Think what you want, just don't say the issue is "language change" when it's actually about one group trying to impose cultural change on the rest of society (whether you believe that change is good or bad or in between).
This is like someone telling you that they have cancer, and you responding "well cells grow and die all the time." It's not that it's not true at a high level, it's that it entirely misses the point.
To be fair though, this kind of journalism has always had a problem with going too far to what the reporter thinks would be interesting as opposed to what's really justified -- it's just that these days the specific manifestation of it is "wokeist". My first Gell-Mann experience was from a few decades ago when I was studying linguistics and the Atlantic published an article "The Quest for the Mother Tongue". Pretty much any working linguist knows that the "Mother Tongue" is not even a well-defined concept, and that in any case the tools we have for reconstruction will never take us back confidently more than a few thousand years, much less all the way back to the beginning -- but the journalist wanted the sexy headline and found some random grad student who was layering reconstructions on top of reconstructions and was just sure he was cracking the code.
"Now I know what your response to be" -- pretty clearly you don't. But it's always pleasant to assume that the people who disagree with you have only bad reasons for doing so.
Sure, I don't disagree and I read a diverse set of folks too -- as long as they're usually interesting and/or thoughtful, I'm fine to account for their POV. It's the predictable ones that I avoid -- I don't like to be bored, even if I agree with them.
The irritating thing specifically about an organization like NPR though is that there's an implicit claim of authoritativeness. It's fine that Slate & MSNBC do their partisan thing, but "National Public Radio" really ought to be speaking to a wider audience.
Anyway, luckily these days we have plenty of media choices. That's the real reason I stopped listening to NPR many years ago -- I just got used to getting my news quickly online.
I can't find it now but probably a dozen years ago here I'd mentioned my experience with NPR -- I used to not notice the liberal bias, but after my own views started to moderate, I could never not notice it. It was like coming back into a smoke-filled room, noticing how smoky it was, and realizing that it must've always been this smoky but you just didn't realize it because you'd been in it so long.
But I had attributed this more to my own shift than to any change at NPR, so I find it interesting that NPR itself has since also moved farther away from even where I used to be.
The bit I learned from this was that post Trump, even many normie liberals have been giving it up. The rest is not surprising, though backroom info is always a little interesting.
I think the issue is, when you say "work better", we can't all even agree on what "better" means. We might disagree on how best to fund and distribute health care but at least we all are more or less on the same page on what "health" is -- but what people want out of education is all over the map, even before you get to how it should be conducted.
So IMHO, school choice should be the default, and the burden of proof ought to be on someone who says that actually we have to coercively collect taxes from everyone to create monolithic systems with very little choice, and where the only power to change them is political power (so you get tyranny of the majority, or of the vocal minority, or the deep pocketed campaign contributors, etc).
Obviously in the real world, the one who wants to change the system is the one with the burden to convince, but if we were starting from scratch, does anyone think we would basically want to build what we have today? Well, maybe so just because that's what people know.
My move from being a liberal to whatever I am now was primarily due to realizing that my baseline "government is for helping the people, private orgs are for enriching themselves" assumption was not only ridiculously oversimplified but actively wrong. People are people, and good and bad and selfish and selfless actors can be found in both places. A government monopoly doesn't magically avoid all the downsides that private monopolies have.
So I think if we're stuck with collecting taxes to have government-funded public education, it's still better overall to give that money to individuals than directly to school administrations -- even if a portion of that money ends up in the hands of con artists or whatever, at least it was given freely by individual choices based on the available options. There are greedy or scummy or incompetent government adminstrators too, and it's harder to get rid of them relying only on the voting booth.
It's a plausible theory that undecideds will continue to gravitate to Biden, but AFAICT it's not buttressed by any hard data. A Trump win is not only not impossible, it's about as likely as a Biden win at this stage. If it happens then I don't see how it could reasonably be called a "fluke".
Rote memorization is not the only thing but it's a necessary prerequisite for most people. There's been some disastrous mathematics pedagogy based on the idea that we can somehow directly teach "concepts" without the groundwork that drill-and-kill provides.
I saw recently (on Twitter, take it for what it's worth) that studies have found that ChatGPT and such have a distinctive word choice pattern, and so people are leveraging this to spot where they're being used in the wild -- peer reviews are apparently one of the high-use spots.
