jltsiren

10 ms·

151.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Depends on the solution. If the solution is that P≠NP, the concept of NP-completeness remains the bigger contribution, unless the proof techniques are particularly interesting and lead to other major results. The same applies if P=NP but th
152.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
The USSR had already reached Oder (less than 70 km from Berlin) around the time the Battle of the Bulge ended. They stopped there for over two months to regroup and to secure their flanks, rather than advancing on relatively undefended Berl
153.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Here is one example: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year Declining enrollment affects universities very unevenly. University of California is still under pressure to increase enrollment, which is mostl
154.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
In real terms, tuition fees in public universities peaked in the early 2010s. They have not kept up with inflation since then. That explains a large part of the fiscal disaster.
155.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Stanford is a research university. The student should have full responsibility for learning outcomes. The university will provide support and opportunities to the extent its resources allow, but it's up to the student to choose if they
156.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
I don't how the English evaluation works in the average (US?) school, or even what's in the exams. But it's possible to have useful native language exams with objective evaluation. Until 2006, the national Finnish/Swedis
157.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
There is nothing new in that. It's pretty common that people get drunk at the airport or on the plane and make jokes about bombs or something. Then the place is evacuated and flights are disrupted. The culprits get arrested and probabl
158.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
NIH grants are pretty good, but they have not kept up with inflation. ERC grants are better, unless you are in a country with particularly high salaries. NSF grants are not that special. Europe spends more on academic research than the US,
159.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Academic salaries are lower in the US relative to industry salaries than in most other countries. While the nominal sums are high, the salaries are low relative to housing costs. Particularly because good universities tend to be in expensiv
160.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Modern cities have a lot of buildings that are sparsely populated. 500 years ago, major Italian cities had ~15k people / square km, which is similar to Brooklyn. Paris had 35k to 50k people / square km, making it more densely popu
161.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Residency programs, as in medicine. After completing your degree, you spend a few years working as a junior under formal supervision. The incentives are kind of bad but solvable. If the underlying issue is that you need more skills to be wo
162.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Education is about building and maintaining a successful society. People have different opinions on how to define success. Learning for the test is just a pointless excercise. If some part of education has no goals beyond that, it should be
163.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Old papers were essentially essays. When there were fewer researchers publishing fewer papers, you were expected to read everything relevant you came across. It made sense to optimize the papers for reading. Today there is much more researc
164.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
You are confusing education with test scores. The ability to solve hard problems in artificial test conditions is a useful proxy for having learned what is being tested. But only if the test itself is irrelevant. If your future depends on t
165.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Standardized testing is usually foiled by Goodhart's law. If the outcomes of the tests matter, schools start focusing on test prep, at the expense of actual education. It's probably necessary to have one set of standardized tests
166.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
With Russia it's precisely because of their fundamentals. Too much depends on the people in charge, because Russia never developed effective institutions to constrain their leaders. When they have a good leader, they take a step forwar
167.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
And my dinner table is solid wood from IKEA. Affordable quality is perhaps harder to find in the US than in some other countries. Because professional salaries are so high, the top 10% is responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That make
168.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Framing it as charity misses the point. Power is always based on reciprocal obligations. Everywhere in the world, at every point in history. While modern societies try to formalize the obligations, there are plenty of informal expectations
169.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
The US is a common law system, where the law is a combination of statutes and precedent. The statutes alone are insufficient for interpreting the law. Your approach would be more correct in a civil law system, but there are no pure civil la
170.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
The short version is that the internal politics of the Mongol Empire shuffled the religious map of Asia. Christianity gradually spread further into Asia, but the rise of Islam severed the contact between the Church of the East and Western C
171.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
There are plenty of incentives, practical reasons, and even legal requirements for extending the benefits to non-members. Germany also has a mechanism for declaring a collective bargaining agreement generally binding, which means that it ap
172.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
I remember similar warnings from when I visited Chernobyl ~20 years ago. The ambient radiation exposure was not that different from the average flight, but there could be some actual risks if you accidentally ingest radioactive dust.
173.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Voluntary unions have a free rider problem. You may choose to join the union because you believe it's the right thing to do, but the benefits are rarely worth the dues. Non-members also benefit from collective bargaining, but they have
174.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Erdős problems form a substantial fraction of all mathematical problems that have been explicitly stated but not solved; are sufficiently famous that people care about them; and are sufficiently uninteresting that people have not spent that
175.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Military history is full of quotes like "war is too important to be left to the generals". When you put people who focus on technical matters in charge, they often make poor decisions, as they are not looking at the big picture. T
176.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
It's the common practice in technical writing. Even when you are writing for other experts in the same field, your target audience never shares as much context as you would prefer. The world is much weirder and more varied than you wou
177.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
A dean is a mid-level manager in an organization, where effective power is widely diffused. Many things are possible in the same sense as rewriting the US constitution. The mechanism for it exists, but using it in practice would require wid
178.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
Money is not fungible when you are a large organization. Many things that should be possible in principle are impossible in practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia. MIT's endowment is ~80% earmarked to whatever purpo
179.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
> If university stopped providing an earnings boost from attending, 90% of students would quit tomorrow. Maybe 10–20% would quit for that reason. There would be more attrition if you could get common jobs (such as teacher or nurse) that
180.
by jltsiren 5mo ago
An honor system is a culture, where most people feel shame if they cheat. While some external enforcement is necessary to maintain the system, it mostly relies on everyone policing their own behavior. The more you focus on policing others,

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