Month: June 2015
What would you remove from or add to the K-12 American school system?
the K-12 American school system t b q h
I am unconvinced of the value of the vast majority of what people learn in school. I would prefer a very narrow set of mandatory classes: people should learn to read and write, perform arithmetic, use computers, and understand basic scientific concepts and basic statistics, as well as financial, health, and home economics classes. (I’d be tempted to throw in a mandatory psych class, but psych stuff is failing to replicate too much.)
Before you object to this list of things I would teach by saying that there’s no history or literature or anything on it, I would like to direct your attention to this study of general knowledge among college students, in which we discover that 9% of college students know who wrote Oliver Twist. I would like to suggest that modern teaching methods are also not doing a terribly good job of teaching about literature, and my system would at least involve spending less effort on it.
I’d prefer to separate vocational education, cultural education, and signaling. Once they graduated from the mandatory classes, students would then get to do cultural education until the age of 18. Cultural education is basically unschooling: schools would be very enriched environments in which students could play guitar, draw, read, learn history or math, write, do experiments, learn about film, etc. etc. This has two effects: first, people are more likely to actually learn stuff they’re interested in; second, people who actually like books or art or whatever are probably going to get more use out of knowing how to appreciate them. Teachers would serve as guides to students. Ideally, schools would also be open in the evenings for lifelong learners.
You’d probably have to engage in some very careful environment design to make sure people don’t just play Angry Birds all day. In particular, I’d require that each hour of television, film, or video games be followed by an hour of discussion and analysis with an informed teacher.
Vocational education starts at age 18 and consists solely of things that actually help you get a job; many careers would be taught through internships or apprenticeships instead of classrooms.
I’m not sure what the best way to do signaling would be.
ja ja ja ja ja
a spanish person laughing or a german person during sex???you decide
Finnish person struggling to remember what they were about to say next
polish person trying to get themself noticed
portuguese person trying to hush other people
Chinese person trying to do calculations
swedish person wanting to get out of a conversation
Dutch person sarcastically agreeing with you.
Indigenous speaker of Yucatec Maya asking repeatedly for water
Sexual orientation: People are pretty and I am scared of all of them.
13. TRIVIA. GIVE ME ALL THE TRIVIA. please. :)
Ooh! Let’s see, here are some of my favourite bits of classical trivia (I know no other trivia). I should warn you that my idea of amusing trivia is quite… esoteric :’) (A couple of these are a little gruesome)
- Ancient Greek had a pitch accent (i.e. the pitch of the syllable went up or down depending on the accent). This mattered, because once during a performance of a tragedy, an actor got the pitch accent wrong and said ‘weasel’ instead of ‘calm sea’ and we are still laughing about it 2000 years later
- Once during a battle between Argos and Sparta, the Argive generals told their troops to do whatever the Spartan herald shouted. The Spartan generals figured this out and ordered their troops to attack when the herald shouted ‘have breakfast’
- The tyrant Polycrates of Samos was so lucky in everything that he did that his friend Amasis, king of Egypt, advised him to get rid of the thing he valued the most. This was a golden and emerald ring (?????). Polycrates threw it into the sea. Soon afterwards, it turned up in the belly of a fish that a fisherman had caught and presented to Polycrates. Amasis said, ‘That’s it, you’re too lucky, I’m cutting off our friendship before the gods screw you over.’
- The tyrant Peisistratos of Athens married an aristocratic girl in order to form an alliance with her family, but he thought the family was cursed, so he would only have sex with her ‘not in the customary way’ and I still do not know what this means because my Greek history tutor was the most awkward person ever and would not tell me
- An Ancient Greek word for ‘extravagant dandy’ was ‘someone who is obsessed with fish’
- The Greeks described the sea as ‘wine-dark’
- Socrates didn’t wash
- Hippocleides doesn’t care
- The great Greek general Pericles was mocked because he allegedly allowed his mistress to boss him around in bed
- It is 100% true that Plato published a serious piece of work criticising Aeschylus for making Achilles top and Patroclus bottom
- This is the what the Greeks came up with to explain intersex people: Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes & Aphrodite, was born a boy but attracted the attentions of a rather obsessive girl who tried to force herself on him. Fortunately for her, they were in a magic spring and she prayed to be joined to him always, so they were joined together in one body that was part male and part female
- In Cyprus, the goddess Aphrodite was represented with both male and female sex organs
- Alexander the Great used to get foreign kings to line up their favourite prostitutes and then he would make a big show of walking along the line and acting disinterested
- Allegedly, Alexander met the cynic philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes said, ‘Get out of my sunlight.’ Alexander said, ‘If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes,’ and Diogenes replied, ‘If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes.’
