coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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30d ago
If you’re increasing everyone’s skill across the board then you haven’t made any domain more competitive. It would just be that everyone you come across is more competent. There would be the same amount of competitive within an industry, though it would definitely be harder to break into an industry in adulthood.
coffee_enjoyer
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30d ago
Hereditary profession is not quite the same thing as nepotism, at least that’s not how I took it. Hereditary profession could mean that a lawyer purposefully raises a lawyer and a composer a composer, and that this is expected; nepotism means that a lawyer hires and promotes his kin who are lawyers, and a doctor his kin. My proposal doesn’t entail anything about nepotism, but it would involve an element of hereditary influence on profession. I think 1 in 5 American physicians are children of physicians, and there are 3.5 physicians per 1000 Americans, so clearly the children of doctors are influenced to be doctors.
Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them
I don’t follow. Many people in history did one task repetitively for hours on end, eg farming or weaving or milling or fishing. We have cases of people focusing on one skill and they improve in that skill. They might nominally be in school, but they attend special schools that are online and not taxing. So we know that Magnus would spends hours a day on chess. We know pianists spend hours a day on piano. We know marathon runners spend hours a day running. Faker, the best strategy gamer, spent 10-15 hours per day practicing. So it’s been abundantly tried, and the results show that the more practice the greater the result. (With the right kind of practice, and with rest, and with diminishing returns).
if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five
How about you just place your kid in fun math contexts for 3 hours a day, and then an hour a day of challenging practice, and then the rest is for enjoying life and maybe some exercise? They will be better at math and they will have more free time. They won’t know about ovaries, orangutans, Ontario or Othello, but they will be better at math than anything else you could do. If they want to read a good book, they ask someone. If they want to know the capitol of California, they look it up. Seems perfect to me, just requires each specialist human to trust the other specialist humans. Adirondacks sound nice though. He can go there on vacation with the time and money he has saved up from not knowing about colonial period.
we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world
Well you haven’t really shown why that is so certain. If my beloved friend is a trucker, I know that specializing in trucking at an early age will be better for his health, reduce accidents, reduce stress, and increase his earnings. I can’t think of a line of work that wouldn’t be aided by specialization.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I was just reading about a woman who loved novels and wanted to be writer but was pressured into going to an elite school for mathematics. That was Maryam Mirzakhani —
Maryam was not particularly interested in mathematics as a child (although she noticed that she could solve the homework problems of her older siblings quite easily). Her passion was reading novels, and her dream was to become a writer. Things changed when she moved on to middle school […] A specialized Farzanegan middle school for girls gifted in mathematics was opened in Tehran, and Maryam enrolled. She was initially taken aback by the steep jump in difficulty. Her first year was not great. But she persevered and realized that she could make fast progress when she made an effort.
The problem with whim is that it’s whimsical. For every person who ignores their passion and regrets it, there’s one or more who ignored their passion and thanks God for it. For every person who wishes they continued trying to be a famous actress, there’s a person who curses their life that they focused on something they aren’t good at, and there’s someone who loves their life because their parents told them not to be naive about an acting career. For every “society has gained a good mathematician, but has lost a great writer”, there’s “society has gained a mediocre writer, but has lost a universally important mathematician”. In college I knew someone who wanted to be a personal trainer. He studied for four years, and after graduating he suddenly hated it. I met him when he returned to do a new four-year degree as a computer science student.
we corral every child into is exposing them to various activities so they can make this choice for themselves
This does not take the thousands of hours of training we administer. This takes, like, three hours per subject. And I support that. Kids should try lots of things to find what they are good at and what they really like. And then they should attempt to balance the two. IMO it’s better to look what one is good at, find what is bearable, and then see if you can’t find enjoyment from it. If there’s still no enjoyment, then they should make a switch. But there are so many people in the world who enjoy making music but are terrible at it, and then there are excellent performers who actually dislike performing. There are writers who hate writing, then there’s a shitty novella published every hour by someone who should just work at a library. Life is weird.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I think chess requires creativity. But if business requires exceptional creative cross-domain understanding, then that “cross-domain understanding” should be included in the specialization training. It’s not every domain which enhances business aptitude, right? It’s unlikely that knowing Shakespeare, the hormonal cycle, and dinosaurs will enhance your business aptitude. Steve Jobs was exceptional because he took design philosophy and applied it to technology, but that’s actually hardly an everyman type of knowledge, it’s the conjunction of two skills which he mastered. He didn’t need to know about early American history, and it would even have been better if he read less eastern spirituality (resulting in his untimely demise through woo woo dieting).
