Fair enough. It's good to know that inspections are no longer pre-announced..
I've read that blog too. It's pretty interesting. Do you have any other sources to recommend?
Also, if you're willing to share which country did you teach in?
My sample size is pretty small, limited to myself and a few people I knew, so I don't have a high degree of confidence that my experiences generalize across the UK. Hearing about experiences like your daughters shifts me somewhat towards thinking that state schools are okayish on average. Still, I find it hard to convert the various good and bad stories I hear into any kind of high confidence conclusion without hard data, which I haven't managed to find much of.
I don't quite think you've solved the problem of induction.
I think there's a fairly serious issue with your claim that being able to predict something accurately means you necessarily fully understand the variables which causes it because determinism.
The first thing to note is that “perfect predictability implies zero mutual information” plays well with approximation: approximately perfect predictability implies approximately zero mutual information. If we can predict the sled’s speed to within 1% error, then any other variables in the universe can only influence that remaining 1% error. Similarly, if we can predict the sled’s speed 99% of the time, then any other variables can only matter 1% of the time. And we can combine those: if 99% of the time we can predict the sled’s speed to within 1% error, then any other variables can only influence the 1% error except for the 1% of sled-runs when they might have a larger effect.
That's not really the cases. E.g: let's say that ice cream melt twice as fast in galaxies without a supermassive black hole at the center. You do experiments to see how fast ice cream melts. After controlling for type of ice cream, temperature, initial temp of the ice cream, airflow and air humidity, you find that you can predict how ice cream melts. You triumphantly claim that you know which things cause ice cream to melt at different rates, having completely missed the black hole's effects.
Essentially, controlling for A & B but not C won't tell you whether C has a causal influence on the thing you're measuring unless
Which is indeed really strange and something I don't really understand. I'd expect that whoever bought the properties after the foreclosure sale would live in it themselves, redevelop the land or put the housing up for rent at a price people would pay. Sure there are edge cases where empty housing makes sense (cities with population collapse = literally more housing stock than needed, super low cost housing which when prices fall the rent doesn't cover the risk of having tenants) but those seem like edge cases which don't explain the widespread phenomenon of empty housing.
My immediate thoughts are that either empty houses aren't really a thing outside of specific cases and the examples we see in media are just a biased sample or that they are and something I don't understand is going on. I'm leaning towards the latter.
A few vague thoughts:
A central log would indeed allow anyone to see who was banned and when. My concern is more that such a solution would be practically ineffective. I think that most people reading an article aren't likely to navigate to the central log and search the ban list to see how many people have been banned by said articles author. I'd like to see a system for flagging up bans which is both transparent and easy to access, ideally so anyone reading the page/discussion will notice if banning is taking place and to what extent. Sadly, I haven't been able to think of a good solution which does that.
I agree. There are a few feairly simple ways to implement this kind of transparancy.
I think these features would add at least some transparancy to comment moderation. I'm still unsure how to make user bans transparent. I'm worried that without doing so, bad admins can just bad users they dislike and give the impression of a balanced discussion with little censorship.
I'd heard of cryonics quite a bit but never brain scanning or preservation. The story of the young man is particularly poignant. It's is truly a tragedy that brain preservation is not more widely commercially available.