Category: personal AnGoL

Indeed, Caplan has done us a service by compelling us to pay attention to a number of distressing facts: U.S. adults who have gone through our public schooling system are astonishingly ignorant of basic civics, history and science. Millions of people who start college will never finish. And the payoff for schooling is primarily about how many hours we have sat in classrooms rather than how much we have actually learned. Tick the boxes, get your degree and employers will smile on you, regardless of whether you gained any real skills and knowledge along the way.But Caplan’s instrumental, bottom-line solutions of practical subject matter and financial austerity certainly won’t help. Indeed, there is a twisted logic at play when we use dismal average student outcomes to justify the call for public divestment from education. When the most vulnerable students fail to thrive in inferior schools, we attribute their sub-par performance to their own inferiority. To tell these students they need fewer credentials in the name of social efficiency is a gross injustice.Surely, schools should be in the business of opening rather than closing doors.

Source: We Don’t Need No Education? | Boston Review

What could be the TFP of the Philippines???

First, the dominant reason for slow growth has been what economists label slow “total factor productivity” (TFP) growth. That is, the problem has not primarily been a shortage of capital and labor inputs into production, but rather slow growth in output, given inputs. After growing at about 1 ¾ percent per year between 1996 and 2004, the TFP growth rate has dropped by half since 2005.While TFP has fallen off rapidly, there is no basis for supposing that levels of labor input or capital are less than one would expect given the magnitude of the Great Financial Crisis. In fact, labor force participation rates in 2016 lined up closely with Federal Reserve researchers’ 2006 predictions. This suggests the lack of importance of the various factors adduced by the CEA’s report.

Source: No, “Obamasclerosis” wasnt a real problem for the economy | Larry Summers

The Disruption Antidote This analysis applies to Facebook and Google, two of the other companies in that chart, more than you might expect. While the two companies’ revenues are based on advertising, the attractiveness to advertisers rests on consumers using both services. Both, though, are disadvantaged to an extent because their means of making money operate orthogonally to a great user experience; both are protected by the fact would-be competitors inevitably have the same business model. That is why, fo

Source: Divine Discontent: Disruption’s Antidote – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The business model follows from these fundamental differences: a platform provider has no room for ads, because the primary function of a platform is provide a stage for the applications that users actually need to shine. Aggregators, on the other hand, particularly Google and Facebook, deal in information, and ads are simply another type of information. Moreover, because the critical point of differentiation for aggregators is the number of users on their platform, advertising is the only possible business

Source: Tech’s Two Philosophies – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Opinion is not scholarship, it is not journalism, and we are dying for lack of honest, fact-based, slow inquiry. Twenty years since my first scholarship-based op-ed ran in The New York Times, here’s what I see: a postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die. The Intellectual Dark Web isn’t a solution, it might just be a sign of end times. I’m all for bringing intellectualism to the masses, but like a lot of academics, I value ambivalence itself, along w

Source: Why I Escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Entrepreneurs think they are better than their resumes show and realize they can make more money by going it alone. And in most cases, they are right.

Source: Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them

If a decision is reversible, we can make it fast and without perfect information. If a decision is irreversible, we had better slow down the decision-making process and ensure that we consider ample information and understand the problem as thoroughly as we can. Bezos used this heuristic to make the decision to found Amazon. He recognized that if Amazon failed, he could return to his prior job. He would still have learned a lot and would not regret trying. The decision was reversible, so he took a risk. Th

Source: Go Fast and Break Things: The Difference Between Reversible and Irreversible Decisions

HYMN TO TIME
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.
And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.
Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.
Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

I can’t believe I am bookmarking something from the National Review.

Amid political differences, there was respect. Then it was back to basketball. It was back to dunks, to the challenges of defending the pick-and-roll, and to off-topic rants from Shaq and Charles. It was back to the things that games are supposed to do: to bring us joy, to tie communities together, to sometimes provoke and sometimes inspire. That’s today’s NBA. That’s why it’s on the rise.

Source: NBA Popularity and Rise in American Culture | National Review

There are at least three different kinds of feedback that may be appropriate in a given situation:
APPRECIATION is expression of gratitude or approval of another’s effort. It is an expression of emotion, designed to meet an emotional need.
ADVICE (or COACHING) consists of suggestions about particular behavior that should be repeated or changed. It focuses on the performance, rather than judging the person.
EVALUATION is ranking the subject’s performance in relation to that of others or against an explicit or implicit set of standards.
The habit you want to develop is to know your purposes when you offer feedback, and to make your comments in a form appropriate to accomplishing that purpose.

Source: How to Provide Great Feedback When You’re Not In Charge