lapsedacademic

Is that true anymore? Everyone I know is always on the job market, even folks who haven't jumped employers in 10+ years are regularly in idle conversation with the job market.

But, the honest answer to your boss's question: what bothers me is trading my time for money. My comp doubled. I can now afford to stop working in 3-5 years instead of 10+ years. I think this attitude has become much more common in the last 5-10 years.

The observation isn't that opposition to big tech is always irrational or partisan.

The observation is that Big Tech plays the role of Powerful Boogeyman for both the left and the right in polarizing narrative construction.

Ofc non-partisans can also dislike big tech, and partisans can dislike big tech for rational reasons. Neither of those is inconsistent with the above observation.

If you want to subpoena information, you need to be specific and targeted

On one hand, a congressional subpoena for "non-public moderation discussions and policies" is broad. On the other hand, there is certainly some version of that request that is within reasonable scope for a subpoena. In the hypothetical world where passing legislation in the US were still possible and Congress was capable of regulating Big Tech (e.g. changing Section 230 or so on), this is exactly the sort of thing a Congressional Subpoena would make sense for, since there would be a germane policy making interest in obtaining this information.

I just don't see what warrants this round of grandstanding.

The paradox of Big Tech: everyone hates Big Tech because they think their political adversaries control Big Tech.

The Left views Big Tech as monopolies controlled by techno-libertarian ultra-billionaires. The Right views Big Tech as Democrat companies controlled by radical leftist censors.

(As an aside: in a sense, both views have a kernel of truth. Big Tech employees skew left, especially on social issues, although not nearly as homogeneously as the right seems to think and individual FAANG employees have far less power than people seem to imagine. On the other hand, the leadership of these companies are definitely not natural allies of progressives, but are also not -- AFAICT -- nearly as villainous as the left seems to think.)

But the real thing that both have in common is conspiratorial brain candy with Big Tech as the modern stand-in for Illuminati or whatever.

What leads you to call that probable?

Because people with guns who said they wanted to kill her entered the capitol with their guns and started looking for her.

E.g., from one charging document: "Thinking about heading over to Pelosi CUNT’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV [purple devil emoji]."

Charges: Possession of Unregistered Firearms, Possession of Unregistered Ammunition, Possession of Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Devices.

So... he had a gun, said he wanted to kill pelosi, and then broke into a federal building and started looking for her.

He was probably just trolling and this is all a big over-reaction, right? /s

unarmed

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases

that Bernie supporter...

the main different here is that I don't recall there being a systemic effort to defend him and explain that it's really no big deal.

I'm in an awkward situation because I'm in R&D, so every job I've had uses DS/A style stuff intensely every day. The engineers I hire are mostly there to help me with my work, so they need the DS/A style stuff. I don't really care about someone having a college degree, but they do need a level of maturity equivalent to an upper-division algorithms course to be productive/useful.

It is odd that jobs which don't require this knowledge test for it.

Thanks for your research. That makes a lot more sense.

So don't merge their forks?

-1M for a religion degree from Talmudical Seminary of Bobov... where tuition after aid is $7,549.

...how do you even spend $1M on a religion degree that costs less than $10k/yr?!

Surely this is just actual straight-up white-and-black fraud, or some sort of weird data entry error, right?

Honestly, sounds amazing.

If I have code where that isn't literally free labor for my business/project, I'll keep it closed source. If I have code where that's free labor but also competes with or commodifies my business/project, I'll keep it closed source or use GPL.

This sort of boils down to "only use MIT if you really mean it", right?

Yes, but you chose a specific article to post to refute a specific claim.

Yes it does! I think you're misreading OP's post.

What was OP's claim?

> The most accurate predictor of a person's lifetime income is the income of their parents. Children of wealthy parents are more likely to go to college. It's like saying "People who drive expensive cars in high school make more money over their lifetime, period".

OP's assertion about "best predictor" is true but irrelevant. The interesting question is why?

OP asserts that the answer to that question is literally "for the same reason that rich kids drive BMWs".

OP is asserting that college has the same causal effect as a parent purchasing a BMW for a child. I.e., none at all, it's just a proxy for parental wealth.

That strikes me as an unlikely causal hypothesis.

Could there perhaps be a reason other than parent income that the child of an MD drives a BMW to school? Probably not.

But could there perhaps be a reason other than parent income that the child of an MD does well in their premed program? Seems likely.

And indeed, the above article establishes a causal link that's directly relevant to falsifying that assertion, that college == bmw in terms of causal effect.

Elsewhere, OP asks if the college wage premium persists across family backgrounds. I think perhaps something related to that question is what you perhaps read into their post. But that's not actually the claim they are actually making in that post.

