Gaashk
1yr ago
I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but you're also throwing together a bunch of things that aren't really symmetrical.
The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first.
This is not symmetrical at all. If we're comparing a dysfunctional woman with a homeless suicidal man, it's more like a series of abusive boyfriends who beat her and molest her children, but with an option of low class prostitution and to spend the night at a women's shelter. In some states it includes an option to abort the pregnancy with fetal alcohol syndrome or the coke baby, or in some states it doesn't, but both things are kind of traumatic.
On the other side, marriages are usually one to one, so symmetrical to the unhappy housewife who doesn't get to self actualize, is an unhappy husband, working long hours at a boring or difficult job. It's reasonable enough to argue that the husband who has to, for instance, go on assignment in an active war zone has it worse than the woman who has to stay at home alone all year with young children, that's probably true. But it doesn't make sense to use marriage in itself as an example of a-symmetrical success/failure.
Gaashk
2yr ago
I finished reading Peter Turchin's new book, End Times this past week, which visits many elements of the culture war, including Trump, immigration, 99%ers, even Ukraine. I hadn't read his previous books, but apparently they included more of the data and graphs that he works with for his research. This one is branded more populist, from the name, bright red cover, and relegation of models and graphs to the final third of the book, which is all appendix. He comes across as a moderate Marxist, who's trying not to alienate American conservatives.
The basic argument is that a core part of nation ending turmoil is a cycle of what he calls the wealth pump and overproduction of elites. A society will start out an epoch with a more or less equitable share of power and money between the workers and the elites, but at some point, this is disrupted by the elites ovedrawing resources from the economy, often because they have too many children, or allow more upward mobility than downward. Then popular immiseration sets in, where the workers have decreased access to the kind of resources they need to thrive -- land, capital, opportunities -- and the elites have a "wealth pump," which seems to be his way of talking returns on capital outpacing returns on labor. Also, increased immigration to keep labor costs low, and benefit employers. The wealthy grow, the poor grow, and the middle class shrinks. Elite competition becomes more and more intense, both because there are more people competing for roughly the same number of positions, often simply because population growth outstrips the growth of important positions, and because the alternative of downward mobility looks worse and worse in comparison. So everyone with any money or influence tries extra hard to get their kids a good position at whatever their era's version of the ivy leagues are, so they can benefit from the growth of the top 10%, while desperately fearing falling into the precariat. There are a bunch of young intelligentsia without money or positions, but a lot of education and family investment, ready to become counter elites or revolutionaries. Often they wage wars until enough of them die to relieve the social pressure, and the cycle starts over.
Turchin's main prescription follows the outlines of the New Deal -- high tax rates for the rich, a growing minimum wage, labor unions, low immigration, perhaps public works projects, that kind of thing.
I found the prescription, especially, underwhelming. Turchin doesn't really go into the kinds of jobs workers do, or how that might influence things, and there's no real commentary about going from an agricultural labor base, to industrial manufacturing, to service, and the growth of a suspicion that it isn't just the aspiring elite jobs that are basically useless, but many of the "workers" are as well. A large component of the current malaise seems to be the impression not only that there are too many leaders, not enough followers, but that, increasingly, the followers are all simulated, automated, or passive consumers, not workers at all. It seems like any plan that could hope to stabilize society over the next hundred years would need to incorporate the possibility that most middle class jobs, especially, as well as a decent number of working class ones, will be automated, while higher level positions and things like garbage collection and construction continue to be necessary much longer. Sure, we could probably move to an economy where each person's job is to care for some other person's parent, child, or pet, but that doesn't seem like a great outcome. He does not mention this at all.
Gaashk
2yr ago
While I disagree with Freddie deBoer on a lot of things, especially his ongoing war with his commentariat about gender, his thoughts on education seem pretty solid. His new post https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated is no exception, though he puts in a bit of boilerplate declaring on faith that of course groups can be equalized somehow, even if individuals can't, despite giving no reason to believe that of any particular group or groups. This seems a pretty paltry fig leaf, but oh well.
I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now. Based on his blogging, he seems to think that moving money from smart, productive people to stupid, unproductive people is the best solution, but this doesn't solve the fundamental question of allowing people who can't contribute much economically to live in a worthwhile fashion that allows self respect.
