programjames

Talking about the greatness of America has been a theme among Democrats from FDR to JFK, when they spoke about defending and spreading American cultural values like democracy and freedom. It goes back even further to the 1840s with James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny. Banning the MAGA hat in the classroom isn't about political signalling - it's just straight out America hate.

Do you see how silly you sound? Look, here's my issue with you: I've told you my reasons to oppose MAGA hats and welcome posters in the classroom. You refuse to believe those are my reasons. You're calling me a liar, saying I must secretly be withholding some racist motivated reasoning. I get that there are America haters who want to ban MAGA hats, and racists who want to ban these posters. But you're talking to me, not them. If you can only refute people who collectively share two brain cells, then you're probably just wrong on your position.

You have yet to address or even acknowledge the focus of both my comments: this phrase is a common means of signalling party affiliation. I feel like you need to improve in how you approach these kind of discussions, because you're getting nowhere in convincing me when you come across as not even understanding my argument.

If your goal is different, maybe to just socially stigmatize people opposed to worlds you prefer, well I guess you're doing fine with that, but you do see how that's problematic at creating consensus, right? And how, the sane reaction is for me to faux-politely call you a shill or a clown. I don't think this is actually your goal (which is why I deleted my previous reply, it was unnecessarily mean unless this is your goal), I just don't think you've really built up your debate toolbox yet.

Read what I wrote:

> "Everyone is welcome here" is now a callsign for "registered Democrat".

Maybe it's suspicious that this phrase is able to distinguish Republicans from Democrats, but the point isn't the virtue of the parties, it's that it's one of the most common phrases people choose to use to distinguish themselves as Democrats. If you don't want one teacher walking around with a MAGA hat, but don't have the political power to just ban them from schools, you have to make a treaty like, "we'll ban rainbow capes and MAGA hats."

Maybe I'm too tired to write clearly. I meant, the reason parents have ownership over their children (at least in America) is primarily for ideological indoctrination.

It is in fact the best outcome, because education is just a ranking game, and it's not like you will end up ranked lower in your school. Also, since the point of education is to help people learn, your calmer presence and pro-learning attitude may rub off on the worst students, and their chance of ending up jobless and in prison will go down!

The short answer is people stopped caring about metrics measuring learning, and instead how easy they were to game to support their politics, or make them look like a better teacher or superintendent.

And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.

It is pretty hard for one parent to change things for the better, even if just for their child in one classroom. The administration and teachers have so many other things to deal with. It's much harder to change the entire school culture. You can volunteer, and you should!, but you still won't make as large an impact on your child's education as you would hope. In some ways, this is good, because there are lots of crazy parents out there who you don't want making impacts on your child's education, but it's also bad if you're not that crazy parent.

Isn't this exactly what society is built on though? Mutually beneficial interactions borne of choice, not compulsion? And isn't it the sane, rational thing to do to oppose people who compel you to join their community?

> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?

It's much closer to the real world though, isn't it? Your child is likely going to live most of their life in similar communities to them, not a wide cross section of the public.

I don't want the separatism, but I also want the ability to give my kids a decent education. There ought to be some way to determine which is which. Do you have any ideas?

A common justification for group projects was, "you have to learn how to work with people, even people who will not work." Yeah no, that's not the case. People get filtered through a much finer sieve when they're older.

We could all learn from Hengshui.

(This is kind of a joke, because while the Hengshui school system is much more meritocratic, including in teacher salaries, it's also infamous for a stressful school environment. It's not really a joke though. While there are problems with the long hours, it's definitely better than whatever America has going on.)

> States are saying that schools have to post the 10 commandments

Yeah that definitely seems against the First Amendment (and Texas' equivalent in their Bill of Rights). I feel like the world makes more sense if you read the First Amendment as a treaty between the Christian sects that were executing one another in the colonies for heresy, rather than y'know what it literally says.

> when teachers put up a poster about “everyone is welcomed here” showing kids of different colors it’s “too woke”.

Keep gang signs out of the classroom. In places where university rivalries are high, teachers are also asked to keep ensignia off their doors. It's the same here. "Everyone is welcomed here" (without a cross) is now a callsign for "registered Democrat". Imagine if a teacher put a big "don't trample on me" sign with a snake... I feel like that would send a message other than, "be respectful in class."

Why? How does this benefit the students, except in understanding allusions in books and poetry? Or is that the goal, in which case, sure, but I think Eastern mythologies should be included too.

There is, but lowering standards is a cheap trick to get a bonus/promotion.

My father has a PhD in physics and couldn't really teach me math past seventh grade. On the other hand, my father has a PhD in physics and ran out of math to teach me around seventh grade.

I think quality over quantity matters. There was no one at my academic level at the public school, but two lived at my house. If you're worried about social skills, why do you expect an open admissions school to be able to train your children better than a more curated social group? You could say, "I don't trust parents to actually give their children experiences that would be beneficial, because maybe the parents are bigots or something," which like, sure is true. Lots of parents are like that. But they already pretty much have free reign to put their child in the local Bible Bootcamp instead of the public high school, so you're not really preventing this bad thing from happening, but you are preventing a lot of parents who would give their children a better experience than the local vaudeville show.

Yeah, I routinely took classes with students 3–8 years older than me before going to college. "Age peers" are an illusion. However:

1. I mostly only cared about school w.r.t learning. For most kids, school is primarily a place to socialize.

2. If it took you two years to achieve the same level as what took someone else ten years (going with the 2nd vs. 10th grade example from a few comments up), I don't think you're going to get an appropriate pacing by just moving into the same class as them...

