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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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I think it’s a problem of weakness of the underlying dogmas under scrutiny. If you have a dogma that absolutely falls apart on contact with reality, it isn’t good to create a population that is able to think carefully about reality. In fact, you’d want a population almost exactly like our own, in which people are taught trades and given university degrees, but aren’t actually taught to observe or think and who are basically scientifically illiterate and unable to read and understand complex texts.

It’s not hard to get right, as high levels of scholarship were achieved quite often before the modern era. Teach kids how to learn, give them tools to observe and interpret their own data, to think carefully about ideas. It’s borderline criminal that we aren’t doing that: teaching logic and statistics and philosophy would create a generation of thinkers with the tools to question narratives.

We aren’t doing that, and judging by how things are, it’s being torn down on purpose as anything that actually produces a good outcome seems to end quickly because of accusations of racism.

If you have a vision for building a better society, you would also be obsessed with improving competence.

This just begs the questions "better in what ways" and "more competent in what?" If the ideologues really do think that, e.g., racism, prejudice, and just plain old meanness are the cause of all society's ills, why wouldn't it make sense for them to honestly invest in educational systems that try to be more competent at not being mean to kids, and similarly try to be more competent in teaching kids to not be mean themselves?

I agree with you that technical skill and competence is quite important, and that modern education is not geared towards fostering it. In fact, I think that modern education is quite prepared to suppress competence when it tends to produce outcomes which do not appeal to modern progressive aesthetic or moral sensibilities, and that this tendency is extremely bad. However, I don't think that your criticism shows hypocrisy - to the contrary, it shows the dangerousness of the earnest belief in bad ideas.

Depending upon what you need people to accept for the first part, I’m not sure that you can do both. If I want kids to accept an ideology that says the earth is flat, then competent understanding of physics would work against that.

Most of the true believers were poorly-educated themselves, and usually have no extracurricular skills, so they have no frame of reference for what excellence would actually look like (except high marks in school). Therefore, they can believe truly without having any idea of what to actually do to achieve their goals.

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