My state legislature has been debating plans to fiddle about with small levers at the margins to make up for Covid losses and "improve education." The levers are very small indeed. An extra half hour in the day? More private bathroom stalls? The only topic that made some sort of sense was career and technical education. I've been thinking about one side of this, trying to help my husband fix a leak this morning, and reading some thoughts from Internaught at DSL lately about crumbling infrastructure. Every time I interact with a Trades produced physical object, I realize that they are made for the large, strong hands of a young man who has been working on manipulating physical objects with weight and mass for years and decades. This probably makes sense from a materials engineering perspective -- assume that a mechanic or tradesman will be interacting with the object, and it can be heavier, with a tighter seal, probably more durable. But it seems like something of a hard sell, getting people to work with these heavy, sturdy objects for decades at a time when they don't have to, and don't get much status out of it, and most people can't afford . Giving out money doesn't seem all that helpful when we're all living in a crumbling, unfixable physical environment, and the computers can do 80% of the writing, calculating, and art, but can't keep the utilities repaired.
I would like to see more emphasis on humans as embodied, physical, tool using beings, but am not sure what steps might lead in that direction. I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year. I don't really know where to go with these thoughts, though. It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.
Gaashk
2yr ago
Do you make art?
I make art as a hobby and teach it, and feel moderately positive toward the recent developments in AI art.
There are a couple of different things that will become more obviously different. There's commercial art, which will likely be extensively created by AI in the fairly near future. The automation of anime nudes hardly seems like a loss worth mourning. There's high status Artist art, which will not change all that much, and already isn't much about visual skill, so much as social skill. There's popular art, which might become some kind of combination thing, with different classifications and disclaimers. There's gift art, which is almost entirely about effort and thoughtfulness, and not much about skill. This seems intrinsic in children as soon as they can talk, and won't be changing much.
Personally, I like the process of art making more than artistic artifacts, and am generally uninterested in artwork that clearly took painstaking detail oriented labor. There are photorealists who show off by making 100 hr paintings of extremely detailed faces or whatever, and I understand caring about that, but do not care about it myself. This seems unlikely to be faked very often -- process videos are already very popular, and will likely become even more so. There is not enough status at stake, and it's rather niche. There isn't really any reason you couldn't still find detailed realistic artists practicing their craft.
There's a quote attributed to Picasso that "when art critics get together they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but when painters get together they talk about where can you get the best turpentine." I like paint and wool and cold pressed cotton paper and warm wax and translucency and the smell of certain mediums and the changes that pottery undergoes as it progresses through multiple firings. I'm excited that there are now water mixable oil paints (no turpentine required!) and Derwent ink pencils. These artisanal practices have already been stripped of most of their importance. They are crafts, practiced by retired ladies in their craft sheds. They are unserious. Plenty of visual art is already like that as well. Hobbyist empty nesters painting impressionist oils of the local wildlife. This is a bit dispiriting, but will not be meaningfully changed by AI. Children will still always give something they made to their family, old ladies will still paint Monet knock offs of their regional landscape. These phenomena are not primarily about the image as such anyway, but about the process and physical manifestation of love or attention.
Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.
Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.
Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.
My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.
The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
Gaashk
4mo ago
They have been converted to the civic religion of celebrating each other's sexual preferences.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I've heard it referred to as an "eating the seed corn" situation at a societal level. A civilization can get high growth by having all its potential mothers do other things instead, but then in addition to not having enough children in the next generation, you also don't have as much social cohesion, because when the kids aren't absolute babies, those were the women volunteering for the churches, organizing social occasions, running the children and youth clubs, sending out cards to recognize everyone's birthdays and holidays and so on. Now, if you want those services, you get to pay market rate for it -- and the market rate is high!
Technological change is busy clearing out a bunch of female heavy positions just now, anyway. Society will lose nothing by a bunch of graphic designers running a household instead, for instance. If they want to. Running a household is harder than graphic design, and as there has been much opining about lately, harder to get status from. Some of the things making women not want to marry the men that would be willing to marry them seems a more pressing issue.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Is there anything interesting happening out there in the world this week?
I probably wouldn't know, since I use this site for news.
The war in Ukraine drags on. The conflict in Gaza drags on. Pride month drags on. A few people were shot at Juneteenth celebrations, but not enough to invite a lot of attention. There are some marginal improvements in LLMs. The Supreme Court has ruled on some things, and some posters have done write ups for them. There were some blog posts put up as top level comments. They probably got more engagement than they would have on people's personal blogs, anyway. I vaguely remember some disgruntled writing about relationships.
