Lost_Geometer
No bio...
User ID: 1246
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm not convinced the evidence for superiority of phonics over all other methods is as strong as you suggest it is. Even if that was the case, however, that fact by itself would not necessarily imply anything about how schools should operate.
Here's where I'm coming from. When I was young I transferred from a nontraditional school with relaxed reading expectations to a more normal one, so I ended up going to a remedial reading program for a few months. I don't recall anything phonics based, though this was a while ago. Either way, as far as I recall, I was reasonably literate within a year. As in I was rapidly able to read anything I wanted, though of course subtle literary senses took longer. What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
15, though I have been watching "Occupied" on TV.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I got the turbo barrels too! Does youtube push them to people in a broad demographic or do they have an implicit characterization of people wherein we both fall into the same narrow bucket of turbo-woodstove-video susceptibility? I honestly find this question rather disturbing, in that unless I choose to buy print media it's getting harder and harder to tell what's going on in the general populace. As in, how am I to tell whether something gets to me because it's in general circulation, as opposed to having been precisely targeted?
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I guess this is part of why I hated teaching. My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.
So the worry is that -- if one prioritizes passing the test at all -- the bare facts being tested militate strongly towards certain ideas, and that ethical use of class time does not allow room to introduce complementary material. This is compounded by the fact that so much of the test seems to be free response, and teachers need to be convinced that these would be rubric-ed tightly enough so as to not be graded on ideological parroting. Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.
Finally, I found the sample questions to be interesting and challenging (IANA historian). Students would presumably find the course valuable, but (IMO) Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Ain't nothing wrong with Dummit and Foote, but as usual you pay through the nose. (I'm too cheap to own D+F, but it was the text in grad school. Ash is 1/4 the price, and has some cool algorithmic style stuff.)
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
During WW 2 it was fairly common, and apparently somewhat successful, for prisoners in the Pacific to cultivate yeast to prevent B1 and B3 deficiencies. I'm not sure how many of the other vitamins were known at the time. So primitive fermentation is viable in some circumstances.
On the other hand, alcohol is an anti-vitamin for at least some of the B-vitamins in beer. For example, alcoholics are prone to B1 deficiency.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I'm pretty far left, but the author doesn't really give much of a reason to think much of anything. He opens with a weakman, demolishes it, and then proceeds to loosely related speculation. In particular, he doesn't do anything to establish that rape behaves differently than other violent interpersonal crimes. Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board, a fact that is much more reliably established using better reported, less heterogeneous types of crime.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.
This, I think, is where the trail veers into the weeds of expressed belief vs reasonable knowledge vs patterns of action and so forth. I think I've encountered the view you reference, as a genuine belief in every sense, in the wild, but AFAICT it's uncommon in my neck of the woods. I have yet to see the extreme version @hydroacetylene (isn't that just ethane?) claims, but presumably it occurs. More often people will express that point for signalling purposes when advantageous, only when they are not in the business of making factual predictions about the world.
In reality it's hard to know for sure, though. If you start spouting racial crime stats at people then you look like a racist weirdo. People will fight you even when they know you're right.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
If you're taking a poll mark me down as unconvinced.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
OK, I'll bite. I'm not anti-nuclear, but hardly pro either. 20 years ago I was enthusiastic, but overall now I think that nuclear has only a modest role to play.
Nuclear never has never been particularly economically attractive -- successful programs have needed to be subsidized by states for national security reasons. The predictable costs are huge and mostly occurred before the plants even come online. The unpredictable costs of accidents, attacks, and proliferation are really hard to value, and require large states or as yet imperfect international control systems. The technologies needed for nuclear to be perform at its best (small safe thorium reactors and the associated reprocessing networks) aren't yet developed. Overall nuclear wins only if you want a to build a power source 15 years from now, to deliver stably priced energy in a stable environment for the next 70 years.
But that's not what we want. We want power sources that can be built in 1 year, that and are priced for a lifetime of 20. We need technologies that can be deployed at a local scale and are immune to political disruption.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Many renewables, and some fossil fuels if you ignore fuel supply, satisfy those requirements. Pretty much everything meets them better than nuclear.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Solar photovoltaic, for example, doesn't need international, state, or even regional stability to function, which nuclear does. Solar installations are trivial to build -- even the largest installation, Noor Abu Dhabi only took 23 months. Onshore wind is similar. Natural gas, AFAIK, has become very quick to construct, though the political coordination required extends across to the extraction area, as you say. The point isn't the precise details -- nothing's perfect -- but rather the huge difference in time and risk profiles with nuclear.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
As far as I can tell the semi-strong EMH (the only one worth using) says that insofar as markets are zero sum games, they have no winning strategy for average players. This is the type of insight only an economist could consider insightful. You can sometimes "beat" the market when
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You're playing a different game - for example certain risk profiles are much more valuable to you relative to others.
