Bombadil
22hr ago
exclusively based on merit.
Merit is just very limited when it comes to kids. They don't have as much agency as adults, so their abilities are often a reflection of how involved their parents are. If my parents help me with my homework and feed me healthy meals, I will obviously have a natural advantage over kids for whom this isn't the case. It seems really hard to solve this with extra funding. Sure you can provide free meals and expertly educated teachers to level the playing field. But good parents is not something that you reasonably buy with money.
So I think any kind of merit based education will run into complains about it favoring kids from good socioeconomic backgrounds. Overall, these children are just going to do better, so granting merit-based benefits will in a way always be a "rich get richer" policy.
Not that this is necessarily disqualifying though. I personally believe that society should encourage skills and hard work in children more than it currently does, so to some extent I am very much in favor of incentives to support these values.
Bombadil
23hr ago
I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part, but I do like the idea of segregating students into different groups based on their abilities or how they act in the classroom. I am biased due to being the kind of kid who would have greatly benefitted from the bottom half of the class being shifted into different grades though. I think it would still be a hard pill to swallow for broader society.
At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class. The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.
On the other hand, the new system only needs to be better than what we currently have. Having the school environment be destroyed by a handful of kids that obviously have no business being there, seems overall worse than excluding said students from normal teaching.
Bombadil
1d ago
You need a special ed teacher for the special ed kids. If you pretend that no kids are special ed, you only need the normal teacher and no extra help for all the normal kids. In other words, you save money on the teacher but sacrifice the quality of education that the majority of the class receives. This is bad for the kids and society, but seems good for the school budget in the short term.
I obviously don't know if there are additional costs to having difficult children in a normal classroom. But it seems logical to me that mixing all the kids together lets you save on teachers, meaning that having separate classes for special ed kids would be more expensive.
Why do you expect it to be cheaper?
Bombadil
1d ago
I imagine "kicking out the kids" would in practice mean "moving them to special ed" or something similar where they can stay for the day (so the parents have time to work) and hopefully learn the skills they need to function in a classroom (or at least not make the day a nightmare for the other kids). In that case money would not be saved, merely moved around. Not providing them with a chance for an education at all due to factors outside their control (mental disabilities, parental neglect, etc.) seems contrary to modern values.
I guess you could maybe do it when they are older though. Expelling a teenager is very different than expelling a 6-year-old. An argument could be made that if a kid is still unwilling to put in effort and constantly disruptive by around age 14 or so, society has done all that could reasonably be expected of it, and from now on the duty is on the parent.
Bombadil
1d ago
It's a hard sell, emotionally and ideologically speaking. Education is meant to be for everyone, and the entire point of making it mandatory and free is so the children from the weakest backgrounds get a level playing field with the rich kids. Not educating the very weakest is counterproductive to this ideal.
Besides, you run into the problem that society is structured around school taking care of the kids for the majority of the workday. Forcing the kid out of school likely means the family has to take care of it, and a lot of parents simply won't be able to do this while also holding down a job. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
Bombadil
4d ago
If it really is just alarmism, it just seems so irresponsible to me. I understand that the incentive of a capitalist society is to profit at any cost. But I also believe that journalists have a duty to accurately inform the population and not poke at their anxieties for no good reason. If they go too far into sensationalism and making baseless claim, they lose their purpose and reason for existing. The value they provide to society will degrade until it is completely gone.
Bombadil
4d ago
Our feeds must be very different. I have seen zero discussion about the virus on The Motte, but stories keep popping up in my news feed while I have seen various subreddits bringg it up over the last few days, including today. And of course, the WHO currently has multiple articles about the virus on their front page. This seems like a lot, but it could of course just be the algorithms screwing with me.
Why do people care so much about the hantavirus outbreak? The ship is still all over the news and social media. The WHO director-general went to the ship personally, which further indicates that this is a really important matter. It is constantly being compared to covid. Officials keep telling people to calm down, but the way this is covered, the warnings have the opposite effect. The public response seems frantic and only serves to create more uncertainty.
And yet, it just doesn't seem that serious. Sure it can be deadly if you are infected. But from what I understand, Hantavirus mostly spreads to humans through ingestion or inhalation of fluids from rodents. There seems to be no evidence that human to human infection is something the virus is really capable of, and even if this is a strain that mutated to do that, it also doesn't spread through the air.
