Gaashk
1yr ago
but for the majority of laypeople I'd imagine a large part of a doctor's job is comforting the person they're treating.
Is that true? I don't think I know anyone who thinks that, or anything even remotely close to it.
Every time I've interacted with medical professionals over the past several years, there has been no emotional component at all, or mildly negative. Doctors are able to diagnose, proscribe, and conduct operations, otherwise people would stay far away.
For instance: family member was pretty sure he had pneumonia. Went to a hospital, got an x-ray. Yep, that's pneumonia alright, here are two antibiotics that might help, come back if you're just as bad or worse in a week (edit: these were, as I remember, not actually given at the hospital. We had to drive to the pharmacy for them). The antibiotics worked, hooray. In addition to $500 upfront and $1,000 from insurance, there was another $1,000 surprise charge, botched and shuttled about through bill collection, which took six months to resolve. Next time family member has pneumonia, he'll probably hold out even longer before attempting to interface with the medical system.
I'm glad that for a couple of hours of wretched interactions, trying to hand write forms alone and delirious, and two week's pay, family member was able to get needed medicine. This is better than the vast majority of times and places. But if there were an automated scanner that dispensed antibiotics, that would be vastly better experience.
I also gave birth during the ending phase of Covid restrictions. I'm glad that there are medical interventions to deal with complications and manage pain. But there is not really any comforting being done that couldn't be replaced with a recorded voice stating what's on the fetal monitor and what it means.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Did the Youtube homepage recommendations get better a couple weeks ago, then worse than they had been previously a week later? The only things it's showing me now are the very most basic MsMojo fluff, despite that not being really what I watch. Something about an armless ballerina: inspiring! A lot of vlisticles.
Is there a better way to find interesting (but rather light) videos?
Gaashk
1yr ago
That looks interesting, thanks. I find it appealing that it's one book instead of a set of 50 books or something.
My parents are book hoarders, and while I do own children's books, I mostly prefer to check books out from the library, and still have trouble managing even the ones we have, and those my parents have given us.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Fair enough, it doesn't sound like we fundamentally disagree. I worked at a charter school for a while with the A-C class system, based on math skills. It seemed fine and reasonable enough as far as I could tell, though the teachers were all a bit frustrated with the behaviors, more than the ability, of the C class. Having a class like that all day every day in elementary school tends to drive teachers with other options out of the profession. It might work to pay the teachers with lower ability classes more to compensate, and this does to some extent happen, with public schools paying more than private ones.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Direct Instruction is widely shunned. Teachers hate it, students like it. It works. It genuinely is low-hanging fruit. I'm referring to an actual technical term hence the capitalization, I don't need to define it. Just search it up!
Yes, it is what I thought it was. I think you're talking about this kind of thing.
So, yeah, there's some tension between the approaches that work best for children with dyslexia and children at risk for illiteracy (but who can read if instructed well), and what at least some teachers prefer.
There are things schools and the educational establishment can do to mitigate this. Letting teachers know up front what they're getting into, rather than BS about Rousseau or whatever. A few schools have teachers follow students as they progress through the elementary grades, rather than staying at one grade level for multiple years, so they don't become burnt out on phonics. Interventionists and tutoring for children who aren't getting enough out of their core courses, using curriculum designed specifically for dyslexia. Programs specifically for the children who already know how to read and are bored with repeated instructions. Aesthetically pleasing special schools for children at no risk of failing to learn to read. I personally do not much want my daughters to do year after year of direct instruction in phonics if they already understand how to read and spell by six or so, which is likely, based on family history. I could be wrong, maybe one of them will prove to be dyslexic or something. ButI would rather they do some kind of aesthetically pleasing Waldorf or Forest School or Montessori or some other kind of hipster program after learning the basics, though I'm unsure if we'll be able to make that happen financially. I would prefer more of a voucher program, probably with more money attaching to the "at-risk" children than to the children who will still learn to read if they spend three hours a day hiking and watercoloring or whatever. I was homeschooled probably four hours a day, which was plenty, and my social circles are very open to this kind of thing. We (myself and my social circle) are in some ways overly literate, and trying to correct for this. My default state is reading, so here I am reading this, rather than planting seeds, which I told myself I would do today. Compulsive reading and akrasia do not show up in the statistics, but much more like what I and the people close to me deal with.
Direct instruction is already very common, but maybe not common enough. I assume you think that whatever the current amount of school time is being spent on direct instruction is not enough. Good news: the pendulum is already swinging. A quick search did not reveal what the current breakdown is. Chat GPT says, likely wrongly, 50% - 80%, and I suppose 50% would be low, if true. Colleges of education like focusing on things like think-pair-share, flipped classrooms, or AVID program kinds of discussion and enquiry, probably because it gives the professors something contentless to do. This is mostly a waste of time, to be sure, especially for lower elementary teachers, since most of the alternative methods assume a child can read, or that they can guess well enough to pretend to read. I was treated to a two hour lecture a while back about how The Neuroscience Shows that children should read about something, rather than than nothing, and that it probably matters what the something is, and it's more interesting to talk about the something than about the reading. The researchers must have been very stupid indeed that they needed neuroscience to figure that out.
