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No Way to Grow Up

nytimes.com

711–714 of 714 posts

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#711
post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because something has increased recently doesn’t mean there is an inbuilt human tendency for it. Sure, but that wasn't my point. I was just showing the flaw in logic of the two quotes given. My original claim was not that we definitely quantify when we can, but that the reasonings given do not support your claim.

Sure but the reasonings don’t support the opposing claim, and that’s all that matters for this purpose. I don’t need to prove that we don’t have a built in tendency, only, that there is no proof that we do.

It's a matter of framing. We have different standards for what the null hypothesis should be. My perspective is to assume human behavior as a relatively broad constant until proven otherwise.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree with you more. Teachers and other school workers were not even mentioned in this article.

Not mentioned in the article - but definitely already being prioritized for 2 years based on most policy decisions.

I see where you're coming from, but, as a first grade teacher, I can say that remote learning doesn't prioritize teachers' needs either. Rather, it reflects the minimal investment a school or district could possibly make. For these past two years, we could have invested in PPE, filtration, and reducing class sizes. We could have prioritized approving vaccines for children. Instead, we're now expecting adults and children to sacrifice their safety in order to go to schools that are roughly the same as they were in 2019.

Re: No Way to Grow Up

#714
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.

Humans breed like any other animal, not sure why people take offense to pointing out biological processes. Mates get selected based on environmental factors and fitness, and increasingly, social status. In the future, rich girls still won’t marry poor boys.

Humans are by an OOM or more the most complex creatures to arise from raw natural selection; about us we have constructed a fractal diversity of society and culture.

Humans are animals, yes, but they have long transcended the ordinary pressures of environment and selection. In a stupor, trying to comprehend our exceptionalism, we intuitively and nonsensically describe much human behavior as "unnatural."

Your crude reduction of human reproductive choice denies myriad past choices made in free will, subsuming both the terror of power and the rare true love to biochemical animism. Go far enough down this path and you will assign to animal spirits the abstract free will you deny, accidentally recreating primitive religion & symbolic thought, thus elaborately disproving yourself.

We're obviously animals. That's a place to start, but not an insight. Contending otherwise is insight to the soul and pain of the speaker, not their society.

The end, the ur-insight: a universal theory which succinctly predicts homosexuality, Dennis Kuchinich's marriage, the Ptolemaic family tree, the fate of the Sabine women, and Kate Upton's romance.

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