cartman
9mo ago
Hmm, I see what you mean but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. For example, (correct me if I'm wrong) I think we may agree that medical school teaches valuable and necessary skills to being a doctor, and is not predominantly a signalling game. However, literally no one will hire a person as a doctor if they made it all the way to final exams and then quit. The signalling is part and parcel with the actually valuable education.
Edit: and if we stopped subsidizing students to go through medical school, I don't think that would make any difference to the above.
cartman
9mo ago
Can you point me to the evidence you're referencing? My impression of the stats was that higher level education at college/university has a quite large lifelong earnings benefit.
i suppose this could still be just signalling that gets them into a higher earning network of like-minded signallers, but if we are trying to change this economic framework we would somehow have to also disincentive businesses from hiring based on this signalling. And that does not seem like an easy ask to me.
cartman
9mo ago
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There will likely be a pretty ugly transition period between programs being gutted and the states spinning up their own versions of some of these programs, if they manage to sucessfully do it at all. It would be simpler to prune specific programs carefully rather than gutting the whole department and starting from scratch.
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I'm not really understanding your point here, it doesn't sound like it makes that much of a difference to me? If the money amounts are the same and going to the same places, why do we need to make a change at all?
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Respectfully, I don't agree that some programs being wasteful on an anecdotal scale necessitates gutting a department which oversees a huge amount of programs. Fine, the programs you saw were bad and a waste of money. What about all the other ones? And further to your point, what reason is there to believe that the DOE has wildly out of whack incentives from teachers/students/parents but the states do not? Why not fund it at the municipal level?
cartman
9mo ago
I appreciate your response and recognize that these are issues that plausibly arise from more funding from non market parties.
I won't debate your points as I agree they are likely the case in some respects, I will only quibble on the point that none of these issues imply that stopping this funding would improve or leave the same the education level of the population. We might be spending money inefficiently, we might be issuing loans in a way that is net financial negative for some students, and we may be throwing off the private market of education, but those are all things you can do while still raising the education level of the population, and indeed goals like that are why we as a society trust the government and not the market for some things.
At this point, it becomes about how much extra money you want to spend for how much education, which is a much harder question, so I'll leave it there.
cartman
9mo ago
Sure, but you don't think there is a difference between your null hypothesis being that any government funded non profit is a CiA front and your null hypothesis being that these orgs waste some money? At a certain point you can judge a null hypothesis and find it wanting based on prior evidence and how much of a reach it is
cartman
9mo ago
That's not the same thing as assuming that it is specifically a CIA front sponsoring regime change and murder. I have no reason to think that about this org based on anything I have heard thus far.
cartman
9mo ago
I appreciate that this could plausibly be the case, and is not assuming some huge gains in education efficiency, but I still have my doubts the transition will be as clean as all that.
cartman
9mo ago
Copying from another reply: Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument. Things don't magically improve when you stop investing in them just because you were paying too much for the service you got before.
You don't get to suddenly match other countries quality of education by spending the same as them. For that to be the case, you would have to posit some huge gains in efficiency of cost/pupil educated.
cartman
9mo ago
...okay... all I can say is I hope these are not the standards you use to make decisions.
cartman
9mo ago
You are making exactly the same mistake that I called out before. I believe the graphs say what you say and that is not good evidence. America spends more than most other countries and gets worse results. That does not imply that we would get better results by suddenly spending less in line with other countries, that doesn't follow at all. Other countries have a huge amount of other variables going into education that you cannot replicate by simply matching them on price.
Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument.
Any qualms I may have were not the point of this argument, which was to determine whether gutting the DOE would result in a lower education level for the population. You have argued that the current education level is unnecessary, which is tangential to my point and something I'm agnostic on.
cartman
9mo ago
What reason is there to think that this agency's actions is analogous to the example agency's actions you cited?
cartman
9mo ago
I don't understand how you can expect the quality of a service to remain the same when a substantial portion of the funding for that service is cut. It seems like a fully generalizable statement that more funding=on average better service. We can quibble about how much funding results in how much improvement in quality for various services, but the principle holds. If police budgets are cut, police service gets worse. Ditto for healthcare, research, customer service, education, and basically everything else.
Looking at the Department of Education in particular: the Office of Federal Student Aid provides 120.8 billion in funding (grants, loans, etc.) for postsecondary education. It seems like a safe assumption that there are, very conservatively, thousands of university and college students who depend on this aid to attend their school at all. This seems like a very straightforward example of a way in which gutting the Department will have a negative effect on the education level of the population at large.
