If you look closely in the first image you can tell that some of those coins are "clipped" then the coin with ridges is not clipped.
The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.
Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.
Not all clipping was illegal, or even nefarious. It was only a crime where there was a solid national currency system, which was far from universal. Many people would be trading in a variety of currencies, none of which was specifically backed by any laws forbidding clipping. Clipping would become so common that anyone with good coins was a fool not to clip them down to the local norm. There was also a general lack of small change in the ancient world. Heavily clipped coins, or even their clippings, likely substituted for the lack of smaller denominations. If a coin is worth its weight in silver, silver must be worth its weight in coins, clippings or not.
Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems.
This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.
It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.
All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.
> Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating.
The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.
Weighing coins was always the preferred way of counting money. The pound sterling is called the pound sterling because 240 mediaeval pennies minted from sterling silver weighed one pound.
And some modern coins are designed so that bags of mixed coins can be counted by weight. For instance, all US cupronickel clad coins (dime, quarter, Kennedy half-dollar and Eisenhower dollar) have the same ratio of weight to value, such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20.
This is sort of interesting as historical trivia, but at what point would it become convenient or useful? You'd need to sort your coins before weighing them, and it seems like if you were partly sorting your coins you may as well totally sort them.
> such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20
Also most of the time you can just dump a bag of coins on the table and visually quickly determine an odd ones, remove them, weight the remainder. Sorting != counting.
An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s.
For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).
Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?
Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.
We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.
That's not curiosity, that's trying to get a reward through randomness. Loot boxes are like being hungry, going to your kitchen, and picking 3 random ingredients to combine. The mayonnaise, raw onion, and ice cube soup is not so good. So you try again. Eventually you land on cooked spaghetti, butter, and cheese. This encourages you to keep trying.
Curiosity is more like scrolling on social media. You know there have been interesting things there before, so you keep looking for more interesting things.
This seems highly suseptible to what a human might consider irrelevant randomness. Given random images just shuffling indefinitely a curious individual will just give up and say, even though I can't predict the next thing it doesn't pertain to the domain of curiosity.
Right, that's why the "noisy TV problem" is a "problem" - it makes the simple model of curiosity used in the research less effective, because it causes agents to get stuck watching TV instead of exploring and advancing in the game, which is what we'd want them to do. (Though this does seem somewhat reminiscent of certain human behaviors...). One possible solution is to equip agents with a more expressive predictive model, capable of discerning "interesting" randomness from "uninteresting" randomness (for some TBD definition of "interesting", of course I'm handwaving here - I'm sure in the 5 past years there's been progress on this front).
First thing that popped into my head: “interesting randomness” is when you can’t predict future frames, but [within some interval] you gain that ability.
Static on the TV is random but uninteresting, whereas morse code is “random” at first, but after enough exposure can be understood and predicted.
> To date, the response of the scientific establishment has been wholly inadequate. There is little attempt to proactively check for fraud: science is still regarded as a gentlemanly pursuit
There is no incentive mechanism, it has been the problem all along. The peer review process is clearly inadequate or not up to the task in its current form.
>Thirty-three states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people's mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.
Incase anyone wants to look at an actual document which I didn't see linked in the article
The CBC article doesn't mention what's arguably the most interesting thing about this lawsuit, which is that it goes after Meta on the grounds of product liability. This of course a pretty established area of law and a central feature of the decades of legal battles that Big Tobacco was embroiled in, but applying it to online publishers is very new.
I think the states have an interesting point. Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact? Doing so is illegal and I think your average HN'er would agree that this is bad when applied to say Big Tobacco or some manufacturer selling a product that contains toxic chemicals or whatever, but what about Big Tech?
Of course there's a big can of worms here. We've known that watching TV "rots your brain" on some level for years, and there's a fair bit of research which claims that porn is bad for you too. So where do you draw the line and when is litigation the correct recourse for society in dealing with these issues vs approaching it another way?
Hard to have sympathy for a company like Meta at this stage in the game though...
> Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact?
With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.
There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.
Well, you're definitely going against the grain on this if you say yes. This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages for the health consequences of their products, and get them to add warning labels to their products. I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.
> This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages
I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.
Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).
My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.
> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.
This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.
The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.
Pretty sure we are going to see a rise in the use of Oral Exams.
The teachers that don't want to use them will continue to churn out students that score high and don't know how to articulate a damn thing. Which may have been the status quo anyway.
Universities already have systems in place to allow students with disabilities to take alternate forms of assessments. So, perhaps, students who can't deal with oral exams can choose to give written exams.
Btw, I was a professor and I saw students on both ends of the spectrum. Students who would bomb an oral evaluation because of anxiety but would do well in written exams. And student who would bomb written exams, but would totally ace an oral evaluation. Since, a professor's job is to create well-rounded individuals, courses should include a mix of different assessment types, so students slowly build up the skills to handle all of them. Of course, augmented by guidance and feedback on how they can build those skills.
The older I get the more convinced I am that a core skill schools should teach—started from early grade school—is speaking. Reading is probably the single most important skill, period, but—and I write this as someone with a bias toward writing—I think speaking is more important than writing, for most people. Not that learning to write doesn't teach skills relevant to speaking! Not that we should stop teaching writing! But I think getting over that kind of anxiety is exactly the kind of thing that every school ought to teach, and I think if the only way to accomplish that were to sacrifice some writing instruction, it'd be worth it.
If I were a professor though, I would use a baseline for every student.
At the beginning of the semester, have an oral exam for a difficult topic that the students are expected to already know. Material from a prerequisite class would be good.
I would always give 100% for that oral exam if the student showed up. And that exam would become that student's baseline; their future oral exams would be judged based on that.
They'll probably be more nervous in front of the professor the first time than the last, so it would actually give them an advantage in later exams.
Definitely. Once word of this system gets out, it will be gamed by students who will throw the first exam deliberately. Even without this sabotage it would still feel extremely unfair to students who did well on the first exam and are now being punished for it.
Well, on future exams, they're still going to have to answer questions with some knowledge, and sabotaging wouldn't help so much with that.
But the other problem is harder to fix. I guess I could be much harsher in the first one, and go easier on the real exams later? Maybe that would reduce the number of students who do well on the first one?
What about students who are currently failing the written exams due to their neurological disabilities? How are you accounting for that? These students would excel in an oral exam.
The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.
Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.