Comment Pushing the Button (Score 1) 358
As long as there is at least one person there to punch in the required code every 108 minutes, what's the worst than can happen.
The thing is that our purchasing power is the only real "rolled up newspaper" that we have when it comes to corporations crapping on the rug that is our beloved tech...
Can't help but wonder if the phrase "rolled up newspaper" will still carry relevance with corporal punishment increasingly being frowned upon (I assume this is true for animals too)? It would be nice though... if the penalty for these kinds of shenanigans were a public spanking for all the executives. It might not solve anything, but would make for good entertainment.
Sounds to me like those people think the essentials of education can be quantized. Sure some measurements are important, but that's not all there is to learning. And those students probably will start valuing themselves by their ranking, and only have those numbers in their heads. I can see how HR departmants will be fans. Another method, like the IQ statistic, to assign numbers to people. What a dumb idea to get yourself ranked.
This is very true. An additional core issue, is 1. the impact of measuring behavior on behavior that is observed and 2. feedback into the overall loop. Regarding 1. If someone is prone to picking their nose, do they do so more often when people are watching, or privately? Some sports players are known for shining under intense pressure, while others crumble at the most critical moments. For a more complex "monitoring" system, it's difficult to discern what the impact might be on behaviors that one might observe if the system were not in place. Regarding 2. For the basic loop of: a. Collect data on behavior b. Model/Analyze/Form Policies c. Use b. to "guide students" changing a. Assuming b. is sensible, is the goal of the system to have observations in a. driven towards the maximum of an objective function defined by b. (What is the guarantee of convergence?). The biggest problem perhaps, is even in assuming that the policies in b. do meet some ideal (that everyone agrees is ideal etc.) to assume that it is possible to drive the dynamics of the overall system in a fashion that has predictable consequences may be very misguided. The medicine can also easily become the disease. (looking at you Bufo marinus)
Turtles all the way down.
Funny, but also Insightful?
Turtles all the way down, or turtles all the way up?
If we inhabit the 3D manifold that resides in a black hole within a 4D bulk universe, and observe 3D black holes (with a 2D event horizon), does this imply 1D black holes inside of the black holes that we observe (with 0D black holes inside...). Is the 4D bulk universe a black hole in a 5D hyper-bulk universe within a 6D
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
