It is doable. There is a book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata that does it for Latin. I have to admit that it has some limits. At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue. English is not my first language. I live in the UK everything I read is in English. There are some words I have seen a thousand times and I sort of know what they mean but they become mine only after I look up for their translation.
>At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue.
It is an interesting point. When you first learn words in your mother tongue, you don't do it by outside reference to another language. Why is it different for you when learning a second language?
In your native language you don't (generally) have a specific goal to learn that word. Unless you feel compelled enough to look at a dictionary or ask someone for a definition (which is basically equivalent to looking at a translation in the language-learning context), you often just live with an incomplete mental model, until it becomes gradually refined from repeatedly hearing/seeing the word in context.
This is required, to some degree, to become fluent (i.e. intuitive) in a new language too, which is why there is an emphasis on immersion/input in most language-learning circles/ideologies. But when you have an explicit goal, you're more likely to be compelled to want the mental shortcut/jumpstart that a translation provides. There's also the fact that, as a language learner, the context itself often isn't understood very well (or at all), which makes the natural process even slower. This is where the idea of "comprehensible input" comes into it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
" This is pretty much what I wanted to write. How come productivity is measured in dollars when exchanging goods/services, but constant units when this Baumol thing comes up?"
From an economist perspective there is no difference between the two. Money is just a convenient metric to be able to compare the value of multiple goods.
You don't think of you salary as the power to buy X burgers or Y beers but really it is what it is. It is just easier to say I earn XXXX$.
If I get paid 100 for playing a concert on one day, but 120 another day, did I get more productive? Either way I produced the same number of concerts, but got 20% more payment.
Measured in concerts my productivity was the same. Measured in other goods it went up.
"The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s."
I imagine streaming services were not a thing back then.
Also you make fair points in your comments but you confuse the example for the argument. Replace 'String Quartet' by 'waiter' or 'child minder' if you prefer.
I think the issue is that you measure productivity as in quantitative physical output instead of in value as driven by supply and demand. Absolute value increases due to inflation even though the supply/demand ratio is the same.
I remember reading once that what you think of as military gear obtained at a steep discount is not the first thing that comes to mind : essentially air conditioning.
There has been at least since 1951 since the famous publication of Arrow's impossibility theorem.
Extract from Wikipedia :
"The framework for Arrow's theorem assumes that we need to extract a preference order on a given set of options (outcomes). Each individual in the society (or equivalently, each decision criterion) gives a particular order of preferences on the set of outcomes. We are searching for a ranked voting electoral system, called a social welfare function (preference aggregation rule), which transforms the set of preferences (profile of preferences) into a single global societal preference order. Arrow's theorem says that if the decision-making body has at least two members and at least three options to decide among, then it is impossible to design a social welfare function that satisfies all these conditions (assumed to be a reasonable requirement of a fair electoral system) at once: [...]"
On HN when people discuss CS/privacy/programming the conversation is very thorough and interesting.
When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete ignorance about the topic.
"Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift."
There are many causes explaining unemployment some due to macroeconomic factors such as the monetary policy, others due to regulations of the labor market, others due to the lack of innovation, ..... They have been studied in depth. But "too many people for the economy" is not one of them.
> most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete ignorance about the topic.
This seems to be a problem inherent to many such forums on the internet. When the discussion is controlled by a certain subset of that population, usually via comments, submissions and voting, that subset tends to self-select and alienate alternative viewpoints. Participants are rewarded with a sense of validation for things that appeal to the group but aren't necessarily true or accurate(or humane, fair, respectful, etc).
I think this topic needs a whole lot more analysis and public debate as more and more opinions are solidified in these balkanized communities. I quit reddit over these issues and am hanging on to HN by a thread. At this point I'd rather pay to hear opinions and analysis of experts than be influenced by, and participate in, internet echo chambers.
You have to become an expert to evaluate the expertise of "experts".
The workaround is to try to get better at using methods to pool the wisdom of "experts", to evaluate their claims based on external attributes (eg. looking at the journal that published the paper, looking at other claims of the expert, looking at the methods used to arrive at the claims, examining the used statistical methods, etc.), see also how prediction markets force "experts" to support their confidence with their money - and of course these markets are not infallible either.
Or you can just point out that, well, if there are too many people, just (virtually) split the country down the middle: voila, fewer people in the country.
A more sophisticated argument brings up density. But it's usually the sparsely populated parts of a country that are poorer.
> When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete ignorance about the topic.
Imagine how little they know about the topics you haven’t studied.
The overall quality of comments here is the same as every other niche discussion forum. OK on the original topic. Pretty poor on everything else. The only advantage is that this place at least has some moderation.
> When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete ignorance about the topic.
I think curating a discussion board to have knowledgeable discussion about many things is a really hard task. On many professional boards, discussions about other subjects are put into an OT corner. HN doesn't split discussions into topics so I guess expectation of comments' quality carries over.
I would just make a mental note: Oh this is not about CS/privacy/programming and adjust accordingly.
I suppose it's one of the reasons one should acquaint themselves with people from a variety of backgrounds and don't run away when others are not as knowledgeable about CS/privacy/programming. Actually
HN's issue with broad topic knowledge is considerably worse than just the difficulty of curation.
For example, I emailed the staff with regard to the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on HN and the response was that it is policy not to remove COVID-19 misinformation (including raving conspiracy theories) but also to allow flagging by the 'community' to remove posts pointing out that something is misinformation.
Tacitly allowing the platform to be used to give a mouthpiece to spread misinformation and allowing users to bully people for injecting some degree of factual reality does not encourage good discussion.
Facilitating knowledgeable discussion across a broad range of topics starts with attracting people who are knowledgeable in many areas, and that cannot happen in an environment where the administration allows mob bullying--through the very thin veneer of the downvote/flag system--of people who actually know things.
We already have a solution to the too many people problem. It is called inflation. Inflation rewards future economic activity. It means you can't sit on your savings. You have to keep working for yourself or let someone else work by investing your money.
The very concept of 'popularity' is completely foreign to my experience. I don't think there was a thing such as a popular kid when I was at school or high school.
I personally enjoyed a lot going to school because I could spend time with my friends. I have never witnessed any violence apart from fights form time to time between two malse wanting to show who the strongest was. I was not in a privileged school.
Went to mostly private schools in America and my home country and none of them were anything like this. I've seen some violence back home but not physical. Alcohol, drugs, general bad behavior etc were a much bigger problem and definitely the worst at one public school I briefly went to.
In every school I'd say like people hung out with like people. So the "popularity" would be limited to that in-group. Most of people who PG would call "nerds" had a clique of their own as far as I could tell.
Some people might have been broadly disliked though.
it's not just a US specific thing, it's a generation specific thing.
The scenarios described in the GP link is a very late 70s-80s (Gen X) thing. 90s and early 00s high-schoolers had somewhat different experiences, but they know the trope since that's what was in movies. Schools today have a different concept of a "pecking order" - it's not that nerds aren't at the bottom anymore, it's that the whole concept changed.
https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html
It is doable. There is a book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata that does it for Latin. I have to admit that it has some limits. At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue. English is not my first language. I live in the UK everything I read is in English. There are some words I have seen a thousand times and I sort of know what they mean but they become mine only after I look up for their translation.