I've commented on Ed Realist claim before and I won't rehash it all.
There are too many districts in leftist areas that lack huge populations of brown people that closed their schools for this to make sense. My own school district is one.
It also doesn't explain the phenomenon of local school districts decisions being overturned by state authorities in leftist states. Or of the attempt to control what private schools did.
All of this was also true after schools "opened", as the conditions upon which they were "open" was itself subject to all the same issues as above.
What I did hear from many people is that they would prefer to keep their kids home from school under the conditions on which school was operating during COVID. The masks, the quarantining, the social distancing, the lack of activities or their constant interruption, etc. They would have preferred to send their kids to NORMAL school, but if the choice was between COVID school or staying home many wanted their kids to stay home.
I can only imagine that in the case of awful inner city schools many didn't even want to go to school during normal school. Normal school in Baltimore City for instance literally having prisons in the school. COVID simply became an excuse.
Great point! I hated school from home, but we allowed our kid to do it for an entire year of high school anyway. Why? Because if you went to school, the teacher was still only teaching into a laptop and you sat at a plexiglass desk alone with a mask to watch on your laptop there, where you also weren’t allowed to interact with other students because it was too “dangerous.”
At least at home you could stare at your laptop without a mask and take bathroom breaks and have Discord running so you could talk with all your friends during class. We were fortunate that our kid is able to still learn under those horrible teaching circumstances.
He went back to school immediately when the teachers resumed teaching to the class and not into the laptop, far later than I would have preferred.
And if was bad for high school, imagine what it would be like for toddlers and young children. That is our demographic and I basically think what happened was a crime against humanity.
Right. Also, EdR's thesis doesn't explain the spectacle we observed with our own lying eyes of top teacher union leaders publicly insisting and vigorously lobbying for the whole suite of deviations from the pre-covid status quo, and doing so repeatedly over a long period. Maybe we imagined it.
Maybe we just aren't savvy enough to property interpret the subtle moves and signals in the complex political game which smart insiders know aren't to be taken seriously at face value. Sure, the union leader lobbied for teleschool and said that she was doing so on behalf of what the teachers wanted, but actually, if you knew more about how this stuff works, you would know that she wasn't *really* lobbying, it wasn't what the teachers *really* wanted.
Oh, and all that stuff was just a cover story for the *real* reason, which is politically unspeakable.
And what's so politically unspeakable in the 2020's? "Because that's what the BIPOC parents want us to do." *That's* unspeakable? What? What? Are you kidding me with this? It's not only speakable, it's not only *actually spoken all the time*, it's the *go-to* thing to say that is trotted out as a universal justification and trump card over any other consideration, like an aqua regia able to simply dissolve every other contrary law.
This goes triple for the period in question, which, if you remember that far back, was during that George Floyd-peak BLM moment during which one heard *nothing but* similar justifications and demands from which people recoiled in terror as if these phrases had the power of genuine incantations. If schools were closed because the BIPOC parents wanted them closed, that's precisely what school officials would have said, jumping at the chance to say it!
1) You don't need huge populations, but close to 50% will do nicely. And your own personal experience compared to, you know, actual data? Wow, that's a killer rebuttal.
2) there's no question that Dem states tried to institute more control and that control was not at the demands of non-whites but a much smaller group of progressive whites. However, they could only achieve that control if they didn't have a large group of white parents. Vermont, for example, is very progressive. But their schools were open. EVen in California, the white areas of the state were open as early as November (and some never closed that year at all.)
3) Once again, why on earth would you consider "what you hear from many people" to be some sort of relevant rebuttal? But even if that's your criteria, there are all sorts of data cases where all parents had the same choice. I went through four of them: NYC, Chicago, central Florida and Houston. In all cases, given the same choices, whites were far more likely to choose in-person than nonwhites.
4) Try thinking outside just black/white.
LH Reader:
Once again with the anecdotes. Whites chose in-person far more than any other race. Full stop. What you personally did is irrelevant.
Handle:
"Also, EdR's thesis doesn't explain the spectacle we observed with our own lying eyes of top teacher union leaders publicly insisting and vigorously lobbying for the whole suite of deviations from the pre-covid status quo, and doing so repeatedly over a long period. Maybe we imagined it."
Sure it does. Your eyes didn't lie. Your brain just can't handle the fact that what teachers unions say and what politicians do are largely unconnected. As I point out in the article, strong union vs weak union states were largely uncorrelated with the rules. Racial demographics are.
Lots of people who hate unions can't deal with the reality that they aren't powerful at all. I mean, as if Randi fucking Weingarten can do anything other than fundraise off the fact that fools think on both sides of the aisle think she's powerful.
Where did I say any of this was unspeakable? The word doesn't appear. It certainly wasn't unspeakable. It's just not something anyone wants to acknowledge because a bunch of idiots want to think unions are powerful.
Seriously, that's the best any of you can come up with? "My own personal experience as I understand it wasn't the case, except it was and I just don't understand what actually happened" and "UNIONS SUCK so I want to blame them!" and oh, yeah, Handle doesn't understand the piece at all.
My district is only 7.7% black. It's 14% Hispanic of which a solid majority are considered "white hispanic". Incomes of every single ethnic group are super high. We live nowhere near a major city, unlike your examples. What few blacks and hispanics are in our county live on the complete other side.
But we did have a school board election in 2019 where a bunch of Soros backed white progressive activists took over. I'm thinking that might be the problem.
And we did have a democratic governor that tried to force his way on local and private decision making. The Dems lost the governorship primary because people hated COVID school policy. Huge loses in every demographic group. So much for "it was the will of the people that schools be closed".
