Persuasion

> They have the power to do it.

Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].

Some choice exerpts:

> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.

> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.

> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”

> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”

[1]…

Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."

>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.

>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not-trust-america?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

That's not entirely fair; I distinctly remember my feeds filled with the medical establishment speaking in approval for the BLM protests that occurred during 2020. The argument, I recall, was that those protests were necessary to improve the health outcomes of the black community, since police fatalities were more dangerous than COVID. And speaking of the medical establishment, in my favorite anecdote from the entire year, I also remember the CDC specifically recommending a prioritization of vaccines[0] that would kill thousands more Americans than the alternative for ideological and extremely racist reasons. Literally, the reasoning they gave was that vaccinating over-65s first was less than ideal because, quote, "Racial and ethnic minority groups [are] under-represented among adults >65". In fact, the plan they ended up recommending would have killed more minorities too, simply because it was more deadly overall. These are the people we should never question.

[0]: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-trust-in-the-institutions - the original report is at https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2020-11/COVID-04-Dooling.pdf with the quote on slide 31

This is one of the better critiques I’ve found of the CDC’s very absurd position:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-trust-in-the-institutions

Literally their plan was to kill a greater number of people “because ethics”. It goes against well established pillars of ethical logic against “leveling” outcomes by intentionally making things worse for a group that is better off, and against the most fundamental tenant of medicine to do no harm.

You must apportion a limited supply of life saving medicine to the population most likely to benefit from it. To claim that apportioning the medicine to a population which is orders of magnitudes less likely to benefit from it, knowing that a greater number of people will die as a result, is an abject ethical failure.

Even accounting for the smaller minority share of the elderly population, you still kill more minorities overall by apportioning the vaccine to essential workers ahead of the elderly, because the death rate is so heavily skewed based on age.

Graeber, as well as being a horrible human being wasn’t much cop as a scholar. Bullshit jobs was tested empirically and it’s bullshit[1]. If you’re going to read Debt at least do yourself a favour and read some negative reviews first so you can see where he tries to put one over on you. See critical reception on Wikipedia[2] or the seminar on Crooked Timber where the discussants do back flips trying to be kind but can’t bring themselves not to challenge it[3]. His last book “The Dawn of Everything” is similarly careful, with experts realising that where they know what ours taking about it’s horseshit but giving the benefit of the doubt elsewhere[4].

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067

Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

[3] https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/

[4] https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity

I’d second the first two as also great.

I’d add:

https://www.persuasion.community/

Which was a community started by Youscha Mounk.

https://www.persuasion.community/about

“ Persuasion is a publication and community for everyone who shares three basic convictions:

We seek to build a free society in which all individuals get to pursue a meaningful life irrespective of who they are.

We believe in the importance of the social practice of persuasion, and are determined to defend free speech and free inquiry against all its enemies.

We seek to persuade, rather than to mock or troll, those who disagree with us.

In the past years, the political and intellectual energy has been with illiberal movements. Too often, the advocates of free speech and free institutions have been passive, even fatalistic. It is high time for those of us who believe in these enduring ideals to stand up for our convictions.”