Today's AXC book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) is about "The Educated Mind" by Kieran Egan. This is my second time reading half of it, skipping to the bottom, and feeling frustrated about it.
The reviewer is clearly invested, excited, and has put a lot of effort into their review. At the same time, I can't think of how the ideas, as presented, could possibly useful as a teacher, parent, or even if I were trying to design a new charter school or something.
A while ago, I went to a two hour lecture (with no breaks! In tight stadium seating, so it was impossible to even go use the restroom!) with someone going on and on about neural imaging and The Science of Reading (tm) and Background Knowledge and whatnot, with five minutes towards the end suggesting that perhaps it would be worthwhile to look into actual books or something sometime, as part of Professional Learning Communities (tm). These are, in general, things I'm interested in, but it was all about the five strands of something, which each split into three strands, which each have seven flavors, or something like that. There was no clever resolution as in the rhyme about the man going to St Ives.
This review felt kind of like that. It either is kind of the same as one would intuitively expect, and so doesn't need explaining (yes, of course we should tell stories. Clearly. Does anyone except Eustace Scrubb's parents disagree?), or it's something very complex that teacher's will struggle to follow and probably fail at (nobody is going to succeed at teaching "ambiguity, meta-skepticism, balance, lightness" in school, to ~30 assorted youth at a time).
A bit ago I was listening to Jordan Peterson interview a man who had opened up a private school in Wichita, Kansas (Zach Lahn, Wonder). The school sounded nice. I would plausibly send my children there, were I in a position to do so. They have a system with older students mentoring younger ones, a binary choice to discuss each morning, and one time they had a disrespectful student, but then they expelled him. It isn't just rich kids, he argued: he has a nurse working two jobs to pay the tuition! I stopped listening at that point, and felt a bit spiteful about it.
Maybe I should stop following this stuff, and just keep my head down. It's not like I'm planning to open up a new Eganian charter school in my city anyway. But educational discussions follow me around, haunting my steps, ever since growing on in a very countercultural, education aware household, reading John Taylor Gatto as a teen. I tried to go to in-person events, and it followed me. The ladies tea was talking about it, with a homeschooling mom of four, a mom with her kid in private school for culture war reasons, and someone getting people to sign a culture war adjacent education petition. I tried going to church, and the pastor's wife was talking in the nursery about Sunday School curriculum, with some sort of Montessori adjacent Catholic derived philosophy or something. I tried going to a friend's house, and they were also talking about Education. All of it sounds kind of exhausted and on edge.
Gaashk
3mo 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
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
26d ago
There's been some buzz lately around Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier (also known "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze").
The central thesis is that therapy, to the extent that it's effective even a little, comes with risks as well as benefits, and it's a bad idea to engage in recreational or mental hygiene therapy, in the same way that it's a bad idea to get unnecessary physical operations done. She argues that it's an especially bad idea to do this to children, who don't come into it with a fully formed self understanding, and that parents and schools have been engaging in way too much therapeutic activity without monitoring for harmful results. For most children, it's a better idea to try giving them as much freedom as is culturally reasonable and try telling them firmly to stop behaving badly and do better (and this is what better looks like), rather than trying to figure out if something's wrong with them psychologically. It probably isn't, unless adults introduce that. To back those assertions up, she conducted interviews with some psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, as well as teens and their parents.
Caveat: the book is primarily about and intended for middle class, essentially functional families that are assumed not to engage in abusive behavior, and therefore doesn't spend a lot of time worrying that the reader, released from the constraints of the therapeutic model, will start escalating from naming feelings to hitting or starving kids or anything like that. I don't know if this is warranted, but do suspect that families who are practicing overly authoritarian child rearing (e.g. "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl) are in an entirely different informational ecosystem. That seems likely.
There are three main threads: therapists, schools, and parenting practices. There's a lot of culture war fodder in each of these, especially an argument to massively downgrade the SEL components of schools -- that to the extent people actually go along with them, they aren't just a waste of time and money, but actively harmful. But more than that, to lay off the SEL inspired ways of talking about problems. Working in a public school, I find this somewhat convincing. There are kids who may or may not have psychiatric problems, I can't really tell, but as far as I can tell, the previously normal things (having to sit alone for a while, suspensions, ISS, noticing that other people are angry about the destruction of their concentration and personal property...) haven't ever been tried, in favor of treating the children as not entirely human (doling out pieces of candy one by one, each time they do a tiny positive thing, pretending like them terrorizing their peers can't be helped, organizing a bunch of meetings between six or so adults to consider ways to use behaviorist psychology on them). To the extent that the kid is basically a human being, this is counterproductive -- it's not actually helpful to become a raving lunatic that everyone else averts their gaze from. But there doesn't seem to currently be a path available for school personnel other than deeper and deeper into more and more therapeutic techniques, or for the parents of the other kids other than transferring schools entirely (something mentioned by some kids in relation to potentially complaining about an extremely bad classmate). There was a "mindset training" about how maybe when a kid who's known to be unreasonable throws a tantrum, maybe we should just instantly cave and find them what they want. "Bad therapy" is not very helpful there, since there's a legal apparatus built up around the problem. In my experience school staff understands that the procedures are stupid, but aren't really in a position to change anything, even up to state legislators.
