Jim Dunning

Unrepentant Unschooler & Skeptic
“Sapere aude!”

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

Today, @JonHaidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, declared he wants to coddle it after all — he wants Section 230 trashed, declaring war on the First Amendment.
#1A
Jon, what do you propose as the arbiter of acceptable speech on the Internet?

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@bryan_caplan Bryan, all wonderful ideas, but Schooling is centered on something called a syllabus the teacher does not control. In fact, it very much controls them.

[Jesse Singal @jessesingal]

Don't really have words for this

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@DKThomp What do fertility rates, free-play, first dates, and dinner parties have in common?

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@MaudMaron You switched from "Equality" to Equity".

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

America is still a country that does big things.

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@angeladuckw I will check this out, but am "biased" by the damage done to young humans by the thousands of GRIT posters adorning American K-12 classrooms.

[Jesse Singal @jessesingal]

yes. basically every factor was lined up to ensure the story hit explosively. if cambridge investigates and disciplines or fires in 2023/2024, it's still big, but nothing like this!

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@jessesingal Tell a teacher, especially during the last 10 years that "working hard" isn't the key to success: Grit posters were everywhere in classrooms.

https://t.co/ZfEgx6aXDc

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

mensis mirabilis

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Really? Shrugging your shoulders and walking away from the deaths of 20 million people sends a message that bioterrorists will heed: we can do this on purpose next time and they won't even investigate properly.

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@jessesingal 😄

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

Gorsuch on why Congress is important

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@jbarro not via subsidies, but by reducing transaction costs. Fantasy, yes. Mechanism seems real.

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@jbarro exactly what neighborhood grocers depend on. Even a few % drop in transaction velocity can raise prices or tip stores into closure (“food deserts”). A narrow urban carve-out for plastic bags might plausibly lower prices and improve access more than city-run groceries —

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@jbarro Probably a political non-starter, but a thought experiment: in walk-dense cities like NYC, plastic grocery bags functioned as low-cost carrying infrastructure. Removing them adds friction that suppresses small, frequent, spur-of-the-moment purchases —

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

They got the same DNA. Genes are the same. Same mother, same father, same older siblings, same younger siblings, same number of books in the house, same number of TVs in the house, same teachers, same everything. So they should be absolutely indistinguishable. They should be, you know, clones. Well, if you know a pair of identical twins, you know they’re not indistinguishable. They have separate personalities. I know this intimately, having two identical twin uncles, Barry and Mark, who are more similar than people picked off the street at random, but no one in the family had any doubt which was which. They each had their own personality, and that’s true of all individuals. Well, that leads to a real puzzle that I think psychologists have not really thought through enough, which is: how can they be different? It’s not their genes. It’s not their environment—at least not anything stable about the environment, like who your mother is or what neighborhood you live in.

@thinkableevents

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The creatures outside looked from MAGA to DSA, and from DSA to MAGA, and from MAGA to DSA again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

[Martin Kulldorff @MartinKulldorff]

Five years ago today, we authored the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection instead of lockdowns. A wholehearted thank you to the almost one million co-signers. We were proven right.
https://t.co/07nispEI2u

[Jim Dunning @jimdunning]

@glukianoff It's says when a journalist who worked at the Washington Post doesn't understand the First Amendment.