BF2S Forums Red Cross takes on virtual war crimes

terrible video

RTHKI wrote:

http://nypost.com/2013/10/08/us-adults-are-dumber-than-the-average-human/

I always love articles like this where the solution is to simply spend more money. We're always a few billion dollars away from solving some grand problem, if only we'd make the investment...

We've always had a love/hate relationship with schools and education in this country. We always pay lip service to wanting to improve the lot of our children, we want them to be high achievers etc. but our culture teaches kids the opposite. Everything has to be practical, everything has to have some use. How many times did you hear a classmate in school ask a teacher 'why do I need to learn this? when will I ever use it in my career/job?'. How many times has a parent said the same thing about their child's homework? We have a culture that does not learn for the sake of learning but instead practices escapism as if it were our true calling. This is why we have athletes and movie stars and musical artists making tens of millions of dollars a year.

It doesn't matter if we pay our teachers $50,000 or $500,000 a year because it's not the teachers that are really the problem. Sure, there are great teachers and shitty teachers, but the average teacher is competent at the least. No, the problem is the students, very few of whom put any effort at all into their studies beyond the bare minimum to get by, and again, very few that actually bother to learn anything not taught in the classroom. Ever been the smartest kid in a classroom? I have. Know what I did in my free time? I read. Know what the kid who didn't pay attention and constantly caused the rest of the class to slow down their learning pace did in their free time? They watched tv or played video games or bullshitted on the phone with their friends for hours every night.

Finally, what we've seen over the previous decade is treatment of schools as national investments. They treat them like businesses: put x money and time in, get y result out. They keep pouring more money in, and school years keep getting longer and longer, and are kids getting any smarter? No, they're getting dumber. They're doing worse on tests. Why? Because they're burning the kids out and the culture has gotten even more distracted rather than intellectual. Look at cable television. History Channel used to show documentaries on the Civil War and other useful stuff. Now it has Ice Road Truckers. TLC used to show open heart surgery, now it shows Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. I'm not indicting America today, I'm indicting American culture from its birth, because these aren't symptoms of a new decline, America has always been this stupid, cable television just became more democratized recently and the stupid outnumber the smart by a very, very wide margin.

All the money in the world won't make Americans any smarter until America has a very real, sustained, culture change. Remember that the next time someone says that the solution to our problems is spending more money. It's not. It hardly ever is.

Spark wrote:

Jay wrote:

RTHKI wrote:

http://nypost.com/2013/10/08/us-adults-are-dumber-than-the-average-human/

I always love articles like this where the solution is to simply spend more money. We're always a few billion dollars away from solving some grand problem, if only we'd make the investment...

We've always had a love/hate relationship with schools and education in this country. We always pay lip service to wanting to improve the lot of our children, we want them to be high achievers etc. but our culture teaches kids the opposite. Everything has to be practical, everything has to have some use. How many times did you hear a classmate in school ask a teacher 'why do I need to learn this? when will I ever use it in my career/job?'. How many times has a parent said the same thing about their child's homework? We have a culture that does not learn for the sake of learning but instead practices escapism as if it were our true calling. This is why we have athletes and movie stars and musical artists making tens of millions of dollars a year.

It doesn't matter if we pay our teachers $50,000 or $500,000 a year because it's not the teachers that are really the problem. Sure, there are great teachers and shitty teachers, but the average teacher is competent at the least. No, the problem is the students, very few of whom put any effort at all into their studies beyond the bare minimum to get by, and again, very few that actually bother to learn anything not taught in the classroom. Ever been the smartest kid in a classroom? I have. Know what I did in my free time? I read. Know what the kid who didn't pay attention and constantly caused the rest of the class to slow down their learning pace did in their free time? They watched tv or played video games or bullshitted on the phone with their friends for hours every night.

Finally, what we've seen over the previous decade is treatment of schools as national investments. They treat them like businesses: put x money and time in, get y result out. They keep pouring more money in, and school years keep getting longer and longer, and are kids getting any smarter? No, they're getting dumber. They're doing worse on tests. Why? Because they're burning the kids out and the culture has gotten even more distracted rather than intellectual. Look at cable television. History Channel used to show documentaries on the Civil War and other useful stuff. Now it has Ice Road Truckers. TLC used to show open heart surgery, now it shows Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. I'm not indicting America today, I'm indicting American culture from its birth, because these aren't symptoms of a new decline, America has always been this stupid, cable television just became more democratized recently and the stupid outnumber the smart by a very, very wide margin.