My daughter is in a Ph.D. program and recently got a "revise and re-submit" response for a journal submission, which she was pretty excited about. But when she went through the peer reviewer feedback, Reviewer #2 was quite negative. At first she wondered why the editor response was positive, but as she read the details, she realized that reviewer #2 must have been responding to a completely different submission. So she pointed this out to the editor, who said to just ignore it and concentrate on the feedback of the other two.
Obviously the editor didn't want to go through the effort of clearing up the confusion. My daughter's advisor explained to her that being a journal editor is kind of a thankless job, a lot of extra work and dealing with demanding/unhappy fellow academics for low pay (mainly done just for putting on one's CV), so it's not exactly rare that one sees less than ideal effort or results.
Even though I understand that different people will like different kinds of music, my first unguarded reaction to a lot of popular music is "OMG how can anyone like that crap???". It takes a few seconds for the more rational part of my brain to kick in and remind me that other people have their own backgrounds and experiences and taste, and that my confidence in the absolute rightness of my own reaction is unjustified (sometimes).
I liked the occasional "argue about food/sports/music/etc." posts that used to be more common here (e.g. the Mt Rushmore series), because it seemed like a helpful reminder for people who were generally busy getting angry at each other for "serious" political disagreements that they could find themselves getting just as worked up about disagreements that everyone intellectually understood were just matters of taste and not fact. So that maybe on some level when they went back to arguing about politics, a little bit of that realization would transfer over and there would be a bit less outrage and a bit more empathy in the mix.
If you're an opponent of race-based criteria in university admissions, it makes you more an Asian-supremacist than a white supremacist.
But to unnecessarily steelman the accusation, I think the thought process is not so much that you're supposed to support legacy admissions, it's that spending so much more time talking about AA than about legacy admits is supposed to reveal that you are not in support of fairness for its own sake but only to exclude the beneficiaries of AA.
Yeah, the part of the 1st bullet that excludes 1-point offenses doesn't make any sense under either the AND or the OR interpretations. I think that the AND interpretation is less plausible as an "intended" meaning since it has the bizarre outcome that someone with two 3-pointers on their record would be eligible but someone with a 3 & a 2 would not be... but overall this isn't a case where it's obvious what the drafters were aiming for and they just goofed on the wording. I agree that the dissent seems to have the better of it, the more so given that even with eligibility, the actual granting of the relief in a given case is still at the judge's discretion.
We can also charge a fixed cost of $20,000 and do only 10 hours of work because it's off the shelf, and not even bring up the question of how long we worked on it for them.
At any time our clients are free to go to a different vendor if they feel they can get a better deal. Exactly how we decide on the bill is less important than how happy they are with the product and price.
I have no interesting opinions on Wade, but I will say (speaking as someone who is not a lawyer but who does work at a company that sometimes bills time and material) that "hours" in billing is often just a stand-in for "value" or maybe "average amount of effort". We often have occasion to modify hours billed up or down based on who was working on the project, whether we were able to start from a template or built from scratch, etc.
Is this surprising? Abortion rights both motivates the base and at a high level is supported by a majority of Americans overall; the severe restrictions passed in several GOP-controlled states are broadly unpopular. I don't really understand why the other respondents here felt the need to mention the other services -- Dems should lean in on abortion rights. It would be political malpractice for Biden/Harris not to play this up.
I would just say that what DD and I were reacting to was not his first comment but his failed snarky response to Jaybird -- "math doesn't work that way". It was not only unnecessarily hostile but also a really dumb thing to say.
Whether there's merit in his first comment is a different topic (DD's reaction re "rising tide" was what came to my mind as well -- however we approach it we ought to aim for consistency).
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/8/2024”
Yeah I was starting to think this is performance art too.
"
Think what you want, just don't say the issue is "language change" when it's actually about one group trying to impose cultural change on the rest of society (whether you believe that change is good or bad or in between).
"
"Language will do what it does."
This is like someone telling you that they have cancer, and you responding "well cells grow and die all the time." It's not that it's not true at a high level, it's that it entirely misses the point.
"
Makes perfect sense to me!