If you can't accept that people didn't like school closures or COVID school policy (the masks and quarantines and all the rest) I don't know what to tell you. If you can't accept that lots of people had to put up with what unelected officials or state politicians force on them I don't know what to tell you. My friends 85% white rural 2:1 Trump voting county had their school board vote against masks and the state health board reversed the decision against their will. Was this done because urban blacks wanted it to be done? Did state health officials at the governors behest harass my kids private preschool because Hispanic voters really wanted to stop the spread?
These white leftists did these things because they wanted to! They didn't do it because poor urban brown people forced their reluctant hands.
Name the state and county and district. Would love to see the data. You aren't reading what I wrote if you think I'm only using urban data.
"If you can't accept that people didn't like school closures or COVID school policy (the masks and quarantines and all the rest) I don't know what to tell you."
What I accept is what data throughout the country shows in polls and revealed behavior. Polls have consistently shown that parents have a high rate of satisfaction with school policy. That means schools were open where parents wanted schools open and closed where schools they wanted them closed. At least two surveys show that just 15% of parents wanted in-person instruction and didn't get it.
"These white leftists did these things because they wanted to! They didn't do it because poor urban brown people forced their reluctant hands."
This is delusional. You would rather believe what you want to believe. White leftists did have power in the Dem party. That's why so many blue states were stuck with CDC policies. It's also why many schools in blue states were forced into hybrid. But parents drove whether in-person instruction was offered.
If you believe I'm lying about where I live, I don't think saying where I live will matter.
You provide a service that people will only buy at the point of a gun. You are deathly afraid of people having the freedom to do what they think best for their children. We accepted that vanquishing your mediocrity wasn't worth the trouble until you committed reprehensible crimes against children these last few years. Justice demands that parents have the option of exit from your villainy.
I don't think you're lying! I want to know where it is to see this magical 80% white district that kept schools closed for eternity.
And as for your second paragraph, like I said, satisfaction with schools during the pandemic was 70-80% throughout, and the people who wanted in-person but couldn't get it were 15%. You're fringe, dude.
If people were satisfied with their schools, why did they vote against pro-school closure candidates by overwhelming margins. I remember people telling me that "polls show that people like the status quo on schools" leading up the the election, only for that to be massively refuted at the polling booth. It's almost like polls are bullshit compared to revealed preference.
In Slovakia we mostly had remote teaching for a year, then a few months of limited/ hybrid, then back to normal in-person for some, including our 16 yo.
EdReal - Please keep insisting on your data over counter-anecdotes. What is truth? How do we "know" what we know? (is true?) How good is the 15% survey result (both of 2)?
I suspect both of you might be technically true but the data is not complete enough, including clear survey questions, to know what the truth is. It would be helpful to us all for forumposter to name state, county, district, and you show your data work.
My prior belief is that far more than 15% parents wanted in-person school instruction, but it's not worth it for me to dig into the data - tho a comment to express interest in somebody else doing the work seems worth it.
Re: "I am willing to bet Bryan that over the next three years, the most credible, high-quality research on depression helps to justify and support pharmacological treatment for it."
Research already justifies pharmacological mood management, not because the drugs remedy a "chemical imbalance," but because the drugs often replace alcohol use, a form of self-medication that often has more harmful side-effects than do new prescription medications for mood-management.
See David Cutler's 2004 summary of this research, "Prozac and the Revolution in Mental Health Care," chapter 4 of his book, Your Money or Your Life (Oxford U. Press, 2004). Prof. Cutler finds that Prozac *greatly* reduced prevalence of alcoholism among women.
Distinguish three kinds of justifications for pharma mind drugs:
a) Pharma mind drugs beat self-medication by drinking (and presumably also self-medication by illegal mind drugs).
b) Pharma mind drugs beat bootstrapping, diet, exercise, therapy, or various other non-pharmacological remedies. (A complication here is the possibility that pharma mind drugs and these non-pharmacological remedies might be complements rather than substitutes.)
c) Pharma mind drugs beat inaction.
If I understand correctly, decades of research have yet to establish large effects for "b" and "c".
I'd be willing to bet Bryan based largely on the fact that all the research funding wants to find support for pharmacological treatment of depression. Truth need not come into it.
I wouldn't bet a lot :) I think Caplan does underestimate the amount of outright fraud in academic research, however. Any estimate less than 10% of all papers (probably more in something like psychiatry) being fraudulent strikes me as way too low.
Yes. The mere fact that so much medical research emphasizes relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction or number needed to treat suggests there is an attempt to make the results look better than they are. Of course, most academic and professional researchers can understand the numbers, but the general population (including many doctors) can't.
I am going further than that, past "p-hacking" or "really biased claims regarding costs/benefits" or "sneaky choices about dropping outliers", and straight into "intentional manufacture of fraudulent data, graphics or results." When >2% of academics admit in surveys to committing fraud, and lots of unadmitted fraud turns up but is desperately shoved under the rug by journals and universities, well... if you see 1 cockroach, you probably have a hundred you haven't seen living in the walls.
If it is the case that researchers want to find evidence to support the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression, then we should give special weight to the recent umbrella review of evidence by Moncrieff et al, published in Nature. When scholars find and report the opposite of what they want to find, then we can rule out confirmation bias.
By the way, Bryan Caplan makes this point, about the special epistemic value of research findings that go against the grain, in his book, The Case Against Education. He states that most scholars in that field want to find substantial "transfer of learning" across subjects, but find hardly any. He argues that these findings are especially credible because they go against the education-studies establishment.
Oh I agree. I think Caplan is right that the research going against the grain, especially in this case, is better than average. I just think that the "top research" is going to go solidly with the grain, because that is how one gets to be a top researcher at a top university with top grant money: telling people who decide who gets the top stuff what they want to hear.
