MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think the worst aspect of “not noticing” in various ways is that it harms the person with lower capacity the most. When we can’t acknowledge that not every kid is going to be successful in college, that doesn’t hurt those who will be fine in college, but those who won’t. We can sort of cheat them through (combinations of grade inflation and easy majors can probably get anyone within 1σ of normal to a diploma) but even then, they cannot do that level of work, and worse, they graduate with outsized expectations (I graduated therefore I get a nice middle class job, right? Right?) but with no actual skills they can actually trade for a decent living. Now instead of the dumb kids learning carpentry and roofing, they pretend to learn Literature and graduate with no skill at all. Further, there’s no real plan for how to employ those with limited ability. Most of those jobs are either gone to computers and machines or to immigrants or shipped off to Pakistan. Even if we start recognizing that Johnny is stupid, there’s no place in the economy for him, nor is there a welfare program for him. He’s either going to hustle (probably in some form of illegal way) or starve or get hooked on drugs and hopefully take himself out.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I feel like in a lot of ways the questions around tyranny and anarchy sort of dance around the actual issue which is what a government is actually for. Why do we have one, why do we want one, what is the government supposed to do. And really I think until you answer that question in a way that makes sense, asking whether or not something is dangerously tyrannical or anarchistic is simply booing a given government or government action.
To sort of answer my own question, I see government as a sort of political operating system— the point isn’t to directly solve most problems, but to provide the necessary stability and infrastructure that allow other institutions: churches, civic groups, businesses, and so on to provide services to society. Now that sort of changes the way you’d think about crime policing. You’d want the government to keep the crime rate as low as possible without unduly interfering with the ability of people to organize and solve problems or do things. Putting up huge roadblocks at every corner would probably solve crime, but it would absolutely destroy the ability of people living in the city to do pretty much anything useful. Having no police presence would allow people to do things in theory, however because there are no cops, the crime rate is too high for it to be safe to do things. You can kind of apply the same lenses to other problems like business law (if you don’t have any, social trust is impossible, too many laws mean that almost all people are too busy with compliance to actually do anything useful) or health and environmental laws. A good government would be stable, but mostly invisible and provide known safety and security measures and predictable laws enforced predictably such that it’s mostly just there but invisible to end users.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
I think this is generally a good approach to most things health. Don’t worry about numbers or apps and just generally aim at doing generally good things and stop trying to minmax your stats.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22d ago
I’m thinking largely in the fact that they have a society that values hard work, achievement, and education. Their government is working towards stability and growth and is generally run by people who understand how things work and how to achieve those ends. I think the issues of TFR are probably temporary in most societies and that eventually we’ll work through how to get more babies.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28d ago
I see history less in terms of individual actors and more in terms of the raising of ideas and other social forces that nudge things in general directions. Personally, I think the future will be dictated more by the decline of the West and Western ideas that simply cannot meet the moment, social forces that drive western countries off various cliffs, and bad social memes that cause chaos and bring about poor outcomes for humans who absorb those bad social memes.
My prediction is that the furvor is a symptom of a coming Soviet-style collapse of the Anglo-sphere centric West where the countries in question will still sort of kick along, but much reduced in power and influence, and under the economic and social power of other countries. The future, I think may well be East Asian much like tge seat of civilization was Islamic after the collapse of Rome.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I mean I think the assumption that the phone and couch are actually more fun than anything one could do is a bit suspect. My belief is that screens are a sort of hyperstimulous— that the version of whatever you happen to be doing on that screen is more immediately stimulating than the same version of that activity off the screen. But I don’t think that’s fun. I don’t think that the average person derives more entertainment and value from those versions than they would from the screenless version. They wouldn’t necessarily choose freely to sit on the couch and socialize on X over going out with friends for a coffee or something. They wouldn’t necessarily find playing some basketball game on Xbox over going to the gym with a couple of friends and a ball better and more entertaining. Instead, the screen is something that provides the high points of the experience without the things that make it less accessible.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m not sure that proves anything other than his use of informal language. He’s not writing a properly cited thesis here, he’s saying “Im going to shoot this guy in the face and this is why I did it.”
