genuinely weird that polymarket is deciding to not even put up the pretense of being a neutral platform
Justin Trudeau has resigned as Canada's PM, and he's being replaced by unelected leftist Mark Carney.
Now, conservatives in Canada are expected to win the upcoming election.
Have liberals in Canada lost the plot — or can they pull off an upset?
poly.market/MDzxqyj
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this is a dumb person’s idea of a smart persons’s college
This is the entire curriculum at Thomas Aquinas College. This is it. No majors. Just a deep dive into the Western intellectual tradition. They consistently turn out the most exceptional graduates I have ever met. This is what a serious undergraduate education looks like.
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a big part of the appeal of prediction markets is directly taking money from opposing partisans, and you can’t do that if they don’t trust your platform
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extremely high openness combined with moderately above-average intelligence remains one of the most annoying combinations of traits in existence
We are supposed to be tolerant of neurodivergence and people who are “disagreeable” but the George Mason economics department must, on some level, need to understand that a department full of creepy weirdos can’t be good for their reputation
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forget about the selection bias or causality for a second.
there is absolutely no way that 22% of Americans have more than 200 books at home, just a completely implausible number.
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it's deeply funny that Tao spent like a year or two halfheartedly thinking about applied statistics problems and collected 50k citations in the process, which is probably more than his entire pure math oeuvre combined (the Green-Tao paper is "only" 1k citations)
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this doesn’t work for definite integrals of the type that Cleo solved. there are plenty of definite integrals which resolve to “nice” constants but where the integrand has no elementary antiderivative.
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academic mathematics naturally has a sort of tall poppy syndrome. everyone knows everyone else is very smart compared to the general population, but two randomly chosen research mathematicians will understand very little about the other's research output or its significance.
not trying to be that much of a hater, but i find it interesting that, among math people i know, going on about how uniquely smart and special you are is frowned upon, but it seems to be (conservatively) 60% of what programmers/engineers/finance people talk about
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this person going on local (not national) television to bring attention to the fact that being one of the ~100 strongest CS applicants in the entire country doesn’t guarantee admission to any of the 5 best state schools in *California* is actually of broad public interest
The fact that you are the type of person who got admitted to UT and then goes on national television to complain about not getting into Stanford may be a hint as to why you didn’t get into some of these schools!
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that Aaron Rodgers’ dad is a chiropractor is probably the least surprising parental occupation in history
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the perfect math slide doesn’t exi-
Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student named Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery about how waves behave, surprising and exciting mathematicians. @KSHartnett reports: quantamagazine.org/at-17-han…
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you couldn't make a better case for eliminating holistic admissions and personal essays than this thread.
as described, what would make this a good essay is simple agreement with the ideological biases of the reviewer, and the actual achievements of the candidate are secondary.
For whatever it’s worth to Zach or other students, I’ve sat on Rhodes Scholarship committees & reviewed many elite apps.
This essay: (1) lapsed into hubris by the end of para #1, & (2) didn’t explain *why* Zach wants to learn from other humans, let alone at a particular uni.🧵
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There is a comical part in Sotomayor's dissent covering mismatch where she cherry-picks a portion of a sentence from Arcidiacono and Lovenheim's paper and utterly misrepresents its meaning.
The actual paragraph (in nber.org/system/files/workin…) asserts something completely different.
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I will never say anything bad about Nate Silver after maxing basically every market on Predictit that diverged far enough from 538 predictions a few days before each of the 2020/2022 elections and making like $25k doing so. Just completely free alpha.
Amusingly, in the intro to his new book Silver talks about how professional gamblers regularly thank him because they bet on Trump based on Silver’s model and won big
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a typical mathematics degree gets you to roughly the mid 1850s, perhaps the early 1900s in a handful of areas. an entire PhD in math gets you to the point where you can understand what *one* of these people have done (if they are in the same area as you) and why it's important.
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as an illustration, Tao and Scholze are widely considered the two most exceptional mathematicians on this list. I have a math PhD, and am broadly familiar with most of what Tao's done and why it's important, but Scholze's work is almost completely incomprehensible to me.
