Compare and contrast "Saudi extremist holed up in Pakistan who has been targeting Americans for a decade succeeds in blowing up three buildings with large planes on American soil: Well, I guess it's time to invade Iraq and Afghanistan then" 8I
> Can, say, the Belgium government read along with all messages on Whatsapp?
There is something to be said for "our populace relies on tech built by foreign companies" though. Said foreign company is at minimum less likely to install a backdoor for a local government (or be as easily hacked by said local government) than if popular language issues leave the ground ripe for local alternatives to be more popular.
Yes, that is about the single only upside to relying on US Big Tech rather than sovereign local tech. It doesn't nearly weigh up to the downsides, but it is a real thing. In Belgium's case though, even if every Belgian migrated iver to WhatsBelgian for their IMing needs tomorrow, given the competency of the government it would take at least a decade before they had things in place to read along.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, the point was that all above things do hold for Korea yet are not at all the norm in the West.
Well I for one am always in favor of arbitrary humans having better ways to voluntarily attenuate their own fertility, full stop.
We may have a depopulation shock problem on our hands at the moment, but trying to encourage more accidental births isn't the way to solve that: we need to increase social and financial incentives for forming families and pull away as many of the social and financial barriers thereupon that we can. Not to increase population but to better slow the free-fall of it decreasing so badly that it upsets the actuarial tables.
While I have no way to assess whether better male birth control options would directly positively impact education in particular, I see zero ways it could negatively impact it.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, then what does the system of "not going to school" do?
If schooling and learning/education are truly mutually exclusive then who is the most learned and educated person you can point to that never stepped foot in a school? And how do those rare examples compare against the breadth of modern PHD holders?
There are a non-negligible fraction of kids that are kept out of school, homeschooled, etc. If school was as bad for learning as you suggest then one would expect those kept out of it to demonstrate higher-than-average aptitude.
Part of the goal there is not only "relatability" (demonstrating how this could be useful in reality) but "applicability" (demonstrating HOW to distill a math problem out of some potentially messy real world anecdote).
I have legit seen real world adults do things like say "Well, I got ten widgets because I know that's enough for two people. But there's gonna be four coming so.. uh.. 10+2=12, I'll bring 12 widgets"
I can recall that one motivation that helped to drive me when I was very young (K-2 at least) was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do. Like there was this ladder I could climb to in a sense help to advance to a more sophisticated peer group; even in relation to academic concerns like reading and math.
So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)
> was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do.
That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over.
When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already a fairly typical "beginners language", and my dad actually already had a book on learning Python.
Wanna know why I started with C++ instead? Because one of my classmates told me that it was too hard and that I wasn't smart enough to do it and only professional software engineers can.
I wasn't about to let some kid tell me I wasn't smart enough to do something that I knew I was capable of, so that afternoon I begged my parents to take me to a nearby used-books store and buy me a "Learn to Program in C++" book, and started on that. Eventually I also found a copy of the Sams "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" book that I read through online.
I still kind of have that mentality; I learned how to use Isabelle because I felt that that's what the "grown up" computer scientists use. I learned how to write Haskell because that's what the "smart" software engineers use. I learned how to use Vim as a teenager because that's what the "good" coders used.
It's probably not the best way to motivate yourself, but it seems to have worked out ok for me.
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