site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   30663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:

The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.

The article notes one reason why:

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.

Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.

The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."

This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.

None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

Most middle class kids never work at Mcdonalds or a similar place (not that there is anything wrong with that). They, in my day, worked as supplemental workers at a place that needed an infusion of labor. I worked at a factory where books were distributed.

I've been trying to nail down what I find so off-putting and alienating about the way you express your opinion.

It brings to mind the social structure of the Qing dynasty, who puts the working class - the peasantry, workers and artisans, and merchants - above entertainers, soldiers, low-level bureaucrats. For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone. That someone has to do the hard work so that you can spend all day doing intellectual and creative things is a basic fact that is the root of nobless oblige.

Every elite class that has ever existed recognizes the need to respect their lessers for doing this.

But you don't.

The fact that your contempt is so nakedly obvious, and that you're either foolish or conceited enough to not have the grace to keep it to yourself. You are not a wise man. You are not an intellectual sticking it to the hidebound hicks who don't recognize your genius.

You are Grima Wormtongue.

I had over 100k posts on the Misc. section of an mma message board where we all basically did what we do here, with a much lower base IQ.

Not once did anyone’s insults start with the Qing dynasty and the forum was much less because of the lack.

I have respect for the value of work. I do not agree with this notion that digging.a ditch with a shovel is "nobler" than digging a ditch with machinery, which is itself more noble than writing software for the ditch-digging machine. That's poverty fetishism and third worldism.

For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone.

Conservatives and the far-right never seem to have this respect when the person who picked their fruit or sewed their underwear is an immigrant or a foreigner.

You don't seem to understand the basic shape of a pyramid.

When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair. But you don't care about that. The fact they yearn for the old terms of their social contract is somehow a moral failing and poverty fetishism on their part, according to you.

There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake! You owe them your consideration, more than any immigrant or foreigner.

You can imagine Iskander Al-Turok, Qatari sheik, smugly and arrogantly say that Qataris are above the enfeebling drudgery of taking care of infants and washing toilets, as he locks his Bangladeshi maid's passport in his wall safe. What's the difference? What's the difference between an UAE princeling letting his hirelings die in the desert heat building soccer stadiums without a water break and a Californian farmer overseeing his Mexicans work sixteen hour work days?

If the people doing this work were their countrymen, they would not be treated so pitifully.

Why is this evil necessary?

With all due respect, given the choice between your respect and your contempt, I'd pick the latter. I know who you adore and admire: to be put amongst the ranks of those men would surely damn my immortal soul.

Okay, you are allowed to express contempt for views, but not for individuals. Yes, it's easy to read between the lines how much you hate someone in a seethingly angry post, but nonetheless, personal attacks are not allowed and you've clearly crossed the line into personal attacks.

I am frustrated with him. I go to all the effort of taking him seriously, and he gives me, what, a two-liner?

Not to say that there should be a minimum reply word count, but I've found AT to be infuriatingly evasive. He never, ever, addresses the main thrust of my argument, only sniping around the edges with snarky remarks.

He refuses to speak plainly. Honestly, at this point, I wonder why he even bothers. I would argue with him if he presented an argument, instead of constantly updating us on his twitter beefs. But he doesn't.

Unless he's willing to defend himself, he should stop making top-level posts. He has a substack, if he wants to sneer at right-wing dudebros without responding to them. Or whatever ideology he professes. So as far as I know, he hasn't even made that position clear.

This has not gone unnoticed. But you still can't just attack people.

Mhm.

I apologize. From now on, I'll just won't engage. Sorry, I'm being an ass.

When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair.

Once more confirmation you people think whites are an inferior race incapable of competing with Guatemalans. I have a much more positive view of white people.

There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake!

They don't exist, as the unemployment rate confirms.

No one is arguing that the work is nobler and that everyone should be doing it, they're arguing that it is noble that if it is to be done, and that machines are not the most efficient way to do it, then it should be done by legal citizens at whatever rate is necessary to be paid to incentivize it, and not by imported slaves.

should be done by legal citizens at whatever rate is necessary to be paid to incentivize it, and not by imported slaves

This seems to imply that employers have infinite resources to pay whatever rate is necessary to incentivize citizens to do it. In reality it may simply not get done.

imported slaves

Voluntary workers are not slaves. But I supposed I could yes-chag.jpg it. They're slaves, so what? The government should put the interests of American citizens first.

infinite resources

Supply curves slope upwards.

No, people listened to Wormtongue.

I don't disagree but you're probably going to want to delete this before you catch a (justified) ban.

Meh. Alex posts a ton of top-levels, and they all have a "working out personal psychodramas" taste to them. At some point meta discussion about those dramas becomes justifiable.

No doubt, and I'll be first in line to complain about him, but this place still maintains a standard when it comes to outright name-calling.

There shouldn’t be a specific taboo on psychologically analyzing another poster’s motivations, or making meta observations about their style of argument or topics of interest, as long as the comment otherwise meets the normal standards of cordiality. Such observations are often extremely germane to the discussion.

(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)

(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)

I did not expect someone to miss a LOTR reference on TheMotte. Ever.

Truly, the youth of today are uncivilized barbarians.

No LotR experience either! Outside of half paying attention to the movies when friends/family were watching them when they first came out.

Now if you referenced Japanese pop culture I’d have a much better chance of picking that up…

Grima Wormtongue

From the same article:

Surprisingly, teens from high-income households are more likely to have summer jobs than those from low-income households. The Department of Labor found that in 2023 households earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year had teen summer employment rates of 46%. For households earning less than $60,000, it was below 30%.

This might seem counterintuitive. You’d think rich teens would have the luxury to spend their summers traveling or pursuing hobbies, while working-class teens have to work to save for college and other expenses. It turns out that teen jobs are actually the luxury.

Statistically speaking, the households in the middle to upper-middle class are more likely to have teen summer jobs than poor households. Maybe there is something to learn from the wealthiest group in America. Asian kids growing up in households where they have to study all day would probably benefit from having a summer job in a customer facing role since they would learn to interact with larger segments of the population, which would improve social and communication skills. Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.

Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

The reason conservatives are not dominating top tier colleges is not because their kids worked a summer job.

There is a significant reason for the drop in teenager summer jobs that the article does not address or mention, which is the increase in the minimum wage. It's simply more expensive to hire people now than in 1950. Wealthy neighborhoods are less impacted because businesses there have more money to be able to afford to hire temporary work. Meanwhile, most businesses in low income neighborhoods are operating on razor-thin margins. They might have been able to afford teenagers to work for $5 an hour, but at $15 or higher they simply cannot afford to anymore. Cheap labor is one of the main reasons to hire a teenager over any other demographic; make all labor more expensive and there is less of a reason to hire teenagers.

One factor is immigration. Many of the jobs formerly held by teens are now held by immigrants, especially in food service, by far the most popular industry for teen workers. High-immigration states have the lowest teen summer employment rates, including California (24%), New York (29%), Nevada (24%), and Texas (29%). The states with the highest teen summer employment rates, at 75% and 67%, are Maine and Vermont.

Factor in immigration, which increases the supply of labor, and it's obvious why teen summer jobs are on the decline. If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead? It's not Maine and Vermont that's responsible for the drop in the nation-wide teenager employment rate.

I speculate the the higher income families might also have more connections with which to secure their kids summer work. All of my summer jobs as a teen and in college came from connections, not randomly dropping applications or otherwise cold approaching employers. Living in a higher income area probably helps too; one of my summer jobs was working at the boat service center at a private marina.

I would guess that Upper-middle class have summer jobs that requires certifications (like lifeguarding), managing your own client list (like tutoring and babysitting), and internships programs. Jobs that were more difficult to outsource to immigrants.

Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.

Something tells me high school Asians working on their “soft skills” more will do little for their college admissions plight, and be negative for their plight if it comes at the opportunity cost of grade-, test-, or extracurricular-grinding.

At least in the case of Harvard, the supposed awful soft skills and personalities of Asian applicants were telepathically diagnosed by members of the admissions committee from afar, sight unseen, and somehow overlooked by the wrong-thinking alumni interviewers who met and interacted with said applicants in person.

Depending on the summer job it could be considered as one of the extracurriculars in your college application.

The competition Asian applicants have for top-tier colleges are other Asian applicants. If all they have are high academics, their chances of getting in are low. If they had all the extracurriculars on top of academics, well they likely didn't need the summer job to stand out and have likely built their soft skills in stuff like sports/debate/etc. When you consider the students that only have their academic scores to stand on, it is likely their soft skills are not as developed as peers that have more than the academic scores. It's this group that could potentially benefit.

A lot of colleges claim their goal is to create a diverse student body group. Whether or not you agree with this, it's true that a lot of colleges and universities after reaching a certain number of the "smart Asian student" archetype will stop accepting more Asian students. Hence, why colleges that didn't have affirmative action like UCLA have significantly higher Asian student populations. There are probably smart, well-spoken Asian students that got rejected from colleges because there are Asians. But there are also smart, awkward Asians who got rejected because they didn't look the interviewer in the eye and stumbled over their words. Yes, Asians have a higher hurdle to enter the top level colleges. Some people would call it bullshit, but your goal should be to minimize the potential checks that could weed you out.

I don't have any stats at the moment so I'll speak from personal experience. I'm Asian and I had a lot of Asian friends, and literally none of us spent the entire summer studying. Sure, some of did stuff like SAT prep school, but that didn't exactly take up the whole summer... it was like a once or twice a week thing. Basically a few hours a week. If you have to spend the entire summer studying just to keep up to the point you don't have the time to hold down a summer job then you'll probably struggle in college relative to your peers that just fucked around and got similar scores to you. Of all of us that got 1500 or higher on the SAT, the ones that got into the top tier schools like Harvard/Stanford/CalTech also just happened to be the most social and well-spoken of the bunch. Personality might be difficult, perhaps impossible, to objectively measure, but it's not like it doesn't matter either.

That being said, my experience might be less and less relevant. From I last remember Harvard lost the case on affirmative action and checking the class of 2028 numbers it seems the number of accepted Asian students have gone up (37% same as previous year, but class of 2026 says 27% which is a significant jump). https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/harvard-releases-race-data-for-class-of-2028/

I wasn't able to find the percentage of Asian applicants that got admitted, only the percentage of accepted applicants that were Asian. It's possible more Asians are applying to Harvard after the supreme court decision.

