>I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.
I'm not recommending we end the use of cadavers -- and this is a discussion site, not a medical school!
351 karma · joined February 15, 2018
I'm not recommending we end the use of cadavers -- and this is a discussion site, not a medical school!
For those of us who don't have to, I recommend:
On the contrary, it is technology and progress that are viewed with scepticism -- watch almost any recent sci-fi movie.
Exceptions I've noted are joggers with hunched shoulders, splayed feet, leaping too high off the ground, and so on. By no means uncommon.
>Does this idea-retraining work as well as the gym?
Not a gym user but I gained a cm in height within a week of encountering the Alexander Technique (AT). My guess is that the best gym users have good posture too, if only for safety's sake.
It's not so much about fitness and muscular bulk but about whether you are receptive to the proprioceptive feedback from those muscles and joints. AT has a unique way of pointing you towards these sensations but it relies on personal contact with a teacher.
(Rather as in Upton Sinclair's famous quote: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!')
There are two things wrong about this I think. Firstly, it confuses activity with purpose. Secondly, unscheduled time is valuable not only for itself but for extra capacity when something important pops up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY
So the real prize is seeing one's work used by others in their work.
The former can be crammed and quickly forgotten. Not knowledge. The latter skill isn't knowledge of the relevant field.
In the less rigorous, more arty fields (shall we say) the trick is usually to flatter the examiners by firing their own opinions back at them in original ways. This can be highly skillful and requires awareness of the academic milieu. But not knowledge of the relevant field.
What counts is depth, and depth depends on semantic connections, including connections to other fields. These are all differentiated and can't be meaningfully added to yield a number, as if we were counting eggs or measuring a distance.
Yep. It matters less apparently if millions of people wander around feeling suicidal as long as they don't actually commit suicide. For what? So we can pick candidates for the professions more efficiently.
Corporal punishment, you mean. Yes. However we've regressed in at least one way: many toddlers are now in daycare for 30+ hours per week.
>given that parenting resources exist, it's better to have and use scientifically tested ones than ones that replicate the prejudices of the loudest voices
Well, my original comment was more about how we use resources. But it seems doubtful whether we can scientifically test for how good such resources are, except in terms of narrow criteria like safety. We can't yet look into children's imaginations and measure how fired up they are; we can only try to find out what our children enjoy and help them to do more of it.
Consider the Harry Potter books. They may have done more for literacy than everything else combined since they arrived. Yet the first manuscript was rejected by many publishers, including some who no doubt had access to purportedly scientific advice.
Far better to look at what other families are doing, reading and playing with. And to read reviews online.
Nah, just intention. For example, teaching children arithmetic with great moral seriousness, as we do, doesn't produce great arithmeticians. It merely encourages people to become math teachers.
>The idea that parenting isn't a field which can be, and is, productively studied
Trouble is that most of the knowledge is inexplicit and that family life is private. So trying to uncover and understand what's really going on is hard. If you try to study families empirically then you're (a) interfering with their normal activities, and (b) avoiding the fact that morality is independent of outcome. However, from the article, 'coach' suggests people are already giving advice. They think they know the answers.
Yes. I think that, as things stand, good parenting is largely a matter of being lucky enough to have oneself received good parenting, i.e. it's mainly a matter of tradition. This doesn't imply that one shouldn't attempt improvements here and there, some guided by science. My beef is principally with the idea that there's a scientific method to produce better people. Conceiving of people as products rather than as ends-in-themselves.
This isn't a trivial point. If you read stories with the intention of fostering skill development you will neither inculcate skills nor get the most out of those stories.
>parenting coach
Ha. The idea that there exist professional parents who explictly know what they are doing (with footnotes and sources) is a major conceit in our present culture.
Sure. But of course they made arithmetic easier than it was before ('tallying' I think, i.e. IIIIIII....)
It's interesting how notation and language, which arise to foster communication between different people, become the very things that make it possible for a lone individual to think. This is why I guess that a single artificial person (AI) couldn't be created in isolation.