Now possibly getting that published in Nature is a sign that the tide is turning, or possibly that what funders want to hear is changing. I just think that is lower probability over the next ten years.
Then again, I might be overly cynical towards the research production industry. Its just that I have seen so much terrible research over the past 10 years get lauded while better work gets silenced that I am prone to low expectations.
I am a little more sympathetic to Caplan's point on depression. I have been dealing with depression for about a decade, and the psychiatric process really is very slip shod. The diagnosis is entirely self reported, as are results of treatment. That's fine, but very prone to Hansonian medicine effects. I may have had worse than average psychiatrists but the structure was basically try some drugs for a bit, if they don't work try more until they do, if they never do try another drug or a combination and see if they work, repeat. Why any of it works is entirely irrelevant to the process because the only question that matter is "how have you been feeling since I saw you last?" Which chemicals are in imbalance never comes up because they have no way of checking, before, during or after treatment. That cause of depression, whether in mind, brain, body, whatever, never comes up. Never. But the answer is always the same: try some drugs for a bit, if they don't work try more until they do, if they never do try another drug or a combination and see if they work, repeat.
That isn't confidence inducing. It certainly doesn't suggest they are keen on applying the insights of chemical imbalance theory to their efforts.
Now maybe the drug makers are, tweaking formulas to better balance chemicals. There again, however, since no measurement of chemical balance is ever made, how does one then decide what drugs to take based on getting them back into balance?
In addition to the usual drug company incentives for the doctors, there is something else I will add. On Medicare Advantage at least, there is a lot of money to be made from "coding people up". If you are "officially depressed" and it can generate a code the insurer gets A LOT of money (and if there is risk share with the doctor, the doctor too). Really any insurance system involving risk scores will usually provide a strong incentive for doctors to decide you are depressed (or have other things wrong with you). With depression in particular as you note it's extremely wishy washy, the diagnosis is basically whatever the doctor wants it to be.
Nope, after about 6 years I just stopped meds, because while I could detect side effects there were no positive effects. Two years later I feel about the same, so I am chalking all the experimentation up to "didn't achieve much." My guess for me personally is that life situation and general disposition are largely to blame for depression, but there is some family history it seems.
The point is not that there isn't something going on with the wet, squishy bits of me that are making me more depressed than the average person probably is. Rather, it is more that the science behind depression and how depression is treated have extremely little connection to what's happening in the wet bits. SSRIs and their ilk get prescribed not after "We did some tests, and it looks like chemicals X, Y and Z are a bit off, so we think we can correct for that with medicine ABC," but rather after you go see someone and say "I am feeling really down, and think about cancelling my census membership periodically." You then fill out a little questionnaire, and they say "Yup, you answered B enough, you are depressed." Some medicine is prescribed, largely based on what the doctor's other patients seem to do well on, and you go talk to a therapist. If you feel better, great! Keep doing that forever. If you don't, next time you see the psych they up the meds, or swap them around a little bit. Repeat until you feel better, give up, or cancel that subscription.
At no point does chemistry come into it, no more than chemistry comes into "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning."
SSRIs work for some people. We don't know why, exactly, nor do we know why they don't work for other people. Importantly, why they work has no bearing on their use. We are just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. I am pretty much ok with that method, but, and this is a big but, we need to be honest that is what we are doing. We are just experimenting with people and messing around to see if things work, with all that "tinkering with people's brain chemistry in ways we don't understand or even bother to measure" implies.
" It seems that non-white parents wanted learning to be remote, and school districts gave them what they wanted—good and hard, as it were."
Yes.
I don't wish to excuse teachers unions at all. Their behavior was repulsive.
However, there isn't a single case of schools being closed because of unions. The closest case, that of Chicago in 2021, is actually a case where Lightfoot *wouldnt* do what she did the next year (shut down remote education) and the reason she didn't, again, is because most parents wanted remote. So the teachers took advantage of that fact and refused to come in to teach in empty classrooms. The next year, when they tried the same thing, Lightfoot didn't blink and wouldn't make remote available. Why? Not because of parents, who largely wanted remote as well. But because Illinois had banned remote for all but a few cases and this didn't qualify and LIghtfoot didn't want to lose funding.
Ed reformers would achieve more if they understood that unions are at best amplifiers, and are usually amplifying parents.
Isn't there some question-begging here about why so many parents wanted schools kept remote? Unions don't just amplify, they propagandize-- and what they propagandized in 2020 was a bunch of non-science-based FUD about the supposed dangers of reopening, often laced with insinuations that reopening supporters were part of a right-wing racist plot against public schools. That many parents, and disproportionately many nonwhite parents, bought into that FUD doesn't let them off the hook for pushing it.
In SF, at least, the unions also played a major role in electing the three awful school board members (Collins, Lopez, Moliga) who pushed the insane, self-parodying school renaming plan in lieu of a reopening plan, refused to let the superintendent hire a reopening consultant because that consultant once worked for a charter school, and were ultimately ousted by a recall effort led by Asian parents like Siva Raj and Man Kit Lam, which got overwhelming supermajority support across racial lines. The union opposed the recall and backed its cronies on the board to the end-- were they amplifying parents when they did that?
"That many parents, and disproportionately many nonwhite parents, bought into that FUD doesn't let them off the hook for pushing it."
Oh, that's a great argument. "Non-white parents were just too stupid to see the truth, unlike smart white parents." Good optics.
Particularly if you're in favor of school choice! "Yes, we want parents to make choices except when I personally think they're too stupid."
San Francisco is overwhelmingly Dem, and the unions don't need to help that along. Besides, where have I argued unions are anything but annoying and leftist?