Also found this chart which is pretty interesting:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/15/does-harvard-discriminate-against-asian-americans-in-college-admissions/

It's a graph of the "personal" rating applicants to Harvard received, split between Harvard Staff members versus Harvard Alumni.

And in the article linked: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/andrew-gelman-sharad-goel-daniel-e-ho-affirmative-action-isnt-problem/

Among the most competitive applicants, the graphs show that Harvard staff are still more likely than alumni to rate whites more favorably than Asian Americans. In the top academic decile of applicants, Harvard staff put 23 percent of Asian Americans and 31 percent of whites in the top two personality categories. In contrast, alumni interviewers gave this group of Asian and white applicants these top ratings at much closer rates (64 percent and 66 percent, respectively).

Like you said, Harvard staff members were harsher on Asians relative to how alumni did the scoring, but across the board both groups rated a lower percentage of Asians top scores for personal relative to other races. Harvard staff was also harsher on all races across the board relative to alumni scoring. There probably is bias, but there is probably also some truth to the personal rating, at least based on my personal experiences of academically gifted Asians. There were Asians that got top scores on personal and Asians that didn't - what was the difference maker? I don't think luck on who interviewed them is the full answer. Even if it was true Asians would have to do better to get the same "personal" score, it's not as if there is absolutely nothing you can do to become a better speaker or to be more charismatic.

Also interesting to note that the students that did the best academically also tend to do the best on personality. The bottom 25th percentile score at Harvard is 1500, so these are all top 1% students from the country. I'm curious if the people rating the personal score had any idea about the person's actual academic scores, but it's all speculation at this point.

If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead?

Higher IQ, ability to speak English fluently, lack of third-world habbits.

Interesting post! I agree that all things being equal, a summer job is a great way to spend time. I did a couple summer jobs, but also spent a few summers just playing video games nonstop from sunrise to well past sundown. Personally I think if I was forced to get a summer job every summer, I would've developed a lot more virtue overall.

I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever? To understanding how the other half lives, so to speak?

Or are you just saying that being in touch with the working class isn't good strictly in the sense of getting into an Ivy League school?

I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever?

To a small extent, sure.

The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.

  • -12

There is a problem here, and the problem is you.

The problem, specifically, is that you post a lot of these kinds of sneering borderline kinda-making-a-point-but-mostly-just-sneering comments, and increasingly people are getting frustrated and angry and snapping at you, and then we have to mod those people (because you are not allowed to attack someone) and it's starting to look very much like this is your game.

Sometimes we ban someone not because any one post was terrible but because their overall effect on the community is so negative that there seems little value in allowing them to keep throwing shit. We don't like to do it; it's very subjective. We can't read your mind. Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy. But we've warned you enough, and you keep doing exactly the same thing, that I suspect you know what you're doing and you're doing it on purpose.

So I'm telling you now: stop it. Or I will propose to the rest of the mods that you should be banned under our catch-all egregiously obnoxious category.

Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts like this? Arguably this post and this post are borderline too. If the issue with this post is that it's making a generalization of a group in a somewhat mean way, then there'd be plenty of posts the mods ought to come down on even in just the past few days. There's also WhiningCoil's post comparing nonwhites to "virulent invasive species" that's been sitting for over 24h without mod action, although you said up above that you weren't equipped to handle that one so OK I guess, as long as it eventually gets handled.

If the issue is that other people are getting triggered and snapping at him, they should be the ones to pay the price alone. Otherwise it's just an informal rule of "anyone who goes against the dominant ideology on this forum (i.e. leftists) gets banned eventually when people get mad at them". The 3 borderline posts I linked don't have this problem because they're going with the dominant ideology.

My personal opinion is that none of these should be warned/banned, except for maybe WhiningCoil's that's a little too egregious.

Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts...

Amadan has given you sufficient explanation, but let me add to it. First, nobody reported those posts, I hadn't seen them before you linked them. Second, every single one of those links is to a user with recent AAQCs. You yourself enjoy the benefit of the doubt in that you have accumulated 3 AAQCs and just one warning over the course of at least three years of activity.

By comparison, in four months, Turok has accumulated eight warnings from three different moderators, including our most left-wing moderator!

Can you see why we might be starting to think that this is not a person who posts in good faith?

(And yes, we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned. One thing I will say for them, typically the most vocal radical leftist trolls take their ban as a badge of pride and go brag about it to credulous strivers in other communities who imagine this place to be somehow "alt-right." That is a pleasant change from the alt-right trolls, who often proceed to wage DM campaigns throwing every accusation and epithet imaginable in our direction. I don't know why it shakes out this way, but it does!)

It's fine to use AAQCs as giving a higher threshold to ban someone, but it shouldn't give them a higher threshold for warnings. If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is. This helps good-faith posters stay within the lines and helps build a sense of consistency in what types of actions are rule-breaking. Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for:

conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities

While I can scroll down a bit and find this type of post not receiving such treatment, thus implicitly being seen as fine enough:

The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits

we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned

For the record, I'm not saying you guys never ban right wing posters

If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is.

There is just not enough moderator time in the day for that. If someone's comment doesn't get reported, it is very unlikely to get moderated (that would require one of us to just happen across the comment). Of the comments that do get reported, probably a majority of them are plausibly rule breaking, but I'd be shocked if we actually moderated even one of those in ten. I cannot tell you how many times I've thought, "Yeah, I agree that's a bit low effort/antagonistic/whatever, but it's six replies deep and seems approximately within community norms and the metamoderation is low-certainty and it's not part of a pattern of bad behavior, it's not worth the effort." Or--"Oh, this is also a pretty bad comment, but I just moderated this user for the same thing in a different thread, do I need to say more here? Nah, I'll catch them next time."

And yeah--"oh, this is a super quality poster, I'm just gonna let it slide this time" is definitely on the list of time saving excuses. But never fear! We have in the past banned quality posters eventually. It's just a much more protracted and painful process.

It is certainly possible for a comment to be sufficiently bad that I will ban a user on sight, first offense, no questions asked, no matter how many AAQCs they have. But barring those egregious violations of the rules, we are actually almost always moderating with an eye toward patterns of behavior more than we are moderating for precise adherence to the rules in specific cases. Indeed, the rules themselves are only in service of the foundation. This is not a sport where we are calling balls and strikes based on high-precision measurements; this is the messy work of curating a community dedicated to the practice of disagreement!

So when you say--

Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for...

--and then you provide a direct quote, you've already missed the mark. That user is getting dinged, not for any particular statement, but for an increasingly established pattern of behavior.

I looked at the three examples you provided as bad posts and they don't seem to be the same level of bad as some of Turok's post. Obviously I am biased so I may be blind to the stake in my eye but I'm going to give it some effort.

If making a statement about a group that could be considered negative is mean then you can never have any discussions about anything. The difference is the negative statements about the groups in the three posts are about specific behaviors and aren't just calling the groups names. It's part of an argument that could be challenged. And then you have to consider how people response to criticisms/challenges of an argument. I don't think I've ever seen Turok acknowledge someone made a good point and he usually only responds to direct questions. It is infuriating to have a conversation with someone that never engages or acknowledges your strongest points and only nitpicks your weakest points. Which is an effective tactic in a debate, but then it's not really a proper conversation in good faith. It's even more infuriating when the same line of reasoning that was never addressed is then repeated in future posts.

I actually didn't see anything in 2rafa's post that could be considered a generic mean statement about a group. The worst thing I could see is this statement.

An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America

But that's actually a conclusion in an argument, something that can be challenged and dismantled if one provides evidence otherwise. It's not a statement like "hispanics are trash", even if you think it is implied that's not what is stated. If the implication is bad dismantle the argument.

Sohois says the African "immigrants are much lower quality" but this is followed by a list of characteristics that could be challenged. If the Africans in Europe aren't lower quality to hispanics in America, they must be the same or higher quality. If you take issue with that statement, can you provide evidence proving otherwise?

Worst thing I could see in Sloot's comment is this initial statement

The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, but she will complain men are BORING with no sense of irony. Men have the burden of performance.

This is a statement about a group's actions and behaviors. You can challenge this statement. Is Sloot wrong? It could be implied sloot thinks the modal chick is dumb but sloot doesn't actually make that statement.

Meanwhile Turok's post:

The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.

I consider myself leaning more conservative, I went to a top tier university and I have a degree. I know many people who have gone to high tier universities. An increasing amount of them are leaning more conservative as time goes on. So from my experience his statement is incorrect. Perhaps if we really want to be technical, I'm being uncharitable here and my point doesn't actually address his claim, but he hasn't provided any evidence for his point. Are higher percentages of people with no college degrees becoming conservative? What exactly are third-rate colleges and are they producing more conservative leaders than before? He might be correct that conservatives have been losing in institutional powers like academia but that's not the claim he made here.

Also, there's something about this line of thinking that I have issue with. It's as if I said bananas are the food of poor people. Poor people do eat bananas so it's technically true. But what if I made this statement to a group of rich people using bananas as part of their morning smoothie? What was the purpose of making that statement? What's the implication here?

His statement on how conservatives are smoking copium about how noble manual labor is - this seems like making a mountain of a molehill. I see no concerted effort from conservatives in trying to push summer jobs to kids. Until conservative right adjacent sphere tiktok and social media is full of influencers bemoaning how the youth should be getting a summer job because it's going to teach them the value of hard labor one article from one conservative leaning site doesn't really mean much. I haven't seen this talking point in like years until I saw this post.

I have never heard of the group CommonPlace until yesterday. Their twitter has less than 5k followers. Linked in around 100. Facebook under 100. This is very weak evidence for conservatives as a group smoking copium. They might be a conservative think tank and maybe the people they actually reach have more influence, but until I see the messaging reach the intended audience this is nothing to me.

If you look at the parent post, his analysis is contradicted by evidence in the article itself, which I quote in my reply to him. I didn't bother touching on his 2nd paragraph earlier but I might as well expand on why I have an issue with his analysis. He makes this argument:

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."

This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.

