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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   34621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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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?

I am a teacher in Canada, so I can't say much about the US Dept of Ed, but I can say a few things about how special ed works up here as a general reply to many of the comments below. Assume that whatever happens in Canada, it's probably worse in the US.

I work at a high school in a pretty affluent area. The affluence generally comes from remunerative blue collar work, not professional work. My school has over 1200 students and a third of them have special ed plans. There is virtually no violence at my school, no crime, students are polite and obedient. They just don't do or learn anything because of special ed plans.

These special ed plans are sometimes the result of tests carried out by private psychologists, sometimes the result of tests carried out by school psychologists, but are frequently ordered by family doctors. At least one was one sentence emailed by a paediatrician when the kid hadn't even been checked. None of these pathways is any worse than the others- they are all fraudulent.

They nearly all specify that the student needs extra time and a "quiet space" for tests because of anxiety.

The "quiet space" requirement is written up on demand because the kids know it will get them their own little room for tests. Everyone but the parents knows this, but if you try to tell the parents they freak out because the school isn't taking their child's special learning style seriously. Moreover, you can hear a pin drop during a test in even the rowdiest classes and so the requirement now demands "an alternative space." Last exam season, it was not possible to give every kid a private or semi-private room, so all the alternative space kids were sent to one big room, resulting in an "alternative space" that contained more students than any of the 4 exam rooms with containing the normal kids. All stakeholders found this acceptable.

The "extra time" requirement is invoked any time a kid starts to do poorly. "Well you didn't give her enough time to show what she really knows." This was originally intended for exams, although the extra time kids almost almost get the same 54% they would have gotten in half the time. By now, however, parents demand it for everything. If one attempts to explain that taking 40 minutes for a 20-minute assignment every day means 20 minutes of missed class time - a class wherein the student was already struggling- parents are baffled. Up until grade 10, it had never occurred to them that there might not be unlimited time in the school day. Any teacher who doesn't provide this time is summoned to A Meeting with the parents and the principal, and since the average teacher is Lisa Simpson, this prospect is so threatening that it never needs to happen.

The third most common "accomodation" is to have all written material read out loud by an aide. Since around 20% of 1200 students are officially entitled to this, it is not possible for a human aide to read to them all, and so text-to-speech programs are used. When text-to-speech is offered, students don't use it because the advantage of the human aide is that you can read the best aides for clues about the right answer and straight up ask the worst aides what they think the answer is. This is usually enough to get a passing mark. Refusing the text-to-speech but using an aide if available is an admission by the student that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Note that the most common exam to have read to you is the grade 12 English reading comprehension exam. All stakeholders find this acceptable.

The fourth most common accomodation is to have someone write out your essay for you as you dictate it, not because you are a poor handwriter (parents, students and other teachers react with horror at the suggestion that even a one-paragraph response could be completed by hand) but because you are a poor typist. When you ask the aides who do this what they did to help the student, they straight up admit to helping the student "organize their thoughts before putting them into words." The students find this to be the most helpful part of having a "scribe. " All stakeholders find this acceptable.

These are only the academic allowances. Almost every student with a special ed plan is entitled to "movement breaks." Weird in high school, but whatever. In practice this means that if they get bored they are allowed to wander the halls with their friends. Predictably, these sorts of kids get bored with schoolwork very quickly. They also get preferential seating. All are entitled to laptops to "help with notetaking" (no notes are ever taken). One specific kid must always have his computer and also no one is ever allowed to sit behind him. Doctor's orders. Any kid who appears to be indigenous is allowed to leave class literally whenever they want to get free cookies because "you can't learn if you're hungry." No other ethnicity is believed to get hungry.

All of this is million dollar (Canadian) Goodharting scheme. The point of special ed is to launder cheating so that students who would otherwise fail can pass classes that absolutely do not matter. The parents of an illiterate student in grade ten are more worried about her geography mark than about the fact that she can't read. When you ask the dedicated special ed teachers about this, they don't even understand the question because the idea of doing anything to a)verify that the special ed needs are legit and b)rectify or mitigate the disabilities that cause them is so far off their radar that they never imagine it. The special ed teacher's main job is compliance- making sure the other teachers give out the extra time and movement breaks.

Anti-school Motteposters might protest that school is hell/prison/etc and so if a kid can use these tricks to escape the drudgery and the power-tripping teachers then they should go for it. But these students are the ones schools are actually designed for. They are the lowest common denominator and will not learn to code (or whatever) with the time they save by gaming special ed. In fact, the special ed gaming costs them huge amounts of time. While sitting in class might be boring, sitting in the cheating room for 45 minutes so that no one questions why you finished the test so quickly is far more boring. Listening to a 50-year-old Phillipina immigrant trying to pronounce "deoxyribonucleic" on question 10 and realizing you have 50 questions left to endure is far more boring. Furthermore, the more one believes that school is a waste of time and money, the more one should rage at the fact that parents, whose attitude toward all of this reveals that they see school as no more than a daycare, continue to accept the billion-dollar form of daycare when they could just use the minimum-wage daycare across the street. And finally, the more you mistrust teachers (and you should) the more you should hate this system because it covers up their incompetence. When a third of kids show up in grade 10 apparently unable to read, no one goes to the grades 1-9 teachers to demand an explanation. "They all have special ed plans" is considered a sufficient explanation for everything.

When I was in Catholic school, I had very poor handwriting- and this was back when absolutely everything was expected to be cursive- so my teachers, rather than struggling, wrote a note asking the doctor to diagnose me with disgraphia(I think I spelled that right) so I could be put in the accommodations room for written work. The reason, of course, was so that my in-class essays could be typewritten. So far, so reasonable. But there was 1 accommodations room, everyone got the same thing. I remember extreme boredom from the extra time(we weren’t allowed to bring a book in- for reasons that seem understandable), but also if released to the accommodations room we had to stay there. I never witnessed anyone being read to; presumably Catholic schools just expelled students who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to read in a timely fashion.

The accommodation room consisted of booths facing the wall, with dividers and an open back. Each one was equipped with a special silent typewriter but the desk was otherwise bare. There were two aids that monitored it, and one private booth for proctoring oral exams. In the third grade I managed to get permission to bring one of the special silent typewriters into the conventional classroom for spelling tests, and then traipse back to print it off- this seemed a treat to me at the time.

Wow -- I guess I've seen aspects of this around my kids' school but this all sounds quite extreme -- are you back East somewhere? In suburban BC I would find all of this quite disturbing.

I don't think my school's situation is extreme. I'd guess that it's about average for a suburban school. If you live around lots of immigrants the situation I describe will be less common.

Location wise, all I can say is that I'm somewhere east of BC.

Huh -- "come to BC" is all I can suggest then -- there's a certain amount of trans/FN pity indoctrination (which the kids mostly don't seem to be really buying), more seriously disabled kids per class than I'd like, and... that's about it.

A fourth grade teacher wanted to diagnose my son with ADD (we had none of it) but other than that I know of approximately 'accommodation' kids working the system as you describe.

Not a lot of immigrants in my (undisclosed) location, either.

I've worked in BC. It might be better, but you have to keep in mind that none of this is advertised or even visible unless your kid sucks at school or you go shopping for it. And I'm talking about high school- before high school, a lot of the problems are just passed along, year after year, because no one can fail. Once high school hits and suddenly kids can fail, the Goodharting begins.

My kids are in high school, and they would know if 50%+ of the class were being spirited away to a special room as test-taking accommodation.

It does seem like the new policy (since I was in high school) is more accommodating in terms of retaking tests you've blown, and handing in homework late -- but AFAICT this applies to everybody, and isn't an obviously terrible idea.

It's not 50%. It's like 20%. At school-wide exam time, in five exam rooms of 30 kids, if each room loses 6, then the "alternate space" contains 30 and each normal room contains 24. For regular tests it's 2 or 3 here and there.

As far as retaking tests, if you can retake them there is little incentive to study, so you can just blow them and it doesn't matter. Since it's a massive pain to make fair tests (about 8 hours for the kind of history tests that are expected in my region, for example) there are usually only two versions, so by the third attempt the kid has already seen all the questions and discussed them with everyone else. Besides the obvious problems, this also makes it impossible to go through the tests with the students and explain why the correct answers are correct, point out the tricky bits, etc.

Late homework is just as bad. Of course marks should just be a reflection of how well the kid knows things, but culturally this is an impossible attitude. Marks are the currency we use to pay students. The point of the homework (we can debate the effectiveness, but this is the intent) is to learn something at a certain point in the course sequence. The mark you get for the homework is the currency the school uses to get you to learn it at the correct time. (The mark you get on the test is the currency the school pays you for having actually learned it). When there is no penalty for late homework, kids let it pile up until literally the last day of the year, after the exam is complete, and then show up and try to desperately churn out a bunch of work from the first week to see what happens to their mark (no matter how many times you explain the math, they won't/can't calculate the effect). So the teacher can just waive the homework. This is the easiest option, but not fair to the kids who played along, and also punishes the kid trying to hand it in late, because now his tests count for much more (and he's no genius and he didn't do the homework, so his test marks are low). Or the teacher can accept all the homework, which is annoying because it is pointless. The tests and exams are over- the proof of learning is complete, so the evidence of the learning process is useless.

That seems fairly similar to how things are in the US. I work in schools, but not in subjects with mandatory tests, but I get to see all the IEPs for the school, and they're mostly things about longer times for tests, breaking down instructions into shorter chunks, repeating instructions, preferential seating, and less stimulating environments (especially for testing).

The very high needs children who have a one on one aid are also on IEPs, but it's quite different situationally, even though their IEPs generally look more or less the same.

Perhaps it ultimately won't make much of a difference whether there's a national Department of Education or not, since the expectations are already there for all of the accommodations.

My mom was a special education teacher for many years, most of that time was with the moderate to severe kids. I worked as an aide in her class on several different occasions. The reality is that many mildly mentally disabled kids can be taught enough to be able to be mostly functional adults (though they'll likely need help on a somewhat regular basis) while the moderate to severe ones never will, and will require constant care and supervision for the rest of their lives.

Schooling does little to nothing for these kids, but the problem is that school's real purpose is to be a state subsidized daycare to enable women to leave the home and work. Even though I vehemently disagree with school being used this way, that's the reality. Without these programs these parents will have to (gasp!) take care of their kids instead of working two jobs!

I think that it's reasonable for the government to provide care for disabled children, teens, and even sometimes adults, since Americans do not live in multigenerational clans or villages, where care can be somewhat distributed. But it seems both very expensive and also rather miserable to be in a school, specifically all the time if someone isn't being educated. They aren't that comfortable, I guess they're reasonably safe and the food is acceptable, but large schools just don't seems like a natural setting for primarily providing supervision.

I had a friend who used to be a teacher. He was all in on virtually every neoliberal shibboleth of teaching. Against school choice because it took resources away from public schools. Always making snide comments about what will happen to special needs kids if schools got fully privatized.

Naturally, his sons all have some non-specific emotional/behavioral problems that lets him game the system for them to have personalized education plans and extra resources. He's always been good at gaming the system like that.

We're currently struggling with some shitty behavior our daughter is tracking home from school. My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.

I donno man. I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.

I do expect lots of malicious compliance around this though. Totally normal shit like just wanting to have a conversation with a teacher about how to help your child in an area they are struggling with becomes "Sorry, Trump said I'm not allowed to."

Personally, I've never seen one.

I've seen a few of these in my life (both personally and as a treating physician) and have a few coworkers who meet this description. The classic example is boys who are a little too male for our current teaching paradigms. Think poor behavioral regulation or ADHD. If they have a supportive home environment and intellectual reserve it is very possible they'll stay out of just enough trouble/troubling behavioral patterns for their frontal lobe to develop and adequate coping skills/treatment to come into play.

Then they end up being productive members of society.

The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen, then they fall out of society. School alone is pretty ineffective at covering that but you do need both.

I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.

IIRC from my deep dive into ADHD skepticism-

  • some cases of ADHD diagnosis are actually hearing or vision related issues that will resolve themselves, and these are very common in elementary school aged boys. Experienced elementary teachers tend to have lower rates of ADHD diagnoses in their classes because they deal with these by adjusting the seating chart first, and that’s usually enough to route around the problem.

  • ADHD diagnoses are much higher in boys born just after the age cutoff than in boys born just before it- that is, cases are concentrated among the youngest boys in a given class.

  • ADHD as a thing that the system worries about is globally correlated with treating elementary school in a seriously academic way, with grades, homework, etc. The US is a global outlier in both respects.

  • The medications in use improve focus and make behavior easier at the cost of side effects regardless of ADHD; teachers are strongly incentivized to get kids on them to make their jobs easier, and they deliver higher grades anyways, so parents usually don’t complain. Doctors who always make the diagnosis and write the scrip are known to the school systems and sometimes recommended by them.

  • Countries which don’t think ADHD is real are doing fine academically.

The TDLR is that there’s a lot of things going into the ADHD overdiagnosis issue beyond ‘why don’t I have a classroom full of girls’ moaning by teachers.

Do you have more info on countries that don't diagnose ADHD? This seems like the kind of thing that is very culture bound in a fascinating way.

I can remember that France was one, I think, but this is all memories from a deep dive several years ago. I concluded that while ADHD probably is real, most cases are some other issue being misdiagnosed and it shouldn’t be considered a possibility before high school. Oh, and I remembered that the diagnosis patterns by ethnicity don’t match any of the usual patterns- blacks get the least but Asians don’t have an elevated rate, it’s a whites and Indians(both kinds) thing.

I mean I'm just here to say it works SOMETIMES.

I suspect that part of the problem is the refusal to give up on anybody leaving everyone behind, as is common elsewhere.

I was one of those who made it. My snappy way of putting it is that I don't have to thank a teacher for being able to read but I do have to thank a Head Start speech therapist for being able to talk.

