I am afraid that even asking this question would be perceived as horribly patriarchal today.
My parents’ generation would probably say “cooking” and maybe a few more things, dunno.
I am afraid that even asking this question would be perceived as horribly patriarchal today.
My parents’ generation would probably say “cooking” and maybe a few more things, dunno.
Former teacher here. Like avancil said, education is organized by amateurs. Having it organized by non-teachers has its own risks (optimizing for legible goals, ignoring all tacit knowledge of teachers), but there should be some way to get best practices from other professions to teachers. Also, university education of teachers is horribly inadequate (at least at my school it was), and the on-job training is mostly letting the new guy sink or swim.
To handle multiple things, you need to keep notes. As a software developer, I just carry my notebook everywhere, and I have a note-keeping program (cherrytree) where I make a new node for each task. So if I was a teacher again, I would either do this, or a paper equivalent of it. (Maybe keep a notebook with one page per student. And one page per week, for short notes about things that need to be done that week. I would just start with something, and then adapt as needed.)
Yeah, the inability to take a bathroom break when you need it can be really bad. There should be a standard mechanism to call for help; just someone to come and take care of the class for 10 minutes. More generally, to call for assistance when needed; for example what would you do if a student got hurt somehow, and you need to find help, but you also cannot leave the class alone. (Schools sometimes offer a solution, which usually turns out to be completely inadequate, e.g. “call this specific person for help”, and when you do, “sorry I am busy right now”.) There should probably be a phone for that in the teachers’ room, and someone specific should be assigned phone duty every moment between 8AM and 3PM, and it’s their job to come no questions asked.
Debates about education are usually horribly asymmetric, because everyone had the experience of being a student, but many of them naively assume they know what it is like to be a teacher. Now you know the constraints the teachers work under; some of them are difficult to communicate. I think the task switching is exhausting in a way that is difficult to imagine if you haven’t experienced it. (Could depend on personality, though. ADHD?) New things keep happening all day long, and you have no time to process them, because you keep switching tasks according to a predetermined schedule. For example, once I taught as a part-time job only one day a week, and it was a completely different experience—I had enough time to prepare for the classes, and to reflect on them after the day. But try teaching 20+ classes a week, and it’s like drowning in a river.
In software, network effects are strong. A solution people are already familiar with has an advantage. A solution integrated with other solutions you already use has an advantage (and it is easier to do the integration when both solutions are made by you). You can further lock the users in by e.g. creating a marketplace where people can sell plugins to your solution. Compared to all of this, things like “nice to use” remain merely wishes.
It could be an interesting experiment to build up this list iteratively. Like, every question you ask for the third time, the answer gets added at the bottom of the list. How long will the list get, and what will it contain?
Consider the pressures and incentives. Adding new features can help you sell the software to more users. Fixing bugs… unless the application is practically falling apart, it does not make much of a difference. After all, the bugs will only get noticed by people who already use your application, i.e. they already paid for it.
For the artificial intelligence, I assume the “killer app” will be its integration with SharePoint.
I suspect that in practice many people use the word “prioritize” to mean:
think short-term
only do legible things
remove slack
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
-- Isaiah 55:8
This probably also implies: “your values are not my values”.
there is strong reluctance from employees to reveal that LLMs have boosted productivity and/or automated certain tasks.
The thing with “boosting productivity” is tricky, because productivity is not a linear thing. For example, in software development, using a new library can make adding new features faster (more functionality out of the box), but fixing bugs slower (more complexity involved, especially behind the scenes).
So what I would expect to happen is that there is a month or two with exceptionally few bugs, the team velocity is measured and announced as a new standard, deadlines are adjusted accordingly, then a few bugs happen and now you are under a lot more pressure than before.
Similarly, with LLMs it will be difficult to explain to non-technical management if they happen to be good at some kind of tasks, but worse at a different kind of tasks. Also, losing control… for some reasons that you do not understand, the LLM has a problem with the specific task that was assigned to you, and you are blamed for that.
I like this a lot! I think you did a great job explaining how the details are connected.
At the root, the problem is “we cannot teach everyone individually”. We do not have enough teachers for that; and the computer solutions are not good enough yet. (Perhaps soon they will get good enough, at least in a way “everyone gets their own AI tutor, and there are still human teachers as a backup”. But we are not there yet.) Many things that are unpleasant about schools were invented as a solution to “how to teach 300 kids using only 30 teachers, especially when most of them—both kids and teachers—are not very bright”. The solutions seems like a local maximum (we already did many small improvements that worked in isolation), but it also seems like we could do much better with a greater redesign.