To be fair though, this kind of journalism has always had a problem with going too far to what the reporter thinks would be interesting as opposed to what's really justified -- it's just that these days the specific manifestation of it is "wokeist". My first Gell-Mann experience was from a few decades ago when I was studying linguistics and the Atlantic published an article "The Quest for the Mother Tongue". Pretty much any working linguist knows that the "Mother Tongue" is not even a well-defined concept, and that in any case the tools we have for reconstruction will never take us back confidently more than a few thousand years, much less all the way back to the beginning -- but the journalist wanted the sexy headline and found some random grad student who was layering reconstructions on top of reconstructions and was just sure he was cracking the code.
"
"Now I know what your response to be" -- pretty clearly you don't. But it's always pleasant to assume that the people who disagree with you have only bad reasons for doing so.
"
Sure, I don't disagree and I read a diverse set of folks too -- as long as they're usually interesting and/or thoughtful, I'm fine to account for their POV. It's the predictable ones that I avoid -- I don't like to be bored, even if I agree with them.
The irritating thing specifically about an organization like NPR though is that there's an implicit claim of authoritativeness. It's fine that Slate & MSNBC do their partisan thing, but "National Public Radio" really ought to be speaking to a wider audience.
Anyway, luckily these days we have plenty of media choices. That's the real reason I stopped listening to NPR many years ago -- I just got used to getting my news quickly online.
"
I can't find it now but probably a dozen years ago here I'd mentioned my experience with NPR -- I used to not notice the liberal bias, but after my own views started to moderate, I could never not notice it. It was like coming back into a smoke-filled room, noticing how smoky it was, and realizing that it must've always been this smoky but you just didn't realize it because you'd been in it so long.
But I had attributed this more to my own shift than to any change at NPR, so I find it interesting that NPR itself has since also moved farther away from even where I used to be.
"
But the important question is, is it good business?
"
The bit I learned from this was that post Trump, even many normie liberals have been giving it up. The rest is not surprising, though backroom info is always a little interesting.
"
This comic prepared me for that: https://xkcd.com/2914/
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
I think the issue is, when you say "work better", we can't all even agree on what "better" means. We might disagree on how best to fund and distribute health care but at least we all are more or less on the same page on what "health" is -- but what people want out of education is all over the map, even before you get to how it should be conducted.
So IMHO, school choice should be the default, and the burden of proof ought to be on someone who says that actually we have to coercively collect taxes from everyone to create monolithic systems with very little choice, and where the only power to change them is political power (so you get tyranny of the majority, or of the vocal minority, or the deep pocketed campaign contributors, etc).
Obviously in the real world, the one who wants to change the system is the one with the burden to convince, but if we were starting from scratch, does anyone think we would basically want to build what we have today? Well, maybe so just because that's what people know.
"
My move from being a liberal to whatever I am now was primarily due to realizing that my baseline "government is for helping the people, private orgs are for enriching themselves" assumption was not only ridiculously oversimplified but actively wrong. People are people, and good and bad and selfish and selfless actors can be found in both places. A government monopoly doesn't magically avoid all the downsides that private monopolies have.
So I think if we're stuck with collecting taxes to have government-funded public education, it's still better overall to give that money to individuals than directly to school administrations -- even if a portion of that money ends up in the hands of con artists or whatever, at least it was given freely by individual choices based on the available options. There are greedy or scummy or incompetent government adminstrators too, and it's harder to get rid of them relying only on the voting booth.
On “About Those Swing State Polls”
It's a plausible theory that undecideds will continue to gravitate to Biden, but AFAICT it's not buttressed by any hard data. A Trump win is not only not impossible, it's about as likely as a Biden win at this stage. If it happens then I don't see how it could reasonably be called a "fluke".
On “It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Algebra 2”
Rote memorization is not the only thing but it's a necessary prerequisite for most people. There's been some disastrous mathematics pedagogy based on the idea that we can somehow directly teach "concepts" without the groundwork that drill-and-kill provides.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
I saw recently (on Twitter, take it for what it's worth) that studies have found that ChatGPT and such have a distinctive word choice pattern, and so people are leveraging this to spot where they're being used in the wild -- peer reviews are apparently one of the high-use spots.
