The irony is that this comment is less informative than the thing that it is criticizing. Basic summary: the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Which is as informative as claiming that the truth is on some kind of binary extreme.
A further irony is the meta-complaining about simplification while being as bare-bones simplistic as it gets. “No! They are wrong!” Really? That’s not what the Twitter thread says at all. For example, it claims that misinformation is not a problem but that the real problem is biased sharing.
The Twitter thread makes a series of concrete claims about social media which can be fact checked. The comment above, however, does not. 4/10.
“The only thing”—only half of all weekdays if one follows the in-bed-for-eight hours recommendation. And you of course have to eat and groom yourself outside of those hours.
I’m not saying that you are wrong. But it seems weird to dismiss a whopping 40 hours a week as a seemingly small thing.
YMMV, but I'm 100% in agreement with GP about programming being the new literacy.
I quit my old SWE job to run a bloody eBay store and am raking it in because I'm competing against people who can't program.
The trick, though, IMO, is not having a programmer solve the problem but getting people with domain expertise literate enough to write some hacky Python scripts.
This is, in my honest opinion, the next leap forward in terms of productivity.
This is exactly right. People who are actual programmers are like poets, essayists, or authors in the original literacy. They have a title that actually says "person is literate".
But there were always great poets and authors. The big win was that you got a bureaucrat class with their own domain titles who could use writing to get things done.
Likewise if the boss in the original article had been taught how to hack some scripts together, they wouldn't need to hire the author for $90k.
I worked as an analyst and was able to automate a job people in my shoes spent ~100 hours a year in doing. It was a huge success.
Until we needed a machine to run it, with good security controls, high availability... blah blah blah.
We're at the point where most people can find low hanging fruit by reading a Python blog in a weekend, but in my experience the IT infrastructure isn't setup to easily do everything else.
As anyone who has read random fanfiction.net stories or middle school penmanship homework can attest, being able to write is not that same thing as being able to write well.
> This is to Danish parliament. I wonder if the research he is quoting applies to (a) a larger country (b) with a heterogeneous population that (c) communicates primarily in English (where most misinformation seems to be aimed).
I was thinking primarily about the US with questions about the UK as well. However, I think India is a reasonable country to also consider. Doesn't India also have the unique challenge of many groups who speak their own non-English non-Hindi language serving as misinformation subculture?
> I intuitively believe that there's truth to all of these so called myths, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
His opinions are based on claimed research while yours are based on intuition. I’d sooner trust his opionions compared to yours because he at least could be exposed as a liar if it turns out that the research doesn’t back up his opinions. You on the other hand would at worst be called naive.
Mindfulness is an English translation of the Buddhist word “sati” which Buddhists use to describe one particular quality of meditation. To dismiss it because some people have coopted it would be like, well, to dismiss the yoga tradition because of “yoga pants”.
A lot of what teachers do is exactly just that—basically talking at the pupils, as if they were vessels who are supposed to have their heads filled up with knowledge.
Proper learning is supposed to be more active and pupil-directed. Look at the Deweyite schools in America.
If you find that to be a belittling description then I’m sorry, but that’s largely what teachers do. And it’s been critiqued for a long time by thoughtful people who care about pedagogy, so you can’t simply dismiss it as some kind of “woe be the state of education” phenomenom.
“Proper education” is student, culture and even teacher dependent. There is no singular best practice. So many of the sit down, shut up models of education in other countries produce students which routinely trounce US students in math and science. At the same time, so does Finland.
My point above is that the belittling is a major part of the problem. You want to denigrate an entire profession, sure, but it has consequences, something we're seeing as experienced teachers leave the profession.
> “Proper education” is student, culture and even teacher dependent. There is no singular best practice.
In my experience it is not productive to have this kind of conversation with teachers since they will go back and forth between (1) general, vague praise for mass education, and then (2) vacuous, relativistic statements that says nothing about education other than “it’s relative” once they are confronted with concrete problems.
They seem to identify too strongly with their teacher identity to be up for that discussion.