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the difficulty of humanities courses is essentially set to the market-clearing point for sufficient enrollment in humanities courses.
there is very little (student) demand for the combination of hard degree and low pay.
This is true - humanities would have a much better reputation if Phil 101 was a weed-out course like O Chem.
I think it doesn't happen because humanities rely on enrollment for funding, whereas STEM gets lots of federal research grants. Can't scare away the golden geese.
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the 'floor of cognitive ability' for IMO qualification is like 150 IQ, and historically about half of Fields medalists were IMO medalists
if you think it's 'optimizing for memory tricks' you probably don't have any clue as to what high level competitive math looks like
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almost every single high quality department in existence will not allow someone who already has a PhD in a remotely related field to pursue a PhD in their department
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this is starting to do numbers, so now I have to acknowledge the typo I made in drafting this tweet at 2AM in the morning before I get a lot of very low-quality comments informing me of such
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exercise left to the reader as to whether this is the typical research output of a tenure-track assistant professor of math at a top 10 public university
Another candid moment in faculty hiring. A University of Washington professor emails his dean noting an "outstanding URM" on the job market. "Can we do anything this year?"
The dean immediately sets up a meeting.
(Acquired via FOIA.)
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thus, the default assumption is that everyone in their department/grad cohort/whatever possesses a comparable level of ability, except for the handful of outliers who are known to be far better than everyone else, whose identities are also shared knowledge within their milieu.
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I don't think this is quite true, because employees at the biggest/most successful tech companies are the ones most likely to have never interacted in any way with Oracle in their careers
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“Thesis” is the dominant term in mathematics, and “dissertation” is virtually nonexistent outside the US in particular. Here’s the greatest active mathematician referring to his, as an example: math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints…
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the idea that complaining about unfair treatment is proof positive that you were deserving of said treatment is such a moronic logical fallacy that it has been given a name: debate.fandom.com/wiki/Kafka…
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one under-discussed but very funny phenomenon is that ultrafinitists and similar cranks are almost always politically conservative, whereas the median ideology of researchers in "abstract nonsense" fields like category theory is something roughly akin to anarcho-communism
Due to circumstances outside of my control I have encountered a number of amateur ultrafinitists on this website in the last few days and one thing I notice is they’re all extremely politically conservative. What’s up with that?
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...and it usually becomes very clear very quickly who the more competent people are on the project. competence doesn't map precisely to "smartness", but also is certainly correlated with it.
unlike academia, there are also clear rewards to distribute to the most competent --
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I mean they are literally blurring it out at this point, can you imagine a more comprehensive defeat?
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defecting from this norm will mark you very clearly as an outsider. your algebraic topology paper in Adv. Math may indeed be substantially better than your colleague's functional analysis paper in TAMS, but departments function much better if people don't make those distinctions,
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every single blue-collar basketball fan understands that a player who requires many years of college basketball to become NBA-ready usually has a low ceiling as a pro, but the completely analogous selection bias here has eluded this Harvard MBA
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and academia works in such a way that post-tenure there are few additional rewards to be allocated even if one was able to make such a distinction accurately.
this is not how industry (tech, finance, consulting, whatever) works. multiple people work on the exact same project...
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the novel aspect of calculus is the relationship between differentiation and integration, not that you can approximate the area under a curve by various types of polygons (which has been known for thousands of years)
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I'm not going to deny this creates competition and hierarchies and in some cases obnoxious behavior, but it is unavoidable.
you simply cannot run a high-performing company like a math dept, and in the broader context of high-skill jobs it is the math dept that is the outlier.
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sure, if the analogy also notes that the burger chain in question here is also famous for lighting money on fire across a wide range of speculative businesses largely unrelated to food
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...bonuses, equity, promos, and in fields like finance there is ground truth because your competitors have the exact same objective function you do.
so there is also incentive for strong performers to self-promote/self-identify as strong in a way that doesn't exist in academia.