And yes, Asians led the push to get rid of those members but not because of school closure. Asians were the most supportive of school closure. Asians wanted Lowell back so they could keep their kids away from blacks and Hispanics. They most assuredly weren't in favor of in person instruction. In fact, there was zero pressure in SF to open schools throughout the pandemic, and this has been thoroughly reported on. Parents were embarrassed by the idiot school board members, yes. But not to open schools.
Persuadable by propaganda under extraordinary conditions does not equate with "too stupid to see the truth." Nor does individual choice work the same as political/collective choice. And as an SF parent I can assure you that there was in fact considerable parental pro-reopening activism, especially from parents who were themselves health care workers and understood the health and child care stakes personally; reporting to the contrary is factually inaccurate.
"Persuadable by propaganda under extraordinary conditions does not equate with "too stupid to see the truth." "
Yeah, it kinda does. "We're too smart to be fooled by propaganda, but you, poor fools..."
And mind you, that's what happened the next year. States wisely realized that parents couldn't be given a choice of having remote ed in their own school, and ended it. But calling non-white parents too stupid to see through propaganda is absurd. They chose what they saw was in their interests.
As an SF parent, you should know the district is maybe 12% white. Yet the major group pushing for schools to open had a majority white membership. Jennifer Sey was fired for pushing to reopen schools--you really think the local community was backing her? It's clear from her own comments they were not.
I think Caplan would argue that because many behaviors associated with psychiatric disorders can be modified by changing the incentives, they are less inevitable than they would be if they were chemically mediated. I have no idea if the predicate is true or not.
There are certain topics that the esteemed Mr. Caplan chooses to opine on where his output is simply not worth engaging. Psychology is one of those topics.
Personally, I think he deploys a deplorably shady rhetorical technique here along the lines of ad-hominem and guilt-by-association. He implies that he has limited anecdotal experiences which are nevertheless sufficient to substantiate a valid statistical conclusion that advocates of a particular position almost all share a negative characteristic along the lines of bad faith, personality flaw, or mental incompetence, and thus a reasonable person should just ignore them as liars or cranks and presume that their arguments can be safely and pre-emptively dismissed.
"I've never encountered someone who says X who isn't also terrible thing Y, and Y is precisely the kind of things which strongly downgrades the reliability of X. So don't even bother, like, actually reading or engaging with their arguments, what a waste of time."
This is just bogus, with the very rare exception of the person saying it having some special and exceptional degree of familiarity with the personalities and literature of the subject. That's just not the case for Freddie.
If you try to object to the deployment of this technique as both an intellectual technical foul and a personal foul, then there are all kinds of ways he can still make it personal and about you, and the irony is that this is precisely the kind of dysfunctional argumentative dynamic that he constantly complains about when others do it on Twitter all the time. Doctor heal thyself.
The real problem here is a common form of epistemic corruption, which is that whenever people arguing about a theoretically 'objective' question all know that different answers will have very different implications for politics and how much social status gets assigned to various individuals and groups, then the goal for most participants no longer remains one of discovering the actual truth but of arguing for the version of 'truth' which is most helpful to getting what they want for other reasons.
These kinds of considerations are always lurking in the background of all the object-level debates, for which the arguments regarding objective truth are mostly a kind of cover story to keep up the pretense of a policy legitimated by observations of the impersonal, and so it's natural and often perfectly realistic and accurate for the sides to accuse their opponents of precisely this kind of bad faith.
Nevertheless, it's improper to level such accusations without strong evidence, and wise discretion favors restraint even when one has evidence. The reason is that the cover story exacts its own tribute, and even having to pretend that one is playing the game honestly, fairly, and rigorously has a way of limiting the range of bad practices. Maybe you will still be able to get away with cheating because no one can call you out, but to the extent one must pretend to be winning fair and square, they'll still notice when you're not, which has costs, which means you won't push it as far as you otherwise would.
Thus, when debating, one ought to stick to the merits, even when everyone knows, "X isn't about the merits of X."
Thus, when debating, one ought to stick to the merits, even when everyone knows, "X isn't about the merits of X."
Great maxim. Especially since this kind of bulverism is self-exacerbating. To the extent we treat debates about X as though they're really debates about the participants' character, people have an incentive to pick their position based on what it might say about their character to the relevant audience, rather than the merits of the position.
Yes, the word "humane" is doing a lot of work in FdB's piece. I don't know how Caplan actually feels, but you could easily put a humane rationale on Caplan's anti-psychiatry takes: Caplan appears to believe that individuals have more ability help themselves than they might otherwise think. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's at least optimistic, whereas the chemical imbalance theory can be viewed as fatalistic and defeating, and in that sense not "humane."
I've commented on Ed Realist claim before and I won't rehash it all.
There are too many districts in leftist areas that lack huge populations of brown people that closed their schools for this to make sense. My own school district is one.
It also doesn't explain the phenomenon of local school districts decisions being overturned by state authorities in leftist states. Or of the attempt to control what private schools did.
All of this was also true after schools "opened", as the conditions upon which they were "open" was itself subject to all the same issues as above.
What I did hear from many people is that they would prefer to keep their kids home from school under the conditions on which school was operating during COVID. The masks, the quarantining, the social distancing, the lack of activities or their constant interruption, etc. They would have preferred to send their kids to NORMAL school, but if the choice was between COVID school or staying home many wanted their kids to stay home.
I can only imagine that in the case of awful inner city schools many didn't even want to go to school during normal school. Normal school in Baltimore City for instance literally having prisons in the school. COVID simply became an excuse.
Great point! I hated school from home, but we allowed our kid to do it for an entire year of high school anyway. Why? Because if you went to school, the teacher was still only teaching into a laptop and you sat at a plexiglass desk alone with a mask to watch on your laptop there, where you also weren’t allowed to interact with other students because it was too “dangerous.”
