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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Maybe this isn't the best place to ask but, can you please disable the ability to delete one's own posts or edit them after they've been replied to?

While likely challenging to implement, I think the preferable way to go about it would be to store the version history of every comment, like github does with comments.

That gives you the best of both worlds. You can edit in typos and strikeouts for statements you no longer endorse. You can even delete a post as a way to de-escalate. But intentionally writing a top level comment and then deleting it as a kind of ding-dong-ditch will be pointless, because any reader is just one click away from reading what you originally wrote.

I have at least one post that I deleted because I belatedly realised that it could function as a "how-to" for a terrorist.

I would not appreciate that post's version history becoming available to all Mottizens.

(The rest, IIRC, are from me realising I misinterpreted a post on reading further context and deleting a misaimed response or unnecessary question; undeleting those wouldn't accomplish anything but I wouldn't strongly oppose it either.)

Yes, post version history also requires a way for mods to make versions invisible to the users.

Besides your example, there are some categories of content which I think the motte server admin has no interest in hosting. Personal information posted accidentally or maliciously. Copyright infringement. Content which is illegal for other reasons in their jurisdiction.

Unlike Wikipedia, we do not have enough Admins/mods that hiding revisions even from them would become a concern, though.

No edits, no exceptions; put it on blockchain to ground the policy in thermodynamics itself.

I look forward to being paid in 𝔹asilisk coin [tm]

Is there even still any ongoing technical development of the Motte?

Yes? Zorba fixed a bug I found particularly annoying like 2 weeks back.

The Motte is mostly feature complete, but changes do happen.

I think a 1 hr grace period is sufficient for typos and regrets. After that, lithography

I think adding stuff at the end should be possible.

Agreed! so long as properly annotated

That was the edit window on Slate Star Codex. But it takes 24 hours before scores become visible; surely we can allow that much?

Not allowing edits would be an extreme form of discrimination against my human right to correct egregious typos.

Eh those kinda edits would be fine, but I've seen how people abuse editing on reddit.

Surely we can generally expect people to act in good faith, at least in better faith than the average Redditor.

If they don't, they get banned, so the problem deals with itself.

don't allow edits

Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.

don't allow deletion

More reasonable. Ideally users can delete their profiles and history, but the contents of their posts remain up. Maybe an edit lock that only goes into effect after so many days would make the most sense.

Which part is the major issue? Is it mass deletion or user edits bamboozling your replies?

Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.

Or locking people into bad temper posting which runs afoul the rules, but which they might think better of after seeing it posted.

Wouldn't keeping editing but removing deletion be pointless? You could just edit your post, change it to the text "[deleted]" and get effectively the same result as deleting it.

If you didn't freeze edits at that point as well, yes.

I don't think they should remove edits or deletion because of one or two serial delete guys. Freeze edits and deletes after a week. Allow authorship to disappear on account deletion. A balance of considerations.

Noting that when I paid dues to The Motte's Conservative Party treasurer I was told the motto was "Change? No!" All these so-called suggested "improvements" are making me a little uncomfortable.

I come back to a thread after a few days only to see a string of user self deleting their posts, random replies to them still hanging. I guess I could just run a scraper slamming the site for every single reply so they can't be removed from posterity, but that shouldn't be the solution.

This would be a request for @ZorbaTHut, but while it's annoying when people go on deletion sprees (and we have banned people for it), I don't think we'd want to prohibit deleting a post you had second thoughts about.

Undeleting the posts of permabanned members would cover a lot of the same ground. I'm pretty sure the admins can do it; Zorba definitely can.

Maybe quote the post if it's a user known for editing/deletion?

Honestly I dunno which ones, there are a bunch of deleted comments in subthreads I\ve talked to people in this master thread.

Or allow editing but have a button so users can see the audit trail? I understand the intent of the request, but I'd never want to lose the ability to fix spelling mistakes, and I often see people add [edit: reason] tags due to a response causing them to update on something or clarify a fact in the original post.

Sure an edit history will be fine, but I guess it wouldn't be simple to implement. At least disabling the delete button and auto reverting edits if they are designed to delete data ought to be enough.

I linked this blog post in a reply at the bottom of a long comment chain, but it occurs to me that it is probably worth discussing in it's own right.

According to all known laws of physics and aviation there is no way that a bumble bee ought to be able to fly. The bee, of course knows nothing of this and insists on flying anyways.

Wikipedia has an entry dedicated to the phrase “Thank God for Mississippi” because for the last 100 years or so, no matter how bad off your state may be in a particular way, you could typically take solace in the idea that Mississippi had it worse. "Yes, our health outcomes suck..." the the people in Wyoming and Alaska may tell themselves "...but at least we aren't Mississippi".

In my experiance shitting on the South Eastern US as an embarassing, degenerate, cultural backwater, is not only tolerated in blue and grey tribe spaces but venerated and encouraged. Of course the south sucks, that's where Mississippi is. If you are from that region and you are persuing a degree at a school like Stanford or Cal-Tech you quickly learn to hide your accent and claim to be from somewhere else if you want to be taken seriously and graded honestly by your professors.

According to all known laws of of demographics, economics, and reason Mississippi shoud not have good schools and yet...

The "Missisippi Miracle"
In 2002 the second Bush administration signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. Educational standards and reform had been had been a big part of his 2000 campaign platform, his wife Laura being a grade-school teacher, and one of the provisions of this act was a a mandate that "Public" (that is tax-payer-funded) schools would participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) originally established by the Johnson administration in 1964. As a result we now have standarized test data for almost every state and municpiple school district in the country going back over two decades.

For those outside the US, US school system is typically broken into 3 4 year long blocks. Kindergarten/Elementry School, Middle/Secondary School, and then High School. Specific names and implimentations vary from state to state but as a general rule the idea is that a child will enter the public school system at the age of 5 or 6 and graduate at the age of 18. The NAEP tests students for reading and mathematical proficiency at grades 4 and 8, IE upon entering and exiting Secondary/Middle School.

In 2003 Missisippi 4th graders where ranked near to last in the nation for reading comprehension, with an unadjusted average of 203. Only DC and Puerto Rico ranked lower. As of 2024 thier score is 219, representing a lttle over a standard deviation of improvement and placing them just shy of the top 10. This on it's own would represent admirable progress, but where things start to become unhinged is when you look at the "adjusted" figures. NAEP and various outside NGOs apply various adgustments to the raw scores in an attempt to control for things like demographics, socio-economic status, and spending per-student. When these "adjustments" are applied, Mississippi schools are not just performing better than they were 20 years ago, they are performing better than any other state school sytem in the nation. This is the alleged "Miracle".

Now a number of liberal commentators ranging from Friedliche DeBoer (of the South African Boers perhaps?) and Kevin Drum to Steve Sailer and the LA Times have all tried to debunk the so-called "Mississippi Miracle". The arguments generally fall into three broad categories. The first is that the mainstream media, academia, and establishment politicians are all prejudiced against liberal coastal blue-coded states like New York, Massachusetts, California, and Oregon, in favor of southern states like Mississippi. I find this claim laughable on it's face for reasons stated in the opening of this post. The second is the significantly more defensible claim that the NEAP's "adjusted" scores do not accurately reflect ground level truth. I believe that this is a fair critique, but the people making this critique often explicitly refuse to acknowledge that the unadjusted scores also saw an marked improvement (casts side-eye at Sailer and DeBoer) and that even when comparing like to like, the average Black student in Mississippi reads at a level about 1.5 grade levels higher than the average Black student in democratic strongholds like Illinois or Wisconsin.

Finally there is the claim that Mississippi is effectively "gaming the system". In 2013 the Mississippi State Legislature enacted the Literacy Based Promotion Act (LBPA) which required kids to pass a reading test to be promoted from elementary to middle school or else be held back or forced to repeat a year. The argument as it is, is that 4th graders in Mississippi are actually 5th or 6th graders by any other state's reckoning. If that were true one would expect to see a substantial age difference in the class cohorts, however that is not what we see, the average age of a 4th grader in Mississippi is only 0.01 years (or just under 4 days) above the national average.

To all appearances, and against the most ardent protestations of our resident Boer it would seem that having standards and enforcing them may actually matter.

How is this possible
I have a cynical answer that I expect to get me in trouble with the moderators, because I am about to take a stand in defense of Bulverism. Ad Hominem may be a formal fallacy, but in the real world it provides real value. Whether or not someone has an ulterior agenda is absolutely something you should be thinking about when you are trying to decide whether or not you are going to believe them.

I expect to be accused of "lacking charity" but the words are going to be theirs not mine. At some point all the experts in the blue and gray tribes seem to have decided that teaching kids to read was too much trouble and that not teaching them to read would be just as effective at promoting literacy as not doing so because demographics matter more than basic competency or engagement. Why would they do that even as they admitted that “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,”. The answer is in the following line "And we hated it."

By claiming that standards matter i am effectively take taking a shit on the foundational beliefs of Steve Sailer, Friedliche DeBoer, and a number of users here including at least one moderator.

Mississippi accepts your hate and Volleys it back. Ideocracy may be coming for America, but its coming for you, the blue tribe, not for MAGA country. We will teach our children Shakespeare Kipling and Twain, and you will not, and in 20 years we will see who has come out on top.

It could be explained idealogically, but there's a simpler answer that also explains "why did Mississippi fail so hard for so long then?" and "why is Mississippi the standout and not all the red states?"

That explanation is human nature. It's the idea trap

People don't like change so they're opposed to mixing things up even if it's better. People don't like to admit they made a mistake, so they keep treading down the same path out of denial. These changes were largely pushed by Carey Wright, an educator and superintendent with little connection to the terrible education decisions made by her state level predecessors. Mississippi has been bad for so long that many of the original people who made it bad don't have much influence anymore and this allows more political pressure to try something else without tons of people in power having to swallow their pride. The main meat of Mississippi's reputation comes from the late 20th century, some of the issues as far back as the 70s!

Some of the states like California are now stuck here. Superintendents, principals and education heads who simply can not admit they made a major mistake. They all huddle together unable to swallow their pride, convinced that it must not have been a mistake at all then and something else must be going on.

It's why you see things like, antivax parents whose kids die of preventable diseases doubling down in the community. One way says "oh god I killed my kid" placing a lot of moral shame and guilt on them, the other way says "I did nothing wrong", and people pick the latter. An abuse victim often goes further into the relationship. Many of the UFO believers double down when the prophecy doesn't happen. It's a hit to our ego to admit fault, especially mistakes that can't be rectified.

Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalizations for the absence of the flood.

It could be explained idealogically, but there's a simpler answer that also explains "why did Mississippi fail so hard for so long then?" and "why is Mississippi the standout and not all the red states?"

The top of the Urban Institute list for 4th grade reading is Mississippi. Number 2 is Lousiana, number 3 is Florida, number 6 Kentucky. Mississippi isn't the only Red State doing good; it's not even the only standout. Mississippi is most notable because it was the worst before.

Many of the UFO believers double down when the prophecy doesn't happen.

Tangentially relevant sequence post: Evaporative cooling of group beliefs

There's a major confounder here that prevents a straightforward liberal vs conservative spin on things: "Science of Reading". As the now-famous (in education circles) Sold a Story podcast helped reveal, a lot of American teachers got suckered into a new teaching methodology for reading that just doesn't work as well (oversimplified: a de-emphasis on phonics). This spread in liberal circles partly through network effects (e.g. the Columbia Teacher's College was a major promoter). It just so happens that Mississippi as part of their reforms made sure to emphasize better practices and follow the neuroscience and good quality research.

Contextually, though I could elaborate, one of the most prominent examples of the trendy but poorly-backed programs was originally focused on reading interventions. However, these interventions sometimes did more harm than good. Infamously you'd get some teachers actively encouraging students to guess an unknown difficult word based purely on context clues and pictures. While that's a good strategy for, say, a high school student encountering a genuinely rare or unknown word, it's a terrible strategy for kids first learning how to read encountering a word that they eventually will need to know. Furthermore, one of those intervention programs had a classifier that was objectively broken. They did a study and found that their assessment of whether a student was actually one who needed help (behind level) or not performed little better than a coin flip compared to more established methods... but kept using it! Ironically, this low-effectiveness intervention program was usually the one well-meaning reading advocates at the time would adopt (or even adapt for general learners, similarly unhelpful there). Notably, Mississippi not only required individualized help for students behind but also required that help follow better, more scientifically validated methods, and so very specifically dodged this issue that plagued the rest of the country.

I don't think this degree of victory lap is earned just because Mississippi taught its poor black kids to read better than California's. Also, there might not be a better way to catch a state's attention than by rubbing Southern success in their face.

Mississippi is supposed to be dumb and backwards. Ipso fatso anything that contradicts this is due to unfair, fraudulent, or underhanded tactics. You can't just spend $32 more per student to teach an entire state of inbred hicks to read more better. Oh, they're making fake would-be 5th graders take the test? That explains it.

A good way to keep kicking the same dumb dog with a finger in each ear, but I don't think it's one that can last. Involved parents prefer effective education more than they do values that say holding kids back is emotionally damaging or mean. Involved parents vote with their feet. Uninvolved or uninterested parents might prefer their illiterate kid get failed upward than the hit to their pride, but that's the school's problem. The schools have lots of problems and seek the path of least resistance, but the school can always point blame above.

California legislature tried at least once already to push science of* reading. They failed. There's another go so it will be interesting to see if it fares any better. This story got a lot of press. States can choose to teach kids to read, but only if they have the power and wherewithal to say, "Tough luck, toots. Teach the program." I, for one, hope we improve education for kids. But, if shame fails to sufficiently motivate, then there is always honor to be found. You may keep your Kipling, Shakespeare, and Twain. They may keep their compassion and progress. Who has the honor culture then?

Ipso fatso

I don't know if this was deliberate, or a typo/autocorrect, but if it was the former, then hats off for a clever turn of phrase.

As with all funny but obvious malapropisms bored children's TV show writers did it before the internet did.

Friedliche DeBoer

On substack, he calls himself Freddie deBoer, while WP calls him Fredrik deBoer.

"friedliche" would be a declination of the German adjective meaning peaceful. If this is a honest mistake, please fix. If this is meant to mock him, I do not think it will land for most people.

Too late- Amadan banned him on suspicion of being Hlynka and thus ban evasion. Not this post, just ban evasion.

Seems like evidence against TBH -- Hlynka is/was a man of many mansions, but weird German puns (?) didn't ever strike me as part of his oeuvre?

German puns (?)

The question mark is justified. What would the pun even be? It's obviously just autocorrect on the Fritz.

You want more weird German puns? This is how you get more weird German puns...

I don't think it was intended as a German pun, just to mock his name and imply he's foreign.

I don't recall his sense of humor ever being to refer to himself as a "Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker" either, but that's what the TequuilaMockingbird profile says.

I mean, if anything that's more my joke.

In 2013 the Mississippi State Legislature enacted the Literacy Based Promotion Act (LBPA) which required kids to pass a reading test to be promoted from elementary to middle school or else be held back or forced to repeat a year.

It's crazy that this is considered cheating. You can't seriously let someone into middle school who can't read. What are they going to do there? Certainly not learn anything if they can't read the textbooks.

In the Netherlands it's normal to be held back if you haven't learned whatever you had to learn in a year.

It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.

Just as a really simplified example, let's say low-performing students in state A learn approximately 0.7 of a grade level each year, while in B they learn 0.6. State A has social promotion, while state B holds students back a year if they are doing poorly. So in grade 4 standardized testing, the low-performers in A would be working at a grade level of 2.8 (4x0.7) while in B they would be working at a grade level of 3.0 (5x0.6). Someone just looking at the aggregate stats would assume B has more effective teachers, when the opposite is true.

This probably has a pretty minimal impact since the number of students held back is in the low single digits, but it is a confounding variable.

The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%. These inter-state comparisons are really just measuring which states are better at handholding the remedial students enough to just barely feign competence.

Honestly, the ideal way to measure it is buy tracking an individual student through the system and using something like “median student improvement per year” as a way to evaluate the school itself. A school system where students improve by 0.5 a year is objectively a bad school, no matter how the class behind them does.

Doesn't seem like a real objection anyway -- data can always be adjusted by birth year or held-back status. The school obviously has the data, even if it's not currently being collected in a way that would enable it being used.

since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts

Partially. It's also just used on an individual level to see if the children are learning. If one of the kids doesn't pass the reading test, you know he can't read well enough and needs more effort. For example by having him repeat the year. If none of the kids pass the reading test, there's something wrong with the school.

Ultimately, the difference is between teaching the kids to read (even if for some kids this takes longer than average), or not teaching the kids to read. Surely we can all agree that the first option is preferable, and if that also leads to the statistics looking better, that just means the measurement is valid (for once).

The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%

Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important. You need to be able to read to participate in modern society. If the bottom 10-20% of people can't read, you get huge societal problems.

The geniuses can save themselves - they're smart. Ideally you have tailored education for everyone, but that's not possible.

Schools are supposed to be assessing learning on a more thorough, ongoing basis. If a student can't read at their grade level, that should be made very clear to the parents repeatedly throughout the year. The point of standardized testing is to keep the schools honest and get information on relative performance between schools or districts.

With respect to the bottom 10-20%, spending huge amounts of resources to get someone from a grade 4 reading level to a grade 5 reading level won't help them avoid getting swindled by someone with a law degree. Also, I suspect that there is a very significant overlap between the people who cannot read a basic contract, and the people who would not understand such a contract even if it were explained to them. The latter category cannot function independently in modern society and likely need some form of assisted living arrangement to help them navigate daily life.

Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important.

At the risk of sounding unfair, this seems like a rationalization for equality or “fairness.” I don’t see the huge societal problems. I assume most people who can’t read are not very smart, so reading won’t help much.

OTOH, geniuses can use what they learn more effectively. Competition and markets lead to them generating consumer surplus they cannot fully appropriate. Therefore, we should focus on them first.

Except our education system is so bad, I am sure we could fail at that and ruin the geniuses.

People who can't read are more easily taken advantage of. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the narrator's grandmother saved up enough money over decades to purchase a plot of land to build a home. Once she thinks she's saved up enough, she hands over the money and signs a piece of paper that she thinks is the deed to the land. It wasn't.

It's difficult to overstate just how shitty the general atmosphere can get when you have a huge percent of the population that can be easily exploited like that. Increase the number of easily exploitable people and you increase the number of people exploiting them. Actually, I think anyone who's against low-skilled immigration can grok what I'm saying here. There will always be an underclass, but not every underclass is the same. I would prefer the kind that work hard and live in a high-trust way. Someone who can tally up money when the register is broken. Someone who can read through the terms of a lease. Someone who views smiles positively instead as a warning sign.

Geniuses are doing just fine. In many states, if you have a genius IQ you can actually qualify for an Gifted IEP and get a bus to another school district if they have a gifted program that your local school lacks. There are AP classes in most high schools, there are community college options, anyone can skip ahead an elementary year at any school in the country.

The ones who aren't doing just fine are the 120 IQ people who are too smart to need to learn how to study, not smart enough to seek out additional learning opportunities. They end up being bored in school and never develop the skills needed to get ahead.

It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.

Depends on how you measure efficiency. Which school is better? With functionally illiterate students released in 3 years or one that releases students actually capable of reading and understanding in 5 years? (obviously in reality that applies to small sample, also threat of being held back encourages to take it more seriously)

I second this approach of thinking, at the end, the goal of school is to pump out students actually capable of reading and understanding. Pumping out illiterate students contradict the function of school, school is NOT day care facility and we should not treat them as such

A school pumping out illiterate students should do worst on stats, State A's school (0.7/year) in @odd_primes's example is a worst school than State B's school (0.6/year), even though State B's school has less effective teachers

Just like a company, the administration stucture matters, it might increase or decrease the overall profitability of the company, and State B's school's administration makes their school more functional at their goal, depite less effective teachers

It's only considered "cheating" when it is framed to make progressives look bad. It's considered a perfectly valid solution when framed as a solution for groups progressives hate.

LOL, you just want to stop that guy when he starts talking about brain development of teenagers and say "SAT-M".

The goal of the US public school system is not necessarily education. Employment, local sports, social engineering all come before and all pale before the true goal- spending money.

… the true goal- spending money

Is this true in a sense other than those which are true for unions and government agencies in general?

Yes, the usual iron law reasons are enshrined ideologically.

