Stress Testing Our Democracy: A Conversation with Barton Gellman<br /> Episode 384 of Sam Harris podcast<br /> https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/384-stress-testing-our-democracy

Suggested by Flancian at FoTL

Private Equity-Gesellschaften investieren enorme Summen u.a. aus Pensionfonds von Angestellten des Public Service in den USA in Fossilenergien. Pro Jahr werden so 1,17 Gigatonnen CO2-Äquivalente an Emissionen finanziert. Private Equity-Unternehmen agieren intransparent und übernehmen oft schmutzige Assets, die von transparenteren Firmen abgestoßen werden. Eine Studie listet auf, für wieviele Emissionen die große Private Equity-Firmen verantwortlich sind. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/01/private-equity-firms-us-pensions-fossil-fuel-projects

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/14/private-equity-dirty-energy-carlyle-warburg-pincus-kkr-climate-risks-scorecard?sara_ref=re-nl-spiegelklimabericht-2024_08_16

Verantwortliche der großen US-Fossilunternehmen haben vertraulich die öffentlichen Statements der Firmen zur Dekarbonisierung relativiert und in ihrer Öffentlichkeitsarbeit gegen die von ihnen selbst offiziell vertretene Politik agiert. Das geht aus Dokumenten hervor, deren Herausgabe der Ausschuss des Repräsentantenhauses für Oversight und Reform erzwungen hatte. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/oil-industry-documents-disinformation.html

Has education in the United States fallen prey to lip service about its importance. Have we substituted an idea of it's value for the actual value itself?

Almost everyone says education is important and that we value it, but do we put our money where our mouth is?

https://shindig.com/login/event/100yearedtechlive

Link between the commentaries of the early middle ages and modern lectures

พอดิบพอดีกับช่วงสิ้นสุดของการปฏิวัติวัฒนธรรมและเข้าสู่ยุคสมัย 改革开放 ของ 邓小平

first referent "he" is George Orwell

Example of a time in which patriotism and nationalism may have been beneficial.

from World Brain, double check with source

Heather Stark in I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.

Some of the missing piece here is knowing a method for extracting and subsequently building. Without the recipe in hand, it's difficult to bake a complex cake.

Not mentioned here as something which may be missing, but which Adler & Van Doren identify as strength and ability to read at multiple levels including inspectionally, analytically, and ultimately syntopically.

To some extent, the knowledge of the method for excerpting and arranging will ultimately allow the interested lifelong learner the ability to read syntopically even if it isn't the sort of targeted exercise it might be within creating a thesis.

It's been burning in my mind all day: you're right that too often, for reasons likely hidden in the folds of of educational reform, some of our most powerful methods of working, researching, and writing are lost or seem like magic when they're rediscovered. Rarely are classes on the subject taught, thereby leaving the student to find their own way in the dark. Thank you for pulling back the curtain covering the proverbial proscenium arch on Act I of research methods.

For those flailing in the dark, Keith Thomas's brief essay (2010) discusses some of the basic problem along with solutions, while Adler and Van Doren (1972) talk about the levels of reading which are now rarely taught or reached (and how to reach them), and finally, imminent scholars/researchers like Umberto Eco or Jacques Barzun & Henry Graff reveal alternate versions of what you're already doing. Others certainly exist, often in piecemeal form, but this short set in combination with your YouTube channel for examples provides one royal road to the destination many seek.

• Thomas, Keith. “Diary: Working Methods.” London Review of Books, June 10, 2010.
• Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
• Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
• Barzun, Jacques, and Henry F. Graff. The Modern Researcher. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1957.

their = multiple-choice tests

Multiple-choice tests usually test for basic facts or simple answers, and aren't well designed for testing complex chains of reasoning, particularly at the lower levels.

https://www.opencampusmedia.org/2023/09/12/the-inspiration-for-californias-grand-experiment-at-community-colleges-wisconsin/

Via Nate Maertens

Gould, Jessica. “Teachers College, Columbia U. Dissolves Program behind Literacy Curriculum Used in NYC Public Schools.” Gothamist, September 8, 2023. https://gothamist.com/news/columbia-university-dissolves-program-behind-literacy-curriculum-used-in-nyc-public-schools.

The Teachers College of Columbia University has shut down the Lucy Calkins Units of Study literacy program.

