Oceans Yet to Burn

ranma-official

Source: samusisnotasextoy shtpost

ranma-official

afloweroutofstone

What do you think the odds are of least one congressman in the next few years coming out and saying they think the Earth is flat and that NASA’s been lying to us? Realistically, 10, 12%?

gunsandfireandshit

Like, the head of an MRA reddit got outed as an elected rep, you’re acting like these people don’t already control NASA funding

ranma-official

Redpill, not MRA

mitigatedchaos

Remember when an article was published saying that “MRAs” were in a frothing rage over Mad Max: Fury Road, but actually it was RoK, a site that explicitly thinks MRAs are all losers?

At this point, I’m very close to thinking the misinformation is deliberate.

Source: afloweroutofstone gender politics

argumate

Our descendants will find our songs about butts and preference for thick ones ridiculously quaint, much like the Victorians going apeshit over visible ankles.

argumate

#god knows what they will be into #livers maybe

mitigatedchaos

Nah man,

This trend ain’t sustainable. Eventually you get into stuff that’s taboo because it’s actually grievously harmful, and then there will be more rebellion against decadence than there already is. People talk like that about mono people doing BDSM in their bedrooms while looking nornal on the outside, but that doesn’t even begin to touch the barest outer surface of harmfulness of some possible tracks.

So I think it will split, and we’ll be looking at weird transhuman augmentations and monstergirls/boys, catgirls, and so on while another group goes to restore tradition and yet another group becomes truly debauched degenerates.

Also in the future, I think they’ll look at porn somewhat like we look at alcohol.

argumate

the gay marriage will lead to polygamy slippery slope argument makes it sound like homophobes are more worried about a dude marrying two women than another dude.

mitigatedchaos

It isn’t obvious, Argumate, dear old boy? It’s trying to trade against the greater remaining taboo value of the second to stop the first. The ideological tools to pass the first will be used to try to allow the second, even though gay marriage is most likely pro-civic while polygamy is very likely anti-civic. (The civicness is not the argument being used, after all!)

gender politics

balioc

xenosystems.net

Tribal Epistemology

When you know who people identify with, you generally get a full-spectrum insight into their beliefs for free. As Fernandez puts it: … while Western civilization pays lip service to “evidence…

bambamramfan

I’m trying to understand the point of this NRx post from 2015, so maybe some defenders of this perspective can explain.

It seems to say as trust in a cynical Cathedral collapses, then people have no source of knowledge but tribal ingroup beliefs. This leads to cynical nihilism and blind allegiance to your social division.

Which, true, but how is this different than before? As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities. You’ve traded one authority for another, but how did things get worse and why would you want to go back?

balioc

“As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities.” The piece definitely does not acknowledge this, not in the way you’re framing it, which is kind of the critical point.

As the theory goes –

* Objective truth is an accessible and relevant thing. (In your language: science, and similar methodologies, provide some level of access to the Real.) There is an important difference between listening to your doctor and listening to your priest, which is that your doctor actually knows complicated facts about the actual goddamn universe that will allow him to solve your medical problems, whereas the priest is mostly just an expositor of local ideology.

* “Rational ignorance” is the practice of deferring to the expertise of those who know Science! that you don’t, because you can’t know all the Science! yourself.

* Scientific experts can “sell out to the Cathedral” by lacing their allegedly-scientific recommendations with ideology, or even by outright dropping the science wholesale and purveying uncut ideology. This can pay dividends for them in terms of social power, cognitive assonance, etc. However…

* …it’s a self-destructive strategy in the long term, because you can’t fool all the people all the time. Eventually, your patients are going to notice that your “medical advice” is no longer doing any better than priestcraft in terms of getting them results.

* At which point they abandon you and start listening to whichever set of priests they like best anyway. Faith in Science! as an objective, neutral, supra-ideological methodology has been destroyed.

You can feel about that however you want, but I’m pretty sure it fairly describes the content of the post.

Source: bambamramfan

discoursedrome

mitigatedchaos

Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?

There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.

collapsedsquid

Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.

isaacsapphire

There was literally a Battle Royal at a local public high school a couple years back. A 14 year old was arrested a couple days ago with a loaded gun. All gang related, of course.

When physical safety can’t be assured in the school, if you call it racism and classism that people want to pull their kids out, aren'tyou just assuming that certain races and classes are inherently violent and criminal?

collapsedsquid

I’m saying that parents view certain races as inherently violent and criminal. They are the ones who will be choosing where their kids go.

And this is not theoretical. This is what actually happens.

discoursedrome

The article in question doesn’t seem like a very convincing counterargument, honestly. It’s not so much that people want to take their kids out of “ethnic” schools because they’re racist, it’s that people want their kids in good, safe schools, and those are heavily linked to class and economic factors, and those are heavily stratified by race due to legal and historical factors. But you’d see the same general pattern even in a society with no racism, it’d just be aligned on whatever axes of social inequality were most relevant in that society.

Personally, I have mixed feelings on the subject. The current system fucks up property values in ways that have negative side-effects, it’s still gameable, and it’s essentially crab-bucketing – the idea is to make it hard for even upper-class people to escape terrible hell schools, so that they’ll be motivated to make them less bad, but that doesn’t seem to have really manifested.