(BTW: CWP and PEP are positive for students from low income backgrounds... these are just numbers you can look up... why am I the thread secretary for basic statistics?)

What you want is a study that shows that people from lower income quintiles that go to college have a higher lifetime earning than people from the same quintile that didn't go to college. Maybe that exists? if it did, I'd imagine the pro college people would be waving it around everywhere.

Yes, there is a large college wage premium for students in lower income quintiles. The most that can be said is that it's smaller, but still quite large.

I assumed the point of contention was a more nuanced question about causation, since the above is just a simple factual question that can be checked without any sort of analysis.

I see. Makes sense. I was thinking more about "general social status", rather than job-specific stuff, because that's how I interpreted OP.

We also continue to interview in ways that are more accommodating for college graduates and attendees, regardless of whether it's needed or not.

Wouldn't Leetcode-style interviewing be more egalitarian? Assuming self-taught people know their stuff, I guess? The alternative in other engineering disciplines is to just check the degree and do some soft interviews, right?

Or do you mean something else?

Thanks. In any case, I'm not sure why we're discussing cherry picked datapoints when someone already posted national averages...

best predictor

But why? What are the CAUSAL relationships between parental earnings, educational attainment, and child earnings? The children of doctors are more likely to become doctors, but saying that educational attainment is therefore less related to doctoring than parental occupation is obviously a bit absurd. Just because a parent paves the path doesn't mean that educational attainment is irrelevant to walking that path. And anyone who makes it through med school and residency has the option to enjoy high earnings, regardless of parental income.

The MD example, for the curious and humble reader interested in Truth rather than Winning, makes it abundantly clear why section 3.6 of the linked paper asks a question that's directly relevant to untangling these causal links.

Do you have another study?

There's an entire literature base on exactly this question. "lifetime earnings parental earnings education" returns 130K results on Google Scholar. But, to be blunt, I don't think you're interested in learning anything. I think you're interested in Winning the thread. So I'm not posting for your benefit; that would be futile. I'm posting for the benefit of intellectually curious readers.

Stop this.... I question the statistical literacy...

Ugh. Why?

You asked for a statistically grounded conversation, so let's do that.

Let's start, for example, with pdf page 25 (and surrounding context) of https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/causal_educ_earnings.p...

The analysis done in that paper is a good starting point for a productive conversation. We could discuss the bounds on various coefficients and decide whether the conditional statements about those coefficients made in the paper have clear answers in either direction. Or we could critique the various modeling assumptions. Etc.

Two issues:

1. Latency. We really needed messages to go out to everyone all at once.

2. My personal phone became unusable for the rest of the event because people thought that number was a general event organizer contact mechanism. This was a big deal because I was a key member of the operations staff and really needed my phone to be useful.

Solving (1) and (2) was certainly doable, but twilio solved the problem for us and I had higher impact IT stuff to be working on for the org.

assuming 7% return

Tuition has been increasing at 8% per year.

Not sure where it can get cheaper than Ohio.

Apparently lots of places, since the national average is substantially lower than the Ohio numbers.

But, more importantly, both UCLA and Ohio University are flagship R1s. Likely literally every other public university in Ohio is cheaper than OU, and I'd be unsurprised if UCLA is one of the more expensive public options in CA (wouldn't know, never lived in CA).

e: sure enough, the total cost at Youngstown State is 22K (tuition 10K, the rest is food and housing).

As an aside, including room and board in college prices always struck me as a bit odd (except in cases where living in a dorm is required, I guess, but that's somewhat rare). Do non-college-students not eat/drink/sleep?

Colleges/Universities and expensive enough and screwed up enough that exaggeration isn't necessary.

but generally there is significantly lower comp in Canada

Right, I figured. This is entirely orthogonal to the discussion about the problems with higher ed in the us...

Texas Tech is a fantastic school. If he chooses to go there and majors in a STEM field, he'll have a bright future.

they're asking why academic courses and more hands-on practical/technical courses can't be mixed?

I think they did answer this: it's because hands-on practical/technical skills are hard to learn and people who can teach them are generally expensive.

1. That number seems way off. What are your assumptions?

2. I haven't looked at the data, but I'm going to go out on a VERY short branch here and assert that the entire delta between US and CA tax rates is not consumed by higher education.

Three things:

1. There actually aren't many low-paid adjuncts in hot fields. The CS and Eng departments subsidize the Math department, and STEM+finance+premed+nursing subsidizes all of the humanities. A philosophy adjunct is probably doing way better ad juncting than they would off on their own. And the instructional staff in the in-demand fields are generally well-paid.

2. The low paid (and usually not that low paid) adjuncts within in-demand departments are generally there as a retirement gig... if they wanted a stressful empire building type of job, they'd go into industry.