Perhaps you're only discussing the education of minors? Still, in that case the OESE seems to provide a huge amount of programs which top up funds to improve local and state schools. You can see a list here: https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-offices/oese/offices-programs-by-office
Is your position that none of these programs have any impact on the education level of the population at all? Or are you assuming that when the Department is gutted similar funding will flow to the states to spend under their own discretion? Unless that is your assumption, then the teachers and schools will not remain the same because they won't have the same budget. If that is your assumption, then we simply disagree on how calculated/planned out this gutting and refunding will be. There are huge costs associated with recreating programs from scratch.
cartman
9mo ago
The education level of the population won't remain the same after funding is cut, it will get worse, even if it's already bad. That's the same fallacy that many people indulged in with Covid: the numbers don't remain the same when you change the policy that affects those numbers.
cartman
9mo ago
Again, you seem to be squashing a lot of plausible complexity into a very simple categorization of Hanania being 'antiwoke'. Does being antiwoke preclude one from disagreeing heavily with other antiwoke people to the point you publically break from them? I don't see why it would. It COULD be the case that he thought this was best for his career and this is some massive error on his part in sensing what his audience wants, but it's just as convenient an explanation that he disagrees with Trump on policy to such a degree that simply being on the antiwoke team is not enough to garner a blind eye.
I think there's a country mile between cynically falling in line behind 'your guy' and being an internet troll. Was Sanders trolling when he ran against Clinton? Or is it more likely that people on ostensibly the same wing of politics sometimes do things that hurt others in the same wing because they have different beliefs?
If you don't accept that people who don't run successful businesses can't provide insight on those who do, then I struggle to see how you manage to derive value from any comments on this forum, where anonymous internet randos constantly comment on the goings-on of high profile business and government leaders who are usually, by every public metric, very successful. A sneer (or criticism, or observation) is just as good as the argument it presents, no more no less. People who are successful may have on average better insights into others that are as well, but you can still always judge the critique on its merits no matter who submits it. In this case, to refute Hanania's comments a good response would be to cite Musk's recent successes, as you've done. The comments on Hanania' lack of business success don't really address anything directly. (And in fact, I find it likely that he is, by this metric you've chosen, more successful than most commenters here, the forum you elect to participate in.)
Do you really believe that someone leading a for-now successful business precludes them undergoing mental decline? If anything, why not take a look at recent developments in contrast to past performance as more relevant evidence than the simple fact of a successful business existing? Tesla stock not doing so hot these days.
Should we assign truth value to people's opinions based on their wealth and following? I don't see how your comments about Hanania's global strategic positioning have anything to do with the veracity of his opinion.
You also seem to think...people are dumb for not following Trump even if they don't believe in his goals or execution? It seems extremely plausible that Hanania simply did not want to be a sycophant for Trump, which says nothing about how 'bad' he is at politics. You seem to be invoking some assumption that Hanania was clearly angling for some political gain that he fumbled by not supporting Trump, and that doesn't seem much more plausible than other explanations.
cartman
9mo ago
That's called coyote time, and it's a pretty commonplace feature of most platformers these days, not just in one or two games. Judging from the trend, It seems to be the case that consumers prefer the feeling of that timing much better than strict one-pixel-past -the-ledge and you're dead timing.
Its fuzzy in that there is a gap between what is shown to you and what the inputs will do, but it does not have to be fuzzy in the sense that the game will likely still have a strict threshold it adheres for what is 'too late'.
cartman
1yr ago
Right, but it is not itself a medical process. Many people will socially transition and then not medically transition. I don't see the inherent justification for a parent to know about something which may or may not lead to a medical decision down the line, even if it's somewhat likely to. I don't want teachers having to litigate these issues among themselves or worry about whether such and such behaviour is a step towards something which needs to be reported. It is either a bright line which needs to be reported or it isn't.
cartman
1yr ago
In your view, what are the most and least cringe age of prostitutes to hire, and for what prices?
cartman
1yr ago
The percentage of people who believe that ax2 + bx + c = 0 or that Shakespeare is mandatory reading off the top of their heads is also likely in a small minority, not to mention any more obscure things which are taught in school, but we don't change the curriculum to accomodate these beliefs if Shakespeare is stil genuinely the best way to teach English or we believe the quadratic equation is important math practica.
I really don't believe the distinction between factual and normative education is as bright a line as you think it is. 'every sentence must contain a subject, a verb and an object' is a normative statement, not a factual one. If you wanted to qualify with something like 'if you want to speak correct English as recognized by such and such body' then it would become factual, but as is there is clearly a normative element to this education where we are trying to get the kids to do things the way we want them to in the same way we dont want them hitting each other.
