I would say it slightly differently: The average rate of growth comes from the average of the successful and unsuccessful innovators and non-innovators.
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
Employment of physicists has had its ups and downs. Academic physics research was impacted by funding, including a draw-down of defense related funding after the Soviet Union collapsed. Also, during my time as a student, mandatory retirement was outlawed, so there was suddenly a drastic reduction of retirements.
The number of people entering graduate study in physics never went down, so the academic career pipeline was flooded with talent. You had to be a research superstar to get a faculty job. I wasn't.
Meanwhile, physics had never really laid out a reliable path into industry. Getting an industry job involved a fair amount of luck. Many physics students became programmers. My first job after grad school was for a company owned by a relative of a fellow grad student, and my ancillary skills in programming and electronics have helped lubricate my resume as needed.
It's not just a dependence on the intelligence of the models, but also their intentions, as programmed by their owners.
A friend of mine asked me if I was optimistic about AI. I told him, it depends on who owns it. If the people own it, I'm optimistic. If the oligarchs own it, I'm pessimistic.
Indeed, likely the most widespread teaching method today is the Suzuki method, and it doesn't introduce reading until after at least the first couple of years. There are books, but they're more for the parents to follow along than for the kids.
American teachers were horrified by this idea when I was a kid. But the Suzuki method has been successful, and I think it has raised the level of playing overall. Many famous musicians self-identify a "Suzuki kids." On the other hand, many of them admit to not being the strongest readers, but reading takes practice. You can also pick up repertoire by following the sheet music while listening to a recording. Like many skills, it fades if it isn't used. I'm fortunate to be a fluent sight-reader, but not a virtuoso.
In my view the notation is what it is. Changing it would be hard. "Standard" notation creates a kind of symbiosis between composers and players. If a composer uses a nonstandard notation, nobody will play their stuff. And the standardization is why musicians can learn the skill of reading.
All the Suzuki teachers I know use the book even in the early years for even their youngest students. It isn't what the method intended, but that is what is commonly done.
Car headlights are regulated. My hunch is that the regulations are based on technical background that is not up to date with modern light sources including LEDs and HIDs.
Styling works against us too. The ability to control the geometry of the light beam improves with the size of the optics relative to the emitter, but people want a car with sexy little lights.
I designed optics for lighting in a past life, though never for an automotive application. This issue is actually on my radar because of the blinding brightness of bike lights on the local bike paths.
The uniqueness of this episode suggests that there are people out there who are fully occupied searching every square foot of the earth for places where they can wheedle their way into a land deal. If it's not for a data center, then it's a CAFO, a mine, logistics center, etc.
NIMBYism is not just a matter of wanting to preserve exorbitant land values, but a knowledge that every square foot of land and gallon of water is in demand by nefarious people who are not revealing their actual intentions.
Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.
Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.
This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.
I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff
This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.
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