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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   24433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:

To connect our divided country, the American Exchange Project sends high school seniors on a free, week-long trip to a hometown very different from their own.

There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.

I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.

Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.

Staring at the sun today. Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.

There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.

I posit the greatest post-war cultural divide in America is along educational attainment, not race or ethnicity or even politics. College-educated Americans and everyone else may as well be distinct species for all practical purposes. They live in different neighborhoods, hold different values, their children attend different schools, etc. This is could be related to the so-called 30 point IQ communications gap, but also cultural capital and literal capital. Charles Murray has written a lot about this.

Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems.

I cannot recall anyone ever believing this. From the onset of the virus it had a dividing effect as policy was split almost perfectly along political lines.

I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid.

I would depend on the initial message or response. 911 was an exception in that it had the effect of bringing people together of opposing ideological lines, but the over-politization of Covid policy had the opposite effect. Had the left not immediately defaulted to masks and lockdowns and was so unyielding or unwilling to compromise, maybe it would not have been as polarizing. This shows the importance of the initial message after a catastrophe. Bush and others were smart to jump on a message of unification right after 911 instead of "you must comply".

OTOH, a pandemic is multiplicative and sensitive to initial values, hence the need for a swift and rapid initial response, but this also makes people want to push back, too, at the imposition, especially when social distancing and masks may not work as well as initially advertised.

I posit the greatest post-war cultural divide in America is along educational attainment, not race or ethnicity or even politics.

[...]

This is could be related to the so-called 30 point IQ communications gap, but also cultural capital and literal capital.

And yet immigrant groups who had very little literal capital managed to succeed. Interventions based on literal capital fail. When we compare groups in the same neighborhoods, gaps remain. Educational attainment is downstream of something. The case for "cultural capital" is IMO shaky but can be made. The case for literal capital just doesn't hold up.

Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.

Covid was exactly the opposite, stoking fear rather than cooperation: "Isolate yourself. Other people will kill you by existing."

"Isolate yourself. Other people will kill you by existing."

Probably worth noting that a significant contingent of Westerners are already primed to think this with respect to global warming climate change (and the solutions thereto generally being "so kill them destroy their ability to meaningfully exist at gunpoint, before they kill you").

Covid is not the first "hide in a hole, the world is going to explode, and it's all the outgroup's fault", and it certainly won't be the last (nor is it unique to one or another political faction e.g. "sin causes extreme weather") but it is an excellent illustration of just how harmful that kind of thinking is.

e.g. "sin causes extreme weather"

This is a much less common view that “pickup trucks will destroy the planet”.

I guess maybe the panic about DEI hires driving planes(seriously, have any of the recently covered mishaps been due to pilot error?) might qualify, but global warming caused by pickup trucks/antivaxxers/strict abortion laws literally killing people is much more of a blue tribe thing.

DR Twitter commentator Isaac Simpson (“Disgraced Propagandist”) has made this exact comparison, saying that “the competency crisis” risks becoming the right’s equivalent of “the climate crisis”. It’s an interesting and troubling prediction.

strict abortion laws literally killing people

Or not-so-strict abortion laws literally killing people, in the Red tribe's case. (Which is why the Blue tribe's defense of abortion rests on the definitions of "killing" and "people".)

That's an interesting thought: maybe it wasn't the common enemy/national project of WWII that brought the country together, but the sheer fact of physical proximity in largely random mixed groups. The 1950s, where we had an entire generation of government officials and corporate executives who had shared foxholes with Mexican ranch hands and Detroit factory workers (and vice versa) will never happen again. There is simply no mechanism likely to bring such disparate members of society together in random, tight-knit little groups like that again.

Not many of them were in literally the same foxholes since the military was still segregated in WW2. Blacks were mostly in support positions like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Miller. Rich people could either become officers or find ways to avoid the draft.

There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards.

