Surveys of the dyslexic population suggest that the crowd favorite is Dyslexie. Even a. Lot of dyslexics hate opendyslexic.
7,521 karma · joined May 23, 2013
Features that improve accessibility for a subpopulation while decreasing it for the broader population are /not/ part of that thesis.
The topic of dyslexia friendly fonts falls somewhere in between. Some fonts are considered friendlier than others and are fine for the general population (verdana), others are friendlier to dyslexics but hideous to the general population (open dyslexia). I call it a gray area because they’re ugly, and do not improve readability for the general population, but not overtly inaccessible to the general population.
If this is the baseline level of Othering involved in the thinking around this, you understand why people view this as an expression of anti-semitism. “Respect other people’s cultures and beliefs, unless they’re Jewish” isn’t a good look for the left wing.
And China would love to launch a boondoggle of a project that gives them an excuse to station a shit ton of staff and infrastructure in the area for the foreseeable future.
The privileged go to private school. Our programs are dominated by first generation immigrants, mostly SE Asian. Even the white component tends to be poor immigrant families.
If hard-working and intelligent poor people clawing their way upwards is a stain on equality, something has gone deeply deeply wrong with our conception of equality.
It’s always been a problem for NY liberals that these programs were so massively underrepresenting the black population. The fact that they were highly diverse had to be ignored. The fact that they were rife with poor first generation immigrants had to be ignored (it undercut the “rich people buy exam prep to get their kids in, which is why so few black kids get in” narrative). (The few black kids that did get in were almost /all/ first generation immigrants, too).
The only thing that mattered was the optics: not enough black kids, kill the program.
It is the epitome of shitty studies cherry picked to support the idealology/politics of the day.
What the NYT article omits is that the elimination of advanced classes has been preceded by a couple of decades of highly restricted availability. 15 years ago (shit I’ve gotten old), when I lived in nyc_borough, there was precisely one elementary school honors class for the entire borough. 30 spots for the entire borough. I didn’t bother to wait and see if my kid managed to get a spot, we pulled her out and stuck her in private school.
There’s no job where you get to skip the part that actually generates revenue for the business because you don’t like it.
With time, the waves hit less and less often. For a while, though, it’s just the frequency that changes - not the amplitude. It will hit just as hard, and your responsibility remains the same: just don’t drown.
With a lot more time, the waves get smaller, too.
My only piece of advice is that when the waves hit, don’t focus on dog-paddling or floating or whatever stupid fucking thing people say you should be doing. Just. Don’t. Drown.
When the wave breaks, and you have your moment of peace, then you can take a moment to remind yourself that this will pass. The waves will get less frequent, and smaller.
Perhaps a touch more actionable: when my father passed, I found it helpful to engage in hobbies related to, but not identical to, his. It hit the right balance of making me feel in touch with him, without clobbering me over the head by emphasizing his absence.
It’s not an irrelevant bit of context.
If any of those Googlers would please comment on how to square those statements with the featured article, I’d appreciate it.
No, they wouldn't, because the selection pressure on the organization is for the minimum amount of signaling required to optimize profits, not actual morality - not least of which because optimizing for profits optimizes for continued existence of the organization, and maximizing morality does not. Holding them to a higher moral standard just changes the measure of "what is the minimum amount of signaling required?" Selection pressure is unyielding - values that don't affect survival ultimately don't matter, because however much you like it, it will be competed out of existence.
Nor could an organization exhibit actual morality, because an organization doesn't have continuity of thought or policy - flip a few board members, change an executive team, and the people whose judgement comprises "the company's judgement" just changed entirely. It would be like discussing the morality of a robot which regularly swapped the brain it contains.
You're making the same category error as the previous poster: describing "corporation" as a noun that has a characteristic known as "morality," and then lamenting the amount of "morality" we expect from it.
Morality is for people. Profit-seeking institutions don't have morality - they have regulatory constraints on profit-seeking avenues. Tricking people into thinking corporations have the former is a jedi mind trick: keep people focused on controlling corporations with the same social censure mechanisms that work on people means you're not focusing your time and effort on the mechanisms of control that would actually work on corporations.
It's like a red dragon walking around talking about oh, gosh, how much his sunburn hurts. He's immune to fire; put away the torches and focus on something that might actually work.
I happen to agree with you. I'm just responding to the subtext in your post that seems to imply that we still have freedom to dissent.[2]
[1] This is my reminder that I'm running late on my regular purging of social media accounts. To try to at least vaguely preserve my sense of anonymity, which I'm sure is much more illusory than real.
[2] I have to point out, given that this current strain of criticism is also politically polarized, that I am a liberal. I just happen to be of the generation of liberals for whom phrases like "free speech extremist" are a betrayal of so much of what we stood/stand for.
Complaining about for-profit institutions pursuing profit is, at best, a category error, and has nothing to do with our ability to shape the world except a childish inability to separate an organization represented by people from actual people.