- The Roman playwright Terence, considered by later writers to be the best example of ‘pure literary Latin’, might have been an African immigrant and is widely thought to have been a slave
- Julius Caesar annoyed the populace of Rome because he used to answer his mail during the races
- Cicero was told to change his name because it meant ‘chickpea’ and he responded that he would make it the most glorious name in Rome
- It is 99.9% likely that it is actually the case that Cicero was not let in on the assassination of Caesar because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut
- Caesar once said, ‘I know I am the most hated man in Rome, because Cicero hates me, and God knows Cicero is easy to please’
- Cicero and his brother Quintus seemingly spent an alarming amount of time chasing Cicero’s secretary around, asking for kisses
- The poet Vergil (Vergilius), for sadly modern-esque reasons, was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (which renders itself quite nicely as something like ‘Virginia’)
- Augustus nagged all his poet friends to write an epic about him, and when Vergil said he would do it, Propertius published a poem saying ‘THANK THE GODS: someone else is doing it – and it’s pretty good btw you should read it when it comes out’
- The poet Ovid was exiled for a ‘poem and a mistake’ and we STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS
- The emperor Augustus was teetotal and lame in one leg
- As part of his propaganda against Augustus, Mark Antony claimed that Augustus singed off his leg hair
- Augustus responded that Mark Antony was a drunken hooligan. Antony wrote a pamphlet defending himself, entitled ‘On the subject of my drunkenness’. To me this is one of the greatest losses of antiquity
- The emperor Tiberius was obsessed with pears and cucumbers
- The emperor Claudius allegedly ordered for his third wife to be executed, then got so drunk that he had to ask why she was not at dinner
- Claudius had a son who died when he threw a pear core in the air, tried to catch it in his mouth and choked
- Augustus complained that Tiberius used words in their strict etymological sense (or used literal equivalents of phrases that were used in a non-etymological sense), and the emperor Hadrian, when reading about this, commented, ‘It sounds like Augustus was not very well educated if he chose his words according to their usage and not their etymology.’
- The emperor Galba is the only Roman male who is explicitly said to have had a sexual preference for adult males (i.e. of his own age) and not boys
- Hadrian and his wife went travelling with Hadrian’s lover Antinous and an aristocratic woman named Julia Balbilla. At a tourist site in Egypt, Julia Balbilla carved a poem in the style of Sappho on a famous statue. One of my history professors said that this suggests Hadrian’s wife was a lesbian and they covered for each other
- The historian Tacitus was a keen hunter. His friend Pliny went hunting one day and sent him a letter, ‘You won’t believe it, Tacitus, I went hunting, and I enjoyed it! I took all my books and I sat in the shade by the nets and it was so peaceful, I got so much done. You should try it!’
I believe the “not in a customary way” one refers to buttsex. Possibly (though a bit less likely) blowjobs or pulling out. Though I believe the source is Herodotus, and putting his reliability or lack thereof aside, if I recall correctly, he didn’t say anything more than “not in the customary way” either, so don’t blame your Greek tutor.
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.
And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.
I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:
Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?
Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.
Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.
Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”
Scott: How does that apply to food?
Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.
So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.
But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:
I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.
Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.
But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.
All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.
So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.
This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.
I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.
As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.
But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.
As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?
It took me approximately forever to find out I was faceblind.
In retrospect, the incident with telling someone she looked like Evil Galadriel from the FotR movie and having everyone including her deny it…makes a lot more sense.
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
This is why I need feminism.
I need feminism because women don’t make as many groundbreaking discoveries or do as many earthshattering things as men do. That sounds like less of an ‘us’ problem and more of a ‘you’ problem. When females do great things they get recognition for it, in fact, the one name that pops into my head one I think of Nobel Prize is that one girl Malala Yousafzai. Just remember, great things happen not with quotas and requirements but passion and devotion.
Oh my fucking god did you just use Malala being a Nobel peace prize winner as evidence of why feminism isn’t necessary and everything is equal WHEN SHE WAS LITERALLY SHOT IN THE FACE FOR BEING A WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVIST? ! !?! ?!?!?!
Always remember that women’s absence in things like this is man-made. Irena Sendler, the woman who saved thousands in the Holocaust, lost the NPP to a man. No, you punk ass misogynist, women do not get recognition.
“Women don’t make as many groundbreaking discoveries as men do” Wanna talk about these ladies who discovered shit and had credit stolen from them by men? LOL okay here!
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/rosalind-franklin-and-dna-how-wronged-was-she/
http://feministing.com/2014/05/01/five-times-cosmos-neil-degrasse-tyson-stole-my-feminist-heart/
https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/meitner.html
http://time.com/3632635/the-true-story-behind-big-eyes/
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/features/profiles/l/catharine-littlefield-greene.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/scientists/jocelyn_bell_burnell
http://skepchick.org/2013/11/woman-rock-at-history-men-steal-credit/
And these are just a few of the ones we know about.
How’s the saying go? “The absence of women in history is man made”
I’m posting this gif almost entirely because of this mans untuck…
dbz landing.
for a while i thought this was just reversed, but then i realised that you can’t reverse the landing.. WHAT THE F*CK. How you do that son?!
i can barely get out of bed without tripping
and then there’s this asshole
This is some graceful, superhero shit right here.
Hi yes I would like to report a lost super hero.