Zach Goldberg and Christopher Rufo on CRT teaching; Robert Bryce on energy reality; Nicholas Wade on the lab leak hypothesis; Devon Kurtz on mass incarceration
Unconscious racial bias is a real thing, and so were settler land grabs in the emergence of the USA. These topics have a proper place in school curricula.
Key challenges are:
(a) Wise pedagogy and balance to achieve an accurate, well-proportioned, and constructive education about human nature and history.
(b) Wise inculcation of ethical individualism, to encourage youths to treat one another as individuals, not tokens of groups.
The use of fossil fuels will increase at about the same rate as today for the next hundred years at a minimum. The people pushing Green energy as the future are mostly fools and charlatans. The only people in that camp to take seriously are those that are fighting for adoption of nuclear, and there damned few of those.
Re incarceration, there's a question of definition here. There are two ways of conceptualizing the problem: is it that too many people are in prison at any given time, or is it that too many people are incarcerated at least once in their life? The latter seems like it might be the more important concern, since there's evidence that being incarcerated causes more criminal behavior (although of course there are possible confounders, yada yada).
"Imagine that in a single year 12 people are given 1-month drug sentences. One serves in January, one serves in February, one serves in March, etc. In the same year, 1 person is given a 1-year sentence for murder. If you take Latzer’s approach and go count the number of inmates in jail and see what they’re in prison for than–no matter what month you pick–you’ll find 1 person in jail for drugs and 1 for murder. You would concludes that 50% of incarcerations are for drugs, and 50% are for violent crime.
But of course that’s not really true. There were twelve drug convictions in our example, not just one. So in reality the proportion of drug offense wasn’t 50%. It was more than 92%."
A key problem with this discussion of ideological indoctrination in schools is that it overlooks the degree to which this happened before anyone ever heard of CRT etc. For those of us who went to public school in earlier times: were you really never taught to regard any contested historical or moral propositions as unquestionable truths? Were you really never taught a biased account of a dubious party line about any hot button issue in a way that could plausibly affect future policy preferences? If so, you were lucky. Using schools as vehicles for indoctrination into a civic religion isn't new or uncommon; it's just that now the content of that religion is more objectionable to conservatives.
I totally agree, fwiw, that such indoctrination is a bad thing, that in a free society students should be left more free to draw their own conclusions, and that reforms to reduce indoctrination would in principle be good. But to believe that blanket state level bans on teaching particular propositions are a reasonable solution, you have to see those particular kinds of indoctrination as special or unusual in a way that just doesn't match reality.
Bryce: Excellent points about the need to couple permitting reform for zero carbon energy technologies with taxation of net emissions of CO2. It still seems that recent developments show that the level of taxation necessary to meet any given CO2 concentration target have fallen and that is being implicitly realized.
Just to revisit an earlier post of yours, I hear the Fed lost $3.2bn last week on their bond portfolio, which approaches 10% of its capital. Interesting times.
Every bit of that poll is nonsense. Are there teachers who cover this? Yes. Would the students be reliable indicators either way? Hell, no. What idiocy. Both the purveyors and the swallowers.
As for the origins of COVID- it is all but certain now that the virus' progenitor was brought to the Wuhan Institute and worked on to increase it's virulence, and then escaped or was deliberately released by someone. Literally all the evidence available today supports this theory, and none support this arising because someone brought a bat to the meat market directly from some cave hundreds of miles away.
Matt Darling of the Niskanen center saw the Goldberg CRT results and quipped that the students were just “being taught labor economics”. I didn’t see any economists correct him.
Unconscious racial bias is a real thing, and so were settler land grabs in the emergence of the USA. These topics have a proper place in school curricula.
Key challenges are:
(a) Wise pedagogy and balance to achieve an accurate, well-proportioned, and constructive education about human nature and history.
(b) Wise inculcation of ethical individualism, to encourage youths to treat one another as individuals, not tokens of groups.
