Taking note of the context within which an acronym or abbreviation is used is part of being an informed reader. In this case, one does not even have to go to the link to get a clue as the URL is right here on HN.
To take an obvious example, I'm sure his friends thought he was a swell guy, but I don't think we need to revisit Hitler's ideas about the Jews. I don't think we need to give much serious thought to theories about moon landing hoaxes or theories about how the Earth is flat either, no matter how nice the people promulgating them may be. We are only given so much time on this Earth; I can think of better ways to spend it than seriously engaging with obvious claptrap.
Everyone I know (and know of) espouses obvious claptrap from time to time. If that is the sieve with which you denote undesirables to remove from your personal sphere, your circle either has a radius of 1 or you delude yourself about your detection abilities.
However at this point "racists" organized and wound up controlling Congress, the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court. The people that you'd like to ignore are currently running the place. Ignoring them might not be the best idea...
It's pretty unlikely that any dyed-in-the-wool Republican is going to hear your rational argument and be so astonished at your doctrine that he changes his mind.
I don't think this kind of exercise is that difficult, and I get plenty of practice on HN talking to people who have very right-wing ideas about the economy. But come on; it's not a way of working miracles. You might persuade your uncle who loves Donald Trump to moderate a couple of positions; you aren't going to turn him away from the Republican Party.
This is the main reason that election campaigns have moved on and focus much more heavily on turning out their own supporters than persuading "undecided" voters, who are a statistical nullity.
Is that what's at issue here? I think very few people -- nearly none -- are actually open to being rationally persuaded to completely flip their political beliefs. People with completely different political commitments usually start from different axioms.
What is a racist? Is this a fixed idea or does it change year to year and depend on the context? Shouldn't we be careful about writing off people based on fluctuating social mores? What about fascists, Marxists, communists, and anarchists? And, say, Trump supporters? Do they deserve basic human respect? Is there any reason not to dehumanize these groups too? Or others who fail our moral tests?
Ideology is a relatively new (taking the long view of human history) mechanism for demarcating tribal affiliation that is a uniquely powerful tool for sowing discord and disunity among people who otherwise have every reason to owe allegiance to and be socially bound to one another.
Dmitri Belyayev's decades-long study on silver foxes produced animals that began to distinguish markedly different morphological features (bushy tails, floppy ears, spotted coats) and physiology (lower adrenaline and stress hormone levels, smaller skulls, longer breeding seasons, larger litter sizes) by selecting strictly for tameness, which they defined simply as aggression toward humans.[0] Belyayev was forced to live in Siberia to carry out this work as Mendelian geneticists and biologists were officially condemned (denounced as "fascist" and many were executed) by the Soviet state as it supported Lysenkoism, a Lamarckian psuedo-scientific theory that minimized the role of genes on behavior, which allied well with Soviet and Marxist ideology.
I'm skeptical of this research. What if the breeder's subjective evaluation of tameness was influenced by bushy tails and floppy ears, as most people's would be? You'd end up breeding both traits in, without the same genes being involved.
"At seven or eight months, when the foxes reach sexual maturity, they are scored for tameness and assigned to one of three classes. The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. (Even Class III foxes are tamer than the calmest farm-bred foxes. Among other things, they allow themselves to be hand fed.) Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the “domesticated elite,” are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs."
Pretty hard and fast criteria. Hard to let a slightly bushier tail affect your evaluation of whether a fox just snapped at you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man describes research that also had hard and fast criteria, yet thumbs somehow ended up on scales anyway. The criteria you quote are a little fuzzy around the edges. "Eager to establish human contact" might well be correlated with fox cuteness.
_The Mismeasure of Man_ is biased garbage written by someone with an axe to grind who attacked strawmen and may well have made up some of his findings of 'bias' and more importantly, has completely failed to predict subsequent decades of psychological, psychiatric, and genetics results: IQ is stronger and more vindicated than ever and a major driver of molecular genetics & neuroimaging research. Try again.
How do you (unconsciously) select for attributes that do not exist? It was not until several generations that the first physiological changes began to be observed and those were in hormone levels, not morphology. In fact, the physiological, anatomical, and morphological changes were entirely unanticipated. The testing & categorization methodology is described in the article:
The tests for tameness took the following form, which was still in use as of 2009. "When a pup is one month old, an experimenter offers it food from his hand while trying to stroke and handle the pup. The pups are tested twice, once in a cage and once while moving freely with other pups in an enclosure, where they can choose to make contact either with the human experimenter or with another pup. The test is repeated monthly until the pups are six or seven months old." At the age of seven or eight months, the pups are given a tameness score and placed in one of three groups. The least domesticated are in Class III; those that allow humans to pet and handle them, but that do not respond to contact with friendliness, are in Class II; the ones that are friendly with humans are in Class I.[5] After only six generations, Belyayev and his team had to add a higher category, Class IE, the "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old."
I wish the opposite. Education should be entirely apolitical and atomized to give those with the most skin in the game the most control. Traditionally, this has been the American way and I do not find a more politicized approach has gained us anything other than divisiveness and contention. The more local the matter, the less the Rs and Ds matter and the more the actual names and people they represent do.
