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Too Clever by Half

epsilontheory.com

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Re: Too Clever by Half

#131

Post by RandallBrown »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #101
haZard_OS wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a number of occasions I have had prospective employers ask what my final grade was for specific classes. I have never been asked about my GPA specifically, but my grades at the University certainly affected me beyond academia.

May I ask which classes, and what type of employer? I don't even know if any of my employers bothered verifying that I graduated college.

Before I graduated, when I was interviewing for jobs, lots of companies wouldn't interview anyone with lower than a certain GPA. Google was the most notable one, although they've since gotten rid of that requirement since they found it has almost no correlation with your performance as an employee.

Other larger companies that cared were Lutron, Epic, and a few more I don't really remember. I think Epic even asked me what my ACT score was.

Beyond that first job though, my GPA hasn't mattered at all, which is good because mine was pretty mediocre.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#132

Post by rlonstein »

oldandtired wrote: post #33
solotronics wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you keep a dog from straying into the wild and getting injured? These are pets and not wild animals able to survive in the bush on their own.

Talking with a friend recently about how "wild" our pet dogs are. In the local area, dogs get out at night and form packs that hunt calves and lambs and simply kill them and leave the bodies. There is a good business in hunting feral cats and dogs that were pets and have been left to fend for themselves in the wild because they were no longer wanted.

It's changed as the demographics shifted and the county urbanized but thirty years ago the local sheriff still issued deputy animal control papers to hunters, farmers, woodsmen, etc. who reported dog packs. There are fewer farms, greater housing density, more posted land, revised laws, and different attitudes toward animal control (generally, better) but the problem still occasionally comes up. Feral dogs aren't just a semi-rural problem, this was the situation in Brooklyn https://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com/2007/07/dog-days-remember... and resulted in a handful of publicized attacks on joggers and pets.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#133

Post by maxerickson »

rlonstein wrote: post #132
oldandtired wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking with a friend recently about how "wild" our pet dogs are. In the local area, dogs get out at night and form packs that hunt calves and lambs and simply kill them and leave the bodies. There is a good business in hunting feral cats and dogs that were pets and have been left to fend for themselves in the wild because they were no longer wanted.

It's changed as the demographics shifted and the county urbanized but thirty years ago the local sheriff still issued deputy animal control papers to hunters, farmers, woodsmen, etc. who reported dog packs. There are fewer farms, greater housing density, more posted land, revised laws, and different attitudes toward animal control (generally, better) but the problem still occasionally comes up. Feral dogs aren't just…

Here the feral dog problem is solved enough that there's a substantial population of rabbits living in town.

(a small town in a rural county)

Re: Too Clever by Half

#134

Post by Sean1708 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #100
rhizome wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up The Marshmallow Test. If there was one thing I wish my parents had instilled in me, it's good study habits.

Wasn't that debunked? It's useful as a myth - "teach your kids patience", "don't go into the woods alone" - but it doesn't actually turn out to be true.

I've not been able to find anything about it being debunked. Wikipedia[0] says

> A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children's performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense.

but it sounds like the original experiment controlled for the trust factor so I don't really think it shows that the original results were invalid.

Having said that, I've not done a huge amount of research into this so maybe take my opinions with a grain of salt or two.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

Re: Too Clever by Half

#135

Post by willis77 »

FuckOffNeemo wrote: post #35
r4unwud wrote: post #6

It's really sad to see this article about animal abuse on the front page of HN.

Edit: I'll be copy pasta'ing this comment to every top level comment about animal abuse here. Shock collars can be used for abuse. But fuck, they can do so much good. = = = = = I'm happy to see you down voted here. I have had to employ shock collars for foster dogs who were capable of jumping 10 feet fences in the past and these things work a damn charm. They were the last option available to me after trying every ot…

Any dog ever would gladly trade a few zaps for a wide open place to explore outside. Cruelty is depriving dogs of exercise and outdoor time and stimulation and the chance to run, not invisible fences.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#136

Post by mfoy_ »

I'm not sure what the connection was, exactly, but this story talking about coyotes and raccoons in finance gave me an epiphany of understanding about Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#137

Post by derstander »

csomar wrote: post #129

Okay. Let's slow down here: The OP says. >> And they’re not that smart. I’d put our barn cat up against a raccoon any day on any sort of cognitive test. We think raccoons are clever because they have those anthropomorphic paws and those cute little masks and even a Marvel superhero with its own toy line, but please. Raccoons are takers, not schemers. From Wikipedia >> Zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons…

I agree. Having grown up in a rural area near raccoons and eastern coyotes, I definitely prefer the latter. I don't _know_ why, but if I were to wager a guess it's probably because they remind me of dogs. Maybe an unconscious bias shared by a lot of people thanks to the domestication of the dog.

Raccoons, in my experience, definitely seem intelligent. I think the author just needs a proxy for a villain. I can't be alone in thinking that the author has chosen poorly; the fault he finds in the coyote is, by his own admission, not shared by the raccoon. The raccoon is successful in both the mini- and meta-games.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#138

Post by zippitydoodah68 »

huffmsa wrote: post #98

The true meta-gamer of the story snuck by with a single sentence reference. So I'm calling you out barn cat. You think you can sneak by having your cake and keeping your solidarity and standoff distance from the humans but also benefit from the free housing + healthcare + steady food when you don't want to kill mice + affection when you decide to wander over to the main house. But I'm onto you.

Actually the parasite infestation (fleas), lack of affection and food when they want it (except through hard work), temperature variations, etc...make the barn cat a misanthrope.

Every house cat owner knows that the house cat is the 'meta game mastermind'. Hell, they've engineered the system to care about their safety so much that it is cruelty to have them reproduce via the species own painful biology. Letting them out into the street is homicidal. If they get pests they inflict them on their caretaker and every other discomfort is communicated to the human caretaker willy nilly. When they want to exert themselves they can be amazingly cruel, subtle, unpredictable and unyielding. House cats win.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#139

Post by GavinMcG »

tristor wrote: post #125
exelius wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a lot of white males don’t understand this. Not out of malice, but simply because the circumstances of their lives don’t put them in these situations as often as say, a black woman. It really affects the way you interact with the world and vice versa. In general, white men still make the rules, so if you’re different than that in any way, you have to adapt to the rule makers.

What does race have to do with this? Your average white male in the US is not a rule maker and suffers under the same arbitrary and often downright unfair consequences as anyone else. I just watched a white male friend get punished for academic dishonesty because another student cheated off him, despite being able to prove conclusively with logs and other evidence that he had no part in it. I also just watched anothe…

The person you're replying to didn't claim that only non-whites or non-males experienced these things. They claimed that white males experience them less frequently.

Your anecdotes are not substantial data, and the data do (empirically!) bear out the claim they were making, at least in many areas.

You're also right, of course, that this has to do with the power structures in place rather than being purely about race or sex. And in that respect, both you and the person you responded to are probably on the same team: you both think the power structures are unfair and ought to be challenged. Maybe focus on that possibility instead of reacting so critically?

In other words, if you're tired of "bullshit identity politics" focus on constructively guiding the conversation towards problematic power dynamics, rather than stomping off just because someone points out that those power dynamics are applied in a way that's disproportionate.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#140

Post by aswanson »

dibujante wrote: post #46
Kiro wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also realized this which made me game the whole schooling system. I didn't study and had a poor attendance but still got an award for the being the school's best student. Pretty crazy when I think about it. Suffice to say, my strategy didn't work very well in university.

High-five, fellow "burned by needing to do real work in university" high schooler :(

Me too. I skated through hs and got a wakeup call at uni. The most critical skill hs can teach is to do homework. Even if its boring.
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