When I was younger, I did a fair number of programs that involved getting grouped with other people you didn't know and having to work together. It was also an eye-opener for me. The rural/urban divide was certainly present, but not the only divide: having been raised in a straight-laced, middle-class, white collar household that I thought knew how to do physical labor, the blue collar work-hard-play-hard approach to life wasn't something I expected.

I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness. Not for militaristic reasons (although those aren't completely invalid), but also because being forced to meet and work together with very different Americans would be good for the country as a whole. And there are some useful life skills that some would never pick up otherwise. Even if it's just cutting trails in National Parks/Forests or whatever.

But I'm not sure how I could convince the median voter to go for it: probably half don't trust the country to be left in charge of their kids, and a similar portion think their kids are too good to spend months of their lives on something outside of their worldview.

I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness.

This hasn't been how it's worked in Russia.

Also, the usual moral hazard of forcing people to work for you and not letting them quit.

Russia's military is incredibly dysfunctional. Conscripts are pretty much dogs. It's not like being a grunt has a lot of prestige in other countries, but potentially better examples would probably include Korea, Germany, Switzerland, or Israel.

You're not wrong. The self-selection process for the times I've seen it work is likely an essential part of it working at all. Self-actualization is something that requires internal motivation, and can't be forced. But it can be an aspirational picture.

I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.

That being said America is a vast country and a lot of Americans would benefit from getting to see more of it.

One of my own personal favorite trips was touring the gulf which has many unique places around it. It helped I had friends to see. But you get going thru their everything from old south (Pensacola for me), New Orleans it’s own animal, and Houston/small Texas towns to see a whole lot of culture and many different foods.

There are no doubt similar tours to be done that can take a couple weeks and involve 18 hrs or so of driving.

It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.

I think it'd solve the opposite problem. Costal Dem voters have minimal contact with the interior of the US. One of the things that flipped Obama voters to Trump voters was that once the Northeast and West Coast recovered from the 2009 financial crisis, DC patted themselves on the back and declared "job done". Regions who were still trying to recover were then hit by crippling new regulations.

Sending wealthy costal kids to visit rust belt cities would at least create some awareness in their communities.

It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.

Sure, but who are you quoting here and what's the relation to this? I went through the AEP site and all the media articles linked from there that I could find (although I didn't get through all of the podcast; no transcript and my internet's spotty at the moment), and didn't find what you're quoting, so I'm a bit confused as to why you're posting it as a reply to @cjet79.

Agree that more Americans should see more of America. Pretty cool place. I feel like I've done most of my traveling in the last decade just attending weddings. My wife and I both have a lot of cousins. I did more travelling in college and just after college as part of an obscure rec-level sport club (underwater hockey, check it out and play it, my endorsement is worth op security concerns)

I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.

I am not feeling that this needs a political dimension. I think in general there are two axis of negotiation on any topic. One is the object level disagreement. And the other is a more nebulous social standing / social cohesion.

Take a simple example of where you want to go eat for dinner with a group of people. The object level concern is "what do I want to eat". If you are with people you care about and interact with regularly like your family, then you are definitely willing to go eat somewhere you don't like just to keep another person in that group happy, or make it clear that you might get later leverage on other things. Or you just love them and you want to make sure that they are happy.

Imagine you are instead going out with random strangers. They will eat at different tables, and you won't even know who they are. The nebulous social standing dimension / social cohesion negotiation space gets entirely erased. You have no reason except to advocate where you want to eat. And any compromise is a pure loss.

I think the bifurcation of America into rural vs urban has really destroyed the nebulous social dimension negotiating space. No one on either side is willing to compromise because its a pure loss for them and everyone they know. But if you stick them face to face with each other and get them to talk about politics you kind of reintroduce that nebulous social dimension.

Politics needs some grease to work. That grease is often the nebulous social dimension. Congress itself seems to partly work on these informal social dimensions. Politicians that only went after the objective political issues like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were semi-pariahs within congress. They often weren't useful in making deals, because they may as well have been robots.

