Sure—but notice that the US, UK, and many other places converged on the same behavior—which in most cases arose as a consensus among local schools that hit on similar practices without any central coordination. Which suggests that the behavior is more than a historical accident.
That’s a bit of a myth:
The history of summer holidays is clouded with myths. One popular idea is that school children have a long summer holiday (six weeks for most pupils in the UK) so that they could help work in the fields over the summer. But the current school system was developed over the course of the 19th century, when English farms were increasingly mechanised and having children helping with the harvest would only have been necessary for a small percentage of the population. Besides which, a brief glance at the farming calendar tells you that a holiday that ends at the start of September is not going to be much use for bringing in the harvest in the early autumn. So whatever the origin of six weeks off at the height of summer is, it’s not for the sake of farmers.
We should also distinguish between two types of historical explanation: people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, but they tend to keep doing the things that create good results. However, they may not know what’s causing those results, and it may have nothing to do with why they initially decided to engage in that behavior. So you can have people all over converge on a certain behavior without a consistent explanation for why they’re doing it—and popular explanations (even if historically informed) may have nothing to do with why the behavior actually persists.
Is that not why schools in many places take a break over the summer?
40% of young adults who drank in the past year
Yeah—it looks like it’s a trend among drinkers, so it says nothing about the overall drinking rate.
I donate to the Patreon account of a local independent journalist who covers the city council.
If someone else posts a better comment that renders mine superfluous, I’ll often delete mine. But if someone else has already replied to mine, I’ll leave it for the sake of context but downvote it so the better one gets more visibility.
I wouldn’t be surprised if forces on the ground deliberately downplayed the damage when reporting to Trump so he wouldn’t endanger them all with further escalations.
It’s ultimately also an observation about what LLMs can and can’t be, based on the structures they’re reproducing:
Languages are systems. They can most certainly have biases, but they do not and cannot have goals. Exactly the same is true for the mathematical models of language that are produced by transformers, and that power interfaces such as ChatGPT. We can blame the English language for a lot of things. But it is never going to become conscious and decide to turn us into paperclips.
Yeah—I just don’t understand how they disentangle the two if they’re both happening simultaneously.
I would have thought the volume of water retained on land by dams would be more than offset by the volume lost to melting glaciers.
Predicting with 64% accuracy how voters will respond to a potential campaign strategy would be enough to comfortably win an election.
The only time orcas see humans is when we’re flailing practically helplessly in the water—they’re probably trying to save us from extinction.
Fish.
My apartment building turns 100 this year.
There are three factors that might prevent you from using an online platform to share your opinion:
The government might impose content restrictions on the platform
The owners (or delegated moderators) of the platform might impose restrictions on its users
The users of the platform might use its tools to police the opinions of other users.
“Freedom of speech” normally just applies to the first. Is that what you mean when you say you’re not “allowed” to speak freely?
Ancestors of Maximinus Thrax?
I presume the goal was to put the remains in low earth orbit, where they would eventually have reentered anyway—right?
Does the Philological Society require papers to include abstracts in Greek and Latin, or is that just the authors flexing?
The good old Edict of Diocletian approach.
It’s contextual: government can be used for right-wing or left-wing purposes, and people opposed to those uses can use libertarianism as a justification whether the actual policies they’re opposing are right- or left-wing. But that means people with right- or left-wing sympathies can selectively target policies they disagree with on purely sectarian grounds, while disingenuously claiming libertarianism as a motivation.