IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills. It's the wrong thing to optimize for.
Besides, high-IQ students can still underperform for many of the same reasons that average-IQ students often do (e.g., under-preparation, lack of discipline, disorganization, mental illness, financial distress, unstable living situation). We should be better addressing those things before students get to a university no matter what their IQ is.
Beyond that, if you have good competency tests on both ends (i.e., the credentials before a four-year degree are accurate signals, and university degrees effectively prove a high degree of competency), who cares if someone manages to get those credentials by working harder while being dumber? I like working with clever people. I also like working with people who know their shit because they take their time to study and consider things. (When I'm lucky, I get to work with people who are both!)
> IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills.
Meaning it can be learned. Trained.
I'm not defending the metric. People use it like it is some innate thing that doesn't change over one's lifetime. In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
It's also important to note that IQ is normalized. An IQ of 100 today is different than an IQ of 100 20 years ago. Notable, it's been increasing, so someone taking an IQ test in the year 2000 getting an IQ of 100 would have had an IQ of 130 had they taken it in 1950. That's an incredibly important piece of information needed to even do basic comparisons of IQs
> Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
Whether things like "intelligence", "cognitive ability", and "aptitude" (some of which may be synonyms depending on your view) are innate vs. learned or fixed vs. variable over time are orthogonal to each other. And for each of those pairs, the answer may not be as simple as a binary division or even a gradient (it may decompose into something weirder, being causally determined by multiple factors where some of those factors are fixed and others aren't).
Moreover, both of those questions are separate from questions that get at what IQ measures (does it measure aptitude, does it measure factual knowledge, does it measure social knowledge or acculturation within a specific context, etc.).
Lots of things are easy to identify as both substantially genetically determined and variable over time and mediated by environmental factors, e.g., height. Lots of things are likewise easy to identify as significantly environmentally determined but also largely stable over time if not altogether fixed (e.g., personality, attachment styles).
It's also at least possible for all of the following to be true at the same time:
- IQ tests correlate with socioeconomic status
- IQ test scores vary over time and can be increased
- some IQ score increases, or some part of a given IQ score increase, reflects a genuine aptitude increase
- IQ tests are somewhat gameable in that training for IQ tests can increase scores so that some of the measured increase does not measure improved cognitive ability
where aptitude means something like fluid problem-solving ability, speed of learning, etc.
Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.
> Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
In this hypothetical you’re a teacher, not world emperor, so you’re limited to pass/fail decisions of a particular class at a particular school.
I personally have grave concerns regarding the poor education of the youth and think education should be far more stringent, but unfortunately I don’t get to make those decisions. If I was a teacher I’m not sure I would be willing to fall on that sword. I avoid the issue by not being a teacher.
This is a big component of why we have objective grade level standards. They are a strong but imperfect defense against racism at the teacher level.
If I am the teacher and I fail your kid but your kid crushes the blind rigorous and as objective as we can make it standardized test then your lawsuit just got stronger.
The issue is people decided to weaken the standard or call standards themself racist (which IMO is actually racist).
There's no hypothetical here IMO, this is a real-world problem, and also you aren't limited to pass/fail decisions as a teacher, except in exceptional cases of borderline grades. Otherwise, there is a passing grade / requirements, and grades can be determined by objective tests (all students get the same difficulty tests). Also you have something like an average of many courses over many years to make the pass/fail decisions, ultimately, if we are talking about getting a diploma and/or graduating high-school here.
Also, it depends what you see the discussion as. If laws are supposed to do the right thing, then "pass everyone always" is really starting to look like the wrong thing, even where the intentions are seemingly "good" because they avoid "disparate impact" (in the short term on very narrowly-chosen metrics). Then if your argument is "yeah well we can't do the right thing because lawsuits", well, yes, I agree, practically, but then these lawsuits are basically also evil and/or misguided.
Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.
If the choice is between eroding the recognition of excellence and risk being sued, then the foundation upon which the society has been built is the problem. The solution to which is, as @JumpCrisscross says, correcting legislation in such a way as to direct the society towards better outcomes.
Disparate impact laws are a spin off from civil rights act 1964 so you’d have to repeal at least a part of that act. Much of modern society is shaped by these laws so you’d be completely changing the structure of society. Many people benefit from the status quo and those people, who have substantial means, will fight any attempts to repeal these laws.
I want these laws changed, it is the whole reason I brought up the issue, but I also understand how monumentally difficult it would be to do that. I suspect the US would have to degrade far further to even consider this.
I had an invitation to bid on a government contract that needed local diversity certifications that would cost a bunch of money just to apply. They also had a scale down provision to basically nothing so even if we won there is no guarantee that the contract would cover the cost of certifications. We have list pricing so they wanted us to jump through these hoops and still give them the standard rate. We passed, but if this is our future we’ll have to stop doing list pricing and start charging 5x to 10x extra to cover the hassle of dealing with them.
Now you know why government contracts are so expensive. They have to be, to cover the costs of dealing with the government.
