511–520 of 1001 posts
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Seems like that trend will result in wages between "America" (I guess you mean the US and don't know Bolivia is in America) equalizing with the rest of the world. Also, fixing things is highly skilled work and very hard to offshore.
> Bolivia Don't you mean the Plurinational State of Bolivia?
From limited knowledge and experience at other colleges (all pretty well-ranked but not as well as MIT), it’s the prestige and graduate research which makes colleges like MIT superior. Otherwise, for most undergrads it’s like a typical college experience, but with harder courses and smarter peers, but even that is flexible (since they have access to graduate students and grad-level courses).
It’s particularly relevant today because apparently college admissions are really competitive. A lot of high schoolers are upset because they got rejected from everything but their safeties, except their safeties are like Georgia Tech, Rutgers or the UCs.
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I disagree with this. Being able to read and understand the math in the paper of the algorithm you are implementing is useful, and calculus is common in ML papers. You may have some short term success without understanding the algorithms at all, but as the field changes and you are no longer in school, being able to keep up at least somewhat with papers is very useful. I agree that the day to day is mostly about form…
Well I took calculus, and I did a Master's thesis (much smaller than Ph.D., obviously) on neural networks, and I didn't find much application. Plus, the vast majority of work on ML is not going to be taking an ML paper and implementing it in code. It's going to be transforming this raw data into a format that the existing ML library can accept as input, selecting which cases are useful for training (e.g. making sure…
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this is a perfect example of why governmental services are so important - even if they are often run poorly. Without them, dis-equities inherently perpetuate due to external incentives. The SAT is treated as a standardized test but it, as you note, is inaccessible to many. It is not government run or organized. I've found, from teaching undergraduates, that most of the students who go to college presume that everyone…
Wow. As someone that isn't in the US, but grew up watching a lot of US TV, I had this same assumption. How the fuck is the primary method of judging student admission to University not a government run service? Wow. As you say, contrast that to my experience where everyone took University Entrance exams in their final year of school. Score over X and you have the right to go to a university. Don't score high enough?…
Instead of funding The One True Test, the US government partially funds every test competing to be the best college placement test.
Unpopular opinion: SAT/ACT correlates with X where X = IQ × work ethic
You can be smart and lazy and do fine. You can be dim and hard-working and do fine. But smart and hard-working will always beat them both.
I was pretty clearly in the smart and lazy camp, and was OK with that lot. And, as he said, I've done fine.
EDIT: I should add, though, that I'm very happy the SAT did not have the writing section when I took it. I severely doubt it would have improved my relative score.
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So let's cut the shit then and just do IQ tests. This is the best technical university in the world offering the best technical education in history. It's where the smartest minds learn foundational knowledge that will enable them to make amazing technological contributions to mankind. Not everything needs to be a battleground for the boring diversity of skin color. It's actually important that we get the most qualif…
But shouldn't starting points be taken into consideration when you are judging someone's merit?
My problem with SAT/ACT actually has nothing to do with the test itself. I grew up very poor in suburban middle of nowhere and even with a waiver for the fee, I had no way of actually getting to a testing center. Parents worked 24/7 to make ends meet, no real public transport and this was before Uber and Lyft. The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure.
> The real culprit here is the lack of public infrastructure. What was your area like? I grew up similarly poor but in a wealthy area and would walk several miles to a public library for early computer access, biked to school, etc. Even then, our school offered SAT, etc.
Also note that I could drive by this time but we only had one car between my mother and I.
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Coaching and studying improves SAT scores. People learn the type of questions they do poorly on and can study to improve. The SAT is a test you can study for.
The SAT is a test of your academic preparation, not Raven's progressive matrices. That you can study for it is not inherently a bad thing. Portions that are highly susceptible to coaching are bad, and that's why there aren't analogies any more. If students learn the vocabulary and practice the math to do better on the test, at some point it just becomes the Key and Peele Heist sketch: "That's called a job!" https://w…
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Arguably 5s on her APs tells her where she sat nationally, I was under the impression that AP tests were the same across the board, while they don’t rank you against other students the test is made to be just as difficult for the top elite college prep private school students as it is for the inner city public school students. The assumption being the AP class material is the same.
Sure but 38% of AP Calculus BC takers get a 5 so it doesn't give you much information.
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I took AP classes in high school, but couldn't afford to pay $65 per exam (at the time) to take the AP test for college credit.
How were you able to afford taking the classes for credit instead, at a cost of over two orders of magnitude more per class?
Fortunately my parent did cover these costs, but I know others weren't so fortunate.