Balgair

10 ms·

31.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Especially in something as squishy as biology. A field famous for withholding any kind of certainty. Sure, DNA seems like something that is 'real' and 'grounded', but once you get into the specifics of even sample collec
32.
by Balgair 3mo ago
The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill. Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago.
33.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Prop 13 y'all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted? It's Pro
34.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Brown's PLME program is famous for getting you into med school. And med schools are quite focused on grades. Same goes for Law Schools, which, again, Brown is an outlier for JDs. Look, the professor here is right. But he's living
35.
by Balgair 3mo ago
If you want to be a MD or a JD, then you must optimize for grades. The entrance into post secondary education requires it to be so. Seeing as the article was about Brown and their PLME program is famous for med school acceptance, then I t
36.
by Balgair 3mo ago
It seems that the Oxbridge model is really going to be the only workable one here in the future. Small groups of about 8 total, lead by a proctor, meeting regularly. The social pressures to not cheat in such small groups keep it honest. The
37.
by Balgair 3mo ago
> The world needs to act quick before their industries fail. It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time. Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of i
38.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Aside: Do older populations vote for older candidates? Like, pick a house district, what is the average age there, does that correlate? I suppose you can do the same for states and senate candidates too. And I think we have good historical
39.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Wait no? Democracy works exactly because of this? We just poll all the people, including the dumb ones, and then average out the answers. The dumbs all cancel out in the end. (Yes, of course , I know it is a lot more complex than this) T
40.
by Balgair 3mo ago
That's r = 0.81 right? so R2 would then be ~.66. Meaning that 66% of the variation in IQ scores can be statistically explained by variation in SAT scores. It's really high for psych stuff. If you even get r=0.5, you've got a
41.
by Balgair 3mo ago
For other readers: Pay attention to the vibes and evidence in this thread. Ask yourself how this community slots into your media diet.
42.
by Balgair 3mo ago
I was talking about my org, but thanks for the insight.
43.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Anecdotally in my org (low down biotech), the AI users are quite few. Of those that use AI, most have finally cleared out their backlogs that were just never ending before AI. That took about 3 years to accomplish. Now they have the time to
44.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Academic Science in the U.S. was pretty ill and needed a lot of reforms. We can all admit that. But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that. From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fle
45.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Whew! thank you!
46.
by Balgair 3mo ago
Serious question here: Can we trust these numbers out of this admin? I've not been super plugged into the latest news out of the BLS, but I seem to remember a lot of political firings in the 'econ' part of the government. I d
47.
by Balgair 3mo ago
It's dumb, but.... I made a scraper that searches through all the news and finds anything 'war' related. It then summarizes it and give me that new in the Star Wars crawl with music.
48.
DoD Officially Drops 180 Faiths from Military's Recognized Religion List(military.com)
70 points by Balgair 3mo ago|66 comments
49.
by Balgair 3mo ago
I love Bret. His outreach work is exactly my cup of tea. It is unfortunate that the Ivory Tower can't recognize it though. His path to tenure is closed at this point. Yet any school would have a gem if they prompted him. His star reall
50.
by Balgair 3mo ago
I think we're talking apples and oranges here. I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein. Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices. I'm
51.
by Balgair 3mo ago
I mean, Japan has been through a few 'collapses' in it's written history. The most recent arguably being in 1945.
52.
by Balgair 3mo ago
What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do
53.
by Balgair 3mo ago
I've got mixed feelings on AI assistance. I'll relate 2 anecdotes. 1 - When I was in grad school (before AI), we had to use Canvas for a class. One day, I got an obvious spam/phishing email in the internal Canvas system. It w
54.
by Balgair 4mo ago
> We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking. Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0" Meaning that you could of course come up with a sys
55.
by Balgair 4mo ago
> In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.
56.
by Balgair 4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings Just greping for 'Israel' or 'Palestine' gives 13 incidents, the latest occurring in 2000. It's a quite large share of the hijackings o
57.
by Balgair 4mo ago
For the non Californians here, there is very important context on admissions that may not be widely known. Under the 1960 California Master Plan, the top 12.5% of California high school graduates have automatic entry into the UC system. Tha
58.
by Balgair 4mo ago
The worst I ever had was a dream to others, possibly. The way I knew that I was not going to work there is they had a net $72,000 401k matching - the maximum allowed.[0] Suffice to say, if that is what they have to do to keep folks on, it&#
59.
by Balgair 4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae For the curious, above is how Crassus died. TLDR: Got over his skis and mad with power and money. Decides to invade Parthia. Gets wrecked by horse archers. That ends up b
60.
by Balgair 4mo ago
https://thebullshitmachines.com/ This is a bit dated, but I think the message out of UW is right. To your point on bosses: Turns out, you can very much bullshit a bullshitter.

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