gog
9mo ago
Thanks for engaging. It sounds like you agree with me that CT can't really be taught and that it's just subject matter knowledge.
I have some questions!
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When you say "objective," do you mean "impartial" or "in touch with noumenal reality," or something else?
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If you think, to take the mechanic example, that it's some blend of creativity/counterfactuals or whatever which exists on top of just brute knowledge, is there anything an omniscient car mechanic would be unable to do (with a car) if he lacked only the power of critical thought? Is critical thought an easier substitute for knowledge? A harder substitute?
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Paths from Status Quo A to SQ B seems too narrow a definition. Critical Thinking is invoked most often as a synonym for "epistemology," but that doesn't involve any transit from one SQ to another- it just tries to figure out what SQ A is. Is that use of the term "critical thinking" a mistake?
I fully endorse voting with your money with regard to woke art, but if the movie isn’t ideological (which remains to be seen), why do you care about the producer? I don’t know about film crew ranks, but if the best boy (whatever that is) held values antithetical to yours would you be bothered? What about the key grip (again, whatever that is)? Costume designer? Casting director? Keep moving up the chain until it matters. Why is that the point where a worker’s political beliefs ruin the movie for you?
In the old Christian view of the world, everyone was equally evil and equally deserving of damnation, but I think that worldview allowed for greater nuance in weighing people’s moral worth. You either had to bite the bullet and say that no one had any moral worth, or make pretty fine distinctions, along the lines of “OF COURSE we’re all equally bad, but we kill people in battle, and that other guy kills prisoners.” Nowadays, though, without that blanket condemnation of every human, it’s easy to fall into “but that guy is BAD and I don’t want to help him/pay him/give him a platform/etc.”
My brother in Christ, EVERYONE is bad. Your plumber cheats on his wife, your mechanic watches child porn, your hairdresser spreads rumours, your kid tortures frogs. You give them all money without a second thought. It sucks, but it is the fallen nature of humanity. If the movie is a wokefest, skip it no matter what the producer thinks, but if this specific bad executive producer can executively produce a good movie, why the isolated demand for purity?
On another note, yousaid it was an ethical dilemma, but ethical dilemmas involve competing obligations. You have only one obligation- to not support this guy, but mentioned shame and feeing emasculated. That’s not an ethical dilemma, it’s a psychological one. It sounds (sounds, that’s all), like you’re trying to preserve an ideal of who you are as resisting in some measure the decline of western society. A noble goal, but we’re fretting over a spiderman cartoon, so the battle is lost. They’ve gotten into your head, and whether you see the movie or not, you think watching spider man movies is really important, which is a win for Marvel marketing over the long run. Do not resist the decline, propel the recovery. Step one is to stop watching marvel movies and go out and act on the world. . If you already act, act more.
gog
1yr ago
I can’t believe this has elicited such a response. Thanks for finding the original and clearing up the intent of the image. Looks like the idealism was because the revolution had just begun- not a cynic’s take, but the dream of a true believer. “The summer of 1789,” though, is in no way “France after the revolution,” any more than “The autumn of 1939” is “Germany after the Second World War.” “This is how things stood in France after the revolution was all over” is not a correct explanation of the picture, but that was the agreed-upon answer for 17 years.
gog
1yr 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
1mo ago
Gymnastics or dance lessons are the standard answers for girls that age, but for a 5-year-old, just waking up is a pretty rich experience already. I wouldn't worry until she's 7 or 8.
gog
2mo ago
I'm not asking about how these sorts of people affect poor black kids. I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them." This group is not super ideological, feels bad for poor people most of the time, but thinks that if the underclass had fewer kids at 14 (via abstinence or abortion or whatever) and worked hard at school, etc, then many of them would rise into the middle class themselves. Does the thought process only go as far as entry into the middle class? In that, hard work and respectability gets you across the threshold, but then further advancement is obsructed by shadowy puppet-masters? Is it just brute Karenism, in that there is no wider world to them, or that it consists only of NPCs? Is it an aloof acceptance of the hard facts of life, and requires no explanation? I'm asking here because there is no polite way to ask these people in real life. I used middle-class women as an example, but as many of the comments have pointed out, lots of people make these sorts of excuses. They can't all be HBD realists or DEI ideologues, can they?
gog
2mo 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
2mo ago
Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.
gog
11mo ago
Teaching in a traditional setting is what convinced me that homeschooling is necessary.
gog
1yr ago
“Functionally illiterate” means the exact opposite: that you CAN pass literacy tests (they kind they give up to grade 6, anyway) but can’t read well enough to read and understand something in day-to-day life.
gog
1yr 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
2mo ago
This is at least AN answer. Can you expand upon the leftist impulse to erase all distinctions, or point me to someone who already has?
gog
9mo ago
Would you be willing to summarize one of the cases you use to teach critical thinking, just as an example of the sort of lessons you’re talking about?
gog
1yr ago
Just checked my kid's copy of The Giant Peach. The centipede sings about the fat aunt. We got it at Costco, in a boxed set. They still seem to be selling it sometimes. Act now!
gog
1yr ago
Oh, they still cast a lot of stones back in the day. But nowadays there's a much more pernicious sense of self-righteousness that I think comes from the loss of the idea that everyone is evil/fallen.
gog
1yr ago
My kid was doing gr 7 math questions on khan academy the other day, and one of the questions was “The word ‘latinx’ first appeared in [dictionaries or Google or something] in 2007. How many years has it been in use?” It was the most hamfisted attempt. I would have expected something like “the Latinx population of the US is…”
It seems like a weaponized use/mention distinction, which is weird, because normally use/mention gets pulled out to defend apparent wrongthink.
