Gaashk
13d ago
The only thing I remember about elementary (homeschool co-op) Spanish class is making hot chocolate with the hand carved mixer and singing a chocolate song in Spanish.
Gaashk
13d ago
So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.
I found an interesting comment on that by someone involved in the program:
Matt Bateman
The “brazilian teachers” are software developers and academic specialists who work on the curriculum and platform. They run the coaching calls because they are the ones who need to know what’s not working and fix it on the app side. Not sure about Brazil but some of them are indeed remote.
So that's interesting. I guess the hope is to eventually need even less human interaction, it's one of those "training your AI replacement" positions. Which brings me back to: what are the Guides doing in the morning? They've selected for kids who won't disrupt everyone to get actual human interaction, so they presumably aren't conducting classroom management. Are they spending half the day preparing the extracurricular programs?
Gaashk
13d ago
I did unschooling for middle school. I did in fact run out of Terry Pratchett novels before I ran out of time. Then I read ancient Roman and Greek epics. It wasn't balanced, but it was about as good as public middle school.
Gaashk
13d ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
Gaashk
14d 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
14d ago
On the more wacky front, I've wondered if we should be dosing married couples with Oxytocin since pretty much all the literature available shows that it makes couples more interested in each other (although I'd not be surprised if this would fail to replicate.)
Couple shows up at the doctor's office saying they've not had sex in months, he hands them a spray bottle: "Take two snorts each and call me in the morning."
Inconveniently, babies are one of the big things that leads women to not want sex over long periods of time.
Oxytocin comes up medically in the context of childbirth and lactation, and is heavily involved in breast feeding. So, if you stimulate a breast feeding mother's nipples, her body will produce oxytocin... and milk. She will likely then think of the baby. Doctors give oxytocin during delivery to make contractions stronger (or, if they only need them a bit stronger, can use a breast pump).
Gaashk
16d ago
Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
Gaashk
18d ago
Interesting, I wonder if there's any way to tell whether that practice is contributing to crashes very much.
My intuition would be no, in comparison to drinking tequila or vodka at a bar, but maybe I'm wrong.
Gaashk
18d ago
I figured people were mostly driving to their friend's house, or a bar (or other location, such as fishing), drinking there, and driving home sooner than is a good idea. I've never actually heard of an American drinking in the car. There are lots of signs at parks about not bringing glass bottles, but I don't think I even disapprove of them buying a pack of cold beers, driving to a park, drinking it with their friends, then driving home -- just that they shouldn't be drinking the whole pack by themselves. Authorities clearly don't care about it, since they allow bars to serve not only beer, but hard liquor, in places that clearly need to be driven to, full of people who very obviously drove by themselves, and are not carpooling with a designated driver (nor is there public transport available).
Gaashk
19d ago
Thanks for the update! I don't necessarily have anything useful to say about it, other than that it does, indeed, sound cultish and destructive.
Gaashk
21d ago
I hadn't heard that, but unless the baby is born in late spring or summer, a woman in America is expected to return to work within three months of giving birth. If she breaks her contract by resigning mid year, that isn't great for her record, though teaching tends towards chronic shortage, so she's likely to find another job sometime anyway.
I don't generally disagree. Some unsorted thoughts:
- Being a subsistence farmer is even less aspirational than belonging to a trade, unless it's some kind of artisanal hobby farm. It was true in the Middle Ages, and is still true, just there aren't that many subsistence farmers left in the West to aspire to joining a union. My understanding of china is that there are still enough people left who have experience debugging rice fields by hand to be relatively grateful for factory work in comparison.
- T-ball? Just looked it up, TIL.
- "Having kids will not fuck up your career [...], or for the vanishingly few female long-haul truckers." If you mean that you can get back into it after a decade or so, I suppose. But what are they going to do, take their toddler in the truck with them? The dad will do all the evening care moms usually do? This seems really unlikely, like they would just get a different job entirely.
- My impression of the trades that don't use a lot of math is that they involve quite uncomfortable conditions, such that men will avoid them when they can. There are roofers out when it's 100 degrees in summer. Plumbers are trying to fit into crawlspaces under houses or around awkward fixtures in sinks (impression from some family members who work these jobs includes yelling and cursing while trying to hold some uncomfortable position and tools that don't quite fit properly). Restaurants involve hot kitchens, cuts, getting yelled at, and unless you're the chef, low pay. If someone is the chef or runs a company, that's totally fine, nobody's asking if he's looking to switch career tracks.
