Technology is at the mercy of our social and financial systems, it rarely leads social advancement. As with other tools, it can be used in many ways
In surveying my friends in Silicon Valley, it seems that most VCs/techies know that:
1. This administration is likely leading us into long term wars and social instability
2. American Dynamism and Defense Tech (or more politely bundled into "DeepTech") are war profiteering, benefiting from greater instability
Speaking / acting out against the American military complex and Big Tech/VC's role in this carries 3 big risks:
1. Not being invited to parties ("too much negative energy, we want to be surrounded by positivity" or "don't talk politics")
2. Censorship and reduced following across most major social media platforms
3. Being economically left out as the world bifurcates into a K-shape economy
As a result, most of my community (generally peace-loving, music-loving humans) seem to be either taking a position of "the world has always been at war and will always be at war, I'm just a realist" or "I'm just going to focus on my locust of control and my personal wellbeing" or "if it's gonna happen anyways, I might as well make money off of it". There is a strong contingent of the resistance as well (still fighting for climate, social justice, peace) but much higher rates of depression and social isolation in this group
So it does not seem to be a problem that can be solved by more information and more technology (though k-12 and higher education assuredly is worth investing in), but perhaps by less nihilism and a stronger social/moral fabric
A big reason I am considering starting a company again is that we need more flags of institutions that carry large weight/reputation and stand for a set of values that is different than the current (and historical) status quo. I expect most of my community would be thrilled to align with those flags if those flags where held up tall and broke through the noise
Which is to say, if you're considering setting up one of those flags, please please do. The world doesn't have to be this way.
The Department of Defense was named as such after the detonations of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
We - as a humanity - collectively recognized the weight of our creation, and decided to walk back
Discussing “AI alignment” in the same breadth as aligning with a “Department of War” (in any country) is simply not an intellectually sound position
None of the countries we’ve attacked this year pose an existential threat to humanity. In contrast, striking first and pulling Europe, Russia, and China into a hot war beginning in the Middle East surely poses a greater collective threat than bioweapons, sentient AI, or the other typical “AI alignment” concerns
Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?
Among those who would resist, half would've done so outwardly by now and been fired, the other half would be hiding their activity. In both cases we wouldn't be hearing about them now.
Technology and national defense are 100% part of the same conversation.
I'm not saying the government can't overreach or over control, but if I or you or any of us were in charge of the defense of a country then we'd want to make sure technology from our country at the very least wasn't used to hurt us and if possible used to help us.
That's what alignment means and it's totally reasonable.
The bomb was built with decision to delay shipment until the 13th to see if Japan surrendered. On the 13th no word had come, but the shipment was further delayed to wait for word anyways. On the 14th word of Japan's decision to surrender was announced. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/articles-and-features/gen...
Had the bomb already been shipped, nothing about these delays suggests it would have instead been dropped before surrender instead of just delayed there. In reality, the pause sources from when Truman intervened immediately after Nagasaki (which was bombed on the 9th, Hiroshima previously on the 6th) by the 10th in hopes of unconditional surrender instead.
Had Japan not surrendered for some reason (they had more going south at the time than just the nukes) the US may well have dropped a 3rd bomb over another approach. That said, I'll give due credit to Truman that the activity was paused on hopes of surrender first rather than waiting for the next one to arrive.
> Why aren’t there more dissidents among the researcher ranks?
Because they’ve likely all lost faith in humanity watching Trump get reelected and now just want to get rich and hope to insulate their families from the reality we’re all living in.
Not disagreeing with you but “I lost all faith in humanity so I might as well run the gas chambers” is the delusion of a psychopath and completely inexcusable.
Nazi Germany and Hitler didn't pose an existential threat to Europe until they did pose a threat.
And even then you had politicians like Chamberlain in the UK who wanted to make peace because the UK wasn't directly threatened (this is after much of Europe was under siege).
It's not "just" a $200m contract, it's the start of a lucrative relationship
1. Stargate seemed to require a dedicated press conference by the President to achieve funding targets. Why risk that level of politicization if it didn't?
