I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor.
For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually deserved their badge of honor. But for students whose parents were "fortunate" enough to send them to private school, they became a part of a corrupt system, whose only incentive is to have its students pass the national exams. Most private schools had high graduate rate, due to them bribing testing officials to allow cheating.
I was one of those privileged students who went a private school, who passed the national test without even reading a single question. I paid the price for it once I started college in the US. But unlike my origin, I had a chance to take a break from college and recalibrate my brain in a sense and find joy in learning.
If failing were normalized and did not have so much social stigma or financial implications (to an extent), we would produce more educated people instead of once just chasing credentials.
I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for.
We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change.
Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more).
Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge.
I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy.
Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't
The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it.
What I want ultimately is that we strive to give a better life to everyone. And I don't think that's what meritocracy achieves.
> I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser
We already do this and we've done it throughout history too. There's always some excuse people will make to feel better than others. Wealth, religion, race, intelligence, education, all sorts of things.
But we do want high social mobility. If you work hard it is easy to climb the ladders. If you squander your wealth it is easy to slip. I'm not saying there should be no friction, the correct balance is always hard to find.
But whatever that merit is is something we need to decide as a society. It can be anything we want. It can be your work that contributes to monetary growth. It could be work that contributes to scientific growth. It could be how great of an artist you are. How popular you are. Our anything. We decide and we decide how much one means more than the other. Or we could even decide that there are no "lessers" and we could decide that the person traveling the world on their parent's dime has the same value to our society as a scientist, businessman, or artist. Mind you, I'm not talking about their value as a human, that's different
Well, meritocracy isn't just who gets the jobs. It's who gets the jobs that run society. And that's important for everyone, because it matters to everyone that society be competently run, rather than run by incompetents who have important parents.
Standardized testing so far is the worst solution, except for all the others.
Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.
My point implies that you have to be dynamic. If your evaluation methods are static for too long they get hacked. You have to balance that though. Change too often and your system is overly expensive and cumbersome. Change too infrequently and the cheaters end up at the top.
You're right that it can always be worse but you're wrong to say that we can't do better now
I think people say they want a meritocracy, but they actually mean "everyone can succeed", which are different. In a meritocracy where everyone is trying hard (like in asian cultures), then hard work is not enough, not everyone can succeed. In America, there is some slack so hard workers can succeed with below average genetics (which is why, practically, meritocracy="everyone can succeed") but I think things are changing as competition is increasing.
This is just a thought bubble, but it makes a certain amount of sense as to why the current administration is so dead-against DEI initiatives. Whilst they say it's about merit (and we all know it's not - just look at almost all of the appointees), it's actually about the added barriers in the way of assigning the individual (not the 'type of person') that they would choose for the role, based on their personal network of contacts and / or those who have made "charitable contributions" (which probably brings them into the fold of personal network contacts anyway).
DEI quotas make it hard to bring along a whole team of boot lickers.
Or in the case of this administration, window lickers.
Friend, you've misunderstood. @abaymado's point was that tier binning people's lives and careers on one or two numbers is an awful approach, and doing it probably produces more poorly educated people.
Every headline when I was in college was "App J Sold for a Gizzillion Dollars." So, I figured I would learn programming and join the club. Easier said than done. Nevertheless, I started watching YouTube videos titled "Make a Clone of J."
In hindsight, it was a horrible way to learn. Most YouTubers probably benefited more from clickbait teaching than from actual fundamental teaching. Eventually, I was able to navigate the internet and land on an actual structured curriculum, whose lectures and courses were long and boring but taught you the fundamentals of programming.
I am picking up a similar pattern with Vibe Coding. Beginners are more excited about having a launched product wrapped with a band-aid rather than having deep knowledge.
> $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is?
I used to follow OpenAI on Instagram, all their posts were reposts from paid influencers making videos on "How to X with ChatGPT." Most videos were redundant, but I guess there are still billions of people that the product has yet to reach.
I have owned both Quest 3 and the Vision Pro. It is safe to say that what Meta lacks in quality, it makes up for with creativity.
When I initially bought the Quest 3, it felt unnatural, bulky, and had a poor resolution. I regretted the purchase after a few minutes. But then I started downloading apps, mainly social apps like "Big Screen", where random people can create/join rooms. I started joining these rooms with my 480p avatar with low expectations. But to my surprise, each room was unique, with crypto talks, atheist/religious debates. I accidentally even stumbled on a rap battle room, where people were passing around a mic and free styling. All of a sudden, it felt like the Metaverse. The social interaction overshadowed the corky avatar and somehow convinced my brain that I was talking to a real human being and not an avatar.
