domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Rather, they unfairly enabled the unscrupulous to get ahead. I realize that the two look very similar in terms of outcome, but accurate framing is important.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
I would really want to have rooms wired, with conduit and pull strings in the event that I needed to pull something which wasn't already there. It's a complete pain in the dick to wire things after the fact, and I have often wished that I had wires for networking, for speaker connections, etc.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
It's tragic the entire article is derailed by people hyperfixating on this one bit.
DUOLINGO
An Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Take-home essays were always a stupid idea; there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing, so they unfairly penalized anybody who was honest and did not have a big budget. All graded assignments should be done in class; AI simply made this clear.
Lazuli
1d ago
I'm interested in following your journey. A few questions:
- How are you financing the construction? Are you working off a loan or cash saved?
- Did you design the house or did you work with an architect?
- Why did you decide to build instead of buy an available house?
- What was the timeline between buying the lot then building the house.
- How much government red tape did you have to navigate to build a home on your land?
- Given the risk of extreme weather—hurricanes and flooding—in the region near the Gulf of Mexico, why did you decide to build a house there?
Your comment inspired me to skim the article.
it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”
giga_chadette.jpg
Virgin “but but my academic data breakdowns” father vs. Chadette head of school.
It also reminds me of the "Dick Flattening / Yes Honey" meme: "It's 4PM! Time for your groveling session."
One might be tempted to call the author weak, pathetic, spineless, a bitch. However, in some ways he has more mental fortitude than I do. I'm not sure how I could live with myself after getting bent over so hard by a school administrator of all people.
The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged.
The article too gave me some "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" vibes. The author mentioned that:
In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth.
I wonder how or from where else the daughter's anxious personality might had been acquired?
Lazuli
1d ago
High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
This is also a problem at universities.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
I now have spent a few hours muddling through a few solitaire games of Versailles 1919, and IMO it's quite fun.
strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything.
I'm reminded of Scott's old homeschooling post where, iirc, he proposes that in early childhood there's just an underlying brain maturity process that can't be meaningfully accelerated toward basic educational attainments, such that you could either spend every day from, say, age 5 to 7 strenuously trying to teach a kid how to read and do arithmetic before their brain is ready for it, or you could spend those years doing basically anything else and by the time they're 7 they'll pick up reading and arithmetic easily in a couple of weeks. (Some version of this has to be true -- you can't teach a baby to read).
I was "unschooled" through elementary age myself and I don't think I learned to read til I was 8, but when I did it barely required any instruction and I was reading at a college level by 12, possibly because I hadn't learned to resent the attempt.
So much of this striving for early acceleration is probably pushing rope, physiologically, putting in 10x the effort to get to (at best) the same result marginally faster.
I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds.
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
ulyssessword
1d ago
Showing your ID in person is not a privacy risk. Sending it over the internet is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Every political movement always thinks the outgroup hit them first, and that they're just perfect little victims who are only trying to defend themselves, and therefore allegations of hypocrisy shouldn't apply to them.
This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?
Oh, very much so. Github Copilot + Claude Sonnet 4, if you care to know. Technically I am a web developer but at this point I am basically all-in on using AI wherever possible. Nice to get done in a couple hours what would have taken me much, much longer, and much more frustration, using the old method of typing code by hand.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It doesn’t, but it passes the blame for ‘you lost something’ and both drivers and fast food workers are, uh, well.
zataomm
1d ago
Thanks! My inability to find such a summary was what caused me to embark upon this folly.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1d ago
He openly admits he's a eugenicist
No s***. It always circles back to DemsRRealRacist, Bible thumping, and not being very bright.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?
Personally, I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases, but it's still interesting to know that almost half of all SCOTUS opinions are 9-0.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
I think that goes too far personally. Someone who e.g. is fine 99% of the time but has occasional severe hallucinations ought to be able to go out and buy food at the local supermarket. If they get unlucky and hit that 1% chance then you probably only have some annoyed retail workers. With guns involved it instantly becomes so much more high-consequence.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1d ago
It doesn't, but it (in theory, at least) absolves the driver from being responsible for checking the order for accuracy (Many restaurants find drivers checking the orders to be annoying, and that's before the driver starts asking for all the sauces/dips that get left out.) while having the happy side effect of keeping their grubby little hands away from the fries.