I hadn't considered ranking the non-educational motives before. My guess would be:

  1. Jobs program for leftists/women
  2. State-funded daycare
  3. Progressive indoctrination (racism/sexism/Xism bad)
  4. Liberal indoctrination (individualism good)
  5. Civnat indoctrination (America good --maybe less true these days)
  6. Teaching the 3 Rs (readin', 'ritin', reckonin')
  7. Teaching anything else they claim to teach (science, history, art, etc)

Flip 1 and 2, and reverse the order of 4-6 (for one thing the whole structure surely pushes against individualism), and you might have the beginnings of something. But your #2 is clearly #1 and it's not close.

Re. 4: Does public school teach that you should make sacrifices for the common good? Do public school kids have to take a stake in their school by cleaning the classrooms and serve each other lunch? All I remember is stuff like "ANYONE can be president, even YOU" and "America is great because of freedom to do whatever you want and the right to the pursuit of happiness (cf. "don't yuck my yum," "different strokes," etc.)" I think many Americans underestimate how individualistic America is. It is alive and well in America.

R. 6, if it was a higher priority there would be more time ensuring basic competency instead of pushing the barely literate out the door with a diploma.

Re 1 & 2, I'm not so sure. If the daycare function were curtailed (say, only half days or something) I am quite sure that they wouldn't cut half the teaching staff. Public school employees are heavily entrenched, and they can always trot out thought-terminating expressions like "investing in our future" and "funding education" and "helping people of any class achieve the American dream" or whatever that American voters are seemingly helpless against.

State-funded daycare

This one is the most important priority by like, a factor of 10

I agree with this. Every time I watch a board meeting, they're pretty explicit about it. It's what people were actually upset about during Covid.

Yes, the Oklahoma legislature spends a ton of money on jobs programs for leftists and progressive indoctrination.

Well, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Correct. A long and running complaint of the conservative base about their elites.

I’m in full agreement that it should never happen that a kid who can’t read and do math on grade level should not be moved to the next grade. The problem lies in the vested interests that almost everyone involved in public education have to bury systemic educational failures. Schools lose funding and prestige if kids don’t at least appear to be learning. Teacher and administrator pay are tied to kids being able to go to tge next grade and kids passing standardized tests. As such the pressure to cheat the system at tge expense of the kids is high. Once you add in the irate parents who will storm the school if little Johnny gets held back and you can pretty much expect “social promotion” to happen with the tests fudged to hide the evidence.

There's also demographic concerns to keep in mind as well. Like discipline, a school absolutely does not want a situation where a legally protected demographic does worse than a cohort.

A school near me has one of the highest reading test pass rates of any school in the state. I recently got into an argument with a parent whose children attend the school. She is adamant that the scores are fake and that the school is just cheating—in precisely the same way that Mississippi is “cheating”—by holding back any students who don’t pass the test. Like you, I think that argument is insane, but I know a sizable minority of parents disagree with the school’s approach.

I have a cynical answer that I expect to get me in trouble with the moderators, because I am about to take a stand in defense of Bulverism.

Not for this, but for unmasking yourself. Someone else finally pointed out the obvious, and I am kicking myself for not seeing it.

Hlynka, I have told you this before, but I am hugely disappointed that rather than taking your ban like a man, or asking us to reinstate you, you keep creating alts. Good job that you managed to run this one for months and being actually rather flamingly obvious about it in retrospect and not getting tagged, but you're done now. We don't exert much effort to catch alts and some people think they are clever, clever little people bragging about how easy it is to recycle an alt every time you get banned, but it just shows you have no integrity and place no value on your word or reputation. You're there to troll, to shit up the place, to giggle and get your digs in before the mods swat you and you reboot. Hoorah, a winner is you. Yes, it's easy to do this. Eventually, however, everyone regresses to their mean.

ETA: In case anyone doubted my judgment, he confirmed it in modmail.

This explains so much. When I said "We've had the same issue with Hlynka", I should have focused on this thought instead of getting triggered by the usual Hlynka rhetorics. In a sense, it's impressive how he did basically nothing to obfuscate his identity, exactly the same cocksure loquacity glossing over substantial flaws, and could rely on good faith alone.

In case anyone doubted my judgment

I did, so good job on the radar calibration.

I do have a question though -- I thought you guys were operating more on the "Mission fucking Accomplished" paradigm for ban evasion? IIRC darwin was doing the same thing for some time in a very obvious way, eventually admitted to it, and still has an active account?

So, like -- who cares? The post in question seemed OK; why are you banning based on (admittedly well-calibrated) vibes at all?

Darwin was never actually banned here. When we moved off of reddit, everyone started with a clean slate. Darwin and Hlynka and everyone else had a blanket amnesty.

While we will sometimes let someone we suspect of being an alt stick around if they are behaving themselves, we're still going to whack ban evaders when it's obvious, because we don't want people to think they can just spin up a new account and carry on like before. (Some people do this anyway, but they at least suffer the minor inconvenience of having to keep creating new accounts and being unable to establish any kind of reputation or history.)

Also worth noting that Hylnka did not exactly come back "reformed"; @TequilaMockingbird was temp-banned three times and warned many times even before I clocked him (and this was not his first, second, or third alt).

And it's also worth noting that you did not ban TequilaMockingbird for past posts, or even any rule breaking aspect of this post.

It's fine if we have abandoned the 'Mission fucking Accomplished' paradigm on this site, as long as we're clear of the change of paradigm.

No. In order for the mission to be fucking accomplished, you have to accomplish the fucking mission, which is to reform sufficiently to go unnoticed.

TequilaMockingbird had already drawn attention repeatedly for being antagonistic and obnoxious. If Hylnka actually managed to create a new account, behave himself for a year, not get repeatedly modded for being his usual jerk-ass self, and then say "By the way, it's me," well... we (mods) would probably discuss it.

Same for any past troublemaker who actually comes back and shows better behavior. It is not (as @The_Nybbler keeps dishonestly claiming) that we want to see someone "hat in hand" and begging, but that we'd want to see evidence of change.

You can't create a new account, be your old antagonistic self, and then make a pikachu face when you're banned as soon as we realize who you are.

Quoting this because this was what was present and being responded to before your edit.

No. In order for the mission to be fucking accomplished, you have to accomplish the fucking mission, which is to reform sufficiently to go unnoticed.

Heavens no. The Mission fucking Accomplished paradigm was established precisely to defend not banning recognized ban evaders who were noticed, but weren't breaking the rules on decorum to the degree to warrant another ban on those grounds. It was the returnees compliance with the decorum, not their ability to not be detected, which was the accomplishment. Were it the later, the defense of non-moderation wouldn't have had to be made in the first place.

To be honest, I don't actually recall any instances in which someone we knew to be a previously permabanned member came back, was identified, but was behaving well enough that the mods decided not to ban the new account for ban evasion. Possibly it happened before I became a mod, but as far as I know, it's kind of like the case of "We'd consider it if a permabanned member petitioned us to unban him": to date an entirely theoretical policy.

Man, if you're right and this is HIynka then that explains some things, but it makes me feel like we're losing out. There were meaningful insights in his post, but they were buried in a structure that prioritized flame-counterflame rather than laying the groundwork (which was mostly in the post!) first and then discussing the arguments clearly if passionately.

If the style and structure of this post had been within a standard deviation of peak Hlynka, it would have been excellent. Why did the mods switch from year-and-a-day bans to permabans? Were too many folks returning in the style of Darwin, with the bone to pick dominating everything else? Hlynka, when he could discuss his experiences openly and not be cagey about ongoing disagreements, was usually better than this. Yeah, there is a risk of spiraling again – we're all human, and he has a temper. But peak Hlynka was irreplaceable.

Clearly I don't follow meta-level Motte issues the way mods do, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Call this a tentative request to reconsider permabans in general and his in particular.

feel like we're losing out

given they got Quality Contribution for long pile of misleading claims about LLM, with lies about supposed credentials as a bonus (OK, maybe credentials were true but worthless), I am less sure about this

they also suddenly had no time to respond to people pointing out falsehoods, and when they replied it was still with LLM-tier hallucinations. Or worse, LLM typically switch to whatever was claimed or at least a novel hallucination.

I don’t want to publicly accuse anyone (especially since I didn’t make the connection myself), but isn’t Darwin still with us under another alt?

That would be weird, since his last alt was never banned.

It was, however, permanently shamed, and to a degree that if Darwin ever tried to reuse the GuessWho account, they'd be constantly challenged to pick up the topic they flopped out on. It'd be like if Tracing came back and wanted to pretend that their flounce and denunciation of the Motte never happened- they'd regularly be hounded for it.

I don't know. There was a peak Darwin, too, and if he's back in a constructive way then that's worth celebrating, even if the ban evasion isn't.

I'd take that as another argument against permabans, although perhaps a mixed one given the reëstablishment of old beefs when his ban expired. But if he was already on an alt by then, maybe the productive discussion was continuing there and the main was just for fighting? I'm just a nerd on the Internet, probably not the best to analyze forum dynamics. But, for that reason, I'd like to welcome good folks back without needing plausible deniability or cloak-and-dagger nonsense.

(I know that sometimes even un-banned folks choose to rotate usernames. And while my life might be a bit nicer if they didn't, I acknowledge that there can be legitimate reasons for that.)

Ahhh, you know, this makes perfect sense. His AI-skeptical post here, which had serious technical errors but somehow got a QC, matched very well with the arguments I've had with him before. Even down to the dubious (and prideful) claims of technical expertise. And the comparison of AI to animal intelligence (one heron, one orangutan).

You too? My condolences.

You know, I genuinely didn't suspect this was a Hlynka alt. Well-played to him, if true. I suppose my anger at people who write bad takes/highly faulty explainers about AI extends to both his incarnations.

Hmm.. What else?

A pathological inability to accept that they're wrong, or acknowledge error? I suppose that's Bayesian evidence. I, @DasIndustriesLtd, @rae, and probably several others wrote detailed explanations of why he was factually incorrect on so many points regarding the function of LLMs, and heard only the chirping of crickets (I will grant that he made an 'attempt' to address some criticism, but at the cost of only revealing even more fundamental confusion in the process)

Both @Belisarius and I speculated four months ago that @TequilaMockingbird may be the return of Hlynka, but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now. The “Steve Sailer is actually a liberal” thing is so inexplicable a delusion that it’s tough to believe two people could arrive at it independently, but I guess it’s plausible, given a certain set of intellectual priors (and generalized mistrust of urban Californians) which Hlynka and TequilaMockingbird might just happen to share.

I support the ban because anyone who peppers their post full of “dude I’m totally gonna get banned for this one, the mods are gonna be soooo pissed” ban-baiting deserves to get what they’re asking for. This can be true even if he’s not truly a ban evader.

but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now.

