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Joshua C. Lerner
9.8K posts
Joshua C. Lerner
@jlerner
iOS developer. If you have to ask, banana/rock. RT ≠ endorsement.
Florida Katılım Aralık 2008
316 Takip Edilen274 Takipçiler
@lyndseyfifield A 4-year-old. In "school". Think about that for a second.
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I can't believe I actually felt embarrassment wash over me yesterday in a backyard birthday party on Capitol Hill when a parent asked where my 4 year-old goes to school and all eyes fell upon me.
I said “we're doing Classical Conversations” with a smile but should have proudly said “my children are home with me!” They asked no follow up questions.
The sacrifices and adjustments my husband and I have made to allow me to stay home with my children are MORE than worth it.
Sometimes I fight the feeling that I am being selfish—like I am greedy or wrong to want to spend every waking moment with them, change every diaper, kiss every boo boo, capture every moment and store it away in my brain to nourish me when I am old—as if my doting will harm them somehow... but when I see how their nervous systems are developing, how they trust and love and explore the world with confidence, how they love and are bonded to each other, and how they make friends so easily—not to mention how bright they are, I know I am not the only one benefitting from this.
The lie that children NEED pre-school (let alone day care) for academic success has been disproven over and over yet still I squeaked out “classical conversations” when I should have BRAGGED about how much my children are thriving at home.
The Spectator@spectator
'Parents don't realise that nurseries are day orphanages and warehouses for their children' Child psychotherapist Erica Komisar says parents are being bullied and misled into believing that daycare is good for their children, aruging that nurseries are effectively 'day orphanages' that cannot provides babies with the same safety and security provided by their parents. @EricaKomisarCSW @NatashaFeroze
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@lyndseyfifield "But how will they be socialized...?", I always hear. As if traditional school excels at this. If you're lucky, sure you may make some great friends, but this happens at any correctional institution. Standard disclaimer: I had some great teachers, and some stinkers.
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Joshua C. Lerner retweetledi
Transgenderism is an ongoing project of attempting to normalize a bizarre subculture built around esoteric pseudo-medical practices from the outermost fringe of human extremity and make it compulsory for every American to join that subculture and to make that subculture the mainstream culture of the Western world. One requires only the most cursory understanding of the pioneering figures responsible for the mainstreaming of transgenderism -- who they were and what their motives were -- to understand this as a matter of certainty.
It is as if ascetics who scourge themselves with whips in public or amputee fetishists began teaching their beliefs to young schoolchildren and recruiting them to join their ranks. One is forced into the strange position of referencing practices that are not more bizarre than transgenderism -- that are indeed arguably less bizarre -- to make an analogy in an attempt to restore some semblance of sanity and proportionality to our thinking about this. The normalization has already gone far enough that the whole culture suffers from vertigo where it is unable to orient itself in space or time.
Giving the same off-label cancer drugs that are used to chemically castrate adult sex offenders to pubescent children who have been brainwashed to fear the decisive stage of mental, physical, and emotional maturation that resolves gender dysphoria in children in most cases is self-evidently an act of madness and medicalized child abuse unmatched by anything in the history of modern medicine. It took the self-lobotomization of the American professional and managerial classes for our truth-seeking apparatus not to see this fact that is self-evident to any normal person with normal human instincts.
This self-lobotomization occurred across mainstream institutions of all kinds -- all it required was the incantation of a few odious euphemisms, the manipulation of rewards and punishments, and confident claims by various authorities that self-evidently ludicrous claims were in fact settled science.
Now we are in phase one of recognizing that there was never any science to any of it.
It was all a lie told by cultists who managed to infiltrate and corrupt society's knowledge-generating, certifying, and enforcement apparatus -- it was the most outrageous of all such possible lies, so outrageous that nobody could believe that anyone would attempt it, much less succeed, unless there was some actual substance behind it, some real grounds for epistemic and moral confidence. There was none.
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Joshua C. Lerner retweetledi
I’m tired of my culture being defined as, essentially, an absence of culture. “American culture is pluralism” is an assertion that American culture is nothing. This is false. Our culture is a specific way of life created by a specific people. Our culture is honesty, honoring not just the letter but the spirit of our commitments rather than looking for loopholes, responsibility, a sense of guilt at imposing on other people, an abiding suspicion of government overreach, a desire to be left alone, open friendliness, blunt talk rather than polite euphemism, the Christian and Hellenic intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions, and much more. It is rich and specific and while there are natural Americans of non-Anglo background, they are rare outliers, usually outcasts and eccentrics in their native cultures. Most humans on Earth are not at all temperamentally suited to participate in American culture and to the extent they are allowed to come here, America becomes less American.
The people telling you that American culture is nothing, that it’s some vague bumper sticker slogan or post-1960s platitude are people who do not fit in actual American culture and so wish to eliminate it, wish to impose alienation on the American people as revenge for their own correct sense that they don’t belong here, aren’t one of us, could never be one of us.
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When a student receives an A or B average in high school math but can't show absolute mastery of middle school math upon arrival at college, this is academic fraud, likely involving all of the players (teachers, principals, parents, and student). Where are the deep dives into exactly how this happens? UCSD is a public institution, some of these ill-prepared students went to public K12 - the taxpayer has a right to know!
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This sounds like a joke, but it's not:
– 1 in 12 incoming UCSD freshmen don’t know middle school math,
– and the remedial math course was too advanced,
– so UCSD had to create a remedial remedial math course,
– and a quarter of the students placing into it had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses.
