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Author Topic: AmeriPol thread  (Read 3535190 times)

wierd

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18705 on: April 02, 2018, 11:56:32 pm »

In other news...

You remember the kids of Parkland Schools? The ones that made headlines about publicly decrying that they were the victims of a mass shooting, and the reactions of the nation towards it?

Remember the statement I made about how the typical response from school and government is to clamp down hard and grind people into dirt to enforce "Compliance" rather than solve the fundemental problem of why children are snapping and going apeshit, and that the end result is a feeling of being institutionalized or imprisoned, which only increases problems?

WELL!!  Guess what!

Turns out that the new policies the school system enacted make the students feel like they have been put into jail!

WHO WOULDA THUNK IT!?
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SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18706 on: April 03, 2018, 12:03:25 am »

Clear bags, IDs, and metal detectors?  This is exactly the same shit that was widespread common response to Columbine...  Are they really going to repeat the exact same response as 20 years ago?
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
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In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18707 on: April 03, 2018, 12:33:30 am »

Clear bags, IDs, and metal detectors?  This is exactly the same shit that was widespread common response to Columbine...  Are they really going to repeat the exact same response as 20 years ago?

Yes. Their options are limited, their resources are limited, and they must justify everything they do to groups whose priorities extend beyond the moment. People will be coming out of the woodwork with solutions they believe will be more effective (or just loud opinions that everyone doing anything is wrong) for years about this, as with any tragedy. Even those proposals in that set that are specific enough to be actionable often run afoul of one or more bureaucratic obstacles, and those obstacles are not easily removed from the systems that keep the schools themselves running.

Right now, everyone's doing the bureaucratic equivalent of haranguing the powerless retail worker at the service desk about the store's returns policy: they are directing considerable ire at mechanisms put in place expressly to absorb it to no effect. Hopefully, if this is sustained, we will see more effectual attempts to bring the schools and their supporting bureaucracy in line with some carefully-considered and eminently practicable vision of a safer learning environment.
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18708 on: April 03, 2018, 01:09:44 am »

"Never attribute to malice what can reasonably be attributed to incompetence."

I have no reason to second guess that these people honestly did what they felt was "best", and simply failed to research how such policies have failed miserably in the past, because they are not competent leaders.

They are incapable of ascertaining that they are incompetent, due to Dunning-Krueger.  I am not a mental health expert, but do work with people who are unstable/at risk. (I work in a nursing home with bipolar people and people with various dementias) I am competent *enough* to know that I am not competent to honestly suggest more than general guidelines.  That is what real experts in large-scale mental health are for, which school boards *ARE NOT, NOR ARE STATE GOVT OFFICIALS*. 

The practical and sensible thing to do is to pose the problem to such population studies experts, then perform implementation pilot trials and observe if there are positive or negative outcomes, then re-evaluate or implement accordingly.

But no.  Our leaders in these circumstances *TOTALLY KNOW WHAT TO DO!*--- Obviously.

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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18709 on: April 03, 2018, 02:10:50 am »

The practical and sensible thing to do is to pose the problem to such population studies experts, then perform implementation pilot trials and observe if there are positive or negative outcomes, then re-evaluate or implement accordingly.

Yes, but who is to bell the cat?

By which I mean: who is to bear the cost of designing, approving, running, and analyzing those trials? Who is to convince the public to patiently accept such a time-consuming solution, let alone the "negative outcomes" (which they will understand to mean "an increased risk of harm to students", the very thing they are trying to prevent)?

And, equally importantly, can you convince them to do so?
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18710 on: April 03, 2018, 02:19:15 am »

Be flatly, deadpan honest.

Tell them that failure to use a rational methodology places a greater risk of harm to all students, and doing nothing basically guarantees students will come to harm.

The goal is to find the path of least harm, in unfamiliar territory. If you are going to do that, you need to go where nobody has gone before, and that means consulting what we currently DO know, and forming possible inroads from there, and evaluating successes and failures.

Of the options that CAN be taken, this is the MOST likely to succeed, and also the MOST likely to NOT result in wide-spread, systemic harm to children.
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18711 on: April 03, 2018, 02:31:32 am »

So that's no answer on who's going to fund trying this, no answer on who's going to supply the political capital (read: publicly take the fall for) trying this, and an assumption that the public's going to simply accept your logic wholesale, sound though it is, with a concomitant assumption that you'll be given a platform on which to present it.