The causal link between higher income and going to art museums is very weak, while one can come up with a causal link between industriousness and adulthood happiness (work hard > more purpose in life > more likely to have material goods to have a higher quality of life). I don't disagree with him that genetics is a factor, but the two positions are not equivalent in their erroneousness. For them to be equally flawed statements would suggest a human being can never learn to become more industrious, and that industriousness has no effect on mental health. Yet surely we can find examples in our own lives that would suggest otherwise. Think of people that after being put into a sports team learned to work hard with a team, or even all the statement made here in the motte of people talking about how working a job helped them appreciate hard work or motivated them to work even harder to get more lucrative jobs. There is also psychological literature supporting the idea that it's possible to increase conscientiousness. I have just made an argument for why increasing industriousness can increase adult mental health. I would struggle to make a coherent argument for why subsidizing art museums would increase income.

To be honest, I should probably ask Turok to expand on his points rather than typing out why I think his argument is flawed in a post not even responding to him directly, but based on his previous interactions with others and to my post I can't say I have much interest right now in actually talking to him specifically.

If there are issues with those bad right wing posts, surely someone could put in the same level of effort I just did here to break down why they think it is bad. Perhaps my analysis is flawed, but at least I put in the effort. Where's the effort to show why these right wing posts are bad or flawed? Even if there is some level of group consensus, truth should prevail and if an argument has no flaws at that point the only option would be to ignore it or to resort to bad faith tactics and logical fallacies, and at that point it's breaking the rules and should be moderated. Upstream, there are some people making an effort to argue with that "virulent invasive species" metaphor is flawed, and I'd like to see more of those conversations than people complaining that the statement is mean. I do agree with you that people on the other side complaining about left leaning posts should also be better and try to address the argument instead of getting mad.

If making a statement about a group that could be considered negative is mean then you can never have any discussions about anything.

I broadly agree with this sentiment and think the rule should be relaxed a bit in general. But under the current status quo, if the moderators of this forum insist it should have a bad rule no matter what, it should at least be enforced consistently.

I think Sloot's post is closest to being at the same level of badness as Turok's post.

The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits

vs

conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities

Your statement here:

You can challenge this statement. Is Sloot wrong? It could be implied sloot thinks the modal chick is dumb but sloot doesn't actually make that statement.

Can be applied symmetrically to Turok's post. You could challenge Turok's post through a discussion on education polarization if you wanted to. You could have anecdotes pointing in one direction, but the data consistently points in another, at least for now: the higher your education, the more likely you are to vote Democratic.

But correctness of these points isn't really the issue. The issue is that it's framed in a somewhat antagonistic light for both of these posts. A right-wing poster might see Turok's post and assume he thinks Republicans are all retards who support stupid things because they're stupid, while a left-wing poster would probably be closer to saying "he's just making a neutral point about which side tends to go to college more".

That's actually a good point and yea you're right that anecdotes are pretty weak in the grand scheme of things.

I dont' think there's any disagreement that the percentage of people with college or higher tend to vote democrat especially in the last 20 years, but Turok's point was specifically that conservatism is increasingly becoming the party of the uneducated, yet if we look at the data for the last 3 election cycles the lead democrats had amongst people that voted with college or higher has actually been decreasing:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/

Percentage of people that voted for republican in 2016, 2020, and 2024 Post grads 29 > 32 > 33 Grads 41 > 42 > 46 Some college 49 > 50 > 54

It's increased for each group.

Granted, just because you voted for Trump doesn't mean you are conservative. Possibly other factors such as people not voting that could impact the numbers. I guess Turok is technically correct since High school or less also increased from 51 to 59.

Maybe you're right and mods are unfairly applying mod posts to Turok. Personally I don't think Turok should have been modded for that statement specifically but looking at Amadan's post it seems to come off as a mod post about his behavior across multiple posts and not specifically the post he made that got the modded comment.

Anyways it looks like the virulent post that modded and I see some mod comments as well so hey seems like you are making an impact.

Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters

Yes. I wrote four paragraphs to explain my reasons.

although you said up above that you weren't equipped to handle that one so OK I guess, as long as it eventually gets handled.

I didn't say I wasn't equipped to handle it, I said I chose not to. That doesn't mean it's going to "get handled" as you would like.

Yes. I wrote four paragraphs to explain my reasons.

I replied that your reasoning is a defacto state of eventually arbitrarily banning anyone who goes against the dominant ideology of this forum unless they adhere to a much stricter ruleset.

Someone with right-leaning views makes a borderline bad post --> nobody gets upset, so it scoots by just fine.

Someone with left-leaning views makes a borderline bad post --> right leaning posters are upset, snap back and get warned themselves --> left-leaning poster is seen as a troublemaker and is eventually banned for nebulous reasons.

I replied that your reasoning is a defacto state of eventually arbitrarily banning anyone who goes against the dominant ideology of this forum unless they adhere to a much stricter ruleset.

Thank you for adding another nickel to my pile.

I don't understand what you mean by this. Is it that people often make this claim, therefore it must be wrong or something?

This is at least the second time you recently dropped a "3rd rate university" put down against those lowly conservatives. I think our society is far too credentialist and we should not look down on people who go to their state school. Almost no one gets into the purposefully restrictive self-described-"elite" universities. That does not put a stink on the other supermajority who went to regular colleges.

Your "3rd rate university" sneer says much more about you than about a conservative with a degree.

I agree our society is too credentialist. The issue is not "they're bad because they went to a third-rate university" so much as "they're bad because they have an inferiority complex around having went to third rate university, and that's where the fetishization of manual labor comes from."

Lol you don't have any theory of mind for conservatives as we actually exist, do you? Conservatives are not embarrassed by going to less prestigious universities. We don't care. University prestige might occasionally matter on non-academic factors(ROTC or the football team are bragging rights) but we just assume undergrad classes are pretty much all the same. Actually someone who went to community college and worked their way through a transfer to podunk state school of commuting would be seen as a hard working self starter, not pathetic for being unable to get into harvard.

There's a red tribe joke- a very bright student from the rural south is visiting harvard. He stops a passing student, asks 'Where's the bathroom at?'. The student answers, clearly disdainful of his accent 'At Harvard, we are taught not to end our sentences with a preposition.' And the visitor responds 'Well then where's the bathroom at asshole?'. This is... reflective of real attitudes towards worrying about highly selective college admissions.

Well then where's the bathroom at asshole?'

To which the appropriate response is: "Your lack of a comma after 'at' clearly shows the difference between a rural south education to one delivered in the rarefied halls here; thank you for proving my point." (and no, adding the comma in doesn't fix the problem, it just goes back to the whole "don't end clauses with a preposition" problem).

Third rate universities have programs like lumberjacking, which do require manual labor. My father got an English degree from a third rate university, then went on to become a cook for the next decade, like his father. He worked on the campus grounds crew, and pointed out various dumpsters when I visited. Then he went on to teach high school when the kitchen became too Spanish heavy and they stopped paying for cooling or letting them take breaks because the illegals would put up with that crap.

It's pretty permeable.

Third rate universities have programs like lumberjacking, which do require manual labor.

Makes me think of Deep Springs College.

The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.

Hmm I think it's hard to put the entire right into a bucket like that. I would say the same for the left. It's a broad coalition. Neither party right now really appeals to the educated elite imo, with progressives throwing away much of their historic stances and technocratic focus for identity politics.

In general I think the left has an ideal intellectual as an effete, sarcastic, witty urbanite who focuses on socialization. Whereas the ideal intellectual on the right is a woodsman, a man who knows the Western canon extremely well, can debate and write poetry with the best of them, but also does have that connection with the land and with the common people. It's a very classically Christian notion, imo.

Y'know, I scrolled down fast and didn't see the author's name on this post, but when I hit this bit:

the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools

I went "Oh! Alexander!" and scrolled back up and whaddya know, I was right!

there's no reason to make him work manual labor because some conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."

It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now. The pure despite and contempt you have for those who make it possible for you to live a comfortable life is astounding. Oh, you don't like the grubby proles who work the cash registers? Don't worry, supermarkets are working fast on self-checkout so now you can do the job of being the grubby prole who works the cash register for free!

Even for those Elite Human Capital who are going to waltz into whatever high-status white-collar job you think most desirable will do better if they have some experience of summer work. Granted, it'll probably be an internship with a company of one of Dad's golf buddies, but some experience of "this is what work looks like" is much better than none. Otherwise you end up hiring people who have all the right qualifications on paper but need to be hand-held every minute of the day since they have no idea what to do on their own (I see plenty of smart people who haven't a clue about "okay this is my first job, how do I sort out my tax?")

You really do want all the low-class (by your metric) people, regardless of colour, to just disappear so you don't have to interact with them, don't you? No more manual labourers. No more people on the tills in shops. No more unsuitables that can be confused with you, the striving wannabe, by the elites you so desperately want to belong to.

My post says nothing negative about low-class people. I'm taking issue with lower-middle-class conservative policy wonks who fetishize manual labor. As to being a one-trick pony, I've written much else, see:

https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-flat-earth

https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/the-garden-of-eden

You go on about "fetishing" manual labour, but what work are people who are not senior AI developers going to do, Alexander? Right now if we had way more construction workers (ugh! icky manual labour!) our housing problem could be solved, because we need to build way more houses (yeah, issues of planning etc. are also involved, but if you don't have the brickies and the sparks, no houses are gonna get built).

You see why I think you have a bee in your bonnet about class? That use of "fetishising" where you don't use an equivalent term about your dream of middle class white collar status for all (providing the "all" meet your criteria for being recognised as humans).

Indeed. We need to reclaim manual labour from the lower classes. I like (some types of) manual labour, it gives the mind good rest after a hard day of work. I'm not unique in this either and nor is this a new thing: the elder Count Bolkonsky in War and Peace was an impassioned wood worker.

Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now.

Ok come on now. @AlexanderTurok is biased against many right-wing folks as he has admitted, just like 80%+ of us here are biased against the left, progressives, wokes, etc etc. The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.

Personally I think this post was fine and shows a willingness to take the feedback from the mods he was given earlier.

While it's a bit of a personal attack, I do think this is a interesting frame - should the elites not care about the working class? So far in America they have (at least nominally), seems like folks nowadays are sort of turning against that. I am curious to see where elite consensus moves on this.