What this exchange program does, what all exchange programs do is add some negotiating space.

When I went to India, I ended up liking my Indian coworkers better. It meant when it came time to schedule meetings that meant me waking up an hour earlier, I wasn't as annoyed with them. Because I knew it often meant staying an extra two hours for them. There were a bunch of minor effects like that. It added up to me being happier / better at interacting with India team members.

The student exchange program I went on middle school is now dead. Its an objectively bad way to spend money. Its basically subsidizing vacations for less well off PMC children that can figure out the hoops that need to be jumped through to participate. I think this American Exchange program might end up going the same way.

Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.

Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.

Sometimes there isn't a cheap substitute. And, well, I sure think this is a better value-add than the various ideological projects already in schools (it's not negative, for one thing), and in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative.

in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative

Hah, that is true!

Main problem with this would probably be scaling. Which is a problem with a lot of exchange programs. The value-add of exchange programs is often in a human element. So you need good host families, good host situations, and good candidates for an exchange. But you can't really manufacture those or spin them up at need. There is low hanging fruit to be picked when the program is small.

I remember my parents hosted an Italian exchange student for a half semester during my first year of college. They volunteered after the girl had request a home change. The girl had a good time staying with our family, but my parents never signed up for it again.

I stayed with a German family during my European trip, and I stayed in touch with them for a bit afterward. They were awesome, but I also don't think they ever hosted again.

My dad was friends with a married couple that couldn't have kids. They hosted maybe a dozen exchange students over the years. I think the kids that stayed with them had a mediocre time. They apparently had a lot of strict rules, which made sense for them hosting teenage girls for two decades in a row.

Not many data points, but I do feel that maybe some of the best experiences aren't gonna be easily replicable.

Fair point.

Something I just realized reading this is that while I'd love to host sometime, and think we would be a really good host family when the kids are older (we would take them to all the local archeological sites! To the historic plaza! To the pig slaughtering contest!), and have enough space, with an enormous spare room just sitting there, we will not have enough vehicle space, until the oldest is driving herself and can afford her own car, at which point it will probably be too late.

I've stayed as a young adult with a host family in the Republic of Georgia, and liked it a lot, but they have cheap van transportation, so I went off and made my own friends, and met up with them myself.

I don’t see why it has to be through schools particularly though. The general idea is good, traveling to places unlike the places you usually go (and that aren’t built to cater to people like you, aka tourist destinations) definitely grows you as a person. But to me, schools are already doing way more than they can possibly do: welfare office, therapy, socialization, and so on. This leaves too little time for the purpose of educating the children to know the basics of literacy, numeracy, and science literacy that they absolutely need. If the kids were doing well in those areas as compared to international standards, we could have the conversation about trying to do other things.

The program in question appears to be one week in June (several Juneteenth references and they each have a one week itinerary), so probably schools are only involved because they already have staff and connections in place. It's likely free to advertise at schools, vs elsewhere they would need paid advertising.

I don't know how highschools are now, but a decade ago when I was a college-bound high school senior the last semester was basically a joke. As long as you didn't fail anything too badly highschool had ceased to matter. GPA had ceased to matter. Even the most diligent students got caught up in the general mood of laziness. A few weeks taken out of this last semester would probably have no negative impact on education.

But I ultimately agree that it doesn't need to be handled through schools. I think this effort is private, and that's how I'd prefer it stay.

I’ll agree that the last semester of high school is coasting, and that the program is only a week or two. But we’re also considering the money factor which can add up quickly and take money from other important programs and issues. A room, food, transportation, and materials is probably in the realm of $2000 a kid. If you’re sending more than a couple of kids we’re probably talking about 60,000 a year on the program. Money that could be used for dozens of other programs or materials that could be used to educate kids in skills and knowledge they will need in their future lives.