I wound up back in special ed as a Kindergartener for bad behavior/ADHD. There were IEPs, some of them were farcical. At some point they had me IQ tested and decided that I was "talented and gifted" (I have a severe loathing for that term, because my sister wasn't, and our mother wrecked her for failing to match that.). Supportive home environment? Not really, though my grandparents were great. It was a lot like Hillbilly Elegy with the characters and dysfunctions shuffled, maybe a bit worse. I did have the intellectual reserve to get away with being a terribly lazy/inefficient student. Even in the worst of times, there was this weird dichotomy where I was this awful pain in the ass kid, but also the kid who could and was glad to fix their computers (mostly dumb issues like "this isn't plugged in", but I wound up working as an assistant for the computer lab in place of study hall and was pretty good at basic PC troubleshooting and repair). I'm not proud of this in retrospect, but the elementary teachers got variable results out of me. The ones who were able to elicit my affection/desire to please instead of resentment through failed attempts to intimidate generally got along fine with me. Odd as it may seem given how much I hated school, I remember all of them fondly.

If I have to credit anyone for my successful reform, it was my middle school and in particular grades 6-8 teachers. They were a bunch of veterans who more or less ran their own show independent of the office, and were thus able/willing to strike their own bargain without involving the office or my mother. They were tough and strict, but fair, and never took anything personally. The bargain was simple: "We catch you breaking the rules, you suffer the punishment.". I liked leaning back in my chair (against the rules), so I incurred a bunch of glossary pages (to the point that I still remember the page number, 746) and paddlings, but it wasn't personal. I was released from special ed by 7th grade and upon graduating 8th grade the vice principal, my old nemesis, called me his "greatest success story". I was privileged as a high school student (in a "math and science" boarding school) to have the opportunity to go back and help the elementary literacy teacher set up her computers before each school year. I was a pain in the ass student; it was the least I could've done.

Am I a success? Eh...I'm not dead or in jail as I was expected to be. Did I live up to my college education? Also no. I rode an easy gravy train (locally owned food delivery company) after being a crippled alcoholic in my early 20s. The gravy train ended and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm not optimistic, but I'm not ready to give up yet.

As for ADHD, I mostly don't notice it as an adult unless I'm badly emotionally regulated (lol where does PTSD end and ADHD begin?) or in an unfamiliar situation where I haven't been able to set up a construct to work around it. At my best (owner's crony/best producer at a food delivery company) I am actually very structured and relentlessly organized/detail oriented.

In my current gig (draft beer repair/service technician) I am lauded for my excellent communication skills because I take the time to document/explain what I'm doing to on-site managers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything special, just explaining to the customer what I'm doing/need to do, and why that is, essentially telling them what they're paying for and why they need this or that thing done.

The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen

I had all the classic traits of childhood ADHD : Loud mouth yapper, easily distracted and stress-driven ultra focus. Home support alone could not have saved me. My parents had no idea what they were dealing with. The problem wasn't caused by them either. I got the same standard strict-south-Asian upbringing that turned my peers & cousins turned into compliant adults.

School should provide initial resources to help students understand their quirks. The 0->1 step can be huge, and that's where schools have the most impact. Additionally, schools see 100s of kids a year. They're best equipped to pattern match the student to their unique quirks.

Some kids can't be a fixed by parents alone.

boys who are a little too male

I suspect the same. My dad was a know-it-all Tarzan incarnate. He was always outdoors and would spend his summer in forests (literally) collecting dead butterflies & hunting rabbits. ADHD is passed down dad-to-son, and I suspect he had it too. But back in his day, he could could get all his physical energy out. I grew up in a school without a yard. Sports were banned. The contrast couldn't be starker.

I've recently found drums to be the best way to exhaust ADHD energy. Strongly recommend. That's a couple of positive anecdotes towards - "ADHD people need something to exhaust their physical energy on".

School alone is pretty ineffective

Agreed. As much as school can help equip parents and do the 101, the rest of the struggle is on the parents & the child. The school can't be handholding the child through 12 years of special education. It's not sustainable. (I can feel a suburban-sprawl / car-culture / death of community rant welling up in me. Imma shut up)

With all that being said, ADHD meds are a game changer and should be viewed as complementary to behavioral interventions.

The first time I took Vyvanse, I was bewildered by new abilities that my siblings & friends insisted all normal people are able to do without extra meds. Most importantly, the meds got my life in order so that I could spare time for learning good habits. The meds helped me follow routines, and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not. Nowadays, I skip my meds on the regular and can still salvage 70% day in a way that I never could before. I wish I'd gotten started 20 years ago. Even if I'd weaned off them, school and college would've been manageable. I would've had fewer struggles with bullying, basic orderliness and studying subjects that my ADHD brain had deemed uninteresting.

and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not.

Yes!

People with a good enough "life" (genetics, money, family support, intellectual reserve, whatever) can often do well or age out with enough time to establish "normal" life patterns and for some general brain development.

Even anti-socials often age out of a lot of the bad behavior.

Institutions that help with this can work! ...but are not always worth the costs.

I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.

I've worked with the disabled in vocational rehab in the past. The young adults I worked with here moderate-function, too disabled for things like extra time on tests to ever really be a thing in their lives. Both of these types do exist; there really are a lot of people that just need a bit of extra help and can find gainful, independent imployment. There really are a lot of parents ruthlessly gaming the system as well. Sometimes these happen at the same time with the same person. Of note with the populations I worked with, there was never really a question about if these people were disabled or not; they were all obviously developmentally disabled to even an untrained observer. One thing I that has stuck with me over the years though was that even some of the more profoundly disabled ones had been coached by their parent to ether exagerate or hide their disablilty depending on the audience. Since I was an authority figure to them at first, one of my biggest challenges was to get them to stop exaggerating.

My sister wouldn't have graduated college without the extra time provided by disability accommodations for dyslexia and dyscalculia. I spent an entire semester of her undergrad with her on video calls (as emotional support, and as someone she could trust would get the right final answer), watching her torturously dragging herself through mandatory remidial physics and algebra classes that have never once been relevant to her professional endeavors, and I had a front-row seat to the frustration and exhaustion induced by learning disabilities on otherwise exceptional people. It takes her minutes to do problems I can do in my head - not because I'm any smarter, but because she literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors, and has to redo every problem about five times to arbitrate the inevitable failed attempts.

That extra time let her squeak through the remedial courses with a passing grade. Years later, she's now a successful practicing psychiatrist, and I'm confident that several of her needs-based clients would say she has utilized her education for the betterment of society.

I also don't think this had anything to do with our parents pushing parenting duties onto teachers. For all their other flaws, not once did they ever abdicate any parental responsibilities. They pushed for disability accommodations because they wanted my sister to be given a chance to prove herself, and spent years researching and trying different approaches, alongside private tutors and disability specialists, at great personal cost, to help my sister over her hump. And it worked! And if the schools didn't give her extra time on her tests, she would have flunked out of college and it would have all been for naught.

I agree that the disability accommodation system is full of parents making their children someone else's problem, and this is probably the majority of its use now. There's a level-headed argument to be made that the cost to society of exploiting that system is way more than the benefit for the handful of people like my sister. I just want to point out that there are people benefitting from disability accommodations in a way that doesn't encourage learned helplessness later in life.

I have a general concern about people who "literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors" doing work that requires understanding complex medical literature and prescribing minute quantities of similarly named drugs where there's no check on their work (other than the dispensing pharmacist perhaps noticing something looks weird). I feel for your sister's difficulty in school and I'm glad she's been successful, but it makes me wonder if it is wise for us to provide these accommodations for academic testing when the job is going to require those skills to function at a certain level, and the only thing anyone has to go by for hiring is the credential.

(This generalizes to a lot of other problems with credentialing and affirmative action and so forth, but the subject of your post brought it into sharp relief for me.)

Yes, the whole theoretical point of academic tests is to be an objective measure of the capacity of students. Because when you go out and get a real job, you have to actually be able to do that job. If these remedial courses aren't necessary for being a psychiatrist, then there should be a path to becoming a practicing psychiatrist that doesn't require them. If they ARE necessary, then lightening the requirements because, gosh, you can't satisfy the requirements but really want to graduate ends up causing harm later on in life.

I mean, these classes are far from the only example of things you don’t need. We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.

We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.

Other peer countries (culturally and economically) don’t, though, it’s solely a peculiarity of the American college system.

I do always think of the local-ish story of the Native American law student forced to take math classes at ASU. Now, sure, depending on the specific field of law, math may actually prove to be a useful skill to have, but I could probably imagine some areas of law where it's not really necessary.

Hard to properly and believably inflate your billable hours when you can't do math.

To whom would you rather trust your well-being:

  • The medical professional who has spent their entire life developing strategies to meticulously check over their work to ensure consistency and accuracy
  • The average medical professional (they're confident they just don't make that kind of mistake)

I think you are significantly overestimating the scope of the problem - her failure mode was losing points for questions she did not have time to answer, as opposed to answering questions wrongly, on a timed test with pencil and paper. This is demonstrably not a representative model of the real world, in which computers, colleagues, and the spoken word exist, variables may be named at one's pleasure, operators correspond to explicit and distinct positions on the keyboard, and you get at least half a decade of extra practice before they let you loose on the unsuspecting populace. Today, her learning disabilities are effectively non-issues; in fact, her meticulousness means she tends to catch mistakes made by others as well (which has made for some colorful stories).

It is precisely this kind of tractable problem, which only really exists in a pedagogical spherical-cow setting, that requires accommodations, as opposed to nebulous claims of racial or mental victimhood from the lazy, the conniving, or the otherwise unqualified comprising the median. The challenge, as it has always been, is telling them apart. Again, there's an argument to be made that it's not worth it to try, and it may even be a good one. But it's not open-and-shut.

I'm genuinely very curious, being also a medical professional, how a person who "literally can't read [text] without making symbol transposition/translation errors" could read medical histories and patient documentation, or keep up with new literature. I could not do my job if I was dyslexic to that level, or at least I would be performing much more inefficiently.

If there's some sort of intervention that "cures" the dyslexia so much so that word and sentence recognition and parsing becomes "native" or at the very least second nature, that would make sense -- but I am to understand that dyslexia isn't really "curable". Or if psychiatrists to read very little medical documentation, which...seems incorrect to me in experience.

Open to be wrong, I don't have any experience with this personally.

One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.

There are lots of ways to read and write text other than the default font by unaided eye. There are laptops and stuff. If you have access to windows, check out the Ease of Access Center for the freebies.i

Hm. I was thinking more paper charts, but I suppose if there are fonts in a digital system that works.

I was also under the impression that dyslexic fonts don’t have a great track record, but if it works for someone…

Now I wonder if there is a difference in difficulty reading for dyslexics when they have to read from an alphabet or syllabary vs when they read from a logographic script.

Weighted fonts are one method by which things can be made easier on dyslexics. Notably, Comic Sans is surprisingly useful as one in a pinch, though still beaten out by purpose-built fonts.

His sister is a psychiatrist not pharmacist

Whoops, I guess this is what happens when I post when sleep deprived

TBF those two words are very similar and easily confused if your brain happens to like... swap some letters around.

watching her torturously dragging herself through mandatory remidial physics and algebra classes

Children take algebra in middle school. If we want our doctors to be the best, or even good, then we simply cannot have anyone who struggles with middle school mathematics as an adult. Questionable that someone who struggles with remedial algebra is in college, much less med school. How did she get in? Don't you have to take like the MCAT? Are you overselling here disability? You're describing a woman who can barely read...

but because she literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors, and has to redo every problem about five times to arbitrate the inevitable failed attempts.

oh god, she can't even read and shes a doctor prescribing medication. What if she needed to read it six times instead of five, would she even know? You're telling us she is incapable of deciphering words.

They pushed for disability accommodations because they wanted my sister to be given a chance to prove herself,

A disabled doctor. I'm glad your sister got to prove herself at the expense of the health of her patients. Good for her, I'm sure she is really self actualized.

I know this sounds really rude, but I don't know your sister. I know her through your words. And you have told me she is someone who can barely read, struggles with basic math, and also prescribes extremely vulnerable patients powerful medication. If what you're telling us is accurate, its just evil. Its your sister putting her aspirations over the health of her patients. No, your sister who can't read shouldn't be a doctor. How did she get through med school? Can she really not read?

I think it's far more likely that the person you're replying to is overstating or accidentally exaggerating the degree of disability here.

I have a hard time imagining someone who can't read becoming a doctor. Maths? The most that average doctors do is basic arithmetic or algebra that's middle school level.

I'm talking figuring out what x should be when when trying to divide doses or transform one unit of measurement to another. With a calculator at hand, and a willingness to redo sums multiple times, even someone with severe impairment would probably manage. These days, you can just look up doses for just about every drug under the sun online.

I struggle to think of any occasion I'd run into in clinical practise where I'd be expected to do more, if I was conducting a study or analyzing a research paper, I'd probably have to brush up my stats and maybe learn something that school or med school didn't teach me.

Funnily enough, I'm in psych training, and also have what could loosely be described as a learning difficulty in the form of ADHD. I never asked for nor received extra time or additional adjustments on the exams I had to clear, as far as the standardized tests in India were concerned, you had to be missing an arm or something to qualify for that. Google tells me that people with dysgraphia could get extra time, but I'll be damned if I heard of that ever happening, or anyone I ran into in my career who fit the bill.

Knowledge, both procedural and arcane, matter the most in med school. I'd hope that this lady had that, and had coping mechanisms that let her circumvent her issues. If she's made it this far, without being sued into oblivion, she can probably handle herself.

Maybe she just has really low ability in maths but has otherwise fine working memory and similar.

Some people are like that.

And she can just use AI for maths.

Bad take, dude. AI makes lots of mistakes. How is she supposed to discover them?

Deepseek R1 is surely better at maths than most people on this forum and doubtless far superior to this doctor: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i5r85h/deepseekr1_scored_100_on_a_2023_a_levels/

I find it unsurprising and troubling that your sister went into psychiatry, the wooliest field of medicine which is least amenable to objective oversight (ie a bad psych can go unmolested for a long time in a way that a bad anæsthesiologist can not)

From the description you've provided it's... A bit horrifying that your sister is actually practicing as a doctor. I'm sure she says she "can do it", but look - there were plenty of conmen throughout the twentieth century who practiced as doctors, successfully, without any medical training. Even surgeons! And I'm sure plenty of their colleagues would have said they were fine doctors, not knowing about their absent/fraudulent qualifications. Many conmen did this for years and years!

The fact that your sister has not yet run into a situation where her incapacity causes some public disaster is meh.

If the description you've provided is accurate, she doesn't have the requisite mental equipment to be a doctor, and it's a serious indictment of whatever country's medical school she graduated from that she's practicing as one. Horrifying tbh

Without commenting on the sister in particular, I do find these sorts of stories ironically depressing.

