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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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note: I'm pretty sure there are drugs that considerably increase the chance of becoming homosexual/bi, such as the famous trenolone

https://old.reddit.com/r/moreplatesmoredates/comments/sabei2/why_does_tren_turn_some_people_gay/

The thing is, every male is gay (bi), this is a basic fact yet it is taboo and everyone is in denial.

By gay I don't mean to be sexually attracted by the male body but to derive more pleasure from prostate orgasms, because that is obviously the male g-spot and the orgasm it provides in order of magnitudes more potent than penile stimulation.

  • -15

By gay I don't mean to be sexually attracted by the male body but to derive more pleasure from prostate orgasms, because that is obviously the male g-spot and the orgasm it provides in order of magnitudes more potent than penile stimulation.

OK, then use a different word, because that's not what gay means. By that logic we should all identify as lotus-eaters because we will derive more pleasure from the latest hedonium crop than from any sexual act. Not that I agree with the premise anyways.

Someone who pushes the pill could say it's to increase gay representation. With a pill like this gays could become not a minority. That everyone would take the pill would be denied, so the future you outline here wouldn't concern anyone. Indeed, as concerned as you are, you must have an ulterior motive!

The point of diversity efforts isn’t consistency, it’s to create high status make work jobs, cover up shady hiring and university admissions practices, and create some kind of controversy allowing the people pushing it to call it’s critics racist, in roughly that order.

That is not their motivation. Their motivation is to provide a hand to help people perceived as having to overcome bigotry to succeed.

Again and again, I have to make this point because people don't seem to grasp that just because someone is ignorant or acting against what they say, that their motivations are therefore fictitious.

To be fair, a lot of the shady hiring and admissions is more about bringing in foreigners than about race per se.

At least in the case of colleges, because the foreigners pay a crapton of money to attend the school.

The son of a Nigerian cabinet minister pays full freight at Harvard the same way as very few native born Americans. H1Bs are also easy to find and cost less(and demand less work-life balance) compared to American engineers.

In providing a deliberate choice, it forces one to answer the question of which lifestyle is better.

It forces each individual who has the option of taking the pill to make a decision about how they would rather be, but I am not sure I see how it forces some kind of cross-individual evaluation of which way to be is "better."

The most defensible formulation of this position is that sure, gay is worse than straight (i.e. any parent would choose the latter for their kids), but some are born gay and there is nothing that can be done.

I am not sure what "this position" being defended is. What if I do not believe that being gay is worse than being straight?

If we are now discussing whether or not someone should (or be allowed to) become gay by choice, leftists would be forced into saying that yes, a sterile existence is better than starting a family.

I think I am as leftist as anyone and it is not clear to me how my beliefs oblige me to answer the way you say. Could you elaborate?

As a rightist assuming that leftism always wants more members of its protected groups (gay is a protected group), the pill would be seen as important technology and marketed towards children through schools and hospitals the same way transgenderism is.

Do you have any evidence for this? As a leftist myself and someone who knows lots of leftists this does not seem like it would be the case to me.

Then you believe a civilization that would extinct itself in one generation

Come now. Gay people are capable of reproduction. We are all familiar with the existence of sperm donation and surrogacy.

If gay is not better, why are we painting/waving the pride flag everywhere and explicitly preferring homosexuals in hiring decisions? Why do kids need to attend drag queen story time?

Even allowing your framing as is, you answered that yourself up above: "ostensibly to remedy all of the homophobia" - if you believe that you don't need to think that being gay is better, just that being gay is ok and due to homophobia/biogtry/whatever you have to put a thumb on the scale.

There may be some people who think being gay is better, but it certainly does not seem to be the mainstream among my Blue Tribe friends gay and otherwise.

Then you believe a civilization that would extinct itself in one generation is on equal footing to one that wouldn't.

Sure. I do not think anything that causes a civilization to endure is made morally good by that fact. Moral goodness does not cash out in "causes civilization to continue."

If it indeed doesn't matter, it would not be worth it to develop and distribute this pill. All the subsequent pushing of the pill would of course not be happening until it's good that it is.

I am a little confused, you take it as a premise that the pill has already been developed. I am not particularly interested in developing a pill to convert straight people into gay people so my beliefs seem already consistent with believing it doesn't matter. I also am skeptical that leftists would be pushing anyone to take this who didn't want to.

It has to be pushed because to claim that gay and straight are equally good is to discredit pride and everything leftists have been saying and doing for 70 years.

I think this misunderstands the purpose of pride.

If gay is not better, why are we painting/waving the pride flag everywhere and explicitly preferring homosexuals in hiring decisions?

Pride is named the way it is explicitly as a response to the historical belief that being gay was something one ought to be ashamed of. Similarly we sometimes have preferences for gay people in hiring decisions for the same reasons we sometimes have them for African-Americans and women, because these groups have been historically discriminated against in those decisions. You identify this motivation in your own comment! It is not related to believing that being gay is better than being straight, it's a reaction against the idea that being gay is worse than being straight.

Why do kids need to attend drag queen story time?

Kids don't need to attend drag queen story time. I think it may even be wrong to force kids to attend one if they didn't want to. But it is also wrong to prevent all such events, even for those who want to attend them or put them on.

Do you also think it's okay to show kids ordinary porn? (Even relatively vanilla porn?)

No, but how is this related to my comment at all? Is a fully clothed person reading a childrens book pornographic?

The whole point of drag queens is sexuality. A better analogy would be like having a famous porn star read a children's book, under circumstances where it's obvious the porn star was chosen specifically for being a porn star. That's a way to sneak sexuality in front of kids while keeping plausible deniability.

I don't agree. People do drag for lots of reasons, including non-sexual ones.

More comments

You would not be able to say that being gay is worse and therefore the pill should be disallowed

I think people may just have a little bit of libertarian spirit left in them to not ban elective things like this. This whole course of argumentation seems to be ignoring that lefties really truly believe the "born that way" framing. You can't really draw anything from this thought experiment by combining it with other things lefties say given that they hold that assumption and this thought experiment violates it. Rightly or wrongly they do not think they are making new trans people, they think they are liberating trans people who were in the closet.

I cannot say I'm surprised that you came back from your most recent ban, in which you were explicitly told to stop dropping flaming paper bags full of shit on the doorstep, to immediately do the exact same thing. But you cannot say you weren't fairly warned.

Banned. Most likely permanently, pending mod discussion.

Maybe kind of a fun flaming bag as far as that goes. It seems to have drawn mainly polite and somewhat interesting responses.

I don't know the users history that lead to previous bans though. And it clearly is an intentionally radioactive post.

How is this a flaming paper bag full of shit on our doorstep? The engagement I’m seeing is rather polite - no one is stomping on the bag, so to say.

I think there's a wider point that can be discussed here, because we're already speaking elsewhere of the possibilities in embryonic selection. Mostly this has been in the context of increasing IQ, but as pregnancy becomes something that is planned rather than "well that's what happens when you get married and start having sex", when - to quote this report - "motherhood is an aspiration and not an inevitability", and when people having their own genomes sequenced, genetic engineering, embryo selection, surrogate pregnancy and who knows, even artificial wombs are more and more the norm and more acceptable and accessible, we're moving into the realm of a whole slate of choices potential parents can make.

Previously there was already one fertility clinic offering the option of "what eye colour do you want the baby to have?" But maybe there will be decisions about "do you want the baby to be gay or straight? cis or trans?" As gay couples use fertility and surrogacy clinics to have their own biological children, maybe there will be "We want our baby to be gay like us" requests. Why not, if it's as normal as being hetero? Why object to it? In the future that might be seen as being as bigoted and discriminatory as trying to force mixed-race couples to only have white children.

force mixed-race couples to only have white children.

Wait what? How does that even work?

I think I see some of what it was modded for—it's a pretty partisan, Outgroup Bad, take, especially the end there, not really aiming at courtesy. But I don't know that it's entirely without value either, since it is a good thought experiment.

It would be nice if we didn't have to guess at exactly what it was modded for.

Agreed, our guessing indicates poor moderation.

That is more to the credit of the people engaging than the OP.

I totally reject the idea that the mods can detect and enforce bad (rules-breaking/bad faith/problematic etc) comments or topics in spite of other commentators engaging with it fruitfully. Dialogue is a two+ way street, if a comment hasn't led to mass rule-breaking or other problems then I don't see how you can pin the good-discourse on other people, and the bad discourse on the OP. That isn't how forums or discussions work. This is terrible.

Well, that's not how it works. First of all, very few comments lead to "mass rule-breaking or other problems." If someone posts flaming hot bait that violates multiple rules, and it happens to spawn an interesting thread, that's nice, but you don't get amnesty for breaking the rules because it started a decent discussion, and this poster in particular has a very bad track record and was explicitly told that if he did what he just did again he'd be banned.

Can you articulate what rules this broke?

Everything about the way his "thought experiment" (which in itself would have been fine) was presented was culture warring. "Leftists want more gays, they favor homosexuals in every arena, and will happily wipe out civilization in order to get more of them" is, as I said, a continuation of his past pattern in which everything is written as a maximally uncharitable boo outgroup. As is usually the case with such strawmanning, the core of his argument ("This is how I think leftists and rightists would react to a 'homosexual pill'") could have been made in a thoughtful manner that doesn't project purely evil and bad faith motivations onto his outgroup, but he made it clear that projecting purely evil and bad faith motivations onto his outgroup was the point of the post. This is what he has done for a long time. It describes pretty much everything he has ever posted, and he was told to stop it, and rather than showing the slightest willingness to adjust to the environment we're trying to create here, he made it clear he's just here to culture war and only to culture war. (I will further note he had other very bad posts in the thread, which were also reported, but we only responded to this one.)

It's no different than the drive-bys we get fairly frequently by a "new" poster with a flaming hot take on HBD: "Hey, since HBD is true, why do you think leftists pretend it isn't?" We do not prohibit HBD discussions; we don't even prohibit spicy HBD takes. We do prohibit people using HBD, or trans issues, or Holocaust denial, just to start threads about how malicious and dishonest their enemies are.

Some people can actually discuss the topic, even if they do actually believe their enemies are malicious and dishonest. @pointsandcorsi has never shown any interest in doing anything but starting a circlejerk about how malicious and dishonest his enemies are, and he was given repeated warnings to stop trying to do that.

Everything about the way his "thought experiment" (which in itself would have been fine)

This is the most annoying part and why I would support a ban. It poisons what would otherwise have been an interesting hypothetical with some promise to shed actual light on things. Worse, it poisons coming up with even more interesting hypotheticals that even lightly pattern match this sort of thing.

This person proposed a pretty interesting thought experiment which has spurred interesting discussion. It seems foolish to ban them for this.

Okay. First, they wouldn't patent such a pill, because they know it'd be the top story on FOX for the next week and not sell. Second, they wouldn't be able to sell or distribute the pill - no FDA approval because it doesn't treat any diseases. Nor would any normal democrats or leftists (leftist generally refers to 'socialist / communist / anarchist', not 'normal democrats), give it to their kid, even the particularly gay-accepting ones, they do not think gay is better than straight. The only possible exception I can see here is maybe some gay parents would want their adopted children to be gay to for the shared experiences, but I don't think that translates to a meaningful number of uses of the pill. It would lead to interesting science on how 'being gay' works, though.

So this is just conservative fear porn? It's not any more interesting than a post about 'what would conservatives do if science discovered 20% of people are trans, and not letting them transition makes them very sad??'.

You could have made that argument about things that actually happened as well though. It needs to get a foot in the door somehow first, unassited, doesnt need to be very big or mainstream. Then I think liberals would support it. Not to increase minorities, or because they believe being gay is better, but in the same sort of way they do with trans now.

The problem is it's designed to be a conservative rage fantasy - "Pfizer turning our kids gay!!". And the 'only to 13yos' aspect is going to put off most libs as well.