It's not that he's biased against 'the right', it's that he has a demonstrable animus against those he considers lower-class, and that includes people who would work for a living (see his snobby remarks about manual labour).

That's anywhere from 30-46% of the American population, depending on definition and self-identification as such. That includes people who do the kinds of things that support Alexander in his lifestyle as Elite Human Capital:

The majority of working-class workers work in services. 78 percent of the working class works in services, with 12.8 percent working in construction, 8.3 percent working in manufacturing, and less than 1 percent working in agriculture.

Alexander may well think Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous but what are you going to do, when you dismiss 30% of your working population as beneath notice or dignity? The AI serfbots are not quite here just yet. Have you any right to be surprised then, when the people you have mocked vote for a demagogue and a populist? Will you take any responsibility for driving people away?

The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.

And the monkey's paw curled a finger hard on this one.

I've long though that people abuse that Twain quote about travel being fatal to prejudice and bigotry, and that travel- especially if it's only a limited exposure- has about a 50/50 shot of reinforcing it instead. Likewise here; if your exposure across the ideological divide is limited and of... particular quality, it only reinforces just how obnoxious/stupid/evil/whatever "the other" really is.

Did he say that, really? Innocents Abroad is a very funny monologue of an American studiously refining his bigotry and moving his judices from pre- to post- as a factor of travel. The French have terrible barbers, the Catholics are Mary-idolators, the Turks are subhuman, and the Arabs are sub-Turk - is the very clear sentiment arising from that book. And, of course, that Americans (especially the Evangelicals) are greedy, pompous, idiot looters, but at least they’re civilized.

What an unexpected thing for him of all people to say, excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…

excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…

It is indeed somewhere in Innocents Abroad, so it was likely intended ironic but modern readers take it as literal.

This seems low-charity. @AlexanderTurok doesn't want the government to encourage people to take up low-class jobs or to make policy that increases rather than decreases the number of such jobs.

Specifically he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is - his knowledge seems to be more hands-on than most of us here and most twitter commentators, so I take him seriously on this note even though I don't necessarily agree.

Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.

he seems to think that the Right is full of people who haven't done such work and fail to see just how awful it is

No, he doesn't. He doesn't mention "I worked such jobs/older family members worked such jobs, I know how shitty they are", he just goes on about "fetishing" working with your hands and makes little to no mention of the left fetishing the trash culture of people of colour or the like. And if he did talk about "black trash culture" there are plenty who would hop on him for that.

I wish, once and for all, Alexander would give a clear statement of his exact position, because all I'm left with is the impression overall that "ugh, poor people, how disgusting; they have too many babies as it is, they should all be contracepted and aborted into extinction so aspiring strivers like myself can ascend to our proper place on the socio-economic class ladder and not be confused with the mudblood milieu out of which we unfortunately arose; those damn pro-lifers are getting in the way of exterminating the eugenically unfit".

Yeah, I was getting him confused with Tree, who has mentioned a couple of times that his family comes from that background and didn’t get much joy out of it.

Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.

Over the short term, by people who have no better option, which is how they're done in any society. Over the long term, economic and technological growth will allow more and more of those jobs to be eliminated.

I see, thank you. Would I then be correct in saying your position is broadly that long-term economic growth will eliminate the vast majority of these jobs in a reasonable timeframe (let's say 30 years) so that long-term tradeoffs (demographic change, long-term transfer of whole economic stacks to other countries, overproduction of elites, socioeconomic resentment, etc.) are not really relevant and we can focus purely on short-term plans to minimise immediate (<30 years) disruption whilst maximising economic growth to the levels required?

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job.

I'm assuming the main reason is that Asian-Americans are the least likely to belong to the working class or the underclass.

I am routinely rang up at my local Chinese restaurant by middle-schoolers, who a few years ago were visible hanging out in the back while their dad worked.

Perhaps they just don't work on the books?

Is this only happening during school breaks?

Yeah, weekends or evenings.

I see. Probably not on the books then.

Depends on the Asians, I know the stereotype of Indians/Pakistanis in the British Isles is "own the corner shop" (to the point where a 90s band named themselves that, their big hit) and for Chinese people it's "run the local takeaway".

In the US I suppose it's "Indians and Chinese work in IT, Koreans own the corner shops"?

Indians here do corner stores so much that '7/11(the most popular chain) or casino' is a synonym for 'dot or feather' when asking for clarification. Chinese and Koreans are notorious for owning restaurants.

This is a good point actually. I've knows a few Chinese American youths who spend a lot of their non-school time working at the restaurant their parents own. None of these kids were on the books as employed at all, and received pay to match.

A lot of kids get roped into working on the farm or working for the family business or wider family - we've just had two nieces of my boss doing some summer work here, in fact 😁 A few hours a week at much lower than regular pay, just to get them some pocket money and give them some work experience.

Plenty of Indians and Pakistanis own and/or run the convenience stores here too, hence the Apu character on the Simpsons; Koreans doing it are a local thing in some areas.

while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture

Since when? In them I see no love for wisdom and erudition, no study in perfection.

They love credentials officially issued by universities.

I think this is probably more accurate, and really of society as a whole. The dominant position seems to be “if you didn’t get college credit, it doesn’t count.” I get it for job skills, as college credits and degrees mean someone verified that you actually did the work. It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time. Instead, I’d have him write on substack or some other blogging platform and learn to communicate with an audience. Same with art. There’s enough instruction out there that you could learn the techniques of your chosen medium, and the rest is down to practice and getting feedback. But it seems like so many people want to get those kinds of degrees even when they don’t make sense.

But our society somehow bought the university marketing that told them that only learning something in a university classroom taught by a TA who has 500 students a day counts. If I pass a course on WW2 history, that counts as learning history. If I read every book I can get my hands on for that topic, read first hand accounts, looked at raw footage, etc. it doesn’t. Problem being that I’ve actually done a lot more work than the kid sleeping through their lectures in Turner Hall. And unlike him, I’ve actually done all the reading.

Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts

That's true for some people, but if you're smart enough to be an auto-didact, you're probably smart enough to have noticed just how bad most people are at simply reading. The biggest difference between you and the dumb kid isn't that you had more exposure to texts, it's that he had more exposure to tests - in theory there's at least some level of verification, even in the liberal arts, that he picked up what he was supposed to from the lectures and reading (at least from the Cliff's Notes). If you swear you did all the reading, you might be much smarter than him, but you also might be much dumber, and we've got no quick way to tell except to take your word for it, and even people who skipped the readings on game theory and mechanism design can intuit why that's not good enough.

In practice, those tests are also increasingly not good enough, and for some reason even the average human who can understand why "I'm self-reporting how good I was at learning" is bad still manages to get lost before they figure out that "We're self-reporting how good we are at teaching" is also bad, so the problem may just continue to get worse, at least until nobody respects college degrees as credentials much more than they respect high school degrees. A degree from the right college name at least may still certify that you had an SAT score in their range and didn't drop out for 4 years, but that's a really expensive SAT test; much safer to be in a field where you can take the PE Exam or grind LeetCode or something on top of getting your diploma.

I don’t think autodidact works all the time for all purposes. And I would never recommend autodidact for things that you’re going to do for a living. At the same time, I think that for a person of average intelligence, you can probably teach yourself more than you think you can. Resources beyond just the books exist, and because you’re able to go at your own pace, you can slow down when you get lost or stuck.

It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time.

There used to be (and still is in some areas) a long, rich tradition of the humanities, passed down throughout the centuries via the academy and other institutions of knowledge generation.

This tradition and gatekeeping it is crucial, and keeping the chain of humanities alive is in my opinion crucial as well. If you just let the masses go at it as they will, art becomes diluted and we stop caring about the old great works of art. As we're seeing now...

I see things in sort of the opposite direction. I think shutting the great art behind the enormous paywall of university means that only members of the elite will ever see it or get anything out of it. It made sense in the era before printing, video, or the internet to keep the high classical artwork and literature behind the walls of a university. But just because I, a peasant, can buy and read a copy of Aristotle’s metaphysics doesn’t mean that you can’t. Nor does being outside the system mean that there are few helps to make the thing easier to learn. Furthermore, how does a culture keep interest in things that most people will never see?

If old great works are so great, why do we stop caring about them as opposed to yearning for the standard they had set? Sounds more like the traditional humanities were simply inferior to the new, "diluted" way of doing art.

Because we don't study history, and we lose the cultural understanding that made those works great in the first place. We forget the lessons our fathers learnt in blood when we forget the art that touched their hearts. We doom ourselves to falling into the same pits they did.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Is the argument here that you should ape the wealthy regardless of your own norms and values, or that striver Asians are universally living good lives? If it's the latter, color me surprised, a lot of them are IME quite angry about the whole situation and hate/fetishize whites to a pretty uncanny degree. Is that the aim here?

But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."

Going further, it's bad to raise your kids in some way or another because someone else told you to. On the other hand, it's good to raise them in that way because you personally believe it to be a good thing.

There's not a lot of meat on this bone. You very briefly mention the kinds of reasons why people might want their kids to try their hand at working before leaving the nest. You do not engage with them in any depth, and your refutation stops at saying "this is stupid." OK, in that case, what is the good life that these parents should aspire to providing for their children? You got something, right? The only thing I'm hearing is "genetic confounding" which, when I plug it into ChatGPT, comes out as "do nothing and trust the plan." Otherwise, this post is effectively just "explain to me why you'd want your kids to go working" with a lot of unearned snark.

When I was in high school I spent a couple summers lifeguarding for my city's public pools. My parents suggested it but they didn't require it, and it was largely my mother's doing. I've always loved swimming, I never did it competitively but all the time recreationally, and my mom also loved swimming, and I think she recommended it because she had a sense about these things, obvious as it is, that her teenage son would enjoy getting paid to spend summers at the pool.

