bsanr (u/bsanr) - Readit News

bsanr commented on Joan Didion has died nytimes.com/2021/12/23/bo... · Posted by u/chewymouse

clairity · 4 years ago

> "Direct confrontation plays poorly in HN comments, and attempts to do so will be futile."

i'd be remiss not to point out how repeating this, the heart of your position, 3 times now comes across as dogmatic, and condescendingly so[0]. observe: there's no one true way. (say that 3 times, even)

note that i'm generally quite intentional about the message and tone of my posts, and they more-or-less land as intended, contrary to unsupported claims otherwise[1]. the path to changing hearts and minds has no single roadmap, and it really is ok if some people get butt-hurt and recoil a bit, even to (what you seem to perceive as) entrenchment.

[0]: e.g., you start with an assumption that i don't understand how hn and discursive mechanisms at large work, and need to be schooled here. but if you want to support transgressive discourse, step aside and support it, openmindedly. not doing so indicates a different underlying objective. this is exactly how the democratic party goes so badly astray on social-progressive issues by the way.

[1]: note also that i don't see downvotes as always bad or even always negative, as you seem to assume.

bsanr · 4 years ago

You're the only person in this conversation who seems to get it, and I just want you to know how thankful I am that you haven't been afraid to express these thoughts. I think that you're right, that the person you've been replying to is wrong, and it's incredibly frustrating that this conversation has to happen. But thank you for being that voice.

bsanr commented on Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories twitter.com/mwseibel/stat... · Posted by u/lando2319

DoreenMichele · 4 years ago

Just researched good/quality crafting printers yesterday. Search results were mostly blogs and crappy websites that offered obviously no insights but were just SEO optimized to direct you to their Amazon affiliate links. Especially sad since those affiliate links to Amazon mostly resulted in "This product is currently not available" site.

I am going to remind people that this happens because that's the internet (and world) we designed. If you aren't a coder and you want to earn a living online, blogging is a way to do that and Amazon links are a way to make it pay.

People use AdBlock and don't want to leave tips, support Patreon etc for a blog. Good jobs are hard to find. Telling someone "Get a real job" is often not a viable solution for various reasons.

If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.

I know no one actually wants to hear that. But I think that's the actual root cause of this stuff and you won't fix it if you don't address those issues.

I've tried for years to take the high road, to not have ads or Amazon links on my sites, etc. The result is starvation and intractable poverty and everyone telling me to get a real job. (I tried. They didn't hire me and continue to cyber stalk me and steal my ideas.)

Anyway, I know all replies to this comment will boil down to "Quit your bitching. No one gives one damn if you die on the streets of starvation and we are so bored with hearing about your whiny problems." Rest assured, I am not leaving this comment with any expectation whatsoever that it will in any way help me.

But maybe after I die on the streets someone will pause and think "Maybe she had a point. Maybe we designed a shitty system with bad incentives and we are getting exactly the crap we pay people to give us."

Because the "high road" where someone tries to add value and respect the fact that you folks don't want ads or affiliate links etc literally doesn't pay to the point of it will keep you underfed and either homeless or underhoused and then your poverty will be a new excuse to have no respect for your observations that "Hey, people, the system you designed is broken and this is why and how."

bsanr · 4 years ago

>If you want a better internet, you might stop and think about the fact that it is built by people and people need to eat. De facto expecting slave labor from some people and then designing an internet where those people can hijack your search results to try to eat gets you this.

People don't/can't pay for things anymore because trillions of dollars have been siphoned out of the holdings of the middle and working classes over the past 50 years. If not for piracy and subscription services, the music and film industries would have collapsed years ago. If you made people pay for the things they used to, they... wouldn't. Because they can't.

bsanr commented on Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins razib.substack.com/p/yo-m... · Posted by u/rsj_hn

rayiner · 4 years ago

> Black Americans? Broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with the ginger whiskers I see every time I look in the mirror.

Who aren’t Africans, but for the most part are of mixed background of Africans and Europeans in the last 500 years.

> What is the value of slightly more Neanderthal DNA, anyway?

There isn’t any, which is why it’s odd anyone is getting defensive about it. It just validates particular models of human expansion out of Africa.

bsanr · 4 years ago

>Who aren’t Africans, but for the most part are of mixed background of Africans and Europeans in the last 500 years.

Again, broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with my skin color and facial features. I think you'll find it a hard sell to much of this country, within and without the scientific community, that black African-Americans are not... you know, African. To an extent. For different reasons, depending on who you ask, of course.

>Which is why it’s odd anyone is getting defensive about it.

