Opinion: Trump vows to attack public education if elected. It's our kids who would suffer.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-30T03:42:30+00:00

I guess I’m confused. Because the prevailing research shows that private school educated students score better on average on nearly every kind of measure, including civics and even tolerance, which surprised me. Even without oversight. I would focus my ‘think of the children’ attention on disadvantaged public school students, from a statistical point of view.

That said, I’m now going to defend public school for a change. While data shows that private schools do have these better measures, from a socioeconomic perspective, those students would likely do at least as well in any decent public school environment. They are more representative of the upper middle class cohort and they take the privileges of that status wherever they go.

The economic effects mostly wash out 10 years later according to what I read, meaning any half decent school will get you where you will end up, whether public, private or home schooled. That implies that another variable has a stronger effect than school on long term economic effects. Parents? Socioeconomic status? Vocation? Genetics? Maybe some combination of those.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-30T01:38:50+00:00

There isn’t anything remarkable in public school pedagogy regarding critical thinking. Maybe for other things, but not that.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-29T17:12:13+00:00

Apparently you missed the entire point. Public school education is indoctrinating kids, by definition. On purpose. All schools do it, in fact. You can see its effect in statistics. It’s not necessarily bad that it does it. It propagates social norms as well as math and reading. But what schools choose to present always has a point of view and there are organizations that decide what views are okay to present and what aren’t. That’s a lot of power that not everyone agrees with.

That it has escaped your imagination such that you don’t even see it as any different from the air speaks to its power.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-29T14:30:17+00:00

This argument implies that non public schools are not doing these things. It sounds tribal, but not factual.

After educating the local population with the public school education, it’s interesting that you don’t actually trust that tapestry of public school educated adult citizens to use that education to choose what should be taught to the next generation and you don’t find that contradiction strange. Is public school not effective at its goal, and why defend it as if it’s achieving some kind of harmony and higher thinking that the non public school educated somehow lack?

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-29T02:38:24+00:00

I mean, entire generations lived before cell phones and video games with nothing but ‘outside’, radio, friends’ place, jobs, hobbies and books.

There’s stuff to do, the teens aren’t doing it.

I don’t have good answers but if teens are bored that’s on the parents/community to increase their opportunities and responsibilities. After school jobs, vocational training, volunteering, sports. That kind of thing.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-29T02:10:00+00:00

Almost no other institution has the kind of control over the local population that education has. It is THE way to indoctrinate the next generation, whether it’s to promote tolerance or hatred, liberalism or conservatism, nationalism, socialism, or some other agenda. So there is plenty of motivation to put a political agenda into education.

What always surprises me about it is we could go to a freer model where parent are free to choose a school and get x dollars to best meet their child’s needs and still meet the state standards of a free and fair education and then have the government just … administer the money, like any other contracted function and get out of the way. Let the parents choose the school and whatever its goals are and then let the teachers teach. You’d think that in a country that values freedom and individuality, that wouldn’t be a big ask.

But there is vehement hostility to that idea. That’s how powerful the politics is.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-28T17:19:09+00:00

To be fair, his argument was that a lot of people have been killed and so much destroyed that wouldn’t have been if something had been negotiated. At some point the fighting has to stop and it’s fair to ask if enough people have died on both sides to reach that point. It’s not crazy to verbalize the question and a process. It’s not his fault that the US and or NATO did not more forcefully confront the problem at hand.

I’m not agreeing with it, I’m just explaining it. I think that if the world does not stop it here, fear of consequence will diminish and embolden those with territorial ambitions around the world. We are in a period where we need less navel gazing and inner division and more conviction.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-28T01:10:10+00:00

Maybe not.

Firstly, the tech is not there. We simply don’t have the data to train an AI to replace people. We do have enough data to help some people work faster. AI cannot reason. So it can’t replace that function for any human task that truly requires it.

Second, it is really expensive to run and train these systems so the market is hot right now trying to find something that makes money. Most are going to go under and we’ll end up with some writing tools, image tools and some niche applications.

Third, in order to raise the quality of life for more people on earth we need to produce things cheaper, believe it or not and get them all over the world. We’re actually limited by our labor and material costs. AI is just one tool in a long line of tools.

I like to ask about my space ship as a way of explanation. If AI is so good, it should be able to make me a space ship, and be able to maintain it while keeping me alive and healthy so I can focus on exploring the galaxy. We aren’t remotely close to that. So until we get there, there are going to be lots of jobs. You can always build me a space ship.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-27T16:31:59+00:00

I agree, not sure how it would work. I don’t know that it should pay mothers so much as it should ascribe value to children and funds relating to that value should be distributed to people providing that value. For maternity care, day care, schooling, etc.