A better thought experiment would be 'a reversible pill for any age that turns you gay'. That, I could see spreading over a long period of time.

It's not any more interesting than a post about 'what would conservatives do if science discovered 20% of people are trans, and not letting them transition makes them very sad??'.

(1) Right now, the estimates are something around 1% for trans people. Hell knows if that's accurate or not, but by comparison, around 11% of Americans are baseball fans. If baseball fans got the same accommodations as trans people do, imagine that. So if 20% of people were trans, I'd be a lot more inclined to take it as a real need

(2) Boo-hoo on "very sad". A lot of things make a lot of people very sad, but we have to suck it up and get on with life. Agree that trans dysphoria is a mental illness that needs treatment, that hormones and in the most extreme cases surgery are necessary medical treatments, and okay, I'll go along with that. But right now we have "it's totally perfectly normal, you bigot; it's not a mental illness, even if there are claims about dysphoria and suicide (and a fuck-ton of sex offenders coming out as trans, imagine that) and co-morbidities of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD and everything else the online snowflakes can tick off the bingo card; it's not a fetish ditto; even if we demand hormones and puberty blockers and surgery and legal enforcement of 'you have to pretend this visibly male person in a dress and bad wig is a woman, to the extent of letting him into a rape shelter', IT'S ALL NORMAL JUST LIKE BEING CIS".

So I think you can gauge my opinion here. Susie who was John who just wants to dress like a woman and get on with their life - great, no problem. Astrella Diamanté Vendetta who looks like a bodybuilder in tight leggings and clown makeup and insists they are six different kinds of neo-pronouns and orientations and disabilities can go right out the door and keep on going.

Okay. First, they wouldn't patent such a pill, because they know it'd be the top story on FOX for the next week and not sell. Second, they wouldn't be able to sell or distribute the pill - no FDA approval because it doesn't treat any diseases. Nor would any normal democrats or leftists (leftist generally refers to 'socialist / communist / anarchist', not 'normal democrats), give it to their kid, even the particularly gay-accepting ones, they do not think gay is better than straight.

Puberty blockers are basically that pill, but for trans. The only thing you might be right about is the FDA approval process, which in this case was easily circumvented by getting it approved for completely different cases, but prescribing them for dysphoria. Otherwise you're wrong on all counts.

Puberty blockers are given to kids who, as a result of stuff they see on the internet, claim they are trans and would be very sad/suicidal if they went through same-gender puberty. This is a very different situation than giving the turns-you-gay-pill to random kids who haven't said anything on the topic. Not arguing puberty blockers are good, it's just entirely different.

Puberty blockers have other uses, so the FDA's approval thereof says nothing about how they would treat the hypothetical gay pill. Here is Wikipedia's take:

Delaying or temporarily suspending puberty is a medical treatment for children whose puberty started abnormally early (precocious puberty).[21] Puberty blockers have been used on-label since the 1980s to treat precocious puberty in children,[22] and were approved for use in treating precocious puberty in children by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1993.[23] Puberty blockers are also commonly used for children with idiopathic short stature, for whom these medications can be used to promote development of long bones and increase adult height.[21] In adults, the same drugs have a range of different medical uses, including the treatment of endometriosis, breast and prostate cancer, and polycystic ovary syndrome.[24]

Uh... yes, that's what I said.

Puberty blockers were approved for blocking puberty, in order to treat recognized medical problems. Hence, they are not evidence to refute the argument that there will be "no FDA approval because it doesn't treat any diseases." That was OP's premise, and in fact OP explicitly referenced treatments for trans kids: " this would be slightly different in that there is no allegation of a pre-existing condition. This pill doesn't alleviate the suffering of someone whose body doesn't match their brain,"

Puberty blockers were approved for blocking puberty,

They have been approved for precocious puberty. That's not an on-label use for treating gender dysphoria in otherwise healthy children.

Hence, they are not evidence to refute the argument that there will be "no FDA approval because it doesn't treat any diseases."

Which is why I said "The only thing you might be right about is the FDA approval process".

Whether it is an on-label use is irrelevant when the question is whether it would be approved for any use.

He's saying a "gay pill" would not get approved because it doesn't treat any diseases. I said he might be right on that, but that process could be circumvented by approving it for something else, and then using it as a "gay pill". If you're disagreeing with anything I said, I really don't see what.

As a rightist assuming that leftism always wants more members of its protected groups

The left has shot itself in the foot massively and is actually doing the opposite of this. There is a widening gap in the birth rate between liberals and conservatives. The left has shifted its focus from workers rights to promoting behaviours that are bad from a reproductive point of view. LGBT is obviously not a great strategy for reproductive success and it has ballooned in popularity among the left with a sizeable portion of very left young people adopting one of those identities. Trans is essentially voluntarily removing oneself from evolution.

Traditional lifestyles lead to babies, the modern left is less about economics and more on opposition to the lifestyle choices that lead to children. Political leanings are more than half genetic. We are heavily selecting for people who are highly attracted to religion, traditional lifestyles and conservative political ideologies.

There is a widening gap in the birth rate between liberals and conservatives.

This doesn't matter, because now they've taken over the schools, they'll just indoctrinate your children into being the next generation of leftists.

"Fortunately" they're also running public schools so poorly that attendance rates are plummeting.

That's assuming that said childhood indoctrination is sufficiently powerful to counter the genetic role in political affiliation.

If it weren't, the inexorable leftward movement of politics wouldn't be happening.

Not sure this is true. Take for example reproduction. In the past, selecting for “enjoys sex” was good enough to ensure reproduction. Obviously that won’t cut it now due to contraception, and we’re in the process of moving to selecting for “wants children.” Perhaps it won’t be possible to select for that but we’ll see

It could be that in the past a genetic predisposition towards “conformity” lead to social conservatism, but now “conformist genes” lead you to be progressive. If “conformist genes” are now leading to plummeting birth rates they ought to become less common, and whatever genes lead to conservatism now will be selected for.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that perhaps a genetic predisposition to X leads to progressivism in some social circumstances and conservatism in others. And perhaps the genetic basis for conservatism in 2023 is not the same as it would have been in 1850

It would certainly be banned in the US; I don't think we've gone that far down the luxury gay space condominium path as for this to be anything like acceptable. Depending on how hard it is to synthesize, it probably gets used as a bio-weapon or in a bio-terror incident at some point.

Depending on how hard it is to synthesize, it probably gets used as a bio-weapon or in a bio-terror incident at some point.

Terrorism from extremist LGBT Issue Motivated Groups? Possibly. This scenario would rely on there not being a reverse treatment to change someone from homosexual to straight.

Depending on how hard it is to synthesize, it probably gets used as a bio-weapon or in a bio-terror incident at some point.

Or as a recreational drug, especially for those who desperately want to be edgy and trendy. Any old normie can try heroin, meth or fent. How about some party fun times with the new gay drug? Give it a whirl for a while, be gay/bi until graduation, easy to give up and revert back to being boring cis het when you finally have to be an adult in your thirties.

All the teens/college age kids who want to be some variety of "queer" since that's the admired characteristic in their social circles while "ugh, cis het normie" is the most boring thing possible? They'd take this no problem! Now you won't even be that "yeah she claims she's bi but she's never even kissed a girl, what a fake" person in your friend group, this solves that whole "but I don't want to kiss girls, but I do want to be queer for Pride Month not just a boring ally who gets told to shut up and sit down" problem and best of all, it's only temporary as long as the drug lasts.

How about some party fun times with the new gay drug?

Fwiw, I've met people who basically described doing ecstasy as being that. Could debate on how much latent attraction they have to the same sex outside of being on X, but if it's significant they still haven't acted on it outside of being high on X (including times they were drunk/high on other drugs, so it isn't purely an inhibition thing).

Cue Alex Jones on location in Paris: "THEY'RE TURNING THE FROGS GAY!"

My prediction- there would be a small number of blue haired women giving it to their kids, but emphasis on the small number. A school in California decides to discuss whether such a pill should be made available to students, for some reason, and then decides against it. Florida bans the provision of it in schools and it becomes a major culture war item despite the number of people trying to pass it out being quite small.

Florida bans the provision of it in schools

...which is misrepresented as banning all gay kids by most media outlets. Countless hysterical reddit and twitter threads act like the misrepresentation is fact.

Incidentally I've been reading up on memeticsm starting from a skeptical perspective about reality of memes and infohazards (very shallowly; suggestions welcome) and have stumbled on Aaron Lynch's response to a critical review:

[...]While Marsden's review does mention topics covered in Thought Contagion, his portrayal of my analysis is misleading to say the least. For example, there really is a section on the evolution of memes pertaining to homosexuality (p. 79-84). In a nutshell, it says that adherents of the taboo out-procreated more tolerant people over the course of many generations in ancient times, leading to increased prevalence of the taboo. (This does not require anything like a perfect correlation between morality and behaviour, or a perfect child inculcation rate, but only enough to increase taboo prevalence by several percent per generation over hundreds of generations.) Then horizontal transmission kicked in as people maligned homosexuality to "prove" their adherence to the taboo. As the taboo becomes extremely widespread, most homosexuals live heterosexual lives, leading them to reproduce any genes involved. As these genes gain prevalence, the rate of taboo dropout increases. Gene carriers who have dropped the taboo are more sexually and socially motivated to spread acceptance of homosexuality than are non-gene carriers who drop the taboo. So the rising gene prevalence can lead to a self-sustained propagation of pro-gay memes. (Horizontal transmission again, contrary to Marsden's claim that I ignore this mode.) That, in turn, can lead to lower gene prevalence in the next generation, and even lower prevalence of pro-gay memes. All of this leads to potential fluctuations over long time spans. Incidentally, there is a brief mention of the way that beliefs about anal sex become involved with homosexuality taboos. Yet despite a multi-faceted discussion of homosexuality taboos, Marsden excerpts a sentence on anal sex and presents it as if I had offered it as the answer to the question "What memes deter homosexual behaviour?" He has thus taken a complex argument and misrepresented it as childishly silly. He uses a similar distorting approach in all of his other indented excerpts.

It's amusing how his reasoning is similar to @pointsandcorsi's (although much more careful and conservative, especially with forecasts) and thus passes for academic content, yet pointsandcorsi's output merits a permaban on an obscure forum.

I don't particularly like either.

It's amusing how his reasoning is similar to @pointsandcorsi's (although much more careful and conservative, especially with forecasts) and thus passes for academic content, yet pointsandcorsi's output merits a permaban on an obscure forum.

Huh? @pointsandcorsi was banned for a comment in a thread about James Webb, and it was a week-long ban, not a permaban (as evidenced by their most recent top-level post which started this thread):

https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/44716?context=8#context

Is there some other event that @pointsandcorsi discussed that I missed?

Oh, I see. They were banned for this post.

In all honesty, its hard to predict how either tribe will react. If I am going to generalize the political reaction to recent text/image ai models the warring factions might not be split along political lines at all. The ai wars are blue vs blue tribe or a certain subgroup of the blue tribe vs everyone else, including most of the remaining blue tribe.

I think it's cool and impressive when someone can play the violin well. In general, I think being able to play the violin is "better" than not being able to play the violin. That said, if there was a pill that made people want to practice violin 8hrs a day like a professional violinist, I wouldn't support giving that pill to everyone (or even most people). The fact that something is "good" doesn't necessarily mean everyone should do it.

I think being gay is morally neutral. I think most liberals feel the same way. A small subset of activists probably think being gay is better than being straight. But even this latter view doesn't necessarily imply a belief that everyone should be gay.

A related but maybe less political (but for me more interesting) is whether you would take (as an adult) a pill that made you truly bisexual, ie profoundly and deeply erotically attracted to both sexes. There’s a straightforward case to be made that for most people it’s obviously rational to take it — you double the number of potential sexual and romantic partners you can have, and given that gay male communities don’t suffer the problem of mismatched male/female libidos, I can imagine many sexual frustrated young straight guys being tempted.

you double the number of potential sexual and romantic partners you can have

Can you stop with that argument please. It's not true, and repeating does not make it true.

