Interesting Links for 12-02-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Five ways to reform benefits - from insiders who know its failings

(tags:welfare uk )

2. If you want people to remember, tell them what they got right, not what they got wrong.

(tags:memory learning psychology )

3. Harlow school punishes pupils for scoring below 90% in maths

(tags:school punishment OhForFucksSake uk mathematics viaPatrickHadfield )

4. First, give the man the fish!

(tags:advice Education )

5. guys .002 seconds after learning about the "male loneliness epidemic"

(tags:men society video funny )

6. BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants

(tags:ai misinformation )

Comments

[redbird]

3. I hope the teachers aren't similarly getting in trouble if fewer than 90% of their students do "well enough" on a given assignment. I'm sure the head of the school isn't.

More seriously, if getting 17/20 right isn't good enough, students aren't going to bother: they might as well spend less time on the homework, and more time on something they like, and take the detention for whatever "not good enough" mark that produces. Maybe a few of those numbers will get the student moved down a level in math, to where getting 16/20 homework questions right is acceptable.

[hilarita]

1. That all sounds sensible, and I wish that was the way the government were heading, rather than desperately trying to force people to work in jobs that make them sicker.

3 is amazingly self-defeating, especially given what's in 2. Also, I'd have ended up even more switched off maths than I was at school (where I was best in my age group), because of my small problem with switching digits and geometry. Top set pupils are usually quite upset enough by not getting high marks without this.

6. Totally not surprising and oh god I really wish we could get through to people that this is the expected mode of operation of LLMs.

[calimac]

4) "Someone who says they don't have time to help you, but who does have time to explain to you in detail why they aren't helping you, is sadistic."
Oh yes. I've come across this behavior, and 'strange, self-defeating and counterproductive' isn't enough to describe it. 'sadistic' will do.

[jducoeur]

The perldoc story in (4) reminds me of the ancient days of Scala (circa 2010). Functional Programming was starting to become a thing, but the most conspicuous community of devotees were wildly callous in this regard -- if you tried asking them beginner questions, you were as likely as not to be told to go take a college course in Category Theory and then come back.

As a result, they managed to turn me away from functional programming for something like 5-7 years: giving up was easier than trying to deal with such people.

I eventually got into FP (pretty deeply, and now I've been teaching it for 5+ years) because a different community sprang up, focused on good documentation, words instead of cryptic symbols, and just generally not being shitty.

The whole experience drove home how essential culture is, even in technical communties.

[andrewducker]

I'm glad you found a better community. It's amazing how much people can stifle their community and make life worse for themselves.