domain:betonit.substack.com
anti_dan
1hr ago
Just because a really bad argument has been adopted in other contexts doesn't mean we should extend it to enabling homeless people to masturbate anonymously in the library.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I don’t believe in the ‘equal contributor’ bs.
Taking care of a baby/young child is well within the capabilities of a teenager. By the time this required an adult adult she would be one.
Our society isn’t set up that way, but it’s much more plausible than in the genderflipped case.
Crowstep
1hr ago
I'm not arguing that birthright citizenship doesn't exist. It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.
And even if having a citizen child had no benefit for the parents (clearly false, having a citizen child makes it easier for illegal immigrants to stay), that doesn't make it any less of a prize. Parents obviously do things that are good for their children. And a system that incentivises parents to commit crimes by rewarding their children is a bad one.
2D3D
1hr ago
My daughters generation expresses interest in sensitive artsy guys with glossy hair and perfect skin who happen to be straight. A particularly gnarly one is "good at talking" which used to be ok but now the boys apparently are using AI to do all their initial flirtations and the girls are copy pasting the messages into chatgpt to figure out if the boy is sincere and get mad at the AI for telling them things they don't want to hear.
The boys I know only have "not annoying' as a criteria. The older guys I know who have more stringent criterias are just avoiding rejection by seeking perfection, and I can't say the same for women. Sorry babe the hybrid of Benedict Cumberbatch and Asa Butterfield who also loves romantasy does not exist in straight versions.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
I don't follow. You believe Congress isn't allowed to decide violations of law are no longer violations of the law?
The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year.
Yeah, I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap. Mind you, the description of the private school they were attending before the parents decided to up sticks and move lock, stock and barrel to Austin also had me going holy crap, this should be the school anthem. (Knowing the original makes the Horrible Histories version even more enjoyable, though I digress).
The fact that this guy is able to up sticks, move across the country, and enrol three kids in a private fee-paying school means that once again, this is something that probably works very well for smart (see the description of the hoops his kids had to jump through to get into the first private school) kids of well-off families who will have support from interested and involved parents, and the genetic and environmental advantages of the same. That's why I went "holy crap" about the private school, because creaming off the best of the best and ensuring you don't have the dummies, the average, and the troublemakers - yeah, you could just stick the kids in the library and leave them to their own devices and they'll come out okay.
Small classroom numbers and highly motivated teachers? Yeah, once again: skim off the good young teachers as soon as they finish teacher training, promise them (reasonably) good salaries and conditions plus they will not be running the risk of getting stabbed in the face for telling a kid to get off their iPhone in class, plus they get freebies like going on ski trips in order to supervise the kids and of course you get them before they're burned out and they're still full of enthusiasm and optimism about education.
How well this Alpha scales up (or down) is something I'm fascinated to know - there's mention of trying it on kids from deprived backgrounds:
I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened.
That is where the rubber will meet the road about "is this a genuinely innovative approach to education that will enable kids to learn more, learn faster, and learn more deeply?" versus "is this something that is about a bunch of very smart kids from well-off families who, let's face it, would do equally well if left in a field supervised by wolves?" and the fact that the author seems to have heard nothing more about it would lead me to believe "the success comes because we cherry-pick really smart kids and put them into a specialised environment of nearly 1:1 tutoring".
In the end, I had to laugh that even the Alpha programme ended up re-inventing school. They have teachers, even if renamed "guides". The selling-point of "only 2 hours per day to learn all they need!" turns out to be "and then we fill up the afternoon with the socialisation, practical subjects, etc." part of education.
I hope it works out for his kids, but this sounds more like "yet another Bright Idea that doesn't scale up" in the field of educational reform. The problem is not "does this work for smart kids from motivated families", the problem is "so now does it work for less able kids from families that don't give a damn so long as the brats are taken off their hands for six hours a day".
EDIT: I'm also curious about this bit:
Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing?
So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.
Hadad
1hr ago
There's no problem, just you wrongly assuming I'm not a citizen by blood. I am correcting you. There's no need to try and fearmonger.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
It’s possible that the THC was the principal culprit. I have witnessed THC inducing acute psychotic episodes on other occasions before. Bit counterintuitive since most people would think of THC as being less “intense” than psilocybin but I suppose the whole thing is under-studied. I’m surprised that the risks of THC haven’t really permeated cultural consciousness.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
I'm not sure what you're failing to understand. If your great-grandfather immigrated here in 1910, had your grandmother in 1925, and naturalized in 1930, he couldn't have possibly passed his citizenship to your grandmother because he had no citizenship to pass. And since your grandmother isn't a citizen in this scenario, neither is your mother, and neither are you. What's the problem here?
Lol, now I see some of the disconnect. To me and people in my bubble, NFP does not mean, "Having sex now, just without hormonal contraceptives."