If you are claiming that educators are teaching kids en masse that "puberty blockers are completely reversible" then sure, we could agree that's likely not factual and a bad thing to teach. I don't think this is in the curriculum broadly. Just like sexual education which teaches kids about the existence of gay/lesbian people and how they differ from straight people is not the same as encouraging kids to be gay, I think there's a way to educate kids about transgender topics which you still might classify as 'gender ideology' that is relatively neutral.
cartman
1yr ago
I'm assuming from the context of Columbine that this was probably a decade or two in the past when such suspicions were more common. In any case, I think this is also an overreach by the school's admin.
An explicit dress code is of course a different thing because it pertains to students following the official rules of the school, it does not at all follow the same reasoning of a teacher reporting a student to their parents for wearing different clothing that is also within the dress code or using a different name.
cartman
1yr ago
Evolution is controversial among creationists, yet we still teach it in public school because it is factual and leave it to private/charter schools to teach creationism. Something being controversial among a subset of the population is not inherently enough to decide it should not be taught in public school, which caters to the general public, not a subset.
I don't understand how you justify a different name and different clothing being a step towards a medical process (justifying parents being given third party info) on the one hand but being completely innocuous on the other hand when it comes to Goth/alt culture. The teachers don't have any special knowledge about what students are going to do in the future. Presumably some teachers think wearing Goth clothing leads to some things they disapprove of (Satan worship, depression, arson, whatever) but they would still be rightly reprimanded if they called home about these things. It doesn't particularly matter to me that the correlation between social transition and medical transition is likely stronger than the example I gave. Until it becomes somethng parents need to know about, it is not something parents need to know about.
If parents want to impose some special conditions under which their students are watched, that's something for private and not public school, which should cater to the general public as decided by the government's education department.
cartman
1yr ago
I see arguments like yours a lot, of the form "they can't leave me alone". But this seems like weird reasoning that is employed to target only policies that are already disliked. I could grant the premise of your statement, but if I did that I would also be arguing that American history fans can't leave me alone, that grammar nazis can't leave me alone, that Big Science can't leave me alone.
Simply put, public schools are institutions whose goal is to educate children. Put another way, a public school's goal is to indoctrinate children with the beliefs that are commonly accepted in the society they're a part of. You (and most other people) are not complaining that all the English majors and all the physicists can't leave your kids alone, because (presumably) you agree with the majority of them. You are targeting an ideology you already dislike and claiming it is for the reason that they are indoctrinating children; but that is what public school is all about.
Of course, there is a difference between the above and the stuff that crosses the line. To go through your examples:
- Compulsory exercises. This is normal school stuff. Same as most other subjects. I'm sure there are some parents who complain about compulsory math worksheets specifically about quadratic equations or whatever, but I don't have much sympathy for them if they signed up for a school where that is common practice.
- Pornographic material. This would be a big problem if true but I highly doubt this is the case in any widespread fashion. There is quite a large distinction between pornographic material meant to arouse and anatomical/scientific maerial meant to educate. I would agree with you if the former was widespread, but I have seen no evidence of this.
- Secret social transitions. This could mean a variety of things, if you meant that a school would not tell a parent if their child started using a new name or wearing different clothes then this also seems non-probematic. There is a debatable correlation between wearing Goth clothing as an adolescent and going through troubled times, but teachers do not routinely make a habit of notifying parents of such things, and rightly so.
- I don't know of anyone who is 'forcing' anyone with a penis to enter a women's space who doesn't want to. The people with penises are presumably there of their own volition. If you meant that girls are now forced to use bathrooms which may also contain penises, then again I don't see how this is inherently any different than any of the other compusions forced upon pupils in schools.
cartman
1yr ago
"The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening"
This is a wild claim to make offhand without a source. Surely if this happened it would be all over the news (at least the conservative outlets). And yet I can find nothing! Unless you were referring to threats left over the phone by anonymous people, in which case again you are making a wild leap in logic to assume that it is the new Congresswoman. Open to being proved wrong if you actually have a source.
I must admit, as an English Lit guy, it irritates me quite a bit that all of the commenters on this forum feel comfortable judging an artistic work by reading a basic synopsis and reviews from people they dislike (if anyone actually watched the show I'm happy to be corrected but it doesn't seem that way from how people are talking). I haven't seen the series either and I can't say that it's good, but there's a reason why we have the saying about the book and it's cover and all that. It's lazy and can hardly be called analysis at all.
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