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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It's a Vibes-based World for Us

The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.

Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.

But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?

The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.

According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.

The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.

Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.

Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:

Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.

Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

I can’t believe I of all people am going to defend progressive activists, but I think you and the author are both massively underselling how formalized and sophisticated the theoretical basis for these educators’ approach is. I’m surprised that at no point does the author mention the man whose ghost looms large over so much of modern literacy education: Paolo Freire.

Freire’s The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, along with his somewhat lesser-known book The Politics Of Education, is one of the most influential texts in teacher education of the last century. Freire was one of the pioneers of critical education - which, like any other branch of critical theory, is explicitly Marxist, and seeks to use education as a tool to undermine and destroy the existing socio-economic system. James Lindsay, of the New Discourses website, did a series of lengthy and dense podcasts in which he went through Freire’s work in excruciating detail, explaining Freire’s theories and how they have influenced modern anglophone education. (For those of you who instinctively scoff any time a right-winger calls something Marxist, assuming that this is like when Republicans call any basic government function Communism, I encourage you to look into what Freire had to say about Maoism and Che Guevara.) Every major progressive educator and pedagogical theorist of the last few decades is using Freire’s work as a jumping-off point.

One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.” He believed that the dominant educational paradigm of the 19th and early 20th centuries was one in which students were assumed to be passive and ignorant receptacles, into which teachers can pour all of the approved knowledge that the teachers have decided the students are required to know. This model is hierarchical; the teacher is the Authority - the Knower, who has a form of cultural capital called Knowledge - and the students, who lack the fundamental skills that would allow them to exercise any agency over their own education, are expected to sit down, shut up, and let the Knower deposit Knowledge into them. Freire’s insight was that this educational model, in addition to teaching kids the actual mechanical skill of reading, also smuggles in a “hidden curriculum”: the unstated hierarchical assumption that the point of school is for Society to tell children what they are supposed to know - what information is important and what isn’t - in order to turn them into effective and productive members of the existing society.

In opposition to this model, Freire developed what he called the “generative” or “constructive” model of education. In this approach, the educator strives to minimize any sense of hierarchical relationship between herself and the students; rather than being there as an Authority, the teacher acts as a collaborator with the students. She presents them with basic concepts and resources, and then allows them the greatest possible degree of freedom in choosing which of those concepts or resources to discuss and utilize. The teacher is, in this model, merely a facilitator for the students as they exercise their own creativity and agency. In doing so, the students not only generate their own insights and absorb knowledge, but they also cultivate a sense of their own potential as Creators.

In addition - and this is centrally crucial to Freire’s model - they begin to notice things about the world. See, the teacher has pre-selected the library of works that the students have on hand to explore; if she has a bunch of, say, thinkpieces about structural oppression, or books written from the perspective of poor and marginalized people, then as the students spontaneously discover and read those works, they begin to ask questions about what they find in those materials. And that’s where the teacher comes in; she can provide some answers, or even ask other questions that inspire students to think in a particular way about the society around them. A Marxist revolutionary way, specifically. Freire is not shy about this. Neither is Lucy Calkins, the educational activist and theorist whom the author presents as the primary driver of the “whole language” model. Calkins is very vocal about the centrality of “social justice” in her pedagogy, and about her insistence on exposing children to materials about racism, structural oppression, etc. For these people, teaching your children to read is not the point. The point is to turn them into revolutionaries against the existing society. The point is to give them the tools, and then the ideological guidance, to allow them to deconstruct, criticize, and eventually dismantle the socioeconomic status quo. Again, if you read Calkins and Freire, they’re not hiding this from you.

Now, as with a lot of the larger critical theory and DEI industries, it’s never really clear how many of the ground-level employees actually have any deep understanding of, or buy-in to, the intellectual infrastructure of the work they’ve been tasked with carrying out. I find it difficult to believe that the vast majority of young women going into primary school teaching are all doctrinaire Neo-Marxists. I believe the last time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people. They’re not serious adherents of critical theory. I think that for the vast majority of them, it is indeed true that they are primarily motivated by the sorts of self-aggrandizing narratives around teaching that are presented by films like Dead Poets Society and Freedom Writers: a charismatic teacher with boundless energy and an almost gnostic ability to unlock students’ inner creativity and knowledge-generating potential becomes a sort of mentor or guru for a whole classroom of students, inspiring them to lives of greatness. This model of teaching is inherently parasocial and allows the teacher to act as a manipulator and ideological guiding light for those students, which is why it is so useful for Marxists, but it’s also an extremely emotionally-satisfying narrative for those who are going into what is otherwise a dismally underpaid and punishing career path.

In general, when you are examining the actions of progressive activists, and you are asking yourself, “Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do. The reason educators don’t seem to be doing a good job of teaching children to read is that their actual goal is something else. The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else. While the average schoolteacher is a mediocrity, in over her head and sustained only by self-serving heroic narratives about her Life’s Purpose, the people actually designing the pedagogical model she was trained on were extremely intelligent people with a strong grounding in a storied and sophisticated philosophical tradition. This is not in any sense an endorsement of these people’s methods - personally I would love to see them all in prison or worse - but they’ve got a lot more going for them than just “vibes”.

I've always found it hilarious that the actual Marxist countries don't buy into these feel-good education theories. China's education system is highly regimented and college entrance is gated by a test that you get one chance to take. They study Marx and Engels as a body of knowledge to be passed from teacher to student, not as some organic discovery that takes place when the student picks up a copy of Das Kapital.

AFAIK the USSR was the same way.

Do the Cubans or the North Koreans educate their children this way?

The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in marxist countries aren't trying to burn their society down. The marxists in charge of training and hiring teachers in non-marxist countries are, explicitly and openly. That's the difference.

Are you saying that the leftist educators (or the philosophers who came up with the justifications behind the techniques used in education) in western countries like the US intentionally want the kids to be dumber and learn less efficiently, in order to harm the country?

No, I'm saying that they are, by their own admission, hostile to the country as such. They consider our existing social structures to be deeply unjust, and they see their job as laying the groundwork to bring down that society by inculcating revolutionary ideals in their students. That's their first priority. Everything else, including outcomes for the students themselves, is secondary to that goal. If you give them a superior method of teaching that doesn't actually advance their revolutionary ideals, they'll resist using it. If you give them a very bad way of teaching that does seem to advance the revolution, they'll happily adopt it. They're happy to teach to the best of their ability, as long as what's being taught advances their values.

They don’t want the kids to be dumber, but they do intentionally want to avoid preparing the children to be productive participants in the existing social and economic order. By instilling in children a functional literacy in the values and prestige language of the bourgeois class, you are churning out good little cogs who can, and will, go get jobs in respectable fields. This will allow them to acculturate into the hegemonic order, and to accumulate cultural capital which will turn them into loyal members of society. This will enervate their revolutionary passion.

Like, I wish I was just reporting to you the beliefs of a wacky lunatic fringe, but I’m literally explaining the entire point of one of the most widely-taught teacher education textbooks in America. These pedagogical theorists genuinely believe that making students better at speaking middle-class “respectable” English is actually a bad thing.

"I believe the lasts time I looked into it I saw that the average IQ of a public-school teacher in the United States is about 102. These are not cognitively impressive people"

Being above average IQ would be impressive, especially for such a low playing job. What am I missing?

edit. I am nitpicking and was impressed by your steelman of activist teachers.

It's only a poorly compensated job if you don't count pensions and 3+ months of vacation per year.

Also, they still get paid even if their kids can't read. Point taken.

Thanks for sharing this. This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire. I've only skimmed the wiki article on him and on his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but I think I need to dig a little more.

Both you and the wikipedia article on him say that he's been hugely influential on the US education system. How is this impact measured? I'm reading the City Journal article on this and it mentions that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is assigned to teachers-in-training very often--but does it actually change how teachers teach?

I can imagine that some more fiery educators will have done the heavy lifting and baked in some of Freire's ideas into curricula. But going off my assumption that most Marxist teachings are very abstract (almost postmodern), then most teachers would highlight a few juicy quotes and later forget about these ideas. My other assumption comes from going through a few grades in the US system and I'm struggling to find anything that would have a noticeable taint of Marxist thought--but then, I only did a few grades, and that was over 20 years ago.

(It's too easy to find low hanging fruit of a few teachers refusing to teach math because it's oppressive. I'm looking for more subtle but broader effects of Freire's thought).

One of Freire’s key concepts is what he calls “the banking model of education.”

I find this interesting because it seems like nothing new. I've met before with the constructivist theory of education, which seems to have begun assembling into a coherent theory somewhere in the early 20th century, though its roots go back to the mid 19th century. It's amazing to me that someone could take this idea, which, in the right hands, could produce so much good, and then cover it in Marxist nonsense.

“Why don’t their concrete policies and actions lead actually seem to further their stated goals”, your first instinct should be to assume that they know what they’re doing, and it’s not what you thought they were trying to do.

I think my emotion wasn't around the disconnect between their goals and actions, because it's pretty clear that whatever "good" they say they aim toward is subordinate to their real goals. Rather, it was about how openly they disdain science, reality, and human discourse as a tool for pursuing truth. While writing my post, I had a look at the Calkin's institute page and most of the messaging their is, indeed, about DEI stuff. So yeah, 100% WYSIWYG.

Anyway, I have more reading to do.

This is the first time I've encountered Paolo Freire

I don't have anything really substantial to add but Paolo Freire has been insanely influential. From some sources he is the the most, or at least one of the most highly cited scholars in the humanities. His influence is at least as large as Foucault in the academy, but the impact has probably been larger on society as a whole because pedagogy and education theory has a much more immediate and direct consequences on society, and his ideas are oriented towards 'praxis' and spread and filter down easily. Google Scholar has Pedagogy of the Oppressed at over 100000 citations (!!!) which as best I can tell, is the third most cited work on the site.

The reason why Black Lives Matter activism doesn’t seem to actually save any black lives - quite the opposite, in fact - is that their actual goal is something else

what specifically is their actual goal? Not to defend BLM, but I have no idea what you're hinting at.

Spitballing but it is generally going to go for using US racial minorities as footsoldiers for a Marxist revolution in the US. It has been pretty standard a refrain since the civil rights movement, but particularly the 1970s.

another article about this from oakland schools

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. And we hated it.

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver

on the bright side, this guy belatedly realized that he was destroying kids' futures for the sake of sticking it to the man

My guess is that teachers find it much more enjoyable to teach using whole language compared to phonics, and so our non-consumer based public school system mostly uses whole language instruction.

Yeah, that's a point that's made as well.

Which is pretty damning, because it invites teachers to use a suboptimal method just because it feels good.

Using suboptimal methods just because it feels good is perhaps the most common failure mode for everything humans have done in all of history. The entire gambling industry exploits the extreme version of this feature of psychology.

Especially to the extent we are evolved to feel good using the suboptimal methods.

Edit: I don't need awards, this point is general enough it doesn't really contain much insight as far as I'm concerned.

Using suboptimal methods because it just feels good is perhaps the most common failure mode for everything in all of history.

I think this quip is question-begging, and just serves to muddy the waters by conflating several distinct phenomena:

  1. Conflict between a society's short-term and long-term preferences.

  2. Conflict between the preferences of distinct groups in a society.

  3. How individuals/groups establish preferences, and how they understand and express these preferences.

There are important questions of fact involved:

  • Are whole-language approaches more effective for teaching students literacy?

  • Should effectiveness in teaching students literacy be the unique factor determining instructional approach?

  • Are teachers well-positioned to evaluate the effectiveness of various instructional approaches?

  • Do teachers have insight into how they arrive at their own preferences?

  • Do teachers misrepresent the justifications for their preferences? Do they do so knowingly?

  • Are whole-language approaches easier/more fun for teachers?

  • Do teachers prefer whole-language approaches because they're more pleasant for teachers?

  • Do students have effective political advocates for their interests?

  • Etc.

Sure.

I'm must making the broader point that it wouldn't be surprising to see teachers preferring to utilize a method that makes them feel good even against evidence that it is less effective at teaching the subject it purports to teach.

One of the more reliable features of human psychology is the active avoidance of unpleasant or painful stimuli and preference for pleasurable or at least neutral ones.

So my general belief is that methods people enjoy more are not likely to be the best methods for achieving a stated goal, especially when the benefits of said goal accrue to others.

There are many options/potential solutions for resolving such a disparity, but it does require us to admit that such a disparity exists, first.

Undervalued comment. Thank you. How do I give you an award? Take this emoji.🥇

What blows my mind is how anyone can think the whole word method is a good idea. If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb. If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.

If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.

Well...

You have to understand, it was the cold war. At least we got a song out of it.

It's worth noting that this "new math" is the basis for all the contemporary complaints about Common Core math. Most of the parents complaining about it aren't aware that the "old fashioned" way of doing things that they learned was actually controversial when it was introduced in the 1960s. A lot of new math stuff like other base systems was eventually ditched, but new math subtraction is all most people who went to elementary school from the 1970s–1990s really know.

deleted

I don't know that much about it, just that the New Math that Tom Leherer talks about in the song is the way that they were teaching subtraction at least as late as the mid-'90s (and probably later), and that Common Core subtraction is different enough that the people who learned subtraction they way I did complain about it. But I'm not a teacher or a curriculum expert or anything like that.

To me, the whole "You can't take three from two, two is less than three, so you look at the four in the tens place" etc. always seemed close to the way I do maths in head, expect just sung fast in an overtly complex way to make it seem sillier than it actually is.

Those sound absurd, but it's more ambiguous which style is better for things like musical instruments (learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right) or foreign languages (memorize conjugation tables or just watch Netflix in the target language with subs and start speaking on day 1).

Language and music existed before writing and sheet notation. You can obviously learn to speak or play an instrument without being able to read.

You really can't learn to read without reading though.

With languages, I find the absorption style often leads to embarrassing situations.

It's the awful realization that the person you're talking to has no idea what the word they just spoke actually means. It's clear that they heard it in a similar-but-importantly-different context, made incorrect assumptions about its meaning, and are now re-using it liberally. Or worse, they haven't even guessed at its meaning, but are merely using the word or phrase because they want to sound impressive or charismatic, and other impressive/charismatic people say it so... ugh.

And what's even worse than THAT is that it's socially forbidden to correct them! It's insulting to point out their error - especially if they're a native speaker and it would make them look foolish.

Music and spoken language are two unique categories of learning because evolution has been optimizing our brains for language and music acquisition for at least hundreds of thousands of years. These are basic human social technologies that our brains are tuned to acquire quickly.

learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right

These are just variants on "whole word instruction for music". Take the Gary Karpinski pill, start with takadimi and scale degree syllables/movable-do solmization. Absolute cheat code for music, much in the way that phonics is the cheat code for the written word.

