gog
1yr ago
Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
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
1yr ago
But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?
gog
1yr ago
Sure, but why? Whence the universalism? Is it a holdover from Christianity? From Communism? They don't seem to care about what happens in Mali, for example, the way Christians and Communists do.
gog
1yr 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
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
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
gog
1yr 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
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
1yr ago
Minor quibble: Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy. Every kid at my daycare except the screaming one-year-old would have said they liked me and the daycare ladies and the food and most of the other kids. One kid (the one who never spoke) tried to refuse to return to the daycare when I quit, though- because she now had a point of comparison.
Main point: Does it matter? Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references. He doesn't know what he's missing. He might enjoy the movie more than you did, but your experience of the movie was richer/denser. The entire world is like that, all the time, and as you become more culturally educated you realize how many well-credentialed adults are in the same position as the kid watching the movie. Doctors and physicists and professors all the way down to gas-station clerks are missing a huge part of human experience and there is no way to even explain that to them since they don't even realize it's there. So all that wordcel cultural stuff is of limited economic benefit, but it is of extreme personal benefit. And it is a benefit that I want to pass to my kids. But there's too much to absorb to start late, so having a dad like me isn't enough. There needs to be teaching and exposure.
So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10. And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.
So I'd say it matters very much.
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
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.
gog
1yr ago
I worked at pretty mid-tier daycare in Canada. It was bad.
The studies that show daycare is good for child development use highly curated daycares, with like 1:4 adult-to-child ratios. These studies actually simulate a mom staying home with her kids. MY daycare was a charity daycare run by a church, so to help single mothers, they took everyone. I worked with the 3-year-olds, and the worst ratio was 1:21 (illegal). A normal day was 1:12. In either case, the kids were supervised, I guess, but the priorities were no fingers in power outlets, no vomit, no urine, etc. Learning to count or something was a complete impossibility.
-The kids could talk, but it was garbled and they couldn't tell you what they had done the night before. Conversation was difficult, so their language development was definitely stunted. A child psychologist once told me that language abilities develop most in early childhood- if that's true, daycare damaged these kids' brains. I would meet kids who stayed home with their moms and those kids would tell me what WOULD HAVE happened if something the night before had turned out differently.
-One kid in the one-year-old room cried LITERALLY all day, 8-5, for about her first month. The metabolic stress alone must have affected her, and the noise and tension affected the other kids.
-One kid didn't talk for the 5 months I worked with her. Not word to me or anyone else.
-The one-year-old room was a pen. The kids sat on the ground with toys pretty much all day. The ratio was better, but the workers were occupied with diapers and feeding most of the time, so interaction was limited.
-About 8 kids (out of around 50) were at the daycare from 7 am to 5 pm. A little kid sleeps about 12 hours, so that leaves either 2 hours with their parents or sleep deprivation. Both of those are bad for kids.
-Since the kid spends the majority of his waking life at the daycare, the workers are raising him. I thought I needed resume padding for teachers' college (incorrect), but the other workers were low-IQ, 5th-generation underclass hillbillies under the stress of just being in a room with so many feral kids, let alone trying to manage them. Since middle-aged women generally don't like the cold, and Canada is cold, the kids spent very little time outside.
I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture. Exposure to puzzles and vocabulary and general knowledge and grammar are extremely important. It takes years and years to acquire that stuff and you can't speedrun it when you realize that it's missing. My kid is 9 and just finished Algebra 1 on Khan Academy. I don't know how that compares to actual school algebra in the US, but in Canada that's pretty good (she can't rotate shapes to save her life though, so that's 1 point for the nature crowd). At this rate she's going to have math powers. She has extreme reading powers. It is possible, and some even say probable, that she will not be able/interested enough to spin that into some high-paying job, and she might turn out a bored housewife or HR-lady-that-none-of-the-other-HR-ladies-like-because-they-think-that-she-thinks-she's-better-than-they-are, and the Nurture Assumption crowd will say "See, Gog? Similar outcomes to other women with parents like you."
But quite apart from money, or propensity to addiction and crime, how do you think her model/experience of the world differs from that of one of the kids who went to that daycare, and which model/experience would you prefer your child to have? What sorts of questions will she wonder about, compared to the daycare kids? How will she experience movies and music and advertising? How many more topics of conversation will she be able to discuss? How much more will she bring to the romance table? None of that just develops because of genetics. Daycare is bad.
gog
1yr ago
I'm not trying to morally compare the current Canadian government to the Nazis, but I was thinking the other day about how they are comparable in terms of "commitment to the bit". The war was well-lost and everyone knew it, but they were still rounding up Jews until the very end. We see that now and think "Guys, take the hint, throw in the towel," but Jew-gassing was just THAT important to the Nazis.
