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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.
I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee
The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.
On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.
On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.
It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.
Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.
Curious to know more.
Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.
Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.
This is meta, but I wonder if our prohibition on "low-effort" top level posts has had a negative side effect. It seems that, more and more, it is low information or low conscientiousness users who post at the top level. Other users recognize that the standards for a top level post are supposed to be high, and don't want to spend an hour writing up something nice, doing research, etc... There are things I've considered posting which would serve as a jumping off point for discussion. I haven't posted them because I didn't have the time to write a long, researched, personal take.
@prof_xi_o I apologize since you asked us to be nice, but in my opinion, this is not a high quality top level post. What's more, since you haven't engaged with the responses, you pattern match to me a personal who is not sincere in actually "learning more" but just trying to troll. I hope this isn't the case.
I'm continually surprised by the people who are willing to write novels in response to this type of top-level content. I think we can do much better. Perhaps the rules for top-level posts can be loosened so that a good faith user can submit a top-level comment without needing to spend a large amount of time doing so. DSL seems to have a much broader number of topics to discuss. This site is much better designed so it would be nice to have similar discussions here.
I wouldn't say this site is better designed, and especially not better implemented. You can start a thread anywhere on DSL and see it from the main page. Here we have... The culture war thread (and I guess the silly Sundays or whatever thread). That's hugely limiting for visibility of top level posts.
I've been enjoying DSL much more because people actually write effortposts about topics they're familiar with, or even just games they're playing. That kind of thing doesn't get much traction here; there were more replies to my throwaway remarks on heat pumps in the CW thread than to the front page post on them.
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It does not have to be a novel.
link to the post
quote excerpt or passage
short summary explaining the importance of the article and your opinion
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I've been saying the rules for top level posts are terrible for years. The mods like them, they ain't going to change. I imagine at some point all the top-level posts will be either from sacrificial accounts or people who don't mind an occasional ban, and every top-level poster will be banned for their post.
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No need to apologize, appreciate the criticism.
Not trying to troll, just looking to flesh out my own knowledge. Seems reasonable to expect more effort out of top-level posts, but what does that look like?
A timebox for research beforehand (you must spend 10 min researching and 10 min writing about the topic before posting)?
What are the characteristics of a good top-level post? Do you have some examples of your favorite top-level posts?
What is DSL?
DSL = Data Secrets Lox, another discussion forum in the same cultural sphere.
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Funny, just the other day someone was arguing with me that if a bad post generates good content, we should consider it a good post and not mod it.
I agree there are some tells that hint at possible "JAQ" trolling - it's not like this isn't a well-trodden subject - but we do occasionally get new posters who really haven't been through every past iteration on a topic.
I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube (and by extension twitch), and this idea (that bad content can generate good content) certainly fits the meta there.
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I miss the pinned 'low effort thread' mod comments that we had on reddit for a while, it was a good way to collect current happenings and smaller topics that don't necessarily need a 5 paragraph write up.
I was hoping that the culture war roundup would be that place (where current happenings get a little bit more wiggle room), but based on the feedback I’m getting it sounds like the community expects more effort out of top-level posts.
If you have any specific suggestions or some top-level posts you really like I’d love to hear/see them
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There isn't a rule that you need to make a huge effort post for a top level post. Plenty of top level posts are something like this:
(link)
This article talks about (thing). I find it interesting for (reasons). I thought that some good points were (xyz) but felt that (xyz) were weak points of the article. I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts on (topic).
Basically, have a modicum of something to say to get an interesting discussion going and it's good enough as far as the rules go. I've only seen people get told off for not putting enough effort into a top level post when they literally throw out a "check out this link, discuss" one-liner or they are dropping some really spicy topic (which generally requires proportionally more effort). But most of the time, it seems to me like people get in their own heads and think that they aren't good enough to make a top level post. It isn't actually in the rules though.
I think I mostly do the latter when I’m trying to see other peoples opinions in an area I’m only beginning to develop a view on. Longer well researched post seem to be of the type where someone has formed an opinion and is trying to sell it.
If I see a weakness in this post it’s that it’s a subject that be talked about elsewhere and have reasonable conversations. Neoliberal or moderatepolitics could perfectly well handle the topic and have a fine discussion. And it’s been well covered.
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Okay, good to know.
I suppose we just need to encourage people more then. We're sort of in the "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" type scenario right now. I might make a couple lower effort (but still hopefully much better than this) posts later. It's been a bit of a desert in here this week.
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