> I assume that the Finnish method isn't magically successful, and it looks good on paper at the expense of not enabling the best and brightest to reach their full potential.
Here's some supporting evidence. Let's compare it to a country of similar size, Singapore:
Of course, IMO scores are not exactly the most important measure ever, but I suspect, nonetheless, that smart Finnish students spend more time playing computer games than their counterparts in Singapore.
> Just approaching it as if it were a difficult task helps.
I have literally the exact opposite experience. I procrastinate horribly on difficult tasks (or just any task that I don't know exactly how to do.) I guess different people are wired differently. If the OP is wired like me, I'd advise him to try to do work as quickly as possible and not worry about quality. Just come home from school and finish everything before 5:00.
> Funny, I think all of these people are athiest/agnostic, goes to show you...
Why do you think that? Dylan famously converted to Christianity, BHO is a long time churchgoer, and Ron Paul is supposedly a creationist Christian. I don't really know about the others (obviously Einstein had a lot to say about god and dice and so on, but that hardly makes him a believer...)
> Or, everyone follows their self interest and realizes that they will need to work out some agreements to moderate fishing or there will be no fish.
This can have downsides, namely the sort of "credentialism" that's often derided on this site (licensing for interior decorators, etc.) All the players in some industry decide that it's in their best interest to appeal for regulation which will prevent others from entering this industry.
What does that mean? Obviously, you need more US dollars today to purchase food than you did in 1950, due to inflation. Does "real dollar terms" mean adjusted for inflation?
People do gamble on chess... but I guess "people mostly prefer gambling on games like poker rather than gambling on chess" would be too long for a proverb.
"What differs most is the teaching style. CS has far better lecture notes. Of course, the stats people wrote a very good book; but better lecture notes win because I can access them later and send them to people for free."
So very true. When I was a freshman in high school, we had mandatory "study hall" periods where we just had to sit in a room and be quiet. I spent most of them doing crosswords and sleeping, but I also spent a lot of time looking at printouts of these notes:
"In mathematics, the repeating decimal 0.999… ... denotes a real number equal to one. In other words, the notations 0.999… and 1 represent the same real number. This equality has long been accepted by professional mathematicians and taught in textbooks."
Note the "real number" part, of course. If you use a non-real number system, more power to you.
Here's an interesting question for you. I do an experiment, and I reject the null hypothesis with p = 0.04. Then I do the experiment again, and get p = 0.09. Does the second run of the experiment make me more or less confident about rejecting the null hypothesis?
> that sort of government action mainly encourages /hoarding/ behavior
Citation needed?
> Spending more on public goods like health care helps
I think most of us are fine with government supporting the public good, building infrastructure, etc. But it's a little sleazy to directly fund startups. I mean, if my uncle donates to Obama's campaign, will my business get special treatment? (That's how it works here in Illinois, or so it seems...)