The most likely scenario in my mind is that hygiene issues on the ship led to a rodent infestation which infected the passengers, and that there is basically no chance that this spreads to the rest of society. It seems about as serious as a hotel giving its residents food poisoning. Terrible for those involved, but irrelevant to the broader world.
But the constant coverage makes me wonder if I am missing something important. Or is this really just a case of the media selling news by appealing to pandemic trauma?
Bombadil
6d ago
Well yeah. That and the adoption system is pretty good evidence in my eyes that giving the state more power over children is not a good thing.
Bombadil
7d ago
the chump who got played
But that's the trick right there. Without DNA tests or another man to claim fatherhood, there is no way to conclusively prove you did get played. With the test being unavailable, we maintain the convenient narrative that the "chump" is in fact the father, and should take responsibility as such.
Bombadil
7d ago
You don't know who the biological father is, so you would have to find him first. You don't know how wealthy he is, so there is no guarantee he is even capable of paying child support in the first place. You will have to take him to court to find out. During this process as you locate and sue the bio dad, who pays for the kid? And what if he is just too poor to pay anything? It seems to me that the incentives, at least in the short term, favor the assumption that the boyfriend/husband is also that goes out the window if you do a test and find out it isn't the case.
That sad, I personally still believe the injustice of paying for another man's kid when doing so is easily avoidable is too great an injustice to be justified by this. But it is the best explanation I can come up with, and I do think it is logically coherent.
Bombadil
7d ago
Why a father should be forced to pay child support without a paternity test
The best argument I can think of is that someone needs to pay for the kid. The state will do whatever possible to avoid taking that task. Partly due to the economic expense, partly for the sake of the kid. If the state starts paying child support, odds are the state will also want a say in how the child should be raised. I believe having such a large faceless entity be directly responsible for any individual leaves a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. So while it is unjust to demand child support while denying a paternity test, there is a decent argument it is helpful to the kid.
As for why it is not the woman who pays, that is tradition. The law has not caught up to gender equality in the labor market, and I imagine feminist activists will work hard to keep things that way, considering this is something that disproportionately benefits women to the detriment of men.
I also think it is partly due to cheap DNA testing being a relatively new thing. It has not been that long since sequencing was an expensive, time consuming task mostly done as academic research. While mandatory DNA testing may well be a reasonable demand today, 20 years ago it would have been ridiculous.
Bombadil
7d ago
One would generally expect that people who are attracted to little girls will flock to a game centered around a little girl. That does not mean the game was designed to appeal to pedophiles though, just like a game with dogs is not designed to appeal to zoophiles.
Bombadil
7d ago
Agreed. The character looks like a prepubescent girl. A pretty girl to be sure, and somewhat stylized. She is a bit doll like, which is fitting given that she is supposed to be an android.
I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy. But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be, leading to weird situations like this one.
Bombadil
13d ago
People being willing to overlook it when attractive people do things they shouldn't is pretty human. Doesn't mean that all the behavior they overlook is attractive.
Bombadil
13d ago
"Women are attracted to dominance" is still a politically charged phrase that can mean a lot of different things to different people. Naming specific traits will probably get you further. "Women are attracted to fit men who know what they want from life, and are not afraid to take it" for example. Or "Being nervous around women is a turn-off for most of them".
For these kinds of discussions, phrasing associated with specific ideologies very quickly shut down any kind of critical thought. So you really want to stay neutral.
Bombadil
13d ago
I mean, plenty of men also want a woman who is deeply in love with them, and will stay a loving and caring partner regardless of his health, abilities, or achievements. Men get incredibly disappointed when that is not the case. For example if the wife leaves because she "fell out of love", or a girl he was flirting with is suddenly no longer interested after he got in a fight and lost. Hell, a lot of the original redpillers seem to be men who experienced these things and became disillusioned about women as a result.
While I do think that the current romanticized idea of love as a magical, inexplicable thing that just happens to you and ties people together forever is part of what is wrong with current dating norms, I also don't think it is fair to blame this solely on women. Men want unconditional love just for being themselves too, and are more than capable of deluding themselves into believing they have it.
