I attended a (public) middle school teacher meeting about two years ago. The 8th grade math teacher said "I am supposed to be teaching XYZ for the 8th grade statewide standardized math test. I can't do it. Around 1/3 of my students can't multiply two numbers. They don't know." (She went on in this vein--it wasn't laughing or flippant, it was a cry for help)

She didn't say 1/3 of her students struggled with some of their multiplication tables, or algebraic concepts, it was that they literally didn't know how multiplication works.

I used to quiz my kids every morning with short "head math" problems starting in K and 1st grade. I started simple "2+2" .. "5+5" ... "6+7". Eventually I added multiple steps "1 + 4 + 3 - 2" or "6 + 7 - 2 + 10". I did the same starting in maybe 3rd / 4th grade with multiplication tables.

One of my kids ended up being an academic high flyer. The other still, to this day, struggles with math. He somehow worked his way into an advanced math class, but he has to work his ass of in there for Bs and Cs.

I am very sympathetic to people who aren't mathematically inclined, but these problems are embarassingly easy.

So I have a serious question for you (this comes on the heels of me doing a deep dive on PISA testing results, and it honestly has been weighing heavily on my mind lately).

I 100% believe that socioeconomic factors are probably the single biggest factor in academic success.

Is there any possibility that average population-wide genetics play a role in academic success? (I very much do NOT want to use the word "race" because I think it's basically meaningless). Is it possible that, on average, Americans with a large Far East Asian genetic component perform academically better than, on average, American students with primarily Western European backgrounds? What about those with large sub-Saharan African genetic components? Etc.

The question really is--is it _possible_?

My answer is that yes, I think it's possible. I don't think academic achievement is the most important thing out there, but it's important.

And, if it's possible? What the heck do we, in a free and democratic society do about it?

It's bleak and dystopian to think about!

My oldest son goes to a high school on the other side of the country. It has an award winning Engineering magnet program. Every year multiple students from this school go to Ivies and other top 25 schools.

Simultaneously, ~55% of the school is poverty level, ~45% is low English proficiency, and about 30% of the students are considered habitually absent (meaning a minimum of 10 _unexcused_ absences).

My son is taking APs, very intensive engineering classes, and participating in multiple extracurricular activities.

In the same school building, more than half of the students regularly rank in less than the 30th percentile on both math and English end of grade tests.

What I commonly hear from teachers and administrators--if you're a teacher teaching classes of the poverty level non-English speakers, what good does it do to fail them? They're just going to drop out anyway. Maybe if you encourage the kids along, a few will get something out of it?

It's an awful situation to be in. The school has at least a dozen ELL teachers. The school offers pretty much all the standard freshman courses (English, US History, etc) in both Spanish and English versions. This drains so many resources from other parts of the school. The arts program operates on a shoestring and all the arts programs are constantly fundraising to keep the lights on.

The soccer team is damn good, though..

So everyone and everything is to blame except removing standardized testing as an admission criteria in California (2021), schools in CA being closed for in-person education for ~2 years due to Covid, and perhaps most importantly, California adopting a a radical new math curriculum that focused on equity and removing cultural barriers in math education. (See, e.g., EdWeek

Right, it's Republicans (all those nasty California Republicans who dominate state and local governments) that have put us in this mess!

If the objective is to maximize profit uber alles of course you ONLY want the most profitable customers. You can maximize your profit function by driving all of the least profitable customers to your competitors--and why would you care if you drive those customers completely out of the market? Profit uber alles!

But when you focus too much on any single dimension the system will eventually implode along that dimension. Have a nice flight?

Thanks for the details, though it still doesn't give me much hint regarding my situation with an Internet-related service and the associated hardware...

Not from AI slop spam, not even from AC morons, but mostly from learning to think like machines as we live into the singularity.

Cue the song "It's too late, baby, it's too late."

Really. I think the greatest danger we face is that many people are much too good at learning to think like machines. But especially the children.

My latest prediction for the human extinction event is that "Justice delayed is justice denied" will be solved with AI courts empowered by all those robocops Musk will create for his trillion dollar payout. Homo sapiens will last for about one week after that.

