> Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".
Israel doesn't want to annex Yehuda and Shomron (the place you call West Bank). This is a complete misunderstanding of the people in the West about Israeli politics. Israel wants to have nothing to do with Arab population. Never wanted it, and doesn't see it wanting it in the future. It's completely antithetical to what the absolute majority of Israeli population (and the politicians who represent it) want.
The reason why Israel holds that territory is that after one of the wars, Israel tried to use it as a bargaining chip to convince its Arab neighbors to recognize Israel as a country and to sign a peace treaty, once the territory is returned (so-called "land for peace" series of UN treaties). But, the Arab neighbors outsmarted Israel by abandoning their people in occupied territories, and, essentially, handing Israel an armed grenade that it now has no idea what to do with.
With respect to this problem, Israel has different approaches to its solution, that range from the "transfer" (the idea that Israel will force / subsidize the Arab population to migrate out of the occupied territories, this is the extreme right-wing position, assassinated "Gandhi" was one of the major proponents of it.) to the two-state solution on the far left, where Israel makes territorial concessions, esp. in Jerusalem and around.
But there's no political force that wants annexation (including the population), and nobody would realistically dare to vanquish / force to move the whole population of Gaza / Yehuda and Shomron. Of course, you could probably find some oddball idiot declaring "death to all Arabs" or similar, but they don't hold any real political power. But even these people wouldn't want annexation if it meant they have to put up with the people from annexed territories.
I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.
But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.
For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.
But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.
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Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)
>But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.
In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.
As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.
There's a large amount of peer pressure to idolize scraping by, and against actually doing your best and putting in effort. While this exists in certain other places too (see classic "jock vs nerd" Hollywood stereotypes), nowhere is it as widespread. Moreso than the intensity - which isn't particularly severe, in the sense that e.g. serious bullying isn't more common than in compare countries - it's how institutional it is that sets it apart, even among a lot of kids who have the potential to do very well and go places if they'd put in a little effort.
Of course YMMV and these things have a large degree of local variance, but there's a reason the linked term exists as a cultural phenemonon there.
Your argument is similar to burning the house down, once you discover that you don't like the couch in the living room. Or, more realistically, arguing against taxation based on the idea that rich people avoid being taxed anyways, and it's only poor people who will get the short end of the stick. The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it. It's a shared good that can only be made better if everyone participates. When people who can contribute the most are allowed to be excluded, the whole thing becomes worthless. But, guess what, those who thought that they may be exempt from contributing to the public pool will inevitably find out that the public who was in this way deprived of a public good hates them, and will eventually come after them with pitchforks and torches.
> The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's a little insulting to insinuate otherwise. When I was in high school, I tried to start a CS club, but no one was interested. I helped run MATHCOUNTS at the local middle school, and we had five people show up on a good day (<1% of the student body). Most students don't care anymore, and why should they when you have to fight the school to take AP Biology as a freshman? Gifted programs are being eliminated in the name of equity, and common core standards are lower than they ever have been. A friend who immigrated in seventh grade said America's seventh grade math classes are years behind China's (and she went to a better school than me). How do you get years behind in seven years?!
I don't think it is possible to fix the education system. The student body has adopted an anti-learning culture, administrators are lowering standards to raise their metrics, and most teachers would be wholly unfit for an ideal classroom, let alone the ones they're supposed to oversee nowadays. I am all for "burning the house down". I think the best solution would be to fire everyone, raise salaries by 10x, and then hire back 10% as many people. After all, the professorship pyramid scheme has lots of PhDs who might be interested in teaching for $300K/year.
> It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it.
How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.
I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.
Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.)
People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story.
The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant.
Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.
to be axiomatic declarations. My issue with these kind of axioms is they're not really necessary. You can get everything useful by only considering things that are good for somebody. Now, we don't live in a perfectly informed and rational society, so it can be good (for society) to indoctrinate everyone with this axiom. But, as with all axioms, not everyone will believe in them. So, if I'm told,
"You need to be more humble, it's a virtue,"
that's begging the question! I need some external reason to either adopt the axiom or humility. Society as a whole seems to have adopted this axiom, but why is that? There was probably an evolution of axioms, where ones that didn't work got rejected, while ones that mostly worked got inculcated. I think most people overestimate their abilities, which would lead to fighting over positional goods. I think the role of the humility axiom is to prevent such fighting, but it comes with drawbacks.
Since the Enlightenment, most wealth has been created by thinking really hard. This means you really want to rank people near the top accurately, so you can give them resources to go and create their ideas. The axiom of humility regresses everyone toward the mean—which is great when the GDP is measured in bushels, but not so great when it is measured in transistors.
