Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patrick Collison's Questions

patrickcollison.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 288 posts

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#221

Post by bhupy »

dredmorbius wrote: post #202
valuearb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical care and education have seen a massive torrent of government funding and regulation over the last 60 years, while the things that get cheaper live mostly in free markets.

Housing, childcare, textbooks, and food and beverages seem strongly market based, and private college tuition has risen far more than public, challenging your characterisation. I note textbook prices took a dive about the time book-sharing services became prevalent.

In the markets where housing prices have increased the most, housing is the least market based.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#222

Post by dizz »

mft_ wrote: post #157
akirakurusu wrote: post #18

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights…

Likewise, I find understanding why Switzerland is so successful very interesting – especially as it differs dramatically in approach from the other countries in Europe held up as successful and happy societies (the more northerly Nordic countries). I can’t give a full explanation, but there are a couple of unique aspects of Switzerland that I believe may influence the situation heavily: 1. A strong aspect of Swiss cu…

Might be of use/help: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/switzerland-explaine...

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#223

Post by wenc »

cdavid wrote: post #217
akirakurusu wrote: post #18

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights…

There is a culture of doing things very well up to perfection, at least in certain domains. I don't think it has anything to do with tourism. One folk story is that this is linked with the perpetual destruction of things in Japan, because of natural elements, etc. so there is an emphasis on controlling the process as most things tend to be short lived. You also need to be careful about cleanliness. If you go into mor…

> Also, why do young Japanese women all have black hair ? Hint, it is not because all Japanese woman have black hair. Etc.

Curious what you mean by this? Most Asian people have naturally black hair.

If anything, there was a period in the late 90s-2000s when most young Japanese people dyed their hair brown (it was a fashion fad), so if you saw an Asian person with brown hair, it was likely they were Japanese.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#224

Post by mhb »

switz wrote: post #172
paxys wrote: post #97

The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects. In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development fo…

This is something I've ruminated on a lot – but frankly, I'm in no way qualified to understand or make sense of it. The two things that I often come back to are: 1) the pathways that infrastructure would run through have more "things" (a scientific term) in the way, raising the time and cost of a project. My father often mentioned how when I-95 was built, many homes near where he grew up had to be physically moved to…

1) You would have to explain how the problem of existing structures account for the orders of magnitude cost of new construction.

2) Why is this any different now than at the times of the examples? It would seem as though, if you initiate a project, you would have an incentive to complete it within your term in office. This could have been accomplished with many of the historical projects cited - Empire State Building, Golden Gate bridge, man on the moon (mostly).

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#225

Post by wenc »

ghaff wrote: post #56
kevindong wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only been to Switzerland once and that was during a When I pay for something with an American credit card in Europe, the machine prints out a receipt for me to sign. I was buying a snack at a store in the Zurich airport and the clerk actually compared the signature on the back of my card to the signature that I scrawled on the receipt. That was the one and only time I've ever had someone do that. I generally don…

So they have an archaic system that requires comparing a signature? I'm pretty sure I couldn't match my credit card unless I were trying to do it while looking at the card signature. I hardly consider that a benefit. And I've been through Zurich. I don't consider it anything special better or worse than going through most major European or American airports. [Oh. I take that back. I had my luggage lost on the way the…

It's not the Swiss; it's US credit cards.

Most Europeans either use a PIN or contactless (for smaller purchases). US credit cards however have no PIN, and contactless cards aren't yet common in the US, so terminals default to chip/magnetic-strip + signature. When a signature is required, one is supposed to check it against the signature on the card (I suspect we don't do it here in the US because everybody signs and it's too much of a hassle to do it for each transaction).

I've had my signature checked against the back of my card in many places around the world -- so it's not just Switzerland.

Most people abroad usually have this look of surprise when their terminal instructs them to obtain a signature. They usually have a face that says, "Oh! Americans".

p.s. this is changing with mobile contactless. I started using Apple Pay in Europe (before COVID that is). Most contactless terminals recognize my phone as simply another contactless card. (NFC)

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#226

Post by HarryHirsch »

pcl wrote: post #143
HarryHirsch wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if I'd agree. Khan Academy is firmly rooted in the American tradition, it teaches facts, but it's like Feynman in Brazil, it does not integrate the concepts. For that you need problems tailored to your level. A good tutor can do that.