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
It is true in the sense that people organically want to make money, and want to master what will make them the most money, and the most visible needs of society are (often) financially rewarded when supplied. I would also say that the right kind of training can make someone enjoy otherwise boring work — there are people who can make excel exciting, for instance. And then I would make a separate point that the education of youth should involve reality: the reality of one’s capabilities, the reality of which jobs will fit them, and the reality of what one is expected to earn according to their performance. Current educational models divorce the youth from reality whereas simply eliminating education altogether (though not my proposal) would immediately make reality salient. A 10-year-old working at the mall instead of studying at school sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet that entire time he is learning the reality of life, that work and money are requirements and that skill and performance matter. When exactly does a kid saliently learn that in school? A 45-min documentary their substitute English teacher plays? That’s not “I am working six hours stocking a shelf” levels of salience and realization and motivation. But that point is an aside and not my proposal, but we should find a way to deeply persuade the youth about reality by the age of 10.
If I can predict your point, it’s that a kid who ought to be trained as a construction worker will opt to attend a school specializing in programming because of the possibility of higher wages. But I think you can persuade the parents + the child that this is not in their interest because reality says it is unlikely, in the same way you can persuade people not to gamble. Note that, if the quality of life for construction workers rises because they get to work earlier in life and are less stressed, then the looming threat of working blue collar is no longer a threat, it’s just a different choice. You will still make money and start a family, etc. I think also just taking money from the super-wealthy and giving it to the employed lower classes is also a great idea which would propel efficiency for a similar reason, that people will opt into specializing in this work because it’s not “the end of the world” being employed there. Classism and over-competition actually winds up reducing efficiency as people opt into chasing the prospect of higher wages when they are better fitted for lower wage professions. But that’s a totally different topic.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
You don’t need to make it hereditary, or fully hereditary, as you can test the child’s own aptitude and interest. But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”. In American history, choice and “hereditarian influence” coexisted, as elite children historically pursued a similar field as their parents, with slots always open for talented newcomers. (Consider the Founding Fathers, or our presidents, I suppose). When Britain was dominant in history, there was a hereditarian aspect, as well as when the Ottomans were dominant, or Rome, or France. I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you? Artisans produced artisans, unless the kid was precocious and gifted.
What do we do with the mathematical equivalent of a Ballerina who gets too fat?
If the child who is on the math specialty regimen simply isn’t good, then they should be pushed to something else, and this can occur before the age of 8. We could feasibly design a national index to ensure we don’t raise up too many mathematicians. But if the student trains in math and then randomly begins to hate math, well, that’s a problem that occurs today already. It occurs today because our training environment (school and university) is divorced from the work environment (reality), so we produce doctors who realize they like studying rather than practicing medicine, teachers who realize they hate dealing with children, etc. A rather dumb system. But anyway, if the math-trained realize they hate math, they work somewhere else; we say “that sucks”, and give him a less skilled job somewhere else, perhaps where counting is involved. We want this to occur as early as possible though, and today it occurs quite late.
[elbow injuries in baseball]
Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law thay you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement. There’s nothing to generalize here. Practicing a skill every day is still the rule of thumb for mastery. While that kid is resting his ligaments from the unnatural pitching maneuver, there are still many ways they can be practicing baseball: watching tapes, jogging, improving endurance and diet, or just resting really deeply. But personally, in my ideal world there would be no serious competitive sport, definitely nothing subsidized by schools and the state — sports should be something you do for fun with friends, like a game of Call of Duty, lightly competitive but not neurotic. Sports should be a game about improving your health and having fun, not stats-maxxing.
Olympians
I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive. There’s lots of people who ran track in high school who now love running as a routine. (Two great books I loved about running, “the loneliness of the long distance runner”, and “what I talk about when I talk about running”, depict a more indulgent and purely positive type of running). It’s also possible they they have an addictive personality and substituted competition for food, or that genetics are involved.