I did. I never thought of it as work, I still don't. It's very funny to me how it does not parse at all in my memories as a job. I was hanging out with people my age, or girls just a bit older than me who were all thin and attractive and in skintight lifeguard suits. It was also a nice pool and this was the 00s so most people going were thin, other than the classic fat dad or chubby mom. It's lifeguarding so it built responsibility, and I think I'm a better person for it, for all of it. As far as summer activity options for high schoolers, lifeguarding must be high on the stack for socialization and peer esteem. I'll fully recommend this to my kids, but as with my parents, not require it, and for the same reason as I suspect from my mom. Work ethic, get in touch with the working class? The pocket money is nice, but nah. Hang out at the pool, socialize, exercise, flirt with girls. That's just a good summer.

I’m sort of torn here because some of the things you learn on a job are things that will very helpful once you pass through all the testing and actually get to college. Things like showing up to work on time, doing tasks as instructed, going to work even though your friends have something more fun in mind, time management. Now what happens with a lot of kids is that the6 got used to the handholding that happens in high school where the teachers basically walk everyone through that big paper or assignment with every step checked off and multiple reminders about when the thing is due. And the6 start college where the midterm paper is in the syllabus but never mentioned, or maybe mentioned once or twice in passing— until the TA is collecting them. A kid who never learned to do the work will probably forget until the last minute.

I don’t think that con only happen at work. Sports teams can do the same. Maybe math camps? I never went to one.

Things like showing up to work on time, doing tasks as instructed, going to work even though your friends have something more fun in mind, time management.

This. If you're an average normie chump just out of college looking for entry-level work, your potential employer cannot really tell if you'll turn out to be a reliable wage slave or not. If, however, you've probably done various summer jobs without getting fired/arrested, you're much less of a risk in that regard. On the other hand, if you belong to a PMC family, doing unpaid internships for state institutions or NGOs and other front organizations of the Deep State is a more efficient use of your summer breaks.

It’s not just looking good for an employer. The main benefit is that while study-maximizing might help you get into a better school, it’s not very good if the lack of work-ethic, time management, prioritization, or working with other people to solve a problem mean that you end up failing or underperforming because you lack the skills to capitalize on the opportunity given to go to the elite school. It’s the difference between optimization to get the first date and optimization to get a fiancé. You can absolutely find advice about how to get through the dating app grind — and it is important to do so. But that advice doesn’t necessarily work when the game changes and now you want to keep the relationship. Getting into Yale is a skillset unrelated to staying in Yale. If you spend all your time training to get in, but none learning the skills that allow you to thrive in an environment where no one is around to give you the step by step instructions on how to do everything and stay around to see that you actually did it.

And actually this is the thing that I’m seeing lots of high school and college educators complain about with the younger generation. They don’t have the skill of doing things without being told, they don’t have the ability to work ahead on projects. And a lot of them don’t know how to problem solve when there are no explicit instructions on how to do that. As I said above,im not convinced that only a stint as a fast food drone will teach those kinds of soft skills. In fact sports and volunteer work can do so as well. But unless kids learn those skills to do things without the adults walking them through every step, they cannot possibly do well in college and probably even after college.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Modern education is a total waste of life. You spend 17 years to learn something that should take 3-4 at most.

Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character.

Especially funny since Kamala mentioned working at McDonalds.

Ms. Harris’s campaign said that she was an employee of the McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University, working the cash register, french-fry station and ice cream machine. It has provided little information beyond that, including how long she worked there. She also mentioned her job at McDonald’s when she ran for president in 2019.

Well, clearly her low-class parent who fetishised manual labour should have emulated the Asians!

Er, wait...

For what it's worth, people say she was lying about working at McDonald's. She may have performatively pretended to growing up middle class and working a summer job in college, etc.

Yes, there seems to be some confusion between was it in California or Canada where she allegedly worked. She may well have done so!

The middle-class thing intrigues me, because as "daughter of academics" she is indeed middle-class. But in American terms, that seems to be used to include "lower-middle class/upper working class" and when she was going on the campaign trail about being 'raised middle class' she was trying to appeal to The Ordinary American, somebody not in the same sector of society as "hob-nobbing with the wealthy and well-connected" as her career has brought her to be.

It's about status as much as economics, and while a divorced single mother may not have been swimming in money, being raised as the daughters of an academic who was that divorced single mother is not at all the same thing as being raised the daughters of the divorced single mother working as a waitress. Oakland, where she grew up (in part) is supposedly economically disadvantaged, so far as I can make out? But I imagine there's areas that are relatively better-off and relatively worse-off there as well.

Can you elaborate?

Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?

Yes?

If you take that random sample of 12 year olds and run them through the education system, where they are force-fed Shakespeare and algebra against their will for another 6 years, you will find that:

  1. Most of them fail to master the material.
  2. Most of them forget what little they memorize as soon as the exam is over.
  3. Most of them never use any of it in real life.

The few things that the average man is both actually capable of learning and truly increase his economic productivity thereby are basic literacy, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication table. The average man cannot actually learn rhetoric or geometry, and resents the attempt to teach him. More to the point, the average man never actually needs those for his job, or to function outside of it.

See "Genetic Russian Roulette", "Against Tulip Subsidies", "SSC Gives a Graduation Speech", "Book Review: The Cult of Smart", and "A Theoretical 'Case Against Education'" for Scott's absolutely brutal takedowns of the education system. Then wash it down with some Education Realist, Bryan Caplan, and Various Refrigerator.

Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.

When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.

Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.

The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.

For some reason unknown modern society severely underestimates kids intellect and overestimates their wisdom.

math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed)

I think it would be quite mean to ask a high school student to figure out/invent how to derive the Taylor series of a function ab initio.

And how many high school students will encounter them?

monads

That takes an afternoon.

I work with Haskell developers professionally, and none of them would claim you can learn monads in an afternoon - it is considered the hardest topic when teaching Haskell to programmers with experience in other paradigms. FWIW, I don't think you can learn pointers in an afternoon either if the learning goal is being able to debug code that uses them.

That is because no one explains what are monads the right way. The answer is simple - those are your side effects, but wrapped in complicated syntaxis because Haskell people need to feel superior. The same way our informatics teacher explained pointers - this is just address in memory but you can abuse them to do fun stuff. Applying something right is easy once you grok the nature of it.

Let's get pointers - if you know what is pointer you can design a class from first principles - it doesn't take huge jump to create a memory blob, put some header information - congratulations that is struct. but let's put another blob attached to it with pointers to executable code - now we have a class. But i want to modify already existing class - well just play with the blobs values a bit - you have inheritance.

But we educate usually in the opposite way - we give everything around the concept and hope for the light bulb moment that people see the concept instead of the other way around.

Let's get pointers - if you know what is pointer you can design a class from first principles - it doesn't take huge jump to create a memory blob, put some header information - congratulations that is struct. but let's put another blob attached to it with pointers to executable code - now we have a class. But i want to modify already existing class - well just play with the blobs values a bit - you have inheritance.

Nicely put, I've been programming for years (though no CS background) and never actually saw it that way. Are there any books you'd recommend that explain things that way round?

honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed

If you have that particular ability. Not everybody does, and it's not just "oh well that's because it was taught badly in school". Some people can't math, that's the sad fact (I am one).

Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.

And then we find they can't understand books that are not the "relevant to the youth" ones they read.

Who the hell needs to understand Dickens today? Sure, that's a point. But what do you do when it's a text for the workplace that isn't Dickens but is also not "The Hunger Games"?

This study is even worse than I first thought, because while I had sympathy that American kids of today wouldn't be familiar with 19th century British law terms, then I find they were allowed to look up unfamiliar terms and couldn't even put it together then for the joke about the dinosaur (bolding mine):

This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam.

It's even more depressing, because these kids got into college to do an English degree with a poor starting level of English:

The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.

They wanted to study English literature without the ability to even read Dickens. This would be like me trying to do a degree in Mathematics. You'd have more luck teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, pace Dr. Johnson:

“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” ― Samuel Johnson

The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed).

Even decently smart, interested teens won't "grok" anything after you taught them those formula sheets. They'll need hours and hours of working with/thinking about the matter. They'll need examples, they need to manipulate the thing in their heads and on paper themselves. Hell, starting from scratch you'll need years just for them to "grok" what equations are, how the symbols are manipulated. Half of them won't really get it, ever. Proving theorems? Most people can't even do that after 12+4.

I think you hang out to much with the top quintile of the population, and you/they underestimate how much they where shaped through learning by osmosis during those "inefficient" 12+4 years.

Could/should the first 12 years be more efficient? Yes, but only for the smart/motivated third of a class. I personally think we should push those kids towards a proper classical education instead of cutting the time in half. The rest? They need to be taught by osmosis, and that takes forever. Both groups should do a lot more music and team sports as part of their daycare, I'd just make both mandatory.

That's the 12. As for the +4? I'm not denying that there are extremely expensive (time, resources) literacy verification and conscientiousness verification degrees. But the hard stuff can't be taught any faster. Engineering (yes, maybe excluding software - half a decade of commits on open source projects are superior to a BA). Medicine. Bio/pharma. Law. Basically, if you can get a post-grad degree and get a well-paying job outside of academia with it, it's probably because the jobs can't be done without the education.

I think you are wrong here. Because no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. We pile things they don't understand on things they don't understand and we are surprised when the only way out of it is torturous inefficient memorization and impossibility of application.

Case in point - history. Take a look where the fertile land, water for irrigation and trade routes go and you will have a pretty good idea what will happen and why.

Physics - I started learning physics at fifth grate - I immediately figured out that most of physics laws are - take a spherical cow in vacuum, multiply everything that affects it add something for initial conditions and a constant to fit the real world data. Suddenly physics became a lot easier. The only thing that annoyed me was S = V0*t + aT^2/2 ... because I couldn't figure out why the fuck that 1/2 division is. And i got it at 10th grade when we learned what integral is.

Education system is like TSA - it is theater, not the real deal. We give engineering degrees for taking exams and writing papers, and not by throwing people on a deserted island with hand tools and getting back 1 month later to check if they have gotten to the early stages of the industrial revolution.

I've thought about this for a long time, but have been dwelling on it more lately. You are absolutely right that no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. Back when I was teaching in university, many many experiences (often via my own attempts to teach the students to understand stuff) made that abundantly clear.

However, I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight. In many cases, you don't know how far along you can take the student. Often times, you have a known end point to a program, at which point, the vast majority of your students will simply not continue further. So you have to pick your battles.

