camelite

> Please, read the current research.

There's no need. How to teach reading has been a solved problem for at a minimum 30 years. It is not a research question. It does include phonics. The only thing with researching is why in the world apparently intelligent, socially conscious people are still litigating the losing side of a lost war after all this time.

And finally, John Taylor gatto from whom you presumably derive your distaste for the Prussian method, had the following to say:

> That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you're reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country.

One part of the solution is to introduce exceptions early. The whole thing is a more complicated business than a one-to-one sound-letter correspondence. But it is a problem that has been solved for a long time now[1]. Cognitive science is not required. The only mystery is how this is not more widely known.

[1] teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons, and associated school curricula from the same author

The fact that an act was passed after the greatest bubble pop since the great depression shouldnt be enough to convince you that dems as a whole arent beholden to wall street. they had zero choice but to do SOMETHING. look instead to what they did before the crash. compare what they did to what they could have done. look at what happened to proposals to do more. look at wall street profits a year after the crisis. look at the doners. less beholden than the reps, probably. not beholden at all? no

> Speculative real estate investment is a direct result of restrictive zoning.

By definition, it's not. It's a term coined to separate out the impact on prices of people buying-to-live vs people buying-to-sell/rent-and-profit. And if foreigners are more likely to buy for speculative purposes, barring them from doing so will decrease speculative increases in house prices.

You don't have to force them if the teaching is competent. It doesn't have to be a painful experience.

Yes, I agree completely. Though I would emphasise that teaching universally bad only when compared to what is achieveable from tightly scripted presentations. I think the actual task of teaching flawlessly while "winging it" is extremely extremely difficult, and beyond at least 98% of the general population, even positing a good working environment.

I would reccommend looking into everything written by Siegfried Engelmann, particularly "Theory of Instruction". Honestly though, that might not be enough. Maybe you have the brains and drive to do it, for me the only unquestionab success has been using scripted presentations written by people who are smarter than I am.

That's a myth. The real problem is that the average teacher (relative performance) is so far away from being close to maximally performant (as proved in studies which rigourously control teacher behaviour) that the impact of variation about that mean is swamped by environmental factors. People conclude that since swapping teachers doesn't make an appreciable difference, teacher performance can't make a difference. When in reality the problem is that teaching is uniformly bad (compared to maximal possible performance, which is very difficult. this is why the answer is not to look for better teachers but to look for better, uniformly implementable, curriculums)

Writing the 900th SQL query is not hard science, it's engineering. And every engineering discipline, to my knowledge, has a large gender gap in participation. So, it is not necessary to "establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science".

As I've pointed out before, that shortcut doesn't work.

If we just look at the higher level computer science your jobs, then again we will see that in the most comparable field, mathematics, women underparticiate something like 30-70.

If we ignore all that and pretend working with computers is uniquely bad for women judged against comparable careers, can we start calling out the enablers yet?

Well, bad news, there's another hurdle to jump, which is that female participation in computing is inversely related to a country's ranking on gender equality tables. I've yet to see that stubborn fact integrated successfully into the argument. It is mostly just ignored.

And that's off the top of my head. There are probably more. It's a complicated question to answer. So you must demonstrate at least familiarity with the obvious hurdles before questioning the moral worth of the people who disagree with you.

If I am anti-x, and I profit from it, am I an extremist anti-x-er? Do I deserves to be put on a list with nutjobs and whackos? Does putting me on a list of extremist when my positions are not extreme reduce the credibility of the organisation which does so? Is the article an obvious hitjob?

The answers are: Not necessarily, not necessarily, yes, and yes.

> but how can Goldman's investment banking arm promise anything?

Easy: they lie. Why is this so mind-boggling?

> This is akin to my bank promising some third party that by Friday afternoon I'll have a certain balance in USD or some specific precious metal in my safe deposit box.

You're just explaining why the company shouldn't have believed Goldman. And I agree they shouldn't. But it appears that they did believe them, for whatever reason. Perhaps it was the Goldman aura. Perhaps it was their top .01% sales staff. Perhaps it was knowledge derived from their client relationships concievably allowing them to choose long-term over short-term investors.

Whatever. But Goldman being skillful liars is not some bizarre left-field theroy.

> f they engineered all these bubbles obv they would have had the foresight to be unscathed during crisis

They did't need any foresight to predict that their bonus money would remain ing their bank accounts no matter what happened. And for that matter, that whatever DID happen, the the US Government would move heaven and hell to avoid Goldman collapsing.

> But most damning to the narrative Taibbi wants to sell, Goldman got in trouble with eToys --- for underpricing it.

I think you're underestimating Taibi's argument if you think the IPO-ing firm being pissed off at a later date argues against Goldman pulling off a scam, or that under-pricing and over-pricing can't be part of the same scam.

There are 4 actors here: a) Goldman b) Goldman's preferred clients c) The company d) The investing public

The argument goes that Goldman underprices the IPO initially. Their preferred investors get cheap stock. The stock goes public. The preferred investors have agreed to buy post-IPO stock. This causes the stock to rise. This rise doesn't appear to the investing public to be artificial, but a stock with momentum. This causes the price to shoot up. At some point the insiders take their gain and sell their stock. They then reward Goldman by channeling a significant portion of their profits back to them by using their underwriting services.

As a post-script, the thing that first struck me was, if they screw their clients, how do they get new ones. Well if you read on to the next section, Taibbi explains part of that puzzle too: "Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business."

Losers: a) The company: they have less money to invest in their company's success, and fewer "long-haul" stock-holders than they would like. b) The investing public who buy high, sell low.

