MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I mean it depends on the goals, but finding or creating a reading group for a bunch of relevant books or on a given topic could probably, given appropriate study materials do at least as well as the median introductory courses are n that subject with the added bonus that unlike the students in most introductory courses, the group using a study guide and meeting to discuss the book are quite likely to have read the material in question. In most of the same courses at university, most students don’t care enough to actually read the text and quite often barely bothered to read the study notes of the text. Most only care in the sense that they want to figure out how to get a decent grade from the course while doing as little work as possible.
And unless you’re going to try to make a career of that subject, it’s probably much better as far as utility goes as instead of spending $100K on a lit degree you can spend the time and money learning career-based skills that allow you to pay off the loans. I don’t think “a degree, any degree” advice really holds anymore. It might have been true in 1970 when going to college was pretty rare and thus “BS in X” was rare enough on a resume to make you stand out. By 2024, college has become the default, and thus “degree in X” is almost expected. In fact, outside of the skilled trades, almost anyone hiring for a liveable wage job expects you to have college, and preferably something that at least signals a practical minded person. At least by getting a skill-based degree and learning about literature or history on your own, you’ll be able to get as good a job as your talents allow rather than having to try to explain to the interviewer how your four years of reading French literature makes you a good fit for the hard nosed number crunching corporate job you’re applying for.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
By why do the university part for 100K a year? I can buy the works of Shakespeare for $50 or less. And unless you actually need the credentials, paying a house mortgage for a piece of paper that says you’re a Shakespeare expert is pretty prohibitive for most people.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I’ve often considered that university should be separated from job training. The university is being tasked with so many things that it cannot do anything to a decent standard. Research suffers because it’s no longer hiring people on just being good researchers. Now they must teach. And they must hand-hold the students who simply want to grade grub. And they must know what industry wants and fear their coursework to train that. It’s an impossible task made even more difficult as more and more students with middling IQs and very poor study skills must be shepherded through university in courses designed for minimum effort and maximum course satisfaction ratings when university level coursework cannot be dumbed down to the level of what would have been a high school sophomore level in 1945. It doesn’t work, and until you have an academy separate from job training midwits there’s not much chance of reintroduced rigor. We’re producing phds who should have flunked out of undergrad.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think there is certainly a value in appreciation. I’m rather a fan of history, philosophy and similar subjects. Where I think the reformation must come is in decoupling it from the protected and tenured oligarchs of college professors in university. I’m thinking of a much more open model where instead of people going to university to pay $100K to have guided programs of reading literature and history and philosophy, you simply make such material available online. The uselessness of the diplomas is in fact a good reason for moving to guided self study for those interested. You don’t need much to read literature. You need books time, and on occasion study aides all of which can be made available for cheap if not free. Once there’s no institutional value and the material is cheap/free there’s not much reason to keep the initial institutions captured. Nobody would be going to 4-year university for history or literature.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think this explains most of the troubles in university. We are not actually requiring rigor to earn a phd in any non-STEM field and thus the blind lead the blind. Dispassionate inquiry requires people to actually understand the subject and be able to research it and genate useful knowledge. It explains why most people even in politics think in simplistic cartoons and comic books. It explains as well how the US government was made to believe that they could collapse the Russian economy by simply unplugging it from the world bank — as though we could really stop buying Russian oil or fertilizer. I guarantee you that Russian political science students know muc( more about our system than we do of theirs. They know about our federalist system and the electoral college, I’m not sure there are a lot of people in America who know how Russia’s federation chooses its leaders.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
The trouble with politics in non-explicitly-political classes is that essentially it changes the subject of the course from whatever the subject was to, well, politics. And it’s almost impossible to make a course like that not turn into a political jam fest in whic( students game the professor for an A by telling him his politics are correct. And it’s also super easy to end up with ideologues teaching such courses and essentially having woke communist teach-ins paid by the university where everybody pretends it’s about learning English Lit.