I found the section on gentle, therapeutic parenting especially interesting. When I had my first baby, and had to sit around nursing the baby for an absurd amount of time day and night, said baby was very bad at sleep -- I hadn't previously realized that humans have to learn how to fall asleep -- so I would read parenting advice from generic online sources about my problems. There's a lot about "attachment parenting," gentle, gradual sleep training, and then as they get a bit older, a lot about gentle parenting. In my household, most of this was not so much tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and left untried -- we both like our parents and come from stable households, so kind of just act similar to our respective parents. Shrier found people who had given gentle, therapeutic parenting a really hard try, but not been blessed with gentle toddlers. The most optimistic account was of an Israeli psychiatrist with a young ADHD son who didn't want to use drugs (at least so young), and spent a lot of time gardening with him as an outlet, and seemed to be enjoying the bonding and enjoying the son. "Raising Raffi" by Keith Gessen chronicles attempts at fatherhood by a highly educated man fully bought in to never yelling or punishing, and Shrier's read on the situation is that maybe some small amount of punishment was in order. An observation from both Shrier and Jordan Peterson is that parents who keep losing power struggles with their young children can, and sometimes do, go on to resent the children, and people more broadly don't like them either, since they're out of control much of the time. That seems plausible, though I can't think of any specific examples. She also thinks that the children in question tend to be the ones who go on to cut their parents off anyway, after all that effort, and not want children themselves, since it looks like such a terrible slog. She doesn't present a lot of evidence for that, just her gestalt impression from interviews. Shrier advocates for parents who themselves like their parents and come from functional households to follow their intuitions and ask their families for advice, rather than reading contemporary parenting books. She, again, doesn't have much advice for parents who come from dysfunctional households with traumatic practices.
In general I liked the book as a bit of casual sociology, it has some interesting anecdotes in it, and would tepidly recommend it to anyone interested.
Gaashk
9mo ago
As others have said, the underlying connection is a literal reading of the Constitution. If Congress wants to amend the amendment to say that organizations can discriminate based on race as long as it benefits blacks, they're welcome to try. If Congress wants to forgive student loan debts enough to actually include it in the budget, they're welcome to do that as well. If Congress wants to write actual legislation protecting abortion, they can do that. If they can't, then they shouldn't.
This is not a legal reason, but as far as student loans go, $10-20k is exactly the range lower middle class people should be able to pay off! They pay off cars in that range just fine, all the time. There are also various programs aimed at that demographic, like debt forgiveness for teachers and government workers. People around the poverty level don't need to make payments on federal loans anyway, on account of income based repayment plans. It doesn't prevent lenders from issuing auto loans or mortgages, and family size is taken into account.
The problem area seems to be those with high debt (which this wouldn't have made much of a dent in anyway), making nominally good money in extremely high cost of living areas, so that they really are struggling to pay rent on their small shared apartment, but looking at their income the financial institution expects them to pay down their loan, and this is too much of.a stretch. I don't feel too sorry for anyone struggling to make it in one of the most expensive cities in the world, though.
There was a recent change to the "Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act" which has led to several of the best natural history museum museums simply shutting down their Native American exhibits last week, rather than (what I would naively expect, based on the title) removing human remains from display or something. For instance, The Field Museum papered and curtained over their displays. The American Museum of Natural History is closing two exhibit halls.
This seems like the sort of rule that looks like it might make sense initially, of not grave digging and talking to descendants, until everyone is suddenly reminded that archeology largely is grave digging, and finding descendants is often fraught, with plenty of Tribal Council politics even if a museum can figure out the right authorities to talk to.
I can't tell if this was the intention of the President's Office when they passed the rule, and how much will be left after everything settles (or if it won't settle, and everything will just sit in storage awaiting a change of zeitgeist).
