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One thing I have noticed, especially in online diatribes by QAnon believers explaining their ‘research’, is a tendency to rely on a mechanism known as Clanging, or Clang Association. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanging Also known as Glossomania or Association Chaining, this is generally regarded as a symptom of a mental disorder often found in patients with Schizophrenic and Bipolar illnesses. It is defined as: “repeating chains of words that are associated semantically or phonetically with no relevant context” This may include compulsive rhyming or alliteration, without apparent logical connection between words. The speaker becomes distracted by homophones, puns, and word-plays in their own utterances, and they fly off down tangential rabbit-holes that take them further and further from their intended topic with each sentence. One example that comes to mind is the incident in March 2021 when a large supertanker collided with the bank of the Suez Canal and blocked it for almost a week. The stranded supertanker was called Ever Given, but it had the name of a Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen painted in large letters on its side. The latter happened to be the Secret Service codename for Hillary Clinton when she was First lady. QAnon believers were wildly triggered when they discovered that this supertanker’s call-sign was H3RC, which was close enough to Clinton’s own initials HRC for them to make a completely spurious clang association. In no time at all, online services such as Telegram and Gab were carrying extensive QAnon threads alleging that the Ever Given was full of child sex-slaves that were part of a dastardly world-wide ‘Deep State’ plot directed by Hillary Clinton in person. The QAnon believers also found a photo of the female captain of the stricken ship who in their opinion bore a slight facial resemblance to Monica Lewinsky - which of course provided them with ‘conclusive proof’ of this entire farrago of nonsense. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/25/facebook-posts/evergreen-ship-blocking-suez-canal-not-linked-hill/ Random word Association Testing of a similar type was used extensively in the earlier period of the Psychoanalytic movement founded by Sigmund Freud, as a diagnostic tool for mapping the cognitive disorders of neurotic patients. Carl Jung in particular was associated with the development of this psychiatric technique, which was originally inspired by ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ‘ (1901) by Sigmund Freud.

This comment actually demonstrates what I have been talking about. The role of education is fuzzy, with sometimes contradictory goals. Let's start with self-sufficient: what is required to be self-sufficient in a given role? Clearly, the required skill set is very different depending on the job. But especially for young folks, how and when do you know what career they will get into? Careers are unpredictable and often young folks need time well into adulthood to find their path and discover their interests where they want to hone their skills. How does it work if early on a parent decides that certain subjects should not be presented? The second part is universal, but again this is something that many folks do not want. The reasons is that the ability to learn is not easily quizzable and those excelling at it tend to be in the minority. However, parents often think that better grades equal better careers. So it is better for students to only have subjects where they can be easily trained to perform in tests. I.e. there is a desire to remove more complex topics (where you are forced to learn). This is a trend we now start to see in universities, where students have an increasing input on how they want to be taught. Having students/parent pre-determine what they want to learn is similarly bad as having patients determine their treatment. Most do not know what they need or what style of teaching works with them. As such diverse exposure is critical for young minds to find their path. The narrower educations gets, the more likely folks it is that folks will miss their mark. Specialization can only come after folks have a good idea of the the range that is out there. Moreover, learning to learn is the opposite of focused skill learning and it requires the broad exposure as you need to learn to integrate various forms and systems of knowledge, rather than excel in the application of a specialized form. Again, there are contradictory desires and with a presented pathway that is likely to fulfil neither.

Not really. You have not addressed what ultimately education should be about. You are saying that practical skills should be taught. Fine, but that is not necessarily what parents want. Right now, in the US there is a movement driven by teachers trying to dumb down students, by limiting their academic exposure to a very narrow view that is in line with their beliefs, but does not really have to have a foothold in reality. It may be something what certain parents want, but it will limit the intellectual capabilities of pupils. Moreover, parents are also likely not competent enough to determine a proper curriculum (which is one of the reasons why some of the demands are questionable). Funding of schools in the US is kind of screwy and compared other countries show more inequity in terms of funding and access to resources. I do not see how any of the suggestions made here would improve that. I will re-iterate that no one really knows what the "product" is supposed to be. Training folks to excel in certain types of tests is too narrow a view. Often the strength and weaknesses of a particular educational journey will only show up years later in life. It is therefore important to open up as many doors as possible for young folks, as no one can predict the path (and it is certainly not deterministic nor can we blame genes for the outcome). At best, the system would create hyperspecialized individuals based on what their parents might have thought to be worthwhile, potentially based on their limited perspective. And I think that this is the opposite of what an effective education should be (whatever we might think of effective). You need to have a broad basis while specialization starts later in University. I would avoid putting young folks on specific trajectories if we do not really know what would benefit them in the future. Adding random indices might provide the illusion of having some sort of objective measure, but if one is not sure what one should be measuring, it is rather useless in the end.

