MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
He also had universalist views on salvation from what I’ve read of him. His belief, AFAIK was that sincere Jews and Muslims didn’t need to become believers in Christianity to be saved. That’s pretty darn progressive/liberal thinking from a Christian perspective.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think the antipopes in the 12 century should have been a clue. There’s no way that you could have tge head of the church be a single person with a direct line back to Peter, then have entire centuries in which there are two and sometimes three claimants to that title.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think there are good aspects to Asian schools that we could bring in, though perhaps not to the extreme that those schools go to.
I think first of all, as a culture, we must start taking academic achievement much more seriously. America doesn’t take education seriously, and instead tends to be rather casual about tge project. And the result is that almost half of all American adults cannot read on an eighth grade level. Mathematics and science fair no better. Because of this, we’re generally stuck when it comes to innovative ideas and deep thinking in philosophy or the arts. If we took school and education as seriously as we take sports, with high achievement being celebrated and rewarded.
But the other thing that makes it work is the tracking. Not every kid who graduates goes to tge same “university to office job” track. If you haven’t earned the grades and done the work, you will go to lower colleges, trade schools, or vocational programs. This not only reduces the competition for entry level positions for college graduates, but ensures that every group ends up with a skil they can use to support themselves.
Most of the actual problems come from taking the system to extremes. Over competing in sports leads to 13 year old kids needing Tommy John’s surgery. To much competition in academics makes people miserable. Neither is an indictment of those activities or those who take them seriously. If rules are put in place to keep the competition sane, competition is generally good for people and drives them to do better. The alternative is underachieving with all the problems that come from that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Of course the culture war angles are attention-grabbing, and the toxoplasma of rage ever present. But at the risk of going full "boo outgroup," can I just say--I really, really hate crowdfunding? It seems like a horrible mistake, a metastasized version of the cancer of social media, virtue signaling with literal dollars that feed nothing but further grift. Regardless of their reasons, I'm thankful to the Somali family for shutting down the NAACP's grifting fundraiser as quickly as they did. I'm gobsmacked that Shiloh has managed to milk three quarters of a million dollars (and counting!) out of being accosted over a minor literal playground scuffle.
I think the dollars make crowdfunding less prone to cheap virtue signals as it requires more from the giver than a simple post. You have to put up cash to the cause. If I believe in something, that’s not a problem. If I believe in DEI, then giving $25 to support such causes or to someone wronged by the lack thereof is at least skin into the game. Simple posts are not the same and therefore people are probably signaling things that the person isn’t committed to but says because it’s “the right thing to say.” But would you be willing to actually donate to that cause?
I mean, I get it--the money is tempting, and if you aren't getting yours, someone else will be more than happy to scoop it up "on your behalf." Racism is big business, for which the demand vastly outstrips the supply, and overtly slur-slinging white moms are... well, usually they're rapping or something, not dropping the honest-to-God Hard R. And on a child!
And it’s a revealed preference. If people didn’t agree with the woman’s cause, nobody would give money to it. In that sense it’s like an opinion version of a prediction market — unlike polling or social media posts, you can’t just opine without putting some actual money down behind it. What meaning you take from this particular case, im not sure. Is it because this woman was threatened, because it’s expanded to her family? Because the thing was filmed? Because people want to say “nigger”? That’s a bit harder to gage. But there’s a signal there that doesn’t exist with mere posts. Every person who donated has has done so at cost to themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality. "Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one. Referring to DeSantis's takeover of the New College of Florida, Jonathan Haidt wrote that, "I am horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country."[2] Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste. There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.
I’m not convinced that “academic freedom” failed. We had university-like institutions across the globe for millennia. The philosophy schools of Greece, the Confucian schools, medieval universities. Even in modern times, it’s possible to have universities without them becoming captured. How many woke professors are there in Korean universities? Or Mexican universities? It doesn’t appear that this is universally true of universities with academic freedom. In fact, for most of history, colleges were not especially woke.
