Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | erosenbe0's commentslogin

Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:

If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.

Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.


That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...


I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.


Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...


"Single-parent households" in Scandinavia doesn't mean the same thing as it does in most of the world. There is usually still a high degree of coparenting.


One possible synthesis is that the high incomes in Sweden make up for the high number of single-parent households.


I almost noted in my prior comment that income is the second biggest factor but left that out. Totally agree that income is a big part of the equation. I also bet because it's Sweden it also has to do with public services like childcare being available.


I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?


I am on my phone but you can Google and find lots of data that shows dual parent/intact families correlate positively with a bunch of other factors like income, college graduation, etc. More parents=more resources. More resources is generally better than less. Having kids myself, I can barely imagine being able to do it by myself... and even if I could it would certainly be to a lesser quality.


This isn't a culture argument or even a sound/good argument for anything. Americans are just wealthier and you can't compare like that.

When you compare groups of students within the same country and adjust for both household income and intelligence you find that (again, even within the same intelligence brackets and income levels) some ethnic groups simply study more while others spend more time on things like unprovoked violence.


Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.


Median, normal lead exposure for toddlers in the 1960s and 1970s in any urban or suburban area would be 99th percentile by today's standards due to leaded gasoline vapors (and lack of awareness about paint dust).

So the crime hypothesis is more about baseline level of criminality being higher throughout the entire leaded gasoline era and for a few decades thereafter. It's generally framed as social science based on aggregate trends rather than individual dose-dependent epidemiological hypothesis.


Primary source of exposure in Chicago is from household dust contaminated by old paint. Water is secondary or tertiary issue, but can be bad. The article is a bit off the mark as they did not interview the Chicago DPH inspectors who respond to high serum reports.

Also, the average lead level of urban or suburban toddlers in the 1970s was 10-15 µg/dL, due mostly to vapors from leaded gasoline. Gen X had eye-popping lead exposures as kids.

So 6-8 µg/dL doesn't guarantee cognitive disability, but it is still bad.

[Edit: also want to add that quality monitoring doesn't necessarily fully solve the water situation either. For example, it is known that a chunk of leaded detritus or solder can drop into rice or pasta water from stream or aerator and raise serum precipitously, but won't be seen in a test as it is intermittent. The problem of lead is ubiquitous and not entirely tractable, but a lot of progress is possible over time.]


id like to remind you all that this is the richest country on the planet, and they live like its 19th century victorian britain


19th century victorian britain was the richest country on the planet


it also had open sewers, child prostitution, destitution, some of the worst living conditions in the first world. Just because the owners bump up the per-capita average doesnt mean shit, just like you see in USA. How many people cant even afford a brick building to live in?


True. Designer I worked with believes the eyes focus easier on text if there is a small amount of low contrast fuzz surrounding it. I don't know if that is based on science but it seems plausible at least on white backgrounds.


I second the reply about incentives. Funding curriculum materials and professional curriculum development is often seen as more of a K-12 thing. There is not even enough at the vocational level.

If big competitive grants and competitive salaries went to people with demonstrated ability like the engineer of this viz, there would be less stem dropouts in colleges and more summer learning! Also, in technical trades like green construction, solar, hvac, building retrofits, data center operations and the like, people would get farther and it would be a more diverse bunch.


For profit subsidiaries can totally influence the nonprofit shell without penalty. Happens all the time. The nonprofit board must act in the interest of the exempt mission rather than just investor value or some other primary purpose. Otherwise it's cool.


yeah, all they have to do is pray for humanity to not let the magic AI out of the bottle and they’re free to have a $91b valuation and flaunt it in the media for days.. https://youtu.be/2HJxya0CWco


I don't really think this is true in non-charity work. Half of American hospitals are nonprofit and many of the insurance conglomerates are too, like Kaiser. The executives make plenty of money. Kaiser is a massive nonprofit shell for profitmaking entities owned by physicians or whatever, not all that dissimilar to the OpenAI shell idea. Healthcare worked out this way because it was seen as a good model to have doctors either reporting to a nonprofit or owning their own operations, not reporting to shareholders. That's just tradition though. At this point plenty of healthcare operations are just normal corporations controlled by shareholders.


Yep, the lay audience conceives of AGI as being a handyman robot with a plumber's crack or maybe an agent that can get your health insurance to stop improperly denying claims. How about an automated snow blower?Perhaps an intelligent wheelchair with robot arms that can help grandma in the shower? A drone army that can reshingle my roof?

Indeed, normal people are quite wise and understand that a chat bot is just an augmentation agent--some sort of primordial cell structure that is but one piece of the puzzle.


Being first to openly generate from billions of copyrighted documents would not have been a sane move for Google's management.


Seems unusual for a nonprofit not to have a written investigative report or performance review conducted by a law firm or auditor. Similar to what happened with Stanford's ousted president but more expedited if matters are more pressing.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: