Makes the divide between the developed and developing world very clear.

Edit: can’t be right. I think this is a dataset problem. China and Brazil should have more dots.

opensky database is limited. I need to find some data source for China and south America

Yeah. I'd invert his assumption. Any reading of history shows a lot of introspection. Read the writings of everyday soldiers in the Civil War. Read any writings from any of the Catholic thinkers of the last 2000 years. Read the Greeks and Romans. Marcus Aurelius was exceptional in his quality, but not in his direction. There are so many such examples throughout history that I think it would be much harder to examples of the lack of introspection.

If anything, I think the lack of introspection is a mostly modern phenomenon.

> Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code

Not the impression I get these days.

I think it’ll be on that same YouTube channel.

Correct, it will be on the CultRepo channel.

It’s not just NPM, though. Every Rails project and every Rust project I’ve seen ended up with massive numbers of dependencies vs what an equivalent project in Go or C# would have needed.

CPAN too, just try Hailo under Perl to test an old-fashioned chatbot based on Markov chains where very small LLM's and Hailo converge if used with the advanced training options for it. Yes, it will pull tons of dependencies, (less with cpanminus if run with 'cpanm -n Hailo'), but contrary to NPM, Pip and the like CPAN's repos are highly curated and before PHP and ubiquitoous Python Perl was used everywhere, from a sysadmin language (better than Bash/Sh for sure) to CGI, IRC bots and whatnot. How many issues did we have? Zero or near zero.

Honestly, you can get pretty far with just Bun and a very small number of dependencies. It’s what I love most about Bun. But, I do agree with you generally. .NET is about as good as I’ve ever seen for being batteries included. I just hate the enterprisey culture that always seems to pervade .NET shops.

I agree about the culture. If I take my eye off the dev team for too long, I'll come back and we'll be using entity framework and a 20 page document about configuring code cleanup rules in visual studio.

Entity framework is pretty good.

I have 2-3 old touchscreen laptops lying around. The touchscreen is useless to me. Worse than useless. If I ever use it, it’s accidentally, and I end up annoyed.

I was researching laptops at BestBuy and every page took ages to load, was choppy when scrolling, caused my iPhone 13 mini to get uncomfortably hot in my hand and drained my battery fast. It wouldn’t be noticeably different if they were crypto-mining on my iPhone as I browsed their inventory.

It’s astonishing how bad the experience was.

Best Buy is actually one of the worst and slowest websites from any large retailer. I cannot believe how bad it is. It's like they set out to make it pretty and accidentally stepped in molasses.

The irony! My router died literally an hour ago, and I was on bestbuy to buy a new one. Over 5g connection. That was probably the worst shopping experience I had in a while...

I think he meant: “How people at the time would have reacted.”

We have the SAT and ACT, and those are objective. The wealthy still pass disproportionately due to better tutoring specifically oriented to those tests. It’s Goodhart’s law.

That's fair, but... What's the alternative? Obviously someone's going to have better academic performance if you have tutors, there's no way around. Still, if you have good academic performance - you have it.

American system feels more unfair when you're given points for extracurriculars like playing instruments or sports, like that's not going to hold poorer children even more (also how's that related to academic performance at all? Unis should not care about unrelated things)

The university will argue that a well-rounded student body improves the experience for everybody. IE, a college that's 100% "nerds" won't be as good as college that's 80% "nerds", 10% "smart jocks", and 10% "band geeks" (or whatever other categories you want).

I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.

In Europe, university is treated as education for adults, not your entire life. Most universities are not campus resorts like in the US, but just buildings in the city itself, students live a normal life in the city, they rent a apartment or live in a dorm, take public transit to get to places, do sport at a sport place independent of the university, etc. You can live a well rounded life that way. The university is there so you learn your specialization. Of course people make friends there, but it doesn't have to be your entire life, and the university administrators job is not to meddle with people's social lives to make them "interesting", but to allow learning.

Our oldest unis are generally "downtown" or similar - Harvard, Princeton, UVA (sort of - Charlottesville is a really small city), etc. Though most do still have their own dormitory housing, at least for underclassmen.

The large campus-style uni is fairly recent creation - many came out of the land grant system during/after the Civil War. And even as newer unis have been created, they've followed that general design (even though they aren't land grant institutions).

All of those universities you mention still immerse students in the university setting round the clock, though.

> I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.

Even worse, rich kids have far more means to engage in extracurriculars than poor kids.

This just means US universities are for networking and partying as much as they are for learning.

Universities in the US and other countries are not the same, and comparing them is not really fruitful.