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I’m not convinced being “good looking” is enough to set a person apart from a crowd enough to have someone not only recognize him, but be sure enough of that recognition to call the police. If there’d been something truly unique about him — say a scar on his right cheek, bright orange hair, green eyes, a limp, etc. sure I get that. Luigi has dark hair, brown eyes, maybe a bit tall and his hair is curly, but on the scale of human appearance, he’s within the median human appearance. Usher is unique— very dark skin, a prominent scar, unusual voice. Those things people will notice because of how unusual they are for the median American. Being “dreamy” isn’t necessarily being weird enough to stand out. There are plenty of tall men who have dark, curly hair and brown eyes who could be described as good looking.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
China has a lot of the makings of a superpower. They’re going to win a manufacturing simply because that’s where the factories are for the most part. We still have some factories, but nothing near what China has. Secondly, China (and most of East Asia in general) have prioritized education and particularly science, mathematics, engineering, and related subjects. And they are oriented towards getting the best and brightest the best education they possibly can. Americans make little mouth-noises about education and STEM, but really, they don’t care about education that much. We are much more concerned about leaving behind a kid who doesn’t or can’t read or write or do math because we prioritize his feelings (actually more than likely his mother’s feelings) than we do about getting the rest of the kids to read and write and do math to the best of their abilities. Culturally, we don’t care about education much either. We want our kids to attend college and get a diploma, but no parents ever care much about whether or not they’re getting a real education. In fact Theres a lot of ADA based cheating in schools where kids get diagnosed with various things so they can get grades they don’t deserve because they have extra time, or help with reading the test, or whatever else. Kids go to college needing remedial education and increasingly having never read a single full book either fiction or nonfiction.
If I’m betting, im choosing the civilization that graduates millions of engineers and scientists and mathematicians every year ready to build the future over a civilization that graduates millions of people with literature, psychology, marketing, and law degrees. I’m betting on the one who teaches kids to study hard and learn the material without coddling them over the civilization that cheats kids through to prevent hard feelings and teaches kids to slack off.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
It doesn’t surprise me. There always a kind of push-pull effect for political figures that you want to support but doing so would make you look less virtuous to other people. The Reddit community wants to support the destruction of capitalism and the death or at least confronting of CEOs. They’re also self-aware enough to understand that open support of Luigi is going to make them look like terrible people who support the things he did. It’s much easier to hide behind claims that Luigi was framed, that he couldn’t have really done those things, that the state is bad for arresting him and so on. You can still support the man, but now it’s not because he did something you support, but because it’s an obvious miscarriage of justice that all of this happened.
The only part of the story that I doubt is that he was apparently noticed and reported by McDonald’s staff during lunch rush. I doubt anyone at McDonald’s would have had time to notice him (he’s actually fairly normal looking), or had time to call the police, or would have bothered. But that can be explained as a way to hide drones or other surveillance that the cops don’t want public.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The ADA which created the mess by making “mental illness” ( which is by definition hard to detect and verify unless it’s really bad) something that public places are required to accept and accommodate. It’s not just a problem for schools, but workplaces as well. Psychiatric disorders are pretty much a get out of jail free card and being diagnosed with one has more to do with access to psychiatric care than anything going on in the brain of the patient. A rich family with high end medical insurance can find a doctor to fill in the forms and diagnose their underperforming child with a bevy of developmental issues and mental health problems that require teachers to give those accommodations.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the first important thing that absolutely has to happen is that you have to be willing to take the parents out of the loop. If the kid is flunking, then either he improves such that he learns the material or he fails and repeats the material until he can do the work. No more requests to make it easier, no cheats from ADA-diagnosed fake disability, no retests, no open book/note, no extra credit or participation points (all of which are just dressing up the urge to remove rigor so your kids pass). Either Johnny reads at grade level and learns his math to grade level or he doesn’t pass.
Second, I think we have to get back to basics here. Reading and maths and science long before any other fluff. Read real books, learn to do maths, learn how to do physics and chemistry. Personally, im very much in favor of the classical model of education, but I wouldn’t oppose the modern system if the kids had managed to read adult level literature by the time they graduated high school and were able to do advanced algebra.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
What anyone wants in a social system only becomes relevant when getting that without putting in the rest of the work becomes possible. If you allow men access to women without them having to become worthy in some form, yes men want that. If you allow women to get the benefits of being liberated without them having to contribute or even learn to be responsible for themselves or their families, they will do that. The way any society functions is to restrain human appetites. That way people do things that benefit society specifically to get the benefits.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
And how do you verify that they are who the claim to be and harbor no jihadist sympathy?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Maybe men shouldn’t be shamed every time they stick their head up to get involved. There are all kinds of stories about men being assumed to be a pedophile for the crime of taking his own child to the park. Men don’t dare to volunteer to work with kids because again, the meme of “any male showing interest in kids is dangerous” means that the male who gets involved in scouting is assumed to be grooming.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The point is mostly verification. It’s not even learning unless you believe that using grammarly and answering emails is something that can only be learned by university students. So long as the degree obtained still requires the students to demonstrate proficiency in those kinds of things, it’s useful, and certainly better than self-teaching in that respect. Self teaching doesn’t verify anything to people who don’t know you personally. It’s like purchasing a black belt on Amazon, no one knows whether or not you did the work or got the skills you claim.