Like no-contact deliveries, it was a covid-ism that stuck around.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
If you are too crazy to be trusted with a firearm, you should not be out in public, period.
chooky
1d ago
On building or remodelling, what I will say is that one of the absolute most visible parts of the work is the drywall/trim finishing. Most GCs sub this out, and most subs are horrible. Since this is close to the final stage of construction, it is hard to have the patience to make them do it right, but it is what you will notice every day even if the rest of the work is great. If a remodel, the drywall stage is an absolute nightmare due to the obscene amount of dust that low quality contractors create. I recommend stressing to GC that professional drywall finishers are a must.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Trump's cultists are mainstream within the Republican party. I think you're interpreting "mainstream" as in "mainstream media" or something like that, which wasn't what I meant.
This is pretty interesting.
All of the GT Workshops are focused on a measurable, legible output. They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties. The school’s “100% Money Back guarantee” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade). This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.
Winning national academic competitions is a bold claim, but maybe there is that much alpha (ha!) to find versus conventional schooling.
Additionally
Airbnb: Maybe the most impressive one. The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)
I find this fucking awesome. You're clearly not only paying for kids to practice Duolingo. Also, an Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."
Mostly, I just enjoy how willing they are to experiment and iterate even in the face of unpopular ideas. And apparently paying kids to read books is insanely unpopular?
Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).
There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.
So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.
The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.
We homeschool our kid and while he is crushing it academically, we do notice his motivation sagging a bit in some areas. Our headline update from reading this entire post was not to move to Austin and send him to Alpha schools, but to try greasing him a bit.
We've been paying for online piano lessons because his mind was blown by Elton John videos and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how to play and we were like sure why not.
And he's been practicing pretty consistently with very little prodding from us for almost 18 months and plays really well. He's decent enough that the last Christmas party we went to he just played and kept it bumping while everyone else sang along. I find this impressive enough because I can't play piano for shit.
But! He hit this one module that has one song that he just doesn't like and his motivation to finish it fell through the floor. It's pretty surprising since it's not even a hard song, it just doesn't seem to satisfy him the way the other ones do. He's been stuck on it for months, just does not care at all to practice it. So... having just read this post we decided to offer him $1 to finish the song by Monday and he bunkered down and has been practicing it hard since.
Are we worried about ruining his intrinsic motivation entirely? Not really. There's some rationalization later about how bribing kids does not render them incapable of doing things without external motivation as adults, and indeed it might be a solid way to push them more towards having intrinsic motivation later.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1d ago
Obama might have had a broader left cult during the election and shortly thereafter, but there was a ton of disillusionment afterwards with the left thinking he was too moderate. This disillusionment was a nontrivial part of why wokeness started gaining steam. Blacks broadly stayed with him the entire time, while proto-woke white leftists felt betrayed pretty quickly.
"Catturd posts on Twitter" is a non-argument. Joe Rogan just posts podcasts. Greta Thunberg just does publicity stunts. Yet we keep hearing about all of these people because they're important for one reason or another. I didn't claim Catturd was a politician himself, but he undoubtedly has influence on the broader base, which trickles up to those in power through various means.
Big fan of GMT, and Churchill (the WW2 game that Versailles 1919 is based on). Churchill has the same basic setup: a three-player game representing the US, the UK and the USSR negotiating even as WWII is still going on. You need to make progress against the Axis (represented very abstractly on two different tracks, one for the war in the Pacific and one for the Eastern and Western fronts in Europe), but you don't want your opponents to make too much progress compared to you. You are also carving up the post-war world with colony chips, and there is a separate Atomic Bomb track. Victory conditions are kind of wonky, because if one faction wins by too large a margin, they destabilize the peace (being seen as a new existential threat) and then there are some complicated rules to figure out who is the "real" leader of the post-war world.
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