School choice is literally just the Lifeboat Theory.
No, it isn't, any more than "grocery store choice," "doctor choice," or "automobile choice" is. The whole idea is that when people are free to choose, the higher-quality schools will get more students, and the lower-quality schools will either go out of business and be replaced by new entrants, or learn to emulate the higher-quality schools, thus raising the average quality of schools. That's how markets work.
This is also why "You don't have any ideas beyond school choice" isn't the slam dunk you think it is. Yes, if you're going to run the school system with a centrally planned government monopoly, you'd better have a good plan for exactly how you're going to do that. For school choice, the plan is to reward other people for figuring it out. This is how something like 80% of the economy works, and the US economy is working a lot better than economies in which the government has a plan for everything.
As is strangely common when you make these kinds of accusations, it's actually your side that's guilty: It's the public school system that runs on lifeboat theory. High-income families already have school choice, because they can just buy or rent a home in a neighborhood that has good schools. The people who get left behind are the ones who can't afford to do that.
I think that the strongest argument against school choice is that student characteristics explain almost all of the variation in educational achievement, and that low-performing schools are just the ones that get a high percentage of low-potential students. I don't know, though. Certainly student characteristics explain considerably more of the variation in educational achievement than school characteristics, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that better schools could produce meaningful improvements for many students.
Why do we imprison people who commit high-level fraud? In general, they do not have the technical skills necessary to do much damage acting alone. They do damage by lying to people. Once they're exposed and widely known to be con artists, they're essentially defanged, right?
So why imprison them? If incapacitation isn't important, the only reasons to imprison them are revenge and deterrence, and I'm told by my betters that revenge is barbaric and deterrence doesn't work.
I am appalled by the contempt for the rule of law shown by the police, who continue arresting him despite the courts having made it abundantly clear that he has a right to continue offending unmolested.
And yet this person, who committed what Wisconsin apparently defines a voting fraud, was caught, tried, convicted and sentenced under current systems.
Which person? Wait? As I already told you, he didn't get caught. He walked into the election officials' office and told them exactly what he did and why he did it. Zapata? Here's what the criminal complaint said about how she got caught:
Woodall-Vogg stated that Zapata was employed by the City of Milwaukee as Deputy Director of the Election Commission. She stated that on Monday, October 31, 2022, she sent Zapata an article regarding an unknown individual fraudulently applying for military absentee ballots and having them sent to JB. Zapata denied knowing about that. Woodall-Vogg also sent Zapata another message, this time containing a statement that was put out by JB regarding how easy it was to receive military ballots. Zapata responded, “She has a point.” On the afternoon of November 1, 2022, Zapata approached Woodall-Vogg at work. At that time, Zapata admitted to Woodall-Vogg that she had created three fraudulent voters and used that fraudulent information to send three ballots to JB. Zapata told Woodall-Vogg that she made up the identifies of the voters and sent them to show how easy it is to commit fraud in this manner.
The system may work, but neither of these cases are evidence of the system working. In both cases, the fraudulent ballot request was detected because it was fully intended to be detected by the person issuing the request. Neither case demonstrates a mechanism by which a person requesting invalid ballots in secret would have been caught.
Again, I know very little about the Trump case. I think it had something to do with overstating the value of a building on a loan. When handed the loan papers, did he say, "Look how easy it was for me to overstate the value of my building! The system is flawed!" and then tear up the papers?
No?
Then it's not really the same thing, is it?
I'm not going to argue this with you further. I just don't care that much, and at this point, either you get it or you don't. Feel free to have the last word.
I haven't looked into it, don't have an opinion on it, and have no idea what you think the connection to this is.
You do understand that Zapata's relationship with the Republican you mentioned was more adversarial than cooperative, right? I get the sense that you're sticking to your guns here beyond the point of reason because you think there are partisan points to be scored, but I don't think there are.
The ballots were obtained illegally, of course, but in neither case does there appear to have been any attempt or intent to use the ballots to vote illegally. I'm not sure what happened with Zapata, but Wait didn't get caught---he went to election officials' offices, returned the ballot unused, and explained exactly what he did.
There's no evidence that any harm was done, intended, or attempted. The reasonable thing to do here would be to say, "Oh, that is a real problem. Thank you for bringing it to our attention," and then try to fix it. Do they have a legal right to shoot the messenger because the messenger technically committed a crime? Sure, I guess. But just because they can doesn't mean they should.
If you go to Kotaku.com (yes, I know, but we have to make sacrifices for science) and click on Guides, you get a bunch of short articles explaining some aspect of a game, like "18 Things to Know Before Starting Dragon's Dogma 2," "FF7 Rebirth’s New Patch: Your Guide To The New Features," "What You Need To Know About Stardew Valley’s Green Rain."
