You come across as incredibly racists / ignorant. I live in a country with a massive immigrant population from places like India, Pakistan, Africa, and SE Asia. I have also visited many countries of their origin. While some of what they do may be considered by you to be unhygienic it's a far cry from what goes on in their own countries.

Travelling around the world I have seen people in major cities dedicate on the streets, wash food in the same water they just wash their cloths, wash themselves en-mass in a local river without any soap. This is not about being prim and proper and using an alcoholic swap on your palms after shaking hands, this is about access to clean water, sewage, things to stop babies from projectile pooing, uncontaminated food, etc. The nationalised immigrants you see in your own country act NOTHING AT ALL like they do back home where the lack of hygiene is born from necessity more than anything else.

Or a live badger. That would just be awesome. Franklinator 2.0.

It both scares me and pisses me of that the government can do whatever it wants with nuclear weapons, while my ability to use them is very, very restricted.

Who do they think they are, claiming the right to use things that the general public can't? Let me use my nuclear weapons!

Until I can be sure things are as safe as they reasonably can get I'd rather not have drones delivering packages yet

But that's exactly what drone proponents are asking for - a permitting standard that gives them the right to fly in these conditions and for these purposes in exchange for meeting a set of safety standards. Passive or automatically-engaged active safety features that ensure that "death by falling drone" is effectively an impossibility, whether that things like be cowled propellors, parachutes, an inherently low terminal velocity, fully independent backup propulsion, or whatever the case may be.

And in case you didn't notice, massive objects weighing hundreds of tons loaded with massive amounts of fuel and capable of taking out whole city blocks and/or skyscapers already fly extensively over your head. But you're worried about little plastic helicopters?

This is all very interesting, but some details of the study you cite suggest that other factors are at play. From your link:

The researchers want to blame the effects on all networking, which is undoubtedly significant, but that's not to say there weren't also other factors present -- like the fact that minority kids, poor kids, and kids without well-educated parents might not have the kind of cultural exposure to the "upper class educated world" that white rich kids with high SAT scores might have. By going to a better school, they might be exposed to more ideas that are more typical of wealthier classes, as well as learning social skills and networking.

Whatever the cause -- the point is that this is SERIOUS confounding variable in this study. Students with high SAT scores are already disproportionately from upper-class or upper-middle-class white (and Asian) families. Saying that those sorts of people will achieve whether they go to Harvard or not isn't actually saying much at all.

The fact that "better" schools make a significant difference for all these other non-privileged groups proves that they actually do something for students who actually NEED the help to succeed in life.

Moreover, I just find this finding hilarious:

Holy crap! If I want my kid to succeed, I just need for him to APPLY to Harvard, since the best predictor is the average SAT score of the most selective school he applies to. It doesn't matter whether he's accepted, rejected, whatever -- as long as he applies, it will help.

Of course... that's preposterous. Once again, the interpretation of this finding gets murky. What's probably more telling here is that kids who BOTHER applying to Harvard or wherever are mostly from households with high-achieving parents or parents who really push their kids to succeed. Those kids will likely do well wherever they go to.

The question of whether better schools "add value" is mostly relevant to kids who would NOT generally have good opportunities to succeed in life otherwise, like poor kids, minority kids, kids whose parents were not well-educated. And for those kids, your study absolutely shows a significant difference.

Well, sure, if you insist. I actually participated in the founding of the discipline of combinatorics, partly to discuss issues of probability and statistics of distributions. See my treatise Ars Magna Sciendi sive Combinatoria (1669), for example.

If you dig into my earlier treatises, you'll find I actually considered a number of issues in this sort of mathematics even before Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria (1666) (he was actually a bit of a fan of my work, I exchanged some great letters with him about it back in the day), and well before all those young Bernoulli whippersnappers got involved.

(What's that -- you wanted a serious answer? You want me to give real-world information about myself to a guy who hides as an AC?)

Sure, you could. If you want to work with a complete unreliable dataset, where all your conclusions are much more likely to be invalid.

"Well-randomized surveys" are not anecdotes. Anecdotes are individual stories, which may all have their individual bias. Since they are reported without context or regard for selection, they are more subject to cherry-picking, confirmation bias, etc.

Agreed. You have to get interested in a topic first, and if you've never heard anything about it, you probably would never look into it. But after we've heard a couple stories then we move onto better data collection techniques if we want to draw any valid conclusions.

Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics. What are your credentials?

That's not necessarily a reasonable policy. I completely agree with most of your post that student loans are out of control and are causing all sorts of price distortions.

But absolutes are rarely good general policies. A good college education is in fact a lifelong investment, and while motivated students can succeed anywhere, a good school and a good line on a resume can really give someone a jumpstart for the first few years of a career and the first few jobs. I am NOT by any means arguing that anyone should take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, as some people are today. You're never going to get any return on investment for that. But would I say that a kid or parent should NEVER take out a low-interest-rate loan for the extra $10k or $20k (TOTAL, not per year) to allow them to get 4 years of education at a significantly better school, which might be repaid in a salary bump from better job offers in just a few years after graduation? No -- that seems a draconian policy which doesn't take into account the real "investment" that education can be.