If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb

Right, but this is literally how we learn spoken language, and also one of the best ways to learn second spoken languages. So it's not obviously wrong or mindblowing that one might use it for written language too.

Here's a comparison: people innately learn the weird and complex rules of english grammar intuitively, just by listening, despite not being able to immediately describe them. Often, they're taught explicit 'rules' of the grammar separately, and much later. "If someone suggested teaching grammar without explaining the rules but just showing people sentences and hoping the funny rules eventually make sense"... except that actually works!

Spoken language is unique. It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

Writing is a few thousand years old, and since the invention of writing the majority of people have been illiterate. Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught.

It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years

... sure, but written language shares that language and grammar, so it seems reasonable to expect some of that to transfer to written language. Compare to sign language - it's also quite recent, and uses physical motions that are seen with the eye (as is writing), but has the same complexity of grammar as normal language, also using the "same brain regions" (but take that with a grain of salt, because what do those regions actually mean)?

Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught

Eh. Driving could be learned by experimentation and experience if not for the strict societal rules. And math is just really complicated and novel. Whereas the fairly close correspondence between written langauge and spoken language suggests they might be learned in the same way!

Is that really what "whole word learning" is about?

Immersing kids in books and teaching them to connect words with images

sounds a lot more like the practice part of learning to drive. Especially considering that kids will probably have been observing from the passenger seat for years by the time anyone lets them drive the family station wagon. It also doesn't preclude teaching the "rules of the road;" both approaches occur after an alphabet-training phase. The article starts with an example of a child who can clearly parse those funny symbols, but isn't (yet) trained to do it past the first phoneme.

The whole word method seems like a good idea 1) from a traditional perspective and 2) generalizing from how few adults explicitly use phonetics. That doesn't rule out phonetics as a more efficient strategy; I'm not sure it was obvious.

Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves. Over hundreds of hours, effortful mental activity becomes intuitive. The question is how this intuition is best paved.

Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves.

It's truly remarkable how many chess patterns are internalized by world-class chess players. Here's a video of a chess grandmaster solving simple chess puzzles in real time, as he narrates. What's amazing to me is how quickly the professional recognizes the solutions - often before I have any sense at all for the position. For him, it's like playing "Where's Waldo" if every non-Waldo character were dressed in all black - the correct result seems to just pop-out without any conscious processing.

So, I agree with the overall thrust of this comment. But it's also absolutely the case that top chess players often perform deep calculations, even in rapid games.

It's nice to be able to fall back on a rote system to check one's work. I'm sure Magnus Carlsen can calculate chess moves explicitly.

I might intuitively feel the correctness of some quick mental math, but I can show my work in my head by laying out the calculations to prove it to be doubly sure.

When paving that intuition with a more holistic approach, how does one explain why a thing is correct?

Sure. My point is that either method seems more akin to how we actually teach other skills (like driving) than to just throwing them in the deep end.

Elementary education is the worst paying end of a mediocrely paying field with few career prospects by the standards of a field with limited upward mobility to begin with. Most elementary school teachers are either robotic in their slavish conformity to pedagogical fashions, planning on not coming back after maternity leave, or a radical who doesn’t care if the methods work because that isn’t the goal.

It is the latter group that dominates curriculum writing for obvious reasons.

I think that at least part of the issue is that pre-school/elementary age education is an overwhelmingly female-dominated field, which makes it far more influenced by emotions rather than reason. Phonics may teach kids how to read, but if it causes them to become anxious or bored or feel bad about themselves, the teachers aren't likely to think the trade-off is worth it - and they tend to empathize with their students, making them feel bad as well.

Basically, the feminization of early education has resulted in coddling at the expense of results.

Early Soviet and communist education, for how much it was insane, was founded on the idea that Socialism was superior because it was more rational, and that maths and logic could improve the capitalistic education system.

A good chunk of it was tossed away with Stalin, but at least they produced a very good STEM system.

This is beyond communism or left-wingism, is purely emotional-based policy made by emotional people and women.

It is not Lenin, it is the insane Church Lady with mental ilness.

My view is that the modern incarnation of Leftism largely is driven by the feminization of society - the modern Left with its concerns about "inclusion" and "representation" - making sure people don't feel bad, basically - may share some concerns with the Communists, but the focus is very different than the muscular, STEM and heavy industry focused Soviets.

This is probably a good thing; it means that it's quite a bit further of a stretch for the modern Left to get into torture, gulags, and mass murder.

Ironically the church ladies hate whole word learning and refuse to use it in their homeschool curriculum, for equally stupid reasons to the ones its proponents put forth.

I'd like to see some evidence for that.

Early childhood education has been "feminized" since before the 1880s. Yet somehow literacy survived.

Yes. I somewhat anticipated a pushback there; what's new is the hyper-focus on emotionalism and safetyism.

Kids may have been taught by women, but the attitude towards it was a lot less coddling, I think.

My view is that the transition from strict rules, enforced by corporeal punishment to the present situation (with a hyper-focus on mental and emotional health) represents a feminization of education, in a way that is independent of the sex of those doing the teaching. Kind of like the sex/gender distinction, I guess, with the worst aspects of femininity taking the lead. So, I guess it would be fair to say that I view early education to be captured by toxic femininity.

The real reason is probably that whole word learning is less work for the teacher and its failures can be blamed on student laziness.

That really doesn't explain it. Education in America has always been that way. Teaching schoolchildren was at one time one of the few professional opportunities open to women, provided they were unmarried. Women have always played a very large role in teaching, that's not a new thing.

I wonder if any such controversy or split exists outside the English-speaking countries. In languages where the spelling doesn't lag behind pronunciation by several centuries as it does with English, something like phonics seems just obvious. In my Hungarian school we first learned the vowels (as they are easy to pronounce in isolation), the teacher would show big cards with these letters, and we pronounced it out loud, she would show another letter and we'd pronounce that etc. (We'd also do exercises of circling pictures in a workbook whose name contains the new letter/sound that we just learned.) Then after learning the vowels, we learned each consonant and immediately combined them into syllables. E.g. lesson about the letter "b": teacher writes syllables on the chalkboard like "ba, bá, be, bé, bi, bí, bo, bó, bö, bő, bu, bú, bü, bű" and we'd go over them, entire class pronouncing them. Then she may ask if any of these are meaningful words by themselves. Or if we know any word that starts with any of these syllables. This seems closer to phonics than to whole word. Then gradually we'd move to longer words, then very short sentences, then longer sentences in large font, short stories etc.

I'm a bit confused on the whole-word method though. Does it mean that they simply don't have a dedicated class/timeslot for each letter, they don't say that "hey this is the letter b, the capital letter looks like B and the cursive handwritten looks like this and this". That they don't do syllables? That it's all just "here's the word 'hello' and we pronounce it as hello", before the kid was ever told that the letters h, e, l, and o are things? Seems very silly. English spelling is far from pronunciation but isn't so far...

Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?

It seems that how French speaking kids learn to read is the obvious question- French being a language with similar orthographic problems to English.

And American kids taught using the whole word method are taught their letters, but not necessarily the way they go together to make sounds. They’re expected to memorize ‘sight words’ that need to be recognized on sight and not to parse individual letters.

Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?

Yes, just like pretty much all European languages, except English and French. But I think even French spelling is more regular than English. (To nitpick: it isn't pronounced phonetically, but written phonetically)

Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere. But probably not, just like the concept of "spelling bee" contests makes no sense and they don't exist for non-English, European languages (elsewhere I don't know). It's useful to think about, in order to understand how fundamentally human this topic is and how far reaching the conclusions can be.

Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere.

Yes, there has been a long-standing controversy in France about "méthode globale" (whole word method) as opposed to "méthode syllabique" (phonics), with the first being considered the modern, progressive approach and the second the traditional, no-nonsense one.

FWIW, "sight words" can complement phonics, it doesn't have to replace them. I think it's actually a good thing both for some tricky spelling, and for quicker reading -- as long as it doesn't exclude phonics.

Sadly, there was a similar movement in Germany, where regarding spelling they allowed all manner of misspelling -- as long as it "looked like it would sound" (which doesn't really make sense as a concept). This has led to a ton of kids who can't spell properly, for no apparent gain (and lasting surprisingly late in life). It's really annoying. I see it in my kids, where I'm a much better German speller, even if they are better speakers (as they are native, and I'm not).

In Israel the corresponding methods are called “Phonetic” and “Global”. As far as I know, phonetic is leading, but there’s some global sprinkled in. In Hebrew it’s very common to read and write without all the vowels (the nikud) so some global reading is a must, but it’s not a good way to start learning.

The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself

I don't even remember learning to read, but I know I was taught at home before starting school, and I'm pretty sure my parents weren't raised on 'whole word' or the likes.

The problem with that method is it works - if you have a 'book-rich' environment, which in turn means parents with a reasonable education level themselves and more importantly, the impetus to educate and help educate their kids.

Not all kids are in such homes, however. I wasn't - we weren't 'book rich'. I was lucky in that my immediate family were interested in teaching me, but for instance, I can proudly claim never to have been the recipient of unfair privilege by having bedtime story books read to me.

There are kids where parents have low literacy levels themselves. There are kids living in homes where they don't have access to books. There are kids whose parents (if there are parents plural and not a lone parent) are about as disengaged as it is possible to be and just leave the kids to raise themselves (sometimes this is because the parents are struggling with mental health and other issues and can barely take care of themselves, sometimes it's because they're scum). Those kids are not getting a helping hand at home about "this entire word is 'cat' and look, that is the picture of a cat, link the sound and the image to learn to read 'cat'" to learn off entire words.

Old-fashioned, learn it off by heart, do drills and repetitive learning is boring and unsexy and not shiny bright novelty, but it works (not perfectly, there is no perfect system). The downside of the old methods is a lot of rote learning without understanding, kids who could parrot off an answer but who had no idea how to solve problems if the mantra didn't apply, which is why the newer educational theories revolted against that, and rightly. But the downsides of the new ideas is that there was an unexamined presumption that parents and the home environment would be taking up the slack, so that the teachers only had to guide the little darlings on self-directed learning, to be facilitators and encouragers which was a much more flattering self-image than that of the traditional strict schoolmarm.

Mr. "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity" can go whistle for himself; a lot of us came from what would now be called disadvantaged backgrounds and this teaching opened up avenues of experience to us, by making books accessible, that we would never otherwise have encountered.

I honestly do feel that being unable to read is a handicap, not just for the economic notion of 'you are unemployable' but for the entire range of human excellence it cuts you off from. And people whose pet theories have resulted in a lot of children being handicapped because the theoretic ideal didn't work out for them in practice should be put into the stocks and pelted with wadded-up copies of the textbooks.

to be facilitators and encouragers which was a much more flattering self-image than that of the traditional strict schoolmarm

Why? I think this is a key question. Why is it more flattering to one's self-image to be a pseudo-peer to the kids than to be feared, obeyed, and hierarchically much higher than the kids? When did it become so? Previous generations of teachers didn't seem to have a problem with being authoritative. Is it a kind of expanding empathy? Or is it because it's too militaristic and after WW2 got associated with Nazi-"vibes"? Is it because the teachers don't want to grow up and want to "relate" to the "fellow kids" as we are supposed to be eternal teenagers now? Is it like when a mother and a daughter say they are "besties" and use first names to call each other?

Also I don't think it's exactly a book-rich parental environment that you need. Rates of higher education have shot through the roof in recent decades, especially in poorer countries like Eastern Europe, bringing many first-generation educated people, who did not have an academically oriented home environment. But still there are styles of existence that can better foster learning and academic success later on. I mean when the parents are conscientious, have a long time horizon etc. For example they may have no books at all, but if they discuss plans at the dinner table, like "next year we are going to have X chickens, I'll go and buy them two weeks from now at the market", "once we have 3 pigs and sell them, we can earn X money, which will allow us to build a new shed", "tomorrow we'll have to go fix the fence that the neighbor's horse kicked down". As opposed to, eg. shouting, fighting, drinking, leaving the yard to disarray, with garbage everywhere, no plans beyond the next hour, etc. In a good, sober, smart environment a kid can pick up the necessary skills for academic success even if the parents never talk about Shakespeare. What's needed is something else, something deeper. Similarly I don't think it's the reading of a bedtime story, but probably simply the affection, attention and time for the kid. It could also be an evening chat about stories about when grandma was young or what happened at school. (And of course there's the argument that all these parental behaviors are simply indicators of genetic propensities that anyway already get inherited by the kid.)

Phonics vs whole word learning is an interesting example of group utility in adopting incorrect beliefs.

Homeschoolers in general hate whole word learning, with a passion. The conservatives end of homeschooling(and the homeschooling community being what it is, this is the majority) believes and repeats a variety of bizarre conspiracy theories about whole word learning as an evil plot to do x, where x is usually something like ‘convince children that the world around them is completely arbitrary/changes on the will of liberal authorities, thus justifying atheism/lgbt/evolution/lockdowns’. I believe the liberal end has their own justifications for opposing whole word learning coming from the opposite direction.

Needless to say, whole word learning does not cause transgenderism. The only drawback is that is doesn’t work, which is a pretty big drawback. But making that argument is pretty difficult and involves a set of tools to prove it that were, until recently, unavailable to the homeschooling crowd. And whole word learning is less work for the educator, so it would have probably won out by inertia absent some kind of pitch.

From my own experience I didn’t learn to read until my catholic school switched from whole word learning to phonics(they switch back and forth every couple of years in my diocese). But anecdata.

How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them? Like, have you made any attempt to actually engage with the theories underpinning this educational model? Or are you just defaulting to the lazy idea that “conspiracies don’t happen” and satisfying yourself with that? There’s nothing “bizarre” about taking the literal words of widely-taught educational theory textbooks seriously, and drawing the conclusion that the people putting those theories into practice actually mean them and believe in them.

How many teacher education schools have to keep explicitly saying that their pedagogical approach is based on liberatory theories of critical social justice before you start believing them

But - in every other area, """these people""" just take random things and say they're racist or liberatory. Eating twinkies? Self care. Milk is racism. More black people in television ads? Helping little black children see themselves on TV, empowerment. Having long hair is conservative. But none of those things actually are that, and deciding that phonics is conservative doesn't actually mean whole-word is based in 'liberatory theories of critical social justice', or is even bad, it might be totally random.

‘X is racist’ is just how midwit college educated women say ‘I don’t want to do x despite it being a better idea than whatever I’m doing currently’.

Or 'I don’t want you to do x despite it being a better idea than whatever you're doing currently.