Like, for example, I get why the intro calc classes for undergrad engineers do what they do. You've only got them for so long; many of them really only need so much; you have other things to get to. Of course, for me, it all seemed so absurd in retrospect. Why couldn't you have just started me off with Baby Rubin? It's really not that hard of an on-ramp; it begins with friggin' sequences! But it does take some time and growth, and let's be honest, the vast majority of the engineering students who go through the college will stop with a bachelors, and when you think of all the types, the chemical engineers, civil engineers, hell, the industrial engineers, etc., they'll probably get by without really understanding.

I never did any nuclear stuff, so believe it or not, I'm going through an MIT OCW nuclear course right now. I haven't "taken a course" in a long time. Wowza is there a lot of stuff in there that makes me want to say, "Ya know, if you had just had your students take a full set of quantum classes already, you could have actually done this right, in a way such that they could really understand what's going on, rather than being a bit handwavy and saying 'this is just what happens because of quantum magic that we don't know yet'." ...but how long would the curriculum take to get there? These kids have basically just taken ordinary differential equations! I honestly kinda wonder to what extent they get what proportion of their undergrads to really grok it within the four years, or if they still have plenty of clean-up to do in grad school.

As much as I often hate on the unis, I am sympathetic to their constraints here. I don't know what to really do to fix much of it, because I do think one of the roots may be the utterly disastrous K-12 situation from a long legacy of terrible public control with the primary mission of babysitting and only secondarily happening to have any learning going on (perhaps due in part to their own, must-take-all-comers constraint).

they'll probably get by without really understanding

Humans are not meant to read; we learn through doing a lot of the time. Most of their education will occur outside the university system because the university system is not meant to teach (which is something nobody will really teach you, and if you're one of those people who do learn this it'll also destroy your patience with it, and that's not something you can afford to lose at that stage of your life: this is why your early twenties should not be spent in education).

I honestly kinda wonder to what extent they get what proportion of their undergrads to really grok it within the four years, or if they still have plenty of clean-up to do in grad school.

Judging by the quality of the instruction I've received from the average university professor, not even the professors actually get it. The ones that do understand it tend not to be academic-types.

These kids have basically just taken ordinary differential equations!

No, what they've taken is a week of differential equations and three months of that being obfuscated by algebra for credential reasons.

IDK, now I'm getting flashbacks to Calc 2 and how useless it was to ask the instructor anything in the interest of understanding. Then sequences and increasingly absurd integrals came along without explnation of the utility ... and that's how I got the worst grade in Calc2. F? OK, retake it. C? Eh ... maybe that's more poor study strats than lack of understanding. But D? They wouldn't let me retake the class and I had absolutely no business moving on because I learned ... hmm, as I remeber, I learned the professor's opinions on Liebnez Vs Newton, and there was something involving a log cabin pun.

Dude's office was right by the CS departments's offices. I frequently heard far more enthusiastic convos coming from there on my way to see a CS prof. Maybe the secret wasn't showing an interest in the subject, but to be a perky flirtatious student? It's been 19 years; just be glad you remember any calculus and hit comment ... ☹️

If what you're saying were true, doing homeschooling successfully would be much easier than it actually is, and it would be much more common. But the opposite is the case. I have yet to meet a single homeschooled kid I'm impressed by. And those kids certainly did more than 3 years of learning.

doing homeschooling successfully would be much easier than it actually is, and it would be much more common

If the parent's smart enough to educate their kid correctly with homeschool, and the kid inherited enough of that intelligence to get the benefits of having an intelligent teacher, the parent is also more likely to understand the opportunity cost of leaving their 6-figure job to do it and that private school and tutors aren't that expensive (and you can fire them if they do it badly).

So it makes sense that most homeschoolers are going to be average parents (or maybe slightly below average if they're doing it for religious reasons), teaching average children, and getting average results.

Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.

The question of how you get into the ivy league is entirely determined by what admissions officers decide gets you into the ivy league. Given that most of the elite colleges have shown themselves vulnerable to political bullying, it would be fairly easy for the government to order them to favor candidates who had part-time or summer jobs over candidates who didn't. This would benefit everyone.

Summer jobs are good for kids. They build independence. They put them into hierarchies that are different from the ones they are used to at home or in school. They get them out of the house and help them meet people. They are capital-G Good.

The main thing summer jobs were supposed to teach middle class kids when I was that age was how much low-skill jobs sucked and thus why you should go to college.

The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.

What sorts of things do you have in mind? As far as I’m aware, such things might include, for example, practicing an instrument. This strikes me as a great example of growth and learning, even if the logic motivating it (at least on the part of the parents) might be mostly mercenary.

I'm thinking in terms of various camps, fake "research opportunities" to pretend your kid is doing science and shit, expensive non credit non graded college summer programs that pretend to be classes at a school, travel programs abroad that masquerade as charity work programs with no deliverables to help you write a college essay. That's more the kind of stuff gunner kids do in high school rather than get a job.

I don't think the time when Asian kids are made to learn violin overlaps much, if at all, with the time kids get summer jobs in high school. If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.

And for that matter, while I agree that music is a good thing to do with one's time, I genuinely think having a job is a better more enriching experience. I think a warehouse job will teach a kid more than a summer biology program at Brown will.

Maybe there’s a difference but I learned guitar after 12 (largely because I noticed girls liked the guy who played guitar).

I mean the difference is that the standard you were looking to reach (impress girls at parties, maybe play in a rock band) is very different from the standard of virtuosity that is required to play violin at a level that an ivy league school cares about. The former can be self-taught as a teenager, the latter pretty much requires that one begin formal instruction as a child. The average concert violinist begins instruction between four and six years of age, and by 14 the wheat has been thoroughly separated from the chaff in terms of those with the talent to take it anywhere interesting.

Tiger Moms aren't pressuring their teenage success-daughters to learn guitar so they can found a local version of the Linda Lindas. Though, maybe they should.

Eddie Van Halen started guitar at 11. Hendrix at 15.

Eddie started classical piano at 6. And, for that matter, had a paper route as a kid.

Jimi worked as an usher in a local theater, as a stage hand at a local music club, and as a construction laborer before he joined the army.

And? Maybe violin is different (practically kids don’t have big enough hands to play guitar) but maybe starting insanely young isn’t actually necessary to be a virtuoso as demonstrated by two of the best guitarists of all time.

More comments

If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.

Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.

I had a summer job between my sophomore and junior years of high school. Your classic fast food job, working mostly with dudes 5+ years my senior. After that, though, as I started to get more serious about extracurricular, my parents encouraged me to quit in order to focus on schoolwork, summer reading assignments, summer band practice, etc. I also similarly had a job — this time a restaurant job — for over a year during college, which directly and negatively impacted my ability to participate in many of the projects which would have been very helpful for preparing my professional development in my chosen major.

I agree that these jobs were enriching in the sense that they forced me to develop time management, a thick skin when being given negative feedback or undesirable tasks, and an exposure to a broad cross-section of society. I further agree that many of the individuals at whom you’re taking aim would certainly have benefited considerably in the same way. I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.

I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.

The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.

That's not my primary aim, though it may be a secondary benefit. I think the major benefit of working a job is developing independence early on in teenagers. They get money of their own, they have obligations outside the home, they have the necessity (and therefore the right) to travel outside the home.

Below, and always, we are talking about the problems of young people dating. Summer jobs are the number one solution! Give them money, get them out of the house, encourage them to have independence from their parents outside of structured and scheduled "day cares." Give them the means and the reason to get a cheap used car. Give them the ability to take someone on a date without asking mom for the money.

That said:

Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.

I don't think a part time summer job excludes hobbies and interests outside of work. Spending part of your day stacking boxes, or mowing grass, or hanging drywall doesn't exclude going home and playing the violin for an hour. The tiny, hyper-talented fringe minority of 14 year olds who have the kind of talent that has been identified for nurture by that time, sure, give them a scholarship to some music program. But that's maybe a few dozen kids across the country that we're talking about, they're completely irrelevant to the question of "should kids get summer jobs?"

I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind.

So I guess my question is, how large should that class be? Because it seems intuitively obvious that it should max out at the 2-5% of the population easily identified by standardized testing regimes.

I’m just not convinced that these are strictly superior qualities to develop for the specific class of people who are genuine candidates for the Ivy League in 2025.

Yeah, but despite the best efforts of the government, there is not going to be "100% of this year's graduating student body from high school are going to an Ivy". For the vast majority, having a summer job of some sort is beneficial, and for a lot of kids, a 'manual labour' job that Alexander is sneering at is the kind of work they will eventually, in some form, end up doing; if you're going to do a pink collar/lower level white collar job that deals with the public, for instance. If you end up working a lower level government job taking in and processing application forms from 'clients/customers' as the new terminology favours, then by God having worked in retail or some other public-facing job will be a great preparation for how dumb/frustrating/'how on earth did they not fill this in right?' that work can be. It'll also give you an opportunity to learn how to fake the Customer Service Smile when dealing with unreasonable demands from the public and your superiors.

I mean, yes you improve past age 12, but if I started violin at 6-7 and you start at 13-14, I have somewhere between 6-8 years of practice ahead of anything you could do in the time between 14-18 and I will be much better than you. It’s that way with sports. If you want to have a chance of playing high school sports, you have to be playing select sports by 8 because otherwise you’ll not get enough quality practice to compete with those who did.

I’m not disagreeing with any of that. I’m fully aware that the people I’m talking about start their instruments at a young age. That doesn’t mean they don’t still need a bunch more instruction and practice later on.

There are literally professional athletes who only started their sports a few years before they went pro. Of course, they are largely massive physical specimens.

Similarly, there can be some degree of cross training due to playing multiple sports. For example, soccer (barely a sport) does teach foot eye coordination. This is helpful for hockey (a real sport) since you sometimes need the puck to go skate to stick.

I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.

Back in the day, elite career paths included an early training job that was supposed to force you into contact with the reality of working-class life in a way which reflected your status as a potential future ruler. Leadership with training wheels, effectively. The canonical example was sending young officers into the field with an experienced platoon sergeant, but something similar was happening in old-school corporate life where the wet-behind the ears graduate management trainee would be given a shift manager role in their first or second rotation where they would work alongside an experienced foreman.

