verylongname · HackerTrans

verylongname

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7 yıl öncediscuss

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. The United States has a system of de jure discrimination against white and asian men. Moreover, there is a great deal of de facto discretization against them as well. Many people seem to think that it is "fair" and appropriate for this to be the case, but I don't think its debatable that this is the fact of the matter. I think those who support this policy should defend it honestly instead of lying about it and claiming its not the policy, when it plainly is.

7 yıl öncediscuss

Personally, I think complex analysis is important. I really like Serge Lang's book "Complex Analysis." It is supposedly a graduate level text, but the first half of it covers the basics at a level suitable for upper division undergrad class. Ahlfor's book is also really really good, but a little harder to read in my opinion.

I didn't like either Royden or Rudin. I really like Folland's book "Real analysis: modern techniques and their applications." His Fourier analysis book is also pretty good IMO.

7 yıl öncediscuss

I think it is about status signalling for the parents and the social status prospects for the children more than its about career prospects for the children.

What college your children attend seems to have a big affect on your social status in the US, and the children's social status is definitely hugely affected by what college they attend. Apparently it is much cooler to say you went to USC then the University of Arizona.

Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but I think the parents aren't stupid to be worried about their children's social status in this way.

8 yıl öncediscuss

What are the problems with just increasing the dosage over time. This sounds to me like a very reasonable approach to someone with intractable pain.

8 yıl öncediscuss

I inherited a house and condo from my parents. They are in California and purchased long ago, so the property taxes on them are ridiculously low (the condo, worth about 700K has a property tax valuation under 150K ... thank you California taxpayers).

I rent them both out I pay a management company to handle maintenance. I screen tenants myself, and so far I've been lucky getting tenants who stay for fairly long periods. I clear about 5K/month after maintenance fees, taxes and insurance. Its very little work.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Indeed. And there is also a continuous shortage of farm workers, or at least workers willing to do backbreaking seasonal labor harvesting crops for substandard wages. Astonishing.

8 yıl öncediscuss

I think overhead rates at most big state schools are around 50%, and I believe they are higher at a lot of elite private universities. This is the link I got when I googled "Yale overhead rate":

https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/rate-agreement.pdf

If I am reading it right, it says that on-campus research has an overhead rate of 67.50 or 69.0 percent depending on the funding source. Ouch! I imagine that the federal government knows that it is subsidizing universities as a whole through this system and intends to do so.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Its very hard to turn down a request to review a paper you are qualified to comment on from an editor you know, or who regularly handles your papers. Editor X from Journal Y sends you a paper which you are well-qualified to review. You've submitted 5 papers to Journal Y in the last few years, some of them handled by Editor X. Are you really going to turn down Editor X's request?

What if the paper is written by Author Z, whose work you are familiar with and whose papers you read anyway. Why not review it?

And so on.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Quite aside from the question of whether or not its okay to discriminate as long as it is principally whites who are harmed, I find this statement from the ACLU to be bizarre. I think it is fairly obviously wrong.

Moreover, the plaintiffs commissioned a study on the effect color blind admissions would have on the racial distribution of Harvard's undergraduate population. It should be taken with a grain of salt, as should the materials offered by the defense, and I suspect it overestimates the effect a bit, but it conforms fairly closely with anecdotal evidence I've seen and so sounds much more plausible to me than the ACLU's take.

It claims the share of black students would shrink from ~15% to ~0.9% and the share of hispanic students from ~15% to ~3%. Meanwhile, the share of white students would shrink slightly from ~37% to ~35%. The proportion of Asian students would roughly double, from ~25% to ~50%.

Again, the specific numbers might be a bit off, but it generally agrees with a lot of anecdotal evidence I've seen --- being black or Hispanic gives one a large advantage, being white is close to neutral, and being Asian is a large disadvantage.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Assuming the basic facts claimed by the author are correct, this is really bad. I'm not referring to the behavior attributed to the U Chicago professor and her husband, either. That might be exaggerated by the author (the account is only one side of the story) and, even if it isn't, strong feelings are not uncommon when it comes to controversial topics. Systems should work even when individuals or small groups of people behave badly.