Missing from the story is more emphasis on not only the social costs, which they touch on, but the tremendous financial (sunk) cost to the system by not only adopting it but enriching Calkins and the institution (in a position of trust) which benefitted from having sold it.

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/eicbpgSKEe6vc0fPdIm05w

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-l-mursell/

See: Mursell, James L. “The Defeat of the Schools.” The Atlantic, March 1939. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95dec/chilearn/murde.htm.

———. “The Reform of the Schools.” The Atlantic, December 1, 1939. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1939/12/the-reform-of-the-schools/654746/.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_Studiorum

• quote
  • "We see virtually no prospect that the Wall Street system will transform itself from within.
  • Change depends on citizen’s working from outside the establishment
    • to create from the bottom up a New Economy based on new values and institutions."
• Author
  • David Korten

Die EU beweggt sich bei der Dekarbonisierung in die richtige Richtung, aber zu langsam, um bis 2050 CO<sub>2-Neutralität zu erreichen. Ein Bericht des neu gegründeten Climate Neutrality Observatory fordert mehr Tempo auf fast allen Handlungsfeldern und wirkungsvollere Monitoring-Prozesse.

State of EU progress to climate neutrality: https://climateobservatory.eu/report/state-eu-progress-climate-neutrality

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eu-must-pick-up-speed-to-reach-climate-goals-report-says/

Why do governments and some so-called education leaders ask about how to best help (academically) children from "poor circumstances" in such a way that improving their circumstances is never part of the equation despite it being the immediate root of their problem?

Ferguson, Niall. “I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken.” Bloomberg.Com, November 8, 2021, sec. Opinion. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-08/niall-ferguson-america-s-woke-universities-need-to-be-replaced.

Seems like a lot of cherry picking here... also don't see much evidence of progress in a year and change.

Only four jobs listed on their website today: https://jobs.lever.co/uaustin. Note all are for administration and none for teaching. Most have a heavy fundraising component.

In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education.

Really?! A conservative saying we should worry about the health of education as his fellows choke off funding to all levels of education in general?

"Why are you turning blue and gasping for breath?" the Republican asks as he stands on the throat of education.

Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free.

No acknowledgement here that 2017 was a Republican Presidential administration, which means that a reasonable number of academics left academia to staff the administration. It's a common occurrence that there are reasonable shifts back and forth between government and academia as administrations change. One should look at comparisons from a Democratic presidential administration for a better idea versus Ferguson's cherry picking here.

Also unmentioned is the general disbelief in logic and the underpinning of science on the right in general, a fact which may make conservatives less likely to figure in these sorts of career paths. Are conservatives more likely to take career paths in capitalism-based endeavors than go into academia in the first place given the decrease in regulatory climate in the last half century?

Additionally by only looking at liberal arts institutions, he's heavily biasing the sample from the start. Why not also include the wide variety of non-liberal arts institutions? Agriculture and Mechanical Schools, Engineering Schools, Religious Schools, etc.?

The presumption of liberal profesoriate from the start is also likely to discourage students from considering the profession regardless of their desires and career goals, particularly when the professoriate has significantly shrunk in the last thirty years due to decreased funding. One ought to worry that there are any educators in the business of higher education, much less conservative ones who may be more biased to leave for higher paying careers elsewhere.

There are so many missing pieces of analysis here...

https://www.getalongfilm.com/

What a fantastic documentary. Everyone in Pasadena should be forced to watch this.

We need better answers for these problems....

The Finnish paradox stems from the fact that despite Finland having one of the latest school start ages in the world (at the age of 7), they also have one of the highest literacy achievements as well.

The paradox is only perceived by those who may feel that hammering knowledge into children's heads from a young age is the best method of education.

Why do we devalue education? Is it such a commodity now that its transmission value is worth pennies on the dollar?

Is Government requirement and support for education part of what causes the devaluation of the "educational market"? If so, how would one decouple this process to increase the wages of educators? Is a capitalistic version the best way to go, or is it better to socialize it further and inject more money into it versus other choices?

Major nationwide strike forming minimum wage with variances for local consumer indices and city/state costs of living? Something which would drive competition for child care and teaching spaces? Wages that would push up the social value of education? Create a market for competition for teachers at the local level as well as between areas?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/college-learning-students-success.html

This is a key difference in knowledge mastery...

