>but don't start excluding one-off noob contributors. Open source is open for a reason.
The idea isn't that excluding noobs is good. But that noobs are coming in not because they want to contribute, but because they want to pad their resume. In doing so, they have diluted the pool in a way that they will not even be padding their resume.
We want to delude ourselves that everybody has the capability to be a doctor, programmer, engineer, successful business owner etc. We ban employees from using IQ tests, when SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Then the best companies hire from the best universities where the best students with the highest SAT go i.e. they just hire the highest IQ people in each year slot.
To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody, as if a degree is in a vacuum a token of value and not the fact that a degree is relatively scarce. A degree when everybody has one isn't worth as much as when only 50% of people have one.
And of course the law of supply/demand makes degrees more expensive when everybody has one, but makes the degrees less useful economically when everybody has one. Double-dipped.
> University is just an overpriced IQ test anyway.
Only from the point of view of employment market, and only when job skills and university material are widely disparate. (But universities do have a role beyond the employment market.)
> To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody,
Do you mean university admission or university degrees? In many European countries admission is unlimited. For example several German computer science programs are open to anyone for free, with no SAT-like test requirement to get admitted. Whether you'll pass your exams is a different question.
And arguably if it's all about IQ testing, it should be for free, so you filter for high IQ instead of for kids of wealthy parents.
You're effectively claiming that university teaches nothing, but good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more.
Added to that, your final grade indicates ability x effort. This is significantly more useful than a narrow measure of ability alone.
> good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more.
Sadly there aren't a lot of those. Most degrees teach regurgitating what a textbook says in a fancy way that means you pass the "I understood it" test.
I was an Econ major in college, which is one of the most popular majors across all schools in the US. I don't remember even having a textbook beyond the first couple of statistics courses. We were only ever graded on problem sets or term papers with some kind of statistical analysis component.
That said, my American Economic History course was easily one of the most eye-opening learning experiences, and absolutely one of those courses where "I understood the reading" was necessary. It greatly expanded by ability to understand why the economic story played out the way it did, and how much of it was based on the societal and political context of the times, and not on the findings of bean counters doing stat analyses.
My middle of the road state school CS program was nothing like that. I can remember exactly 1 CS class where memorizing the text book was remotely useful.
creating mountain to get more precipitation sounds good until you realise that the optimum strategy is either forest spam or getting weather control and then borehole and condensor spam.
I think the research you are referring to is about unconscious impact of looks on decision. Lack of pictures will affect choices, but will not necessarily make participants unhappy. The later requires an entirely different approach to be studied.
They select on looks because that's all they have on dating sites.
People (especially women in mainstream society) mostly ignore looks when they have already had a real-life pleasant interaction; however, it is very challenging to replicate that online, since it's very hard to give incentives to be genuine.
The funny thing I noticed when living in Switzerland and traveling other European countries is due to the way lower obesity rate, most people are generally attractive.
The American obesity rate is something absurd like 40% among adults. A bunch of these people aren't actually half-bad looking if they were able to drop the weight.
The riches already gave back, because they got rich making things people want.
>We need more civic-minded leadership across the population, not less. The greed is just excessive.
This is the wishful thinking that statists will always use. the state will be fine if only people would be better. Well people are not better and never will be, so we need a system whereby we do not grant people, who will never be better, power over their fellow men.
people still die more driving to the airport than in a plane crash.
The fact that people smoke, drive while texting, drive drunk, don't exercise and so on, show that they don't really care about not dying. They just like to complain when dying is caused by somebody else.
The idea isn't that excluding noobs is good. But that noobs are coming in not because they want to contribute, but because they want to pad their resume. In doing so, they have diluted the pool in a way that they will not even be padding their resume.