On the other hand, in America, universities have two direct lines to power. First, their research directly affects public policy as government cites research and the professors who do it. This means that any ideology injected into universities will eventually be reflected in government policy. Second is that the press will cite these things often without criticism, thus injecting the ideas directly into the veins of culture. Both of these things make American universities ideal for ideological purposes. It’s an easy way to get your ideas to be accepted as received wisdom by the masses whether or not they happen to be true.
What would be the ideal solution is to not use colleges as the source of knowledge and government policy. If you no longer have direct access to the ear of the king, the position no longer is useful for pushing ideology. If journalists investigated beyond just quoting the first professor they come across, again, it’s not useful to push ideology. At that point, the academy goes back to being a place where you do dispassionate research and teach students how to think for themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I mean im not sure LARP is always a problem. If a worthy tradition was lost due to force — for example, a culture was forced to give up its language after a conquest, it’s somewhat a LARP to go back to that. It’s also in many cases a worthy effort to do that even if at first it is a LARP. The revival of Hebrew was a LARP at tge time. Now it’s the native language of Israel, and there’s a living culture that grew up alongside it. Irish is taught in schools in Ireland, it is sort of a LARP even now, but it’s an attempt at reviving a piece of that culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4d ago
I see this as part of a larger problem of our system basically beating initiative out of the population. It shows up in dating because that’s pretty obvious, but teachers report that kids don’t really try to figure out how to solve problems on their own, and often end up “stuck” until an authority be it teacher or parent does the problem for them. They also tend to seek out adult help with any social problems that tend to crop up. If some kid is mean to them, they don’t try to solve that issue between the kids, they go straight to an adult.
Partially, I think it’s a lack of time away from adults and with other kids, especially when the adult doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Most kids have their lives arranged for them — they play sports after school, they have activities. They have playdates. And of course, the cellphone means that someone always knows where they are and can call them if they deviated from where mom expected them to be. How do you learn to take risks and initiative when you live an arranged life? When you have never been in a situation where you do something awkward and discover later that it’s recoverable?
The other thing is that school and parents tend to be overly worried about the kid making a mistake that will follow him around. Maybe he tries to figure out that homework problem and gets it wrong and loses his spot on the honor roll. Maybe he makes a mistake with a girl and gets accused of sexually harassing her. Maybe he does something stupid when he’s out with friends and ends up in trouble or does drugs or drinks underaged. Any of those can stick around for a while. Parents know this and kids pick up on it. So between th3 both of them, it’s better to just not try those things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
It’s not just the men literally killed, it’s also people fleeing the country. And a lot of people have fled already.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6d ago
I mean weapons do not fire themselves. You can arm Ukraine all you want — they are still toast more or less. And Ukraine is rapidly running out of people. If you’re resorting to abducting senior citizens off the street to fuel your army, you are in no position to defend much. And this is the calculation that NATO missed — Ukraine didn’t have the population to sustain this effort, and so any weapons given were useless because eventually you’d have no one left capable of firing them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
I don’t think most people honestly care unless the writer is in some sense the reason they’re reading the piece in the first place. For 90% of news or blogs it literally doesn’t matter. And even for boilerplate fiction (the kind people bring on vacation) that’s mostly read as a pastime or relaxation, they probably won’t care that much if it’s chatbot unless the publisher didn’t bother to clean up the disjointed phrases.
This place and the people who read sites like this are probably extreme outliers. We care if the stuff we read is good, or accurate, or has clunky prose or hallucinations. But this is a place full of highly educated, intelligent, thoughtful Readers. Most of us have probably read a nonfiction book in the last six months that isn’t related directly to work. We’ve read blogs for information. When we read news, it’s something we care about the accuracy for the article. A person who’s reading journal articles to fact check news reporting is going to easily find errors just because of information exposure. Someone who reads a lot of content is going to notice the slightly off phrase and check to see if it’s LLM slop.