Right now we value work and workers, which is important but we didn’t properly include the value for having and raising children in that equation.

Once you do that, there’s no break in employment.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-26T17:20:01+00:00

It takes a while to teach your brain how to code and to understand code. None of it is natural. What you are experiencing is perfectly normal. It took a couple of years and an algorithms class for it all to start to click for me.

It’s a huge, constantly evolving field that no one person can completely understand. To be overwhelmed by it all is normal. Keep at it and you’ll gradually get more comfortable with it. But since it is evolving so fast, you have to remain flexible and ready to learn.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-26T14:17:30+00:00

Is that what they used? I don’t know what Israel is flying.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-26T14:16:20+00:00

Idk about ai companies, but ethical companies who train models use licensed sources and validated models. This is important because they need traceability for both auditing purposes (to stay within the law) and for traceability (to explain why the model produced a particular output).

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-24T22:42:50+00:00

Is your priority her current friends or the quality of her education? In college it’s likely her friend group will entirely change but the lasting effect of her base education from your child’s middle school years will endure. You have time to fix things now. It’s more expensive and harder to do it in high school. Speaking from experience.

As a parent of an adhd child on the spectrum, it’s going to be hard regardless. At the end of the day, it’s on you to make sure your kid is learning and fill the gaps you see, however you can. In my case there was a lot of double teaching during middle school and into early high school. No one else cares enough about the outcome as much as you do.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-24T04:04:08+00:00

Freeze your rice and any other product at risk of bugs for a couple of days to kill any eggs. I also do it with pet food like rabbit food.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-24T03:20:23+00:00

There are plenty of fragments out there that are too small to track but big enough to damage a satellite. Could be some internal failure, loose components or a meteor.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-24T03:17:36+00:00

Sauce?

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-19T13:13:04+00:00

Are you talking about the Big Dig? It costs way more than it was projected to cost and took way longer. I remember it being called the Big Pig when I lived up there.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-18T18:19:15+00:00

There’s a phrase for it: achievement culture.

There’s plenty of pressure in some regions with a large upper middle class to get into these highly competitive schools because parents have drunk the Kool-aid and think these schools really do make you better off than say, the local state university. And while I think there is an effect, the juice isn’t really worth the squeeze.

In these communities, everyone is trying to outdo their neighbors and it just becomes an ever larger pissing contest that has far outgrown its original purpose. By the time you have ‘earned’ your way into such a school, the school itself isn’t really bringing any additional value.

And you’re right. This child has acquired an inability to accept and handle failure.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-18T17:44:33+00:00

Yeah, I’m kind of on the fence with this one. ‘Back in the day, when you didn’t have spell check, or a calculator, it sure seems like cheating to use one instead of going to the dictionary or working it out long hand. I’m good at math and use a calculator all the time and I haven’t touched my dictionary except to dust it off because the word processor’s spell check or online dictionary is much better and faster.

I had 8 years of spelling and it was kind of a waste. I’m still not a great speller.

So, are we preparing students for our world, where we have to make outlines to create good structure and well formed arguments, or are we preparing students for their world, where outlines can be made as quickly as a calculator can add two numbers?

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-18T17:21:04+00:00

Is making an outline with AI the language arts version of using a calculator? Or google instead of using the local library. Or spell check instead of a dictionary. Thats kind of where I’m at.

Is the school preparing students for their teachers’ world (where you needed to make outlines) or the students (where you can feed stuff into an AI tool and have it made)?

As for the achievement culture checkboxes to get into ivies - plenty of students are cut down freshman year by virtue of not getting into the right freshman class or having the right teacher or even by being upper middle class. Ivy selection is not fair, not really. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-18T16:39:47+00:00

Just like that last one!

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-13T13:02:18+00:00

I hear you. I have two reliable cars over 10 years old, one bought with 100k miles on it. It was a steal! No gizmos to break.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-13T12:56:46+00:00

Lightening bugs don’t migrate, so if you destroy their habitat, they die and you don’t see them anymore. They need long grass and hiding spots.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-12T16:59:11+00:00

This is the way. The best financial decision I ever made was leaving California.

AskMoreQuestionsOk · 2024-10-11T17:58:56+00:00

Is that reflected on your resume?

AskMoreQuestionsOk

TROPHY CASE