If you make the job more attractive by preventing teachers from being harassed, then attrition will reduce and you can be more selective with applicants.
It appears to be unclear what, exactly, the effect of higher quality teachers is, above a certain baseline. But, sure, everyone agrees that this would be great, and sometimes if enough teachers quit or strike, improvements are made. It would be better to not wait that long, for sure.
Anyway, I'm not certain that this is a useful level of abstraction. If a Mottizen were Education Czar, perhaps they could pole-axe the bureaucracy, sequester unruly children, improve the quality of social science research, and bring back the good old days. Or perhaps not.
Right now my state legislature is debating adding 100 hrs of instructional time to our elementary schools. I do not like it, but am not sure if my dislike is well grounded or not. My preference is for less default schooling, rather than more, especially for younger children, along with summer school for kids who aren't doing well, and less expensive play based childcare available to those who want it. I can't really write a letter to the state legislature or go into a meeting with administration and say "pole-axe the bureaucracy!" But there is some support for things like charter schools, vouchers, 4 day school weeks (this is apparently already common in rural districts with long drive times), and half day kindergartens used to be more of a thing. All of which are more like what I support than the alternatives. But I'm still trying to figure out exactly what my position is, and whether it's well grounded or not. It's probably just a case of kids at different ages and from different backgrounds needing different things, and it's a matter of what my own students and daughters happen to need more or less of.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Thanks, I'll check them out!
My father had several James Beard cookbooks that I remember fondly.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Yeah, and I find that kind of odd, and refuse to answer that question. Apparently my state is about half and half hispanic and non-hispanic; hispanic is larger by far than non-hispanic white. This seems a little silly. "My abuela speaks Spanish, so I guess that's my ethnicity." Especially since it's asked as a yes/no question on forms, with no other options.
Come to think of it, I have heard "ethnic" used in a cultural adjacent way before -- "ethnic restaurants" serve food that can be traced back to a more specific culinary tradition than non-ethnic restaurants -- be that India or Ethiopia or Serbia or whatever, but are not regionally prevalent. American diners and Mexican restaurants are not ethnic in my region.
It's especially ironic you use Hungarian as your example.
I used it because the OP did -- I admittedly know nothing about Hungary, and they may well use different distinctions than Americans. If a Hungarian-American said they were ethnically Siberian, I would believe them.
Gaashk
11d ago
I just looked this up, since I had never really noticed or thought about height all that much before. Turns out I've been spending time with all the tall ethnicities by accident. I didn't know the Balkans and Southern Slavic people were noticeably tall before, TIL.
Gaashk
12d ago
I don't, it's very hard to learn, and I am not much good at languages. I learned enough to do things like go shopping, hire a cab, or give an extremely basic toast.
It wasn't too bad -- most communities have at least a couple of English speakers, and will go find them. Most older people know some Russian, and younger people know some English. We were part of a government volunteer program specifically to provide English speakers for people to practice with. The latter goal had mixed success in my case, since I'm more introverted than ideal for the role. I went to a lot of occasions where I just didn't know what anyone was saying most of the time, but didn't really mind it.
Gaashk
15d ago
So I guess looking at Coffee Enjoyer's list:
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media restrictions -- common and generally seems like a good idea. Even secular academics like Jonathan Haidt are now advocating for this. I'm unsure how much I want to apply it personally, though -- so far very little.
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simplicity -- I'm not sure that I've seen this seriously attempted, or what exactly it means in most contexts. For instance, look at a grown up homeschooler Paula at the Cottage Fairy Youtube channel. In general, I like her, and she likes to talk a lot about simplifying her life and home, and about "simple living," but actually, she's always buying craft kits off of Etsy, filming complex shots from multiple angles, moving her artwork around, and dusting the bundles of dried herbs artfully decorating her wall space. I sort of get what she means (contrasted with a complex social and work life in a city, more or less), but also somewhat don't (contrasted with playing DnD with friends once a week in the city? Going to bars? I'm not actually completely sure) People in Bronte novels sometimes advocated for it seriously, and they seemed to mean only owning three dresses, all of them grey, keeping one's hair in the same basic bun every day, without curls or lace, and only leaving the house to go to church. This has been found undesirable and left untried in my circles.
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social competition predicated on virtue -- I'm not very clear on this one, either. It seems to depend somewhat on the virtues that are most focused on. The people I most genuinely respect seem to be the "beauty will save the world" sorts. The ones who were eventually disgraced, their daughters prostitutes, their wives divorced, focused very hard on controlling other people in their household, to get them to act virtuous for social credit. Mostly, the men seemed fine and stable, but often boring and bored. There were a few years where several of them got really into Wild At Heart, with not only book studies and conferences, but also a salmon fishing trip and beating on drums in the forest. Our church bought the pastor a claymore sword. The men occasionally got a beer together, despite mostly not drinking. It seemed interesting sociologically, related to contemporary alienation. Several of these men worked a engineers at a missile company, and came home every night to their two to six basically fine children and an expectation to "give everything to God," but it's still important to provide for the children, so nothing too wild is on the table, really.
