Maybe you can't find people from real life with pseudonyms, but not all of us have that problem. Where I'm from -- literally, my geographic area -- social networking under nyms is so normal, that if I want to find someone on the internet, I say, for example, "Hey, are you on LJ? I'm so-and-so on LJ." And if they want to have anything to do with me, they can come "friend" me there. I have almost 300 people on my LJ flist, about two thirds of whom are people in my f2f social circle, the vast majority of whom I've worked with as a musician.
No, the pseudonym-finds-pseudonym thing only breaks if you can't or won't ask someone what their nym is. In other words, it prevents you from finding people who don't want to be found, and who you have no in-person contact with. Sounds like a feature to me!
You are being flip, but I'm a graduate student in Mental Health Counseling (as well as a web developer:), and a number of my professors -- including the quite wonderful one I had for my class in Group Therapy, the class text for which extensively documented the benefits of support groups -- are openly skeptical that computer-mediated communication (CMC) even counts as socializing!
In a strange way, this research supports the controversial contention that CMC actually is socializing, because it shows that some of the results of in-person support groups may also be found in virtual support groups. That certainly suggests the same psychological processes and interpersonal dynamics are going on in both cases, and that is most definitely not a foregone conclusion!
Uh, to put a finer point on it, tracking is controversial because, pretty much independent of objective measures of capability such as standardized testing, white kids place into such programs at a disproportionate rate over black kids.
This points out a basic problem with tracking: who choses and on what basis? Unfortunately, the people in power tend to use (even unwittingly) tracking to reinforce their power base.
I keenly aware of the benefits of tracking -- I'm a beneficiary (insofar as anyone "educated" in public schools can be said to have "benefitted") of tracking. I'm a survivor of its opposite, "Heterogeneous Grouping", as well (changed school districts.)
I could agree with this, were my school more like a trade school, which it wasn't.
You could agree with this, if you actually read Gattos work. You make the typical assumption of people who haven't read it yet, that he must be talking about the content of the classes. But he talks about things like regimented schedules, being trained to obey a bell (like in a factory), being trained to ask permission of an authority figure to eat or eliminate, being trained to obey when assigned work, the power hierarchy within the school and how order is or is not kept. All those things, you probably lived through, too, like the vast majority of the rest of us.
For decades parents were actively discouraged from participating in their children's education, and were told that their only welcome contribution was to join the PTA and send money. The modern secular homeschooling movement, which was essentially founded in the early 1970s, was at least in part a reaction to how incredibly disenfranchised parents were then.
Please remember that was the day and age in which people we're only beginning to ask for "second opinions" in doctors' offices, and that was controversial, because doctors were "professionals" so you were expected to passively receive their commands. It was the same with teachers. Patient activists used to accuse doctors of "playing god" when they treated patients like that, making decisions for them, not letting them make their own decision. Well, back then, the teachers were "playing god", too.
I'm talking about parents being told that reading to your kids will delay their learning to read. I'm talking about parents being told not to help their child academically in any way, or otherwise "interfering" in their kid's education. I'm talking about parents not being allowed to observe the classes their kids are in, even discretely. And most certainly you didn't get any say in what education your kids got. Your kid with a four digit IQ got assigned to the "red chairs"? To bad, try another lifetime.
So excuse me if I'm a little exasperated at modern complaints about how parents -- who, in their own childhoods, their parents were not permitted to participate in their own education -- are so little involved in their kids' lives and education.
How many of these courses that you didn't care about then, are you glad you took now?
Not one. Every last one of them was a complete waste of my time.
Speaking as someone who has taught high school English; has 25 years experience in music; is a professional computer programmer; is in grad school in psychology; attended MIT; and dabbles in the fields of medieval history and first-world anthropology.
Did you want to tell me how shallow and poorly educated I am? I believe that's how this usually works: someone challenges the notion that what is taught in schools is actually necessary, and the rebuttal traditionally takes to form of impugning their intellectual or scholastic breadth or depth.