> it’s like Feynman in Brazil I hadn’t heard that reference before. Here’s the story: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm

Feynman's complaints will be familiar to anyone teaching university in the United States. Obviously Feynman makes a distinction between the science education that he knew and the travesty that he saw in Brazil, but today's education in the US is exactly like what he complained about. What happened, and when?

The Russian tradition of "math circles" (https://www.msri.org/people/staff/levy/files/MCL/Zvonkin.pdf) is altogether more productive than US-style kindergarden (no resemblance to the German original) where the 3-year olds sit in rows and have the ABC beaten into them. Of course the Russian approach relies on individual attention and problems, and class sizes are smaller.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#227

Post by igneo676 »

padolsey wrote: post #191
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #136

Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1] As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are? As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these…

> What to do? Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to society. Just as Khan Academy has revolutionised explanations of complex topics (resolving the ambiguities from school), scaled tutoring in which everyone participates could augment traditional teaching with soft skills, conversation, expansive…

I find this doubly interesting in the context of homeschooling.

Often the parent's goals are to make the student as capable of being self-taught as possible. After the early years, the parent essentially steps into the role of tutor. You look for shortcomings and help the student step through those knowledge gaps. Otherwise the student can go as quickly or slowly through the material as they need to

Not that this scales, we'd have to look elsewhere for that, but interesting to see this function in a small community.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#228

Post by patrickk »

BurningFrog wrote: post #213
patrickk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details. On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring . Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern…

> On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power. Back in the day, you built what you wanted on your property.

> Today your design has to be approved by many different people with veto power.

I don't think that's it, at least for public buildings like churches, theaters, town halls, museums, and so on. After all, veto power doesn't prevent awful buildings like the Walkie Talkie building[1] from being built, as long as they conform to the bland, in vogue architectural tastes. It's the cult of postmodernism, stripping away visually interesting features, even though humans gravitate to older buildings despite the "form over function" blind cult thinking. This has dominated architecture for the past few decades. Many older buildings are simply built with many intricate visual details that are architectural heresy nowadays. As mentioned, there was a briliant article and HN discussion on this recent-ish, I just cannot dig it up.

EDIT: This is the article, "Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582942

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_Fenchurch_Street

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#229

Post by Balgair »

> Why is there no canon for life's most important questions?

There is!

Well, sorta, but a very good attempt at least: Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World, 1965 (a bit dated by now).

It's the supra-compilation of 'western' thought, and the works in there do come close to a canon for the most important questions in life. That list of questions does need to be formalized first, unlike, say Electromagnetism; you're dealing with more than just charged particles after all.

Still, the best thing about Adler's work was the Syntopicon: a 'quick' reference of the great works based on ~100 topics (Astronomy, God, Justice, Family, Dialectic, etc.). Each of those topics was further subdivided into specific areas (The nature of Jesus' human form, Ellipses, Jurisprudence of Judges, etc.). It's a huge work.

Most critically, these specific areas listed a where you could find the relating pages in the great works.

For example: Under the topic of 'Mind' and the subtopic of 'The condition of the human mind when the soul is separate from the body', you have a listing for 'GIBBON: Decline and Fall, 233d' and a lot of other listings too.

It's not exactly what the question asks, but it is as good a starting point as I think you can get shipped to your door.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-weste... (pricey, but the search feature is essential)

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#230

Post by cdavid »

wenc wrote: post #223
cdavid wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a culture of doing things very well up to perfection, at least in certain domains. I don't think it has anything to do with tourism. One folk story is that this is linked with the perpetual destruction of things in Japan, because of natural elements, etc. so there is an emphasis on controlling the process as most things tend to be short lived. You also need to be careful about cleanliness. If you go into mor…

> Also, why do young Japanese women all have black hair ? Hint, it is not because all Japanese woman have black hair. Etc. Curious what you mean by this? Most Asian people have naturally black hair. If anything, there was a period in the late 90s-2000s when most young Japanese people dyed their hair brown (it was a fashion fad), so if you saw an Asian person with brown hair, it was likely they were Japanese.

I forgot to mention specifically in schools, which is where until last year every girl had to dye their hair black: https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-school...
Post reply on HN