The writing of a thesis is a shock to many specifically because information overload has not only gotten worse, but because the underlying historical method of doing so has either been removed from the educational equation or so heavily watered down that students don't think to use it.

When I think and write about "note taking" I'm doing it in a subtly different way and method than how it seems to be used in common parlance. Most seem to use it solely for information extraction and as a memory crutch which they may or may not revisit to memorize or use and then throw away. I do it for some of these reasons, but my practice goes far beyond this for generating new ideas, mixing up ideas creatively, and for writing. Note reuse seems to be the thing missing from the equation. It also coincidentally was the reason I quit taking notes in college.

What was the specific change in mathematical teaching instituted by Whewell, Peacock, and Herschel in An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819)?

Micheal Hudson : tax the rent seeking class or face barbarism like in Rome - The situation today is degrading in the same way Rome degraded into feudalism - rent seeking class today is not the landlord class, but the financial and raw materials class that are making large fortunes from rent seeking - that is the system level reform necessary today

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361

Is it possible that with the flowering of the storehouse of knowledge and the rise of information overload following Gutenberg's moveable type, we became overly enamored with Sayers' subject-based Quadrivium that we forgot to focus on the basics of the Trivium?

Hilarious that she sees "exceptionally docile parents" as a necessary condition for educational reform!

It seems broadly true in the new millennium and potentially much earlier that students are not taught broader reading strategies within academic settings. The history of note taking strategies and teaching would indicate that this wasn't always true.

In prior centuries there was more focus in earlier education on grounding in the trivium and quadrivium including rhetoric. These pieces and their fundamentals are now either glossed over or skipped altogether to focus more training on what might be considered more difficult and more important material. It would seem that educational reforms from the late 1500s shifted the focus on some of these prior norms to focus on other materials, and in particular reforms in the early 1900s (Charles William Eliot , et al) which focused on training a workforce for a more industrialized and capitalistic society weaned many of these methods out of earlier curricula. This results in students dramatically under-prepared for doctoral research, analysis, and writing.

They're drawing primarily from students with the following broad interests: - learning sciences / educational psychology - sociology of education (to influence policy/practice) - those with strong real-world experience (looking to apply it to a specific area)

tuition coverage & stipend<br /> must be based in Baltimore<br /> prefer one speaks to faculty members for alignment of research areas and mentorship prior to joining

stakesinscience

open science activists

ideology in science

The associative emblematic worldview prevalent prior to the seventeenth century began to disappear within Western culture as the rise of the early modern period and the beginning of the scientific revolution began to focus on more descriptive modes of thought and representation.

Have any researchers done specific work on this shift from emblematic to the descriptive? What examples do they show which support this shift? Any particular heavy influences?

This section cites:<br /> William B. Ashworth, Jr. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westfall, eds #books/wanttoread<br /> which could be a place to start.

Note that this same shift from associative and emblematic to descriptive and pedantic coincides not only with the rise of the scientific revolution but also with the effects of rising information overload in a post-Gutenberg world as well as the education reforms of Ramus (late 1500s) et al. as well as the beginning of the move away from scholasticism.

Is there any evidence to support claims that this worldview stemmed from pagan traditions and cultures and not solely the art of memory traditions from ancient Greece? Could it have been pagan traditions which held onto these and they were supplemented and reinforced by ecclesiastical forces which used the Greek traditions?

Examples of emblematic worldview: - particular colors of flowers meant specific things (red = love, yellow = friendship, etc.) We still have these or remants - Saints had their associative animals and objects - anniversary gifts had associative meanings (paper, silver, gold, etc.) We still have remnants of these things, though most are associated with wealth (gold, silver, platinum anniversaries). When did this tradition actually start? - what were the associative meanings of rabbits, turtles, and other animals which appear frequently in manuscript marginalia? (We have the example of the bee (Latin: apes) which where frequently used this way as being associated with the idea of imitation.) - other broad categories?

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Police-asked-a-Black-couple-to-prove-they-owned-17090739.php

Still so many unanswered questions here.... Headline seems mostly clickbait for the story presented.

