tl;dr: Education rant. If you don't like rants don't read this comment.
7 hour a day have no motivation other than preparing kids for 9 to 5 jobs and depriving kids of their valuable time and potential.
Software used in education has a lot of room for improvement. A 1 man operation like 3Blue1Brown has done more for education than man-centuries of work in education software.
Kids spend years learning inefficient arithmetic algorithms. An 8 year old abacus user wipes the floor with an American teacher in mental math.
With respect to civics, kids learn about democracy in Ancient Greece but don't learn about corporations and lobbying, which nowadays has more weight than democracy.
A lot of adults today don't remember that Americans were given free land grants in the Mexican states of Alta California and Tejas (now California and Texas respectively, top American states by GDP) and then revolted against the Mexicans to later be annexed by the US. Similar story in Hawaii. The US set a shitty precedent in terms of respecting borders, sovereignty and immigration, creating the crisis that is now being weaponized today by corporations to transfer their blame to laborers that spend all their money in food rather than the true reason for our economic situation: trillions of dollars taken from taxpayers to pay "Quantitative easing" to the financial mafia and more trillions wasted in wars that achieved nothing other than make private defense contractors richer.
Kids won't learn about how the US Chinese exclusion act started the opium poppy planting industry in Mexico that later evolved into the humanitarian clusterfuck that is the War on drugs.
Kids won't learn about mass incarceration and its legal foundations like the loopholes that are possible by the 13th amendment to the US constitution.
Kids won't learn about mass surveillance by corporations and governments and how their privacy is being taken away.
Kids won't spend a lot of time thinking about compound interest and how it can make or break their lives, or how population doubles every 63 years and what will happen to us if this keeps happening.
Of course they will learn, eventually. Or like me, they will learn at a young age but struggle to apply the concepts in adulthood in a meaningful way, because we're all learning these lessons as we go, but we haven't learned effective antidotes yet to concentrations of power that become destructive.
Got any good recommendations for some of these? I'd love to recommend some books to my students who actually care (and for myself, on some topics I'm unaware of)... Unfortunately many don't care, which is another problem in and of itself.
> that smallness-of-file or smallness-of-function is not a target to shoot for
I disagree. Unless you are methodical and know what you are doing (like NASA or the authors of Kubernetes), it is hard to create large functions and files by keeping levels of detail consistent and not repeating code.
How do you test a function that has 100 unique outcomes? How do you safely maintain it to ensure it won't break? How do you even know it's working?
Write automated proofs? Probably best but tooling is junk - it's rarely supported.
Constraint or property based tests as opposed to value tests? (That depends on how unique.)
Usually the only thing that does unique things is a direct mapping, everything else is either an equation or has other preconditions, postconditions and internal or external properties.
It also makes the logic more directly visible and refactoring easier presuming tests are reasonably written.
It's not an uncommon tactic to give homeless one-way tickets to other cities. In fact, San Francisco actively does it as well [0]. It doesn't seem like San Francisco and cities like it are particularly targeted for this kind of activity. The only case I can recall is in the case of Nevada intentionally sending mental patients to SF which was settled out of court[1].
I talked to someone who worked at a shelter about this. He was able to provide several cases of someone calling the shelter from another city informing them someone else was on a bus on on their way to SF and that they needed a bed. He had to inform them that a person had to be present that day to request a bed, and the other person on the phone going, "Whatever, they are your city's problem now."
So it does happen, but they don't want to publish it out of fear that it will just legitimize the practice for other cities.
> in the end, it will benefit humans. And we are more important than pigs.
Let's agree with you for a moment and understand what it really means:
- Let's say you are N times more intelligent than an average pig.
- Now let's say another species appears, where the average individual is N times more intelligent than you.
According to your argument, you would voluntarily subject yourself to experimentation, including getting your brain removed.
Of course you would not do that. So your argument is really about justifying the abuse of other species of mammals that cannot defend themselves.
Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.
This argument is valid forwards, but not universally backwards. Otherwise you could repeat it with pigs and ants, and then with ants and bacteria.
There is a spectrum of life, on one end you have self-propagating chemical reactions, on the other you have beings with moral significance. Whether or not experiments on animals are morally justified depend on where those animals lie on this spectrum, and the form and goal of the experiment.
I'm not trying to say here where pigs lie on the spectrum, just that this discussion needs to happen on a much deeper level of details than "humans are more important than pigs" vs. "but aliens could say the same thing about us" for it to be useful.
(Personally, as long as the brains remain comatose all the way through, I don't feel there's a problem here. If they were active... that would be animal cruelty to me. But that's just my individual moral intuition.)