gog
1yr ago
Okay- I see where the miscommunication is. The question was not "what is this image?" The question was "Now that the entire section on the French revolution is over, show that you understand the overall course of the revolution by saying something about this image, which you have never seen and know nothing about." These types of questions are popular here. If a kid said something like "Well, it looks like what the 3rd estate wanted, but the priest is now holding scales of justice and is happy, so the artist seems to like priests, but they killed a lot of priests in the Terror, and for some reason the noble is just accepting that he now supports the peasants, but there was a counter-revolution and a lot of exile" that would be great, and worse answers would be less great. But instead the kids say "Well, this is clearly the reverse of the image I HAVE seen, and the teacher told me that that was France before the revolution. This must therefore be France afterward." To reason like that shows no knowledge of the revolution at all, and even suggests ignorance, since the situation depicted, if it existed at all, only existed for a short time in the early stages. Such an answer is straight-up guessing the teacher's password. When you try to explain that to the teachers (not Lesswrong, but that the answers do not show understanding) they are unable to comprehend even the possibility of the problem, let alone specific instances of it.
gog
1yr 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
1yr ago
I am a high school teacher in Canada, and I see this type of thing all the time. We have a token gay teacher at my school who runs the GSA (formerly the gay-straight alliance, but now the gender and sexuality alliance) but the flag is really waved by straight, childless women who crave the trappings of emotional intimacy that come with long, private discussions about sexuality, gender, coming out and whatever else. So they co-op the GSA (which has itself been co-opted by homely “trans” girls, and contains very few gay kids) and get to emotionally masturbate and play confidante every lunch hour with the neediest kids, and feel just like cool moms! They really are using these kids for their own purposes, those purposes just aren’t sexual, and they cheerlead (“affirm”) the girls who come to them relentlessly, so it’s not weird to see the explosion of trans-identifying girls as a partial result of this. It’s maybe a tortured definition of grooming, but it is damaging kids for personal gain, and it’s definitely a bad thing.
gog
1yr ago
I'm not @urquan, but my mom died at 58 under similar circumstances, having to choose between starving to death or dying of bowel obstruction. People have come to understand dying with dignity as meaning dying on your own terms, or dying without a lot of suffering or something, but there is something to be said for equating dignity with triumph, in the sense that you can whip slaves all you like, but they can still stand tall and ask for more, thereby denying you the victory of degrading them. As painful as it is to see someone suffer, it also painful to see someone reduced to bemoaning their state and begging to be put out of their misery, not because it fills one with pity, but because it fills one with scorn. By the end of someone's life, it is perhaps too late to inculcate stoicism, but in my mom's case I basically told her to man up and quit being a pussy, that she would soon be dead, but everyone but her would have to live with the memory of her final days, so she should consider pulling whatever victory she could out of the situation. And she did. She did it out of maternal love for me, rather than out of any attachment to airy principles, but even still, in dying she left the gift of an example of courage and forbearance in the face of certain defeat. It doesn't get much more dignified than that.
gog
1yr ago
On mobile, at gym, sorry for gaps in the explanation, but The Last Psychiatrist (Edward Teach) talks about pretty much only this, in a hundred different ways. In the absence of any higher moral principles, you don’t even know how to desire things, and so the consumerist system steps in to teach you what and HOW to desire. All it cares about is keeping the money flowing, so it’s not weird that no one actually becomes happier, and it substitutes the much easier illusion of happiness by making identity (as divorced from actual deeds) the centrepiece of satisfaction. People allow this because the system promises absolution without requiring action, and people hate hate hate actually doing something to change their lives.
gog
1yr ago
Two things:
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People vastly overestimate the amount of information on the internet. Nowadays I get most of my reading from the internet, but when I open a real book, written to be inform attentive readers, the amount of detail there is usually literally amazing. Quite apart from the density mentioned by the others, the quality of the information is just so much higher than you can get anywhere else.
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I don't know if you've traveled much, but people who have traveled generally agree that traveling is good for you in many ways. The problem is that if someone tries to explain to someone who hasn't traveled how much traveling can change, enrich, and expand your perspective on the world, they just end up sounding like a pompous boob. Reading is the same. At the risk of sounding like a pompous boob, I object to the idea that "all these people are doing just fine." It seems to me that huge numbers of people suffer from narrow global outlooks, shortened historical outlooks, confused scientific outlooks, facile religious outlooks, and self-serving philosophical outlooks. This all combines in a soup of error and small-souledness, and while I don't claim to be feasting on a stew of truth and magnanimity, I notice many differences between my life and the lives of people who don't read, just as a gym-rat notices many differences between himself and people who don't lift. Mottistes will doubtless insist that reading correlates with IQ, and IQ with a lack of error and small-souledness, but my IQ was what it was long before I devoted my life to extreme reading. That time of my life is over now- I have kids, and a job, etc, so I read a lot less and I notice that I used to just be . . . better. If you are the average of the people you hang out with, it pays to hang out with the best thinkers we know of, through the Magic Of Books!
Note: I'm talking here about philosophy and history and economics and science and uppercase-L Literature. Not Game of Thrones or Jack Reacher. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but as a pompous boob, I've just never tried it.
gog
1yr ago
Maybe it's more useful for adults who thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it offers what was, to me, an unsettling look at the sort of self-destructive martyr-in-the-name-of-authenticity complex that a lot of intelligent young men fall into. The main character delights in dropping truth-bombs on other people's willfully ignorant illusions, and revels in the hostility this provokes in the sheeple, but is blind to the fact that this is all just a means of shoring up his own identity as the only person who REALLY gets it. He has glimpses of his many defects, but in the face of these he doubles down on the identity he has created for himself, which is pretty much divorced from any action he has taken. If TLP was a novel, it'd be NFTU.
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?
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