At least at home you could stare at your laptop without a mask and take bathroom breaks and have Discord running so you could talk with all your friends during class. We were fortunate that our kid is able to still learn under those horrible teaching circumstances.
He went back to school immediately when the teachers resumed teaching to the class and not into the laptop, far later than I would have preferred.
And if was bad for high school, imagine what it would be like for toddlers and young children. That is our demographic and I basically think what happened was a crime against humanity.
Right. Also, EdR's thesis doesn't explain the spectacle we observed with our own lying eyes of top teacher union leaders publicly insisting and vigorously lobbying for the whole suite of deviations from the pre-covid status quo, and doing so repeatedly over a long period. Maybe we imagined it.
Maybe we just aren't savvy enough to property interpret the subtle moves and signals in the complex political game which smart insiders know aren't to be taken seriously at face value. Sure, the union leader lobbied for teleschool and said that she was doing so on behalf of what the teachers wanted, but actually, if you knew more about how this stuff works, you would know that she wasn't *really* lobbying, it wasn't what the teachers *really* wanted.
Oh, and all that stuff was just a cover story for the *real* reason, which is politically unspeakable.
And what's so politically unspeakable in the 2020's? "Because that's what the BIPOC parents want us to do." *That's* unspeakable? What? What? Are you kidding me with this? It's not only speakable, it's not only *actually spoken all the time*, it's the *go-to* thing to say that is trotted out as a universal justification and trump card over any other consideration, like an aqua regia able to simply dissolve every other contrary law.
This goes triple for the period in question, which, if you remember that far back, was during that George Floyd-peak BLM moment during which one heard *nothing but* similar justifications and demands from which people recoiled in terror as if these phrases had the power of genuine incantations. If schools were closed because the BIPOC parents wanted them closed, that's precisely what school officials would have said, jumping at the chance to say it!
On fourposter's claims:
1) You don't need huge populations, but close to 50% will do nicely. And your own personal experience compared to, you know, actual data? Wow, that's a killer rebuttal.
2) there's no question that Dem states tried to institute more control and that control was not at the demands of non-whites but a much smaller group of progressive whites. However, they could only achieve that control if they didn't have a large group of white parents. Vermont, for example, is very progressive. But their schools were open. EVen in California, the white areas of the state were open as early as November (and some never closed that year at all.)
3) Once again, why on earth would you consider "what you hear from many people" to be some sort of relevant rebuttal? But even if that's your criteria, there are all sorts of data cases where all parents had the same choice. I went through four of them: NYC, Chicago, central Florida and Houston. In all cases, given the same choices, whites were far more likely to choose in-person than nonwhites.
4) Try thinking outside just black/white.
LH Reader:
Once again with the anecdotes. Whites chose in-person far more than any other race. Full stop. What you personally did is irrelevant.
Handle:
"Also, EdR's thesis doesn't explain the spectacle we observed with our own lying eyes of top teacher union leaders publicly insisting and vigorously lobbying for the whole suite of deviations from the pre-covid status quo, and doing so repeatedly over a long period. Maybe we imagined it."
Sure it does. Your eyes didn't lie. Your brain just can't handle the fact that what teachers unions say and what politicians do are largely unconnected. As I point out in the article, strong union vs weak union states were largely uncorrelated with the rules. Racial demographics are.
Lots of people who hate unions can't deal with the reality that they aren't powerful at all. I mean, as if Randi fucking Weingarten can do anything other than fundraise off the fact that fools think on both sides of the aisle think she's powerful.
Where did I say any of this was unspeakable? The word doesn't appear. It certainly wasn't unspeakable. It's just not something anyone wants to acknowledge because a bunch of idiots want to think unions are powerful.
Seriously, that's the best any of you can come up with? "My own personal experience as I understand it wasn't the case, except it was and I just don't understand what actually happened" and "UNIONS SUCK so I want to blame them!" and oh, yeah, Handle doesn't understand the piece at all.
My district is only 7.7% black. It's 14% Hispanic of which a solid majority are considered "white hispanic". Incomes of every single ethnic group are super high. We live nowhere near a major city, unlike your examples. What few blacks and hispanics are in our county live on the complete other side.
But we did have a school board election in 2019 where a bunch of Soros backed white progressive activists took over. I'm thinking that might be the problem.
And we did have a democratic governor that tried to force his way on local and private decision making. The Dems lost the governorship primary because people hated COVID school policy. Huge loses in every demographic group. So much for "it was the will of the people that schools be closed".
If you can't accept that people didn't like school closures or COVID school policy (the masks and quarantines and all the rest) I don't know what to tell you. If you can't accept that lots of people had to put up with what unelected officials or state politicians force on them I don't know what to tell you. My friends 85% white rural 2:1 Trump voting county had their school board vote against masks and the state health board reversed the decision against their will. Was this done because urban blacks wanted it to be done? Did state health officials at the governors behest harass my kids private preschool because Hispanic voters really wanted to stop the spread?
These white leftists did these things because they wanted to! They didn't do it because poor urban brown people forced their reluctant hands.
Name the state and county and district. Would love to see the data. You aren't reading what I wrote if you think I'm only using urban data.
"If you can't accept that people didn't like school closures or COVID school policy (the masks and quarantines and all the rest) I don't know what to tell you."
What I accept is what data throughout the country shows in polls and revealed behavior. Polls have consistently shown that parents have a high rate of satisfaction with school policy. That means schools were open where parents wanted schools open and closed where schools they wanted them closed. At least two surveys show that just 15% of parents wanted in-person instruction and didn't get it.
