841–850 of 1001 posts
Tldr: If you are actually smart, you leverage as much of the social system to your advantage that you can get away with. It's called being street smart. Don't blame the kids for being street smart.
Midwit meme strikes again.
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I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished. In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue. I rea…
exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).
The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.
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> There are now also online telehealth services that don't hide the fact that this is one of their services. You pay their (cash only, please) fee and they'll make sure you get your letter. The same thing is happening with "emotional support animal" letters. This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?). The answer is for schools to grab their share of this money by selling each of these ac…
> This used to be a thing with medical marijuana as well (maybe still is?). Yup. A few years ago in California, go to a weed store in Napa. "Oh, you need a medical card" "Oh, sorry". I get handed a business card, no worries, just call this doctor here, it'll be $x (can't remember) and you can get a medical card and just come back in. I had my medical card within 5 minutes on the phone on the sidewalk outside the stor…
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That's basically a take-home at that point (assuming open book--or at least honesty) and, yes, you're now computing with classmates who will spend a weekend on it. It's the same problem as companies giving take-home interview problems that you should only spend an hour or two on.
At Caltech, exams were take-home, with a 2 hour time limit. It was on your honor to abide by the 2 hour rule. I used my alarm clock. Ya know, the funny thing about students - if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized. Besides, I actually wanted to…
I think if you look at the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, it's clear that this isn't true. There, the professor presumed honest students, hundreds cheated, and no student reported.
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That's how my parents taught. Design questions to make the students apply their knowledge rather than regurgitate it. Forget a fact it's being applied to, look it up. Don't understand the concepts, you're stuck. Know the material, piece of cake. One time I was in my father's classroom because he was showing a film he wanted me to see. There was a quiz afterwards, he knew it wouldn't be alien to me and had me try it.…
One physics exam question I remember was derive Maxwell's Equations from the starting point of presuming the existence of magnetic monopoles. This sounds like an intractable problem, but it turned out that if you really understood how they were derived, all you had to do was switch out the charge monopoles with the magnetic monopoles, and it was a piece of cake. A similar exam problem in AMA95 was to derive the hyper…
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That's exactly the dilemma. Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that. Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to. But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well…
Okay, the oposite would be, you put a stringent process on how to measure things. You have rigorous testing. These all take time and money, including lost income in time you need to take away, and money paid for the testing. And you end up with people that could have had help to be successful, and not they're not being able to operate within the constraints. So, what do you do then? > then what the heck is going on t…
> So, what do you do then?
You figure out what the equivalent of Blackstone's Ratio for this kind of accommodation is, and then proceed accordingly. If we declare that it's unacceptable for even a single legitimately disabled person to miss out on accommodations, then we should the nonsense and just give accommodations to everyone, explicitly.
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I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished. In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue. I rea…
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I nearly failed high school and I flunked or dropped out of college four times. I just absolutely cannot work within the framework of modern schooling. I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic. The way my brain works is just fundamentally incompatible with school. Starting from fundamentals and building up…
I say this as humbly as possible, but still I'm one of the best engineers I know and working on some pretty advanced stuff. And yes, I'm rather autistic. lol...there is nothing humble about this statement. >50% of people think they're above average.