The whole premise behind the school system is that there are things kids Need To Know
Yes. And the whole premise of many insightful and humane authors' works, such as Holt, Neill, and, of course, Gatto, is that (1) before the advent of universal mandatory schooling, people somehow managed to learn the things they Need To Know without being forced to by a government agency, and (2) that is precisely what is wrong with the school system we have, and why it should be eradicated.
I spent years getting my full intellect back from the damage done it in the schools, despite all the parental enrichment.
Like you, they didn't take what was going on in school seriously. They thought the worst thing that could happen in school is that we'd fail to be taught. It for some reason didn't dawn on them that we'd be negatively trained by the experience, and that would undermine their positive example.
Actually -- I'm an MIT dropout, btw -- MIT has no problem these days with attracting women in the sciences. Indeed, there are science courses (majors) at MIT which are >50 female students. (So is it just that men don't like biology? Is it that the only reason that most of the advances in biology so far were by men, is because the people who would have been really into it and talented at it were suppressed by cultural sex-roles from studying the field?)
At any rate, the "MIT is gender biased" thing generally refers to two things: (1) promotion and privilege patterns -- it's not that they can't find women, it's that they don't promote them when they have them and give them smaller lab spaces, and (2) the EECS department, which has lagged dramatically at attracting female students, well behind the other departments at MIT.
There is a biological basis for difference -- but it's only about 60/40 m/f. So I'm happy if an institution is batting around 40% women in technical fields; that would indicate they're taking the cream of the crop, regardless of gender. MIT, over all, was at 44% women students last I checked. (It was 34% when I went.) So when EECS shows up with considerably fewer female students, than, say, the math or physics departments, that does seem to suggest there's a problem. Or just that women are better at pure theory than men.
[joke! We all know that is a logical non-sequetur. It's not like MIT CS has anything other than theory in it...;]
IANAPsy.... yet. I'm a Masters student in counseling psychology and Myers-Briggs is a specialty of mine.
The mapping you want is SJ:Conservative::NF:Liberal, not T:Conservative::F:Liberal. You actually want the Kiersean Temperaments (NT, NF, SJ, SP) for this, not the Myers-Briggs Type Axes (I/E, N/S, T/F or J/P).
NTs are all over the map. SPs are generally uninvolved.
Of course, that's merely a statistical observation. Individuals will vary.
Well that has been the issue for a long time with Gays and the primary reason why they have been so discriminated against is because the old belief that being gay was their choice.
This is factually untrue. The discrimination against gays was not rooted for a long time in the belief that homosexuality was a choice.
Quite to the contrary, at the beginning of the 20th century and previously, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and no more volitional than schizophrenia.
The idea that homosexuality was volitional only became widespread in the 20th century, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it actually was a reaction to the burgeoning gay civil rights movement -- as a post-hoc justification as to why homosexuality should be illegal -- than a cause of it.
No, the reason that gays have been not merely "discriminated" against but outright oppressed has been that most people thought homosexuality was morally wrong.
This is hard for us modern people to understand, because we don't think it rational to consider people morally culpable for having an illness, but that is not always how morality has worked in Western culture. Remember there was a day and age in which, for instance, mental illness was considered the sign of demonic possession; curing someone was not merely a matter of their physical well-being, but also a matter of saving their immortal soul.
The idea that something being an organic illness is exculpatory of moral responsibility is a very modern idea.
Compared to other college towns, the Boston area has a phenomenal rate of retention. I'm an MIT alum, and there are thousands upon thousands of MIT alums living in Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville -- there was a running joke that the MIT SIPB should take over the Arlington Town Council.
Part of the reason why is that high-tech, biotech, medical, and research undergrads don't have to go somewhere else to get summer internships. They can say in the area and work, and develop a relationship with a company/organization which they may parley into a job come graduation. MIT allows their students to rent dorm rooms over the summer and something like a full third of the undergrad population stays all summer.
Ever notice how feminists just really aren't torn up about any of that, even though most of it is deeply sexist?
While I can speak for no one but myself, I, sir, am a feminist and a woman, and I am pissed off about all three of those things, and have been for a long time. Furthermore, I consider the draft to be the appalling institutionalization of a sexist attitude against men: the attitude that young men are more expendable than young women, that men's lives are worth less than women's lives.
