ksdale

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421.
by ksdale 7y ago
Your comment jumped out at me, my wife and I are homeschooling/unschooling and some of people we've met focus on "purity" and all I can think when I talk with them is, "The point isn't to completely avoid anyth
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by ksdale 7y ago
I don't think I agree. I think the drug example makes very explicit what the cost of this kind of enforcement is, and as a result a lot of people have very reasonably concluded that the price of enforcement is much higher than the cost
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by ksdale 7y ago
I agree, but I think it’s valuable to make it explicit. Many people talk about requiring this or that as though it has no cost beyond just asking people to do it.
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by ksdale 7y ago
Are kids learning enough to maintain their finances, do their taxes, and vote in a way that integrates historical knowledge? It's not my experience that the average 18 year old knows any of those things, and the article suggests that m
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by ksdale 7y ago
I think this sort of exercise would be beneficial for everyone to do. Even the most benign government policies are enforced by the police and the military. I'm continually surprised at how often people offhandedly suggest that the gove
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by ksdale 7y ago
This is exactly what I was alluding to in my first comment though. Of course a well rounded education is important, but we’re failing to deliver basically any kind of education to a very large number of people. I think it’s not inappropriat
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by ksdale 7y ago
Why are you assuming ignorance? In the parent's examples, the kids knew lots of things. Additionally, it is our current state of education that's led to such a large portion of the population being unable to do basic math and the
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by ksdale 7y ago
This is largely my position as well. I think kids are capable of drastically more than we expect from them, especially when they are motivated, and there's no reason that 18 year olds shouldn't be perfectly capable of making an im
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by ksdale 7y ago
I said most, not all, and do you consider yourself average? I would consider an 18 year old with your skills to be rather exceptional. And 18 year olds like you were tend to go off to college and not enter the workforce right away, anyway.
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by ksdale 7y ago
We already tell all children what they should be learning, and apparently a huge portion of them end up without basic literacy and numeracy. That's as bad as it gets. It's hard to imagine how these adults would have been worse off
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by ksdale 7y ago
I don't think it's that difficult, but I think people spend way too much time arguing about the last half of the syllabus (what we should be teaching high schoolers) and ignoring the fact that a quarter or a third of students aren
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by ksdale 7y ago
Yeah, I think you're spot on about a lot of kids not being interested in the subjects that are taught and I agree that it has a big impact on total learning. On the other hand, I don't really remember being taught many professiona
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by ksdale 7y ago
My wife and I are in the early stages of homeschooling our kids and one thing I've noticed in all my reading about education is that there seems to be one side that argues for more job training in school, and there's another side
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by ksdale 7y ago
I've thought that "antifragility" as a concept has been a useful way to think about a lot of different things, could you clarify what you mean by true systems analysis? I'm always interested in learning more about this s
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by ksdale 7y ago
I think you made great points in your comment above, but I would point out that the thought experiment indicates that the resources they control are actually not that vast, compared to the wealth that would actually be required to raise eve
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by ksdale 7y ago
I mean, the thought experiment isn't about the logistics of redistribution, it's about the sheer amount of wealth. These counterpoints amount to saying that actually redistributing wealth like that would have terrible unintended c
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by ksdale 7y ago
Yeah I agree it's not remotely practical and that there would be all sorts of crazy consequences, I just think the thought experiment is useful as an intuition check for how much wealth there is. As an aside, I don't agree that we
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by ksdale 7y ago
It's especially interesting, because although a billion dollars is a staggering amount of money for one person to possess, if you distributed the wealth of the world out to every single person evenly, it would only be something like $5
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by ksdale 7y ago
I didn’t say they were easier, I said that I thought the disruption to a person’s life was a lot more comparable than people think. If you’re footloose and fancy-free without a kid or a dog, both a kid and a dog will require serious lifesty
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by ksdale 7y ago
As an only semi-related aside, I've always thought it was interesting that my friends who didn't want kids when we were younger because of the responsibility have nonetheless spent the last 10 years having dogs. Kids are far more
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by ksdale 7y ago
I've always been rather suspicious of this way of reasoning. It basically goes, "Things aren't as bad as they need to be for people to change their ways, so hopefully they get worse so people change their ways." And it i
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by ksdale 7y ago
I think I watched a few episodes of that with my father-in-law and all I remember is that several of the contestants spent the first 8 hours or so building shelter (and if I recall correctly is was summer, so freezing was not an issue) and
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by ksdale 7y ago
Your point is well taken, but in the US, at least, a limited liability company is also an entity that you can form like a corporation, or a partnership, so the words don't necessarily conform to their dictionary definitions and are, pe
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by ksdale 7y ago
I think an illustrative example would be certain young professional athletes who struggle when they reach the level where everyone is as good of an athlete as they are. Throughout their amateur careers, they excelled by being a far better n
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by ksdale 7y ago
It's hard to separate out what is a lack of strength or coordination and what is random trial. When babies learn to do basically everything, they do a tremendous amount of random flailing that gradually (over weeks or months or years)
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by ksdale 7y ago
You're completely correct, of course. Violence is definitely utterly ordinary. I suppose I meant something more along the lines of mundane or even gentle?... I'm not sure what would have been a better way to phrase it, but I think
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by ksdale 7y ago
"This is what violent death is really like. It is unexpected, out of nowhere – it cuts our stories short. Victims of homicide do not pop into existence three minutes earlier in order to be killed." I love this line and I think thi
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by ksdale 7y ago
This was my experience. In my SAT prep class 15 years ago, the first thing the instructor did was talk about the statistics of guessing and how even if you don’t know any answers at all, you can improve your score dramatically just by elimi
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by ksdale 7y ago
I agree with all of this, which is why I said I think a single payer system is the best way to go, but the parent mentioned insurance being cheaper, which it would not be. The total cost of the whole system is lower per capita when everyone
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by ksdale 7y ago
That doesn't necessarily follow. Whether or not it gets cheaper or more expensive depends on how likely the new people are to get sick compared to the other people in the pool. Adding a bunch of sick people raises the costs for everyon

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