"I suffer from severe [performance inhibiting condition], and yet through incredible perseverance, added efforts from friends, family, etc., a few convenient accommodations, and some really painful medical interventions, I was able to become a mediocre practitioner in [Career Field]!"

Like man, you had to ignore a lot of incentives, advice, and straight up warning signs to push through to become, at best, approximately as good as the average person who doesn't have your condition. When you might have ended up a lot happier just following the economic signals and going down a path that didn't require 5x the resources to produce 2/3 of the optimal outcome.

Like, imagine a 5'2" dude REALLY wanted to play in the NBA. So he does severe training regimens, he gets leg lengthening surgery, he has extensive coaching from ex-NBA stars, and finally, he manages to convince the NBA to let him wear stilts on the Court as an accommodation. And After all this, he makes it to the NBA and performs at a slightly below average level overall. Which is impressive for him! But that's a lot of resources spent to get the guy up to merely 'adequate' performance, which is to say he's not contributing much to the overall success, despite all the inputs required to get him there.

When the guy with that sort of willpower and drive could have found his true calling as a Horse Jockey at a much lower price for everyone.

Well, does our hypothetical manlet want to be a horse jockey? Would he find it fulfilling, compared to his strongly indicated preference of merely playing professional basketball?

I'm getting a takeaway of "if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it." I don't agree with this, even though I think we'd agree on a close converse of "if you could be the best, or above average at an occupation, it's not wrong to pursue it."

Is "contributing to the overall success [of the NBA]" as you put it expressed solely by players at the peak of natural talent and aptitude, or is there room for people doing "just OK, slightly below average, could've been amazing at something else" to keep the show going on? Like, sure it's not optimal, is it actually wrong in your estimation?

(Not to get totally sidetracked by the analogy, I think my line of questioning still tracks to the original topic at least.)

"if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it."

"If it will cost you 5000 hours of time and $200,000+ in 'extra' efforts to get to a particular position, it behooves you to figure out if the payoff is worthwhile." I can 'believe' that the extra utils the manlet gets from becoming an NBA player might pay off for him.

BUT... its not clear that he'll really be happier/better off/wealthier than he would have been going for a more directly attainable goal.

I don't want to imply that his only alternate choice is horse jockey. Flyweight MMA Champion of the World is absolutely on the table, for example. But if he decides he'd like to instead be the Heavyweight champion, should we celebrate his decision to on a massive regimen of steroids, get risky surgeries, and bulk himself up at the expense of his mental and physical wellbeing just so he can get outclassed by the 'natural' heavyweights?

What's the point?

Part of the secret to a happy/content life, I think, is 'setting realistic goals'. And in situations where your skill at a given job has other people's lives hanging in the balance, then yes, you really DO need to be especially good at it.

The nice thing about playing in the NBA is that individual screwups will almost never be fatal. We can 'afford' to indulge somebody's fantasies there without much collateral 'damage.'

But I wouldn't want an epileptic to become an airline pilot, even if they 'overcame the odds' to get through flight school and have hundreds of hours of successful flight time under their belts. (note, if a proven 'cure' for epilepsy existed, this would be a different situation). For the love of God just do not choose a career where a single incident can kill a hundred people!

That's fair and I think we're on the same page. Thank you for the elaboration. :)

I think, again, as matter of politics, of giving these kinds of helps when you could simply bend to the path that doesn’t require so many resources, I think there’s a point at which the public is not served by giving basketball lessons to short people. Lots of people don’t get to do the jobs they want, either from lack of ability, or poverty, or being born in the wrong region, or family culture. I think this is an immensely unreasonable approach to finding a career for a whole host of reasons starting with ability and leading through technological advancement, pay for the work, demand, and so on. If I want to be a dog walker, I can do so, but given the low wage, low demand, and the fact that a person can probably build a dog walking robot would make offering this as a job training program rather stupid — especially if the student is sitting in a wheelchair.

I'm getting a takeaway of "if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it."

This seems clearly true for tournament professions, where only the best get a high payoff. If you have no chance of making it out of the NBA G-league, basketball probably isn't the field for you. If you have no chance of making it IN to the NBA G-league, it definitely isn't.

I mean, if you know you’ll be quite bad at an important field lots of people want to go into, it seems quite selfish to insist on going in anyways.

It is probably better if everyone gets a living; that is not equal to everyone fulfilling their hopes and dreams. Sometimes your hopes and dreams are stupid.

or is there room for people doing "just OK, slightly below average, could've been amazing at something else" to keep the show going on?

"Field Fillers" and Jobbers are a thing in the more entertainment-oriented sports, at least.

A lot of people are jumping on this so I'll give my two cents as a diagnosed dyslexic. Only being privy to the one experience I cannot be totally sure if dyslexia is a real thing or not as I can't directly experience how others interact with words. I will say that I find reading long texts difficult and tedious, frequently needing to reread sections and losing my position while doing so. I never actually used my diagnosis besides getting some side lessons in elementary and middle school. I took the ACT without any help and my lowest section was actually science because I only completed about half of the questions within the time frame despite getting them all right. This probably resulted in getting less scholarships/into less prestigious colleges than I would have otherwise.

I think @blooblyblobl 's sister is probably fine as a doctor, it's not like you literally cannot focus and interpret text or that big proper nouns will get confused with each other. It's that as you try to read faster text gets kind of jumbled and you need to slow down and reread sections. There are plenty of coping mechanisms.

Personally, I've never seen one.

I can testify there to the case of one of my own family members, who was sick as a child and benefited from such programs, he teetered on the verge of dropping off society because of difficulties caused by his impairment, but managed to remain on the good side of things and now holds a respectable job that he enjoys and is good at.

His parents' valiant efforts should get most of the credit, but I do think total academic failure would have pushed him over the line, and into drugs and crime.

I can also say that I have seen people exploit the system in sometimes disgusting ways, but people whom these things truly help exist, and I know so.

Fake special needs people exist and are a problem, perhaps too much of a problem for these programs to continue existing as they do, but real special needs people also exist, and dealing with them can sadly be a nightmare for everyone involved if the system is too rigid.

My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.

This is the way. It's absolutely asinine to me that so many parents think it's the schools' job to raise their kids for them. But you're 100% correct, it's your job not theirs. Even the teachers hate it - my wife's family has several teachers in it, and they complain about how students' parents act as though they are supposed to be fixing kids' behavioral issues. They would rather just dump it off on the school rather than, you know, being a parent.

Surely it's both? The schools have control over the children 8h a day, time during which they interact with their peers. This is very likely the most important part of the day for socialisation and a part that the parents can't really influence much.

Of course the parents play an important role but so does the school. It's a collective responsibility.

I'd say that the school's responsibility is subservient to the parents' responsibility. The parents have a sort of "natural" responsibility over the child, in part due to being the ones to voluntarily create the child and to keep the child. As such, it's the parent's responsibility to actually check if the school is doing a decent enough job at raising their child during the 8 hours a day the child is there and, if not, to correct it in some way, whether that be changing schools, changing the way the school treats the child, making up at home for the school's failures, etc. It's like how some company's R&D department might be the responsibility of the vice president in charge of that or whatever, but it's ultimately the CEO's responsibility to make sure that the company has a system in place to hire a competent person for that role and to make sure that that person is performing that role competently, and so any failure of the R&D department is ultimately due to a failure of the CEO.

After all, parents also tend to have much more skin in the game for the child than the school, since the child doesn't stop being their child once they graduate, though the child does stop being the school's student. And generally, the relationship between the child and parent tends to be more sustained in the long term than the relationship between the child and the school he went to when he was a child. So from a purely selfish, narcissistic perspective, a parent would want to consider himself the responsible party, since if the school fails in raising the child right, the negative consequences fall more on the parent than on the school.

This makes a lot of sense - if the children are at school most of the day, then the school has to be an ally in making sure they turn out properly. Traditional English schools (Eton, Winchester, Westminster) have always seen it as their responsibility to build character. It does result in a certain level of conformity of course.

No, when you're a parent the buck stops with you. The school can be your ally in raising your kids, but they are not the responsible party.

There are multiple responsible parties. The parents are the primary responsible party but the school is another.

I disagree. The parents are the only responsible party when it comes to raising the kid. The school is responsible for education, but they don't bear responsibility if the kid turns out to be a drug dealer or something.

To some degree this is cultural, and the vehemence here on both sides can be attributed to cultural assumptions.

In Japan the school is very much (I was going to put a percent on it but that would be pushing it) charged with raising the children. If you see a kid out in the world pulling some jackass stunt, the question "What is your school and who is your home teacher?" is enough to chill their veins. You don't ask "Who's your dad?"

Enculturation in the Japanese sense cannot occur outside the context of the group, so it is within the group (i.e. the school group[s]) that this process occurs, year by year, from a very very young age.

To some degree this is how one can understand the term "bullying" in Japan. There are of course exceptions, but bullying here is largely when you have a kid who for whatever reason just doesn't toe the line after years of having the rules dinned into his or her brain. (There could of course be all sorts of reasons for this.) So you have an entire class, not just one punk, turning against a student. Bullying here is not one monster terrorizing a class, but a class "terrorizing" one individual.

Teachers here, in particular in primary and secondary education, for the most part (of course I am writing generally) take the job of raising the children (子どもを育てる) as an explicit part of their jobs. In the cases of troubled students (think fighting in school, but also just basic withdrawal) meetings are held, and there is a great deal of discussion and handwringing, often in absurd ways and resulting in very odd strategies. If a kid makes up his or her mind to just rebel, schools will eventually go through with expulsion. And compulsory education only lasts through age 15, or the first year or so of high school.

I've probably overwritten this. I am aware it's different in the US, where people have specific ideas of parenting, self-expression, individuality, and personal choice.

It seems relevant that in the UK you have different classes for each subject whereas AFAIK in Japan you’re with the same group all day every day.

I think, anyway, my memories of school are faded.

School might not be directly liable for long term consequences like someone eventually becoming a drug dealer but they are legally responsible and liable for most of what happens in school, extending far beyond just education.

No, and don't call me Shirley.

As a parent your kids are ultimately your responsibility, your investment in the future of humanity. No one else can be expected to care more about thier future/individual well-being than you.

I think honestly that the biggest reason for school failure is the lack of honesty about the students. Because every kid is attending public school unless their parents specifically opt out, they are forced to be a microcosm of what we think society is like. And for lots of reasons, this means that we can’t admit to ourselves that differences in talent exist in education.

Part of it is that education in modern society largely determines where a kid ends up in society. If your kid isn’t learning at the same speed as his peers, he’s going to have much worse jobs later on, and thus make less money, and live objectively worse lives. Obviously, no parent wants this for their own kids, so they will resist anything that seems to suggest that their child isn’t capable of doing what the other kids are. Teachers, being generally optimistic about the potential of a child, are also reluctant to tell them that they’re simply not good at a given skill. The result is that nobody is actually getting an appropriate education in a public school. Everyone is learning at the same speed: too fast for the stupid ones, and too slow for the smart ones. But everyone is learning the “college bound” curriculum, even if an objective look at some kids’ test scores makes it obvious that they cannot actually do well enough in college to get any sort of job that pays them enough to pay back the loans.

Of course, Theres the political part as well. A school system that does tracking like Asian and European schools do is going to find itself in arrears of the Civil Rights Act in fairly short order as the lower tiers of the school will be full of black, Hispanic, and MENA students, and the upper tiers will be full of white and East Asian students. Whether this is biology, culture, or poverty is unimportant to the problem here — getting the results that would happen if you put kids in classrooms that fit their actual education needs would be racist and probably sexist as well. Reality is illegal.

All of which hurts everyone but the most average kids. The smart kids, unless their parents put them in an expensive private school or teach them after school are limited. Sorry, kid, you have more potential than average, so you’ll be made bored at school, probably hate it, and never reach your full potential. The dumb kids are sent through a system that shunts them toward college-bound studies and away from the kinds of life skills that they can learn that would give them reasonably attainable job skills so they can earn a living wage. A college bound kid who can’t actually do college has no marketable skills and thus has a bright future in stores, restaurants, warehouses, and professional driving whether uber, taxi, or delivery. But we didn’t hurt his precious feelings, so all good, right?

And so I think if I were in charge I’d track kids, and if you’re below average, I’d put the kids in a skilled labor track as appropriate to the child. If you are not suited to college, you still need a skill, and that means pushing things like shop classes, cooking, repair, and so on so when those kids graduate, they have something they can do to support themselves and thus earn a living. For the above average kid, I’d put him in the most advanced classes he could handle — and see just how far his brain can take him. I think there are a lot of geniuses stuck, bored with a pace meant for future clerical workers who would shock the world given the chance.

shop classes

Random thought, is shop class even a thing anymore? I mean I remember a shop class in middle school every year, and I think my freshman year of highschool too? But that was 20-30 years ago now. Even then it was pretty meager because of the safety aspects of working with power tools. I think there was a drill press we were allowed to use in middle school, and maybe a band saw in highschool? I remember the class being 95% "nothing" or stuff I don't remember, and 5% getting a supervised turn on the drill press. That and sanding. Every time you asked the teacher a question about your project, the answer was always "You should probably sand it more" and being pointed to this giant box of worn out scraps of sandpaper with random grits. I have no memory of a table saw, but it might have been there but verboten on account of how dangerous they are even for experienced woodworkers to use.

I'd love for there to be more shop in school, but I'm not sure the risk profile of working with power tools sits well with most moms.

I’ve known a few people who graduated from highschool with welding certifications less than ten years ago. They all went to school in less affluent white parts of the far burbs, though- redneck parents have a higher risk tolerance and are also more willing to bluntly admit when their kids need to focus on non-college skills.

It's definitely still a thing, but district dependent. My high school had a fully equipped shop that was converted into a storage room years before my family went through. Not sure whether that was a district call, funding thing, liability or what. I would guess at some point a decision had to be made whether to fund the shop class, art, or other extracurriculars and my high school decided to dump the former.

I was talking about this with my father. He grew up in a rural area. He had both a woodworking shop class and a metalworking shop class at his high school and took both. That must have been in the 60's. A shame, really.

In the 1980s in Fairfax County, Virginia, I took wood shop and metal shop. I was on the college track, so I couldn't access other vo-tech classes because they conflicted with foreign language and advanced/gt classes. But they existed in the same school.