Which will long term benefit Americans? Kids who understand science and math at high levels, or that they spend a week in a school in a red state (or blue depending on district)? That the majority of kids read on grade level, or that they go on a field trip? A robotics lab or science lab? And this is why I think even if it’s just a week in the last semester, unless it’s completely self funded, it’s really taking a lot of money from other very necessary programs that would benefit every student.

Yes, I agree, as I said in the original post it seems like an objectively bad way to spend money.

I’m glad we agree. My point though is that this is a huge problem with trying to turn schools into one stop shopping for solving everything that affects kids. They’re daycares, cultural centers, therapists, art centers, sports leagues, enrichment activities, and when they can find the time and money, education centers. I don’t think it’s possible to have schools take over everything that other institutions and families drop and still perform their primary function as education simply because everything added takes time, energy and resources away from that purpose. And I think this is also a major factor in teacher burnout. They’re wearing so many hats, many of them contradictory, with little to no support and often forced to deal with serious mental health crises while trying to teach the other kids something.

My sister in law teaches elementary school. She had a kid in her class who was cutting herself as a way to get attention as well as acting out a lot. Because the resources are minimal she had to deal with this, and pretty well beg the school to get the kid more help than she could provide (parents didn’t seem to care). In the meantime, the class could get nothing else done. That’s the result of turning public schools into the Swiss Army Knife of society. Once it does everything, you no longer have time for teaching.

I'd agree with that too. One other problem it causes is that, for kids who drop out of school, they also get cut off from everything else in their community. Really drops an anvil on high school drop outs, who hardly need any other trouble in their lives.

I benefited from a lot of programs like these. I 100% agree with the concept. I just find the political element cringe. But it’s probably a good fundraiser tool. Now the Upper East Side housewife gets it quicker and can brag to her friends “I donated 50k so 50 maga kids met a Muslim (that’s the pic in the website)”. Way better use of money than donating 50k to the ADL or ActBlue. Feels less dehumanizing to me if it’s just I funded a bunch of poor kids to go on vacation somewhere else for a week.

If something is intrinsically good which I would agree this sounds intrinsically good to me it would be nice to just have it be that than add a political element to it.

Maybe I am over playing the politicization. They only said “our divided country”.

I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.

Ironically, right wingers in America do much better on the ideological Turing test than left wingers. There’s no actual reason for the sometime leftist assumption that if conservatives would just get out of their bubbles, they would calm down.

I’m reminded of an article a few years ago, by a progressive pointing to the 30-40% of the country which he claimed was obstinately convinced that democrats wanted to do a short laundry list of perennial conservative complaints- all of which were regularly being floated by mainstream democrats and had large support in their base. He was of course oblivious to the idea that more exposure of conservatives to people who wanted to take their guns away would not in fact convince them no one was coming for their guns.

The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide. Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other. Unfortunately, that bifurcation closely corresponds to our political parties. It also didn’t help that the public health administration is seemingly tightly aligned with the Democratic Party. Covid functioned more like a mass shooting in the realm of the Culture War.

Accountability literally anywhere in government would be great…

Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other.

There is no particular reason to think that urban policies worked in urban areas either.

I agree that it was urban vs rural. But the biggest difference was in the effects of pretty standard policies. It was painfully obvious that most of the CDC had no idea how the rural economy works. Shutting down an office and going remote is no big deal. Those office workers didn’t lose their jobs, the owners of those companies were in no danger of losing their businesses. It frankly mattered so little that most office workers are fighting tooth and nail to not go back to the office. In rural areas, the exact same restrictions were absolutely devastating. If you worked in a factory, a small business store, a restaurant, a construction company, you got a layoff. If you owned those kinds of businesses, you had bills pilling up at a time when it was illegal to do business. At the same time, big businesses doing the same thing could often poach your customers by simply being allowed to do business. If you needed something, you went to Amazon or Walmart or Target, nobody else was open for business. And the cruelest part was that the owners of those businesses were basically forced to watch and forced to let it happen.

The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide.