Keep in mind that the median American reads rarely and when he does, it’s often below the 6th grade level. At such low literacy, tge difference between a random anuthor and a chatbot isn’t obvious. The difference between a bot and a human writing about news and politics isn’t obvious, because boilerplate news is written in a formulaic way with a formulaic style. To someone who reads a lot of it, word choices and odd phrases stick out. To people skim reading the news, it’s not obvious.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
The problem, at least in major cities, is no that the public finds public transport “inconvenient”. They’re quite frankly unsafe for normal people to use. Full of homeless people, gang members, insane people, it’s just not something that is going to catch on as long as getting accosted on a train is a reasonable possibility. Europe has a wonderful train system that seems pretty easy to use. But tge biggest draw is that day or night, a person can get on a train and be sure that it will be safe and sanitary. And because it isn’t full of homeless and criminals, people don’t think about the trains as a pipe of such people coming to their area. In the USA, trains are limited to parts of the city that nobody wants to go to — in large part because property owns do not want to import those problems. In my area, it is confined only to a small portion of the city center. You can’t ride it to work because it doesn’t go to the county where most office workers live — and they absolutely do not want it to come anywhere near them.
Until subways and trains are as safe in America as they are in Europe or Korea, Theres just no there, there. You can’t build more because people paid a handsome some to get away from criminals, drug users, and homeless people and have no intention of allowing trains near them because they don’t want a pipeline for such people to come into their neighborhood. Car centric neighborhoods are in part a defense strategy — one way to keep criminals out is to require a car to get there. Poor people generally don’t have cars, homeless and druggies definitely don’t, so you can keep your area low crime be requiring a car for access.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
7d ago
My perspective comes from both my own efforts at self education and watching my sister in law teach at a public school.
The thing is that you can’t teach yourself using the standard industrial program intended for use in the public school system. It doesn’t work well to produce understanding of the material in the sense that you can use it to either understand other things or solve problems. You might be able to recognize a fact. You know the procedures to solve algebra equations but you don’t know how to think about them in ways that allow you to solve problems that tge text hasn’t presented yet. Nor can you use facts to draw logical conclusions. In short the method is wonderful if the goal is to get a very basic baseline of knowledge and don’t care if it the student understand it or learn to think for themselves about the information or to critically think about the sources being used.
Now having used a method similar to the older classical method, it works a lot better for producing and understanding of the material. If I learn how to do all the steps of algebra and mathematical calculations, then I should understand enough to approach a problem that’s just beyond what the text explicitly teaches. Or if I read a history and understand what all the actors are doing and why they are doing that, you can compare events and come to understand something about how those kinds of things happen. If you read literature in its historical context and culture you’ll have a better understanding of what the author was intending to get across.
The problem of course is that individual close study of a subject is almost impossible in a large classroom. Classrooms with 35 squirmy kids are simply not suited to have a discussion. They’re built for the lecture and textbook model that they were designed to accommodate. Classical education does not scale up to traditional school class sizes. The model is based on discussion, and beyond a certain class size you simply cannot have a discussion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
I do think the problem is that we can’t crack the problem of teaching. There are other issues.
First, doing it right means a lot more work for the administration, teachers, and students. If you want people to understand a topic, they must understand it more deeply than simply being able to repeat back the summary at the end of the chapter and do curated problem sets that never deviate from the examples in the textbook. To learn about history, you need to read a lot of history— cover the same events from multiple perspectives, read accounts from the various groups involved, and to write an attempt to answer questions about what is going on, what various factions believe and why they believe it, and how those beliefs shaped their actions. To understand science, you have to learn to ask questions and figure out how to find answers, you have to understand what the laws of physics actually mean. No one actually teaches this way because it’s a lot of work for everyone and because it doesn’t work at industrial scale, it’s expensive. It’s far far cheaper to lecture at a bunch of bored children out of a textbook, assign the problems at the end of the chapter and move on to the next lesson. You don’t need to spend time reading the answers or figuring out what they understand, just go grab the teacher’s guide, open up to the answers to the assignment and mark papers. Further, you can have much larger class sizes when the model is “lecture, assign homework,” rather than class discussion, essays writing, and reading multiple sources. To properly have a discussion in which everyone can participate, you can’t really have more than 10-12 kids in a room. In the traditional classroom, you can have thirty or more.