> When the silly federal government wasn’t meddling in local schools they could avoid teaching evolution.
Could they? Only with the consent of the parents.
You are actually highlighting the OPs point. Government bureaucrats made a crazy ruling and people with actual skin in the game had to go along with it.
You are just saying "Hold up hold up. Not those bureaucrats. You should be forced to listen to these other bureaucrats instead".
Why should the consent of the parents matter when designing the curriculum? If the parents in an area suddenly decides that they all believe the earth is flat, would you be okay with that being the science education?
And if a bureaucrat decides that flat earth theory must be taught to kids would you be ok with that being the science education?
It's the difference between a state run economy and a capitalist one. Of course the capitalist one is not infallible but it has been proven time and time again to provide better results over time.
How are parents better than bureaucrats in this case? There are countless towns in the US that if left to their own devices would soon resemble Sunday Schools and would utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.
> There are countless towns in the US that <snip> would utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.
There are currently countless inner city schools that utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.
California with its immense wealth, it's progressive views, and some of the most intelligent bureaucrats has one of the worst school systems in the country.
> would soon resemble Sunday Schools
Why do you think that?
Parents want their kids to do well. They understand the scientific method is important for a wide range of careers.
Conservatives are on equal footing with progressives when it comes to science except for belief in evolution.
Would you find some schools refusing to teach evolution? Yes, but they would be in the minority even in deep red states. And even then the majority of those schools would still be teaching the scientific method. They would just drop evolution from the curriculum.
The local people that must utilize the local schools of course.
The US varies to a great degree from the top 10 states to the bottom 10 states, economically. Massachusetts is at $75,000+ GDP per capita, on par with Norway. Mississippi at the bottom is at $37,000, half that of New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts. The gulf isn't nearly as wide as that of the EU ($70k Ireland vs $13k Croatia), however it's still a considerable difference.
How would one propose the Federal Government's massive bureaucracy manage such wide variances in prosperity when it comes to states & counties? Maybe a dozen large school system zones, each semi-locally managed, encompassing several states. Otherwise, the best option is for states and counties to retain large amounts of control over local education.
Isn't the disparity between states (which is even more pronounced at the municipal level) an argument for more federal intervention? How can Mississippi ever afford an education system like Massachusetts has? How else would the best ideas make it to more insular communities?
Of course there needs to be some local control, some variation to help the students succeed in the environment they'll actually live in (agriculture classes in Iowa, for instance), but the federal government has an important role to play in preventing local systems from falling very far behind and spreading knowledge about what works in comparable systems.
It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, and certainly it does require a lot of money and people and procedures. Education is complicated and critical to both the present and future functioning of society.
> Isn't the disparity between states (which is even more pronounced at the municipal level) an argument for more federal intervention?
I believe it's an argument for financial subsidy, not an argument for large amounts of control transfer away from local and up the chain to some far away bureaucrat.
The system I'd envision would have large amounts of local state + county control/influence, Federal subsidy to boost poor states who lack the tax resources, and a certain number of Federal supervisory school agency zones that would coordinate with the states in that zone to keep results high and represent the Federal Government's money (the US tax payer's money in theory). The idea would be to stay away from having bureaucrats in DC directly telling people in Idaho how to operate their education systems or how to fix their local problems (the Federal school zone overseeing Idaho would operate more locally and would be accountable to the member states; these Federal zones or agencies would be partners with the states conceptually).
Shoot, you're right. I saw somebody upthread mention ~$40k for Mississippi and didn't bother to verify. Still, it's not exactly like Mississippi is a 3rd world country.
Literacy is a low threshold. This study is talking about eliminating achievement gaps between populations. Their method is intense intervention in every facet of the students' lives. So who receives these services? Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them? And if all students receive them, what then becomes of the achievement gap? Does it re-establish itself?
Truly! But not low enough for the USA to be failing.
> Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them?
The fact is, in the upper half of the American class system, educational needs are fantastically well served by redundant layers of investment. I went to an extremely well resourced public high school that made my mid-tier undergrad education a breeze.
That's not saying my school was perfect. Even it did a poor job of addressing the needs of the students at the highest risk. But this is my point. We need an attitude and behavioral shift toward truly embracing the concept that no child should be left behind without a fight.
I don't mean to sidestep your question, but you're identifying a purely hypothetical problem when we're in an ongoing educational crisis. It's kind of like saying, "won't those firehouses cause water damage to the carpet?"
>The fact is, in the upper half of the American class system, educational needs are fantastically well served by redundant layers of investment.
And in the lower levels, we attempt to pick up the slack by spending more money. Unfortunately, this is not a problem money can solve. Motivated parents are the only real solution, assisted by more efficient use of resources.
As a teacher at a tough school in Baltimore, almost every parent or guardian I dealt with wanted nothing more than a bright future for their kid. The lengths some of these parents went through were beyond impressive. But these are families who are often suffering the compounding effects of poverty and living in impoverished communities. That means they often didn't have a high quality education themselves or social capital or political pull.
