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Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
48m ago
pbmonster
47m ago
Can you elaborate?
Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?
RenOS
something is wrong
33m ago
You need to distinguish some things.
First, you need to treat technological and social progress separately. Our civilization has been steadily progressing technologically for several centuries at this point, but it has been one of the biggest lies/self-delusions that the social changes happening alongside were consistent improvements. Some were, some weren't, and mostly it was just a change in the trade-off curve the ramifications of which we still probably haven't fully experienced and can't appropriately judge.
Second, the current state and the pace & direction of change; I agree that western society increasingly seems sclerotic, overregulated and overinterdependent. Nevertheless, the peak we have reached is pretty damn impressive, and even rome took centuries to fully break down, with golden ages lasting decades, long after its eventual fate seemed sealed.
Third, private and public. The reason why conservatives lean happier is that they are, on average, grillers. If you just ignore the public dysfunction, pretend there is nothing you can do about it and focus on ways to improve your own life, it's actually quite easy to get by and be happy. Imo this is the reason why civilizations peak; After reaching some level of prosperity, it's much easier to just pay off dysfunction to not bother you instead of fighting against it. At first it's a great deal, since in % terms it's very little, and there is a lot of inertia about not falling into dysfunction staving off the bad incentives. But what is incentived, grows, and eventually it's "suddenly" substantial, but now so many people depend on it that there is now way of getting rid of it without a revolution. Usually the society is still overall quite prosperous, so they just try to limit the growth at this point, or if you have really competent & conscientious people in charge they may even manage to find a way to slowly whittle down the dependency a bit. But it's a lot of work for almost no return for yourself, while frequently making lots of unnecessary enemies. So, the smartest and most competent at best actively avoid politics & just improve things in small localized ways, or at worst take advantage of the situation to redirect more stuff their way while paying off the important interest groups.
pbmonster
29m ago
Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.
Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.
aldomilyar
16m ago
Why would I want to let my gifted kid nerdsnipe themselves into a track with likely minimal real world applications so they can then be runover by academic hiring affirmative action after accumulating their paper qualifications?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9m ago
(but then why have representatives in the first place?)
The good answer used to be "because the infrastructure doesn't exist to do direct democracy on a greater-than-city scale".
The okay answer with major caveats is "because unitary executives are more effective at getting shit done than a Roman system". This obviously only applies to the executive branch.
The bad answer which I suspect is like 80% of why we still have parliaments is "there is no procedure in most nations for abolishing a parliament without the parliament's own consent, which 100% of its members are strongly incentivised not to give".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6m ago
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind. The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
Back in the day, elite career paths included an early training job that was supposed to force you into contact with the reality of working-class life in a way which reflected your status as a potential future ruler. Leadership with training wheels, effectively. The canonical example was sending young officers into the field with an experienced platoon sergeant, but something similar was happening in old-school corporate life where the wet-behind the ears graduate management trainee would be given a shift manager role in their first or second rotation where they would work alongside an experienced foreman.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2m ago
The "underrepresented major" type, think arch and anth at Oxbridge (iirc) or music at MIT
This doesn't work in the Ivy league, where you are admitted without committing to your major. It is a big deal at Oxbridge, probably the last surviving rich-kid backdoor.
Lizzardspawn
1m ago
Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.
When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.
And why much worse?
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