erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
2d ago
There are ways to get around this. For example, when I was in school, there was a difference between a Z (0%) given out for no work turned in and an F (50%) given out for shitty work. Likewise, when I was teaching, the head of my department told me that if he saw a student was trying he would give them a high F (e.g. 59%) so that it would only take a little bit more work to pass.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
That essay reminded of one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, "How to Say Nothing in 500 Words" by Paul Roberts:
It's Friday afternoon, and you have almost survived another week of classes. You are just looking forward dreamily to the weekend when the English instructor says: “For Monday you will turn in a five-hundred-word composition on college football.”
Well, that puts a good hole in the weekend. You don't have any strong views on college football one way or the other. You get rather excited during the season and go to all the home games and find it rather more fun than not. On the other hand, the class has been reading Robert Hutchins in the anthology and perhaps Shaw's “Eighty-Yard Run,” and from the class discussion you have got the idea that the instructor thinks college football is for the birds. You are no fool. You can figure out what side to take.
After dinner you get out the portable typewriter that you got for high school graduation. You might as well get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Five hundred words is about two double-spaced pages with normal margins. You put in a sheet of paper, think up a title, and you're off:
WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED
College football should be abolished because it's bad for the school and also for the players. The players are so busy practicing that they don't have any time for their studies.
This, you feel, is a mighty good start. The only trouble is that it's only thirty-two words. You still have four hundred and sixty-eight to go, and you've pretty well exhausted the subject. It comes to you that you do your best thinking in the morning, so you put away the typewriter and go to the movies. But the next morning you have to do your washing and some math problems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The English instructor turns up too, and you wonder if you've taken the right side after all. Saturday night you have a date, and Sunday morning you have to go to church. (You can't let English assignments interfere with your religion.) What with one thing and another, it's ten o'clock Sunday night before you get out the typewriter again. You make a pot of coffee and start to fill out your views on college football. Put a little meat on the bones.
WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHED
In my opinion, it seems to me that college football should be abolished. The reason why I think this to be true is because I feel that football is bad for the colleges in nearly every respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he discusses college football, it would be better if the colleges had race horses and had races with one another, because then the horses would not have to attend classes. I firmly agree with Mr. Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that many other students would agree too.
One reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become too commercial. In the olden times when people played football just for the fun of it, maybe college football was all right, but they do not play college football just for the fun of it now as they used to in the old days. Nowadays college football is what you might call a big business. Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I don't think it is especially true here at State, but certainly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America nowadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. Actually the coaches and alumni go around to the high schools and offer the high school stars large salaries to come to their colleges and play football for them. There was one case where a high school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college.
Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players. They do not have time to get a college education, because they are so busy playing football. A football player has to practice every afternoon from three to six and then he is so tired that he can't concentrate on his studies. He just feels like dropping off to sleep after dinner, and then the next day he goes to his classes without having studied and maybe he fails the test.
(Good ripe stuff so far, but you're still a hundred and fifty-one words from home. One more push.)
Also I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because not very many students get to participate in it. Out of a college of ten thousand students only seventy-five or a hundred play football, if that many. Football is what you might call a spectator sport. That means that most people go to watch it but do not play it themselves.
(Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you retype it, you can make the margins a little wider.)
These are the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should be abolished in American colleges and universities.
On Monday you turn it in, moderately hopeful, and on Friday it comes back marked “weak in content” and sporting a big “D.”
This essay is exaggerated a little, not much. The English instructor will recognize it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on college football will bring in. He knows that nearly half of the class will contrive in five hundred words to say that college football is too commercial and bad for the players. Most of the other half will inform him that college football builds character and prepares one for life and brings prestige to the school.
As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of nothing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.
But note that, even in 1958, Roberts felt such an essay was deserving of a D, not an F.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
lol, reminds me of my year as a math teacher. Halfway through, I went from "I want right answers to these homework questions" to "I want to see that you tried" to "just turn in something so that I can give you a grade". That's about the time I gave up on teaching and focused on surviving until summer, when I got nonrenewed.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.
Interestingly, this implies that the purpose of a grade is to rank a student among their cohort rather than to an objective standard; that if you throw a bunch of morons into a university-level class, you curve scale and give an A to the best of them rather than just fail them all.