2. Greg Brockman donated $25mil to Trump MAGA Super PAC last year. Why risk so much political backlash for a low leverage return of $200m on $25m spent?
3. During WW2, military spend shot from 2% to 40% of GDP. The administration is requesting $1.5T military budget for FY2027, up from $0.8T for FY2025. They have made clear in the past 2 months that they plan to use it and are not stopping anytime soon
If you believe "software eats the world" it is reasonable to expect the share of total military spend to be captured by software companies to increase dramatically over the next decade. $100B (10% of capture) is a reasonable possibility for domestic military AI TAM in FY2027 if the spending increase is approved (so far, Republicans have not broken rank with the administration on any meaningful policy)
If US military actions continue to accelerate, other countries will also ratchet up military spend - largely on nuclear arsenals and AI drones (France already announced increase of their arsenal). This further increases the addressable TAM
Given the competition and lack of moat in the consumer/enterprise markets, I am not sure that there is a viable path for OpenAI to cover it's losses and fund it's infrastructure ambitions without becoming the preferred AI vendor for a rapidly increasing military budget. The devices bet seems to be the most practical alternative, but there is far more competition both domestically (Apple, Google, Motorola) and globally (Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei) than there is for military AI
Having run an unprofitable P&L for a decade, I can confidently state that a healthy balance sheet is the only way to maintain and defend one's core values and principles. As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn - the road to hell (aka a heavily militarized world) is oft paved with the best intentions
First, I have to say I loved your thoughtful & detailed comment. You have clearly considered this from the financial side; let me add some color from the perspective of someone working with frontier researchers.
> As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn
I will push back here. Dario & co are not starry-eyed naive idealists as implied. This is a calculated decision to maximize their goal (safe AGI/ASI.)
You have the right philosophy on the balance sheet side of things, but what you're missing is that researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter.
It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability.
There is no substitute for sheer IQ:
- You can't buy it (god knows Zuck has tried, and failed to earn their respect).
- You can't build it (yet.)
- And collaboration amongst less intelligent people does not reliably achieve the requisite "Eureka" realizations.
Had Anthropic gone forth with the DoD contract, they would have lost this top crowd, crippling the firm. On the other hand, by rejecting the contract, Anthropic's recruiting just got much easier (and OAI's much harder).
Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth. Yes, there's a lot of money, but very few highly intelligent people want to work for them. (Almost no top talent wants to work for Palantir, despite the pay.) So, naturally:
- If OpenAI becomes a glorified military contractor, they will bleed talent.
- Top talent's low trust in the government means Manhattan Project-style collaborations are dead in the water.
As such, AGI will likely emerge from a private enterprise effort that is not heavily militarized.
Finally, the Anthropic restrictions will last, what, 2.5 more years? They are being locked out of a narrow subset of usecases (DoD contract work only - vendors can still use it for all other work - Hegseth's reading of SCR is incorrect) and have farmed massive reputation gains for both top talent and the next administration.
This is an interesting perspective. What happens if there is a large global war? Do researchers who were previously against working with the DoD end up flipping out of duty? Does the war budget go up? Does the DoD decide to lift any ban on Anthropic for the sake of getting the best model and does Anthropic warm its stance on not working with autonomous weapons systems?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the answer is “yes” to at least 1 or 2, then I think the equation flips quite a bit. This is what I’m seeing in the world right now, and it’s disconcerting:
1. Ukraine and Russia have been in a skirmish that has been drawn out much longer than I would guess most people would have guessed. This has created a divide in political allegiance within the United States and Europe.
2. We captured the leader of Venezuela. Cuba is now scared they are next.
3. We just bombed Iran and killed their supreme leader.
4. China and the US are, of course, in a massive economic race for world power supremacy. The tensions have been steadily rising, and they are now feeling the pressure of oil exports from Iran grinding to a halt.
