Teachers deciding Exam Results

I read the following article:

Teachers to get sweeping powers to decide exam results in England

As I said last year on facebook (and which resulted in me having to block a certain relative on there) this makes the grades meaningless.  Someone who brings in an apple everyday for the teacher will get high grades, those who take issue with the teacher's thoughts will get low grades (precisely those pupils/students who might tend to be the most intelligent).  And, of course, rampant grade inflation means that the grades cannot be compared to historic results.  This makes it very difficult for Universities and employers to establish who has the most ability.  It's just insane.

Exams or tests should determine one's grades, and most certainly each school's proportion of specific grades shouldn't differ from that attained in 2019. 

Amazon: All comments on Customer Reviews have been removed!

My TV set is almost 14 years old, so I'm looking at TV sets on Amazon and reading the customer reviews.  I've just noticed 1 hour or so ago that there is no longer a facility to comment on reviews!  This is quite definitely not useful to the customer.  If someone makes negative remarks about a product it was useful to read the comments underneath to see if others had the same experience.  A discussion forum here confirms that Amazon removed the comments in December.  

According to that forum Amazon said:

While reviews and feedback are important to our customers and sellers, the comments feature on customer reviews was rarely used. As a result, we are retiring this feature on December 16, 2020.

I have noticed in the past few years that the comments are becoming more and more difficult to access. Indeed, in the past year, their existence was not at all obvious.  Someone even mentions that they were not possible to view at all on smartphones.  It is therefore scarcely surprising that the comment feature was rarely used.  The obvious solution, therefore, would have been to make the comments prominent again and to allow smartphones to access them, not simply get rid of them altogether!

Something else irks me about this.  I'd typed countless thousands of words in the comments underneath customer reviews, especially under my own review of the book The Myth of an Afterlife, where I engaged with the editor Keith Augustine. We each must have contributed thousands of words arguing (or sometimes, more accurately, quarrelling) with each other.  Have all these arguments/debates been irretrievably deleted?  I find this extraordinarily irritating.  Why on earth could they not have warned people beforehand that their comments were going to be deleted?  It is disgraceful that no warning was given. 

Also, because it is not permitted to provide links in the actual reviews, I had included a link in the first comment to my ~13,000 word full review of this book on my main blog.   Now potential customers won't be aware of this more complete review (customer reviews on Amazon are (or were) limited to 5000 words, so I had to omit most of my review)  Nor am I able to edit my review on the USA site to advise customers to google for my full review (since around 3 years ago I am no longer permitted to submit customer reviews since I have bought insufficient number of products from the USA site.  Incidentally, that's because for most products they won't post to my address in the UK!).

So, anyway, I'm far from happy about this.  I shall email Bezo.

22/01/2021 Edited to add:  I emailed Bezos, although it wasn't him that responded.  Here is their response:

Dear customer, 

Amazon is always innovating to improve our shopping and selling experience. 

Comments on product reviews were rarely used, and we are retiring this feature so our teams can instead build features that will delight more customers and sellers. 

Thank you for your understanding.  

Thanks for taking the time to send us your comments on COMMUNITY FEATURE. We’re continually working to improve the shopping experience and ensure we present useful information to customers. I have passed your message along to the team involved with future development of our Communities features.   

If you want to find out more about this or other Amazon.co.uk features, please visit our Amazon.co.uk Site Features Help pages:   

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_16465201_bid_208917?n   

I hope this helps. We look forward to seeing you again soon. 

Warmest regards, 

Mikyle Lakay

Amazon.co.uk

Your feedback is helping us build Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company.

First of all why does the response say "Dear Customer" rather than "Dear Mr Wardell" or even "Dear Ian"?  It makes me suspect that he or she is just sending me a generic email.  Which might be the reason why my points have been ignored.  Also, why is Amazon UK responding?  I used Jeff Bezo's primary email address -- jeff@amazon.com -- and he doesn't reside in the UK.  I responded with the following:

Hello, first of all why hasn’t Jeff responded, and why is Amazon UK responding?

You say:

"Comments on product reviews were rarely used, and we are retiring this feature so our teams can instead build features that will delight more customers and sellers."

But, as I said in my original email to Jeff, the reason why this is the case is, first of all, because Amazon doesn't make these comments available at all on mobiles and tablets, and secondly, for those who do use browsers, the very existence of the comments won't be noticed by the casual user compared to 3 or 4 years ago. You had to make a couple of clicks to get to the comments.

So, presumably, the comments are rarely used, not because people are not interested in them (why on earth would that be so anyway?) but rather because they are either not there, or their existence is only noticeable with those well versed with the Amazon site. 

The comments used to be directly below the reviews and couldn't be missed. The pertinent question here is, were they also rarely used then? I very much doubt this! In which case it has absolutely nothing to do with the assertion that people have no interest in the comments.

Pass this on to Jeff will you??

Ian Wardell 

Update 25/02/21: I got another response, but once again not from Jeff.  A different person from last time though.  They said:

"Hello Ian,

I am Bryce of Amazon.co.uk's Communities Escalation Team. Jeff Bezos received your email, and I am responding on his behalf.