For the record.
The other disciplines which have been helping us too-smart-for-our-own-good people get in touch with their bodies are the studies of music and dance.
For the clueless, I particularly recommend study in strict formal traditions where they tell you things like "This is right/this is wrong" rather than "Just express yourself."
In addition to making practitioners more in touch with their bodies, both disciplines have interesting social effects. They can provide a modality of interaction particularly suited to shy people, one which doesn't involve small talk; they can provide both cooperative and competitive interactions.
Re:They ought to be checking something else...
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 1
I know you mean that in a sort of snarky way, but seriously: I gather there are plenty of senior citizens who keep finding symptoms to report to their doctors, because they're so starved for human companionship and the doctor is one of the few people they see. Yeah, they should get their heads checked -- they could really benefit by an hour a week with a psychotherapist -- but, speaking as someone who tried and failed to get psychotherapy for her grandmother, it's easier to get insurance to cover emergency room visits for the elderly than to get insurance to cover therapy.
Hrmph. I opened one of those files and all it said was:
If this were a virus, you would be dead now. Fortunately, it's not.
The Metaverse is a dangerous place; how's your security? Call Hiro Protagonist Security Associates for a free initial consultation.
Are you quite certain you don't want any "Anonymous Cowards" in your house?
And if someone left an anonymous phone call on your answering machine letting you know that, say, there was a round of layoffs coming at your place of employment, or that the local mob had put a contract out on your life, or that they'd observed a suspicious character planting something under your car... how would you feel then?
You presume that the only reason someone might want to remain anonymous is that they are advocating some position which you might be uninteresting to you. That's certainly the more common situation.
But the other circumstance is when someone is doing you a favor, but is only willing to do so if they can remain anonymous. Those situations are incredibly rare. But by their very nature they cannot be anticipated so that you can turn off your requirement for identity in advance.
And by their very nature they are often very important.
BTW, for a similar but different situation, there is a certain famous organization which provides cheap health-care services to the indigent, but the name of which is so controversial, when you get services there -- even non-controversial ones -- they ask you whether it is OK to identify themselves by name if they have to call you. Alternatively, you can specify that when they call, with, say, the results of a blood test, that they identify themselves as "your friend, Kathy" or some such.
The organization is Planned Parenthood. (And if you didn't know, abortion is only one part of what they do -- they also provide gynecological exams, birthcontrol, fetility help, etc.)
Since the whole purpose of the "your friend, Kathy" ruse is to avoid letting other people who share the same phone line know with whom you're talking, it highlights nicely the other reason a default presumption of "no Anonymous Cowards" might be unwanted. While you may live alone, for people who live with others, there's internal privacy issues, too, which are not at first obvious to most folks.
My theory on this is that from middle through high school, boys form a linear hierarchy of individuals. We're constantly moving up and down on it, usually within a fairly narrow range, within which most boys find their small circle of friends. With few exceptions, each boy is on there somewhere.
Girls form a hierarchy of groups whose position is fairly fixed. The girls within a group are of roughly equal stature, but there might be one or two leaders. A particular girl is either all the way in or all the way out of a particular group, and some are out of all the groups altogether. Very few boys ever have to deal with that level of alienation (and most of the boys I know who were that far off the hierarchy were off by choice).
Having never been female, though, that's just speculation; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
You don't want a filter automatically doing anything, because of joe jobs.
But instead, perhaps there is a solution which works like this:
1) A service is established much like the various blacklists, wherein volunteers manually determine which links from example spams really are spammer websites, as opposed to joe jobs. Once every while, they collate a nice list of spammer links.
2) Zillions of willing slashdotters have eggdrop bots listening in on a previously determined IRC channel(s).
3) Every once in a completely varying while, the Moderated DDoS service sends out a very special message -- there needs to be some encryption for authenticity here -- across that IRC channel.
4) Simultaneously, every one of those eggbots pass the list of URLs to a little script which proceeds to, simultaneously, hit the relevant links.