I think a solution to fix this moral hazard is to take children away from their parents when the subsidies become too much. But for lots of reasons, society really doesn't want that to happen.

Parents as a group have lobbied to pretty much own their children. It's hard to justify that ownership if the state is constantly intervening for basic things like healthcare, food, and education.

I disagree with this ownership, as it's pretty bad or at least not as good as what the children could have. Think about how few children received an education before the state took ownership. This doesn't mean I don't understand why it is the way it is. A large part of it in America is for religious reasons: "don't teach my children your Satanic ways." But even without religion, most people have ideas about how their children should grow up and don't trust other people to raise them better than themselves. Even if someone is a shitty parent and recognizes it, they still might prefer more control over less control because they care more about being a parent than their children.

I think, moving back to the topic of the state providing childcare, there's also two more reasons this can be bad. Too often, child support payments end up being misused to fund the parent's lifestyle and leaving the children without basic necessities. You can instead just give the children food/clothing/shelter directly, but you kind of have to provide the bigger, stronger adults in their lives the same things. This creates a perverse incentive for neglectful people to have children. They don't care about the children, just the ticket to free food/housing. Second, people who grow up poor have a lot of disadvantages in their future. Do we want to be creating a financial incentive so that a greater fraction of our population grow up disadvantaged? If the state is not cool with eugenics or taking away children from poor people, then poorer people who would otherwise choose not to have children will suddenly find it more financially feasible. Because the tax dollars came from a richer couple, maybe that richer couple now do not feel they can maintain their lifestyle with another child. Of course, you probably end up with more total children, but the balance has shifted and more people in your society will end up in the lower classes.

My goal wasn't to have a discussion, it was to shut down the propagation of lies. This is one of those memetic viruses that people keep passing around, that most people passing around don't even bother to think about, and it has some pretty negative consequences, such as aiding in the elimination of American gifted programs.

Huh? You asked, "why is there broad consensus today that intelligence is ill-defined?" That's what I answered. Did you mean to ask a different question, "why is there broad consensus among people who research intelligence that it is ill-defined?" Which kinds of people are you talking about? The information theorists? The machine learning researchers? The linguists? The psychologists?

The information theorists generally agree it has a precise definition, though they may choose different ones. The machine learning researchers typically only know how to run empirical experiments, but a small group of them do theory, and they generally agree intelligence is low Kolmogorov complexity. The linguists generally agree it cannot be defined, in the nihilistic sense, but if you posit a bunch of brains, then words have meaning by being signals between brains and intelligence is moving the words closer to the information bottleneck. I don't know what the psychologists say on the matter, though I wonder if they have the mathematical tools to even say things precisely.

What you need for conflict resolution is usually a willingness to try to resolve the conflict. In rare situations, where communication and time is limited, you can actually run into the issue where you have to be smart enough to figure out what the other person wants (and see if you can come up with a mutually beneficial offer), but often in real life you can just spend more time thinking and ask them what they want.

1. Religious mysticism. The murkier people are on concepts like thinking, consciousness, and intelligence, the easier it is to claim they include some metaphysical aspect. Since you cannot actually pin down the metaphysical aspect, they must claim it is because you cannot pin down the physical aspect.

2. People do not like feeling less intelligent than other people, so they try to make the comparator ill-defined.

True. I expect most conflicts come from people preferring not to think, and I also expect most conflicts escalate from people preferring not to think. Those are separate statements, and I only said the former.

> This seems to imply that intelligence only exists in deliberate, conscious thought. Do you think that's true?

Eh, I don't think it implies that, and I also don't think that is true.

I literally gave you the criterion. You can measure, "I have this model that is supposed to compress data. I have this data. Does it compress the data into fewer bits than other models? Than humans?"

Or, "I have this game and this model. Does the model win the game more often than other models or humans?"

Or, "I have this model that takes in states in an environment and outputs actions. I have this environment. Does the actions it outputs have a higher discounted future entropy than other models or humans?"

> I don't appreciate your expletives in your original unedited post, by the way, but the fact that you lost your temper is once again proof of something.

It was the first edit where I added them, since I could not reply to your post, and I removed them once I could reply. Yes, I lost my temper. You did too (and first)... you're just less honest and put up a facade of politeness.

> And the world will have to make do without "training" on your secret "methods to measure intelligence", somehow.

Is the goal here to provoke me enough to get what you want? lol. Maximally adversarial.

I think Solomonoff beat me by about 70 years, and Wissner-Gross & Freer by about 10 years. Even if I had something novel to publish in this area, I think I would rather do something like solve ARC-AGI and make a lot of money.

Babbling in the mathematics sense: no information transmitted.

I agree with you in the linguistic sense on the word 'intelligence'. Everyone has their own colloquial meaning. That doesn't make their definitions correct. If someone says, "exponential growth," just to mean fast growth, they're wrong (according to me). It's impossible to have universally agreed upon definitions, but we can at least try to standardize some of them. If you only care about intelligence in regards to a specific niche, add adjectives not definitions.

IQ tests measure 'intelligence' in the general, correct sense of the word. Not perfectly, but they're pretty good. If you care about a specific task, you can finetune on that task. While a generally intelligent agent will do better than a less intelligent agent at pretty much all tasks, it can still be defeated by test-time compute.