Well, it's one-third more of a plan than I'd feared, but I'm afraid we're a long way from a grant proposal.
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SalmonGod

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18712 on: April 03, 2018, 02:42:26 am »

The article mentioned tens of millions of dollars being spent just on this one school in follow-up.  So a lot of money is being put out.  I'm part of the public, and I don't accept the logic of what they're doing.  Because it's literally the same things that have been done in the past that amounted to nothing.  It's already painfully obviously just blowing a ton of money on doing something just to say they did something.  So the way you're heckling weird is just absurd to me.

Not that I don't understand.  Security theater is a compromise between the public's emotional response, and political incentive to appeal to that emotional response with a minimum of effort and move on... bonus points for creeping authoritarianism.

But that doesn't make it irk me any less when you use the same arguments to tear down attempts at reasoning through what should be done that should be used to tear down attempts at doing what has already been proven by recent experience not to work.
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In the land of twilight, under the moon
We dance for the idiots
As the end will come so soon
In the land of twilight

Maybe people should love for the sake of loving, and not with all of these optimization conditions.

wierd

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18713 on: April 03, 2018, 02:45:59 am »

It is personal opinion on this, and possibly uninformed at that-- but:

The US has a known problem with underfunded public health, especially in terms of mental health.

This problem is caused by lack of basic service providers, and made much worse by lack of progress in finding better treatments, through lack of funding for basic research for public health, both physical and mental.

I agree that money should not be given to charlatans. However, Dunning-Krueger applies.  Acknowledging this, and putting qualified people in charge of grant review and acceptance, will go a very long ways.  (However, it requires people that are not competent to acknowledge that they are not competent, and defer to people who are, who also happen to be their subordinates. Yes, I know that is not how that normally works in practice, and thus is unrealistic to expect. I don't have a valid solution; trying to solve it just moves the intractable part of the problem around in a frustrating manner.) 

Increasing this spending is an investment in a better future, and will reap rewards outside of the narrow issue of school violence, while also supplying the "Who pays, who decides" answer you are seeking.

As for "Who takes the fall for failures?" --- This can be part of the "understood" conditions of submitting a proposal.  Your proposal, your fault if you hurt students. Politicians should love this, as it puts the fault of the failures at the feet of the "trusted experts", and thus increases the degree of care that will be taken when formulating and submitting trial programs.

Again, I am not an expert in any of these fields, and can only suggest the most general of guidelines. Specific solutions require domain specific knowledge which I do not have, and cannot bullshit my way through.
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Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18714 on: April 03, 2018, 03:57:03 am »

But that doesn't make it irk me any less when you use the same arguments to tear down attempts at reasoning through what should be done that should be used to tear down attempts at doing what has already been proven by recent experience not to work.

No such attempt has been made -- I'm not tearing down weird in this, just acknowledging that such an attempt would be a significant endeavor. A demand has been made that other people reason through what should be done, and still other people make it feasible for them to do so. The benefits of evidence-based policy are obvious; its drawbacks are only slightly less so (albeit considerably less exciting). The hard part is getting from ought to is, so to speak, given only an awareness of what generally ought to happen.

I have no interest in tearing down advocacy for evidence-based policy. I have every interest in seeing that advocacy take n form likely to result in evidence-based policy, and unfortunately simply saying what should happen helps little when what should happen is painfully obvious but the exact implementation is not.

If you wish to be irked, by all means -- but understand that no one person produced the conditions that led to the bigger problem, and there is no one place at which to shout to solve it. This is a consequence of chronic inertia, not acute incompetence. That is why I heckle weird, if you want to call it that: to demonstrate the complexities involved in going from a general understanding of the problem to a solution which tells you what, specifically, to do now, and how it will help.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2018, 04:04:55 am by Trekkin »
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wierd

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18715 on: April 03, 2018, 04:07:22 am »

The issue, Trekkin, is that this same inertia is the result of incompetent people asserting that seeking the requisite domain knowledge (what one gets through trial programs) to offer a specific solution is not needed, because "WE TOTALLY KNOW WHAT TO DO!", due to dunning-krueger, as I pointed out.

EG, "We dont need to do all that hard sciencey stuff that wastes money, we can just do X!" (That totally inflates my support base, wastes resources because it has a proven record of not working, and simultaneously denies providing a hard evidentiary record for alternatives.)

