I'm leaning toward this being top-notch satire, but I can't be entirely sure---and that's a good thing.
> Without those standards, the profession would lose its weight, its dignity. If becoming a doctor were simply a matter of competence and compassion, we’d all be wearing name tags and making $60,000 a year.
Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from fundamentalist ravings, so says Poe.
But this comment has me solidly believing it's satire: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43495692. Not that I can't believe someone would really think that way, just that the odds of them being an actual psychopath who doesn't see what they're saying seem lower than the odds of a non-psychopathic person taking the opportunity to make a joke.
> This is very similar to the minor fraud of an academic publishing an overstated / incorrect result to stay competitive with others doing the same.
I completely disagree.
For one, academic standards of publishing are not at all the same as the standards for in-house software development. In academia, a published result is typically regarded as a finished product, even if the result is not exhaustive. You cannot push a fix to the paper later; an entirely new paper has to be written and accepted. And this is for good reason: the paper represents a time-stamp of progress in the field that others can build off of. In the sciences, projects can range from 6 months to years, so a literature polluted with half-baked results is a big impediment to planning and resource allocation.
A better comparison for academic publishing would be a major collaborative open source project like the Linux kernel. Any change has to be thoroughly justified and vetted before it is merged because mistakes cause other people problems and wasted time/effort. Do whatever you like with your own hobbyist project, but if you plan for it to be adopted and integrated into the wider software ecosystem, your code quality needs to be higher and you need to have your interfaces speced out. That's the analogy for academic publishing.
The problems in modern academic publishing are almost entirely caused by the perverse incentives of measuring academic status by publication record (number of publications and impact factor). Lowering publishing standards so academics can play this game better is solving the wrong problem. Standards should be even higher.
The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:
> The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).
Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any points.
The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed to select for candidates who preformed badly academically. Thus leading to the allegations it was designed specifically to only let people pass who were given the answers beforehand.
To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.
The choices for both were Science, Math, English, History/Social Sciences and Physical Education, plus did not attend college for the second.
Math is highly predictive of ATC performance. English is a key requirement due the communication-heavy role. Physical Education is linked to confidence which is a strong predictor of graduation rates.
That leaves History/Social Sciences and Science as oddballs. If you did poorly in Science or History/Social Sciences in high school, that likely didn't change in college, so you would have gotten at least 15 points by answering it the same way for both questions.
I'm not sure there was an expectation that someone would get them both right. Rather having different answers get 15 points ensures people answering both the same way didn't which likely would make the test a bit too easy to pass.
This test just looks like a big five personality test mixed with some socioeconomic and academic questions.
Is that the only question that an active military ATC would very likely get points for?
I don't think you can take questions in isolation. Active military ATC would likely pick up full or close to full points on several other questions like recent unemployment (#26), expressing views (#27), formal training (#30), formal suggestions (#36), knowledge of job (#46) and probably coursework (#54).
> Less capital cost, less labor, less wasted inventory, less chokepoints
I don't think this is a fair comparison without considering the subsidies that go to trucking, which are substantial: the interstate highway system, manufacturer and consumer auto subsidies, municipal tax codes and development that favors single family homes (further bolstering auto and road industries).
Consider that most of the damage done to roads is done by heavy trucks, but the cost is spread across everyone. That is effectively a huge subsidy.
I agree, but shipping is cutthroat. They care about out of pocket cost.
In the case of NYC and other cities, it shows the edges/limits of your argument. The entire waterfront and west side was dedicated to rail, industry and shipping to support the city and the port. The meat packing district was… a bunch of slaughterhouses. We traded that infrastructure for highways. There’s good and bad aspects to that.
For the most part I don't think there is a difference. It seems like once all the common factors of divisiveness and brainrot are removed, the main difference between TikTok and the others is that it would be harder for certain powers in the US government to corral TikTok into toeing the line on State Department foreign policy goals than western companies. Considering the largely homogenous, biased western media coverage of e.g. the lead up to the 2nd Iraq War, Patriot Act, US-Israel policy that has shaped American viewpoints, I don't think it is obvious why having a major non-aligned media source is a net negative.
All of your points except 1. are true of American social media companies. 2., in particular, is widely documented: the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco, Cambridge Analytica, Musk's personal tweaking of the Twitter trending hashtags, and YouTube's heavy-handed censorship of legitimate medical advice during Covid are just a few of the higher profile instances of this.
The important distinction is the whole “hostile foreign government” thing.
None of the stated reasons for the TikTok ban matter except this one: a country who is openly hostile towards us can control what our citizens see. That alone is enough to ban it. War with china is not some far flung fantasy, it’s something both sides have been actively preparing for for a long while.
I would wager that in a modern war scenario, your ability to bend the public support of your enemy’s war effort is going to be a huge factor in the outcome. I don’t really need to explain why; it’s self-evident.
If relations with china were better, the ban would not make sense. If this was a French social network or something, a ban would not make sense. But China is a hostile nation that explicitly aims to oppose the US. It’s not worth letting them walk all over us just out of “fairness.” I don’t want to be fair to China in a future conflict, I want to win.
The real criticism we should be making, is about how relations with china got this bad in the first place. Could there have been more diplomatic treatment? Better trade deals? Agreements on IP ownership? Etc etc… that’s a discussion that would make more sense to have. But given the current relationship between the countries, the TikTok ban is literally the bare minimum we should be doing. I expect a lot more things like this to follow.
> Without those standards, the profession would lose its weight, its dignity. If becoming a doctor were simply a matter of competence and compassion, we’d all be wearing name tags and making $60,000 a year.