People should be careful about taking on debt. But sometimes there are valid reasons to do so, if you gain larger benefits in the long-run.

It's not only you, but your kids who will have to compete with these people on the job market. I'm all for instilling responsible spending habits and financial sense in kids, but part of responsible financial management is knowing when debt is a good and rational choice. Credit card debt is almost always irrational, because interest rates are ridiculously high. Other types of loans can sometimes be justified.

Heck, I have a car loan on my current car (at a crazy low interest rate) even though I could have paid in cash -- but that money's better off in the long-term investments I have for retirement (where it will likely gain at least 5 times as much value as the amount as the minimal interest charge on my car loan), and even if I stuffed that money under my mattress, it would lose value due to inflation, whereas now my car loan loses principal with inflation instead, making my effective interest rate less than zero. (Of course, I would have been less likely to take on this debt without being financially secure -- if you don't have a large emergency fund in the bank, adequate insurance, etc., this may be a harder decision.)

THIS. Whenever the topic of college tuition increases comes up, the assumption is that it must have to do with the cost of instruction (i.e., faculty salaries) or maybe lab equipment or something.

In reality, the biggest factor for many colleges has been this "arms race" (great term) to make sure all the new dorms have a swimming pool and a climbing gym and whatever. New buildings and facilities keep going up, which have ongoing staffing and maintenance costs. You could often fund many endowed professorships with the cost of a new building.

After campus facilities "improvements," the biggest reasons for increased costs are often enlarged administration bureaucracies and sports programs. College administration staff in many colleges has increased by 50% or so at many universities in the past few decades, even as faculty size remains roughly constant. High-profile sports at big athletic schools are often thought to bring in the cash, but actually most schools lose huge amounts of money on them. It's only a precious few that win that gamble.

But, as the parent says, it's great that we can have wealthy foreign students throwing in the cash so our kids can have the new climbing gyms, a boatload of administrators, and great sports coaches that often earn a lot more than college presidents.

Oh, wait? You were concerned about better education? Hah! There's where we need to cut costs. Let's put everything online and create MOOCs, so we can reallocate the buildings with classrooms for more climbing gyms, have professors record their lectures so they can then be dispensed with (along with their pesky salaries -- think of how many administrative staff we could hire by getting rid of that endowed chair!) and have the courses "taught" by adjunct drones who respond to emails, and without those annoying "class schedules" where you might have to actually show up and interact with real people to learn and discuss deep ideas, we can use online classes to meet whenever and have more flexibility to schedule athletic events whenever we want!

I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but these are really some disturbing trends. I'm not saying that traditional college lectures were always the best way to teach information, nor that higher ed couldn't be improved in general. But the pressures which are creating the tuition cost often have little to do with education... but I guess we have foreign students to pay for it (which is ironic since most foreign students are coming to the U.S. because of its educational reputation at universities, not for the climbing gyms).

Good for you! Want a gold star?

Anecdote is not data. Graduates from many prestigious schools in general have better outcomes. Highly motivated people can generally get ahead anywhere -- if you're such a highly motivated person, then it's not surprising that you did well in life, regardless of where you got your degree, or whether you even had a college degree AT ALL.

Well, you might have a point if you were talking about some random expensive second-rate private college. But the schools brought up in the summary like the Ivies and your chosen example of MIT have incredibly generous financial aid packages that are generally entirely need-based. Some facts from MIT's financial aid info:

-- 72% of undergraduates receive either a need-based or merit-based scholarship.

-- 41% of undergraduates have student loan debt at graduation, and the average debt at graduation is $17,900. The median debt for all undergraduate financial aid recipients who graduated in 2013 was $10,948.

For a school that estimates its ANNUAL tuition and fees now come to over $60,000/year (with 4-year cost in the $250,000 range), coming out with just over $10,000 in debt is pretty darn miniscule, I'd say. And that's less than the cost of ONE YEAR of college at many state universities these days. (Lest you think that these numbers are skewed because everyone comes from rich families, note also that at least 1/3 of MIT graduates come from familes with annual incomes of less than $75,000.)

So, sorry -- if you actually get into and graduate from MIT, chances are your debt levels are going to be at the levels of many state university graduates, perhaps lower.

(Note that MIT and the Ivies can do this because they have big endowments. Your argument would be better targeted at lesser private universities that change $50+k/year and don't have the resources to give such generous aid.)

Meh. You have a point, I suppose. But there are many, many years and daily opportunities to learn to socialize with people who aren't as smart as you ("normal" people). Even if you go to a place like MIT, you can easily find plenty of opportunities to deal with "normal" people while you're there -- go outside your down, volunteer, join some non-university social groups, become active in local politics or non-profit organizations... whatever. Build up your resume AND learn to deal with "normal" people, all while going to a top-tier school -- what a concept!

However, there are far fewer opportunities to surround yourself with incredibly smart people to get a high-quality education. Not to mention that it's useful to get this training while you're young and your brain is still more malleable. And unless you end up at some really top-tier company, chances are you're not going to be challenged intellectually by those around you.