It's not wrong to over-quote a shitty customer by an amount that'd make you willing to deal with their shittiness. That's totally fine on your part actually, since either they take the bid and you make money, or they don't and you don't have to deal with them.
We do list pricing to cut down on marketing costs. Many tenders disallow increasing the price of deliverables over list pricing (it’s an automatic disqualification). You can’t throw in extra stuff either as they reserve the right to remove specific line items after awarding the tender. They write the rules to benefit themselves.
The only way I can increase prices is if I stop having an advertised price and go to a pure ‘contact us for pricing’ model. I can either be mass market at commodity prices or I can target governments at inflated costs but I can’t do both. We’re the last hold out in my niche and eventually we will have to leave the commodity market.
My understanding was that the government doesn't want list service, but wants to negotiate something very specific and annoying, like some weird compliance or support requirements. Of course the government can pay list price if they only want list service, but they don't. List service means you ship the product to the customer and then it's the customer's problem after that.
What you are saying does not make sense to me, if that were true then why have a provision requiring that any excess on list pricing would be disqualified. Also there was little scope for negotiation, basically if you meet a bar on functionality then the only consideration is price. Any ‘negotiation’ has to go through an app that loops in everyone who has applied and is really limited to clarifications of facts. This is one of many government orgs and tenders I’ve dealt with, and the first one I elected not to proceed with.
The typical strategy is to not ask for clarification and use deficiencies in the spec to justify change requests that gouge them. You need a cadre of lawyers to be able to play that game though.
Also there are a million of different governments and all different levels, I’m giving one anecdote as it applies to one of them. I’m sure many others have a different experience.
I don't think that's quite how it works - I think they are saying that they have a framework contract so they will have had to provide some list prices, but that doesn't affect the overall contractual terms.
You could potentially do so with some extra games around 'different' products and/or business entities, but whether it's worth the trouble is another question (there are certainly companies that make a good margin just reselling products to the government).
If I could have I would have, I’m not the only person in this position nor is it their first tender, they progressively go and close the loopholes. If it’s on the market for a price they want this price regardless of the overhead they add to the process.
There are many reasons to lie about peace being around the corner, it is the default norm. It is in part to place the blame of further conflicts on your enemies, i.e. I wanted peace but clearly they did not.
There is a conflict of narratives and one way to help push your narrative is to act like it is the reality on the ground. Unless the US is going to send in a ground army or nuke Iran then all we have at the moment is a pointless stalemate and the longer this goes on the more people will be upset at Trump and Israel for creating this situation.
Parsing single file is easier than navigating a file system for an LLM. Until the models have context windows large enough to hold the entire codebase in one shot, single files will beat multiple files every time.
This. I suspect the codebases in the future will be made of a small number of gigantic source files. These will be able to be transpiled into a more human friendly that produces multiple smaller files per big file in human-debug mode.
As a human who typically uses large files, 10k to 30K lines of code files are pretty common, I find the agents don’t read the whole file after the first time, they almost always do a range select for the bit they are interested in.
Investor fraud is usually brought as a civil case and takes a balance of evidence approach.
Since enforcement is stochastic and rare these practices are pretty common. The freedom to do ‘whatever’ is really dependent on the discretion of the government and investors. Most companies can and do fly under the radar but have to be careful not to piss off the wrong people.
Okay but then why are we singling this out as tax fraud, if the justification is just "anything can be"? Why not claim that posting on HN is tax fraud?
Barter counts as income by many tax jurisdictions, if you don’t declare the fair market value of the exchange you are in violation. Most people don’t declare this and it is rarely ever enforced.
It depends on jurisdiction, the US is unusual, most countries they’ll reassess you and it’s on you to prove them wrong.
I did have to look it up, I didn’t know that the US was different in this way. I did have the California tax authority make a mistake and take money directly out of my account and there didn’t appear to be a way to fight it. It wasn’t enough to be worth hiring a lawyer over so I let it go but it didn’t give me much faith in the governance of California, very Kafkaesque.
CA FTB does not take money out of your account unless you have explicitly authorized it to do so and it definitely does not do so automatically. It only pulls specifically authorized amounts when specifically authorized to do so unless you have a garnishment order issued by a court. (I deal with the CA FTB on a daily basis.)
You're also wrong about most other countries as well, with the exception of France.
It is possible my memory, Google, and now AI are all conspiring against me.
It was a vehicle registration issue for a car I had sold 10 years earlier, it got a parking ticket in CA and they used that as evidence I still had the car and owed registration fees. I had evidence the car was sold and had changed title many times since then before the parking ticket but they wouldn’t accept that. I didn’t go to court over this and the money disappeared from my account, I did get a phone call telling me what happened. I had not received any notice prior. As mentioned I’m sure I could have gotten a lawyer for this but legal fees would have exceeded the amount lost, perhaps in the future when I have a lawyer on retainer.
Don’t take China on face value, they have every incentive to promote a grifting military industrial complex in the US while focusing on competing in manufacturing. An actual war would fix a lot of the grifting in the US as it would align interests. Pretending they’ll go to war over Taiwan and not doing it is an effective strategy for undermining the US.