5. The past couple days Macron has been trying to quell tension between Israel and Lebanon.
I really do not hope we are not headed into war. I hope the fact that we all have nukes and rely on each others’ supply chains deters one. But man does it feel like the odds are increasing in favor of one, and man does that seem to throw a wrench in this whole thing with Anthropic vs. OpenAI.
"We" here clearly means USA+israel. There isn't a distinction between the two when they're working towards the same goals, bombing everything in sight, together.
The one who pulled the trigger is irrelevant here, because both have pulled the trigger hundreds or thousands of times in the past few days, dividing up targets between them for the joint operation.
> Given that direct assassination is still prohibited by EO 11905 / 12036 / 12333
It sounds like you think this means something?
Obviously it doesn't when we're talking about an administration that openly breaks laws, much less EOs, and issues whatever EOs they want saying whatever they want, even in violation of previous EOs. There aren't even any repercussions to the president "violating an EO".
So, the pedantry here is irrelevant. The two parties are on the same team, working towards the same goal, doing the same things, divvying up the list of targets to strike.
Given that you totally ignored the substance of my post, and instead focused on attacking me personally, it does seem like you're not interested in a discussion, and not a good fit for the HN culture and guidelines. So yeah, maybe you are right and it would be better if you left.
But! That's not who you always have to be! I'm confident you can coherently articulate your point without resorting to that. Feel free to come back if you're willing to share why you feel the president not complying with a presidential executive order is significant here, rather than insignificant.
that is considering if there will be elections, which many people don't believe it's the case.
reminder that trump has been flirting with just continuing in power (2028 hats and talks about a third term) and is responsible for trying a coup last time he lost.
personally I think there's a possibility where he'll just declare martial law and stay in power at the end of his term.
> researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter. It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability.
This is a massive cope imo. The reason that the AI industry is so incestuous is just because there are only a handful of frontier labs with the compute/capital to run large training clusters.
Most of the improvements that we’ve seen in the past 3 years are due to significantly better hardware and software, just boring and straightforward engineering work, not brilliant model architecture improvements. We are running transformers from 2017. The brilliant researchers at the frontier labs have not produced a successor architecture in nearly a decade of trying. That’s not what winning on research looks like.
Have there been some step-change improvements? Sure. But by far the biggest improvement can be attributed to training bigger models on more badass hardware, and hardware availability to serve it cheaply. To act like the DoD isn’t going to be able to stand up pytorch or vllm and get a decent result is hilarious: the reason you use slurm and MPI and openshmem is because national labs and DoD were using it first. NCCL is just gpu accelerated scope-reduced MPI. nvshmem is just gpu accelerated scope-reduced openshmem.
If anything, DoD doesn’t have the inference throughput requirements that the unicorns have and might just be able to immediately outperform them by training a massive dense model without optimizing for time to first token or throughput. They don’t have to worry about if the $/1M tokens makes it economically feasible to serve, which is a primary consideration of the unicorns today when they’re choosing their parameter counts. They can just rate limit the endpoint and share it, with a 2 hour queue time.
The government invented HPC, it’s their world and you’re just playing in it.
> Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth.
Sure the architecture is from 2017. But the gap between GPT-1 and frontier models today is not simply "more FLOPs" and as simple as "standing up PyTorch and vllm" - theres thousands of undocumented decisions about data, alignment, reward modeling, training stability, and inference-time strategies, and lots of tribal knowledge held by a small group of people who overwhelmingly do not want to work on weapons systems.
The dense model argument is self-defeating long term. Sparsity (MoE etc.) lets you build a smarter model at the same compute budget, so going dense because you can afford to waste FLOPs is how you fall behind b/c you never came up with the step function improvements needed.
Sure, the DoD invented HPC, but it also invented the internet, and then the private sector made it actually useful.
