Between Halls B and E, nearish giant Pikachu

Setting up at the blue Fantasy Flight tables, by the X-Wing Miniatures banner, in front of the HQ table, just before the banner showing the switch to Asmodee.

If you have spotted a good/better location at the con, suggestions are still open. Otherwise, I will be updating on-site when I arrive on Saturday.

There is some small number of people whom I trust when they say they very confident. They can explain the reasons why they came to a belief and the counterarguments. Most other highly confident statements I look upon with suspicion, and I might even take the confidence as evidence against the claim. Many very confident people seem unaware of counterarguments, are entirely dismissive of them, or wear as a badge of pride that they have explicitly refused to consider them.

There are others whose intuition I will trust with high confidence on certain topics, significantly because they are aware that they are exercising intuition. They may not know how they know something, but at least they know they don't know how they know it, which tends to get them to the right confidence level.

"You can’t just decide to be happy."

"No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable."

-- Quentin and Alice in The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I only know of 1 at AADL. Folks found it somewhat uncomfortable and wanted to be able to have food and drink. Several were held at Pizza House, just a bit off south campus.

Good point, thank you. I was focusing on the top half of the distribution, when there is also a cutoff in the bottom half.

Granted. The top hires from the top. This leads to two questions: * Do we see corruption in those grades? If that is where it matters, that is where we would expect to see it. Say, does admittance into and top grades at Harvard Law depend mostly on academics or is class rank better predicted by other factors, from social class to blatant bribery you mention above? * Once you are below the tournament economy, do we see any corruption? I work for a state government. "Do you have a relevant degree?" is the question, not how good your university was or what your class rank was. Barring extremes (obvious diploma mill, top tier graduate from top tier university), grading just isn't that important.

Moreover, universities have a strong incentive to not be corrupt in their grading - if they let people slip through without learning the work, employers will start to notice and discount qualifications from that institution This assumes that employers are using a college degree primarily as a signal for education, outweighing conformity, conscientiousness, class, deference to authority, low time preferences, habitual credentialism, or anything else a degree might signal. We note that most employers want to know that you have a degree but not, say, "must have at least a B+ in Intermediate Microeconomics," so the entire degree might as well be pass/fail apart from the few hiring at the top of the graduating class. And no employer is going to detect or care whether you legitimately passed something not relevant to work. I had an undergraduate course in Magical and Occult Philosophy, and I have yet to be quizzed on Plotinus and Hermes Trismegistus during a job interview.

The fact that few employers request transcripts and fewer distinguish between "barely passing" and "summa cum laude" (maybe apart from recent graduates?) seems like pretty strong evidence about caring about grading corruption. You really need to corrupt your school's degree award process (like a diploma mill) before anyone will care about it.

Also, as Old_Gold suggests, if you count grade inflation as corruption of grading, empirically this incentive wasn't strong enough. We also note that across-the-board corruption of this type undermines incentives. If someone comes up with a better signal, the entire institution of universities would collapse, but most people have seemed to accept rampant grade inflation with a shrug rather than mostly ignoring degrees. It may eventually collapse, but on a time scale where it seems difficult to believe "this was due to grade inflation starting 50 years ago."