All the money in the world won't make Americans any smarter until America has a very real, sustained, culture change. Remember that the next time someone says that the solution to our problems is spending more money. It's not. It hardly ever is.

for some reason this doesn't read like a jay post at all

Why not?

I'd love to see those exam results broken down by demographic. I'd bet money that there is a residual effect based on where the Americans ancestors hailed from. My bet would be that those Americans of Scots-Irish, English, Spanish, Italian and black heritages would be on the lower end, just like they ranked lower on the world survey...

Stubbee wrote:

don't forget the school taxes go your school. So schools in nice neighborhoods are better funded. White people live in better neighborhoods on average. Skews the results.

In my neck of the woods, the school taxes are pooled and dispersed per student capita.

There's very little disparity in school funding on Long Island between towns. There is, however, quite a lot of disparity in schools because of the culture of the towns they are located in. Long Island is very... neighborhoody for lack of a better word. You have Jewish majorities here, Italian majorities there, black majorities over there, hispanics over there, German/Irish/WASPS over there etc. Basically all of the public school districts you want to send your kids to are located in the German/Irish/WASPy and Jewish majority towns. Yes, the parents in those towns tend to have more money, but the spending per pupil is roughly equivalent. They're the ones with the 99% graduation rates and the 90% college acceptance rates. It's a cultural thing.

I just downloaded the sample questions from the test they referenced and it's stuff a fifth grader should know

Jay wrote:

Everything has to be practical, everything has to have some use.

Immediately practical and ultimately practical are a little different.

Ever been the smartest kid in a classroom? I have. Know what I did in my free time? I read. Know what the kid who didn't pay attention and constantly caused the rest of the class to slow down their learning pace did in their free time? They watched tv or played video games or bullshitted on the phone with their friends for hours every night.

Thats because you were too poor to have a videogame.

Finally, what we've seen over the previous decade is treatment of schools as national investments. They treat them like businesses: put x money and time in, get y result out. They keep pouring more money in, and school years keep getting longer and longer, and are kids getting any smarter? No, they're getting dumber. They're doing worse on tests. Why? Because they're burning the kids out and the culture has gotten even more distracted rather than intellectual. Look at cable television. History Channel used to show documentaries on the Civil War and other useful stuff. Now it has Ice Road Truckers. TLC used to show open heart surgery, now it shows Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. I'm not indicting America today, I'm indicting American culture from its birth, because these aren't symptoms of a new decline, America has always been this stupid, cable television just became more democratized recently and the stupid outnumber the smart by a very, very wide margin.

I think most nations, even America were better and are slipping rapidly backwards.
'Idiocracy' Is one of the few films which actually changed my thinking. I used to think it was OK for people to do whatever they wanted, spend their schooling at the back of the class making fart noises, join the infantry, waste their lives drinking and racing quad-bikes, the whole libertarian dream etc.
Now I don't, its socially damaging and brings us all down. Authoritarianism isn't actully so bad.

I'm not sure whether Murdoch has some agenda, or if he just wants to make the cheapest crap and sell it at the highest price, but there seem to be two steady threads running through Fox programming now.

- Its OK to be an illeducated loser and waste your life on a shitty dead end job - if you can express your personality with banter, facial hair, piercings and tattoos - and who knows, one day TV might want to make a TV program about you, you being awesome as you sort through wriggling invertabrates and slime while being hosed with freezing saltwater/fix up old cars in a ghetto workshop/wrestle animals in mud/drive some sort of machine to a background of generic guitar riffs. You! TV! You! On TV!

- Its OK to be a bottom-feeding shyster who rips people off - doesn't matter if its old people, stupid people, dead people, poor people or desparate people you're ripping off - just get dat green

All the money in the world won't make Americans any smarter until America has a very real, sustained, culture change. Remember that the next time someone says that the solution to our problems is spending more money. It's not. It hardly ever is.

Keeps people distracted and enough money flowing around that no-one notices whats been quietly siphoned off.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2013-10-10 03:47:53)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Jay wrote:

Everything has to be practical, everything has to have some use.