Me? I'm going down for aggravated littering with malice aforethought. Or maybe for felony jaywalking? Perhaps expired bicycle registration? So many crimes, so little time...

Mod parent Funny, but I hain't got my own Funny as of this replyin'.

Okay, so that was a weak joke, but there actually is a feature I want and the wizards of Slashdot must know where it's hiding, right?

I want to clean up the wasted storage. I know there are are (at least) two classes of photos that could be mined for text and the original images could be tossed. Mostly save the most prominent phone numbers, and the geodata, and perhaps some of the larger words, but rest is not worth saving. Save it to a spreadsheet or portable database? Not sure how many such images there are, but the savings would be at least 99% in my data.

More difficult and a real challenge for AI would be figuring out what's least interesting in the remaining stuff and either tossing it or moving it somewhere else, perhaps with lower accessibility. Obviously this side should focus on the largest stuff.

Oh yeah. About the original story summarized for Slashdot: What I REALLY want for Christmas is less AI slop, not more ways to make it. But the increasingly EVIL google has to show the shareholders bigger profits from more, More, MORE AI, how and NOW.

*sigh*

s/quite machine/quite mature/

Reminds me of another theory: Maybe they (the company selling whatever) get some kind of free insurance on payment if you use a credit card?

Sounds interesting but I doubt it's available here and also sounds like it has gaming elements to repel me.

No checking accounts here. It displays the Visa logo and I just use it in exactly the same way as I used my old "local" credit card. That was from a different network than Mastercard or Visa and I think I may have once or twice had some trouble with international purchases, but pretty sure I encountered no problems with the "Visa-branded" debit card, even for international stuff. Until last month, when I hit the "credit card only" wall. I had also received a couple of "free" credit cards over the years, at least one under the MasterCard brand, but I never used them and just cancelled them because of the risk of changes with new charges.

I forgot to mention regarding the grocery store games that I rarely use a fifth grocery store, which is actually the closest one, because I don't like their loyalty card game. Also, I might have implied that I was using the cards of all four stores, but actually I'm only playing with three of their cards. However I buy more stuff from that fourth store than the closest fifth one... The store I use most is the one that seems to be most consistent with the best prices--and the fewest weird sales.

YAC for "Yet Another Cryptocoin" but the real joke is with DIY iris scanning for the masses. Were this thing to catch on, where would it end?

"First they came for proving your identity for international currency transfers that might be money laundering, then they came for iris scanning before you can get a soft drink out of the vending machine..."

Oh, yes. Almost forgot to say fsck the cryptocoin. EVERY cryptocoin. OF course it's already too late because the cryptocurrency has already fscked us.

By the way I've abandoned the solution space of trying to prove any identity is actually human. My last failed fantasy involved interactive timelines created with personalized trivia quizzes exchanged between the human participants in the events of the shared timelines. The idea was to create networks of identities with anchor points on real human beings. Can't recall detecting any interest or comprehension or even any questions. But after the usual pondering I see two fatal problems. One is that AIs will be able to break into the networks by stealing the identities of actual human beings, either by captured the identities of deceased people or by working between networks. For example, I am no longer on Facebook or in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter (and it is even possible that my personal information was deleted as promised), but if I became validated on some other network, perhaps the new social website Jimmy Wales is working on (currently called "Trust Cafe"), then that information could be tapped and used to create fake identities on the websites I don't use, and then those fake identities could be used to validate any number of fake identities.

However the bigger problem is that there are plenty of people who are already more stupid than the current AIs. The human beings are not getting any smarter (and actually I've seen too much evidence they are getting more stupid over time) while the AIs are rapidly seeming more and more intelligent.

"Any test you can pass, AI can pass better" with apologies to "Anything you can do, AI can do better" with apologies to the ancient musical and derivative movie with "Anything you can do, I can do better". AI can do anything better than me?

And just think how much funnier this joke could have been if I asked an AI to "help polish" it. But I'm standing on my human fingers and I type again fsck the AIs even as I contemplate my next succumbence to the the temptations. And there it was! I had to websearch the spelling of the (rare) noun form and the AI jumped in to "help".