Can you please link an example of this? I really need to read this in all of its glory for myself.

See my below comment in this same thread about Paolo Freire and Lucy Calkins. You can find a bunch of their work and their public statements on Google.

'believes and repeats a variety of bizarre conspiracy theories about whole word learning as an evil plot to do x,"

There's a comment below that is a steelman of the homeschooler's paranoia- that Paolo Freiro explicitly calls for Marxist Revolutionary concepts to be taught/indoctrinated in school using techniques designed with such goals in mind, i.e. whole word learning.

It's not undue "paranoia" if the neomarxism is being pushed/funded from positions of money and authority.

But making that argument is pretty difficult and involves a set of tools to prove it that were, until recently, unavailable to the homeschooling crowd.

A lot of the tools were there back in 1955, in a bestselling book.

Just wanted to add to the pile of “hooked on phonics worked for me”.

Seriously though, how are the “whole language” kids meant to learn new words?

I went to a catholic school which switched between whole word and phonics instruction every couple of years.

Phonics worked better and the whole word learning answer was to have every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times. Yes, seriously. Needless to say this idea is stupid because it will never happen. But it’s not the teacher’s fault that the students are lazy, is it?

every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times.

This is the absolute stupidest thing I have ever heard. The idea that somebody would suggest something this stupid, in earnest, is baffling to me. It seems the equivalent would be to have every child carry a book that had every combination of numbers added together in a lookup table, instead of teaching them how to do math.

Astonishing.

That was how they used to do logarithms and trigonometric functions.

What does that have to do with anything? That was the best way, and those table were painfully calculated (e.g. by series expansion), and then shared with others so they wouldn't have to repeat the work.

With phonics (and word attack skills, as they were called when I learned them), you have a better way than "memorize each answer).

Even tables are better than this -- you interpolate between the given values to get the ones you need.

(Also, in some domains tables is pretty close to how those things are still done, it's just the computer is doing it for you. Admittedly for most there are fairly good functions or HW that converge on the answer quickly, so that's done rather than just a table, but even that is something of a blend, where a number of coefficients is saved, and the computer plugs the number into a long polynomial).

I don't have a part of my brain dedicated to trig.

the whole word learning answer was to have every student keep a dictionary to look up any word they didn’t know how to pronounce at all times.

Let me tell you, as a child who was once caught reading the dictionary for fun rather than doing my assigned homework, I am god-awful at pronouncing new words from reading them or reading phonetic keys, if I haven't heard the word.

Did they teach the phonetic symbols but not the letter combinations that would most commonly produce them?

They didn’t teach phonetic symbols well enough to use the dictionary, no, but they did teach eg what a long versus short ‘a’ sound was.

Through vibes obviously...

Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.

In particular, the comments here seem confident that phonics works and the alternative doesn't, and the progressives are so ridiculous for believing it - but with little discussion of the methodology by which they settled it! But before you move to "clearly these people are wrong and making a stupid mistake because they are progressives that's what they do", you should take a look at how precisely it is a mistake.

As for vague reasons why "immersion" isn't just feel-good vibes, consider how people learned spoken language historically and still do today ... immersion, just picking things up as they go listening in context, rather than 'phonics'. It's not obviously wrong.

[will read article now and edit]

In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but as three-dimensional objects rotating in space. That’s why kids who are learning to write so commonly exchange “b” and “d,” for example, or “p” and “q.”)

Absolutely no idea what this means, or how it can be true at all. Kids who are learning to write exchange b and d or p and q because they're similar, not because they "rotate". That's like saying if you confuse a and q, it's because the tail is morphing in your brain.

Absolutely no idea what this means

They mean to say that kids, presumably, learn those shapes in a transformation invariant way, just like they would for other things. For example, a dog is a dog whether it faces towards the left or the right. But p isn't p if it faces the other way, then it's a q, which is its own separate thing. For real objects out there we have some mental 3d representation that we can mentally rotate (if we are shape rotators) and manipulate. But the same strategy doesn't work the same way for letters.

Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.

Good point. I'll be more careful about the curse of knowledge in the future.

I don't have access to my notes, but wikipedia does a good job summarizing what I've found myself (source):

The whole-word method received support from Kenneth J. Goodman who wrote an article in 1967 entitled Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.[127] Although not supported by scientific studies, the theory became very influential as the whole language method.[128][129] Since the 1970s some whole language supporters such as Frank Smith, are unyielding in arguing that phonics should be taught little, if at all.[130]

Yet other researchers say instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness are "critically important" and "essential" to develop early reading skills.[131][132][133] In 2000, the US National Reading Panel identified five ingredients of effective reading instruction, of which phonics is one; the other four are phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.[134] Reports from other countries, such as the Australian report on Teaching reading (2005)[135] and the Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose Report 2006) from the UK have also supported the use of phonics.

Furthermore, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology compared teaching with phonics vs. teaching whole written words and concluded that phonics is more effective. It states "Our results suggest that early literacy education should focus on the systematicities present in print-to-sound relationships in alphabetic languages, rather than teaching meaning-based strategies, in order to enhance both reading aloud and comprehension of written words".[138]

The National Research Council re-examined the question of how best to teach reading to children (among other questions in education) and in 1998 published the results in the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children.[286] The National Research Council's findings largely matched those of Adams. They concluded that phonics is a very effective way to teach children to read at the word level, more effective than what is known as the "embedded phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught opportunistically in the context of literature).

In 2000 the findings of the National Reading Panel was published. It examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S.[288] The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.

Better to destroy an entire generation than to allow a conservative approach to erudition.

It seems like nothing works well , or that no method is superior to any other method, which agrees with Freddie Deboer's posts on education. Educators have tried every possible approach , and yet nothing can overcome innate individual differences in learning ability. Smarter kids will pick up reading faster regardless of which method is used.

No. Literacy does have to be taught, you don't just "pick it up". Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way. So the question is why educators are so attached to a system which doesn't work?

Anecdotally, some amount of private tutoring is incredibly widespread among rich kids in the US, and private tutoring(sylvan etc) uses phonics almost exclusively. Engaged parents also frequently teach some basic phonics rules about silent e’s and soft c’s, and smart kids tend to figure some out on their own without having to be explicitly taught.

Combine the three, and wealthy districts can achieve a fair amount of success with the whole word method then quietly shuffle anyone who fell through the cracks into remedial classes that use phonics until they’re caught up. Poor districts just suffer.

This is addressed a little bit in the New Yorker piece. Researchers agree that literacy teaching is difficult to measure because some kids just seem to pick it up quickly, some take a long time, and yet others learn to fake literacy very well until 3rd or even 4th grade. She also raises the point that the kids that do well in whole language learning programs probably come from well off households that have many books and where the family actually spends time reading.

That said, I believe the main point about phonics is that it is able to bring kids who struggle with reading up to speed faster than other methods. These struggling kids include both those with dyslexia as well as those from poor families. If this is true, then I would expect phonics to have little effect, except maybe annoyance, for the smart or lucky kids, but it would be a huge help for poor/dyslexic kids.

I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine. People and intelligence are flexible, you can learn things in poor and slow ways and still learn them, and the claim was that whole-word was less effective than phonics, not that it didn't work. Just compare it to language learning - if you have a smart kid and he does whole-word, even if it is greatly inferior to phonics, couldn't the kid figure out all the tough bits themselves the same way a smart kid does that for other things?

from the article:

These students are more likely to be growing up in homes full of books, Shanahan said, among adults with the time and ability to read aloud to them. It is most likely these lucky children, in fact, who at some point “just know” how to read—who bear out Calkins’s theory of literacy by vibes, because these kids are already marinating in those vibes at home. “And that’s where this gets to be noxious,” Shanahan said. “It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower.”

It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College. If a kid doesn’t know how to match letters and sounds, or to sound out and segment and blend, they’re not learning to read. They’re not going to naturally intuit how to do that in twenty or thirty minutes of free reading.” And because those blocks of time are mainly devoted to silent reading, children aren’t demonstrating their understanding of letter sounds—they aren’t, to borrow a term from math class, showing their work.

What’s more, Susan Neuman told me, some clever members of the sixty per cent may be able to feint their way through books for early readers, and so the true extent of their lack of decoding skills may not emerge until as late as third grade. (In 2011, a national study of four thousand students found that a child who is not reading proficiently by third grade is four times as likely to drop out of high school or graduate late as those who are, or eight times as likely if that child is also Black or Hispanic and affected by poverty.)

So, this is the kind of argumentation that sounds like "evidence", because "shanahan said!", "wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, told me", but could easily be wrong. Going with it as true, though - the way the quotes are strung together seems to hint-hint that most of the "roughly forty per cent of children [that] can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction" learned it at home - but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home, and nowhere does it say that all of those 40% are explicitly taught it at home, especially with phonics. And taking the claim "It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower." literally also suggests that both work.

None of this is really compatible with "Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way".

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine.

So you've got nothing?

but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home

I think they are. An unstructured version of it, but teaching them the sounds for the letters and having them try to figure out unfamiliar words by putting the letter-sounds together is pretty common.

so you've got nothing

just "It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College"

I think they are. An unstructured version of it

sure, but 'whole word' style also has portions of an unstructured version of phonics! just showing single-syllable words together with their pronunciation is enough for that. And that's enough for a particularly smart kid to learn from.

How much of whole word learning is actually phonics? Two fifths of it maybe?

Homeschoolers hate whole word learning and I doubt you can find a homeschool curriculum that used it.

I think this correctly sidesteps the entire 'issue'. The only victims are the kids stuck with ever more elaborate schemes of learning designed for the innately illiterate or those with no mind for reading in the first place.

Recognizing the issue of innate differences, and assuming we do not consider school to be a rat race for our children, wouldn't the best teaching method be something that makes the kids happier at the same time as they are taught how to read? I wish that we could change our objectives away from ever more elaborate schemes designed for the innately illiterate or those with no mind for reading in the first place, towards something more aligned with making school a more 'harmonious' experience, for a lack of a better term.

This seems right, phonics 'working' [might i will read more] come out of the same body of knowledge that produced learning styles, growth mindset, etc. The comparison to learning spoken language seems obvious - there isn't a "phonics" for spoken language, you just learn it via immersion!

Chinese kids seem to learn to read just fine and they don't have any option but whole-word methods. I would expect phonics to help some students on the margins, but only in terms of time spent in the classroom and not their eventual level of literacy. A much larger impact could perhaps be achieved through orthographical reform, but that's never going to happen.

I thought I read somewhere that it takes Chinese kids longer to attain an equivalent level of literacy, but I can't find a source right now.

That's not exactly true. PinYin does exist.

Think about all the mini sequences involved in reading: training the eye to look at small etchings next to each other from left to right; converting those etchings into an audible (and later, subaudible) sound based on pattern recognition; remembering all of the cases where the pattern doesn’t work; hearing the sound and making sense of the sound; combining it with the next sequence (the following word); combining these sequences together a la sentences and paragraphs.

Surely whichever approach contains the most motivated deliberate practice of the constituent parts will be the best. Honestly these can be converted into a computer game pretty easily and probably be as good as any public school teacher.

In my own experience, phonics wins here.*

Going into school, you already know how to talk. So being able to turn squiggles into sounds allows you to "talk" with texts.

*I was dropped into the American school system in first grade. I did even speak English. A few months in, I was speaking, read, writing English like all my other classmates.

As far as we know, the way the brain works is actually stacking all those parts on top of each other and they are all important.

There are multiple forms of Dyslexia but they all stem from a difficulty or inability to have the brain recognize a certain level of abstraction of this process. For instance being unable to map letters to syllables and then to sounds and having to do the harder task of mapping letter sequences directly to those.

I don't recall if phonics or the neurology that vindicates it came first. But given this knowledge all the holistic methods are doing really is betting on the kids figuring out those separate skills on their own.

Given the stated goals of the "vibes" this is quite ironic.

Yep. And for the stacking to work effectively you ought to master the constituent parts. We find this in other domains too; good luck solving a complex math problem when you don’t have mastery over the smaller sub-problems. Good luck learning a piano piece without working out the left hand and right hand alone, or not knowing how to sightread. Even things like driving require mastery over a bunch of small parts. Just placing a kid in a car and saying good luck is going to get him into an accident.

It’s good to remember that reading is a totally unnatural human activity. A human has built-in instincts for learning to walk and speak. But writing and reading is as artificial as unicycling while playing the violin. So it needs to be trained.

Artificial except for those lucky rare of us with hyperlexia. I don’t remember learning how to read, because it happened before the age of childhood amnesia. Reading, writing, and computer programming come as naturally to me as swimming to a duck.

remembering all of the cases where the pattern doesn’t work

Somehow the Greeks with access to both the Minoan syllabary and the Phoenician abjad birthed the evils of the alphabet on the world and thousands of years later we are still paying the price.

Hey, I like my writing system to include vowels. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

You can have vowels as completely different symbols than the consonants, like in Hebrew or Korean. Reading Korean is ridiculously easy to learn thanks to that.

Humans are vibes-based creatures. Always have been. It’s nothing new.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

Sounds like phonics itself, if you take "vibes" to mean "vibrations" to mean "sounds." Probably less productive here, though.

On the subject of "vibes": "good vibes" etc is a phrase I started hearing only in the past 5 years or so, and I noticed the kind of people who used it were inarticulate socialites. I started also hearing more people talk about "radiating energy" and what not. Before, I used to think it was primarily something uncommon, only said by spiritual-yoga types.

I wonder if its a coincidence that vibrating particles is literally thermal energy, and if those phrases are somehow related in that way.

I didn't even consider that "vibes-based" education here could literally be referring to sound.

Whole word seems like throwing in the towel in recognition of the reality that English spelling is massively divorced from English pronunciation. The phonic "rules" work for the simplest vocbulary (sometimes) but by the time you hit the numbered grades you will encounter word after word where they simply do not apply. Exceptions to the rules are more common than the rules themselves, and at some point attempting to teach a systemic set of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions becomes impossible. As time goes on the separation will only get worse, and teaching phonics will become fully impossible, with english words becoming impenetrable hanzi-like clumps of meaning divorced from their constituent parts. You can teach phonics and be limited to learning 3 letter words (except pho) without a mountain of non-phonetic exceptions, or you can do whole word and admit defeat.

Exceptions to the rules are more common than the rules themselves, and at some point attempting to teach a systemic set of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions becomes impossible.

Zompist: hold my beer.

I'm not convinced the evidence for superiority of phonics over all other methods is as strong as you suggest it is. Even if that was the case, however, that fact by itself would not necessarily imply anything about how schools should operate.

