gog
2mo ago
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
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?
gog
11mo 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
2mo 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
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
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.
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
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
The priest on the peasant was a mistake. The image has a priest leading a noble, and a peasant riding the noble. It’s in the link someone posted above.
gog
1yr ago
It seems like a dream of the ideal post-revolutionary period, but it’s so rosy that it looks like a cynic’s satire of revolutionary aims. It certainly doesn’t depict post-revolutionary France, though.
gog
1yr ago
Sure, it counts. But we’re not talking about who is evil and who is righteous; we’re talking degrees of bad in badly conceived system.
gog
1yr ago
One more!
-Flatland: It's not a mathematical novel, it's a philosophy book. Nothing groundbreaking, but it's fun, and written in the most splendidly ornate style. And it's short!
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.
gog
1mo 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
1mo ago
Being imposing is absolutely a huge advantage when dealing with students in an anarchic environment. Even in Canada. But the complaints are never about that. They're about how some man got to go on (="he organized") a field trip, or how some guy rear-ended their car "but that would never happen to my husband" or whatever.
gog
2mo 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
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
11mo ago
Teaching in a traditional setting is what convinced me that homeschooling is necessary.
gog
1yr ago
They had rich people, but not in the service of the poor, the poor did not proclaim “vive le roi,” and the clergy did not become vessels of revolutionary justice, as the image suggests.
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
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
-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?”
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?
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