ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
13hr ago
Going by the rubric, she clearly deserved significantly more than a 0.
But it's a terrible rubric, and the goal shouldn't be applying shockingly low standards to all students fairly, but to apply reasonable academic standards fairly. If successful, this red-tribe push is far more likely to just further hollow out American universities as glorified daycare for post-teens than it is to get reasonable standards applied fairly.
Though, I can see an argument that universities are already doomed, so might as well accelerate the collapse so that something better can take their place.
I have a hard time imagining anyone reading her essay and thinking it's actually good--more precisely, to avoid consensus building, I'd assume anyone who defended it has such a radically different conception of what a university education should look like that we likely wouldn't have much to say to each other. I also don't think it's intentionally poorly written: you could write a significantly better version of it while taking the same line and and still manage to score a 0, which would be more effective for outrage mongering.
What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument. I would expect that at least one student wrote equally bad pablum of a progressive flavor and got a passing grade; but, there's no way to verify that, because students don't complain when they're given an unjustifiably high score.
Should we care, though? If we see universities as credential mills, yes; dumb conservative students face discrimination that dumb progressives don't, which impacts scholarships, graduation rates and times, etc. But if we aspire for universities to educate and improve human capital, then we shouldn't. In that case, to the extent that anyone is being harmed by the grading, it's the progressive students who are getting more screwed here, because they're not getting feedback to improve (Fulnecky is at least getting a coarse signal).
ThenElection
14hr ago
My "starter home" was a 500 sq ft condo, 1br, in a sketchy area, that ran $680k a decade ago. Sigh, urbanity.
Available in the technical manual appendix:
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-suite-assessments-technical-manual-appendix-pt-1.pdf
Page 136, Table A-6.9.1.
Found via Gemini. Interestingly, I'm told it drops significantly for students who attend elite schools, to around 0.6, due to restriction of range effects.
ThenElection
1d ago
Sheer intelligence is very valuable, but it's not actually that important in the bulk of jobs (although there's a clear floor that you want people to be above). Diligence and consistency, paired with a moderatively above average level of intelligence, seems like the sweet spot for most jobs. I'm not sure the legal system really needs brilliant people to implement correctly; and, to the extent it does, that's a failing of the legal system.
ThenElection
1d ago
It may just be the quality of people who attend and staff education schools. In other countries, admission is highly competitive; in the US, it's close to "we'll take anyone we can get." Smart people in the US have better jobs available than teaching, while it's probably one of the better careers available in other countries. And so we get some of the duller crayons in the box becoming teachers, doing research, and deciding education policy. And, since math and statistics is hard, you get much more emphasis on autoethnography and social theory than empirical research.
ThenElection
2d ago
Makes for a solid venison chili, though more of something from my youth than present (illegal to collect in CA).
ThenElection
2d ago
I've also said here that I describe myself as a vegetarian, despite eating bivalves (and roadkill, and caviar, and etc...)
It's just much less work to do that than explain to a restaurant the exact things I do eat. There is a word--ostrovegan--that kind of describes it, but most people would be confused by it, as it's obscure enough to be overly precious.
That's just communicating dietary requirements, though, in the not especially common scenario when I need to. I wouldn't say I identify as any particular terms associated with dietary restrictions.
ThenElection
4d ago
One argument in favor of speaking (even, or perhaps especially, lubricated with alcohol): you're much more likely to get people's true beliefs and gut reactions. With writing, as you say, you state what you mean and an argument and evidence. But it's not quite those things themselves, but public representations of those things. When people write, it's less immediate; there's time for revision; and there's a public record of what you say that can be held against you for all eternity. This introduces more opportunities for dishonesty and crafting an inauthentic argument, either intentionally or not.
There's also a quickness and flexibility with concepts that speaking teaches in a way that writing doesn't, which probably helps with thought more generally.
Both modes of communication have their pros and cons. I'd say something like 25% speaking/75% writing is near the ideal, though I don't have real evidence of that or know one way or another what evidence would even look like.
ThenElection
5d ago
A lot of the streetcar suburbs that developed in the 1890s-1920s would count, and they'd probably still qualify in the 1950s.
ThenElection
5d ago
Worth pointing out: although $1.1M is nothing to sneeze at, $100k in 1950s NYC would afford you a live-in maid, live-in cook, and a governess, along with a 10 room apartment on Park Ave and a house in the Hamptons. I don't think $1.1M would go that far today; I think you'd need maybe $3M or so for the same baseline luxury (though, the 1950s elite would have an even harder time buying an iPhone).
ThenElection
6d ago
Challenging situations that force us to learn, adapt, and act on the world, with real consequences.
ThenElection
6d ago
Humans are not today mere consumption machines, but they will be. And that's a bad thing.
I agree that the goods and services available would (and will) radically increase. But human agency will be lost: there will be no way to set out to hone your skills and world models against other agents, because there will be, in the foreground, AI that is strictly dominating on all fronts.
You can speculate that we could have games or human reserves that are AI-free, but these will be inherently decoupled from reality: we'll be learning a set of arbitrary, artificial rules (ones dictated by what's convenient for the owners of the system), and humans will have to opt into them.
This is all the worst aspects of our current system reaching their apotheosis. The future is everyone being made a welfare dependant, getting gold stars for winning gacha games. Caged monkeys whose brains are wildly overspecced for their lives.
ThenElection
10d ago
HRC is being pulled in two different directions: one, to maximize an estimate of the number of reported trans people; two, to maximize the number of trans murders. The former is a much easier task than the latter, because the same amount of work can get you any estimated number you want. The latter is much harder, because (AFAIK) most places don't report the gender identity of victims; so instead, they have some intern trawl through news reports and flag the ones that explicitly list the gender identity of the victim.