I think honestly the best way to actually teach critical thinking is the old fashioned way — teaching formal logic, both philosophical and mathematical. People don’t know how to think clearly because they don’t read books (which can only be fixed by actually reading whole books), and because they don’t have a toolset to examine truth claims. The best way to get such a toolset is to be taught it, and use formal proofs to examine, make and refute arguments. If I want to argue for trans rights, fine, but do so in an open honest and logically correct way. Show your work. If you’re going to argue that The Tempest is about being White is good, then fine, but it’s going to need to examine its own assumptions.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I honestly don’t think at least at present, that politics is polarized because it’s so important. Political in the past was important because the people who generally discussed them were important people, and thus it mattered to them. In most systems, other than signaling loyalty to the regime, there’s nothing much at stake here. And even if it did, from an evolutionary standpoint, democracy is extremely young— 250 some years since the American and French Revolutions. 250 years from an evolutionary perspective is nothing. Furthermore, even in democratic systems, the average Prole has almost no actual power. The legitimacy of the system requires his consent, but he himself has almost no power over any of the decisions that actually affect his life.
So from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, there’s no reason to care about politics. Even from a practical perspective, there’s no rational reason to care about politics. The opinion of the proles has never mattered on those kinds of politics. And weirdly enough, as you bring up local politics, it’s long been my personal observation that the more power a person has on a political system, the less interested people actually become in learning or talking about it. You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect. Nobody but the die hard political junkies know who sits on the school board or the county board or even the state legislature. The people in those seats can still be affected by local citizens. Nobody really cares, and those politics are boring.
In my view, the reason for politics being so divisive is just how little power most people have over the direction of the country. It’s basically a topic that lets you feel powerful, important, and smugly right. At the same time anyone rational knows that if you’re talking about national politics, their opinion doesn’t actually matter. I want to dump the entire science budget into building an albucurre warp drive. It’s not happening because nobody actually cares what I think. The only reason that I matter is that I’m supposed to buy into the idea that because we all voted and that guy won, that “We The People” have spoken and “We” have decided that giving Ukraine the go ahead to fire long range missiles into Russia is a good idea. “We” decided no such thing. Biden did. And this is the way politics works in democratic societies— you must follow the news and vote correctly even though you actually don’t have any power other than giving the system legitimacy. Thus political issues become nothing but identical signaling and pretended power in a place where you don’t have to worry about being right, just making a lot of mouth-noises.
I would honestly contend that you could easily turn down the temperature of politics by giving people actual skin in the game. If voting had consequences beyond the draperies in the Oval Office or which mug you’d see on TV for 4 years, people wouldn’t use it as an identity for social networking purposes. They’d actually care who wins because they want specific things to happen.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.
I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think it’s unlikely that you’d find a triple A piece of media produced after 2012. Indy stuff can still be okay, but if you’re looking at big companies producing art, you aren’t going to find much worth the effort. I dunno, so much of it just feels like people ticked off boxes in a spreadsheet and had ChatGPT produce the script. It’s boring, predictable, politically correct, and generally lacks things like plot, characters, or charm. Indie stuff is better simply because you can still find stuff that genuinely creates characters and situations that you actually care about, plots that don’t feel like long setups for the cool action sequence to follow, or contrived “will they won’t they” love interests (who totally will).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I’m not sure I’m following you here. I’m not talking about someone who doesn’t get into med school. I’m talking about a typical medical office visit in a family practice where the doctor doing much more than backstopping the NP or PA is in fact a waste of time simply because you don’t need 8 years of college and a couple years of residency to read blood pressure, heart rate, or oxygen levels. You don’t need that level of education for minor issues. I had a spider bite and needed to get an antibiotic for it. Nothing about that visit required a full fledged doctor to personally see me or prescribe antibiotics (other than liability issues and legal stuff) for a fairly minor complaint.