Simply the word abridgement here leads me to wonder:

Was the continual abridgement of texts and excerpting small pieces for later use the partial cause of the loss of the arts of memory? Ars excerpendi ad infinitum? It's possible that this, with the growth of note taking practices, continual information overload, and other pressures for educational reform swamped the prior practices.

For evidence, take a look at William Engel's work following the arts of memory in England and Europe to see if we can track the slow demise by attrition of the descriptions and practices. What would such a study show? How might we assign values to the various pressures at play? Which was the most responsible?

Could it have also been the slow, inexorable death of many of these classical means of taking notes as well? How did we loose the practices of excerpting for creating new ideas? Where did the commonplace books go? Where did the zettelkasten disappear to?

One author, with a carefully honed practice and the extant context of their life writes some brief notes which get passed along to their students or which are put into a new book that misses a lot of their existing context with respect to the new readers. These readers then don't know about the attrition happening and slowly, but surely the knowledge goes missing amidst a wash of information overload. Over time the ideas and practices slowly erode and are replaced with newer techniques which may not have been well tested or stood the test of time. One day the world wakes up and the common practices are no longer of use.

This is potentially all the more likely because of the extremely basic ideas underpinning some of memory and note taking. They seem like such basic knowledge we're also prone to take them for granted and not teach them as thoroughly as we ought.

How does one juxtapose this with the idea of humanist scholars excerpting, copying, and using classical texts with a specific eye toward preventing the loss of these very classical texts?

Is this potentially the idea of having one's eye on a particular target and losing sight of other creeping effects?

It's also difficult to remember what it was like when we ourselves didn't know something and once that is lost, it can be harder and harder to teach newcomers.

Jeremias Drexel became one of the earliest educators and reformers to recommend against the ars memoria and instead use the art of excerpting as a means external written memory.

Collective memory is our history.

Something interesting here tying collective memory to education. Dig into this and expand on it.

http://hackeducation.com/2022/01/30/bell

William Wirt, a student of John Dewey who became the superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana in 1908, was one of the first educators to use a bell to signal the changes between classroom periods.

https://eleanorkonik.com/the-difficulties-of-teaching-notetaking/

A fascinating take on why we don't teach study skills and note taking the way they had traditionally been done in the past. What we're teaching and teaching toward has changed dramatically.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

much as prisoners escape from jails without guards.17 16 Drexel, Aurifodina, 258 17 Drexel, Aurifodina, 3–4.

Jeremias Drexel (1581 – 1638) recommended against the method of loci during the explosion of information in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Add Drexel to the list of reformers against the ars memoria in the early 1600s.)

While dealing with the information overload, educators may have inadvertently thrown out the baby with the bath water. While information still tends to increase and have increased complexity, some areas also show compression and concatenation and new theories subsume old information into their models. This means that one might know and understand Einstein which means that memorizing Newton's work is no longer needed at some point. Where should one draw the line of memorization for subsuming the knowledge of their culture? Aren't both old and new methods for memory usable? Keep the ars memoria while also using written methods.

Tunç, D. U., Tunç, M. N., & Eper, Z. B. (2021). Is Open Science Neoliberal? PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ft8dc

Notice the focus of turning education here toward servicing the industrial revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realschule

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Yusufa</span> in Improving how universities teach science (<time class='dt-published'>11/04/2021 13:26:34</time>)</cite></small>

You might also appreciate Nobel laureate Carl Weiman's work on trying to transform STEM teaching in large research universities. Cautionary tale for how hard it is to change existing institutions IMO. Some notes I took on it here: https://yusufa.notion.site/Improving-how-universities-teach-science-a3b3df69e10b48829e96e9ec70b3fdca

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>ysf</span> in 📚-reading (<time class='dt-published'>11/01/2021 20:55:11</time>)</cite></small>

Religious and national divides were likely very important here as authority from above would have been even more important than in modern time. Related to this is the change in mnemonic traditions due to religious and political mores around the time of Peter Ramus.

Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

Political finance reform!

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_08.html

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>FARNAM STREET </span> in Why Math Class Is Boring—and What to Do About It (<time class='dt-published'>09/01/2021 09:22:50</time>)</cite></small>

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/

Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.

I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.

The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.

The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.

At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).

One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.

I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.