Career and Technical Education high schools have pretty useful shop classes.

I don't know that this can be addressed without a revolutionary change in how prestige is divvied out in society.

And in fact it may not be desirable for Americans in particular. You could have a system with less de jure social mobility if you make it noble to be on the lower rungs of society and create other games one can play to get prestige.

In Japan, age owes respect to the degree that there's negotiation to be had on who is owed deference if you are the young boss of an old employee. This and other such norms that reward mastery of even the lowest jobs makes all out elitism acceptable when it comes to schooling. But can Americans muster the discipline and ethno-cultural loyalty that such a system requires?

I'm here reminded of a pair of documentaries I saw about Japanese prisons. Prison is yet another solution to ugly reality that one's society must cope with justifying. The Japanese system is setup under the idea that criminals are deviant antisocial elements that must be reeducated into society, and it takes the form of a work camp where every minute of your time is dedicated to hammering pro-social habits into your mind like a soldier's drill. Complete with slogans you have to recite and beatings if you don't do what you're told properly.

The first documentary I saw was made by French television about such prisons, and it depicted a system that is opaque and produced some abuses, but engaged positively with the general idea of the prisoner's life being regimented to a totalitarian degree if that allowed successful reinsertion in society.

The second one was made by American television, and pictured the very concept of this reeducation as an insult to one's human dignity.

My point is then this: is America's infatuation with individual freedom, self made men and the "American dream" not categorically incompatible with dealing with the reality of such problems pragmatically? Is it not morally preferable to the American that everyone is given the same chances and elitism is nominally crushed even if that allows elites to deny a sense of noblesse oblige? Can American nationhood imply enough collective loyalty to shun the need for handouts in the name of Civil Rights?

Other than the beatings, some of the “social communication” classrooms for severely autistic kids are already rather like those prisons.

It seems like public schools in the major cities in Texas have this, albeit as a patchwork and parents have to opt in. There’s career high schools, taking classes at community college is free(and community colleges are willing to track much more aggressively than high schools), etc.

I think we’re coming back to involved parents.

In the UK we used to have a strong two-track system.

The most damaging criticism came from a group of genuinely “bad at school, good at life” people. The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment. There weren’t that many of them but everyone loves an underdog story so they were very influential. It made the system look ludicrous.

I can’t now remember names but think eg Einstein or Gauss.

The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to [Einstein] in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of the curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry.

Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. When the elementary teachers noticed his intellectual abilities, they brought him to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick who sent him to the local Collegium Carolinum,[a] which he attended from 1792 to 1795

None of this sounds like kids who were on the bottom track at school.

There's a popular myth that Einstein was bad at school and failed math classes. It is completely false.

It's quite funny that the myth cropped up while Einstein was still alive, and Einstein himself was rather confused about why that myth came to be.

IIRC, some other country gives their failing students a grade of "6" and the myth started when someone didn't realize foreign standards were different and mistook his top grade for failure.

Today I learned. Thanks for correcting me. I had heard the Einstein myth around somewhere, and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

I heard that one too, but as the incident showing he's a prodigy, rather than one proving he's a dum-dum troublemaker. Instead of calculating the sum by brute-forcing, he came up with the arithmetic series sum formula on the spot.

Huh, I just did it like this:

001 + 002 + 003 + ... + 049 + 50 + 100
 +     +     +           +
099 + 098 + 097 + ... + 051
--------------------------------------
100 + 100 + 100 + ... + 100 + 50 + 100
--------------------------------------
100 x 49 + 50 + 100 = 4900 + 150 = 5050

Yup, and when you generalize this you get the arithmetic series sum formula. Congrats, you're as smart as 15 (or less) -year-old Gauss.

Nope. I can follow the derivation, but there is no way that would have occurred to me in an hour, or however long his class was. Shota Gauss (who sounds like a great Fate character) is smarter than me.

The summation story has an interesting backstory, but it doesn't seem to have been special punishment for Gauss, but rather a standard assignment for all of the students (and the exact nature of the assignment is lost to history).

The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.

Is this really a bad outcome though? If you manage to get every smart person into the white collar stream, you no longer have any smart blue collar workers to advance society in those areas.

I'm obviously no Einstein, but I think I fit into the "didn't do well in school, did well IRL" category pretty well. If people like me were the reason for schools doing whatever the hell they are doing now, it truly feels ridiculous.

Not only don't I see how any of the changes to education systems that I observed over my lifetime would help me fit in, the only thing you'd have to do to make me happy is get rid of credentialism, and let me learn what I want to do on my own (which is exactly what happened).

To your question, I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off going to trade school myself, but when I was growing up that was widely seen as the loser trajectory, so I was avoiding it like the plague. The end result being years of wasted effort at university, as I'm smart enough to get in, but unable to grind long enough to graduate.

In fact a shortage of highly skilled blue collar workers is a crisis society will have to face going forwards. I’d actually like a top level post to discuss it but I’m not sure where to research for sources.

These people became writers, entertainers, well known public persons. They complained loudly about having been wrongly downgraded to the low-grade stream in their youth.

Just tell them that society needs at least a few writers and entertainers who aren't utter morons as well...

Both Einstein and Gauss were tracked into the top track (Gymnasium) of the heavily tracked German school system, and accelerated further within it.

The classic example of a genius-tier mathematician who failed out of school due to poor performance in non-maths subjects is Ramanujan.

I mean outside of entertainment or entrepreneurship, how common is that? I can’t imagine that’s a typical experience for kids who are clearly not interested or successful in school. And as far as public policy, I think the best approach is to aim for the typical experience for students rather than waste time and money hoping that you have that one in ten thousand unicorn who fails middle school algebra and goes on to become the guy behind a tech company.

It’s very untypical, and I agree with you. Unfortunately people love an underdog, so the only time that Grammar schools (the upper level) appeared in the public conversation it was someone in the category boasting about how they’d (been) failed by the exam system but became famous anyway.

It’s just something that’s always bugged me about conversations like this, or criminality, or drug use. It’s like people want to spend billions of dollars on something that rarely works and only for the extreme outliers in hopes of saving a single unicorn. But in anything the government does, you’re doing an essential triage — you know going in that you cannot and will not save everyone that it’s possible to save, because you don’t have infinite resources or infinite time or perfect tools. The best that can be done by a policy is to try to do good for the vast majority of people who the policy affects.

In the case of education, I think tracking is the best option because it works for most people. Most people in lower education tiers are not going to somehow become successful writers, actors, and entrepreneurs. The vast majority will be doing low level work somewhere in the system. In that case, it’s much better to teach them skilled trades so they can be productive members of society, earn a reasonable wage, and raise a family than it is to flog them and drag them to university where not only are they going to fail, but when they do, they have little skill to fall back on. If he can at least make something, read a blueprint, cook a great meal, or repair things, he’ll be a productive member of society able to provide for himself and a family, everyone is better off. If he spends that time pretending to understand calculus he works for peanuts in retail, restaurant, warehouse industries for less than a living wage and we pay for his survival for life. Which is better for him? Which is better for the rest of us?

The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.

But it's not like putting those in the upper track would have actually helped there, higher-tier classes are if anything more restrictive. And it certainly wouldn't have helped the other kids in that track having their education disrupted.

Maybe this suggests the "bottom track" should be significantly shorter or more freeform: get the basics down, then either let the kids out of schooling early or let them spend that time in more focused programs. The writers decide they like writing and then get to spend their whole day on writing instead of learning chemistry. This seems like it might help mitigate the impression that being pushed into a lower track is a permanent blight on kids' lives, that they're being condemned to a label of "stupid".

Granted, they might later learn they're not all that great writers and regret wasting their time focusing so heavily on it, but they're unlikely to pivot into the chemistry or pre-calc classes they're missing in the upper tracks.

I guess the downside is that this style might be attractive enough to pull kids from the upper tracks, but at the very least it would be an unknown that might negatively impact college admissions, so the default path-to-career-success looks basically the same.

Anyone know what proportion of kids in their school district are in special education programs? I was shocked to hear that it's over 25% and about to hit 30 here.
(The state caps funding at some level lower than that, so they're asking for an even higher levy)

I know the kids aren't alright these days, but unless my district is a huge outlier it seems like another institutional metastasization to absorb the overproduction of social workers.

That depends entirely on what constitutes "special education programs". I remember going to some supplementary reading classes during grade school, along with a good number of other students, for an hour once every couple of weeks for maybe a year. Were we a special education program? It wasn't part of our regular class and we met with a special education teacher. Some other people went to a speech therapist, was that a "special education programme"?

Without knowing how special education program is defined, these kinds of stats aren't very interesting.

Anyone know what proportion of kids in their school district are in special education programs? I was shocked to hear that it's over 25% and about to hit 30 here.

That's legit possibly the most shocking stat I've ever heard. If someone had told me 5%, I would have considered it on the high side of plausible, but just barely, and that's more than 5x that. I really hope that your district is an extreme outlier. Otherwise, either there's massive fraud or mismanagement in public education (best case) or we really are headed for an Idiocracy future. Unfortunately, those also aren't mutually exclusive.

Or, every child with an accommodations plan is labeled as special Ed, and huge numbers of kids have fraudulent ADHD diagnoses because higher grades are worth the side effects of aderal to their parents.

I think it's mainly over-diagnosis and excessively pathologising certain behaviour. Also parents don't want to turn down any kind of extra support they feel they are receiving.

I think that number includes 504s and BIPs (behavior intervention plans), and IEPs is closer to 10%

At least in my state there is financial incentive for districts to classify kids as special needs. They get more than double funding for each such child, though that amount diminishes as you climb above 16% special ed students: https://ospi.k12.wa.us/policy-funding/special-education-funding-and-finance/special-education-funding-washington-state

The penalty is a percentage multiplier applied to the total amount of extra funds, and it's possible to lose funds. There are two tiers of special ed students, one that pays out a 112% bonus, students who spend > 80% of their time in general ed, and another that pays out 106%, for students who spend less time than that in general ed.

In either case you start losing revenue at about 58% special ed. Well before that you'd be losing money since you'd need to actually spend some amount of those funds on special ed services.

Would not be surprised if 25% is the real break-even factoring in the need to spend on services.

At first glance, Colorado is not as incentivized as Washington - at least to get that filthy federal lucre.

If I'm missing context here, I'd love to know more.

Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.

The speed at which students will learn 9 years worth of material will vary vastly and the pain points and bottle necks in learning will vary vastly. It isn't at all surprising that at least 25% of students will be out of sync with the curriculum.

The IQ 130+ students aren't getting individual calc tutors in middle school, it bears pointing out.

Differentiated education is good. But you could go much further with the same amount of resources by grouping students of roughly the same ability and teaching classes targeted to their abilities. Even if you want to put more resources into students at the lower end, it makes more sense to group them in low student-teacher ratio classes appropriate to their learning rate.

I was offered the opportunity to go straight into college at government expense three times- twice my mom vetoed it because she thought I’d wind up dating an oriental(yes, really) if they were most of my social circle and once I decided against it because I liked the Catholic school system. That’s probably the closest a large institution can do to ‘individualized calculus tutoring in middle school’.

Our solution to that was to just split the kids into four or five classes based on their performance. Seems vastly cheaper than individualized coaching or trying to figure out the specific issues.

The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.

My understanding is that classrooms are generally integrated and they therefore go at the speed of the slowest student. Streaming is generally seen as reactionary and antiliberal in the public system.

Streaming is generally seen as reactionary and antiliberal in the public system.

But it is inclusive if we rebrand it as special ed.

Depends, gifted education has been getting dismantled in certain districts under the guise of social justice

I recall reading about New York City and Seattle closing advanced schools. Not equitable you see. A quick googling confirms.

The decision to phase out the cohort schools was made to address concerns about racial inequities, as the highly capable programs were perceived as not serving all students equally.

Same as universities implementing racist policies to discriminate against Asians. They worked hard to avoid clearly stating "too Asian so we are ending the advanced programs".

Is it really that bad that 25% of students get individualized coaching? The IQ spread between a student with an IQ of 70 and one with an IQ of 130+ is far too great to teach them together.

That explains five percentage points and assumes that half of "special education programs" are for gifted children.

If you want to map it to one tail of IQ, then 25% of students have <90 IQ. I don't think that the typical student with an IQ of 89 needs coaching, so something else is causing those numbers.

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.

teaching ... severe autists not to strip naked because their tags are bothering them ... is something which requires lots of expensive specialists.

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

cutting off annoying tags doesn't at all guarantee that the resulting roughened seam isn't going to be even more aggravating

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.

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.

most IEPs are not that

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

Why is modern architecture so bad, and more importantly why is it so common in spite of this?

The utter vacuity of modern architecture (and art) is probably not lost on many users around here. My distaste for modern architecture has been around for a while, but I never felt very strongly about it up until I visited Toronto and saw just what kind of effect that sort of construction had on the urban landscape - I found a city filled to the brim with ugly water-stained concrete-and-glass skyscrapers, some constructed by the likes of Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei; a city where traditional vernacular architectural styles were typically absent, found only in select areas like the Distillery District and St. Lawrence Market. It was an utterly depressing cityscape, and after I contrasted it with the very many examples of cosy and inviting vernacular architecture in South Korea - some of which were actually new traditional hanok neighbourhoods funded and supported by the South Korean government - I found myself deeply wanting to know why an entire society would willingly subject themselves to the pernicious and subtle form of psychological torture we call "modern architecture".

The gulf between what I perceive most people like and what architectural theorists like is truly incredible, and that shows up in many enthusiast forums. In true gatekeeping fashion, /r/Architecture seems to consider talking about the broad concept of "modern architecture" in a critical way as showcasing one's plebian-ness and disqualifying one from offering opinions on the topic. The general take seems to be that modern architecture is clearly too complex to broad-brush, after all post-war architectural styles span the range of heroic modernism, post-modernism, 60s space age, 70s modern, 80s neo-brutalism, 90s cookie cutter, contemporary, and so on. The blanket claim that one doesn't like all of it seems to be perceived as such a ridiculous and broad statement that no credence should be given to it whatsoever, then as a counterpoint people will recommend a piece of purportedly groundbreaking, humanistic modern architecture that... doesn't look substantially more pleasing to your average person than the concrete blocks people recall when they think of modern architecture.