No, the problem with our Covid response was that it was damn stupid and full of lies, not in the sense of being mistaken but in the sense of being knowably false and told for political purposes.

Problem with our COVID response is it was dumb and weaponized for politics and self-satisfaction. I would say it was just politics but I also think a lot of people thought they were the “good” people for being safe. It wasn’t just a rural/urban divide.

Things like 6 boosters for 20 something’s was dumb regardless of side. And over 50 being completely anti-vaxx regardless of side was dumb. Or students masking at Stanford while riding a bike was just dumb.

There were probably some policies that made more sense in urban areas like less in-person during waves to protect hospitals but the vast majority of the issues seem to me like one side was just being dumb regardless of density of their community.

Accountability literally anywhere in government would be great…

Agreed. But the problem is that, as identified by Max Weber, a hallmark of modernity is rationalization, and the resulting bureaucratization, which serves incredibly well to diffusion of responsibility and a "rule of no one" in which nobody in government is ever accountable.

I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project

That looks fun and interesting, but very short. At only a week, it seems unlikely much exchanging will be going on, aside from generic high school acquaintance making. I looked at a town I'm familiar with, and all the choices look... fine... but very clearly vacation based.

I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.

It probably would, insofar as we can't really account for the feelings of the dead. But if we're going down the "we need a good war" line of thought, is our condition really so tragic as to demand catastrophe that we may be motivated? Can't we just get along...by going to Mars or something?

Can't we just get along...by going to Mars or something?

That's a much better idea, I have to admit.

And we do have a massive humans-to-Mars project getting underway, so a quick examination of the public discussion of it will surely reveal just the culture-war-free cameraderie we're looking for. Let me do a web search now, right after taking a big sip of water...

Alas, poor Yorick!

But really, I think if anything can still do it that isn't a war it's that thing that Nick Land calls the "Lure of the Void". Western man is constitutionally lusting for the infinite, and what's more infinite than space?

Based essay:

"The inexorable logic of techno-industrial efficiency, on its anti-gravity vector, means that the only consistent motivation for leaving the earth is to dismantle the sun (along with the rest of the solar-system), but that doesn’t play well in Peoria"

I am at least down with giving the Sun something of a lipectemy (heliectemy?) to extend its life. Would prefer it never be completely dismantled, for sentimental reasons. Maybe convert it into a constellation of red dwarves.

Uhh, a stable configuration of stars close by ?

I don't know about that. Even just two stars rotating around each other lose energy and end up in a gamma ray burst inevitably.

It's easy to say those things now but when the time comes, will you say 'no, we shall preserve this massive pot of wealth as a national park'?

Imagine a hundred million tonnes of gold and uranium. A trillion barrels of oil. A hundred Australia's worth of coal and iron ore. All of that is a rounding error compared to the Sun. Its value goes up into the wacky numbers, the sextillions and nonillions.

Didn't Land have a mini story with that exact premise? It was a corporate guy explaining that sentimental luddites won't stop the inevitable disassembly of Earth. But of course it would be "lovingly, even reverentially" digitally backed up for all to experience.

It's in the same essay.

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I read it “a little happier than COVID” as “less of a strain, emotionally, than COVID was.” Not that it would actually improve matters, but that it would be less depressing.

That exchange project feels like one of the things which people feel the need to talk up, but doesn’t have that much actual effect. Like the ineffective altruists.

But also, I don’t see how it could be bad? It’s absolutely wild how much sortition is involved in the U.S. For a New York resident to visit, I dunno, Dallas—that’s further than Paris-to-Warsaw. The trains are embarrassing, too. We’re firmly in road-trip territory. And the issue is much worse for those who don’t have the disposable income or time to cross the continent for a few days.

I grew up close enough to take an a school field trip to our national capital. I can’t imagine how much of the country never got that chance.

But also, I don’t see how it could be bad?

There's a thing in the Mormon church where they send teenagers to evangelize randos. It seems a little weird at first glance: everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites. But getting new recruits isn't the point -- the point is to absolutely demonstrate how bad non-Mormons can act.

