aaronem

> A huge proportion of society is easily manipulated by showing them a "manufactured consensus."

And for the rest, you just need to pander to their belief that they're immune to that sort of thing.

Well, if you go to a collision specialist who's legally prohibited from turning away anyone with a bent frame regardless of their (current or future) ability to pay, it's not unreasonable that they'll charge you more than Jiffy Lube does when you can pay. That overhead has to be covered somehow.

How on Earth did this make the front page? I mean, it's not that I ever get tired of seeing Massachusetts Yankees and California carpetbaggers use a magazine named after my hometown to tell us Southrons what they demand that we be, but I am somewhat surprised to see it here, of all places. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

The DPRK's constitution isn't intended for internal consumption.

You seem to suggest that a government which doesn't behave in accord with your wishes is illegitimate thereby. It's hardly unique these days, but one might hope nonetheless to see you stop short of treating it as something to be proud of.

Really? Weimar's human rights laws were second to none in the world for their time, and are considered exemplary even now. If what you say is true, how did the Nazi abuses occur?

The reasoning you present here is exactly equivalent to:

- You have a broken arm

- Somewhere else in the world, someone has stage IV pancreatic cancer

- Therefore your broken arm should be of no concern even to you

The flaw should be intuitively obvious, especially to anyone who's ever had a broken arm. But hey, you actually concede you're a robot in your HN profile, your hyperalloy combat chassis is no doubt proof against such mishaps, and why should anyone expect you to understand or care what humans feel?

I don't suppose I can argue your point about the origin of the term. Perhaps "professional shit-stirrer" would be more accurate.

Certainly homeschooling isn't scalable. There are techniques, methods, curricula, which can be (and are quite widely) shared, but no one can systematize it into something which will guarantee a good result in every case. Unfortunately, I see no reason to imagine anyone can so systematize anything else, either. After all, the current lamentable state of affairs is the result of concentrated effort, over a period at least of decades, on the part of many of the world's finest minds. If they can't come up with a "one size fits all", why expect that anyone else can? Perhaps the "social sciences", so called, are fundamentally in error. Perhaps every family and every child is unique, a non-reproducible n=1 experiment -- and perhaps, cast in those terms, it becomes a little easier to see just how wrongheaded the concept of a "one size fits all" solution for human beings might possibly be.

As far as I can tell, the most common objection to homeschooling is that it doesn't work in the absence of parents who are interested and closely involved with the progress of their children -- not in the modern "helicopter" style borne only of a desire not to be seen to parent badly, but rather in a consistent and, to the extent possible, effective fashion, out of both genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of their offspring, and a sense of the duty to society which also inheres in parenting, that is, to bequeath upon the world children whose presence is more likely to be overall a benefit than a detriment. Or, to put it simply, that homeschooling can't work reliably because it doesn't work at all without good parents.

Unfortunately, as the last decades have also shown us, without good parents, nothing else works, either -- and a sufficiently broken system can easily overcome the effects of even the best parents, if only by being vastly larger than them and all but inescapable. Here we have a Yale professor telling us that the existing system is sufficiently broken -- and not really telling us anything we didn't already know. Do we assume that nothing else can work either, and that our kids are doomed? Or do we seek alternatives, even those which are utterly alien to the sort of systems-first thinking that got us into this mess?

I can't speak for anyone else, of course, and I'm not raising any kids of my own, but it seems to me that the only option compatible with even the most basic concept of parental responsibility is the latter one. After all, we've not only seen ourselves that what we've got doesn't work; here we have one of its highest exponents telling us it doesn't work, which should be authoritative enough for just about anybody. Perhaps something else might work better? It'd be very hard for anything else to work worse.

Oh, it's quite possible for a troll to believe what he says. The essence of trolling isn't bullshitting; it's knowing how to get a rise out of people.

To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.

Your erstwhile instructor seems to be a professional troll, which is probably good work if you can get it, but I'm not joking. GP's comment casts the options available to him in the following duality: either

1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or

2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.

Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.

Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.

Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.

I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.

A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.

Stanford also confers more degrees in social sciences and "interdisciplinary studies" (i.e. degrees in having graduated from Stanford) than in engineering and computer science, and has done for some years now. I don't doubt you can obtain an excellent education in those fields at Stanford, but it's been a long time since that was what Stanford was for.

Well, yes. When you decided what you wanted to do with your life, and made that decision stick over parental objections, that was in the nature of a declaration of adult independence. Good for you! Lots of people never make it that far. But, having done so, you can hardly expect to retract it eight years later. "Mommy, Daddy, I don't want to be a grownup any more!" With whom do you imagine this playing well? How would you react if your presumably notional kid tried to pull it on you?

If you want to go to the world's best school for mine engineering, Yale shouldn't be on your list to begin with. It's a sign-off for pedigreed elites, not a trade school.

Only 26? Surely not. Why, at that age he might not even have a master's degree yet!