"The opposite of poverty is justice"

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Riggerjack
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Riggerjack »

But if you legalize most of it you had better be prepared for those consequences too and any unintended side-effect.
Such as?
Might want to take into account the fact that there is a solid percentage of the population which is incapable of passing a high school equivalency exam. Imagine the inhabitants of a forum which if combined with the inhabitants of this forum would result in a population with average IQ and functioning
I did. No parole. Somebody has to serve as the example of a path less pleasant. Some people will be stubborn, some stupid. And those who aren't should be motivated to work to show that they aren't. This is prison, not preschool.

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Well, since there is a known correlation between violence and Y chromosome, and a known correlation between IQ and violence within the Y chromosome group, why don't we just cut to the chase and test all boys for IQ at age 3 and immediately send the bottom 10% off to the pokey?

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fiby41
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by fiby41 »

"...who I'm a great admirer of, once described an old religious idea, and that was- god ruled the world with two hands, left and right, mercy and justice. And the world couldn't survive if only mercy was applied, because no one could ever be encouraged to adopt the trappings and responsibilities of adulthood. And you would end up in a situation in which you were forgiven for absolutely everything you'd do or failed to do. Your thrust into the Freudian nightmare of Oedipus family where your utter uselessness forgiven on the grounds of compassion where you live in your mother's basement producing fantasies as a consequence of your squelched development of perhaps going out and shooting up a highschool.

Mercy in its excess produces pathology. Justice in its excess produces pathology too because people are not perfect. And
that means that we all fail when we attempt to do things we all know we should do. When so being held to account for failure should be tempered by mercy but both principles have to apply.

Justice means that there is structure, and rules. people who abide by the structure and play by the rules move towards the top and win. And mercy means we are forgiven our failures so that we can rise up and play again. But you cannot have one without the other because the world falls apart if you do. And this is my problem with tolerance. Because tolerant people. First of all, those who proclaim the virtues of tolerance believe they are tolerant but generally that's not the case. They just don't want to accept the responsibility that playing by the rules would bring."

~Jordan Peterson (transcripted, don't have og vid, this much is relevant to topics covered in this tread anyway.)

Riggerjack
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Riggerjack »

@ fitby41, good quote.

@ 7w5, this is the inherent difference between your approach to planning and society and mine. I believe in choice. I believe that making consequences clear and direct helps people make the choices that make them feel better about themselves.

I wouldn't jail stupid men for being stupid men. I would jail anyone who chose to break the rules of society, not out of any sense of fairness, but because they chose that path. And prison is where that path leads. This helps others make better choices. All of society gains by the contributions of stupid men who make good choices, and by the example of what happens to smart men who make bad choices.

Jacob described my ideal prison as being like middle school. And he was exactly right, it is middle school for the ones who didn't learn the way you teach. Prison shouldn't be a gladiator school, it should be remedial civics and acedemic training.

Our current system is to take the ones who didn't learn, and put them in an eternal Recess in a unsupervised schoolyard. And you see where that got us. Lord of the flies scenarios make for poor training to live a productive life in our society.

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Riggerjack: I don't think we are in essential disagreement. I am just less optimistic than you that we will ever live in a society with enough resources to provide that level of education. It costs more to haul 1 low functioning individual up from 2nd grade level to 12th grade level than to direct 50 high functioning individuals along that path. Unfortunately, I think the market/society has already made the correct (not ideal!) calculation that cost of crime is higher than cost of incarceration and cost of incarceration is less than cost of education/reform. It might even be the case that overall cost of crime is less than cost of educating/treating those who would be criminals. Let's say 5 house break-ins year vs. some percentage of the combined salaries of special education teacher, social worker and psychiatrist vs. some percentage of prison guard salary, institutional food, and corporation specializing in prison construction profits.

Riggerjack
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Riggerjack »

@7w5, I think we are.

You've trained people, I've trained people. Some pick up training easily and quickly, others don't, still others actively resist.

It is tempting to consider those that pick up training easily to be smart, and those who don't as not.

I don't believe this.

I'm an INTJ, I picked up all the lessons in school, as presented by the teachers, at the periphery of my attention. There was background noise in my childhood that was the teacher. I picked it all up, but it didn't require effort, or even for me to not spend my real energies elsewhere ( games, fantasy novels, other useless geeky shit). This made teachers think I was smart. I test well. This made me think I was smart.

Then, I discovered the real world. The evidence of how smart I am is much less apparent.

Eventually, I started training people. And judged them when they couldn't learn the simple things I was showing them. It could have stopped there.

But part of that real world experience was finding that the spoon fed knowledge of school was only part of the education, and that while I got it easily, mynot paying attention to any of it caused me to miss out on all the non curriculum education going on. Then, that for most folks, the non curriculum education was their main focus.

This caused me to more directly focus on how people learn.

I have come to the conclusion that the human brain is just good at learning what we are interested in. And that most of what we call intelligence is really interest.

Here, we have a group of people who, like me, have interests both deep and broad. That's rare.

Most people are really only interested in people. And when I talk to them, they see things I don't. Their interest and focus on this subject far exceeds my own.