Anyway, I'm not sure it's just the message board, so much as the actual world that's in a bit of a slump.
In no particular order:
- Her college sex and dating environment does sound pretty bleak.
- Islam as represented by the people in her life also sounds pretty bleak in respect to women.
- She does seem to be perpetuating some of the bleakness with camgirl activities and inviting romantic prospects to bed then ejecting them again, rather than just not inviting them.
- As is sometimes said, it probably isn't to women's advantage that colleges are very female now. But it doesn't even seem cearly to men's medium term advantage, if the women come out jaded and thinking of men as basically beasts.
- It seems like eventually the college girls would learn to say things like "I want a romantic relationship, not a one night stand" and hold out against the "why's" with their experiences of disappointment? It doesn't seem like most of them care all that much for the sex in and of itself, or are all that carried away in the moment aside from the effects of intoxicants they're choosing to take.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I think there's something to this, and that it's unfortunate. American Indian culture is often quite interesting.
I do like what the Ojibwe adjacent areas have been doing in Minnesota, with "Indian Education" teachers in the schools, both academically supporting native youth, but also making popped wild rice and leading field trips to the art and culture exhibits, leading plant walks, and inviting drum circles to assemblies. It adds regional flavor, which seems good. Not that (clearly!) Minnesota doesn't have their own problems, but Ojibwe teachers and artists are, on he whole, doing good work.
Gaashk
7d ago
In addition to what others have said, hormonal birth control is, indeed, under explored and under discussed. If you go to a doctor and ask for birth control, she won't necessarily talk about the psychological side affects of it, and it can cause changes in sexual preferences related to hormonal cycles.
Gaashk
6mo ago
I was homeschooled, and... it depends. In general, I liked it. My mom is disposed to be a decent teacher, and went on to teach lower elementary in the public schools. I ended up very well educated in literature, because a Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky book club is my parents' idea of a good time. Math didn't go so well. This is fine, since I don't necessarily want to be a Woman in STEM, but also very common among homeschoolers I know, even with engineer fathers. I think math just inherently requires more structure and pushing for a lot of teens than reading and writing do.
Hasn't it only been about 5 years now that society has been worried about population collapse?
My mother remembers Population Bomb rhetoric when she was younger. Google says China only ended their one child policy in 2016. The trends are probably just moving too fast. If you tell a whole generation they're destroying the world by having children, it surely takes some time to pull that back with "we didn't mean you, women who were already having 2.5 children! We meant the Nigerian ones having 7 children in desperate poverty! (But, also, global warming is a very terrible disaster, you should feel bad)"
I think the Christian perspective is something like that marriage is hard, but it's alright to ask hard things of people. Traditional cultures also ask people to do things like serve in the military, fast, and stand multiple hours for public ceremonies. Orthodox churches have crowns instead of vows, and one of the several symbols involved is "crowns of martyrdom." Is staying married to an angry, unpleasant man and bearing his children as hard an ask as fighting in a war? I don't know, I've never done either, but maybe it is! And if we have a norm of people in general never needing to do hard things, it isn't surprising that the same would be true of marriages.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Do specific parenting choices really make a difference for how people eventually turn out?
@gog posted a comment fairly deep in the thread about courtesy, which seemed worth discussing further. (https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176067?context=8#context)
The obvious: misery is bad all on its own, regardless of whether it affects future earnings. So, for instance, Aaron Stark’s childhood was bad (https://youtube.com/watch?v=su4Is-kBGRw) and his parents should feel bad, even though he eventually turned out alright. It sounds like Aella’s childhood was bad and her parents should feel bad (https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children is not about her childhood specifically, but is the kind of discourse she and others with similar childhoods end up in. FWIW, “my parents are too violent, maybe I should escalate to breaking windows” sounds like an absolutely terrible plan), and it’s debatable whether she turned out alright or not.
Also obvious: It’s possible to prevent children from learning basic things like reading by never reading to them, teaching them, or exposing them to reading culture, not having books at home, not reading or writing oneself, etc, as has been common historically among impoverished households. There seem to be a fair number of children on the margin, who can learn to read just fine with proper instruction and interesting materials, but fall off with poor instruction and boring materials (c.f. Los Angelas whole language program). There also seem to be a fair number of people who will learn to read with just the Bible and an adult who will eventually, somewhat irritably answer their questions.