Second, having a population that is not well educated — at least beyond the ability to do whatever jobs the ruling class needs them to do — is beneficial for the ruling class. A population who can’t critically reason cannot question the narratives they encounter. A population trained on the Pavlov’s dog model of education where what matters is repeating back what the authorities told them is in no position to rebel even when it’s clearly in their best interests. A population that has no experience of looking into questions for themselves is sunk. They believe themselves educated, they have the appropriate credentials. They can do whatever job they are hired to do, but beyond such things, they can’t understand their world. And because they don’t understand it and don’t know how to fix the gaps, they revert back to what they learned in school, sit down, shut up, and obey the experts, and don’t question things.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8d ago
The Polynesians didn’t face any of the obstacles of space exploration and colonization though. The cost? Chop down a couple of trees, tie them with vines, launch with maybe a big container full of water (that you can easily refill with rainwater) and live off the fat of tge ocean by fishing. Once you land, you still have the ocean for fishing Annnd more than likely you’ll have edible food on whatever island you land on. It’s cheap to do, requires few resources to get there and few to survive once you make landfall. You barely need the ability to plan ahead to pull this off.
And space is absolutely not like this. Mars is 9 months of travel away, and you need to take everything you need to survive with you — air, water, food, etc. you need to overcome the negative health effects of zero gravity. And everything you carry is limited by the physics of launching a rocket into space — launching a kilogram of matter costs $1500. You need 9 months of air, water, food, exercise equipment, the crew itself, waste disposal, and so on. A single rocket to mars is pretty resource intensive. It gets worse. You can’t just pluck a coconut off the abundant trees on mars. In fact, not only are there no trees, but it would require pretty extensive work to get to the place where you could plant food on mars. And you need to take that stuff along with you. And extra supplies to support the crew while they set all this up. Point being that space is nothing like the ocean. And at such high cost, it’s going to compare pretty unfavorably to just about anything else in the national budget. We can work on the mars colony that might be at least resource neutral 40 years from now, or we could spend those billions on AI, or education, or anti poverty programs,or cure a disease, or building a big gold tourist attraction statue of Trump. Even the statue might be a net gain simply because people will want to travel to see it and spend money while there. For most of these things, other than prestige, space loses pretty handily compared to most other ways one could spend the money.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9d ago
I think AI maybe not 2027, but certainly before 2032, is the much surer bet, not because AI is that much closer, but because Mars Base requires not only an upfront investment of decades and billions but also probably another billion in upkeep. Unless you have a very very good reason to build a base on another planet (or to be fair, faster rockets) it’s just not something people or governments are going to spend 1% of global GDP on. If it’s 10% of global GDP and might well take a generation or two (my thinking is probably two as you’d need to be able to grow substantial amounts of food, produce substantial amounts of water, extract minerals and metals, and so on) it’s just too expensive to consider. Keep in mind that until you are self sustaining, you are a net drain unless you send the amount of resources back to Earth to cover materials sent plus the fuel needed to get them to the base. Are there 15% of global GDP in minerals and metals on mars in such a way that it could be extracted with low enough cost to make this work? I honestly doubt it. Once you factor in the cost of extraction and refining and launching the material earth-ward and sustaining the crew to do the work, plus the crew to support the miners, it’s pretty expensive to even attempt it.
AI, even if it takes a bit longer to get there is a self-sustaining effort. The partially automated systems are useful tge minute they’re trained. As such, unlike Mars Base, it’s going to be something that people and governments are going to want to put money in. They’re almost guaranteed to get their money back plus interest in a couple of years when the next Gen AI rolls out and businesses and governments buy it.
