If by "intelligent" we mean the conventional thing -- learns new things easily, capable of reasoning through complex tasks, would do well in med school/law school/phd programs/finance/engineering, picks up creative disciplines quickly, etc -- then are we sure it's not exactly the other way around?

People become invested in cults and conspiracies for emotional reasons, not rational reasons, and conventionally intelligent people are extraordinarily good at post hoc rationalization. More importantly, they're often better at mitigating or managing some of the downsides (eg, maintaining good-enough status in a cult, avoiding talking about the conspiracy in certain circumstances, etc.).

At least, this has been my experience with some extended family who fell into a cult: the ones I could consider "smartest" were stuck in the cult the longest, because they could rationalize their way into an answer for everything.

I was working on a personal project yesterday to answer some questions I had about how liquidity risk works for money market mutual funds, and to forecast/nowcast liquidity risk and NAV risk for a bunch of funds.

Mind you: I don't know the first thing about anything financial. I was just curious.

chatgpt gave me a bunch of sources of data that I wanted, translating my lay description of things I wanted to know into financial terms of art. I could then look up legal definitions and formulas for those terms to make sure they were what I thought they were. chatgpt also told me which SEC forms those things are disclosed on, what data brokers I could use for other data, etc.

between chatgpt and copilot I saved at least an hour on the job of pulling down historical data from EDGAR for a bunch of funds and getting the stats I wanted (I didn't know EDGAR existed until yesterday, and the xml/html/txt formats are kind of annoying... like, fine, but a bit of a pita so I'm glad I had help because ughhh is that kind of code boring and damn are LLMs good few-shot inductive parser generators!). Also wrote some nice chart.js code for me and helped with automatically collecting, searching, and extracting some key stats and terms from prospectuses. I didn't know about chart.js until yesterday.

All of this would've been possible without assistants, and required a lot of "executive function" on my part to bring together, but it seriously saved me at least a couple hours of implementation work and up to a day on research and learning terminology and regulatory stuff. Again, verification of those things is way easier when you know what words to look up definitions for. And chatgpt did make mistakes/hallucinate.

I don't find much use in my professional life, where the code I'm writing is apparently too domain-specific for copilot to be helpful and the mathematics is too complex for chatgpt to help with. Maybe in a few years. We'll see.

My parental rights end where the rest of the class's fair allocation of the teacher's instructional focus begins.

But teacher and admin time isn't free. People with high political media engagement have lost their damn minds and are now offended about everything. Including thousand year old statues, apparently.

No one gives a shit if your pull your kid out of a class, but everyone -- including LOTS of clued-in conservatives -- are sick of teachers/admins/boards spending too much time holding the hands of parents who spend too much time reading political news and not enough time working on their emotional regulation skills.

If you want to control what your kid sees, YOU need to do more work. If you want more information, YOU need to review your kid's materials. If you want access to more than every other parent is provided, then YOU need to do the work of getting that material and deciding what your kid will see. It's called parenting.

If you want to curate your kid's educational experience, then put in the fucking work and stop demanding use of my tax dollars and my kid's instructional time to satiate your neuroses.

(Also: your innocent little middle school angel is definitely talking about boobies and balls recess.... because, y'know, they're middle schoolers and that is what middle schoolers do. But we'll pretend they don't as long as you stop stealing time and money from us.)

> don't get me started on the hap hazard parental controls for the internet

You can buy all sorts of software, but no amount of law or regulation is going to solve the problem of the internet being the internet.

Some publisher's course materials may fit your criticism. Lots of expensive garbage in K12.

The material I reviewed was quite the opposite. Instead of memorizing one way of performing an operation, you learn many different ones, discuss why one might be better than the other in certain contexts, and even think through why two different algorithms implement the same operation. The students I worked with/observed emerged from high school with a level of mathematical maturity that most students don't achieve until well after their university Calculus sequence, if ever.

Two other thoughts:

1. Everything you just described also describes how most schools implemented mathematics education prior to common core. If this is how someone taught with common core, it's almost 100% certain that this is also how they taught before common core, and that this is how they would teach mathematics regardless of what standards they were following. What you are describing is a bad mathematics educator, which is a serious problem in the USA but is orthogonal to choice of standards.

2. Most importantly, I never got even an articulation at this level of detail. People were angry because pundits told them to be angry. There were no articulated reasons. Just, "CC = bad".

That said, I can teach an entire course on statistics without mentioning penis size. Even a single use of this example has "middle school boy turned creepy old man" energy. But I imagine it'd be difficult to make it through a semester of a Classics/Renaissance-focused art course without covering at least one or two of David, The Creation of Adam, and Birth of Venus. Each is a master piece of an era and medium...

