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Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal pro

by scoofy 11mo ago

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.

atmavatar 11mo ago
> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted. For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations. Others could probably come up with additional examples.
- amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
  They've rebranded knowledge they don't like as "woke".
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 11mo ago
  My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis. In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manual for the actual society we have inherited. Even in my deep red state public school system, we spent way more time than was warranted on native Americans and other things that people feel guilty about. If you’re born in a multi-generational colony ship, you need to know how the CO2 scrubbers work. It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.
  - mmooss 11mo ago
    > It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors. It does, because for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers. The politics and institutions turn out to be much harder than the scrubbers - few societies produce the latter, and it's generally the ones with much stronger human rights.
    - rayiner 11mo ago
      But the world’s most technologically advanced civilization was built by politics and institutions that killed and displaced the native Americans then glorified that effort in movies and television. The guys who built the moon rocket and silicon valley grew up playing cowboys and indians.
      - mmooss 11mo ago
        Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished. The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving? So many push so hard against liberty and justice.
        rayiner 11mo ago
        You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers." We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
- lelanthran 11mo ago
  > For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. Is this actually common? The argument is quite common, but I expected that the actual number of schools who do this is a very very tiny number.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    I'd imagine the same; skipping evolution entirely is hard. Dismissing it however, is not that uncommon. > Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-education-in-the-u-s-is-getting-better/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati...
rayiner 11mo ago
I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise. Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” I went to the Iowa Caucuses back in 2019. These were democrats, but not highly educated ones. Mostly farm and farm adjacent people. But watching them ask questions and deliberate, there was a degree of level-headedness, practicality, prudence, skepticism, and caution that was just remarkable to watch. These are folks who don’t have much book learning but come from generations of people who managed to plan and organize their lives well enough to survive Iowa’s brutally harsh winters and short planting window (about 14 days—either side of that and you and your whole family die). You need smart people to do smart people things, but those conscientious normies are the backbone of a healthy society.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- lelanthran 11mo ago
  > The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise. Outliers. You cannot come to conclusions based on examining outliers only. The better conclusion is from taking a sample of the population, and checking the correlation between test scores and success. > Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” There's plenty of studies that determine the correlation between academic performance and success. Have you possibly even considered that the basic "gut-feeling" only gets better (i.e. more predictive successes) with better academic scores? IOW, the more you know, the more you learn, the better your heuristic is when making snap conclusions.
mmooss 11mo ago
Lots of people besides nerds care very much which schools their kids attend. Look at home prices.

by scoofy 11mo ago

atmavatar 11mo ago

> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted. For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations. Others could probably come up with additional examples.

amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
They've rebranded knowledge they don't like as "woke".
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
rayiner 11mo ago
My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis. In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manual for the actual society we have inherited. Even in my deep red state public school system, we spent way more time than was warranted on native Americans and other things that people feel guilty about. If you’re born in a multi-generational colony ship, you need to know how the CO2 scrubbers work. It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.
- mmooss 11mo ago
  > It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors. It does, because for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers. The politics and institutions turn out to be much harder than the scrubbers - few societies produce the latter, and it's generally the ones with much stronger human rights.
  - rayiner 11mo ago
    But the world’s most technologically advanced civilization was built by politics and institutions that killed and displaced the native Americans then glorified that effort in movies and television. The guys who built the moon rocket and silicon valley grew up playing cowboys and indians.
    - mmooss 11mo ago
      Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished. The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving? So many push so hard against liberty and justice.
      - rayiner 11mo ago
        You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers." We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
lelanthran 11mo ago
> For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. Is this actually common? The argument is quite common, but I expected that the actual number of schools who do this is a very very tiny number.
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  I'd imagine the same; skipping evolution entirely is hard. Dismissing it however, is not that uncommon. > Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-education-in-the-u-s-is-getting-better/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati...

rayiner 11mo ago

I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise. Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” I went to the Iowa Caucuses back in 2019. These were democrats, but not highly educated ones. Mostly farm and farm adjacent people. But watching them ask questions and deliberate, there was a degree of level-headedness, practicality, prudence, skepticism, and caution that was just remarkable to watch. These are folks who don’t have much book learning but come from generations of people who managed to plan and organize their lives well enough to survive Iowa’s brutally harsh winters and short planting window (about 14 days—either side of that and you and your whole family die). You need smart people to do smart people things, but those conscientious normies are the backbone of a healthy society.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
lelanthran 11mo ago
> The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise. Outliers. You cannot come to conclusions based on examining outliers only. The better conclusion is from taking a sample of the population, and checking the correlation between test scores and success. > Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.” There's plenty of studies that determine the correlation between academic performance and success. Have you possibly even considered that the basic "gut-feeling" only gets better (i.e. more predictive successes) with better academic scores? IOW, the more you know, the more you learn, the better your heuristic is when making snap conclusions.

mmooss 11mo ago

Lots of people besides nerds care very much which schools their kids attend. Look at home prices.