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there is roughly a 15% difference between the men's/women's WRs at both 50 miles and 100 miles, suggesting that your statistic quoted above likely reflects large selection bias
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the UCs have taken a novel approach to affirmative action where they deliberately blind themselves to highly predictive data, overlay geographic proxies for URM status, and then produce an extremely noisy but (maybe) legally defensible admissions decision.
After being rejected by 16 colleges, Bay Area teen Stanley Zhong was hired for a PhD-level position at Google. Now, he and his father are suing the University of California for racial discrimination. abc7ne.ws/42XhOTE abc7ne.ws/42XhOTE
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anti-Indian sentiment among the US right wing is predominantly an export from other anglosphere countries responding in part to contexts that don't exist in the US, amplified by rw influencers from those countries who LARP as Americans
anti-indian racism is so beautifully, childishly pure. they speak english, they're here legally, they work, they don't commit terrorism, they're not in gangs. people just don't like them because they're brown and have weird names. it's like how a Planeteer would explain racism
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the marginal divorce induced by exposure to more women than expected in the workplace probably selects for a particular type of divorce/divorcee that is not representative of the full range of divorces
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the problem with this estimate is that in most applications where you want to use the median for robustness, the standard deviation is very large and so the bound is mostly uninformative
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There's like a 100% chance it becomes clear she's an obvious grifter within the next 6 months, right?
I mean just look at this teslarati.com/tesla-human-tr…
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an IMO gold medalist at age 17/18 is a couple of orders of magnitude more likely to win a Fields Medal than a graduate of a top-10 math PhD program at age 24-26, where you receive training to do precisely what the Fields Medal is assessed against.
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No, there is a separate extracurricular rating from the personal rating which captures the types of activities you refer to, and Asians have a significantly higher unconditional rating on that subscore than any other group.
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one interesting distinction is that "X is a good textbook" means something very different from someone who read it in a course with complementary lectures plus spent 10 hours a week working on the exercises with similarly motivated peers, vs someone who read the text on their own
I think partly my views on math education are shaped by the fact that I didn't really get a math education - I took only 2 math classes in undergrad, multivariable calculus and differential equations for physical science majors, and never took real analysis
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nber.org/system/files/workin…
kind of odd for you to be confidently stating what the personal score measures while also needing to be directed to a link containing details on said score
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you should probably view this as a complete failure of institutions rather than assuming that he actually learned anything of substance during his bachelor's degree (which should in turn probably have some small effect on how you view the median STEM grad)
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It’s this. Applies to CRT and “woke” on the left, MAGA on the right.
A phrase that your opposition has previously embraced gives you so much more material to work with or cherry-pick/nut-pick.
We have successfully frozen their brand—"critical race theory"—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
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fwiw the issue here is much less the quantity of papers than the quality/what journals they are published in. h-index of 5 is not a priori disqualifying.
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Canadian immigration post-Covid has not been high-skilled -- it's primarily been low-quality students from India doing fake work at fake colleges:
it's certainly much more fraudulent than anything in the US, where even the H1B abusers were still typically paying ~$100k and produce real outputs
the Canadian international student abusers are all literally zero value-added diploma mills
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not sure what the funniest part of this is:
1) that it's fine to mimic studio ghibli as long as you're a person and not a LLM
2) that it's $40 and not the prospect of interacting with a NEET with an executive function disorder that stops people from paying for "art commissions"
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a bunch of ECE academics who couldn't design a proper experimental study to save their lives produce results aligned with the orthodoxy of their field and contrary to those of economists, truly shocking
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many people are informing me that they have over 200+ books (presumably true), or that accumulating a moderate amount of books per year would get you to 200 quickly (true if there were no outflows); nevertheless, the best available data on the topic is decidedly on my side:
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whatever you want to say about the American immigration system, at least it doesn't produce outcomes like this
Well this will end very badly. Male international students in their 50s openly chasing a visa doing fake childcare courses and passing using AI. Calling it now, there will be a royal Commission into it within 5 years @AvidCommentator @AussieRedPill @rationalaussie
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guy who hears the phrase “oracle-like data provider” and thinks of crypto and not the 14th largest publicly traded company in the world
Did you even read what you wrote ? “Oracle like data provider “. Are you suggesting a crypto like oracle that outputs employment data, every month, on the same day , be REQUIRED FOR EVERY BUSINESS ?