Participation is wholly voluntary. Humans make sure no joe jobs slip into the system, and only authentic spammers are targetted. The use of IRC means there can be little to no warning to the spammers. Heck, if folks want, they can run their anti-spammer bot silently and not even be bothered by it's behavior.
OTOH, any such app should report periodically to the user how many spammers have been hammered, so they get the rosy glow of satisfaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you can't find people from real life with pseudonyms, but not all of us have that problem. Where I'm from -- literally, my geographic area -- social networking under nyms is so normal, that if I want to find someone on the internet, I say, for example, "Hey, are you on LJ? I'm so-and-so on LJ." And if they want to have anything to do with me, they can come "friend" me there. I have almost 300 people on my LJ flist, about two thirds of whom are people in my f2f social circle, the vast majority of whom I've worked with as a musician. No, the pseudonym-finds-pseudonym thing only breaks if you can't or won't ask someone what their nym is. In other words, it prevents you from finding people who don't want to be found, and who you have no in-person contact with. Sounds like a feature to me!
You are being flip, but I'm a graduate student in Mental Health Counseling (as well as a web developer :), and a number of my professors -- including the quite wonderful one I had for my class in Group Therapy, the class text for which extensively documented the benefits of support groups -- are openly skeptical that computer-mediated communication (CMC) even counts as socializing!
In a strange way, this research supports the controversial contention that CMC actually is socializing, because it shows that some of the results of in-person support groups may also be found in virtual support groups. That certainly suggests the same psychological processes and interpersonal dynamics are going on in both cases, and that is most definitely not a foregone conclusion!
Dude, you're my hero! Can I reprint this in my blog?
I don't remember any public schools in the past thirty years requiring students to get down and pray
Ah, but the ACLU does. Check out the "Greatest Hits".
Uh, to put a finer point on it, tracking is controversial because, pretty much independent of objective measures of capability such as standardized testing, white kids place into such programs at a disproportionate rate over black kids.
This points out a basic problem with tracking: who choses and on what basis? Unfortunately, the people in power tend to use (even unwittingly) tracking to reinforce their power base.
I keenly aware of the benefits of tracking -- I'm a beneficiary (insofar as anyone "educated" in public schools can be said to have "benefitted") of tracking. I'm a survivor of its opposite, "Heterogeneous Grouping", as well (changed school districts.)
There is no easy answer.
I could agree with this, were my school more like a trade school, which it wasn't.
You could agree with this, if you actually read Gattos work. You make the typical assumption of people who haven't read it yet, that he must be talking about the content of the classes. But he talks about things like regimented schedules, being trained to obey a bell (like in a factory), being trained to ask permission of an authority figure to eat or eliminate, being trained to obey when assigned work, the power hierarchy within the school and how order is or is not kept. All those things, you probably lived through, too, like the vast majority of the rest of us.
For decades parents were actively discouraged from participating in their children's education, and were told that their only welcome contribution was to join the PTA and send money. The modern secular homeschooling movement, which was essentially founded in the early 1970s, was at least in part a reaction to how incredibly disenfranchised parents were then.
Please remember that was the day and age in which people we're only beginning to ask for "second opinions" in doctors' offices, and that was controversial, because doctors were "professionals" so you were expected to passively receive their commands. It was the same with teachers. Patient activists used to accuse doctors of "playing god" when they treated patients like that, making decisions for them, not letting them make their own decision. Well, back then, the teachers were "playing god", too.
I'm talking about parents being told that reading to your kids will delay their learning to read. I'm talking about parents being told not to help their child academically in any way, or otherwise "interfering" in their kid's education. I'm talking about parents not being allowed to observe the classes their kids are in, even discretely. And most certainly you didn't get any say in what education your kids got. Your kid with a four digit IQ got assigned to the "red chairs"? To bad, try another lifetime.
So excuse me if I'm a little exasperated at modern complaints about how parents -- who, in their own childhoods, their parents were not permitted to participate in their own education -- are so little involved in their kids' lives and education.
The school system is just reaping what it sowed.
