domain:nfinf.substack.com
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d 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
2d 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.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
MAGA was against intervention broadly. I don't think I heard a single MAGA aligned person say "boots on the ground are my specific redline" beforehand.
mr_bailey
2d ago
We don't really have a good idea how different individuals will react, this guy seems to have pretty badly f*cked up his life https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/23/us-pilot-magic-mushrooms-plane-engines (tldr pilot takes some mushrooms for depression, 2 days later is riding in the jump seat of plane [as a passenger, not flying the plane] has a bit of mental breakdown and tries to turn off the plane's engines to wake up, the interactions with the crew are odd and suggest to me more of a break with reality [could be due to the shrooms, or not, hard to say definitely] then a murder/suicide but ymmv).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I find it much more reasonable to protect the speech of people I disagree with (e.g. Nazis) than to let people with lots of mental illnesses use firearms. Again, no rights are absolute. This is something everyone implicitly agrees with. For free speech we draw the line at incitement. For firearms we draw the line at crazy people (among several other places). If you're pro crazy-people-having-guns, firstly I think that's just silly on its face, and secondly I don't think it really does much to protect non-crazy-people from having their rights not be infringed.
HereAndGone
2d ago
Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder
It's American, so they can't. Some of the wealthy striving Blue Tribe parents that these programmes are intended for may, indeed, be one or two generations away from the horny-handed sons of toil, so if they're trying to attract the newly wealthy through tech jobs sector, they can't be overtly snobby. The old money upper class already have their own snobby schools, as the review notes:
How do Alpha’s MAP score improvements compare to other selective private schools across the country?
This is an important question for some parents. It is great if you can expect your 5th grader to advance 2.6x faster than they would at the local public school, but if you are planning to spend $40,000/year to send him to Alpha, your alternative is likely not the local public school. And if you are considering moving your family to Austin for the school, your alternative options are places like Horace Mann, Harvard-Westlake, and Lakeside.
So the market for Alpha (and others like it) are the new money, self-made, middle to upper-middle class:
2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha”
MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home.
And these people can't be appealed to on snobbery grounds, since as part of the Blue Tribe values they are all about the DEI, fairness, fight racism, and all the rest of the shiny liberal values. Hence why Alpha has been trying to expand out past the "you're smart and well-off, your kids are smart, let us provide a boutique concierge alternative to public education for you" market so the parents who fork out the 40k per kid can soothe their consciences about their privilege:
The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects.
...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. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?”
Personally I don't think "kids of employees at SpaceX" is the move out from 'well-off smart parents' that they think, but also the comment from a Brownsville parent seems to show it really does work on "rich-kid selection effects", as does the lack of information about the Florida effort.
So in short: they can't sell it overtly as "this is for the 5% to help you hoist your kid into the 1%", as the 1% already have their established track for their kids and don't need Alpha, even for their dumber scions (see the joke about being the cream of society - rich and thick) and the middle-class strivers don't want to think that they're using their privilege to get an unfair leg up.
Above the pale stale Dodgers’ objections, a Stunning and Brave latinx #ChicaJefa recently sang the National Anthem in support of undocumented citizens, sticking it to gringos and their Eurocentric linguistic imperialism by singing in Spanish instead of English.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines.
I would think that as a matter of law, most SC cases are at least somewhat controversial.
Per WP:
Each year, the Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions for certiorari; in 2001 the number stood at approximately 7,500,[2] and had risen to 8,241 by October Term 2007.[3] The court will ultimately grant approximately 80 to 100 of these petitions,[a] in accordance with the rule of four.
They are obviously not going to pick a lot of the clear-cut cases where the circuit courts are all in agreement about what the law is and the SCOTUS would concur. They will likely prefer cases which allow them to steer things more than saying "every court is doing fine, keep doing what you are doing".
From your neat dashboard, it seems like only 16 out of 62 cases are affirmations (which I understand to mean "there was nothing substantial wrong with the lower courts judgement"). This would be a scandalously high rate of reversal, except in the context that for 99% of cases, the lower courts judgement stands because the SC does not grant the petition for cert.
Of course, while e.g. the major questions doctrine may be controversial legally, it is not one of the big battlegrounds of the culture war, which tends to be focused more on the object level. I can totally buy that the 6-3 split is common for CW cases.
It would be interesting to establish a metric how CW a case is. Perhaps the amount of discussion it generates on social media within 48h of publication might be a decent proxy. Or one could arbitrary define and case related to gun rights, abortion, minority/LGBT rights, immigration as CW and everything else as non-CW.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
I am currently reading Private Citizen, by Tony Tulathimutte, on @FtttG's recommendation. (We had some discussion about his collection, Rejection, not long ago, in which appeared his most talked-about story, The Feminist).