Empirically, this seems to be exactly what happens, but it leads to grade and credential inflation as ever more unprepared students are sent off to college; just another institution to spend 4 years doing pointless busywork until you get a piece of paper, high school 2.0, except that now you are four years older, 5 figures in debt, and there is not a virgin girl left among the graduates.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
I will never, ever, forget how much this story about a University essay crushed me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teen-accepted-stanford-after-writing-blacklivesmatter-100-times-application-n742586
So basically just Zhang Tiesheng, but for wokeness instead of communism?
erwgv3g34
6d ago
It would almost be easier to list examples of the things Scott didn't change in "Archipelago":
Archipelago diff:
Oh holy shit. All sorts of changes.
- Nuked sections I and II
- Purging lots of "left"/"liberal" in section III->I, either removing the references entirely or changing to "modern"/"individualist"
- Removed worldbuilding in V->III, removed or reworded all references to "World Government" with "united government / UniGov"
- Section VI->IV, removed this section entirely:
This is pretty funny, because the idea I’m pushing is rather explicitly reactionary. Like, I think it would be fair to call this the single core idea of reaction. All that stuff about kings and gender roles and ethno-nationalism is to some degree idle speculation about what kind of Archipelagian community would end up most successful, in the same way transhumanists sometimes speculate about how things should be run after the Singularity.
Yet I think its liberal credentials are impeccable.
Yeah, a purge of the neoreactionary stuff.
He claims to have done it because the piece got popular and he was embarrassed that so many people were reading about his conworlding, but replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" still robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, and deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Scott Alexander wrote something about this tension.... (TL;DR version: limited central government enforcing very robust exit rights.)
Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not to the (horrible) revised edition.
Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.
Don't forget about reverse mortgages! Basically, boomers sell their houses while continuing to live in them, use the money to go on cruises, then when they die the house goes to the bank and their kids get nothing. I see tons of ads for them whenever I watch OTA television.
They truly are the locust generation.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
You may enjoy some of his other glowfics; I really liked "but hurting people is wrong". There's also the conspiracy world, a series of stories set in an alternate Earth. And the Masculine Mongoose trilogy on Tumblr. But, yeah, he mostly does one-shots.
"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions" by Zack M. Davis, a devastating takedown of Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories".
"Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky approaches transition from a transhumanist angle.
Not a deep dive as such, but I also enjoyed AntiDem's "On the Creation of Unicorns".
erwgv3g34
9d ago
Just looked it up; cute passage:
Merlin and the Director were meanwhile talking in the Blue Room. The Director had put aside his robe and circlet and lay on his sofa. The Druid sat in a chair facing him, his legs uncrossed, his pale large hands motionless on his knees, looking to modern eyes like an old conventional carving of a king. He was still robed and beneath the robe, as Ransom knew, had surprisingly little clothing, for the warmth of the house was to him excessive and he found trousers uncomfortable. His loud demands for oil after his bath had involved some hurried shopping in the village which had finally produced, by Denniston's exertions, a tin of Brilliantine. Merlinus had used it freely so that his hair and beard glistened and the sweet sticky smell filled the room. That was why Mr. Bultitude had pawed so insistently at the door that he was finally admitted and now sat as near the magician as he could possibly get, his nostrils twitching. He had never smelled such an interesting man before.
"Sir," said Merlin, in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him, "I give you great thanks. I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it: a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres, it is time that we should open counsels to each other."
Reminds me of this scene from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (published in 1859, but the scene takes place in 1780):
Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
With that kind of money, you could afford to live fulltime in a nice 1950s hotel, certainly nicer than an Airbnb.
But if we are talking equivalency, yes, either a boarding house or a single room occupancy (e.g. Judy's apartment in Zootopia).
erwgv3g34
10d ago
See "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" by Scott Alexander.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
That's because stealing sperm from a bank is ridiculously easy while inventing artificial wombs is ridiculously hard. They are just two completely different problems, and solving one versus the other doesn't tell you much about the respective genders.
As the Dreaded Jim points out, the impulse behind the seven kill stele and environmentalism is the same; you simply have to replace "earth" for "heaven":
Earth brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Earth.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
10:10 no pressure.
In my experience, there is no such thing as promotions. The boomers in management remain there forever, and even the one time there was an opening they just gave one of the managers two hats to wear at once instead of promoting one of the grunts who had been with the company for years.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
From "I Am A New Atheist, And I Repent" by Eneasz Brodski:
Over the past few years I watched a new religion born. A secular religion, which doesn’t have the dead-easy failure mode of requiring belief in a sky-fairy. But, since it was created in America, with strong Christian roots, it has all the trappings of Christianity.