Here's where I'm coming from. When I was young I transferred from a nontraditional school with relaxed reading expectations to a more normal one, so I ended up going to a remedial reading program for a few months. I don't recall anything phonics based, though this was a while ago. Either way, as far as I recall, I was reasonably literate within a year. As in I was rapidly able to read anything I wanted, though of course subtle literary senses took longer. What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.

This forum may be one of the absolute worst places on the entire internet for the members to apply their individual experiences to this particular topic. If you are here, your language skills are extremely good. Everyone here is an outlier in the same direction on this topic.

Gifted and talented students are a special problem in education, much like the learning-disabled, but for the opposite reason. For those with disabilities, it's difficult to find the right strategies to achieve education. For the gifted, nearly every strategy works, and it's difficult to find the best strategy.

Though as you note, "failing to move on when education has been achieved" is by far the most common way for the system to fail gifted students.

What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.

That just sounds like an argument in favor of better tracking. Students who have already mastered a topic, in any subject, should be allowed to test out of it and move on.

I should have added more meat to my post, my bad.

I collected some snippets straight from wikipedia on the subject in this comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/75/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/9901?context=8#context

So it appears that whole-word has no effect whereas phonics has a positive effect. Neither probably affect all kids, but given that phonics has a positive effect on at least some kids whereas whole-word has none, it seems like phonics should be used--at least until we find something more effective.

Wouldn't phonics eventually wipe out regional dialects?

AAVE seems like it wouldn't survive long under phonics.

And if more liberal areas tend to go with whole word learning, and presumably conservative areas with phonics, could this be why (it seems) that southern dialects are disappearing?

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You don't need all the racism and plantation aspects to explain the disappearance of dialects. The same is happening in many European countries with no such history. Dialect is associated with peasants, low skill workers, poor and uneducated people, etc. Probably due to infrastructure, media, urbanization, telecommunications, but also standardized schooling etc.

My wife and I usually speak in dialect. A few weeks ago I spent a lot of time cloistered away at work and she spent a lot of time trading voice messages with a northern friend of hers. The friend does and my wife used to belong to the cultural left that try to distance themselves as far as they can from dialects, using that distance to signal tribal allegiance. After a while, my wife began speaking to me and our child in high german. I was honestly horrified. Our dialect is dear to me, a large part of my home memeplex, and I felt like an utter stranger when suddenly adressed in that artificial, impersonal and politically loaded high language.

It's back to normal now but aua did that sting. Felt like the clammy fingers of the cathedral sullying a sacred space.

In Hungary, the culture war angle seems a bit different than that. Here academic (usually leftist) linguists emphasize descriptivism and that no dialect should be stigmatized, there is no single correct way to speak, the standard language is more like customs of clothing while real language is organic and biological. I generally agree by the way. There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc. While there's a connection to the topic of Gypsies, these linguists also speak out in favor of not shaming non-Gypsy Hungarians for their dialect, inclusivity etc.

Why doesn't it work out like that in Germany?

There's even a term, linguicism to describe prejudice against non-standard speakers, which may prevent people from getting hired etc.

Language is for communication. If you speak in a dialect that is not mutually intelligible with the standard, or is only with difficulty, communication becomes more difficult. This is not "prejudice", this is a legitimate consideration.

This doesn't happen in Hungary though. There are specific stigmatized grammatical quirks that are present in some dialects but they don't make understanding harder.

Imagine for example if there was a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von". L And people who learned it so in their village would be ridiculed for it or assumed uneducated. "Haven't you paid attention at school? That makes no grammatical sense! It makes me cringe like hearing nails on a chalkboard!"

I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard, so there it can make sense to require standard knowledge for a job (not sure whether that's legal though). But in Hungarian we only have slight pronunciation differences, some regional words and some minor grammatical differences.

The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)

I know that in German there are dialects that aren't mutually intelligible with the standard

Those are few, and spoken by very few people, and even then most of them are very well able to modulate their speech to find some compromise in which they're intelligible while still retaining as much of their dialect as possible. Unintelligibles used to be more prevalent of course, but they're nigh-nonexistent by now.

The question still stands: why don't inclusive German leftists fight for the proud right to speak dialect and fight against linguicism, encourage dialect use as a form of diversity etc? (maybe they do)

Because tribal ideologies aren't designed in advance and built on rigorously logical foundations. Instead they coalesce around condensation nuclei and after that only shift under pressure. German leftism coalesced around cosmopolitanism, antinationalism and high german with as many anglicisms as possible as its common tongue because this distancing from dialects and even your own language signals that you have no actual national allegiance.

a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von"

In English there are relatively few grammatical differences between the American and British standard dialects, but 'different than' vs. 'different from' strikes me as a perfect analog here.

Though both of those have a whole country where they are part of the local standard.

That's not even the issue here. There are practically no speakers of dialects remaining who cannot make themselves understood without switching to the so-called standard. What we have is the remaining dialects, which are almost universally mutually intelligible given any but the dumbest or deafest listeners, being opposed by the dominant strain of cultural leftism.

Depends how close to the border you get. As a high-german speaker, I can say from experience that spoken Plattdeutsch is completely unintelligible to me. I'd have had more luck talking to that person in English - which is a problem if you're trying to book a room for the night! :) (We got through it with sign language.)

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That depends on whether the dialect actually hinders communication no?

This may or may not be the case, I might understand your accent perfectly well but still not like it for prejudicial reasons, e.g because it outs you as a backwards farmer or a privileged type worthy of resentment.

Motte: We're protecting against prejudice against those with clear but low-class dialects

Bailey: We're protecting people who speak unintelligibly and placing all the burden of communication on those who speak the standard dialect, and if they complain we call them bigots.

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Germans hate individualism with a passion. Blame it on protestant puritanism, or prussian uniformity, or whatever animation the nazis ran on, but each German thinks he knows exactly how things need to be in the world, and any aberration must be expunged with a vengeance. The right way to brew beer, the right way to build a machine, the right way to drive a car, the right way to engineer a society, the right way to respond to a novel virus, the right way to speak German. I'm fully prepared to believe that all of the current progressive mania is based on whatever the Frankfurt School did, because this modern big-government, small-individual ideology is exactly something Germans could come up with.

Maybe Hungary doesn't have the same hardon for collectivism?

I was specifically reacting to you attributing your wife's switch to standard German to some leftist influence. I would imagine German leftists would want to distance themselves from that Prussian style rigidity that you mention.

Superficially they do, and even substantially in some ways, but a leopard can't change its spots and more often than not they drift towards the same old uniformity-for-uniformity's-sake that most people here love.

While I broadly agree that this is a common phenomenon in the West, I wanted to say that this disdain for dialects is less prevalent/important in India.

We've got a fuck-ton of dialects, which isn't a surprise given the thousands of distinct languages we have. As such, there really isn't all that much discrimination on the basis of dialect, and whatever there is usually mild, like girls speaking Hindi who seek to emulate the posh South Delhi Girl accent (exactly equivalent to the Valley Girl accent in the US).

If I had to guess, that's largely a consequence of the normal linguistic diversity, hard to care about accents when you hear 3 or 4 different languages on a daily basis.

That's part of it, but a lot more of it is just the straightforward result of modernization.

Ocracoke Island is a good example.

The Outer Banks were fairly isolated until about 80 years ago. The Wright Brothers had plenty of room to try out their aviation experiment there, but today the area around their flight path is highly developed. But Ocracroke Island, which is a bit further south is one of those places that I think is still only accessible by ferry. It has a unique dialect, speakers are known colloquially as "High Tiders", and their accent sounds like British Isles with some Southern sprinkled in.

These early American immigrants lived in a community that was fairly isolated from the mainland for centuries and developed its own culture. I have always loved the stories of several of these Carolina island communities who celebrated 'Old Christmas', basically because they ignored the memo about shifting over to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But then you get radio, television, and infrastructure that brings the barrier islands in closer contact with mainland people and culture. Today, fewer than 200 people on Ocracroke still speak the High Tider dialect, and the island is increasingly populated by 'dingbatters' or outsiders.

It's the same phenomenon playing out in black southern island communities that speak Gullah.

On the other hand, there are places in Appalachia where it works pretty much as described - JD Vance goes Ivy Leauge and learns to say "wash" not "warsh" and "toilet" not "towlet", etc. But within these communities themselves, all of which also have radio and television and infrastructure, etc., it does seem that the areas themselves remain somewhat isolated, with fewer migrants or tourists, and that differences persist.

Country music notably uses southern dialects and is very popular, just not with Hollywood tastemakers. And red tribers and working class whites(to the extent that there’s still a difference) still use southern dialects.

Also - radio, television, internet etc do a lot to remove dialects.

Phonics associates letters and sounds - you can still memorize sound patterns that are different for different dialects, or make that association yourself by noticing how people speaking your dialect speak the same words. Keep in mind that you could teach British English with phonics, for instance.

Also, school indoctrination is far from omnipotent, regional dialects can survive even if the children are taught a standardized form in school and over the internet. Maybe that will stop being the case in the near future, but children interact with peers, their families, and other locals a lot more, and can make themselves understandable to foreign city-folk/mainlanders/whatever with little effort - whereas the opposite would involve internalizing and speaking the standard form while in an environment where everyone speaks differently, but switching back to the local dialect to speak to your own parents and friends, or weirding them out by speaking the standardized way. There isn't a lot of pressure to change. It can depend on mutual intelligibility, though - very minor differences may get smoothed out, very major differences can cause you to choose standard, I'm not sure it's predictable.

As an aside: Versions of a language can diverge pretty significantly. Diglossia is fascinating - it happened in Greece, before my time, but not that far back, just a few decades ago. What happened is that the "high-status" (official, pretentious, archaic, literary, ...) version of the language mostly disappeared, and is now only really used in sayings, when referencing history, for fancy labels, or for comedic effect. Of course part of the reason is that government changed what was taught in schools, it's not all natural - but the high-status language itself wasn't natural to begin with. Ordinary dialects based on geographic regions still very much exist.

The standard American English dialect doesn't correspond to a simple phonics, anyway. We're not Spanish and even Spanish has weird dialects like Argentinian.

Whole language learning sounds more enjoyable so I would stick with that. Does it really matter whether they learn to read at 6 or 7 as long as they get there in the end? Most smart kids will learn at home before they're school aged anyway.

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Most smart kids will learn at home before they're school aged anyway.

Then it isn't for the smart kids, and the point isn't fun.

A lot of the lower IQ kids taught under whole word learning never do get there, and taking up several additional years learning to read actually is bad because something had to get bumped to make room for endless spelling tests.

In New York, 63% of fourth grade students are not reading at their grade level.

Amazon might pay a team several million dollars over five years to shave .1% off of total delivery costs by optimizing routing. And this has massive benefits both for amazon's profits and for our delivery costs. A million pieces like that make up a part of why modern technology and society is so powerful. 6 vs 7 is a 1% difference in literacy-averaged-over-years-of-life for everyone. Having children sit in reading class for an extra year wastes billions of hours of time, time that could be spent on ... anything valuable, learning more, doing more, etc.

... not that phonics actually does that, the evidence for which is strangely not debated at all in this thread. But it does matter! We could still be using roman numerals for math. "Does it really matter how long it takes to add CXXVMI and VXMCMII as long as they get there in the end?"

New from me: Viral "Racism in Academia" Story Deleted When I Started Asking Questions

I noticed a suspicious-looking viral Twitter thread yesterday, so I started poking around a bit and, to my surprise, watched its author first reply to my question, then delete his reply and hide my question, then lock the thread, then delete the thread and nuke his whole account.

In this article, I tell that story and examine my takeaways from it. Highlights below:

“So I did an experiment, I am looking for a postdoctoral position and decided to check to what extent racism in science could be. I took my CV and changed the name to a more western one. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or before) with the western name.”

So began a viral Twitter thread from Mohamad, a PhD student with a small online presence and a remarkable and troubling story of racial bias in academia. When he applied to a postdoc using his real name, he got seventeen responses to a hundred applications, all negative. Changing nothing but his name, he experienced a remarkable transformation of fortunes: eighty-seven replies, including fifty-four scientists willing to apply for a fellowship with him. Not only that, but he reported harrowing harassment from the universities, with messages like “If we can keep lowering the barrier for entry, science will become a joke.”

The thread exploded in popularity, reaching well over 40000 likes and 10000 retweets. Millions of people saw it. Commenters rushed to extend their sympathies. Professors and researchers encouraged him to publish the experience, called for more implicit bias training in the field, and shared the story as an example of the grim reality academics must deal with. It began to spread around the internet, rising quickly to the front page of Hacker News and elsewhere.

Now the thread is gone, his account is renamed and private, and it looks increasingly likely the whole story was a fabrication.

In the replies to the original thread, there were a good handful of confused or uneasy responses, but none of them got much traction. One person pointed out that institutions should notice two copies of a CV with different names. Another asked how he could change his name on the scientific papers that would be included in the application. A third commented that most institutions would require letters of recommendation with others vouching for the individual under their real name.

There were other incongruities. Who would put in the work to send out two hundred applications under two different names, then provide no visible evidence? Who would design a precise experiment like that, with a hundred applications at once, in the middle of a high-pressure academic job search? What’s the likelihood that he could even find a hundred institutions with open postdoc positions exactly matching his niche academic field?

How could the results flip so dramatically, from nothing but rejections to half of the responders eagerly looking to apply with him? And what of the rude remarks? Any academic who harassed him as he described would be committing career suicide and opening themself up for lawsuits as soon as the harassment was publicized. (Link)

Look: none of this guarantees something fishy. There could be good answers to any or every one of these questions. But they’re odd, aren’t they? They demand explanations, they demand answers. At the very least, they demand curiosity.

None of these were the smoking gun that made him nuke his whole account, mind. That smoking gun came from a reddit thread shared on /r/MensRights a few days beforehand, pointed out most prominently by Stuart Ritchie.

In the end, this sort of self-nuke is about the best outcome I could really hope for. Someone with more sinister intent could have dodged my question, ignored people pointing out incongruities, and left the story up to let it keep spreading. Now, no news stories will be written to amplify it further. Nobody will keep the thread in their back pocket to add to a list of stories about racism in academia. No stubborn contrarians need to chase it around the internet begging people to remember that it probably didn’t happen.

All that’s left? A million people nodding vaguely and saying “Oh, yeah, I read something about that once. People with western names get like ten times as many callbacks as others. Hm, can’t find it now. You know how it goes.”

Just the vibes.

So basically he just copied that Boston experiment from 2003, the one that is always quoted about "black names do worse than white names on job applications" and personalised it? For sympathy, likes, etc.?