Can you explain why? Similar to you, I also thought that it was Hlynka four months ago, but with much higher confidence. What convinces me then as now is the last point from my post: TequilaMockingbird talked in the way someone deeply familiar with this forum, its history and connection to Scott Alexander would.

There plausibly are many other people with beliefs similar to Hlynka, so TequilaMockingbird having exactly the same views (and rhetoric! seriously, the Steve Sailer thing isn't the first time he's let his old ticks shine through) on every single issue as him isn't dispositive. The fact that an account with such beliefs is created three months after Hlynka's ban and immediately participates in discourse as an old regular would, even calling out specific users' post histories and ideologies, is though, especially when no other well known long-time poster was missing/banned at the time. It was very, very obvious that he was Hlynka from the start.

This forum has a ton of lurkers and users who at some point switch from only posting sporadically to suddenly becoming more active. It’s very plausible that TequilaMockingbird is one such user, and that seeing Hlynka banned inspired him to “take up the mantle” of defending the cultural/ideological corner that Hlynka had previously occupied. There has always been a contingent of users here who (bizarrely) found Hlynka’s posts profoundly insightful and important, and who thought he was fighting the good fight against the (imagined) “Blue Tribe” consensus of the community.

I mean it depends. Getting one or two of the same data points — knowing post history, or having a similar political profile, sure, I can see that as coincidence. Once you add in posting style, knowing the history of the forum, knowing the SA connection, etc. after you hit 4-5 unique features being tge same, im generally high confidence in believing that it’s the same person. Writing styles are especially important because they’re both hard to fake and hard to mask, especially in multiple writing samples over time.

seeing Hlynka banned inspired him to “take up the mantle” of defending the cultural/ideological corner that Hlynka had previously occupied

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Was this when we were all nostalgic for Hlynka and he was joking that Hlynka might be JD Vance? Because I thought he basically came right out and said it lol. I thought everyone else had already figured it out and known for ages.

To be clear, I have never been nostalgic for Hlynka and have been glad he’s gone since the second he caught his ban.

K. I meant the royal we, there was a thread a while ago where everyone many people were reminiscing about Hlynka, in which I thought Tequila basically came right out and said 'yeah gang, it's me!' in different words. And everyone many people reacted so nonchalantly that I thought it was already well known and I was just oblivious.

Got a link handy? I must have missed all the drama, this ban came as a total surprise to me. Even in hindsight, the main commonality I recognize is atrociously bad takes on AI.

I found it - it's not so obvious now that I reread it, but after reading @Hoffmeister25's post about his suspicion, this post struck me as such classic hlynka in style and tone and proud sense of humour, plus the overt familiarity with the motte's inner workings, that it felt obvious.

Hah. I remember thinking at the time he was very sus, but for some reason he just didn't trigger my radar. Well played, I guess.

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Out of the loop: can someone give a short explanation who Hlynka is and why he is banned? (I am a long term regular, but I don’t often (almost never) give attention to user names.)

Hlynka was a mod from back on reddit who took care of troublemakers and had a bit of a chip on his shoulder from growing up poor (like most of us who grow up poor) that he used to fuel the zingers he would level at troublemakers. But being the enforcer made him bitter (like it does to everyone who assumes that role) so at some point he stopped being a mod, but his former mod status gave him leeway to continue making zingers. But people were less willing to tolerate it when he wasn't using it for the good of the community and people started to feel like he got special treatment (he did). But I think to him he just felt like he was being the same person he'd always been, and it just kind of made him angrier and eventually he flamed out.

he stopped being a mod

Point of clarification, he didn't merely resign, the other mods removed him. I think that's unprecedented in all of Motte history.

But being the enforcer made him bitter (like it does to everyone who assumes that role)

Eh, more like jaded.

He did get "special treatment" but we never hid that; we have always given more slack to people with a positive record. However, that slack is not infinite.

He did get "special treatment" but we never hid that;

If I'm right and it's all above board then uh, why are you qualifying special treatment? I'm not trying to imply anything, just confused.

He was a user who predated the Motte even on reddit. He stood for a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism and that made him stand out somewhat from all the Dissident Right people, but ultimately he was an evangelist here to save the lost sheep rather than a debater here to chew the fat. Like most of the evangelists we get here, he ended up eventually flaming out in fury that most people didn't want to buy what he was selling.

He stood for a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism and that made him stand out somewhat from all the Dissident Right people

We should really let him back; we have a lot of libertarians and alt-right types but not so many God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III Red Tribers. He added color to the place.

I have no problem with his beliefs, though I don't also share them. The problem was that he was so totally certain of the rightness of his own beliefs and the wrongness of everyone else's that he had absolutely no interest in genuine discussion. He didn't bother trying to understand anybody else's objections to his arguments, and even asserted multiple times that he knew what his interlocutor thought better than they did. Any effort made trying to engage with him would never be returned and I stopped bothering. I think that attitude is more corrosive to the Motte than overt shitposting.

a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism

The cuckservative kind mostly, boy did he blow his lid at the effective deployment of that term vs his chosen neoconish internationalist bullshit.

You know, your record is pretty awful too, and for exactly this kind of low-quality growling and contempt. The discussion was "Who was Hlynka and why was he banned?" not "Take free shots at Hlynka because he's banned."

He was a former mod, greatly respected by many members and absolutely hated by many others. He was eventually removed as a mod for being too antagonistic towards people he despised, and then when he wouldn't amend his behavior, he was banned entirely.

Looking at that thread you linked, I am more leaning towards the theory that @hydroacetylene is KulakRevolt, based on politics, the particular style of deflection when they want to deflect, and most of all the curious dedication to the idea of frustrating stylometry/basilisks with artificial tics (Kulak's forwards-from-grandma punctuation, hydroacetylene's "French autocorrect").

Definitely not.

I’m not offended, more genuinely curious- what makes you think my politics are similar to Kulak’s?

To elaborate, Kulak wants a violent overthrow of the existing system to be replaced by ‘?’. He doesn’t have any particularly consistent reasoning for this; he can be a white identitarian, an ancap, a fascist, ultra-mysogynistic, etc. The common thread is that he wants short term violent action. He’s also some kind of pagan but not in the sense that he, like, believes in literal gods(I believe in his gods more than he does- specifically, that they are demons who at one point convinced Northern Europeans to worship them as gods). There is a bunch of historical fan fiction that he uses to tie this in with his generic pro-terrorist vibe and AFAIK he is a Canadian who makes his money entirely through internet media- whether this is from people finding him interesting or genuine believers.

I am a rad trad Catholic in the sense of actually, literally believing in my own religion. And I believe that the existing system will collapse under the weight of its own degeneracy without the need for violent action; the important thing is to be building parallel societies which grow by functioning better, to enable a slow replacement of existing power structures with patriarchal, religious, virtuous ones. I expect this to proceed as existing power structures shred their human capital through things like low fertility rates and retarded equity pushes which force them to rely on functioning parallel societies more and more. I believe a set of conspiracy theories about apocalyptic prophecies which guarantee that this will actually take place so long as me and my tribe do our part; the cathedral likes indoor plumbing a lot more than it hates rum millet, even when that rum millet is slowly overtaking it. Violence is thus counterproductive.

Where did you come upon this idea of the pagan gods? I recently learned of it from the Lord of Spirits podcast, but it's the only place I've ever heard it before.

It’s in the Bible.

No. Hydro has been around for a long time, and he and Kulak are entirely different people.

Did Kulak eat a ban? I must have missed that, I just thought he got really involved on X / Substack and drifted away.

He made a big post about how The Motte was pointless because the time for debate was over and it was time for violence. Got a 3 day ban and never came back.

Shame; I really liked him. His Rhodesian catgirl bit was funny, and he made some genuinely good points. I still follow him on Twitter and Substack.

Twitter and Substack

this impotent whining for violence is hilarious

I wonder whether it is his actual belief, trolling or just grifting in niche they found. I would put my guess on trolling supported by financial extraction they managed.

Had a look at the Substack link, tried reading what he believes as a pagan, and my impression is "cut-rate Gibbon". Too occupied with "and here is why it's the fault of Christianity that our empire is declining!" and not enough "as a pagan this is why I do things the way I do". I doubt he makes any offering to his picture of Athena, or to Wotan, or any of the rituals pagans would engage in. When he was going "and a real pagan of the past would never do this thing", I was going "Dude, that was exactly the thing they were doing".

He hates Christianity because Christianity places importance on concepts like "mercy" and "forgiveness" and not hating, which he despises. I don't think it's much more complicated than that, and certainly not theologically deeper.

He didn't eat a perma-ban, but he did try to flounce IIRC.

As I recall, Kulak had a flame out post where he basically said "if you guys are gonna be that way [I forget what his grievance was], then just ban me". I can't remember if he did get banned but he did get modded to some extent or other, and I haven't seen him back since.

His grievance was that we talk about things instead of planning to murder our enemies and burn it all to the ground.

He got a timeout for his screed, but he's not banned currently.

I would find that extremely surprising, given my interactions with Kulak and my observations of his personal interactions with others. (There are places other than TheMotte where he dwells, and I’ve also been known to dwell in some of them.) Mostly I’d just be very surprised to learn that Kulak has a second, way less strident, persona. I’ve watched him have embarrassing and quite personally-vindictive crash-outs over relatively minor disagreements — something which I’ve never seen from @hydroacetylene.

I am hugely disappointed that rather than taking your ban like a man

Never understood this concept. In Paths of Glory, when they decide to execute three soldiers at random, one of the condemned starts whining and dragging his feet, saying it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?

That quivering mess is the only honest man there, and moreover he’s morally correct. You want your “comrades” to have nightmares for years where they see you begging for your mother – their conscience torturing them is good. You don’t want them to commit a grave crime, then eat breakfast like it’s tuesday.

When you make it easy on them, you are cooperating with defectors. In modern parlance, by acquiescing to your own destruction, you become a cuck.

Hlynka doesn't come remotely close to meeting that description. He basically forced the mod team, many of whom called him a friend (beyond me what makes them do that) to hold the gun to his head. He then began yelling "shoot me if you dare, motherfucker". I do not recall if there was time for a surprise Pikachu face when he got shot.

I mean, sure, but, we're talking about being banned from the Motte.

Yeah, one is banned from the digital world, the other from the analog world. Astral plane, mortal plane. Hard to tell which one hurts more to lose, soul or body.

