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Notes -
India is collapsing
The attack in Kashmir last week led to a lot of outrage and public statements about it from Pakistan. I am posting about the direction the so called "Nazi Hindu right" party took. They announced a caste census.
India has massive hbd spikes, when you go from the middle castes to the upper castes. I do not consider China-style entrance tests to be the best metric, they make for even worse policies. India in a fit of leftism, upon its modern conception post independence in 1947 mandated affirmative action of less than 30 percent, which got stretched to 50 with the Mandal commission in the 90s. Affirmative action and bioleninism are two genies that you cannot put back in a bottle.
Currnetly you have cases where people who score a literal zero in exams can teach math, you can get your neighbor jailed without proof by alleging he used a castiest slur wherein the government will give you 8 hundred thousand indian rupees or about 10k USD within a week of filing that case, under the SC ST act, a worthy rabbithole to check out for the more curious ones. You even get money for marrying people of other groups, thousands of USD actually in some states.
The caste census is a death blow. The nation is not industrialised, and real estate, basic amenities like running water, avoiding land grabbing, and education are out of bounds for most. Land grabbing and owning a house is nearly impossible, even with high incomes, without a back-breaking mortgage. This leads to people wanting to get employed by the government and that is done via exams. In each exam, you have to present a caste certificate if you are "backwards" and by Central Law, anything government-related has to have at least nearly 50 percent if not more sanctioned for people of backwards bent. In case a few of them score higher, they are allotted spots in the "Open" list as opposed to the "backwards" one. So even the 50 percent that the "upper castes" get is not truly for them. Most if not all people who get decent posts indulge in illegal things. Kickbacks are the only way to afford a house.
Modi and the BJP are using the caste census as a way to distract people from their inaction with the Kashmir issue. The census will show that the evil upper castes make up close to 10 percent of the nation, therefore, even 50 percent is too much. Places like Bihar are already pushing it, and frankly, this is India's fate. The country's economic slowdown is not going to stop the chery on top is that the Indian Armed Forces is nearly 95 percent upper caste. The army is also the only place where you do not have any affirmative action as even the bioleniniss know that would be stupid because the army actually has to win wars. Bridges collapse here regularly from shit engineering but people learn to live with that, wars are not a place you want to fuck with. The people who serve right now, their own kids, will not get to have good career outcomes.
Sure, you have state-wide bans or attempts at them on everything, crypto, proton mail, signal but what will fix that is ensuring more people leave. I have zero issues with any castes, the post illustrates a deeper point, which has to do with the universal nature of culture war. Anti caste scholars saw the backwards people as blacks and their own people as whites. And now, you end up in a state where posting any of this risks jail time. When Spandrell wrote bio leninism, he used the examples of minorities in Europe, but that very concept describes India way better.
The Indo Aryans were not pot-bellied soydevs, they were capable people, the majority was always the underclass, but it was closer to 90 than today's 99. something percent. Each year, you see people get visibly dumber. Plenty of Canadians are right to blame their boomers for selling them out by allowing an influx of the subcontinent's underclass. Today, I can relate to that sentiment. The elders here simply gave up without a fight, and now you are left with less social upward mobility. The entry-level IT sector and customer support people will get replaced fiarly soon, what then happens to the hordes of not-so-smart engineers and the economic fallout? Another proposal is to mandate state recommendations for social justice in private firms. This has not been enacted yet, but I will not be surprised even if it is.
Nothing is ever enough, they have land ceilings here to thwart to the evil upper caste from owning all the land and even had large scale land redistributions (hello south Africa) but nothing is ever enough. The upper caste male exists to pay taxes and fight wars. He does not get to enjoy any benefits and his leaders like the Canadians want him dead. Instead of making an example out of kashmiri "youth", the government showed a middle finger to its capable people on the frontlines. You can't own guns in the nanny state, now you won't get to be upper middle class either. The nation is doomed and pajeet elites deserve bad things, the kind that would be considered fed posting. I'm critical of most migration advocates as filling your nation with third world underclass and soydevs is a good way to end up with India like issues. Some is beneficial but letting large amounts of genetic rejects from Indian or Pakistani Punjab is suicidal.
They'll mandate the affirmative action policies in all things private too, schools, jobs, unis. It's over. It's actually over. Here is the leader of the opposition posting about it.
I know this isn't the main thrust of your post, but it reminded me of a blog post that was trending on Hacker News sometime this past week. It basically describes the author's disillusionment with the academic "industry" in Romania after an influx of EU funding to increase the number of PhDs in the late aughts.
I'm becoming more convinced that creating an actual education system (one that creates highly skilled intellectual workers) is nontrivial and probably rare throughout history, and it's far too easy to create systems that LARP or cargo-cult education instead of actually performing education. Authoritarian regimes seem to have a knack for creating systems of alternative science that are more palatable to their dear leaders and their cronies than whatever "mainstream" science they are supplanting. It's almost as if the deck is stacked against humans and scientific progress is an unnatural status quo that we've lucked into because of certain post-enlightenment conditions?