How anti-vaccination websites build audiences and monetize misinformation %. (2021, March 10). First Draft. https://firstdraftnews.org:443/articles/antivaccination-audiences-monetize/

@MMScotofGlasgow, Hopefully it's not too late...

Francis Yates discusses Petrus Ramus as an educational reformer in Chapter 10 and onward in The Art of Memory. There she outlines Ramus' crusade against images (based in part on the admonition from 4 Deuteronomy about graven images) and on their prurient use (sex, violence, etc.) which were meant to make things more memorable. Ramism caught on in the late 1500's and essentially removed memory by the root from the subject of rhetoric of which it had been an integral part. Ramus felt that structure and rote memorization would suffice in its stead. As a result the method of loci decreased in prominence in schools and disappeared from the scene based on educational reform which was primarily pushed by Huguenot/Protestants. I've not read anywhere that the practice was ever banned, it just fell out of fashion due to these reforms.

I'm sure it didn't help that printed books became ever cheaper during/after this time and so the prior need to memorize for those reasons wasn't helped either.

I'm sure another confounding factor was Erasmus' Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512) which dramatically popularized the keeping and use of commonplace books by the learned and literate. These became a regular place in which people collected and kept their thoughts and ideas rather than memorizing them as they may have done in the past.

I really appreciate the respect given to indigenous knowledge here.

The researchers could have gone much further in depth in describing it and the aspects of what they mean by cultural "safety". They've done a disservice here by downplaying widespread adoption. Why not? Why couldn't we accord the proper respect of traditions to actively help make these techniques more widespread? Shouldn't we be willing to do the actual work to accord respect and passing on of these knowledges?

Given my reading in the area, there seems to be an inordinate amount of (Western) "mysticism" attributed to these techniques (here and in the broader anthropology literature) rather than approaching them head-on from a more indigenous perspective. Naturally the difficult part is being trusted enough by tribal elders to be taught these methods to be able to pass them on. (Link this idea to Tim Ingold's first chapter of Anthropology: Why It Matters.)

All this being said, the general methods known from the West, could still be modified to facilitate in widespread adoption of those techniques we do know. Further work and refinement of them could continue apace while still maintaining the proper respect of other cultures and methods, which should be the modern culture default.

If nothing else, the West could at least roll back the educational reforms which erased their own heritage to regain those pieces. The West showing a bit of respect for itself certainly wouldn't be out of line either.

This idea has been known historically for centuries. It's only with education "reforms" in the 1500's that things have become markedly worse in Western education.

Forget medical students and patients, this could broadly be applied to everyone everywhere! Why limit it to simply medical education?

However, I suspect that without prompting or repeated uses and examples, the percentage of students who actually do is likely abysmally poor.

How can something like this that so many people find worthwhile be so neglected by any school, much less a medical school?

Our educational system is really failing our students.

Damn you Peter Ramus!

Note the dramatic difference between these spaces and the potential ability for things to get better.

how to have validations in model and some in contract/form object without duplicating

Ledgerwood, Alison, Sa-kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson, Jr Neil Lewis, Keith Maddox, Cynthia Pickett, Jessica Remedios, Sapna Cheryan, et al. ‘The Pandemic as a Portal: Reimagining Psychological Science as Truly Open and Inclusive’. PsyArXiv, 11 January 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gdzue.

I'm not sure what he meant by:

fully detached from the activerecord I didn't think it was tied to ActiveRecord.

But I definitely agree with:

code is a bit hacky and complex to modify

FitzRoy. F., Jin. J., (2020). Reforming Tax and Welfare: Social Justice and Recovery after the Pandemic. Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved from: https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/pp157/

U of Vermont faculty members pledge to fight planned cuts to liberal arts. (n.d.). Retrieved December 9, 2020, from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/07/u-vermont-faculty-members-pledge-fight-planned-cuts-liberal-arts

An easy way to keep severe crime off of their books perhaps? Should police be the ones doing this sort of classification or should it go to an independent body unaffiliated with local law enforcement?

Would it have been classified the same if it was a more identifiable affluent white woman? (Likely not...)