This is because there is a broad common thread spanning most of these architectural trends, and among these are a "clean slate" philosophy, a conscious refusal to adopt local, pre-modern styles, focus on clean shapes and simplification and minimalism, and design and expressions meant to be adapted for the "age of machine". It's a trend that persists when you look everywhere from early pioneers like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to contemporary starchitects like Zaha Hadid, and even if certain architects weave in vernacular sensibilities every now and then, it will often be expressed within the larger context of this new post-war mode of architecture, for example in an ironic and highly simplified manner like is done in postmodernism. To engage in such obfuscatory pedantry so as to not properly engage with the critical opinions of laymen who aren't as well-versed in architecture-speak (whose opinions on what constitutes good architecture significantly differ from that of the academic world, and who often feel deprived of any say over the urban environments they live in) rubs me the wrong way. So for ease I'll refer to the phenomenon in question as "modern architecture", instead of listing out every single style it encapsulates.

I've seen a number of explanations posited to explain why "modern architecture" is so common, and I've attempted to look into them in order to investigate if they have any credence whatsoever.

1: The general public actually enjoys "modern architecture", and demands architecture in that style.

It is not uncommon for architects to suggest to detractors that the style of building is the client's fault, and not to blame the architect. So is this true, do clients actually ask for modern architecture? This is probably the explanation that is easiest to address - the literature is actually shockingly consistent on this: People hugely prefer traditional vernacular styles over post-war styles of architecture, and this preference is consistently found across groups regardless of political identification or race or sex.

This is practically a formality, but here goes. A 2007 poll of 2,200 random Americans conducted by the AIA found a strong preference for traditional styles after presenting them with a list of 248 buildings deemed important by AIA members, with participants strongly preferring buildings that evoked Gothic, Greek and Roman traditions. It is necessary to note that tastemakers did retort to this, with the rebuttal of urban design critic John King including the assertion that architecture cannot just be evaluated via a photo, as well as the assertion that the list did not reflect the ideas of architectural experts but the opinions of the general populace (this one I find somewhat funny, considering it's a tacit acknowledgement that the preferences of architects are out of line with the general populace). In a similar vein, yet another study of 2,000 US adults who were shown seven pairs of images of existing U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings (consisting of one traditional and one modern building) showed that 72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed). The preference for traditional architecture was also consistent regardless of what socioeconomic status the respondent belonged to, suggesting the disparity in prevalence of traditional architecture and general-populace preference for it isn't an issue of class divide where the richest people can specifically commission buildings and decide what gets built. Neoclassical buildings were most favoured, and brutalist buildings were most disfavoured. A British replication of this result can be found in a YouGov survey, which polled 1042 respondents asking them which building out of four they would prefer to be built in their neighbourhood - the result came out 77% in favour of traditional and 23% in favour of modern. The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Ruth Reed, responded to this with the assertion that traditional buildings are expensive and unsustainable (a point I will examine later).

But perhaps John King is correct that a photo doesn't properly capture how a piece of architecture actually feels - this is actually a critique I think holds water, there are many places I like far more in person than I imagined I would from a photo alone. Lucky for us, there's a study in Norway which used VR technology to partially circumvent that problem, capturing 360 degree videos of streets in Oslo then presenting them to participants by means of a VR headset. "It emerged that the places characterised by traditional architecture were appreciated considerably more than contemporary urban spaces. The traditional square Bankplassen got the best score, while the contemporary part of Toftes street in the generally popular district, Grünerløkka, came last." But if that, too, isn't a good enough facsimile of the actual experience of visiting a place, here is a Swedish thesis that details the results of a poll in the town of Karlshamn about what parts of their town residents like best, finding that "the inhabitants make very unanimous aesthetic valuations of the buildings and that the wooden buildings, the small scale and the square are the most appreciated features. Studies in the field of environmental psychology find a general aesthetic preference for features that can be related to the traditional small town".

There are also other more informal polls which one can rely on, such as this bracket assessing readers' favourite buildings in Chicago - the bracket in question was populated via popular nomination, then whittled down to a final four. All of the final four are in traditional style, featuring the Tribune Tower, Carbide and Carbon Building, Wrigley Building, and The Rookery Building. It seems clear that the majority of the public, regardless of demography, prefers traditional architecture, and these results are robust and replicable across many different methodologies. And, well, water is wet. Sometimes it seems that architects are unpleasantly surprised with these results and are in disbelief/denial about the fact that the majority of the public might truly have these views, which brings me to my next possibility:

2: Architects like "modern architecture", the public does not; the excess of modern architecture represents the tastes of architects and not the general populace.

There is a somewhat convincing corpus of evidence showing that architects simply appreciate architecture in a different way from the general populace - as a starting point this study summarises some results from previous work on the topic. One study from 1973 suggests architects respond more to "representational meaning" in a building while the general layman prioritises "responsive meaning", with representational meaning having more to do with the percepts, concepts and ideas that a building conveys and responsive meaning being more of a judgemental view of whether the building is nice in a more immediate affective and evaluative way. Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography". The study in question reaffirms these findings, finding from an admittedly small sample that "non-architects gave more affective responses and descriptive responses to the physical features of the building in question, whereas architects commented more on ideas and concepts used to arrive at the physical forms".

This 2001 study showed a large discrepancy between architects' predictions of laypersons' preferences and their actual preferences. They presented a sample of 27 individuals without architectural training with colour slides of 42 large contemporary urban structures constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, and asked them to rate it from 1 to 10. 25 architects were then brought in to "predict or try to mimic a typical nonarchitect's global impression of each building". Low correlations were found between lay ratings of architecture and architects' predictions of lay ratings, and a slight trend towards less experienced architects making better estimations of lay ratings was found. Experience as an architect, if anything, seems to distance one further from the public's idea of "good architecture". While that study showed people contemporary buildings and doesn't directly touch on the traditional/modern dichotomy, it is notable that architects cannot predict lay preferences even within that narrow subset of architecture.

In addition, there are a number of studies which deal directly with that, though sample sizes are typically small. Devlin and Nasar (1989) report on the results of a study where 20 non-architects and 20 architects were shown a series of pictures of buildings which were categorised into general types: "High", which was characterised by fewer materials, more concrete, simpler forms, more white, and off-center entrances, and "Popular", which was characterised by use of more building materials, horizontal orientation, hip roofs, framed windows, centred entrances, and warm colours. Non-architects were more likely to evaluate "high" architecture as unpleasant, distressing and meaningless, while for architects the relationship between architectural style and evaluation was inverted. Small sample sizes, I know, there's not that much research on this, but the research that does exist tends to point in the same direction.

I consider it very likely that some architects (starchitects in particular) do build structures meant for their own self-edification, at the expense of the public and even the client - Peter Eisenman's House VI is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms. But most architects are normal working people constrained by clients' preferences and requirements, so the assertion that architects' preferences are responsible for the proliferation of modern architecture feels a bit impoverished to me as an explanation. They may have come up with the style, but it's not clear how much decisive influence their preferences have on most building projects. Perhaps it is just a dictatorship of taste - maybe architects do utilise their monopoly on skill and expertise to push their preferences through, as this comment by an architect on Scott's post "Whither Tartaria" notes, or maybe another driving factor is responsible here.

3: Traditional architecture just costs more to build, and when asked to make a tradeoff between their design preferences and low costs clients would prefer the latter.

This is an often-forwarded explanation for the prevalence of modern architecture, and it was initially the explanation I found the most convincing and intuitive. However, the urban planner and author Ettore Maria Mazzola has put some work into trying to estimate the prices of traditional vs modern architecture, and he does so by using ISTAT (Italian Bureau of Statistics) data, illustrating a large number of buildings and their costs from the 1920s and 1930s and updating them to today's dollars. His findings are presented in his 2010 book on the topic, but that is hard to access so they are also outlined in this paper. According to him "[t]raditional buildings of the first decades of the 20th Century were built in average times ranging from 6 to 12 months, they cost up to 67% less than the current building, and, after all these years, they still have never required maintenance works". Of course, there are problems when you're comparing across different time periods since there are factors that differ between the 1920s/30s and now, such as differing labour costs and building regulations, and so this cannot be considered the last word on the issue.

For a far more illustrative modern-day comparison, there's this paper: "The Economics of Style: Measuring the Price Effect of Neo-Traditional Architecture in Housing" which attempts to study the price premium on neotraditional houses in the Netherlands. They investigate if the higher prices placed on neotraditional houses are due to the higher costs of construction, and from a preliminary investigation into that topic they find: "On our request they provided information on construction costs of houses that vary in style but are otherwise the same. The information provided by Bouwfonds shows that houses in different styles developed by Bouwfonds do not vary in costs. Terraced homes in the style of the 1930s have similar construction costs as houses designed in “contemporary” styles." In an analysis of 86 Vinex housing estates they find significant price premiums for neotraditional houses and houses that refer to neotraditional architecture (as compared to non-traditional houses), with a 15% premium for the former and 5% premium for the latter. They also investigate if differences in interior quality or construction costs could explain the price premium and find that the price premium barely reduces even in more homogenous samples with less room for differences in construction costs. Rather, what they find is that supply is the main factor influencing traditional architecture's prices - in the highly regulated Dutch environment there has been a lack of supply capable of meeting demand, and the price premium has been slowly eroded as more traditional housing has been manufactured overtime. As a result, cost doesn't seem to be the driver for the lack of traditional architecture, nor does it seem to be the case that the style of residential housing perfectly reflects consumer preference - there seems to be an undersupply of neotraditional housing, which then gets reflected in higher prices.

Such an analysis seems to be supported when looking at individual case studies - traditional architecture is not inherently more expensive than modern architecture. An interesting example of this is the Carhart Mansion in New York City, a traditional building which was constructed at "substantially the same unit cost as new Modernist luxury apartment buildings", according to Zivkovic Associates, the organisation that was responsible for the plans and elevations for the building. While it is true that this building was constructed as a luxury apartment building at a higher price point than many other housing markets, the fact that it features a similar unit cost as luxury modernist buildings still raises the question as to why there aren't more traditional buildings at this price point. Furthermore, it's hard to explain away the findings of the earlier Netherlands paper with the claim that traditional stylings are only cost-effective when building higher-end properties, since the similarity in cost seems to persist there too. However, there's an interesting aspect to the case of the Carhart Mansion which might explain the proliferation of modern architecture:

4: City planning boards and other approval committees strongly prefer modern architecture, and are more likely to approve modern-style constructions regardless of the wishes of end-users or architects.

The Carhart Mansion's design was opposed by many members of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), with the LPC initially being skeptical about the proposed Classical design, and with many members making statements such as "You can’t do that – the façade has to be plain and simple." According to the source linked earlier, "[t]he LPC’s concerns seemed to focus on the question of how well the design would be executed – whether the quality of the craftsmanship in the new construction would do justice to the historic buildings around it. (Oddly, this did not seem to be an issue with the earlier Modernist design!)"

This quote from the very same source is also illustrative: "If you speak with architects and consultants who appear frequently before the LPC, they characterize their perceptions of the LPC’s decisions as follows: Designs for additions to landmarks or infill buildings in historic districts that do not violate the cornice lines and overall massing of neighboring protected buildings will likely win approval, even if aggressively Modernist in style, materials and details; but new traditional designs would have a harder time being approved on the basis of style alone. Accordingly, a number of prominent New York architects specializing in projects involving landmarks have advised their clients that new traditional designs employing actual historic architectural language, such as fully realized Classicism, would likely cost them a lot more in time and money in the review process. This perception has had a chilling effect on new traditional design in historic districts in New York City and in other cities where similar views prevail."

I'm not aware of any source that properly studies this, but it's probably not implausible that planning committees' preferences and tendencies surrounding architecture differ from the public. It's not necessarily the case that architecture granted planning permission reflects what the public wants - planners are a selected group of people with certain training, and this obviously skews the preferences of the people involved in planning.

Finally, a bonus:

5: People don't like modern architecture less than traditional architecture, it's just that the traditional architecture has been subjected to a selection process which filters out all the bad buildings.

Easily falsified - see above in part 1; even modern architecture selected for their importance doesn't fare as well against the traditional stuff.

Furthermore, here is the modern day Toronto City Hall. Here is the Royal Ontario Museum, with a large contemporary "crystal" built into the original neo-romanesque façade. Here are some old photos of Toronto. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else and maybe some users of this forum will find the current Toronto architecture to be scintillating pieces of art, but I can say it's quite clear to me - a plebeian - which of those looks more appealing, and the examples of modern architecture I've offered up are serious landmarks of the city, whereas the old photos in question are just normal streets in Old Toronto.

Anyway, it's a bit bizarre to me why architecture today seems to skew overwhelmingly modern, despite the public seeming to find these buildings worse than traditional styles. So far I think a combination of point 2 and point 4 is probably what's skewing the ratio, but I've not drawn any firm conclusions.

Isn’t it akin to modern art (I think few people actually enjoy modern art compared to masters of the past): liking something beautiful is blasé and therefore the midwits prefer ugly over beautiful to signal taste?

I think that's almost certainly the reason why the midwits in academia prefer modern architecture - it is a signal that you have had the time to develop this type of inaccessible preference. Of course, that still doesn't explain why modern architecture is everywhere despite the general populace seeming to dislike it - they are the clients that developers and by extension architects are marketing to, after all, and one would expect market forces to assert themselves at some point and populate the urban landscape with architecture the public actually likes. That's the very question my post is attempting to answer.

The general populace aren't the clients. Rich people (and corporations) building buildings are. And they hire people to decide on the architecture, and those people are likely close cousins to those midwits in academia.

If you want to know what the general populace likes, look at tract houses including McMansions (but keep in mind that architectural design is not the only thing people are looking for). If you want to know what rich people like, look at custom-built homes.

I'm on team "it depends."

There are a lot of problems in Chicago, but the city looks pretty goody, actually. I like their Trump Tower! It has human centric walking paths around it, gardens, and places to sit. It looks pretty good from across the river! It's probably comfortable inside. The Wrigley building may be more aesthetic, but not enough to be worth passing up all those windows. I love the aesthetics of the Lurie Gardens, with a little bit of prairie, surrounded by city towers. But Chicago has always wanted to be a big American city.