That's probably not intended (either here, or in the Mormon church). Yet I wonder what, precisely, the proposer expects to have happen were he to ship cornfed rural folk (or even the Unnecessariat writer) to San Francisco, or vice versa.

everybody knows that they're not going to get any bites.

Eh? Even in the world capital of Godlessness (the Czech Republic, though Estonia might be slightly higher in percent that identifies as atheist) I had multiple baptisms.

Edit: it almost sounds like you've got it parts of it mixed up with an Amish Rumspringa to some extent?

I'm not sure if there's a specific term in the LDS community that separates it from more general missionary work, but sending 18-25ish young adults in suits on bicycles to knock on doors away from home, typically for sections of two years. TraceWoodgrains wrote about it from the perspective of someone then-inside the community who did the work in Australia, but I've seen it referenced from online and offline ex- and current-LDS.

Yes, ostensibly missionary work gets convert baptists, and the official statistics are in 4+ per missionary-year. Which is pretty respectable, even if it's an astounding amount of manhours to get there. But these numbers come about by merging the numbers from all jurisdictions, and by mixing explicit missionary work knocking on doors with, talking with organically-developed friendships while on mission, missionary service (such as volunteer work for the destitute).

Add in retention to baptism -- and from a non-LDS perspective, that's the LDS baptism requirements are a really low bar -- where knock-on-door numbers are awful and the entire program sells itself on members talking to or encouraging investigators that they found through personal efforts, and it turns into a wash pretty quickly for a lot of jurisdictions.

I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.

The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.

The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.

IIRC, the rumspringa for most Amish is fairly tame and doesn’t involve that much contact with the English. It’s a time when Amish youth are allowed to disobey their parents a little bit and generally have a few exceptions to the strict Amish codes, not a general license to rebel.

I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.

It was over a decade ago. I won't get into specifics because the country I served in already narrows down my identity far too much. But no, I was a little bit under the average for missionaries in the Czech Republic as far as baptisms go. That said, a significant source of baptisms (none of mine, but probably around 20% of the mission's) were Mongolia immigrants. In one of the cities with missionaries there was a member who had joined in Mongolia. She lived in an apartment building mostly full of other Mongolians and introduced the missionaries to a ton of them.

Regarding retention after baptism, the rule of thumb I've always heard (and have usually seen in regards to actual activity rates vs. membership on the rolls) is about 1/3 stay active. Not sure how this compares to, say, cultural Catholics that never go to mass.

Catholic RCIA has a ~50% retention rate. So making baptism harder has room for improvement, but not infinite room.

It’s absolutely wild how much sortition is involved in the U.S. For a New York resident to visit, I dunno, Dallas—that’s further than Paris-to-Warsaw. The trains are embarrassing, too. We’re firmly in road-trip territory. And the issue is much worse for those who don’t have the disposable income or time to cross the continent for a few days.

Or they could just take a 4 hour flight for less than $300 round trip?

If they’re at a regional hub like Dallas. It gets harder and more expensive pretty fast from smaller airports.

Google Flights indicates that round-trip prices from Abilene, Lubbock, and El Paso to Newark still are around 300 or 400 dollars.

Huh, it does look like they aren't too bad. I haven't flown for several years, because the last couple times I tried looking it up, the flights were pretty expensive, and I just gave up.

When I was single it was more expensive to fly, and then stay, in a major American city and do anything interesting there than to fly and stay in Southern Europe and wander around on public transportation, on account of hotel/hostel, ticket, food, etc costs, but I should probably do the math again sometime now that I have kids. I remember spending about as much going on organized trips to DC and Syria, but then in Syria we were staying in church sponsored accommodations, which I both liked better and cost less.

You can argue that the money spent on something like this can be spent on other things, but on the grand scale of things, I'd probably prefer the money to be spent on something like this to some other community outreach program.

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