"
My daughter is in a Ph.D. program and recently got a "revise and re-submit" response for a journal submission, which she was pretty excited about. But when she went through the peer reviewer feedback, Reviewer #2 was quite negative. At first she wondered why the editor response was positive, but as she read the details, she realized that reviewer #2 must have been responding to a completely different submission. So she pointed this out to the editor, who said to just ignore it and concentrate on the feedback of the other two.
Obviously the editor didn't want to go through the effort of clearing up the confusion. My daughter's advisor explained to her that being a journal editor is kind of a thankless job, a lot of extra work and dealing with demanding/unhappy fellow academics for low pay (mainly done just for putting on one's CV), so it's not exactly rare that one sees less than ideal effort or results.
On “Girl Dadding in the Taylor Swift Era”
Even though I understand that different people will like different kinds of music, my first unguarded reaction to a lot of popular music is "OMG how can anyone like that crap???". It takes a few seconds for the more rational part of my brain to kick in and remind me that other people have their own backgrounds and experiences and taste, and that my confidence in the absolute rightness of my own reaction is unjustified (sometimes).
I liked the occasional "argue about food/sports/music/etc." posts that used to be more common here (e.g. the Mt Rushmore series), because it seemed like a helpful reminder for people who were generally busy getting angry at each other for "serious" political disagreements that they could find themselves getting just as worked up about disagreements that everyone intellectually understood were just matters of taste and not fact. So that maybe on some level when they went back to arguing about politics, a little bit of that realization would transfer over and there would be a bit less outrage and a bit more empathy in the mix.
On “From NBC News: Virginia bans public universities from considering legacy in admissions”
If you're an opponent of race-based criteria in university admissions, it makes you more an Asian-supremacist than a white supremacist.
But to unnecessarily steelman the accusation, I think the thought process is not so much that you're supposed to support legacy admissions, it's that spending so much more time talking about AA than about legacy admits is supposed to reveal that you are not in support of fairness for its own sake but only to exclude the beneficiaries of AA.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/18/2024”
Pretty soon you front-pagers will just generate your posts and all the comments with AI, and the rest of us will be superfluous.
Actually, reading some of the comments here, i wonder if you're doing a staged release of this already.
On “Lawsplainer: Our Three Most Recent Supreme Court Decisions”
Yeah, the part of the 1st bullet that excludes 1-point offenses doesn't make any sense under either the AND or the OR interpretations. I think that the AND interpretation is less plausible as an "intended" meaning since it has the bizarre outcome that someone with two 3-pointers on their record would be eligible but someone with a 3 & a 2 would not be... but overall this isn't a case where it's obvious what the drafters were aiming for and they just goofed on the wording. I agree that the dissent seems to have the better of it, the more so given that even with eligibility, the actual granting of the relief in a given case is still at the judge's discretion.
On “Fani Willis Survives, But Not Unscathed”
We can also charge a fixed cost of $20,000 and do only 10 hours of work because it's off the shelf, and not even bring up the question of how long we worked on it for them.
At any time our clients are free to go to a different vendor if they feel they can get a better deal. Exactly how we decide on the bill is less important than how happy they are with the product and price.
"
I have no interesting opinions on Wade, but I will say (speaking as someone who is not a lawyer but who does work at a company that sometimes bills time and material) that "hours" in billing is often just a stand-in for "value" or maybe "average amount of effort". We often have occasion to modify hours billed up or down based on who was working on the project, whether we were able to start from a template or built from scratch, etc.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/11/2024”
Is this surprising? Abortion rights both motivates the base and at a high level is supported by a majority of Americans overall; the severe restrictions passed in several GOP-controlled states are broadly unpopular. I don't really understand why the other respondents here felt the need to mention the other services -- Dems should lean in on abortion rights. It would be political malpractice for Biden/Harris not to play this up.
On “The New Right-Wing Leftists”
I would just say that what DD and I were reacting to was not his first comment but his failed snarky response to Jaybird -- "math doesn't work that way". It was not only unnecessarily hostile but also a really dumb thing to say.
Whether there's merit in his first comment is a different topic (DD's reaction re "rising tide" was what came to my mind as well -- however we approach it we ought to aim for consistency).
"
I assume (hope) that Philip is just exhibiting here the 30-point IQ drop that political partisanship causes, rather than a core deficiency.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.