There is a growing number of parents who, because of this exact overt and known discrimination against applicants from private schools, will first send their kids to elite private primary schools and then they switch them to the best secondary state schools they can find, using the money to supplement their education with private one-to-one tutors.
This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.
Oh yes, I have kids in a prep school where half of the class goes to Eton, and the rest to Winchester, Harrow, Seven Oaks, Derby... Now, for the past few years, almost no parents want to send kids to Eton. They know how much are those kids discriminated against. It's better to send them to a school with lower profile.
Doesnβt this prove the reason for the existence of the disparity? The wealthy kidβs parents want tutors to supplement the education they get from their state school.
I understand an argument saying people will game this setup, but arguing that state school kids are not disadvantaged is indefensible, in my opinion
There is absolutely a disparity between private and state teaching quality.
I don't think thats an objectionable statement.
Also, while not wanting to paint with a broad brush, people I know who work in state run schools are aware of how many other challenges students must face when they're on school grounds.
They're fighting more than the test criteria, they're fighting their peers, outside criminal influences, prostitution, drug dealing etc etc.
Meanwhile this stuff is rarer and more swiftly dealt with at private schools because the parents won't have it, and they pay the bills and have some leverage, the financial incentives are different in the model and it shows.
I personally don't have a problem with loosening the grade criteria, even if it's gamed, the candidates are all interviewed anyway, it's not like a free pass, more an opportunity.
> (Proverbs 13:7) There is one who pretends to be rich, yet has nothing;
There is another who pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.
Pretending you're rich has been happening for a long time.
Conversely, pretending you're poor though might make you a bit of a miser as you wouldn't use what you have to help anyone else.
It seems wise to be discrete about your wealth if you have it, or you're just inviting trouble for little real gain.
The most probable scenario for inorganic matter to be arranged and organised into a living, homeostatic self replicating machine, is for a number feature complete systems (including hardware and software) to appear all at the same time.
If you don't start with all of them in place, the organism dies, and fails to benefit from both time and natural selection.
Even in this model there are many chicken / egg scenarios. e.g. Every cell needs a membrane to survive, but how does a membrane benefit a cell if it has no ports built in to let waste out and food in? So the wall and the access control systems must appear simultaneously, or the cell dies and does not benefit from natural selection.
Another one is DNA, it's information storage, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything except be acted upon by other systems, but DNA holds the information to create those systems. So how were the systems consistently replicated before information storage systems like DNA?
You probably don't care about this because you seem to be answering something he didn't suggest... But he's not saying that every cell in our bodies is being actively managed by another being, he's saying that cells have been designed to self-coordinate.
Anyway, just food for thought for other readers who may also have these questions, you're not alone, and it is worth investigating because the current paradigm is in crisis and it's not worth basing your life decisions on their ideas anymore.
On what basis do you say that it is the most probable? It seems highly improbable to me that a mind could exist before living tissue exists, when every single example of a mind that we have studied depends on living tissue for its existence. It seems even more improbable to me that this mind could somehow intricately shape the universe. Through which mechanisms? Magic? The idea that lifeforms as we know then today were created whole cloth by an intelligent being of unclear origins and properties poses more questions than it answers.
On the other hand, there are plentiful examples of extremely simple lifeforms in nature, and there are also non-living things in nature that display phenomena that early simple lifeforms could have utilized (e.g., membrane-like structures that are spontaneously formed by phospholipids). There are still a lot of questions and unknowns here, but not nearly as many, and scientists are on a general trajectory of answering them at a fairly quick clip β whereas theological questions about the creation of living organisms are largely just as unanswered today as they were hundreds of years ago.
A different but popular notion is that a creator created the universe (effectively by sparking something like the Big Bang), but the lifeforms that followed evolved as scientists believe. This, to me, is far more plausible. As yet, we do not have any other good explanations for how the universe came into existence, and so this deistic hypothesis is as good as any other I have heard.
An organic "feature" like flight or gills, or the ability to blink requires both hardware and software (to both create the hardware, and to run the new hardware.)
This, we're discovering, takes quite a lot of information. Organised, specific information in the correct order to harness maths, physics and chemistry to create a working feature.
To get such a feature off the ground by random point mutations using evolution by natural selection, each and every mutation needs to provide selective advantage, or it is discarded. Any progress to such a feature must start again from scratch.
There is a theory about how this can happen, it's well understood, but now we know much much more about how Biology actually works at the lower levels. So regarding the theory, people know that something needs to give, and it's not going to be maths, physics or chemistry, lets put it that way.
What evidence have you considered to the contrary? Have you ever turned the chessboard around to look at this from the other side of the table?
Most people I've spoken to who have strong feelings about this topic have only ever looked at it from one side properly.
The GP is skeptical that one can go from A, a chance interaction between two systems, through a continuous uninterrupted, robust, repeatable chain of unguided interactions, and arrive at Z, the placenta. An organ whose function and elegance is unrivalled by anything we as a species have made with logic and thought.
And why should he not be skeptical, everything we've practically achieved in terms of technological progress has been the product of mind and intelligence, any claims to be able to do the same thing without that should be scrutinised very closely.
Did you know that with Gitlab you can generate gitlab ci yaml in a job runtime and then run that yaml as a child pipeline using trigger:include:artifact?
This was the only way I could create dynamic terraform pipelines which changed depending on a plan output.
I'm sure could use it to achieve what you've described.
Thank you, that's indeed a good point. And yes, I did consider that. However, then the Gitlab UI (pipelines overview etc.) ceases to be very useful as everything will be inside one big child pipeline (i.e. individual jobs will no longer be shown in the overview). My coworkers would have hated me.
This is an entirely expected outcome. Water will find a way to ground.