I hope you are right, but unfortunately there is no particular reason to trust China's leadership anymore. They are not nearly as obvious at Trump, but they are not on a good path.
I'm explicitly distrusting them, they're saying they want to take Taiwan and I don't believe them. I try to ground my belief in realpolitik, cynicism, and from my experience with strategy games. There is an element of manipulating your opponent into acting the way you want them to by sending them costly false signals, they have to be costly or they won't be believed. I think we (the West) are being played and the gifting elements in our political leadership are more than happy to play along. I'm sure China would like to take Taiwan if it wouldn't cost them anything, but the US is a waning hegemony so for now it is better to wait until the US is beyond fixing itself. At this rate that may not take long.
> I try to ground my belief in realpolitik, cynicism, and from my experience with strategy games
I'm trying to do that too but what the hell is going on with Putin? Why does he continue to engage in this ridiculously expensive war? I don't see any evil genius explanation anymore. It just seems like a mix of sunk-cost-fallacy and save-face.
I think many geopolitical decisions are actually based in irrational emotions of a hand full of people.
I think Putin was and remains a rational actor, I know a lot of how that war is understood in the west is colored by a very effective propaganda campaign that I don’t have the time nor energy to counter.
But I will say, in a very broad stroke, we’re heading for a great power conflict and the US has two primary factions on foreign policy; the primacists vs the restrainers, both want to take on China (contain with war) but the primicits want to topple Iran first and set up Israel as a regional hegemony where the restrainers want to build up locally first. China knows this and Russia is a junior partner / quasi vassal state to China. China lacks modern war fighting experience which the Russian Ukraine war has been very helpful in fixing. Yes it’s very expensive, but so is losing a great powers conflict.
Is your claim that Russia is continuing to fight Ukraine as a favour to china in order that china get information on how modern war is fought and intel on western capabilities?
While it is undoubtedly true that china is learning everything it can from this conflict, and that russia is at least a little subservient to china, they aren't so subservient for this explanation to make sense.
Otoh, if you send the costly false signal of investing in your military, and your opponent doesn't buy it, you might as well use it since you just spent the money anyway and your opponent can't stop you since they didnt believe your signal.
A grifting military industrial complex is unable to defend Taiwan even if it wanted to as evident by the exceedingly poor showing with Iran. The disastrous reality of doing what was done is already with us. If the US didn't take that bait it could have made better choices that would have left it in a stronger position militarily long term, if it made a real attempt at re-shoring civilian manufacturing it could cross subsidise dual use technology, but instead we have corrupt politicians doling out concessions for kickbacks.
> If the US didn't take that bait it could have made better choices that would have left it in a stronger position militarily long term
Like what though? If the problem is that not going to actual war has enabled the MIC to be captured by grifters, then "taking the bait" and going to war should actually help improve that by showing up the grifters and giving us a chance to switch to making stuff that works.
> The Iran war doesn't count as the alignment of interest requires an actual threat of being defeated.
That's starting to sound a bit no-true-scotsman. If we need an existential threat to the US, that's not going to happen - realistically China conquering Taiwan or even building an empire around the Pacific would still not be felt as such a threat.
To align the interests there has to be a substantial negative consequence that would be felt by the grifters if the endeavor fails.
The US is already close to losing world hegemony status and it kinda needs it in order to print money / export inflation. A multipolar world is one where the US is greatly diminished and this will happen with or without losing a war.
> To align the interests there has to be a substantial negative consequence that would be felt by the grifters if the endeavor fails.
Like what though? The failure in Iran has had pretty substantial consequences that are being felt. If that's not good enough, what is? You were talking like you thought there was a realistic path to a better military, but consequences for the US aren't going to come much bigger than this.
You're conflating the grifters with the US in general, the grivers are able to continue grifting even at the expense of the US. This is requiring too much hand-holding from me so I'm done with this conversation.
All China needs to do is do what they’re doing play the long game the United States is currently shooting itself in the head, if they’re smart, they should just sit back and watch the show by the year 2100 well you know. And coincidentally that also applies to Russia sit back and watch them do it to themselves.
In addition, some of the other countries like Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand had better get busy from within because they’ll be on their own. In the same applies probably to Europe.
> The people who control the capital are building autonomous armament to protect themselves against both foreign and domestic enemies.
Rich people can build all the fortified bunkers they want, but they still need to get their food, water, and air from somewhere. It would be very easy to cut them off or smoke them out.
(I'm not advocating for violence in any way, I'm just pointing out that nobody's invincible, no matter how obscenely wealthy they are).
"Guys, there is an ugly but working solution to many of our problems, but hey, I am so well-tamed I automatically need to emphasize I don't condone choosing this option"
Imagine a split between two factions, one that wants UBI and one that doesn't. The most talented people will go to the faction that doesn't offer/impose UBI. That's why UBI is impossible, the incentive to defect is immense.
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