hdctambien (u/hdctambien)

hdctambien commented on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs axios.com/2025/01/10/meta... · Posted by u/bsilvereagle

eadmund · 8 months ago

> White people aren't being punished.

When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.

When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.

When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.

hdctambien · 8 months ago

What do you do when both A and B score a 95 and there is only one job?

That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"

hdctambien commented on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs axios.com/2025/01/10/meta... · Posted by u/bsilvereagle

lazide · 8 months ago

But as you note, you used race to discriminate, and someone who otherwise would have been qualified who wasn’t black (apparently), lost not due to some skill gap or the like, but apparently purely due to the color of their skin. At least that is how I read it.

At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.

Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?

Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)

Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?

Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?

Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?

I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.

But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.

The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?

And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.

The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.

In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.

Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.

Frankly, they often do.

hdctambien · 8 months ago

If you interview 10 people for one job opening, you have to pick one of them. If 5 of them pass the technical interview you start filtering them on other non-technical things. "Would I like to hang out with this person", "were they funny", "do they have similar hobbies to me?", "did they go to the same school as me?"

Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.

Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.

Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.

Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.

Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"

hdctambien commented on Issue affecting the Gateway API on the Braintree platform paypal-status.com/inciden... · Posted by u/siddharthgoel88

ta1243 · 2 years ago

The whole point of git was its decentralisation.

Then people just moved to a client/server model hanging off github.

But you're right, local servers are more reliable than big cloud ones.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

I think you may have missed a bit of their point... a plex server is a video hosting server.. like a personal Netflix. They wouldn't push their code to their Plex server because it's not a server that accepts code pushes.

hdctambien commented on Math for kids outside of the Calculus Sequence kidswholovemath.substack.... · Posted by u/sebg

lern_too_spel · 2 years ago

If you can't prove something, even informally, you aren't doing math. Memorizing and applying magic formulas (especially in "math" and physics classes) is a big problem with the curriculum.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

I agree. Algebra based Statistics is one of the things that makes people say "Math is a religion". There is a lot of "just trust me" in statistics when you don't know calculus.

I suppose you could switch Probability & Statistics to "Just Enough Calculus" & Statistics to make it a less religious experience... but that also sort of defeats the "nobody really uses Calculus" mentality.

hdctambien commented on Math for kids outside of the Calculus Sequence kidswholovemath.substack.... · Posted by u/sebg

ecshafer · 2 years ago

Schools should honestly have two parallel tracks of math (which students should take at the same time). There should be the standard "analysis" mathematics of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus. But there should also be a track of (what I will shorthand to) Discrete mathematics, which focuses on proofs, combinatorics/ probability, number theory, graphs, etc. Discrete Mathematics used to very much be a niche mathematical field, who needs to know about number theory!? But computers has really made these other fields incredibly important to modern society. Plus writing proofs is a good exercise for anyone.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

I don't think you'll find too many Math teachers that disagree with you. There are a lot of things that schools should do.

I'm curious to think through what a second track like this would look like.

Assuming the "normal" 8-12 track is:

Algebra 1 -> Geometry -> Algebra 2 -> Trig/PreCalc -> Calculus

I think you need Algebra 1... maybe I'm too stuck in the old ways.. but at some point you need to understand what a variable is and how to "solve for x". How to plot points, read and interpret a graph. Identify patterns in series of numbers, etc.. Call it what you want, but without the content of Algebra 1 you're going to have a hard time communicating ideas in the language of Mathematics. And these kids also have a Physics graduation requirement where they will need to at least solve f=ma.

Geometry is usually the "proofs" class. You're only really learning geometry so you can write proofs. You could plug&play that with a Discrete Math/Sets/Boolean/Logic class. I think Geometry is conceptually easier to understand as a 14/15 year old because you can "see" that the proofs work. Truth tables are kind of visual, but still a little more abstract than triangles and rectangles.

Combinatorics/Probability is already a half year course that's usually combined with the half year course of Statistics. I can see non-AP versions of this class split into two full year classes.

