gog
11mo ago
India also has, by Western standards, a very strong culture/very strong cultures and family structures. North America has basically no traditional culture at all and is extremely socially atomized, which makes school the chief influence on kids after Tiktok. So if you care about transmission of cultural values, public schools are unattractive and will in many cases actively work to subvert the values of the families whom teachers consider their culture war enemies. I am a teacher, and I see it every week, if not every day. Add to this the fact that schools in North America are expected to teach nearly nothing, and fail even at that, and homeschooling starts to look okay.
gog
1yr ago
I haven't seen it, but my objection to it even existing is that, if you're going to make up a bunch of stuff -which they had to do, because of licensing issues, why call it LOTR? I know it's for marketing, but it surprises (or maybe just depresses) me that people are going for it. It's like starting a taco restaurant, and calling it McDonaldo's because people like McDonald's. Savvy business, I guess, but also a sign that you don't care one bit about McDonalds, or tacos, or making sense. For this reason I see this as one of the worst signs of our cultural decline. The naked commercialism is one thing, but the corruption of beauty (in the grand sense) is another. The LOTR showed modernity the harmony between the pagan and Christian virtues that made the West great. Rings of Power has no such claim even to ambition, let alone greatness.
gog
1yr ago
Maybe he phrased it churlishly, but I see what he means. The trads are less defying authority than they are preferring one authority over another. Among the traditionally-minded there are many highly intelligent people. In my little homeschooling circle there are computer programmers, a guy with a phd in engineering physics, a woman with a masters in musical accompaniment, etc. They are also all evangelical Christians. Normally we don’t think of evangelicals as highly-educated, but these people border on hyper-educated. Except that both their education and religious inclination depend on strict adherence to agreed-upon truths. I, a de facto wordcel, show up and try to make conversation about ideas- their ideas! Physics! Music! Code! and it’s the embodiment of the NPC meme. They absolutely cannot think outside their boxes, and even thinking inside their boxes takes the form of mere recitation of principles. If the regeneration of the West ever comes, it will come after the traditionalists’ descendants recreate something like worst aspects of the middle ages. So expect it in 400 years, not 200.
gog
1yr ago
For most modern board games, pursue anything that gets you extra actions. Often it’s not a question of who plays best, but of who plays most IN a game. So get the extra worker in worker placement games, get the free actions in roll-and-writes, etc. If it’s an engine builder, don’t stall your engine (ex: don’t run out of money in Roll for the Galaxy). Seems obvious, but people get trapped by the idea of a big, strategic, knock-out turn and make decisions that are suboptimal for victory, but also for fun, since that knockout turn might only come around once every three games, and the rest of the time you’re just sitting there frustrated.
gog
1yr ago
Most of the true believers were poorly-educated themselves, and usually have no extracurricular skills, so they have no frame of reference for what excellence would actually look like (except high marks in school). Therefore, they can believe truly without having any idea of what to actually do to achieve their goals.
gog
1yr ago
I think you misunderstand the objection. It’s not that people “have issues” with changing sex, they way they might disapprove of gay sex or pirating movies or something. The contention is that, since they think sex is innate, and “gender” is such a motte-and-bailey of a concept as to be useless, changing your sex is totally, categorically impossible and any claim/affirmation that it has happened is at best an error and at worst a lie. You might as well ask “If there was an immortality pill, how far back along the line from that point would you accept someone’s claim that they will never die?”
gog
3mo 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
9mo 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
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
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
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
3mo 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
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
2mo 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
2mo 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
9mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
2mo ago
This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.
gog
3mo 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.
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.
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