Admittedly, I already mostly go to the local natural history museum for the animatronic dinosaur, and my state has lots of Pueblo Ruins museums, but they're not very good, and run in partnership with the Native American communities. It isn't clear how this will affect locally interesting museums about communities not continuously inhabited since the most archeologically interesting period, such as the Dickson Mounds museum (I recommend stopping by if you're in the area!). Their most interesting parts for non-archeologists are landscape, reproductions and dioramas anyway, so perhaps not much. The Milwaukee Natural History Museum has an unusually enjoyable Native American section (very good in general, go if you're in the area!), but iirc it was also mostly reproductions and dioramas as well.
Ultimately, I suppose it will probably not deteriorate the experience all that much for non-archeologists once the dust settles, but will be one more step of history museums in general toward irrelevance.
Gaashk
24d ago
My state offers heavily subsidized childcare and healthcare for pregnancy and young children to middle income families and below, which is not that hard to actually use. I looked up the fertility rate, and it isn't great.
But also, I like this visual tracker of US births by state 2005 - 2021, where is shows births per 1,000 women (15 - 44) going down noticeably every single year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fertility_rates.htm
It looks like more than just "we can't go out when we want." Arizona went from 80 to 55.5 in 15 years. Utah went from 93 to 64. 15 years ago, women went to college and worked, people also moved away from their parents to work, liked going on trips together, missed going on date nights when they had young children, used contraception, and had access to abortion. The trend remained pretty steady through Covid and the years after.
I'm not sure why it's so stark, but even very expensive taxpayer funded childcare, food, tax breaks, and healthcare programs don't appear to be doing anything about it. Certainly not trivial things like cheap (or even free!) diapers and formula.
Gaashk
3mo ago
I'm having a bit of trouble following this.
I did, in fact, read Leviathan and participate in a discussion group about it, but don't remember all that much about it. It seems obviously true that it's better to live in a society with basically functional norms and consequences around interactions between individuals, groups, and governments than not. And that there are a lot of examples of what that "not" looks like, and they can get really bad.
Present day America certainly is inculturating a social norm that some people might act extremely unpleasant in public, and everyone else needs to politely ignore that unless they are actively harming someone (or maybe not then depending on the kind of harm). Public schools actively cultivate this dynamic from the earliest years with the way they integrate the very least integratabtle special education children, by letting them scream and bite in the name of "inclusion" (though there are limits on the amount of biting and scratching that is tolerable, since they don't want to lose staff constantly), rather than letting them have quiet, privacy and space, whether or not they would prefer that (the screaming, biting ones certainly do look like they might prefer it), and no matter the cost. There's certainly an argument to be made that this is bad.
On the other hand, violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is obviously not the default. Warring clans might be the default. Subways are not the default. Millions of strangers all peacefully taking public transportation to their cubicles every day, ignoring the one crazy person screaming threats is absolutely the opposite of a default way of managing society. It is a wonder of civilization. The default, given the possibility of a hundred million people cooperating and a few defectors, might then be to hang or exile the defectors. But we are generally so secure (And in general we are! That's precisely why almost everyone just ignores the screaming crazy person, because it so rarely escalates to violence) that we're tending toward complacency which, yeah, is probably a mistake.
Can things break down surprisingly quickly and violently? Yes. Liberals probably know that? Apart from actual wars, they do know about things like gang violence in cities, even very wealthy cities, even with tons of various expensive "programs." Just, maybe they will say that it isn't done right, or isn't enough, rather than saying that the neighborhood has degenerated into a state of nature and needs to be civilized by force. But the liberals have a bit of a point, in that when the US government tries to civilize by force, it has often done a terrible job of it.
I spent some time living with a Albanian family in Kosovo. They had been shelled during the war, then mostly rebuilt, though a co-worker mentioned several times that he was concerned that they used to have a lot more cows, herds of cows they would lead through the fields, and now they only had a few, and he interpreted that as poverty and dysfunction. I have never had any cows, and they do seem like a very tough culture, optimized for toughness and not getting swallowed up by the surrounding civilizations, no matter how many sons had to go serve as janissaries through the years. But America can and does swallow them and everyone else up anyway, because that's what we're optimized for. Conservative Americans seem to think this is a fair trade, since we're all much better off materially in America. I'm unsure what the conservative Albanians think, other than that they like and are attached to their cows, flia, clothing, fields, and everything else.
That was unusually rambling, because, again, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. Perhaps my own social milieu is too much of a mix of conservatives, liberals, people underwriting Dreamer loans, people who have had to change jobs because their workplace suddenly started operating entirely in Spanish with the thermostat at 90 degrees, people who have read Hobbs, and people who milk goats to notice?