Yeah, I can believe it, unfortunately. A lot of people think that being Internet Famous is something to aim for, especially if they see other people getting away with "This horrible thing happened to me, bigotry is real, here are my Venmo and Ko-Fi and Patreon and GoFundMe accounts if you want to help me out after this heinous experience". And since the supply of white supremacism/racial hatred is not sufficient to keep up with the demand, sometimes you have to manufacture your own hate crimes.

Wasn’t the Sokol Squared guy punished for experimenting on humans without advance warning? I thought this kind of science was now off-limits?

To be honest, some of the criticism also applies to that MRA thread (especially about it being weird that someone put in so much work and doesn’t even want to show it off).

Then, that MRA thread really agrees with my priors that tech companies are really chasing female applicants, since they have diversity targets that are basically not possible to meet. So any woman applying to a tech job (at big tech) will have an easier time getting a response and an interview (from there on, they probably only have a light advantage, see that study with anonymised voices for tech interviews).

But I still don’t believe that MRA post really happened.

Looks like your post is now the top submission on HN, not sure if it will be there long before getting flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32898573

And less than 15 minutes later I'm not seeing it anymore on the front page.

Thanks for letting me know (in both cases)! Looks like they decreased its weighting pretty heavily/quickly—which, fair. Always happy when I show up there at all.

Man, even the arguments on Hacker News that agree with my viewpoint are very poorly made.

Was it always like this or did it go downhill?

Interesting that the Root and other publications by people of color hear slurs when watching the video but Caucasians do not.

It suggests that BYU, and whites in generally, may not even be aware of their casual use of terms considered offensive to minorities.

I wouldn't say the arguments are poorly made, because that's some quality gaslighting. I've never seen "don't believe your racist eyes and ears" done so blatantly and literally.

Nice work there.

What strikes me about the whole ordeal is how eager people are to consume this type of content, how eager they are to be lied to in just the way the suites them. Also, I'm surprised that we don't see more of this type of content produced. Given the demand, it seems there's a some good money to be made here, especially if you use something like GPT-3 to just generate twitter reports like this.

I'm not too shocked. It's just confirmation bias. If you have a belief, you'll search out information that confirms it in order to feel justified.

If I hate a film, I'll look for reviews that also rated it poorly. I already know what I believe, what joy do I get from reading stuff that disagrees with me?

I think there's a difference: I'm not very cautious about film reviews. If I don't like a film, I'll happily get on the bandwagon of those bashing it.

But when I'm evaluating ideas about how the world works, then I'm going to use a much higher standard. It's more uncomfortable, both because the issues are more complicated and more important, but it seems the struggle is worth it.

It shouldn't be that surprising, and for the same reason I'm not overly updating on this post. I'm not going to independently verify this and it conforms to my prior, if I took it too seriously I'd be making the same mistake as the people who fell for the other post, although I do trust trace more than some random. I also wouldn't put it past trace for this to be a double hoax to show how easily people who call out hoxes are hoaxed.

I recently got a youtube ad for an AI social media post generator. I googled it and I guess there’s more, but here’s the first result:

https://postello.ai/

Keep in mind that the “business” they’re advertising for also includes “influencer”.

I wonder what would have happened if the racists in the story were part of an out-group rather than an in-group.

If you've spent any time around academia, even as an undergrad, you'd know that these institutions and the people that they are composed of are absolutely desperate for diversity. In their hierarchy Mohamed is better than Christopher, but Fatima would be even better. It doesn't pass the sniff test that not only would these institutions harbor an anti-Arab bias, but some would write down racist statements and send them to the applicant.

Imagine instead that the applicant was seeking a job in the oil industry, or with a defense contractor. Would the thread still be up?

In my experience, the primary differences in hiring for defense versus general tech is that the defense hiring leads with "Are you a US citizen?", possibly followed by "Are you willing and able to acquire and maintain a clearance?". Civil hiring lacks a bona fide reason to ask about citizenship and tends instead to ask if you'll need a work visa: they don't want to know if you're a citizen or permanent resident (green card). In both cases anything beyond those questions is generally forbidden.

There are plenty of (American citizen) workers in defense with "foreign-sounding" names. The security process is rather opaque, but even naturalized citizens can do sensitive work. See the Lockheed pride socks meme if you think the hiring preferences aren't similar, although the resulting demographics are different largely because they've removed all green card and H1B applicants from the system.

That said, I've definitely seen cases where heuristics have been applied to double check whether, say, a candidate with a degree from a non-US institution correctly marked their visa or citizenship status.

In fact, many defense companies will higher non-citizens too, for work not requiring actual clearance: note that ITAR regulations, for example, apply to exports to non-“US persons”, and a permanent resident is a “US person”. Thus, a permanent resident can work on ITAR/EAR controlled stuff just fine.

Seconding @VoxelVexillologist. Here in defense the main qualifiers are citizenship and security clearance.

I also have spent undergrad/grad time around academia, and don’t find your characterization to be very accurate. Despite working two steps removed from defense, in a tech field, and in a very white Midwestern university, there was no desperation to the culture. University research, at least in engineering, has the advantages of international collaborations and giant pools of exchange students.

Anyway, I expect we’d have seen the same behavior. Guy nuked his thread because someone asked too many questions, not because the scenario was “obviously” wrong.

Thank you for the good work, Trace.

Hm. About that: I feel like integrity demands I speak up here, even though I also feel like I'm going to regret it, but here goes:

I do have some reservations about the personal involvement, here, same as with the LoTT incident. I was under my lurker-vow-of-silence at the time, but hey, that's okay: it just means that I've longer to formulate my thoughts. Long enough? We'll see.

See: I feel like it's against the spirit of this place for it to house after-action reports by culture warriors returned from campaign. "Check out this scalp I just claimed" doesn't seem like "leaving the rest of the internet at the door," or something. Now, this certainly shouldn't be taken so far as to say that you can't speak from your own experience - Doglatine reporting on family conversations, and probably Obsidian's report from the trucker protest - but I do feel like there's a difference between speaking from your life and, I dunno, writing up the outcomes of trouble that one has deliberately instigated. Maybe someone can articulate a better boundary; I feel I've still only got a vague sense myself.

But on which side of the boundary does this fall? I don't know. There's less personal involvement this time - but I do feel like "TracingWoodgrains reports on his victory over a dishonest Twitter culture warrior [but with the political valence - and the reception - reversed]" maybe smacks enough of an incoming 'gotcha' that something needed to be said. Fortunately, with the political valence reversed, the personal involvement still does make me uneasy, so maybe I did have a principle, or maybe I've just tricked myself into assuming one since them. Either way, I hope it sticks iff it's worthwhile.

Trace was in the wrong with the LibsofTikTok story, a journalist should never become the story.

But I don't see this as a 'gotcha', more reporting on 'not enough hate crimes to fill demand, have to manufacture some' tendencies. Trace is a lot more liberal than I am, and if he is a Culture Warrior, he's generally on the other side of the fence - see TheSchism, which was set up for those driven off The Motte by the mouthy right-wingers 😁 This is different from the furry hoax, as Trace didn't set the entire thing up; this guy posted his (fake?) claims of "I am discriminated against because I am a minority, here's proof", and Trace (and by the accounts, some others) felt "hm, something fishy here" and being a journalist (abhorrent profession) he went digging. That's a legit story.

You may have a point about "sounds too much like boasting" when coming on here talking about it, but I feel it falls just on the right side of the line.

a journalist

How is Trace a journalist? He's just some guy that posts online and produces a podcast for two people who are I guess quasi-journalists still.

FWIW Trace has consistently self-identified as a journalist

That's close enough for journalism nowadays (boom-boom!)

He's getting paid for covering stories, so I guess that's being a freelance reporter? I don't know, he's making a quasi-living out of it and not just pulling pranks to post to /r/drama, that seems like a difference to me!

I see your reason for concern, but I don't think it's accurate to stick this one in quite the same bucket. Specifically, I don't know that "instigating trouble" is an accurate framing here.

That my question contributed to him shutting the whole thing down was welcome, but unexpected. The role I expected to play was "onlooker investigating the veracity of suspicious-looking story." Increasingly, I reach out to the people involved as part of that sort of process. Is that instigating trouble? If it is, then no media outlet in the country would have cause to post here: getting commentary from the people involved in events is core to reporting.

I believe my behavior here was in line with the standard for anyone curious about a story and motivated to get to the bottom of it. That my digging led to more of a story than there would otherwise have been shouldn't preclude me, I believe, from writing that story or sharing it here.

"Check out this scalp I just claimed" doesn't seem like "leaving the rest of the internet at the door," or something

When the "scalp" is calling out a 2-bit liar who just copied and pasted a /r/mensrights post that a bunch of sheep believed, it's a lot more like pulling a hair off someone's arm.

What was lost here? A grifter had their 15 minutes of virality and spent a couple of days feeling very seen and popular. Now that account is memory-holed and they've faced no real consequences. It's a pretty far cry from them getting fired or blackballed.

with the political valence reversed

If you read the essay, the point is that all spaces love bullshit that confirms their priors. Whether MRAs convinced that people hire only women or racists convinced that people only hire white people, people want that kind of content, really bad. And everyone should ask themselves how they fit in that narrative.

People like people like themselves, it is natural and normal. Most animals have difficulty being around members of the same species who are further than second cousins or a partner. Getting people to cooperate, work together, understand each other and creating a sense of community is hard. Go to a restaurant and look at the people who join a table, you will do a much better than random job at guessing which table people belong to. It isn't just race, two white people don't have much in common. People want to be friends with someone the same age, income bracket, level of education, personality type, political orientation, family situation etc. Friends even look the same.

When I have hired people, I have absolutely looked for people who are more similar to me. I don't just need someone who can preform tasks, I want to build a team, build friendships, have good communication and have someone who has similar experiences and worldview. When I have looked for people to join a team, I imagine the team doing something on a Friday night and I try to picture the candidate in that group of friends. The degree to which the candidate would naturally be a part of the team is imho an important recruiting criteria.

Most jobs are more of a team effort than individuals making extraordinary individual efforts. A PhD candidate that builds a great relationship with the research team and the lab in which people know each other's grandmother's names is going to preform better than rockstar individuals.

I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.

It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.

Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.

This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.

These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.

I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother last year. She is a fairly standard-issue Gen X liberal, although somewhat open-minded about certain conservative issues, and guilty of Noticing™️ certain things about race and gender that gave me no shortage of distress back in my days as a dedicated progressive. She caught a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome after 2016, though, and began ensconcing herself ever more deeply into the MSNBC bubble. She and I hadn’t talked politics for years, until last year, when she was ranting about Trump and his voters and how stupid they are, and how she could never imagine having an intelligent conversation with one, at which point I hit her with the “you’re talking to a Trump voter right now”. This was utterly shocking and disorienting for her. She couldn’t imagine that someone well-informed, sophisticated, and obviously intelligent - her own son, no less! - could see any value in Trump. Every conversation she had ever had with a Trump voter up to that point had been like pulling teeth - nothing but Fox News talking points, uneducated ranting, shit-tier conspiracies, and an evident lack of even a basic curiosity about the world.

I brought up an article called [The Asshole Filter] (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html). This article is about how women navigate the dating world, and how for certain women, if they make it clear that any guy who approaches them in public will be rebuked, the only guys who will approach them in public are going to be uncouth assholes with no social tact. If a guy is conscientious and desires to be respectful of your boundaries, and he is aware that you will be offended by his overtures, he’s not going to commit the faux pas of transgressing your explicity- or implicitly-states wishes. An asshole, though, doesn’t care about your boundaries, or isn’t smart enough to intuit them, so he will transgress them without a second thought. Eventually, as this process is iterated, the only strange men who will ever approach you in public are going to be assholes, and you will begin to get the strong impression that all men are assholes, because the only ones you meet are assholes. You unintentionally set up a filter that has screened out all the normal nice men you would have met, and the only men who made it through the filter are the ones you wanted least to meet.

I told my mom that she had unintentionally set up a similar effect when it came to talking politics. She is a very outspoken person, and is not shy about broadcasting her liberal views. Therefore, most people in her life are well-aware of where she stands and the kinds of statements that will make her mad or will start an argument. If they value maintaining a cordial relationship with her - for example, a coworker, or an acquaintance who likes hanging out with her without needing to have a deep level of agreement with her - will be conscientious enough to avoid making those statements. They will let her spout off about her opinions, and they will not challenge her on them or bring up their own more conservative/Trump-oriented views, since it’s not worth offending her or rocking the social boat. However, if someone doesn’t care about offending her - maybe they don’t particularly like her, or maybe they’re just not smart or self-aware enough to predict the negative consequences of expressing pro-Trump opinions around her - then they’ll happily say something Trumpy around her. That means that the only pro-Trump opinions she will ever hear will come from hostile, stupid, or unsophisticated people. All the smart Trump voters are invisible to her because they know better than to say anything where she will hear it.

The vast majority of liberals and progressives have set up precisely this type of political asshole filter. When you go on Facebook and post something like “If you don’t support a woman’s right to choose, unfriend me right now,” you’re not expecting any of the people you see as your actual friends to unfriend you. Your real friends would never have such an ugly opinion; if they did, surely you would know about it. Well, no, they just know how much it would piss you off if they expressed disagreement to you, and they care about your friendship more than they care about winning an argument. So, they stay silent. However, the people who don’t actually care that much about preserving a friendship with you - or the people who are dumb enough to think they’re actually going to change your mind with a public argument on Facebook - will take the bait and argue with you. Of course those arguments will be stupid or hostile; only a stupid or hostile person would have gotten into it with you in the first place. All the smart people realized it wasn’t worth it.

Any right-winger in a heavily left-wing social context - myself, for example - has long since realized the futility of attempts to persuade, or even of publicly outing yourself as a dissenter. They’ve decided to keep their heads down, only discussing politics in (usually anonymous) forums like this where they won’t be dogpiled or doxxed. The fact that this woman was willing to publicly display her GOP allegiance in that context should have been an immediate red-flag: she is either someone with nothing to lose socially, or someone who’s not smart enough to realize she’s about to lose it. A smart conservative would have avoided the whole situation and moved on with her life.

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It seems to me that an Asshole Filter can only be dismantled from the inside, but the person who sets up that filter (in whatever context) doesn't have much reason to do so--in fact, the usual behavior he sees from others just reinforces the reason for the filter. Quite the unfortunate Catch-22.

(And yeah, I've seen a number of the "if you don't agree that [whatever], unfriend me!" posts. Haven't found a better approach than ignoring the posts, and backing away slowly...but that doesn't really help anyone in the long run.)