Winners: a) Goldman's clients - buy low, sell high b) Goldman - they build long-term relationships with investors and skim some of the profit back directly

Here's the eToys guy:

After the deposition, he recalled, the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents. He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients would support the stock. “That’s when I thought, ‘We really got screwed,’” Lenk told me.

Although the experience still angered him, he now has 14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the country?”

“What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what they did to the country in 2008,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/nocera-rigg...

I will second that the moderators deserve credit for the change in "tone" as you put it. But it is not really a change in tone, but rather that the hold-on-a-seconders, whose "tone" is generally utterly anodyne in comparison to the reflexive vituperation they receive (not that it bothers me) have been warned off contributing. And so it goes.

I can see you're trying to rise above your instincts here, and that is a good effort. However, you should have left out the parting shot about the axe.

> I was commenting on the mindset one would have to take the positions you have, which is why I didn't address individual points. I guess that was lost on you.

There's a word for that, you know.

> Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?

If we both agree that we want fewer incidents of harass ment, a higher fraction of harassers punished, fewer false allegations, and fewer incidents of innocent people being punished... then that's a pretty complicated problem, right? Now multiply that by the number of potential harassers and harassees in the world. My "work" is simply the observation that a complicated problem isn't solvable by simplistic rhetoric. Of course, given the climate, that spiraled, as it does.

> This is really a stretch in logic

It's not even a tiny weeny little stretch of logic. It is self-evident to anybody who is thinking clearly about the matter.

> Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace.

No. Wrong. Parent comment said "believe women who...", not "give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment". Do you understand how those two statements are different? Your one doesn't even make sense. Crediblity is "the quality of being believable or worthy of trust". Credence is probably the word you were thinking of. I don't think I'm smarter than you, but these sorts of mistakes do go to show that you are not thinking clearly.

> It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better

Not the falsely accused. They are men too, right?

> But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.

The suggestion is not mild. My reaction was not hostile. My arguments were not misleading. I'm not contributing to the problem of some men being sexual harassers, except perhaps at some absurdly theoretically removed degree, which would leave me damned for pretty much any I comment I could make. I'm not encouraging manly, or even "manly" behaviour. My comments don't necessitate women's blog posts, if by that you are referring to Fowlers call-out. The latter is in fact an absurd charge against me on a personal level, as I'm sure you would recognize after mature reflection. That I necessitate company culture course-correction is likewise absurd, though flattering.

OK. Should "anything go", or is there a limit to how low the burden of proof should go?

My rhetoric has the advantage of being true.

disingenous: lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically

I'll do you the honor of not questioning your sincerity without even making an effort to address any specific thing you said. Seems like an almost...pusillanimous...thing to do.

> We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting.

I am not suggesting a solution to the existence of injustice, which is what a utopia would entail. I am merely pointing out that simplistic rhetoric about believing accusors will not solve the problem.

> But if we're not actually in utopia, then we really are tipping the scales in some way. And that does suck, and sometimes that means that one group is going to be treated unfairly, but often it's about the lesser of evils.

And there we part ways. Adding up all the bad stuff that happens to one group, comparing it to all the bad stuff that happens to another group, and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles. I know you probably don't recognise that as what you're doing, but your reasoning is far too simplistic given the complexities of the problem.

Meaningless rhetoric which skips the part where you determine who the victims actually are.

Should "anything go" in the workplace? Your phrasing doesn't make it clear if that's what you believe.

> Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them.

If you "believe women who report sexual harassment", and more specifically, if you believe women who report sexual harassment in "less clear cut" scenarios than Susan Fowlers, then you are deliberately stacking the deck against the specific men who are accused of sexual harassment, some of whom will invariably be innocent. How much comfort the fact that other people with the same genetalia tend to fill the boardrooms provides to the accused, I will leave to your imagination.

> They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to.

Men aren't reminded constantly by their culture to do things they don't want to do? Where do you live, because it sounds like paradise to me.

> To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just being a dick.

It's neither. It was an attempt to puncture what I saw as misguided rhetoric. A good old WhatAboutTheMen is an efficient approach because the commenter's default reasoning for not "just believing" men would likely mirror mine for not "just believing" women. And so I don't have to spell it out for them.

As speakers of English, we ARE the experts in the field, and the vast majority of us don't agree with you.

Should we believe men too when they're victimised by women, or is this a one way deal? What if it's a man and a woman accusing each other, or two men or two women. What if the dude is a historically oppressed minority?

The relevance of that study is a massive stretch.

Your links do not justify your confident tone. Two are about the 7 Supreme Court Justices and some Google guy. That's 8 people. The first is about a study involving 11 male-female interactions (19 now), and a study which noted that "...The men interrupted their female conversational partners 2.1 times during a three minute conversation. That number dropped to 1.8 when they spoke to other men." So men just interrupt more in general, not against women specifically, i.e. not sexist behaviour but a simple gender difference.

Ironically, the guy's "fuzzy memories" are more accurate than your "research-based" opinions.

> clearly it is not obvious enough

It is very obvious though, if your basic working principle is that your fellow comments aren't sexist monsters.

It's a good principle to work off.

That's because they're different. "Over taxiing" won't deplete the population of taxi riders. Just because you know something about the economics of the taxi business doesn't mean you can indiscriminately apply the same logic to a different industry. Which in a thread full of condescending compassion for the economically illiterate, is by far the more common fallacy.

I was actually coming back to delete the original comment as it wasn't very well thought through. I mean, sure, of course there was "content". There were chapter headers as so on and so forth. It would be better to criticise the absense of thought put into having a theory of instruction beyond "Experts do this, therefore if we teach this, we'll create experts"