The scandal here is the journal editors deviating from their standard procedures. There are procedures in place for re-evaluating articles which have been published or accepted for publication, and for retracting them if they don't meet proper standards. If the members of editorial boards don't think those procedures are proper, they should work to change them, or, barring that, resign. What they did instead undermines the credibility of the journals. How do we know that usual procedures are followed in other cases when they clearly weren't in this one (assuming the facts are as stated in the post)? Are there articles that are accepted for publication because of external pressure, over the objection of reviewers and editors? Are there other papers which have been disappeared without the expected retraction notices? What a disgrace.

8 yıl öncediscuss

Tech seems to be converging to the norms of other highly paid professions. I'd bet that at least 40% of Goldman Sachs' hires come from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

How about the big law firms? I know they don't really hire much outside of the Top 14 law schools, and I wouldn't be surprised if the top few schools provide 40%-50% of their hires.

I think the discussion has to be broader than just tech ... America is looking an awful lot like an oligarchy with a caste system. Especially when you consider the recent articles about Ivy League admissions policies.

And this seems to have accelerated in the last 30-40 years. It seems to me that in the past it was much more common to see very successful and highly placed people from humble backgrounds, with degrees from schools I've never heard of, or good regional schools which aren't the Ivies. Now it is dreadfully monotonous, with a huge percentage of people in leadership roles from Yale, Princeton, Harvard or Stanford and whose parents have similar backgrounds.

8 yıl öncediscuss

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.

8 yıl öncediscuss

It was "recentered" in 1995. The right side of the distribution was essentially truncated. A 1600 on the pre-1995 SAT was quite an accomplishment (I don't have data at my fingertips, but in most years, fewer than 10 students achieved a perfect score of 1600 and only a few dozen scored 1550+). By contrast, several hundred students a year scored 1600 on the recentered test.

The scoring system has been changed several times since 1995 and I have no idea how the current system compares to the pre-1995 system or the recentered test given for some years afterward.

Many, including myself, suspect that one of the motivations for the recentering was to give colleges cover for their admissions decisions. It is pretty hard to turn down students who get 1600s when only 7 or 8 students a year do so. It is easier to "shape" a class without provoking criticism when a large percentage of students score 1500+.

8 yıl öncediscuss

The bargaining power of workers is being undermined by large-scale immigration and by trade policy. The National Academy of Sciences report on immigration found that current immigration policy diverts a shocking 500 billion dollars a year away from wage earners (and a net benefit to the economy of about 50 billion dollars a year from immigration). I suspect trade policy has an even bigger impact.

Everything else is lower order.

9 yıl öncediscuss

Indeed, statistics is fine, but I think the problem is larger than scientists being poorly educated. It looks to me like an awful lot of scientists aren't acting in good faith. I don't think that their conduct necessarily rises to the level of dishonesty, more like they aren't taking obvious steps to mitigate the potential for erroneous results.

9 yıl öncediscuss

In order to owe $60,000 in back taxes, you had to have income. Where did that income go? Were the original loan amounts even higher? Loans of $140,000 sound awfully high for an undergraduate degree. Did you attend a professional school (law school/dental/medical)?

9 yıl öncediscuss

The law puts most of the burden on drivers quite intentionally, and I think properly. My general impression is that the average driver doesn't understand the law and don't appreciate the extent to which it is designed to favor pedestrians.

To give one example, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in cross walks and to pedestrians approaching crosswalks while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.

9 yıl öncediscuss

I'm sure there is a lot of waste in the UC Office of the President. But Universities have become huge, complicated behemoths with many functions besides education.

I recently saw a breakdown of where the money for one of the UC campuses comes from. About 50% was from the associated Medical center, about 25% was from federal research grants (many of which had PIs in the medical school and medical center), about 15% from tuition, and 10% from other sources (not broken down further). This wasn't UCSF, either, where I would expect the medical center's budget to dwarf everything else.

I don't think it would be too far fetched to call it a medical center that happens to have school with 30K undergraduates attached. I wonder how the cost of running the chancellor's office there compares with the costs of administration of a medical services company?

Of course, at this point aren't Yale and Harvard basically hedge funds?

10 yıl öncediscuss

Because you get a lot of free press.

10 yıl öncediscuss

Moreover, in most of California, the supply of housing has been artificially restricted using overly stringent zoning rules and laws. I'm in favor of reasonable zoning rules, but in my city the only justification for limiting new constructing seems to be existing homeowners who "want to live in a small town" and enrich themselves at the expense of newcomers who have little choice but to settle in the area for economic reasons.