Adjacent medicines have seen major improvements: eg Ketamine was a significant improvement from PCP (notably, less psychosis and safe enough to use off the battlefield / with children)
“Removing the worst and most fatal danger” is a laudable goal with Fentanyl given the absurd rate of ODs
As have the opioids buprenorphine and Suboxone (buprenorphine/naloxone), which are genuinely useful treatments for addiction and have much lower risks of abuse.
Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education:
1. Old and expensive to maintain land
2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty)
3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club)
It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education
The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone
As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed
Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. If we wanted elite colleges to provide the benefits that they are supposed to; then we would, if anything, want to reduce matriculation.
Stanford,—and I would hazard a guess many other HYPSM schools,—are already minting out too many students; this is especially true when it comes to non-PHD masters degrees, which are essentially an unbecoming cash cow for departments. Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours; increasing matriculation would only lead to more auditorium-sized classes that are run by lecturers or postdocs—these classes are essentially at the same level as trudging through online material.
Your proposed "solution" would have a Procrustean effect: I can't speak for Chinese or Indian universities, but while schools like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, University of Michigan, et seq... have good reputations, they have a noticeably lower reputation than the ivy leagues and certain private colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech—and a worse reputation for being degree mills.
If you think that Stanford having 180,000 students matriculated will give everyone a quality education, then I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality. The only benefit that would come of it would be popping the degree bubble and prematurely ending the current moribund trajectory that universities are on; where they are already treating degrees as if they were artificial-scarcity NFTs, rather than providing the actual scarcity that is access to,—and direct training from,—high-level researchers.
Stanford has a $40 billion endowment for 8k undergrads. UCLA has a $10 billion endowment for 34k undergrads. Naturally, the class sizes will be much larger. The UC system does not put 100% of students at UC Berkeley and UCLA, they distribute it across several campuses and distance education and maintain a leveling system that helps promising research talent be in the room with experienced researchers
Despite rising costs, a college degree is still a positive lifetime investment for students (not to mention the positive externalities educated populations have on society at large). The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure
HYPSM choosing to share land, curriculum, expertise, and administrative infrastructure through network'd partnerships would lead to massive economies of scale and a broad reduction of educational costs. Another way to think about this - is one city of 1 million people more efficient to run per capita than 10 cities of 100k people? The answer is a resounding yes due to urban scaling. Colleges are effectively mini-cities
"I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality" -> I founded an in-person college with regional accreditation that had a lot more 1:1 and small group teacher time than HYPSM and an average starting salary on par with CS grads from these schools. Our alumni have gone on to become YC founders and can be found at most top tech companies and startups
It is a choice to value exclusivity for exclusivity's sake (eg. withholding JSTOR data from students of colleges who can't afford those costs). The best institutions (eg. YC, Apple) care a lot more about what you can build than what school you got into at age 17
The solution is to hoard ideas, organize them, review them and experiment. I for example suspect that giving students more time for everything would improve results. I have nothing to show for this but it would be good science to run the experiment. Unless of course there are better sounding ideas that should be tried first.
"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure"
I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.
It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes
Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.
You want them to go back to being finishing schools for the wealthy, as they were before Hopkins (funnily enough) founded the first institute in the US that would be seen as a form of a modern university today?
For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.
You're putting words in my mouth. I merely pointed out that they have a very confused mission thus I think it is not surprising that there is dysfunction.
We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment).
I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target.
If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors? I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia. The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.
> You're putting words in my mouth. I merely pointed out that they have a very confused mission thus I think it is not surprising that there is dysfunction.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.
> We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment).
> I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target.
I agree that undergraduate institutions should be required to set unambiguous goals for each program, but what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"? I think there is value in having these multi-faceted institutions that are a combination of finishing school, classical academic study, and vocational training that can (and do) produce sufficiently educated and mature adults who can independently function in society.
That is the mission of the undergraduate portion of the Arts and Sciences school at basically every college/university. Professional schools have a slightly more specific mission.
> If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors?
Excellent question, and it's one for the history department to answer. Maybe things stay as they are now and it's a home for the many people who don't have specific career goals while attending college, and that is their goal.