So who's smarter? Me, the guy who can pass tests on subjects he has never studied, or the silicone enhanced blonde who doesn't know who won WWII, but can manipulate her BF into
doing anything she likes?

In my experience, when someone isn't "high functioning", it's because I have failed to capture their interest. This isn't their failure.

Now, obviously, there are biological limits. Downs syndrome, autism, some extreme traumas, will always require other methods, resources and other standards of success. But I believe the top 95% to be roughly equal. This coming from someone who was enlisted, worked in construction, and currently in engineering. It's not like I came to this conclusion by only surrounding myself with " high functioning " people.

BRUTE
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by BRUTE »

great post. "intelligence" has been so poorly defined and elusive, the concept might as well be given up.

brute would answer the "who's smarter" with: whichever aptitude is valued higher by the (broader, not just financial) market. in the stone age, maybe physical strength was super important. then, as societies got stronger and bigger, social skills. only nowadays is there even the infrastructure for INTJ type nerds to productive use of their aptitudes - good luck being a nerd in a clan of cavemen. there might be room for one.

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Riggerjack: I guess you are right. We aren't on the same page because I never think of myself as being engaged in the task of training other people. What I usually do is attempt to create attractive vacuums and/or filter for behaviors I prefer.

Anyways, I think you would probably perform better on an IQ test than the silicone enhanced blonde, because you are smarter even though she may be more successful. Social skills and physical appearance correlate more strongly than IQ with many measures of success such as income. The trait that IQ (defined here as score on standard 20th century IQ test) correlates with very strongly is objective productivity. For example, if you set 10 people independently at the task of mopping a floor, and then assign a neutral panel to judge quality of work, the best floor mopper would generally be the person with the highest IQ. Of course, in this example there is some assumption that the 10 individuals assigned the task have been offered some motivation to exhibit their best performance. I don't know why so many nerds are resistant to learning social skills or procuring aesthetic assets. There's no reason why an individual can't be a silicone enhanced blonde who performs well on standardized tests and knows how to allow men the privilege of paying her bar tab.

OTOH, I don't disagree with your estimate of only 5% being severely low functioning. My pessimism is likely due to the fact that I am a bit of a burnt-out case since the population I have been working with is probably composed of at least 30% representation of the lowest 5% functioning in the general population.

Campitor
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Campitor »

BRUTE wrote:
Thu Jun 22, 2017 10:04 am
great post. "intelligence" has been so poorly defined and elusive, the concept might as well be given up.

brute would answer the "who's smarter" with: whichever aptitude is valued higher by the (broader, not just financial) market. in the stone age, maybe physical strength was super important. then, as societies got stronger and bigger, social skills. only nowadays is there even the infrastructure for INTJ type nerds to productive use of their aptitudes - good luck being a nerd in a clan of cavemen. there might be room for one.
Considering that human proto-ancestor brains kept increasing in size up to homo sapiens emerged, I think some sort of intelligence was being prioritized via evolutionary pressure to justify the caloric cost and vulnerability of added brain growth. I like RiggerJack's solution for prison (middle school). I think people today are lazy thinkers because they can be. If you were lazy mentally and/or physically in ancient times, you won the Darwin award. You had to be smart, attentive, and active. Today neither is true because our civilization of plenty is enough to carry even the laziest and stupidest along - they are no longer provided immediate and obvious feedback loops to incentivize self correction.

Riggerjack
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Riggerjack »

I wasn't trying to be reassured that I'm smarter that the blonde, in fact I was trying to say the opposite.

I know who won WWII, because I was interested. She knows in intimate detail how to read and manipulate her BF, because that interests her so much, it as a constant focus. She has put more hours into her area of interest than Jacob has in modeling movement of gases in stars.

I believe what we call intelligence, is really just a measure of interest. I'm a smart guy. I fish. Maybe once a decade. While I can pick up fishing pretty quickly, I will never be the fisherman my nieghbor, Jeff is. Because Jeff thinks about fishing when he's working, and fishing, and driving...

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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by jacob »



7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Riggerjack: I know you were trying to promote the blonde as your intelligence peer, I was just being a bit Captain Obvious. If we are considering the studies that correlate intelligence and likelihood to engage in violent crime, these studies are not measuring that ineffable quality equally possessed by you and the blonde.

At the school where I teach most often, there is one 6th grade class that nobody can handle. In most classes there are maybe 3 or 4 bad boys. In this class there are 8 or 9. I have been sent into this assignment solo with constant back-up from 6'5" male vice-principal and teamed up with male teachers of Iraqi and African-American heritage, and still they will/can not behave for more than 5 minutes. One very experienced, conservative 50-ish male teacher who was assigned this group just for one afternoon, told the school secretary that if she ever asked him to cover again , he would immediately request a personal day, and then added "unless you give me a cattle prod." The secretary turned to me and said "What is to become of these kids?' Two of the 8 bad boys seem to be intelligent (not nerds!) One of them found his mother dead from a drug overdose several years ago. The other intelligent kid is only borderline bad, more of an assertive class-clown type. Two of the bad boys are probably average intelligence, but in possession of extremely bad attitude. Four of the bad boys are very low-functioning, brutish. I agree that the tough-love-motivational-prison model you suggest might prove effective with the intelligent class-clown, and the average bad attitude boys. It will not work with the emotionally damaged intelligent child or the extremely-slow-witted-brutish children.