So far, Private Citizen is quite entertaining with the same clever and descriptive wordcrafting and vivid descriptions of a certain caste of Millenial. They are all striving fail-trackers in San Francisco, messed up in various ways, and while I enjoy the true-to-life and often hilarious slices of their lives - self-involved neurotic would-be PMCs-in-denial at the bottom end of the social spectrum in the proto-woke era - gods, they're annoying. So far not much of a plot has emerged, but that was true of many of his short stories as well- they were more like "Here is a Certain Type of person and how they end up." It will be a super-dated book in ten years (it's already showing its age) but some things will probably remain timeless, such as the brutal takes on sexual relations. (The "nojob" is cringey and physically painful to read.)
On a less highbrow note, my current audiobook is The Air War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is the eighth book in his Shadows of the Apt series. I wish more people knew about Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's obviously a big seller, and he has two Hugo nominations this year, so he's not exactly a nobody, yet you rarely see him talked about with other big names in fantasy and science fiction. I suppose it's because in some ways, he's not a super-memorable writer; his prose doesn't leap out at you, and he writes so much that it's hard to say he's notable for any one thing or series (he isn't even a "fantasy" or a "science fiction" author - he is very much both, something many authors try to do but few pull off well), other than writing a lot of books. He also seems to be aiming for that inoffensive middle ground where his books are very people-pleasing and as an author, he's an enthusiastic science and gaming nerd but mostly seems to stay out of the culture wars and SFF politics.
But boy does he produce, his output is at Brandon Sanderson or Stephen King levels, and I have read about 20 of his books now and not one let me down. He switches between epic fantasy and space opera and writes long series. I think Sanderson is his closest comparison, and IMO he is a much better writer than Sanderson in every way.
Lewis2
2d ago
If there are still enough nuns.
Therein lies the rub. Also, I’d argue that having a free teaching staff counts as a subsidy from the parish.
HereAndGone
2d ago
I'm not sure I have this right as I'm only going by impressions picked up online at third-hand, but there seems to be the reverse idea about Asian universities: what we would call the state ones are considered the high-value, high-class colleges you want your kids to get into (the equivalent of MIT and the Ivies), going to a private university is considered a step down (think "small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere versus an Ivy League college").
So you grind grind grind to get into the right university to get the degree that will get you into the handful of 'acceptable' large business combines where you grind grind grind to get on the executive path or else you're just an 'office worker' which is a failure.
There is this notion of being an elite/belonging to the elite, and elite seems to mean "from a wealthy family, went to the right university, got into Big Corp and am on the executive promotion track".
Let the more informed correct me, please!
HereAndGone
2d ago
What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!
That's the Elite Human Capital route to success, and why the likes of us are too normie to ever be worth the time of day from Richard Hanania 😁 Reading articles by Freddie deBoer from his time in NY, it gets even more insane: you have to get your kid into the right kindergarten so you and your spouse train the kid like you're stuffing a Strasbourg goose prepping them to pass the entrance exams while both of you cultivate the right connections and present yourselves as the 'right kind of parents'.
You need to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right school to get into the right high school to get into the right college so they will network with the right connections and get into the right careers. Or else their entire lives will be failures.
At least in England, they were upfront about the model of getting into Eton or other public school -> Oxbridge -> civil service career, the professions, or inherit Papa's estate.
"We're smart and successful, our kids are gonna be smart and successful, that means making sure they get into the right schools which will advance their learning on the time-table we think most efficient, you don't get to be the 1% just by lollygagging". The parents would die rather than acknowledge the snobbery, because they've been brainwashed in their turn that this is all about merit: they were smart and bored in school, why didn't the mean ole teachers let them learn what they wanted to learn how they wanted to learn at the pace they wanted to learn, they're going to do better by their own kids.
The fact that achieving this meritorious path means you have to have the spare resources to throw around 40k per kid and be able to quit your job(s), move across the country, and be pretty certain of walking into a similar well-paying job just for a school is swept under the carpet. No, it's all about pure intelligence and enabling kids to learn without clutter of traditional education system.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
So inauthentic; if you're doing that you should be singing in Nahuatl.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
I haven't seen good faith engagement from you in ages in this conversation. You clearly imply that some infringements on the right to bear arms is reasonable but you don't want to admit what that is then you later try and imply that you don't. Those are incompatible and you must pick.
Yes, I've said that an infringement is reasonable if it's a process similar to a felony conviction. And I've said that involuntary commitment is nothing like that. You keep telling me that then I have to solve the problem of people who were involuntarily committed and released buying guns and killing people, or accept that involuntary commitment loses gun rights. And I keep telling you that no, I do not have to solve that problem; that some bad people will get guns is an unavoidable consequence of having a right to keep and bear arms.
