Bold added:
Are these (bold parts) intended to all paraphrase the same thing? Do you see differences between any of them?
I agree. So did you know that when you replied about detention? I found your response weird if you knew that since, in that case, it would be basically disagreeing with the video not applying what the video said (but your response wasn’t presented like arguing with the video).
Why relate to authority? Does doing that give you more info about something?
If there are authorities ready to abuse their power then maybe when you relate to them you can tell they’re abusing their power with you. Maybe when you relate to the authority you can tell that they want to hurt you but using their power to do it. Their power is being able to tell you what to do.
Yes they are all intended to paraphrase the same thing. At first I didn’t notice this, but I’m not sure that “people in positions of power” and “authorities” are necessarily the same things. But I don’t know; it’s just an inexplicit doubt I found when looking for potential differences. They do seem intuitively very similar to me.
No I didn’t.
I thought about the topic more after you and ActiveMind replied and helped me realise that my idea of just disobeying authorities you disagree with was problematic. After rewatching the video more carefully and with a few questions in mind about what Pargin might think about that, I couldn’t conclude that he thinks you should disobey authority when you want to.
I think I missed the point of the video initially. I’ve been trying to just post more and filter less, so that could be why. Also I have a lot to learn about engaging with things well, like what questions to ask to myself, how to judge if my reply is on topic, and heaps more stuff probably. So I’m not surprised that I replied in a confusing way and missed the point. I think this has been a success for me regardless and I don’t feel bad nor embarrassed about it so far, which is good.
I think this has been a success for me regardless and I don’t feel bad nor embarrassed about it so far, which is good.
ok cool
Key to understanding the lesson is knowing that the world full of people in positions of power who know they can take advantage of that.
What does “that” refer to?
(I just noticed the verb “is” is missing. It should be “…the world is full of people…”)
“that” refers to “power”. A rewrite like “…the world is full of people in positions of power who know they can take advantage of that power.” has the same meaning.
I noticed another difference between those three sentences you bolded: knowing that you can take advantage of your power (1st sentence), and being ready to abuse your power (2nd and 3rd), are different things.
I don’t think “power” (or a synonym like “authority”) is what Pargin meant when he said “that” in the TikTok around 3:22. Can you come up with any alternative interpretations?
Oh yeah, I think you’re right. I think he’s saying that the world is full of authorities who know they can take advantage of the fact that the lesson is difficult for kids to learn.
It seems to me that you’re possibly misunderstanding how the word “relate” is being used? The way I’m using it and the way I think Pargin in the video uses it, is in the following sense:
3: to have or establish a relationship: INTERACT
Oh ok I see. I think I am misunderstanding the definition of relate. I still don’t get the definition after reading it a few times. That’s hard.
Maybe this will help: It’s similar to the word relationship.
In this context, how one relates to something means something like: what kind of relationship you have with something. When Pargin talks about relating to authority, he’s talking about the problem of what kind of relationship to have with authority. Examples of kinds of relationships with authority would be obedient, disobedient, trusting, distrusting, etc.
Oh ok that makes sense. I get what Pargin means he’s talking about relating to authority.
Ahh, those are kinds of relationships. Ok, so Pargin has a problem with how students relate to teachers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1ftnbp2/the_elite_college_students_who_cant_read_books/
A podcast I keep recommending is Sold a Story - a short limited series investigating how much of the English speaking world was duped by grifters and bad science into essentially not teaching kids how to read properly.
Schools were teaching cueing theory - you might also know it as reading recovery or whole language, where instead of teaching kids phonics, or insisting that they memorize words, teachers were teaching kids to guess based on context cues, letters and pictures.
This creates kids who can bluff their way through simple readings with a good enough understanding of what’s going on, but cause disasters when they try to advance to books with harder readings and no more pictures.
It’s funny how the science of education is so, so bad sometimes. Massive decisions are made on bad science and tiny sample sizes. The podcast even mentioned a story where,the publishers of one of the most popular curriculum had funded a well done proper study that they linked on their website, but it showed the opposite of what the publisher claimed, and nobody examined it or even questioned it.
I was going to respond to “54% of US adults have a literacy below sixth grade” with this yt video I saw by Jared Henderson: Why everyone stopped reading.
