261–270 of 297 posts
The origin of higher education is partly rooted in selling secular credentials the public was too ignorant to falsify, as science began falsifying fairytale.
We keep circling around payola for landlords and manual labor for the rest.
This isn’t exactly new.
There are way too many examples to validate the elite overproduction theory. Just right now we don’t have enough skilled trade workers to execute on the infrastructure plan. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/us/politics/biden-infrast...
I don't share the same sentiment that we don't have enough talented workers. We just don't have enough workers who are willing to work minimum wage with a $0.5/hour raise year over year.
Also, infrastructure construction jobs are not minimum wage.
I strongly agree with the premise of the article, and I wish more of society was aware of the issues that propagate what the author calls "Elite Underproduction". However, while I agree with the premise, I think the precise factors that create this issue are not sufficiently discussed or agreed upon (Not enough money goes into science research? Regulation imposes too heavy a burden on the outputs of scientific endeav…
Looks like you are talking about https://podcastnotes.org/portal-with-eric-weinstein/thiel/ from 2019, correct? Sounds interesting, thanks!
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%34 of the world population are from India and China. And to be honest there isn't as many ex-soviet engineers in FANG as you would think, they are vastly outnumbered to chinese and indian engineers. When you hire the world, your demographics are going to represent the world for the most part. There are a few modifications as to why latin america, africa and developed nation people are not as well represented, but it…
That's an interesting observation, because paired with the elite overproduction hypothesis, it implies that allowing skilled immigration destabilises the country those people are entering, and stabilises the one they have left.
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Yes, but historically great advances in theoretical physics have usually followed great advances in experimental apparatus.
Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc. Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 yea…
Actually, Kepler came before Newton. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were derived from observations of others. They also follow straightforwardly from Newton's laws of motion. In particular, Kepler's second law is equivalent to conservation of angular momentum. Kepler's third law is equivalent to "Newton's universal gravitation + conservation of angular momentum". And Kepler's first is a consequence of Newtonian kinematics. That is to say, Newton generalized Kepler's laws.
The order is:
1. Astronomical observations (Brahe et. al.) 2. Kepler's laws 3. Newton's laws + universal gravitation.
Similarly with Einstein: His theoretical treatment of Brownian motion was based on observations by... Robert Brown half a century ealier. The photoelectric effect (for which Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize) was an extension of theoretical work by Plank, who started theorizing to explain observations made by Hertz.
Special Relativity resolved a conflict between E&M and Mechanics, but it was really needed to explain why the Michelson-Morley experiment couldn't find a difference in the speed of light, despite increasingly-sophisticated apparatus (which was an unsolved paradox for a quarter of a century before SR was invented).
And, while not on your list, quantum theory had many experimental inspirations. The Millikan oil drop experiment, for one. And spectral lines in stellar observations, for another.
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Everyone here is missing the point. It's not that physics is running out of questions to ask. It's that the questions are getting increasingly more expensive to answer, and the answers are increasingly less compelling. The low-hanging fruit picked long ago, modern physics produces fewer discoveries that change people's lives in the way that radar, lasers, microwaves, and transistors did, which makes science investmen…
There's always a time gap. Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that , 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER…
One of the reasons we had such an explosion of new theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century (which gave birth to all the practical discoveries you mentioned) is that, in 1900, there was just so much unexplained weird shit.
Shit like:
1. How do you predict the energy of electrons produced by shining light on a surface? And why does light cause electrons to be produced?
2. Why is the speed of light the same in every direction, to really, really high precision?
3. Why are there spectral bands in the light from stars? And why are they sometimes shifted?
4. Why can current pass only one way through a metal pin poking a semi-insulator?
5. Why does pollen appear to move randomly in the sunlight in still air?
6. Why the fuck is the sky blue? Why does light sometimes act like a way, but sometimes like a particle?
Remember, a lot of this weird shit went unexplained for 25-50-100 years. Then, between 1900 and 1950, smart people came up with theories that explained all the weird shit. So we don't really have so much weird shit anymore because most of it has been explained. Sure, super-conductors are kinda weird, but we also seem to be able to predict a lot of their properties from existing theory.
So, we're really just riding the coat-tails of scientists from 100 years ago. People 100 years from now aren't going to have coat tails to ride.
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There's always a time gap. Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that , 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER…
> vaccine ... wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died The total death toll has just passed 5 million.
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H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine, they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. American kids with access to generational wealth aren't as interested in difficult technical subjects.
> H1B's in Big tech are about as far from indentured servants as you can imagine False. > they're in high demand and switch jobs for better pay constantly. And each time they do so, their new employer has to go through the entire process of getting them a new H1 visa. When your right to be in a place is dependent upon your labor to a specific contracted employer, you are an indentured servant.
this is not true, saying this as a person on h1 who changed jobs easily.
when talking about indentured servants you are probably referring to small Indian IT bodyshops, that keep people on low wages due to them being on a very long green card queue, but this has nothing to do with H1 per se. These people do not work in big tech
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Absolutely! When UK Parliament wanted Zuk to answer some tough question about his company facilitating electoral fraud, he simply refused to show up. Even first world nations struggle in dealing with American corporation, which often act as if they are above the law. God forbid you are a developing nation. British American Tabacco has taken poor developing nations to court for trying to ban children from smoking (!!)…
And yet the US is not #1 in pretty much any quality of life metric. The point is there are plenty of nations with varying degrees of US influence that are far from miserable or painful places to live.