1,045 karma · joined September 11, 2022
>There's pretty much no better way to ensure you'll produce students that dislike and suck at math for the rest of their lives than proceeding by mind-numbing rote memorization.
I couldn't agree more.
Interesting! I didn't know there was both flagging and downvoting. I'd assume flagging works like reporting on Reddit.
I also don't like forced socialization but like the possibility of socialization being there, as a way to build team cohesion, disengage from work, etc.
>The best math textbook (Theory of Algebra) I ever read had little sections about the person who revealed a particular subject, why they were studying it, and how the subject is used.
I've found the best type of books provide motivation for concepts, how they have evolved, etc.
Take Computer Science for example, many of its concepts were area of research for decades but from a student's perspective it seems these concepts were always here instead of being constantly refined until the states they're now in.
Good problem sets that aid studets' intuition aren't easy to come by, oftentimes they're either too easy or too hard.
I got Joseph M. William's "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" recommended [1] so you might be interested in it. I read the introduction (I'm planning to read it this year) and with the few examples the author presents it sells the idea that prose doesn't need to be utterly complex to communicate ideas and concepts succinctly and clearly.
The other day someone posted a webapp they wrote that doesn't let you edit and that blurs all the text except the current line while you're typing. If you want to edit your text, you need to download the file. His aim was to separate writing from editing, which I think it's an interesting approach.
This is a great point, and Haidt does acknowledge these "virtues of aggregation" can be and have been hijacked. Case in point, facism which labels as "hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights." It's undeniable that dictators, cult leaders, etc. have exploited what he terms the "hive switch" but is that reason enough to completely do away with it, especially given its innateness as a groupish especies and its main function as a social adhesive?
I don't know what this means and I don't care to look it up.
>the equating of people being wrong with malfeasance,
What else can you do when honesty and hubris is out and part of the equation respectively?
The best way to escape quick sands is to actively avoid getting into quick sands.
This is such a poignant analysis of these -isms. Do you have any recommended readings by any chance?
As someone once said, "everything woke goes to shit". There are few ideologies as pervarsive and corrodive as Wokeness. At the end of the day, it's ultimately about power and ruling over people's thought process.
>The piece’s hectoring tone, which tells us what we MUST do, pervades the entire paper, especially the final section, “A path forward.” Oh, and here’s part of the acknowledgments—the obligatory self castigation
That's par for the course:
1. Point out a non-existent problem (or amplify it to gigantic proportions if it does).
2. Pontificate how it affects some marginalized group(s) and how the problem's day-to-day existence mortally affect the livelihood of said group(s). It's important you're talking on behalf of the group(s) and that you don't provide any evidence.
3. Try to introduce some methodology and/or framework to solve the problem. It's important this new framework be the only "path forward", and morally justified to bully others to accept it even if it has no merits.
>(I have yet to understand what unlived experience is! And what do white settlers have to do with ableism?)
Neither do I!
>The paper, as you’ll see, is really an indictment of biology and undergraduate genetics for not using sufficiently woke language.
It seems that ship unfortunately sailed a long time ago. Nowadays it's about denying reality, and being forced to participate in some individuals' theatrics and self-image or else you'll be labeled a -phobic or -ist.
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On a different note, give Coyne's books (Faith vs Fact and Why Evolution Is True) a read. Highly recommended.
ChatGPT is definitely leftist/progressive.
As of more recently, I think Dr. Fauci should be held accountable for lying to the American public in the last two years, from the effectiveness of masks to the effectiveness of the CV vaccines to the effectiveness of mandates to crowning himself as the herald of science (e.g., paraphrasing "if you disagree with me, you disagree with science").
After reading _The Righteous Mind_, this is something Jonathan Haidt's book drilled down on me. The book focuses on the political and religious divide in the US primarily, and his Moral Foundation Theory shines some light on the issue: In the case of conservatives vs liberals, their moral matrices are vastly different and that's a recipe for disagreement.
In Moral Foundation Theory [1], Haidt and a group of social psychologists seek to understand the variability of morality across cultures. Despite this variability, they find there are similarities and recurrent themes. They think there at least are six foundations: 1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/cheating, 3) Loyalty/betraying, 4) Authority/subversion, 5) Sanctity/degradation, and 6) Liberty/oppression.
According to Haidt, liberals (aka leftists, Haidt uses "libertarians" for "classical liberals") respond extremely to the harm/care and liberty/opression foundations, however conservatives do not respond to these foundations as well. In fact, conservatives respond to all the foundations by the same degree while liberals respond to only two foundations. Both liberals and conservatives respond to liberty/oppression but they approach it differently.
- Opaque moderation (at least more opaque than the current one)
- Banning and shadowbanning users despite admitting the administration admitting they didn't violate company's ToS
- Soft banning users regularly so they could build a case to outright ban them once and for all
- Collusion with some three-letters agencies (see Twitter Files) to censor speech, bury newsworthy stories, etc
- Journalists were treated as a separate class above regular users.
Oh my hyperbole, what would we do without you?!
>Then came the exodus from Twitter, due to the tyrannical new owner. Many of the voices that I have come to appreciate the most are leaving. In particular, the ones with the highest morals were the first to jump ship. As well they should! If you stay on Twitter, the way it is now, and continue to contribute your content to it, then you are saying that you approve of the tyrant-in-chief banning reporters for writing about things that make him look bad.
Oh my hyperbole! It's interesting to see the dichotomy between people who think Twitter was a safe haven and people who think it was a hellhole.
And you can both support that Elon Musk shouldn't have been so trigger happy banning reporters without a clear policy in place AND that doxxing should earn you an instantaneous and permanent ban.
To be more precise, usually white liberal English speakers from the US.
>'Retarded' used to be a medical term, now it's a 4chan term, so it needs canning.
That's exactly Doug's point. Soon enough terms like "neurodivergent" might become offensive when it's co-opted by people in general, e.g., "you're such a neurodivergent", "you're a neury", etc
I'm unfortunately in the extreme end of that advice. I listen to my teammates but I rarely contribute anything worthwhile, not because I don't want to but because I've nothing to contribute. In two recent sessions about database design for one project and integrating SSO into another, I literally had nothing to say.