cjet79

cjet79 14hr ago · Edited 13hr ago

Yeah it seems like OP is bouncing back and forth between the signalling and capital formation models of schooling as needed.

Tests in both models should be useful. For signalling it lets you differentiate. For capital formation it lets you know if the teachers are doing their job well. So ruining testing in any way is a bad move by education.
Parental engagement with education seems tied to wealth and class. With the middle class being engaged to some degree, and everyone else involved to a lesser degree.
Teachers unions seem to mostly care about the quality and pay of the job itself. Administrators seem most concerned with the day care aspects. Individual teachers care to carrying degrees about the education itself. The level of care and ability to push education outcomes makes for good or bad teachers. But it doesn't seem that there is a systemic force within education that cares about education, while there are at least two forces pushing against education for other goals they follow.
Coddling is bad for the recipient and neutral for everyone else in the capital formation model of schooling. In the signalling model of education coddling is bad for everyone else, and good for the recipient. So the people asking for coddling seem to be treating education as a signalling exercise. Coddling is at best zero sum, and at worst negative for the recipient.

As a parent of young kids I have a wishlist for schooling:

Rigorous Testing. Tests are either letting me know teachers are doing their job. Or fairly measuring relative ability and achievement. It would be best for me if my kids had an advantage, but it seems the current environment makes you jump through a bunch of hoops to acquire those advantages. I'd rather just let no one get the advantage. This hasn't come up much yet for my kids, but the stories I've heard have me weary.
Consistent child care. Yes it is a day care to some extent. But it is also the worst day care ever for working parents. We are almost halfway through the school year and there have been maybe three full weeks of school, i.e. no half days, teacher work days, holidays, elections, etc. There is an after school program but the wait-list for it is twice as long as the number of spots available in the program itself. Schools also completely failed this function during COVID.
Learning progress tracking. I'd like to know where my child is at with math, reading, and anything else the school thinks is valuable to teach. I'm happy with how the school is doing this right now, no complaints. I just want to make sure it doesn't go away.
Progress relevant education. After you spend all the time tracking where a student is at you should know what they can be learning. If they know addition you can stop teaching addition and move onto subtraction. The school mostly fails at this. Large class sizes and teachers with big hearts means that the class teaches to the lowest common denominator. My kid has complained about being bored of learning about patterns and shapes, the class has apparently been learning about them for three months. I apparently need to get my kid into the gifted programs as soon as possible to avoid the boredom issues. But that is apparently something that requires active parental involvement, but it should just be default based on where the kids education progress is at (which the school knows because they are doing a good job of tracking it).
Less state religion. Recycling, environmental worship, diversity worship, nice little lies about how government works, etc. I know this is least likely to happen. It's what you get when you have government funded schools. But this is my wishlist, and it would be nice if I didn't have to worry about them teaching my children crap.

Context

cjet79 3d ago

I have these in person drunk chats with the local neighborhood dads. Many of the better discussions are about interpersonal stuff. Turns out that random dads in a good neighborhood are likely only experts at not fucking up their own lives. Political discussions vary heavily in quality depending on the topic.

We don't get to it as often as we would all like, but that is part of our expert ability to keep families together: we don't try and get wasted more than once or twice a month.

9

Context

cjet79 3d ago

If his failures in life haven't deradicalized him I don't know if you will.

I was painfully lonely for a period and that made me drop some of the strictest requirements I had for a partner. That painfully lonely period was only months though, not years or decades.

You are a better friend than me. I would have probably dropped this bitter pill of a person from my life. Such bitterness and negativity will only get worse, not better.

4

Context

cjet79 3d ago

Values are pretty important in a partner. He should at least know where he is willing to compromise or meet in the middle.

I'm atheist my wife is Catholic. I agreed to raise our kids catholic, but I never agreed to convert. And by raising them catholic I made it clear that I meant getting out of the way, and not undermining her efforts, but very little active assistance.

Would he be fine with a vegetarian?

Would he be fine with someone that is mostly apolitical?

In general, the more strict your filter is the more you are going to filter. I always had the approach that nothing was truly off the table. There are gonna be things you like and dislike in a partner. You want it to be net positive in the moment, and for it to be likely to remain a net positive in the future.

You can maybe get your friend thinking in the direction of tradeoffs by asking about age, weight, and looks tradeoffs. Since those things are more of a sliding scale and we all recognize that one of those characteristics being slightly off from perfect is fine if there are other positives to balance it out.