The fact that you don't personally meet with "average" people isn't the point. The point is that they exist, and they affect your existence, and they will not and cannot be made to disappear. The "average" people have to share resources with you, and in a way the resources cannot be segregated... unless we start building colonies in space, and send "non-average" people there or some similar dystopian project.
Someone comes in with a gripe that the bottom quintile imposes negative externalities on their education system. Your response is that the same people impose positive externalities when they grow up. These are not the same. If they were still imposing negative externalities when they grow up, I wouldn't want them to exist around me, and sending "non-average" people to space or some similar dystopian project [or jail] would be the correct game-theoretical response.
You missed the point: if you don't like how school work today, you need to improve the schools. If you are saving yourself, especially before helping others (because you have the means that others probably don't), you are the bad person in this situation, and you should reflect on your ethical position some time, preferably soon.
Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling. The US government has put such enterprising parents on terrorist watch lists for speaking up at school board meetings.
If a system is specifically set up against you, runs poorly, and in a real sense hates you, you have the option to let it fail without you. It is the polite, and least conflict path to leave it to its failure, and to forge your own way.
On the other hand, listening to people who tell you that you are unethical, guilty of an *ism of some kind, or bad, does not have a good track record of success. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What you suggest is specifically not going to happen on my part.
> Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling.
Then you, as a conscientious citizen, need to put pressure back on the US government. Instead, you are trying to save yourself at the expense of others, who cannot save themselves. You are like a grown-up man, who's trying to escape a sinking ship by pushing women and children off the deck to make way to the lifeboat.
I don't think your attitude warrants any kind of niceties. You should be treated like any other narcissistic egotist. It's not important to convince you, it's more important to either isolate you, or to prevent you from acting in the way you want by other means. Same way how it's not important to convince criminals to do good: it would've been nice if it was possible, but humans don't live long enough, and often lack capacity to reform, while the rest of the society usually lacks the resources to reform the offenders.
Don't forget that I am saving my own children at the """expense""" of other, usually very disruptive if not outright violent children. Make sure to add that to the list of grievances.
A nice bit of irony is that the same top down, authoritarian control your comment strives for is the same sort of control that prevents schools from improving themselves. Massive government control enacted to fix some social ill or another hobbles admins and teachers, preventing them from punishing disruptive kids, and thus ruining the teaching environment.
The idea that the government owns or in anyway deserves control over our children must be opposed, with arms if necessary.
"Improving" a system your opponents control by sacrificing your children's safety and education is a bad idea. The United States has several good options for parents to avoid the hell that modern antiracist educational doctrine has created.
So you are saying that people should remain irrevocably loyal to institutions that have lost their trust, do not further their interests, and are not meaningfully accountable to them, out of some notion that the most important thing to them ought to be optimizing aggregate statistical metrics involving large numbers of strangers, at the expense of the actual direct social obligations and communities that are central to their own lives.
It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.
Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.
We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.
To me, this is a development in the wrong direction. Shell is great precisely because it's so minimal. Everything is string rule is one that calms all of your type-induced fears.
Having to implement hash-tables, while still keeping the appearances of everything being a string is the anti-pattern known as "string programming" (i.e. when application develops a convention about storing type / structure information inside unstructured data, often strings).
I would love for there to be a different system shell with a small number of built-in types that include some type for constructing complex types. There are many languages that have that kind of type system: Erlang, for example. But, extending Unix Shell in this way is not going to accomplish this.
Oh, but we live with a lot of consequences of bad decisions, some of which have been made thousands of years ago :) A decade or two is nothing compared to it.
From cursory reading of the specification, the format doesn't seem to offer anything groundbreaking, no particular benefits compared to other similar formats.
Whatever your messaging format is going to be, the performance will mostly depend on the application developer and their understanding of the specifics of the format. So, the 20% figure seems arbitrary.
In practical terms, I'd say: if you feel confident about dealing with binary formats and like fiddling with this side of your application, probably, making your own is the best way to go. If you don't like or don't know how to do that, then, probably, choosing the one that has the most mature and robust tools around it is the best option.
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NB. It's also useful to remember that data transfer of the network is discrete, with the minimum chunk of information being MTU. So, for example, if most of the messages exchanged by the application were smaller than one MTU before attempting to optimize for size, then making these messages shorter will yield no tangible benefit. It's really only worth to start thinking about optimizations when a significant portion of the messages are measured in at least low double digits of MTUs, if we believe in the 20% figure.
It's a similar situation with the storage, which is also discrete, with the minimum chunks being one block. Similar reasoning applies here as well.
