> I think the parent is saying that ipso facto joining a cult means that they weren't actually 'very smart', only in appearance.
If by "intelligent" we mean the conventional thing -- learns new things easily, capable of reasoning through complex tasks, would do well in med school/law school/phd programs/finance/engineering, picks up creative disciplines quickly, etc -- then are we sure it's not exactly the other way around?
People become invested in cults and conspiracies for emotional reasons, not rational reasons, and conventionally intelligent people are extraordinarily good at post hoc rationalization. More importantly, they're often better at mitigating or managing some of the downsides (eg, maintaining good-enough status in a cult, avoiding talking about the conspiracy in certain circumstances, etc.).
At least, this has been my experience with some extended family who fell into a cult: the ones I could consider "smartest" were stuck in the cult the longest, because they could rationalize their way into an answer for everything.
This entire subthread seems to be an argument over the definition of "intelligent". In no dictionary definition that I can find does it exclude people who join cults. Yet that seems to be the argument being made here.
From the Wikipedia:
> No True Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect their generalized statement from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly.
So I think it's a No True Scotsman argument to make to say "well, if they joined a cult, they must not have been intelligent in the first place."
But now I suppose we're arguing over the definition of the No True Scotsman fallacy and that's just a bit too meta for me on a rainy Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to go walk my dog. :-)
I was working on a personal project yesterday to answer some questions I had about how liquidity risk works for money market mutual funds, and to forecast/nowcast liquidity risk and NAV risk for a bunch of funds.
Mind you: I don't know the first thing about anything financial. I was just curious.
chatgpt gave me a bunch of sources of data that I wanted, translating my lay description of things I wanted to know into financial terms of art. I could then look up legal definitions and formulas for those terms to make sure they were what I thought they were. chatgpt also told me which SEC forms those things are disclosed on, what data brokers I could use for other data, etc.
between chatgpt and copilot I saved at least an hour on the job of pulling down historical data from EDGAR for a bunch of funds and getting the stats I wanted (I didn't know EDGAR existed until yesterday, and the xml/html/txt formats are kind of annoying... like, fine, but a bit of a pita so I'm glad I had help because ughhh is that kind of code boring and damn are LLMs good few-shot inductive parser generators!). Also wrote some nice chart.js code for me and helped with automatically collecting, searching, and extracting some key stats and terms from prospectuses. I didn't know about chart.js until yesterday.
All of this would've been possible without assistants, and required a lot of "executive function" on my part to bring together, but it seriously saved me at least a couple hours of implementation work and up to a day on research and learning terminology and regulatory stuff. Again, verification of those things is way easier when you know what words to look up definitions for. And chatgpt did make mistakes/hallucinate.
I don't find much use in my professional life, where the code I'm writing is apparently too domain-specific for copilot to be helpful and the mathematics is too complex for chatgpt to help with. Maybe in a few years. We'll see.
But teacher and admin time isn't free. People with high political media engagement have lost their damn minds and are now offended about everything. Including thousand year old statues, apparently.
No one gives a shit if your pull your kid out of a class, but everyone -- including LOTS of clued-in conservatives -- are sick of teachers/admins/boards spending too much time holding the hands of parents who spend too much time reading political news and not enough time working on their emotional regulation skills.
If you want to control what your kid sees, YOU need to do more work. If you want more information, YOU need to review your kid's materials. If you want access to more than every other parent is provided, then YOU need to do the work of getting that material and deciding what your kid will see. It's called parenting.
If you want to curate your kid's educational experience, then put in the fucking work and stop demanding use of my tax dollars and my kid's instructional time to satiate your neuroses.
(Also: your innocent little middle school angel is definitely talking about boobies and balls recess.... because, y'know, they're middle schoolers and that is what middle schoolers do. But we'll pretend they don't as long as you stop stealing time and money from us.)
> don't get me started on the hap hazard parental controls for the internet
You can buy all sorts of software, but no amount of law or regulation is going to solve the problem of the internet being the internet.
The article does mention they used a curriculum from Hillsdale College, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some general creepiness imbued into the course design.
That said, I can teach an entire course on statistics without mentioning penis size. Even a single use of this example has "middle school boy turned creepy old man" energy. But I imagine it'd be difficult to make it through a semester of a Classics/Renaissance-focused art course without covering at least one or two of David, The Creation of Adam, and Birth of Venus. Each is a master piece of an era and medium...
> According to the BNPL industry, fees and interest make up a small portion of their overall revenues. Whether that's wholly accurate is another story.
It may also be irrelevant; I'm more interested in their forward-looking forecasts than their current revenue sources.
The issue with "Parental rights are supreme" is that there are tons of parents whose demands will make it impossible for your kid to learn much of anything.
In our district, we had to put AP CS on hold because apparently RNGs are too close to gambling and gambling is sinful. You can't even get through the Java standard library without angering the religious right these days.
They threw a huge fit about Common Core Math as well (as a working mathematician -- and one with some amount of passing experience in teaching mathematics at that -- I could never get those parents to articulate what the actual problem was... AFAICT some TV pundit told them to be angry about math).
