gog
4mo ago
I don't think my school's situation is extreme. I'd guess that it's about average for a suburban school. If you live around lots of immigrants the situation I describe will be less common.
Location wise, all I can say is that I'm somewhere east of BC.
gog
6mo ago
Your injuries will heal . . .eventually. I'm certain I tore some kind of CL (mcl/acl/whatever) chasing a 500lb DL. I got stress fractures in my wrists chasing a 400lb BP. This was a 14 years ago when there was less info easily available. I scaled way back for like 2 years, then got back into it and got some kind of cramps in my back that put a sideways curve in my spine (visible to random strangers). That eventually went away when I scaled way back. I got back into it and hit the 500lb DL. Then I got tendonitis so bad that when I was playing music at a jam session, my biceps tendon popped back into place and the audience heard the crack over the music. Then I scaled way back. Then I got back into it and hit a 600lb DL. Then a 405 BP. Then I felt something tear in my lower back/upper glutes while doing . . . .super light rdls with an extreme range of motion and couldn't walk for like a week. It was the worst gym injury of them all. The fear of the pain hung like the barbell of Damocles over every workout, and I eventually tore it again. That was about 2 years ago. Now I'm all better, do a ton of cardio and pretty-boy machine work. I'm not as strong as I once was, but I'm in overall the best shape of my life.
I don't recommend my kamikaze approach to training, but I racked up enough injuries to be able to say that the fear that an injury won't heal is totally understandable and almost certainly unfounded. Play the long game; just keep doing something and you'll bounce back. Unless you're like 60.
PS: PT is only a half-step removed from chiro and aromatherapy. Kin tape is fake. Electric acupuncture is fake. Acoustic accupuncture is fake. Laser therapy to "break up the scar tissue" is fake. 5lb curls while standing on a wobbly board are fake. Massage for anything other than hedonistic purposes is fake. Strength and flexibility are real, but that's what the gym is for.
gog
1yr ago
This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.
gog
1yr ago
Yes, IQ is the legible component of intelligence, and your vocabulary, ability to do logic problems, etc is what makes it legible to the test, to others, and to the world we live in. So you might have a really high innate intelligence but it would do you little good if you were never exposed to the sorts of challenges for which IQ score is the proxy.
To distinguish a man from a non-man, check the chromosomes. I don’t know why everyone forgets to do that. But if you want “man” to be a social identity and you aren’t a compensatory narcissist, then counter to trans ideology you need to forget appearances (the mere trappings of maleness) and check behaviours. So examine the human in question and consider:
-Whether or not it is interested in objects with which it can DO something, like guns or computers or model trains or Magic cards.
-Whether or not it prizes mastery of skills, like jiu jitsu or Fortnite or coding or Magic cards.
-Whether or not it habitually considers recourse to violence in times of conflict, like war or crime or school shootings or Magic cards.
-Whether or not anyone would find that violence threatening if it were to be put into action.
-Whether or not it cares deeply about how you are feeling at any given moment.
-Whether or not it is moved by things that are cute.
-Whether or not it would have the capacity to provide for a group of others if the economic system were less bountiful.
-Whether a group of others would consider following it, uncoerced by bureaucratic structures, in the pursuit of any goal.
Non-men may possess some of the characteristics, and are-men may not possess them all, but anything that DOES possess them all is not a non-man. You might, as an objection, demand to know exactly what constitutes a credible threat of violence or what leadership is, but anyone about whom you would answer these questions in the right way would know. “What’s the right way?” They know that too.
gog
2yr ago
-Pensées, by Blaise Pascal gets poo-pooed because the stock objection to the Wager is easy to understand, but it's a good trip through the mind of someone honestly grappling with religious questions.
-Notes From the Underground should be required reading for every teenaged boy who suspects he is smarter than other people (this means you, probably, if you're here)
-Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth is the best post-apocalyptic story I've ever read, and I've read all the canonical ones.
-Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent history of ideas about magic. Academic enough to be serious, but popular enough to be readable.
gog
1yr ago
Not that anyone is obligated to play along, but I'm not getting many answers to my question. There's lots of "no, women don't do that" and lots of "preach, king!" but the question stands. How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
gog
1yr ago
This makes sense. I am a teacher, and it's worse than that, though. The teachers hate KIDS because the kid has an Audi that his dad bought him.
gog
2yr ago
I’m coming around to this one too. In schools it’s pretty clear that you either remember the information or you don’t, and that depends on you. Maybe the teacher tells you some mnemonic, but that’s about it. For most subjects there aren’t even multiple ways of explaining a concept. I’ve taught music, and families are just paying for a threat they can use to make the kid practice. Even teaching my kid to ride a bike involved (for Baby Genius) telling her that we weren’t going home until she figured it out, and I’ll be on that bench over there. For Baby Average, it involves making her practice every day. Extra help in something like math usually involves a face-to-face explanation that can’t be tuned out. In each of these cases learning is either automatic or self-directed. In the gym at 6am I can’t think of a counter-example. Somebody dogpile me!
Maybe the place for teacher influence is in the selection of the tasks to be practiced or the info to be learned, which is where Egan seems to offer hope; he has a specific plan, just not a fully developed one. He has decided what kids should learn- schools have decided how LONG kids will learn and then filled that time with busywork.
gog
2yr ago
They show the kids the one you found and explain it, and then test “higher-order thinking” by showing the one I described, but the lesson is “different roles=reversed roles=opposite=after the revolution.” After the revolution, it was not the case that the peasantry and clergy were being supported by the nobles, but even if you didn’t know any of that, the chain of reasoning is still clearly fallacious.
gog
2yr ago
C.S. Lewis pointed out that no technology increases human power over nature- it only increases the powers of SOME humans over nature, with the rest of the humans making up part of that nature. Whatever happens with technological progress, the delusion is that we will all share equally in it.
gog
5mo ago
It's really the horror of arguments. Validity gets hard to check really fast. In geometry or deductive logic it's really easy, in law it's harder but maybe still feasible. But once you get to "I should not be taxed to raise funds for the care of the mentally retarded because of my natural right to property" it's basically impossible, and all that remains is persuasion. I grant that persuasion is largely also rhetorical, but good-faith persuasion seeks to persuade the interlocutor. Lawyer-arguing, (street-litigation?) is carried out, face-to-face, in what ordinary people would consider a personal conversation, as though there were a jury or judge listening, and so rhetoric and theatrics get deployed to sway onlookers, but there are no onlookers; there are only participants. The interlocutor becomes a means, where in good-faith argument he would be an end.
gog
1yr ago
Oh, I barely move in any social circles at all. This is all at work, which is a high school, and therefore maybe selects for people without much ambition . . .
gog
1yr ago
WHY is there a culture war?
I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
gog
1yr ago
IQ lets you use the info, but it doesn't make you prefer it to video games. Parenting removes the possibility of video games.
gog
2yr ago
“Ye” means “vous.” (O come all ye faithful). It never meant “the,” as in “ye olde castle.” We also had “wit,” which meant “me and exactly one other person.” We threw away perfectly good pronouns.
gog
3mo ago
You don’t want to “bulk.” You want to eat like 200 calories more per day than you need to, otherwise you’ll get fatter way faster than you get stronger. They say 0.82 grams of protein per lb of body weight is optimal; after that, returns diminish.
To be sure about both of those, you need to track calories and macros. Track what you normally eat for like 2 weeks and see how your weight changes, then adjust up or down accordingly. I was stalled for years because “I eat a lot of meat,” but when I started actually tracking it I was shocked at how little protein I was actually getting. I use MyFitnessPal, but there are lots of apps.
gog
1yr ago
For the first thing, I have no idea, but I suspect that COVID was not the problem. Kids learn almost nothing at school until grade 10, and the gains after that could be achieved much more efficiently. So educationally, staying home is probably better if your parents take any steps at all toward teaching you something. Socially, school/daycare does not offer great opportunities: If a kid needs development, it's hard to see how he will get it from his similarly undeveloped peers. Furthermore, the main social lesson of daycare and elementary school is that disagreement is forbidden and that you should weaponize the authority of 3rd parties to harm your enemies. Teachers always tell kids to "solve the disagreement with a discussion," as though 6-year-olds are going to convene a Special Council on Pokemon Cards or something. That doesn't happen and fighting is looked upon with horror (see TLP on how people don't fear someone getting hurt in a fight, they fear the existence of a fight itself)so you get preference falsification and a lot of tattling. This is a pretty good practice for our new era, but not something I want a kid steeped in. But it's better than watching unboxing videos all day.