Please never work at a think tank
I would never waste my time doing something so ineffectual, so you have nothing to fear. Spending two dozen pages and sixty-nine citations saying something uninteresting, read by fewer people than an average post on the internet, which could be better summarized in a few paragraphs if the evidence is based on compelling common information? I’ll leave that to more grandiose minds. Someone should do a study to see whether think tanks or 4chan have been more influential in shifting political views in the US (was it a think tank that influenced Elon Musk and his influence?) — a perfect study for a think tanker, if you know anyone.
evidence of this is that most prodigies start young
No. The evidence for this is that most elite performers start young across competitive domains. Chess and instrument performance are the most well-known and competitive. Children can learn more efficiently than an adult, so I’m surprised that you disagree with that.
What do you think that world looks like?
I’m glad you asked. We should be focusing on making a world with less stress. If everyone hones their professional skills in childhood, everyone will be less stressed. We should also be focusing on a world with less mandatory working hours. If everyone hyper-specializes, we could get away with reducing working hours due to increased efficiency, entering the workforce at a younger age, and fewer required schooling hours. We also want a world where things work well, which requires experts experting.
The world already has massively disproportionate rewards for the prodigies
Only for comparatively worthless skills, and then also like, 0.1% STEM performers. But my proposal is that whichever career we can reasonably predict you entering, we should train you in those skills at the youngest age. Whether that’s construction, retail, technology, teaching, etc. If you are most likely going to be a waiter your whole life, then we should train you in all possible skills related to that and then send you on your way. Waiting isn’t skill-intensive, but there are still skills (social charm, physical endurance). When trained, why shouldn’t they begin to work at 13? That’s four extra years of work, four years cost reduction in schooling (not counting college), it’s better for the waiter himself, and it increases likelihood of family formation too.
I'll tell you what that world looks like. It's China
If anything, our current system is based off the Chinese imperial examination method of schooling. Every Chinese kid regardless of career destiny is made to study way too much across way too much material. There’s no specialization at all until much later.
gaslighting me into buying more knicknacks or signing me up for more subscription services
I agree but I consider this an ancillary topic. But I’ll give my opinion because you brought it up. I think, if every worker is trained in their specific work, that we will actually have time to instill them with practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is vastly more important than knowing biology, phys ed, history, or even lots of maths you don’t wind up using. And practical wisdom would be all about spotting deception, knowing the dangers of consumerism and the hedonic treadmill, knowing how to spot someone trustworthy, knowing how to find a good deal. If there is one universal skill-set for training every human, it would be this. So something like “hyper-specialization plus universal practice wisdom” would be ideal.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
We already train kids for 8 hours every weekday plus homework, beginning at a young age. I’m saying that that this training should simply be more specialized, not that it needs to be more strenuous. In fact, if you make it more specialized, we could probably get away with making it less stressful.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
We don’t know if his interest in math began at 14, only that by 14 he started teaching himself college-level math. In Maryam’s case, she enrolled in a specialized math middle school, so she started focusing mostly on math at 11-12. Anyway, when I read that these prodigies started at ~11-14, I think that it’s sad that they didn’t start at 5. Surely if they started at 5 they would be even better.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Are you sure about Scholze? I couldn’t find anything but this
Scholze started teaching himself college-level mathematics at the age of 14, while attending Heinrich Hertz Gymnasium, a Berlin high school specializing in mathematics and science. At Heinrich Hertz, Scholze said, “you were not being an outsider if you were interested in mathematics.”
And his parents were in STEM, likely teaching him at an earlier age than his specialized high school.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
But in music performance and sports, we do find that the younger they start the better they are.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I think this depends on what you mean by pushing. There are ways to incentivize and promote childhood expertise that don’t revolve around “I will punish you if you don’t train for hours every day”. You can put a child in formative social contexts where their identity becomes tied to the skill, and where they want to master the skill in order to enhance their reputation in the social context. A bad thing to do would be to threaten your child to be a pianist. A good thing to do would be to show him how amazingly well good pianists are treated socially, how they get to go on adventures around the world, how the skill is valuable, how beautiful the music they make is, present them in front of a kind pianist who they now want to please… once their identity has been changed, then you can gently criticize their worst habits of laziness. I recall reading a study on this (child prodigies) and the author noted that the first months of skill development must purely involve play, interest, and fun. The hard training comes later in the same way it does for soccer players — but surely no one would think a top soccer player ought not be forced to train.