This is also me positing nurture over nature - that humans have quite a bit of potential but the difference between a real education system and one that LARPs as an education system is staggering in terms of the intellect of the people it produces. There's a bit of big fish little pond / little fish big pond in there as well (speaking from firsthand experience).
I do think the problem is that we can’t crack the problem of teaching. There are other issues.
First, doing it right means a lot more work for the administration, teachers, and students. If you want people to understand a topic, they must understand it more deeply than simply being able to repeat back the summary at the end of the chapter and do curated problem sets that never deviate from the examples in the textbook. To learn about history, you need to read a lot of history— cover the same events from multiple perspectives, read accounts from the various groups involved, and to write an attempt to answer questions about what is going on, what various factions believe and why they believe it, and how those beliefs shaped their actions. To understand science, you have to learn to ask questions and figure out how to find answers, you have to understand what the laws of physics actually mean. No one actually teaches this way because it’s a lot of work for everyone and because it doesn’t work at industrial scale, it’s expensive. It’s far far cheaper to lecture at a bunch of bored children out of a textbook, assign the problems at the end of the chapter and move on to the next lesson. You don’t need to spend time reading the answers or figuring out what they understand, just go grab the teacher’s guide, open up to the answers to the assignment and mark papers. Further, you can have much larger class sizes when the model is “lecture, assign homework,” rather than class discussion, essays writing, and reading multiple sources. To properly have a discussion in which everyone can participate, you can’t really have more than 10-12 kids in a room. In the traditional classroom, you can have thirty or more.
Second, having a population that is not well educated — at least beyond the ability to do whatever jobs the ruling class needs them to do — is beneficial for the ruling class. A population who can’t critically reason cannot question the narratives they encounter. A population trained on the Pavlov’s dog model of education where what matters is repeating back what the authorities told them is in no position to rebel even when it’s clearly in their best interests. A population that has no experience of looking into questions for themselves is sunk. They believe themselves educated, they have the appropriate credentials. They can do whatever job they are hired to do, but beyond such things, they can’t understand their world. And because they don’t understand it and don’t know how to fix the gaps, they revert back to what they learned in school, sit down, shut up, and obey the experts, and don’t question things.
Your response made me reflect on my own secondary education, where my school district certainly punched above its demographic weight in terms of educational quality. When I look back at it in terms of my personal experience, I remember specific teachers who were highly effective and probably had a profound impact on the way I think and reason about things. I also had plenty of teachers who were completely uninspiring and gave no indication during class that they had an IQ above room temperature (maybe they were different in their personal life). I actually don't think about the textbooks or exam structures at all, but maybe that's because it's a bit easier to remember human beings rather than pens and paper.[1]
In retrospect, I think what made those highly effective teachers exceptional is that they really seemed to know more than I could imagine even learning at that time in my life. They also seemed genuinely keen on sharing not just that knowledge, but in little ways their own personal philosophies on how to properly learn. Is the "industrial scale" version of this identifying these highly effective teachers at scale, properly compensating them, and just letting them loose on our youth?
Tying into the second paragraph of your response, I think I just got real fucking lucky that my father's blue collar job transferred him to a semi-rural Midwestern town that somehow managed to gracefully keep up with the regional transition from a populace working on assembly lines to working in cubicles. Our sister city across the county line didn't fair nearly as well: it smelled twice as shitty, had 75% of the median household income, and sent almost no one to our state's flagship university. The question it provokes: what's the incentive structure for the ruling class for organizing education in these two cities over the coming years?
My perspective comes from both my own efforts at self education and watching my sister in law teach at a public school.
The thing is that you can’t teach yourself using the standard industrial program intended for use in the public school system. It doesn’t work well to produce understanding of the material in the sense that you can use it to either understand other things or solve problems. You might be able to recognize a fact. You know the procedures to solve algebra equations but you don’t know how to think about them in ways that allow you to solve problems that tge text hasn’t presented yet. Nor can you use facts to draw logical conclusions. In short the method is wonderful if the goal is to get a very basic baseline of knowledge and don’t care if it the student understand it or learn to think for themselves about the information or to critically think about the sources being used.
Now having used a method similar to the older classical method, it works a lot better for producing and understanding of the material. If I learn how to do all the steps of algebra and mathematical calculations, then I should understand enough to approach a problem that’s just beyond what the text explicitly teaches. Or if I read a history and understand what all the actors are doing and why they are doing that, you can compare events and come to understand something about how those kinds of things happen. If you read literature in its historical context and culture you’ll have a better understanding of what the author was intending to get across.
The problem of course is that individual close study of a subject is almost impossible in a large classroom. Classrooms with 35 squirmy kids are simply not suited to have a discussion. They’re built for the lecture and textbook model that they were designed to accommodate. Classical education does not scale up to traditional school class sizes. The model is based on discussion, and beyond a certain class size you simply cannot have a discussion.
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