Never-mind that blind implementation of an unproven protocol is how you cause immense, systemic harm, via the grossest form of belligerent negligence.

Your argument is a round-robin.  You cannot get the domain knowledge needed to go from a general direction to a specific implementation, without doing the trial programs, and gaining that knowledge. There currently *IS* at least a reasonable amount of existing domain knowledge to call upon to make cogent specific implementation suggestions that can then be trialed--  The specific policy is to trust that existing domain knowledge exists, and that living people possess it-- Make use of those people and actually make use of their input in ways that are not mere lipservice, then proceed in a calm and rational manner toward the end goal. However, the existing domain knowledge is rather dated, as we have not put significiant investment into sociological studies of this type for many decades, and societal influences change and shift, meaning protocols need to be adjusted.  This means that specific courses of action indicated by the existing knowledge need to be pilot tested before being implemented--- and therein lies the crux of the round-robin.

At some point, these idiots need to accept that they do in fact have to get off their asses, and stop navel gazing.
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Kagus

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18716 on: April 03, 2018, 07:45:38 am »

I feel like you guys are trying to shout explanations across a chasm at each other, without realizing that you're both standing on the same side.

Trekkin isn't refuting anything you're saying; he's playing devil's advocate. Yes, those are all good ideas for approaching a good solution to the problem, and here are the obstacles that thinking will meet on the way to realization (and indicating why it hasn't been realized already).

Yes, the bellowing maws in authority are at times deafeningly incompetent, but how do you intend to make them understand that?

We'd all like a better future, but just dreaming about "how it could've been" isn't particularly helpful aside from making us feel better about ourselves for a little while. And you can't make a useful strategy for actually getting there unless you recognize and try to solve the issues that the strategy is going to face along the way.


I mean, sure... Any real authority figure who takes advice from a section of the Dwarf Fortress forum should probably have their head checked, preferably in a country with better mental health institutions than the US... But y'never know! And if we're going to theorycraft the solution for all the world's ills, might as well sperg it for all it's worth.

...I recently explained that term to my girlfriend, and she's taken to using it around the house ever since. I've created a monster.

Trekkin

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18717 on: April 03, 2018, 08:57:05 am »

I feel like you guys are trying to shout explanations across a chasm at each other, without realizing that you're both standing on the same side.

Trekkin isn't refuting anything you're saying; he's playing devil's advocate. Yes, those are all good ideas for approaching a good solution to the problem, and here are the obstacles that thinking will meet on the way to realization (and indicating why it hasn't been realized already).

That would be why I said I liked weird's idea, yes.  :P

So just to be clear, I'm not saying that our public officials are necessarily competent. I'm saying they're part of a system designed to normalize competence levels across the board, and part of the way it does that is by limiting the options available to any one part of it. Most of the time, that serves a valuable function: it keeps one crazy person from throwing the whole system off the rails on a whim, which is nice if you like stable government. Unfortunately, it also limits the ability of the bureaucracy to implement good ideas unless those ideas pass certain internal sanity checks -- and that is when the system works properly.

My whole point is that it's very rare that the reason for any given bad government decision can be usefully traced to a single entity's incompetence, let alone malice (EDIT: I should point out that the current administration is exceptional here). Instead, the emergent properties of a hundred different individually sensible systems all impinge on their available decision space, and the best way to find out what particular thing is stopping your sensible and practical idea is to work out the details well enough to identify where it's asking a given system to work in a way it's not allowed to work, be that funds that cannot be allocated to a particular purpose or jurisdictional issues or conformity to internal standards or anything else. Those can then be changed administratively or legislatively, and it's much easier to that when, again, you know what you need and who would stand to gain what from giving it to you. Bureaucracy is a non-Newtonian fluid; it's inflexible when you stand outside and kick it, but if you work at it continuously all the little bits can individually be made to move out of the way.

So yes, the clear bags and metal detectors and ID badges are not the optimal solution here. Before we condemn it as the product of inferior minds, it's worth asking who had what choices available to them for what reasons, because figuring that out gets us halfway to actually fixing it.

I'll grant you that's less cathartic than just calling people incompetent, though.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2018, 09:00:29 am by Trekkin »
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Flying Dice

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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: AmeriPol: cabinet reshuffle shuffle shuffle
« Reply #18719 on: April 03, 2018, 04:33:57 pm »

Allegedly a personal vendetta, and I don't know if I'm that surprised - working conditions in the Googlesphere are infamous.
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