That sounds so ridiculous, like something you’d read in The Onion, but it’s unfortunately real.
Here are some direct quotes from the UCSD report:
"Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort."
"While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11)."
"Few, if any, students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree."
"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."
"The correlation between the average math grade and the placement result is only around 0.25 on a scale of 0 to 1. In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0."
"of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels, 94% went beyond [the minimum high school course requirement], with 42% percent completing Calculus or Precalculus."
"The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has."
"In fact, for more than two decades the Mathematics Department has found that out of all available student data, the single best predictor for math placement has been the SAT (math section) score, with the ACT score being an equally good predictor."
unusual_whales@unusual_whales
Generation Z college students are reportedly arriving on campus struggling with basic reading comprehension, even difficulty processing full sentences, per FORTUNE.
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@justinskycak Yes, but who cares about grade levels? (I know, almost everyone does.)
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A grade level's worth of learning can be compressed much, much shorter than a year if you just avoid wasting time.
And once you see this in academics, you see this everywhere in life.
Standard milestones are based on what anyone can accomplish with a high volume of unserious, inefficient work.
Why?
Because that's the standard approach to work. Show up, mess around, waste time, do the bare minimum, run out the clock, rinse and repeat every weekday.
But if you just take things seriously, work efficiently, and put in the same volume, you can take off flying.
It's the biggest edge: actually giving a shit.
But in order to capitalize on this edge, you have to get into a line of work where outsized results reap outsized reward.
Not every line of work is like this.
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Try arguing with this. Try living without mastery or even competence in your dealings with reality. "Mastery is the best goal because the rich can't buy it, the impatient can't rush it, the privileged can't inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status."
Justin Skycak@justinskycak
Hardcore skill development is one of the greatest social mobility hacks. Even if your family is not well-connected, you can make up for it by developing real skills. Sure, you have to develop more skills than well-connected people to reach the same level of opportunity, and you’re going to have less guidance developing those skills and finding your way to the arena – but once you’re in the arena, those extra skills pay big dividends.
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Joshua C. Lerner retweetledi
Hoover Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell delivers a sweeping critique of American education, affirmative action, and modern universities—drawing on his journey from Harlem classrooms to elite institutions, decades of research, and hard data. Dr. Sowell argues that ideology has too often replaced knowledge and that well-intentioned policies can harm those they aim to help, raising urgent questions about race, schooling, AI, and the future of American institutions.
Watch a new episode of @UncKnowledge with @P_M_Robinson on X:
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"It’s about refusing to create dependencies on systems you cannot control." Or even meaningfully influence any of the time.
Robert Bortins@TheRobertBshow
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@frugalbc @SahilBloom This is why folks really only can change their minds over time, in the light of new information and experiences. The brain needs time to process it all. In the heat of the moment, somehow this obvious fact is usually forgotten.
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@SahilBloom Yes, in the face of new, overwhelming evidence.
But I think there does need to be a barrier.
Everyone knows that person ready to hop onto the newest thing or newest idea. Contrasted to the person who never changes.
The sweet spot is somewhere in between.
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I’m increasingly convinced that the willingness to change your mind is the ultimate sign of intelligence. The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information. It’s like a software update. The goal isn't to be right. It's to find the truth.
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Yes - and they cement it all in place by leaning in to the use of labels, not just on others but on themselves. Try deviating from what's implied by "I'm a proud liberal" or "I'm a MAGA conservative". No you're not one or the other. You're a mix of lots of opinions, some informed, some assigned to you, some justified, some the result of your confusion. Same with those you so casually label and dismiss.
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@SahilBloom The problem is most people tie their identity to their opinion
So changing your mind feels like losing instead of upgrading
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And this is why you should avoid labels and not align yourself too closely with tribal politics. Once you tell people "I'm this" or "I'm that", it becomes part of your identity. Self-interrogation ends. You start making up reasons to maintain the belief, just to avoid admitting having been wrong all that time.
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@HawleyMO You don’t want answers. Constant interruptions, refusing to listen, and talking over a highly respected doctor isn’t “debate”. It’s disrespectful and deeply misogynistic.
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@EliLanger @HawleyMO Because she doesn't believe that male and female are real or useful categories when it comes to humans. How about other sexually reproducing creatures? She does, OTOH, believe that "gender identity" is real and useful.
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@HawleyMO If she believes the answer is, “Yes,” then why not just say “Yes.”
😉
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@SophiaSLorey @HawleyMO The real issue is the system that produced and employs this cowardly doctor, that rewards her for toeing the line to deny biological reality.
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@HawleyMO If a doctor cannot easily say “No men cannot get pregnant” then they should not have their license, they don’t follow basic biology.
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@HawleyMO What would she have said in response to the question "Can a male dog get pregnant?"
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Joshua C. Lerner retweetledi
Joshua C. Lerner retweetledi
My suggestion: recognize that you’re on a hijacked flight and shut up about whether your in-flight hot towel isn’t warm enough.
Stop complaining about your pilots and the turbulence: they got chloroformed and tied up or thrown off the plane entirely. Those people
running the show aren’t the pilots. Fauci wasn’t a scientist. Get it?
Stop ringing the hijackers with the call button and asking them for help solving your pilot problem.
You don’t have a pilot problem. You have a hijacking problem. You are communicating with hijackers. You are looking to hijackers to help you make your connecting flights and find lost baggage.
What is wrong with you? You aren’t dealing with scientists. You are dealing with the people who got your scientists fired and are now wearing their lab coats.
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