This isn't a new conundrum. This was a very contentious question in the end of the 19th century, where French mathematicians clashed with the German mathematicians. Poincare is known for describing proofs as texts intended to convince other mathematicians that something is the case, whereas Hilbert believed that automation is the way to go (i.e. have a "proof machine", plug in the question, get the answer and be done with it).
Temporarily, Germans won.
Personally, I don't think that proofs that cannot be understood have no value. We rely on such proofs all the time in our day-to-day interpretation of the world around us, our ability to navigate it and anticipate it. I.e. there's some sort of an automated proof tool in our brains that takes the visual input, feeling of muscle tonus, feeling of the force exerted on our body etc. and then gives an answer as to whether we are able to take the next step, pick up a rock and so on.
But, mathematicians also want proofs to be useful to explain the nature of the thing in question. Because another thing we want to do about things like picking up rocks, is we want to make that more efficient, make inanimate systems that can pick up rocks etc.
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NB. I'm not entirely sure how much LLMs can contribute in this field. The first successes of AI were precisely in the field of automated proofs, and that's where symbolic AI seems to work great. But, I'm not at all an expert on LLMs. Maybe there's some way I cannot think about that they would be better at this task, but on the face of it they just aren't.
From what I have heard when talking to the people behind formal analysis of protocol security, the main problem currently with using LLMs to 'interact with the theorem prover for you' is that there is nowhere near enough proofs out there for the LLMs to learn how to generalize from them.
> an algebra is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with operations of multiplication and addition and scalar multiplication by elements of a field and satisfying the axioms implied by "vector space" and "bilinear"
Historically though, the word "algebra" was used more broadly, and the further into the past you go, the more vague this term becomes. But, today, if you ask a mathematician, the definition above is how they would immediately understand algebra, and other kinds of algebras would need a qualification, eg. "linear algebra" or "abstract algebra" etc.
Another way to look at this is to say that various subfields of mathematics that are called "algebra" are studies of particular kinds of algebra (from the first definition). And so they will still have all the same elements: a set (with some restrictions on it), a multiplication and addition.
It could be surprising that so few basic elements give rise to such a rich field, but that's how math is... In a way, the elements you work with act more as constraints rather than extra dimensions. So, theories with very few basic elements tend to capture more stuff and be richer in terms of theorems than theories with more basic elements.
You’re confusing “algebra” with “an algebra.” You’re misunderstanding the terms here. For a simple example, group theory is absolutely a branch of algebra, and a group is not “an algebra”
I don't see how any of that matters to answering the question. Anything that's labeled "algebra" will have addition, multiplication and a field over which those operations are defined. This is the whole point of the term.
Transcendental functions s.a. sqrt() are to algebra like the trolley problem is to physics: deliberately excluded from the domain of discourse.
No. exponentiation and square root are not algebraic operations. Only addition and multiplication are. That's kind of the whole point of this theory / subfield of mathematics.
The operations you mentioned can be found in many different subfields of mathematics, eg. real analysis, number theory, or even arithmetic (using a more broad, but a well-accepted definition). But not in algebra. It's the point of algebra to only have addition and multiplication. And it's why, for example, algebraic geometry exists (because algebraic geometers want to avoid transcendental functions like sqrt(), sin() etc.)
Israel doesn't want to annex Yehuda and Shomron (the place you call West Bank). This is a complete misunderstanding of the people in the West about Israeli politics. Israel wants to have nothing to do with Arab population. Never wanted it, and doesn't see it wanting it in the future. It's completely antithetical to what the absolute majority of Israeli population (and the politicians who represent it) want.
The reason why Israel holds that territory is that after one of the wars, Israel tried to use it as a bargaining chip to convince its Arab neighbors to recognize Israel as a country and to sign a peace treaty, once the territory is returned (so-called "land for peace" series of UN treaties). But, the Arab neighbors outsmarted Israel by abandoning their people in occupied territories, and, essentially, handing Israel an armed grenade that it now has no idea what to do with.
With respect to this problem, Israel has different approaches to its solution, that range from the "transfer" (the idea that Israel will force / subsidize the Arab population to migrate out of the occupied territories, this is the extreme right-wing position, assassinated "Gandhi" was one of the major proponents of it.) to the two-state solution on the far left, where Israel makes territorial concessions, esp. in Jerusalem and around.
But there's no political force that wants annexation (including the population), and nobody would realistically dare to vanquish / force to move the whole population of Gaza / Yehuda and Shomron. Of course, you could probably find some oddball idiot declaring "death to all Arabs" or similar, but they don't hold any real political power. But even these people wouldn't want annexation if it meant they have to put up with the people from annexed territories.
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