For the second, if you can make the question more specific, I'll give it a go.
gog
2yr ago
I’m not sure you do either of those things in the way that Big Teacher wants to be true.
To teach a kid to read you just go over the sounds again and again, then go over words (which is the same thing). Eventually they get good at it. Big Teacher wants it to be the case that if that doesn’t work, then you move to some plan B that depends on esoteric that only Trained Professionals know about, but there is no plan B that works, which is why you have legions of functionally illiterate people. Plan A (“I make you practice and you will thereby learn automatically”) is not the type of thing they make movies out of.
Arithmetic is almost the same. At some point you see 1 and 1 making 2, and it just sticks. Same for subtraction. Smart kids grasp it after few examples, less smart kids grasp it after more examples. For something more complicated, like long division, the kid is still either remembering the steps or he isn’t (virtually no 9-year old actually understands what the steps are doing). There is no stronger tool or one weird trick- all you have are more examples. This is why patience is so often lauded in teachers. The good ones just grind out more and more examples without getting exasperated.
So kids learn to read and do arithmetic, but is that because adults do something to put the knowledge in the kid’s head (which is what most people mean by “to teach”) or just because the adults make the kid learn it himself?
gog
2yr ago
Scott Alexander’s Paranoid Rant sounds like the type of thing you’re talking about, but it wasn’t posted on NR. I can’t find it online, but someone around here must have it saved.
gog
3mo ago
It's not 50%. It's like 20%. At school-wide exam time, in five exam rooms of 30 kids, if each room loses 6, then the "alternate space" contains 30 and each normal room contains 24. For regular tests it's 2 or 3 here and there.
As far as retaking tests, if you can retake them there is little incentive to study, so you can just blow them and it doesn't matter. Since it's a massive pain to make fair tests (about 8 hours for the kind of history tests that are expected in my region, for example) there are usually only two versions, so by the third attempt the kid has already seen all the questions and discussed them with everyone else. Besides the obvious problems, this also makes it impossible to go through the tests with the students and explain why the correct answers are correct, point out the tricky bits, etc.
Late homework is just as bad. Of course marks should just be a reflection of how well the kid knows things, but culturally this is an impossible attitude. Marks are the currency we use to pay students. The point of the homework (we can debate the effectiveness, but this is the intent) is to learn something at a certain point in the course sequence. The mark you get for the homework is the currency the school uses to get you to learn it at the correct time. (The mark you get on the test is the currency the school pays you for having actually learned it). When there is no penalty for late homework, kids let it pile up until literally the last day of the year, after the exam is complete, and then show up and try to desperately churn out a bunch of work from the first week to see what happens to their mark (no matter how many times you explain the math, they won't/can't calculate the effect). So the teacher can just waive the homework. This is the easiest option, but not fair to the kids who played along, and also punishes the kid trying to hand it in late, because now his tests count for much more (and he's no genius and he didn't do the homework, so his test marks are low). Or the teacher can accept all the homework, which is annoying because it is pointless. The tests and exams are over- the proof of learning is complete, so the evidence of the learning process is useless.
-I’m saying that people believe sex is innate, so they believe that whatever happens to you later is irrelevant. At best you would gain the “power of menstruation” or something, just as if you had functional wings grafted on you would gain the power of flight, but still not be a bird.
-My immortality thing is trying to point out that your question amounts to “does an imaginary world where something impossible is possible cause you to reconsider that possibility of the impossible thing in the actual world?”
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