But if everyone were bisexual, why would it not be true? If I only like fleems, then I don't like florps and that confines my pool of possible romantic partners to fleems. If a florp expresses interest in dating me, I will refuse them. But if I like both fleems and florps, I am open to dating both fleems and florps and fleems and florps can both try dating me.

Personally, I'm not interested either way and I wouldn't take a drug that would make me want sex and romantic love, since the entire thing seems to be a complete mess with all the anger, rejection, aggression, and arguing over what are the expectations and the mores and the right way or wrong way to do it, and all the unhappy people who want it but can't get it, or get the wrong kind of attention. Why on earth would I take a drug that makes me want to stick my hand into a running blender?

If you're living in a city in the Western World, the problem probably isn't that your dating pool is too narrow. Plenty of single guys and girls out there - if you couldn't find a partner in the first 10,000, the next 10,000 probably isn't going to change things.

Personally, I'm not interested either way and I wouldn't take a drug that would make me want sex and romantic love, since the entire thing seems to be a complete mess with all the anger, rejection, aggression, and arguing over what are the expectations and the mores and the right way or wrong way to do it, and all the unhappy people who want it but can't get it, or get the wrong kind of attention.

People argue about it and get angry about it because it's something important. And though the experience of wanting things does cause problems and drama, I think that not wanting anything is worse.

I think that not wanting anything is worse

Worse than this? The news coverage doesn't mention it, but part of the reason he was arrested is because he was the boyfriend and putative father of the unborn child.

Yes, it's really terrible that I prefer to live happily single and haven't murdered any romantic partners, whether or not unborn children were involved!

Are you what the kids call ace? I wish I was sometimes. But I assume it feels like nothing at all yeah? Like, no different from being hetero or homo, you just don't feel like checking people out?

But if everyone were bisexual, why would it not be true?

The doglatine premise doesn't include that everyone take the pill, it just says it doubles your potential partners as you take the pill.

So from your statement that you wouldn't take a drug that made you want sex, you are in fact asexual at this time?

All I can say is, ya just gotta be there. It's a hell of a blender.

But if everyone were bisexual, why would it not be true?

it only holds true if you believe that male-male, female-female and male-female relationships are equivalent. Not everyone defines sex or relationships in the same way.

It seems isomorphic to a pill for straight men that eliminates 95% of your potential female partners but makes a random 5% of women thrilled to have sex with and date you with no effort on your part. If anything, it doubling opportunities is an extreme understatement.

Random (again: random) 5% women?

That is, with same probability having STD as women in general. Also a man can have genetic children with such random-sampled woman.

Versus gay bars where 20%-50% people have HIV and even more have more mundane diseases.

You get any ratio by picking appropriate utility function.

We already have that and it mostly works(anecdotally). It's called Estrogen.

As a rightist assuming that leftism always wants more members of its protected groups (gay is a protected group), the pill would be seen as important technology and marketed towards children through schools and hospitals the same way transgenderism is. As more people become gay there will be more support for pushing this pill, until it becomes mandatory. Everyone in the Western world dies. The end.

This just seems like a totally wrong assumption. They aren't trying to maximize the number of people in minority groups

Right, but that's more about finding and activating existing people to see themselves as queer or PoC or whatever so they will see their interests as being aligned with the wider queer or PoC community. Such as the efforts to sheepdog Asians into voting for affirmative action.

But these are two very different things: that people are keen to move into a club doesn't imply that the club is trying to maximise membership. In fact, it may indicate the opposite, since it would suggest that the club has benefits that are worth guarding jealously.

I think that's a few different influences that aren't really goals. There is a raising of status of those with grievances so many people are playing up grievances. In the past the harlot great grandmother who slept with a native American that the family keeps hush hush starts looking like your ticket scholarships or at the very least a life raft off of the maximally unaggrieved sinking ship. or just total fabrications. At the same time no longer gatekeeping and pride are encouraged with the belief that many 'queer' people of all stripes are simply suppressing their inner self for fear of judgement or... judgement. These don't really constitute a goal for maximizing the size of these communities as believing that a lot of people are in hiding and the more people who come out the better.

I'd say that generalizing the leftist position as 'always make the choice that results in more minorities' is in error - specifically, the actual position is anti-anti-minority.

Compare with abortion. Leftists are not trying to maximize the total number of abortions, which among other things would involve working to ban all forms of contraception. They just want to remove all possible obstacles to abortion if that is what a mother decides. They arent pro-abortion, no matter how the pro-life camp likes to strawman them; they're anti-anti-abortion. If the natural consequence of knocking down all the barriers on the left means Cthulhu drifts in that direction & abortion rates skyrocket, that is perfectly acceptable but not the actual goal.

The distinction in this case would be: people are allowed to take the pill, even as minors, even without parental consent. People are allowed to try to convince others to take the pill, with a few limitations. (Teachers pressuring students is a no-no, though many will push their luck. Paying people to take it is probably no good either.) Physically preventimg people from taking the pill is illegal, and counselling them not to is legal but cancellable/fireable. But, no-one is ever forced to take the pill, even if everyone (who counts) agrees it would be better if they did.

Just look to the cochlear implant micro culture war for a template of how things would go.

I was just thinking of that too.

Pfizer patents a pill that can make someone homosexual. It must be taken before puberty.

The real big deal is if you can apply it in-vitro for surrogate mothers carrying the children of gay couples. Ethical crossovers with things like screening for Downs Syndrome and the like?

"I want my kids to be like me. There is nothing wrong with being gay."

We could perhaps generalize this further to the question of whether it's worthwhile to preserve distinct or minority cultures when their own members would abandon them given the choice. Whether it is in ethnicity, languages, culinary traditions, or clothing (basically everything except for sexual orientation), we see a very strong trend towards homogenization, while at the same time the argument is made that diversity in these things is needed as a sort of insurance in case some fatal memetic weakness of our collective monoculture is exposed one day. Do we let the market decide which traditions, lifestyles, and cultures survive or do we need to tip the scales in some way e.g. some form of segregation, putting resources into revitalization efforts, or at the most extreme end the sort of medical intervention outlined above?

Perhaps a more realistic hypothetical I have seen discussed before: Imagine a pill is invented that “cures” transgenderism, as in eliminates dysphoria and causes your gender identity to painlessly conform to your birth sex. Would leftists support this? It seems undeniably good, even if you support gender affirming care as it is the perfect treatment. But I have a hard time imagining leftists actually supporting this, which I think reveals that transgenderism is actually a preferred state tk cisgenderism

I really don't think that frames trans as "preferred" to cis. Removing something is a stronger action than tolerating it, so I don't see a contradiction in doing the latter but spurning the former.

The other obvious reason to oppose this would be realpolitik, since there would most certainly be points to score. But I still wouldn't describe that as preferring a group.

What do you mean by "support this?" I would think it would be a good thing for such a pill to be available. I'd support anyone who wanted to take it (which I think would be quite a lot of people). I would oppose it being forced on people and support people who wanted to undergo a more traditional gender transition as an alternative.

I’m not sure that that many people would want to take it; while there would probably be a lot of people pressured into taking it, I do not have a very charitable view of motivations for transgenderism and I don’t think it’s possible to field much evidence for a charitable view. The more conventional gender transition appears to be part of the draw, despite its obvious drawbacks.

Frankly, I think if your prior is "most trans people would prefer to undergo difficult, painful, expensive surgery to achieve middling results rather than take a cheap one time pill to be comfortable in their bodies" your prior is being guided by a very vocal minority.

From a perspective that most of them have munchausen’s, however, that prior is extremely plausible.

And even if we go by the statements of trans people themselves, they want to be the opposite sex, through painful, expensive, difficult treatments. Not the same sex.

through painful, expensive, difficult treatments

Only some of the treatments are painful, expensive, and difficult. SRS certainly is, but very few trans people actually get that. HRT is dirt cheap and painless, and that's the core of what most people would consider trans healthcare. I think for many of us taking HRT nowadays, it's not really such an imposition that we would be willing to risk a lobotomy to get rid of the desire to do it.

What is the evidence that most of them have munchausen's? I'm also a little unclear what it means for them to have munchhausen's in this context. Do they not actually have gender dysphoria? Are they not really distressed by their bodies?

And even if we go by the statements of trans people themselves, they want to be the opposite sex, through painful, expensive, difficult treatments. Not the same sex.

Given the small fraction of trans people who go through with both top and bottom surgeries this seems unlikely to me. Rather I think what most trans people want is to feel comfortable in their bodies and surgery is currently the option for effecting this change. I suspect most trans people would love to have a pill to fix their gender dysphoria.

I think this is more complicated, some trans people may take the pill, but others I am sure would have the same reaction that changing your mind fundamentally is a bigger change than your body. I have a friend who feels his medication "kills" him because the person he is on it is not his real self. If your identity is a core part of your mental conception of self, then there is an argument that changing how you think is bigger than surgery.

Like if many people here had a choice between having a hand lopped off, or taking a pill that dropped our IQ by 20 points or removed our contrariness, or enjoyment of 10,000 word comments on culture war esoterica. I think I might take the hand lopping off, because then I am still me absent a hand, whereas changing the way I think, may in fact erase this version of me.

Sure, I know trans people with this perspective. That's why I said in my original reply I'd support them in transitioning as well. I'm curious, what fraction of the people who take the medication your friend does feel similarly, that it kills them, and what fraction are satisfied that the medication resolves their condition? I did not claim, and do not believe, that every single trans person would be ecstatic to take such a pill, merely that most quite a lot of them would be happy to.

I think more would oppose the pill, believing it would erase their self, but the number of trans people I know is low so it certainly isn't a robust determination. So I think "most trans people would prefer to undergo difficult, painful, expensive surgery to achieve middling results rather than take a cheap one time pill to be comfortable in their bodies" is an accurate description. But with low confidence.

I mean, jeez, just look at the autism community vs. Autism Speaks; the latter's mission has mentioned finding a cure for autism, which causes the former to understandably recoil in fear and horror.

What do you mean by "support this?"

For me, "support this" would involve something akin to being either ambivalent to or promoting of a medical/social standard where when someone believes they have gender dysphoria and wants to explore options to progress from there, this pill is presented by doctors/psychologists as an equally helpful option to address their dysphoria as medical/social transitioning, modulo the relative risk/benefit ratios of the different processes. This is a pretty muddy and imprecise standard, but that's hard to avoid when talking about something as broad as "leftists" "supporting" "this."

I'm a leftist who would support this by the above standard, but I have to honestly say that I'm skeptical that agreeing with me would be popular or even common among leftists.

This is interesting. My position is pretty close to what you describe but my perception about what leftists in general would support is reversed. Between this and the downthread conversation with @SSCReader I wonder if I'm the one who interacts with unrepresentative leftists.

At the end of the day, we can't really tell who's got a more perception, I guess. My thinking is that much of the philosophical basis I hear from the left around trans issues seems to implicitly posit a sort of dualism, that there's some immaterial soul that has a gender that is decoupled from the sex of the body. As such, I would predict that for most of the left, a pill that makes someone identify their gender with their birth sex would be akin to a pill that tears off a part of the person's soul. It's the same reason why I would guess that even if gay conversion therapy were proven to be effective and with low risk/benefit ratio for a medical/psychological intervention (neither of which seem plausible to me), I doubt there would be much support at all for it from the left.