I was going to say that those 54% wasn’t just the non-college educated population of the US getting worse at reading. So I was thinking there was a common cause, which I thought was stopping to teach phonics. I was thinking that this is an example of rational debate, and our current scientific system, not working out. I haven’t researched phonics and whole language/cueing theory, but I think I can remember Peikoff and/or Rand liking phonics. I remember them saying it’s the conceptual view of reading (I think this is in * Teaching Johnny to Think: A Philosophy of Education Based on the Principles of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism*). So I would think there would be good conceptual non-empirical reasons to do phonics. I would also suspect that reading the science they did on phonics vs whole language you should be able to tell which was right, or point at errors in whole language studies, which I think many people did.
So it’s an example of this society being bad at rational non-empirical debate and empirical science. Also it shows us the effects bad irrationality has on people, so some generations of people with no control of the situation are screwed over because of it.
Cueing theory is not whole language, memorizing words, sight reading or Look-Say. I think you misread the text which says “instead of teaching kids phonics, or … memorize words, … [cueing]”. It’s an “Instead of (X or Y), Z” format. I added parentheses to indicate the grouping.
The Three-Cueing Systems Model is a flawed literacy instructional practice that teaches students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues—collectively known as “MSV.” While this sounds wonky, it can be boiled down to this: Teachers using this method instruct students to guess. This approach is soundly criticized by many reading experts, because it encourages students to guess, not sound out, words they do not know by using pictures or what they think might make sense given the context of the sentence.
Leonard Peikoff argued for phonics over Look-Say (learning whole words) in The American School: Why Johnny Can’t Think I’m skeptical that Peikoff knows what he’s talking about on this subject.
I’ve found that people guess a lot when reading sentences and paragraphs. Instead of understanding every word and its role in the sentence, they guess at the overall meaning of sentences in ways that ignore or contradict some words. They also will write in the same way, so not all the words are meaningful or correct, so trying to analyze all their words doesn’t actually work well and the more guessing-based approach to reading actually makes some sense with their writing… One of the points of practicing sentence grammar trees is to consider the role of every word instead of skipping some words.
I also think people often learn new words by guessing the meaning from context without looking the words up. I’ve encouraged people to use dictionaries more.
I don’t know, but I suspect, that a ton of these college kids who have trouble reading whole books are decently literate on the individual word level – able to read single words – but struggle more with understanding sentences and paragraphs. I’d expect they have smaller vocabularies of known words (and some errors from guessing word meanings), but I doubt that’s the main problem. A lot of people blame attention span but I suspect that if they were understanding what they read better then they’d be more interested in it.
EDIT there may have been some misunderstandings. It turns out “whole language” is an umbrella term that includes both cueing and sight reading.
I agree that rational debate hasn’t happened. I think you’re wrong to believe you know what the outcome of the debate would be (phonics wins) if it did happen.
Yeah, I don’t know a lot about the debate. I only vaguely remember what Peikoff said about phonics, I think I listened to the book you linked maybe 1.5 years ago. I had also watched this video The Ongoing Debate Over Reading Education (also long ago).
English isn’t fully phonetically consistent, so that’s a reason to be skeptical of phonics.
I should probably have said it would be an example of rational debate not happening if phonics truly was better and had existing better arguments and criticism of opponents.
Something anecdotal to share on that:
I read a lot of Chinese web novels. A website to read them online is webnovel.com, The company is pretty unethical and the parent company is also pretty bad. Hmm. Not relevant to what I’m sharing but wanted to point that out nonetheless.
What I wanted to point out is that the stories on their are simple. People on their don’t have trouble reading the stories. In fact (well anecdotally at least) many people, including me, have trouble with binging the novels on there. People enjoy reading the stuff on there to the point where they binge it and it isn’t cheap either (though people aren’t good with their money in general). An example of how expensive it is: I spent at least $150 (probably more) to read a whole series.
So I agree with that sentiment. I think it helps that many of the works on there are translated works. From what I know when you translate you usually end up simplifying it. Also, anyone can be an author on there.
Hmm. Maybe thats partially why fiction sells better than non-fiction.
