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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

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Re: No Way to Grow Up

#91

Post by zepto »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #77
_jal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…

It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified. (The unquantified is often partially quantifiable, but that would take effort , and the statistics aren't currently on the dashboard…) See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

> It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified.

Are you sure that isn’t just a modern trend now that we are able to quantify so much stuff?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#92

Post by 29800795 »

xwdv wrote: post #39
monkeybutton wrote: post #14

So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be pa…

It is obvious what will happen. The education system will crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences, presumably with other elite children. This will allow some ch…

Your first paragraph is the set-up to the novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#93

Post by xboxnolifes »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #45
paxys wrote: post #34

When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident. Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply a…

> When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident. From the earthquake, or from the disruption? It's an important distinction in the COVID case. Are kids being traumatized by having to attend school via Zoom, or are they being traumatized by living through a global pandemic?

I don't think the distinction is important in any scenario. It's always the disruption.

Put another way: if an earthquake happens, but nobody notices except the Richter scale, does it impact anyone? Of course it's not the pandemic term itself, it's the first-, second-, third-order effects of covid and the term pandemic. Zoom school, masks, vaccines, media coverage, political shifts, fights, worrying about family members getting sick (possibly dying), seeing your friends less, fewer/smaller gatherings, longer periods of isolation, etc.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#94

Post by cm2187 »

animal_spirits wrote: post #5

> For the past two years, Americans have accepted more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults. At first we didn't know how much harm the virus would cause to children. But now that we see it is much less dangerous for them we shouldn't be preventing them from learning because we are afraid of getting sick. The children are the future, and in order to secure a positive growth in society it is our obligat…

Chinese deaths stats by age were available from March 2020. It is just the media decided to ignore them.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#95

Post by WalterBright »

paxys wrote: post #34

When I was a kid there was a big earthquake where I lived and my life was disrupted for a few weeks. Many decades later I still have latent trauma from that incident. Children involved in situations like accidents, wars, disasters and abuse need years and sometimes lifelong therapy to deal with it. We are kidding ourselves if we think that the long list of behavioral changes we are starting to see in kids is simply a…

No doubt some are long term traumatized by this. But a brief look at history shows that such things happening during childhood are normal, not exceptional. If most people need therapy to get back to normal, the human race would have died out.

In my grandparents' generation, it was normal for a family to lose a third of their children before adulthood.

The US has had devastating epidemics before, like the 1918 flu, and the polio epidemics.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#97

Post by ajmurmann »

wayoutthere wrote: post #35
superfrank wrote: post #18

I'm not sure I like this article. They seems to overstate what the sources they link to claim. For example the article says > Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. But when you go to the study they link, it says > Although school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission, a study of 12 million adults in the UK found no diffe…

This is an attempt at manufacturing consensus by making it seem like these arguments are coming “from the adults in the room” because it’s in the NYTimes. They’re so good at gaslighting their readers (and I say this coming from the left of the NYT, not the right). You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed.

"You’ll start to see liberal politicians using these same talking points in the coming weeks, guaranteed." This article's position seems to be more in line with the Republican's general stance on the pandemic. So isn't it a good thing of the left can revise its position?

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#98

Post by mhb »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #77
_jal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be a weird blind-spot when discussing COVID outcomes - anything short of death appears to be discounted or ignored. So hospital issues, long COVID, etc. just don't exist, so catching it either didn't matter or you're dead. On a planet where that was true, that sort of reasoning would make sense. (As it does if you're trying to encourage other people to ignore risks.) What I don't understand is why so…

It's the human tendency to optimise the quantifiable and ignore the unquantified. (The unquantified is often partially quantifiable, but that would take effort , and the statistics aren't currently on the dashboard…) See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Fine. What also isn't on the dashboard is the lost QALYs which is pretty much the point of TFA.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#99

Post by yupper32 »

Honest question: At what point do we give up?

I'm in the Bay Area and it'll be coming up on 2 years soon of what basically amounts to a social shut down.

-- Many social groups are just not getting together anymore, including most of mine.

-- Concerts, sporting events, parties of most sizes, crowded bars/clubs just seem off the table at this point.

-- Masks for the majority of it, which makes gym going and working out, especially cardio, uncomfortable enough to not bother.

-- It's been so long that I've now never met, in person, anyone on my team at work.

Like yeah, technically we're not shut down. Technically you can do most things with masks/vaxxes. But for a lot of us things are still essentially shut down. Especially the social aspects.

At what point can we give up? If at 4 years in with Variant #3242, are we still going to be doing what we're doing now? There's zero sign that this thing is going to stop any time soon.

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