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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4247 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?

Bullets from me:

  • General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
  • The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
  • School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
  • The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.

I suspect that the common core math curriculum was deliberately designed to be obtuse so that engaged parents can't help their kids with their homework, increasing reliance on the public school system and sabotaging high performance students to "level the playing field" for students whose parents can't/won't help them with their homework.

Why would high performance students need help from their parents? Especially if we talking about core math curriculum.

When I say high performance (which makes them sound like sports cars--I meant high-performing), I don't really mean the the absolute cream of the crop Ivy League-bound STEM types. I mean more the A and B level students at your typical public school with attentive parents who help them with their homework. Mainly I was talking about myself. I was a bright kid but sometimes struggled with math, and I would not have been nearly as academically successful as I was if my parents hadn't been able to help me work through concepts I wasn't able to grasp during class.

Perhaps I should have said "middle class with a stable home life" rather than "high performance."

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