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Comment Re:Has Boring Co really done anything? (Score 1) 45

I overall agree with you - price disruption in tunneling would have so many benefits.

But at this point, I'm thinking Elon's businesses such as SpaceX is a mix of two factors: Elon not being full crazy yet, and other people successfully managing Elon's excesses.

Also, overall, techbros are like moths to the flame when it comes to reinventing mass transit poorly.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

The problem with the K-12 system is that it's just _bad_. There is no drive for excellence, so students that don't have engaged parents are just coasting. In some places (Seattle) you could graduate with a passing score without even attending the classes and randomly filling out the tests. Then there are busybodies that try to cancel math and magnet schools because they're racist (see: California).

There's a lot of variability here. The Seattle and California models are baffling to me. Totally agree that the US system is largely focused on irrelevant (or immutable) things. I have a kid in highschool now. His peer group is very, very impressive. Multiple perfect scores on the ACT every year. ~55% of the highschool is English-language learners and 60%+ is free lunch eligible (meaning poverty level or close). There's an engineering magnet program that does really, really cool stuff. The school was on lockdown 3 times last year for gang fights.

It's a tough environment, comparatively.

This is really apparent when you look at college admission tests. In the US you have SAT tests that are trivially easy to pass with perfect scores (more than 2% of people get them!), and ACT with a bit more reasonable 0.22% of perfect scores. In China you have Gaokao where _nobody_ ever got the perfect score, in Korea you have CSAT with something like 5 people a year getting perfect scores, etc.

I have a different take! What's the point of a test that nobody ever gets a perfect score? I guarantee you that I can design a test that nobody ever aces, but it also wouldn't be worth anything. I think there needs to be a middle ground between overtesting, teaching to the test, and tests being the be all and end all of education, and the loosey goosey approach one often encounters in the US (most commonly among leftists) that thinks all testing is bad and racist and invalid and hurts kids.

Another thing to look at is the competitions. You can likely remember your high school's football team name, but you probably have never heard about your school's math olympiad teams. Schools in the US spend a lot of money on stadiums and gyms, but hardly any on academic competitions. It's the opposite in China and Russia. Nobody cares about the athletic performance, but schools actively compete academically with each other.

You are probably assuming the wrong things given the demographics of Slashdot and those few of us who have hung on for decades at this point! I was not on the math team, but I had friends who were. I participated in both Latin and Computer Science competitions (and marching band). Our football team sucked (I know this from marching band). But yeah, I'm sure a huge amount of money was spent on the gym and fields and athletics, far beyond what was spent on supporting the best academic achievers.

You will get NO argument from me that America's obsession with sports, from the cradle to the grave, is hugely detrimental to our society and culture.

I hope that the current mess with NIL, paying college athletes (I will NOT call them "student athletes" -- what a joke) forces some or many schools to back off on their sports expenditures and focuses, but I'm not holding my breath.

Comment What about reversible heat pumps? (Score 1) 191

Google says about 1/6th of European buildings use heat pumps for heating. A heat pump is just an A/C unit operating backwards. A reversible heat pump does both With Europe's warmer climate, as well as advances in heat pump technology, it seems like heat pumps would be viable in most of Europe. Heat pumps are more efficient and can use greener sources of energy. As well as reduce dependence on non-EU fossil fuel sources. All of that is a win. It seems like the added desire, if not need, for A/C could be used to encourage more people to switch to reversible heat pumps that can be used for both heating and cooling.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

It's mostly an artifact of the way the Science proficiency is tested, the questions are mostly the logic-type deduction questions and require little if any specific knowledge. If you look at physics in particular, the US is far behind China.

Hey, I asked you your metric, I wasn't planning on nitpicking it!

China is not a member of the OECD, but they did unofficial scoring for the Beijing-Shanghai area, and they came out in the top 3 countries.

Sure, just like micro-regions, individual demographic groups in the US, etc., score higher.

IMHO, US public education is amongst the very best in the world at the high end and pretty bad at the low end. The real confounding factor is that demographics are hard to escape.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

I agree PISA is a reasonable standard.

So, in the context of STEM that you raised, the US scored 14 points above average, #16 in Science placement. That seems strong to me.

Math is slightly below average (-4 points), number 34. Weak.

Reading, US placed #9, seems strong again.

You mentioned immigrants being the majority of STEM students. I don't know if that is true, but, using the metric you picked of PISA scores, some of the countries that send the most immigrants to the US in STEM .... have no data available. Nothing for China, India, Pakistan, etc. India seems to have scored exceedingly poorly the last time they participated.

The chart at the bottom of the Wikipedia page that includes 2015 US State results and racial breakdowns for the Mathematics portion for the US over multiple years is fascinating, and I think, should make an impact on your thinking.

(For instance, in the 2018 math results, Asian students in the US scored 539, whites scored 503, and the US average was 478. That puts US Asian students between Hong Kong and Taiwan in position #5 and white students in between Seden and Finland at #20. Black students in the US scored 419, the level of Thailand and Uruguay, around the upper 50s in rank. Kind of changes things a bit?)