My perception could easily be colored too much by the leftists I interact with, though. And it's entirely possible that the implicit dualism I see being invoked is just a tool being used to push forward policies intended to reduce the suffering of people with gender dysphoria, and in the scifi scenario that a pill is invented to painlessly do just that, the dualism basis would get dropped entirely. Most leftists aren't activists, and most people aren't principled left or right, so it could take just a few activists supporting it and the regular everyday people going along with it to make it popular among the left.

that there's some immaterial soul that has a gender that is decoupled from the sex of the body. As such, I would predict that for most of the left, a pill that makes someone identify their gender with their birth sex would be akin to a pill that tears off a part of the person's soul

This is true regardless of the immaterial soul thing, no? Let's say your most defining character trait is that you're very logical and detail-oriented, and your family encourages you to take a pill that makes you more artsy and creative instead. Regardless of which is actually better, the pill itself replaces part of your personality with something new, so it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to view that as partial murder.

My position on trans is essentially that gender identity is not very important (gender is, but how you feel about your gender is a category error), so it would be something more like a pill that makes you slightly prefer the color blue over the color red, except it also improves your health, financial, and social outcomes drastically. I'd take such a pill without question. If I considered gender identity to be a core part of someone then such a pill would seem somewhat evil to me.

This is true regardless of the immaterial soul thing, no?

No. For instance, in your example, being logical, detail oriented, artsy, or creative (the latter 2 and former 2 don't seem to be at all in conflict with each other, for the record, making the analogy rather off) aren't things that exist independently of the body. These personality traits come about as a consequence of the biology of the brain which is affected pretty directly by the biology of the rest of the body, such as hormones. The reason I might be any of these things isn't because there's something fundamentally "me" about being logical and detail oriented or whatever, it's because my physical body caused that to arise in my sets of behavior and my consciousness.

A pill that changes my personality in that way would be a pill that changes my personality in that way. It would be changing my biology the way pills tend to do, and I do consider it quite a stretch to say that that's partial murder.

I don't see why it being a consequence of biology is relevant. My point is that people really do consider their personalities to be their souls, so changing your personality is ripping out a piece of your soul. I think this is basically the correct way to look at it too. Let's assume for a second that people do have souls. Which would you prefer: to have your personality changed drastically, but your soul remain the same, or to have your personality remain the same, but your soul damaged somehow?

My view of the "soul" is that the latter hypothetical is impossible, precisely because the very most important thing about one's soul is their personality.

The reason I might be any of these things isn't because there's something fundamentally "me" about being logical and detail oriented or whatever, it's because my physical body caused that to arise in my sets of behavior and my consciousness.

I didn't claim that the cause of your detail-oriented personality is your soul. The cause doesn't matter. What matters is how much you value that personality now that you have it. Changing it via a pill on a whim seems like a very drastic decision akin to replacing yourself with a similar person. Like I said, I'd feel comfortable doing so if that other person is very similar to me in the ways that matter to me, but if they're drastically different then that starts looking more like "tearing off a part of my soul."

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A couple of weeks ago, in the week of Jan 16 thread, there was a discussion of the kerfuffle re Florida refusing to offer the pilot of AP African American Studies. There were a couple of minor developments last week. First, the course description is available here

Second, Florida specified its objections here

Now, I am not a fan of most "studies" courses, because, in my limited experience, they tend to lack rigor and often push a political viewpoint, which is both a disservice to students and, to the extent that students are required to parrot that viewpoint, a First Amendment violation when the course is taught in public schools (and in private schools as well, in California). I have not looked closely at the course description for the AP class, so I don't know if it has those flaws. That being said, this decision by Florida seems to be more a part of the DeSantis for President campaign than a principled objection. That is because the course description is not a curriculum, and the course description, like all AP course descriptions, says:

Individual teachers are responsible for designing their own curriculum for AP courses and selecting appropriate college-level readings, assignments, and resources. This publication presents the content and skills that are the focus of the corresponding college course and that appear on the AP Exam. It also organizes the content and skills into a series of units that represent a sequence found in widely adopted college syllabi. The intention of this publication is to respect teachers' time and expertise by providing a roadmap that they can modify and adapt to their local priorities and preferences.

I have attended several AP trainings in my day, and can attest that they make a big deal about individual teachers being given autonomy, as long as their syllabus addresses the content and skills set forth in the course description. So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.

And, btw, the claims on the other side that Florida does not want to teach African American history is also nonsense, because teaching of African American history is mandated in FL schools

Edit: PS: There is a very odd complaint in the Florida DOE's list: It objects to a reading by one author in part because, "Kelley's first book was a study of Black communists in Alabama." Not, 'an adulatory study," but merely a "study." It is like objecting to a reading by Donald Horowitz because he wrote a study of ethnic riots.

"The courses are not rigorous." Maybe true, but many courses in school are not indented to be rigorous in an academic sense per say, like art, music, PE, etc. If rigor is the sole criterion, then this would mean many other courses would have to be removed. This would imply that 'European History', which is also an AP course, may also be lacking in rigour.

"The courses are biased." But what if they were made more objective/impartial?

These objections seem to be be an attempt to divert from the actual motive /reason, being that people do not want courses which single out African Americans, although European History already exists. Maybe rebrand it as "African History", which does not exist as an AP subject? There are no good answers it seems. My own opinion is just lump all ethnicities/races into a single course(s), without any obvious preference/favoritism. I don't think it's that big if a deal.

being that people do not want courses which single out African Americans, although European History already exists

Do you think that there would be similar objections to an African history course?

"The courses are not rigorous."

To be more clear, I meant that in a relative sense. Several years ago, I was talking to a former student of mine who was attending UC Berkeley. He mentioned he was taking a Women's Studies class. I said to him, "Let me guess -- it was by far the easiest class you have taken at Cal." He confirmed that my suspicion was very much correct.

These objections seem to be be an attempt to divert from the actual motive /reason, being that people do not want courses which single out African Americans, although European History already exists. Maybe rebrand it as "African History", which does not exist as an AP subject? There are no good answers it seems. My own opinion is just lump all ethnicities/races into a single course(s), without any obvious preference/favoritism. I don't think it's that big if a deal.

Banish from your mind the notion that this course teaches history. I linked below to an African American Studies scholar who freely admits as much. The course is not about history. It's about "learning how to think" and "viewing things through a critical lens".

I'm really struggling to come up with anything that would be an apple to apples comparison to a course we'd be broadly familiar with. But these "XYZ Studies" degrees really are their own special thing. I can't think of a single other curriculum that isn't about teaching subject matter per say, and is instead about deconstructing, recontextualizing, or specifically countering other course work or cultural forces. Like a "math" class that attempts undermine your belief in validity mathematics.

The course is not about history. It's about "learning how to think" and "viewing things through a critical lens".

Those are not mutually exclusive. The CA history standards, for example, include both content standards and historical thinking and analysis standards. I assume other states do as well. And AP World, AP European and AP US History all include historical analysis and thinking as purposes of the course.

viewing things through a critical lens

I have come to the opinion that critical is a terrible word choice (but possibly deliberately so). The different meanings of "heralded to critical acclaim", "critical decision to save the world", "in critical condition", and "overly critical diatribe" are so disparate that despite years of supposed education, I'm not sure which "critical thinking" refers to.

Naively, we should be teaching students to fairly evaluate ideas, and to make important decisions. But sometimes it seems like people lean into the criticism aspect to justify nihilism and tearing down everything without any thought to improving the human condition.

But sometimes it seems like people lean into the criticism aspect to justify nihilism and tearing down everything without any thought to improving the human condition.

Political as well as social revolutionaries often seek to destroy and delegitimize the dominant framework because chaos and confusion are fertile soil for planting the seeds of a new framework. That's the implicit goal of efforts to "attack structural whiteness" or whatever. Once "whiteness" has been made radioactive and repellent enough, activists can offer their CRT framework as a path to redemption for those benighted souls who had been ignorant enough to use the old framework to understand the world.

You can see this strategy play out in every leftist movement since the French Revolution. It's a good one, the right seems to have no defense against it.

EDIT: disregard the below. I missed the course description link

You’ve got a slight problem in your post: a circular reference.

That is because the course description is not a curriculum, and the course description, like all AP course descriptions, says:

[no specifics about this AP class]

I have attended several AP trainings in my day, and can attest that they make a big deal about individual teachers being given autonomy, as long as their syllabus addresses the content and skills set forth in the course description.

From this, it looks like anything could be taught and match the course description. We should really look at the actual course description, and much more importantly What’s on the test??

No, no, no. The course description sets out the topics and skills to be covered. (As I noted in my post). HOW those topics are covered -- the curriculum -- is up to the individual teacher. It is simply not true that "anything" can be taught, and in fact the College Board requires AP teachers to submit their syllabi to the AP Course Audit to ensure that they are actually covering those topics and skills.

Sorry, I missed your links. Let me review. I was responding to your text, trying to follow the argument, but I was premature in responding.

HOW those topics are covered -- the curriculum -- is up to the individual teacher.

in fact the College Board requires AP teachers to submit their syllabi to the AP Course Audit to ensure that they are actually covering those topics and skills.

So... it's not actually up to the individual teacher then? You seem to be proposing some sort of magic, inviolable barrier between "how" and "what" that I don't think exists here. In the realm of teaching, the how and the what influence each other heavily and are frequently just the same thing in different garb.

???? The TOPICS are required (to the extent, of course, that anyone can cover all of the topics, which they can't. But the point is that a course needs to cover those topics, not other topics. Eg: The AP Modern World History covers "the cultural, economic, political, and social developments that have shaped the world from c. 1200 CE to the present." So, a syllabus that spent weeks comparing the Roman and Han empires would be dinged).

But, there is no mandate re HOW the topics are covered. So, in a unit in AP Modern World on Mass Atrocities After 1900, I can focus on Rwanda and Cambodia, or on Germany and the Holodomor, or whatever. Similarly, in that unit I can assign readings by Scott Straus, or by Omar McDoom (yes, the real name of a guy who studies the topic), or Lee Ann Fujii, or people who claim all of those people are misguided.

So you realistically think some teacher is going to be able to get away with assigning Steve Sailer or Charles Murray to add the HBD context to such a course? (If I were the teacher of such a course and strictly striving to be objective, I would feel deficient in that regard to not do so, irrespective of my personal political leanings.) You think that's actually possible?

You're also ignoring that the whole point of AP courses is the test, meaning that the test inevitably dictates quite a bit by gravity even if not necessarily by fiat. You're, as I stated in my other response to you, appealing to possibility while ignoring probability. The fate of those who naively accept that reasoning from their opponents is the same fate of any other gambler who bets on bad odds: the house wins.

Why should those who oppose ideology X be willing to or care to bet on the small probability that a course with every reason to be biased in favor of ideology X might, with great effort on their part that they could expend elsewhere, not be? Why go to pains to try to stop your opponent from shooting you with a gun when you can just stop them from possessing it at all in the first place? Who benefits from this other than the bad actors who caused the issue in the first place? It's the equivalent of peeing on the floor (causing concerns over education being institutionally biased towards the left by, well, institutionally capturing education in a biased left-wing fashion) and demanding someone else clean it up (expend massive resources to try to allow you to still be able to teach your favorite pet subjects without taking advantage of that capture). Why should they?

So you realistically think some teacher is going to be able to get away with assigning Steve Sailer or Charles Murray to add the HBD context to such a course?

What teachers can "get away with" is a rather different issue, but the question is not whether they would get away with adding a new topic to the course, but whether they can get away with including a variety of views on the existing topics in the course.

You're also ignoring that the whole point of AP courses is the test,

As I discuss elsewhere, that is not the whole point of AP courses. The point of AP courses is to enhance student learning.

As I discuss elsewhere, that is not the whole point of AP courses. The point of AP courses is to enhance student learning.

How many AP students have you polled about this?

Quite a few, actually. In the form of revealed preferences. And I have certainly had lengthy discussions with school policy makers and accreditors, and that is precisely why policy makers pushed to enhance AP offerings, and why accreditors pushed them to do so.

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As I discuss elsewhere, that is not the whole point of AP courses. The point of AP courses is to enhance student learning.