How many of these courses that you didn't care about then, are you glad you took now? Not one. Every last one of them was a complete waste of my time. Speaking as someone who has taught high school English; has 25 years experience in music; is a professional computer programmer; is in grad school in psychology; attended MIT; and dabbles in the fields of medieval history and first-world anthropology. Did you want to tell me how shallow and poorly educated I am? I believe that's how this usually works: someone challenges the notion that what is taught in schools is actually necessary, and the rebuttal traditionally takes to form of impugning their intellectual or scholastic breadth or depth. The whole premise behind the school system is that there are things kids Need To Know Yes. And the whole premise of many insightful and humane authors' works, such as Holt, Neill, and, of course, Gatto, is that (1) before the advent of universal mandatory schooling, people somehow managed to learn the things they Need To Know without being forced to by a government agency, and (2) that is precisely what is wrong with the school system we have, and why it should be eradicated.
Yeah, my parents thought like that, too. :/
I spent years getting my full intellect back from the damage done it in the schools, despite all the parental enrichment.
Like you, they didn't take what was going on in school seriously. They thought the worst thing that could happen in school is that we'd fail to be taught. It for some reason didn't dawn on them that we'd be negatively trained by the experience, and that would undermine their positive example.
Funny, I was thinking, Oh, so this is why his essays suck.
Actually -- I'm an MIT dropout, btw -- MIT has no problem these days with attracting women in the sciences. Indeed, there are science courses (majors) at MIT which are >50 female students. (So is it just that men don't like biology? Is it that the only reason that most of the advances in biology so far were by men, is because the people who would have been really into it and talented at it were suppressed by cultural sex-roles from studying the field?) At any rate, the "MIT is gender biased" thing generally refers to two things: (1) promotion and privilege patterns -- it's not that they can't find women, it's that they don't promote them when they have them and give them smaller lab spaces, and (2) the EECS department, which has lagged dramatically at attracting female students, well behind the other departments at MIT. There is a biological basis for difference -- but it's only about 60/40 m/f. So I'm happy if an institution is batting around 40% women in technical fields; that would indicate they're taking the cream of the crop, regardless of gender. MIT, over all, was at 44% women students last I checked. (It was 34% when I went.) So when EECS shows up with considerably fewer female students, than, say, the math or physics departments, that does seem to suggest there's a problem. Or just that women are better at pure theory than men. [joke! We all know that is a logical non-sequetur. It's not like MIT CS has anything other than theory in it... ;]
IANAPsy.... yet. I'm a Masters student in counseling psychology and Myers-Briggs is a specialty of mine.
The mapping you want is SJ:Conservative::NF:Liberal, not T:Conservative::F:Liberal. You actually want the Kiersean Temperaments (NT, NF, SJ, SP) for this, not the Myers-Briggs Type Axes (I/E, N/S, T/F or J/P).
NTs are all over the map. SPs are generally uninvolved.
Of course, that's merely a statistical observation. Individuals will vary.
HTH. HAND!
Well that has been the issue for a long time with Gays and the primary reason why they have been so discriminated against is because the old belief that being gay was their choice. This is factually untrue. The discrimination against gays was not rooted for a long time in the belief that homosexuality was a choice. Quite to the contrary, at the beginning of the 20th century and previously, homosexuality was considered a mental illness and no more volitional than schizophrenia. The idea that homosexuality was volitional only became widespread in the 20th century, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it actually was a reaction to the burgeoning gay civil rights movement -- as a post-hoc justification as to why homosexuality should be illegal -- than a cause of it. No, the reason that gays have been not merely "discriminated" against but outright oppressed has been that most people thought homosexuality was morally wrong. This is hard for us modern people to understand, because we don't think it rational to consider people morally culpable for having an illness, but that is not always how morality has worked in Western culture. Remember there was a day and age in which, for instance, mental illness was considered the sign of demonic possession; curing someone was not merely a matter of their physical well-being, but also a matter of saving their immortal soul. The idea that something being an organic illness is exculpatory of moral responsibility is a very modern idea.
In other words: "Backward compatability".
Part of the reason why is that high-tech, biotech, medical, and research undergrads don't have to go somewhere else to get summer internships. They can say in the area and work, and develop a relationship with a company/organization which they may parley into a job come graduation. MIT allows their students to rent dorm rooms over the summer and something like a full third of the undergrad population stays all summer.
I will go with apple before that happens.
Join now, avoid the rush. :)
Actually, I think the most cinemagraphic of the Vorkosigan books is Barrayar, in which Miles is only a minor character.
Dayum. If only we could get most OS app developers to be that thorough.
The other disciplines which have been helping us too-smart-for-our-own-good people get in touch with their bodies are the studies of music and dance. For the clueless, I particularly recommend study in strict formal traditions where they tell you things like "This is right/this is wrong" rather than "Just express yourself." In addition to making practitioners more in touch with their bodies, both disciplines have interesting social effects. They can provide a modality of interaction particularly suited to shy people, one which doesn't involve small talk; they can provide both cooperative and competitive interactions.
I know you mean that in a sort of snarky way, but seriously: I gather there are plenty of senior citizens who keep finding symptoms to report to their doctors, because they're so starved for human companionship and the doctor is one of the few people they see. Yeah, they should get their heads checked -- they could really benefit by an hour a week with a psychotherapist -- but, speaking as someone who tried and failed to get psychotherapy for her grandmother, it's easier to get insurance to cover emergency room visits for the elderly than to get insurance to cover therapy.
Hrmph. I opened one of those files and all it said was:
Are you quite certain you don't want any "Anonymous Cowards" in your house?
And if someone left an anonymous phone call on your answering machine letting you know that, say, there was a round of layoffs coming at your place of employment, or that the local mob had put a contract out on your life, or that they'd observed a suspicious character planting something under your car... how would you feel then?
You presume that the only reason someone might want to remain anonymous is that they are advocating some position which you might be uninteresting to you. That's certainly the more common situation.
But the other circumstance is when someone is doing you a favor, but is only willing to do so if they can remain anonymous. Those situations are incredibly rare. But by their very nature they cannot be anticipated so that you can turn off your requirement for identity in advance.
And by their very nature they are often very important.
BTW, for a similar but different situation, there is a certain famous organization which provides cheap health-care services to the indigent, but the name of which is so controversial, when you get services there -- even non-controversial ones -- they ask you whether it is OK to identify themselves by name if they have to call you. Alternatively, you can specify that when they call, with, say, the results of a blood test, that they identify themselves as "your friend, Kathy" or some such.
The organization is Planned Parenthood. (And if you didn't know, abortion is only one part of what they do -- they also provide gynecological exams, birthcontrol, fetility help, etc.)
Since the whole purpose of the "your friend, Kathy" ruse is to avoid letting other people who share the same phone line know with whom you're talking, it highlights nicely the other reason a default presumption of "no Anonymous Cowards" might be unwanted. While you may live alone, for people who live with others, there's internal privacy issues, too, which are not at first obvious to most folks.
You don't want a filter automatically doing anything, because of joe jobs.
But instead, perhaps there is a solution which works like this:
1) A service is established much like the various blacklists, wherein volunteers manually determine which links from example spams really are spammer websites, as opposed to joe jobs. Once every while, they collate a nice list of spammer links.
2) Zillions of willing slashdotters have eggdrop bots listening in on a previously determined IRC channel(s).
3) Every once in a completely varying while, the Moderated DDoS service sends out a very special message -- there needs to be some encryption for authenticity here -- across that IRC channel.
4) Simultaneously, every one of those eggbots pass the list of URLs to a little script which proceeds to, simultaneously, hit the relevant links.
Participation is wholly voluntary. Humans make sure no joe jobs slip into the system, and only authentic spammers are targetted. The use of IRC means there can be little to no warning to the spammers. Heck, if folks want, they can run their anti-spammer bot silently and not even be bothered by it's behavior.
OTOH, any such app should report periodically to the user how many spammers have been hammered, so they get the rosy glow of satisfaction.