I'm less of a fan of California design, especially since it's been encroaching on the Southwest, with grey houses with sharp angles taking over from the tan houses and soft edges. The Southwest should have tan houses and rounded edges! It should look like it's covered in local clay! I'm not certain what's prompting the grey and white angular houses, the owners probably think it looks "fresh" or some such thing, even if I think it's tired just five years on. Like the Catholic churches in the 70s, they age quickly.

Phoenix is odd, and not very aesthetic, but each individual person gets some nice desert landscaping, an air conditioned house, and access to a bunch of goods at one of the hundreds of identical strip malls. It isn't a city built for the past or the future, but for the present, and it will be fine if it keeps getting rebuilt until they run our of water or air conditioning units are outlawed. Tucson has more history, and therefore better architecture. Here's a church from about a decade ago. It's completely fine. Most of their newer apartment and condo developments are also just fine, in a way that pictures don't capture super well. They're safe, clean, have nice little patios full of potted succulents, and a couple of swimming pools. Nothing grand or awe inspiring, but just fine. Very livable.

I'm not sure what's happening with Toronto, perhaps like Phoenix they don't have enough history as a city? Quebec City sounds reasonably aesthetic. South Korea is more aesthetic than Phoenix, but may be a worse place to live, going by everyone's unwillingness to raise children there.

72% preferred a traditional look, and this was the case regardless of whether one was Republican or Democrat or Independent, female or male, white or black (so no, liking traditional architecture isn't a "right-wing thing", as it is sometimes portrayed).

My intuition here is the leftists enjoy the construction of experimental transgressive architecture, and while they may prefer traditional architecture in isolated comparisons, they would not enjoy a city that maximizes this preference.

In general I consider aesthetics-based zoning rules to be a left-leaning preference, and many of those are varying degrees of "traditional": I've heard Europeans in touristy cities complain that installing a heat pump is difficult because they can't visibly change the facade. Or San Francisco requiring expensive custom woodwork for similar reasons. Santa Fe codified "traditional" adobe as an architectural requirement, and I've suspected some "cute" small American towns I've visited do similarly to manage their aesthetics.

If anything, architectural free-for-all seems a bit of a libertarian aesthetic, and it's popularity in the US strikes me as a remaining vestage of the nation's cultural focus on "liberty".

If anything, architectural free-for-all seems a bit of a libertarian aesthetic, and it's popularity in the US strikes me as a remaining vestage of the nation's cultural focus on "liberty".

I wouldn't say that the US's focus on liberty is at all in a state of remaining vestiges -- both the mainstream US left and right define themselves explicitly in terms of liberty ("my body my choice," "live free, no mandates", "trans rights are human rights", "no tax on tips" -- even "all cops are bastards" is rather an interesting corruption of libertarian critiques of the police), they just disagree on precisely where the limits of liberty should be and what constitutes an unacceptable attack on the liberty of another. That's why the left went all-in on the paradox of tolerance, after all, and why they began defining hate speech in terms of 'violence', because 'violence' was long considered the limit of liberty.

Americans eat, drink, sleep, and breathe liberty, so much that it's very hard for Americans to understand how profoundly liberty-focused they are even in comparison to the rest of the Western world.

I generally disagree with the notion that modern architecture is bad but there is definitely quite a lot of bad architecture made. But good modern buildings can be visually very pleasing. For example, I find the Rietveld Schröder House extremely captivating. Even more impressive is that it was built in 1924.

If you don't find it better than an ordinary brick house from that time, the next explanation is

6: If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it

This is a well-know phenomenon in music. A song feels better the more you listen to it. An architectural example is the Eiffel Tower that was extremely controversial and hated by many when it was built. Now, it is perceived as an iconic and inseparable part of Paris. It will also explain why architects are more fond of modern architecture: they are much more exposed to it.

I've lived near and in buildings that look almost exactly like that, and it still looks absolutely hideous to me. The building in the background mogs it by a mile.

To provide a contrary data point, I find that building you linked utterly repulsive.

I find the Rietveld Schröder House extremely captivating. Even more impressive is that it was built in 1924. If you don't find it better than an ordinary brick house from that time, the next explanation is 6: If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it

Personally I don't like it, and I've been exposed primarily to modern architecture in my urban environments. I would think this is true for most people who express preferences against modern architecture - they live in cities primarily filled with concrete-and-glass blocks. Perhaps exposure plays a bit of a role here, but I doubt it's the only reason for the disparity between architects' and laypersons' preferences.

I suppose the initial framing is a bit besides the actual question, which was not "why do people like modern architecture", it was "why is the style associated with modern architecture so common, despite the fact that people in my experience dislike it?" I've updated the title of the post to reflect this.

Does your distaste to modern style extend to other aspects of modern design? Modernist architecture was just one pillar of the modernist movement. Modernist ideas for exteriors also allowed for completely new interior designs. The interiors with large windows and open spaces are impossible in traditional architecture. The modernist style of furniture or just simply design of tools is also different.

Looking around me in my European landscape, I can definitely say that modern interior design is pretty widely accepted, way more than the exteriors that are indeed not fully accepted. There are very few people that design their bedrooms in old style, similarly for bathrooms or living rooms.

I definitely think there is some merit to modern interior design principles - I enjoy bright open spaces as much as the next guy - but I find it most visually pleasing when these principles are integrated with older, more rustic styles of design. For example, here's Eunpyeong Hanok Village in South Korea, built in 2014. The interiors clearly crib from modern design with how open and airy they are, but they incorporate traditional stylings into the buildings' interiors seamlessly to make a space that looks inviting. Of course this is adapted for the Korean environment and can't be generalised - localised approaches involving the vernacular style of any given area are always needed, much of this wouldn't necessarily work in the European context.

Currently, I live in a gleaming white block of an apartment building, and frankly I have to say the interiors feel a bit alienating sometimes. It's hard to hate it because it's been my home for years, but it sometimes comes off as quite sterile and bland, and while it's technically designed in a way that's meant to let in light, in spite of this I almost always keep the blinds closed. The sunlight can get harsh. Many traditional East Asian buildings tried to solve this problem by softening the sunbeams through panes of paper, creating a warm diffuse glow, but modernist buildings do nothing of the sort - the light that filters in through the massive glass windows in the midday is brain-boiling, and I dislike having to pull down the blinds every single time noon rolls around.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not strictly in favour of retvrning completely and building everything in perfectly authentically old-style ways, I think there's something to be learned from some modern ideas of design, but as a standalone aesthetic package it just doesn't work for me. I primarily wish we had hybridised these traditional vernacular forms with up-to-date concepts in a more seamless and natural manner - more like a natural progression of the style, instead of simply disposing of all the architectural forms that had developed locally for thousands of years. To see these rich and varied traditions quickly disappear in mere decades feels like a travesty.

For what it's worth, the more time I spend looking at the Eiffel Tower the more I agree with the original critics and wish it had been torn down.

If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it

That might be a true factor, but if it were the entire reason, it would predict that people make no distinction between buildings that were built before they were born - after all, can't be exposed longer than your life.

That would surprise me and doesn't appear to be in evidence.

An architectural example is the Eiffel Tower that was extremely controversial and hated by many when it was built. Now, it is perceived as an iconic and inseparable part of Paris.

The Eiffel Tower might an icon of Paris - but do Parisians actually consider it beautiful? Compared to, say, the towers of Notre Dame? Or may its impressive and skyline-dominating size, the imposing construction, and the utility as a vantage point more relevant to its popularity?

Angular things are always inferior to curves. Buildings that look more natural are more beautiful and modernism leans into artificial looks

I think like a lot of other parts of western culture, it’s just a matter of thinking of the culture as disposable. You just don’t design a building with the assumption that the building will outlive you, so the order of the day is to make the thing as cheaply as possible and not worry about future users of the building.

This seems to be contradicted by point 3.

Modern style architecture is due to the shift in where cost falls. Notice something about modern construction? It tries to maximize big flat sheets put together and flat concrete and minimizes having lots of individual bricks. This is because semiskilled labor has gotten dramatically more expensive, so options which minimize it become more appealing.

Isn't this a circular argument? Semiskilled labor has gotten more expensive because nobody wants to train to be a bricklayer when nobody needs bricks laid. Or do explain the cost of semiskilled labor another way?

Semiskilled labor in general is much more expensive in the modern west than it ever has been- warehouse workers and painters and the like are just harder to replace.

I can't speak for Toronto. Maybe the demands of harsh winters, or the lack of natural beauty limit what can be done with modern styles which often draw much of their appeal from space and the surrounding environment, so architects instead try pure weirdness and that puts people off.

I can say, though, in Vancouver, modernism works very well.

Meanwhile, I find the nearby Vancouver Art Gallery to be a dated relic of an ancient time, and neither inviting, nor pleasant to be around, or inside.

But that's just my opinion

The Law Courts

That’s a cool-looking building, but I can’t take it seriously as a courthouse

I've often wondered if that's the point, much like being given a death sentence for twitter posts by a man in a dress and silly wig. Making the justice process deliberately absurd demonstrates power because the message is "you don't dare laugh at this"

You're failing to represent the full case for argument #5.

  1. People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.
  2. Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.

People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.

I don't know about that, one of the building considered most beautiful in my city was built for the purpose of holding water tanks.

I agree that the novelty might wear off a bit, but Paris is chock full of beautiful buildings, and people all over the world seem to like it all the same.

People are emotionally primed to associate particular styles with particular positive or negative things. If you see something in a tudor style you probably think of a wealthy old neighborhood or a european tourist trap-- both of which would be pleasant places to exist in regardless of what architectural style they were built in. If we built all our prisons, hospitals, and corporate offices in the same style it would take a bit of the shine off of it.

I think you've got the causality here entirely backwards - the reason why traditional architecture is associated with wealthy old neighbourhoods or European tourist traps is because traditional-style properties are capable of commanding high prices and/or an influx of tourist money, resulting in them being high-SES neighbourhoods. That association can only exist, however, because people like these buildings in the first place.

Furthermore in Sweden many towns are built in traditional style, and there have been a few studies evaluating architectural preferences in such places, and the overwhelming majority still prefers older buildings. The study I linked in Part 1 of my post on the preferences of Karlshamn residents is one such example; it evaluates the residents of a town that is primarily traditional in style - you can look up photos of the town - and finds that they also prefer traditional small-town architecture. There is also the fact that scenes that deviate far from the rule of nature are literally harder for the visual cortex to process and cause more discomfort as a result, and modern buildings are less naturalistic and more unpleasant (as noted by that very same study).

On a personal note I can say I very much enjoy all traditional vernacular architectural styles, even those I've only recently stumbled upon - for example I like Korea's hanok and temple architecture, Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty palaces and tombs, and India's Himalayan kath-kuni buildings, they are not represented very widely and you don't come across them often, but even on first glance they were hugely pleasing to me in a way modern architecture has never been. I suppose you can add an epicycle and say they recall other forms of architecture I have positive associations with, but taken alongside the above reasons for skepticism I think this fails as an explanation.

Old styles haven't stayed static-- they've been constantly improved on. The apartment complex I live in probably would have looked like a set of hideous industrial buildings when they were built in the first half of the 20th century. But since then, they've been decorated and improved in a variety of little ways-- decorative green window shutters, trees that have grown to maturity, tasteful black railings on staircases, etc. All of those things were technically possible to do when the property was first built, but it took time for people to understand how best to work with that style and incorporate the most effective decorative elements. We're not just seeing the prettiest old buildings, we're seeing the prettiest versions of old buildings.

I don't really understand how this is relevant to an argument regarding aesthetic merit though. Yes, old styles of architecture have been constantly iterated on and improved overtime, and modernist styles could in theory be prettier if we changed all kinds of things about it. But as they currently stand, these buildings are evaluated as less pleasing by the public compared to traditional architecture. How long these respective styles took to develop is not what's in question here. I mean, if you turn the clock forward 200 years perhaps modernism will have mutated into something people really enjoy, but that timeframe isn't necessarily relevant to your average urban-dweller today who will live and die in one of these blocks. All it means is “hey, maybe we shouldn’t have thrown out literal thousands of years of accumulated wisdom in a poor attempt to implement the design equivalent of Year Zero”.

Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?

I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant! Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example, but I find them to be comforting and nostalgic. Where other people see a dystopian late-capitalist hellscape, I see the familiar sights of the family road trips of my youth. YMMV.

Admittedly I'm a complete plebian and philistine when it comes to architecture. I've never made any attempt to study architecture qua architecture at all.

Another study from the same year found that architects tended to prefer the person-built environment, whereas non-design students tended to prefer natural settings. This is relevant considering the fact that much modern art and architecture tended to be highly conceptual and focus on rejecting the rule of nature in favour of designing for the new era of machine, as described by Jan Tschichold in his book "The New Typography".

This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):

Our topic proper is the beauty of art as the one reality adequate to the Idea of beauty. Up to this point the beauty of nature has counted as the primary existence of beauty, and now therefore the question is how it differs from the beauty of art.

We could talk abstractly and say that the Ideal is beauty perfect in itself, while nature is beauty imperfect. But such bare adjectives are no use, because the problem is to define precisely what constitutes this perfection of artistic beauty and the imperfection of merely natural beauty. We must therefore pose our question thus: why is nature necessarily imperfect in its beauty, and what is the origin of this imperfection? Only when this is answered will the necessity and the essence of the Ideal be revealed to us in more detail.

[...] spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art's actuality is the Ideal.

Focusing in on some specific examples:

Peter Eisenman's House IV is one of the most infamous examples of this, a fantastic example of utter psychosis where he split the master bedroom in two so the couple couldn’t sleep together, added a precarious staircase without a handrail, and initially refused to include bathrooms.

I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.

I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.

Many people hate the "stroads" of America for example

Nobody uses that term but fans of Strongtowns. Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory. Their priority isn't visual appeal, it's function. Quaint medieval (or in the US, imitations of same) town centers with narrow twisting alleys and hipster shops are very picturesque, but if you want to get some serious shopping done, not very practical. Bringing your SUV to your nearest commercial area, bisected by a "stroad", and hitting the Home Depot, Target, and then the grocery store... now that's more like it.

I, who have never had a driver's license, find stroads a real pain in the ass. I don't want to think about how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through 20-acre parking lots. God forbid anyone actually put the parking lot in the back, with the store right on the sidewalk like in a real city, and have the main entrance on the sidewalk, and a separate entrance in the rear (supermarkets used to be built like this in the thirties and forties).

