domain:greyenlightenment.com
Hieronymus
9hr ago
SEL (social emotional learning)
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
erwgv3g34
9hr ago
I got hit by the tail end of the new math. The way I was taught to do subtraction is definitely closer to Tom Lehrer's second method than the first; we would say that the two "borrowed" a one from the four, so the four got crossed out and replaced by a three while the two became twelve, and twelve minus three is nine.
I... like it? It makes a lot more sense than the first method. We didn't get taught that the four is actually four tens, since it's in the tenths place, and that you are substracting ten from the forty and adding them to the two, but hearing him say it makes it obvious in retrospect that's why the algorithm works.
Tom Leher says "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer" like it's a joke, but I actually agree with that. As my calculus teacher said "your only advantage over the machine is your ability to think. Once you lose that, I prefer the machine. Calculators are faster and make no mistakes".
Anyway, we also did simple sets in elementary school. No non-decimal bases, though; I learned that on my own reading about computers, because binary and hexadecimal.
MachineElfPaladin
9hr ago
You have to pick the same number for the multiplication and division, but other than that 2 is picked just because it's a small, easy number to do division and multiplication with. (You could think of it as "taking" the number out of the one you're dividing and then "putting it back in" to the one you're multiplying, so the whole problem has the same numbers in total, just moved around.) Since 8 isn't divisible by 3, 3 isn't very useful - unless you really like fraction mathematics, I guess - but 4 works equally well:
4 x 7 = 28
8 / 4 = 2
28 x 2 = 56
Or, for the way I would do that last line in my head:
(20 + 8) x 2 = (20 x 2) + (8 x 2) = 40 + 16 = 56
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
I mean, the onion making fun of biden’s age was a recovery of their old charm; their article on him greeting dead European leaders was absolutely hilarious and I’m surprised South Park had nothing like ‘I see Jaques Mitterand regularly, beckoning me into the light’ given its reputation.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
Iirc Botswana’s purchasing power per capita is higher than Ukraine or Moldova. Not high bars to clear, but it’s achieved solidly normal Latin American economic success that the two worst white countries do not have.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9hr ago
The comment about Hell’s brimstone might be referring to his devious satire, The Screwtape Letters, in which Screwtape, a demon experienced at tempting, writes a series of letters to his nephew Wormwood advising him on the best ways to snatch the faith from one of their Enemy in Heaven’s mind and thus soul.
I would pay a pretty penny to have it read by John DeLancie, who specializes in this sort of character.
Gaashk
9hr ago
There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9hr ago
Interestingly, Lewis and Louis are derived from Levi, the tribe of priests. Little bit of nominative determinism, considering how highly many lay Christians regard C.S. Lewis.
HereAndGone
9hr ago
As you say, you came along long after all this row. So any improvements that occurred before you started working in the UK are invisible to you. I don't know if the lurid accusations were true but they were certainly made:
Of the hundreds of families who submitted testimony of their loved ones’ experiences on the pathway to the independent review chaired by Baroness Neuberger in 2013, many referenced hydration and nutrition. Some patients’ families had been shouted at by nurses when trying to give them water. The panel also heard how opiates and tranquillisers were sometimes used inappropriately and in too strong a dose as soon as the LCP was initiated, which made the patient drowsy and incapable of asking for food or drink. The Neuberger report quotes a particularly shocking example of someone who suffered a painfully “slow death, attributable in part to dehydration and starvation”.
...One case study in the 2023 report refers to a 21-year-old woman named Laura Jane Booth, who was admitted for a routine eye operation in 2016. Three weeks later, she was dead. Booth, who had the genetic disorder Patau’s syndrome, was initially deemed to have died of natural causes on her death certificate; a 2021 inquest, however, found that there had been a “gross failure of her care” and that “malnutrition contributed to her death”. Her parents said that she’d been denied food for weeks while in hospital, and that they’d had no idea she was put on an end-of-life pathway. The report for LCFCPG said this is one of seven cases in which doctors failed to take a patient’s mental capacity into account, in clear breach of the Mental Capacity Act 2005.
...We spoke with Julie James, whose dad David was a respected Liverpool musician and cancer survivor. James drove himself into Aintree Hospital in May 2012 with constipation. After originally being told a simple procedure would remove the blockage, he contracted pneumonia and sepsis and became more seriously ill, eventually requiring a tracheostomy and ending up on a critical care unit. At first, he did not recognise his family.
“He was crying out for a drink,” Julie says. “He was very, very thirsty.” Julie says David’s wife, May, asked if she could give him some water, and was told by a nurse that David was not allowed food or drink. When David was finally given fluids by drip, he began to recognise Julie and May again, and even asked for music books to pass the time.
Julie and her family accused the hospital of putting her father on the LCP without his or his family’s consent, so he could pass away “peacefully” and “with dignity”, as she remembers hospital staff saying at the time. The trust took the unusual step of seeking declarations from the Court of Protection to withdraw what they said were “aggressive” treatments, including CPR; they argued that James had little chance of recovering and that trying to resuscitate him would cause him pain. The judge denied the trust’s application, but this began a long legal journey for the James family that led to a Supreme Court battle via the Court of Appeal after James’s death from cardiac arrest.
That is part of the problem: something is done to excess, it gets fixed, the people who come along later have no idea of the history and go "well everything is fine as it stands today, what is the problem?"
