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Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

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Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#421

Post by Obscurity4340 »

bombcar wrote: post #263
mikkupikku wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best way to get a manager position is to be a few inches taller than everybody else. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but pay attention to how often the boss is taller than everybody else on the team. Not always, but far more often than random chance can account for. (Incidentally, the best boss I ever had was barely 5 feet.)

This reminds me that SkyMall (RIP) always had those advertisements for height increasing shoes. Now that I think of it, the inflight magazines still have those ... Amusingly enough the best CEO and best salesman I ever knew (two different people) were below average height.

Putin and DeSantis all wear them

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#422

Post by jimbokun »

busterarm wrote: post #162
pm90 wrote: post #152

Our society has a lot of pretty privilege (and tall privilege for male identifying humans). Taking steps to address this is welcome.

Why though? Maybe the advantages are natural and our species is selecting for it.

Maybe we’ll be happier overall if we select for other things.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#423

Post by keiferski »

jimbokun wrote: post #418
keiferski wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities in the US and other countries are not the same, and comparing them is not really fruitful. US universities do care about extracurriculars and GPA and other things because they aren’t optimizing for raw academic performance, they’re optimizing for various other things like an interesting student body (that attracts donors, professors, and future students), real-world networks, and so on.

In other words an extra four years of day care before those students have to function independently as adults.

No, that’s not even remotely close to what I wrote, at any level. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite, because selecting purely based on an abstract exam has nothing to do with being a real-world adult, whereas extracurriculars, internships, etc. do to some level.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#424

Post by tptacek »

cubefox wrote: post #394
atwrk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I happen to have a phd in that broader domain. It's not censorship, as you imply, but IQ is just way fuzzier a concept than people outside of this area of research think. The popular view is IQ is an objective thing, exactly measurable and so on (the metaphor of brains being computers, essentially). In reality you can put a 14 year old from a bad environment into an optimal environment and their IQ increases by…

IQ is highly heritable, so I don't think there is any environmental factor that has this big an impact, except in extreme cases like severe malnutrition. Also note that IQ increases with age roughly into early adulthood independently of environment, so the IQ of a 14 year old increasing is a perfectly normal part of the heritable parts of development.

What's "highly"? It's likely somewhere between 15%-50% --- weak-to-medium, if you read it as a correlation coefficient.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#425

Post by olalonde »

forgotaccount3 wrote: post #255
olalonde wrote: post #92

I remember in college there were always small groups of students chatting with professors after class or going to office hours. Many profs would drop pretty big hints about upcoming exams. I guess it was a mix of enjoying the attention, pitying weaker students, and wanting to reward "participation". Always felt a bit unfair to me.

> I guess it was a mix of enjoying the attention, pitying weaker students, and wanting to reward "participation". It probably wasn't intentional, just 'I have x minutes a day with the students to teach them the day's lesson. I have more than x minutes worth of content to convey. If you willingly spend more time with me, you may get information that was lower in importance and was missed during the day's classes.'

I don't see a problem with that and is not what I had in mind with "pretty big hints". See my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493450

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#426

Post by mikkupikku »

jimbokun wrote: post #393
triceratops wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wealthy parents tend to be wealthy because they are more intelligent Not "more intelligent", just "unusual in some way". People can be wealthier than average for all sorts of reasons unrelated to intelligence (as defined by IQ). Here's a sampling of them: Being social and good at sales. Most successful real estate agents I've met don't strike me as particularly brilliant. Working a boring job, living modestly, and…

A lot of those correlate with intelligence and “grit.” Being good at selling to people absolutely requires intelligence. So do many entertainment fields, and athletic achievement more than you might expect. Investing consistently in an index fund over 20 years requires a bit of intelligence and a lot of grit.

> and athletic achievement more than you might expect.

Yeah, it flies in the face of Hollywood's jock/nerd dichotomy, but in my experience there's an awful lot of correlation between honors students and athletic participation. I think the root of it might be good genetics and early life nutrition contributing heavily to both.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#427

Post by mikkupikku »

mgfist wrote: post #62
keiferski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children? That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT. I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

Well nothing is truly meritocratic - even with free tutoring, kids will still have different genetics, different home environments, different upbringings etc.. Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sen…

> Well nothing is truly meritocratic

How do you figure? Many things in life are meritocratic. Apply for a job welding, they'll ask you to weld some coupons. If you can do it, you get the job, if you can't then you can't. If your father was a welder or a banker makes no difference, merit is about being able to do the work, not whether life was fair to get you to that skill level.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#428

Post by pxc »

jimbokun wrote: post #410
pxc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what you're measuring. You can have a test that gives you whatever distribution of scores you like. But is the thing it measures competency in the subjects it tests, general intellectual ability, familiarity with the test format, etc.? The worst negative outcome is usually subordination of learning itself to preparing for the exam, which can happen even when the gatekeeping function of an exam still w…

Then what’s a better, unbiased method of assessing students?

The main problem I raised with the Gaokao isn't that it's biased, but that it has negative effects on the way education is conducted prior to university.

It's not difficult to find first-hand accounts of this; go browse social media posts by teachers in mainland China if you're curious.

There are similar problems of "teaching to the test" in other contexts, too.

I'm not categorically opposed to standardized testing and I never said I was.

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#429

Post by CalRobert »

jimbokun wrote: post #379
CalRobert wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently some make a distinction regarding whether they pass or not to address this. James Barnes is one person whose written about this https://www.newsweek.com/trans-man-broken-men-1817169

That’s a great article but it confuses me how the author shows affinity for so many feminine traits and stereotypically feminine interests, that I wonder what the draw or perceived appeal of living as a man was. Maybe that’s in a different article.

Well, I imagine gender dysphoria is more than thinking the grass is greener

Re: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

#430

Post by threethirtytwo »

Mezzie wrote: post #348
threethirtytwo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What I find interesting about comments like this is how revelatory they are of the worldview of the people writing them. It's always interesting to see which facts about the primal human experience are left out when this kind of thing is discussed. For example, I'm betting you're a male who likes women who's between the age of 20 and 45 and likely doesn't have children (I'm pretty sure on male between 20 and 45, but…

Bro you made many assumptions. First women today have plenty of power. A lot of times more so than men. I only refer to prehistoric times.

Men primarily drived survival in prehistoric times. Without a man a women could not survive. That doesn’t mean she couldn’t contribute it means she was not the primary driver. Women contribute a lot, but that contribution is in the end supplementary because it is not critical for survival and this definitely shapes evolved behavior. It means for survival a man is required for her, this is asymmetric for a man and you can see this in how women and men select mates. Men select based off of superficial markers for fertility. Women select more on practical markers for capability. This is because a women’s survival is dependent on the man’s capability while a man’s survival is not as much dependent on this.

Additionally please don’t make the argument personal. If you disagree attack the argument don’t attack or make assumptions about my character. Thank you.

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