I wonder about ways to prevent their establishment, really. Familiarity with the concept helps (and Siderea certainly gave it a vivid name) but if anybody has specific ideas to go further, I'd be keen to hear them.

Best starting point I can think of is intellectual humility--embrace the idea that you've got more to learn than you know, and grains of wisdom can be found in many unexpected places. In terms of external behavior, be willing to talk to anyone, even if that person is unpopular.

Even here, there is some wisdom in moderation; I'm not advocating for going full-bore quokka.

@ZorbaTHut I tried to report this as AAQC but the submit button on the report pop up is grayed out. I'm on mobile if that makes a difference. Just FYI.

same for me, and I'm on PC.

Are we just whistling in the dark? We’re engaged in a process of refining our own beliefs, separating the gold from the dross, or at least the iron from the stone. We’re sharpening our wits, becoming able to see our own biases and those of our discussion partners. If nothing else, we’re learning to be less foolish ourselves.

I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs

According to investigations, Planned Parenthood does indeed harvest and donate fetal tissue/parts/organs, and is often compensated for their effort. The right was aghast when this hit the news cycle, and called for investigations. The left pointed out that it’s perfectly legal and above-board, and that Planned Parenthood isn’t being paid above market rates. The right has basically said, “And that’s a problem! It should be illegal,” but has no power to make it illegal.

She wasn’t using our words, but she was aware of a real occurence.

The person's claims, to the extent they're coherent at all, are a combination of: "the left wants to do medical research on fetuses" - nobody on 'the left' cares - "planned parenthood is incentivized to cause more abortions because they get monetary compensation for selling fetuses" - when you combine the frequency of said tissue donation and the compensation, it is not relevant to their bottom line.

Yes, from a steelman perspective, murderous ghouls like Kermit Gosnell who actively seek to kill children are few and far between. Most abortionists, along with the institutions and politicians who enable them and the mothers-not-to-be who avail themselves of their services, honestly don’t think they’re killing people. They’re simply being consistent when they legally categorize the tiny bodies as “medical waste” instead of “corpses” and threat them as a commodity.

Obviously, anyone who does believe fetuses are people look at Big Abortion with some mix of shock, horror, disgust, and righteous anger. The 65-year-old GOP supporter who OP met is fighting a cultural monolith on multiple fronts and she feels overwhelmed, and she probably has no experience fighting The Man.

The left as a coalition contains the constituency of academics whose perennial interest is that the budget to study anything and everything is always increased. Moral considerations only enter into this insofar as they conflict with other members of the coalition, and as it turns out, the people with any fealty to the sanctity of fetuses are all on the right.

And here we see one of the most common tactical patterns of the culture war. People see ill consequence for them, and infer intent from their ennemies, and their ennemies assure them that they are imagining the intent, paint the implication as delusional and use this to shutdown any discussion of the original consequence.

The Great Replacement is probably the canonical example of this, with the same exact people boasting about something they are actively saying isn't real, but you can see it throughout so many memetic conflicts between humans that it should probably get a name.

I suppose Coulter's got a nice formulation in "the law of merited impossibility" but this seems to double down on intent being actualized, which I don't believe to be necessary for the pattern to exist or be effective.

FYI, the Law of Merited Impossibility is Rod Dreher’s, not Ann Coulter’s. Coulter’s Law is the principle that when you’re reading a news article about some sort of crime or malfeasance, if the race of the perpetrator is not mentioned, that’s a clear indication that he or she is a racial minority. If the criminal were white, the author would have mentioned it without hesitation.

Oh yes, I got my conservative editor wires crossed somehow.

If we are judged to be ranting buffoons by a third party, what does that matter?

I made a post I think last year on subreddit as to why the echo chamber is the ultimate destination for any kind of social group. Even on this place most people are in alignment on things like SocJus and transgenderism and such. When your style of communication is incompatible with another person's, let alone held values, how can you deal with them? People would rather hang out in places that are agreeable to them.

I remember a particular banpost that was made shortly after Roe V Wade was undone, and there were all these non-regulars you'd never seen before. There was one woman asking about a particular type of diet, and when questioned on aspects of that diet she devolved into ALLCAPS insults. This was a person simply not capable of engaging with the sort of deconstruction of ideas that occurs here. Most people I think are not: to them, ideas gives them grounding in this confusing, frightening world. Ideas are not things they defend with argumentation, they are things they defend with passion.

To you, the old lady was a ranting buffon. Perhaps in her eyes, you were just one of many sheeple.

People in repressive regimes easily get overloaded, fed up, frustrated, and of course make more than a fair share of mistakes, even when they are basically on the right track. Not everyone can be an Oskar Schindler -- that level of cool under fire is rare and valuable. And in those areas with the highest concentration of repression, selection pressures will be very significant; you would expect only to find those outliers, in terms of personality, who would be both motivated enough and perseverant enough to dive into those depths, and those traits are likely to correlate with plenty of other things that can be weaknesses. There are fine lines -- and relative ones -- between perspicacity and paranoia, between holistic judgment and black-and-white thinking, between personal virtues and social vices, etc.

I find in talking with progressives as well as MAGA types that there is usually a core or kernel of value, often surrounded and obscured by more dubious stuff, but I am well passed the idea that "extremism" or even major asocial/atypical behavior is a reliable indicator that someone should be ignored. Too many central, stable, status-quo social formations, ideologies, and institutions have been revealed to be grossly mistaken at best and patently corrupt at worst. My guess is there may well be a very interesting historical connection being drawn by the woman, for instance, even if it happens to be wrong (though who's to say if we haven't even encountered its content?).

Perhaps there was truth in the Soviet diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia, its just that it was caused by the regime itself.

And in those areas with the highest concentration of repression, selection pressures will be very significant; you would expect only to find those outliers, in terms of personality, who would be both motivated enough and perseverant enough to dive into those depths, and those traits are likely to correlate with plenty of other things that can be weaknesses. There are fine lines -- and relative ones -- between perspicacity and paranoia, between holistic judgment and black-and-white thinking, between personal virtues and social vices, etc.

This is the conclusion I've come to as well. The people who are most likely to break from any social hegemony and are most willing to criticise its most sacred tenets (which I believe can be a valuable and necessary thing to do) are almost certainly going to have many outlier personality traits which mean they likely won't behave in a manner which people would usually term as "pro-social", even in other parts of life unrelated to politics.

Most of the time, the people who will break from the majority or mainstream view are likely to lean towards being bitter, disagreeable provocateurs who don't care much for "the wisdom of the masses" or the niceties of social life. Additionally, the very effective ones are likely going to be driven and almost obsessive in nature, but they're also going to be motivated by very different considerations than your average person is.

I suspect that, often, you would find more than a small heaping of self-destruction in their behaviours too - it kind of comes with the territory when you're not only willing to firmly stick to your unorthodox beliefs but also risk social death in order to promote these beliefs (keeping in mind that a willingness to self-deceive e.g. genuinely believing in the orthodox view and promoting it is the most personally beneficial behaviour in terms of social gain). "I will die on the hill of my convictions"-type behaviours are principled but almost certainly do not correlate with positive personal outcomes.

I can very much testify that in my experience, those attributes that make one personable and affable and those that make one an independent thinker who is willing to openly criticise mainstream thought in any significant way do not seem to overlap.

Where did you meet those people? I used to be among far-leftists and I used to be among academics (STEM though) and I never encountered even one far leftist who so much as knew what his opposition's arguments actually are beyond a forest of strawmen. At least I cannot recall any.

Aye, guess that's a far cry from my provincial German surroundings, and some kinds of people simply cannot be found here.

Like people who are into specific kinds of literature. Downright impossible. They don't exist here.

Which specific kinds of literature?

Cormac McCarthy, Melville, Howard, Homer, Grimmelshausen, Gene Wolfe to name a few. I know exactly one person who read George MacDonald Fraser.

Alright, "don't exist" is speculation - they might. I just never met any, and I did ask around.

Back in the Old Country, in AskSocialScience, there was a recent question asking about the "growing number of POC nazis and white supremacists", and I have to assume that for the poster this is isomorphic to the question of "why are Latinos voting for Republican candidates?"

This is what you'd expect, of course, given how many far-leftists and academics there are, many of which aren't going to be either very smart or deeply connected to the far-right. I've mostly met them by their adjacency to the far-right.

Well, I would presumably meet that description. I meet every datapoint here (expect for Land, who I've never bothered to study that much), and I continue to be a member of a far-left party, if an inactive one.

More to the point, I know personally a large number of far-left people who are extremely interested in local far-right online obscure esoterica, most likely often possessing a better picture of the Finnish fringe far-right scene than the actors within it do themselves. There's a personality type that is very interested in fringe, esoteric thinking and figures in general, and that's of course very easy to combine to a general left-wing line.

If I'd have to describe why I continue to stick with the left, despite having a lot criticism about both the workings of the national and international left, would be three points, not in a particular order:

  • I continue to believe that the climate crisis and the resource crisis continue to cause a large (not existential, but still considerable) threat to the stability of the modern society, that simply trusting technology and market-based solutions is not enough, and believe that proactive governmental action is needed both to combat its onslaught and mitigate its effects.

  • I believe the Nordic welfare state to be both one of the most humane models of society to be conceived thus far and particularly foundational for Finnish culture, and after studying it's history, believe that its based not only on ameliorative ("for-the-poorest-and-weakest") measures, but on a strong bedrock of direct state intervention in economy through SOEs and such and on a strong, combative labor union movement.

  • For all the possible criticisms that could be aimed at how it can be weaponized, I find the international human rights treaty framework to be an important fundamental stabilizing civic myth both internally for modern societies and for the existence of a global international community, and worry that many of the thing advocated and agitated by far-right nationalist and populist movements are chipping away steadily at this civic myth, leading to unpredictable consequences.

I continue to believe that the climate crisis and the resource crisis continue to cause a large (not existential, but still considerable) threat to the stability of the modern society

How does climate change threaten - at all - the stability of modern society? Let's say one of the worse posited outcomes happens, and hundreds of millions of africans or poor south asians are displaced - but europe, china, the US, etc manage any disruption technologically. How does this threaten 'the stability of modern society' at all? If 20% of the population dropped dead, or a dozen random cities got wiped off the map, inhabitants included, it'd be unfortunate, but society would survive - and climate change will do much less than that to the US or europe. (and we know this from history - plagues and wwi/ii).

Also: what's the "resource crisis"?

international human rights treaty framework to be an important fundamental stabilizing civic myth

What is the myth specifically? Most people believe less in 'international human rights treaties' and more in a general sense that rights and democracy are necessary for all that is good, and specifically all that is good for happiness and prosperity for the people, especially the disadvantaged. This isn't really a myth, just a set of values and claims about their benefits. Do you mean that individual or collective rights aren't independent goods but rough gestures towards things that are generally contingently beneficial, but it's better for people to believe that protecting "rights" has some independent meaning or value beyond that contingency in some deontological vs consequential sense? I think the difference is deeper - everyone ("progressives") wants happiness and prosperity and freedom from want for all, and the larger part of 'international human rights' are just direct attempts to accomplish that - as opposed to (variously) struggle, complexity, duty, nation, race, beauty, etc.

Since the particular purpose of my statement in this subthread was simply to shortly present my essential beliefs, I am in fact not going to engage in further discussion of them here.

Fair enough. Often people make tangential statements with the intent of inviting further discussion, often they don't, hard to tell which.

I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the former. Of the leftists I know and have engaged in political discussion with, all of the ones I actually find know their shit in any way belong to the "original" economic left (most of whom have a distaste for woke). There are even some tankies I'm fond of, despite vehemently disagreeing with them on almost every point about economics.

The DEI/woke-type leftists, on the other hand, are by and large painfully confused on every topic including their very own ideology.

I'm also going to note that I haven't met anyone during my time in academia that meets that description, but in my case, I know that the fact that I keep my head down so much means that I wouldn't have had a chance to learn anybody's political sophistication in such detail even if they were right next to me.

I just avoid political discussions (anywhere but the likes of here) because the risk/reward ratio seems far too great for me.

I work in super-woke academia where presumably I should have run into such a person at one point

Why? There are a lot of academics, many of which are super-woke. There are comparatively few far-righters. And a small subset of both are deeply invested in the details of their opponents' arguments, ideas, etc. So you'd expect only a small number of the former to be the latter. And there are plenty of people directly exploring the far-right at mainstream universities - here's a lecture where the first half does that (hilariously, the second half is a black man with a lisp making meaningless arguments about how kaepernick's kneel is meaningful for race relations). There are also some books out of universities, some of decent quality and some not, diving into far right thought.

I’m extremely, extremely skeptical with your general point. I have never met any leftist familiar with those sorts of ideas except with passing familiarity that often misses key parts; better yet, I’ve only seen a few exist online. Best yet, whenever I see discussions online I find that leftists most often miss the heart of the discussion (not here, but elsewhere). Maybe you have found some truly amazing people, who also happen to never participate in online discussions (entirely possible), but I do not think these are typical of even the 95th percentile of leftist argumentation.

but I do not think these are typical of even the 95th percentile of leftist argumentation

obviously, and yarvin or land also aren't within the 95th percentile of rightist argumentation. the bottom 95% of anything in popular politics is gonna be pretty bad, but how can that prove the top .1% is bad?

MattY is a perfect example of a left of center person who interacts with important right wing arguments, but is unable to engage with them. He will acknowledge all the things that Salier says, but then doesn't adjust anything. I am not saying, he must necessarily change his preferences and goals, but he doesn't even adjust how he'd things things should be implemented to have more success. At most he will say something like, "be quiet we have to do this on the down low," regarding something like defunding police.

In fairness to Yglesias, he at least sidesteps this stuff or will vaguepost some of the stuff he agrees with while ignoring the stuff he disagrees with. I find this a lot less annoying than the ones who know the score and will obfuscate or outright lie about it. Sticking with prolific twitters, I'd say the one who most typifies this is the one with a robot profile pic.

Whos that?

I think he’s probably referring to Noah Smith (noahpinion on Twitter) or maybe eigenrobot

Oh, of course. Noah Smith is the paragon of that. Is that a robot avatar? I always thought it was some Tron helmet or something.

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Don't feel bad, I have no idea either.

the former has been banned because they used simple, working class language, and the latter hasn't because they used flowery prose free of profanity that only hinted (but did so obviously) at the same thing the other person was forced, by dint of their lesser ability, to state explicitly.

Does that happen ? My impression is that people typically get banned for getting into heated arguments, but not for controversial opinions (except for the ultra-controversial subset that used to get reddit admins interested, like types of parentheses). Maybe occasionally for stuff like "building consensus", but that's usually not banning material.