Contentious: given a certain genetic makeup, family environment, and baseline level of things like nutrition, how much difference do things like daycare, schooling methods, or specific actions make?
Does teaching a child to read at 3 vs 6 matter? Does teaching them algebra at 9 vs 16 matter? Does it only matter under certain circumstances (such as a future mathematician needing to learn math early, or a future world class musician needing to learn to play an instrument early)? Do the children of the sorts of people who like cramming them full of Math and Culture and Literature end up with a richer inner life than if their parents hadn’t had time and energy for that?
I’ve read a lot of fairly surface level articles and reviews about this by people like Scott Alexander, Brand Caplan, and Freddie DeBoer, but mostly forget the details. They tend toward saying that most things work about as well as other things, but some situations are miserable or waste a lot of money and resources, and wasting billions of dollars making people miserable for no reason is probably bad.
I was homeschooled, and am now teaching public school, and sending my daughters to public preschool. Several of my friends are homeschooling or planning to once their kids are old enough, and more are stay at home parents than not, despite being generally lower middle class. I don’t have anything against homeschooling, it just isn’t pragmatic given my personal financial situation and the personalities of my older daughter vs husband and I. This might change as she gets older, she’s still in pre-K, and when I try to teach her something, she tends to argue with me about it.
My general impression on the ground, as it were, with two children and teaching 600 elementary children, is that there is not necessarily any One True Way that will work for every child. And that there are children who are thriving in the large elementary school, and children who are miserable there. Their autism program, especially, seems very stressful for everyone involved, like placing it inside a very large elementary school was probably a bad idea.
Both my daughters seem pretty happy with their publicly funded daycare/pre-K. Two year old is always waving bye to everyone and seems pretty happy to see them. Four year old talks about liking the playground, some friends, and learning to write her name. We bought food from the school cook, and it was quite good. Gog’s preschool did sound pretty unfortunate.
Is there any useful way to systematize any of these observations? Any high leverage changes people are able to make but don’t?
Gaashk
1yr ago
I don't think very many people have a problem with things like West Side Story, with an entire culture swap?
Or things like The Princess and the Frog, where the black heroine has a reasonable place and culture. I don't remember anyone complaining about moving the setting, because it made sense.
The Little Mermaid might have been interesting if they had an entire Black Mermaid culture, complete with a black king, and a sensibly different aesthetic than Ginger Mermaids. The problem isn't that mermaids must be ginger, but that they didn't really do anything interesting with the changes, which seems lazy and boring.
It might be interesting to have an Othello where everyone is black, except Othello, who is asian or something, and the Jew is some other minority people have opinions on. But having his race stand out and get commented on suggests that he should at least look like he comes from a different group than everyone else.
The problem with lazy race or gender swapping is that it's lazy, not that it never makes sense to clothe stories in contemporary culture.
Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!
In some states anyway, pregnant mothers and their young children qualify for medicaid even if they are married and making the median family income for their state. Even if they already have family healthcare coverage through their employer, and nobody in their family has challenging health conditions. They not only pay for appointments, but give them toys and stuff when they go. This might be reasonable from the point of view of the state -- I'm sure dealing with complications after the fact is outrageously expensive, and making childbirth and infancy safer is one of the great triumphs of modern medicine.
I wouldn't expect the average 29 year old man to consume all that much healthcare, and if they are it's likely to be for the same reasons they're struggling to work.
Adding: I'm mildly in favor of publicly funded healthcare for sort of basic things that we're good at doing, like things requiring antibiotics, it's dumb that the 29 year old man might not go to the hospital for pneumonia because it could cost $10,000 (who knows? It's inexplicable) somehow, despite really mostly needing $20 worth of antibiotics.
Gaashk
7mo ago
I don't necessarily feel disgusted. If I were forced by Society or the State to interact with a (certain kind of) trans woman in a female only space, I would probably feel threatened. The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening. Trans women in contact sports or women's shelters seems potential threatening, on a case by case basis. I am basically fine with people using their intuition/gut/systems that are below the threshold of rationality to make decisions about things like "does this person feel threatening?" I think that we are wrong to try to squash that in the name of disparate impact.