Putting parking lot in the back makes little difference. It only matters if you’re already on the street with the front entrance. If you’re a block away, you need to cross the parking lot anyway.

More generally, without a car you are effectively disabled, in the literal sense: not fully able to participate in society in the same way the majority is. Most societies make some accommodations to the disabled, but there are real limits and trade offs involved. For example, people who have trouble walking (which in US is I suspect a bigger group than people without access to a car) typically appreciate a lot being able to drive right to their destination, and park right at the entry.

Point is, it is not clear to me why we should cater to your disability, to the detriment of the majority.

People don't use that term, but that doesn't mean that people like them. The problem is when people have to spend significant amounts of time looking at the visual equivalent of, as you say, a factory interior, whenever they need to commute or go to the store.

Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory.

I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it. The problem is there is nowhere in this country where I could get that even if I wanted to (and the thought of moving to Europe disgusts me).

I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it.

As long as you don't work in one, you don't have to. As for commercial areas... there's usually not that much housing there and what housing there is, is on the lower end of the market, so you can pay your premium and not look at them all the time. Here is a pretty good example. Ugly, yes. But this is the suburb it's in. Don't want to stare at a "stroad"? Don't live on Route 10. There's lots of other space.

tfw your fellow forum-dweller posts a road that you have walked down multiple times as a "pretty good example" of an "ugly" "'stroad'"

On a serious note, I think you mixed up your links, as the first one and the second one are not in the same area.

Sorry, I have no idea why that link goes to Lexington Avenue now. I checked before I posted and it went to the right spot. In fact, when I cut and paste the link from the source it still goes to the right spot. I've replaced it with a Google Maps link to the same place.

The original version of the first link pointed to an unintended location (which apparently varied depending on who clicked on it) because it included multiple tildes, which were misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.

Yeah, when I hover over the "ugly" link the url says it's in New Jersey, but when I click it takes me to my own neighborhood. Which is several states away from the Garden State.

I figured it out. The first link points to an unintended location because it includes multiple tildes, which are misinterpreted as strikethrough formatting by this website's broken formatter.

Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created. The issue is that people live in suburbs that have the greenery and freedom of a city while having the services of a rural area forcing people to drive places.

The car based city layout makes people obese, is ugly as sin, and isn't functional as it is incredibly demanding to maintain.

Why do you even need an SUV to buy things? You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need. The SUV solves the problem the stroad created.

Do you have children? How many people do you need to buy groceries for? Have you ever needed to buy one (or multiple!) sheets of plywood? Do you own your own home, or do you rent an apartment?

Car/stroad haters seem to overwhelmingly be young, childless, apartment-renting city-dwellers. If you somehow aren't, then your critiques make no sense.

I lived in Europe as a missionary for two years. Carried all my shopping by hand either walking or on public transit. It sucked then, and I was 19 to 21 at the time and extremely physically active and only shopping for myself (my companion was carrying his own groceries). It would suck far more now.

In my big city (indeed the biggest) in Europe, what most people in the middle class and above do is order groceries 1x per week online. Because the city is so dense, the truck makes like 20 stops over a couple of hours and delivery fees are therefore very cheap. I pay $5 a month for unlimited deliveries, and all the groceries are the exact same price as in the store with no additional service charges or fees.

This accounts for all heavy items like detergent and bottled water, bulky bags of potatoes etc. Then for the rest of the week I either walk to the grocery store, deli/butcher or farmer’s market on Sunday (all a maximum of ten minutes’ walk) and get fresh meat/bread/pastries if I want them. This works pretty well and I never feel overburdened.

I could buy all my groceries every day in person with little additional nuisance, because there are multiple grocery stores in the five minute walk between my subway station and home and in the four minute walk between my destination subway station and my office. In that case, like many people, I’d just buy items in smaller purchases instead of once for the week or fortnight. But I prefer planning my meals.

I have family who live out in the suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut. Walking from the parking space to the store, around the huge and not very dense grocery store (since space in big warehouse stroad strip malls is cheap), and then back to the car likely covers a greater distance than many trips to and from (and around) the grocery store in dense cities on foot.

Walking from the parking space to the store, around the huge and not very dense grocery store (since space in big warehouse stroad strip malls is cheap), and then back to the car likely covers a greater distance than many trips to and from (and around) the grocery store in dense cities on foot.

LOL, no. The distance to the furthest spot to the store entrance in my suburban NJ grocery store shopping center is 600 feet. Nobody ever has to park that far away; those particular spots are only used by employees and other far spots are used by people going to other stores that are closer. More typically it's less than half that. Most places in Manhattan are more than 600 feet, never mind the typical lesser distances, from the grocery store. 600 feet is just over two short blocks in Manhattan, and less than a long block.

But I prefer planning my meals.

I thought i did too, because that was how my mother taught me, but when i stopped it was as if a massive weight came off my shoulders. Now i just shop every other day, buy what's on sale and make something from that. If me or the family happen to crave something specific I can adjust on the day. I plan like 1 meal a week and I love it.

Car/stroad haters seem to overwhelmingly be young, childless, apartment-renting city-dwellers. If you somehow aren't, then your critiques make no sense.

lol, on Reddit there is a nearly 1-1 overlap between childfree/fuckcars subs

I have three sons, do practically all the shopping and I have been doing just fine without a car for the past 4 years. If I lived in a suburb it would probably not be fun but I live in an urban area with a medium sized shop between me and the subway station. An alternative is of course having your groceries delivered, which is still far cheaper than owning a car.

On the rare occasion we actually need a car we just borrow or rent one. We found owning one was excessive for our current needs.

An alternative is of course having your groceries delivered, which is still far cheaper than owning a car.

Not always. in the long-run a car is cheaper. You pay a huge premium for delivery.

Not that big a premium. I'd have to buy groceries in excess of $5000 a month for car to just break even with home delivery.

You need other frequent or important uses of the car for it to be remotely economical.

That probably depends on location? Where I live grocery stores will deliver to you for free if you order more than €40 of food.

Yes, but how much do they charge for smaller orders, and how much do you pay each year to own a car? In the UK we pay £2–4 for delivery of a £40+ order every few weeks (buying the rest of what we need on foot, typically once a day on the way home from the station). Let's say we spend £150/y on delivery (certainly an overestimation). No car can be owned for so little, even if you could get insurance and fuel for free.

You could just walk a few blocks in a sensible city and get whatever you need.

Let me see you pick up two bags of 25 kg each rice and flour on foot. Or fill a bottle of propane.

No issue on a cargo bike. Also I prefer fresher food that buying tens of kg of food that is meant to be stored for years.

Because all of that is expensive. Expensive in your own time because you have to go to the store every day instead of once a week; expensive because the shops can't be megastores on relatively cheap land, and instead have to be studio apartments that sell bread or parsnips; expensive because the stores have to get their food delivered somehow, and if there is no road, that has to be done with some alternative, slower, more expensive implement than a truck.

"Sensible cities and walkable environments" is code for "we want to force people to use public transportation because cars give you too much freedom". And you really do not want to be forced to use public transportation in America.

That’s an entirely circular issue. “We chose to cede our cities and public spaces to the underclass and mentally ill drug addicts, so now public transport is scary and unsafe” is a political choice, not an inevitability. There are many countries in which public transport is clean, safe, well-policed and used by all classes except the super rich, even where those very same people have cars or can afford to drive. Long road trips are tiring, and on public transport you can read, work, or relax instead of performing the labor of driving.

It is a circular issue. But the ceding of America’s public spaces to the Visigoth marauders is something no municipal administration will ever, ever fix. So when sensible Americans hear “we should abolish cars for walkable cities and public transportation” they correctly hear “please step inside the rape tube”

If all of the policies that would reverse this state of affair are firmly outside the Overton window, then unfortunately it is an inevitability rather than a choice. The choice was made a long time ago.

What Overton window? If DOGE can dismantle executive agencies at will and we're discussing undoing birthright citizenship and annexing Greenland and Canada, then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?

If DOGE can dismantle executive agencies at will and we're discussing undoing birthright citizenship and annexing Greenland and Canada...

We are doing at most one of those things. It may yet turn out to be zero of those things, once the courts have their say. So there's not much reason to believe "let's lock up mentally ill drug addicts" is back on the table.

Mainly because crime is a local issue, not a federal one, and nearly every metro area is firmly under local single-party rule.

then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?

That would be logical, but logic doesn't have much power in the culture wars. Have you seen any evidence that's actually the case?

Additionally, if most people could walk to their local pub, drunk driving injuries/deaths would be almost nonexistent.

Only if all your friends also live within walking distance, which is unlikely in any case.

For what it’s worth, Japan did not have the issues with vagrants and crazy people on their trains - instead, we were packed in like sardines with people so close that I couldn’t hold my arms flat against my sides without touching someone (and I was noticeably a foreigner and a man - my sister had it far worse). I’d take time spent in traffic over the subway any day of the week.

That assumes that crime and vagrancy are the reason Americans don't embrace public transport. But these aren't problems everywhere. Pittsburgh transit doesn't have these problems, at least not to the degree that anyone has expressed concern about them. I used to rely on bus lines, including some that served bad neighborhoods, when I lived in the city, and the worst thing I had to deal with was poor people listening to shitty rap music with cheap headphones that didn't contain the sound well. While this may be one of the reasons that some people say it's relatively easy to live here car-free, most people still use their cars to get around, despite the fact that narrow streets and a dearth of easy parking doesn't make driving particularly easy, either.

And they also are denser or in other ways optimized for public transport. America , except for some cities, has never been optimized in this way.

No, this is a code for: "we want traditional European urbanism without traditional European rule of law"

Close. The issue is that they think they can have European urbanism without a European population.

It’s not the population. Public transport in Addis Ababa is literally cleaner and safer than in LA. It’s solely the rule of law and harsh (or not so harsh) treatment of the vagrant, violent underclass.

There isn't an inherent reason that public transportation has to be a mobile insane asylum. If we're fantasizing about tearing out stroads, we can throw that into the bargain too.

It's not that way in Scandinavia, or wasn't when I visited. It's just too bad the US doesn't have the demographics of Denmark.

(deleted and reposted because I posted one level too deep)

Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs. Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic. Police spend more time controlling drivers than any other mode of transport.

The issue in the US is a black crime issue. Instead of solving that issue the US has revamped its cities to socially isolate people by wasting vast sums of money on cars. The result is urban sprawl with low social cohesion with fat people driving around in cars with cops controlling them.

Cars don't give freedom. They are the most regulated form of transport. They require licenses, insurance following strict rules on the road and high costs.

Cars are both more regulated than other forms of transport, and still give more freedom than they do. The ability to go directly where you want, at the time you want, with the cargo you want, is that significant that it far outweighs everything else.

Most of the time a driver is stuck in traffic.

This is just plain false.

being stuck in traffic is offset by time waiting for the bus/train to come, stops, and so on. Except for maybe BART during heavy congestion, it is not faster.

it is not faster

I'm skeptical of this, and even if true, it doesn't matter. Economists have been wrestling with this issue for a long time, and the conclusion they always find is that people would rather be stuck in traffic in their own personal conveyance than stuck in public transport, as they value the privacy and control personal conveyance gives.

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I occasionally visit my parents for brunch.

How would you recommend I exercise my supposedly-increased freedom to travel without a car if I wanted to make a 100 km trip to a rural location that isn't on the route between two cities?

The cars came before the crime. Crime on public transit is a deal-breaker in many cases, but public transit has plenty of disadvantages before that. It's not door-to-door or even garage-to-parking lot, so there's a longer walk at each end. You have to wait for it. It has to stop all the time to pick up passengers. Passengers who aren't criminals are still often annoying, talking loudly or playing music or (usually children) crying and screaming. To make bus routes efficient, they tend to be circuitous so they take not only more time but more distance than driving. The target in transit is a "3-seat ride", which means changing vehicles twice with an additional wait each time; lesser destinations either are not served or require even more changes. When ridership is low they cut routes or limit hours; when it's high you end up standing for a long time or waiting for the next bus/train or both.

Cars give convenience , which is close enough. Public transportation is slow and a waste of time even if it saves a small amount of fuel. Time wasted waiting for the bus, bus stops, and then walking too and from the stops.

In many cities it is as fast if not faster. Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car. The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.

In many cities it is as fast if not faster.

Which cities?

I just checked my daily commute, and I'd have to leave an hour earlier and get home 45 minutes later if I had to take the bus. I could cut that down to half an hour each if my boss let me change my shift to match the busses, but that's still an hour a day on top of getting that accommodation.

Also for most things people don't need public transit, a short walk is faster than being stuck in a car.

A short drive is faster than a short walk. I've driven to the store literally 400 meters away (280 m as the crow flies) because I was in a rush and driving is faster than running.

You can criticize me for my poor planning, but I confirmed that it was faster by timing my next few trips. It wasn't a lazy misconception or a naive assumption.

The mindset of a car being convient because it allows people to travel far comes from people living in a dead suburb.

That's literally the majority of Americans, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. Are you saying they have a distorted mindset and are factually incorrect? That it's true for them (due to their bad circumstances), but the idea has spread to people it doesn't apply to? Is it a moral judgment?

In many cities it is as fast if not faster.

Not in any Canadian city, unless you happen to live right next to the trunk. A commute that would take 15 minutes by car ultimately ballooned to an hour by a combination of bus, train, and being on foot.

I would rather commute an hour by car. I can buy a car that is nice (I could even get one where the roof comes off), I don't have to worry about belligerent drunk people, schedules being offset so that the bus departs right before the train arrives for whatever reason, or worry about being stuck out late once the transit system has shut down for the night.

I know you said that you wanted to talk about "modern architecture" as a whole and avoid quibbling over the details, but, it really depends on what you're talking about specifically. It varies from building to building. I think that some modern architecture is quite pleasant!

I grouped modern architecture together in part because no studies I know of are conducted with the objective of quantifying architects and laypersons' preference evaluations for specific architectural trends, in general they just present their preferences for broad categories such as "traditional architecture" and "modern architecture". I also think that it's perfectly acceptable to use these broad categories to simplify analysis - despite the different modern architectural trends possessing some differing philosophies they also share a lot and the variance in the end result isn't super significant for someone not well versed in the history of architectural trends.