So these aren't like the complete catalogs of everything there is to know about a game that you find on GameFaqs.com, but brief "tips and tricks" articles giving you information about some aspect of a game. This seems doable, but would leave Kotaku's writers less time to crap out poorly-reasoned political screeds.
Also, Dragon's Dogma 2 is out! I don't think it's ever been mentioned here, but Dragon's Dogma was a great game. I think it might be the only game that I've ever finished and then immediately replayed again.
Nobody but you is claiming that he asked her to do that. She says she was trying to show him how easy it was to get an absentee ballot under a fake name, and sent them to him specifically because he had been claiming that the election system was insecure in ways which she believed it was not.
As it's unclear how she got caught, it's unclear whether this shows the system works. It does mention that she used her work laptop, which may have been a factor. There was a similar case a few months earlier where a man named Harry Wait had requested ballots under a state politician's name, then got caught when he returned the ballot unopened and said, "Hey, look what I was able to do. You should fix this."
In neither case does there appear to have been any genuine attempt at election fraud. Sounds like the government's just mad that flaws in their system were exposed.
My aunt went through a month-long phase where she would spend all day reposting obnoxious Facebook posts about how Taylor Swift was triggering conservative snowflakes, making their heads explode, and sodomizing their corpses, or something like that.
I've been told by people who are much better than I am that, as an opponent of affirmative action---and therefore obviously a white supremacist---I'm supposed to be mad about this, because it disproportionately benefits white people.
Interesting. Obviously many people voting against Haley in the Republican primary are not going to be fans of Trump, but the fact that 50% express approval of Biden's grossly irresponsible governance suggests that there are a lot of Democrats crossing over to vote in the Republican primary, secure in the knowledge that the Democratic primary is a lock for Biden.
I appreciate their pitching in to help out, but unfortunately it won't be enough.
I don't expect him to be good in any objective sense, but a member of the New Democrat Coalition is probably as good as can reasonably be expected from California voters.
"Better than Katie Porter" is a very, very low bar.
I give California voters a hard time, and with good reason, but credit where credit is due. They finally put Katie Porter in her rightful place: Far behind a retired baseball player, just ahead of some loon who thinks the minimum wage should be $50, and raving about the race being rigged by (((billionaires))).
May Orange County voters make better choices in the future.
More vibes-based reasoning. As proud as you may be of your ignorance, it really isn't a virtue.
I'm well aware of the limitations of LLMs, and I'm perfectly capable of reading and understanding the research myself. I wasn't looking for personal validation; I was exploring the boundaries of Gemini's lobotomization.
There were also a lot of Eastern Europeans who fought with the Germans because they were much more worried about being conquered by the Soviets than by the Germans.
I have an LLM-based plug-in for my IDE that offers autocompletion suggestions. It's hit-and-miss. Sometimes it gives me exactly what I want, saving me 30 seconds of typing or so, and sometimes it's way off.
I got a pleasant surprise when I asked Gemini about the Scarr-Rowe effect, which is the observed lower heritability of IQ in low-SES children (but not for adults).
Gemini explicitly described it as a phenomenon seen specifically in children, cautioned me that there's some controversy over it, and stressed that it does not mean that genes don't affect intelligence in low-SES children.
Then I asked it whether it the Scarr-Rowe effect had been replicated in adults, and it said that the evidence was mixed, citing a real study (Gottschling et al. 2019) which found no evidence for the Scarr-Rowe effect in adults, and hallucinated a fake meta-analysis that did find evidence of such.
I think that its default mode, for issues where it hasn't specifically been trained to give only Morally Right answers, is to hedge and try to give both sides of an issue, even when it has to make up evidence for one side.
Remember that stupid, stupid idiot with his "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" sign? I mean, yes, he'd been told his entire adult life that Medicare is an earned benefit, implying that the payroll taxes paid by the average worker cover the actuarially fair cost of Medicare benefits in retirement, but that's on him for believing such blatant propaganda. Obviously no intelligent person could fall for that.
He was a stupid, stupid idiot, and we were right to laugh at him.
The thing that confuses me is that, a decade and change later, many of the highly intelligent, sophisticated people who had joined in the pointing and laughing back in 2009 starting echoing him with calls to "Keep your government hands off my public schools."
Isn't that weird?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
No, it isn't, any more than "grocery store choice," "doctor choice," or "automobile choice" is. The whole idea is that when people are free to choose, the higher-quality schools will get more students, and the lower-quality schools will either go out of business and be replaced by new entrants, or learn to emulate the higher-quality schools, thus raising the average quality of schools. That's how markets work.
