(I admit, I liked the cloud crowd better.)

I especially feel this is relevant in public spaces. Fallacies are common because they can be compelling. Calling them out clearly is a good way to help others.

The majority just want what’s cheap; I think the blog makes this argument well. Renewables are cheaper for the vast majority of applications, and so they become the responsible, pragmatic, easy, automatic thing to do.

editing to add: ‘avoiding apocalyptic levels of warning’ = ‘halved expected total warming as of late ~2024’. This particular nugget of hopium was from before iran war, and so we’re likely to see further reductions as the models update over the next ~year

I’m saying that just because something is specifically intended for something doesn’t imply that it has a larger effect than other things which have broad effects.

So no, the fact that homeopathy is psudoscience is irrelevant for my example (and the argument as you phrased it above). I read you, effectively, as saying:

because teaching is intended to influence literacy, and poverty reduction influences many things, teaching has a bigger effect

I agree bad teaching practices can have knock-on effects (though I don’t think knowledge of phonetics was at real risk of dying out?). But so can bad health outcomes, learning environments, etc?

I think, especially in education, that effect sizes are difficult to judge. And I can’t find good data for reading ability over time. So I am very interested in what we are sure about/evidence is.

I don’t think specificity is enough to guarantee a large effect. We have tons of homeopathic ointments for extremely specific diseases, and their effect is entirely negligible compared to, say, improved sanitation.

no link?

I agree that we have made recent changes that were bad. But we’ve also expanded access to free lunches in some places, decreased some extreme poverty metrics, have expanded AuDD diagnosis and treatment, raised the minimum wage in a handful of large metro areas, etc.

Is it obvious that a worse teaching method (and the many other bits of bad policy) does more damage than the improvements? This isn’t clear to me.

This seems to be hard to tell from the data. While the others are right that there have been recent downward movement, the country is old and we don’t have data going back very far.

basic literacy has almost certainly increased (meaning one can write a sentence about onesself, and read it). The large majority of Americans meet this bar (and the rest are children or quite old/sick), while only ~80% met this bar 100 years ago.

But it seems we haven’t kept data on reading level for very long. The wikipedia page is pretty good afaict. I suspect what actually matters for democracy and such is the literacy rate of voters, though I haven’t seen great data on it. We know a large share of folks don’t vote, I would guess this correlates very strongly with literacy.

Also, there’s a relevant confounder here (which the wikipedia page highlights): one can be american and not speak english, but still be literate in their childhood language.

(interested in more!)

If we believe the internet, all of that is funneled to the CEOs, and so the previous post applies?

(Which seems absurd to me, but maybe the bills are rare enough that this makes sense? Does anybody have data on how big that figure is vs actual cost of the buildings+labor+materials? We could compare to other countries, but then I think we’re seeing a difference in infrastructure, social and physical, more than malfeasance.)

Downvote for advertising ICE?

We should use symmetric data where we can. We also have lots earmarked and moved around for education, it’s just a much bigger project. The cost comparison for signing bonus of ICE vs educators was apples to apples, and what was literally suggested in OP. Make another post with the honest comparison if you want that to be the standard. Feeds can be both informative and honest if we make them that way.

(Also, only a few thousand jobs are offered the signing bonus. It’s a last mile carrot to get people talking, which we seem to be gullible enough to upvote and spread. I’m not enjoying being an ICE recruiter.)

Note that the CEO’s also don’t go very far for teacher pay. It looks like a few hundred CEO’s cut would raise teachers pay by ~$100/month. Same mistake: 4 million is a big number to divide by.

Yeah, this is like the ‘1 billion is enough for to give everyone a million’ - an unfortunate bit of innumeracy. Directions good, but this is still misleading at best.

Encouragement to downvote lazy takes like the screen cap above, for exactly this reason.

A good feed should have basic media literacy, a little info on the parties involved at a minimum.

This one gets it.

We’re reposting and spreading the same misinfo as in a twitter bubble. Downvote the OP, demand better from your feeds.

Yes (National park service, documenting the behaviors wolf packs take to avoid overlap, and the conflict that follows if they do)

I imagine that the wolves put nonzero hours into it

I appreciate the catch! Though I did read it correctly the first time.