It's like making a pool in your backyard and complaining it's a bad place to jog. That's not what it's for. Private for-profit entities aren't for public policy, or for moral leadership. They're for taking money and giving you widgets. If there's a manner in which their doing so runs contrary to desired public policy, that's a government and regulatory issue. That they've managed to somehow convince you they're "people"/"sentient" adequately enough for you to criticize their moral stance is an astounding success of marketing and branding. Because it takes a lot of marketing to convince people that widget-making is anything other than widget-making, for good or for ill.
They don't believe our internal propaganda. That's why Russia and the like spend so much time hyping up where we don't live up to our ideals - it lets them sell the line that we're just as bad, just as corrupt, just as etc. but we either mouth the propaganda trying to get by, or we're dumb/gullible enough to fall for the propaganda.
My understanding of Chinese culture suggests there's also a strand of "they'd love us to be hamstrung by falling for their bullshit, so we don't seize our place in the world."
The answer to that question is almost always "no," and certainly until proven otherwise. Complaining that these corporate PR statements are anything other than lip service is like complaining that the world isn't fair, or that everyone dies. Perhaps a sad truth, but one you should've figured out by the time you turned twelve.
Corollary: corporations are not hypocrites, either, because corporations don't hold beliefs. They make PR statements. Their belief is "I will say what I need to in order to be left in peace to maximize profits." Any corporate leader that doesn't hold to that will be replaced by someone that does, either proximally (by the board and shareholders) or ultimately (by one day landing on the wrong side of idealogy and getting outcompeted by organizations that weather the storms more nimbly.)
Is there good reason to expect that they reformed?
Is it as or more reasonable to expect they've simply learnt to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest?
If the answer to the former is "no," and to the latter is "yes," then I don't really know how you'd expect anyone to work with a leadership that openly views them as a hindrance to the workplace.
If he'd made a public anti-semitic article 20 years ago, and didn't undertake very significant acts of reformation, certainly I would take for granted that he's still an anti-semite. There's no reason to imagine otherwise. And I'd feel very uncomfortable working for a company where the leadership includes and accepts a publicly professed anti-semite.
If your rebuttal to someone is to ignore widely-known idiom to focus on a particular detail that does nothing to undermine their actual point, please reconsider whether that was really a contribution worth making.
> But instead to react professionally and contritely you made it worse to stamp on the shards to make sure no useful piece of trust will survive.
> I've just de-installed the Duckduckgo app and also won't be using their search engine anymore. Trust is lost. Their CEO can put his statement where the sun doesn't shine.
If I print a headline that says "ALL DOGS ARE RED" followed by a text qualifying the words "all," "dogs", and "red", you certainly can assert until the cows come home that I said "All dogs are red", but that would also be incorrect, given anything but the most superficial reading.
Lastly, to the extent that you're presenting the AAP statement as a direct argument from authority, I'm pointing out those other organizations not to argue "I disagree with the AAP", but to point out that in this instance "an argument from authority is invalid, they're roundly criticized by the other authorities."
And what argument do they make for it?
They trawled the data for things like reducing the transmission of HIV - which it does, in third-world country where condom usage is low, antiretroviral usage is low, pre-exposure prophylaxis is low. In first-world countries, circumcisions have not been shown to be protective, because in a setting with a higher baseline level of antiretroviral and condom usage, its effect is somewhere between negligible and non-existent.
The AAP is writing recommendations for America, not the third world.
Likewise, the reduction in cancers is a tiny effect. Small to begin with and, again, negligible in first-world countries.
As other pediatric bodies outside the AAP noted, including these "benefits" is a reach, and the AAP got raked over the coals for doing so.
So, no, not literally - the AAP made a strong political soundbite headline, and then walked it back in the text of their position paper, because they couldn't defend that headline.
And certainly not unambiguously, when they were widely criticized for relying on weak studies that didn't apply to the population in question.
The AAP isn't a terrible organization, but it's not immune to politics, and this shift in their official stance was political, not data-driven.
The AAP has waffled for years, putting their thumb on the scales of every guideline to include a “cultural factor” to the cost- benefit analysis which is literally “but people really want this for religious reasons.” They generally aimed for neutral, until the 2012 task force statement.
Accordingly, if you look up their most recent position statement (2012) they headline with “benefits outweigh risks.” But if you go -into- the actual statement they phrase it more delicately:
“ Although health benefits are not great enough to recommend routine circumcision for all male newborns, the benefits of circumcision are sufficient to justify access to this procedure for families choosing it and to warrant third-party payment for circumcision of male newborns.”
The benefits are sufficient to -still ask insurers to pay for it-. If health benefits -actually- outweighed risks, they’d recommend it for all infants routinely.
Accordingly, they got raked over the coals by pediatric organizations outside the US, which aren’t accustomed to cosmetic circumcision:
“ To these authors, only 1 of the arguments put forward by the American Academy of Pediatrics has some theoretical relevance in relation to infant male circumcision; namely, the possible protection against urinary tract infections in infant boys, which can easily be treated with antibiotics without tissue loss. The other claimed health benefits, including protection against HIV/AIDS, genital herpes, genital warts, and penile cancer, are questionable, weak, and likely to have little public health relevance in a Western context, and they do not represent compelling reasons for surgery before boys are old enough to decide for themselves.” (https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/131/4/796?utm...)