Today's "nonideal" parent is just the kid the system failed yesterday. Any solution has to acknowledge the debt we have built up.
I read the article you linked. It's a great article. But what it doesn't say is "unfortunately, this is not a problem money can solve", and I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion.
Of course there are ways of spending money that don't have good "outcomes". But the article both cites examples where monetary investment has paid off and also challenges the reader to take an expansive view of what the "outcomes" are. Which I 100% agree with, because schools in impoverished carry far more of the load of holding together communities and providing essential services than in well off areas.
And if you push this logic to its extreme we would have to take children away from under achieving families to break the reproduction of under achievement cycle. Will probably work but not exactly desirable.
Perhaps, if humans are mostly fungible commodities that respond uniformly to inputs. And RIP if you dare suggest the inverse: subsidizing the reproduction of high achievers.
Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.
Aside from the nasty eugenics overtones of this concept, it's flawed from the perspective of how warped the reward system of America's brand of capitalism is. All of our forms of measuring merit are deeply distorted. We pour advantages upon those who have already benefited from previous advantage and then congratulate ourselves for our foresight in identifying how deserving they are when they continue to flourish. The result is a lot of mediocrity elevated and "unrecognized" talent squandered. Scare quotes, because the interlocking circles of privilege and protectionism are how our system is designed to work. We are a deeply elitist society mascarading as a humble, objective meritocracy. No one with advantages actually wants fair competition.
Click on the time of the comment (right after the poster's name). On the new window, click on the "flag" link. I think that calls it to dang's attention.
And yes, dang responds to this kind of garbage, no matter which side it's aimed at...
The comments that I saw you responding to did not seem to be very directly about race. You want us to exclude someone from here because of their statements elsewhere. We don't agree; feel free to leave in righteous indignation if you so choose.
When I see a comment advocating for actual white supremacy, I will flag it, downvote it, and do my best to rebut it. If you see that as "welcoming", so be it.
If you're concerned about abuse on HN, the thing to do is email hn@ycombinator.com, not take threads off topic like you did in this thread. We don't see everything on the site, and can't act on what we don't see.
And what if both of those are caused by self-indulgence? Ballooning waistlines reducing lifespans while concomitantly causing healthcare shortages (because of high demand due to obesity-related chronic conditions) is definitely "getting worse" but it's an odd and self-inflicted sort of worse.
>So the obvious story here is the actual decrease in US life expectancy, a situation broadly reflecting declining living conditions in the US.
True, however complicated by the obesity pandemic. Some informed estimates posit that by 2030 the majority of Americans will not be merely overweight but outright obese. [0] That alone is surely sufficient to retard and revert the US life expectancy.
I sort of feel like the contributors are a cluster of symptomatic problems all rooted in inequality, from lack of universal healthcare, to more people in prison than any nation (where prisoners then get substandard health care), to underfunding of wages to an increasing underclass. It seems we have this storm of rising problems in the US.
Obesity is a sign of improved living conditions that is also a sign of declining living conditions. The former conditions are largely out of the individual's control while the latter conditions are largely in his control. That is, being able to be obese is dictated by the economic vitality of one's country whereas being obese is dictated by one's actions.
There are a lot of roadblocks put in the way to controlling your weight. In the US that on the intake, junk food is readily available while healthy food is a luxury. Conversely, the US working environment suffers from increasingly medieval labor laws[+], limiting one's ability to exercise or live a well balanced lifestyle.
I wouldn't be so eager to say "being obese is dictated by one's actions". It's an equal mix of self-control and an unhealthy environment.
[+]: "Independent contractors", arbitration, union stigma/busting
I dispute that avoiding obesity requires either exercise or high-quality nutrition. It is simply a matter of maintaining a caloric balance at a healthy weight. This can be effectively controlled entirely on the intake side. (See the nutritionist who lost weight and improved his bloodwork on a gas station junk food diet. [0]) Other countries with varied labor and economic conditions (presumably among them are some you would not label medieval) are experiencing the same obesity pandemic. There is nothing unique about the US in this regard other than it has been leading the trend.
But one's actions are also largely dictated by societal living conditions. Many people are extremely time-constrained due to working + commuting + child caring hours. Finding time to exercise or to prepare healthy food is a challenge. Add to this that healthy food is often less easily available and more expensive than unhealthy choices. There is a degree of individual control, but it is society that controls what is easy or hard for the individual to choose.
> Add to this that healthy food is often less easily available and more expensive than unhealthy choices.
It's worth pointing out this isn't true everywhere. In America, cheap fast food is generally unhealthy, yes. As an extreme counter example, a bowl of pho in Vietnam is cheap by local wage standards, has very little grease, and can be ready within 2 minutes of you ordering.
On a macro level, I don't buy it. If the economic reality is that you live in a food desert and you are bombarded by sugar propaganda every living day of your life ... sure, there is some kind of selection process of the most fit for that environment going on. Not sure it's a good outcome though, the optimal strategy seems to be get as many kids as you can before dying of obesity in your forties.
Absolutely, but also the lobbying and campaigns vilifying fats, the lack of a competent authority explaining the benefits of sweeteners instead of sugars etc.