I've never gotten banned from here, only Reddit, and I've been posting under several usernames since the bans for compliance have started happening. The first was RedMikeYawn I believe and then we'll it doesn't matter.

I used the simplest language here of what I consider long time posters - even tho I don't stick out or make many acquaintance due to the name changes - and only received one warning on my first ever (I believe) post. This was because I found this place before I found Scott Alexander which confused everyone. So then I lurked for a bit before posting again.

No one's brought it up so either the op here is incorrect or I write more eloquently than I thought.

I've met a large number of very intelligent far-left activists or otherwise true-believers who are extremely familiar with every single argument posted here. They've read Moldbug and Land, they follow BAP and WrathofGnon types on Twitter, they've read the regulars on Unz, they know who Steve Sailer is, they've spent hours poring over the works of Murray and Herrnstein, they've explored the debates between MacDonald and Cofnas, make jokes about physiognomy that descend directly from those made by the usual crowd, indeed they often know about every little controversy and minor disagreement on dissident right twitter etc..

This is 100% Grade A bullshit. It reminds me of the days, long before TheDonald, when TheRedPill was the bogeyman of reddit. I remember one popular thread that blew up against the sub on bestof or wherever, where the poster claimed to have personally met dozens of self-confirmed redpillers openly bragging about manipulative tactics against women to sleep with them.

At the time, the sub count couldn't have been more than 50k tops. https://subredditstats.com/r/theredpill . And openly saying you were following any seductive (lol) techniques to anyone was a big No-No.

Also judging by your responses downthread tells me you are nothing but a troll.

When you find someone tilting at windmills, it's much more likely to be Don Quixote than someone who has developed a really good new jousting technique. Regardless of the windmill.

Look at this fool Don Quixote, he is a raving lunatic!

Does he truly think he fights giants that feast on men?

Does he truly believe the most noble of men in society to be wicked sorcerers that worship demons?

He truly has the nerve to call these lowly peasant harlots and filthy prostitutes fair maidens and noble princesses?

What a miserable wretch! Does he think these good officers to be pawns of a conspiracy out to get him too? He gets what he derserves!

How lucky we are that our world is ruled by the sane and reasonable. Imagine our world if there were more psychopaths like him!

I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true

Well, they have nothing to do with each other. Even if moldbug/NRX is the future, that doesn't make aryan prison gangs any more intelligent. The highest points of what one could call Christian European society coexisted with plenty of stupid villagers who were also christian and european. And the best progressive intellectuals coexisted with low brow tabloids / yellow journalism and street gangs. It's very easy to take something quality and make it less so, whether by genetics or drift, and it doesn't indicate at all the high quality version is not so.

Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?

Well, there's no "outside view" evidence of that by definition, but that can't prevent themotte from being better. The posts here need to stand for themselves, and some do!

Wouldn't the question be if Aryan prison gangs are more or less intelligent than Black, Hispanic or Asian prison gangs?

Are there even enough Asian prisoners to form a prison gang outside Hawaii?

Wikipedia does not seem to think so, perhaps this is just another instance of Asian Invisibility.

In fairness, it's much easier to commit crimes and escape punishment if you're invisible. Excellent superpower, 10/10, would mutate again.

I doubt it. Crime is a pretty strong selection effect for relatively lower IQ and the result of blacks having lower IQ re: crime seems to be that a higher percentage of blacks are criminal, not that black criminals are even stupider.

Black prison gangs could easily be more intelligent than aryan prison gangs just by chance, selection effects, or numbers, with little relation to whatever race's top decile has higher median iq

Qanon might be a spook, but Alex Jones is genuinely popular enough to survive multiple attempts at deplatforming and Glen Beck is a self made multimillionaire from his audience size. These people definitely exist. I don't think they exert as much influence within the republican party as the extreme woke loons do within the democrat party, but that may be because of my position- that is, I don't like democrats or wokeness, and I do like republicans and think most of these conspiracy theories are generally harmless.

I do think the median republican is more able to have a civilized political conversation with his ideological opposites than the median democrat, and the ideological turing test results is probably good evidence of this. But to deny that people live within the red tribe bubble and hold ridiculously false beliefs is to ignore reality.

I do think the median republican is more able to have a civilized political conversation with his ideological opposites than the median democrat

I understand the sentiment that this metric is supposed to point to, but the metric itself doesn't seem coherent. The ideological opposite of the median Republican is the median Democrat, so unless you have some asymmetrical concept of a civilized political conversation, this can't be the case.

I understand what you’re saying, but there’s definitely an extent to which you could just match people up with those who won’t lose their cool. What I’m saying is if you do that, the republicans are more likely to continue making calm, reasoned arguments than the democrats. But that’s an average and I fully acknowledge being biased.

so unless you have some asymmetrical concept of a civilized political conversation, this can't be the case.

Alternatively, they could have an asymmetrical concept of partisan polarization.

Our ramblings are logical, falsifiable, and evidence-based. They have high rates of predictability. Predictions made here about coronavirus often came true, as did predictions on increased homicides in the wake of BLM marches, economic fallout from lockdowns, etc. We shouldn’t hold the nihilistic belief that we can never determine ramblings from truth.

Predictions made here about coronavirus often came true,

According to my recall, this is accurate.

Not only were people here first on the train to see Covid as a threat at all, they were also the first to notice when the threat began to subside. They were always like 3 months ahead of 'mainstream' knowledge the entire time.

I had a few interactions where I worried that Covid would burn through the population fast if no actions were taken and could mutate into a deadlier version, and users pointed out that commonly, historically and almost necessarily any virus allowed to replicate freely would turn less deadly with time since killing hosts is not conducive to spreading rapidly. And that is what happened with new Covid variants appear with higher R0 but lower death rates, and eventually become dominant.

This was maybe the only forum I was on that didn't immediately fracture it's positions on Covid's severity and likely path along partisan lines.

There were still those who seemed to have partisan leanings, but by and large, almost every development of the disease's effects was accurately predicted and discussed by people from all political stripes, distinct from its economic and political implications.

Including:

  • The fact that it would be most severe amongst seniors, and almost a nonissue amongst children.

  • The fact that the vaccine might not provide full immunity.

  • The fact that communities with lockdowns and masking wouldn't end up with significant differences in death rates from those that 'opened up' and didn't force masking, over the long run.

Sweden was a decent control group

  • The fact that the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible, although there was good back-and-forth about this vs. the wet market origin idea.

I won't pretend there was any sort of 'community consensus' on the matter, but that was arguably the point, as people stayed very open to incoming information and, generally, also acknowledged that data in the short term would be highly noisy and uncertain so nothing would become very evident until we were well into the pandemic. It didn't become 'snap-to-grid' where you can predict a person's opinion on the virus itself (as separate from their policy preferences for dealing with it) from their other positions.

Agreed, rats really shone during covid. I felt vindicated in the usefulness of our talks here, that was objective proof we were more than a fun debating club, we had actual knowledge of how the world works. Expert opinion, or perhaps more accurately, the mainstream perception of expert opinion, was just wrong. More importantly, we could have made real money off this, sigh.

The most interesting part of the saga as a culture war observer was that in the first few months, the political sides hadn’t fully crystallized around the covid danger issue, which made partisan discussions amusingly unstable and prone to whiplash (eg, parts of the left tried to make ‘globalism is good, therefore covid is harmless’ happen, and the right played along by going for the ‘dangerous foreign contaminant’ disgust reaction ) . Then they would find something else in their respective memeplexes to attach to the issue and suddenly switch sides, as if choreographed.

I don’t know if we can repeat the covid feat. It seems the BLM covid riots radicalized some of the more right-wing commenters, and our coverage of the ukraine invasion has not been stellar (imo those same commenters seemed to support russia purely on culture war grounds, like normies, forcing their memeplex battle into the object-level issue).

Perhaps we were just lucky contrarians that time, and we’ll be automatically wrong when the mainstream is right. Or we only have a true advantage on certain subjects that are unprecedented, emotional and involve some, but not too much, multiplying.

Maybe you were lucky covid contrarians but you were mostly right.

However, I knew that the panic about covid was unjustified simply due to my healthcare training. I couldn't know how good the vaccines would turn out to be, or if covid is spread by droplets or aerosols, or if masks are effective. Those things require good studies and evidence. But for the general understanding for a disease that is so much age stratified, it was immediately clear what the upper limit of damage can be (bad for elderly, no effect on kids, variable to all others). Covid resembled exactly how other cold viruses work, kids get it several times per year, and we get constant exposure that keeps our immune system activated therefore we rarely suffer severe disease. It was immediately clear to me that kids are not in danger despite the panic. It was clear that people going outside are of very low risk. I also knew that once covid virus had spread in the country, it didn't make sense to close borders anymore (Australia was an exception due to specific geographic situation). I couldn't understand how people could support all these things despite clear evidence before their eyes about the contrary.

What Tegnell did in Sweden to me seemed like a standard textbook that I had studied at a public health course a couple of years ago before pandemic. I expected the UK going the same route because of all rationalists (e.g. Dominic Cummings) advising them, but alas, politics are so incomprehensible.

I lost my respect to rationalists due to this. I had learned in medicine that human biology is very complex, you cannot assume anything, you cannot make easy logical chains. You have to do RCTs instead. Sometimes things work like magic without our full understanding, like the most common painkiller, paracetamol (Tylenol for Americans).

I visited the conference a week ago with good presentation reminding us about the strength of evidence. The presentation showed the list of all the drugs initially approved for covid treatment (remdesivir, Paxlovid, several mabs etc.) showing the actual evidence for them. It reminded again and again that only RCTs is the gold standard, everything else is second or third class, regardless how much we want to believe. I still remember doctors who being asked about the evidence of mask effectiveness said that parachutes do not need RCTs. Ok, almost nothing in medicine are parachutes, including masks.

I feel vindicated at the end, but the damage done on all us was terrible. We had experimental vaccines made mandatory worldwide with very little evidence from RCTs. It's fine to take risks if we think the situation requires it, but don't force them on people against all medical ethics that were drilled to every healthcare professional. I still don't understand why we had so few dissenting voices from health professionals.

commonly, historically and almost necessarily any virus allowed to replicate freely would turn less deadly with time since killing hosts is not conducive to spreading rapidly

I bring this point up with a lot of non rationalists. I know nothing about epidemiology, myself, but the point you said makes sense. However, I get a lot of push back from people. People who claim to know more than I do about this stuff tend to think that there's no predicting whether a virus will become more deadly and spread less well, or become less deadly and spread better. They think both are likely, and I'm not sure why. However, they do agree that a virus that is less deadly will necessarily be more contagious and vice versa.

Maybe they're not thinking about the fact that both new variations might arise, but only the one that spreads easier one will outcompete, which will result in the quick demise of the other. Is there any merit to what they're saying? On what basis should I argue back against them? Are there any papers which show this phenomenon, or is there some scientific principle I could point to about it?

commonly, historically and almost necessarily any virus allowed to replicate freely would turn less deadly with time since killing hosts is not conducive to spreading rapidly

Layman: This is true on average, but viruses have avenues to become more deadly without hurting spread. For instance, Long Covid does not penalize the coronavirus at all, because it happens after it has already propagated. Anyways, viruses can become more deadly and spread worse, then they just ... spread worse. They can still spread for other reasons, for instance immune escape.

Regardless, it's important to keep in mind that viruses are never selected for killing the host, it just happens as a side effect that sometimes (short incubation) has pressure to avoid it. All the killing that viruses do is coincidence to begin with. That's one reason why viruses may become more deadly, because it's a random walk to begin with.

Not just Long Covid, but so long as the majority of spread occurs at the presymptomatic phase, then there is little selection pressure at all.

One notable example of Covid evolving to become deadlier was the Delta variant, which is deadlier than the ancestral strain.

If you are only interested in convincing people to your arguments, give them the image that you are a serious high status person who knows what he is talking about. Arguments and papers and principles don’t convince people, the image does.

On a side note, I am interested in knowing if there has ever been a recorded respiratory infection that turned more deadly and contagious at the same time via mutation and selection. I feel like the covid complex would definitely point to such an example endlessly so there probably isn’t one.

In my experience it is our being here and able to talk about controversial topics in depth and usually with someone poining out errors in reasoning or judgement that enables us to not feel trapped in our heads with only TV or social media for input and talking to ourselves as the output.

The overton window has become very narrow lately, and I am not at all surprised that many people find themselves unable to go with the program but also unable to find productive ways of communicating their disagreement.

And finally, some people just are like that old lady or that uncle - but if they're within the overton window they can just join a socially acceptable club of crazies. See PETA or the Last Generation for examples. If they aren't, then shouting into traffic or ejaculating into unrelated conversations are possibly the only channels left to them.

and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.

It seems like conservatives, even on the fringe-right, still care a lot about not been seen as racist. If we assume anti-racism is the highest moral value to aspire to, no amount of this will change how republicans are perceived in the eyes of democrats or mainstream press.

The extremes of the political spectrum are equally out of touch with reality. It is QAnon vs White Patriarchy conspiracies at the fringes endlessly triggering themselves to their idea of the enemy. And those who don't ascribe to these descriptions of reality in the center get to be onlookers and increasingly harder to find places to discuss what they perceive to be actual reality and move the ball forward. The biggest contribution to my sanity in most cases when I hear conspiracy like theories is Hanlon's Razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.". It is just look a couple years back to see the handling of the pandemic and know that the bumbling fools that rule us couldn't conspire their way out of a wet paper bag. Of course conspiracies could exists but it is a extraordinary claim that require equally extraordinary evidence. So what does that say about the future of motte? Nothing if the place gets taken over by extremist descriptions of reality the place is doomed, we will have to try to stay sane.

White Patriarchy conspiracies at the fringe

Forgive me but isn't this type of thinking exceptionally mainstream in a way that QAnon just... isn't?

Yes the white patriarchy conspiracy theory is more mainstream. It is the prevailing conspiracy that rules currently in the western world. But it is still a conspiracy theory, it hasn't any more claim on being a true reflection of reality than QAnon. A conspiracy theory doesn't become less of a conspiracy theory when more people believe it.

A conspiracy theory doesn't become less of a conspiracy theory when more people believe it.

Right but I don't think it's fair to characterise it "at the fringes" once it's reached ruling status. Far left, sure, but fringe implies a certain lack of critical mass, does it not?

It is only the extremes that have the belief of big systems with delibirate coordination to surpress the truth. Those closer to the center it myths and half-truths that previal but not the full blown conspiracy world view that everything evil is deliberate machinations by group of people.