If you consider being executed in comparable to being banned from themotte.org then something went horribly wrong

it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?

I agree that if you're about to be literally executed, then the dignified thing to do (or, one of the dignified options you have available to you, at any rate) is to fight to the last breath. Although I think there are some important dissimilarities between that sort of situation and Hlynka's situation (assuming this really was an alt account of his).

To continue to attempt to surreptitiously use TheMotte after you've been banned from TheMotte means that you simultaneously derive value from the community, while also disrespecting the rules and procedures that allow the community to be what it is and generate that value in the first place. It comes across as selfish and confused. You should either respect the site as a whole, or not. (Of course, this is the problem that Socrates considered in the Crito, where he refused to escape from prison and from his own execution because he felt that it would be unjust to violate the laws of the community that had, up until that point, provided him with life and sustenance. In that case I would disagree with Socrates, perhaps because I somehow view "society" and "the state" as being more separate than "TheMotte" and "TheMotte's moderation" are, and also perhaps because I view the right to one's own life as particularly sacrosanct, but, in any case...)

Hlynka will always remain as one of my all time favorite Mottizens, but if he is creating alt accounts without asking the mods first, then that would be quite disappointing.

We know for a fact he's done it repeatedly. I am only 95% sure this was him.

They're not going to have nightmares or be tortured by their consciences. They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward. If you can't change your fate, then facing it with dignity is better than making yourself pathetic. You aren't helping people do what they are going to do anyway.

Banning people from a forum, of course, is nothing like executing them, and I feel no remorse for banning people who deserve it, so arguing that it's "cucked" to refuse to accept a banning just means you think there is some virtue in being an undignified annoyance. There isn't.

They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward.

That was the ending of the James Cagney movie Angels with Dirty Faces: the childhood friend, now a priest, of the gangster Rocky asks him to beg for mercy on the way to the electric chair so the gang of juvenile delinquents who idolise him will turn away from the criminal path:

In Rocky's last few hours before execution, Jerry visits. He sees the negative impact Rocky could have on the Dead End Kids and asks him to beg for mercy on his way to the death house, citing the impact it would have on the gang, ruining their romantic image of the gangster lifestyle. Rocky refuses, telling Jerry that his reputation is all that he has left.

As they enter the execution room, Rocky shakes Jerry's hand and wishes him well before walking to the electric chair. Then out of nowhere Rocky breaks down, begging and screaming for mercy, and seemingly dies a coward's death. Later, Soapy and the gang read in the newspapers of how Rocky "turned yellow" in the face of his execution. The gang no longer knows what to think about Rocky or the criminal lifestyle, and Jerry asks them to accompany him to say a prayer for "a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could".

Agreed. I would think stating eloquently that they are evil while at the same time dying with dignity will have more affect compared to a man who seemingly is weak.

They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward.

Pure vanity. A grave injustice and your life hang in the balance, this is not the time for such superficial concerns. If morality requires you to cry, you cry. If your duty requires you to die despised, then you swallow your ego and holler like a bahamian.

Btw, I don’t know, and thanks to mods’ I won’t know, but I’m pretty sure that Hlynka, as the NCO law-order-honor-type, would not back my defense at all, which I find amusing. As is tradition, since I’ve always maintained he should not be banned, even though he himself was the most pro-censorship of the mods.

The object level is important. Geeks have an easily exploited habit of trying to make rules that are agnostic to circumstances.

What's a good way to treat criminals? Put them in jail. What's a good way to treat accused criminals? Figure out if the accusation is correct, and put them in jail if they are. What's the best way to treat accused criminals if you don't want to figure out if they're correct? There isn't one. Anything you do has to have the step "figure out if the accusation is correct".

If Hlykna is unjustly accused, almost anything he does in response is okay. If he's justly accused, almost anything except submitting to jail is wrong. If he's justly accused and thinks he isn't, that doesn't change what responses are right and wrong, which depend on the true situation, not on what's in his head.

If you really believe that begging might save you, there is an argument for it, but otherwise, no, I can only despise the "morality" you advocate.

Also, your example is of someone being unjustly and arbitrarily executed, not someone being justly punished for his actions.

You've said that begging here CAN save you, even rescue you from a permaban. Which encourages begging, which is why you shouldn't do it.

That is not what I said. You did not misunderstand me. You are pretending to misunderstand me. Stop doing that.

I did not misunderstand you, nor am I pretending to. I am merely seeing the issue from a perspective you don't share. If you permaban someone and they go away and never come back and never contact you again, they remain permabanned; this is what "permaban" means, of course. If they go to you and request to come back and promise they'll be a good boy, you might let them come back. You don't want to call that begging, but I can't see how it is anything else; you're saying the only way back is through the supplicant's door.

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If you really believe that begging might save you, there is an argument for it, but otherwise, no, I can only despise the "morality" you advocate.

You expressed skepticism earlier that it would inflict guilt-ridden nightmares upon the executioners - but supposing it provably did, would your stance change? Or what if your death is to be witnessed by the public? If you think you're being unjustly put to death, it stands to reason you dislike the regime doing this to you, and want to use what little agency you have left to raise the odds that it'll be toppled or reformed. This is to say, it stands to reason that you want to make yourself a martyr. All else being equal, making as much of a stink as possible when they drag you to the gallows increases the odds of your death having consequences for your killers, whether it makes them second-guess themselves or drives public opinion against them.

Notably, this needn't take the form of whining and blubbering; you could also try and make an impression on the basis of fighting spirit, struggling and cursing your murderers until your last breath, to try and inspire others to show the same rebellious courage - even if you have ~0 odds of actually freeing yourself or injuring your captors. Much manlier, but also very different from "facing death with dignity".

I guess it depends on what kind of role you have the look of. e.g. if you're a nebbish-looking student protestor, or a woman, you'll probably make a more memorable martyr if the cameras capture you as a weeping victim slaughtered by merciless monsters. If you're a big strong guy, going out as a fiery revolutionary might be inspirational and make you look the bigger man, while a sobbing breakdown, rightly or wrongly, might indeed look pathetic.

(To be clear, none of this is about Hlynka's behavior, I'm just curious about the meta-argument.)

You expressed skepticism earlier that it would inflict guilt-ridden nightmares upon the executioners - but supposing it provably did, would your stance change?

Well, now we're deep into hypotheticals having nothing to do with the original example.

If I knew that undignified groveling and blubbering would make my killers feel bad, but not save my life, would I do it? I like to think not. If it would serve some instrumental purpose - like making a martyr of myself that would stir public pity such as to prevent future killings? Assuming I was capable of making such a rational and strategic decision in such a moment, maybe?

Notably, this needn't take the form of whining and blubbering; you could also try and make an impression on the basis of fighting spirit, struggling and cursing your murderers until your last breath, to try and inspire others to show the same rebellious courage - even if you have ~0 odds of actually freeing yourself or injuring your captors. Much manlier, but also very different from "facing death with dignity".

Fighting them and cursing them seems much more dignified than begging and crying. At least I wouldn't die ashamed.

If I knew that undignified groveling and blubbering would make my killers feel bad, but not save my life, would I do it? I like to think not.

and I would do

I would prefer to be able to take actions earlier (when they would be more effective) but in such situation I expect that my priority would be to cause whatever damage I can do, even if i would be only a minor annoyance to them

Fighting them and cursing them seems much more dignified than begging and crying.

+1, though not on shame reasoning but because I guess it would be a bit more effective

(hopefully I will not have reason to apply it in practice - but I will not reduce my opinion about someone being unjustly executed and begging/crying/etc, though I would harshly disapprove of offering to turn traitor at last moment)

but otherwise, no, I can only despise the "morality" you advocate.

On what grounds? Your idea of 'manlyness'? You're generally liberal, but the sex stuff is your achilles heel.

Also, your example is of someone being unjustly and arbitrarily executed, not someone being justly punished for his actions.

Right, but I don't think Hlynka thinks he's been justly punished for his actions. Personally I don't consider most of the permabans the mods hand out justified.

On what grounds? Your idea of 'manlyness'? You're generally liberal, but the sex stuff is your achilles heel.

That's a general problem with the old liberalism. Men are still supposed to act traditionally, but then accept worse results for it. A man who stands up for his rights in court will just get slapped down and get a tougher sentence than one who pleads guilty and begs for leniency, and liberals applaud this -- but still despise the latter man.

On what grounds? Your idea of 'manlyness'? You're generally liberal, but the sex stuff is your achilles heel.

I don't even know what you mean by "sex stuff" here. I despise cowardice, weakness, and lack of dignity and self-respect.

Right, but I don't think Hlynka thinks he's been justly punished for his actions.

Actually, he was pretty straightforward about his disagreement with Zorba and acknowledging that this disagreement necessarily led to his being removed as mod and then banned. We had many conversations with him: I don't know that he necessarily agreed that he was "justly punished" (obviously he wanted to keep doing what he was doing and he did not want us to make him stop) but he knew what he was doing and at the time seemed to accept the consequences.

Personally I don't consider most of the permabans the mods hand out justified.

This does not surprise me.

I think you know what I mean – there’s a tension between liberal egalitarianism which you generally support, and your traditional view of manhood as special protectors and providers, paying for everyting before going to the gallows with a smile. You foist plenty of duties on men you would never foist on women. They’re not even allowed to make a fuss on their last moments on earth when they’re wrongfully executed. By contrast you indulge women their tears in every situation, and tend to view them as innocent victims, like your idol feminist JK rowling (I’m not talking about the "anti-trans" stuff, which is fine and compatible with liberalism).

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Are you sure it's Hlynka? It's easy for someone to tell you "Dude, I think this is him" but if you didn't catch it before, then maybe it's not?

I dunno, I can't identify posters as easily as others on here claim to be able, so if it is him, okay.

95% sure. The report made me look back over his comment history and previous warnings.

We do frequently get reports claiming someone is an alt, but we usually don't find them particularly credible.

I suppose you're right, because no one else would refer to Steve Sailer as a liberal (except maybe Dreaded Jim). But both Bulverism and Ad Hominem being a formal fallacy but a practically useful idea are things I refer to often enough, and I'm definitely not him.

(Also, creating alts to get past a ban doesn't mean you place no value on your word or reputation, at least if you did not give your word not to. It merely means you don't respect the authority of the moderators. Suggesting you'd be willing to reverse a permaban for things other than error in imposing it, however, does cast doubt on your word.)