If you take the Chomsky example, you can imagine he was eager to please his father and father’s friends. The Magnus example, he was eager to accrue as many wins and titles as he could. There’s an element of, like, gentle propaganda here.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
IQ is an absolute requirement, but no amount of IQ will lead you to being a chess great if you started the skill at 16. Ed Witten seems like a bizarre anomaly as far as STEM goes, and I wonder how much his father taught him physics as a child — it may be that he had some childhood expertise but momentarily decided to pursue journalism.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
We should probably figure out how to hyper-specialize people by the age of five
It’s known that to be the best chess player or instrumentalist you need to start at a young age, with ~5 being a common age to start for the best in the world. If you’re a chess prodigy or world class cellist, you hyperfocus on these skills throughout your childhood, and it’s accepted that you sacrifice normal schooling and extra-curriculars to pursue your skill. But why do we only allow this for the most worthless skills? There’s nothing unique about chess or cello — to be the best at any skill you need to start at around five. The Olympian Yuto Horigome started skateboarding before he could walk; Mark Zuckerberg started making apps before he was a teenager; Noam Chomsky joined political discussions as a child when accompanying his father to the newspaper stand; Linda Ronstadt learned all the genres of music she would later perform before 10; Von Neumann and Mozart had legendary childhood specializations.
But every skill is like this. If we want the best therapists, they need to be practicing conversation and understanding people by five, hours every day. If we want the best philosophers or practical thinkers, they need to be arguing and testing themselves by five, hours every day. Similar for movie directors, novelists, designers. This even applies to skills that are essential but not economical, like being a good mother, or being a good friend. And to skills that are essential for implementing political change, like writers and representatives and propagandists and moralists. Imagine if your teacher in school were a master at motivating, disciplining, and explaining, and had training in these skills like Mozart with music? Imagine if everyone’s gym teacher or exercise trainer had training to be like Jocko Willick and Tony Robbins? How much more accurate would your doctor’s diagnosis be if he had trained in medicine since five, instead of 21? (By five, a child can learn 5 different languages without accent. By 13, Magnus Carlsen’s skill equaled that of a 40yo Garry Kasparov). We all enjoy Scott’s writings — now imagine a version of Scott that is a better writer, specialized in writing, who outputs even more?
I think we are wasting enormous potential for social improvement by corralling every child into the same mandatory (and inefficient) skill-training, instead of specializing them at an early age. Would Mozart be more valuable for knowing biology? What if Caravaggio knew calculus? What if Einstein took a Spanish class for 2000 precious childhood hours? What if George Washington knew what an atom was? We would have just made them worse, and the world worse by consequence. We are raising up a generation of woefully mid professionals — a whole society of sub-perfect workers across every industry. Everyone a jack of trades, master of none.
And this is more serious than just “they aren’t as good”. It’s also that they can’t perform as many work iterations in a day, their working years are shorter, and they are more stressed (which has multigenerational effects). That little kid you see at the Chinese restaurant ringing up the order for his parents hasn’t just learned to perform that specific skill well, he is also able to perform it for more hours in the day, he can start at a younger age, and he incurs less of a stress cost. That means he is happier, which means you get happier, and it also means his stress is reduced, which means his kid is healthier, and so the cycle goes on. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t apply to a number of industries.
Lastly, I wonder if the “wasteful hobby specialization” among Western youth isn’t due to our denial of their specialization instinct. Boys love becoming experts at something, and today they become experts at video games, or their hair, or some entertainment product, or memes. We have excluded them from any useful specialization, and so they specialize in uselessness, forming a perverse “pair-bond” with a hobby instead of a career. This is a grave evil. How many Asmongolds have we brought into the world, experts at a fantasy world because they have been denied real life’s RPG? This element can’t be ignored. A world where everyone you meet is as passionate in their work as a WoW player would be close to perfection.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
JRE is so large that, even if the core audience were all MMA fans and young men, the non-core audience would dwarf the size of the audience of the next largest non-core creator / space. Eg, 32% of JRE listeners are parents, which is low, yet it’s still probably the most popular podcast among parents.
I second that his gaffes will be bad though.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
Note how this photo op is in McDonald’s interests. There’s been a huge shift online against “slop” and seed oils, overwhelmingly among young conservatives (one of the weird role reversals in recent years, along with young conservatives criticizing the military and vaccines). Making a big display of Trump serving the slop winds up associating Trump with McDonald’s in a nostalgic, Home Alone cameo kind of way, which improves their image among at at-risk demographic. The Democrats who care so much that they are willing to forego McDonald’s are few and far between, and no one will remember it in a few months anyway. But McDonald’s meanwhile gets a stupid amount of advertising. Whether the spectacle was a farce, insensitive, an homage to Americana, whether Kamala really worked there — McDonald’s is the constant in the controversy.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or if basic reasoning is actually at an all time low, but the “debunking” that the store preselected customers and that it was just for a photo op is absurd. (Top post on Reddit for the week is approximately that). Like yeah, of course they didn’t allow a presidential candidate with 3x attempts on his life to serve anyone driving by. Do they have any idea how risky it would be to do that, even if you scanned all the cars beforehand? Of course it was just for photos — do they think he was genuinely employed there? None of these debunk or detect an iota of the spectacle, but that they are shilled so hard signals that there really are low IQ Americans who are persuaded by this. The Reddit political propaganda in recent weeks has also been lots of “look at this photo taken at an inopportune moment that makes him look bad”, like the Elon Musk jumping photo. Yeah, if 20 photographers take 500 photos each, some are destined to make the subject look bad.
widely seen as trashy and disrespectful
I disagree. It was widely seen as awesome, including by those in attendance. It was narrowly seen as trashy by snotty rich progressives who don’t want to admit they enjoy the occasional fast food.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
What do you think IQ is exactly
IMO IQ is the malleability of animal pattern recognition, which allows for human intelligence dissociated from pure animal instinct (sex, aggression, status). The cognition which would otherwise be dedicated to learning what is sexually attractive and dominant can instead be allocated toward abstract, socially-mediated goals. This explains why high IQ is associated with higher rates of virginity and delayed age of first sexual experience (the instinct is less powerful; otherwise, the high intelligence would lead to earlier and easier sexual experiences). It also explains why having a high IQ doesn’t appear to be related to skill in music composition, as an element of animal instinct is essential. And it explains the popular notion that there is something socially “strange” about very smart people.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
This is the great utility of alcohol. It is supposed to be used to increase friendship in a peaceful setting. It should be had in the morning or afternoon so it doesn’t affect sleep. People who claim that alcohol is bad for the brain haven’t understood its optimal use case, where the cognitive benefits more than compensate for the minor damage. Poor social bonding causes greater cognitive damage than moderate drinking, and communities without bonds cause cognitive damage through its secondary effects on the polis. Hypothetically, if you were to go on runs with friends and then celebrate at the end with drinking, this would be better for your health than running without drinking, because by drinking you increase the likelihood that you will continue to run, and vastly increase the social bonds which have secondary health consequences over time (and also increase your likelihood of running). Sadly I can’t drink as it only makes me sick and anxious for some reason, but I’ll always defend its legitimate uses. Better drinking advice: never go to a bar, never drink alone, only drink in celebratory bonding social settings with benevolent peers.
Aside: a place not far from me has taken advantage of our state’s lax rules about wine tastings. You don’t need an expensive liquor license for wine tasting. They give you all the tasting cups at once, along with a large glass that you can pour the small cups into. Behold: a liquor license for the clever, without costing 350k.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I am claiming you are impassioned because you misread my post with extraordinary confidence, and then proceeded to act like I was lying for informing you that you misread my post. Not because you have a point of view. This is despite my original assertion having abundant and frankly unnecessary qualifiers due to the sensitivity of our pro-Israel contingent.
corrosive to reasonable discourse
This is ironic, no? I didn’t mind your faux pas but now you’re claiming some sort of moral high ground. After woefully misreading my post you wrote
slippery goalpost-moving
Again, stop being slippery. Do we need to go through this word by word?
Debunking you point by point and line by line, while tedious,
are now pretending that that's what was in dispute.
Again, moving goal posts.
[random accusation that I use alts]
There’s definitely some corrosion and disingenuous posting, I agree with you there.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I don’t think it’s a given that these humanitarian doctors sympathize with Palestinians especially rather than humankind generally. I also don’t think that sympathy to Palestinian kids in their practice would lead to biasing their answers to a survey. There’s a subset of doctors who seek out wild ways to help people, and there is no wilder or more attention-grabbing way to help people than volunteering in Gaza. I would wager (total conjecture here) that volunteering in Gaza is actually a coveted position for young medical school graduates. Maybe 1% are accepted. It will probably shift to Arabic-speakers for practical reasons, so maybe that’s a small selection bias. It beats potentially getting malaria in Africa or helping alcoholic Appalachians in West Virginia.
that’s a tell
There’s no tell. I remember almost zero biographical details of any posters. Google tells me that your name is Gaelic for fool. Why do you think the Irish are so critical of Israel — are they all secret anti-semites too? You are clearly impassioned in this particular topic. Slippery this, that’s a tell that, Jew-hater there, alt accusations yonder… it’s all so tiresome .jpg
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
I don’t know why you would include the line “the NYT didn’t interview every doctor” if you weren’t insinuating that the sample was biased by the NYT. But okay, if you’re not alleging that, then you’re alleging that the doctors were under some pressure by Hamas to testify in a certain way? This hypothesis is unevidenced, would be evidenced if it happened (given how important it would be for the Israeli propaganda machine), contrary to the nature of the interview (anonymous), and counter-evidenced (20% of doctors said it didn’t happen). So I have to simply ask why you retain this belief. If you’re merely insinuating that the doctors, by virtue of their willingness to volunteer in Gaza, are predisposed to lie (?), or predisposed to like Hamas (?), or by virtue of caring about dying children are willing to exaggerate how many they saw (?)… maybe it would just be helpful if you tell me clearly what you believe.
To copy-paste my original assertion,
Some extremist branches rise up in some Jewish academies, especially among the conservative and non-ultra orthodox. These extremist branches are most likely to pour out students onto the Israeli military. In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel
Please notice the italics. My assertion would wholly explain why the children are shot in the head. There are 20k-30k Israeli soldiers in Gaza. How many deprave, genuinely evil Jewish extremist soldiers do you need in order to see too many killed children? Not most. Not half. Mere percents in combat roles. Yet this is not excusable; the failure of Israel to check or punish its extremists is inexcusable.
For some reason you are naive about the extremism in Israel. So I will provide more sources. It’s almost Jihadi, indeed we may call it Jewhadi. Apparently the support for sexually torturing POWs by some Israeli leaders, and the call for killing children by what amounts to a military recruiter, were not sufficient. From Haaretz:
In late January, Rabbi Dov Lior, a leading Orthodox rabbinic figure on the religious far-right, was asked if it was permissible to desecrate the Sabbath to block humanitarian aid to Gaza […] For Lior, blocking aid to a starving population, even against the wishes of the Israeli military and an extreme right-wing government, is a more crucial religious commandment than keeping the Sabbath.
To be a good Jew is to put the collective punishment of Palestinians ahead of basic observance. Recently, Rabbi Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Zfat, even wrote a special prayer for those blocking humanitarian aid.
This mode of religious thinking, which sees God as a God of holy wars and vengeance and demands that Jews act violently in His name, has been gaining ground for more than half a century in some extremist corners of Israel and the Diaspora. But since October 7, it has developed into a more coherent and grotesque worldview, a political theology that licenses and even commends collective punishment and the proliferation of gun licenses while undermining or even dismissing efforts to return the hostages. It demands the expulsion or total submission or death of Palestinians
From the New Yorker, interviewing Yehuda Shaul, who founded “an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories”:
Over the years, every once in a while you would see a video of settlers attacking Palestinians with soldiers not intervening. In the past four or five years, there was a transition. We moved from soldiers standing idly by while Palestinians were being attacked to soldiers sometimes even joining the attacks. Sometimes it was soldiers who were settlers, who were back at home in the settlement or the outpost where they live, or where their friends live, and the guys are organizing to go down and attack Palestinians, so they take their gun or come half in uniform and join the attack. Sometimes it’s because specific military units were made up largely of extremist, nationalist, religious guys that the U.S. was even contemplating restricting military assistance to. But after October 7th things got even worse. Now the settlers are the soldiers and the soldiers are the settlers
two more things are happening. One is the sociological change in the Army. What we see is a significant shift within the Army—a change from the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists. People like Smotrich.
In 1990, only two and a half per cent of graduate officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist religious. In 2015, it was nearly forty per cent. That’s about three times their size in society. So you have this change, this sociological change, of middle-, high-class, secular, better educated military people going into cybersecurity and signal intelligence, more into positions that can advance their status in the economy post-military service, while the combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues, the nationalist-religious guys, as well as blue-collar people. In the past decade, there has been a big fight in the I.D.F. about who the real authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?
In 2016, two Palestinian attackers stabbed a soldier, wounding him. The Palestinians were shot. One of them was killed—the other one was neutralized, laying on the ground. Minutes later, a military medic called Elor Azaria arrived and he shot one bullet into the head of the Palestinian—basically executed him. And it was all filmed by a Palestinian activist who was living nearby. Once this came out, there was outrage. Ultimately, Azaria was indicted, but there was outrage about the fact that he was indicted. And it got to a place where even Netanyahu, who was the Prime Minister, called the shooter’s parents to show support. Ultimately, Moshe Ya’alon, who was the minister of defense at the time—a right-winger and a former chief of staff of the I.D.F.—had to resign, among other reasons, because he supported the indictment. Azaria was sentenced to eighteen months for basically an execution that was filmed.
That was the moment where the rank and file within the Army, plus the political base of the Likud Party and the Israeli right, essentially rebelled against the old guard who want to say that the I.D.F. is a professional army with discipline, who want to tell a story to the world of adherence to international law, checking ourselves, investigation, accountability. Now it became, “In our Army, we have different ethics than you, and we have a different idea of rule of law than you have. And it’s unacceptable that a soldier will be indicted for this.” For me, that’s the threshold where you understand that, at least at the level of the rank and file, the ideas had changed.
For me, the idea that bad things are happening in Gaza, that bad things will happen in detention centers, is not surprising. But how bad they are, to be honest, is surprising. I fear that we’re just scratching the surface here. And I fear the fact that the media is largely not yet in Gaza. I fear that we’re going to discover that we’ve reached serious new lows in our behavior—in terms of rules of engagement that were extremely permissive in the amount of collateral damage allowed, and in terms of treatment of detainees
I think there is a big chunk of Israeli society that, for them, the kind of assault that is alleged against detainees actually sounds reasonable. It sounds reasonable to people in the Knesset today and for ministers in the government. You saw thousands of Israelis standing and defending these soldiers, even with what is alleged that they’ve done. That’s how low we’ve reached. An entire section of Israeli society and the political class and government have actually stood up to defend these actions.
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Now responding to other points:
Are you willing to clearly state this is false and you do not hate Jews?
Jews are not a monolithic group. I hate the extremists, and I do not hate the others. I probably have positive valence toward secular Jews. While I hate aspects of progressivism, I do not see it as Jewish-driven like some commenters here.
I can’t help but ask: have you invested your identity into Israel in some way? Are you yourself a religious zionist? Your posts come off as biased, to say the least. You misread my original post, which isn’t a big deal, but maybe it hints to deeper biases in this discussion. I am a random American guy from the east coast, have made friends of all faiths. There is no reason for me to be biased against Israel. But, you know, if I grew up singing songs about how Israel is the pure God-given land of my forefathers, and that everyone else has it out to get me, and that I have to love other Jews as tribesmen, that is going to bias me, right? So I think I am naturally less biased than anyone who grew up in a religiously Jewish household. If you think about how Hitler was able to make young Germans prejudicial and extremist, it was through singing songs about their homeland, hyping up their history, believing they were the chief victims of the last world war, increasing love for pan-Germans and sending them to German summer camps to instill values and camaraderie. So should we really be surprised if Israel has a lot of extremists — more than a Western nation? They are maxxing for extremism, except unlike the Hitler Youth, some of the orthodox get little secular education and are trained in the violent Old Testament.
you should provide a source that accuses the Israelis of shooting children
If we’re just going to ignore my whole OP post, then I’ll recap all of my posts from the thread. Thank you for the opportunity —
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There is an anomalously high amount of children being one-shotted in Gaza. This is according to a survey of doctors conducted by the most reputable mainstream newspaper, currently managed by a Jewish CEO and chief executive, owned by a family with Jewish heritage, located in New York City, and employing many Jews. There is no reason for the NYT to have fudged this reporting, and not only did they oversee the polling, but they took the unusual step of publishing a defense of the reporting, consulting a new assortment of medical experts to look at the C-Scans and photography.
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At the highest levels of Israel, there is support for soldiers who have sexually tortured enemy PoWs.
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In the joint rabbinical/military academies, at least one rabbi has explicitly called for killing children.
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There has been an increase in IDF soldiers who come from an extremist background, and these soldiers have already caused trouble in the military and worried their secular peers.
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There are unique aspects of Israeli Judaism that promotes extremism and de-emphasizes interpersonal morality to non-Jews.
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The available evidence in the context of the Libyan Civil War shows that stray shots to the head and chest should not be so prevalent. This is an upper-bound, because IDF soldiers are better trained and because the study did not look at multiple gunshot wounds.
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The NYTimes reporting reinforces the Guardian reporting from earlier this year, in which yet another non-Arab, non-Muslim doctor talks about an unusual amount of children one-shotted. (this is new evidence I am presenting.)
In response to this, you have claimed that Gaza is using pre-teen soldiers, which has no evidence to support it; you have accused the doctors of being pressured by Hamas, which has no evidence to support it; you have accused me of calling Jews uniquely evil (lmao); you have claimed that Hamas is selecting which doctors enter Gaza, which has no evidence to support it; and then you have alleged that these volunteer doctors were only presented with the worst one-shotted children, which is an unreasonable assumption. In the cases of zero evidence, the absence of evidence qualifies as an evidence of absence for one reason: pro-Israeli advocates would report on this information immediately, abundantly, and continually. Child soldiers would be all over the news, if it were happening. Doctors being vetted and pressured by Hamas would be a well-published fact, if it were happening. For these claims, an absence of evidence does actually qualify as evidence of absence.
coffee_enjoyer
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1mo ago
The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza
Why do you believe that their sample of doctors is flawed? There’s not an enormous amount of Western doctors in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that the NYT Time only picked doctors willing to lie. This is just what you want to believe. A team of NYT employees oversaw the polling.
Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."
The doctors had the option to answer anonymously. There is no evidence of Hamas threatening doctors. Many of these doctors have already returned home permanently. So your theory here is wrong.
That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset.
Infantry officer is an influential role. It is a relevant role if we are looking at shot children. You mistakenly thought that there was not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military. I showed you an article that 40% of infantry officers come from a group with extremist views. The article goes on to say that these extremists have already violated rules of engagement and caused problems. Your screed called this “specious” — are you willing to concede you were empirically wrong? There are, factually, a lot of extremists in the Israeli military.
So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities."
Read what I wrote again. You made up that quote wholecloth. I said that there are extremists in the Israeli military, that the military selects for that more. You do not need most of the military to be extremists to have major problems with shooting innocent kids in the head. You need a sufficient amount of extremists, like… 40% of the infantry officers coming from a group that has problems with extremism. Read the article — it’s literally about how the group is extremist and has caused problems for the military and is causing secular soldiers worry. Even the secular Israeli soldiers see problems with extremism.
it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe."
We both know that is not my argument. Let’s ask these questions: in what capacity is the religious practice different? Which type of cognition is increased by the different practices? Where is the moral concern located?
Which candidate is mostly like to effect the end result of deporting aliens? The one who talks about how terrible mass migration is, or the child-of-immigrants who celebrates indigenous peoples’ day by talking about how America was founded on genocide?
If you genuinely care about effecting an end to illegal migration, then there’s an obligation to vote for whoever moves the needle on effecting that change. Trump didn’t succeed in building a border wall but he did smash the borders of acceptable speech on illegal migration.
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