It may also be irrelevant; I'm more interested in their forward-looking forecasts than their current revenue sources.

The labs were about these things (and cards), and therefore gambling. We had to do purely abstract labs instead. The issue is that probability is hard to teach even with visceral physical examples of sampling from distributions.

In our district, we had to put AP CS on hold because apparently RNGs are too close to gambling and gambling is sinful. You can't even get through the Java standard library without angering the religious right these days.

They threw a huge fit about Common Core Math as well (as a working mathematician -- and one with some amount of passing experience in teaching mathematics at that -- I could never get those parents to articulate what the actual problem was... AFAICT some TV pundit told them to be angry about math).

I wonder if these parents realize that about half of the middle schoolers in Florida not only have seen a penis, but have one of their very own!

BTW, the possibility that this was about inter-personal feuds rather than David just strengthens the point. Giving every parent potential veto power over anything that happens in school is a good way of making sure that nothing will happen in school.

Some teacher makes a valid criticism of your child's classmate during a parent-teacher conference, the parent takes it personally, the spat escalates, the course is derailed. By the time you find out WTF is even happening, your kid is already half a grade level behind in every subject. Rinse and repeat the next school year.

Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.

> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.

I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.

The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.

The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.

I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.

I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...

You are employing an old and tired strategy: latching onto any lewd expression and then dismissing the rest of the work whole cloth as purely pornographic. This is exactly the same strategy as was used in e.g. the Howl obscenity trial [1].

Anyways, I reject the premise. These books aren't attacked because they contain pornographic scenes. These books are attacked because of the people, identities, and viewpoints they represent and affirm. It's about bigotry, not the kids. As evidenced by the fact that these comments even crop up on articles such as this one, where the article isn't even about school libraries [2].

Sex and sexuality are deeply important parts of being human and it's possible to have uncensored discussion of this part of humanity without reaching for Hustler or hentai. I'm saddened that there are apparently people who aren't able to distinguish between uncensored discussion and straight up porn. Who cannot read or think or talk about sex without their brains pulling up hentai and pin-up girl style pornography. What an impoverished experience of humanity these people must have. No wonder they are so angry all the time.

[1] https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Howl_Obscenity_T...

[2] See https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/LibraryDevelopment/FY22WebP... and https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/LibraryDevelopment/FY22WebP...; $0.00 of the funds discussed in this article go to school libraries.

Or, in the case of this article, about public, non-school libraries.

(I guess an elementary school kid or middle school kid could order a book via the inter-library loan system, but that's sort of a stupid caveat since typing pornhub.com into a smartphone or desktop browser is several orders of magnitude easier than knowing about and learning how to use the ILL system.)

>> I've read that book and it's not aimed at children. No sane educator or library person would offer that to a young child.

> That's the problem:

The first article is about 2 high schools.

The second article is about a high school.

The third article is about a high school.

The fourth article is about a high school.

The fifth article is also about a... wait for it!... a high school.

High schools are not primary schools and high schoolers are not young children.

(Also: the whole conversation is hilariously non-unique to libraries. 90% of male teens watch porn, and that's probably an under-estimate given that porn is embarrassing/stigmatizing... I promise you there are exactly zero high schoolers in this entire country who have access to this book in their school library who do not also have infinitely easier access to near-infinite amounts of actual porn.)

Predominantly.

> Seems like either they are serving their constituents, or they'll be voted out next time?

It satisfies an immediate vengeance, but is very "cut off my nose to spite my face" for rural Missourians. In 10 years when the "drag queens in libraries" moral panic is long forgotten, these communities will lament the loss of their libraries.

Your question is deep, and gets to the heart of why we even bother electing representatives in the first place.

If reps are only there to channel the emotional state of their constituents, then what's the point of having representative democracy? If representation does not come with some expectation of leadership, then representation is a poor proxy for public will with no upside. If elected officials have no moral responsibility or practical expectation to lead -- and are just reactionary automata -- then get rid of the politicians and do everything via the ballot box.

You can see where aid goes here: https://www.sos.mo.gov/library/development/stateaid/default

And then you can look up or estimate the total spend for each of those community's libraries.

Likely this means approximately nothing for most suburban, urban, and exurban/college town/resort town/etc. library systems. Those communities can easily cover the difference, and their libraries have large enough budgets that a 20K hit is barely felt. Might lose some overtime or a very part-time librarian, or reduce some fringe services, or most likely just re-appropriate a rounding error's worth of local funds to make up the difference.

Very well might mean a death sentence or significant service degradation for many of the state's rural libraries.