Gaashk
26d ago
Who are these meta-contrarians you ask? They are mustachioed hipsters of the rationalist community.
I've never heard of this before. Do you have any examples?
Gaashk
11mo ago
I thought the ad was interesting, but do not like lite beers, or hoppy beers, and still do not want to go buy Miller Lite, nor do I condone focusing on hops. Aesthetically, I would be happier if they focused more on grains, but I understand that, logistically, a bunch of paper compost won't go very far in farming grains.
Plausibly there are a decent number of women who like showing off their bodies, bikinis, and so on, but dislike a media environment saturated in even hotter, photoshopped women for them to compare themselves to. There has been a big backlash about that over the past several years. It's "bad sh*t" from a female point of view because it makes average women look unattractive in comparison. If a woman puts on a bikini in a culture that's moving from more conservative mores to more liberal ones, it's great if she can get a lot of attention for how daring she is. She probably can't regularly drink more than one or two beers and still look good, though, so she isn't really the target audience of cheap beer ads. It's frustrating if she is expected to look sexy, in a culture moving from more liberal to more conservative mores -- if she looks great, she'll be a bit less attractive than the advertisement behind her, or if she doesn't, she'll be looked down on as frumpy. Maybe the norm is to only sell bikinis, and she has to buy one or face a steep price hike and inconvenience ordering something from a more niche brand, but she's fat or older, and feels awkward and ugly in it.
The woman in the ad is wearing a rather short, tight skirt -- women can be a bit sexy, nobody wants to go full burqa, but she's not sexier than the viewer. Nor is she more conservative than the viewer. The viewer would be in a fair competition with her. A woman who wants to stand out as unusually attractive would like the media women to be in overalls and sweatshirts, for contrast.
They're also having it both ways -- showing the bikini models to get attention, while decrying them as bad sh*t. Encouraging their male audience members to take a look at their older advertisements in order to send them in.
Gaashk
3mo ago
Dyed hair, painted nails, and cardigans? According to the TikTok via GQ, crop tops (but all the examples look terrible)
It seems like a man wearing clothing associated with women is a much stronger signal of sexual preference/identity than the inverse, creating a stronger barrier for men who aren't actively trying to signal that.
Gaashk
3mo ago
This is all besides the fact that I don't think it's POSSIBLE to retvrn because I think the massive social changes of the past two centuries are down less to the Frankfurt School indoctrinating everyone with Cultural Marxism and more to the seismic shifts in the actual underlying material basis of society
Plausibly.
But, also, it isn't going to work very well over long periods of time for fertility to continue declining. Now Mexico is below replacement. Land of the large, warm Catholic family. Something will likely have to shift again within the next generation or two. Perhaps more work from home situations for women? That's a longstanding solution. More public disapproval of childless women in their early thirties seeking approval through work, going out, and going on adventures? More support for young parents? The current state is not stable, and is already tending toward regret for many.
Gaashk
3d ago
There may be something to the accusation that some jobs have been set up in a way to favor people who are very good at showing up with to the minute timing, writing emails and reports, and other things that are convenient for managers but not exactly about the work being done, such that it's more convenient to manage a small white woman moving a few boxes than a strong black man moving many larger, heavier boxes, because her m in general office skills and agreeableness are higher. This seems to happen a fair bit in government positions, where there might be several support white women writing grants for some minority local agricultural program or something. I've seen it in politics, with full time non-minority positions devoted to "centering minority voices" in marketing materials.
I'm most familiar with education, and do sometimes see this happen. People often talk about the degree barrier, and schools being organized like mid-century factories. Recently, I saw a situation where a minority community is required to hire an art teacher. The specific community is rich in professional artisans, that and views of nature is all they're known for. But they have to hire someone with a college degree, additional education classes for certification, who can run classes that are cleaned up and ready to leave exactly when the bell rings, do a moderate amount of accurate paperwork, and write some reports. So they get an outsider. They are not allowed to exchange this position for a business or finance teacher, which they might be more in need of. This is a bit silly and wasteful. The skills for m, training the next generation of artisans is not the same as m fitting into a tightly scheduled, interlocking education system that's stressed about specials teachers providing "preps" for the homeroom teachers, and the bureaucratic money goes towards the latter.
That isn't to say that I generally agree with the woke take that surely if you removed barriers we could achieve "equity," especially in high education and prestige positions. But the structure of at least some jobs (probably the kinds of jobs the average woke activist is most familiar with) are not very tightly linked to their ostensible goal.
Gaashk
4mo ago
There's a new Open Thread on ACX today.
