Gaashk
4d ago
I think disability actually does work that way, but suffers from benefit cliffs that disincentivize some people from doing the work that they're able to do.
Gaashk
10d 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
11d 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
13d 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
10d 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
10d ago
Another interesting comment from the Substack:
Jessica Lopez
As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.
There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.
This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.
N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.
Gaashk
9d ago
From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.
My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.
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
10d 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
9d ago
A couple of thoughts:
- Almost nobody is good at getting preferred behaviors from people who don't want to cooperate. Even good managers are not all that good at it, they refuse to hire almost everyone, and sometimes fire people when things aren't working out. Paying more sometimes helps, but there are a decent number of unemployable people out there. All of them were once children who's teachers couldn't remove them from class for more than about 10 minutes at a time unless they physically assaulted someone.
- Almost nobody is good at social science research, including actual social science and educational researchers.
- Elementary teachers are not selected for their educational research and testing abilities, they are selected for patience with small children, helping them learn to get along with each other, and the ability to work within a system that isn't all that well designed, where nobody can ever be expelled and almost nobody can be fired or demoted.
- Individual teachers can't decide anything about curriculum, schedules, or class compositions. Which are almost everything. They can conduct classroom management, and do actually iterate a lot on who sits next to whom, sticker charts, fidgets, and so on.
- "If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work." It depends on what you mean by work. If you have an unstable client who keeps freaking out and throwing things around the room and pulling random people's hair, and your method works to decrease that but not to improve other metrics, did it work?
Gaashk
20d 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
9d ago
It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.
I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.
Gaashk
20d 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
9d ago
I am very glad that the person who built the house I own:
- Installed a metal roof
- Planned ahead for water flow, and intentionally designed the landscaping around it.
A big house like that might be hard to cool in the summer. I don't have any specific suggestions -- we can't afford a full house air conditioner, so we're all in the main room with the window unit in during summer afternoons, and use open windows and fans at night.
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
10d 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
18d 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.
Gaashk
9d ago
I guess I can see the appeal.
Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.
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
10d ago
I suppose a "good regulatory environment" is one where the nuns can teach for cheap, the children can bring their own lunches, and any children who don't do well under those circumstances can go to public school instead at much higher cost to the state. If there are still enough nuns.
Gaashk
22d ago
The guys I know who can’t seem to find a single woman to date… you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation.
One such man I know IRL, who I was friends with at the time, said something like "I would ask Gaashk out, but she would probably stab me," in front of me. He did not in fact ask me out), and is still single and complaining about it on Facebook.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The whole thing seems very weird, probably fake, and not primarily about "agency." What kind of weather situation were they in where he was actually cold, not just making idle chatter, and a "nice scarf" was going to fix that? And then he just went around wearing some random woman's scarf the rest of the evening? It sounds funny, I guess they could have a good laugh over it? Definitely manic pixie dream girl vibes.
But, also, I've been confused about how "agency" is being used lately. Assertiveness? Willingness to take action? It seems kind of new to hear that discussed in terms of agency, but seems to have become a thing lately.
Gaashk
1mo ago
The first fear is having a child who is not, ah, as fortunate as the preceding three.
I was worried about that with my third as well, since I was around some of the kids who had lost the genetic lottery, and it really sucks. I think the odds of having an unbearably bad condition that isn't detected in early scans, and isn't caused by bad behavior on the mother's part is pretty low, though. (I did not personally get the tests done other than ultrasounds). I'm going on a road trip this week on a busy freeway, which is also not risk free, there are plenty of somewhat small risks that are worth taking.
I don't think I'll have a fourth child, especially since I'm closer to 40. My pregnancies were pretty easy, I was eight months pregnant, starting long road trips in the middle of the night and carrying around my toddler in the summer heat. The births were basically alright. It's both age and finances that would prevent me from having another. We need to be able to both work sooner rather than later, and get our finances in order, our current situation isn't long term sustainable even without an additional car payment for an expanded vehicle.
The new Sanderson novel, Isles of the Emberdark. It is, of course, not very sophisticated or thoughty, but is a fun little adventure.
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