There is another factor. We calculate the segments of past time in relation to the whole. When you're two years old, a year is half of your life. Odds are, you can recall only the last week or so as a continuous segment, in which a large part of what happened was unique, unfamiliar. You may not recall any suppertimes except the one when you threw a tantrum over the carrots, but that's still an event. That week was 1/104th of all the time and events you've experienced, and you're already allocating memory-space according to significance. As your mental faculties expand, so does you memory - at the same time that novelty of experience and memorability of individual events diminish. What happened in the past week becomes a smaller and smaller portion of all that has happened in your lifetime. When a year is 1/50th of your life, the past week contains only 1/2600th of your experience, and most of what happened in that period is insignificant. (I also think Covid and lockdown tended to flatten all of our experiences, as fewer venues and opportunities for social encounters were available and much of our daily activity became constrained routine.)

In addition to the above, there is usually logarithmic relation between a stimulus and our perception of it, aka Weber–Fechner law (Weber–Fechner law - Wikipedia). See example here: Logarithmic Time Perception - Exponential/Logarithmic Functions (weebly.com)

.the real problem is with doctors who want (too much) money.. You want to help people. Or you want their money.. You can't treat people and steal their money at the same time.. Hundred thousands or millions of dollars for "experimental therapy" or "terminally ill" person? Your PhD is dismissed.. Don't complain at the police station you cannot log in to your banking accounts etc.. @StringJunky We will have to remember not to respond to Erina threads next time.. I upped completely undeserved downvote.. ..which governmental, once-created institution does not want more public money next year than it got last year? Which one? People are thieves.. Just leave your smartphone in an apartment with multimillionaires.. I used to make fun of them, and put the latest iPhone in the trash at the bottom and covered it..

Well they might be more careful, but it only means that they are spending money to make money, but not necessarily to educate. Private universities spend relatively more on administration than faculty in private institutions. They spend more on extra-curricular things like recruitment and retention compared to teaching and training. There is a lot of incentive to upsell with amenities (dorms, food court etc.), which bloats the budget for making money. That is not to say that universities are not starting that trend, too (at least in North America, and I believe UK). A big reason is that the governments are either cutting or maintaining educational funds (which, with inflation is the equivalent of cuts), but at the same time try to encourage enrolment. This creates perverse financial incentives for the universities to reclaim the money from students. In contrast, in systems where there are virtually no tuition fees (i.e. state-funded, like in Germany), administrative bloat and waste is minimal and in many ways the educational outcome is better, as students have to do more work themselves.

That's ok in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. That's why Russia and China couldn't prosper as communist countries. It's easy to say that public entities can cut waste, but they don't. People operate better on real incentives. And there's no better incentive than making and spending your own money.

That's not true and ridiculously simplistic. You can make a profit by cutting out waste and fiddles. State owned entities can be and often are ripped off for huge amounts, whereas privately owned businesses are more careful with their own money.

Are we talking about things that are unexplainable? How do we know that they are unexplainable? I was under the impression these were unexplained/unidentified. That's not the same thing. A large number of the UAP reports were resolved, meaning they were explained, and therefore not unexplainable. There's a huge difference between them. You don't have a default assumption about whether something is natural or supernatural? How do you proceed to investigate? An apple falls from a tree. Do you initially assume gravity, or do you assume ghosts? You see hoof prints in North America. Do you initially assume they are from horses or zebras? Which direction leads to a massive waste of time and effort as you begin to investigate? Incomplete is not the same as wrong. And these tend to come with fairly well-defined areas where we know we need better models. When an apple falls from a tree we don't question it because General Relativity doesn't mesh with quantum mechanics. We know those issues appear at the Planck scale. Yes, we've been discussing this in another thread. She is discussing the issue within the confines of science. Does she discuss aliens in any of this?

This is definitely part of a possible solution. However, I don’t think this gives the full picture, because it seems to me - and that’s just a personal observation - that at the foundation of every conspiracy belief lies the desire to condense down an inherently complex and unpredictable world that is full of “grey zones” (morally, politically, philosophically etc) into a simple “good” vs “bad” narrative that is easy to grasp and understand. All such theories I can think of, irrespective of specific details, always and ultimately boil down to this - the idea that there is some nebulous “them” who do everything in their power to hide “the truth” from “us” for some nefarious purpose or another. Structuring the world in this simplistic manner gives one a sense of empowerment, since it feels like one sees through “their” deception and can actively resist “evil” by not buying into the alleged lies. To give just one random example - Flat Earth is ultimately not really about the shape of the earth at all, but about the fact that there is a “them” who have been hiding the “true” shape for their own evil ends. This tendency to want to simplify things in this manner stems from a deep-seated sense of powerlessness in the face of an increasingly complex world that is harder and harder to grasp and understand for the common Joe-on-the-street. It’s really very difficult to address this - but yes, education and critical thinking skills are definitely a large part of the answer.

