It’s incredibly difficult to run a large social platform without it quickly devolving into a cesspool of hate speech, pornography, extremism, misinformation, propaganda, etc. It’s a never-ending tightrope walk, and you ultimately need to empower a team to make decisions they believe are in the best interests of the site and its users. But you can never please everybody. People who leave comments like this only reveal their naivety. But leaving comments like this today reveals something worse than naivety.
The card check at entrance and “club” concept serves another purpose: it deters random people from going to Costco to steal or cause problems. Retail theft is a major problem for most stores these days, unfortunately.
I’ve fallen victim to this, though perhaps fortunately with digital synth plugins that take up no physical space.
This is related to another problem of mine: ignoring things I’m naturally good at, and fixating on things I’m naturally bad at. In this case, I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song, and I’ve nevertheless been pursuing this in my spare time for a decade with no results. Sometimes I buy new gear thinking it will help, but people with musical talent can do much more with much less.
On the other hand, I showed promise for visual arts but never pursued it. My frustration with being bad at something seems to overpower my desire to be really good at something.
I relate strongly to the comment you're replying to, and I can tell you that it's very frustrating to have a vision of something you want to create and be unable despite struggling towards that goal for a long time.
It has nothing to do with other people. My art doesn't live up to my own standards. That's frustrating as hell! It's not a simple as comparison to others -- who cares about them if I just can't seem to create the sound I want to create?
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
- Ira Glass
I very much suffer from the same thing when it comes to music. I'm a pretty decent guitar player, all round - but I still struggle mightily to make music I'd want to listen to. But such is life, I guess.
I can relate to this. I have 8TB of orchestral libraries and other virtual instruments (many, many, many thousands of dollars), but after a decade I still haven't been able to crank out 8 bars of convincing symphonic composition. On the other hand, I can crank out a convincing and interesting rock song on guitar in real time... but I don't invest in that because it's "easy."
Sounds similar to what you describe: we shun the things we're naturally good at because they feel trivial and don't provide a sense of accomplishment, meanwhile we bash our head against a wall for years because the accomplishment of breaking through would be so amazing.
> I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song
Have you heard of dubstep?
Actually, acid house might be the genre for you, since "it’s true that if you gave 100 monkeys a TR-808s and a TB-303 each, you’d probably get at least 70 decent acid tracks". [1]
I get its a joke, but dubstep is actually one of the harder EDM genres to make, in my opinion. As in, how much skill/work it takes to make a "mediocre" dubstep track, especially for the more commercially well known "brostep" variety. Minimal techno, ambient, noise or lo-fi beats are perhaps electronic genres that are (again IMO) easier to make mediocre tracks for. Great tracks are hard to make in any genre, of course.
I wonder if you are getting more internal reward and stimulation from the challenge and novelty of something that is a struggle than from the steady success something you have natural talent for is offering. If so and that is troubling to you or puzzling, it may just be the way your brain is setup, but there are psychologists good at unraveling this sort of thing.
I do a similar thing. I like learning new things so much, I spend most of my time on new skills that I perform poorly, instead of using & continuing to hone my expert-level skills.
I'm skeptical of the claim for musical talent. Especially the case that you lack any 'real' one. Rhythm, interval recognition, composing are all skills that require practice and dedication. The lack of results point to a bad method, not lack of talent. Have you considered getting instruction?
I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money.
This assumes that working 40.0 hours a week of $x/yr is going to be worse for your family than working 60.0 hours a week for 15% or 20% more. If you're already making $175k/yr in Omaha it's very unlikely that making $205k/yr but missing dinners and school functions and not being able to chaperone class trips is going to give you such a huge quality of life increase that it's worth it.
> writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company)
Make certain the planning people have no idea what the project actually looks like. Recipe for success, no doubt.
Sarcasm asside, I do understand not assigning coding tasks to someone who doesn't have the bandwidth but to be chastised for pitching in seems non-ideal.
> If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money.