Another sad constraint is that many students would be unwilling to cooperate even with a much better designed system. Any solution needs to provide answers for what to do about students who will try their hardest to undermine the system, no matter how irrational such behavior may seem to us. Kids, especially at puberty, are often trying to impress their peers doing various destructive and self-destructive things. Assume that every school will have some bullies, some kids who want to hide in a place out of sight and use drugs, etc.
Just some random thoughts:
are the some kind of summer seasonal jobs? perhaps you could try looking for those
find opportunities to meet local people, then ask them if they know about a job
is there anything you could make at home and try to sell?
I haven’t paid attention to this recently (I have small kids, so we need to cook anyway), but I think it is magnesium and calcium—they somehow interfere with each other’s absorption.
Just a random thing I found in google, but didn’t read it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1211491/
(Plus there is a more general concern about what other similar relations may exist that no one has studied yet, because most people do not eat like “I only eat X at the same time as Y, mixed together”.)
Ah, so it is. I have no idea how American student debt works with regards to inflation. I assumed it was fixed. If not, then it is much worse than I assumed (and I already assumed it was quite bad).
Some issues have legible, material stakes.
Scrolling down… the table of how important are individual topics for young people; “student debt” is at its very bottom.
(Also, inflation on the very top? But isn’t inflation a good thing if all you have is an enormous debt?)
This, and also most people on ACX respect Scott and his opinions, so if he demonstrates that he has put a lot of thought into this, and then he makes a conclusion, it will sound convincing to most.
Basically, we need to consider not just how many people believe some idea, but also how strongly. The typical situation with a conspiracy theory is that we have a small group that believes X very strongly, and a large group that believes non-X with various degrees of strength, from strongly to almost zero. What happens then is that people with a strong belief typically don’t change their mind, while people with zero belief (who until now just took one side by default, because they never heard about the other) will flip a coin. Therefore the typical outcome is that the conspiracy theory becomes better known.
Or maybe the zero belief is not literally “never heard about theory” but “never met an actual person who also believes the theory” and as the debate starts, they find each other, and thus the conspiracy theory becomes socially acceptable (even being in a minority feels very different from being alone).
When the conspiracy theory is wildly known, and everyone already knows a few believers, most damage was already done.
Rationalist-adjacent community is often the opposite of the wider society, in that the mainstream beliefs are low-status, and we need to be reminded that they sometimes actually exist for a good reason. There is always this suspicion that people who have mainstream beliefs are simply too stupid to think independently. Therefore a debate will improve the case of the mainstream belief.
Thank you, this explains a lot. So, kinda, status is good in itself, because it is a mechanism to direct social rewards to people who produce some kind of value, or at least display some kind of excellence. It is just bad if people think about status in a way other than the completely naive: “you need to get good at X, then status will automatically happen proportionally to how much you deserve it”.
There are also other mistakes people could make, such as sacrificing too much in order to achieve X. Such as a guy who writes a perfect book, but also his wife divorces him and his kids hate him, because sacrificed everything to the goal of writing the perfect book. But this is about the specific mistake of trying to get X-related status using means different that maximizing the X; such as befriending the right people. Like a guy who writes a book that is “good but not the best”, but he is a friend with the right people, and therefore his book gets elected as the official book of the year. And this probably requires that he reciprocates in some way—maybe he also in turn votes for their art, or helps their kids pass admissions to a prestigious university, or simply provides some financial or sexual services in turn.
Lewis was a writer, so I suspect he might have seen something similar among writers, but also noticed that this is a more general thing. (The first example that comes to my mind is publishing scientific papers.) I am not a professional artist myself, but I have seen enough to be disappointed. I have also seen people who refused to play this game and succeeded anyway; such as writers who have never won a book award, but their books sell better because they are good; and maybe if they keep being obviously good, even the critics will be one day shamed into giving them some award.
