Increase the probability-weighted average of your utility function over Everett branches.

There are two influential theories of the value of education: the human capital theory and the signalling theory. According to the former your education makes you more productive, and in so doing enables you to land good jobs with good salaries. According to the latter, education in itself doesn't make you more productive. However, having acquired a place and good grades at a prestigious university is a signal that you have certain desirable features (eg intelligence, conscientiousness).

Now it seems to me that if the signalling theory is right, then it doesn't matter that much what students actually learn during college, as long as employers can continue to predict who's going to be a good worker on the basis of degrees and grades. Hence if that theory is right, the market would only exercise a weak pressure to improve educational standards.

No doubt the human capital theory is closer to the truth in some areas (say medicine) than in others (say a classics student at Oxford who lands a job at a bank). However, it is a further aspect to take into consideration.

I'd be interested to hear why you think that the market would be good at correcting for this. For one thing, we often lack reliable measures of how much students learn (I take it that this is what OECD is now trying to remedy). Hence employers go by reputation even if second-tier universities are in fact better.

Another issue that should be noted is that teaching is a necessary evil for most professors: what they really are interested in is research. Also they are hired mostly on the basis of their research output. This incentivizes them not to spend too much time or effort on teaching, something which leads to a further lowering of standards.

I'm actually curious why "the market" hasn't corrected itself on this one. I mean, since people go to college to become employable, tools to determine the best colleges should have emerged, and this in turn should have forced colleges to make sure they deliver. Especially since most colleges in the US are largely private institutions.

But this hasn't happened, even with the outcry against college loan burdens. I'm no libertarian, but this is one situation where I'd expect libertarians to get it right, so what's going on ?

is there a discussion somewhere on the relative merits of up/down-voting versus upvoting only ?

Yes, it came up here the last time someone made a Discussion post about retributive downvoting. Not to toot my own horn, but I feel I outlined some reasonable issues with that plan in my response.

(Short version: I feel that upvote-only systems encourage cliques and pandering, neither of which align well with LW's culture or goals.)

You only need maybe 10 karma to be able to significantly hurt new users.

Maybe there should be some treshold, e.g. 100 karma before you can downvote. And then, you can downvote as much as you can today. This probably could be done by one "if" line in the code.

We need downvoting, but we don't quite need to have new users able to destroy other new users.

What are some ways to effectively practice and apply Maths learning?

I've been doing a lot of learning and found that practicing on paper is generally easier than Latex or a cobbled syntax in electronic documents, but would like to know if I just really need to bite the bullet and do it this way (Latex or similar).

Once I have (what I believe) an understanding of the problem types, I will generally write code to do it for me as doing this makes it even clearer in my head. Problem is though, once I do the code, I generally don't practice on paper anymore and I am not sure if this is going to be hindrance in understanding more complex topics.

My end goal is to be able to read and understand the maths in any AI focused research paper, and then be able to do some maths which isn't just practice examples but I am not sure on how to get to that last step.

It seems there are few distinct cases

• I am someone who does not wear helmet in our current society where this is illegal and people don't exactly discriminate in case of car accidents, so the introduction of smart cars will only confirm my current (bad) decision - no change there.

• I currently wear a helmet, but would stop wearing one if smart cars were introduced.
  Assuming every car magically became a smart car, that means I am willing to suffer a fine in exchange for a slightly greater likelihood of surviving a nearby car crash.
  Considering smart cars are better drivers than humans, and that car crashes are already rare, that means if I considered the fine adequate to incentivize me into wearing a helmet previously I should consider them adequate now.
  There is an edge case here : smart cars are better drivers, but only by a small fraction that is offset by their tendency to aim away from me.

• I currently wear a helmet, and will continue to do so.

Only the edge case would create a morally ambiguous situation, but that seems pretty unlikely (you'd hope that a swarm of cars with superhuman reaction speed would be more than marginally better at preventing accidents).

What do you mean exactly by "lower status" ? Do they lower the perceived status of the writer, or do they convey the idea that the reader has lower status than the writer ?

Exclamation marks friendliness, "it'd be great if" and "Thanks!" I'd perceive as somewhat condescending in an email exchange with someone I didn't know well, whereas "you don't have to do this but" and "sorry to bother you" I'd read as delaying expressions and thus status-lowering for the writer.

But again, it's a matter of context. In an informal email exchange I wouldn't worry too much about these things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union

Mendel- and Darwin-based biology was rejected in the Soviet Union for ideological reasons. Unlike Western epistemology, which holds itself to a standard of objectivity, communism (and leftism in general) is always suspicious that someone who tries to convince you of an idea is secretly planning to sell you something. In this field communism made the same mistake of the postmodernists: it couldn't conceive of objective science without an agenda hidden somewhere. Genetics was labeled "bourgeois science" and thus not worth learning. A classic example of rejecting a good idea because of who happened to say it.

In my personal experience, it was because physics makes for the best kids' magazine. Few things beat reading about astrophysics, especially in a highly illustrated science for kids magazine.