knzhou

61 ms·

481.
by knzhou 7y ago
And what exactly do you think "it" is? In terms of concrete actions for content moderation, not some vague "be good, don't be bad" moralizing.
482.
by knzhou 7y ago
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
483.
by knzhou 7y ago
It's worse than that. She made a reasonable blog post highlighting somebody's doubts of the LIGO response, got a reasonable response from LIGO, and acknowledged that she was satisfied with it. That was a perfectly fine scientific
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by knzhou 7y ago
Perhaps, but many of these labs are extensions of universities. I do research at SLAC, a national lab which shares grad students with Stanford.
485.
by knzhou 7y ago
Absolutely. I helped to write a series of tests that had to create a 200:1 funnel. There was some debate over whether it was less brutal to cut, say, 20:1 and then 10:1, or 10:1 and then 20:1, or perhaps add another stage and cut 10:1, 5:
486.
by knzhou 7y ago
But these are fundamentally supply and demand issues. Why is there so much pressure to develop interesting research? Because there is a deluge of research coming out from our huge oversupply of graduate students, and you only will progres
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by knzhou 7y ago
What can you do? Suppose you magically double the number of faculty positions. Within one year all of the new positions could be filled a hundred times over. Now you've back to the exact same scenario, except that now you also have twi
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by knzhou 7y ago
As a grad student, I feel compelled to repeat my usual spiel: it's just supply and demand. All problems of grad school are caused by a massive oversupply of potential grad students, tens to hundreds of times more than necessary to fill
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by knzhou 7y ago
English is an official language of Singapore, in fact probably effectively the official language, since it's the one everybody has to learn.
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by knzhou 7y ago
You are an outlier, as is just about everybody else commenting here.
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by knzhou 7y ago
> It seems pretty reasonable to me that as human society grows more complex and specialized, humans would benefit from more education. That narrative is totally destroyed by knowledge retention studies. It's one of the few things in
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by knzhou 7y ago
I'm getting a PhD and it's been 90% real stuff, with no regard towards impact metrics. It probably depends a lot on the subfield. My subfield is less "hot" than most, which some would take as a sign of unhealth, but it m
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by knzhou 7y ago
This is a good article, but I think it's a little confusing -- it doesn't specify the scope of the bootstrap programme. It's true that general considerations can give you very strong constraints on how particles of various sp
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by knzhou 7y ago
Uh oh, that seems to be rather out of date. When I took the SAT-M in 7th grade I recall having already seen harder versions of all the questions, because of math competitions. The same went for almost everyone I knew that took it.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Stanford physics PhD student here. We actually don't have qualifying exams, but my unpopular opinion is that we should. Physics is a lot of fun to study. The undergraduate and core graduate curriculum show off all its greatest hits. Wh
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by knzhou 7y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem is always scale. The modern system of American education really was born out of idealism, in fact the same ideals that the comments here are using to attack it. It doesn'
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by knzhou 7y ago
There's a near opposite hypothesis to yours: Strauss–Howe generational theory. The idea is that instead of sitting at an 'optimal' point, we have cycles of general societal personality that last four generations, which dictat
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by knzhou 7y ago
You can't just hack your way into being a STEM professor at a top institution. You actually have to do stuff, discover new things. It's analogous to actually building a good product if you're a startup founder.
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by knzhou 7y ago
The methodology is much much better than Forbes 30 under 30. In Forbes you pay to nominate yourself. The list is accordingly mostly people in obscure startups seeking to use it to attract publicity. The "eminence" in this study is
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by knzhou 7y ago
Never mind what it measures. My main point is that whatever it is, it's not simply "dollars spent on prep". Good tests provide an opening for the less well-off to succeed, despite the more well-off doing everything they can
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by knzhou 7y ago
That's not evidence the tests are flawed. I was just having a very similar conversation with a friend who aced the physics olympiad. She said, "it's too easy to game, all I had to do was try old tests on my own". Well, h
502.
by knzhou 7y ago
Huh, I stand corrected. My original complaint still applies to >99% of criticality studies, but the field might be coming around since the last time I looked into it, 3 years ago. Skimming through the papers, I'm still skeptical of
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by knzhou 7y ago
> If anything I see selection for wealth: the samples in one of the bigger studies selected from “the 15 best STEM graduate training programmed”, which is broadly a proxy for wealth. Not everything is about wealth. STEM graduate school d
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by knzhou 7y ago
Again, the alternative to standardized tests and credentials is hiring based on connections, ethnicity, pedigree, physical appearance, and superficial confidence. These problems are exactly why meritocracy was invented in the first place. T
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by knzhou 7y ago
Because proper evaluation takes time and a bad choice carries a huge cost. In the absence of any objective measures, an employer gets around this by just hiring the son of the guy they golf with. Connections. Sports works, but only because
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by knzhou 7y ago
Any study about "criticality" needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. The standard methodology is that criticality is synonymous with power laws. And power laws are straight lines on log-log plots, with slope equal to the cri
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by knzhou 7y ago
This is exactly why making more FCI-style questions is so hard. They shouldn't be sensitive to things like air resistance -- a question whose answer is completely changed by realistic air resistance isn't a very good one.
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by knzhou 7y ago
We have to try, because the alternative to standardized testing isn't some egalitarian utopia, it's nepotism.
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by knzhou 7y ago
I liked Randall Knight's Five Easy Lessons, which summarizes findings in the field and also comes with sample exercises and activities for the whole intro curriculum. There's also Mazur's Peer Instruction, which is a little o
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by knzhou 7y ago
As somebody who has designed some of the tests Paul Graham is complaining about, it really is hard from the other side! For example, it's long been known in the physics education research community that students come away from introduc

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