In my home area, Northern Virginia, all the jobs that teens used to do - fast food, lawnmowing, child care - are now done by adult Central American immigrants. It's been that way for thirty years or so!

I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.

In my home area, Northern Virginia, all the jobs that teens used to do - fast food, lawnmowing, child care - are now done by adult Central American immigrants. It's been that way for thirty years or so!

?

I mean, yes, you will absolutely find immigrants doing this kind of work, but you will also find teenagers. I live in MD rather than VA now, but I go back and forth a lot. It varies from establishment to establishment, but it is extremely common to find teenagers working at short-order restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, etc...

Trust me you don't have more illegal Guatemalans than Texas, yet I see plenty of white teens working as cashiers, waiters, baristas, babysitters, etc.

I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.

They could get jobs, unemployment rate is very low.

I don't think you understand. In order to work at a Fairfax, VA McDonalds, you need to speak spanish in order to communicate with the rest of the staff. They literally won't hire you.

Well, that's not 100% true. I saw a single white teenager working at a Burger King around 2009 in Reston, VA. His coworkers were laughing and carrying on during the lunch rush flipping burgers, and he was all alone, head down, working the fry machine. Couldn't understand anything anyone was saying around him. One of the most depressing things I'd ever seen in my life.

Last time I was in Loudoun County, 2015-ish you could still find entry level work as a native English speaker. The Roy Rogers in Leesburg was staffed entirely by very polite local highschoolers. That may have changed in the last 10 years though.

I don't know about the spanish part, I went to a Wendy's in Chantilly right before covid and noticed the staff were entirely Indian women. I only remember this because they royally fucked up my order (It's plain! Just meats, cheese, and bread! And where the fuck is the bacon?), and served a bun that was somehow 1/3 rock hard stale and the rest was fine.

Depends on the restaurant. Chick-fil-A feels the opposite. There are also some local Burger joints that seem to be all English as a first language teenagers, but naming them would dox me.

I don't think you understand. In order to work at a Fairfax, VA McDonalds, you need to speak spanish in order to communicate with the rest of the staff. They literally won't hire you.

I doubt this. DFW is much more heavily Hispanic than Fairfax(citation not needed) and white fast food workers are a dime a dozen. They seem to be concentrated in the front of house with Hispanics working the fryer, but McDonalds will clearly hire english-speaking cashiers.

I suspect white teens in Fairfax simply don't want to work fast food, either because their parents want them to do something else(maybe more school), or because they have less desire for spending money, or whatever.

I am spitballing here but I have definitely wondered if places with longstanding minority groups just are able to handle integration much better than places where the very same groups are new. In other words, in this scenario, possibly you are both right and it's just that DFW, which has ~always had a significant Hispanic presence compared to Fairfax, Virginia, is much better culturally at handling the situation.

It would be odd if it were not at least somewhat that way, imho.

As I suspect that none of us has done a formal survey, we're probably literally talking about one or two local fast food franchises, which might be a case of a particular owner with a preference for hiring hispanics (easier to schedule full time, not as flighty so I'm not retraining all the time, less likely to slack off) vs one with a preference for hiring white teenagers (easier to keep them on short hours making your labor pool more flexible, better customer experience, don't seek advancement).

I know in my hometown, the Taco Bell is all local teenagers, the Burger King is the most busted methhead trailer trash you've ever seen, and what's left of the Wendys is all black women from the local city, must be on a bus route.

Probably. I have noticed that whites in certain fields(especially restaurant trades- cook, manager, stuff like that. Not the jobs students/kids do.) have mostly learnt Spanish, that there are self-segregated mostly-black kitchens and groceries, and that bosses expect to have to translate between different kinds of entry-level workers in certain places- construction in particular, but also sometimes warehouses.

Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Saying one thing, then saying another, does not actually tie these things to each other. There was an entire and recent court case at SCOTUS specifically about how Harvard does not select the makeup of its student body from mere academic records or test scores, and just like New York's carry permit rates post-Bruen, Harvard has been hard and heavy at defying SFFA.

Sending your kid to put eighteen hours a day into study over their summer vacation will not get them to Harvard. Pushing them to have a hundred very marketable extracurriculars, which is another part of the equation here and goes very overlooked by the Compass, also won't. I think you already know that.

John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

It's a little funny that only 'mathematics' is the only part of that list that overlaps with the modern College Prep Uber Allies approach, and it's becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the focus. That's both the problem, and the kinda damning fault of this sort of rant. There's fair arguments about the tradeoff between the 50% chance of success at a mid-tier college and Mike Roweism, or about tradeoffs between education and work experience (so long as you don't flinch when anyone mentions what post-grad degrees do to total lifetime income). There are some less fair arguments where we compare college grads to non-college graduates and mumble whenever everyone mentions external variables, but are still worth knowing about.

Turning the debate into An Ivy League graduation specifically versus flipping burgers for a summer isn't just putting a thumb on the scales, it's throwing out any pretense of balanced evaluation.

This is only partially true. Excepting some URM (who are usually still in the 98th+ percentile for their demographic and so usually still would have studied very hard) and some athletes (who again are usually still 95th percentile plus academically), almost everyone who gets into Harvard in 2025 did work to tiger-mom levels. Sure, a few mega-donors’ kids with parents on the board of trustees make it in (although you’d be surprised at how many of them work very hard too), and there might be a handful of geniuses who get to international math olympiad champion status and perfect SAT and GPA without ever trying who make it too, but they’re in the small minority.

I knew plenty of people at elite colleges who didn't do anything near tiger mom workloads in high school. There are some seats open for ultra-grinders, but really not all that many (and you have to compete with Asians). Contrary to some stereotypes, admissions officers at top schools are looking for a mix of types, and being a tiger child grinder is boxing yourself into one of the most competitive. I don't know your educational history, but I'd imagine those types are overrepresented in the finance/consulting rat race, which may give you that impression, though. Much more common archetypes:

  • von Hammerstein-Equord's "smart but lazy" type, running off natural firepower and intellectual charisma, very good at playing the system to get better results for themselves than the grinders.
  • The ultra-passionate about a particular topic, who don't grind for it tiger mom style but are thinking about their subject all the time and treat it as a hobby as well as work (this represented most math majors I knew, and 100% of those who stayed math majors)
  • The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT (I'm guessing), who was essentially recruited to fill out a less-desired department. You can get into the best colleges in the world while being an absolute fuck-up that way, and the most elite private schools will steer their fuck-ups in that direction.
  • The "little grad student" type, who is not necessarily a crazy grinder (could be a variation of any of these archetypes) but has internalized the lingo and style of academics in such a way as to present as advanced on the academic track.

If you've got a kid with the requisite IQ, I'd maintain that the best way to get them into an elite college is not to grind them as hard as possible at the same metrics everybody else is trying to fulfil, but to let them freely explore their own academic and other high-status interests and put the work into them (i.e. basically anything a smart kid wants to do except vidya and scrolling). That's what gets you the kind of intellectual individuality that stands out to admissions officers. If they haven't got the requisite IQ, start thinking about what weird major they can take, or send them to State.

The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT

This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.

It absolutely does work if you can convince the admissions officers that you are dead set on that particular department, you just have to be a little cannier. Knew a guy who was excluded (i.e. not formally expelled) from his posh high school for drug dealing who got into an Ivy-tier college that way.

Why would I want to let my gifted kid nerdsnipe themselves into a track with likely minimal real world applications so they can then be runover by academic hiring affirmative action after accumulating their paper qualifications?

Not suggesting they become academics (God, no! Affirmative action just scratches the surface of academia's professional pathologies). If you go to a top university, and are sufficiently intelligent, personable, and flexible, you can pivot into basically any type of email job you want with a little networking. Or, with luck, they can follow some passion and have a happy life doing something for its own sake.

Sure, but the vast majority of tiger-mom scoremax grinders make it into 0 ivy league schools. I'll wager that the median outcome is that they get an education of equivalent prestige to their state flagship, just more expensive and requiring more scoremaxxing to get their, from someplace like Boston College or whatever. Hell there are probably more that burn out and wind up at community college than there are who actually get into the Ivies/Stanford/MIT- and I'm not claiming the former are a majority.

My gut tells me that effort put in past getting a 4.0 is essentially wasted. The supply of parents willing to push their kids to succeed academically at the expense of all else simply exceeds the demand by orders of magnitude.

(almost) Everyone that gets into Harvard works very hard. Not everyone who works very hard gets into Harvard, or even has a 1% chance of getting into Harvard, or even has a 1% chance of getting into an Ivy. In many cases, the various epicycles for politics mean that many people will have a chance closer to zero, no matter where their test scores or GPA end up.

The problem with systems is that they can be gamed in a way that takes the joy, the fun, and even the intellectual work out of it for everyone else. One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.

The problem with meritocracy is precisely that everyone except the underclass and the generational super rich is required to participate in it. Don’t, and you will be left behind. If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone because they will be competing with every son and daughter of every sniveling, striving pauper who harbors the same ambition for their children.

Of course it shouldn’t be so. Let us reserve 75% of medical school places for the children of doctors. Perhaps 85%, even. Of course the child of an accountant should have it easier becoming one than some random person. AI changing all this stuff aside, it’s a perverse system that forces the children of good families into torturous over-education just to maintain their own standard of living.

A big part of the reason Americans voted for Trump is because we were tired of the rotten policies of the meritocracy. I wanted an heir. Those chosen because they tried so very hard at school failed their country.

What downsides of occupational castes do you foresee, and how did you come to the conclusion that they would be a net-improvement?

One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.

That's an artifact of playing Number Shooters (where enemies are transparently walking sacks of hitpoints you're trying to subtract), or Number RPGs/looter shooters where you're just trying to make Number Go Up. Everything can be easily reduced to metrics like DPS, to the detriment of having a game at all.

I'm grateful that I prefer my games to operate in a manner that obfuscates the fact that it's all 1s and 0s on a storage drive, and which remain fun even if you're not playing them like you're a glorified SAT-solver.

People find SAT-solving fun, a classic example is the game Sudoku.

If you are not into it then you are not into it, but the game of building the meta, thus meta gaming itself can be fun, for people like me at least.

