theLotusGambit's comments

Saying his ideas are well-supported by history is a bit generous considering his historical arguments always seem to boil down to a barrage of anecdotal evidence of dubious factual value. To be fair, I've only read the Underground History and not Dumbing us Down, but here's a quote from wikipedia:

"The publicity generated by the initial success and compounded by the publishing disagreements propelled the pamphlet to incredible sales and circulation. Following Paine's own estimate of the pamphlet's sales, some historians claim that Common Sense sold almost 100,000 copies in 1776,[13] and according to Paine, 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months. One biographer estimates that 500,000 copies sold in the first year (in both America and Europe, predominantly France and Britain), and another writes that Paine's pamphlet went through 25 published editions in the first year alone.[7][14] However, some historians dispute these figures as implausible because of the literate population at the time and estimated the far upper limit as 75,000 copies."

Now, this gets into a bit of a weird circular argument where the book didn't sell as many copies because the people weren't literate and therefore the people weren't literate because the book didn't sell so many copies. Still, claiming that the book sold 600,000 copies seems disingenuous unless Gatto expanded upon it. I don't remember him citing his sources either in his book, but it's not like I've looked at the sources either, so whatever.

So as someone who doesn't have a good grasp on copyright law, I'm not sure how 1984 is on this list. All the other books here appear to be over a hundred years old, making them public domain (I think), but 1984 was published in 1949. Pretty cool site, anyway.

Students attend school for 13 years. Let's say they miss out on 5/8 of a year because of this (I think the number is closer to 1/3, but it's not a big difference). So, instead of getting 100% of a "dismally low" education, they're only getting 95.2%. That hardly seems like a devastating loss to me, either from a knowledge or economic perspective.

I feel like this page really nails down the key feature that makes great STEM notes: lots and lots of examples. And they're fully worked out too, showing all steps from formula to result.

So much technical documentation and tutorials and what-have-you seems to want to stay on an entirely conceptual level, when just throwing in a single example can make things so much easier to digest.

It's wrong to treat the brain like any other muscle. It's more comparable to a neural network (pardon the tautology). You feed in data (knowledge) in hope that some of it sticks and forms new connections that you can use to better tackle new and existing problems. There's no rule of the universe that states that the process of feeding data into the brain has to be challenging.

Now, I'm not arguing that hard work has no merit. Clearly, working hard can increase your rate of knowledge-consumption and get you further faster. For some people, you included it seems, that works out great. For others, the ever-present "110% or bust!" attitude can have serious mental consequences. Accepting that education can happen without rigor won't harm those that intend to push themselves anyway, but it sure would benefit the constantly stressed-out students.

> If you don't find yourself studying 6 hours a day, you're not getting an elite education.

Seems like an unhealthy attitude to me. I really dislike the perspective that education is at its best when the learning is most difficult. The best teachers are the ones that make things as clear and digestible as possible. Bad teachers are the ones that want to see you sweat.

> Assuming there are at least some things that require a minimum effort that is uncomfortable before allowing you to see their benefits, you will discover more guided by qualified people and well-designed curricula than on your own.

Perhaps, but sitting in the lecture hall isn't the only way you can get thorough instruction from professionals. Books exist, and they don't suffer from the same monetary, timing, and pacing issues that classrooms do.

The primary historical disadvantage of books- that they weren't interactive and you therefore couldn't get help if stuck- is no longer an issue with the internet. It's possible that the internet is too disorganized and low-quality to be one's primary teacher, but its amazing supplementary value makes other media tenable.

Those are my anecdotal opinions, anyway. But I'm curious, what do you think physical teachers have to offer that Books/Online Courses/Podcasts/Whatever + The Internet don't?

> Why do the teens of today think this? Because simply, they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps.

Wanting technology to just work without having to deal with esoteric nonsense? How childish!

Funnily enough, The Case Against Education made me more comfortable with my place in the education system, because it gave me a better idea of what I'm actually accomplishing as a student. Definitely cleared up a fair bit of angst and resentment for me. I wish I had read it in high school, but better late than never.

Not only are the results good, but the music is generated decently rapidly. The implications are clear: whoever wants to make a quick fortune on YouTube should start converting and uploading truckloads of songs as fast as possible. The demand is there. I could easily see that bringing in millions of views.