> I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia.
"Pure" academia only exists for those with a patron (which could be themselves), which is non-existent at any meaningful scale.
> The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.
Good for them, because anyone applying their CS knowledge in any capacity needs to know that.
If you want to go major in purely theoretical CS at a place that offers only courses that are effectively a specialization of a math major, there is value in it but the department offering them has to answer the same questions as the history department.
It seems we largely agree. For example I wasn't criticizing the CS program at my undergrad, simply observing the mismatch between the label on the tin and what was actually inside.
Observations of inconsistencies, dysfunctions, and similar are not necessarily calls for any particular course of action.
> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.
I merely observed that many of the issues people point out can be traced back (at least IMO) to having a set of confused and inconsistent goals. I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly controversial observation to anyone who's had significant contact with US academia within the past few decades.
> what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"?
They probably don't belong there. Most of them only attend because you need a diploma to land a job. Not because the education is particularly useful to the job, but rather because of what diplomas historically signaled about a candidate before everyone had them. Now it seems to just be a holdover (ie we require them because we've always required them and at this point everyone worthwhile has one). At least that's my (admittedly quite cynical) view.
I'm all for a more educated populace but if that's what we want then we should directly implement that.
I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
> I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
I didn't, because it seemed like a cheap insult. I don't know that directionless students have serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. They can have serious negative impacts on themselves due to student loan debt and a lack of a financially viable skillset when they stop attending college (with a degree or not).
What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives? And I'm not defending the status quo, which certainly can be improved.
Classes and more importantly practices get watered down to accommodate them. The situation gradually looks less like university of the 1950s and more like highschool.
Loans that can't be discharged removes lender hesitancy thus removes some degree of downward price pressure from the market. Institutions then have an incentive to capture this money due to the sheer quantity of it - ie not to let marginal students wash out. Hence the changes.
They even start attempting to attract based on amenities rather than prices. I won't belabor the subject. Others have written about it in incredible detail over the past several decades.
> What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives?
I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.
As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
> Classes and more importantly practices get watered down to accommodate them. The situation gradually looks less like university of the 1950s and more like highschool.
Fair, though the solution there is to just flunk them out.
> I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.
I'm not convinced this is happening at the scale you think it is, but higher education is an arms race to some extent and you'd need to get all parties to agree to de-escalate, but only for the ones who don't get much value out of the experience (a group that is somewhat hard to identify a priori).
> As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
For the jobs, probably not. I still think a portion of the "college experience" is just maturing, which I agree could be done while working in theory but there is some personal opportunity cost there.
It's not an easy problem or one that can be solved individually IMO. Something like mandatory public service could be an answer, but I don't have high hopes of that being enacted.
As I understood the grandparent post, the idea is that a highest-level university should 10× its student throughput, and 9 other, lower-level universities would be made redundant by that.
This would make sense if all what an elite university did were providing elite-level education. Of course exclusive schools provide other benefits, often more valuable for the target audience than the education proper: a highly filtered student body, networking and bonding with the right, upwardly mobile people (either mega-talented, or just smart kids of rich and influential parents), a luxury-grade diploma that few can afford. Maybe you could theoretically 10× Stanford or MIT, but likely not Yale.
I see the value of the students, it just seems like an odd thing for a government to subsidize via NIH/NSF funding. We don’t really have anything analogous to that in Canada and it just seems awfully weird that it exists in the US without the “it’s older than the country” excuse that Oxford/Cambridge have.
>Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours
I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high.
lower tier universities have excellent faculty, they are selected from applicants from the elite universities as well as excellent students from lower tier universities who have floated to the top. Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.
Not trying to be a jerk, but we see the same thing in athletics, elite athletes are significantly above the next tier, and so on. the worst professional team can beat the best college team, because the worst professional team is still made up of the cream of the college teams, with experience (i.e. more education) added on.
at a lower tier university, a dedicated student can still work in labs if they want, but as you move down the tiers you simply get fewer autistics and more partiers. University of Michigan is an excellent univeristy, but do you think the students are studying on weekends, like they do at MIT? no, they're not.
>Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.
Only if the school mandates a quota of passing grades. Not sure about HYPSM but anecdotally at my (Canadian) alma mater no such quota existed: the pass rate for 3rd year fluid dynamics was in the 40% ballpark, for example.
I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but neither do you. Students at universities ranked similarly to Michigan absolutely do spend a significant amount of time studying on the weekends, especially if they’re not business majors. And MIT has parties and pranks, too.
I mean, is the goal of an elite college to educate? Or is the benefit to sift through the population and pluck out its masters?
I don't really care that UC has a lower "reputation" than Harvard or Stanford. The fact is, the UC system has produced more fundamental research and more actual value for the population and the world at large than Harvard or Stanford. Even if a UC degree is not quite the "golden ticket" that an Stanford degree is.
Concentrating individuals into a smaller and smaller elite benefits them and only them. The U.S. has done this with capital allocation in its economy and it has and will continue to be a century long arc bending toward utter disaster.
I totally agree. Folks here seem to be under some misapprehension that elite = better education. Based on my experience earning my PhD at a public R1 and then working as faculty at a selective private institution, this is not the case. For starters, just consider the incentives for grade inflation at a private vs a public institution. Harvard has famously out of control grade inflation.
My public alma mater was a tremendous force multiplier for upward mobility. Many of my peers were first generation college students. They’re now scientists, doctors, and engineers. Few of them will become famous—they mostly just make the world tick.
My current private institution concentrates already wealthy people. These folks mostly go out and become consultants. They’re consumed with the idea of becoming “thought leaders.”
Which one really provides more value? I have strong opinions.
Pretty much agree but may I also add that Santa Clara County would probably not allow Stanford to increase its student body by any real sizeable amount due to restrictions in traffic, building, parking, etc, etc.
I don't think they're suggesting we reduce the amount of faculty. They're suggesting that you ask all the faculty to share less space, increasing the efficiency of the real estate holdings. Also by reducing the number of schools, you reduce the amount of expensive ancillaries.
I used to have a view of a baseball field out my office window until they rolled up the astroturf to start construction of the new computing and information science building.
They got some money to build a really nice fan-friendly facility off-campus. Still the thing about baseball is that the season is early in the year and starts before the weather is comfortable for home games so they spend the first half of the season going to away games down south, far enough away that they're probably buying airline tickets instead of riding the bus the way that Ivy League (or ECAC) teams usually ride the bus to go to other Ivy League (or ECAC) schools.
If it wasn't for Lacrosse we wouldn't have anybody using our football stadium in the spring and hey, Lacrosse is both a men's and women's sport. (At Cornell we're lucky enough to have two football teams to keep it busy in the Fall)
Critics would say that Lacrosse is a boon to rich students since poor students don't go to high schools that have Lacrosse and it largely escapes the notice of the marginalization-industrial complex because those folks are aware that there is an industry in SAT test prep and not so aware that there is Lacrosse.
It’s an open secret that “expensive ancillaries” like polo, crew, equestrian teams, etc, are a sneaky way to have supposedly blind admissions while making sure that the incoming class still contains just the right number of students who can pay full tuition. Smart people are not all that rare.
I can’t comment on the Chinese research universities you mention, but the comparison with IITs is bizarre. They are notoriously extremely selective, and all set in lush, spacious, grounds. I don’t think they back up your point at at all.
I know you are making a joke, but for people who may not understand: The point is that well regarded Universities in the USA are generally old relative to other institutions in the USA. So Stanford has a pretty campus on land that was purchased when hardly anyone lived in Palo Alto. Now that land is absurdly valuable.
As in the article, it changes how you might use the land. A grove is a beautiful place to go and read or relax. But if you could replace that grove with a structure worth of hundreds of millions of dollars it changes things.