US universities do care about extracurriculars and GPA and other things because they aren’t optimizing for raw academic performance, they’re optimizing for various other things like an interesting student body (that attracts donors, professors, and future students), real-world networks, and so on.

In other words an extra four years of day care before those students have to function independently as adults.

No, that’s not even remotely close to what I wrote, at any level. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite, because selecting purely based on an abstract exam has nothing to do with being a real-world adult, whereas extracurriculars, internships, etc. do to some level.

Camus life is not good preparation for post campus life, unless Google and Facebook are still modeling their work environments to imitate campus life.

Pure lottery for all slots? Seems that it would be fairest possible alternative. Anything else being less fair.

One important thing is whether the tutoring is making better students, or just gaming the test.

And after graduation they can grind leetcode, and after that they can practice social cues to get in the management class. It's gamed tests all the way down.

For people who choose that career path. Still, somewhere somebody is doing some work.

The uggos I guess

Are those independent?

That's tricky. I think it depends on what kind of gaming and what kind of test.

Good schools for everyone

Wouldnt wealthy people on average be better educated and potentially more intelligent than the poorest group?

I would expect wealthy to always be well represented.

> potentially more intelligent than the poorest group

It's easy to think this but its not true. There is just a ton of privilege involved in life. There are groups in India who purely tutor slum kids to the top IITs(the JEE exams in India are very hard).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_30

They said "on average". Selecting 30 of the most talented from the poorest group does not contradict that.

On average more educated? Yes. More intelligent? Nah I see no data. Given the same access to resources I expect the kid from a poor family and a kid from a rich family to perform similarly.

I do not. Where do unintelligent people exist in your society?

And at a certain point the argument about equal access is entirely hypothetical. For example can’t redo early childhood. So if that impacts your ability then it’s been impacted.

> Where do unintelligent people exist in your society?

Everywhere? Both in rich and poor households.

> For example can’t redo early childhood. So if that impacts your ability then it’s been impacted.

Ah I thought the argument was more about genes(aka born smart) and not something like nutrition.

I think a good thought experiment is Formula 1. Most top F1 racers come from super rich backgrounds. Does that mean that more money == better driver? Its mostly a accessibility problem.

Which premise do you disagree with?

1. Financial and career success are correlated with good test skills.

2. Good test skills are strongly influenced by genetics or early childhood.

If you agree with both then you expect some correlation between wealth and test performance.

I disagree that being born to rich parents == you have better genetics.

It's mostly privilege. And just being born in America is one of the biggest privileges wrt career and wealth.

Well I’ll be charitable and interpret == as correlation as we are talking about averages.

From your conclusion you’re telling me wealth is completely random or the capabilities of children is completely random. Neither of those holds up to any scrutiny.

I don’t know what being born in the US has to do with the conversation.

Sorry I’m not familiar with Indian culture and power structures.

better educated I get, but more intelligent? That doesn't track.

Yes, very unintelligent people tend to not do well financially.

The problem seems to be that intelligence is not entirely heritable; that just because unintelligent people fail to do well financially doesn't mean that their children are doomed to the same fate.

Not entirely heritable? Or has no genetic correlation?

> just because unintelligent people fail to do well financially doesn't mean that their children are doomed to the same fate.

Correct, my statement is about expectation of averages. Not a claim that we should exclude an individual because of who their parents are.

> Not entirely heritable? Or has no genetic correlation?

My understanding is that there is some genetic correlation but it's not a certainty; smart/rich parents can have dumbass kids and vice versa.

It's hard to quantify because a direct "IQ" measurement is fraught with issues and trying to measure by "success" has its own issues. If you've not met a lawyer/doctor/PhD that you'd put in the "dumbass" category, you probably haven't met many.

Agreed. All children of smart people are not smart. All financially successful people are not smart.

Yeah it'd be very slight, but things like stress and nutrition can affect your memory in the long term which is a part of intelligence.

Assuming that’s true, wouldn’t that mean you are less capable?

Yes. There as difference between unfair and unreal; someone who is malnourished when growing up will forever likely be weaker than someone who received a proper sequence of meals.

We should perhaps recognize that and try to compensate for it, and it's not a value judgement on the person so afflicted, but pretending it doesn't exist just confuses matters.

If the difference is real I don’t think the test is the place to compensate as its function is to select people who will succeed in that area.

That's been the entire fight over the last 20+ years, does the test identify anything real and if so, what should be done with it (equality of outcomes vs equality of opportunity, e.g.).