.

Of course, mainstream productions across many different art forms have gotten so large-scale and expensive that the market forces incentivizing low-risk art are extremely strong. I question how much of an effect snobbish critics would really have. But I think we've also seen a near disappearance of "gatekeeping" critics in major media, at least ones who get mainstream attention (a couple of noteworthy exceptions spring to mind but I honestly think independent "snob" critics are small potatoes in comparison to the sea of generic reviews in like major press and whatnot). Part of the reason might be that reviews are themselves a product, so if that product does not align with mainstream opinion it simply doesn't do well financially.

Every single day I'm in a math class that uses calculators I watch dozens of students type in the wrong numbers or the wrong operation into the calculator, not realize it, get a weird answer and then get confused. And then because they don't have a firm grasp on the underlying procedures they struggle to figure out where they went wrong or how to retrace their steps. It's a frustrating experience for them. The students make more errors and take longer to solve problems than they probably would if they just spent like 10 minutes a day on arithmetic fluency practice.

It's a cliche to say but totality truly was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen and no picture that's out there, no matter how impressive, comes even close to what it looks like in real life. One of the things that struck me most was the color. I haven't seen a single picture that captures that.

I didn't even bother trying to take a picture of my own. I've seen posts online from others expressing regret that they spent most of the few minutes of totality fiddling with their phone or camera and not appreciating the moment. I'm happy I resisted the urge. It's weeks later now and I can still see the eclipse clearly in my mind's eye.

People are making a comparison to how cigarette companies responded to research showing that cigarettes were linked to cancer. But the reason it's convincing that cigarettes are linked to cancer is not because cigarette companies objected to the research and funded their own, contradictory research. The reason it is convincing is because there is good evidence that cigarettes do actually increase risk of cancer.

The fact that a company is obviously going to object to criticism of its product and spend money to counter that criticism does not automatically make the criticism correct. You still need to evaluate the evidence. In this case, the quality of evidence on "ultra-processed food" is quite bad.

Another thing I don't like is that the "ultra-processed" label gets used as a circular explanation. "Ultra-processed" is a name that some people are giving to a broad category of foods that are alleged to have some negative health impacts. But people will then claim that "these foods are bad for you because they are ultra-processed." No, that is a name some people have given to foods that have these properties. That is not an explanation of why they are bad. This kind of circular explanation --- using the name of a phenomenon as if it is an explanation for the phenomenon --- is really common and the problem with it is that it's thought-terminating.

A third thing I don't like is how much discourse out there is framing this as some big conspiracy and that "Big Food" is suppressing evidence of the harmful impacts of their products. But if you search for anything related to "ultra-processed foods" you will be inundated with hundreds of articles and videos and other media making really strong claims about how we're all being "slowly poisoned" by this food and it's actually pretty hard to find any critical commentary. If there's a conspiracy to "suppress" information about the supposed negative effects of this food, the conspirators aren't doing a very good job.

Of course I think it's plausible that some of the foods that get put under the label of "ultra-processed" are probably bad for us, but I also think there's probably already some mechanisms we know about for why they are bad for us, and at best the "ultra-processed" label doesn't add much. I know some representatives of "the food industry" have also made this point but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

The worst is the suggestion that challenging math courses should be replaced with courses about "real world applications" when those "real world" based courses often have almost no math in them. Students may superficially "like" these courses more at first but in practice it's taking away resources from programs that actually help students gain deep understanding of how things work and help them succeed in quantitative fields. Not everyone will or should go into a quantitative field but we also don't want to be closing doors for people when they are still teenagers.

In my own experience and based on what I've learned from more experienced educators, when students start finding success in math they don't focus so much on "when am I going to use this" and the activity can become self-reinforcing. And people who become proficient at math tend to find ways of incorporating it into their daily lives. Although the relationship between motivation and success may be bidirectional, it really seems like it's a lop-sided relationship. Success leads to motivation more than the other way around.

In reality, the city in which Heemeyer lived, his neighbors, and even the family he was feuding with, bent over backwards at every turn to accommodate his wishes. The straw that broke the camel's back for Heemeyer was that the city told him to stop shitting in an irrigation ditch (seriously) and to connect his property to the public sewer lines as he was legally required to do. The family business owners across the street even offered to pay for Heemeyer's sewer hookup for him. Heemeyer refused and built the killdozer.