Trying to figure out how a single compressed/encrypted buffer works given only it and its resulting image is certainly an unwinnable task, but increase the sample size to a few million or billion and I don't see why the algorithm couldn't eventually be cracked.

Yep, and I think it's easier than ever right now. School IT systems will often whitelist browsers including Chromium and its derivatives for installation without admin privileges. That means any student can download Brave, access Tor, and get to any site they want. All GUI, no hassle.

Awesome site! This is infinitely more useful than any other pronunciation site I've seen.

Two questions:

I'm guessing the site uses the YouTube API to build a database from video captions, but which videos does it pull from? All of them or a subset? Querying the word "the" yields about 12 million results which seems low to me.

Also, is there any way to prevent the site from modifying my YouTube watch history? I noticed after clicking around a few times and then going back to YouTube's home page that my recommendations had been updated based on the random videos I'd been fed. Clearly this isn't desirable behavior, but I don't know if there's any way around it. For the time being for other users, I recommend using an incognito or private window.

>Consider the "Tyranny of Rockets" problem: if you want to send a rocket up 1 km, you need X fuel. But to get to 2 km, you need way more than 2X fuel- because you first have to carry all that extra fuel up 1 km, which takes more energy/fuel, before you can use it to go the other km. And if you want 3 km up... well, you get the idea. It's exponential in cost.

Is this correct? I know how the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation relates to mass, but I've never heard it used in terms of altitude before. Using the kinematic equations, it seems the initial velocity required to reach height 2X would actually be less than double of that for just X. However, I'm not sure if that also applies to rocket launches and if it does how it relates to fuel requirements.

Feel free to correct me if I'm on the completely wrong track here.

Interesting. This proposal would for the first time allow any javascript to be written in just 5 characters:

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Down from the 6 that jsfuck requires:

  []+!()

This article has no substance. Its primary idea is that teens are moving away from social media, but lets look at how it actually backs that idea:

So there's 5 anecdotes from 5 teenagers, all describing their dislike/disuse of social media. I don't know about you, but I think I could get 5 teenagers to back basically any claim I wanted with stories if I asked enough of them. I'm not saying that gathering opinions of the target audience is a bad thing, but just that 5 hand-selected samples out of an incredibly diverse group of people may not be entirely representative or meaningful.

The only qualitative information presented here are the statistics, which I'll rattle off:

63% of British Schoolchildren in 2017 would be happy if social media was never invented according to a survey

A survey of 9000 internet users found that in 2016, 66% said social media was important to them, but only 57% in 2018

58% of US teenagers had taken a break from one social media platform

Facebook users aged 18-24 in Britain expected to fall 1.8% this year

41% of gen z teens said social media made them sad, anxious, or depressed

I think it's entirely possible that there is a large trend among Gen Z of moving away from social media, but I don't think these statistics or anecdotes do a good job backing the claim up.

OP here: You're on the right track in that I go to boarding school. Definitely not super-affluent (it's Louisiana after all!), but not an average high school either. We've got very good teachers and a wide selection of advanced classes, so it makes more sense that college is pushed hard here.

But regarding the first point, the program is mandatory. As for the second, I haven't heard of any other options and I doubt they exist, but as you point out it may just be the circles I interact in. And of course attending boarding school is a choice, though I can't speak for what the situation is at the other schools.

> I distinctly remember more than one person dropping AP Calc so they could focus on the college prep course...

This comment really made me smile. I wonder how much that was actually motivated by wanting to focus on college and how much was just wanting an excuse to get out of AP Calc. AP Calc sucks.

Louisiana

I'll be honest, I have no idea! I can't remember the topic of trade schools ever being brought up in class or otherwise. I think you could probably do it, but it would be very unconventional.

Perspective (anecdote) from a high school student: There is a real push for college. It's an unstated assumption that you're going to go, and the topic of debt seems to be passively avoided ("Don't worry, it'll all work out!"). We receive a grade for the college application process, so you can't not apply. College is still probably a good deal the majority of the time I think, but I wish there was some acknowledgement that it is less important in some fields than others. As for me, I think I'll take a pass on it, for now anyway. There's always time to change my mind later on.