Sex segregated spaces are usually a good thing. To the extent that we, as a society, have gotten rid of male spaces, that was mostly a bad idea and we should bring most of them back. To the extent that we are now in the process of getting rid of certain female only spaces by admitting trans women who the other women don't necessarily accept without coercion, that is also a bad thing. I think it is very reasonable to admit some trans women to some female spaces on the basis of vibes with the women, and not other trans women to other spaces, on the basis of things like large, strong, and has a penis. We've gone crazy and extra on marginal equity lately, which is a bad thing.
Gaashk
11mo ago
Interesting observation.
And I'm not sure why they abandoned them.
Probably for barber pole of class signaling reasons, combined with physical objects like suits becoming reasonably cheap and accessible to the working classes.
I don't really know people with nice handbags or jewelry, but for the kind of store that has representatives in malls, it seems to be at least as much a matter of motivation as class. Tradesmen can and do buy $100,000 trucks and $500 boots, and would probably buy their wives some nice jewelry or a nice bag if they really wanted that. They might be more likely to just walk into a store and buy the thing than someone in a higher social class, but who isn't embarrassed to take notes and go look for a better deal online.
Customer service people probably can tell underclass and teenagers likely to shoplift from body language and speech patterns more than by clothing. That doesn't necessarily suggest higher trust, simply that the class markers have changed.
Gaashk
11mo ago
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Peterson should know by now that he's really bad and unpersuasive at X-posting. Every time he gets in an argument there he comes across much worse than when he's talking.
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As is often then case with X threads, it's kind of hard for me to evaluate what's going on. It's like everyone is sitting around drinking absinthe and yelling at each other (in free verse? And drawing angry pictures?), I walk into the room for 5 minutes, and then walk right back out again thinking that maybe I prefer social contexts with babies and tea after all. Except that it's conducted in a public online venue, which is weird and probably not a good idea.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I went in for an ultrasound, and baby #3 is looking good as far as they can tell, and is a boy.
People keep asking if I'm excited, and I just look awkward, because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope. Nurses keep having me take depression questionnaires as a matter of course (I am not and have never been clinically depressed, but half the symptoms overlap with pregnancy, they also strongly overlap with sleep deprivation such as just after giving birth, and they like to give it to pregnant and postpartum women multiple times. I give some credence to Abigail Shrier's observation that the medical establishment likes to give depression screenings out too much, and get people who are just feeling neutral but going through physical changes to second guess that). There are no parenting questionnaires, but I can sign up to enroll in a baby brain study if I want. I feel like some of this is related to the current fertility problem.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I don't think this is actually that different from the situation of normie grill pill Americans trying to enjoy franchises they grew up with, but where the messaging has taken over the characters and story.
The main thing is that, recently, it isn't "otherwise good."
But also, I don't think most people are able to set their BS thresholds consciously.
Personally, I'll put up with a fair bit if the actors, costuming, makeup, and lighting are good. Still, I'm about to give up on Neil Gaiman adaptations, because while I enjoy the aesthetics, the LGB relationships have become just about the whole thing. Also, the Strong Females of Marvel (still enjoying Loki though; hope they don't pull anything extra dumb in the last episode...). The nonsensical ethnicities in Wheel of Time would doubtless be obvious to anyone, anywhere, but I'm basically willing to overlook it, because this season the acting, music, and costuming were basically good (and as a non book reader, the plot was intelligible, all things considered, unlike season 1). Which I think is more the median American position -- it's forgivable to mess with races and sexes a bit in the name of The Culture, as long as you're actually making an effort in general.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I agree that more age mixing would be a healthier norm, but my revealed preferences (child in pre-K, working at a large public school, moved away from parents and in-laws...) suggest that I don't really care all that much. This very mild preference does not seem to affect any of my actual decisions.
Upon finding out I was pregnant I thought something like "I've never known a baby, but chances are I'll love my baby. All my ancestors succeeded at this, I probably will too." That turned out to be correct thus far. This attitude may be more true for women than men, though.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Education is more like this than not -- I've gotten about a third of the jobs that I've applied for. They do make people enter all their credentials into an online application with no chance to autofill, and ask for written letters of recommendation, often from one's current principal, before even scheduling interviews, though. It's also accepted to substitute teach in a school district someone wants to work in until they offer a permanent job.
It doesn't help to call and "check up," though. I suspect it might annoy the people involved, and make them less likely to hire, actually.
That sounds like another entry into more bad things happening because USAID was doing things they shouldn't have been, in this case conducting medical trials.
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