I agree mostly. But I would push back on the idea that you need to let your child do whatever (play on Roblox, get fancy clothes or toys, etc) because of bullying. You're trading one set of potential problems for another set of known problems, and letting your own fears dictate how you raise your kids. How do you expect your kids to stand up to peer pressure as teenagers if you give into their peers when they are younger?
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
On the contrary, developing a deep relationship with someone very different than myself (different religions, native languages and countries, socioeconomic class, race, gender) has shown me the lies I've been telling myself all my life.
It's easy to identity lies and hypocrisy in others. But the brain has all sorts of tricks to prevent it from looking inwards; at least for me it prefers feeling rewarded to deep self-criticism. Finding someone who sees me and will happily call me on my assumptions, conditioning, and BS has been a great gift.
I'm not sure I'd have phrased it as "lies I've been telling myself", but I have a similar experience from a cross-cultural relationship, from mid 20s to early 50s. We had to work through conflicts more explicitly, with a lot more communication. Many things may be misunderstanding due to divergent assumptions, expectations, and even different body language signals.
I guess the "lie" exposed here is the way people can automatically believe they're seeing the truth of a social situation. It is easy to project false experience and motivation onto others. A more truthful approach recognizes windows of uncertainty around many encounters.
I think this applies to basic single-culture contexts too. Even in the same culture or the same family, we don't really know exactly what another person is experiencing.
Many seem cocksure that their social read is correct, and any grief is the other party's deliberate action. It takes a certain detachment to realize that your misreading of a situation may well be the genesis of a negative spiral, rather than a justified response...
The social aspect is a part of it, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. So much of how we fundamentally see the world- the role of the individual vs society, luck vs skill vs determination as being important for success, what defines a 'happy' life- is determined by our own conditioning. By seeing someone else's perspective you start to appreciate that there aren't many 'first principles' in life.
Take a simple example, marriage. If you're a Millennial you were probably brought up to think marriage is for love, and should produce kids. Depending on your orientation and enculturation, the wife is 'supposed' to stay at home or 'supposed' to have a career. We don't question the basic outlines of what a marriage looks like, unless you happen to be a part of the polyamory or fundamental religious communities, in which case you probably take those standards as being the ideal.
My husband's entire family had arranged marriages. Seeing their relationships gave me a new perspective on what a marriage can be, and forced us to be intentional about what parts of our culture we bring along. It's not that we're doing marriage 'better' than anyone else, but when you can't assume anything about what a marriage looks like you have to really examine it in detail.
From an evolutionary standpoint what would be the benefit of the brain looking inwards and constantly questioning itself? Certainly lower animals mostly just go with what instinct tells them, maybe with memory of prior experience in the larger-brained ones. Most people also seem to operate on their feeling of "common sense" without much reflection, at least in my observation.
> what would be the benefit of the brain looking inwards and constantly questioning itself?
When what you think matters. An animal that questions its belief "there is no tiger behind that bush" and finds a tiger lives longer than one that doesn't.
To be fair, I didn't read that suggestion as being about a possible placebo effect, just that you can't attribute any one good day to the pill. It's like climate change- it undeniably exists, but you can't blame climate change for a single heat wave or freak storm.
You read it that way because that’s the sensible way to read it. Everyone suggesting you missed the plot is in turn making a rather large logical leap.
Considering private schools cost tens of thousands of dollars and get to choose who they admit, as good (in reading) and worse (in math) than schools with similar demographics seems pretty damning, doesn't it?
Damning for who? Education is just one reason parents choose public schools for their children. Depending on the school (eg. Catholic schools) it may be the last thing they care about. Also you should look at the cost per pupil for public schools. It is very high in many states, with the average being $18,000 per student in 2021.[0]
I did. My comment was to the “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?” comment in the article. Even if you suck at math when enrolling college, if you actually manage to get through some math-heavy STEM degree, you've probably learned the math through your studies.
I also did check out the paper, and it does indeed seem like the number of students that are placed into Math 2 (The lowest or second lowest placement if I read it correctly) has 20-fold increased in just 5 years, while most other Math placements have stayed somewhat stable, at least toward the top.
My conclusion is that the students that simply don't have the math knowledge to pursue STEM-degrees, will either not enter them, or finish them, so that might not be a huge problem? They'll purse other majors that don't require math.
My hunch is also that those that are not interested in math, have found shortcuts to get through their math classes the past 5 years (cheating? AI?). But, then again, what are the chances they'll actually end up working with anything math-related after college?
The fact that 8 individuals voted says nothing about how any of them actually felt. It's not a coincidence that none of them are up for reelection soon. This was all done with the blessing of leadership, they were just the sacrificial lambs.
In Nancy Pelosi's memoir there is a story about some red-state Democrat who came out publicly against Pelosi on some issue. Turns out the entire scheme was her idea- make the representative look good to his own state by throwing herself under the bus.
I'm not saying any of this is good or bad, but this is what politics actually is. A bunch of behind the scenes scheming to advance leadership's agenda. Not individual politicians voting for what they think is best.
I don't know the exact details, but I thought the Framingham survey was just a cross-section of the population. So getting upset about a 50th percentile score makes no sense at a population level.
A quick Google says that the Mesa study was actually of people without cardiovascular disease at the beginning of the study. So again, these conclusions don't make any sense to me.