This is also why "You don't have any ideas beyond school choice" isn't the slam dunk you think it is. Yes, if you're going to run the school system with a centrally planned government monopoly, you'd better have a good plan for exactly how you're going to do that. For school choice, the plan is to reward other people for figuring it out. This is how something like 80% of the economy works, and the US economy is working a lot better than economies in which the government has a plan for everything.
As is strangely common when you make these kinds of accusations, it's actually your side that's guilty: It's the public school system that runs on lifeboat theory. High-income families already have school choice, because they can just buy or rent a home in a neighborhood that has good schools. The people who get left behind are the ones who can't afford to do that.
I think that the strongest argument against school choice is that student characteristics explain almost all of the variation in educational achievement, and that low-performing schools are just the ones that get a high percentage of low-potential students. I don't know, though. Certainly student characteristics explain considerably more of the variation in educational achievement than school characteristics, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that better schools could produce meaningful improvements for many students.
On “It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Algebra 2”
Saul: Humanities are good because they're subversive.
Jesse: No, not like that!
On “Sam Bankman-Fried Gets 25 Year Prison Sentence”
Why do we imprison people who commit high-level fraud? In general, they do not have the technical skills necessary to do much damage acting alone. They do damage by lying to people. Once they're exposed and widely known to be con artists, they're essentially defanged, right?
So why imprison them? If incapacitation isn't important, the only reasons to imprison them are revenge and deterrence, and I'm told by my betters that revenge is barbaric and deterrence doesn't work.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/25/2024”
I am appalled by the contempt for the rule of law shown by the police, who continue arresting him despite the courts having made it abundantly clear that he has a right to continue offending unmolested.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/18/2024”
Which person? Wait? As I already told you, he didn't get caught. He walked into the election officials' office and told them exactly what he did and why he did it. Zapata? Here's what the criminal complaint said about how she got caught:
The system may work, but neither of these cases are evidence of the system working. In both cases, the fraudulent ballot request was detected because it was fully intended to be detected by the person issuing the request. Neither case demonstrates a mechanism by which a person requesting invalid ballots in secret would have been caught.
Again, I know very little about the Trump case. I think it had something to do with overstating the value of a building on a loan. When handed the loan papers, did he say, "Look how easy it was for me to overstate the value of my building! The system is flawed!" and then tear up the papers?
No?
Then it's not really the same thing, is it?
I'm not going to argue this with you further. I just don't care that much, and at this point, either you get it or you don't. Feel free to have the last word.
On “Girl Dadding in the Taylor Swift Era”
I hope you're not signing along to Meatloaf while driving.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/18/2024”
I haven't looked into it, don't have an opinion on it, and have no idea what you think the connection to this is.
You do understand that Zapata's relationship with the Republican you mentioned was more adversarial than cooperative, right? I get the sense that you're sticking to your guns here beyond the point of reason because you think there are partisan points to be scored, but I don't think there are.
"
Is the left cool with Candace Owens now because Ben Shapiro doesn't like her and she doesn't like Jews?
"
The ballots were obtained illegally, of course, but in neither case does there appear to have been any attempt or intent to use the ballots to vote illegally. I'm not sure what happened with Zapata, but Wait didn't get caught---he went to election officials' offices, returned the ballot unused, and explained exactly what he did.
There's no evidence that any harm was done, intended, or attempted. The reasonable thing to do here would be to say, "Oh, that is a real problem. Thank you for bringing it to our attention," and then try to fix it. Do they have a legal right to shoot the messenger because the messenger technically committed a crime? Sure, I guess. But just because they can doesn't mean they should.
On “Jen Glennon, Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, tweets that she has resigned”
If you go to Kotaku.com (yes, I know, but we have to make sacrifices for science) and click on Guides, you get a bunch of short articles explaining some aspect of a game, like "18 Things to Know Before Starting Dragon's Dogma 2," "FF7 Rebirth’s New Patch: Your Guide To The New Features," "What You Need To Know About Stardew Valley’s Green Rain."
So these aren't like the complete catalogs of everything there is to know about a game that you find on GameFaqs.com, but brief "tips and tricks" articles giving you information about some aspect of a game. This seems doable, but would leave Kotaku's writers less time to crap out poorly-reasoned political screeds.
Also, Dragon's Dogma 2 is out! I don't think it's ever been mentioned here, but Dragon's Dogma was a great game. I think it might be the only game that I've ever finished and then immediately replayed again.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/18/2024”
It's probably an office with nonpartisan elections.