Who is gonna pay for the implementations?
And of course there are gov agencies that have to respond as well. What do you have in mind for them ?
Do you really think the implementation, maintenance and response timing and rates will be better than the current survey ?
Get off your knees Chamath
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entirely possible, but it takes orders of magnitude more mathematical skill to reverse engineer this type of definite integral relative to what’s being hypothesized above
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the first part ("smarter than every South Asian admitted to the country") is completely absurd, but it's also worth noting that virtually no one, let alone some hypothetical undiscovered genius, is blocked from college due to competition.
very few colleges are selective!
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the converse of this is that high-skill immigrants who are enormously beneficial to America by any reasonable methodology are pushed towards advocacy groups who only care about marginal immigrants which are almost certainly negative under those same calculations
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at least 4 things are true:
1) personal statements add more noise than signal
2) this is a bad personal statement
3) it was probably written with the aid of ChatGPT
4) it's ridiculous to reject someone with these real-world accomplishments in favor of one who writes better
Not really understanding why people are mocking this personal statement! The entire concept of a personal statement, quite frankly, is absurd to expect from a 17-year old, especially in the age of ChatGPT, which, props to Zach, at least he did not use! This is the sort of intellectually curious person universities should want in their classes, as opposed to the polished and grade grubbing student with an obsequious personal statement carefully—and dishonestly—tailored for admissions departments.
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in the context of Harvard the elimination of legacy preferences would result in significantly less legacy whites being replaced by a roughly equal number of upper-middle class whites who attend schools in ultra-competitive high-SES areas
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US public schools in high-SES areas are basically the highest performing public schools on the planet.
Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries do terribly at the IMO year after year, consistently underperforming Eastern European countries with 1/5 the GDP per capita.
The US just beat China in the Math Olympiad. A great win for the country and immigration and proof that individuals can overcome poor public education
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the right messenger, inasmuch as such a person exists, is pretty clearly the strongest student in California who gets rejected from all the selective UCs, which he plausibly is
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MLS also punches way above its weight in actual attendance (relative to TV revenues), at about 22k/game vs 7k for the WNBA. But even focusing on revenues to understand salaries kind of misses the point. The fixed costs of running any serious professional sports league are huge.
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it's funny because there is actually some good advice here (new managers are often terrible at navigating megacorp promo processes, it's a skill you need to pick up quickly if you want to build any sort of strong team) but it's impossible to take this guy seriously
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this is somewhat at odds with the UC's most recent findings (slightly different objective function): nitter.app/PosterInternet/status/…
note in particular that:
1) the College Board study omits dropouts
2) 4-year college GPA is substantially downstream of major choice...
coincidentally the UCs have spent an huge amount of money, time, and effort researching this and found that SAT-only is (unsurprisingly) better-correlated with college success than grades-only (but either adds incremental predictive value to the other): senate.universityofcaliforni…
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in case it’s not obvious, the quality of foreign-born engineers that you work with is commensurate with your quality as a native-born engineer
Talk to some reasonably based Engineering Managers who deal with foreign engineers before you take a hard position on that topic.
I've got a friend who works in manufacturing and complains non-stop about foreign engineers who are under-educated, dishonest, and incompetent.
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the current state of immigration discourse is advocates of zero immigration working completely off vibes arguing with immigration advocates who have read every study but refuse to ever discuss marginal effects and only quote average benefits across all immigrant subgroups
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the unblockable skyhook of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar turns out to be extremely blockable when done by smaller players
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most people do not have very good intuition concerning probabilities near 50%.
on average, it requires ~250 independent trials to be confident (at p < 0.05) that a coin with true probability of heads 0.5 is not a coin with true probability of heads 0.6
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it's easy to see why creating essentially fake non-profits or organizations is an effective admissions grift -- being constrained by "running a business" or "making money" is worse than fabricating a compelling origin story and then achieving nothing, if this is your reviewer.
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