Obviously, this is very sticky moral ground, and I don't claim to absolutely have the answers....
But I think there is merit to the idea of personage. Types of dolphins have been declared non-human persons, as have some primates, by several governments. There is some significant evidence that elephants may also belong in this grouping.
I think that at some point, an individuals awareness and potential for moral autonomy becomes significant enough that it deserves recognition as such by others with similar capabilities.
I don't pretend to know exactly how to judge this, but I think it is possible as we gain knowledge about the nature of intelligence to make judgements on this criteria.
I think that all animals (and plants) should be treated humanely within the practical possibility of doing so (I subscribe to the "if you can't fix it, try not to break it" philosophy) but I think it is farsical to attempt to equivilize the moral significance of dogs and pigs with that of humans and primates.
Others have already touched upon a few other points in your argument, but quite frankly, intelligence is not a good metric.
And neither is a creature's ability to measure morality.
Do we know how a pig measures morals? Do we know how to measure a pig's awareness? To an extent, we can measure a pig's intelligence, but is it simply 'doing what is repeated over and over' or is there actual understanding of the why behind an action?
Quite frankly, we don't know. We're not even close to understanding how to measure such things.
Because, right now, humans only really understand humans and how the human brain works. We can measure morality, intelligence, and awareness in humans, to a point. And yet...Shit, the brain is one of the least understood parts in humans still.
And we have very, very limited understanding of how animals "see" awareness, consciousness, intelligence, and moral ambiguity.
That isn't even why we need to do more brain research on animals.
Humans need to survive. That's our base-code. Survive. And quite frankly, humanity is on the verge of our own mass-extinction. Maybe brain research wont save us in the end, but it might help us find ways to continue living as a species when the Earth is a ball of dust.
And even then, the potential to understand ourselves, and animals, even more has amazing possibilities. Yes, five hundred years from now, we might look back and think, 'Damn, they did that to an animal?!'
But we would also understand why we had to do it, just like how we understand why people a hundred years ago experimented on animals and humans to develop our scientific knowledge to where it is today.
If theory of mind is the issue, some pigs display some attributes that could be interpeted as theory of mind.
In any case, your argument fell apart because there is no metric you can pick to justify what we do to animals other than: it is wrong but it is the least of evils right now (from a legal standpoint), which is different to "humans are more important than pigs".
Your argument is a slippery slope that leads to very dark places: can the rich experiment on the poor?, can we experiment on the disabled or mentally ill?... if being "important" justifies abuse, we would live in a world of abuse.
That is important because when simulations can solve the problem, we could outlaw experimentation in-vivo.
>where the average individual is N times more intelligent than you.
Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. Of course that’s a stupid metric. How many times more intelligent are you than a mushroom? Why is that an acceptable amount and not this pig ratio.
>Of course you would not do that.
Don’t call people liars without evidence to turn them into straw men that are easier to tear down.
>Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.
It’s not op’s argument. It’s yours. Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. You then disregarded the part where op said he/she would volunteer because it didn’t fit your narrative.
7 hour a day have no motivation other than preparing kids for 9 to 5 jobs and depriving kids of their valuable time and potential.
Software used in education has a lot of room for improvement. A 1 man operation like 3Blue1Brown has done more for education than man-centuries of work in education software.
Kids spend years learning inefficient arithmetic algorithms. An 8 year old abacus user wipes the floor with an American teacher in mental math.
With respect to civics, kids learn about democracy in Ancient Greece but don't learn about corporations and lobbying, which nowadays has more weight than democracy.
A lot of adults today don't remember that Americans were given free land grants in the Mexican states of Alta California and Tejas (now California and Texas respectively, top American states by GDP) and then revolted against the Mexicans to later be annexed by the US. Similar story in Hawaii. The US set a shitty precedent in terms of respecting borders, sovereignty and immigration, creating the crisis that is now being weaponized today by corporations to transfer their blame to laborers that spend all their money in food rather than the true reason for our economic situation: trillions of dollars taken from taxpayers to pay "Quantitative easing" to the financial mafia and more trillions wasted in wars that achieved nothing other than make private defense contractors richer.
Kids won't learn about how the US Chinese exclusion act started the opium poppy planting industry in Mexico that later evolved into the humanitarian clusterfuck that is the War on drugs.
Kids won't learn about mass incarceration and its legal foundations like the loopholes that are possible by the 13th amendment to the US constitution.
Kids won't learn about mass surveillance by corporations and governments and how their privacy is being taken away.
Kids won't spend a lot of time thinking about compound interest and how it can make or break their lives, or how population doubles every 63 years and what will happen to us if this keeps happening.