Bernie is winning the nomination race and here's whyFollow

That's a thing? I'm a highschool drop out so I don't really know how college classes work outside of general research on the subject. That sounds...absurd.

College they pretty much just gave us an unlimited supply of free condoms and the campus security phone number in case we had any problems.

That would be because Sanders needed to actually WIN them to be catching up rather than falling farther and farther behind.

Context is your friend. Washington state was probably one of his biggest wins. With 72% of the vote, he had a 16 point lead. She doubled that in New York. It's kind of hard to catch up when you're falling behind.

This x1000. Far too much of our education is about rote memorization and regurgitation. Knowing why something works the way it does is often much more useful than memorizing how it does. Anyone can learn how to do something. But if you know why, then you can adopt that to any work you do. Very hard to teach this though. And unfortunately, nearly impossible to test for (testing can often go too far the other way, in fact).

I honestly think that on some level, the problem is that many people (especially those in the education profession themselves), just don't trust a system that appears to be indirect. They don't trust individuals in a system to have the freedom to make their own choices, and they don't trust that the system can and will weed out those who make poor ones while keeping those who make good ones. In the business world, we trust the "invisible hand". So while it's hard, for example, to say precisely how much workerAs work contributed to the bottom line of the company, attempting to objectively codify what makes workerA a "good worker" is almost always going to fail. What works is allowing workerA's supervisor to make that assessment. And his supervisor does the same for him. And so on. Ultimately, you can look at a business and see the big patterns of success and failure, and make small adjustments from the top, that will ripple through the organization in the form of process changes at each level. Of course, this isn't perfect, and only works if you can actually make pay, bonus, promotion, and firing decisions in this context.

Education (and most government work in fact) doesn't trust that individuals can make those choices. So it instead uses strict pay scales (to ensure fairness), and places huge obstacles on firings. I think this is the root of the problem though. Since you can't trust the principle of a school to decide that their program isn't working (or even trust him to implement one on his own), you can't trust the department heads to pass the information about where the problem is to that principle, and you can't make raises available faster to those who do well versus those who do poorly (or even *gasp* fire them), you are required to eternally attempt to find some kind of objective measurement of success. Which has lead us through a series of methods of standardized testing using various methodologies. None of which work. And all of which basically result in "teaching to the test", in one form or another.


It's a far more radical change than most would propose, but I'd change the structure of K-12 education so that the schools each compete for education dollars (yeah, still paid for publicly though, so there's that). Yes, I'm talking vouchers. But don't be afraid to let the system "float". Let the market decide which schools are good and which are bad. Let that same market force schools that are under performing to have to change, and let them have the power to make those changes. And yeah, this means some schools will teach to a trade school path. Some will teach to a university path. Some will teach more science. Some more art. I don't think that's a bad thing. But as long as we keep trying to set strict objective rules to decide what works and what doesn't, we're most likely just going to end up with things that don't. If we allow those students future success to flow back to the schools naturally, I think it will work. And I think we'll get more teachers willing and able to teach the "why" rather than the "how". Because no one's standing over them watching to make sure that they teach enough "how" for kids to pass a test. They're looking at how well the teacher teaches, using their own subjective abilities, which are honed by the same fact that if they make consistently bad assessments, they'll be replaced by someone else who can make better ones.

That kind of system does work. You just have to trust it to do so. But most people in government don't trust people.

Sort of like that assessment of the problem? Not wrong, but with no knowledge of how to apply it outside of a canned perspective?

You know what would be exactly the same in ethics, but far greater in efficacy assessment than "free market fixes everything"? Controlled scientific testing on children.

I am broadly in favor of that, we might develop systems which generate good outcomes, or even systems which generate very interesting outcomes.With regard to ethical implications; well this is already going on anyway, just in a haphazard manner, much like evolution, where we don't crib effective methods directly, and claim blindness to, rather than exerting agency is a morally superior approach due to risk of apparent harm. Knowing what inputs lead to what outputs is quite important if we'd like to intelligently design our future.

Either way, this is important underlying research which is directly applicable to artificial intelligence research.

Edited, Apr 26th 2016 9:34am by Timelordwho

I'm a big fan of these primaries with the 8pm EST close times

Trump's margins are friggin' huge. He's not just winning, he's crushing. Say hello to your Republican nominee for president.

Cruz might drop below 10% in RI and forfeit any delegates.

The Northeast was supposed to be Kasich's strong region.

Total political nerd trivia: The DNC awards extra delegates to clusters of 3+ adjoining states who hold their primary at the same time. So Clinton get a little extra delegate boost from winning PA/MD/DE since those states are worth more than they normally would be had they held primaries on different days.

Looks like Clinton moved up in Connecticut and is up by less than 1% now. Kind of interesting to watch, in a "doesn't really matter" sort of way. I kind of wonder if that's a hard 10% or is there wiggle room in it. I mean, he's sitting at 10.2 right now and I can't imagine it'd be worth giving him one delegate, like some kind of participation trophy. Thanks, I was feeling bad about fanboying over Captain America's Energy Shield and now I recognize there are far worse things to geek over.

No, I recognize mine is worse.

Identifying a problem is the first step towards solving it. Insisting that one must have a complete and perfect solution readily available prior to pointing out that the existing method has some problems just seems a bit silly. I just suggested some ideas that might lean us in the right direction. Surely that's sufficient for a forum discussion of the topic?



That's hard to do though. Any testing can be discounted for other factors. So, for example, we could look at the differences in success level between children who attend private K-12 education versus those who take the "free" public school system, and conclude that the former does better because it's screening out kids with development problems, drug addicted parents, or even just disinterested parents. As a general rule if parents are interested enough (and financially capable enough) to pay for their kids education, they're probably also going to be providing a more stable home environment, better parenting, more encouragement, and better examples for the kids themselves. And those are valid reasons to discount such statistics.

But that also does not mean that, everything else being the same, we might achieve better global results if the education being provided to children across the board were in some way tied to their eventual financial outcomes. Hard to do directly, but I guess my point is that this works in the private market. All the time. It seems reasonable to assume that if we could just let people make choices with their education dollars, the statistical result would likely be better than having a group of "smart people" making the decisions. Doubly so when those smart people have no negatives to suffer if they are wrong.

Don't discount the chance that Hilary could get hit by a comet, or a sharknado!