All of my encounters with individuals who feel liberal arts are useless and STEM is the way seem to, at their core, feel that way because of earning potential, and I’ve never heard one of them bash Econ/finance/investment as a career path. But 🤷♂️
Then no, I don’t agree with this specific implementation of the system, at least the second half. I do think more productive/effective workers should be compensated more. But being a good engineer does not make you a good manager, and the issues associated with promoting an excelling worker into management (a job requiring a substantially different skill set) are so common there’s a name for their inevitable failure, The Peter Principle
I didn’t say it did, but I am a citizen of the USA and the vast majority of my cultural experience and knowledge, and therefore what I can intelligently comment on, are centered on the US.
Well you need to clarify further then. Are you saying we should make the best scientist the president, or the person with the most aptitude for politics and rule to be president? I don’t see how this is functionally different than what I said.
If I was guessing, in general, I think people who advocate for a pure meritocracy in the USA feel the world should be evaluated in more black and white, objective terms. The financial impact and analytic nature of STEM and finance make it much easier to stratify practitioners “objectively” in comparison to finding, for instance, the “best” photographer. I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only “real” academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy. But I’m no expert.
As a general rule, yes. People who are able to better perform a task should be preferentially allocated towards those tasks. That being said, I think this should be a guiding rule, not a law upon which a society is built.
For one, there should be some accounting for personal preference. No one should be forced to do something by society just because they’re adept at something. I think there is also space within the acceptable performance level of a society for initiatives to relax a meritocracy to some degree to help account for/make up for socioeconomic influences and historical/ongoing systemic discrimination. Meritocracy’s also have to make sure they avoid the application of standardized evaluations at a young age completely determining an individual’s future career prospects. Lastly, and I think this is one of common meritocracy retorhic’s biggest flaws, a person’s intrinsic value and overall value to society is not determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance, which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.
You’re generalizing a specific phenomenon, and incorrect. Acid-base reactions only very rarely produce gases. The reactions produce heat and water, only in the case of bicarbonate being a base is a gas produced. This is because carbonic acid forms, which spontaneously decays into carbon dioxide. This is not a universal acid-base phenomenon. Soaps should not cause fizzing with vinegar.
I’d be honored to be Mr. Shadowheart
You make physics come alive!
There is an OTF version, it’s just not bundled w/ anything by default as far as I’m aware.
Available here: https://ctan.org/pkg/kpfonts-otf?lang=en
Personally I’m a huge fan of the Kepler Project font. I got hooked on it when I started writing papers in LaTeX.
AI, especially as it relates to completing daily tasks. I cannot wait until an AI can efficiently sort, delete, and categorize my email so I don’t have to deal with all the junk and FYI emails.
Pharmacist and 4th year medical student here. Medical tests are ordered based upon their statistical ability to alter your likelihood of a diagnosis. No test is perfect in either direction (negative result meaning you don’t have disease or positive result indicating you have disease). Tests cost money, take resources of the healthcare system, and have the potential to be wrong. When a test is wrong, it can result in financial, emotional, and physical harm to an individual.
Example: you’re an otherwise healthy 34 year old and you feel a little under the weather and are coughing. It’s only been going on a few days, mild fever, but you’re worried and you go to the doctor. Your doctor thinks this is most likely a viral infection, recommends Tylenol and ibuprofen and sends you home. You imply to the doctor you’ll sue if you don’t get antibiotics and a chest x-ray just to be safe. The doctor, rather than argue with you when they have a dozen other patients to see, just orders the stuff and moves on. The chest X ray doesn’t explain your cough, but there’s a small lesion of undetermined significance on the X-ray. Now you need a CT. The CT says “probably a self-limited granuloma from a fungal infection, can’t rule out cancer, correlate with biopsy”. Then you have to go get sedated, put a camera down your throat, and have a pulmonologist take a sample of your lung to see if you have cancer. Maybe you end up with a complication from the sedation or a pneumothorax. Meanwhile the antibiotics you took didn’t really improve your cough but now you have this uncomfortable itchy rash. Are you allergic to the amoxicillin? Or did you just develop the typical rash seen in people who have mononucleosis that also take amoxicillin? Will you get allergy testing for the amoxicillin? Just avoid amoxicillin, an awesome antibiotic, for the rest of your life?
We are restrictive in our prescribing of medications and tests not because we don’t care about you, not because we want to save the hospital or the insurance company money (in fact the hospital prefers we order more things because they make money on testing). We are restrictive because we want to maximize benefit while minimizing risk, and everything we do has risks and benefits.
It’s not that we don’t use mode, there are definitely times mode is used. It’s just that mean (and median as well) contain a lot more useful information about distributions that we often care about. For a normal distribution mean, median, and mode should all be identical. So why do we use mean? Because mathematically, the mean is what underpins the formula for the normal distribution, not median or mode, and when you’re talking about doing math with normal distributions mean is the thing to talk about (along with standard deviation).
We use median a lot too, you probably just don’t hear it called median very often. The median is useful in non-normal distributions, and it defines the 50th percentile, so along with the 25%-ile and 75%-ile you’ve got your quartile distributions. We use these all the time to talk about grades in schools, or when we talk about home prices distributions in a given area, or salaries within a given field.
We use mode too, again just by a different name most of the time. Any time you’ve asked “what’s the most common blank” you’re basically asking for a mode. When we talk about “average” income in a country, we’re usually actually talking about median or mode. Favorite animal? Answered as a mode.
You have to use the right statistical tool for your question: unfortunately English doesn’t do a good job of conveying this without math jargon.