Sure, it's definitely possible for a well-motivated student to get a great education elsewhere and to do great things in life. But if you have the opportunity to attend a top school with decent financial aid rules, there are few downsides to it, contrary to your implications.

Part of the problem, I think, is that this isn't really "history" in the traditional sense (at least not as the word was understood before the past few decades or so). I'm NOT saying it shouldn't be taught in schools, mind you, but this whole project is based somewhat on a false premise.

"History," as the term traditionally means, has to do with a "story" (it's in the word, and in fact "history" and "story" used to basically mean the same thing in early English). That is, it's a narrative based on human accounts of events. Read the intro to the first major "history" in Western civilization if you don't believe me, Herodotus's "Histories" (where the word acquired its meaning) describes exactly this -- history is recounting events based on what humans have said and done, and trying to sort of causes and effects within that narrative.

This sort of "history" is what actual historians are trained in -- evaluating written documents and sources, as well as the role of artifacts, in creating a narrative about history. The word "prehistoric" only has meaning based on that meaning of "history" -- i.e., before written records exist, we have "prehistory." From TFA, it's clear that 90% of this course is about prehistoric events. Therefore, it's NOT a history course at all. Gates does NOT want to "remake the way history is taught" -- he wants to substitute a traditional course on history with a course on scientific theories about prehistory.

That's great -- and I'm all for interdisciplinary approaches and perhaps devoting more time to this stuff in schools. Maybe this course could take the place of part of a history elective and part of a science elective, or maybe it could serve as a kind of "bridge" between the disciplines, with science teachers starting it off, and history teachers swapping in once we get to modern anthropology and archaeology.

But let's be honest about what this is. It wouldn't make sense to have a person with "history" degree teach this course -- since the kind of methodologies and understanding have little to do with what historians do. The kinds of questions raised by scientific theories about prehistory and how we evaluate them are very different from the ways we critique human history narratives based on human records of events. Historians have some overlap with archaeologists in their methods, but very little overlap with anthropologists (particularly those who work on early humans), evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and cosmologists -- which are actually the main topics of this curriculum as it's advertised.

Meh. What does it mean to have an unenforceable "right"? Yes, you can go with the Declaration of Indepedence and say we have "inalienable rights," but as a practical matter, our rights can be severely curtailed and restricted according to current legal doctrine.

I get what you're trying to say, but I don't buy it. I think it requires some sort of supernatural objective thing that somehow "endows" us with these "rights" that exist for all time and in all places. I don't think that exists.

Instead, I think that society and governments negotiate rights for citizens based on their metaethical systems. Do I believe that people DESERVE the rights you discuss? Absolutely. I think it's a moral necessity. But as a practical matter, those rights only can exist when someone observes them. If the government ceases to observe those rights, they are no longer in force... it's that simple.

From an ethical standpoint, I believe that the people deserve to have them back, but saying that the people continue to have them when no one actually observes them is just bizarre. It's like a shop offering the "right to free ice cream for senior citizens," but most of the time a senior citizen shows up and asks for ice cream, the shop finds some arbitrary excuse why they can't serve them the ice cream that day. What the heck could it possibly mean for the shop to advertise a "right to free ice cream" in that situation?

And let's not forget that the Constitution is an instrument of our government. It may have been written by elected representatives of "the people," but it's basically no different from any other legal document. It's interpreted by the courts, and legislatures and executives act within what they consider to be its purview. If all the government basically interprets the Constitution so that the "rights" ennumerated there no longer have legal effect, then you really don't have them anymore. You SHOULD demand for them back, but pretending, "Yeah, I still have my rights, but nobody respects them" is just wordplay. It doesn't mean anything.

Sorry, but that is absolute and utter nonsense. Look at history, if you need plenty of examples. A voting populace that DEMANDS better treatment often gets it. A voting populace that merely "expects" better treatment from politicians who have proven that they will not give them better treatment is just ignorant and stupid. Why would someone who has more power over you and who has a track record of violating rights voluntarily give up that power when people continue to elect them, even as they take away more rights?

You're acting like the relationship between government and the general population is one of some sort of mutual respect governed by laws of etiquette -- I respect you, and I expect that you'll respect me back.

The problem is that stuff only works well among parties that have equal power in a relationship, or when the respect is always given by the party with more power. The U.S. government has consistently been enlarging its power, particularly over the past century or so, and there is definite truth to the phrase about how power corrupts.

Yeah, yeah. Been there, done that. About 375 years ago.

Back when Vesuvius was actively erupting in the 1630s, I decided to take a closer look. While the volcano was still smoldering and active, I hired a local guide to take me to the top, then was lowered into the crater to take some scientific observations and temperature measurements. You wanna read more about it? Here's some info on my book. (Of course, science has progressed a lot since then.)

We didn't have fancy videocameras back then, so I had to make make my own drawings of what I saw.

Despite what people think Ebola is not very contagious in the western world where personal hygiene is actually practised. Ebola requires prolonged exposure or direct contact with bodily fluids. It's not like a influenza which can easily spread around an office from a simple sneeze.

Personally I was more concerned about the SARS outbreak a few years ago than a few people coming and going from a "part of the world" which has an Ebola epidemic.