Comments on product reviews were rarely used, and we are retiring this feature so our teams can instead build features that will delight more customers and sellers. This is applicable to both the UK and US marketplaces."

So, yet again, my reasoning has simply been ignored which invites the question of why they bothered to respond at all.  What do I do? Just copy and paste my previous argument that this is wholly irrelevant? They simply don't take a blind bit of notice of what I say. No-one ever takes any notice of what I say. Might as well not bother communicating with anyone.

Maybe a different tack is in order. I could email back and threaten to boycott Amazon. 

 

 

 

I've always been an Outsider

I've never fit in, always been an outsider and always will be.  I think that's unfortunate as people don't like those who think differently to them, hold different attitudes, values, aspirations, you name it.  

I used to try and be like them, echo their sentiments, make others like me. But, I think they could see through me, they realised I was different, that I was . . am . . totally other.  Now I don't bother and am just myself.  I now embrace my otherness.

The Filter Hypothesis of the Mind-Brain Relationship

In the Myth of an Afterlife there's a chapter called The Dualist’s Dilemma.  The authors of this particular chapter (different chapters are penned by different authors) are Keith Augustine and Yonatan I. Fishman.  At one point they criticise the filter hypothesis of the consciousness-brain relationship.  The filter hypothesis rejects the idea that the brain produces the self and consciousness and, at least in its most simplistic interpretation, holds that the brain serves to constrain, limit and focus our consciousness.  They say:

If the mind is “not generated by the brain but instead focused, limited, and constrained by it” (Kelly et al., 2007, p. xxx), the filter theory entails that a brainless mind will be expanded, less limited, and unrestricted by brain function. 

So, in an unembodied state as in an afterlife realm, we ought to be more conscious.  This seems to be supported by accounts from those who have undergone NDE's who often report that during their NDE they felt more conscious than they have ever felt in their lives.

They continue:

[No] brainless minds are available to clinicians for study, this is not a falsifiable prediction in itself. But it does have falsifiable consequences, most obviously that the greater the disruption in brain function, the “freer” the mind will be from its neural confines, and hence the clearer one’s cognitive function will be. For example, we would expect the progressive destruction of more and more of the brain’s “filter” by Alzheimer’s disease to progressively “free” more and more of consciousness, and thus increase Alzheimer’s patients’ mental proficiency as the disease progresses. Just as removing sections of a dam would increase the flow of water going through it, the degenerating “filter” would become increasingly ineffective in limiting consciousness as more and more neural pathways were destroyed.

But nothing could be further from the truth. As the dependence thesis straightforwardly predicts, the more that brain functioning is compromised, the more that the mind itself is compromised.

Well, in the context of Alzheimer's there is the phenomenon of terminal or paradoxical lucidity, but anyway... 

Often the metaphor of a TV set is employed to illustrate this filter hypothesis. Just as a TV set doesn't produce the programmes that are shown, but merely alters the TV signal in certain characteristic ways, so too brains don't produce consciousness but rather alters consciousness in a certain characteristic way.  Now, clearly, a damaged TV doesn't result in enhanced picture quality, so why would a damaged brain result in one becoming more conscious?

Their mistake is to ignore the fact that while the self is attached to the brain, then it will be subject to the condition of the brain.  Compare to my vision when I wear eyeglasses with the lenses progressively fogging up.  My vision won't be enhanced, rather it will be compromised.  But not so when I take the eyeglasses off.

They go on to say:

[O]n the filter theory we would expect more robust brains to be better filters of an otherwise unrestricted mind, and thus for the minds of those who possess the most complex brains to be the most mentally handicapped. But then wouldn’t the organisms with the simplest brains be the most mentally proficient, rather than those with the most complex ones? And wouldn’t children with the least developed brains be the most mentally proficient, while those transitioning into adulthood became increasingly impaired by the greater filtering imposed by their progressively developing brains?

Not at all.  Again, if we refer to the TV set metaphor, we would scarcely expect an old-fashioned B&W TV set to produce the best picture quality, and a more technologically sophisticated  smart UHD TV set, to produce the worst.

Incidentally, they're taking the notion of a brain being a "filter" too literally.  The brain doesn't merely filter, it will have a somewhat more involved role than that.

PS I have a ~13,000 word review of The Myth of an Afterlife.  Go here.  

Covid could cost children £350bn in earnings due to lost learning?

According to this article the Institute for Fiscal Studies claims that Covid could cost children £350bn in earnings due to lost learning.  The article says: 

The IFS estimates that such a substantial loss of learning is likely to be followed by lower skills and qualifications for children at school during the pandemic, resulting in permanently lower incomes during their careers.

What absolute nonsense.  All school kids from 4 to 18 will have lost perhaps a year or so of schooling.  Are employers not going to employ any of them?  Just employ older people instead?    How often do people use matrices or calculus or know about fronted adverbials, or utilise their knowledge of trilobites and igneous rocks?  Let's face it, there's precious little that kids learn that will translate or be useful to their careers. What employers should be interested in are peoples' skills for the job and how hard they will work.  The former will be acquired from experience, not having a load of irrelevant knowledge in their heads. 

Oh yes, and I'm sure most adults won't have retained the vast majority of stuff they learnt at school anyway.  Who knows what matrices are?