Is this a joke? Were you ever in AP courses? The point is to skip college classes and hopefully save money.

Once upon a time, but more importantly I taught an AP class for years.

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It's also to get higher weighted GPAs in schools that do that. Anyone in the top 10% or so of my highschool class had a GPA higher than could be achieved without taking APs, any non-AP class that took, even with a perfect score, would lower their weighted GPA.

Hahaha. That might be what is written down about AP courses, but in practice, the point is to give smart kids some college credit through the public school system. And ‘no, we’re not going to spend state money getting kids college credit in some field invented by literal communists and ending in -studies’ is a perfectly reasonable view to take.

And ‘no, we’re not going to spend state money getting kids college credit in some field invented by literal communists and ending in -studies’ is a perfectly reasonable view to take.

And I never said otherwise. As I said, initially, I am generally skeptical of "studies" courses, and as I have said above, Florida is free to decide what courses to offer and not offer. And had they said, "we think "studies" courses are usually bullshit, so we don't want to offer them," that would be fine. But, that is not what they said.

Hahaha. That might be what is written down about AP courses, but in practice, the point is to give smart kids some college credit through the public school system.

It's right there in the name, "Advanced Placement". The College Board's own blurb about it:

AP gives students the chance to tackle college-level work while they're still in high school—whether they're learning online or in the classroom. And through taking AP Exams, students can earn college credit and placement.

So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.

I think this is double standard, as many actions are criminalized separately several times by different laws. For example, consider the anti-lynching bills: nothing they make illegal was legal before, but they are still passed with only conservative objecting.

I don't understand what you are referring to. I was referring to the "Stop WOKE Act," which, contrary to what people on both sides have claimed, does not forbid the teaching of CRT-adjacent concepts "as part of a larger course of training or instruction, provided such training or instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts."

Individual teachers are responsible for designing their own curriculum for AP courses and selecting appropriate college-level readings, assignments, and resources. This publication presents the content and skills that are the focus of the corresponding college course and that appear on the AP Exam. It also organizes the content and skills into a series of units that represent a sequence found in widely adopted college syllabi. The intention of this publication is to respect teachers' time and expertise by providing a roadmap that they can modify and adapt to their local priorities and preferences.

It's been a while since I took AP courses, but the history exams I took definitely had a mix of more open-ended questions where students had to be able to evaluate evidence and make arguments, and also a section of multiple-choice fact questions. In addition, some of the writing questions required you to know all of the relevant information already (FRQ). Even for the part that gave you primary sources and required you to evaluate them (DBQ), you would have to have at least some context and outside information in order to be able to do that evaluating. So although you could emphasize different themes, there was still quite a lot of factual information you had to have in order to get a decent grade on the AP exam.

The material need not be skipped*. It can be covered from opposing views.

*That being said, there are 90+ topics in the course description. Every teacher is going to skip some, as is common in AP History courses, which the College Board well knows (source: UC Berkeley prof who was a long-time member of the AP World History test committee).

Let me attempt some kind of steelman here. First, like you, I am extremely skeptical of grievance study courses, and particularly CRT. Second, while I think it’s fine to study these phenomena at arm’s length, often high school students assume they are being taught the truth, not merely one perverse angle on it. In 99% of my high school classes, it was obvious I was meant to internalize and adopt the teachings presented. Only the most careful of teachers could approach truly controversial topics. I have little confidence this can be maintained across our public high school education system.

Nonetheless. The course description describes what to expect at college. This is an AP class after all. I can’t argue with the course description, which certainly covers a great deal of CRT, even if seemingly out of proportion with its influence and impact on ordinary African Americans.

Now, Florida DOE is faced with a course description that it has significant disagreement with. They could design a curriculum that sideskirts all the CRT stuff, but then its students will fare poorly on the AP test. Which failure is a greater disservice to its students? Failing to prepare them for a very important test, or breaking the ban on CRT?

It would be nice if the College Board could separate the most controversial, politically charged aspects of their African American History into a seperate module, perhaps Advanced African American History. It seems we are forced to throw the baby out for the bathwater.

They could design a curriculum that sideskirts all the CRT stuff

My entire point is that they don't have to do that. They need only include opposing views. And that would probably give their students a leg up on understanding the material.

"African-American Studies" (hereinafter "AAS" because I'm lazy) is not "African-American History." In fact, properly understood, a student isn't really able to engage fruitfully with AAS until they already have a reasonable familiarity with the relevant history, sociology, anthropology, music/cultural studies, etc. The whole point of the various "X Studies" programs is to be interdisciplinary - to take extant bodies of information, place them in dialogue with each other, and attempt to figure out what insights they may have to offer each other, and identify blind spots in prior, monodisciplinary analysis.

Were that true, then college intro to Af Am Studies courses would have lengthy prerequisites. They don't. Nor does the major normally require basic intro coursework from any of those fields. See, eg, the UCLA major requirements here.

The major is certainly interdisciplinary, but the basic concepts of sociology, history, etc, are acquired through an African American lense.

Most college education still presumes a basic level of competency; after all, the aspirant already graduated high school with at least decent grades, and did decently well on the relevant college entrance exam.

Yes, of course. But that is an entirely different claim.

No it's not. Presumably someone taking a college-level interdisciplinary class at least has high-school level knowledge of the basics of the underlying history, civics, and literature. The college level course can draw on that background knowledge while presenting the information in a new context, or through a new frame.

The coursework under discussion in FL, by contrast, is a high-school level interdisciplinary course, which is putting the cart before the horse.

  1. You were clearly referring to college-level programs in your comment, since you referred to "the various "X Studies" programs"

  2. Regardless, why do you assume that the AP class will be taken by students who have not already completed HS history, etc? Most HS seniors have done so, for example.

Oh gosh, good point. So maybe the distinction I propose is already there? It would make sense, to me, for Florida to offer AAH but maybe not AAS. I feel like much of “liberal” uproar assumed Florida was cutting out AAH. Is AAH generally a prereq for AAS?

On page 68 of the Course Framework document, we find that one of the "research takeaways" that "helped define the essential course topics" is that "Students should understand core concepts, including diaspora, Black feminism and intersectionality, the language of race and racism (e.g., structural racism, racial formation, racial capitalism) and be introduced to important approaches (e.g., Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism)."

These "core concepts" are mostly from CRT or the cluster of ideologies to which it belongs. Presumably all variants of a course must teach its "core concepts." We can assume students will need to be familiar with these concepts to pass the AP exam and that the College Board will decline to approve syllabi that don't teach these concepts.

Why would anyone who believes this ideology to be harmful ever agree to allow this course to be taught? You might equally well argue it would be unreasonable to object to the introduction of an "AP White Studies" course in which the "core concepts" are tenets of white nationalism, on the grounds that as long as you make sure students are conversant on the Great Replacement (which will definitely be on the test), there's no rule saying you can't include other perspectives too.

Why would anyone who believes this ideology to be harmful ever agree to allow this course to be taught?

As I have said several times, if Florida does not want to offer the course, that is their right. And as I also said, right up front, I tend to be skeptical of "studies" courses in general. The point is that being familiar with the concepts does not mean accepting them as true, and the College Board explicitly requires teachers to "design[] their own curriculum . . . [and] modify and adapt [it] to their local priorities and preferences."

And, your AP White Studies hypothetical is a perfect example: Yes, it absolutely would be unreasonable to object to the introduction of a course that includes the study of the tenets of white nationalism; that is an important ideology. Just as it would be unreasonable to object to the introduction of a course on Important Ideas of the 20th Century because it includes the study of the tenets of National Socialism, or Stalinism. And, just as it would be unreasonable to object to a African American Studies course because it includes discussion of ideas that were important to African Americans in 1920, such as Garveyism, it is unreasonable to object to that course because it includes discussion of ideas that are important to African Americans today. What IS objectionable is a course which advocates any of those ideas, be it white nationalism or Garveyism or Stalinism or "anti-racism." And, yes, I am sure that some teachers will teach the AP course precisely that way, but that does not mean that doing so is required, nor that the State of Florida can't teach it in, as the Stop WOKE Act says, "an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts."

The point is that being familiar with the concepts does not mean accepting them as true

This is sophistry; they will be taught from materials which assume and assert these concepts are true, and they will be required to use these concepts, as the first two bullets of "Learning Outcomes" make clear

  • Apply lenses from multiple disciplines to evaluate key concepts, historical developments, and processes that have shaped Black experiences and debates within the field of African American studies.
  • Identify the intersections of race, gender, and class, as well as connections between Black communities, in the United States and the broader African diaspora in the past and present.

Certainly one could remain an atheist while taking a course on Catholicism from the Bible and other Catholic theological material in which you are required to recite prayers and apply Catholic theological perspectives on the test. But such a course would still be way over the line for a public school.

they will be taught from materials which assume and assert these concepts are true,

Once again, Florida teachers are free to have students read materials on both sides of the issues.

"Apply lenses from multiple disciplines to evaluate . . ."

In education speak, "evaluate" means "presenting and defending opinions by making judgments about information, the validity of ideas, or quality of work based on a set of criteria."

Once again, Florida teachers are free to have students read materials on both sides of the issues.

In practice how do you think this will turn out though? I have a hard time believing you are being honest with this act of “Who knows, all the teachers of AP Af Am Studies might just turn out to be David Duke, Chris Rufo and Charles Murray!”

You know damn well 99% of teachers for this course will either be true believers or willing to parrot the true believers in presenting this stuff as uncritically true

You know damn well 99% of teachers for this course will either be true believers or willing to parrot the true believers in presenting this stuff as uncritically true

Please review my initial post, in which I said:

Now, I am not a fan of most "studies" courses, because, in my limited experience, they tend to lack rigor and often push a political viewpoint, which is both a disservice to students and, to the extent that students are required to parrot that viewpoint, a First Amendment violation when the course is taught in public schools (and in private schools as well, in California).

I have also repeatedly said that Florida is free to decide what to offer and what not to offer, and have noted that it actually requires coverage of African American history.

You seem to be trying to argue the merits of the course. But that was not my point. My point is not that the course is good or bad, or should be taught or shouldn't be taught. The point is that Florida is inaccurately claiming that the course **must **be taught that way. If the state thinks that it will be unable to ensure that its teachers follow the law when teaching this course, then they shouldn't offer it. But that is a completely different argument than the one that they made.

Even if you had skeptical teachers, having them read materials on the other side of the issues -- that is, those which disparaged intersectionality and denigrated the various "lenses" -- would be a waste of time from the course perspective. It would not further the course's goals and it would actively harm the student's chances on the test. Basically it's saying that the course is forbidden by law but the violation can be cured by teaching the "anti-course" at the same time.

Your hypothetical Important Ideas of the 20th Century course, and I think the way you're choosing to imagine the white nationalist course, aren't quite the same as what's happening here. You're ignoring the social and academic context in which this course is being introduced.

This isn't just the equivalent of a course having high school students learn the tenets of white nationalism — which most people would already find wildly objectionable, even if you don't — it's the equivalent of white nationalists themselves introducing such a course, in which students are not only taught about white nationalist beliefs but are presented with history interpreted through a white nationalist lens and taught how to perform such interpretation themselves. Also white nationalists get to write and grade the exam, can veto syllabi that deviate from their understanding of what the course should be, and know they can rely on most teachers interested in teaching the course either being white nationalists themselves or at least naively willing to accept white nationalist framing.

So, sure, in some extremely hypothetical sense a state where the consensus was against CRT could adapt this African American Studies course to "local priorities and preferences" by having students learn its CRT-derived "core concepts" via James Lindsey. Those students might even have a clearer picture of those concepts than they'd get from reading the often obfuscatory writings of their proponents! But in practice, no, you couldn't remotely do this. The College Board wouldn't approve your syllabus, on the contextually reasonable basis that it didn't represent African American Studies as taught in colleges. Your students wouldn't be able demonstrate "correct" (that is, politically correct) understanding on open-ended exam questions.