It looks like the current government is finished. Pretty much everyone hates them, Canada is (relatively) crumbling around us, and the government is trying to do things like find a path to citizenship for illegal migrants. I used to console myself with the knowledge that they were a bunch of bad-faith virtue signalers, but their laser focus on moremoremore immigration- to the exclusion of many, if not most, other issues- makes me think they really do believe in this stuff. Talk about commitment to the bit.
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
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
I’m a teacher in Canada, where salaries often top out around 105k CAD. Teachers here are also distressingly low-g, low curiosity, low nuance. Realistic raises aren’t going to fix it.
gog
2yr 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
2yr 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?
gog
2yr ago
It's not a story. I just have something that half-approaches the old liberal/renaissance-man education (literature, philosophy, general science, music, am swole, etc) and I see how it enriches my life and how the lack of it impoverishes the lives of pretty much everyone I meet. It took me YEARS of autodidacticism to get here, and other than teaching me some math, school did not help one bit. I got all this education at the expense of productive technical training, but I think I can arrange things so that my kid gets most of what I have before she starts technical training so she doesn't end up a wordcel like me. There's no way she'll get it a school though.
School is a colossal waste of a kid's time. I taught elementary school for years, and anyone of average intelligence or higher spends most of the day colouring while the teacher tries to coax a 0.1% improvement out of the sub-average kids. No one wants to do "more challenging work", so they just draw or read the crappy school-provided books. High school is the only place where you will be told that you MUST either learn calculus and quantum physics OR learn how to make jam. This reveals that the primary goal of the institution is not to transmit a considered body of knowledge to a student, but to occupy his time.
Socially, school teaches the wrong lessons. Kids spend most of the day being told not to socialize, and when they are allowed to socialize it's with a bunch of people exactly the same age, which is great for commiseration but bad for education. The main lessons in elementary school are that everyone has to obey the prettiest girl and that you must use authority figures as weapons against your enemies (relentless tattling). The main lesson in high school is that anarcho-tyranny is here and you'd better just accept it (this may not be such a bad lesson . . .)
Ex: Because we can't tell who is ripping the toilets off the walls, no one is allowed to leave class to go to the bathroom, but the toilet-rippers were never in class in the first place. Etc.
Teachers are generally not people you want your kid hanging around if you care about intellectual development. The education system is very much a welfare system for people with bachelor's degrees (I fully admit my participation in this) and is completely ideologically captured, so teachers are almost never the best and the brightest. This wouldn't be so bad if they confined themselves to showing the kid how to do math or explaining how chemical reactions work, but the daily grind is not enough for around half of all teachers. They are there to teach students "how to think, not what to think." THAT wouldn't be so bad if they showed literally any sign at all of possessing such knowledge themselves. It has been my UNIVERSAL experience, however, in numerous schools, at numerous conferences, in various parts of the country, that teachers do not have original thoughts and are incapable of judging a thought beyond the most rudimentary "That's just like, your opinion, man". The most philosophically inclined might sometimes drop a "correlation is not causation," but only with regard to the opinions of others, never their own. Their opinions are totally off-the-shelf, NPC platitudes. They are usually PMC/progressive platitudes, but the dissenting ones only ever rise to FoxNews-style "If a MAN acted like that he'd be in jail, but a woman got away with it" type of stuff. Luckily, such people will never teach your kid how to think, but they'll do their damndest to teach your kid what to think (whether they are successful is an open question- kids openly talk about how you just have to say the white guy in the story was bad and Mr #%^ will give you an A, so they see what's going on, but that just turns the school into the Junior Greengrocers) The rest of the teachers are grill-pilled, which doesn't set a great example for a developing intellect.
Teachers hate learning. Hatehatehate it. Teachers love credentials, and believe that since they got a credential twenty years ago, the matter is settled. English classes study the 4 books the teacher studied in university. History classes repeat historiography from the nineties. Gym teachers are 10 years behind the times with regard to exercise science. I asked a biology teacher where the chromosome pairs actually ARE in the cell because I had been wondering, and she literally did not understand the question- she just drew the same diagram of the 23 pairs that every textbook contains. A week later she came back with an answer after a bunch of research. Good for her, I guess, but had the question never occurred to her? I spent a year learning Latin. It's a niche interest, sure, but my coworkers absolutely could not understand why anyone would learn something just for the fun of it. "So teachers are normies and you're a half-aspie weirdo?" I guess. But in a billion-dollar system that claims to foster intellectual development, I think it's reasonable to expect a little more intellectualism.
gog
2yr ago
She's 3. We're working on reading one day at time. You can't do anything really until the kid can read.
gog
2yr ago
There was a lot of enthusiasm at the start, then a period of much conflict from ages 7-8, and now we're out a more neutral "I'd better get this done," which I'm happy to accept.
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 . . .
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