HereAndGone
2d ago
They must be doing something necessary because if I understand the review correctly, Alpha is burning through money. So they're not going to pay "guides" higher than market salaries for no reason. I think there must be a lot more 'under the hood' traditional teaching going on than the marketing materials make out. Maybe they discovered that hey, you actually do need physical bodies on the premises when you have a bunch of kids running around, no matter how smart and well-behaved the kids are.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
I don't even know what I don't know about building
You may want to buy a copy of the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction. It's a bit pricey, but absolutely comprehensive in terms of design.
Highly relevant is the International Residential Code. This link leads to the 2024 version. Your jurisdiction probably uses an older version, but you may still want to tell your builder to obey parts of the newest version. In particular, ch. 11 (Energy Efficiency) has undergone major changes recently, such as §§ N1102.1.3 (Insulation and Fenestration Criteria: R-Value Alternative) and N1108.1 (Additional Efficiency Requirements). Appendices NE (Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure) and NG (Energy Efficiency Stretch Code) may also be of interest to you.
International Property Maintenance Code § 404.5 (Overcrowding) also has some handy guidelines for design, and ICC A117.1 (Accessible and Usable Buildings and Facilities) ch. 11 (Dwelling Units and Sleeping Units) has information on the different levels of accessibility that you may want to meet in order to facilitate "aging in place".
t. in the process of getting a two-bedroom custom house built for 220 k$
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Finland collects fairly granular data on languages spoken in Finland, which are often used as a proxy for "foreignness". Here's a table with the numbers of approximately school age children by language family, showing that a large majority continues to be Finno-Ugric speakers and the next largest groups are Germanic speakers (including Finland-Swedes) and Slavic speakers (including recent Ukrainian refugees).
Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.
Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.
thejdizzler
2d ago
Just finished my fourth annual reread of Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, which is perhaps the best one volume history book about the civil war ever written. Some random thoughts from my reread below.
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It seemed like the war was coming long before 1860. At least the South seemed ready to leave the union in the 1850s. So why was there no preparation for this war in terms of stockpiling weapons, encouraging military training/enlistment in the US army? Maybe these things would have been too obvious, but at least pro-secessionist leaders could have encouraged things like the strategic localization of ammunition factories, diversification of agriculture away from cotton, and investment in railroads. Nope, instead we have cope about how feminine mechanized labor is, and how the only real work is overseeing a plantation. This society deserved to lose.
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I think Lee is overrated. He managed to win a ton of really impressive tactical victories, but never seemed to effectively follow these up to destroy the enemy army, which is what all the tactics is supposed to be in service of. In fact, Lee's tactics ended up shredding his army much more than his opponents, and he arguably only won because of northern inability to deal with taking casualties, especially under General McClellan.
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It's interesting how much the rich man's war, poor man's fight theme seems not to be true, in contrast to most modern wars I can think of. It seems like a general on one side or the other dies in almost every engagement (Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James McPherson, to name a few off the top of my head). In fact, generals were something like 50% more likely to die than privates, which is a wild statistic.
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Struck by the respectful treatment of Army of Northern Virginia by Grant/Chamberlein upon Lee's surrender. Yes, the South fought for a horrible cause, but still can respect the valor, leadership, and conduct of people you really strongly disagree with. Perhaps an argument against tearing down confederate monuments/renaming forts. You don't beat a man when he's down. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two from this.
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Insane levels of delusion by Southern leadership in Late 1864/1865. How did Hood think that assaulting breastworks head-on was going to work in Franklin/Nashville? How did Davis think the government was going to continue the war after the fall of Richmond?
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Cool to see how much of the technology of this war would presage WW1. Importance of rail lines and logistics to Northern victory. Also shift to destruction of ability to wage war/armies rather than necessarily capturing territory. Arguably this started with Napoleon too.
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I'm getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
No Hydro, I'm hearing you, but it's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about Ms. Zito. You can't really choose to live in 1890 in 2025, especially when you're in your mid twenties and your family is liberal and lives in another state. There is no realistic pressure that her family can exert on her erstwhile suitor, nor is she herself obedient to her parents' wishes regarding her dating life to begin with.
In 1890 there was an entire familial, legal, social infrastructure around the shotgun wedding. And all of that is required to produce the shotgun wedding. To start, it requires that your dad and male relatives want that for you and want to threaten force to get it done. It requires that society will look the other way when such violence occurs, and that society will look down on the cad who hits "betray" in such a way that he will have trouble finding life opportunities at all if he doesn't marry her.
Ms. Zito can't just magic all that into existence by wishing it were so. If she gets knocked up her New Jersey parents aren't going to threaten to beat the dude up if he doesn't marry her, and if they did the guy wouldn't take them seriously, and if they tried to beat him up he would call the cops and the cops would take his side, and if everyone at work knew what happened it would impact him minimally in his profession that he "stuck his dick in crazy" and "her parents stalked him" or something like that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Great advice for a man, doesn't make "being crazy" a dominant female strategy.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2d ago
Is there a new cheating epidemic?
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Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree
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High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
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.
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