Almost certainly, the "local priorities and preferences" language just cashes out as "you can add some modules about local history," not "you can refocus the course on questioning the validity of the analytical framework that underpins the entire academic field it's situated within."

Almost certainly, the "local priorities and preferences" language just cashes out as "you can add some modules about local history,"

As mentioned previously, I have taken several AP trainings, and that is absolutely NOT what what that language means. They make a rather big deal about teacher autonomy.

Those students might even have a clearer picture of those concepts than they'd get from reading the often obfuscatory writings of their proponents!

Yes, they probably would, as I argued in another response.

The College Board wouldn't approve your syllabus, on the contextually reasonable basis that it didn't represent African American Studies as taught in colleges.

  1. That is conflating the TOPICS that are taught with HOW they are taught. The AP course audit looks at coverage, and at whether students are asked to use analytical skills, etc. It is of course possible that this course will be an exception, but a claim that it will be is based purely on the assumption that the course is intended to be indoctrination. As I said in my initial post, "studies" courses often are, in my very limited experience solely at the HS level. But that does not mean that they must be.

  2. The bigger problem with a James Lindsey-based course is that it would fall afoul of Florida's Stop WOKE Act, because it would be teaching the subject in a non-objective manner. You have inadvertently set up a strawman, since my point all along has been simply that a course which assigned students both Kimberle Crenshaw and her critics would meet the criteria of both the College Board and FL law.

You have inadvertently set up a strawman, since my point all along has been simply that a course which assigned students both Kimberle Crenshaw and her critics would meet the criteria of both the College Board and FL law.

I feel like I've addressed this already. Reading Crenshaw and her critics might be a reasonable basis for a class, but not if Crenshaw supporters get to define the "core concepts" of the class, the syllabus has to be approved by Crenshaw supporters, and the exam will be written and graded by Crenshaw supporters. It is entirely unreasonable to ask people who disagree with Crenshaw to accept this.

It is entirely unreasonable to ask people who disagree with Crenshaw to accept this.

Again, I think you are addressing an argument that I did not make. As I have said, if Florida doesn't want to offer the class, or any class, that discusses topic X, that is fine. So, I agree that there is nothing unreasonable about that. What is unreasonable is claiming that the College Board requires that the course be taught in a one-sided manner, which is what FL seems to be claiming.

There is a very odd complaint in the Florida DOE's list: It objects to a reading by one author in part because, "Kelley's first book was a study of Black communists in Alabama." Not, 'an adulatory study," but merely a "study." It is like objecting to a reading by Donald Horowitz because he wrote a study of ethnic riots.

It's not hard to look up.

It's not terrible as a book, as much as I'd take a lot of its summaries with mountain-sized pieces of salt (in particular, I remember being impressed by how poorly the book glosses around Soviet funding of the organizations while describing Soviet influence or organization as propaganda). But for however the reviewers call it a 'descriptive' study, it's very much a descriptive study from the perspective of someone that really fucking likes communists and communism. There's occasional recognition of faults and failures, but they're things like :

The little Red Scare had taken its toll by the middle of 1939, forcing liberals and labor into temporary retreat and ruining the Party's hopes for a Southern Democratic Front. As CIO and SCHW leaders geared up for their own internal investigations and expulsions, an unexpected event in Europe hastened their actions. In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with fascist Germany that cleared the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland and simultaneously enabled Russia to invade Finland. After an initial period of disbelief, two confusing months passed before the Comintern announced a substantive change in the Party line. The old antifascist slogans were dropped as the Central Committee launched a new campaign to keep America out of the "imperialist war." The era of the Democratic Front came to an inauspicious end.

or

The ILD's persistent mass campaign on Peterson's behalf proved to be a painful thorn in the side of the newly reconstituted NAACP. When the Birmingham Post published an article linking the two organizations as defenders of "Negro cases," the local NAACP branch responded with a patriotic letter distancing itself from the ILD and claiming no connection whatsoever with the Scottsboro case. In fact, distinguishing itself from the ILD seemed to be the whole point of the Peterson campaign, with respect to politics.

or

The case of white Birmingham Communist Fred Keith provides us with an instructive example. When three Birmingham Party members were invited to the Soviet Union in 1932 to study at the Lenin School, Keith wanted desperately to go, but Hosea Hudson's criticisms of his work among the white unemployed convinced other members of the district committee to reject his request. After three blacks were chosen over Keith, he turned informant and complained to authorities about the favoritism blacks allegedly received in the Party.

That is, Hammer and Hoe details a lot of ways communist groups were sometimes incompetent, occasionally became unintentional strawmen, and were often insufficiently communist; it has few places where it considers or even describes potential solutions to a given economic or social problem other than more Stalins communism except to consider these things conservative interlopers. The 25th Anniversary edition opens with a preface explicitly spelling out that "I'd be lying if I said Hammer and Hoe was conceived as a purely academic contribution, unburdened by presentist concerns", before highlighting perceived overlap with the 1990s South African revolution.

There's a fair criticism that the Stop WOKE Act doesn't actually have any rules about communism, and in that sense, yes: I don't think you could honestly say Kelley blamed people for the racism of their ancestors at any point, both because it's not the focus and also because he was too busy blaming them for the insufficient communism. In that sense, the inclusion on the list is pretty obviously and overtly a political moment (ed: and not even an especially competent one: the recommended authors for 4.1 and 4.2 are far more controversial in Stop WOKE-specific ways).

But even if I hadn't previously read the book, I don't think I'd have had to make really difficult calculations on its political position, or the political position of its inclusion on the Florida DOE's list.

Yes, I am sure the book is terrible, and horribly biased, etc. But the point is that the document doesn't claim that. It complains merely that he wrote a book on the topic.

This is an overly charitable take. The key to judging AP courses of this sort is to just skip to the recommended readings section. In this outline it starts on 70 with recommended textbooks. The first one listed, by Maulana Karenga clearly would be in violation of the FL statute if used. It is an openly race critical text that contains all forms of intersectional conspiracy theories. Its hard to imagine the majority of those textbooks (which are not mandatory, but in practice are more or less mandatory) are all that different. The other literature section contains a hodgepodge of works, I am not familiar with all of them, but at least 5 on the first page contain conspiratorial rants about whiteness, white supremacy, or some similar concept.

  1. Where does it say that the course requires a textbook at all? After all, it says that only 61% of college courses surveyed use a textbook.

  2. It is impossible for a textbook to violate the FL statute, because the FL law does not reference textbooks. It references courses, and permits the study of the concepts listed therein as long as it is done so objectively. It does not require that every resource be objective. Many teachers ask students to critique textbooks, and there is nothing to stop Florida teachers from doing so, if for some reason the State adopts one of the textbooks you find problematic.

  3. Speaking of textbook adoption, state funds can not generally be used to purchase textbooks that have not been adopted by the State or by the district, including AP textbooks. See, eg, this district's list of adopted books, including those for AP classes. hence, if those books are as problematic as you say, Florida will not permit districts to use state money to buy them, just as they did not permit districts to use state money to buy math textbooks which they found problematic.

Edit: Also, 4) The fact that the FL DOE did not take issue with the textbook list indicates that it is not as problematic as you suppose.

Where does it say that the course requires a textbook at all? After all, it says that only 61% of college courses surveyed use a textbook.

HS teachers rarely do this. I had very few HS courses without a textbook, and those were all ones with reading lists of books. Its a question of basic competency and effort.

It is impossible for a textbook to violate the FL statute, because the FL law does not reference textbooks. It references courses, and permits the study of the concepts listed therein as long as it is done so objectively. It does not require that every resource be objective. Many teachers ask students to critique textbooks, and there is nothing to stop Florida teachers from doing so, if for some reason the State adopts one of the textbooks you find problematic.

Obviously the text of the law is written to evade facial challenges and forum shopping to find a particularly left wing federal judge from striking it down on whatever spurious grounds she thinks up. In practicality, the DOE must holistically review a proposed course to see whether, in a large number of instances it will violate the law.

Speaking of textbook adoption, state funds can not generally be used to purchase textbooks that have not been adopted by the State or by the district, including AP textbooks. See, eg, this district's list of adopted books, including those for AP classes. hence, if those books are as problematic as you say, Florida will not permit districts to use state money to buy them, just as they did not permit districts to use state money to buy math textbooks which they found problematic.

There are likely ways for teachers to obtain them for free. They also can use the alternative readings list as a basis, which also would result in a course that is in violation of the law in nearly every iteration.

The fact that the FL DOE did not take issue with the textbook list indicates that it is not as problematic as you suppose.

DOE official statements need to be as measured as possible so as to survive hostile lawsuits.

Obviously the text of the law is written to evade facial challenges and forum shopping to find a particularly left wing federal judge from striking it down on whatever spurious grounds she thinks up. In practicality, the DOE must holistically review a proposed course to see whether, in a large number of instances it will violate the law.

You basically seem to be making this up. There is no way to make a facial challenge to the law regardless of that provision. The Court's govt speech cases in general, and their education cases in particular, make it very clear that govt can use schools to inculcate any values they want. And, the law says what it says, and in fact the very fact that it explicitly permits objective discussion renders the criticism of the law invalid.

There are likely ways for teachers to obtain them for free

Nope.

DOE official statements need to be as measured as possible so as to survive hostile lawsuits.

You obviously haven't read the statements that have been made.

I find the autonomy listed a bit misleading for a couple reasons. First, they know exactly what kind of teacher is going to sign up for teaching this course. But more importantly they control the fundamental curriculum with the test design. AP teachers teach to the test, they'd be failing their students their valuable college credit if they didn't. We can pretend like the teachers get to pick the curriculum all we want but if critical theory is on the test critical theory will be taught, simple as that.

But you are confusing content and curriculum. Yes, it will be taught, but as I noted, Florida law explicitly allows it to be taught, as long as it is done objectively. In fact, perhaps the best way to learn about a topic is to criticize it.

perhaps the best way to learn about a topic is to criticize it

I'm struggling to think of examples of this being true. If you don't know a discipline, how can you accurately criticize it? If you don't know a topic, wouldn't you just be satisfied with counterarguments which someone conversant in the topic would know to be inaccurate? It's like people in favor of gun control, but who have never shot a gun in their lives or deigned to learn anything about how they work or how they're used. We know how that ends up - bans on purely cosmetic features which do nothing to actually limit gun proliferation or shootings.

I said the best way, not the perfect way. My point is simply that if student A were asked to read article X and summarize it, whereas student B is asked to read article X and criticize it, student B will probably* walk away with a better understanding of article X than will student A.

*note that I said, probably. Not every student, every time.

Edit: And, btw, I said the best way to learn about a topic. Not the best way to, as you said, 'accurately criticize it."

as long as it is done objectively

So you fully support and expect such a course to include (given it is a matter that, though not fully settled, still has much objective evidence in its favor) the influence of the quite possibly genetically limited black average IQ on their history and current state of affairs? Since after all if you're studying blacks and black history, surely any genetic specifics of their race are objectively relevant, right?

Your reasoning reminds me of the classic "Just make your own Reddit if you don't like its moderation!" line, in that it retreats into the technicalities of what is formally not impossible to pretend that it is not so blatantly improbable, unwieldy, and unreasonably/unduly burdensome for their interlocutors to be worth seriously advancing as any sort of solution to them (a fallacy I am not quite sure of the name of, but perhaps you could call it "appeal to possibility" or the "akshually fallacy").

Sure, technically based on the written word of Floridan law if this course were to be taught in Florida then it should/could/would be fully objective, merely presenting the facts and allowing students to come to their own conclusions. In practice though, anyone with an ability to make predictions about the future based on empirical observations about the past greater than that of someone with Alzheimer's knows that the context and unavoidable partisanship (given that it's already happened) of the course's formulation and dissemination will inevitably influence its content and presentation in a non-objective direction.