This probably doesn’t matter for degrees that cover fluff like history or literature. No one actually cares if you’re good at reading history books. But if you’re putting it on a resume, you need third party certification simply because the person reading the resume cannot verify that you did anything and probably isn’t willing to waste time testing people who are claiming to have learned something without verification.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
Education matters in the modern era if (and only if) it verifies the existence of actual skill. The issue with self-taught expertise is that it can be extremely hard to verify. I can simply claim to have studied English Literature, but what I really did was skim Shakespeare, then read the Daily Mail. You can’t really tell unless you’re willing to and able to test me for proof of skill. If I have the degree from UCLA, you can look at the curriculum and my transcripts and know what kinds of work I did.
College has the same problem that traditional martial arts have. You need the belts to determine where in the curriculum the student is, but it’s easy for the unscrupulous to simply allow people to buy their belts with little regard for whether or not anything is being learned.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
The thing is that those constraints often created and maintained an incentive structure that mitigated the negative effects of TV shows.
In the case of content, keeping the family limited to one screen in a public area means that you can’t just pump whatever you want into your show. Mom and Dad can see what’s on the TV screen, and thus at worst bad ideas had to sneak in as subtext. And because the screen was the only one in the house kids couldn’t use it for more than an hour or two before Mom wants her soaps or Dad wants his golf. A TV show featuring women in combat would likely have been cancelled because no adult was going to let their kids watch it any more than moderns would allow kids to watch programs where the heroes smoke. TVs still have an off switch, but because kids have their own TVs that adults can’t control (or don’t control) any script writer with an agenda can put that out without worry about losing ratings when the adults turn off the television and warn their kids not to “let them catch you watching that kind of garbage.”
Personally, I regard screens like I regard any other hyperstimulous— it should be a rare treat, not a staple part of your daily diet.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1mo ago
I think the problem is in part a lack of real-world pressure testing of our military. We haven’t had a global conflict that fully engages the might of the military since the Second World War, and no major on the ground engagement with a military on the level of our own since view an (hard to count Iraq War I when the military surrendered to CNN news crews).
This leads directly to people thinking of the military less as a War-Machine and more of a low key jobs program. Which then creates the problem that it’s increasingly difficult to say no to ideas that obviously reduce military capacity. Women, gays, transgender people are now fully integrated into the military without a second thought as to whether or not this would affect the war-fighting capability of the military. Putting women in those positions simply means they’re in danger without any military advantage to the country. Putting gays in does the same (we go to war with Iran, what would they do with a captured American gay soldier? They kill their own gay citizens).
The military isn’t the only place where this happens. But once you stop pressure testing any institution for its purpose, it tends to turn into a projection of whatever the laptop classes think will make them popular at dinner parties or get them promoted at work. Making into a diversity group does both, and they don’t need that group to be at top performance, so why not? Or you can use it to score points by following the latest trendy ideas in the field. This actually happens a lot in education. The old boring ideas of teaching kids mathematical concepts like addiction, subtraction, multiplication, and division— then making them practice it until they can do it right — has worked for centuries. Teaching phonics has created strong readers in any language with an alphabet for millennia. But you don’t get credit for that, instead you need a trendy new idea that makes you look with it and hip and forward thinking. Who cares if it means kids don’t learn to read and write? If the main criteria were the results— the kids can read on grade level, the military can win wars, the programmers can produce a working product on time, most of these issues solve themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
The counter is that putting the stuff that can really mess up your computer behind multiple steps in hidden menus generally means that users who don’t understand the system won’t find and mess with them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
I think this seems more of an explanation. Americans are increasingly allergic to serious sustained effort toward a long term goal. Some of it is the relatively instant gratification of our hyperstimulous laden society. Some of it is because America has a difficult time admitting that differences in ability exist and matter. Furthermore, academics is no longer valued. I mean we want kids to go to college, but we aren’t concerned about much beyond simple graduation with decent grades (which leads to the need for employers to find work arounds for jobs with actual skills required to avoid hiring a kid who graduated but learned nothing useful). Compared to Europe or East Asia, we are lazy in education.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
Key word a vote. No one is obligated to vote yes, they just have to hold a vote.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
To be fair, outside of professional political science related fields finding someone able to have enough information to have a deep level conversation more than a sixth grade level of research. Most people have other things they spend the majority of their time on and at best they read a few articles a week.
I’d be perfectly interested in creating a case for some liberal policies that I differ with you guys on. But keep in mind that because I have a regular day job that im not really a wonk.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2mo ago
It’s not on a random walk, I think the issue is that the markets themselves are ahead of the news. To be blunt, by the time a market-pushing force becomes general public news, it’s long since been priced in. The people making a living from stocks are generally aware of what’s going on in the world from private sources— global intelligence agencies, government sources, knowing the players and the playbooks. I’d watch the markets to time the end of the shutdown rather than the opposite.
Do those jobs provide liveable wages? I mean I get that we have some sort of “jobs” for stupid people, but they generally don’t pay enough to live on let alone have a family or not need roommates etc. especially when compared to things like skilled labor.
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