Assuming that you're an American, the notion that you don't understand the defensiveness strains credulity. It validates quite a bit more in the eyes of some.

bsanr commented on An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter scottaaronson.blog/?p=614... · Posted by u/feross

syki · 4 years ago

I wrote:

The idea in education is that everyone is intellectually equal. Therefore the racial achievement gap in mathematics is due to racism. The solution is to change things.

This is a line of reasoning used by people to advocate for things like getting rid of remedial math. The problem with this line of reasoning to me is the premise that everyone is intellectually equal. Not all premises have to be wrong for an argument to be wrong. This comports with my later statement that too many people are going to college.

There is nothing of a racial nature in any of the statements I made in this regard. To reiterate, I believe that there is meaningful variation in the intellectual ability of humans. I believe too many people are going to college.

My problem with the California initiative is that it is based on the idea that everyone has the same intellectual ability and, furthermore, it does not meaningfully address the true cause of the problem of the racial achievement gap. It’s worthy to address biases amongst institutions and I agree with their efforts in this regard.

The racial achievement gap is a systemic wide problem caused by the structure of our society and nothing meaningful will improve until these things are addressed at a higher level. The effect of the California reforms, I fear, will cause more harm than good.

bsanr · 4 years ago

I understood what you said. This post is simply a reiteration of statements I've already addressed. If you did not mean to make racially-charged statements, you should reassess how you talk about your views in the future, because - and I am telling you this as someone who is taking your stated aim on your word, against my better judgment - what you said sounds racist. Full stop.

bsanr commented on Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins razib.substack.com/p/yo-m... · Posted by u/rsj_hn

Leary · 4 years ago

I didn't know claiming a genetic component in explaining differences in racial averages for IQ is scientific racism.

bsanr · 4 years ago

That's... quite the statement to make with a straight face.

bsanr commented on Yo mama's mama's mama's mama: our understanding of human origins razib.substack.com/p/yo-m... · Posted by u/rsj_hn

traject_ · 4 years ago

> The science is constantly evolving to this very day on the supposedly 'trace levels' of Neanderthal DNA in Africans (especially as we gather a more diverse range of cohorts) so I'll leave it at that.

No, the trace levels of Neanderthal DNA in Africans is very unlikely to change by gathering more diverse range of cohorts. It is a matter of identifying major strands of ancestry within Africans (by admixture over thousands of years to now be in various African populations) which all are distinguished by a lack of Neanderthal DNA outside of West Eurasian admixture.

And for the last point, I did not condone scientific racism. To repeat, interest in human populations and such phenotypic differences does not imply scientific racism once you realize the basic scientific principle that humans are animals and consider how animals exist in populations with phenotypic differences.

bsanr · 4 years ago

>No, the trace levels of Neanderthal DNA in Africans is very unlikely to change by gathering more diverse range of cohorts.

Black Americans? Broad pronouncements like this square... strangely... with the ginger whiskers I see every time I look in the mirror.

What is the value of slightly more Neanderthal DNA, anyway?

bsanr commented on An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter scottaaronson.blog/?p=614... · Posted by u/feross

Delk · 4 years ago

> Childhood nutrition, single parent households, health of mother during pregnancy, culture/respect towards education as a virtue in the community and household, education level of parents and the time they have to play and talk with their kids.

I'm not American, and I don't claim to know the environment and the issues people face there, or their root causes. I may not be fully understanding the extent of nutritional differences or family dynamics.

I am, however, absolutely certain that affluence feeds affluence and that misfortune feeds misfortune, on average. Even if you had all of the above equal except for the education levels and socio-economic status of the children's parents, you'd end up with statistically different outcomes.

I live in a fairly egalitarian country, and if I remember correctly, there's an average income gap of ~30 percent or so between people whose parents were in the highest quartile in income and those who were in the lowest quartile. While ethnicity may play some role in the statistical gap nowadays, I don't think it explains the statistical difference; ethnic minorities are disadvantaged here but they make up a small enough minority that I expect the bulk of the difference to be simply due to socio-economic differences within the same ethnic group.

Basically, if your parents and their social in-group got highly educated, I believe you perceive that as the norm. If they didn't, it's not as likely that you do.

Add in some practical stuff such as whether your parents can afford to finance or support your education, and the gap's already there. The rest just amplifies it.

Sure, physical health, nutrition etc. can have an effect, and they certainly do if the differences are great enough. I'm sure ethnicity or race has an effect, sometimes due to racism, and sometimes because people perceive their own opportunities or expectations differently depending on social roles, and for various other sociological dynamics. The latter is true even if you remove ethnicity or race from the equation. Racial stereotypes and images probably emphasize things but I don't think you can pin it all on that.

