Why did they ask the teens? How would they know if their personal situation was better or worse than the alternative?

Any good software vocoders out there?

I don't know what the state-of-the-art is, but there was some work done that suggested that memories are formed encoded in the language you know at the time of formation.

I dug up some of this a while back[1].

My dad, who taught our language to immigrants, mentioned that it was known in that field that immigrants who lost their native language would also lose a lot of the knowledge they had from their home country, like stuff taught at schools.

Thus the memories might be there, one just can't make sense of them anymore and so they become forgotten.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37204047

You write “You can give these people houses but without treatment they will still be begging on the street.”

Your choice of words makes me wonder whether you would agree that an addict who sleeps in an apartment is better off than an addict who freezes their ass off in an alley at night.

Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world. By demanding that their life “is in order” before providing housing, I think we are demanding the impossible from someone who clearly is not capable of making perfect choices.

> Submitting a paper to a conference because it’s got a decent shot at acceptance and you don’t want the time you spent on it go to waste, even though you’ve since realized that the core ideas aren’t quite correct.

I don't see a problem with this? If papers are the vehicle for conference entries why shouldn't authors submit it just because it's wrong? Conferences are for discussion. So go there and discuss it... "My paper says XYZ, but since I wrote it I realised ABC" - sounds like a good talk to me?

(Naivety check: I am not an academic)

Been interviewing for over a decade. Tests like this do not really tell you whether someone is a good programmer, they tell you whether a person has spent a lot of time practicing problems like this. The only way to tell if someone is good at the job is to have a conversation with them and pay attention to how they answer your questions. Ask your candidate their opinions on API interface design or whether they favor mono-repos. A good candidate will be able to speak legibly and at length about these things. The problem is that in order to judge those responses you also have to be very knowledgeable. So instead we have stupid little tests designed to let interviewers of varying ability screen candidates.