So many (snooty) people treat audiobooks like a cheap substitute for reading, when in reality, reading is the cheap substitute for oral storytelling. Sure, you've got Infinite Jest where page structure and end notes are part of the aesthetic design, but I think more people would consume more literature if audiobooks were more normalized.
Most literature we have today was written with a reader in mind, not a listener.
I don't even think audiobooks are necessarily bad, it's people consuming them like a hamburger while they multitask so they aren't even really engaging with the text. Let alone not really having the ability to stop, think and relisten very easily. With a text you do it basically automatically if necessary, with an audiobook you've got to fumble around for your device and hope you get back to the right spot and not break your train of thought in the process.
Audiobooks are a cheap excuse for oral storytelling. People listen to audiobooks as they sculpt their muscles in the gym, as they walk to the shop to get groceries averting the eyes of all strangers who pass by, as they fold laundry, alone.
Oral storytelling used to happen in small intimate groups around fires with a couple of lamps lit, total silence, wind howling, drinks and sometimes other delights, with no conceivable distractions. Even saying "no distractions" isn't accurate, as it was moreso the case that they'd a completely different conception of time. The stories would be told live by another human, with their voice and body and eyes looking at you.
Reading is different than oral storytelling - it doesn't pretend to be the same thing, at least not anymore. Creating a hierarchy between the three is, I find, a bit odd, in general.
US colleges foresee a future where they are under attack for being absurdly selective, what some are now calling being "highly rejective". I think they want to avoid being targeted by the fairness wonks anymore than they already are.
Also, US News and World Report rankings have major problems, for instance, the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality, but doesn't account for price, giving schools incentive to raise prices to fund campus improvements that boost rank, in turn boosting applications, in turn reducing % acceptance (the principal indicator of "quality" in US schools). This was how TCU went from a meh christian school to a "selective private college" in just a couple of years. World Report now publishes a "best dollar value" report to account for this, but few read it.
You can see a lot of hypocrisy that’s uncritically accepted by a lot of organizations, including nonprofits. Exclusionary higher education is a particular notable example, given the soaring rhetoric of “inclusion” spouted by some people involved with higher ed, versus the reality of those same schools seeking to reject as many applicants as possible. Princeton University’s president, Chris Eisgruber, has, for example, blathered extensively about the school’s efforts to “combat systemic racism.” Princeton has a $37 billion endowment. The school’s undergrad acceptance rate is 5.6% and it charges a sticker price of $73,000 a year (yes, the school does accept a handful of token low-income students every year, but that the school’s overall demographics reflect its target: the wealthy). Does that sound like a school devoted to combating systemic racism to you? How can people make these kinds of arguments with a straight face? Colleges and universities are run largely for the benefit of their administrators. The other exclusionary schools are doing the same things, as are their private-school feeders, despite their vigorous marketing to the contrary.
Regarding the above paragraph, let me be clear: describing how something is, is not the same thing as approving of it.
It's truly mind-boggling. The Ivies were always bastions for maintaining the position of WASP elites. They still serve that function. Maybe there is a bit more wiggle room about skin color, but they still function to socialize the next generation of people to run WASP institutions like "JP Morgan Chase."
There's nothing inherently white, anglo-saxon or protestant about the oligarchy that these institutions preserve; they will very happily pass on to a new generation of westernised, college-educated liberals of all races and genders but no more variation in thought than the one they replaced. The cultural focus on such ephemera gives them a very useful fig leaf for excluding the demographic that it actually matters to exclude: the working class.
In this context, “WASP” refers to social status and cultural norms derived from northeastern British and Dutch colonists, but not limited to them. Working class southerners or Appalachians have never been “WASPs” in that sense despite fitting the definition literally.
Is that really so wrong though? I'd like to go to a college where the food doesn't suck and the campus is nice. Those are definitely factors that went into my choice. Value was definitely the overwhelming factor in my decision though, I went to a UC.
Also, even the value rankings are mostly just Ivies at the top. Funny enough, my school is in the ~30s for overall rankings, but in the low 100s for value, since they're looking at the out-of-state cost (which for UCs is around 50k vs. 15k in-state), and they include grants, which is extremely variable by individual student. If they looked at the in-state tuition, UCs would dominate the value rankings.
Yes! The thing that was missing in the original article was answering the most important question in all of this: Does Tutoring Work?
The implication left for a reader of the original article is that tutoring is mostly about exam-prep or that it is under-regulated, ineffectual, and a folly of the rich. But the truth is that the over-regulation of conventional time-based classroom learning is deeply flawed based on our understanding of how people learn. Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success, nor is moving everyone along at the same pace and calling the material complete after a semester of education regardless of the depth of understanding conveyed. We need intensive and personalized schooling with mastery based learning - and to answer the question of "where are we going to get that many teachers?" we need people to teach as part of how they learn. For some odd reason society only starts to embrace this in graduate school.
> we need people to teach as part of how they learn.
I've got a principle I came up with called LTD: Learn, Teach, Do.
The idea is to prioritize activities where I can be doing all three at the same time. An example would be pair programming with a junior on a new problem where I don't know how to solve every part of the problem. "Learn on the job together with a team, and share learnings as you go" is basically the kind of work that I mean. I've found LTD activities are awesome in so many ways. You build up the team around you, grow as an individual, and get shit done all at the same time.
I'm increasingly against activities which focus strongly on only one of these(school being the main example).
teaching is a very effective method of learning. in one community that i am part of it is emphasized that most of the benefits of teaching go to the teacher.
as for a school model, montessori groups children in age-groups spanning 3 years, and older children there routinely teach the younger ones.