No, that can happen to any game. Call of Duty 1 and Insurgency, for example, everyone knows the spawns and the approximate travel times, so have fun eating a rocket or grenade within 5 seconds of spawning and running out.

COD and Insurgency, while not quite as "Number Shooter" as say, Destiny, are still not that far.

You have small maps, predictable spawns and player behavior, and a constrained set of weapons. Said weapons can be somewhat easily modeled with DPS being the only really relevant property.

I play a lot of Arma, and you're not going to be able to do that. The bigger the playing field, the wider the space of strategies, the more simulationist the modeling..

You will have a hard time min-maxing Arma for the same reason nobody has solved IRL war, despite the obvious extreme optimization pressure.

If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone

If I want my (hypothetical) kids to be doctors, then I'd need to quite a bit of faith that there are Amish communities running around in 2050. I really don't see how it's feasible to be entering that profession otherwise, that's just not the way things are going.

One might argue we're already over Peak Doctor, we just don't know it yet. I certainly wouldn't want to even be just a bright-eyed student entering med school in the Year of Someone's Lord 2025.

At the end of the day, I'm strongly of the opinion that there's no point in worrying about the state of education if you're someone who has only young kids or no kids at all. Formal education as we know it will very likely not exist by the time they'd be old enough for it, and if it does, it'll likely just be entirely signaling as opposed to 75% signaling.

Not sure if you're being serious but if you are, it's kind of funny to see a Jewish person like you advocate in favor of just the sort of anti-meritocratic policies that would have locked many of your European ancestors out of social advancement 200 years ago.

To be fair, I think that "I got mine, now it's time to pull the ladder up" is a perfectly sensible strategy from the individual point of view, and I'm not criticizing you for it if you do have such a strategy. It's just not a strategy that extends well to a global imperative for all society, for obvious reasons.

She's not that religious and there was always the baptism loophole.

Jews have been bankers for far longer than modern meritocracy has existed. In any case, given the probably twenty or thirty fold increase in the number of white collar jobs created since the Industrial Revolution (on a per capita basis, let alone overall), some degree of meritocratic advancement was always inevitable. Even in 1400 someone very smart of humble birth wasn’t necessarily tied by fate to that origin - social advancement is a feature of all human society. As the total number of certain jobs increases, of course there’s space for people to move up the ladder.

But the rigorous nature of our meritocracy, combined with slower economic growth and elite overproduction, has created more perverse incentives. The only way out - the only way to protect children - is either a lottery system (structurally bad in so many ways) or some kind of hereditary structure, even if only in part.

It’s always been weird, because rafa would lose enormous amounts of status in such a system. Right now the PMC, doctors bankers lawyers are at the top of the status pyramid because it’s their bourgeois regime. Replace it with rigid generational classes, and rafa’s title and status would be downgraded to ‘banking clerk‘. Just like it was in the good old days. And rafa works like 60 hours a week or something, which is huge, but most people do not feel this pressure, and they don't need to be "liberated" from it/re-enslaved in a guild by the revolution.

What's a "rafa"?

@2rafa

One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it

Cries in DOTA2...

Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.

Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.

DOTA2

This strategy guide for DOTA2 players is the best around. Hope that helps!

I had a friend who straight up quit Dota 2 because of how negatively it affected his mood and mental well being. I never let myself get too frustrated but the tryhards in ranked are obnoxious to play with so I usually just play turbo as mid ogre and hit Q and 4x multicast (multicast is pure skill and zero luck fight me).

I usually just play turbo as mid ogre and hit Q and 4x multicast

I hope I am never in the same game as you. Either with you or against you...

have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

There's been some controversy over how AI has impacted top level Chess and Go, but my impression is that top players of those games still find them enjoyable and worthwhile, even though many hours of AI study are required to succeed at the top professional level in both games now.

I play a lot of fighting games, which for the most part only get better and more fun as you get deeper into the meta. Learning the meta gives you more tools and options to integrate into your gameplay, but because the game has inherently unpredictable elements (twitch reactions, making reads on your opponent, etc), they always stay fresh and it's impossible to fully "solve" them.

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

David Sirlin's Playing to Win is the canonical essay on this point. His day job was balancing console fighting games, but he also develops viciously competitive two player board games as a side gig.

From the essay:

A scrub would not throw their opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize your chances of winning? It's "cheap," though, throwing is cheap. And it's not just throwing, it's also a long list of somewhat arbitrary maneuvers. If you keep a scrub away from you by zoning them with projectile attacks, you'll probably be called cheap. If you do one move over and over, that's cheap. If you get a lead, then do nothing for 30 seconds so that you can win by time-out, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.

Let's specifically consider the case where you do one move over and over. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Are they such a poor player that they can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't you be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.

... to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.

The scrubs' games might be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter their every move, even their every counter.

And if the two groups meet, of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it's not degenerate.

The thing is, this works okay if you can keep the low-level players and the high-level players apart. But a) that doesn't work for real-life friend groups and b) it means you're either stuck in the little leagues forever or you have a long, long, hard grind before you can play with the experts. Thus rafa's original point, which is that if you open everything up to maximum competition with everyone all the time, only the monomaniacal grinders will have any fun.

Weak player != scrub. In the weak sense of the word, the Scrub is someone who has no interest in gitting gud. Sirlin mostly uses the term in the stronger sense that the Scrub is someone who does not want to play the game that competitive players are playing because they consider some expert tactics (like throws in console fighting games) that are clearly permitted by the rules and considered a key part of the game by competitive players to be unfair. You see a bit of this in competitive bridge with the debate about exotic conventions in competitive bidding, but in general weak but competitive players play against strong opposition and hope to learn from the experience.

With the notable exception of contact sports where too large a skill gap creates an unacceptable risk of injury, the size of acceptable ability gap for social and competitive play is the point at which the weaker player never wins anything at all. In chess that is about 400 ELO points, but in bridge the luck element and more granular results (you play about 7 hands an hour) means that it is the difference between a decent club player and a world champion. I know several people who play racket sports socially in groups where the weaker players never win a match but win enough points/games to keep things interesting. You can cover an even wider range of abilities if the game supports handicapping. I don't know how large this gap is in console fighting games.

What you can't do is allow a true scrub to play against anyone who isn't playing the same crippled game that he is.

The issue with viciously competitive games is that they are attractive mostly to viciously competitive players. A game that is designed with "play to win" in mind doesn't necessarily accommodate those who "play to play".

Yep, I link people to that book all the time.

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

Absolutely right but getting to be a doctor, academic, high-ranking officer, lawyer isn't a game. It's not designed for fun. Becoming a doctor is one of the least fun things I can think of.

Does Korean hyper-intensive education of young people really pay off? Well it's a highly developed advanced manufacturing powerhouse. But we can't be sure that the extra stress and strain of intensive meritocracy is helpful. 90% of their edge could be from doing good industrial policy, not wrecking their economy, having a population of high-IQ Koreans... Perhaps Korea would do better with a less stratified economy, more emphasis on zero-to-one innovation, more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything.

Perhaps shredding the nerves of young people with high-intensity tests and competition (I've seen this happen with some Chinese kids) is just too much meritocracy, I think that's 2rafa's main point.

more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything

I think that is the way for the economy to survive, instead of emulating Japan which in the 80s was the Coming Economic Global Superpower (remember the movies about Japanese companies buying up America?) but look at where it is today.

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

This sounds right, but is it true?

Chess is a famously enduring centuries old game, the goto example of refined design which even you cite. Yet I think your impression about it is wrong. Basically every GM has a quote about how high level play is a boring memory game. And 960 became popular for a reason. It's not entirely unfun, but it's a lot less fun (and arguably less entertaining) than 1500 level play.

Football is celebrated as one of the best ball games ever created and enjoys popularity on the scale of the whole human race. It's well known for it's upset outcomes and the general unpredictability to the last minute. And yet, it too has a well known problem where mid to high skilled play can be incredibly boring 0-0 matches where nothing happens because a dominant strategy at those levels is to play quite defensively for most of the match and aim for a last minute killing stroke.

Motorsport is well known for its pattern of very long periods of boring dominance intermediated by legendary high stakes races where it's anybody's game. And that's despite the best efforts of its organizers to tweak the rules to prevent dominance as much as possible. It seems to constantly naturally arise out of the business dynamics of the companies involved and the technical characteristics of the cars varying over time.

My theory is that the level of fun at meta level play is actually not a common or required characteristic of good games. The sporadic entertainment value they provide is what's selected for at those levels, alongside fun for the median player.

Fighting games are actually like this: it is fun to watch high level players and fun to play the game at an intermediate level yourself, but whether or not the high level players enjoy themselves is I think immaterial to their success.

This is also true of all the above: playing chess with friends, a pickup footie, or racing your buddies in lemons is a lot of fun. And GM galaxy brained moves, Champions League upsets and F1 drama are fun to watch and talk about.

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

That's pretty dramatic hyperbole if you ask me. You can optimise the fun out of any game. Chess and go grandmasters often burn out, as do many esports players, when they reach the skill ceiling and their motivation becomes extrinsic instead of intrinsic. Esports players bitch all the time about how playing professionally has impacted playing for fun because they can't help but optimise for success, they can't just relax and fuck around like they used to. Fighting games are great for meta because of the reasons you mention, but even they have ceilings.

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

Cries even worse in DOTA2...

If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.

Cries even worse in DOTA2...

Cries in League of Legends...

I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun, and that might mean some self-expression by picking items you think look cool, or trying to do silly things that probably won’t work, or just playing infrequently and not getting good. It’s not fun if playing with less than maximal seriousness means you get constantly steamrollered by the meta people. At least they should be on a different server.

I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.

With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.

With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.

Not to mention that quite often such players infest even non-gaming forums (including The Motte!) and viciously attack anyone who suggests that the non-competitive version of the game (usually the single player campaign) should not be held to the same artificial limitations put there for the competitive players (eg. making RTSes depend heavily on actions per minute because the player AI has been intentionally left braindead).

I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun

Well, they're the same thing for me (and a lot of other people too). I'm not having fun if I'm not trying to attain mastery, so I pick games where playing them at a high level of mastery is also fun.

I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.

Yeah, if you're playing in a social setting you want to pick games that will work well for everyone obviously.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats