gog
8mo ago
I'm not asking about how these sorts of people affect poor black kids. I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them." This group is not super ideological, feels bad for poor people most of the time, but thinks that if the underclass had fewer kids at 14 (via abstinence or abortion or whatever) and worked hard at school, etc, then many of them would rise into the middle class themselves. Does the thought process only go as far as entry into the middle class? In that, hard work and respectability gets you across the threshold, but then further advancement is obsructed by shadowy puppet-masters? Is it just brute Karenism, in that there is no wider world to them, or that it consists only of NPCs? Is it an aloof acceptance of the hard facts of life, and requires no explanation? I'm asking here because there is no polite way to ask these people in real life. I used middle-class women as an example, but as many of the comments have pointed out, lots of people make these sorts of excuses. They can't all be HBD realists or DEI ideologues, can they?
gog
8mo ago
Not that anyone is obligated to play along, but I'm not getting many answers to my question. There's lots of "no, women don't do that" and lots of "preach, king!" but the question stands. How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
gog
8mo ago
Being imposing is absolutely a huge advantage when dealing with students in an anarchic environment. Even in Canada. But the complaints are never about that. They're about how some man got to go on (="he organized") a field trip, or how some guy rear-ended their car "but that would never happen to my husband" or whatever.
This is not a small-scale question.
But anyway,
(1) An external motivation to act rightly. In the old internet-atheist days, there was lots of indignation at the perceived attitude of the religious that atheists can’t be good people. That was always a strawman, though. There are lots of good atheists. The question is why there should be. Penn Jilette famously protested that he doesn’t need religious belief to keep him in line, since he already rapes and murders everyone he wants to, it’s just that he never wants to. I admire his purity, and grant that in a society as decadent as ours rape and murder are less tempting than they might once have been. And maybe Penn Jilette has never reflexively blurted out a self-exculpatory fib, or fumed internally about some kid getting the last burger at a barbecue, but it would appear that a lot of people have, and it would be surprising if the rest of humanity had jumped straight to Einsatzgruppen and Congolese rape-battalions without passing through lower levels of immorality.
We can Euthyphro this all day but even setting aside questions of the One True Good, the loss of that external nudge has been disastrous. Law cannot fill the gap- there can be no law against selfishness or contempt, for example.
(2) A prescribed human identity. Religions tell people who they are. Muslim women know exactly what they are supposed to do. Orthodox Jewish men know exactly who they are supposed to be. Suicide bombers know. The vast majority of people are incapable of forming an identity from scratch. Religion offers/offered identities that had many drawbacks and did not adequately serve a lot of people, but they did the job for the vast majority. Among the truly religious, there is no self-expression-by-buying-tattoos, no retail therapy, no do-it-for-the-gram; indeed such narcissistic paroxysm is a sign that someone is on their way out of the religion. Religious people have/create lots of problems for themselves and others, but the defining problem of our age, lack of identity, is the result of the loss of religion. No such broadly effective alternative source of identity has yet appeared.
gog
8mo ago
Oh, I barely move in any social circles at all. This is all at work, which is a high school, and therefore maybe selects for people without much ambition . . .
gog
8mo ago
Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
gog
8mo ago
This makes sense. I am a teacher, and it's worse than that, though. The teachers hate KIDS because the kid has an Audi that his dad bought him.
gog
8mo ago
But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?
gog
8mo ago
Sure, but why? Whence the universalism? Is it a holdover from Christianity? From Communism? They don't seem to care about what happens in Mali, for example, the way Christians and Communists do.
gog
8mo ago
This is at least AN answer. Can you expand upon the leftist impulse to erase all distinctions, or point me to someone who already has?
gog
8mo ago
This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.
gog
8mo ago
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
gog
8mo ago
Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.
gog
8mo ago
WHY is there a culture war?
I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
gog
9mo ago
IQ lets you use the info, but it doesn't make you prefer it to video games. Parenting removes the possibility of video games.
gog
9mo ago
Minor quibble: Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy. Every kid at my daycare except the screaming one-year-old would have said they liked me and the daycare ladies and the food and most of the other kids. One kid (the one who never spoke) tried to refuse to return to the daycare when I quit, though- because she now had a point of comparison.
Main point: Does it matter? Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references. He doesn't know what he's missing. He might enjoy the movie more than you did, but your experience of the movie was richer/denser. The entire world is like that, all the time, and as you become more culturally educated you realize how many well-credentialed adults are in the same position as the kid watching the movie. Doctors and physicists and professors all the way down to gas-station clerks are missing a huge part of human experience and there is no way to even explain that to them since they don't even realize it's there. So all that wordcel cultural stuff is of limited economic benefit, but it is of extreme personal benefit. And it is a benefit that I want to pass to my kids. But there's too much to absorb to start late, so having a dad like me isn't enough. There needs to be teaching and exposure.
So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10. And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.
So I'd say it matters very much.
gog
9mo ago
For the first thing, I have no idea, but I suspect that COVID was not the problem. Kids learn almost nothing at school until grade 10, and the gains after that could be achieved much more efficiently. So educationally, staying home is probably better if your parents take any steps at all toward teaching you something. Socially, school/daycare does not offer great opportunities: If a kid needs development, it's hard to see how he will get it from his similarly undeveloped peers. Furthermore, the main social lesson of daycare and elementary school is that disagreement is forbidden and that you should weaponize the authority of 3rd parties to harm your enemies. Teachers always tell kids to "solve the disagreement with a discussion," as though 6-year-olds are going to convene a Special Council on Pokemon Cards or something. That doesn't happen and fighting is looked upon with horror (see TLP on how people don't fear someone getting hurt in a fight, they fear the existence of a fight itself)so you get preference falsification and a lot of tattling. This is a pretty good practice for our new era, but not something I want a kid steeped in. But it's better than watching unboxing videos all day.
For the second, if you can make the question more specific, I'll give it a go.
gog
9mo ago
Yes, IQ is the legible component of intelligence, and your vocabulary, ability to do logic problems, etc is what makes it legible to the test, to others, and to the world we live in. So you might have a really high innate intelligence but it would do you little good if you were never exposed to the sorts of challenges for which IQ score is the proxy.
gog
9mo ago
I worked at pretty mid-tier daycare in Canada. It was bad.
The studies that show daycare is good for child development use highly curated daycares, with like 1:4 adult-to-child ratios. These studies actually simulate a mom staying home with her kids. MY daycare was a charity daycare run by a church, so to help single mothers, they took everyone. I worked with the 3-year-olds, and the worst ratio was 1:21 (illegal). A normal day was 1:12. In either case, the kids were supervised, I guess, but the priorities were no fingers in power outlets, no vomit, no urine, etc. Learning to count or something was a complete impossibility.
-The kids could talk, but it was garbled and they couldn't tell you what they had done the night before. Conversation was difficult, so their language development was definitely stunted. A child psychologist once told me that language abilities develop most in early childhood- if that's true, daycare damaged these kids' brains. I would meet kids who stayed home with their moms and those kids would tell me what WOULD HAVE happened if something the night before had turned out differently.
-One kid in the one-year-old room cried LITERALLY all day, 8-5, for about her first month. The metabolic stress alone must have affected her, and the noise and tension affected the other kids.
-One kid didn't talk for the 5 months I worked with her. Not word to me or anyone else.
-The one-year-old room was a pen. The kids sat on the ground with toys pretty much all day. The ratio was better, but the workers were occupied with diapers and feeding most of the time, so interaction was limited.
-About 8 kids (out of around 50) were at the daycare from 7 am to 5 pm. A little kid sleeps about 12 hours, so that leaves either 2 hours with their parents or sleep deprivation. Both of those are bad for kids.
-Since the kid spends the majority of his waking life at the daycare, the workers are raising him. I thought I needed resume padding for teachers' college (incorrect), but the other workers were low-IQ, 5th-generation underclass hillbillies under the stress of just being in a room with so many feral kids, let alone trying to manage them. Since middle-aged women generally don't like the cold, and Canada is cold, the kids spent very little time outside.
I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture. Exposure to puzzles and vocabulary and general knowledge and grammar are extremely important. It takes years and years to acquire that stuff and you can't speedrun it when you realize that it's missing. My kid is 9 and just finished Algebra 1 on Khan Academy. I don't know how that compares to actual school algebra in the US, but in Canada that's pretty good (she can't rotate shapes to save her life though, so that's 1 point for the nature crowd). At this rate she's going to have math powers. She has extreme reading powers. It is possible, and some even say probable, that she will not be able/interested enough to spin that into some high-paying job, and she might turn out a bored housewife or HR-lady-that-none-of-the-other-HR-ladies-like-because-they-think-that-she-thinks-she's-better-than-they-are, and the Nurture Assumption crowd will say "See, Gog? Similar outcomes to other women with parents like you."
But quite apart from money, or propensity to addiction and crime, how do you think her model/experience of the world differs from that of one of the kids who went to that daycare, and which model/experience would you prefer your child to have? What sorts of questions will she wonder about, compared to the daycare kids? How will she experience movies and music and advertising? How many more topics of conversation will she be able to discuss? How much more will she bring to the romance table? None of that just develops because of genetics. Daycare is bad.
gog
10mo ago
I'm not trying to morally compare the current Canadian government to the Nazis, but I was thinking the other day about how they are comparable in terms of "commitment to the bit". The war was well-lost and everyone knew it, but they were still rounding up Jews until the very end. We see that now and think "Guys, take the hint, throw in the towel," but Jew-gassing was just THAT important to the Nazis.
It looks like the current government is finished. Pretty much everyone hates them, Canada is (relatively) crumbling around us, and the government is trying to do things like find a path to citizenship for illegal migrants. I used to console myself with the knowledge that they were a bunch of bad-faith virtue signalers, but their laser focus on moremoremore immigration- to the exclusion of many, if not most, other issues- makes me think they really do believe in this stuff. Talk about commitment to the bit.
gog
1yr ago
I’m not sure you do either of those things in the way that Big Teacher wants to be true.
To teach a kid to read you just go over the sounds again and again, then go over words (which is the same thing). Eventually they get good at it. Big Teacher wants it to be the case that if that doesn’t work, then you move to some plan B that depends on esoteric that only Trained Professionals know about, but there is no plan B that works, which is why you have legions of functionally illiterate people. Plan A (“I make you practice and you will thereby learn automatically”) is not the type of thing they make movies out of.
Arithmetic is almost the same. At some point you see 1 and 1 making 2, and it just sticks. Same for subtraction. Smart kids grasp it after few examples, less smart kids grasp it after more examples. For something more complicated, like long division, the kid is still either remembering the steps or he isn’t (virtually no 9-year old actually understands what the steps are doing). There is no stronger tool or one weird trick- all you have are more examples. This is why patience is so often lauded in teachers. The good ones just grind out more and more examples without getting exasperated.
So kids learn to read and do arithmetic, but is that because adults do something to put the knowledge in the kid’s head (which is what most people mean by “to teach”) or just because the adults make the kid learn it himself?
gog
1yr ago
I’m coming around to this one too. In schools it’s pretty clear that you either remember the information or you don’t, and that depends on you. Maybe the teacher tells you some mnemonic, but that’s about it. For most subjects there aren’t even multiple ways of explaining a concept. I’ve taught music, and families are just paying for a threat they can use to make the kid practice. Even teaching my kid to ride a bike involved (for Baby Genius) telling her that we weren’t going home until she figured it out, and I’ll be on that bench over there. For Baby Average, it involves making her practice every day. Extra help in something like math usually involves a face-to-face explanation that can’t be tuned out. In each of these cases learning is either automatic or self-directed. In the gym at 6am I can’t think of a counter-example. Somebody dogpile me!
Maybe the place for teacher influence is in the selection of the tasks to be practiced or the info to be learned, which is where Egan seems to offer hope; he has a specific plan, just not a fully developed one. He has decided what kids should learn- schools have decided how LONG kids will learn and then filled that time with busywork.
Gymnastics or dance lessons are the standard answers for girls that age, but for a 5-year-old, just waking up is a pretty rich experience already. I wouldn't worry until she's 7 or 8.
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