Considering how much worse off African Americans are socio-economically, on average, than white Americans, it's a no-brainer that their kids end up worse off on average as well. I'm not saying you should just shrug and accept that, and I'm sure actual racism exists as well, but the point is that some of it would happen even without racism, either overt or covert, or any "structural racism" that could include a whole spectrum of things.

That means any real solution is going to be hard and slow, unfortunately. Changing the subject matter in the name of equity really doesn't sound like one.

> I believe most proponents of "math equity" actually know all this, and are just maliciously virtue signalling either because they're jealous that their own kids aren't doing well, or for social credit.

It could also be that people take an easy non-solution in preference to working towards improvements and solutions that could take time, great patience, tolerance of morally and socially undesirable situations (one might have to accept that you can't achieve perfect equity, or at least not quickly, and be able to withstand social judgement for that), and are all around a lot harder to accomplish.

bsanr · 4 years ago

>Considering how much worse off African Americans are socio-economically, on average, than white Americans, it's a no-brainer that their kids end up worse off on average as well.

It's worse than that. There's something about the American system which forces black families to be not just stagnant economically, but often to move backwards (at least in the transition from Boomer/Gen X to later generations). Both of my grandfathers provided a strikingly middle class life for their families, leaving the military after WWII for decent careers: one as a stable, unionized factory employee, the other as a nuclear physicist. All of their children went to college. Both of my parents hold advanced degrees. Even still, they face financial difficulties that their white peers don't seem to, and my generation of siblings and cousins, while along a spectrum of affluence, seems to have inherited a magnified version of their parents' diminished prospects relative to their achievement. On average, the families that were middle class mid-century are now working class, even with degrees.

And we're outliers, in terms of educational attainment in the black community heretofore. That's changing, but to what ends, when black professionals must have a more advanced degree to be considered for the same job as a white applicant with a less advanced degree? When our houses are worth $50k less, our access to credit is restricted, our tax burden relative to income tends to be higher, and we are actively sought out for discrimination by many bedrock institutions of American life? It's not a level playing field.

bsanr commented on An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter scottaaronson.blog/?p=614... · Posted by u/feross

syki · 4 years ago

I made no assumptions, statements, or implications regarding the cognitive capabilities of students of color. You are incorrectly ascribing beliefs to me. I do believe too many people are going to college. I said people and not students of color.

Do you have any evidence that the vast majority of people can learn calculus in a timely manner? I have a lot of anecdotal evidence that this is simply not true. Please note that I’m making no reference to or claims about students of color. I’m speaking about all people. In my experience a lot of people simply can’t learn calculus to any reasonable definition of what that notion entails.

The requirement of a specific set of knowledge for a degree is not what is wrong. What is wrong is living in a society in which having a degree is increasingly necessary to live at a decent standard.

https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/11396/what...

bsanr · 4 years ago

>The idea in education is that everyone is intellectually equal. Therefore the racial achievement gap in mathematics is due to racism. The solution is to change things.

I'm at a loss as to how you might construe these statements, which you presented as wrongheaded (i.e., that you believe the inverse of each), to not imply that you believe that the "cognitive capabilities of students of color" are lesser, considering the nature of the racial achievement gap (an aspect of the conversation which you broached). Either you simply do not remember what you stated earlier, or you're lying. This is clearly a reference to students of color, at the very least. I just want to establish the high probability that you are being disingenuous.

>Do you have any evidence that the vast majority of people can learn calculus in a timely manner?

Assuming that most people can learn at a 5th grade level, and that, as suggested several times in the comments, this lecture could be broken up into multiple days worth of dynamic, interactive instruction, rather than being presented as a blitzkrieg 20-minute lecture:

https://youtu.be/TzDhdvVg9_c

This is not conclusive, of course. But you asked for any evidence, and I think a reasonable person arguing in good faith would conclude that it suffices. You've shown evidence to be otherwise, so I don't expect you to agree, but I would be happy to be wrong for once in this conversation, on this matter.

bsanr commented on An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter scottaaronson.blog/?p=614... · Posted by u/feross

talentedcoin · 4 years ago

What specifically about the courses being taught by black people do you think helped you do better?

bsanr · 4 years ago

It was not the fact that they were black. It was the fact that, as a black student, I was not subject to the same warped expectations that I found common while taking higher-level courses under some of my white teachers. Not every white teacher was like this; however, I did notice, particularly in my AP courses, that many were less supportive and understanding of black students who hit periods of difficulty, and more disciplinarian in their regard. I'm unconvinced that American pedagogy in general has shaken off the inclination to view students of color as un-growing children to be trained and tamed, rather than growing thinkers to be taught and empowered.