No, because "White Patriarchy" refers to two different ideas: One is that there is a secret masonic lodge of old white dudes who wear red robes and sacrifice a BIPOC virgin every full moon to anoint themselves in the blood of the innocent as they secretly control everything, man!

And the second "White Patriarchy" is noticing that white men hold something like 65-70% of all US political offices, but constitute 30% of the population.

One of these is empiricism, one is insanity.

Qanon is just insanity.

And the second "White Patriarchy" is noticing that white men hold something like 65-70% of all US political offices, but constitute 30% of the population.

And yet when people Notice things like this about other population groups, for example Jews, that's considered wacky conspiracy on the level of the first idea you mentioned. It seems there's actually only one group you're allowed to notice and decry the dominance of.

And the second "White Patriarchy" is noticing that white men hold something like 65-70% of all US political offices, but constitute 30% of the population.

One of these is empiricism, one is insanity.

In the name of empiricism, I bid you take a deeper look. I think you'll find these positions are disproportionately held by an even smaller group than that!

But other than Jews ruling the world, this is just special pleading. There's no lack of ridiculous fringe left-wing beliefs, feminist and non-feminist; tarot, astrology, otherkin, are all as absurd as anything the worst of Q asserts, and feminism's mainstream belief is certainly more than Noticing the numbers.

My intuition tells me that it's fair game to consider QAnon "political" but that tarot, astrology, and otherkin are "not political." This is true even granting that my worldview is opposite those who believe tarot etc.

If some rhetorical trick has been played on me to recenter QAnon nearer to the center of "right winger" and no such trick has been played w.r.t. tarot and the left, please elaborate on that.

My intuition tells me that it's fair game to consider QAnon "political" but that tarot, astrology, and otherkin are "not political.

I don't see why this matters. The insanity of a belief seems entirely separate from its political focus. The idea Hillary Clinton is a reptile or drinks infant blood is insane; so is the idea that the moon has exerted psychic control over you since birth or that you are actually a Zergling.

Certain crazy conspiracies are popular on the right, and certain crazy conspiracies are popular on the left. They're all crazy conspiracies.

It's all fun and games until someone decides they're a Baneling instead.

It’s not just noticing that there are more white males in positions of power, it’s positing this was done through malice and oppression. This is the mainstream view as well.

Motte: White Patriarchy is empiricism

Bailey: White Patriarchy is a theory that the observations are caused by a self-perpetuating system of laws, institutions, people

Strawman: White Patriarchy is a conspiracy theory

It's possible I'm being too charitable here, and what I've labeled "Bailey" is what someone else would label "Motte" and what I've labeled "Strawman" is what someone else would label "Bailey." I suppose it all depends on if in the real world, there are activists out there who behave as if there is a conspiracy of white people keeping the common person down.

Still, the self-perpetuation theory is promoted by people who I suspect also attack science and empiricism, so it's no surprise that this position is bears more resemblance to a religious faith than to a scientific theory. (I've certainly never read about anyone trying to falsify this position, while coming from an angle of trying to reduce racism).

I didn’t have any better expression for conspiracy theory on the political left than white patriarchy. Since it can be construed as a straw man does it mean that there is no qanon equivalent on the left? Because in the recent case with Shannon Brandt running over a teenager just reeks pizzagate levels of insanity.

"Trump is a Russian asset"? On parts of the right, this is sometimes called "Blue-Anon."

Whether it's correct or not, "Trump is a Russian asset" is far less crazy as a conspiracy theory than QAnon, as a whole. Imagining that a politician/businessman/public figure might be secretly in cahoots with a foreign country through blackmail or some other means is not an insane idea in itself, there have been plenty of such figures throughout world history. The QAnon metanarrative contains a huge number of intricate pieces and fantastical, improbable parts that would need to be true for the entire worldview to be true, not to forget that it involved a large number of specific date-based predictions on unprecedented events that didn't come to pass.

I disagree. "Trump is a Russian asset" is facially ludicrous given both his history and policies. "Sometimes public figures get blackmailed" is a very far cry from the specifics of Blue-Anon and the Steele Dossier. Similarly, the very broad strokes of QAnon bears a passing resemblance to Epstein's island and the Lolita Express, even though the details don't match. Blue-Anon was certainly more widely believed and higher status than QAnon, but it was no less crazy for all that.

Name me literally a single person who has ever advocated the first theory. I’ll wait.

When you misrepresent and distort the views of your outgroup beyond recognition, it’s very easy to call them insane.

I dont think they were saying, "The Right thinks the Left believes in a secret masonic lodge" or "The Left believes in a secret masonic lodge" or anything like that.

They were saying that "QAnon is insanity" and "White Patriarchy is not insanity," and then described a hypothetical world in which White Patriarchy was insanity.

It's probably not hard to find a QAnon true believer that professes a cabal of elites that make literal sacrifice (which is Insanity)

Lotta post SJW types essentialize white dudes as a whole into some sort of malicious entity; when they are just the current hegemonic class.

There is nothing uniquely bad about white people or white men.

I mean, look, you’re talking to a white identitarian, so obviously I’m in vociferous agreement that there’s nothing wrong with white men. However, I think you have at best a surface-level grasp of what serious leftists actually mean when they talk about “systemic white supremacy”. It’s far more sophisticated than a simple attribution of malice to white men.

Yup. I know, because it's the position I hold: That groups who have historically held positions of influence have a tendency to act so as to benefit their own group, and that this urge is completely rational and ethical (on the level of the individual).

This extends up the chain of associations: given a chance, you will help your direct family, then extended family, then your group associations (Eg, I've gotten 10k+ in money for jobs over other equally skilled dudes because I play at the same gamestore as a client.)

There is nothing wrong with this, on the individual level. Eg, imagine two platonic applicants for a job are equally talented in all regards, except one of them went to your alma mater. There is nothing wrong with giving them the job.

Then you do this for 200 years, and you have a ruling class. Of course people who aren't in the ruling class are going to attempt to level out those advantages; they would be stupid not to. You can have opinions on the ethics of it all on top of that, of course, but the core is all practical.

It be how it be. Your ancestors fought against the romans for status, then they fought against the nobility, and now people are fighting the putative oligarchs. When someone eventually casts down the current group in pole position , someone will start fighting them, on into history until we get turned into paperclips or the sun explodes.

I would make a distinction between "fringe" and "extreme." "Fringe" would mean very unpopular; maybe 1% of the population believes [X], so it's a fringe belief. "Extreme" means far from the "average" view (for some calculation of average). So fringe ideas can show up wherever they like on any political spectrum, while extreme views can be much more popular, but not centrist.

What does centrist really mean here? Can you give an example of fringe and centrist?

I don't know of centrism is a theoretical position that lets us come up with fringe opinions, and I suspect we use it to mean like "a median belief"

Fringe and centrist should have the property that: the left and the right feel about the same about it, but also nobody holds the belief? Does that mean the left and the right equally condemn it? Would a fringe centrist belief be "Murder is good?"

At least a couple of different types--first, a rare belief that (currently) doesn't have a strong political valence. For example, advocates of a number of rare diets or other health-related practices that are generally rejected by the mainstream, but also don't map to current politics. Second, a "compromise" position on a political topic that takes strong elements from both ends of the political scale and fuses them together in a way that partisans on both sides would reject, though for different reasons.

"Wearing magnets is good for your health."

"Human fetuses are morally equivalent to any other human, but humans are bad for the environment, so abortion is a positive good."

I use fringe in terms of a network where conspiracies exists outside main hubs of “knowledge” so to speak. On top of that I tried to take two of the fringe clusters and put them on a political spectrum on the extremes. Following another branch of discussion I came to realize that my example that I used for the left sparked some discussion. Trying to find a better example but I’m unsure what would be a better representation for qanon on the left(your suggestion on blue anon is good).

It's a little difficult for me to be sure about "fringe + extreme + left" in terms of conspiracy theories, because I think most of the extreme left conspiracy theories I know of might be too common to be fringe. Best I can think of is normal extreme conspiracy theories on the left, plus a further twist in a sort of "50 Stalins" telephone-game way.

A couple more candidates:

"Bush lied us into Iraq in order to steal their oil."

"Brett Kavanaugh organized gang-rape parties in high school."

That might be the problem in that case that we don't know enough of the lefts conspiracies to be sure where their batshit insane are. Reading things like https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1969/essay-liberation.htm I'm sure that they are out there. Just not as public.

The extremes on the political left and right political spectrum has a end goal of subjugating the individual to benefit of collective/state/nation. That goal has a tendency to warp peoples perception on what drives the world and sometimes it ends up with false beliefs about groups of individuals running things behind the scenes. Conspiracy theories can arise and be perpetuated without this political dichotomy and if one side has had their false beliefs thrust out in the mainstream. It doesn't mean that aren't false or conspiracy theories. Most of mainstream Soviet had a belief in Lysenkoism it didn't make it less fringe out of established science or a conspiracy theory that the scientist opposing it are puppets of the west.

The only meaningful measure of intelligence is one's ability to successfully make predictions about the world -- smart people can predict, geniuses can exploit. If you're right, you're right, and if you're wrong, you're wrong. It's a very straightforward thing.

So is this a good space full of smart people? Maybe! Go track some poster's whose opinions intrigue you and see how consistently they take accurate measure of the world and how often their predictions come to pass.

The only meaningful measure of intelligence is one's ability to successfully make predictions about the world -- smart people can predict, geniuses can exploit. If you're right, you're right, and if you're wrong, you're wrong. It's a very straightforward thing.

Is there a name for this philosophy? I think it underpins a significant portion of rationalist thinking and leads to some of the more exotic conclusions.

Looks like a version of the scientific method / empiricism. A scientific theory is good if it leads to accurate predictions on the outcomes of future experiments or events.

But to say that this is also the only useful measure of intelligence seems dubious. For example solving math problems or following complex argumentation, and rhetorically convincing other people are also marks of intelligence and they don't require making geopolitical predictions. You can be a highly intelligent theologian who knows the ins and outs of the trinity and all the heretical versions of it and this still demonstrates intelligence, even though the subject matter has no predictive value about physical reality.

Teleb beleives that the measure of how smart someone is, is how rich he or she is by applying said intellect. This seems wrong though.

It seems like a decent heuristic to me. Why is it outright wrong?

Not everyone is solely motivated by money?

I don't think this is the best objection because smart people are far more likely to care about money.

If you were to exactly follow the cultural pressures, taking all the cliches to heart, then you would place a low value on money but a very high value on things that money can buy. This describes most people who say they are not motivated by money. However, since smart people have consistent preferences, they don't fall into this trap.

smart people are far more likely to care about money.

I don’t claim to be a people expert but this is very much contrary to my life experiences, unless you use circular logic to define being smart as being good at making money.

I think they are much better at making money compared to average IQ people, *if *they seek to make money .They can get good paying jobs, credentials, find loopholes or tricks to making money easier

It's wrong because there are so many other things that can sabotage wealth. Energy levels, social anxiety, obsession with something unproductive.

Conversely, there are ways to become rich without using intelligence. A person who is extremely energetic and wants to be rich will eventually hit the jackpot by immersing himself in opportunities and following up on them.

because IQ encompasses far more than how materially successful someone is. There is a positive correlation between IQ and wealth but but it's small. You have to take into account individual preferences. Many smart people do not aspire to wealth or careers that lead to wealth.

LessWrongers typically believe that real intelligence is changing the world (writing to it), not just predicting it (reading from it). But, in practice you need to be able to predict it in order to change it.

The definitions you assign things should not change your understanding of the universe (i.e. the map is not the territory). "Intelligence is ..." should not underpin one's thinking in the same way that deciding whether electrons are negatively or positively charged does not meaningfully change our understanding of physics.

I'm sure there's a name for it, couldn't tell you what it is. I'm not a rationalist and only know bits and pieces of the lingo from cultural osmosis.

The only meaningful measure of intelligence is one's ability to successfully make predictions about the world -- smart people can predict, geniuses can exploit. If you're right, you're right, and if you're wrong, you're wrong. It's a very straightforward thing.

not sure about this. I think the most intelligent people may not make for the best forecasters, or maybe the two are not that highly correlated. Intelligence is more about precession/preciseness of skill whereas forecasting is more about intuition and 'having a feel for things' (with some evidence to support the supposition) , which is not as precise.

If the world's smartest man routinely fails to make accurate predictions about the world, what use is his alleged brilliance? What does he have to show for his intelligence? He needs to be able to achieve or his genius is illusory.

There are achievements that don't reduce to empirics you know. Anything to do with apriori for instance.

I don't think anyone would deny that Euler was highly intelligent, but who in their right mind would go to him for predictions about the real world?

string theory doesn't make predictions as well as Newtonian gravity does, but I don't think anyone would dispute that you need to have a high IQ to understand the math behind it. IQ measures in part the ability to understand abstractions. Predicting is something else, more to do with randomness or non-deterministic systems. There may be some weakly positive correlation, but hardly mutually inclusive.

I'm not saying it doesn't indicate high IQ. I'm saying it's useless to be intelligent but unable to leverage that into successful interfacing with your external reality.

that is a far difference from being a meaningful measure of something. I agree applied intelligence matters but that's different from what I think you originally said

Just different concepts of 'meaningful'. IQ isn't valuable in and of itself, it's what a high IQ can allow you to do that's impressive. Big number without the accolades to back it up is just... a big number.

Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?

There seems to be value in having exposed yourself to the best arguments from each side of a debate. Ceteris paribus, someone who has only seen the other side at its worst is vulnerable to a biased perspective of the disagremeent. For example, if my only impression of the left/conservatives came from online comments on news articles and Facebook posts, while having read lots of libertarian intellectuals, I would have a sense that left wing or conservative views were products of ignorance and weak reasoning skills. Fortunately, I have had the chance to communicate with many intelligent and intellectual conservatives/leftists, so I know things aren't that simple.

"Ceteris paribus" is doing a lot of work here, though, because people who tend to be involved with politics tend to be very interested in politics, and people who are very interested in politics seem to be more vulnerable to cognitive biases about politics than others. It's like team sports: I know some extremely smart people who fall prey to fallacies as soon as we're discussing their favourite/least favourite sports teams. And this is unsurprising: no matter how smart and intellectual you are, it's hard to produce cool-headed acute analyses about subjects that you are hot-headed about.

The obvious solution is that society should be libertarian, because this tendency of even smart and informed people to be biased about political issues proves beyond any reasonable doubt that democratic state action is a poor way of doing things: voters are either ignorant or biased. I feel very passionately that this is true and all the evidence I've ever seen confirms this hypothesis.


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