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> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not aver

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity

woodruffw 2y ago
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you. I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- r3trohack3r 2y ago
  I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance. Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about. The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something. I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that: * every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human * your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional. A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values. Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
  - svnt 2y ago
    I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion: Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois. Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional. If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    > you can optimize for that I think that this is the core problem - you can't.
    - r3trohack3r 2y ago
      Pretty sure you can. You try your thesis. I’ll try mine. We will see where the other’s grand kids end up.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    > But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois. And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.
    - programjames 2y ago
      It is impossible for an individual to do this search themself, so you have to have some global sorting. Top-down approaches include math competitions and national testing. More federated approaches include just... moving to communities where the average is closer to you.
dijksterhuis 2y ago
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”. tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything. edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners. in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities. children are a great example of this.
watwut 2y ago
Well, one reason is that your assumption that they are all or mostly inferior is wrong.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids. The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool. Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool. What if there isn't one within a reasonable distance, or your locality doesn't have school choice? > Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs. The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, not necessarily that you need the presence of other gifted children except insofar as you need to fill out the class, which is not an issue when the class size is one.
      - defrost 2y ago
        There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc. I grew some 1,500km north of the nearest city and got by .. still managed to hook up with Terrence Tao and Paul Erdős when I got to university and ran a math club. When one of my kids was ready for high school we got a house in the catchment of the only public school with an aviation program so they could build and fly a light aircraft. > The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages. Despite a lot fighting at high school, on and off the fooball field, I managed to pick up enough abstract algebra to work on CAYLEY/MAGMA which cracked a few quantum encryption candidates recently, enough linear algebra and calculas to author a geophysical processing suite, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
crabbone 2y ago
> what is there to gain from it? Humility.
- programjames 2y ago
  Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
  - crabbone 2y ago
    This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.) People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story. The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant. Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.
    - programjames 2y ago
      I consider phrases like > It's just good to be humble. End of story. to be axiomatic declarations. My issue with these kind of axioms is they're not really necessary. You can get everything useful by only considering things that are good for somebody. Now, we don't live in a perfectly informed and rational society, so it can be good (for society) to indoctrinate everyone with this axiom. But, as with all axioms, not everyone will believe in them. So, if I'm told, "You need to be more humble, it's a virtue," that's begging the question! I need some external reason to either adopt the axiom or humility. Society as a whole seems to have adopted this axiom, but why is that? There was probably an evolution of axioms, where ones that didn't work got rejected, while ones that mostly worked got inculcated. I think most people overestimate their abilities, which would lead to fighting over positional goods. I think the role of the humility axiom is to prevent such fighting, but it comes with drawbacks. Since the Enlightenment, most wealth has been created by thinking really hard. This means you really want to rank people near the top accurately, so you can give them resources to go and create their ideas. The axiom of humility regresses everyone toward the mean—which is great when the GDP is measured in bushels, but not so great when it is measured in transistors.
__loam 2y ago
I hate this fucking site lol
gm678 2y ago
> Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
jkolio 2y ago
When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat. It's not all about you.
- programjames 2y ago
  Exactly. It's not all about you. It's best for the community to encourage education, and dragging down students who actually care about education does the opposite.
  - jkolio 2y ago
    Your selfishness is not equal to my desire for common prosperity. If anything, lone wolf-ism is what drags us down (no matter how proficient the wolf thinks he is). We live in a society.
    - matrix87 2y ago
      > lone wolf-ism is what drags us down with respect to what metric? economic growth? that's probably not true, lone wolfism is what drives people to develop expertise in the first place if the metric is community or "sustainability" or something else, is pursuing that metric in the place of economic growth sustainable long term?
- matrix87 2y ago
  You and the homeless guy aren't peers, you just did a nice thing. You're not going to classes with him or working alongside him
  - jkolio 2y ago
    I was (and remain) a few bad breaks from his situation. I'm not responsible for his state, but we absolutely are peers (i.e., same age, facing the same broad socioeconomic environment).
programjames 2y ago
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? The appearance of humility^[0]? I don't really see what there is to gain either. [0]: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section II, Paragraph 9