"
Nobody but you is claiming that he asked her to do that. She says she was trying to show him how easy it was to get an absentee ballot under a fake name, and sent them to him specifically because he had been claiming that the election system was insecure in ways which she believed it was not.
As it's unclear how she got caught, it's unclear whether this shows the system works. It does mention that she used her work laptop, which may have been a factor. There was a similar case a few months earlier where a man named Harry Wait had requested ballots under a state politician's name, then got caught when he returned the ballot unopened and said, "Hey, look what I was able to do. You should fix this."
In neither case does there appear to have been any genuine attempt at election fraud. Sounds like the government's just mad that flaws in their system were exposed.
On “Girl Dadding in the Taylor Swift Era”
My aunt went through a month-long phase where she would spend all day reposting obnoxious Facebook posts about how Taylor Swift was triggering conservative snowflakes, making their heads explode, and sodomizing their corpses, or something like that.
On “From NBC News: Virginia bans public universities from considering legacy in admissions”
I've been told by people who are much better than I am that, as an opponent of affirmative action---and therefore obviously a white supremacist---I'm supposed to be mad about this, because it disproportionately benefits white people.
Oddly, I'm not. I wonder what's up with that.
On “Hail to the Champs”
Let the dementia derby begin!
Every election is a garbage buffet, but this one has nothing on offer but toxic waste.
I am deeply disappointed in everyone who, after four years of each of these jackasses, said "Four more years" to either of them.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/4/2024”
Interesting. Obviously many people voting against Haley in the Republican primary are not going to be fans of Trump, but the fact that 50% express approval of Biden's grossly irresponsible governance suggests that there are a lot of Democrats crossing over to vote in the Republican primary, secure in the knowledge that the Democratic primary is a lock for Biden.
I appreciate their pitching in to help out, but unfortunately it won't be enough.
"
I don't expect him to be good in any objective sense, but a member of the New Democrat Coalition is probably as good as can reasonably be expected from California voters.
"Better than Katie Porter" is a very, very low bar.
"
I give California voters a hard time, and with good reason, but credit where credit is due. They finally put Katie Porter in her rightful place: Far behind a retired baseball player, just ahead of some loon who thinks the minimum wage should be $50, and raving about the race being rigged by (((billionaires))).
May Orange County voters make better choices in the future.
On “A Few Thoughts on Gemini-gate”
More vibes-based reasoning. As proud as you may be of your ignorance, it really isn't a virtue.
I'm well aware of the limitations of LLMs, and I'm perfectly capable of reading and understanding the research myself. I wasn't looking for personal validation; I was exploring the boundaries of Gemini's lobotomization.
"
There were also a lot of Eastern Europeans who fought with the Germans because they were much more worried about being conquered by the Soviets than by the Germans.
"
Indo-Aryans. Close enough.
"
I have an LLM-based plug-in for my IDE that offers autocompletion suggestions. It's hit-and-miss. Sometimes it gives me exactly what I want, saving me 30 seconds of typing or so, and sometimes it's way off.
"
I got a pleasant surprise when I asked Gemini about the Scarr-Rowe effect, which is the observed lower heritability of IQ in low-SES children (but not for adults).
Gemini explicitly described it as a phenomenon seen specifically in children, cautioned me that there's some controversy over it, and stressed that it does not mean that genes don't affect intelligence in low-SES children.
Then I asked it whether it the Scarr-Rowe effect had been replicated in adults, and it said that the evidence was mixed, citing a real study (Gottschling et al. 2019) which found no evidence for the Scarr-Rowe effect in adults, and hallucinated a fake meta-analysis that did find evidence of such.
I think that its default mode, for issues where it hasn't specifically been trained to give only Morally Right answers, is to hedge and try to give both sides of an issue, even when it has to make up evidence for one side.
On “Goodbye, Cocaine Mitch”
The filibuster is great. We can't have good politicians, because we don't have a good electorate. The next best thing is ineffective politicians.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/19/2024”
Remember that stupid, stupid idiot with his "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" sign? I mean, yes, he'd been told his entire adult life that Medicare is an earned benefit, implying that the payroll taxes paid by the average worker cover the actuarially fair cost of Medicare benefits in retirement, but that's on him for believing such blatant propaganda. Obviously no intelligent person could fall for that.
He was a stupid, stupid idiot, and we were right to laugh at him.
The thing that confuses me is that, a decade and change later, many of the highly intelligent, sophisticated people who had joined in the pointing and laughing back in 2009 starting echoing him with calls to "Keep your government hands off my public schools."
Isn't that weird?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.