Perhaps that is not obvious to a person who's read about architecture for three thousand hours and can see all the tiny differences, but two different pieces of modern architecture will both still be perceived as generally minimal and stolid, and there will generally be a high level of correlation between your average layman's evaluations of the two buildings. It's not that an individual layman will have the same opinions on all modern architecture, in fact I think most don't, but a person who dislikes one modern architectural trend will also probably dislike others (again, this is as a general tendency, not saying this always holds true on a person-to-person basis). You will probably find high correlations between what people think of Walter Gropius' Fagus Factory (early modernist) and Robert Venturi's Guild House/Gordon Wu Hall (postmodern). In any case, doing large-scale analyses of broad groupings based on proximity in concept-space is kind of necessary to some extent unless you only ever want discussion to remain on the level of the individual house.

This goes back to at least Hegel (and by that I mean, he was certainly not the first human to ever find man-made beauty superior to natural beauty, but he did give it articulation as a self-conscious philosophical principle):

Hegel and the modernists (as well as the architectural tradition they spawned) are exceptional in this regard though. People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't. They literally take more effort to process and increases the amount of oxygen used by the brain. That same source notes "We then analysed images of apartment buildings, and found that over the last 100 years, the design of buildings has been departing further and further from the rule of nature; more and more stripes appear decade by decade, making the buildings less and less comfortable to look at."

I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space. When you walk into a gallery, you tacitly accept the fact that you are going to be seeing an individual artist's expression. The same is not true for public art, which has to be endured by people regardless of whether they want to see it - they have to work and play and travel in these spaces. I remember going into Union Station in Toronto and seeing a horrendous piece of art, Zones of Immersion, plastered all over the walls, it made me feel like I was boarding a train to Auschwitz. It sucked. It was terrible. It made me hate the artist for inflicting that travesty upon commuters that have to use the station day in, day out. In similar fashion every building an architect makes inherently has the ability to elevate or pollute the commons, and it makes me extremely annoyed when the government spends 250 million dollars worth of public money to erect monstrosities their citizens hate.

Personally, I like very weird, discordant music. I would not expect it to be played in a public square and especially not as a permanent fixture.

I've always thought that House IV was quite lovely! Whether I'd actually want to live in it is a separate question; but I don't judge a painting or a film by how much I'd want to live in it, so it's not clear why that constraint should be applied to architecture.

I'm glad you enjoy the look (given the studies linked in my post and in my comment to you here, I think that opinion might be a fringe one). But architecture is inherently part art, part design, and what makes it unique is that it doubles both as an aesthetic product and a tool which people want to use for its functionality as a living space. House VI indisputably fails at the latter, and in my opinion, the former as well.

I previously wrote some remarks defending Eisenman's philosophy of art if you're interested.

I'm almost deliriously exhausted so I may be retarded right now, but the way the post is structured, it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts; could you cite the sections which you consider as defending his philosophy?

People in general far prefer natural environments to man-made ones, studies on the topic have tended to show that people find landscapes that depart far from the rule of nature more uncomfortable than those that don't.

Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.

I would be fine with architects building these things if they were just making art for display in a dedicated space.

There have to be limits of some kind, of course. But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.

it's a bit unclear where the defence of Eisenman starts

The most relevant section is everything between "McGowan and Engley" and "the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean".

But within reason, I generally lean on the side of privileging the freedom of the (public) artist, regardless of the aesthetic preferences of the public who will be exposed to their work. If it's that important to you, then you should consider becoming an artist too. And if it's not sufficiently important to you, then you are at the mercy of the people to whom it was sufficiently important.

I'm not sure that this is coherent. If the artist has the freedom to put a sculpture of a gory corpse outside my house against my will, because that fits his conception of beauty, then do I not have the freedom to melt down his sculpture with a blowtorch against his will, because that fits my conception of beauty? Am I not also an artist, for making the world around me more beautiful as I see it?

You might say "well, he got approval from the government and you didn't", but since we're presupposing that the public agrees with me, and since this is presumably a democratic government that is supposed to follow the public will, for the government to give him and not me approval is an obvious bug, not intended behaviour.

Right, but there's a high correlation between the types of people who tend to prefer man-made beauty to natural beauty, and the types of people who tend to become artists. So their own aesthetic preferences get amplified and displayed to the public.

To what extent is this itself a modern phenomenon? Plenty of historical artists were obsessed with natural, including human, forms (e.g. da Vinci, Michelangelo, Durer). I could believe that the obsession with man made beauty is a "preversion" of the modern artistic class, but I don't see a reason why it should be so, or even why the members of the academy should have been replaced by those who don't care about natural beauty in the first place.

It's a highly modern phenomenon, and it was driven by many things - the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction, for example, since withdrawing from realism was a way to distinguish themselves and find something photography couldn't do. Of course, they didn't have to make the new style so ugly - Islamic art has long tackled non-representational visual style with incredible results which I think most of the public would enjoy, which leads me to my second point:

Artists previously conceptualised themselves as inevitably having to interact with the commercial world - many modern design schools were an attempt to distance themselves from this, to bring taste into the halls of academia, and this also meant they removed all sanity-checks on their vision of artistry. This is how you get things like Eisenman depriving his client of a master bedroom where the couple could sleep together, and depriving them of a staircase with a proper railing, and initially attempting to deprive them of bathrooms in-house. Mies van der Rohe made a building with only three positions for the blinds inside of them; allowing people to only open them fully, halfway, or have them completely closed, because the demands of life should not impose upon their artistic vision. In Tom Wolfe's book From Bauhaus to Our House, a sneering quote can be found from the director of the Museum of Modern Art "We are asked to take seriously the architectural taste of real-estate speculators, renting agents, and mortgage brokers!"

In many European art compounds it was not uncommon to announce something akin to "We have just removed the divinity of art and architecture from the hands of the official art establishment [the Academy, the National Institute, the Künstlergenossenschaft, whatever], and it now resides with us, inside our compound. We no longer depend on the patronage of the nobility, the merchant class, the state, or any other outside parties for our divine eminence. Henceforth, anyone who wishes to bathe in art’s divine glow must come here, inside our compound, and accept the forms we have created. No alterations, special orders, or loud talk from the client permitted. We know best. We have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future of architecture."

In contrast much art back then was "commercial" art understood to be made primarily for the benefit of wealthy patrons, and the first image that comes to mind whenever I think of a tremendous artist is Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, contorted in an uncomfortable position, paint dripping down onto his face, reading scripture intently so he could draw inspiration from the words of the Bible itself, and yet feeling so inadequate about his ability to rise to the task he literally believed it would destroy his reputation, as detailed in his poem about the painting of the chapel. He did not consider himself a painter and only acquiesced to the pope's pressure for him to take on the commission. But he singlehandedly made one of the most beloved pieces of Western art in existence.

Now consider this absolute hubris from Jan Tschichold's book The New Typography: "More than all pre­vious art, the art of today demands creative will and strength. Its aim is utmost clarity and purity. ... Is it then surprising that its representations at first baffle the unsophisticated viewer, who is used to something completely different, or even actually repel him? Lazy and hostile people are still trying to make it appear contemptible in the eyes of others. and describe it as nonsense. These are the same people from whose physical attacks Manet's "Olympia" had to be protected by the police, a picture that is today one of the most precious treasures of the Louvre. Their prattling is too empty and unimportant to be taken seriously."

Yes, artists being indulgent has always existed, and there's some continuity between the attitudes of artists then and today, but in general the difference in humility is incredible. It's been a trend of modern artists and designers to view themselves as beholden to nothing, with the public being seen as an irrelevant triviality. And that would also be my response to @Primaprimaprima above - dictatorships of taste have never sat right with me, and the purpose of public art is for, well, the public. For artists not to consider the effects of their work on the intended stakeholders is basically a dereliction of their intended function, IMO. The complete separation of art from commerciality or the actual people it's being made for, where they will fail to consider the public's preferences and instead opt for narcissistic works of self-edification, is one of the very many defects of modern artistic thought.

the arrival of decent photography in part drove the visual arts into increasing abstraction

Like modern art's relation to photography I feel your discussion of modern architecture is missing some mention of the development of novel materials. A great big part of why so much of it is steel beams, sheet glass and reinforced concrete or finished in synthetic colours and assembled with adhesives and rivets or such is because they were newly available and made what was previously impossible possible. Tie that in with the "truth to materials" attitude from the Arts & Crafts movement and you arrive at a distinctly industrial era aesthetic, both in the sense that the materials are made in a factory and the resulting buildings are often vaguely reminiscent of the factories where the materials were made.

Your first point is good and sounds reasonable.

Your second point is not clear to me. What is it that caused artists in the modern era to rebel against the tastes of their patrons? Why is it that these rebellious artists, rather than toiling in obscurity, actually became commercial successes with ample patronage?

It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed. This is kind of kicking the can down the road, because we can ask why the taste of patrons changed in the first place - but I'm comfortable saying that peoples' tastes change over time for some exogenous reasons, and sometimes they change for the worse.

It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed.

This would have been my hypothesis too if not for two things:

1: There are modern architects and artists, particularly very popular and in-demand ones with the most power to set taste, who actually seem to fail to give the client what they want. See Eisenman's House VI again as an example - he certainly felt comfortable depriving the client of much of what they found important. Again, there's also this comment from an architect under Scott's post on the traditional/modern divide in aesthetics, stating that architects do have some power to impose taste due to the fact that they possess skills the client needs, and that the client does not dictate everything. In Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, he notes "I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out."

2: Most people, including the upper class who have the power and financial wherewithal to commission these buildings, seem to prefer the style of traditional buildings as opposed to modern ones. See the studies linked in Part 1 of my original post, as well as the price premiums that traditional housing commands despite apparently similar construction costs (in part 3 of my original post); it doesn't seem to be the case that this proliferation of modern architecture is primarily a bottom-up, demand-driven phenomenon.

It's a copout, but I don't have a definitive answer for you as to why the public and the art world shifted so heavily out of phase, and how this situation continues to propagate itself. The bulk of my post tries to answer the question of what's happened, why there is such a persistent bifurcation between what is actually being produced and people's stated preferences, and I can't really come to a firm conclusion. I can only guess it's partly down to the maintenance of a strict academic/architectural hegemony and partly down to the influence of city-planning councils which are a nonrepresentative and generally trained group of people that have the power to approve or veto developments. Perhaps there's also some fashionability in there - academic opinion is high status and has the ability to dictate the choices of the public, not just the other way around, and once academic consensus regarding modern art was established it caused some segment of the elite to be willing to forfeit designs they personally enjoy for an attempt at signalling status. For some people, getting a house built by Frank Gehry in what is perceived as forward-thinking styling is more important than actually living somewhere they would most enjoy, and there are also many patrons like governmental institutions who don't actually live in the buildings they commission and may not actually like them but want to project an air of modernity, which isn't inherent to the style but is rather an aesthetic signal academics created once they deemed it the New Style, fit for the Age of Machine. In other words, academics dictate demand just as much as they respond to it.

It's a copout, but I don't have a definitive answer for you as to why the public and the art world shifted so heavily out of phase, and how this situation continues to propagate itself.

There's a very simple solution that I'm honestly surprised no one has voiced. I confess I have neither the knowledge nor rhetoric to conclusively prove this theorem beyond my passionate and amateur interest in house design and architecture, but it basically boils down thusly;

Architecture is heavily invested in Academics. Academics are very political. Therefor, it's reasonable to assume that Architecture is also heavily political and driven by politics.

When you trace 'Modern'(I use capital M for a reason) Architecture back to the Bauhaus movement and the entire reasoning behind it, I feel it becomes very obvious.

Then again, I am clearly biased, as I absolutely loathe Bauhaus and nearly everything it's influenced.

Two possibilities come to mind for a shift in power towards artists:

  1. Better coordination of artists through the academy, unifying artistic taste and coordinating the shunning of defectors.
  2. Most patronage is now distributed by committees not individuals. Individuals seem to have stronger personal sensibilities and more confidence asserting them.

Artistic defectors have been shunned for hundreds of years. Off the top of my head, the Vienna Secession and the Exhibit of Rejects both consisted of artists with heterodox styles that couldn't find a place in the academy and had to strike out on their own.

More comments

You could argue that the mere act of creating art at all is already an admission that there is something deficient or lacking in nature such that it needs to be supplemented by human creation.

And artificial/non-natural subject matter has always existed in art, see for example Hieronymus Bosch or the three headed Jesus paintings.

But why does man-made beauty need to be something normies hate? As a strong example, consider traditional bonsai, which is primarily about making things more natural than nature. Theres also a strand of modern industrial design which isnt forcefully minimalist;the things it makes are not usually beautiful, but they are cool, and in certain product categories very popular. The architecture version is the glassbox skyscraper, which is not super popular but propably some of the best of modernism.

But why does man-made beauty need to be something normies hate?

Well, there was that one study where architects actually are psychologically incapable of seeing beauty like a normal person. (I know it was linked on here, but I can't find it).

But really, it's all about how the general public perceives the designer's intentions. Dropping an intentionally-ugly structure in the middle of the city is basically a giant fuck you to its residents, whether the designers meant it that way or not (and given the demeanor and... political persuasion of the average artist, I think this happens more than anyone wants to admit).

We already know government buildings are designed with brutalist architecture in mind simply to make them seem more imposing, powerful, and official, so it's not exactly far-fetched that rich patrons (or groups of patrons) commission [modern] art for that purpose as well.

Why is modern architecture so bad, and so common?

This is more like one person's opinion than a matter of fact

the WTC facade, composed of tridents situated above the square aqueduct-like arches of the foyer, was an example of visually pleasing modern architecture. it does not always have to be bad.

This is more like one person's opinion than a matter of fact

More like an (admittedly exaggerated for effect) statement of general public evaluation, supported by multiple studies of preference linked within the post itself.

the WTC facade, composed of tridents situated above the square aqueduct-like arches of the foyer, was an example of visually pleasing modern architecture. it does not always have to be bad.

I don't like the WTC. That being said I realise it does not always have to be bad, and there's even a piece of modern architecture I actually do like in my own city - the Sydney Opera House. Unfortunately I also understand that most of what people have constructed does not live up to this standard in the slightest, most of it falls far short of even the most pedestrian traditional buildings, and even with the Opera House I find it works better as an isolated structure rather than an overarching aesthetic for most of the city.


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