woodruffw 2y ago

> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you. I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
r3trohack3r 2y ago
I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance. Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about. The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something. I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that: * every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human * your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional. A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values. Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
- svnt 2y ago
  I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion: Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois. Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional. If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > you can optimize for that I think that this is the core problem - you can't.
  - r3trohack3r 2y ago
    Pretty sure you can. You try your thesis. I’ll try mine. We will see where the other’s grand kids end up.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois. And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.
  - programjames 2y ago
    It is impossible for an individual to do this search themself, so you have to have some global sorting. Top-down approaches include math competitions and national testing. More federated approaches include just... moving to communities where the average is closer to you.

dijksterhuis 2y ago

> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”. tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything. edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners. in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities. children are a great example of this.

watwut 2y ago

Well, one reason is that your assumption that they are all or mostly inferior is wrong.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids. The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
- defrost 2y ago
  Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool. Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool. What if there isn't one within a reasonable distance, or your locality doesn't have school choice? > Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs. The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, not necessarily that you need the presence of other gifted children except insofar as you need to fill out the class, which is not an issue when the class size is one.
    - defrost 2y ago
      There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc. I grew some 1,500km north of the nearest city and got by .. still managed to hook up with Terrence Tao and Paul Erdős when I got to university and ran a math club. When one of my kids was ready for high school we got a house in the catchment of the only public school with an aviation program so they could build and fly a light aircraft. > The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages. Despite a lot fighting at high school, on and off the fooball field, I managed to pick up enough abstract algebra to work on CAYLEY/MAGMA which cracked a few quantum encryption candidates recently, enough linear algebra and calculas to author a geophysical processing suite, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

crabbone 2y ago

> what is there to gain from it? Humility.

programjames 2y ago
Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
- crabbone 2y ago
  This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.) People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story. The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant. Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.
  - programjames 2y ago
    I consider phrases like > It's just good to be humble. End of story. to be axiomatic declarations. My issue with these kind of axioms is they're not really necessary. You can get everything useful by only considering things that are good for somebody. Now, we don't live in a perfectly informed and rational society, so it can be good (for society) to indoctrinate everyone with this axiom. But, as with all axioms, not everyone will believe in them. So, if I'm told, "You need to be more humble, it's a virtue," that's begging the question! I need some external reason to either adopt the axiom or humility. Society as a whole seems to have adopted this axiom, but why is that? There was probably an evolution of axioms, where ones that didn't work got rejected, while ones that mostly worked got inculcated. I think most people overestimate their abilities, which would lead to fighting over positional goods. I think the role of the humility axiom is to prevent such fighting, but it comes with drawbacks. Since the Enlightenment, most wealth has been created by thinking really hard. This means you really want to rank people near the top accurately, so you can give them resources to go and create their ideas. The axiom of humility regresses everyone toward the mean—which is great when the GDP is measured in bushels, but not so great when it is measured in transistors.

__loam 2y ago

I hate this fucking site lol

gm678 2y ago

> Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

jkolio 2y ago

When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat. It's not all about you.

programjames 2y ago
Exactly. It's not all about you. It's best for the community to encourage education, and dragging down students who actually care about education does the opposite.
- jkolio 2y ago
  Your selfishness is not equal to my desire for common prosperity. If anything, lone wolf-ism is what drags us down (no matter how proficient the wolf thinks he is). We live in a society.
  - matrix87 2y ago
    > lone wolf-ism is what drags us down with respect to what metric? economic growth? that's probably not true, lone wolfism is what drives people to develop expertise in the first place if the metric is community or "sustainability" or something else, is pursuing that metric in the place of economic growth sustainable long term?
matrix87 2y ago
You and the homeless guy aren't peers, you just did a nice thing. You're not going to classes with him or working alongside him
- jkolio 2y ago
  I was (and remain) a few bad breaks from his situation. I'm not responsible for his state, but we absolutely are peers (i.e., same age, facing the same broad socioeconomic environment).

programjames 2y ago

> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? The appearance of humility^[0]? I don't really see what there is to gain either. [0]: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section II, Paragraph 9