Immediately practical and ultimately practical are a little different.

Ever been the smartest kid in a classroom? I have. Know what I did in my free time? I read. Know what the kid who didn't pay attention and constantly caused the rest of the class to slow down their learning pace did in their free time? They watched tv or played video games or bullshitted on the phone with their friends for hours every night.

Thats because you were too poor to have a videogame.

Finally, what we've seen over the previous decade is treatment of schools as national investments. They treat them like businesses: put x money and time in, get y result out. They keep pouring more money in, and school years keep getting longer and longer, and are kids getting any smarter? No, they're getting dumber. They're doing worse on tests. Why? Because they're burning the kids out and the culture has gotten even more distracted rather than intellectual. Look at cable television. History Channel used to show documentaries on the Civil War and other useful stuff. Now it has Ice Road Truckers. TLC used to show open heart surgery, now it shows Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. I'm not indicting America today, I'm indicting American culture from its birth, because these aren't symptoms of a new decline, America has always been this stupid, cable television just became more democratized recently and the stupid outnumber the smart by a very, very wide margin.

I think most nations, even America were better and are slipping rapidly backwards.
'Idiocracy' Is one of the few films which actually changed my thinking. I used to think it was OK for people to do whatever they wanted, spend their schooling at the back of the class making fart noises, join the infantry, waste their lives drinking and racing quad-bikes, the whole libertarian dream etc.
Now I don't, its socially damaging and brings us all down. Authoritarianism isn't actully so bad.

I'm not sure whether Murdoch has some agenda, or if he just wants to make the cheapest crap and sell it at the highest price, but there seem to be two steady threads running through Fox programming now.

- Its OK to be an illeducated loser and waste your life on a shitty dead end job - if you can express your personality with banter, facial hair, piercings and tattoos - and who knows, one day TV might want to make a TV program about you, you being awesome as you sort through wriggling invertabrates and slime while being hosed with freezing saltwater/fix up old cars in a ghetto workshop/wrestle animals in mud/drive some sort of machine to a background of generic guitar riffs. You! TV! You! On TV!

- Its OK to be a bottom-feeding shyster who rips people off - doesn't matter if its old people, stupid people, dead people, poor people or desparate people you're ripping off - just get dat green

All the money in the world won't make Americans any smarter until America has a very real, sustained, culture change. Remember that the next time someone says that the solution to our problems is spending more money. It's not. It hardly ever is.

Keeps people distracted and enough money flowing around that no-one notices whats been quietly siphoned off.

I think people in general are competent enough to run their lives effectively,  much more effectively than some remote authoritarian with imperfect knowledge and one size fits all solutions. I don't believe thst the average bureaucrat is any smarter than the average layman, no matter how many degrees they might hold.

I've just come to expect very little from people on the whole. I value people for their intelligence and what they can teach me, and those people are very rare. Fart jokes and other banter bores me to tears. Give me a spirited argument instead.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I think most people are too dumb to do whats in their own interests, let alone society at large.

Work in rehab.

Can confirm this statement.

Billions and billions of people all around the world have let religion dictate how they should behave in their daily life since the dawn of humanity, when the first idiot came up with the principle.

Stubbee wrote:

Jay wrote:

I'd love to see those exam results broken down by demographic. I'd bet money that there is a residual effect based on where the Americans ancestors hailed from. My bet would be that those Americans of Scots-Irish, English, Spanish, Italian and black heritages would be on the lower end, just like they ranked lower on the world survey...

So intelligence is tied to genetics?

maybe more socio-economics, is the point I think he was trying to make.

Stubbee wrote:

Jay wrote:

I'd love to see those exam results broken down by demographic. I'd bet money that there is a residual effect based on where the Americans ancestors hailed from. My bet would be that those Americans of Scots-Irish, English, Spanish, Italian and black heritages would be on the lower end, just like they ranked lower on the world survey...

So intelligence is tied to genetics?

No, inherited culture. I'm not talking about intelligence, there are plenty of intelligent people that never get out of the gutter, just as there are many of average or less intelligence who rise high and do well in business and other things. The latter benefit from being raised in cultures that esteem learning. I think even in multiple generation scenarios there will still be some residual cultural influence based on country of origin. Values get passed down from generation to generation just like recipes.