Comment Anecdote rather than data... (Score 1) 98

Both of my grandarents died from lung ailments.

One of my grandfathers worked in factories his entire life, smoked for about 20 years of his youth, and and was generally of the socioeconomic level that wasn't able to live an extremely healthy lifestyle. He developed emphysema and associated conditions, and died in his low 70s. He had been on oxygen for years at that point.

My other grandfather never smoked a day in his life, never drank, worked in academia, swam daily until sometime in his 80s, and died right around age 90--from lung cancer! One of the doctors asked him if he had any career asbestos exposure and he answered "Well I did go down into an asbestos mine in 1934..."

You never know what will get you, but dying at age 90 and being in good physical and mental shape is pretty good by me!

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

I strongly agree with almost everything you wrote. Taking the locale example, and using my own state as an example, most counties have their own school system, and a handful of cities have their own school systems. Even within a single county's school system, the disparities in results between school are very significant. They also track, almost 1:1, with socioeconomic level, and that in terms very closely tracks with race. I'm absolutely not making an argument that race is a cause of educational disparities, though I would not rule out any genetic impact, but race and socioeconomic level are tightly correlated almost everywhere in the United States (and really, the world).

I googled a few lists of top US states by K-12 education. There are a lot of variations, but, as you said, New Jersey (just over 50% white) shows up near the top in most, so does Massachusetts (another state with huge immigrant and non-English speaking populations, but that is still ~75% white). Many of the other habitual high achievers are small, (more) homogenous, wealthy. Even the link between spending on public education and success isn't written in stone. California, for example, spends a lot, yet gets a pretty middling result on average.

The "homogeneity" argument as you call it, and I would note that I listed 3 criteria present in most of the top countries, primarily small, ethnically and culturally homogenous, and wealthy, is just one part. All three are important factors. South Korea, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia, Japan, Germany, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Singapore from one list. Most are small (Japan/Germany/South Korea definitionally), most are wealthy (I guess Slovenia would be lowest?), all are pretty ethnically and culturally homogenous, with some variations. It will be interesting to see if, for instance, Germany's results change given the massive population change in the last 10 years there.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 162

The US has a strong K-12 public education system (not the best, but still strong) and an incredibly good showing, the best, in the list of strongest universities in the world.

When you look at most lists of the top countries in the education ranking, they are primarily small, ethnically and culturally homogenous, and wealthy. (And to be clear, not all top educational countries are all of those things!)

If you compare white and asian student achievement in the United States to elsewhere, you're going to see results very comparable to European and Asian countries. The United States, unfortunately, remains highly uneven, and our population is far more diverse (racially, linguistically, culturally, and probably IQ-wise too) than almost any other high-performing country.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 64

Unfortunately, the economic justification for AI assumes problems of the caliber of the Riemann Hypothesis will be solved

Does it? It would be fascinating if AI could eventually solve problems like that, but I think the economic justification is more along the lines of "we have billions of dollars of capital available, billions of people who want to use this technology, tens of thousands of other companies working on AI technology, and we don't want to be left behind when the next big discoveries are made."

Comment Re:AI Training (Score 2) 64

In the definition of reasoning that I use, e.g., alpha-beta pruning would count as reasoning. Clearly you disagree.

That's a really good point, and I would love to hear the GP's response! Why isn't alpha-beta pruning considered reasoning? Why isn't A* search over a generated graph considered reasoning?

I've said it before, but I truly do think many of the most vitriolic anti-LLM voices come from a place of being worried about what LLM capabilities say about the nature of human intelligence and reasoning. Perhaps the bottom line is that human intelligence is not so special as we make it out to be?

Go stands out to me as an interesting case. When I took an AI class ~2004, Go was given as an example of a seemingly intractable problem--the search space is simply so big that no existing AI-methods could effectively manage it. Many people talked about Go in almost mystical terms, as a problem that only human intelligence could approach and one that was fundamentally different from chess (now derided as solved and a mere search problem--no special human intelligence required).

It took only ~10 years and by 2015, Google's machine learning models were crushing the best humans.

I'm fascinated to see where the technology goes.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 64

Not relevant to your post, but I appreciate your insights as a mathematician on this article (says the guy who tapped out after 3rd semester calc!). For what it's worth, I don't _think_ gweihir is trolling, though he could be be, but he does seem to spend a substantial number of his waking hours posting ad hominems and just outright calling people stupid if anyone suggests any possible productive usage of an LLM. He doesn't engage in good faith, so the conversations are never particularly interesting.

Comment Re: I remember what I was relieved... (Score 1) 282

I know it's a radical concept, but maybe CBS fired Corbett because they were losing large sums of money. The show costs 40 million USD a year with Corbert's salary at 20 million. The fact is that there are some large YouTubers that get more viewers than Corbett does now.

Maybe if they made Corbert's salary dependent on the number of viewers he had (like YouTube does) he might get back to doing comedy again.

But they just did not fire Corbett. They cancelled the whole show. There is no conspiracy other than basic economics.

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