Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "TED" channel.

Because most people don't understand how education works. Having 95% of the students passing a standardized exam is something that politicians can point to as success even if the test itself is meaningless. People also have a mistaken view of education in other countries. Sometimes it is as good as people think, but in the US, the students aren't generally as far behind as is generally imagined. The Chinese remain well behind the US even though we assume they're ahead. They have twice as many students per class as in typical American schools and they just serve to prepare students for the gaokao which is extremely narrow. Students will quite literally not do any studying for classes that don't prepare for that exam as that exam is what determines if they can get into a good university. There's another route, but the schools aren't as good and it takes years longer. Also, that would involve the families taking some responsibility and many of them aren't in any condition to do so.
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Gates is a bad example. His parents had a lot of money and he had a massive opportunity to leverage a loan from his parents into something significant. If he hadn't had that, he would have finished up at Harvard. You don't score 1590 on the SATs if you don't know how to study or lack drive.
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He specifically said that ADHD does exist, but his point was that a lot of the "ADHD" isn't really ADHD, it's children struggle to pay attention through an entire day of low grade clerical work. Get rid of the tedious work and the rates would likely return to normal. There's been an explosion in diagnoses of ADHD over the last 20 years and it's highly unlikely that it's just a matter of the disorder not being diagnosed, that's probably only a small part of it.
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I was tutoring a student in statistics recently and the question was rather ridiculous. It said that 30% of people polled considered Roosevelt to be the best President since WWII and the other 70% didn't. The glaringly obvious problem to people that have actually had American history is that Roosevelt died in 1945 several months before WWII was finished. So, the whole idea that he could be the best President of the post-war period makes no sense at all. He couldn't be the best, or worst for that matter, because he wasn't anything in the post-war period having already died. Although, I suppose he may have been pining for the fjords as they say.
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@exploitedfight8081 keep in mind that he's known for pushing his responsibilities onto others while reaping the reward.
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Perhaps, but I look forward to a day when most people are actually smarter than me. The key takeaway here is that we should be investing a lot more time and energy ensuring that young people have the best training we can give them in dealing with morality. And I mean dealing with it, not parroting what we think is right and wrong, but how to evaluate it as much as possible. The intelligence thing will probably solve itself with any halfway decent education system, but we've failed miserably when it comes to teaching children how to develop morals and identify the difference between things that are considered to be moral and things that actually are. Or swap in ethics if you want.
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This is definitely consistent with what I've found in terms of my alcoholism. I'd stopped using for about 6 months before I realized what was going on. I was in so much pain that I'd literally take anything to deal with it. Somehow I managed my way through that, but in the years since, most days I have no interest in drugs, except when I get lonely around the holidays.
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It's standard to call the cops in a lot of cases, the ones you hear about in the paper are usually ones which are ridiculous. Many of those situations don't even justify talking to them, just that the people involved keep walking. Although, Starbucks was completely right to ask those men to leave, they were trespassing.
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He's mostly right, except for the racist cops. The reason why you see a disproportionate number of people of color shot by police is that people of color are exposed to police a disproportionate amount of time. If you actually control for that, the rates aren't that dissimilar. Or, to put it a different way, when white people get shot by police, it rarely makes the news for more than a day or so. When people of color are shot by police it's often a much bigger deal. The reason being, that there are fewer of those incidents and as such, they actually are news. It's the amount and type of exposure to the police that's the main problem here. As long as there's more contacts, there will be more shootings, regardless of intention.
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The local paper probably has them digitized. I know that my local paper has digitized archives going back to at least the mid-80s as I looked. I'm not sure when they started doing that, but I know that decades ago, journalists were already using computers and submitting things via modems.
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