Also, creating alts to get past a ban doesn't mean you place no value on your word or reputation

Yes, it does.

Suggesting you'd be willing to reverse a permaban for things other than error in imposing it, however, does cast doubt on your word

We have always been willing to consider granting amnesty to someone who contacts us and asks for reinstatement, with the important proviso that they promise to stop behaving in the way that got them banned in the first place. I pointed this out to Hlynka when he first started coming back with alts.

I am fairly sure that even Bryan Caplan, when he makes his case against education, is not referring to primary education but to secondary (high school level) and post-secondary education. There is little doubt, IMO, that most people simply will not learn to read and write unless actually taught, and there are better (phonics) and worse (whole word) ways of teaching reading English. Same goes for arithmetic, though I suspect less so. Part of Freddie's "Education Doesn't Work 2.0" article is weaker than that; it is basically claiming education does work to larn you stuff but not to make you smarter, and thus doesn't change your relative position in society. Of course, even granting Freddie's thesis, this becomes false if Mississippi is doing the right thing and Illinois and Wisconsin are not; if that's true the Mississippi students will change position relative to Illinois and Wisconsin students.

Freddie does go on to say that no educational interventions work, and the Mississippi experience argues against that. But most of his evidence concerns older students. And it's quite likely the interventions he's referring to don't work. The reductio of the claim that educational interventions don't work is the claim that not teaching at all works as well as teaching, and that is clearly false -- but it does not mean that lesser claims are not true.

I’ve always read Caplan as mostly talking about college specifically, not really anything K-12. And I agree to a large measure, that the current model of

  1. Get credential
  2. ???
  3. Get hired for tons of money
  4. Profit

Is flawed for a number of reasons. It doesn’t work for those kids incapable of attaining the diploma. It encourages the dumbing down of educational standards to allow the stupid to get on the path toward a diploma, and allows banks and schools to get rich financing this. It creates a ratchet for the actual talent who now must get ever higher degrees to prove “no im not just here because I paid tuition I actually learned something worthwhile in school”. And it wastes lots of time that could be put to better use.

I argue that at this point higher education credentials are a fetish. They are not worth something for their intrinsic value, but because both the holder and the person reading about the diploma on a resume believe it means something. It doesn’t.

To be fair to Freddie, I don't think he's claiming "education doesn't work". He's claiming "some kids are academically stronger, some kids are academically weaker, and all the interventions in the world are not going to magically give Susie a six point IQ leap up to the same level as Theophilus if she doesn't have that originally".

It's the push about "all kids must go to college" where experience at the coalface has shown him that some kids are not college material and would be better served being educated for a different path. But if the 'cure' for poverty or getting out of your original social class is being pushed as "more college! college for all!" then you are faced with (a) be honest and some kids won't get into college, any college at all (b) go along with what the government and everyone else is telling you, fudge the figures, lower standards, and graduate kids to go to college who will then drop out in their first year because they are not able for it.

I think Freddie sees (b) happening and thinks that is worse for everyone: schools, parents, the kids, society itself.

I think the blue tribe ideological reason for not teaching reading don't have much to do with the idea that it's racist. It's an ideological fixation with teachers always being right. Teachers don't like phonics and self-proclaimed education experts say it shouldn't work- these things may be related, but they're both there and they're both more important than whether it actually works. To these people 'educating kids' isn't really the point of public schools- although it's ideal- public schools exist to spend an ever-increasing amount of money, provide jobs for college educated women, and separate kids from their parents. It's unsurprising that red states who care more about the kids learning than about using the public schools for evil can close the gap rapidly when discovering techniques that work.

Friedliche DeBoer (of the South African Boers perhaps?)

No, DeBoer is just Dutch for the farmer(the South African Boers were originally named this to refer to their supporting themselves by farming, in contrast to east india company employees). It's not a particularly uncommon surname and Dutch names are scattered throughout the US white population from either small waves of immigration or original settlement.

We need a term for the set of things that people and movements push for in practice after all the social dynamics have been accounted for, as opposed to the things they want in principle. Revealed preferences is close, but it comes bundled with a theory of mind I reject. (Revealed preferences are not preferences.)

The only item on your list of goals that anybody would support in principle is separating kids from their parents, and only some would endorse that. But as a practical matter that movement ends up fighting for the whole list.

How about revealed (or implicit) tolerances? Downgrades the intentionality of wanting implied by "preferences" to simply "acceptable results" .

The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.

Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.

If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.

I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.

People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.

It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".

I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.

That would probably be useful.

I felt irritated about the assertion above, but didn't bother spending energy responding to it, because it's basically just boo outgroup. People being motivated by making money is a fully general complaint, and it was two of the three complaints. As for the third claim -- I provide childcare, you are an overeducated babysitter, she is separating children from their parents.

To be clear, my claim is that the education system exists to employ college educated women to make home-makers more of an odd one out than they already are, thus suppressing their numbers further, and that this is an ideological opposition to female domesticity rather than a program to pass out economic benefits.

I don't think this claim is insane on the face of it; education workers are probably a double digit percent of working women who would prefer to be- and could reasonably expect to be if their job was eliminated tomorrow- housewives, and not a particularly low double digit percent.

I don't think it's insane, necessarily, but I can't think of any way to test it off the top of my head, either.

There is a strong case for elementary schools, specifically, and even very conservative communities generally have them. Apparently the Puritans had them, the Amish often have them, Catholic parishes, etc. People who can't do reading, writing, and arithmetic really are at a huge disadvantage, and homeschooling is pretty niche. Even historically, sometimes housewives would also educate their own children to the same standard as a school, but often not. Even Muslim countries have to be very strict indeed to stop sending little girls to elementary school. Sometimes very conservative communities specify only unmarried women can teach, though.

Calling elementary school teaching a jobs program for women doesn't make any more sense than calling policing departments a job program for men.

Elementary special education and the various specialty positions that come with it is largely misguided, in my opinion. But they are not very attractive jobs, as evidenced by the many, many unfilled openings, and the average woman is not very well suited to filling them. Teachers are upset when asked to transfer to SE, and complain about it constantly. There are two sides to that: the low function/high needs self enclosed classrooms, and the inclusion kids on IEPs. The former is probably a function of better healthcare and smaller family units, and is extremely staff intensive, but also extremely draining for the women staffing those positions. Not only the kids themselves (there are a decent number of women suited well enough to that when they're small enough not to be physically threatening), but the compliance paperwork. The overlap between the legal skills and the care work skills is pretty low. Schools are a bit embarrassed about how many SE employees they have, and struggle to hire for those positions.

Junior high and high school are more controversial, but also include more men as workers.

To be clear, historically Catholic schools were staffed by nuns(unmarried women) and in the United States other schools were staffed by literal teenaged girls(unmarried women). Now high school teachers require more subject matter expertise(and this probably extends into many middle school grades/subjects) so it seems like this was always a college educated job. Agreed that even the taliban allows preadolescent girls to go to school with no special conditions, and that modern special ed, flawed as it is, is genuinely a skilled profession that is likely an improvement over previous systems. But the fact remains that a bright sixteen year old can teach a 'normal' third grade classroom, elementary school teaching as a career track- and at least a large portion of the administration growth in schools- is about pulling middle class women who love children into careers. Absent that ideological push 'elementary school teacher' would be similar to 'lunchlady' or whatever, where a college degree isn't necessary.

It's also important to note that elementary school used to be much shorter, with less demand for teachers. My own parents remember kindergarten being treated as advanced preschool(and regularly skipped), with no such thing as preK and first grade having a loosey-goosey attitude to attendance, sometimes first and second grades were combined. While not doing this obviously requires more teachers it's not clear that it's better.

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There is a Dewey-esque impulse among many education reformers to use the schools to shape the next generation into something their parents would not approve of. Nineteenth-century opponents of Roman Catholic education were in that vein, as was Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I think that's what he was getting at.

I think for three years I watched Robby Suave at The Hill tee off on the Teacher's Union for fighting against phonics based teaching, despite all the science and decades of outcomes showing that whole language teaching is a miserable failure. But teachers hate it, because it's rote and boring, and they insist on narcissistically avoiding all unpleasant aspects of their job. Despite being responsible for the education of our next generation. So their union fights phonics based teacher curriculums tooth and nail.

At least that's what Robby's reporting showed consistently over the years. It was a bit of a hobby horse for him, and an area where his libertarian brain really found a nit to pick with the "trust the science" blue team.

The point I'm drifting towards is that this is really a proxy battle against teachers. The profession is overrun with activist LARPing as educators, their union is controlled by a lesbian activist, and to whatever degree education is occurring, it's haphazard and inertial based on decades of diminishing institutional knowledge. It's a low pay, highly political profession, and increasingly only true believers are attracted and willing to stay in the profession. The ones that treat the trials and tribulations of the profession as a test of faith for their activism are the only ones that thrive.

Luckily I went to school before the "whole reading" thing kicked off (indeed, I was able to read before I started school) but I was there for when the New Maths kicked in, and oh brother.

I think they did to English what they did to Maths: don't teach it the old boring rote way, be the guide helping children discover for themselves, draw out of them what is naturally there.

That's fine for people who have talent for maths and can figure out on their own from first principles. For the likes of me, it meant I understood nothing of what was being taught and scraped along with barely passing. The old "rote learning" would have worked a whole lot better for me, rather than "now we'll just write this on the blackboard and you can all figure it out for yourselves". Even the teachers were stuck at times! They couldn't follow the methods in the new textbooks and were reduced to "just look up the right answer in the back".

For kids who got thrown in at the deep end with "just look at the shape of the entire word and take clues from the context and then you'll figure it out", that must have been a nightmare if your parents weren't teaching you how to read at home.

I'm so sorry. I truly don't understand how anyone can have a functional use of math if they didn't at least learn basic arithmetic by rote. These alternate ways I see of doing addition, subtraction, division and multiplication out of common core are bonkers to me, because of how intensive they are in terms of the number of steps they require, or how much scratch paper you'd need for all the intermediate parts. They look more like academic proofs of how basic arithmetic works than how a person should be expected to functionally work with numbers in the spur of the moment.

I mean shit, just yesterday I was playing a game, figuring off the top of my head what the odds of a single 5 or 6 were off rolling a pair of dice. Came up with 20/36 in fairly short order. Although I will be marginally embarrassed if my off the top of the head work turns out to be wrong after all that.