It's the deed that's old; in the case of Columbia it's that it holds the northern half of the Anglican church's glebe[1] in Manhattan (Columbia is the largest private real estate owner in NYC), which is not only held tax-free but generates significant money for the University.
In India (among others), honking is essential to reducing crashes
We often greatly underestimate / undervalue the role of our ears relative to vision. As my film director friend says, 80% of the impact in a movie is in the sound
The biggest surprise I had in attempting to distribute my first Android app is how difficult it is to get beta-testers through the "standard" channels. It requires a 1 week review and 25 beta-users invited by email addresses
In contrast, Apple has a ~48 hour turnaround for reviews before you can upload to TestFlight and distribute a beta with a link
Not sure if I am in some "trusted developer" cohort on iOS but not Android - but the difference was enough for me to stop trying on Android
you are conflating equity and equality. its equalising in the sense that it democratises access to data, knowledge. but that does not mean it will end up with everyone being equal in terms of wealth.
But it won't even do that. In the pursuit of extracting maximal capital, better models with "better" knowledge will be gated behind higher prices. If you pay more, you get more.
"Swarm of autonomous drones kills 3 buildings of civilians, Silicon Valley is shocked, CEO's offer condolences" is a byline waiting to happen[1]
The administration and the executives will make justifications like:
- "We didn't think they would go haywire"
- "Fewer people died than with an atomic bomb"
- "A junior person gave the order to the drones, we fired them"
- "Look at what Russia and China are doing"
Distracting from the fact that the purpose of spending $1.5T/year on AI weapons (technology that has the sole purpose of threatening/killing humans) run by "warfighters" working for the department of war
At no point will any of the decision makers be held to account
The only power we have as technologists seeking "AI alignment" is to stop building more and more powerful weapons. A swarm of autonomous drones (and similar technologies) are not an inevitability, and we must stop acting as if it is. "It's gonna happen anyways, so I might as well get paid" is never the right reason to do things
This feels like a fair question (perhaps not perfect wording, but no adhominem or disingenuity)
More broadly, we are overbuilding infra on highly inefficient silicon (at a time when designing silicon is easier than ever) and energy stacks _before_ the market is naturally driving it. (with assets that depreciate far faster than railroads). Just as China overbuilt Shenzhen
I have heard (unconfirmed) that the US is importing CNG engines from India for data center buildouts. I loved summers in my youth in Bombay and the parallax background have been great for photography, but the air is no fun to breathe (and does a kicker on life-expectancy to boot)
If we aren't asking these questions here, are they being asked? Don't bite the hand that feeds?
In surveying my friends in Silicon Valley, it seems that most VCs/techies know that: 1. This administration is likely leading us into long term wars and social instability 2. American Dynamism and Defense Tech (or more politely bundled into "DeepTech") are war profiteering, benefiting from greater instability
Speaking / acting out against the American military complex and Big Tech/VC's role in this carries 3 big risks: 1. Not being invited to parties ("too much negative energy, we want to be surrounded by positivity" or "don't talk politics") 2. Censorship and reduced following across most major social media platforms 3. Being economically left out as the world bifurcates into a K-shape economy
As a result, most of my community (generally peace-loving, music-loving humans) seem to be either taking a position of "the world has always been at war and will always be at war, I'm just a realist" or "I'm just going to focus on my locust of control and my personal wellbeing" or "if it's gonna happen anyways, I might as well make money off of it". There is a strong contingent of the resistance as well (still fighting for climate, social justice, peace) but much higher rates of depression and social isolation in this group
So it does not seem to be a problem that can be solved by more information and more technology (though k-12 and higher education assuredly is worth investing in), but perhaps by less nihilism and a stronger social/moral fabric
A big reason I am considering starting a company again is that we need more flags of institutions that carry large weight/reputation and stand for a set of values that is different than the current (and historical) status quo. I expect most of my community would be thrilled to align with those flags if those flags where held up tall and broke through the noise
Which is to say, if you're considering setting up one of those flags, please please do. The world doesn't have to be this way.
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