Of course it makes sense. 30% of this population will die of heart disease. You don’t want to be at the median of that population if you can avoid it. And as a society we need to move the median, not just accept it. Which means giving people better advice based on better data.
As an aviation fan just reading this thread is quite eye-opening in terms of how much risk tolerance the average commenter has vs what is standard in the aviation community and on aviation forums. It's almost like peeking into two different worlds. I wonder if there would be any value in teaching an "engineering when lives are on the line" or "war stories from accident investigations" classes to new engineers. I feel like there's value in appreciating just how much more work goes into building a system where people's lives are at stake.
Yeah it bothers me to no end with the "engineering"-inflation of various jobs.
Like, I'm definitively not an engineer, nor does my day job really involve engineering, yet my title contains Engineer! I'm a proud CRUD monkey and designer.
I have done engineering work previously when developing hardware, and it's really a different mindset (even in an agile & fast-moving engineering org). Safety, cost, reliability, multidisciplinary integration, etc. just don't really come up in a lot in web and app development (which is a wonderful thing, really—I love it!)
It is an endless source of frustration to see poorly engineered software solutions powering critical systems.
> I wonder if there would be any value in teaching an "engineering when lives are on the line" or "war stories from accident investigations" classes to new engineers.
There would be immense value in that. But who is going to pay for it? It's a course that will essentially cause your crew to start producing software at 1/10th the rate they would otherwise do.
The average commenter here is a software guy. I imagine for the average software guy a Master Caution would be like a minor compile-time warning, i.e. feel free to just disregard it. :)
PBS kids shows teach (sometimes via a heavy hand, I'll admit) things like acceptance of people of different skin colors and ability levels. There's a show featuring Inuits called Molly of Denali, not McKinley. Some of the characters are even LGB (not trans as far as I've seen). Sadly in the current world these concepts are considered 'political'.
That "heavy hand" is precisely what makes things controversial or political. For instance Star Trek has pretty much always been 'woke.' My favorite series is Deep Space 9. The captain is black, the second in command (as well as the chief science officer) is a woman, the chief medical officer is Mideastern, and so on. And there were countless episodes that hit on all typical social justice themes, yet somehow these things were presented so 'naturally' that it all just felt very 'appropriate', for lack of a better term.
By contrast I was completely unable to watch things like Star Trek: Discovery (them choosing a title that would be acronymed as STD is already weird) because the identity politics were force fed so hard, to say nothing of 'Mary Sue'ism. It felt very unnatural and like a thinly veiled political rant. Back to PBS, Bert and Ernie - gay? I mean very possibly, if not likely. The creators say no, but they'd probably say no even if the answer was yes. And it's fine. It's introduced in a way that feels very natural, but when you suddenly start making such things overt, and one whose answer must be discussed and force-fed, it starts feeling much more like a political statement than just an inclusive context.
I'll certainly be letting my children watch old Sesame Street et al, but I think we'll be turning to things like Masha and the Bear for contemporary programming.
You hit the nail on the head. The issue is not writers wanting to tell stories that get people thinking about ethics and politics; the issue is that the writers can't restrain themselves from turning the show into a preachy, obnoxious mess. Older Trek series weren't perfect in this regard (to your point, DS9 had a couple of episodes where the writers very clearly took a side and were preaching at the audience), but mostly they were skilled enough to use a light touch and let the audience draw their own conclusions. The same is unfortunately not true for the writers currently in charge of Star Trek (or a lot of shows for that matter).
I don't watch the newer Star Treks so I can't connect with you there.
I should have been clearer in my post: PBS shows treat everything in a heavy handed way. Daniel Tiger will explain the main theme of the episode, have characters burst into song repeating that theme over and over again, and then repeat the theme again at the end. It's a long ways from Mr Roger, who seemed to treat kids like little adults. To be honest it's not my cup of tea. But I wouldn't call it the least bit political, just bad writing and/or best practices depending on who you talk to.
I'm completely with you on this. I think a lot has to do with Alex Kurtzman. He has that particular opinionated way and he needs to inject it in everything he touches, very "Hollywood safe and committee approved"
The earlier Star Treks went AGAINST the norm. Not the 'current' trend. There's a huge difference and as you say, it feels as if they see the viewer as stupid and unable to read between the lines.
I think you’re being unfair on Discovery in attacking its “identity politics” as being more intense than earlier Treks. I say this because Discovery intensifies EVERYTHING it does over earlier Star Treks. The visuals are more cinematic, the sets are much, much larger, the pace is faster, the costumes more detailed, the cheesiness is cheesier, the “science” is wilder, the tension is …. er… more tense. I think singling out Discovery’s heavy-handed wokeness as a sign they’re outting too much emphasis there ignores the fact that the entire show is more heavy-handed than previous Treks.
I know the reactor will explode in seconds causing a chain reaction that will echo back in time erasing the entire universe from existence, but I just have to stop for a minute or three to express my feelings and deliver a monologue about my motivations and info dump this hastily assembled backstory in case I need to nobly sacrifice myself for the greater good, while you just look on gormlessly nodding as the body count climbs. Everything might be turned up to 11, but the eye rollingly forced emotional bullshit managed to overshadow it all. I would have preferred the Seasame Street script writers to have written it.
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.