As such, I don’t see why it’s a problem that someone who didn’t go to medical school goes into software. It’s not going to make much of a difference in terms of the kind of care that I’m talking about. Probably 90% of medical care is pretty routine.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I’m not sure that’s all bad. For the most part, medicine on a family practice level is pretty simple. It’s routine physicals, vaccinations, and common diseases about 80% of the time. The issue is less a NP or PA can’t handle that kind of workload than he or she is not handing off edge cases to doctors. If they were properly handling cases where patients had more complex symptoms or were complaining of serious pain with no known cause, there wouldn’t be much of an issue. Furthermore, wasting the talents of a full fledged doctor on walking into a room where a kid has a fever and runny nose and telling him he has the flu is a waste of the patient’s money and the doctor’s time. Doing routine vaccinations and physicals is likewise a waste of a doctor’s time and a patient’s money. And I don’t think at that point adding a bunch of doctors fixes the issue. You could do what happens in a dentist office in medical offices with no loss of care. The nurse does all the routine work and the doctors look over the data and only talk to the patients if there’s something more complicated than basic medical care needed.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
It’s not just financial means. Nobody really wants to live in a downtown area of a city, because of homeless people, drugs, crime etc. unless you happen to be rich enough to afford one of the very expensive and exclusive areas of the city, you basically live with crime as an everyday reality of your life. Leaving the door of your car unlocked so thieves don’t smash it. Women carrying at least mace (because guns are illegal) and often being consigned to their homes after sunset. Using the buddy system or proactively telling people everything you’re doing so someone knows where to start looking if something happens. I can’t imagine any woman tolerating the idea of having a baby in the city if they have the means to flee somewhere safer.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think something important to note here is the sheer volume. Especially for those who spend a lot of time online, there’s a firehouse of memes, and because of the silo effects, you simply don’t hear anything from the other side. It’s always been rather hilarious to me that the leftist response to free speech on Twitter was to leave almost immediately. And it’s rather the wrong approach to a radicalism spiral on either side. If you’re going down a black hole, the critical thing that can keep you from going too deep is seeing the other side. If I’m becoming a radical lefty, seeing conservative content and specifically memes opposed to mine will at least keep me from thinking that my Marxposting peers are in the mainstream.
The other thing is to unplug from media. Go camping and leave the phone at home. Read books, draw, paint, make warhammer figures, bake stuff, who cares. But unplugging from the firehouse is probably the best cure for radicalism.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
My understanding of aspies is basically that they have to learn to be social explicitly, they have to kind of learn that something is a joke and that you laugh after a joke, etc. it’s completely external like a skill. And I think that since our vision of our identity or identities is seen through the other, the aspies have a bit less self-awareness of their identities than a normie might. You don’t just naturally act like your gender as most people do by picking up on cues, you learn to act your gender the way I might learn French — you make an explicit decision to study the subject, and then to use it. Of course it’s never going to feel quite natural in the same way my French isn’t going to feel natural— it’s something I’m translating in my head from my natural language to French and it’s not the same as English which I just naturally speak without having to think about it.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
See, to me there’s the “I hate people who do this” thing where everybody just dunks on whoever we’re talking about, calls them gross and disgusting, and tries to make them miserable. I think life is too short for that. And sure, there’s nothing to be gained by saying to a gay couple that they’re disgusting people, degenerates, and so on.
But the other side of tha5 is some bad behavior simply shouldn’t be normalized due to the knock on effects on society. The trans issues especially come with a lot of real, serious baggage. The WPATH files more or less show this, as does the literal explosion of kids under 15 or so suddenly deciding they’re trans and being given drugs. There might well be a case for “okay, fine, if you’re of legal age, you can do whatever with your genitalia and we’ll leave you alone for the most part.” I have reservations about restrooms and trans people being in positions of power over children. But I think for the most part, I’m like okay, this guy wearing a dress is 40 and shopping at Walmart, I don’t need to get out the pitchfork here, he’s not hurting anyone. I might not hire him to babysit, but beyond that, I think there’s something weird about people spending too much energy on it. Once the bad policies that open up the door to harm are closed, there’s not much to talk about here.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think honestly I’d consider the relationship over. She’s not looking for you because she misses you. If she did, she’d probably not have broken it off. She probably did move, and either hasn’t yet found someone nearby or she did and th3 relationship came apart. To my mind, that’s not her choosing you, but her choosing to contact you because she can’t find someone in her new environment. If she really thought you were someone she could see herself marrying or even long-term dating, she would have at least made that offer. For whatever reason she didn’t want to. There’s nothing long term here.