The amount of resources it would take to actually realize a truly objective version of such a course (such as, for example, finding the hundreds of teachers required who would be interested in teaching "African-American Studies" and are also capable of being charitable enough to a right-wing view on the matter to be objective, while also rigorously excluding/avoiding the thousands who would almost certainly engage in any deception to become among those hundreds so as to have a bully pulpit for left-wing propaganda) is not even worth the intellectual/educational value even a truly fully objective version of such a course would provide, especially given how much blacks have tended to be the objects rather than subjects of history.

So you fully support and expect such a course to include (given it is a matter that, though not fully settled, still has much objective evidence in its favor) the influence of the quite possibly genetically limited black average IQ on their history and current state of affairs? Since after all if you're studying blacks and black history, surely any genetic specifics of their race are objectively relevant, right?

Yes, I support the right of a teacher to include that topic in a course on African American Studies, if it is done so in an objective and intellectually rigorous manner.

Okay but that's never going to happen. So even seriously advancing it as a possibility is naive.

LOL, why did you ask the question, if any answer is going to be wrong somehow?

You haven't heard of a rhetorical question? The point is phrased as a question to highlight the obvious absurdity of its own premises.

Your reasoning reminds me of the classic "Just make your own Reddit if you don't like its moderation!" line, in that it retreats into the technicalities of what is formally not impossible to pretend that it is not so blatantly improbable, unwieldy, and unreasonably/unduly burdensome for their interlocutors to be worth seriously advancing as any sort of solution to them

We are quite literally having this discussion on a “your own Reddit”! As Scott pointed out a while ago, any argument is made better with made up numbers, so let’s make some up!

I’ll claim that at least 10% of teachers would actually meet the criteria, which I believe to be an underestimate as some students will take those classes looking for trouble. Teachers would be aware of that; a few would probably aim for martyrdom… which brings us to avoiding a discussion in the concrete as shrewd politics. Allowing for an argument over the merits of “favorite teacher”, students rallied around, after the fact would be a strong and effective nucleation site for dissent. Canceling the class is comparatively easy - the courts could reinstate it, but they can’t turn back time to before the semester.

We are quite literally having this discussion on a “your own Reddit”!

Um, no. This is a forum formatted like Reddit. But it is still a fraction of the size and influence of Reddit. If I want to discuss 90% of the things I can discuss (albeit in an infuriatingly censored/muted fashion) on Reddit (hobby interests, etc.), this place is no alternative whatsoever. It's still better than having no alternatives at all certainly, but saying it is "your own Reddit" is like giving a 16 year old a Hot Wheels and telling them they don't need to be jealous of adults anymore because now they have their own car too.

Are there any course designs you would consider objectionable by this standard? AP race an IQ? AP Based altrightism? Especially if by teaching demographics data you know that nineteen out of twenty classrooms will be run by a rabid partisan of whichever side you oppose and the test at the end is designed by people you oppose.

I wouldn't be here if I didn't agree with the basic premise of your objection, that exposure to repugnant ideas is good and I'm even sympathetic to high school students getting a dose of this, but I think this is a maximally bad environment for it.

Well, as I think I made clear, any course that is taught with the purpose of pushing a political viewpoint is objectionable.

nineteen out of twenty classrooms will be run by a rabid partisan of whichever side you oppose ... the test at the end is designed by people you oppose

You are making a lot of assumptions there, I must say. Did you even look at the course description? The material that Florida has identified as objectionable are about four of 92 topics.

More importantly, your claim is not Florida's claim. Florida's claim was NOT that "the course seems OK as written, but will be implemented in a biased way." Rather, it was that the course** as written** is biased, which is a claim based on a misunderstanding (perhaps intentional, but perhaps not) on how AP classes work.

The material that Florida has identified as objectionable are about four of 92 topics.

"It's ok officer, for 90% of my drive I wasn't doing 30 over the speed limit"

You must be a big fan of banning gas stoves.

You must be a big fan of devoting 5% of biology class to Intelligent Design.

Nice try, but as it happens I have long advocated for including a unit in intro to biology that presents students with intelligent design and asks them to assess the evidence for and against it. As well as evidence for and against evolution by natural selection, and everything in between.

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I know at least one AP biology teacher who gets away with teaching YEC, but overall you’re probably right that the vast majority teach to the test.

We need to distinguish teaching what is on the test from teaching with the purpose of passing the test. Eg: When I taught AP World History, every topic that I taught was one that was in the course description and might be on the test. However, instead of covering every topic that might be on the test -- as one would do if the purpose of the class was to pass the test -- I chose to cover fewer topics in greater depth, and particularly emphasized teaching skills (such as analytical writing) over content.

Similarly, at the end of the class, and before the test date, I had students write a research paper, instead of doing weeks of test review, as would someone whose goal was to have the students pass the test.

I guess this is part of why I hated teaching. My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.

So the worry is that -- if one prioritizes passing the test at all -- the bare facts being tested militate strongly towards certain ideas, and that ethical use of class time does not allow room to introduce complementary material. This is compounded by the fact that so much of the test seems to be free response, and teachers need to be convinced that these would be rubric-ed tightly enough so as to not be graded on ideological parroting. Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.

Finally, I found the sample questions to be interesting and challenging (IANA historian). Students would presumably find the course valuable, but (IMO) Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.

My viewpoint would have been that (ethically) maximizing the students' chances of passing the test should be heavily prioritized. Even if the fun stuff is better for their psyches, they're paying for a leg up on the competition.

Well, that is an unavoidable dilemma, as is the content v. skills dilemma, and breadth v depth dilemma. But, btw, I don't know that most of my students would call writing essays "fun stuff," though it is probably more fun than lots of rote memorization.

Professionally, I've only seen how the AP grades calculus, so maybe you can tell if such a thing is even possible? My own high school experience was that one wants to approximate ChatGPT's response as well as possible, which is what we'd like to avoid here.

There are obviously no scored tests yet for the new course, but scoring guidelines, sample responses, rubrics, etc for old AP World tests are here, and for old AP US History classes are here

Florida would be right to claim that the Black experience is better understood with every bell hooks reading replaced by Tupac Shakur.

Yes, Florida is free to offer or not offer whatever course it wants (and, as noted, it does in fact offer African American studies classes). But the "culture war" aspect is why Florida rejected this particular course.

But the "culture war" aspect is why Florida rejected this particular course.

Did they explicitly say that?

Yes.

Did they? Iirc, the stated motive was an apparent lack of academic rigor.

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But the "culture war" aspect is why Florida rejected this particular course.

Yes. It's also the reason this particular course exists.

Except that Florida high schools offer non-AP versions of the course already.

And, the course exists for one reason: to get more African American students to take AP courses.

And, the course exists for one reason: to get more African American students to take AP courses.

Is this because it is intended to be extremely non-rigorous so anyone with a pulse can get a 4 or 5?

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And, the course exists for one reason: to get more African American students to take AP courses.

That sounds both very counter-productive (see Goodhart's law) and extremely condescending. Like, since they can't take AP math, so we invent AP bullshit and pretend it's the same thing. Nobody would think it's the same thing.

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That being said, this decision by Florida seems to be more a part of the DeSantis for President campaign than a principled objection.

...

And, btw, the claims on the other side that Florida does not want to teach African American history is also nonsense, because teaching of African American history is mandated in FL schools

Or, in other words, the complaints against DeSantis seem to be more a part of the long-running "Defeat DeSantis" campaign than a principled objection? I don't think there's any question that DeSantis is angling for the White House, such that everything he does can be plausibly cast in that way. But asking politicians for principled objections seems to always and everywhere end up as an isolated demand for rigor.

The complaints from Florida seem perfectly reasonable to me; I regard so-called "intersectionality" as much more like a religion than a legitimate form of academic inquiry, and I don't see any value in teaching it in schools (beyond, perhaps, including it in a religious studies course as an example of a secular dogmatism that has emerged in response to the broad exclusion of deity-oriented faith from public debate). Of course, reasonable minds may differ on this point, and I'm comfortable with each state education system in the U.S. reaching its own conclusion through standard legislative processes, which Florida has done here.

But I am also broadly disinterested in having "standardized" education across the country, and would rather see states actively competing in that arena rather than outsourcing everything to monocultures like the College Board. Very few people seem to actually care about AP Black-Queer-Feminist-Communism, and most of the complaining I see is false claims (as you noted) about black history being removed from Florida schools. Given that no actual history is being excluded from Florida schools, only certain forms of political indoctrination, what complaint remains? The complaint that DeSantis is doing this for the votes?

I have a lot of problems with democracy, but ultimately "politician doing the things his voters want him to do" just isn't very high on my list of things to worry about.

ETA:

So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.

This seems like a great way to get poor scores on the exam, though. "You are free to teach what you like" does not translate into "and your students will still do well on the exam." Students who are not closely able to at list imitate the dogmatic thinking from the objectionable readings seem unlikely to do well on the exam that is the ultimate point of any AP class. My own experience with AP exams is that failure to hew closely to the "suggested" readings will often leave your students swinging in the wind.

But asking politicians for principled objections seems to always and everywhere end up as an isolated demand for rigor.

That seems an odd response to a post in which I explicitly criticized both sides.

Of course, reasonable minds may differ on this point, and I'm comfortable with each state education system in the U.S. reaching its own conclusion through standard legislative processes, which Florida has done here.

I agree; Florida is free to teach what it wants. But note that the standard legislative process in Florida has yielded a law, the Stop WOKE Act, which explicitly permits the teaching of "CRT"-related topics.

This seems like a great way to get poor scores on the exam, though. "You are free to teach what you like" does not translate into "and your students will still do well on the exam." Students who are not closely able to at list imitate the dogmatic thinking from the objectionable readings seem unlikely to do well on the exam that is the ultimate point of any AP class. My own experience with AP exams is that failure to hew closely to the "suggested" readings will often leave your students swinging in the wind.

  1. The quoted material does not say "you are free to teach what you like." It in fact says the exact opposite, as I noted: That teachers are required to "address[] the content and skills set forth in the course description." What it says is that teachers are free to teach the material how they like.

  2. IF the test requires students to "imitate the dogmatic thinking," then I will be the first to agree with you. But note that that would only happen in free response questions, and one cannot assume that there will be any free response questions on the topics at issue.

  3. I take issue with your statement that doing well on the exam is the ultimate point of any AP class. It wasn't when I taught an AP class, and any teacher who thinks it is the point should be reassigned, if not fired.

That seems an odd response to a post in which I explicitly criticized both sides.

Well, you (I think at least partly correctly!) identified the DeSantis administration's arguably unprincipled motivations, but you did not actually call out his opponents' straightforwardly equal-but-opposite arguably unprincipled motivations. Even the Twitter link you provided to Florida's specified objections is a Tweet deriding those objections as obvious wrongthink. All I did was make the hypocrisy explicit.

But note that the standard legislative process in Florida has yielded a law, the Stop WOKE Act, which explicitly permits the teaching of "CRT"-related topics.

To the best of my understanding, this is only if CRT topics are taught about, not if they are presented as correct. As far as I have seen, nothing in the AP readings seems to accommodate the possibility that any of these claims are wrong. There are not even readings from, say, black scholars like Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell. Not even a pretense of ideological neutrality is evident in the selection of materials.

But note that that would only happen in free response questions, and one cannot assume that there will be any free response questions on the topics at issue.

Presumably one cannot assume that there will not be any free response questions on the topics at issue, either, so this seems to be an obvious case of "the College Board should have been clearer, then, so the fault continues to lie with them."

I take issue with your statement that doing well on the exam is the ultimate point of any AP class. It wasn't when I taught an AP class, and any teacher who thinks it is the point should be reassigned, if not fired.

