Readit Newsgh0std3v commented on I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears twitter.com/sama/status/1... · Posted by u/jger15
It's late at night so apologies if this seems incoherent. I recently applied to college and I got into a university that is pretty good. I'm pretty happy with where I am and I consider myself fortunate in every regard to be going to college.
That being said, I have some reservations about the college admissions process and I think this Twitter thread addresses it well. In particular, I think there is an ongoing trend to eliminate standardized tests in favor of more "subjective" and "holistic" measurements like your essays and extracurriculars. While I think it's perfectly fine to have students write about themselves and their achievements, I think it's still way too integral to the admissions process and there needs to be more balance. Personally, when I wrote my essays, even though I was trying to be authentic and I did write about experiences that were meaningful to me, I always felt as if it wasn't enough. I just kept wondering, "what are they looking for?" And I couldn't really get a good grasp of whether what I was writing was "good" or not. To me, the essays completely obscure the nature of the admissions process because no college can clearly tell you what they want. Hell, even some admissions officers seem to dodge the question when you ask them what they look for in an essay (or they provide really vague answers). I think it's silly to make the essays so critical to the process when they clearly don't allow anyone to extrapolate concrete things about a person's abilities or skills. Many smart people I know were rejected from universities that I think they should have gotten into even though they easily would fit in and thrive in those places.
By the end of the college admissions process, even though I was happy with the college I got into, I honestly felt a little jaded. Sure, I'm happy that I got in, but I feel as if I couldn't properly communicate my skills to the admissions officers. It just makes me feel as if your skills matter less than your ability to impress people. Maybe it was naïve of me to think that it would be different in an academic institution compared to the corporate world, but it is a little disheartening in the end.
I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but this post resonated with me and I felt that I needed to share my thoughts.
I am extremely surprised at all the people who are against this, saying that "Making DST permanent forces people to wake up earlier." I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun. Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.
I am happy to have more sun after I get out of work. It was a breath of fresh air this week getting out of work and seeing daylight.
I don't care about whether there's more sunshine in the morning or not (that's why I have blinds!). What I do care about is the fact that DST introduces needless complexity into the task of keeping time.
I know it's stupid, but I just think DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars. Not to mention, because not everyone observes DST, it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings.
Overall, regardless of your preferences, the world would be better if we didn't have to adjust the clock for no reason.
I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could produce because we forget that in ancient times they often operated on longer timescales than we do.
With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a great mystery.
But I don't see any reason to believe that the Greeks built it in a short time. It could easily be the lifework of the builder, or even the lifework of successive generations of a family of builders.
If you need to make a very precise gear in a day you need our technology. If you need to make a very precise gear in 50 years you just need someone with an abrasive that is harder than the material you are making the gear from.
I agree. To me, the ancient Greeks were an extremely advanced civilization and we don't often comprehend quite how rich their intellectual culture was.
It turns out that Archimedes had actually discovered some of the foundational principles of integral calculus centuries before Newton or Leibniz even considered it [1]. In fact, Eudoxus — another Greek mathematician — had created a "method of exhaustion" which was essentially an informal, geometric method for computing limits (though he tried to make it as rigorous as possible) [2]. And if they don't impress you, then Euclid on his own is an extraordinary mathematician. The Elements is a modern mathematical marvel, with all of its theorems on foundational geometry and algebra stemming from 5 axioms.
Astronomy was a critical part of many ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Indians (and of course, the Greeks). After some pondering, it makes sense why they would invest so much time, energy, and innovative zeal into creating a device as intricate as the Antikythera. I wonder how many other inventions and revolutionary ideas created by ancient cultures have been lost to time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_of_Mechanical_Theor...
gh0std3v commented on Gopher – A 280B parameter language model deepmind.com/blog/article... · Posted by u/kevin_hu
GPT-3 is very capable of humor, even better than humans are. It's not really that it finds it funny, but more that it's mimicking a conversational pattern. Sarcasm, silliness, snarkiness, it's all there. Gopher seems to also be trained on books and the internet, so it wouldn't be so surprising.
While I want to believe this is true, I think the above response was more a lack of Gopher's ability to analyze mathematical equations properly than an attempt to display a sense of humour. Many NLP approaches work by creating word embeddings, which don't always help the model to understand "first-order logic" language mixed with spoken language.
Though who knows, maybe it does have a sense of humour.
While I think it's important for workplaces to take care of their employees, I feel like Pete's issue was that he was too close to work. And on top of that, he wasn't even an employee, just a contractor with no benefits, PTO, etc.
The real problem here is that Pete was not integrated as an employee. If he were, he could have taken PTO, accessed health benefits, and gotten help. I don't know the complete story, so I won't extrapolate further, but I feel sad thinking that this team almost feels "responsible" for his suicide. It wasn't the remote team's fault for not catching on, it was the company's fault for not acknowledging the health and security of their contractors (who, I reiterate, should have been employees).
Don't mean to offend anyone, I just felt the way contractors are treated is sometimes unjust.