Comment by matrix87
4 days ago
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron
And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you.
I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.
Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.
The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.
I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:
* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human
* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that
I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.
A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.
Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
> But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.
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I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion:
Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois.
Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional.
If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.
> you can optimize for that
I think that this is the core problem - you can't.
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”.
tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything.
edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners.
in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities.
children are a great example of this.
When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat.
It's not all about you.
You and the homeless guy aren't peers, you just did a nice thing. You're not going to classes with him or working alongside him
I was (and remain) a few bad breaks from his situation. I'm not responsible for his state, but we absolutely are peers (i.e., same age, facing the same broad socioeconomic environment).
Exactly. It's not all about you. It's best for the community to encourage education, and dragging down students who actually care about education does the opposite.
Your selfishness is not equal to my desire for common prosperity. If anything, lone wolf-ism is what drags us down (no matter how proficient the wolf thinks he is). We live in a society.
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> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
The appearance of humility^[0]? I don't really see what there is to gain either.
[0]: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section II, Paragraph 9
Well, one reason is that your assumption that they are all or mostly inferior is wrong.
Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids.
The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
the 90th percentile of what?
sport?
english lit?
maths?
music?
socialising?
being the mother hen?
being a jock?
teaching everyone else things in the library?
class clown?
being the wacky one?
skateboarding?
acting?
rebelling?
looking after someone who has just been picked on by all the other kids?
schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.
not saying there aren’t alternatives.
but specialising for only the 90th percentile of one thing seems like a way to isolate someone later in life because they may not have learned how to deal with people who aren’t in the 90th percentile of that one thing.
and i say that as someone who hated my time at school and has struggled with the repercussions in later life.
i still learned a lot near the classroom tho.
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As someone who was in the 90th percentile, I can confirm that it wasn't a universal quality about my entire being. I got to be in higher-level courses where I excelled. Those are generally available, even in public school systems.
And just because I was good at math and writing didn't mean that I "deserved" to be in some separate system where I got the "best" of everything (with diminishing returns). When I eventually encountered people who were afforded just such a deal ("elite" private school in a wealthy area), they were far less impressive than the top college-level facilities they enjoyed as grade schoolers; it seemed like a waste of money that could have been put to more efficient use, as far as society writ large might be concerned.
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Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.
Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
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I find your statistic mistake rather amusing in light of the point you are making. :D
Distributions aren't all normal, for one. And skill levels are often quantized in a way that majority of people will be above a 50% level on it.
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> what is there to gain from it?
Humility.
Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.)
People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story.
The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant.
Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.
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Humility is relative. Humility in front of actual experts is good. It has to be earned
Becoming humble in front of people who suck is learning the wrong life lesson
> Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I hate this fucking site lol