The problem is, we've seen the days when it wasn't okay, and there's little reason to think that there will not be new and improved ways of going off the rails in future.
Hieronymus
9hr ago
Man, if you're right and this is HIynka then that explains some things, but it makes me feel like we're losing out. There were meaningful insights in his post, but they were buried in a structure that prioritized flame-counterflame rather than laying the groundwork (which was mostly in the post!) first and then discussing the arguments clearly if passionately.
If the style and structure of this post had been within a standard deviation of peak Hlynka, it would have been excellent. Why did the mods switch from year-and-a-day bans to permabans? Were too many folks returning in the style of Darwin, with the bone to pick dominating everything else? Hlynka, when he could discuss his experiences openly and not be cagey about ongoing disagreements, was usually better than this. Yeah, there is a risk of spiraling again – we're all human, and he has a temper. But peak Hlynka was irreplaceable.
Clearly I don't follow meta-level Motte issues the way mods do, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Call this a tentative request to reconsider permabans in general and his in particular.
Gaashk
10hr ago
It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".
HereAndGone
10hr ago
You shall not commit adultery.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
Well of course, they first have to figure out their gender identity and sexual orientation and position on polyamory before they can even begin to contemplate ethical non-monogamy. How repressive to tell eight year olds that adultery is sinful!
Throwaway05
10hr ago
Where is the evidence these people have fabricated studies in an attempt to slander the efficacy of opioids?
That's your claim right?
Otherwise you can find a minority population online saying whatever, but they need to have an impact on prescribing habits and the research you deny.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.
The Tom Lehrer (God rest the man) song is funny but acute if you're old enough to have gone through the process when schools were switching from the old way to the new way, and teachers weren't adequately trained yet in the new way.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
See, that's the kind of 'innate understanding from first principles' that my brain just does not have for numbers. I learned my times tables and I'd be lost without them.
I look at that and go "but why pick 2? Why not multiply the 7 by 3 and divide the 8 by 4 if you're doing it that way?" Not getting the underlying patterns means I'm blind as to why "this number rather than that number, this of course is the quadrant of the circle for cos" etc. It's like trying to explain to someone tone-deaf that of course this note from hitting this key on the piano is not the same as this note hitting that key. (I'm bad at that as well, I love music but in music classes at school when we had to identify 'what note was that?' I bombed).
Throwaway05
10hr ago
There's also concern around organ donation. I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
If you want to read more about this some discussion is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1mf2rv4/donor_organs_are_too_rare_we_need_a_new/
Gaashk
10hr ago
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
10hr ago
the solar eclipse (the earliest manuscripts actually specify that it was a solar eclipse, rather than a darkening of the sky)
Please specify, which manuscripts of which texts?
We need a term for the set of things that people and movements push for in practice after all the social dynamics have been accounted for, as opposed to the things they want in principle. Revealed preferences is close, but it comes bundled with a theory of mind I reject. (Revealed preferences are not preferences.)
The only item on your list of goals that anybody would support in principle is separating kids from their parents, and only some would endorse that. But as a practical matter that movement ends up fighting for the whole list.
Well eating ice cream all day gets boring fast.
Eating ice cream as a self-reward after achieving something is better, now we're adding more complexity to the experience as a whole which is broadened beyond just ice cream. Songs are good but songs played at the right time in the film are better. The smile from someone you love is another example, it's more than just a smile because of that added background and context.
Likewise with video games. There's some value in Pong but the simplicity really limits it. You're doing the same thing again and again. If you were doing more and different things at a greater level of depth, without skinner box mechanics to trick the brain into coming back...
but it is that a life dedicated wholly to seeking pleasures is morally empty and contemptible
Wouldn't it be worse for an incompetent to be sticking his nose into a well-running machine earnestly trying to help yet only ever causing more problems? That activates my sense of aversion and cringe. In a world of strong and benign superintelligences, there will probably be nothing that a once-human can do to produce any kind of wealth or benefit. The astrophysics-specialist bots will do all the pondering of the stars at a massively superhuman level, the poetry bots will make poems better than any human or machine could, the engineer-bots will do all the engineering. They were purpose designed to be the absolute best at those things. One could imagine a loverengineer-bot too that spins up a perfect partner specifically for you. If you want a challenge and excitement, there's challenges, reverses, drama...
Having one's heritage be an ape generalist is probably a structural deficiency when it comes to 'ability to do things'.
Our idle pleasure seeker in a post-singularitarian reality would still be a great mind and capable of great feats by our standards but there'd be nothing to contribute. I just don't see how this can be a bad ending if everything you want is on tap, including all the best human experiences and post-human experiences that are even better.
There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse.
That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
Gaashk
10hr ago
Elementary schools are a bit paranoid that someone out there might be a murderer, and might come to their school, but I haven't heard any I've been in suggest that their students themselves might become murderers, and should instead choose not to.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
10hr ago
The research supports this - plenty of people manage without pain control or with more deliberate OTC medication usage.
Yes, if you have to suffer without pain control you can suffer. Having suffered this way, I do not wish to suffer in the future because some drug warrior thinks that opiods are a stain on the American soul. And I have seen some of their writings about how it's better that someone die horribly of acetaminophen toxicity rather than feed an opiod addiction, so I do not believe they have anyone's best interests at heart.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
10hr ago
Why is homicide specifically worse when it's another person doing it?
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
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