Unfortunately the Cass report really doesn't seem to be anything new. It's basically a restatement of the same exact talking points conservatives have been making about youth gender transition for years. The report doesn't make any convincing case that puberty blockers or gender affirming care in general are harmful, or even that they likely could be harmful. Instead, it mainly juxtaposes a bunch of facts that we are clearly supposed to find "alarming," but the report doesn't actually draw any causal or logical connection for why any of it is supposed to be bad.

The usual suspects are all present:

Youth who go on puberty blockers are quite likely to start HRT later on. Why is this a problem?

People who go through gender transition are quite a bit more likely than average to be autistic. Why should this change how we work with people who want to transition? What difference does this make?

People who socially transition at an early age are very likely to go on HRT. What's the problem exactly? The report is clear that it can't find any negative mental health impacts of socially transitioning, and it doesn't make clear why going on HRT is a problem in and of itself, so where is the harm?

I also find it very amusing how much moralizing there is about how more people AFAB are choosing to transition these days. Back when the claim was that it was almost exclusively trans women who were transitioning (I emphasize this as a claim because I doubt it was ever that true), the moral panic was that gender transitioning was a new domain for "men" to assert their privilege and take things from women, and/or that trans women only received care because of "male privilege." Now that more trans men are getting the care they need to the point where the numbers are pretty even between trans men and trans women, the narrative is now that children are being coerced and misled and that trans people are now "victims" somehow. I think maybe there is a simpler explanation.

This article covers a lot of things, like historical debates around ability grouping and tracking, the practical challenges to implementing school-wide intervention programs both for struggling students and advanced students, among other things. But this section on the potentials and pitfalls of "personalized learning" via computers is especially good (emphasis my own):

Anyone who has gone online to learn has, at some point, come face to face with this dilemma: On the internet, you can study almost all human knowledge, but usually you don’t. In a world with virtually every MIT course fully online for free, a world with Khan Academy and Coursera and countless other tools to aid learning, why has the heralded learning revolution not yet arrived?

In a way, the revolution has arrived — it just hasn’t improved things much. Rocketship Schools, a California charter using online learning for about half of its instruction, has had solid results. Lately, though, they’ve moved away from some of their bigger bets on personalization and rediscovered teachers, saying “We’ve seen success with models that get online learning into classrooms where the best teachers are.” School of One was a widely hyped high school model in NYC that was preparing to scale up its offerings… until a fuller picture of the results came in and it was pilloried. Online charter schools, meanwhile, seem to actively depress learning.

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to get solid research on the efficacy of various ed tech products. Many tools, particularly those sold directly to schools or used by online charters, are proprietary and stuck behind paywalls, selectively presenting their best data and limited demos. The ed tech sector in general seems to deliver mixed results to students.

Why is it so hard to make effective teaching software?

For one, teaching is complex. A good human teacher does a lot of complicated things — gets to know their students, responds to the class’ moods and needs, asks “just right” questions, monitors progress, clarifies in real time as a look of confusion dawns on the class, etc., etc. — and it’s simply hard to get a computer to do that.

Maybe, theoretically, a piece of software could be designed that does these things. But in practice, many software designers don’t even try. It’s easier and cheaper to make pedagogical compromises, such as providing instruction entirely through videos. Yes, there are some thoughtful tools made by groups like those at Explorable Explanations, such as this lesson on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. But building high-quality tools well-adapted for a digital environment is difficult and time-consuming, and for prospective designers, destinations like Google or Blizzard tend to be more glamorous than working with schools. In practice, humans currently have a lot of advantages over computers in teaching.

Even if we overcame all the design issues, though, would students be motivated to stick with the program? Studies of online charters point to student engagement as the core challenge. When you put a kid in front of a computer screen, they jump to game websites, YouTube, SlateStarCodex, Google Images — anything other than their assigned learning. Many educational games that try to fix this resort to the “chocolate covered broccoli” tactic, trying to put gamelike mechanics that have nothing to do with learning around increasingly elaborate worksheets.

To be fair, student engagement is also the core challenge of conventional schools. But that’s precisely what the much-maligned structures of school are attempting to confront. The intensely social environment helps children identify as students and internalize a set of social expectations that are supportive of learning. The law compels school attendance, and schools compel class attendance. And, once a child is in the classroom, their interactions with actual, live human instructors can set high academic expectations that a child will genuinely strive to meet.