Ecgberht

Handle refers to Ecgberht of Ripon, the obscure 8th C Anglo-Saxon monk, but the picture is Ecgberht of Wessex.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@Gingerfella58 They changed the rules this year. It used to be they took the time of the fifth rider across the line. Now it's the time of the first rider.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@FondOfBeetles @benryanwriter The genital inspection argument is dumb - that would never be used because it won't detect conditions like 5-ARD. This isn't all about trans-women, it's about males.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

Also Ontario: Lisikh v. Ontario (Education), 2022 HRTO 1345 (CanLII)
[19] It is important to note in the Tribunal’s jurisprudence that an allegation of racial discrimination or discrimination on the grounds of colour is not one that can be or has been successfully claimed by persons who are white and non-racialized.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@MsMelChen @Nick_Decap It can't be the cost of food. Obviously well off people tend to be very slim

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

I heard a podcast where a fairly well-known psychologist was interviewed and he had done a study that found that childhood trauma generally does not affect long term happiness. He said something to the effect that "I thought people would welcome this finding -- it shows that survivors can overcome abuse -- but instead I was attacked for it."

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@xwanyex The broader point is that knowledge is Bayesian: Here is another post from Scott and one from Zvi https://t.co/4Sb3gfs9No https://t.co/A7tenCeTbn

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@xwanyex Similarly, there are no randomized controlled trials showing that parachutes are helpful when jumping out of an airplane. Here is the classic review article: https://t.co/tcQR2WZBW8

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@_alice_evans You should post out about it again after it comes out in Kindle

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

A colleague has been teaching defamation law for about 15 years. In the last 5 years or so she has had to start the course with a lecture about why free speech is good. She says now the default attitude of the students is that offensive speech should be suppressed. When she started, the default attitude was pro-free speech. Peak woke has passed, but it has left behind some fundamental shifts.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

I'd say some STEM is necessary to develop critical thinking skills, understood as the ability to discern truth from appealing fables. In STEM, truth and error both have tangible consequences. The humanities, undisciplined by real-world feedback, too often conflate 'critical' and 'criticism', which is why so much modern humanities involves false criticisms of the status quo. (Of course, errors in the humanities can have major real-world consequences, but the link between error and the consequences is too indirect for pedagogical purposes.)

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@xwanyex @_alice_evans could give a very good course

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@TristinHopper Any examples? I'm not seeing it.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@robinhanson They have the same biases, but are more willing to change their mind in the face of evidence and reasoned argument. Eg try asking any LLM if Caster Semenya is a woman.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@terftasticwoman And the SCC is woke anyway - they'll give rights to criminals but not to the rest of us

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

Worth keeping in mind that schools could be harsh everywhere at the time. My mother was educated by priests and nuns in rural Quebec in the 1940s and 50s and she was beaten regularly. She turned against the church as a result, as did many of her peers. My impression is that harsh school conditions were also widespread in the Anglo world. Residential school conditions need to be compared to the norms of the time, not the norms of today.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

I agree and disagree. They are not interested in making a difference in the sense of making things happen that everyone agrees are good eg fixing potholes - that's where we agree. But I think they do want to make a real practical difference in a way that shows that they are morally superior to the plebes, ie they want to make things happen that most people think are *not* good. See Scott Alexander, The Toxoplasma of Rage

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@TristinHopper I'll suggest that they are not merely getting in the way; they are actively harmful. The elites we are currently producing are taught to believe that they need to 'make a difference' - ie their goal is to get into gov't and force their dumb ideas on the rest of us.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

The argument that Canada imitated US wokeness presupposes that wokeness is a primarily intellectual phenomenon that spreads through cultural imitation, as in Rufo's theory that the US imported wokeism from European postmodernism. I'm more inclined to primarily structural theories, eg that it arose as a result of increasing wealth / feminization of the professions / elite overproduction or similar structural factors. With that said, I accept that intellectual factors shape the details, and when I went to law schools decades ago, the intellectual antecedents of wokeism that I encountered eg McKinnon, were American. So my guess is that Canada was structurally primed to go woke, but the immediate impetus and some of the details came from the US. I think that's probably just a matter of scale - there are 10x as many Americans, so wokeism got big enough to be a movement in the US before Canada. It only looks like an import if you insist on country demarcations - I think it's more accurate to call it a western phenomenon with influences both ways and the US dominating just because of scale.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

That's actually the formal law in Canada: Lisikh v. Ontario (Education), 2022 HRTO 1345 (CanLII)
[19] It is important to note in the Tribunal’s jurisprudence that an allegation of racial discrimination or discrimination on the grounds of colour is not one that can be or has been successfully claimed by persons who are white and non-racialized.

[Ecgberht @Ecgberht4]

@SteveStuWill When does the Kindle version come out?