On the contrary, I find that the first or second line of managers above ICs is almost always insufficiently compensated to offset the extra hours/stress/bullshit.
On the other hand, early in my career as an IC, I was already working as many hours as I possibly could (out of interest/passion and driven by myself rather than a boss or PM). As I transitioned into management, there weren't any more hours possible (though I was already well over 40/week).
Fully agree on the incremental amount of excess bullshit, though. :)
If the city says “You cannot live on the sidewalk, in public parks, or in Bart stations,” that’s a far cry from putting a gun to someone’s head.
The city can offer other options:
- shelters in the city
- shelters outside the city if shelter in the city are full (this is my controversial opinion, but if you can’t afford housing in a specific place, you may need to live in a different place until you can afford it. I’d love to live in Malibu, but I can’t afford it. I don’t think it’s my right to plop myself down on the sidewalk and shoot heroin until the city of Malibu builds me free housing. That’s not a realistic expectation.)
The point is that you don’t incentivize moving to SF with no money and no job and no prospects and living on the street until you get free housing.
Newsom tried this while he was mayor. His conclusion was that for every person they put in housing, two new people showed up on the street.
Another issue was that most people they put into “temporary” supportive housing never moved out. A significant portion of SF’s budget goes towards paying for the housing of formerly homeless people. The city won’t put them out on the street, so why would they ever leave?
Do you let the shelters become drugs dens? Because many chronically-homeless people in SF are addicts, and they prefer to live on the street than give up drugs to sleep indoors.
Addicts should have a choice: shelter, treatment, or jail. If you bring drugs in the shelter, your choice becomes treatment or jail. Drug encampments on city sidewalks should simply not be an option.
Some chronically homeless people in SF also suffer from mental illness and cannot look after themselves. They may also not do well in shelters. But leaving them outside is not humane. Institutions had a reputation for poor living conditions, but leaving them to suffer in the street is no better. And institutions can be improved.
The IQ of the average college student has dropped from ~120 to 102 over time.
College no longer the domain of a people pursuing intellectually-demanding careers. It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public, costing them a fortune not only in tuition, textbooks, boarding, etc., but also in the opportunity cost of delaying their earnings and career advancement by 4+ years. We’re now stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.
By ignoring the problems, and actually making them worse by lowering academic standards and pushing the student loan burden to taxpayers, it reeks of either gross incompetence or corruption in our government.
If so, Google Scholar finds only two citations to it, neither interesting, which tells me the conclusions haven't been really examined by others in the field.
I bring this up because my first thought was to wonder how they handled any implicit cultural bias which might have been in the 1950s-era tests. If the IQ tests favored well-off white students, which were over-represented in college students back then, then IQ result would be excessively high for the 1950s students.
The alternative explanation for the secular decrease in student IQ is that IQ tests became less culturally biased over the same period of time.
I saw no discussion of this possibility in the paper.
Sometimes you can just blame people. All you need to do is hear the stories of parents forcing meetings with teachers to complain about how their child is failing because they didn't submit any assignments. And the school administration pressures the teachers into acquiescing to the parent's demands.
If 100 is average IQ, isn’t it more likely that a higher percentage of population enrolling in college has caused the average college IQ to revert to the average population IQ?
You might say it’s a distinction without a difference, but surely it’s a healthy trend for more than 10% of the population to have access to a college education. (120 IQ is 90th percentile.)
The point that college is becoming useless as a reversion to the mean?
I dunno, I think it’s a question of framing. If you think that the lowered standards of admission (which are not evenly distributed amongst all colleges, btw - I doubt the average IQ at Harvard is 100) will degrade the experience for the more intelligent students, then sure, I was restating GP’s point.
But I’m not sure that’s the case. You get out of college what you put into it. The presence of some students with average intelligence should have a limited affect on the experience of someone with higher intelligence (YMMV - this depends on the quality of the institution and the effort of the student).
