of small children I regularly have to repair electronic devices that have been temporarily broken (e.g. different languages set, screens locked out, tablet storage filled by thousan

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