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You have privately acquired information (either by circumstance or hard work)
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You're lucky
The market does sometimes generate what seem like blunderous mis-valuations, but they're hard to mine in advance.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Fair point. My hot take is that, of the spectrum of things called the EMH, the correct variations are obvious and the non-obvious variations are incorrect. I'm very happy to be educated to the contrary, however.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
Piano, which I'm shit at. I don't get the opportunity to practice much, since I live with other people. When I can it's still fun to improvise over various music theory ideas.
Lost_Geometer
1yr ago
On a literal level, no -- the fossil record records things that have died in favorable circumstances, not things that have reproduced.
On the evolutionary level, 30_000_000_000_000_000 sterile social insects argue otherwise.
How is any of this relevant to the conversation?
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
I think folks should recognize that a crowd trying to restrain someone will end badly a certain percentage of the time, regardless of whether neck restraints are used. Violence is random like that -- people don't die when they should, others die when they shouldn't. Some just drop dead from the stress. Add the extreme exhaustion of fighting for ones life, a person who would otherwise survive might not be able adjust their position to breathe adequately. Like with drowning, the death process and mechanism might not be obvious to observers.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
Contrary to what most people think, rich people work more.
"Facts" not in evidence. I suspect the only jobs where marginal productivity doesn't decline sharply with time worked are highly monitored, low intensity, repetitive ones, like warehouse worker or truck driver. Hence your inequality statement is backwards -- the people who get hurt most by shorter hours are already low paid.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
"We were scared for our lives."
No. No reasonable person would be in that situation, and, "survivor" or not, it cheapens our discourse to tolerate such statements with not even gentle push-back.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
For those that haven't seen it: Liam Neeson jumping a fence.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
When someone says they "feared for their life" I expect there to have been a reasonable chance that they would die. Now I'm at best a middle-of-the-road martial artist, but I'm not a malnourished psychotic either. Compared to Neely I'm a force of nature. In a train car with a dozen people I doubt I could do enough damage to kill someone before being stopped. Maybe? Call it under 10%, fixating on one person with the sole goal of killing.
Now one might contort the phrase to mean "needed to do something to reliably avoid a lethal threat". That might well be the case here, but it's a dangerous equivocation: after all, by that standard one "fears for their life" constantly while driving a car.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
[ @The_Nybbler makes similar points ]
To clarify, can you answer 2 questions?
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How common are killings in similar circumstances -- a single, unarmed individual kills complete strangers on a modestly crowded bus/train after exhibiting unfocussed threatening behaviour?
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In light of your answer to (1), and the unfortunate common presence of disturbed individuals on public transit, how do you estimate the probability that any given passenger (other than Neely) would have died on that trip?
From this side of the screen:
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I was unable to find any examples in a brief search -- plenty of cases of group violence, armed killings, or direct person-to-person conflicts, but none resembling the facts at hand. Presumably it's happened -- just due to the huge numbers of encounters.
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Given that I can't find any examples, and that this type of thing must happen thousands of times a year, I'll put the individual death probability at < 0.01%.
If you can get a better handle on (1), then I'm happy to update.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
That the risk is small doesn't matter when there is no reason why anyone should tolerate being exposed to it in the first place
Agreed. My issue is with the casual use of "fearing for ones life", which cheapens and reduces our ability to del with what should be very serious issues. In the case at hand, it seems reasonable for the passengers to have restrained Neely, as some violence was arguably reasonably anticipated from him. Shooting him, for example, would not have been justified though, and we should, IMO, calibrate our language to maintain respect for human life.
Lost_Geometer
11mo ago
People have fears disproportionate to actual threats all the time. For example, some people won't go to the beach because they're convinced sharks will eat them. And when they're reported to fear for their life when a wave breaks over their feet, we acknowledge that, but with a footnote that the fear is irrational, and sharks aren't really a danger of much magnitude in that situation.
There is an urgent societal need to (as much as possible) ground such feelings in reality, in part because mortal danger justifies a lot of otherwise forbidden behavior. One's dog phobia, for example, does not justify shooting your neighbor's pet when it barks.
This might be an (whatever type of) NGO culture thing. I haven't heard that opinion too much in South America. Not that it's not there, but people weren't sharing it with me. Then again, I never really asked why their countries weren't more wealthy. In Bolivia, during the recent political crisis, people joked that I (from the US) was there to help overthrow the government. But they were in favor of that.
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