There would always be outliers - did a 140 IQ student have a bad experience in college when the average was 120?
> The point that college is becoming useless as a reversion to the mean?
The point that college stopped being a signal of raw intelligence and potential and became a way to gatekeep people who couldn't afford it from the same level of white-collar jobs of people that could.
> There would always be outliers - did a 140 IQ student have a bad experience in college when the average was 120?
Probably to some degree, but it wasn't that pronounced. People below a certain intelligence level almost have a deliberate culture of ignorance (at least in America) - e.g. being proud of not having critical thinking skills and berating others for sounding smart.
> People below a certain intelligence level almost have a deliberate culture of ignorance (at least in America) - e.g. being proud of not having critical thinking skills and berating others for sounding smart.
You've conveniently not stated what you to believe that threshold to be, and likely no evidence exists to support your hypothesis so I'm not even going to ask for it.
About 44% of the population goes through college.[1] If this population was the top 44% by IQ, then the minimum IQ would be 102.[2]
Instead the average IQ is 102, meaning many college students are below average in intelligence. We’re populating our universities with students of less academic potential than you would expect given the number enrolled.
The question is not whether any particular person can benefit from university education - the answer is that there is a possibility of benefit for any person. That does not mean that every person should attend university.
The question we should be considering is, given that university education comes at substantial expense, and that the number of students our university system can accommodate is necessarily limited: what students are justified in going to university, by their ultimate social and personal benefit?
I would argue that sending unintelligent people through university is counter-productive: it undermines the quality of conversation and culture of the university by allowing mid-wits to shift the conversation. It undermines the standards that professors apply to their students by making it intractable to fail much of their class. It lowers the bar, even for the capable students. Thus it diminishes the education, most tragically, for the capable students who might otherwise take us to greater heights of understanding.
>It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public,
This isn't a "problem" per se because that is literally what we drilled into multiple generations of people.
"Go to college if you don't want to flip burgers forever.", as was oft said. We will become a country of white collar service industries, it was oft said.
We demanded everyone go to college, everyone thus went to college regardless if it made any logical or financial sense to do so.
Meanwhile, the trades are seeing fewer and fewer students and apprentices, blue collar jobs are seeing fewer and fewer applicants, and people who actually gave some thought to going to college or not generally have had happier lives.
The problem isn't everyone going to college, it's the notion everyone should go to college.
We required them to go to college (employers require the checkbox with no exposure to the cost), didn't pay for it (funds to schools reduced to lower taxes), made them take out loans that aren't dischargeable (what other obligations are not dischargeable in bankruptcy besides tax claims, spousal and child support, etc?), did not provide any guarantee for a job mandating the obligation, and did all of this when folks were too young to understand the trap they were sent into. We should be ashamed of this, but in America, this is a Tuesday.
You must internalize the externality of requiring a college degree to obtain a job, and shift the cost to the demanding parties. Universal access to community college and robust apprenticeship pipelines are also potential solutions. Otherwise, people will just give up [1] [2] [3], as it is the rational course of action. Think in systems. With all due respect, this system is garbage and we can do better if improved outcomes are desired.
The trades are not "struggling". They have the same administrative incompetence issue as uni's. Unions in the long term destroyed your ability to work in a trade by requiring indentured servitude to get your certificate. The one you need to pull any kind of permit or do basic work.
Government and unions have intentionally choked the life out of trades by ensuring very few can get into it. It's a club, and you ain't in it.
The solution is effective - nullify duration requirements, replace with in person testing.
And related to this, there's the failure of secondary schools to actually sufficiently educate children. Is it budget cuts, flawed curriculum, or (this is approaching conspiracy theory territory) a particular political party wanting to keep the population stupid, because a better educated population would vote against them?
Definitely not budget cuts. School budgets have surprisingly little to do with educational outcomes. See Abbott districts in New Jersey for one of the starkest examples of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
Despite having better per-pupil funding than the wealthiest districts in the state (thanks to a court order mandating increased funding) student performance has stayed the same and even worsened in these districts.
