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This sounds like a complete nonsense argument. Can you explain what your point is? Are you saying that it's impossible to accurately research anything? Or that,

This sounds like a complete nonsense argument. Can you explain what your point is? Are you saying that it's impossible to accurately research anything? Or that, given infinite time, parents would be so bad at researching charter schools that they would never be able to divine the best choice anyway? What do you think MY argument was? I suspect you misread.

joe_the_user 7y ago
I believe the gp is engaged in the bad-faith approach of taking your comment about the state having more time as being literally the only argument you're making, where it's of course obvious the state has more advantages than simple time (including trained personnel, institutional practices, etc, etc).
- swivelmaster 7y ago
  Sounds like it. I really miss the good old days of Hacker News when there was literally none of that kind of nonsense.
- ultrarunner 7y ago
  Why is that a bad-faith approach to response? That's the argument being presented, and there are myriad reasons it's entirely without merit. If the argument is that the state has more advantages, they can also be presented one-by-one and weighed. Politics often fails precisely because it smashes far too many decisions into one do-or-die package. Why should we repeat that unproductive pattern here?
  - tanderson92 7y ago
    It's a bad-faith fallacy because the OP's point holds even if the playing field is level and the state doesn't have an advantage in any other component than the stated one (time). The bad-faith comment (yours) instead reversed it, implicitly claiming the state was negatively positioned with respect to factors other than time, and pretended that was the OP's argument.
    - ultrarunner 7y ago
      The state is negatively positioned; it has poor-to-no feedback with regard to the personal outcomes of its implementations. Parents and students do, on an ongoing and daily basis. The idea that I "pretended" that this was anyone else's argument but my own seems completely absurd. While I'm glad you're able to infer implications, it would be wonderful if you could take it a step further to find that an argument cannot be true if a necessary premises is false. That's not bad faith, that's logic.
  - swivelmaster 7y ago
    You're not doing the bare minimum of even attempting to understand the purpose of my argument and instead taking the dumbest possible literal interpretation and then responding to that. That is the very definition of a bad-faith argument. Governments can hire experts to determine standards by doing research, and then can apply those standards over time to the schools they regulate. They can also collect massive amounts of data and compare performance between schools, across time, determine means and check for outliers, etc. etc. etc. My argument is that consumers don't have time to do any of that. They have time to do what they do with colleges: Read a limited number pamphlets, thumb through Newsweek's annual "best colleges" report, maybe spend a few minutes here and there checking data online. We can, as a society, devote more resources to making sure the government regulation side of things improves. What we can't do is collectively give OURSELVES more time to do that research individually.
    - ultrarunner 7y ago
      Oh no, I understand your argument full well. I just think it's extremely shallow. Parents and students have plenty of time to research important aspects of their lives, starting with the experiential reality of the school they're subjected to for several years. One of your argument's shortcomings is the implication that only an a priori decision making process is possible for the over-a-decade process of going to school. I would argue that these experiential data are more valid than metrics like standardized test scores by ethnicity or "letter grades" that the government gives itself for its school. Ultimately I question the motives behind many of these testing methodologies, because when they're not meant to satisfy the motivation of the student and/or their parents, the student (and their parents) become the product. But even if parents could choose between multiple public school pedagogical methodologies, many can't simply because it requires selling the family's house and relocating to a different district. It's hard to have time to impact a situation when the situation is already fixed before the fact, but of course then it's not a time issue at all. Ultimately I was responding to a two-sentence comment from you. I don't think complaining that my response was "bare minimum" is an appropriate way to handle the challenge, and I find the resort to name-calling about the "age of 4chan" particularly off putting.
      - 7y ago
tracker1 7y ago
Sounds like they're saying that poor parents are too stupid to know the difference.

joe_the_user 7y ago

I believe the gp is engaged in the bad-faith approach of taking your comment about the state having more time as being literally the only argument you're making, where it's of course obvious the state has more advantages than simple time (including trained personnel, institutional practices, etc, etc).

swivelmaster 7y ago
Sounds like it. I really miss the good old days of Hacker News when there was literally none of that kind of nonsense.
ultrarunner 7y ago
Why is that a bad-faith approach to response? That's the argument being presented, and there are myriad reasons it's entirely without merit. If the argument is that the state has more advantages, they can also be presented one-by-one and weighed. Politics often fails precisely because it smashes far too many decisions into one do-or-die package. Why should we repeat that unproductive pattern here?
- tanderson92 7y ago
  It's a bad-faith fallacy because the OP's point holds even if the playing field is level and the state doesn't have an advantage in any other component than the stated one (time). The bad-faith comment (yours) instead reversed it, implicitly claiming the state was negatively positioned with respect to factors other than time, and pretended that was the OP's argument.
  - ultrarunner 7y ago
    The state is negatively positioned; it has poor-to-no feedback with regard to the personal outcomes of its implementations. Parents and students do, on an ongoing and daily basis. The idea that I "pretended" that this was anyone else's argument but my own seems completely absurd. While I'm glad you're able to infer implications, it would be wonderful if you could take it a step further to find that an argument cannot be true if a necessary premises is false. That's not bad faith, that's logic.
- swivelmaster 7y ago
  You're not doing the bare minimum of even attempting to understand the purpose of my argument and instead taking the dumbest possible literal interpretation and then responding to that. That is the very definition of a bad-faith argument. Governments can hire experts to determine standards by doing research, and then can apply those standards over time to the schools they regulate. They can also collect massive amounts of data and compare performance between schools, across time, determine means and check for outliers, etc. etc. etc. My argument is that consumers don't have time to do any of that. They have time to do what they do with colleges: Read a limited number pamphlets, thumb through Newsweek's annual "best colleges" report, maybe spend a few minutes here and there checking data online. We can, as a society, devote more resources to making sure the government regulation side of things improves. What we can't do is collectively give OURSELVES more time to do that research individually.
  - ultrarunner 7y ago
    Oh no, I understand your argument full well. I just think it's extremely shallow. Parents and students have plenty of time to research important aspects of their lives, starting with the experiential reality of the school they're subjected to for several years. One of your argument's shortcomings is the implication that only an a priori decision making process is possible for the over-a-decade process of going to school. I would argue that these experiential data are more valid than metrics like standardized test scores by ethnicity or "letter grades" that the government gives itself for its school. Ultimately I question the motives behind many of these testing methodologies, because when they're not meant to satisfy the motivation of the student and/or their parents, the student (and their parents) become the product. But even if parents could choose between multiple public school pedagogical methodologies, many can't simply because it requires selling the family's house and relocating to a different district. It's hard to have time to impact a situation when the situation is already fixed before the fact, but of course then it's not a time issue at all. Ultimately I was responding to a two-sentence comment from you. I don't think complaining that my response was "bare minimum" is an appropriate way to handle the challenge, and I find the resort to name-calling about the "age of 4chan" particularly off putting.
    - 7y ago

tracker1 7y ago

Sounds like they're saying that poor parents are too stupid to know the difference.