Well, with AI, it would likely have been immersed in human language from its very beginning stages, so maybe not analogous to a lion. But maybe it's not completely OT, in terms of the broader question of how an AI would experience the world differently from us. And much depends on whether or not an AI is embodied, either virtually or as an android. And if it has a childhood-like phase of growth. And other considerations.

As said in the previous reactions, the general triangle exists as a concept. As you correctly notice, you cannot draw a 'general triangle'. So, e.g. a proposition about 'the triangle' means, that it should apply to all triangles, like 'the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180o'. To expand a little on 'concepts': naive ideas about language are that the words refer to things in reality. But that is not the case: words refer to concepts. If I ask you the question 'How many legs has a dog?' you have no trouble to give the correct answer. But if I ask you to visualise a dog, and then followup with 'Is it black or not?' I do not know what you will answer, because you pictured a specific dog, not 'the general dog'. The 'general dog' is not black, not brown, not white etc. But the 'general dog' has four legs. Without concepts, language would be impossible, and with that general propositions, and with that on its turn, science. Concepts are not naturally given, so in different languages, concepts might differ too. And in science new concepts are developed again and again. Concepts are not true or false: they are useful or not. If they allow us to describe processes, ideally as a law of nature, they are useful.

She makes two arguments, both based on Special Relativity. The first is that the energy required to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light is arguably not infinite. When v=c in the equation, the expression becomes singular. IOW, no longer valid Physics, just like anywhere else infinities arise. ( alsoexplains how mass is mostly binding energy, and the workings of the Higgs field ) The second, also using SR, using FTL travel, or communication, to send information elsewhere, then back to yourself in the past and violate causality, seems to disappear when GR is considered, as the co-moving frame estabilishes an entropic direction to the future and makes sending information back to your past self from elsewhere, impossible. The direction would be from your past self to elsewhere, not the other way around. I enjoy her humor, but SoL invariance ( and the reason why all observers measure the SoL to be the same, why you can't catch up to light, and why it takes increasing amounts of energy to approach the SoL barrier ) is the footing of the foundation of SR and GR. Without it much of modern Physics crumbles to the ground, nd we know that both SR and GR have been immensly successful. Maybe, as Sabine mentions, Quantum Gravity will redefine the singular points where v=c just as ( we hope ) it will for the singularity of Black Holes, leaving the rest of SR/GR unchanged.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/06/does-faster-than-light-travel-lead-to.html ...The relevant point to take away from this is that superluminal travel in and by itself is not inconsistent. Leaving aside the stability problems with superluminal particles, they do not lead to causal paradoxa. What leads to causal paradoxa is allowing travel against the arrow of time which we, for better or worse, experience. This means that superluminal travel is possible in principle, even though travel backwards in time is not. That travel faster than light is not prevented by the existing laws of nature doesn’t mean of course that it’s possible. There is also still the minor problem that nobody has the faintest clue how to do it... Maybe it’s easier to wait for the aliens to come visit us.

You can't fiddle with one side of the equation only. If private schools can identify and cut waste, so can public ones. And they'll always be cheaper in the long run because they don't have to charge extra for profit.

Yes, it's a strategy used by many political groups. I think the redder Tories know they won't get away with it. A blackhole, which is the NHS, is always gagging for money.

Sometimes I wonder if this is the approach of the British Tory party to our National Health Service: starve it for years, demoralise the staff and then say, “Look, it doesn’t work.”

What?! I am the last being in the universe who could talk about such nonsense as philosophy.. Seriously.. ? Seriously deadly seriously..? According to your ex-POTUS.. must have a gun... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43149694 More deadly seriously: In the US? Don't get shot? ...except the US is not the world.. what you want to talk..

Why would there be a null hypothesis for something unexplainable? Assuming its mundane is no different than assuming its sensational. Both have little evidence to lean one way or the other. I don't believe in ghosts, alien visitations or any other sensational phenomena, simply because I haven't seen enough credible evidence to convince me of such. But then I also don't just assume everything that is currently unexplained has/will have a mundane explanation. But there are question marks by many leading scientists hanging over our understanding of the laws of nature. The standard model and relativity are our best models for this, yet both are either incomplete, or not quite correct. I agree that these are the only tools we have to work with for now, but this doesn't mean that they are absolute and therefore there may be things that we currently believe are not possible or very improbable may turn out not so. Speculation, yes agreed, but why not if we know there is something missing? I was listening to a lecture from Sabine Hossenfelder just the other day, where she was discussing about FTL travel and communication. How there are speculative, but potentially possible, ways around it and advanced aliens (if they were to exist) may have discovered how to use this knowledge. Does this make her a crackpot?

In a capitalist country? .... In which country? ... In a communist country? Make an non ambiguous request.. then you might be satisfied..