Montessori schools are so weird. I'm convinced they're mostly buzzwords to get rich parents to send their kids there - at least around here. I know a couple of teachers and all of them say that the Montessori schools around us don't actually follow most of the philosophies of Montessori.
In our area they seem to be for over-achievers. Want your 4 year old to learn to read, write, and do math? Send them to a Montessori. At least, that's the reason all the parents I know send them there.
the problem is that the name "montessori" is not protected, and schools take advantage of that.
so you have to look closely if the teachers are actually trained and certified by one of the training schools that actually provide proper montessori training, and whether the classrooms have the proper environment.
>Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success
The problem here is that getting enough money to hire more teachers per student is like pulling teeth. The problem that we as a society are solving isn't "how can we achieve the best overall educational outcome?" It's "how can we avoid a disastrously uneducated population with a budget of $X?" I'm not entirely sure we're doing a good job on that one either, though.
Right - but part of the difficulty and expense in hiring teachers is that we've segmented it off as an expert population with high barriers to entry. If everyone who learned was also expected to teach, you scale the teaching population with the learner population. You can actually see the dynamics of this play out with flight training, since you get your CFI at ~300hrs total flight experience but nobody will hire you with less than ~1,000hrs, so you have this massive pool of certified teachers with 300 - 1,000hrs of experience available to teach as a consequence of the design of the system.
I wonder if you could get some positive results by using students as tutors. Imagine if a certain number of hours per week, you paired up students in grade X with students in grade X-1, to have the older students help the younger ones to learn the material they leaned the previous year. This would also help cement that knowledge in the older group. Then you also have time where the students in grade X are tutored by students in grade X+1, through the same process. During this time, the teachers' jobs would be to provide support.
The biggest problem with public instructions is bullying and everything being targeted at minimum competence. Some 12 year old prodigy graduated college and high school at the same time because the pandemic and remote learning letting him zoom ahead at a ridiculous pace.[1]
Bullying is bad, but I definitely knew my role wasn't to be strong but rather academic. That line "nerds will be their boss" was my incentive. (Although I don't personally want to be a manager)
Sure it would be great to get rid of bullying, but I wonder if it's inherent in humans.
I'd focus on things we can control like that minimum competence problem you described.
that's in interesting angle with the grad school advisor reality. Very true, never thought about how an "advisor" would function throughout the entirety of one's education.
Why doesn't pure math get similarly attacked? Clearly math has generated lots of economic and scientific value, but it seems to me that there isn't much difference between string theory and, say, math work on the Monster Moonshine group or whatever.
Because pure math doesn't make a claim to be anything other than it is. String theory supposedly describes real things in the real universe, and as such it's a valid criticism to say it can't be tested.
Maybe it's a marketing problem. If string theory would move outside of the realm of physics and into that of mathematics I don't think it would have these issues.
That's my thinking as well: just re-brand string theory as math. It's not as though string theory will be testable anytime soon, so the criteria of verification is just hurting the field.
Pure math does not pretend to be a theory explaining the natural world. String theory does, and that's why it must be subject to the standards that describe what is, and what is not, a scientific theory.
I recommend Torkel Franzén's Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse. It is readable without sacrificing rigor.
It is especially good at ensuring the reader doesn't come away infected with the pseudo-profound BS that plagues many discussions of the Gödel's Theorems.
That, and Nagel's book on the proof, have been recommended on HN before (very recently!). And Rebecca Goldstein's book has been dismissed as too hand-wavy.
For important, wiki-friendly topics like this one, HN is frustratingly not great for building a readily checkable/cumulative knowledge base, rather than encouraging a forgetful herd discussion that goes around in circles. It is as I say frustrating for anyone who wants long-term knowledge rather than flimsy "news".
Newton wasn't above abusing his position as head of the Royal Society to discredit Leibniz. Wolfram reminds me of Newton—a self-conscious genius, exceedingly jealous of his intellectual primacy. I think Wolfram even compares NKS to Newton's Principia on the book's dust jacket if I recall.
He also wrote over 100 books on alchemy (that he didn't publish because it would have been illegal to practice), tried to predict the apocalypse from the Bible, predicted a Jewish repopulation is Jerusalem from similar crazy bible numerologies, and, because he saw himself as a priest of the natural world, never married.
Not a knitting needle but a bodkin, at least that's what I heard. A bodkin [needle] is for threading and has a rounded end. As I heard it he was investigating the action of the eye rather than colour per se and managed to induce visual artefacts, possibly by contacting the optic nerve.
Citation with corroboration/correction appreciated.
“There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?” -- Frank Herbert
I hope this research evolves beyond the 'Cybernetics' buzzword. It seems like a meaningful term (control, regulation etc.) but when other disciplines take it up, it often seems to fade into vagueness. Psycho-cybernetics, socio-cybernetics, and cybernetics of child development were all hot stuff in the decades after Weiner. But little came of them in the end (mean while, Claud Shannon was doing very real work in Information Theory, which started from the same theoretical underpinnings).
There is no reason x-cybernetics can't deliver, esp. for quantum systems...I just hope that it does this time.
Would have been more interested to know how the avg EEV household electricity consumption compares to offset gasoline usage (as energy). My understand is that the efficiency of power plants is so much higher than automobile combustion engines that even if all power plants were gas-powered, EEVs would be an efficiency improvement thermodynamically.
I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.
I've heard numerous people reference the mythical pragmatism of programmers and hackers as a problem when idealism vs. self-interest is on the line, Kevin Mitnick being one of them (~"a caught hacker always rats etc.")
Solution? It would be great to revive the old cyber-optimism of the 1990's when everyone thought the Internet was going to save the world. The "twitter revolutions" come to mind, but that narrative is pretty shallow.
For people to take a stand and hold under temptation for money and power, they have to have something they can believe in.
