201–210 of 588 posts
The free market itself is the ultimate hackable test, no? Our society has examples where superb work goes unrewarded financially. Does pg argue that they simply should ignore this test grade?
Yes and the job interview.
> In theory you shouldn't have to prepare for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood test. The key here is the “in theory” part. It is very hard to design exams that actually test your understanding of some topic as opposed to your memorization skills. As somebody who recently got his bachelor’s CS degree (currently working on my master’s degree), and who also puts more emphasis on actually l…
This is especially true in a domain that has no practical purpose. In computer science, the "exam" could be to go solve some hard problem, or write a program with a particular effect. In engineering, you can have students build a bridge and then stress test it. In athletics, the exam is competition. In business, it's making money. In dating, it's finding a mate (or whatever your personal goals are in that space). In…
The bridge test can be passed by memorizing one bridge.
The history course from American university required students to write few paragraphs as answers to around 5 questions that covered topics from lectures. Which is pretty close to what actual historians do.
Practical usage of medieval history: know when people are bullshiting for ideological reasons when they blable about how people in history behaved, what values they had and origins of certain traditions. Pretty much all "in the past people would" is a fantasy.
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As an example, can you name a b2b or b2c product that you feel is truly great but overlooked?
B2B: (1) The scripting language Rexx. (2) The text editor KEdit with macro language KEXX much like Rexx. (1) and (2) are far and away my two most important tools in computing, from IBM mainframes to PCs, DOS, OS/2, Windows, and my startup on Windows 7 64 bit Professional on an AMD FX-8350 64 bit 8 core processor at 4.0 GHz with Microsoft's .NET. E.g., I typed in the 100,000 lines of text for the software for my start…
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There is truth to this. It reflects the shift of mentality in tech entrepreneurs since the 2000s (experimentally entrepreneurial, introverted hackers, libertarian) to the 2010s (work for FANG or make a feature that FANG wants to buy, well-curated github and social media, social justice). I could dare say that this mentality flowed from academia to the greater economy. Academic funding has been generally formalistic a…
So in the greater economy, how was funding allocated before that?
My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…
Alternative option, tell the school he's not doing homework - they're providing a service to parents to aid with a child education, if that's not aiding then change the contract. FWIW the UK Education Act actually enshrines this concept (parents are responsible for a child being educated), though this has been eroded considerably by Tory policy in the last decade or so. We did tell our primary school "don't expect ho…
This is a very interesting thing to think about, I thought about it a bunch of times already, and have a couple of thoughts about it too. First of all, once you're 55, it's easy to say stuff like that, because you won't be tested anymore. And I think there is a good chunk of survivorship bias: "Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!" Although that is probably not true for a big chunk of the pop…
To be fair he did say "For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took, and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was studying for a test."
>I think a lot of people are falling thought the cracks because they don't fit the expectation of a HR person close enough.
In retrospect I'm sure this was the case for me. It's probably why I ended up starting my own business.
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>But what is the practical work product of a deep knowledge of medieval history? It's extremely difficult to test the past, so it's certainly not predictions about what already happened. This strikes me as a really sad way to see the world. Would you then agree that say, archaeology or palaeontology are things that nobody needs knowledge of for any practical purpose in the modern day? If you disagree, why?
I didn't say we shouldn't study those things. I just said that there is not a much of a practical work product, and especially not one that a student could produce. But, I also think that probably more people are studying them than need to be. If that is a student's interest, then well enough. Otherwise, I'm not sure that, e.g., a middle school medieval history class is a good use of a student's time.
In my opinion, the issue in liberal arts education is with grade inflation, along with the scalability of assessing learning discussed in the essay/these comments.
I suspect that really rigorous liberal arts education is much harder to do at scale than really rigorous science/engineering education because to be blunt, there is less room for argument in scientific concepts.
For example, properly grading student essays and research is more difficult at scale in the liberal arts and the level of the whole thing gets dumbed down as a result.
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I think this is an excellent point. I really agree with pg's thesis, but I think it would be worthwhile for him to go more in depth into the "edge cases" he talks about in passing, mainly because I think these edge cases actually bolster his thesis, not detract from it. Companies like Theranos and WeWork succeeded for a short while because they tried to "hack the test". E.g. Theranos hacked the metrics of "buzz", "in…
Theranos issue was not lack of product. Their problem was massive fraud going effectively demanded from top levels. Framing it as lack of product is unfair to all startups who lacked good product, hacked buzz, got investment, got notable people and then did not committed fraud. Plus it suggests that Theranos fraud is result of not having product. The same people would be engaging in unethical conduct with product too…
> The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. That is wrong – or, at the very least, incomplete. "Build it and they will come" is the dream and misconception of every programmer who's talented at software development but not at sales. Hell, this is the number one advice of every business how-to book ever: You can't rely on people finding out about your great product by chance, you need to put i…