I got invited to demo the Vision Pro prior to its release. They had already announced it at WWDC at this point. Given the price tag and the fact that it is Apple, I had high expectations. I was not disappointed. In fact, I was even more amazed. The cinema was phenomenal. After a few updates, my avatar or persona, like Apple likes to call it, looked just like me. But the plateau came too fast. Everything I tried on demoed the first day was everything it had to offer, just with different content. I still use the Vision Pro 2/3 times a week to watch movies or shows, and it is still a mind-blowing experience, but nothing that would make me rush to put the Vision Pro on.
I wish Apple would follow Meta’s footprint and bring more social apps to the Vision Pro. I don't want to be on FaceTime with people I know and watch an Apple TV show. I want to join rooms with randoms arguing about why Bitcoin will be in the future.
Yeah I clocked Apples death grip on the OS as a fundamental weakness after a few weeks with it. Every idea I had for an app, I had to cross off the list because “no API” or “no permission” etc. I’d have to wait years for Apple to first develop the APIs, then grant me permission to use them.
What worked on the iPhone and to a lesser extent the iPad, will absolutely not work on the head. It’s a head mounted TV because that’s all Apple allows it to be. They’re killing their own future to protect App Store sales.
Apple burned a lot of goodwill with developers over the years with App Store. Developers play by Apple's rules on App Store, because iPhone is such an attractive (and obviously hugely successful platform).
But when Vision Pro came, no developer wanted to give in very quickly. Netflix and YouTube sat out, and so did Spotify. And why not? They learned their lesson with App Store - you give an inch to Apple, and they'll bully you for years.
The same thing is playing out with Apple CarPlay Ultra. Ford (and other manufacturers) dont want Apple to barge in and bully their territory.
If only Apple were a little less selfish, they could have had this one
To add to this, I published an app on the Vision Pro App Store within the first few weeks of the Vision Pro release. A simple 3D garden that grows simultaneously as you complete your Pomodoro goals.
After the original release, I wanted to expand my app by adding more animals and plants. However, when I searched for my app in the App Store, it kept defaulting to iPhone/iPad apps. I don't have proof to support this, but it felt like it was done intentionally by Apple, and many developers were facing the same issue and started complaining, which eventually led Apple to decide to have the native store be the default search.
I have been shadow banned by EA before for selling an item at the auction below the average price, and this reminded me of that. I lost all interest in making apps for the Vision Pro or helping grow the ecosystem if Apple was going to be this greedy.
Apple doesn't support VR/AR standards like OpenXR, so really developers haven't had a lot of time to iterate. They've had a lot of time to experiment, and then were asked to write a program from scratch for a headset without motion-tracked controllers.
When they released visionos and a bespoke version of safari and it had zero support for openxr. After years of closed development and a full year of open development and they launched without support for the one api that was mandatory... Thats how you knew it was DOA
This is awesome! I always wanted to utilize AI for my day to day work Slack convos, but the friction of switching apps was more than me just proof reading, if I even did.
There have been a couple of instances, where I would try to debunk a conspiracy theory to a friend or family member and the next day, I would wake up to "Real/TikTok/Short" video with an AI narrating there exact argument. Most of the time, it's not even an LLM generated text turned to voice, rather an AI voice used to read a text the content creator has provided it. As long as it sounded like ChatGPT, Siri, "Her" combined with confirmation bias, people are treating these LLMs as their new oracles, as you may say.
Good job! Make it more mobile-friendly (only tested on iPhone). Like many others suggested, make the segments clickable for non-technical people to navigate, and add commands like cd, ls, etc., to make it more interesting for hackers. Gobez!
All it takes is one person to find out and raise the alarm. The average user doesn't read the source code behind openssl or whatever either, that doesn't mean there's no gains in open sourcing it.
The average user is also not reading these raised “alarms”. And if an app has a bad name, another one will show up with a different name on the same day.
You're on a tech forum, you must have seen one of the many post about app, either on Android or iPhone, that acts like spyware.
They happens from time to time, last one was not more than two week ago where it's been shown that many app were able to read the list of all other app installed on a Android and that Google refused to fix that.
Do you really believe that an app used to make your device part of a bot network wouldn't be posted over here ?
"You're on a tech forum", that's exactly the point. The "average user" is not on a tech forum though, the average user opens the app store of their platform, types "calculator" and installs the first one that's free.
For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually deserved their badge of honor. But for students whose parents were "fortunate" enough to send them to private school, they became a part of a corrupt system, whose only incentive is to have its students pass the national exams. Most private schools had high graduate rate, due to them bribing testing officials to allow cheating.
I was one of those privileged students who went a private school, who passed the national test without even reading a single question. I paid the price for it once I started college in the US. But unlike my origin, I had a chance to take a break from college and recalibrate my brain in a sense and find joy in learning.
If failing were normalized and did not have so much social stigma or financial implications (to an extent), we would produce more educated people instead of once just chasing credentials.
reply