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emphasis on tradition -- I suppose that the people I grew up with were mostly in the American Evangelical tradition, where it is traditional to talk a lot about the unimportance of following traditions of man, and then there are traditions like giving testimonies and going on mission trips. I did traditional to my family things like reading George MacDonald and complaining about Calvinism. Then I was Orthodox, so of course there are general traditions, much talk about Tradition vs traditions, and some people went around checking out the different cultural traditions and cobbling things together. This is all a worthy project, but fairly complex in America, in a way I don't think Coffee Enjoyer is representing realistically.
Gaashk
15d ago
It's certainly possible to have too little space. My first daughter was born in a 500 sq ft section of duplex, and that was too small. My current house is something like 2,000 sq ft, and that is larger than necessary. 1,000 sq ft seems like an alright amount of space for a family of four if it's well designed. All else equal, I would rather a slight smaller place with thicker walls, a better layout, or architectural details than a larger space built as cheaply as possible, but when house searching in America, all else was never equal.
I have trouble telling other people's preferences because all else has never been equal for anyone I've ever known well enough to ask -- there's always a school they want to go to, something about the yard or neighborhood, a subsidy, or something else involved that's more important than the square footage.
Gaashk
16d ago
My understanding of the progressive position is that it isn't necessarily the case that the same social constraints will make different groups happy, hence the stuff about "white culture" like following strict schedules and reading a lot or whatever the things were, and that it isn't necessarily a good idea to pick the most stable happiness producing white Christian social system and try to get everyone else to progress towards it. Hence, tossed salad theory replacing melting pot theory.
That doesn't seem completely unlikely. I'm basically willing to believe that different groups have slightly differentiated teloi. I realize that isn't necessarily compatible with Disparate Impact, but I would also strongly prefer a telos oriented way of thinking about social groups to an Equity based one. Everyone knows it's silly to ask why Amish aren't producing their fair share of programmers, and I would prefer a world where we talked less about demographically proportionate FAANG jobs, and more about who the best adjusted, happiest, best liked members of a given group are, and how to get more of that.
Gaashk
21d ago
I got involved in an argument on the Nextdoor platform with someone who's working on opening a cannabis and dog gift shop in our very small local shopping area, that currently only has three things in it, despite the nearest town (6 min drive) already having about 8 dispensaries. Mostly, I want an ordinance saying they can't have giant green flags in an otherwise beige setting, huge leaves on their signs, and other attention grabbing street side signage. My opinions aren't very strong on the substance itself, other than I tried it a couple of times and it did nothing for me. I don't care for getting drunk, either, but drink a cocktail occasionally for the aesthetic presentation.
Gaashk
1mo ago
On the one hand, that sounds plausible.
On the other hand, for instance, Kosovo has continued living in large multi-generational families through hundreds of years of poverty and war, and still has heavy family involvement in marriages. Kosovo's TFR. Every Western and Asian country I've looked at has been something like that, whether they had a teenage pregnancy campaign or not.
Gaashk
1mo ago
As I recall, the ACX poll has categories of Catholic, Protestant, and Other Christians (e.g. Eastern Orthodox). That seemed basically fine.
I haven't listened to the audio, but a likely interpretation from Trump's comment is: This is an important holiday! It's important to Catholics! And it's important to other Christians too! That seems in keeping with his speech patterns that have made for uncomfortable sound bites before.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Are you and your girlfriend involved in a community? Do you have a community you know you could join, but haven't gotten around to it?
I have a basically functional community I could join, but due to some discontinuity, am having trouble joining again with very young children.
Gaashk
1mo ago
So sorry for posting. What was I even thinking?
I'll respond down there.
I was thinking something similar. Here's what I'd propose. Drug companies can't sell drugs to Americans at a price more than 5x what they sell to Germans. For the same reason, I'd like to propose a 10 strikes and you're out law for career criminals. Pruning the most egregious misconduct can create a lot of value at relatively little cost.
That sounds plausible enough, I'd probably vote for either if they were options.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Interesting, thanks for the response.
I've never been much interested in story drawing, so don't know much about it. I guess I had always assumed there was a robust and parallel way of learning things like how to draw dynamic poses for storytelling that's unrelated to what I learned (I follow traditional landscape artists like this), and am surprised to hear that it isn't that well laid out.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I teach, so I always have two months off, and we generally go on road trips, I paint, and I'm trying to make something of the yard.
If money and children weren't considerations, I, like several others, would travel, and did in my 20s. I especially enjoyed the Republic of Georgia, which has a very friendly guest culture. There are also some pretty interesting educational opportunities, such as the Saint John's College summer program, which is kind of a 2.5 month intensive book club (though that doesn't line up with your timeline, but I'm sure there are other things like that). An acquaintance did a month long plein air painting tour in France, which seemed neat.
I want to try guinea fowl next year.
Our previous neighborhood had feral peacocks, and they give off this great jungle call in the middle of the night, and every once in a while I hear them here too, from a half mile or so away.
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