How much of the article did you read? The main substance of it is not that the UN rankings are flawed, but how the rankings change based on the broader analysis by Blanchflower and Bryson. That result can't so easily be read off from our cynical preconceptions
At $113B, 2019 was the third-highest year on record for VC deal volume.
2019 had the second-highest volume of “mega rounds” ($100M deals or greater)–mega rounds represented 44% of total annual deal volume.
Revenue grew by an average of 12.2% in 2019 and the total revenues of the tech giants was greater than the GDP of four of the G20 nations.
Yes, tech hiring in 2025 is down from 2019. That's a lot like saying "tech hiring is down from 2000" in 2003.
Still, "over 100,000" is technically correct if it's more than 100,000. Since this subject isn't the main point of the article and the Iraq war is generally acknowledged to have been disastrous, I suppose he chose a safe figure so as not to derail the article with disputed estimates at the outset.
Is the MOOC the same as the actual MIT course though? I went through one of the old Grimson Guttag Intro to CS courses on MIT OCW years ago, with zero programming background I found it a very gentle on-ramp with all the basics explained.
I think it was this one, unfortunately archived now. I don't know the new one
No idea how similar it was to what's taught in the classroom. Of course you have access to TAs and other students IRL. And I have no doubt that assumptions about prior exposure and skills have changed over time.
I can only report that, had you dumped me into that content with those assignments, with no prior background I'd probably have been dropping that class.
The online version was more Grimson on the algorithms and Guttag (who wrote the Python book) on a bit of the programming. But the emphasis was more on the algorithms.
It's similar to the benefits of attending lectures (or watching them on yt): there are more informal asides and intuition-pumps, and maybe more detailed explanations of intermediate steps in calculations than you usually get in books.
And for videos specifically, it can obviously help understanding in many cases to have animated visualizations
For serious lectures (not story telling like history or other humanities) you can't be doing anything on the side if you want to understand. Try listening to a math lecture, or chemistry lecture while doing dishes :)
I found the same to be true with audiobooks, nothing serious can't be "just listened to". I've tried to "listen" to a good biology non-fiction on how live evolved from the primordial soup. Shit, in the first chapters there were covalency chemistry and other stuff that I needed to sit down and write to understand.
> not story telling like history or other humanities
Those are not serious humanities lectures. The serious ones are not storytelling, but serious examination of the evidence or of its analysis. There are far more factors, complexity, and uncertainty in an historical event or process than in a petri dish, and the event can't even be reproduced. It's impossible to use the same kind of scientific method and obtain the same kind of certainty, and requires far more critical thinking, judgment, and analysis.
What caused Andrew Jackson to be elected? There's a relatively simple story told, but the reality is enormously complex and uncertain.
Referring to "math" as serious just makes me want to discount your opinion entirely. Lectures (or indeed any linear encoding) are a bad medium for discussing formal languages. This has nothing to do with how much you care about a topic or whatever "serious" is supposed to imply here.
Regardless, listening to something intently and doing mechanical actions are not exclusive.
Well try to listen to a group theory lecture (for example on cohomology of groups) while doing chores :) But the lecture was indeed useful if you stop and rewind and see how the lecturer was explaining (there were some interesting graphs).
Your brain can't hold the context long enough to go to the required level of abstraction, while you're multitasking (may be walking or something deeply automated doesn't count.
I would say the main reason it's hard to follow abstract maths lectures by listening is not the difficulty of the concepts per se, but simply because it's so visual: it relies on notation and diagrams
But mathematicians can talk to each other about arbitrarily abstract concepts, as long as they have enough shared background, and they don't (always) need a blackboard to do it.
Conversely, you can have conceptually very simple things that are basically impossible to follow just by listening, like multiplying two nine-digit numbers or following one of Euclid's proofs in plane geometry. The difficulty isn't about abstraction, but how many things you have to hold in working memory
Yes, maybe, but for many maths or physics lectures you might have to imagine what's going on as you're listening to the squeaking of chalk on the blackboard:)
The Meta paper, as well as other studies which have been interpreted as rudimentary "mind-reading" have measured activity in sensory cortex correlated with direct sensory inputs. There's a fairly close mapping between the initial layers of sensory cortex and patterns of activation in the sense organs. e.g. the optic nerve from each eye projects onto the initial layer of visual cortex in a way that closely preserves the geometry of the retinal image, so it's not that difficult to correlate information in the stimulus and these parts of cortex. Making sense of activity in deeper areas of cortex which isn't as closely correlated with immediate sensory stimulation is a much harder task.
Secondly, the idea seems to be that the brain could make use of a "lossy image" of its own overall functioning. This part seemed very handwavy to me. The brain already contains the information about its own functioning, by definition, so it's not clear to me what functions would be served by the brain's being able to "sense its own magnetic field". It's known that the brain integrates information from distant regions through the patterns of neuronal connectivity. It's not clear that something similar can be done with magnetic fields, because these would mostly affect very nearby areas of the brain, and long-distance effects would be scrambled with all the other activity going on in other parts of the brain.
The idea to look at the effects of the electromagnetic fields in brain functioning is interesting though. The general idea has been around for a long time[0]. The dificult part is making a detailed proposal for how it would actually work and finding experimental evidence for that.
[0] Burr, Northrop (1935) The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life
He also has this series of talks beginning with the question "What is probability, what is randomness?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJAQVletzdY&list=PLx5f8IelFR...
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