So… I guess the most vulnerable are the people who are “almost good”; who stand on the line between “mediocre” and “good” and could be plausibly rounded up in either direction. And this cannot be dismissed by mere “don’t worry about what they think, the art is either good or bad regardless”, because the decision will have a real impact: emotional, but also as an advertisement. An almost-good artist getting an award will be encouraged to try harder (because it seems that the hard work is rewarded), and will find it easier to get money on Patreon or Kickstarter, or to find a publisher for a book. An almost-good author ignored may give up (because the hard work done so far seems to be useless), and will get less external support. So the recognition can make a difference—I assume that if you took 20 such almost-good authors of the same quality, and randomly gave awards to 10 of them, statistically those 10 would have more success ten years later than the 10 you did not choose.
The problem is that trying to get to the inner circle also has its costs, both emotional (not only the award received by cheating will not encourage you, but now that you know how things work, even the possible future awards will motivate you less) and in time and energy (the effort spent on getting to the inner circle is an effort not spent on getting better).
As a toy model, imagine 3 wannabe artists, all of the starting at the same almost-good quality: artist X gets an award from the inner circle because their parents are in the inner circle (i.e. X didn’t spend any energy on the inner circle, probably is not even aware that the inner circle exists); Y doesn’t get the award; and Z works hard to get into the inner circle, ultimately succeeds and gets the award… ten years later, I would expect X to be more successful than Y, but Y more successful than Z. That’s because X received an unconditional support, but Z got a part-time job that distracts them from the art. And the thing is, unless you have the inner circle “naturally” on your side, your choice is not between X and Y, but between Y and Z, and there Y is the better choice.
...or maybe I am over-analyzing this.
I don’t have an explicit theory of how this works; for example, I would consider “pleasing others” in an experience machine meaningless, but “eating a cake” in an experience machine seems just as okay as in real life (maybe even preferable, considering that cakes are unhealthy). A fake memory of “having eaten a cake” would be a bad thing; “making people happier by talking to them” in an experience machine would be intrinsically meaningless, but it might help me improve my actual social skills, which would be valuable. Sometimes I care about the referent being real (the people I would please), sometimes I don’t (the cake I would eat). But it’s not the people/cake distinction per se; for example in case of using fake simulated people to practice social skills, the emphasis is on the skills being real; I would be disappointed if the experience machine merely gave me a fake “feeling of having improved my skills”.
I imagine that for a psychopath everything and everyone is instrumental, so there would be no downside to the experience machine (except for the risk of someone turning it off). But this is just a guess.
I suspect that analyzing “the true preferences” is tricky, because ultimately we are built of atoms, and atoms have no preferences. So the question is whether by focusing on some aspect of the human mind we got better insight to its true nature, or whether we have just eliminated the context that was necessary for it to make sense.
ah, it also annoys me when people say that caring about others can only be instrumental.
what does it even mean? helping other people makes me feel happy. watching a nice movie makes me feel happy. the argument that I don’t “really” care about other people would also prove that I don’t “really” care about movies etc.
I am happy for the lucky coincidence that decision theories sometimes endorse cooperation, but I would probably do that regardless. for example, if I had an option to donate something useful to million people, or sell it to dozen people, I would probably choose the former option even if it meant no money for me. (and yes, I would hope there would be some win/win solution, such as the million people paying me via Kickstarter. but in the inconvenient universe where Kickstarter is somehow not an option, I am going to donate anyway.)
Lets use “disagree” vs “dislike”.
Thanks for the link. While it didn’t convince me completely, it makes a good point that as long as there are some environmental factors for IQ (such as malnutrition), we should not make strong claims about genetic differences between groups unless we have controlled for these factors.
(I suppose the conclusion that the genetic differences between races are real, but also entirely caused by factors such as nutrition, would succeed to make both sides angry. And yet, as far as I know, it might be true. Uhm… what is the typical Ashkenazi diet?)
How can expectations exist without roles? When everyone is free to do whatever they want to, no one can expect anything specific...
Well, we can still have general, i.e. not gender-specific expectations, such as: people should be nice and emotionally mature. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems like the traditional gender roles also provided some gender-specific “hacks”, and now we don’t have them.
Or you could ask which traits are valued at the dating marketplace, or more specifically at the part you are interested in. But there is no general answer anymore; it depends on what you are looking for. For example, if you want to have a traditional relationship, it would make sense to behave according to the traditional roles, and expect the same from your potential partners. Other subcultures have different rules. And I suppose most people are confused, do random things, get random results, then hopefully learn and try something different.