I imagine this would be something like what you're thinking of:

Algebra 1 -> Discrete Math -> Probability -> Statistics

The only thing standing in the way of something like this is politicians (state boards of education) and startup costs. For example, the graduation requirements in Texas are "4 credits of Math including Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2" (and the content of those classes are explicitly laid out in the TEKS). And you would also need to buy new textbooks/curriculum... which is money that schools don't really have to spend.

hdctambien commented on Math for kids outside of the Calculus Sequence kidswholovemath.substack.... · Posted by u/sebg

kqr · 2 years ago

I've always been surprised that probability and statistics are not getting more stage time in school. It's one of the most practically useful areas of mathematics, and also one of the least intuitive so people with little training get it wrong all the time.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

I think it all depends on where you went to school and possibly who noticed you while you were there.

I took 2 years of Probability and Statistics in Highschool in 1998-99 and 1999-00 at a school with 200 students. At the 4000 students school I taught at a few years ago we offered AP Probability and Statistics (had have been for at least 10 years, but probably much longer than that). In both situations, you could (and many did) take Stats without Calc.

Most times when people say "schools should teach X", many schools are (and have been) doing it (taxes, car maintenance, carpentry, gardening). Just maybe not your school ... or maybe nobody told you that it was a possibility at your school... Or maybe it's not at your school, but it is offered at another school in your district...

Or maybe it's just not offered at your school. Because there is an AP exam associated with Stats, it is fairly easy to get the class made as long as there are students that want to take the class and enough teacher slots to accommodate that. If a school is understaffed in the math department and class sizes are nearing 40, then you probably won't find a Stats class there.

hdctambien commented on Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity noahpinion.blog/p/refusin... · Posted by u/bankershill

gnicholas · 2 years ago

I wouldn't advocate for grade inflation, and there's no indication here that's what happened. I would advocate for analyzing which types of students were well-served by the change, taking into account their learning and the effect on their GPA.

I would expect that it wouldn't be that difficult to select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class. This would be more fine-grained than simply shunting all kids into an advanced class.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

> select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class.

That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)

The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?

I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.

hdctambien commented on Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity noahpinion.blog/p/refusin... · Posted by u/bankershill

timerol · 2 years ago

I understand that grades matter for getting into college, but this mindset is viscerally horrifying to me. It almost reads to me as: "What if people were appropriately challenged and learned more? Wouldn't that be horrible?" Grade inflation is a terrible thing, even if it is likely an intractable problem because of the incentives that go into it.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

Grades are a score that parents can use to compare their children to other children.

It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.

The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.

hdctambien commented on A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves news.umich.edu/a-surprisi... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

dcow · 2 years ago

> (because that is dangerous)

I've always wondered why the car doesn't warn the driver that there's 100 yards left before it will cut the engine (or limit it to idle), keep the power steering, turn on the hazards, and warn the driver that the vehicle won't continue to function because the key is not in range. Doesn't seem dangerous at all...

hdctambien · 2 years ago

I dropped my wife off downtown in her car and she had the key in her purse. The car did make a weird beeping noise as I drove away, but I had no idea what it meant and I was pulling onto the highway which would have been a bad time for the car to stop driving on me.

hdctambien commented on Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983 statecraft.beehiiv.com/p/... · Posted by u/armanhq

diob · 2 years ago

Do you have data on how many take advantage of it? My anecdotes are that everyone who tries this gets trapped in some bureaucratic hell hole that tends to prevent it from actually being used.

hdctambien · 2 years ago

NPR did some reporting on this a couple years ago: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/11/739860400/broken-promises-tea...

"By the department's last count, only 1% of the people who think they've made their 10 years of payments and apply for loan forgiveness are getting approved.

If you took all the people getting rejected and got them together in one place, Peterson says, you'd have "football stadiums full of nurses, firefighters, teachers, law enforcement officers that are seeking to have their debts forgiven.""