3. Runway. Adjuncts who aren't semi-retired have no access to capital and here's a really long lead time until an institution is regionally accredited. You can't take a dime of federal grant money, GI bill money, private scholarship money, student loan money, etc. until you're accredited.

why was it impossible for me to add an aircraft maintenance certification through my school?

Because schools can't bullshit maintenance certification curricula and aren't willing to pay qualified faculty.

See also: the alarming number of schools where CS and Data Science courses are still taught by mathematics faulty (because they can't find CS faculty who are willing to work for $70K).

This model of "pay unqualified people to teach a good enough version of the course and hope our consumers don't notice they're being shafted" only works in unregulated fields. Most trades are not unregulated.

the social stigma of not having a college degree

People have been saying this for decades, but is it still really a thing? Perhaps on the coasts? If you're in a small or mid-sized city in the midwest or the south, it's almost exactly the opposite...

There are two sources of "magic":

1. Efficiency. Canadian universities deliver similar/better products at much lower cost. Not just cost at point of use, but actual "amount of money spend annually to deliver education".

2. Financing model. Taxation allows you to fund things without paying interest to a middle man. If you pay off a set of loans whose principle is 50K, but with 5%-7% interest rates, then you're paying a lot more than 50K. So even if the products were equal in price, the taxation model might work out ahead.

If they don't use SAT scores then what should they use instead?

The answer depends on institution type.

Highly Selective Institutions: the admissions process is so hands-on and personal that I could believe they are able to get a good sense of each candidate without testing. E.g., I absolutely believe Harvard's admissions folks have the bandwidth to compare grades between high schools (not that they need to). And they do all sorts of stuff that gives you a better sense for the candidate than test scores (alumni interviews, essays, rec letters, delving into performance in highly competitive extra-curriculars, exceptional community service work, etc).

Non-Selective Institutions (let's say admissions >70%): Standardized tests are kind of a waste of time and money for all involved. These institutions are functionally admitting everyone who can manage to fill out the admissions paperwork and didn't systematically fail high school courses. It makes sense to make test scores optional, because there might be a few diamonds in the 30% "oof" pile who can pull off a decent SAT score to compensate for their D-average-no-honors-courses transcript. But requiring the SAT/ACT is silly when your admissions standards are extremely low.

Moderately Selective Institutions: I definitely see utility in these universities still using the SAT. But notice that this is actually a very small set of institutions. Perhaps 100-300 the US's 3K+ colleges fit in this category.

--

FWIW, my opinion on SAT/ACT is somewhere in the middle.

I think standardized tests can be an excellent instrument when some form of assessment is necessary but more nuanced assessments of merit are cost-prohibitive. So for places like competitive state flagships, I think getting rid of testing and replacing it with an admissions process that works at least as good as testing is probably more expensive than it's worth.

However, I also think the pro-testing camp is often extremely hyperbolic. Testing is just one way of assessing merit. It has all sorts of flaws. Tests are a model, and all models are wrong.

As an aside, I'm not surprised that so many pro-SAT-the-sky-is-falling folks are mathematicians. That entire field is completely fucked up when in comes to testing. Math as a discipline is bad about intellectual peacocking in general... if you think Mensa is insufferable, spend an afternoon in a math dept. Math professors are exactly the last set of people in the world I would trust to have a healthy attitude toward the ability of testing to suss out real merit. They literally talk about their prelim exams the same way frat bros talk about hazing rituals. Systematic misuse of testing is the second biggest reason that people choose to do phds in math-adjacent fields instead of math. (The biggest reason is job prospects.)

Stuff you learn when you start interacting with the petite investment property class...

Contact your city councilperson and state rep/senator. Public policy doesn't need to punish this sort of behavior, but we should at least stop rewarding property owners who do this sort of thing.

Rate limiting.

About a decade back, we used to use the email approach at a non-profit I volunteered at. Annually we would need to send a bunch of texts of a short time period. Think "once a year event".

Eventually we had to stop using that solution. Most texts went through, but there were enough failures that we had to switch to twilio. I can't remember when; I guess 5 or 10 years ago? Getting old.

(We didn't immediately switch to twilio. There was one year during which we used my personal phone to send out an obscene number of texts from my personal phone number. Figured out that was a bad idea pretty quick.)

Yeah, places like MIT are where I got the model. Seeing how my peers were treating at places that are not like MIT is how I got the motivation to care.

Tippy-top programs in any particular field already operate in a way that treats grad students more like students than itinerant labor.

It's the other 99% of institutions that are gutting scientific human capital in the name of empowering incompetent middle management. (Professors are middle management. Most of them are incompetent at that job.)