Look, I love to tell my own students how intrinsically valuable learning is, too, but I am not stupid. The vast majority of them take my classes because I am an obstacle imposed between them and where they want to be. Students who take AP classes out of nothing but inquiring interest are lovely and wonderful, but if you're not doing your best to help your students score well on their AP exams, then you are doing at least many, and probably most of them a grave disservice. They would not be doing the work that AP courses demand, if they did not anticipate a reward in the form of legible credit towards their upcoming university matriculation and education.

Even the Twitter link you provided to Florida's specified objections is a Tweet deriding those objections as obvious wrongthink. All I did was make the hypocrisy explicit.

As it happens, I did not read the Twitter thread. I posted that link because that is where I found the letter. It is not on the FL DOE's news page, nor does it come up when I search for "African American Studies" in their webpage.

To the best of my understanding, this is only if CRT topics are taught about, not if they are presented as correct. As far as I have seen, nothing in the AP readings seems to accommodate the possibility that any of these claims are wrong.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, the AP course description accommodates the possibility that they are wrong by leaving it up to the teacher to decide how to cover the material.

Presumably one cannot assume that there will not be any free response questions on the topics at issue

Obviously. The point is that your assumption that the test requires parroting of ideas re the topics is based on a mistaken premise.

Look, I love to tell my own students how intrinsically valuable learning is, too, but I am not stupid. The vast majority of them take my classes because I am an obstacle imposed between them and where they want to be. Students who take AP classes out of nothing but inquiring interest are lovely and wonderful, but if you're not doing your best to help your students score well on their AP exams, then you are doing at least many, and probably most of them a grave disservice. They would not be doing the work that AP courses demand, if they did not anticipate a reward in the form of legible credit towards their upcoming university matriculation and education.

Who said anything about "nothing but inquiring interest"? A course that improves the skills students will need to succeed in college is a course which provides rewards to students, even if it does not provide the more tangible, yet far less valuable, reward of college credit.

As it happens, I did not read the Twitter thread.

"I didn't read the stuff I linked everyone to" is certainly some kind of response, sure.

The point is that your assumption that the test requires parroting of ideas re the topics is based on a mistaken premise.

I didn't assume anything--I only identified an uneliminated possibility. The possibility itself was objectionable. The College Board's failure to eliminate the possibility is where the objection is grounded. Thus "it's merely possible, not certain" is no answer at all.

Who said anything about "nothing but inquiring interest"? A course that improves the skills students will need to succeed in college is a course which provides rewards to students, even if it does not provide the more tangible, yet far less valuable, reward of college credit.

Sorry, I charitably assumed there was an interesting point underneath what I took to be kind of a silly one (firing AP teachers for teaching toward success on the AP test). The putative intrinsic value of learning seems like at least a potentially interesting topic.

The idea that incrementally improving general study skills is somehow a more valuable reward than college credit seems odd to me, given that the point of success in college is, for most students, more college credit! In particular, AP courses are a chance to cut down on the number of years students need to spend paying university tuition. If our time is the most valuable thing we humans have, then helping your students secure credit in advance is surely at least as valuable as incrementally improving their study skills--which many will never use again after college, alas. (And if you do think that is tragic, then of course--see my point about the intrinsic value of learning.)

"I didn't read the stuff I linked everyone to" is certainly some kind of response, sure.

The link was to the FL DOE document posted there. Why would I read the idiot comments re the document on some Twitter feed, if the point was to provide the document itself? The real mystery is why you think it was some sort of "gotcha" to note the existence of said idiot comments. How are they relevant to the issue?

I didn't assume anything--I only identified an uneliminated possibility. The possibility itself was objectionable. The College Board's failure to eliminate the possibility is where the objection is grounded. Thus "it's merely possible, not certain" is no answer at all.

Except that my entire point is that the FL DOE claims that it is certain, and that they are wrong.

The idea that incrementally improving general study skills is somehow a more valuable reward than college credit seems odd to me, given that the point of success in college is, for most students, more college credit! In particular, AP courses are a chance to cut down on the number of years students need to spend paying university tuition. If our time is the most valuable thing we humans have, then helping your students secure credit in advance is surely at least as valuable as incrementally improving their study skills--which many will never use again after college, alas. (And if you do think that is tragic, then of course--see my point about the intrinsic value of learning.)

I didn't say that it is more valuable.* I simply noted that even a student has no intellectual interest in anything at all, but rather whose only goal is getting a college degree as easily as possible might well enroll in a class which improves academic skills even if it did not offer a chance to acquire college credit.

*In the eyes of the student, that is.

AP Black-Queer-Feminist-Communism

Was the end of this just a silly throwaway joke, or did I miss something in the syllabus? "Black-Queer-Feminist" seems to be thoroughly covered, but the closest thing I see to socialist or communist thought is the inclusion of "racial capitalism" in a list of forms of racism, and without looking deeper at the texts I can't tell whether this is a case of an adjective being used for association or just for categorization.

Reportedly, one of the concerns Florida expressed is that Robin D.G. Kelley, specifically, advocates for communism. But more broadly, "critical theory" is largely the new phrase people use to refer to theories that used to be called "cultural Marxism" before people decided that phrase referred to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories instead of, you know, the huge body of academic work by people who literally called themselves cultural Marxists.

Somewhat ironically, it is the critical notion of "intersectionality" that gave rise to the sense that people can't talk about e.g. feminism or racism without also being "allies" for every other "progressive" cause (or at least every other progressive cause with a stripe on the flag). But the moment Florida says "we really don't like communism" suddenly everyone is supposed to accept that Kelley's work on communism is just cleanly separable from the other stuff Kelley wrote. It's a classic motte-and-bailey--which makes sense, given that it is ultimately a postmodernist critique, and the motte-and-bailey doctrine was specifically identified to critique postmodernism.

So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.

This seems a little bit of a change in approach from the normal strict literalism you've been bringing recently. Stop WOKE does not require teachers to "assign readings on all sides of the issues", under the increasingly-reasonably-looking theory that progressives would consider their own racially-discriminatory texts as a legitimate side and conservative-leaning views (or classically anti-discriminatory ones!) as not. The relevant prong of the law is:

"It shall constitute discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, or sex under this section to subject any student or employee to training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such student or employee to believe any of the following concepts:

  • Members of one race, color, national origin, or sex are morally superior to members of another race, color, national origin, or sex
  • A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
  • A person's moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.
  • Members of one race, color, national origin, or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, national origin, or sex.
  • A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex bears responsibility for, or should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of, actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.243
  • A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.
  • A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.
  • Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, national origin, or sex to oppress members of another race, color, national origin, or sex."

((From a philosophical position I think this raises some serious free speech questions given that it is neither content- nor viewpoint-neutral, but from a legal one it'd just get smothered in the crib as government speech were it a progressive political program.))

Now, this statute does have one exception, but rather than a "all sides" one, it's :

Paragraph (a) may not be construed to prohibit discussion of the concepts listed therein as part of a larger course of training or instruction, provided such training or instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.

Emphasis added. That is, it is neither sufficient nor necessary to cover "all sides", but instead a teacher must specifically avoid endorsement. There could be a fair argument that this syllabi could be customized in a way that matches this exception. Except, of course, you specifically admit:

"I have not looked closely at the course description for the AP class..."

Now, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether this is political propaganda lacking rigor and requiring students to parrot a political viewpoint, because it's a school project on a politically valiant topic what do you expect the sort of question that immediately demands argument-by-definition whether this is happening and then, having admitted it, whether it's good. And there's a fair argument that this is not sufficiently precise enough to be a law, in that fun void-for-vagueness way (although, again, compare how government speech regs fair when used to further progressive political goals).

But it's a little hard to see that for this specific situation. A recommended text for "The Reparations Movement" is Coates' "The Case For Reparations". Even assuming that teachers could add a Sowellian counterargument, this remains an endorsement of racially discriminatory practices for the purpose of repairing the harms from actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or national origin (literally: "It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear" and "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole", in case you thought fiscal conservatives had a monopoly on bad debt metaphors), and one that's very likely to be on the not-adjustable test.

((And in practice, there's a complex auditing system that goes on, here; I think you're vastly overstating the degrees of freedom a state has to modify the syllabi.))

It's physically possible to discuss the material without endorsing it (although whether such discussion would prepare students for an AP exam...), but do you really expect the average classroom to manage it? We can barely manage to teach Brave New World without people missing the blatant racism and classism for the feelies and drugs and free love. And it's not exactly alone, here.

Yes, I suppose I misspoke slightly; Stop WOKE does not not technically require teachers to assign readings from both sides. Nevertheless, under the course description, teachers are free to do so, and are certainly free to teach the course in an objective manner. That is the main point: Florida seems to be claiming otherwise, which is incorrect.

A recommended text for "The Reparations Movement" is Coates' "The Case For Reparations".

The point is that it is a recommended text, not a required text, as Florida implies.

((And in practice, there's a complex auditing system that goes on, here; I think you're vastly overstating the degrees of freedom a state has to modify the syllabi.))

Yes, I have gone through the AP course audit. But, like many people here (as well as the Florida DOE), you are conflating the course description with the curriculum or the syllabus. Teachers are not free to modify** the course description** -- for example, they generally cannot teach units that are not included in the official description. But, they are free to develop their own syllabus: There is no official syllabus, and the course audit to which you refer is a review of each teacher's syllabus.

It's physically possible to discuss the material without endorsing it (although whether such discussion would prepare students for an AP exam...), but do you really expect the average classroom to manage it?

Yes! By assigning readings on both sides.

  • -12

I'm having intense flashbacks to culture wars of years past, with the polarities reversed. I'm of course talking about "creation science".

It's all the same arguments. The "both sides" arguments, the "this belongs in a social studies class, not science" arguments, the "you can't have an authority figure like a teacher showing preference for these ideas in an education setting" arguments. And we more or less saw how that culture war shook out. I see no reason this one shouldn't follow through to the same conclusion. AP African American Studies is not education. It's dogma masquerading as such. It's no different in substance, rigor or evidence as "creation science".

I have zero reason to ever give the people teaching this curriculum the benefit of the doubt. Every interview with African American Studies scholars I've seen lambasting the decision is full of all the mealy mouthed buzzwords and turns of phrase I've learned to interpret as massive red flags.

The insistence that they don't "teach kids what to think, but how to think". Which I've learned is actually far more pernicious when you teach people how to think incorrectly. To turn a phrase, throw someone's fish in the river, they'll go hungry for a day. Teach them the wrong way to fish, and they'll go hungry the rest of their life.

There is always the old classic that they teach kids to study history "through a critical lens", which rather gives the game away. The "critical lens" only ever points one direction.

And of course in the interview I saw on The Hill, the scholar further emphasized that MLK Jr's legacy needs to be placed in the proper context of MLK Jr's "Democratic Socialism and radical" beliefs, if you believed any of the red flags I listed above had a more benign interpretation.

Furthermore, DeSantis was elected almost specifically to do this. If he actually has the authority to do so, I'm all for it. I'm over arguing principle. This is naked power politics, that I've been on the receiving end of. Turn about is fair play.

Because in my local school district that has tripled down on far left policies, they just lie. They lie when they are caught. They lie when those lies are exposed. When a grand jury is empaneled to investigate them, they lie more. When the grand jury report is released, they tell even more lies. It's lies the whole way down. The process has taken 3 years and counting, and in the meantime, nothing has changed and they still have our children as a captive audience. These are institutions that have learned to obscure, confuse and obfuscate through extreme bureaucratic defense in depth, and they've repeatedly proven themselves to be utterly untrustworthy.

There is always the old classic that they teach kids to study history "through a critical lens", which rather gives the game away. The "critical lens" only ever points one direction.

Note that the syllabus never uses the term "critical lens". But it does use "lens" in that manner. It's like they were trying to avoid the trigger word while still getting the meaning across.