- It will be interesting to see what happens now that technology can replicate emails and spreadsheets, but not holding a tool in an awkward position while water is spraying on it.
Now sure, whatever it is Mackinsey consultants actually do, it's probably more comfortable and easier than electrical linemen. But at a certain point, shouldn't we as a society go 'it takes all sorts to make the world go round, why don't we make the top of every field prestigious, give everyone someone to aspire to.
That's not how prestige works.
American folk culture told a lot of romantic stories about cowboys, lumberjacks, trappers, all sorts of things. The guy who owns the roofing company probably has a wife and kids, and the people in his church respect him. Is that not good enough for him? Some things are harder to romanticize than others, but people have been making beautiful stories about the British navy for hundreds of years, I'm sure it's possible to draw attention to the honor of HVAC technicians. Winter on the Railroad , Landsailor, Logging Song
Gaashk
21d ago
I have a friend who's an apprentice electrician, but he already has a bachelors from a good college and is happy to be taking trigonometry again, so it's more of a "same academic skills, better personal fit" when compared with white collar positions.
Gaashk
21d ago
The key in the southwest is sunshine and rainbows -- sun showers. Especially the kind where there's rain on one side of the house, but not the other. A key to sunshine with rainbows weather is that the rainbows happen when the light is low and the storms are dense, say 7pm when it's lovely out and smells like creosote, ozone, and petrichor.
Gaashk
21d ago
Lol.
The highlight of my social life was going to people's houses for Bible studies where they recounted their dreams, a funeral wake, and "Slavicing" (visiting everyone's houses for Russian Christmas, where people exchange silverware and eat moose stew and Crisco with berries).
Gaashk
21d ago
The MAGA base doesn't see it a "shilling for Russia". They just stopped having a problem with Russia when communism ended and see the policies popular in DC as incredibly antagonistic for no reason.
Yeah, that's been my experience of pro Russia rightists.
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
23d ago
Yeah, multiple people going no contact is very weird, even by friend in a cult standards. Perhaps they tried declaring "this seems like a cult," and everyone's feelings were hurt or something?
Gaashk
23d ago
I didn't like applying for jobs at all in my early twenties, because they would always ask why I was the best candidate, and I would always feel stupid about how fake I was being and give up. So I put out some super lame applications, until someone in middle of nowhere Alaska called me and talked me into working there, and it was actually really interesting, even though it was not very pretty and -60 and I wasn't really teaching the kids all that well, and I spent hundreds of hours reading Edgar Rice Boroughs novels (I would not necessarily recommend Alaska, specifically, to someone prone to depression though).
Especially if you're American, a young man who doesn't necessarily want a family or retirement can just go do something that's interesting and low pay somewhere random for a few years. Low level English teacher abroad, Americorps, Peace Corps, pineapples, contractor for a military base; whatever sounds slightly interesting.
Gaashk
23d ago
I don't necessarily have any specific suggestions.
If the teen needs to leave the culty environment sooner rather than later, a lot of the other options are also not great, especially if she doesn't have very strong adult skills and is not yet at least 16.
Perhaps it will become more obvious what's going on after visiting the workshop?
Gaashk
23d ago
Sympathy for her terrible situation, sure, and it suggests there's more to the story if the husband doesn't want to live long enough to see his baby. But that doesn't mean that she should have done it. Was she suddenly worried the baby was going to inherit whatever its father was committing suicide over or something?
Gaashk
24d ago
Yeah, most of the married people I know met their husband in a fairly small cohorts, such as a church or volunteer group (not rotating volunteers, a specific stable cohort), where that sort of thing is more likely to work out, and both parties will experience negative repercussions if they act badly.
Gaashk
24d ago
It's more that it stresses my husband out than that other people are actually judging us. He's very much a walk up a hill, light a candle, walk around it three times kind of churchgoer, as were many of the men in Georgia. He's spent some time in Muslim areas, and liked the part where he would get up on the middle of the night to eat dates for Ramadan, or go to a cow slaughtering or something.
Another interesting comment from the Substack:
N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.
More options
Context Copy link