I’ll be honest, I really wish space exploration was viable, but more than likely, humans will not leave earth and roam much farther than our nearest neighbors. Everything else is going to be robots and telescopes because traveling the stars is risky and expensive.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
Until they get sick of riding in urine soaked public transit with drug addicted homeless people. I mean there’s a reason why no one wants to ride public transit and it ain’t the cost. My city has voted on expanding it all the time no one wants it.. They don’t want the crime, the drugs, the smell.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
14d ago
I don’t know for sure how typically im skewing this, but it used to be the norm that you’d be taught to get to know tge person as an individual without regard to race. That was the color blind 1990s and 2000s. And I’d say that seems to have featured much better race relations in most cases. Certainly there were still problems, but you didn’t have any real animus between groups en mass. Now you don’t have to go very deep to find open racism, sexism, or homophobia that would not have been said aloud in the 1970s. You wouldn’t have talked openly about Jews manipulating American government, or immigrants eating pets, or black men being criminals in the Frank manner people do today. If you got in a delorean and went back to 1975 and casually mentioned that during the VP debate, JD Vance talked about immigrants eating cats, it would seem weird.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
I think like anti-racist trainings done by HR for adults, these things might well be counterproductive. It firstly associates this group of people with essentially “struggle sessions” often humiliating, but definitely something that they are forced to do and don’t want. Secondly it creates these divisions where a class of people are essentially otherized in an attempt at inclusion. You might not have thought about gay people as different from other people, but then the teacher hangs up flags and spends hours talking about how gays are different from other people, and to the shock of absolutely no one, the kids now see the gay or trans kid as a weird alien species of human not like them. Or in the case of HR programs, you don’t start our thinking of minority coworkers as weird, you don’t say “there’s a black person in accounting” or something. Then you are forced to Notice, Affirm, and Celebrate the diversity of your workplace and told how different these black people are, and then you can’t help but see them differently.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
I mean what comes to mind are two things done in the West. First, acting. People wear costumes. To represent the character they are portraying. Second would be fraternitie using dresses as humiliation or just as a quirky costume for a party. Those things are rare, but I don’t think it’s true that no contexts in any culture have cross dressing must be sexualizing it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
Most kids turned out just fine. And honestly I think it was ultimately good for us to have done those things. First of all because it taught us to self regulate behaviors and thus learn when and how to break rules with minimal danger to ourselves and others around us. Second because we’d end up getting in some level of danger either of getting caught breaking rules, or rarely physical danger, an$ would have to figure out how to get out of that mess. And finally because we learned how to get along with other kids without mom and dad to mediate. If you wanted to play one game and they want to do something else, you negotiate and figure it out.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15d ago
I think you’d have a hard time with such a system simply because verification could be impossible. It’s perfectly legal to shoot me, im an outlaw. But what happens if you misidentified someone else as me? There are probably several million people on earth right now that look like me, so what happens next? You thought you were going to get me, who has no legal rights, but you didn’t get Maiq the True, you got Maiq the Liar. Do you go to jail? Is mistaken identity a defense? Can you be sued by next of kin? Must you return the wares?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16d ago
If I were queen, my hard rule would be no sexuality in school for any kid under 12. At 13 or so, obviously you need to explain sex and how babies are made. But why teach that in preschool, or even grade school when kids are not mature enough to handle it? And what make this sort of thing so important that it cannot wait for that maturity to develop.?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16d ago
Their lives are also ridiculously locked down. They are tracked by phone apps, social media is read, driving privileges are extremely limited (you can’t drive with more than two friends in the car until 18 under graduated licenses). The ability for kids to just go do things the way that their parents and grandparents did doesn’t exist anymore. We used to ditch school all the time, we cut class, we would go outside with other kids and the adults would not know where we were until we came home. And it was entirely possible to have friends your parents would not approve of. Kids could get drugs to school because it was easy enough for a kid to go to skid row and score some to sell at school. Safetism coupled with modern social media and phone tracking killed this type of independence.
I think this explains the mental health crisis and the no sex and drugs thing. Kids are never allowed to be alone with other kids without all the adults being privy to where they are and what they are doing. It causes a mental health crisis because kids never learn to get out of messes on their own, or to be independent. This means that kids never learn that they are capable of being independent or that problems that come up are solvable, least of all by themselves. The sex thing is because it’s impossible to get alone with a member of the opposite sex. No telling mom you’re spending the night with Mike and then going to Mary’s house. Mom will be tracking you. If you go anywhere other than Mike’s house, you’ll be in big trouble.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
17d ago
I feel the same. I’m happy with conservative Anglicans on the more traditional end of things. I can recognize other Christians even if I have disagreements in (though I have various degrees of separation depending on how far you get from the traditional understanding of Christianity and the sacraments.
I mean yes, but after the fact. If you’d lived in the era of antipopes, that doesn’t resolve the issue of whose rulings are the infallible ones or which hierarchy actually has succession.
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