I'd expect the market to correct first on the students side by creating reliable tools to determine which college is most cost effective (e.g. a simple measure would be average time before repayment of college loan), which would then lead students to these colleges which are more cost effective, which would lead colleges to focus on employability-related courses (and on specializing etc).
Now there is the fact that people have conflicting notions of what education is for, because they're also looking for signalling, and could thus be misguided in their ...
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 ?
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 do...
Actually, I was wondering about this: do we need downvoting ?
I mean, is there a discussion somewhere on the relative merits of up/down-voting versus upvoting only ?
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.)
I have heard (I have no citation and it's probably apocryphal, but I found the anecdote enlightening) that Enrico Fermi's way of reading articles was to read the abstract, put the paper away, do the maths by himself and once he was done, compare his results with the article. That's probably a bit hardcore, but you should be able to start from somewhere in the paper's reasoning and do a few steps forward.
But where are you in your paper reading at the moment ? Is there a particular problem that spurred this question ?
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
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.
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.
I'd say argue it's not a complete mistake, and indeed can be a very useful guide, to assume that there is an ideology behind everything, even science. There are, however, a number of mistakes one can make given this statement, the first being to divide al...
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.
I'm doing Overcoming Gravity now, and I must say I've been pretty impressed by the results so far even though it hasn't been long. Probably the first time since I started working out that I can really feel results so quickly.
Actually the Italy-Austria border is a pretty mountainous area with a bunch of national parks. The only cities of note are Udine and Trieste, but altogether I doubt you have more than 5% of the population (and google maps suggests Venzone is around 20km from the border). So I think it's not an altogether arbitrary suggestion to make.
How do you choose the measure over Everett branches in the absence of interactions between branches?