The use of fossil fuels will increase at about the same rate as today for the next hundred years at a minimum. The people pushing Green energy as the future are mostly fools and charlatans. The only people in that camp to take seriously are those that are fighting for adoption of nuclear, and there damned few of those.
Re incarceration, there's a question of definition here. There are two ways of conceptualizing the problem: is it that too many people are in prison at any given time, or is it that too many people are incarcerated at least once in their life? The latter seems like it might be the more important concern, since there's evidence that being incarcerated causes more criminal behavior (although of course there are possible confounders, yada yada).
Since drug sentences are shorter, the number of people in prison for drugs at any given time is not reflective of the number of people who are ever sent to prison for drugs. See this piece by the moderate conservative blogger Nathaniel Givens: https://difficultrun.nathanielgivens.com/2016/08/18/mass-incarceration-is-not-a-myth/
"Imagine that in a single year 12 people are given 1-month drug sentences. One serves in January, one serves in February, one serves in March, etc. In the same year, 1 person is given a 1-year sentence for murder. If you take Latzer’s approach and go count the number of inmates in jail and see what they’re in prison for than–no matter what month you pick–you’ll find 1 person in jail for drugs and 1 for murder. You would concludes that 50% of incarcerations are for drugs, and 50% are for violent crime.
But of course that’s not really true. There were twelve drug convictions in our example, not just one. So in reality the proportion of drug offense wasn’t 50%. It was more than 92%."
Off topic, but just read this and thought everyone would enjoy: https://open.substack.com/pub/kvetch/p/the-sublime-transgression-of-an-appalachian
A key problem with this discussion of ideological indoctrination in schools is that it overlooks the degree to which this happened before anyone ever heard of CRT etc. For those of us who went to public school in earlier times: were you really never taught to regard any contested historical or moral propositions as unquestionable truths? Were you really never taught a biased account of a dubious party line about any hot button issue in a way that could plausibly affect future policy preferences? If so, you were lucky. Using schools as vehicles for indoctrination into a civic religion isn't new or uncommon; it's just that now the content of that religion is more objectionable to conservatives.
I totally agree, fwiw, that such indoctrination is a bad thing, that in a free society students should be left more free to draw their own conclusions, and that reforms to reduce indoctrination would in principle be good. But to believe that blanket state level bans on teaching particular propositions are a reasonable solution, you have to see those particular kinds of indoctrination as special or unusual in a way that just doesn't match reality.
And of that 146,000 imprisoned only for drug related charges, a large fraction of them are probably violent criminals who simply pleaded down charges.
Bryce: Excellent points about the need to couple permitting reform for zero carbon energy technologies with taxation of net emissions of CO2. It still seems that recent developments show that the level of taxation necessary to meet any given CO2 concentration target have fallen and that is being implicitly realized.
Just to revisit an earlier post of yours, I hear the Fed lost $3.2bn last week on their bond portfolio, which approaches 10% of its capital. Interesting times.
Every bit of that poll is nonsense. Are there teachers who cover this? Yes. Would the students be reliable indicators either way? Hell, no. What idiocy. Both the purveyors and the swallowers.
As for the origins of COVID- it is all but certain now that the virus' progenitor was brought to the Wuhan Institute and worked on to increase it's virulence, and then escaped or was deliberately released by someone. Literally all the evidence available today supports this theory, and none support this arising because someone brought a bat to the meat market directly from some cave hundreds of miles away.
Re Wade lack of COVID bat evidence trail:
China has banned any research, and removed any data it could think of removing.
this can be construed as indirect admittance if guilt etc. obviously. but it makes Wade's lack of data unconvincing. because research has been nipped.
Matt Darling of the Niskanen center saw the Goldberg CRT results and quipped that the students were just “being taught labor economics”. I didn’t see any economists correct him.
https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1583444432464273408?s=46&t=VZ_dIlUN0hhIS_VqU9AL3w