4

Context

cjet79 3d ago

I'm reminded of one of Bryan Caplan's multi chapter reviews of the Malcolm X autobiography.

Malcolm never distinguishes between victimless crime (drugs, bootlegging, prostitution, gambling) and regular crime (burglary, robbery). For him, it’s all “hustling” – one person preying on another. Indeed, Malcolm appears to regard all for-profit business as “hustling.” While he’s clearly aware that mutually beneficial trade exists, the fact that trade is mutually beneficial isn’t morally significant for Malcolm. Purely charitable motives are the only ones he sees as admirable.

Basically this "hustle" culture seems equivalent to "Izzat". Caplan also goes on to point out how Malcolm has a lot of self destructive behaviors:

Still, Malcolm is well-aware of the importance of self-destructive behavior among the poor. Indeed, he’s a perfect example of the syndrome:

[A]ll the thousands of dollars I’d handled and I had nothing. Just satisfying my cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes…

Once he starts experimenting with Islam, Malcolm becomes puritanical – and predictably turns his life around. But he somehow manages to avoid the lesson that he was a major – if not the main – source of his own problems.

Imagine if Malcolm had stayed sober, stuck to victimless crime, and conservatively invested his money. He would quickly have surpassed the typical standard of living for contemporary whites. Yet the devil’s to blame for everything wrong in his life – and the devil is the white man

I think the idea of a sober Malcolm X sticking to victimless crime and conservatively investing his money is nonsensical. You are what you do. And Malcolm did petty crime so he also did all the petty criminal things. If you want to not do petty criminal things you need to not be a petty criminal. Malcolm instead became a religious leader and started doing all the religious leader things, which included a lot of righteousness and puritanical beliefs.

He sort of invented the role of black muslim religious leader. There was a great deal of flexibility in what he could have chosen for that role to become in society. It seems he made it more of an "anti-peti-criminal" role than anything else. Instead of no morals about anything, he had all the morals about everything. Instead of a life of debauchery and drugs, he chose a life of puritanism and sobriety.

Anyways, I think this "Izzat" culture is likely screwing itself over as well. Being a scammer would be a shitty life. Everything and everyone would feel fake all the time. You'd probably end up viewing all the victims of yours scams as pieces of crap that deserved it, and it would make you absolutely paranoid about being scammed yourself (so that you are not also a piece of crap that deserved to be scammed). You'll view many things that could be mutually beneficial exchanges as instead just scams waiting to happen.

If "Izzat" culture at all looks appealing its because they are running a scam on scammers. Probably recruiting for some sort of pyramid scheme. Think of it like a recruiting message for a company where the top salesman shows off his cool company car and brags about his company vacation. Meanwhile at that company most of the sales people joining are just doing cold calls and feeding that salesperson at the top promising leads, and then earning close to nothing on the commissions.

This happens a lot, where something that is basically a hyped up recruiting message gets translated by outside people as "this is how things really are". I remember a while back Stephen Colbert did some kind of expose on trailer park landlords and found this video about a guy bragging about how you could ruthlessly exploit trailer park renters. He claimed you could rent it out, immediately jack up the prices and they'd be screwed and have to pay cuz they'd have no where to move. The obvious thing that Colbert missed is that the guy saying this was selling trailers to trailer parks. The advertisement was trying to scam the scammers. Every point the guy made in the advertisement clashed with reality. The writers of the Colbert show didn't care though, they found this perfect little snippet of a guy being the most scumbag landlord you could imagine.

So yeah we need a category of things for "Advertisements between scammers getting mistaken for reality", and then we can hopefully avoid making this mistake again and again.

18

Context

cjet79 4d ago

Starship Troopers Extermination again.

I play with a light military sim group. I recently got certified to lead 16 person groups for the company. This comes with a promotion to the NCO ranks. I'm corporal for now, but since I have the platoon lead certification I will be Sergeant once a week elapses.

The certification process was simultaneously easy and difficult. Easy because I was ready for it, and it was fun leading a well oiled machine of 15 other people. Hard because I have a baby that occasionally wakes up in the middle of matches and there is a bit of random luck to the game that can make certain matches very difficult. I failed my first attempt because the dropship was far away and I wasn't able to get all the troopers to the dropship alive. (A condition of passing the certification but not winning the match).

I'm looking forward to the next game update when there will be improvements to in game companies. Should allow for some more meta progression. I've mostly topped out a lot of the existing progression stuff.

1

Context

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

cjet79

cjet79