Goes back a long way, c.f. C. P. Snow and the Two Cultures book or article in the 50s. Before that Charles Babbage had something to say about the state and teaching of mathematics in British universities.
My personal view is that there has to be a wider discussion on what 16 to 18 education is actually for in the UK, or at least England and Wales (Scotland has a different system, not sure about the Province).
To what extent do we have specialised often vocational courses for students? Do GCSE exams at age 16 still actually have a function?
Then you can have a discussion about the role of quantitative and logical thought in whatever system you decide to have.
PS: I'd keep mathematicians at least 50 miles away from any committee working on this. Nice people, but a tiny minority of the communities of practice who use mathematics to make decisions.
"They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool. 'Til you're so fucking crazy, you can't follow their rules." - John Lennon - Working Class Hero
Private schools feed into the top universities because the private schools provide actual education. The problem isnt that private schools are too good or that private schools educated people get better grades.
The problem is that the majority of pupils in state schools, be they intelligent or not intelligent never stand a chance and are recieving a terrible formal education.
Are you prepared to devote the resources necessary to provide class sizes in 'state' schools in the UK that match the class sizes found in private (i.e. 'Public') schools?
I am, many are not - in the timeframe of an election cycle it is wasted money. The money spent today would only show positive returns in 10-20 years time.
State school in the UK costs the governement £7,100 a year per pupil vs £13,700 a year for private schools (averages). The government is getting poor value for money, but it would cost ~50bn a year to send every secondary state school pupil to private schools.
It is cheaper to simply pander to your base, make the next generation of their offspring dumber and blame the foreigners or the rich people or boats or whatever gets people angry. It actually increases the size of your political base, with the only downside that it dumps your future party with a massive social welfare bill in the distant future. By then they will be burying you at a state funeral, and your decendants will be living offshore somewhere nice talking about how great the country was back in your day.
I've had burnout. I was 12-18 months in a startup before I realised it was not at all the right fit for me.
I was brought in as CTO to fix some stuff. I fixed that stuff and then realised that how I wanted the business to operate and how the CEO wanted to operate were very far apart.
It all came to a head when somebody got fired and I disagreed with both the decision and how it was carried out. This was just one item amongst a bunch of other things.
This drained me so hard emotionally. I was CTO at another startup for much longer and never got close to this level of burnout. I've talked to someone else about this (talking is helpful) and they had a similar experience. It's not always about the hours or the tenure. 60 hours/week in the right environment is very different to 40 hours/week in the wrong environment.
It took a few years for me to get over this. I took some less complicated jobs with less responsibilities and less personal investment before chucking myself back into the fire. It's going well so far and I'm definitely more resilient as I've been through some pretty dire work shit since then.
Sorry to hear you're having a tough time of it. Getting less personally invested for a while really helped me. I also took on some hobbies that I had total control over and that helped too.
> It all came to a head when somebody got fired and I disagreed with both the decision and how it was carried out. This was just one item amongst a bunch of other things.
I've never been involved in HR / sausage making you're describing but I can empathize so much with this feeling.
At one of my better jobs I was a developer on a backend app that would crash frequently due to queue processing issues. I kept getting distracted from what I was doing to fix this as it blocked account management teams from using the system (making money). I went out of my way to create a prototype tool to diagnose the issue (that I was fixing almost every day) and when I asked management for some time at work to finish it, they said no.
The way this was handled was fucking awful. They gave me a meeting to present what I created, but before it started the most senior person started things by saying "I'm going to let you present this but there's no way we're going to use it".
I wish I had just said ok I won't waste your time, I quit.
This is one of those PTSD trauma things I havent quite gotten over yet... it melted my candle in an unhealthy way.
It's especially sad for me because for a time (about a year?) it was the best job I've ever had and I really fondly look back on the things I did and (most of) the people I got to work with. It was a great fit for a time but it came undone in a way I was unprepared for.
This person was responsable for multiple public HR debacles, their seniority meant everything was swept under a rug.
One employee provided a list of things "if we can't fix these, this is my two weeks notice" and this choad responded with "cool see ya".
HR got involved and after his two weeks was announced by choad he was suddenly back with the company, just kidding! Said employee stayed around for another month or two but ultimately left.
"I'm in charge, so I'm right" is the most cancerous personality to deal with. I pride myself on acknowledging when I'm wrong and I'm astounded and disappointed at the lack of ability in 99% of people to engage in genuine reflection / introspection.
Hah. Lack of pay on job ads is one of my biggest bugbears!
I've always been of the opinion that nice to haves just shouldn't be there. They don't help self-select in a meaningful way. The must haves must be actual must haves. E.g. must be able to code confidently in Python.
I looked into it briefly a few months ago but I'm not a biochemist/plant scientist; there is a lot of research on growing human organs, not so much growing fruits.
I'm sure it's possible to trick a plant stem cell into turning into a flower, then fruit, but I think the main question is whether it's economically viable. At the end of the day you would have to bypass photosynthesis and introduce sugars from some external source to grow the fruit which is probably quite expensive and inefficient. I chalked it up to being a very obvious idea which Monsato would have a solution for if it was viable.
Interesting to think though that if you did it perfectly you could turn some weight in sugar + water + stuff into an avocado.
I worry that it's not as easy as just tricking some cells into growing into what they want - you'll likely also need to replicate appropriate flow of energy, nutrients and signalling chemicals - i.e. basically fake the rest of the plant.
Fair enough! Hopefully it will not become a problem. In the end, it's just the name and we want to be defined by the product and its value rather than by the name itself.
As to why exactly we picked it: as ray casting is a way to instantly query information about closest objects, we thought it would be a good metaphor for instantly querying and accessing different third party services. Rays represent speed and focus.
Interesting! What makes it hard for you to develop trust? For me, I think that if I can't trust someone than I don't want them working for me in any capacity (office or remote!)
Not the OP, but I would imagine part of this comes from the fact that when you work side-by-side with someone, your level of non-verbal communication and just the ability to get to know one another is generally going to be a lot higher. You trust someone through getting to know them better. I'm not saying you can't achieve this level of communication, familiarity, and trust remotely, but I would assume it takes more planned effort to do so.
The deep flow disturbance can be caused by any sort of communication. So basically, that’s an argument against communication, as opposed to being an argument against standups.
If anything, by being at a fixed time, either at the start, or the end of a team’s day, it’s far easier to prevent a standup from disrupting deep work than a Slack message would be.
Except async communication doesn't disrupt deep flow if done properly since it should be simply ignored until flow breaks or pauses naturally.
A slack message won't disrupt my deep work because I'll have notifications turned off, unless it's extremely urgent in which case it would be too urgent to leave until a standup anyway.
My personal experience as a Brit is that the UK has a growing trend of anti-intellectualism and being innumerate is "cool" in certain circles.