One minor nitpick: the event that it rains next week is probably rather correlated with the event that it rains this week (in particular it's correlated with the season), so I don't think this is a great example of independent variables. Maybe you can separate by distance: the event that you wear t-shirt vs the event that it rains in city Y vs the event that it rains in city Z.
I am a paying subscriber for the New York Times . If you can afford it and you find yourself running over the amount of views, you should consider subscribing as well. Actual journalism (as opposed to only recycling news and posting opinions ) as done by nytimes, wpost, wsj, New Yorker etc. is an expensive enterprise, but one that is hugely important to our society. (This particular article however is of course not an example of actual journalism and probably not worth the click)
Thank you so much for overleaf! It’s been such a great tool for multi-author papers but even for writing on your own it’s better than standalone latex. Unlike typical latex that would just refuse to compile if you forget to close a brace, overleaf/sharelatex will make a best effort and just mark the part of the source where you made a mistake
Arxiv vanity is very nice!
FWIW I believe KaTeX’s coverage is always growing. I found out it can do everything I wanted in https://introtcs.org , though there were a couple of times I had to reformulate some macros after looking at the documentation.
I don't presume my institution is representative (nor that it isn't), but for what it's worth, most students I see are not slackers at all. Students often choose the harder courses, and many of them require a significant amount of work (a typical CS course requires 12 hours of work outside lecture and many require much more).
I am of course biased as a faculty (though I think his policy prescriptions would negatively effect public schools more than private universities such as Harvard), but I think Caplan's analysis is extremely shallow.
First, note that if he's right, higher education should be an incredible drag on the economy - we're taking 4 highly productive years out of the workforce. Such an extreme conclusion shouldn't be that hard to test without resorting to anecdotes and contorted reading of data. Educational policies and subsidies vary so greatly between different countries and even states, that if it was such a colossal waste we should be seeing it in the higher GDP or productivity of the less educated countries and localities.
(The article is in general very US-centric for an issue that is not specific to the US at all.)
When a locality has less access to education, there would be naturally less of a "credential arms race" and so more people that have just as much base talent but did not go to college. Why aren't employers flocking to those places and hiring high school graduates who would be so much cheaper?
I know one theory Caplan has is that completing college certifies "conformity" and "tolerance for boredom": is spending 4 years and tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars the only way to test for these properties?
Also (at least from my experience in the IDF) conformity and tolerance for boredom are very important for the army, arguably moreso than many other employers, yet they do fine with high school graduates.
Might be an interesting experiment to train a neural network to distinguish between different currencies, and then visualize the features that correspond to the “one dollar neuron”. It might turn out not that far from the drawings of the author’s students.
I am writing a book on introduction to theoretical computer science in markdown and use pandoc to transforming it into HTML, Latex (and from there to PDF) and MS Word. (The latter format is rather buggy at the moment, but I am including it because I've heard from visually impaired students that it is often the easiest format to read as you can control the font size.)
I've now put my scripts on https://github.com/boazbk/tcs/tree/master/scripts
in case anyone finds them useful.
(This is not a "plug and play" package that you can install and use, but people that are better programmers than me might be able to adapt it and improve on it.)
One minor nitpick: the event that it rains next week is probably rather correlated with the event that it rains this week (in particular it's correlated with the season), so I don't think this is a great example of independent variables. Maybe you can separate by distance: the event that you wear t-shirt vs the event that it rains in city Y vs the event that it rains in city Z.