Mance, H. (2020, September 18). The future of the university in the age of Covid. https://www.ft.com/content/9514643d-1433-408c-8464-cb4c0e09c822

Covid-19 has decimated independent U.S. primary care practices—How should policymakers and payers respond? (2020, July 2). The BMJ. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/02/covid-19-has-decimated-independent-u-s-primary-care-practices-how-should-policymakers-and-payers-respond/

van Rooij, I., & Baggio, G. (2020). Theory development requires an epistemological sea change [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rnw9q

Bellaigue, C. de. (2020, June 18). The end of tourism? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/jun/18/end-of-tourism-coronavirus-pandemic-travel-industry

Pettifor, A. (2020). Rebuild the ramshackle global financial system. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01507-1

Prof Daniel Lakens | The New Heuristics: Jumping through hoops instead of improving our science. (2020, June 17). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp1ocUuPWiU&feature=youtu.be

Schwab, K. (2020, June 03). Now is the time for a “great reset.” World Economic Forum. Retrieved June 5, 2020, from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/

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Utter nonsense. To paraphrase:

Any election system that favors unrepresentative candidates [like IRV] would be considered unreasonable; the same rationale must be applied to one that favors representative candidates.

Uh, no. That doesn't follow.

FairVote starts from the conclusion that IRV is the best voting method, and then works backwards to try to justify it, in this case arguing that a flaw of IRV is actually a feature, by making a false equivalent between a voting system that favors unrepresentative candidates and one that favors representative candidates.

The whole point of an election is to find the most-representative candidate.

Yes, candidates who are moderate relative to the voters should always win.

The goal of an election is to find the candidate who best represents the electorate. If the electorate is left-wing on average, the winner should be too. If the electorate is "strong on both personal freedoms and economic freedoms", then the winner should be too.

Anything else is undemocratic.

This isn't true. It's possible for a Condorcet candidate to be extremist relative to the other candidates or the electorate, since weak preferences are given equal weight to strong preferences. Simple example here:

This is true, but IRV doesn't choose the candidate who is most-liked (the "utilitarian winner"), either.

The bias that has been cited by critics wishing to undermine the general argument of this article (and similar articles, blogs, social media claims, etc), is that figures being shared for expenditures on non-teaching staff are misleading because they include funding positions such as nurses who are in schools every day providing vital services directly to students. I believe this is critique is factual.

On the other hand, there are claims that the total amount spent on administrative staff is dramatically under-reported as DPS classifies certain staff as school-based who in fact serve in roles that are central admin in nature. Whether this is intentional deception or aligned with standard accounting practices probably depends on who you ask. Either way, I believe this claim is also true. At the risk of offering annotations that qualify as "what aboutism" I include the point here because it is possible that the amounts that critics cite as being spent on staff that do not interact with students may actually be significantly less than what DPS is actually spending.

In an age of shrinking News Room budgets, there is huge power to having a strong Communications department as reporters of local news can be reduced to writers who are expected to crank out an unrealistic amount of content and therefore rely on press releases for turnkey stories. I have first-hand knowledge of this dynamic: when I worked a marketing internship, I saw my exact language appear in the local paper under a reporter's byline multiple times.

While there is clear benefit to the District's administration when it comes to exerting ownership of the public narrative, it is worth asking how this serves students and whether it is in fact in the public's best interest to use public funds in order to manipulate the news coverage the public relies on for learning about the district's efficacy in educating area youth.

Under range/score, the best strategy to promote the election of a preferred candidate is always to give that candidate the maximum score and then give every other competitor the minimum score.

Yeah, this is false.

If you have perfect knowledge of how everyone else is voting (and you usually don't), then the best strategy is to give a maximum score to the frontrunner that you prefer, and also to everyone you like more than them, and to likewise give a minimum score to the other frontrunner, and to everyone you dislike more.

This is not bullet voting; it's equivalent to Approval Voting, and leads to more moderate winners who are good representatives of the electorate.

Real-world Score elections don't show this behavior, anyway, because polls are imprecise and the consequences of voting honestly under Score aren't as dire as they are under FPTP or IRV.

Rebuttal to [the original version of] this page at https://www.equal.vote/fv

This is nonsense. All voting systems are subject to tactical voting.

The "Norman yoke" was a term English nationalists in the middle of the 17th century used to describe oppressive elements of feudalism introduced by William the Conqueror.

The simplification of Japanese kanji was done to a lesser extent than that of the Chinese hanzi.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.