This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.
I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.
Some articles from the past couple days:
I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.
I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.
Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?
Stop trying to educate the congenitally (literally, in a lot of cases) ineducable. That's a lot of what special ed programs are attempting. There's also a large part of it being gamed by rich savvy parents to give their kids (who are victims of nothing more than regression to the mean) a leg up on the grounds of some fake condition, and you can obviously take that away too. If government MUST shepherd these kids on to their life in a halfway house working as a sub-minimum wage grocery-cart pusher, it can be done far more cheaply if we don't spend years pretending to educate them.
The actual educating kids on their life to a halfway house is in fact very expensive- teaching Downies basic skills for taking care of themselves/severe autists not to strip naked because their tags are bothering them/etc is something which requires lots of expensive specialists.
Most IEP’s are not that. Sure, parents are notorious for faking a ADHD diagnoses for extra time(and we should probably crack down on this), but I suspect school admins love putting kids on IEP’s because they get more money. School admins are not averse to fraud and have as their primary overarching goal spending as much taxpayer money as possible, no matter the effect.
this is true, but I think a lot of the expenses from IEPs are from the hard cases - it costs a lot more to pay a specialist to 1:1 a kid every day than it does to give someone extra time on tests
More options
Context Copy link
Or a ten-dollar pair of scissors. (Cf. the Hair Dryer Incident, Slate Star Codex, November 2014.)
Unlike with the boolean yes-no presence of the hair dryer, cutting off annoying tags doesn't at all guarantee that the resulting roughened seam isn't going to be even more aggravating (and now impossible to deal with without tearing the clothes). I actually started to just put up with tags as is rather than risk failing the DEX check and ending up with unwearable shirts.
>t. autist
The fact that there are several brands of decent clothing (from underwear to jackets) that lack tags entirely has been a beautiful development. I don't care that it's cost-cutting, it's the correct thing to do.
I haven't seen those, only a compromise where the tag is flimsily attached somewhere else instead of having its base woven directly into the seam/collar (side note, why are tags even woven in like that so they're maximally troublesome to cleanly remove? Does it not occur to tailors that people prefer to cut these things off?) I can only hope this trend will reach my shithole someday.
I have no idea where you live, so I can't offer any recommendations.
If you're in the US, Old Navy offers some like these.
If you're in Canada, or have access to Canada, go to Mark's and buy the 50-wash shirts. They're usually 7-10USD each, they last forever, and there are no tags anywhere on them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This was a proxy for about 10,000 other things that bother severe autists about wearing clothes.
It might be worth a try, even so. Hand knitting clothing out of alpaca wool or something is probably still less expensive than most of the interventions in public education.
Yes, finding clothes that autists are willing to wear is a thing that parents of severe autists who insist on public nudity should be doing. But I’m given to understand that most of these kids are… not good communicators, making it challenging, and besides, it was a single example of antisocial behavior that has to be trained out of such kids.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link