iguy

100 ms·

961.
by iguy 8y ago
Agreed -- making alternatives, which are as good for the professor, and free for the student, seems like a great idea. Correcting incentives is indeed hard. My guess is that, with professors, the ideal is actually zero explicit incentive:
962.
by iguy 8y ago
The split is really 3 ways, nature/nurture/noise, although the latter two tend to get lumped together and called nurture. The rule of thumb for most complex traits is half genetic, half environment... but this half is almost all &
963.
by iguy 8y ago
How do they do this in the UK? I mean, what's the mechanism? Do they have a formal seat at the table for textbook decisions, or do they just organise marches against lecturers who disobey, or what? (Seriously asking.) I also had the id
964.
by iguy 8y ago
Maybe this is one more example of a broader pattern: if you're spending someone else's money, you pay much less attention to the price, and tend to prioritise side-benefits to you. That's why frequent flier programs exist: to
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by iguy 8y ago
More cynically, the vast majority of Internet customers are OK with it. Given the choice between having the consumer wait 10 more seconds for the page, vs. not knowing whether the ad company screwed them / leaving 1c on the table i
966.
by iguy 8y ago
You may enjoy the Connes interview linked here, discussing (in the 2nd half) French vs US vs Soviet systems: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-french-way-alain-co...
967.
by iguy 8y ago
Awesome, thanks. So maybe around 2/3 the cost per trip, compared to school busses, which seems plausible.
968.
by iguy 8y ago
I'm surprised, or perhaps, can you be more specific about what they had in mind? If we could replace seeing-eye dogs with computer vision, good enough to help blind people cross the road, then why build it into a fake dog, not into fak
969.
by iguy 8y ago
I think infantry is the only answer, really. The army still finds it really essential to have lots of guys walking around on two legs, who can go anywhere their opponents can go. And often carrying a serious weight, because having stuff wit
970.
by iguy 8y ago
Do you know off-hand how this compares to the rest of the system? I mean non-student public transport... maybe just busses? Per-rider and overall, ideally.
971.
by iguy 8y ago
And it could grow quite a bit to absorb all the school traffic. Someone above said ~25$/student/day: sure that's higher than the average commuter fare right now. Couldn't a unified system serve everyone better? And encou
972.
by iguy 8y ago
Something similar has long happened even within EU countries. Gregory Clark was giving talks about historical data on this in England, looking roughly for signals of people who were born in the north, got rich, and tended to move south -- a
973.
by iguy 8y ago
> Before approximately the Victorian age No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how
974.
by iguy 8y ago
No and no. I don't even know what times you think I'm conflating. From memory, numbers like 16% come from population genetics around the time we invented farming -- we swung from relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to
975.
by iguy 8y ago
OK, I exaggerate a little! And the modern states have indeed retreated from this role... but still outlaw keeping a harem of five -- as must have been common if 16% of the men had almost 100% of the women.
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by iguy 8y ago
> The third, WTF? Not really. A society where only 16% of men mate has 84% angry young men with nothing to lose. Expect a lot of violence, and not much careful consistent tending of the fields... My understanding is that this is why stat
977.
by iguy 8y ago
Many people thought this, e.g. it was assumed in Victorian England that the past looked a lot like the present of less-developed countries, like Russia. But it's not true, we have data. The quite readable book on this is Laslett, &quot
978.
by iguy 8y ago
I'll stop now, but my church claim was only that the medieval church had a hand in changing the culture, in places which are now mostly protestant or atheist. The places which the post-reformation catholic church has thrived are indeed
979.
by iguy 8y ago
Well this is fun, see other answers. I agree that the extreme individualist end of the spectrum has downsides, for sure. Suicide rates make horrifying reading. But I think you can argue it's part of what made the west successful -- in
980.
by iguy 8y ago
To be clear, my claim above is that the church, as a centralising power structure in "christaindom" circa 1000AD, played some role in pushing the culture there towards openness, or in making extended families less important. Claim
981.
by iguy 8y ago
The fairly solid part here is that the west is different, and my understanding is that the divergence in things like family/clan structures dates to early medieval times, in a zone something like London-to-Milan, core europe. Something
982.
by iguy 8y ago
Yes indeed, they specialise within India too. And surely some of the same network benefits may apply there too. Surely Parsi entrepreneurs (a century ago) got better loans... backed in part by the fear of angering a close community? It&#x27
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by iguy 8y ago
I'm struggling to think of a good source right now, sorry. But a link I've posted before looking the other way, at how the other half of the Roman empire turned out: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/article
984.
by iguy 8y ago
There's an interesting ancient pattern of small minority groups dominating certain businesses, often ones which need trust -- here "handshake loans", but traditionally also simply payment for goods shipped long-distances. e.g
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by iguy 8y ago
I think it's much deeper than "individualist streak in American culture". Western Europe in the last 1000 years or so has been a very unusual place... one aspect of which is having nuclear families not extended ones. Because
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by iguy 8y ago
Once you have an amazon.com account, you magically also have an amazon.de account, and an amazon.it account... and it's a few clicks to switch in the app. Maybe that's how it'll go?
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by iguy 8y ago
In this vein, R V Jones "Most Secret War" is great if you haven't read it -- about the cat & mouse game of radar development, from a guy deeply involved: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003380
988.
by iguy 8y ago
Not an expert but it does sound like American car-making for instance is lower-skill than German, today. But I'm not sure about manufacturing as a whole. The things America is competitive in exporting tend to be pretty high-tech. I fou
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by iguy 8y ago
Many books! (Although sadly too many are just modern political battles dressed up in earlier period costumes.) For now let me recommend https://pseudoerasmus.com/ (and his book lists) as an honest guide to all this, for tho
990.
by iguy 8y ago
This is part of a long and interesting story I don't have time to find the right links for... In the UK compared to the US, say 1850-1950, the premium commanded by skilled labour over unskilled was always much smaller. Or another way t

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