True, and I agree this is nowhere near enough. But wouldn't a "defense in depth" approach be wise? There are no all or nothing solutions, especially when it comes to policy in a large city. Any bit of relief will no doubt likely be welcome.
Yeah, I agree. I think the change is a step in the right direction to address this specific concern. I think there will be some unintended consequences like loss of tourism dollars which will impact small business, but those concerns seem less important to voters.
Still, I fear that people generally look to politics for simple, one sentence solutions to problems which take decades to manifest.
Barcelona is the 68th densest city in the world. You look at a satellite map and you can see they have a very well planned city layout. It's dense and filled with tall buildings.
At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners. I'm not condoning that policy - just trying to highlight the futility of attempting to protect a desirable area from overpopulation.
> At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners.
That does not follow at all. If you look at the actual densities Barcelona is 1/3 as dense as the densest city in the world. There is plenty of room to accommodate more housing, they just need to build higher.
Do we think this is likely? Surely if we also have an incentive that compares schools to each other in terms of their test scores at the same time -- which we currently do now -- then schools could be both incentivized to a) maximize the scores at every grade, and b) increase the scores the most?
Surely growth measures require repeated testing (so one can see how the differences between student at Time A vs. Time B), not necessarily adaptive tests? Maybe I'm missing something; could you help me understand?
I'm abstract, you're correct, and a typical setup for an educational experiment is a calibrated pre / post test to see what changed over the course of interacting with an activity. Both tests are effectively identical and measure the same thing.
However, state tests are annual. You don't want to measure the same thing. If you don't measure the same thing, you can't compare.
There are technically non-adaptive test designs which might work, but it's not what we're using, and they're a lot more complex than adaptive.
This idea sounds familiar. Isn't this basically "Value-added Modeling", which looks at how much teacher contribute to individual differences in increases in student test scores? [1] Has this not been applied at the school level!?
I used to be a data scientist, I'm now a grad student researching personality development. There are easier ways to make a lot more money, but I feel like I'm doing the deepest possible work, given my interests and skillset.
I hate to be stickler, but on the very first page ("Syntax"), right after explaining comments, the text says "In previous exercise, you saw the greeting function..." Unless I'm missing something, this is the very first intro to Rust, and so there are no prior exercises...
Betteridge's law not withstanding, for the first time in human history, things like loneliness have become the subject of scientific inquiry. This has happened over the last ~50ish years, if that.
As Feynman says, figuring out which of our theories are true, and which of our ideas are subject to the illusion of explanatory depth is important. Especially when it comes to things we think we know, like interpersonal relationships and our own psychology.
True, the social sciences are quite young compared to other scientific fields. But already we have estimates for distinguishing what impacts between and within person variation in loneliness. At the moment, most of this work is done at a very general level; the work tries to characterize various populations of people.
However, one of the newer / more cutting-edge methods of studying things like loneliness involves pinging them multiple times a day to see how their emotional state is changing over time. (So called Ecological Momentary Assessments if you are curious.) Some researchers are using such designs to try and figure out / model what makes an individual tick.
Clinical psychology, anecdotal folk wisdom, research psychology, and potentially even Neuroscience will eventually converge. In my opinion, one semi-unique challenge is that the set of skills that makes one a good researcher and one a good people person are not highly correlated. This doesn't matter for Chemistry (etc.), but I think it matters more for the social sciences.
The problem with social sciences isn’t that they’re young, it’s that they’re all junk science. They’re all filled with poorly defined experiments, theories that you can never properly test, results that you cannot reproduce and that nobody’s going to try to, and if the topic of a study is even slightly political or controversial, you’ll often find that a study can’t feasibly be conducted, or it will be conducted by people who don’t want it to be rigorous in the first place.
I’m skeptical that a lot of these questions even can be answered scientifically at all, but rather confident that they’re not going to be by the existing system.
There is plenty of junk, I'll grant you that. But there is also variation in study quality, which ipso facto implies that some studies might just even be good. I take what you are talking about to be the relative immaturity of social sciences.
> But there is also variation in study quality, which ipso facto implies that some studies might just even be good.
The fact that there's variation doesn't at all imply that any of it is any good. It could vary from "embarrassingly flat-earth-theory-in-2024" bad, to "unable to produce a falsifiable hypothesis" bad.
And even when some of it is good (controls, reproducability, etc), it gets completely ignored by practitioners[1]. Imagine if doctors prescribed eye of newt even when there's studies proving the efficacy of paracetemol.
[1] By practitioners I mean therapy and therapists. You could send 100 random people to 100 different therapists and all of them would report that a followup visit has been recommended. As far as therapists are concerned, there is no such thing as "You're perfectly normal. Congratulations and come back only when you have a problem"
> However, one of the newer / more cutting-edge methods of studying things like loneliness involves pinging them multiple times a day to see how their emotional state is changing over time.
That would seem to have a strong Heisenberg problem. "I'm not so lonely any more, sociologists keep asking for my important opinion."
Fair point. It's controlled for statistically; while there are no perfect measures, it's a decently novel lens into daily experience. Even Apple Health does a version of it now.
I love reading books, and I write: I've had essays published in various internet corners, and I'm working on a humble little book of my own. Few who write do so for the money, and like most things, the Pareto Principle applies. That being said, another commenter has pointed out that book sales data suggests we are actually in a book boom.
Also, publishers are absolutely in it for the money. But the quotes and analysis of this article suggest that publishing houses are too big and a victim of their own size. It seems like they can't "run lean" and are big enough that they are trying to find books that can sell millions of copies.
Other questions I had while reading the article:
- Is there any Hollywood accounting in the book industry?
- Do writer's advances still make sense? What if advances were smaller but royalties are bigger?
- These companies are looking for books that can sell millions of copies, but they could also a) raise the price, or b) have supplemental products + content for avid readers and fans.
I like this blog post, and like other commenters I agree. It's also interesting that it doesn't so much distinguish between external and internal 'achievement' so much.
For a very different take on the topic... I too was interested in the question of "measuring personal growth." So much so that I enrolled in graduate school and am now getting a Ph.D. researching personality development / change in "individual differences" over time. Another way to conceptualize / measure personal growth could be via decreases in one's level of Neuroticism over time.
What about kids? They don't seem to start with any neuroticism until they learn it or maybe the more neurotic parts of the brain start to mature/engage
Good question. We typically don't think of young kids as having neuroticism so much as an aspect of temperament we call "negative emotionality." Some children seem to have more of it than others. Taken at a slice in time, roughly half of the between-person personality variation on a given trait can be attributed to genes, the other half is environmental. (Strictly speaking, this doesn't quite account for variation in the change of traits over time though.)
Also, there's a well-studied effect where adolescents typically experience decreases in neuroticism / negative emotionality as they change and mature as they move into young adulthood.
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