I wonder if these parents realize that about half of the middle schoolers in Florida not only have seen a penis, but have one of their very own!
BTW, the possibility that this was about inter-personal feuds rather than David just strengthens the point. Giving every parent potential veto power over anything that happens in school is a good way of making sure that nothing will happen in school.
Some teacher makes a valid criticism of your child's classmate during a parent-teacher conference, the parent takes it personally, the spat escalates, the course is derailed. By the time you find out WTF is even happening, your kid is already half a grade level behind in every subject. Rinse and repeat the next school year.
Have you ever met a kid who was excited about doing math the Common Core way?
One of the issues with Common Core Math is that it really teaches children to jump through the hoops of diagramming the way the book says to do it (and that way is cumbersome), not actually solve problems or understand concepts. People model ideas differently, Common Core requires one overly pedantic way of doing it, for the intelligent who figure out a better underlying representation, the Common Core Math Way(!) is drudgery. That just means more hatred for mathematics. It would be better to show examples and ideas, get interest and excitement, then formalize, but formalize in a way that is useful later on.
Mathematics _is_ exciting, it is a puzzle. Teaching should reflect that.
Common Core is just a set of standards. This is a bit like criticizing the API because one specific implementation of the API is garbage; you may be right, or wrong, but what you're criticizing is not relevant to the API design, at least at the first order.
Some publisher's course materials may fit your criticism. Lots of expensive garbage in K12.
The material I reviewed was quite the opposite. Instead of memorizing one way of performing an operation, you learn many different ones, discuss why one might be better than the other in certain contexts, and even think through why two different algorithms implement the same operation. The students I worked with/observed emerged from high school with a level of mathematical maturity that most students don't achieve until well after their university Calculus sequence, if ever.
Two other thoughts:
1. Everything you just described also describes how most schools implemented mathematics education prior to common core. If this is how someone taught with common core, it's almost 100% certain that this is also how they taught before common core, and that this is how they would teach mathematics regardless of what standards they were following. What you are describing is a bad mathematics educator, which is a serious problem in the USA but is orthogonal to choice of standards.
2. Most importantly, I never got even an articulation at this level of detail. People were angry because pundits told them to be angry. There were no articulated reasons. Just, "CC = bad".
> One of the issues with Common Core Math is that it really teaches children to jump through the hoops of diagramming the way the book says to do it (and that way is cumbersome), not actually solve problems or understand concepts
That's actually the opposite of the Common Core content I've seen at schools—its emphasis is on having a variety of looking at a problem and solving it, based on he situation. Instead of just hammering in the standard algorithms. It's not perfect, but what I've seen, I've liked.
I do think parents should be able to review the stuff they're kids are getting thought and probably have the option to opt out. so they're kids can learn about it on youtube the way they're supposed.
The solution is to boot the kids (sorry kids) until their parents come back slightly saner or can afford private schools for flatearthers and creationists.
Education should not be a democracy where the loudest bully parents whine about critical race theory, evolution, or sex ed.
A couple of years ago I attended an introductory course on scheme. about halfway through the second or third lesson one of the students objected on religious grounds to the example presented by the instructor, which simulated some basic statistical operations involving a deck of cards. This guy proceeded to file a complaint with some review board and the course had to be modified to avoid mentioning anything to do with hands or sets of playing cards. Not even games, just groupings of shuffled cards.
But similar examples featuring probabilities of outcomes in a relay race were deemed suitable despite the obvious nerfing of the model required to set the capabilities of all runners to be equal.
I think in situation like these it is more likely than not that there is no actual objection, it is just one person wanting to cause problems. I seriously doubt anyone had a problem with using playing cards for a demonstration. This person just wanted to cause problems, much like the woke mind virus. No basis in reality, just power and disruption.
The labs were about these things (and cards), and therefore gambling. We had to do purely abstract labs instead. The issue is that probability is hard to teach even with visceral physical examples of sampling from distributions.
> Aren't politicians involved whenever the will of the voters is being enacted? What if most parents in MO support what the politicians are doing? What if they called their representatives and asked them to take action against libraries?
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
It applies to PEOPLE of all ages. The law is about public libraries, NOT public school libraries. 100.00% of FY 2022's allocation went to NON-school public libraries.
Someone will reply to this with a list of news articles purporting to contradict you, and all of those articles will be about controversies surrounding books available in high school or public libraries.
If by "intelligent" we mean the conventional thing -- learns new things easily, capable of reasoning through complex tasks, would do well in med school/law school/phd programs/finance/engineering, picks up creative disciplines quickly, etc -- then are we sure it's not exactly the other way around?
People become invested in cults and conspiracies for emotional reasons, not rational reasons, and conventionally intelligent people are extraordinarily good at post hoc rationalization. More importantly, they're often better at mitigating or managing some of the downsides (eg, maintaining good-enough status in a cult, avoiding talking about the conspiracy in certain circumstances, etc.).
At least, this has been my experience with some extended family who fell into a cult: the ones I could consider "smartest" were stuck in the cult the longest, because they could rationalize their way into an answer for everything.