- Original sin
- Essentialism
- Repentance and confession
- Manichean good/evil dichotomy
- Focus on martyrdom and victimhood
- Salvation dispensed by the church and needing constant reaffirmation
Even worse, since it is a new religion that is being seized as a lifeline by people who’ve been spiritually drowning for over a decade, it is full of fiery zealots. All conflicts are recast as spiritual struggles focused around the original sin. Like the puritans, they can harbor no dissent in their midst. Everyone must be equally zealous and on their side, or they are on the side of evil. Any price is worth paying to save a soul from evil.
When the scales fell from my eyes and I finally realized what had happened, I felt true crushing failure. Not because I had failed in my objective. Tradition religion is less relevant than ever. The New Atheists won. But in winning, having not realized how different others are, we left a massive religion-vacuum in society. We laid the groundwork for a new religion. One that had been purged of the greatest weaknesses of traditional religions, and with a dense underbrush of religion-starved kindling to tear into.
So, yes. New Atheism helped to create Wokeism. I repent of my ways, I was wrong. Religion is needed, and we should have focused on strengthening the least harmful religion(s) while tearing down the most harmful ones, rather than trying to eliminate them all. Forgive us, for we knew not what we did. :(
erwgv3g34
12d ago
If the results are indistinguishable, would it truly matter?
If.
I have nothing against digital art, but it is decidedly distinct from traditional art.
My concern now is that between the women themselves who are wont to give up this optionality, the cohort of men who are wont to ever upset women, and the small cohort of men who are massively benefiting from the status quo (until it all crashes), there's no way to muster any political will to even adjust the current policy reality.
We've basically got some sub-majority portion of men, including the hardcore trads and the incel brigade, who would possibly be on board with any platform that includes "possibly telling women 'no, you can't have that.'" So as some on here have been saying, it seems like a "coup-complete" issue.
What I expect to happen at Current Rate No Singularity is that the first world never wakes up, we keep giving women more and more "rights" paid for by stealing from men (or at the very least refuse to repeal any such), the incels never revolt, TFR continues to sit in the toilet, the elites keep importing foreigners to make line go up, eventually patriarchal third worlders make up the majority of the population in formerly first world countries (if they aren't patriarchal, they won't reproduce, so immigration will continue until they are the only source) and that will be the end of feminism.
erwgv3g34
12d ago
there are female protestant ministers blessing a wedding of polycules of 4 gays out there
Our ancestors were neither sadists nor fools. There was a reason they used to burn heretics at the stake.
erwgv3g34
12d ago
I was somewhat amused that in that glowfic quoted in a different post on here because of course, naturellement, ICE are Le Ebil. Le big grand monstrous eeeeevuuuulll. Not a bunch of guys doing their jobs in a government department, nope, Big Evil. That is the attitude amongst the Bay Area Rationalist glowfic writers who are going to vote straight Democrat in the midterms, and that's the constituency this kind of video is appealing to: the military are being forced to follow illegal orders by the evil moustache-twirlers in power, and if they don't raise their consciousness enough to realise this is what is going on, well you and your views about the boots on the ground grunts have been proven to be justified.
From that I may be as bold in my beliefs:
The pay is good near Sunnydale - unreasonably good, she can make twenty paper dollars in a day - but the land is cursed. They had not planned to come here at all. "It's an evil place," she was told, "full of demons," and she nodded very seriously. She will fight demons, if it must be done, but she will almost certainly die of it, because demons are strong; it would be better to wait, and come back when she has the strength to fight demons and win.
But then a job fell through in Orange County and there were rumors of la migra - worse than demons, she takes it, though no one's explained them - on the coast, and they'll starve if they don't go anywhere, so it's Sunnydale.
But I'm surprised you got that far; last time you bounced off the exact same fic.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
erwgv3g34
13d ago
I don't see where "rationality" even comes into the picture here. If we were modding people for being "irrational", we would have far fewer participants left.
Aren't we a rationalist forum? I've always thought so, at least; a part of the rationalist diaspora, if a few steps removed from LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.
Yes, "quality adjustments" are how economists lie about inflation. It's what leads people to look at alternative, objective measures like gold or Big Macs.
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