So, although I think the HRC estimates of the number of trans people countrywide are significantly inflated, the bigger factor is that the HRC is not capturing most of the number of trans victims.
ThenElection
10d ago
That's a true clarification, but I doubt many people here are unaware of the demographics of criminals.
From @sarker's comment:
18 / 3M = 0.14 homicides per 100k
CDC reports 6.8 homicides per 100k Americans in the general population.
So, trans people are fifty times less likely to be murdered than a random American? That doesn't pass the smell test.
As @FtttG points out below, trans people are substantially more likely to report being the victim of a crime, though that comes with obvious caveats. But some basic sanity checks: trans people are also disproportionately non-white, particularly black and Hispanic. They are disproportionately poor and young. These are all groups that face high rates of crime victimization, and you'd expect that, even if trans identity itself doesn't affect victimization, they'd be more likely to be victims of crime. Beyond that, my bet is that trans people spend time with other trans people; trans people commit more crimes; and so even accounting for race and income, you'd still see elevated rates of victimization.
None of this means buying into the HRC's framing that there's a systemic trans genocide going on, except insofar as our public policy choices let criminals run rampant in those communities.
ThenElection
11d ago
Indeed, and that's the issue. Moreover, as much as you're not going to learn how to drive from a vacuous press release, the people actually responsible for the crimes are even less likely to. These types of studies serve essentially no purpose but to distract from the real causes, and they only get any credence because people are too afraid to call them out or think about calling them out.
ThenElection
11d ago
Crime does disproportionately impact minorities, though, including trans people. If you're poor or mentally ill, you're far more likely to be a victim of a crime than if you're not.
The issue is that the HRC apparently thinks press releases about how bad abstract "systemic" transphobia is is a more effective way to address the disparate impact of crime than increase policing and enforcement policies in the most victimized communities.
ThenElection
13d ago
I agree somewhat, but that is too optimistic. The reason the intro sequence for physics majors was fast and rigorous is that later courses all built on it. If someone only completed the intro sequence their second year, it wouldn't be impossible to finish all the major requirements in four years, but it'd be much more difficult, leave no room for later error, and electives would be minimal.
I also somewhat doubt that the ~1/3 of people having the most trouble would have a good grasp of it after taking it a second time, though here I'm less sure. If it was purely because high schools failed at preparing students because of COVID etc., I can see how a retake could be successful.
We do need to get more comfortable at telling students "you don't have the aptitude for it, we encourage you to do something else you have better aptitude for."
ThenElection
14d ago
Do men actually ever do things like this? Smollett is kind of close, but he reads a bit differently to me: he wasn't seriously injured, and he seemed to more be trying to get negotiating leverage for his career than sacrificing himself for the greater benefit of the Cause.
ThenElection
14d ago
Everything old is new again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Todd_mugging_hoax
On October 22, 2008, Todd claimed that she was robbed at knifepoint by a "six-foot-four African American of medium build, dressed in dark clothes wearing shiny shoes" at a Citizens Bank ATM in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She also alleged that after the robber saw a McCain bumper sticker on Todd's car, he assaulted her, cut a reversed letter B into her cheek, and told her "you are going to be a Barack supporter."
ThenElection
14d ago
IIRC the dumbing down wasn't so much in removing calculus entirely, but setting aside time to review concepts like derivatives and integrals and generally setting a much slower pace for the class, with gratuitous handholding.
Comparatively, I took the same freshman physics sequence at the same university decades ago, and it included Hamiltonian mechanics the first quarter. When I mentioned this to her, she laughed: the students would absolutely not be reaching that same level.
The most troubling thing is that, in theory, the students all had passed the prereqs (a year of high school calculus, high school physics). But she had no idea how a solid third of them had managed to satisfy those prereqs.
ThenElection
14d ago
I remember two or three years ago, a friend of mine (then working on her physics PhD) was having to TA the intro physics sequence for majors at a highly prestigious undergraduate program. But the freshmen were wildly unprepared, struggling even with simple calculus. She and her fellow TAs brought it up with the professor: the team wanted to simply fail them. But that was impossible, because various administrators decided that teaching physics (again, to would-be physics majors) with calculus was too harsh and cruel to be allowed. So they had to dumb down the problem sets and class, and even solve upcoming exam problems for students who came to office hours.
Any class can be dumbed down if you try hard enough.
For one, men have much greater variation than women: the worst men will mess up your life more than the worst women. That's not to diminish that there are plenty of pretty bad women out there, but, statistically, if a member of a couple is being killed, it's usually the wife by the husband.
For two, after a divorce, a man can more easily start over and find another high quality wife. A single mom with kids may find someone else, but she'll have to limit her expectations of a mate much more than the man does.
Alimony exists and is often unfair, but it does nothing to help women facing the consequences of bad partner choices: he will not pay alimony or child support, and he certainly doesn't have a house to be granted to you.
If the husband is significantly above average, the calculation changes substantially, but most women can't marry men who are significantly above average.
The authors actually found, for self-esteem and anxiety:
So, the study says that self-reported teasing did not mediate anxiety and self-esteem for boys, and that the negative mental health effects of being gender atypical came from being gender atypical, not from teasing.
The paper is kind of badly organized and an info dump, and I don't care enough to dig into the actual statistical methodology of it, which I assume is what's typical for a psych paper (i.e. bad). But it seems, if anything, less biased and ideological than a typical paper from the field.
(It's also worth pointing out that this isn't looking at dysphoria or wearing skirts, but atypicality in the sense of e.g. being short or bad at sports is gender atypical for boys.)
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