On the other hand, social stratification is certainly going to be worse under vouchers, and it will mark a movement to a more high-pressure cram-school type lifestyle for students. It will diminish the proportion of the population that’s trapped in the dead-end hell schools while still keeping it enormous, which increases the likelihood that they’re there for good. So it’s really a question of what percentile we want to optimize for here. Obviously, people mostly want to optimize for theirs, but it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a right answer.

mitigatedchaos

The upper class people aren’t *allowed* to make the schools less bad. When some kid comes in with the intention of starting a knife fight, knife in hand, he needs to be either punished hard, or kicked out of the school. Ideally bad behavior should be punished proportionately long before then. It doesn’t take much to disrupt a classroom if no one has the ability to remove a child or punish them for being disruptive and the kid knows it.

Many on the Left think it’s just about being discriminatory, but do people really think my parents would give a damn about the number of black kids if they were all college-bound? No, this is almost entirely about selecting the kids whose parents will punish them for causing trouble (which is what actually gives detention any teeth) and kids who actually have something to lose.

It’s been deemed unethical to allow the schools to punish the children, so that just leaves exclusion.

To prevent stratification, just don’t make the vouchers additive - you either pay only the voucher or you pay the whole thing yourself. That will allow routing around the political damage.

All this complaining about racism and classism, but who is really being hurt most by the status quo? It certainly isn’t upper middle class suburbia.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics

nuclearspaceheater

Whats the name of that Scott Alexander story with the heart of the H<something> that allows you to do anything without it being immoral?

mitigatedchaos

heartstone I think

argumate

I feel the left (as represented here on Tumblr) is too busy looking backwards and larping the Spanish Civil War, and it’s sort of sad.

If you look back at socialist activism 100 years ago it was dynamic and offered a vision of the future that was challenging, while today it’s all about justifying failed states and bickering over whether Stalin was really that bad.

maybe there are exciting things happening in leftist enclaves somewhere, but they don’t seem to have any impact or be able to capitalise on things like the GFC or public dissatisfaction with neoliberalism.

mitigatedchaos

Anyone talking about workers’ councils is stuck in the 20th century. The future is digital and uses far more exotic organizational systems.

politics

ranma-official

blackblocberniebros

Hey quick question, why is the music app on the iPhone so fucking worthless? Cant repeat songs anymore, cant listen to all a bands albums back to back. Wtf, it’s unusable.

ranma-official

No competition.

mitigatedchaos

Don’t be so harsh Ranma-san. They’re just trying to ~simplify~ the listening experience. Listening to one song over and over repeatedly, hah, who would do such a thing? Sounds like a total dork!

* hides in the bushes with an Android phone, listening to one song over and over again, as Apple iCopters buzz overhead, searching for the last users to escape the Walled Garden of Babylon, *

Source: blackblocberniebros shtpost

the-grey-tribe

mitigatedchaos

Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus ~~a more powerful vampire~~ more experienced than me.

Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.

the-grey-tribe

I leave out all the boring and embarrassing details. FWIW I might have been the ~~dumbest~~ least well-adjusted guy in my class.

Scattered thoughts on education:

If a technocratic dictator instituted a centrally managed, stratified education system (tracking), then party officials/bureaucrats would use it to extort parents by holding children hostage.

If school vouchers/tutor vouchers are in any way transferrable or fungible, alcoholic parents will sell them to temporarily embarrassed, frugal intelligentsia and thus widen the educational gap.

Efforts to make education more integrated are sold as left-wing or fostering solidarity and social cohesion, but are actually cost-cutting measures that make education net worse for everybody (Will-Rogers-Effect).

There is a lot of confounding going on between socioeconomic class and school/teaching style. Waldorf education is notoriously bad at actually imparting knowledge on children, but it tends to attract hippie parents with strong convictions and disposable income (I knew a couple of Waldorf-educated math students. They hated it. I don’t know if they would have hated regular high schools less, but still).

Montessori Schools are actually based on constructivist developmental psychology and not eastern mysticism woo, but the selection effect is even bigger there.

Moscow-educated mathematicians or rather math teachers trained by Moscow-educated mathematicians were great at actually teaching math. I learned more English from Cartoon Network than from my teachers though. Eastern bloc English teachers were not very good. Same goes for Latin, but there was no Reticulum Tabulae.

I liked several books that were later required reading, before they were required reading.

Finnish comprehensive primary school until grade 10 with a good teacher/student ratio has the best outcomes in the EU. It’s not at all clear what causes that.

Back to vouchers:

I personally believe that there are lots of high school teachers out there either who do not understand the subject they are teaching or suck at the didactics of their subject. Good teachers can have a positive effect on students, but are limited by the material they work with.

Bad students can drag the rest of the class down. Smaller classrooms have numerous benefits: Not only does the teacher have more timer per student, but students who are slow to grok a particular concept keep the whole class back. It makes a difference if you have one stupid question per hour or three. The time adds up. It’s not always the same student lagging in every subject.

If you can use vouchers to pay for remedial classes or individual tutors in specific subjects, you could have slightly bigger classes moving on a much more consistent pace. It might be smarter to reduce the student/teacher ratio as needed for specific students and subjects.

I am much more skeptical of vouchers for whole schools (Which seems to be the proposed policy in the US?).

mitigatedchaos

Actually, I already laid out a plan for a total revamp, something I’d instantiate a few prototypes of were I actually the technocratic dicta- er, I mean Central Director. Perhaps you could comment on it.

I’ve been slowly writing a more detailed version.

Source: thathopeyetlives

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Tribal Epistemology