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Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

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Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#61

Post by whimsicalism »

Gud wrote: post #59
whimsicalism wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the “problem” unique to America is that we like to take in the poor and huddled masses (who don’t test well), while the EU likes to watch them sink and die in the Mediterranean.

This is objectively not true. If anything, the opposite is true. Europe receives less educated individuals who will be a burden on their welfare, while the USA has cheap labor from South America and attract top talent globally.

name me a single EU nation with a higher per-capita rate of immigrants from developing countries. it is simply not true that Europe has more immigrants without strong education background than the US, there is no way of cutting the data

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#62

Post by Gud »

whimsicalism wrote: post #61
Gud wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is objectively not true. If anything, the opposite is true. Europe receives less educated individuals who will be a burden on their welfare, while the USA has cheap labor from South America and attract top talent globally.

name me a single EU nation with a higher per-capita rate of immigrants from developing countries. it is simply not true that Europe has more immigrants without strong education background than the US, there is no way of cutting the data

You are changing the goal posts. The USA doesn’t have a welfare state the same way Sweden has.

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#63

Post by culll_kuprey »

somenameforme wrote: post #9

This seems like a clear selection bias. One of the reasons, and probably the main one, that public schools are awful is because a very small number of highly disruptive kids can completely ruin the education of an entire class of other kids. Public schools generally have no way to get rid of these children and their parents also generally don't care. These are also of course the kids that are going to score abysmally…

> in these households are going to have minimum of IQ that's higher than the normal minimum since that's a prerequisite for enlistment.

Is it? I know they’re a lot more selective than historically, but I was under the impression that a low 30-something asvab score qualifies you for at least infantryman. Is that really above average IQ?

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#64

Post by terminalshort »

austin-cheney wrote: post #34
terminalshort wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military training programs have exactly one goal and that is to train. They have the ability to set their standards and enforce them ruthlessly. Public schools have many goals besides education, have to keep their students (and more importantly the parents of those students) happy, and have no ability to select their students and very little ability to fail them out and remove them, and can be sued for anything a…

The Army software developer is 170D and supposedly they are vastly superior at training developers. There are only two factors to this: better selection of students/candidates and excellent training formulation. My experience in corporate software is the opposite where it’s all about hiring/firing for the lowest common denominator. It’s not about being good. It’s about speed and not training.

> supposedly they are vastly superior at training developers

Based on what sources and using what metrics? And vastly superior to what alternative? If you're saying better than schools, I wouldn't be surprised. But I would be surprised if it's better than the experience you would get as a junior at a major tech company, and shocked if it was better than experience at a small startup.

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#65

Post by huhkerrf »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #45
Retric wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I edited for clarity, but an apples to apples comparison means to compare like to like not to compare everything. I can weigh a bag of groceries, that’s a metric I can collect on everything you’re buying but it doesn’t tell me if you’re making healthy choices at the grocery store. Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countri…

> Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countries school system. I'll repeat for the third and final time: excluding people that speak English as a second language in a country's school system that has been taking immigrants for all time (and vaguely plans to continue) is not the same thing as excluding people affected by a b…

You're being unnecessarily condescending and combative.

The point that the person that you're arguing in bad faith with is making is not that we jettison immigrants and ESL students. It's that you accept that they will have struggles that the students in Japan do not (because there are much fewer immigrant students). So if you compare the students who are _like_ the ones in Japan and you come out ahead, then you go, great, we don't need to adjust for those students.

It does _not_ mean that you don't adjust for the students who have unique challenges and try to bring them up.

But if you compare two different cohorts, you might incorrectly get the signal that you should also change what you're doing for the students who don't have those challenges.

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#67

Post by whimsicalism »

Gud wrote: post #62
whimsicalism wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

name me a single EU nation with a higher per-capita rate of immigrants from developing countries. it is simply not true that Europe has more immigrants without strong education background than the US, there is no way of cutting the data

You are changing the goal posts. The USA doesn’t have a welfare state the same way Sweden has.

i’m not changing anything - you are the one who brought up welfare. my point is and always has been that the US has a multi-decades long run of relative immigration permissiveness towards people from poorer countries - and that will impact education outcomes.

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#68

Post by Dylan16807 »

zevon wrote: post #54
whimsicalism wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis. This is just about race & IQ and already cedes the genetic argument that you were refusing to believe - because the evidence is so overwhelming. > Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal…

Why do you insist on saying that I "don't believe" in genetic components when I've literally said the opposite? The people who wrote the stuff on the Wikipedia site I was provided with and their (researcher-)sources seem to try to tell you and me both "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very…

> "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very careful with interpreting correlations and for (m)any practical purposes (such as thinking about how to structure educational environments), you really should consider quite a lot of things not directly related to genetics."

I'll say the same thing as you: context matters. Someone trying to say that smarter parents lead to a smarter student body doesn't need to model any genes and they don't need to care about the difference between things that are transferred genetically and things that are transferred socially.

> because of genetics as the main determining factor?

Does that matter? While the word "heritability" was used, and that term "very much has to do with genetics" as you say, that person didn't directly mention genes and didn't attribute any particular percent to genes. The original argument is the same whether genes are 80% or 20%.

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#69

Post by supongo »

I went to a DoD school from fourth grade until my second semester of 11th grade. After that, we moved to the U.S.

We moved to a good school district in the U.S, so the quality of the education remained the same. The most startling difference in a U.S public school was in how we were viewed by admin.

Compared to DoD schools, administrators in U.S public school system weren't too different from middle management at $corp. We were numbers on a spreadsheet.

A good analogy - U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.

DoD schools respected our autonomy - we were treated like humans. Non-DoD schools treated us like cattle.

Re: Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program

#70

Post by PoorRustDev »

egl2020 wrote: post #42
PoorRustDev wrote: post #33

I went to a DOD school for most (around 90%) of my life before High School, I'm happy to answer any questions as a student that actually attended elementary school on base in a foreign country. In general I would disagree with the posts that say they are not more discipline focused. It was a normal school, however if you were consistently a problem in class the squadron commander would be notified of a subordinates u…

"No one cared who your parents were." Did it never matter if my dad was a pfc and yours was the base commander? Ideally it shouldn't matter,but in practice? Genuinely curious.

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