The most troublesome kid in a 3rd grade class I occasionally teach has red-hair and freckles (white, non-immigrant is minority in this district.) One day I was noting that he was absent on the attendance sheet, and one of his socially-savvy-bright female African-American classmates offered me matter of fact likely explanation for his absence as "He is probably in court." (much laughter from the peanut gallery.) This is 3RD GRADE! These kids are only 9 years old and they are already aware of the justice system as part of their life :( One of the African-American para-professionals told me she always tells the kids "Look what they are building for you." in reference to new prison construction.

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@BRUTE: I actually went to see "Revenge of the Nerds" on the big screen with my BF just recently.

I think we are really debating two different things in this discussion. I agree that if the 20 most resistant to developing social skills nerds on this forum were to be imprisoned with no hope of release until they mastered these realms at a level of competency of maybe being able to get a second date with a Grade B-minus Mean Girl (adult version) and/or obtain 3 leads on lucrative financial/employment opportunities by working the crowd at some cocktail party type event, they would be in possession of the inherent abilities to achieve these goals under circumstances that forced a change of interest. And the same protocol could work for street-smart not nerdy types in reverse.

It is even possible that under such circumstances I might develop some degree of athletic competence.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by ThisDinosaur »

I think the interest-to-competence thing may work both ways. Like, if you are good at something, you get reinforcement from people respecting you for it. So you do it more because you like the social proof and general lack of frustration. Gladwell talked about this in Outliers.

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@ThisDinosaur: I think this is true until you reach a point in adult development where you realize that your potential for marginal gains in your "natural" competence realm has become much lower than your potential for gains in other realms. One thing I would note for the record is that there is a scant minority of well-rounded "golden" people. For instance, the character played by Robert Redford in "The Way We Were."

Campitor
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Campitor »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:04 am
I agree that the tough-love-motivational-prison model you suggest might prove effective with the intelligent class-clown, and the average bad attitude boys. It will not work with the emotionally damaged intelligent child or the extremely-slow-witted-brutish children.
The failure is keeping these types of children mixed in with regular kids who want to learn. Teachers should be spending their time teaching instead of trying to mitigate the erosion of learning caused by incorrigible students. People have to be honest and admit that some student are unteachable in this stage of their life - they should be sent to a school that teaches basic math, reading, and writing skills - forget algebra, calculus, poetry, physics, etc. Once the basic lessons are taught, the kids are put through aerobic type sports the rest of the day to drain them of excess physical energy as much as possible. But this will never happen because it's cheaper to demonize society, ignore personal responsibility, and overlook the problem which allows good teachers and students to be devastated by a tsunami of prison yard antics.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by ThisDinosaur »

Well, is the goal of school to educate or to separate the educatable kids from the uneducatable ones? Similar to the question of the purpose of prisons. If I'm paying taxes to support public schools, what do I care if someone else's kid can read and write? What I want is for them to become productive citizens so, as a group, some of them might do something useful for me someday. Also, the better informed they are, the smarter they'll vote. Hypothetically anyways.

Campitor
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Campitor »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri Jun 23, 2017 12:22 pm
Well, is the goal of school to educate or to separate the educatable kids from the uneducatable ones? Similar to the question of the purpose of prisons. If I'm paying taxes to support public schools, what do I care if someone else's kid can read and write? What I want is for them to become productive citizens so, as a group, some of them might do something useful for me someday. Also, the better informed they are, the smarter they'll vote. Hypothetically anyways.
As a result of the overriding psychological issues that can't be addressed in normal class room setting, these incorrigible kids are not receiving an education nor are they allowing other students to get one either. I too want them to be productive citizens but not at the cost of the majority. I'd rather pull up one weed than toss the whole garden. Society has been brainwashed into thinking that a teacher can come in and force an epiphany on a kid who has experienced <insert repeated traumatic emotionally/psychologically scarring event here> during class in a manner that doesn't retard or interfere with other students ability to learn. So instead of one or two student falling behind, all of them start to fail. Get those kids out and teach them the basics - if they show increased aptitude then perhaps they can be put back into a normal class.

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Campitor: I completely agree. Unfortunately, there is no other place to send these kids. Meanwhile, there are some very poor, very bright kids in these classrooms who are just wasting their time, and falling further and further behind their peers in more affluent districts. There are also well-behaved, eager-to-learn children with low abilities who could at least hope to achieve basic competency if the teachers had some spare time to offer them more remediation. In the terrible 6th grade I described, there is one extremely intelligent little boy (likely an INTJ) who sits and reads in the middle of the tornado. I spent just a few minutes one day teaching him the quadratic formula and then referred him to some internet resources. This kid could be doing much more advanced work. The waste of human potential is appalling.

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