The single biggest determiners of school performance seems to be the level of parental involvement and the average IQ of the students. Well those, plus selection effects to bump up numbers: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-t...
The problem is they have several conflicting goals and education is only one of them. Secondary schools teach whatever their local government or state wants.
Now there are things like UT Austin's online high school where they teach everything like Khan Academy. Again they are teaching to meet whatever standard the state told them to meet. https://highschool.utexas.edu/hs_courses
Here's my experience. I went to a majority black school my freshman year and was initially placed into core classes. These classes were filled with clowns and I immediately demanded assessment testing to assess out. Once I was in AP classes, shit got real and I definitely felt like I got what I put in: I could have learned a lot but chose to do the minimum. I also felt like my fundamentals were so flawed that they had to grade me on a curve in order to not fail me. Of course this did me a disservice but I did put in a little effort.
Anyway, the next year I transferred to a white school and they placed me in core classes again. Difference was that in the white school, these kids were chill so I was fine doing the bare minimum. In this environment, the bar was set so low now, it was easy to ace anything. I did take some AP classes that were challenging.
So my hot take is that school is hard for those looking for a challenge and willing to advocate for themselves. I chose to take assessment tests. I went into the offices to talk to department heads. I never once told my parents this or anyone really. I just knew I wasn't personable enough to survive a year of "looking ass" jokes.
Well said. I have a plethora of personal experience dealing with incompetent chair warmers at big uni's everyone has heard of.
The solution is actually simple. remove all federal student loan aid and grants. Only project grants should be used to onboard students into a higher uni education. If there's no work to be done then no students. There should never be an education program where the professors are not including their students in tangible work.
Guess we have to close all those pesky departments that don’t use many funds for research because the professors only work on fundenmental problems that don’t have linear solution. Goodbye theoretical physics!
If they want to limit “visual pollution” they should crack down on graffiti. Zurich is covered in it and it’s really ugly. Local Swiss claimed it’s no worse than other cities, but it was worse than any place I’ve seen.
By graffiti, I assume you mean tags, i.e. not the ones with some artistic value?
I live in Zurich and also wasn't under the impression that it's noticeably worse than elsewhere, but it's certainly an unnecessary eyesore.
There was some reporting on it recently, saying that a major issue are private building owners. Public spots are usually cleaned up quickly. They said the city has some form of very cheap service/insurance offering that building owners can get, which assures that any reported sprayings will be washed off by city workers within x days, but that this service seems to be not widely known. So at least, people seem to be aware of the issue and doing something.
Nothing preventing tackling both issues at the same time, in any case.
Yes, tags, and really anything illegally spray painted on public or private surfaces. No problem if the city or a building owner wants to commission or invite graffiti artists.
I spent time in several European cities recently (and in the past), and Zurich was the only place where the amount of graffiti really stood out to me. Maybe there was an expectation that a wealthy city/country wouldn’t have tagging, which made it stand out more. Berlin had a lot of both good street art and tagging, but the tagging seemed more concentrated in specific areas.
The graffiti stood out more to me than billboards, but as an American I’m surely desensitized to billboards.
Why are you pretending that $100k-$200k is the ceiling in the defense industry, when the comment you’re replying to is specifically pointing out that it’s frequently a stepping stone to more lucrative career options?
Not to mention that those nominally earning more in SF/SV often have worse quality of life than those earning less elsewhere due to housing prices and overall cost of living.
I'm not pretending anything? I'm saying that's a normal salary - not bad but not high. Not a very good basis, by itself, for picking a job.
Also, low cost of living is great. I have a fully work from home position so I could move to a lower cost of living location if I wanted. That kind of flexibility is unusual in government work in my experience.
Edit: Also - I wasn't saying the pay was bad, or that 200k was the max you'd get - I was saying it comes with a work culture you might not like. It's not a situation where the pay is so much better in return for restrictive culture.