I find this a little strange. Yes, rote memorization is a good idea. But every time I see someone criticize the common core methods it just seems like how I naturally learned to think about numbers? You definitely can truncate most of the steps, the point is spelling it all out. People will say the squares are pointless when you can just carry the one, but the whole point of the squares is to show how carrying the one works mechanically and how it works the same way with multiplication .

I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.

The Tom Lehrer (God rest the man) song is funny but acute if you're old enough to have gone through the process when schools were switching from the old way to the new way, and teachers weren't adequately trained yet in the new way.

I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.

same here, only it was my "learned calculus with a slide-rule" engineer dad who got so fed up with what the school system was trying to pull he just sat me down and long-handed it out with me.

The base 10 "new math" in that song isn't THAT new (that is, it wasn't introduced with the post-Sputnik "New Math") -- that sort of subtraction (which I believe remained standard up to common core) dates back to 1821 in the US. The "old math" (for people under 35 who went to public school) in that song is indeed considerably older, and incidentally works better on a computer because the borrow only propagates one way. I don't know about the under-35 or private school variant.

I got hit by the tail end of the new math. The way I was taught to do subtraction is definitely closer to Tom Lehrer's second method than the first; we would say that the two "borrowed" a one from the four, so the four got crossed out and replaced by a three while the two became twelve, and twelve minus three is nine.

I... like it? It makes a lot more sense than the first method. We didn't get taught that the four is actually four tens, since it's in the tens place, and that you are substracting ten from the forty and adding them to the two, but hearing him say it makes it obvious in retrospect that's why the algorithm works.

Tom Leher says "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer" like it's a joke, but I actually agree with that. As my calculus teacher said "your only advantage over the machine is your ability to think. Once you lose that, I prefer the machine. Calculators are faster and make no mistakes".

Anyway, we also did simple sets in elementary school. No non-decimal bases, though; I learned that on my own reading about computers, because binary and hexadecimal.

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”

Your ability to think matters because it enables you to get the right answer. The only problem with students who don’t understand is that they won’t be able to get the right answer in more general situations. An athlete doesn’t need to understand the physics of his sport or the biology behind his movements.

I'm so bad at memorization that I never learned the multiplication table by heart. If someone asks me what 7 x 8 is, my mental process goes: Okay, I have no idea what 7 x 8 is, but that's the same as 14 x 4 (multiply the 7 by 2 and divide the 8 by 2). Then I can just:

1
14 x
 4

56

Which only takes me a few seconds, even in my head.

Likewise, I never memorized most of the trigonometric identities. Instead, I memorized cos x + isin x = e^ix and rederive them at need. When I took the ABCTE math exam, I even practiced using Feynman's notation to make this faster. And the only reason I know the common derivatives is because of this song.

The one math quiz I totally bombed in high school was when our teacher gave us a list of squares and cubes to memorize and then deliberately did not give us enough time to calculate them, to check if we had indeed memorized them.

Personally I just remember the 10 times table and get everything from that.

7x8 is just 70 with a couple of 7s taken away, ie 70-14.

See, that's the kind of 'innate understanding from first principles' that my brain just does not have for numbers. I learned my times tables and I'd be lost without them.

I look at that and go "but why pick 2? Why not multiply the 7 by 3 and divide the 8 by 4 if you're doing it that way?" Not getting the underlying patterns means I'm blind as to why "this number rather than that number, this of course is the quadrant of the circle for cos" etc. It's like trying to explain to someone tone-deaf that of course this note from hitting this key on the piano is not the same as this note hitting that key. (I'm bad at that as well, I love music but in music classes at school when we had to identify 'what note was that?' I bombed).

You have to pick the same number for the multiplication and division, but other than that 2 is picked just because it's a small, easy number to do division and multiplication with. (You could think of it as "taking" the number out of the one you're dividing and then "putting it back in" to the one you're multiplying, so the whole problem has the same numbers in total, just moved around.) Since 8 isn't divisible by 3, 3 isn't very useful - unless you really like fraction mathematics, I guess - but 4 works equally well:

4 x 7 = 28

8 / 4 = 2

28 x 2 = 56

Or, for the way I would do that last line in my head:

(20 + 8) x 2 = (20 x 2) + (8 x 2) = 40 + 16 = 56

that still requires you to know that 4 x 7 = 28 and to me it's just as fast to learn all the times tables in that case.

I was just using it because you'd brought up "why not pick 4" - and, as demonstrated it's perfectly valid to pick 4! It would work fine. It's just that multiplying and dividing by 2 is usually easier for people, so that's what erwgv used.

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The median teacher is a normie. Mathematically, this must be true- there are simply too many of them for it not to be.

But to be more specific, teachers are very very conformist women who are at least moderately good at school. If, going through a 'standard' American education system, you uncritically do what the system recommends at every point(and are smart enough to do so, but not smart enough for someone to recruit you out of it), you will probably wind up as a teacher. This is not a recipe for pushing back against retarded activist union bosses or doing hard work that your coworkers doubt the value of.

So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle. It's hard to see how she even could. She took the job because she didn't think the default path pushed on her through very well, would rather go home after her shift than engage in politics but doesn't know how to say no. She probably likes believing that she's helping the kids in her classroom; she certainly likes the kids. She probably doesn't like her admins or union bosses but does whatever they say with no pushback- because she has never pushed back against anything in her life, ever. That the teaching profession is populated, on the 'grunt' level with the normiest, most submissive women in existence may not be good, but it is a failure of all of society rather than of those teachers themselves.

At one point this may have been true. After vaccine mandates and pronoun mandates, the activist have more or less gotten the last of the conscientious objectors out of the profession, and the normies have been indoctrinated.

Yes thé normies are indoctrinated- because they’re, you know, normies.

Ok, so we're back to all teachers being the problem then?

So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle.

Unhappily, the most vocal and most online ones are the Mx. Smiths in a polycule who were highly indignant over not being able to tell their eight year old pupils all about their sex life as a queer non-binary folx because some repressive, probably MAGA, parent snitched on them to the administration about what was really being taught instead of readin'/ritin'/'rithmetic.

I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.

(In case you think I'm inventing the polycule teacher, nope, that's a real example from a few years back).

You weren't kidding about that subreddit. Just browsed a thread where they were complaining about having to hand the ten commandments in the classroom, and a commenter literally recommended hanging the 7 tenets of the Satanic 'faith'. You can't make this stuff up. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1miopbb/its_over/n76x3d5/

I mean, I strongly oppose public school teachers being required, or even permitted, really, to hang the Ten Commandments in a classroom. Public schools should not endorse an establishment of religion.

The point of the Satanic Temple stuff is as a protest against religious impositions on public spaces — you say you’re just endorsing good morals, well here’s ours, how do you like it? It’s a good troll, and I think it makes its point.

You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.

The Satanic Temple stuff is just a more edgy version of the Pastafarians trying to wear pasta strainers in their drivers license photos. I think they need to be careful, because yelling “hail Satan” as they like to do sometimes is both upsetting to normies and spiritually stupid, but based on my experiences with the type they’re just edgy atheists and their personalities aren’t much different.

I don’t like any of them, and my view on existing religious references in public spaces is to roll my eyes at people making a big deal of them, but the teachers have a legitimate constitutional complaint that being required to hang religious texts in their classrooms is inappropriate.

I mean, I strongly oppose public school teachers being required, or even permitted, really, to hang the Ten Commandments in a classroom. Public schools should not endorse an establishment of religion.

This boils down to banning public schools when you look at it at all. Every school teaches a religion, it just depends what flavor.

You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.

Someone once described the first two groups as people “who worship Satan by pretending to worship Satan.” As an assessment it depends on Satan’s existence, but if you accept that it describes the situation well. It’s still worth distinguishing them from those who deliberately and unironically worship Satan, of course.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they are a foundational part of our civilization, and it's good for people to know about and consider them, so I would certainly address them in the curriculum at some point. On the other hand, they're kind of appropriate as actual classroom rules.

I am the LORD your God; you shall not have strange gods before me.

Clearly inappropriate for American public schools.

You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.

I don't think religious people even agree about what this means, and also not appropriate for American public schools.

Remember to keep holy the LORD’s Day.

They get Saturday and Sunday off, anyway. It would be an improvement on playing Roblox all weekend, but not seriously taught in public schools.

Honor your father and mother.

Good advice. Public schools like to focus on the dishonorable parents, with messaging like this Mother's Day, think about all the women who are unable to be mothers, or are estranged from their mothers, and how sad they are. This would probably be a net improvement.

You shall not murder.

Schools are very serious about this one.

You shall not commit adultery.

Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.

You shall not steal.

Schools are and should be serious about this.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Schools should be more serious than they are about this.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.

Inappropriate for children.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.

Schools should be much more serious about this, and especially about flaunting your goods at your neighbor to try to bait them into covetousness.

So I guess that's half of them, where the Commandments and schools align, though they probably wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder, even.

You shall not commit adultery.

Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.

Well of course, they first have to figure out their gender identity and sexual orientation and position on polyamory before they can even begin to contemplate ethical non-monogamy. How repressive to tell eight year olds that adultery is sinful!

There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.

though they probably wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder, even.

IIRC schools in USA keep holding shooting drills intended to make subset of "You shall not murder." harder

(in effect cause more damage than shootings themselves, but that should obviate "wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder" anyway)

Elementary schools are a bit paranoid that someone out there might be a murderer, and might come to their school, but I haven't heard any I've been in suggest that their students themselves might become murderers, and should instead choose not to.

Except they do not have different morals, they do not believe in the tenets of Satanism, they are trolling? Petulant trolling no less since I would bet they agree with the morality of most of the ten commandments, usually they're just having a 'fuck you dad' reaction to at least one of the first four?

I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.

It's worth remembering how extreme Reddit is when you see stuff like that. For example, the board gaming subreddit is extremely woke (as the forum discussed a few weeks ago), but in real life very few people I have encountered are that way. Similarly, the observation that Reddit teachers are crazy does not necessarily show that the wider group of teachers is that way. They may be, I don't have experience or evidence to say otherwise... I just think one needs more data points than Reddit because of how overall crazy that site's users have become.

Oh, I agree, but the ones most online are the most vociferous, and they that shout the loudest get heard most. So the extreme positions get pushed because the majority are silent or don't know the shenanigans going on until it's too late.

It's also worth noting that the median post on /r/teachers seems to be perfectly ordinary discipline or dealing with admin problems with canned answers that often boil down to 'yeah that sucks'. It's just stuff like 'I had a fight break out in my class' and 'my students won't keep track of which pronouns I use which day of the week' that gets the most attention for reasons that seem obvious.