My go to of any relationship among people in any context is if they wanted to, they would. If they really want to have a long term relationship with you, they would be making moves to make that happen— either not moving or committing to a LTR or something like that. If they actually want to marry you, they’ll be making concrete moves n that direction. If someone wants to be your friend, they will be willing to make time for you and to actually invite you over on occasion. If your boss really sees you getting promoted, you’ll see concrete moves in that direction— more training, being invited to conferences, being asked for input on things, maybe asked to fill in n occasion. On it goes, but my point is pay closer attention to what people are doing over what they are saying. If there’s a mismatch between words and deeds, go with the deeds.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
Nobody seems to be having that conversation. The consensus on the left seems to be that only a bigot would even ask the question. I mean the dominant position seems to be forcing businesses to open their bathrooms to trans women. Then complaining and calling women bigots for objecting— even for extremely vulnerable places like homeless shelters (this is how JK Rowling became such a pariah).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I don’t know if any specifically transitions to use women’s restrooms. I will say that especially given the trans community’s abhorrence with the idea of having to prove that they’re actually trans and under treatment is basically an end run around the norm. If a guy in a beard and a short dress walked into a women’s restroom, the business is under the civil rights gun and thus can do little about it no matter how much of a pest he’s being until he actually rapes someone. And I find that enabling of crime to be telling.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think the idea of political ideology being at least somewhat protected (in my view, muc( like religion) simply because it’s easy and therefore tempting to use the threat of unemployment as a cudgel to prevent public expressions of non-mainstream politics. The temptation to use this, and thus use social media “job-swatting” (gee wouldn’t it be terrible if this crime-thinker’s name and photo and screenshots went to the HR office of his company X) to either threaten or punish public expressions of political opinions. And depending on where you happen to live, even relatively sane and even centrist opinions might well offend someone who can get you fired and thus potentially unemployable depending on industry. This creates a situation where people learn to self censor and be very careful about what they say in public. It would be highly irresponsible if you live in a blue city and work in a blue coded industry to openly express support for Israel, or to openly express opposition to abortion. And so it’s creating “the closet” for politics and somewhat religion if the religion is too strongly coded for a political outlook. People have talked about it here before, they don’t tell anyone they work with that they’re conservative, often trying to figure out how they can quietly signal opposition to things like pronouns in their email taglines without attracting the attention of HR.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
To me, it’s the lack of understanding. I don’t think Transgender people in general get how dangerous it is to open the door to the idea that any man can put on a dress and walk into the women’s restroom anytime they want to. There are safety issues here. Men can so easily overpower women that it’s not even a contest. And without the very firm rule of “biological men are not allowed in women’s spaces, particularly where dressing and undressing are happening, it’s impossible to prevent a rape from happening. If you’ve ever wondered why women generally use the public restrooms in pairs, the reason is men who might enter the restroom and try to rape a woman. And the trans community hasn’t even glanced in the direction of understanding the issue or reassuring women that they too are opposed to men in the women’s restrooms and locker rooms being an issue. If anything, their attitude is “women, you aren’t allowed to object to this for any reason. The only reason you care is that you hate trans women.” Followed by using authority to force women to shut up about it. Not a thought about rape, secretly being photographed naked for porn, or being harassed, or worse these things happening to children. I feel like the entire rest of society, particularly the woke end has decided that the rape of women is a small price to pay for feeling progressive about letting transgender women into women’s spaces — without vetting at all.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
To be honest I think it’s the way most social media is set up. Unless you set up pretty hard limits on minimal content quality, you’ll quickly find that everyone is going pretty low hanging fruit of one liners and hard core factionalism. Nuance just doesn’t work in an environment where the currency is engagements. Long from content is not viral in the same way that a one line dig at outside enemies can be. Memes, gross images, crass wording, and anger are the things that nature has somehow engineered our brains to notice and spread. A long form nuanced article that steel mans the other side and treats the issue fairly is only plausible in environments where such content is a minimal expectation.
I do go on Twitter for the lols, but not much else. It’s kinda funny to snark and mock the pious Palestine-free stuff simply because I find it naive and uncritical of its own side. People who under other circumstances would oppose rape, murder, and terrorism are taking the side of people who do exactly that and celebrate it happening. The Israelis, particularly the settlers, are not completely innocent here, but after months of hearing about how this is one sided and anyone who isn’t actively opposed is evil, some part of my brain gets excited about posting a guy eating a hamburger under a tweet about McDonald’s supporting Israel. Downside being that Twitter thinks I’m Jewish or something.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
A huge difference is that being wrong about a nuclear red line quite simply means a pretty serious blow to civilization period. And this makes every “crossing of the Rubicon” an all-in bet that Putin will not use nuclear weapons over whatever this new thing is. And I think honestly it’s pretty obvious that the man has a Rubicon and if we continue to cross false Rubicons we eventually cross the real one, especially if the Rubicon crossed would create a serious threat to Russia as a world power or Putin as leader.
I personally have little confidence in the leadership of NATO to handle this kind of thing. I just find nothing that makes me think that they have thought strategically about anything in the war. The arguments for continuing seem to be nothing more than moral preening. Saying Russia is bad and thus we will fight them and they will lose because bad guys always lose is not the kind of hard nosed strategic thinking I’m looking for in the leadership of NATO. Further, they’ve already been wrong about the state of Russia. It was supposed to collapse in the first months because we disconnected them from the central banks. It turns out they were not economic paper tigers and were more or less fine. They thought once Ukraine got this or that weapon system, that Russian military units would fail and the invasion would end. Turns out the best we can do is hold them in place. If the leaders of NATO can be wrong about the state of Russian and Ukrainian forces, and the Russian economy, I just don’t think they can be able to gage which Red Line is one Red Line too far.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
8mo ago
I think we agree on that. But my issue with current policy is that the most reliable way to get into America is hopping the fence because the legal immigration process is pretty broken. Which increases the burden on the Border Patrol, ICE and law enforcement because of all the people who should be able to get in legally choosing to be illegal immigrants instead. I think it’s a Both And situation. You enforce the laws, but you also fix the system such that those who are employable and have no criminal record and a command of English can get in by legal immigration. Having a system — a sane, easy to understand system that doesn’t take a decade to get your visa — would tend to encourage people to use that system. I don’t think anyone is aspiring to be an illegals immigrant.
Coming from the other side, I’d say that numeracy and clear logical reasoning is probably more important to creating the mythical “well rounded citizens” than humanities. The reason is that almost every decision made in policy or even discussion of policy positions requires logic and statistics. The idea that you can have a productive conversation about things like economics without understanding utility curves and statistics is crazy. Figuring out the percentages of trans people in a population and what the percentage of increase is kinda matters if you’re trying to make a case that the entire thing is biologically based. Algorithmic logic is extremely useful in learning to plan and communicate a plan precisely. And as far as understanding anything in science, understanding the statistics and how probabilities work and so on is critical to understanding what is going on.
Obviously, I think a well rounded person would know all of the above. The thing is though, that we’re actually nearly backwards where there’s more emphasis on exposing people to the humanities in ne form or another over and above giving people the tools to understand their very scientific and mathematical world. The results, as far as I can tell, is a world where people fall for conspiracy theories, but don’t understand science. They can’t understand science or technology because they re not forced to learn those things after high school, if they had much exposure in high school.
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