Ms. Zito is "taking up a natural family planning method." It takes three months of charting before someone who practices NFP is supposed to have sex. Some rules rely on six months to a year of charting data. Knowing this, many practitioners start charting before they even date. I charted well before I was married.
When I see that someone is learning about fertility-awareness, it isn't necessarily connected to sex. It's simply useful information to have about yourself!
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.
At least you assume so. Unless you can prove that their parents had the power to transfer citizenship, I'm just going to assume you aren't, and that goes all the way back up the chain. You'd better hope that a sufficient number of immigrants in that chain were either here before 1789 or naturalized before they had your ancestors, or else they couldn't have transmitted citizenship to their children and I'd prefer you'd be deported to South Sudan or some other country that will take anyone. At that point you can get in the back of the line behind all the other South Sudanese who want to live in the US (Good luck!).
Hadad
2hr ago
I can say with absolute confidence not a single person in my life or my social circles has ever had an episode of psychotic violence. If you just snap and go postal, you're broken somehow, and must be banished. You are not safe, you are not normal.
Do you count the people who have committed that "pre crime" or not?
If you're showing signs that you're psychotic, you should be supervised for awhile, have your risk confirmed, and if it was a false positive, you can go.
Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical.
Indeed, if citizenship is a reward why aren't we going full evolutionary humanism instead of focusing on crude bloodline?
There are like poor eighth generation Appalachians who lust for Marxism that are social dead weight compared to the most skilled and industrious red white and blue immigrants eager to come in and deepen our capital and gleefully celebrate Christmas.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
I'm sorry to hear that, and I'm glad to hear he got better.
However, the dose makes the poison. I presume he was using very large doses on a frequent basis, in conjunction with "massive quantities of THC". I can't speak authoritatively about the risks of psychosis from the former, at least not without reviewing the literature first, but the latter? If you have some kind of genetic predisposition, such as to schizophrenia, that will fuck you up. And the more drugs you throw into the mix..
In the case of psilocybin, for therapeutic doses, especially under supervision, the risks are minimal. I would never call psychedelics "harmless", but at least in this instance, when compared to how awful depression can be, I felt the odds were in my favor. Even something as 'benign' as SSRIs can cause mania shortly after initiation. Holding out for something that truly has no risk associated with it is a fool's errand I'm afraid.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Okay but the problem is that psychotically violent is a transient state - at present we hold them away from others while psychotically violent and then release them when they aren't.
A good number of people have one episode of violence or violent potential and then stop.
Likewise the mental health system is somewhat optimized for trying to predict violent potential in advance and head it off. Do you count the people who have committed that "pre crime" or not?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
I brought my own entertainment. The study design only offered "relaxing music" and an eye-cover if you were feeling overwhelmed. The music would have worked okay in an elevator or a Thai spa, but was absolutely not to my taste haha.
It's hard to blame them, really. Getting IRB approval for a clinical trial is a PITA on a good day, I strongly suspect that if they wanted to offer entertainment or a walk outside, they'd be raked over the coals, leaving aside the increase in liability and the demands on personnel. I'm certainly interested in trying shrooms in a more congenial environment!
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
2hr ago
I don’t actually mean to care about the homeless here - it just seems like me putting in my Drivers License to watch a Nikki Sims pov video from 15 years ago or something more obscene and German may lead to someone revealing this to people in an attempt at something.
Replace me with ten million other people I guess.
Maybe it’s an unfounded fear but there’s tens of thousands of people right now upset that Leo went to a wedding - I don’t want to not retire in 20 years because I have a foot fetish, and on occasion watch foot fetish video, of which on occasion veer towards obscenity.
aceventura
2hr ago
My impression is that randomly stumbling upon porn was a lot more common in the early years of the internet than it is now. Sure, finding porn if you search for it is super easy, but it doesn't seem to be embedded in ads or links on unrelated websites like it was back then.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2hr ago
But no, you're illegitimate. I'd be willing to fast-track you through the immigration system, but you'd have to go back first
I appreciate the endorsement.
Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.
Well! My blood claim is probably as solid as yours is, maybe even moreso.
You're just a citizen and I am not in your framework by legal technicality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
You accepted violation of the law to allow illegal immigrants in. On what grounds do you appeal to the law now?
I believe I've also been pretty clear that I do not consider the law a valid entity, but welcome my opponents sacrificing their values to uphold it when they are willing to do so.
Hadad
2hr ago
To be clear: I want those who are psychotically violent to be indefinitely restrained, and killed if they won't cooperate with the restraint. If for reasons of cost others refuse to let them be indefinitely restrained, I would prefer they be killed than released back into polite society to terrorize everyone else.
Gaashk
2hr ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
Ah, yes, the ‘combination doesn’t go together’ problem.
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