Am I just imagining it, or were SSC open threads way more interesting a few years back? I remember spending an unreasonable amount of time reading them, and would re-load them and scroll through hundreds of pages of half read comments to see updates. Now they seem kind of dull for the most part?
Adding: also, they seem more difficult to participate in. If I do ever comment, someone either slaps it down dismissively, or there's simply no response.
Another thought: maybe all the interesting stuff is happening on the hidden open threads?
Gaashk
4mo ago
So you're using them enough that you have to "constantly" correct historical ethnic choices, but also calling them "awful?" If an artist was awful, I would stop asking them for new art and go to someone else. Is your job forcing you to use Dall-e 3 specifically or something? What kind of image/material are you using it for?
I don't have a subscription to GPT 4, so am unable to test this, but the previous iteration allowed users to mention styles that they want it to emulate, and there isn't necessarily an advantage to just leaving it at its default style. If it's oversaturated, you can probably request a limited palette? I tried asking Dall e 2 for a painting with a zorn palette, and it used too much blue (zorn replaces blue with black as a primary), but maybe GPT could help interpret that kind of thing (or I could try spelling out what I mean more clearly?).
I had heard that people have been making add-ons for Stable Diffusion that point it toward specific styles, so that might be worth looking into as well.
Gaashk
1yr ago
My almost four year daughter has expressed an interest in learning to read. I am lazy, and don't particularly want to teach her to read, but also can't afford preschool any time soon, so probably should.
Recommendations for methods/curriculum/concrete actions would be appreciated. Preferably that doesn't include a lot of small pieces -- my mother is really into teaching reading, but tends to give us a bunch of matching letter toys that are instantly scattered throughout the house.
Gaashk
21d 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
1mo ago
Are there inexpensive enrichment activities I should consider enrolling my ~5 year old daughter in?
I was in Girl Scouts, but it was getting pretty dodgy (heavy cookie sales focus, zero outdoors skills) even then, and I haven't heard great things lately. 4-H is still good as far as I can tell, but for 10 and up. Someone I know tried Mormon and Evangelical groups (for a bit older kids), and said the boys groups were fine, but the girls were doing kind of the larp housewife stuff people have been commenting on lately. A co-worker has her first grade daughter in gymnastics and she likes it, but I think that's kind of expensive for me at this time.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I remember some controversies about that as well.
If the problem is something like that it's actually quite difficult to find enough people who are both willing to work with small children all day, and willing to follow rigid instructional scripts, this seems like a good opportunity for technological augmentation. If the lessons are scripted, why does it have to be the childcare worker reading the script? Couldn't some kind of anthropomorphic chatbot say the script, and the childcare worker gets to focus on ensuring the kids are actually doing what they should, settling disputes, ensuring some degree of order, emotional regulation, and so on?
Gaashk
4mo ago
which I now see cropping up everywhere
I haven't noticed it -- do you have an example?
"Simple, not complex, no extra characters, restrained, not saturated"
Maybe it has trouble with negatives? I wonder if it would respond to directions about specific color palettes (yellow ochre, Paynes grey, cadmium red?), where to place the focal point, or name dropping Rembrandt?
Gaashk
10mo ago
I do feel "that's nice, dear" when people talk about teaching their children to read below the age of four or so. What do three year olds even want to read on their own? My three year old just wants to follow me around all day and climb on me all the time, like those nature videos of the mother and baby dolphin or whale swimming under and over and on the side. They can learn to read by themselves when they're willing to be by themselves.
On the other hand, absolute pitch may have a much shorter acquisition window than reading, so perhaps it makes more sense to really work at it. Also, I'm not a good judge, since I'm personally musically illiterate. I'm good at drawing, which I learned in one semester when I was 16, and seems to generally be a very different developmental process to being good at music.
Gaashk
21d ago
I'm ambivalent, I just tend not to feel excitement over babies in general. I want the children in the long run, but many of the parts I don't like are front loaded.
Gaashk
26d ago
I feel like the standards have increased to the point where people are afraid to post
looks at three previous top level posts Two deserved to get pruned, and two top level posts in an hour is a bit dodgy.
I do kind of miss the bare links thread, since I mostly get my news from here, though I realize that's my own fault.
So why is the United States paying for > 100% of global pharma research? And how can we fix the glitch?
I would potentially be open to a regulation that companies can't sell drugs to Americans at a higher cost than they sell them to Germans, though there's probably some reason why that wouldn't work. Even in America, it'll be worth having in the long run, so I wouldn't want to discourage the process entirely.
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.
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