Bombadil
14d ago
I wonder if a book written in this style, a kind of "social rules for social autists" (maybe under a different name?) would sell well. Certainly, it would be an interesting archeological artifact a few hundred years from now.
Bombadil
14d ago
Because hope is not rational, and it is easy to believe yourself better than your peers. Even if said belief is an illusion.
Bombadil
14d ago
If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.
Not necessarily. As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it. Whether your odds are actually good is an entirely different matter. People who are poorly off don't necessarily run on cold logic, and even if they do, they may be unable to see how redistribution helps them more than it hurts.
Bombadil
15d ago
I don't see how a critical mass of women can't just force the men to do the essential job that require muscles. Guns are the great equalizer, so if you just don't give guns to the men (or let gunmen be the only high-status job available), you can force the new underclass to do hard labor through regulation. It wouldn't have to be total slavery either. Just make it so that producing goods is the only viable path forwards.
I guess I will have to concede that very specific jobs cannot be relegated to an underclass though. Your military and emergency services would probably still require men, and those men would likely have a lot of bargaining power.
The dystopian take: We are moving dangerously close to the most radical feminist fantasies with this. Keep in mind that feminism seemingly needs to treat men as the outgroup to function, and that most women still identify as feminist. We live in a democracy. Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists. That scares me, because there seems to be no end to the slippery slope that ideology is currently on. If something is wrong in society, they blame men. If that doesn't solve it, then they blame men more. Increase their power and reduce the ability of men to organize against it, and we could see some truly dystopian shit.
Why not bar men from high-paying positions entirely? Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population. Any male politician speaking out against this trend can be efficiently cancelled by hordes of women and watch himself slowly lose influence.
You also mention that men are more common than women in STEM. But for several fields this is not true. Women outnumber men quite heavily in medicine and biology for instance, and if you look at science fields overall, women actually outnumber men overall. Also note that the link I have here is 6 years old. As far as I know, women have only moved further ahead of men in the past years. In spite of this, there is still a broad push to get even more women into higher education. I fail to see how a version of the current landscape actually dominated by women would not just result in women dominating academia completely. I can already see the argument: Men is only X% of the global population, so there should at most be X% men in any given degree. Of course if the male percentage is lower than X (or 0) this just goes to show that women are better.
Finally, I think you are misdiagnosing the incel and broader dating problems of modern societies. The culture promotes hedonism, women are taught to fear men, people spend less time in-person socializing than ever, and the way that men are encouraged to act is unattractive to women. Nothing about reducing the ratio of men to women actually fixes any of this. The addictive and convenient nature of social media and gaming means they will continue to be picked over social interaction. Men will still be brought up anxious and scared of approaching. Demonizing men will only be easier as you meet them less. Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it. That seems more like a male thing to do.
Just in general, screwing with the ratio of men to women seems like a Chesterton's fence of monumental proportions. No one predicted that the one child policy of China and the resulting increase in the proportion of men would turn out as disastrously as it did, even though it seems obvious now. Your experiment would probably result in some very interesting insights into the human mind, whilst similarly blowing up society in spectacular and unexpected fashion.
Fun to think about though.
Bombadil
16d ago
Yeah, it depends on how accurately one can predict the skill and risk of assassinations. If you are confident you are not at risk of some professional or organized effort to kill you, then you can afford to spend less on security.
I might be totally wrong here, but I imagine that a lot of security lies in gathering intel beforehand, and adapting your efforts to the information you have.
Bombadil
16d ago
I have seen the conspiracy theory on leftwing subreddits that this was staged to bolster Trump's popularity. If looked at through the lens of it being performative, lax security kind of makes sense. They needed the "assassin" to get close enough that it felt dangerous to viewers.
It is also an argument for the ballroom. If private venues cannot be trusted with security, then you naturally have to make your own. Only for the sake of safety for your guests of course.
More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.
If Mississippi consistently produces better educated people than other states that sounds like a pretty huge advantage. I can imagine parents would want to move there to secure a better future for their kids, and companies would like to recruit the people living there.
That seems like a pretty good incentive for other states to follow suit.
More options
Context Copy link