"These white leftists did these things because they wanted to! They didn't do it because poor urban brown people forced their reluctant hands."
This is delusional. You would rather believe what you want to believe. White leftists did have power in the Dem party. That's why so many blue states were stuck with CDC policies. It's also why many schools in blue states were forced into hybrid. But parents drove whether in-person instruction was offered.
If you believe I'm lying about where I live, I don't think saying where I live will matter.
You provide a service that people will only buy at the point of a gun. You are deathly afraid of people having the freedom to do what they think best for their children. We accepted that vanquishing your mediocrity wasn't worth the trouble until you committed reprehensible crimes against children these last few years. Justice demands that parents have the option of exit from your villainy.
I don't think you're lying! I want to know where it is to see this magical 80% white district that kept schools closed for eternity.
And as for your second paragraph, like I said, satisfaction with schools during the pandemic was 70-80% throughout, and the people who wanted in-person but couldn't get it were 15%. You're fringe, dude.
If people were satisfied with their schools, why did they vote against pro-school closure candidates by overwhelming margins. I remember people telling me that "polls show that people like the status quo on schools" leading up the the election, only for that to be massively refuted at the polling booth. It's almost like polls are bullshit compared to revealed preference.
I live in Loudoun County, VA.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/loudoun-county-va
We are immediately rich and have no poor people, even amongst the browns. The striver Asians were more livid about school closures than the whites.
My friend lives in Carrol County, MD and went through the same stuff. He was so pissed off about it he moved to Texas.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/carroll-county-md
It's not very hard to find other examples in other parts of the country. This was a very common phenomenon, especially in blue states.
In Slovakia we mostly had remote teaching for a year, then a few months of limited/ hybrid, then back to normal in-person for some, including our 16 yo.
EdReal - Please keep insisting on your data over counter-anecdotes. What is truth? How do we "know" what we know? (is true?) How good is the 15% survey result (both of 2)?
I suspect both of you might be technically true but the data is not complete enough, including clear survey questions, to know what the truth is. It would be helpful to us all for forumposter to name state, county, district, and you show your data work.
My prior belief is that far more than 15% parents wanted in-person school instruction, but it's not worth it for me to dig into the data - tho a comment to express interest in somebody else doing the work seems worth it.
"My prior belief is that far more than 15% parents wanted in-person school instruction, "
Your prior belief strikes me as accurate. Your reading ability, not so much. Try again.
"So, where did the unions come down on this? "
Does it matter where "the unions" came down on it? What happened, everywhere, was that teachers went to work in whatever the conditions demanded.
And no, unions are as sketchy as you want them to be. What they aren't, in the slightest, is powerful. So what they want is irrelevant.
Could you really think I don't know about that or that I thought you wouldn't?
Are you that much of an idiot?
Surprise me: think hard and figure out why that information doesn't matter.
Re: "I am willing to bet Bryan that over the next three years, the most credible, high-quality research on depression helps to justify and support pharmacological treatment for it."
Research already justifies pharmacological mood management, not because the drugs remedy a "chemical imbalance," but because the drugs often replace alcohol use, a form of self-medication that often has more harmful side-effects than do new prescription medications for mood-management.
See David Cutler's 2004 summary of this research, "Prozac and the Revolution in Mental Health Care," chapter 4 of his book, Your Money or Your Life (Oxford U. Press, 2004). Prof. Cutler finds that Prozac *greatly* reduced prevalence of alcoholism among women.
Distinguish three kinds of justifications for pharma mind drugs:
a) Pharma mind drugs beat self-medication by drinking (and presumably also self-medication by illegal mind drugs).
b) Pharma mind drugs beat bootstrapping, diet, exercise, therapy, or various other non-pharmacological remedies. (A complication here is the possibility that pharma mind drugs and these non-pharmacological remedies might be complements rather than substitutes.)
c) Pharma mind drugs beat inaction.
If I understand correctly, decades of research have yet to establish large effects for "b" and "c".
I'd be willing to bet Bryan based largely on the fact that all the research funding wants to find support for pharmacological treatment of depression. Truth need not come into it.
But Brian always wins his bets, so there's that....
I wouldn't bet a lot :) I think Caplan does underestimate the amount of outright fraud in academic research, however. Any estimate less than 10% of all papers (probably more in something like psychiatry) being fraudulent strikes me as way too low.
Yes. The mere fact that so much medical research emphasizes relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction or number needed to treat suggests there is an attempt to make the results look better than they are. Of course, most academic and professional researchers can understand the numbers, but the general population (including many doctors) can't.
I am going further than that, past "p-hacking" or "really biased claims regarding costs/benefits" or "sneaky choices about dropping outliers", and straight into "intentional manufacture of fraudulent data, graphics or results." When >2% of academics admit in surveys to committing fraud, and lots of unadmitted fraud turns up but is desperately shoved under the rug by journals and universities, well... if you see 1 cockroach, you probably have a hundred you haven't seen living in the walls.
If it is the case that researchers want to find evidence to support the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression, then we should give special weight to the recent umbrella review of evidence by Moncrieff et al, published in Nature. When scholars find and report the opposite of what they want to find, then we can rule out confirmation bias.
By the way, Bryan Caplan makes this point, about the special epistemic value of research findings that go against the grain, in his book, The Case Against Education. He states that most scholars in that field want to find substantial "transfer of learning" across subjects, but find hardly any. He argues that these findings are especially credible because they go against the education-studies establishment.
Oh I agree. I think Caplan is right that the research going against the grain, especially in this case, is better than average. I just think that the "top research" is going to go solidly with the grain, because that is how one gets to be a top researcher at a top university with top grant money: telling people who decide who gets the top stuff what they want to hear.