I think this is probably largely true. My kid's teachers have all been pleasant types who are passionate about helping kids and who do not seem overly political, but I can't help but be pulled away from your claim every time I pop open Facebook or any social media site and see, on my feed, some of the few random "friends" that I acquired through acquaintances in college (some who are now teachers) start talking about the patriarchy while simultaneously demanding that they and their districts receive more funds. The one thing they have in common is that they are all college educated, middle to upper middle class liberal-progressive white women.

The online world probably skews my perception of reality when it comes to the actual percentage of teachers these types represent, but they are so loud, passionate, and irritating online that it starts to feel like they are the majority simply because they take up the majority of the conversation online. Not sure what can be done about these squeaky wheels other than just waiting for the continued vibe shift brought about by regular people finally having had enough and insisting that these women shut the fuck up and that no one cares about their personal vendetta against the toxic masculine white man.

For me personally though, this group has become the most annoying group on the planet. To clarify, I'm not saying they're the worst people. It's just the combination of them dominating the online conversation and acting offended (either over something that happened to them or on behalf of someone from a marginalized group) while also having the cultural momentum to impose and enforce all of their bullshit rules and policies that makes them exhausting to endure.

I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.

The median teacher is a normie. Mathematically, this must be true- there are simply too many of them for it not to be.

There's about 4 million primary and secondary school teachers in the US, compared to about 260 million adults. That leaves plenty of room for non-normieness among teachers.

It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.

I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.

There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse.

That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.

An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.

I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.

I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.

SEL (social emotional learning)

What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.

I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.

My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.

More comments

Yeah, I think a lot of this is top-down, not grassroots. Unfortunately, the people going through the universities and the training get this imposed on them. So even if they're not progressive themselves, they are being taught "this is how you do it" and not given alternative tools.

Good for them.

I haven't read the others, but as I recall Freddie's position is explicitly that, yes, there are better and worse teaching methods, and that teaching can and sometimes does improve. And that's good! More kids can read when teaching improves! But to the extent that the improvements are important and sustainable, everyone else will pick up on it fast enough, and then everyone will be back in their relative positions again, but now with more people able to read (again: good and worth doing).

The test for that is whether in a decade, (assuming people still care how many kids can read and haven't just switched to voice interfaces for a large chunk of the population) Mississippi ends up exactly where you would expect them to be, based on their demographics. They already have to adjust for demographics to look really impressive. Tenth is good, but not groundbreaking.

You can also get programs that are good but not sustainable, like KIPP. It's sort of sustainable, because New York schools in general are able to absorb all the burnt out teachers leaving there, and supply a constant stream of new, talented, excited teachers. But it's not sustainable at scale, you can't just replace all the normal schools in a state with KIPP schools, because in addition to teacher burnout, you have to have family buy in, which is a limited resource. I suppose whatever Mississippi is doing is reasonably sustainable, or they would have flamed out by now.

Now a number of liberal commentators ranging from Friedliche DeBoer … to Steve Sailer

(emphasis mine)

anon, I…

As a Millennial Southerner who grew up in crappy white rural schools (aka. north Alabama) where ~20% of the kids exited middle school more or less illiterate my non-ideological take is that some mix of the Bush/early Obama era Republican takeovers and/or old-fashioned generational turnover likely flushed out a bunch of shockingly old-fashioned/complacent educators/administrators (aka. dead wood) such that schools actually started giving a shit about literacy. Are we going to surpass Massachusetts? I doubt it, but I bet there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit to be gathered as late as the 90s and the Southern states just started to grab it.

I don't want to get into wall of text territory, but I am retrospectively appalled that I was lavished with resources by our local school system (however misguided they may have been) because I was a non-compliant pain in the ass while my middle sister was allowed to skate through silently struggling to read because she didn't cause trouble. I'm smarter than she is, but not twice her ACT score smarter.

The past poor literacy is a very real thing. I work for a trucking company whose driver pool mostly draws from MS, AL, and GA and many of our Gen X drivers (who are otherwise successful owner-operators, aka. not stupid) are incapable of writing a basic incident report without requiring heavy editing from management to produce something intelligible in English. Likewise, many of our white-collar office staff (again, I'm picking on the Gen Xers) are barely capable of using computers. If anything goes wrong they just hit the buttons harder and start swearing. They can memorize how to do this or that but don't really grasp how to navigate an interface to find something they want. I would rate my computer skills to be marginally above-average by mid-millennial standards (I can install and use an easy Linux distro and that's about as far as my skills go.) and I'm treated like an IT wizard for what I can do.

On an amusing side note, I vividly remember No Child Left Behind because suddenly my teachers became very friendly during the annual standardized tests and worked to ensure that I was filling in the answers correctly (They were confident that I had the right answer and less confident that I was bubbling in the scantrons correctly.).

and a number of users here including at least one moderator.

How did it go again?

"You are allowed to ping me if you like? You know that right?".

You are, of course, at liberty to disclose which moderator you're talking about. In fact, I actively encourage it. Don't worry, we don't bite. You are very unlikely to get banned for talking shit about a mod, we actually tolerate quite a great deal. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion of who that moderator in question is, but it's always good to have clarification without jumping to a conclusion.

Please, go on. But I must note, if you strongly suspect that a post of yours will get you in trouble with the mod team, that is a good reason to not post that. You might even DM us and ask us if it looks okay.

Steve Sailer doesn't think that education has no value, only that biology is the most important factor:

Here is a summary of his extended take on the Mississipi miracle: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle-search

In general, it appears that Mississippi is making progress by being realistic about its human capital. Instead of succumbing to progressive education fads that begin by assuming that your students are self-motivated prodigies, the Mississippi Miracle is based on the assumption that its students aren’t necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer, so they need basic education tailored to their abilities, not fantasies about self-actualization.

Also, it appears that Mississippi’s reforms tend to make teaching less creative. Teaching tends to appeal to theater kids who like doing creative stuff in front of an audience, so most schools tend to allow teachers to try out the latest fad and their various brainstorms, most of which don’t work particularly well, but at least keep the teachers hopeful and motivated.

Since 2013, however, Mississippi has been drilling teachers on “the Science of Reading,” which doesn’t sound like that much fun for teachers other than the satisfaction that these time-tested drills tend to work a little better than the latest creative breakthrough sweeping the more progressive states.

I don't accuse you of lacking charity to Sailer, I think you just haven't read what he thinks about this at all and were going off vibes. He makes basically the same limited argument you're making 'Mississippi is doing a better job of education' without the extension of 'hereditarians are wrong' which doesn't necessarily follow.

Likewise, in terms of sub-Saharan African countries, Botswana is fairly well run. But being well-run can only get you so far. The wealth comes from the mining industry rather than broader industry and development, there's a very high poverty rate. But they haven't cocked it up, which is better than can be said for Nigeria or many others. The best-run African country is still poorer per capita (and presumably much poorer in real terms, minus diamond mining wealth) than the worst-run European country (Ukraine) which is also in a major war. If Botswana was white, it would be an absolute disaster zone, most of the population are basically subsistence farmers, 1/3 of the adults have HIV, no significant manufacturing.

While Mississippi may be teaching more efficiently, what actually matters is the unadjusted scores. US White progressives can afford to indulge in dumb fads. It'll hurt to be sure, it's squandering enormous amounts of wealth and talent. But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.

Iirc Botswana’s purchasing power per capita is higher than Ukraine or Moldova. Not high bars to clear, but it’s achieved solidly normal Latin American economic success that the two worst white countries do not have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Table

Seemingly not as of 2021, though it depends whose measures you use, IMF or CIA. Perhaps it's the case today but even then Botswana would be poorer in a real sense than Ukraine. If the economy is diamond mines and a bunch of subsistence farmers it rather stretches the limits of what GDP PPP per capita is supposed to mean. Ukraine has minerals but also produces drones, guided missiles, tanks, jet engines, software, video games...

Botswana’s extreme poverty rate for 2023 (13.5%) is more than four times higher than comparators at similar GDP levels. Unemployment rate remains high at 23.6%.

That's real extreme poverty, about $3 a day, that basically does not exist in white countries. The GDP figure is high but much of the rest that one expects to come along with the GDP isn't there.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/botswana/overview

Working link: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle

Wow I really cocked that one up didn't I? Good catch.

But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.

That's true, but raising the waterline for the less able and less talented is going to be good for the nation as a whole. Better to have literate, functional (as in "learned how to pay attention and behave, not wreck the classroom"), blue collar or working class kids than criminals-in-training. Sure, they'll never get jobs at Bear Stearns, but they won't be clogging up the jails either.

The unadjusted scores are still quite good; perhaps they're not as good as Massachussets but leading the second quintile ain't bad.

By claiming that standards matter i am effectively take taking a shit on the foundational beliefs of Steve Sailer, Friedliche DeBoer, and a number of users here including at least one moderator.

It's a little strange to read a polemic against X, Y, and Z without links to the writings of X, Y, and Z that we are supposed to think are wrong. Well, it's not that weird in general, but it's weird for this forum.

This post is a kind of anti-Bulverism where you wish that we assume you are right and fill in the argument (and the supporting evidence) post-hoc. Are you really shitting on the foundational beliefs of the above named? Would they be surprised to learn that "standards matter" is shitting on their foundational beliefs?

Also, the German name is "Friedrich".

without links to the writings of X, Y, and Z

Y, and Z may be missing, but he did link to deBoer.

it would seem that having standards and enforcing them may actually matter.

I may misremember things, but AFAIK they replaced failed way to teach reading by older boring one that works? (AFAIK the bad one is named "whole word")

You're thinking of "whole language".

It's also called "whole word". Amusingly, the Wikipedia page on it currently starts with a little editorializing in the opposite direction that you'd expect for Wikipedia:

Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited[8] educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children.

"Discredited" dates back to May 2022. The citation goes here, which is clearly a biased source.

There's another citation to Jordan Peterson:

"You don't use whole word learning unless you're absolutely bloody clueless"

According to all known laws of physics and aviation there is no way that a bumble bee ought to be able to fly.

[citation needed]

(The person who wrote the script didn't know very many laws of physics. He was trying his best, okay?)

Anything can be a UFO is you're bad enough at identifying flying objects.

Citation needed?

Know your meme.

It's an old meme, with a 1947 debunking.

oh, so this time it was intentional joke

(you would be surprised how many people actually believe it)


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