domain:alexepstein.substack.com
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
Women being associated with very high status men causes them to gain in status, though. There’s clearly a parallel status ladder.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
It’s not hard to find very intelligent right wingers that went to Ivy League schools recently enough for this to be a concern. They do not, generally, express things in a maximally based way- they use more nuanced phrasing to express a broader point.
Before we continue this discussion, I believe you should read all 7 Harry Potter books. I also believe you should read the Bible and the Torah. I believe you should read the Dead Sea Scrolls. I believe you should have an AI translate all 7 Harry Potter books into Swahili and read them again. Learn Swahili first if you have to, time is apparently no object. I believe you should read every word ever written by Thomas Aquinas. I believe you should re-read them, but this time reinterpret them as the works of Thomas Aquinas's black trans lesbian housekeeper, plagiarized without credit.
Since you seem to desire to continue this discussion regardless of your requested pause, I'll be happy to indulge you just once more before honoring your requested pause for the Swahili translation step.
Which surprisingly is the only one I haven't already done. (Well, mostly. I don't think there's an authoritative word count for Aquinas.)
I will start by noting that you have retreated from the earlier bailey. I am happy for you to abandon prior arguments about midwit professors, defending blood sacrifice, and other arguments I did not make. I will be interested if your next / last post in this exchange abandons any more strawmen arguments I did not make.
I think you're operating under a misconception. You seem to think I disagree with the concept of reading things. I do not. My point of contention with you is that you are not making any actual arguments in favor of your position. Telling people to read more books is not an argument.
Disagree with the concept of reading? Heavens no. I just think you had a bit of a reading comprehension failure.
I suspect you believed it was advocating some sort view that ethics reading would/should change one's own ethics, hence you emphasis in response two that no reading would change your moral worldview, as if that was an objective.
I also think you also thought I was advocating dimwit-professor-led ethics classes, hence your repeated reference to the dimwits characterization, until response three after your (hopefully) accidental almost-insinuation against Pasha was teased.
I also think you completely missed the point that recommending self-pursued reading outside of a university class format is a complete non-advocacy for, well, university-level ethics classes.
Further, my conception of you is that you are doubling down in a you-won't-admit-it's-embarrassment defensiveness and are trying to claim some rhetorical moral high ground after your earlier mistakes were teased. You are attempting to reposition to an argument about making unreasonable demands, despite no demands having been made of Pasha, by using a ironic-equivalence of a raising learning Swahili as a precondition for further discussion. A language whose only relevance to the discussion is to demonstrate the difficulty of unreasonable demands. Since clearly learning Swahili is as relevant, and as unreasonable, a precondition for addressing provided arguments as...
...checks notes...
...recommending someone read about a potentially interesting and useful subject in a way that avoids a medium and format they have said they don't trust.
Checks out.
It's not that I don't know enough about ethics, or that I haven't considered the possibility that other people might believe different things than me. My point is very simple: If you're here to make an argument, then make it. If you're not here to make an argument then you should at least stop trying to give people homework.
If your point was simply about homework, you would have talked about homework from the start, rather than spending the first two responses talking about blood sacrifices and the strength of your convictions and dimwit professors.
But hey. It's still the internet. Being called out can be embarrassing, even more so than leaving with out the last word. In fact, I'll even give you a hand with some counter arguments you could leave off with.
You could argue that you did not actually miss the argument, but that it was not long enough, even though there's no requirement for how long an argument needs to be in a short post. You could argue that you were requesting an elaboration of the argument, which I unfairly did not provide, despite you not asking for a longer argument. You could even argue that you didn't misunderstand the argument at all, truly.
But for your pending last word, I would suggest that 'you did not make an argument' falls a little flat after three iterations of the argument have been provided, and then had it's presence ignored even after being re-posted and bolded for emphasis. That would be just a tad embarrassing to end off on.
Especially if you were so predictable as to do it after being predicted you would try for the last word.
Farewell. I'll not respond until after I learn Swahili, so consider any last word yours.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
I definitely remember being taught about the Spanish American war, but I think most of my classmates, if asked today, would say something like ‘well, Cuba attacked Maine, so we had to go to war’ on the high end of historical knowledge. There’s only so much class time to go around, especially when a full 70% of it has to be dedicated to the civil war/slavery and WWII/the Holocaust.
SkoomaDentist
23hr ago
Professors in the 21st century don’t grade homework in much of the world.
I always get frustrated in conversations like this where so many Americans assume that their rather peculiar system must be the norm everywhere.
The Complete Works of Saki. Pen name of H. H. Munro, a bitchy gay early 20th century British writer. Mostly wrote short stories, which are delightful.
SerialStateLineXer
23hr ago
this study seems to show some convergence in educational outcomes with Hispanics (although it includes all kinds of Asians)
The problem with cross-sectional comparisons of different generations is that each generation is from a different wave of immigrants. This study was published in 1998, using data from students who were in eighth grade in 1988, meaning that the 3rd+ generation were from families that had been in the country since long before the 1965 reopening of the country to Asian immigrants. And 20% of 3rd+ generation were Pacific Islanders and 50% "other Asians"; who knows what that means?
Because the legacy Asians come from very different cultural and genetic backgrounds, you can't necessarily attribute to generational differences to assimilation.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
It seems interesting to me that standards for finishing school may be lower, but before then they’re actually higher. Math and reading are much more advanced much faster than they used to.
I wonder if this is why everything seems to be graded on a curve these days.
TitaniumButterfly
23hr ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever
I'm not sure I buy it. "Teaching how to think" may have been a self-congratulatory justification for a while, but people in the past weren't that shy about teaching morals.
Not gonna lie, I do find the idea appealing, but these days I wonder if it's even possible. The whole idea just smells like the pretense of neutrality that liberals emanate, as long as they have ways of ensuring they will always win the argument.
AvocadoPanic
23hr ago
I can't speak to the demographics of the student population referenced in the article.
Speaking with my friend who teaches at the local community college the students he'd fail would overwhelmingly be from 'disadvantaged' or minority backgrounds and would lead to uncomfortable conversations. I suspect some form of this plays a role in many schools.
I remember reading Sowell's "Vision of the Annointed". "Nuance" would not have been a word I'd use to describe it, and it seems to me that nuance, as typically deployed, often obscures rather than reveals. Sometimes, things can in fact be relatively straightforward.
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