Now possibly getting that published in Nature is a sign that the tide is turning, or possibly that what funders want to hear is changing. I just think that is lower probability over the next ten years.
Then again, I might be overly cynical towards the research production industry. Its just that I have seen so much terrible research over the past 10 years get lauded while better work gets silenced that I am prone to low expectations.
I am a little more sympathetic to Caplan's point on depression. I have been dealing with depression for about a decade, and the psychiatric process really is very slip shod. The diagnosis is entirely self reported, as are results of treatment. That's fine, but very prone to Hansonian medicine effects. I may have had worse than average psychiatrists but the structure was basically try some drugs for a bit, if they don't work try more until they do, if they never do try another drug or a combination and see if they work, repeat. Why any of it works is entirely irrelevant to the process because the only question that matter is "how have you been feeling since I saw you last?" Which chemicals are in imbalance never comes up because they have no way of checking, before, during or after treatment. That cause of depression, whether in mind, brain, body, whatever, never comes up. Never. But the answer is always the same: try some drugs for a bit, if they don't work try more until they do, if they never do try another drug or a combination and see if they work, repeat.
That isn't confidence inducing. It certainly doesn't suggest they are keen on applying the insights of chemical imbalance theory to their efforts.
Now maybe the drug makers are, tweaking formulas to better balance chemicals. There again, however, since no measurement of chemical balance is ever made, how does one then decide what drugs to take based on getting them back into balance?
In addition to the usual drug company incentives for the doctors, there is something else I will add. On Medicare Advantage at least, there is a lot of money to be made from "coding people up". If you are "officially depressed" and it can generate a code the insurer gets A LOT of money (and if there is risk share with the doctor, the doctor too). Really any insurance system involving risk scores will usually provide a strong incentive for doctors to decide you are depressed (or have other things wrong with you). With depression in particular as you note it's extremely wishy washy, the diagnosis is basically whatever the doctor wants it to be.
Nope, after about 6 years I just stopped meds, because while I could detect side effects there were no positive effects. Two years later I feel about the same, so I am chalking all the experimentation up to "didn't achieve much." My guess for me personally is that life situation and general disposition are largely to blame for depression, but there is some family history it seems.
The point is not that there isn't something going on with the wet, squishy bits of me that are making me more depressed than the average person probably is. Rather, it is more that the science behind depression and how depression is treated have extremely little connection to what's happening in the wet bits. SSRIs and their ilk get prescribed not after "We did some tests, and it looks like chemicals X, Y and Z are a bit off, so we think we can correct for that with medicine ABC," but rather after you go see someone and say "I am feeling really down, and think about cancelling my census membership periodically." You then fill out a little questionnaire, and they say "Yup, you answered B enough, you are depressed." Some medicine is prescribed, largely based on what the doctor's other patients seem to do well on, and you go talk to a therapist. If you feel better, great! Keep doing that forever. If you don't, next time you see the psych they up the meds, or swap them around a little bit. Repeat until you feel better, give up, or cancel that subscription.
At no point does chemistry come into it, no more than chemistry comes into "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning."
SSRIs work for some people. We don't know why, exactly, nor do we know why they don't work for other people. Importantly, why they work has no bearing on their use. We are just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. I am pretty much ok with that method, but, and this is a big but, we need to be honest that is what we are doing. We are just experimenting with people and messing around to see if things work, with all that "tinkering with people's brain chemistry in ways we don't understand or even bother to measure" implies.
Thanks for your kind words.
My own thoughts are a) depression is a chemical imbalance and b) medication doesn't help much.
There are pharmaceuticals that help with mental illness. But I'm not convinced depression is aided by it.
I'm a chronic depressive, never medicated, never wanted to be. But that's a far cry from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
What a drag it is getting old
"Kids are different today, " I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
"Things are different today, " I hear every mother say
Cooking fresh food for her husband's just a drag
So she buys an instant cake, and she burns a frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And two help her on her way, get her through her busy day
Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old
"Men just aren't the same today, " I hear every mother say
They just don't appreciate that you get tired
They're so hard to satisfy, you can tranquilize your mind
So go running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And four help you through the night, help to minimize your plight
Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old
"Life's just much too hard today, " I hear every mother say
The pursuit of happiness just seems a bore
And if you take more of those, you will get an overdose
No more running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
They just helped you on your way, through your busy dying day
Hey
" It seems that non-white parents wanted learning to be remote, and school districts gave them what they wanted—good and hard, as it were."
Yes.
I don't wish to excuse teachers unions at all. Their behavior was repulsive.
However, there isn't a single case of schools being closed because of unions. The closest case, that of Chicago in 2021, is actually a case where Lightfoot *wouldnt* do what she did the next year (shut down remote education) and the reason she didn't, again, is because most parents wanted remote. So the teachers took advantage of that fact and refused to come in to teach in empty classrooms. The next year, when they tried the same thing, Lightfoot didn't blink and wouldn't make remote available. Why? Not because of parents, who largely wanted remote as well. But because Illinois had banned remote for all but a few cases and this didn't qualify and LIghtfoot didn't want to lose funding.
Ed reformers would achieve more if they understood that unions are at best amplifiers, and are usually amplifying parents.
Isn't there some question-begging here about why so many parents wanted schools kept remote? Unions don't just amplify, they propagandize-- and what they propagandized in 2020 was a bunch of non-science-based FUD about the supposed dangers of reopening, often laced with insinuations that reopening supporters were part of a right-wing racist plot against public schools. That many parents, and disproportionately many nonwhite parents, bought into that FUD doesn't let them off the hook for pushing it.
In SF, at least, the unions also played a major role in electing the three awful school board members (Collins, Lopez, Moliga) who pushed the insane, self-parodying school renaming plan in lieu of a reopening plan, refused to let the superintendent hire a reopening consultant because that consultant once worked for a charter school, and were ultimately ousted by a recall effort led by Asian parents like Siva Raj and Man Kit Lam, which got overwhelming supermajority support across racial lines. The union opposed the recall and backed its cronies on the board to the end-- were they amplifying parents when they did that?
"That many parents, and disproportionately many nonwhite parents, bought into that FUD doesn't let them off the hook for pushing it."
Oh, that's a great argument. "Non-white parents were just too stupid to see the truth, unlike smart white parents." Good optics.
Particularly if you're in favor of school choice! "Yes, we want parents to make choices except when I personally think they're too stupid."
San Francisco is overwhelmingly Dem, and the unions don't need to help that along. Besides, where have I argued unions are anything but annoying and leftist?
And yes, Asians led the push to get rid of those members but not because of school closure. Asians were the most supportive of school closure. Asians wanted Lowell back so they could keep their kids away from blacks and Hispanics. They most assuredly weren't in favor of in person instruction. In fact, there was zero pressure in SF to open schools throughout the pandemic, and this has been thoroughly reported on. Parents were embarrassed by the idiot school board members, yes. But not to open schools.
Persuadable by propaganda under extraordinary conditions does not equate with "too stupid to see the truth." Nor does individual choice work the same as political/collective choice. And as an SF parent I can assure you that there was in fact considerable parental pro-reopening activism, especially from parents who were themselves health care workers and understood the health and child care stakes personally; reporting to the contrary is factually inaccurate.
"Persuadable by propaganda under extraordinary conditions does not equate with "too stupid to see the truth." "
Yeah, it kinda does. "We're too smart to be fooled by propaganda, but you, poor fools..."
And mind you, that's what happened the next year. States wisely realized that parents couldn't be given a choice of having remote ed in their own school, and ended it. But calling non-white parents too stupid to see through propaganda is absurd. They chose what they saw was in their interests.
As an SF parent, you should know the district is maybe 12% white. Yet the major group pushing for schools to open had a majority white membership. Jennifer Sey was fired for pushing to reopen schools--you really think the local community was backing her? It's clear from her own comments they were not.
I think Caplan would argue that because many behaviors associated with psychiatric disorders can be modified by changing the incentives, they are less inevitable than they would be if they were chemically mediated. I have no idea if the predicate is true or not.
There are certain topics that the esteemed Mr. Caplan chooses to opine on where his output is simply not worth engaging. Psychology is one of those topics.
Freddie DeBoer broadly impugns the motives of people who are skeptical of the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression.
Are any of his broad assertions, about what makes skeptics tick, supported by evidence beyond his first-hand impressions?
Personally, I think he deploys a deplorably shady rhetorical technique here along the lines of ad-hominem and guilt-by-association. He implies that he has limited anecdotal experiences which are nevertheless sufficient to substantiate a valid statistical conclusion that advocates of a particular position almost all share a negative characteristic along the lines of bad faith, personality flaw, or mental incompetence, and thus a reasonable person should just ignore them as liars or cranks and presume that their arguments can be safely and pre-emptively dismissed.
"I've never encountered someone who says X who isn't also terrible thing Y, and Y is precisely the kind of things which strongly downgrades the reliability of X. So don't even bother, like, actually reading or engaging with their arguments, what a waste of time."
This is just bogus, with the very rare exception of the person saying it having some special and exceptional degree of familiarity with the personalities and literature of the subject. That's just not the case for Freddie.
If you try to object to the deployment of this technique as both an intellectual technical foul and a personal foul, then there are all kinds of ways he can still make it personal and about you, and the irony is that this is precisely the kind of dysfunctional argumentative dynamic that he constantly complains about when others do it on Twitter all the time. Doctor heal thyself.
The real problem here is a common form of epistemic corruption, which is that whenever people arguing about a theoretically 'objective' question all know that different answers will have very different implications for politics and how much social status gets assigned to various individuals and groups, then the goal for most participants no longer remains one of discovering the actual truth but of arguing for the version of 'truth' which is most helpful to getting what they want for other reasons.
These kinds of considerations are always lurking in the background of all the object-level debates, for which the arguments regarding objective truth are mostly a kind of cover story to keep up the pretense of a policy legitimated by observations of the impersonal, and so it's natural and often perfectly realistic and accurate for the sides to accuse their opponents of precisely this kind of bad faith.
Nevertheless, it's improper to level such accusations without strong evidence, and wise discretion favors restraint even when one has evidence. The reason is that the cover story exacts its own tribute, and even having to pretend that one is playing the game honestly, fairly, and rigorously has a way of limiting the range of bad practices. Maybe you will still be able to get away with cheating because no one can call you out, but to the extent one must pretend to be winning fair and square, they'll still notice when you're not, which has costs, which means you won't push it as far as you otherwise would.
Thus, when debating, one ought to stick to the merits, even when everyone knows, "X isn't about the merits of X."
Thus, when debating, one ought to stick to the merits, even when everyone knows, "X isn't about the merits of X."
Great maxim. Especially since this kind of bulverism is self-exacerbating. To the extent we treat debates about X as though they're really debates about the participants' character, people have an incentive to pick their position based on what it might say about their character to the relevant audience, rather than the merits of the position.
Yes, the word "humane" is doing a lot of work in FdB's piece. I don't know how Caplan actually feels, but you could easily put a humane rationale on Caplan's anti-psychiatry takes: Caplan appears to believe that individuals have more ability help themselves than they might otherwise think. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's at least optimistic, whereas the chemical imbalance theory can be viewed as fatalistic and defeating, and in that sense not "humane."