Lenin's Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy

Huh, I've read some of Lenin's essays, but I didn't know about that one. Thanks for namedropping it.

The only situation in which democracy as a whole would be rejected under a Marxist program is when false consciousness is too powerful to overcome

that feels pretty instructive for the US, lol

Yeah I know who Moldbug is. I was giving him as an example of a belief that I don't agree with.

To me, his most interesting assertions are the following:

• some kids are just smarter than others
• kids separate out into different levels of academic performance pretty early, like age 7-10, and then generally stay there into adulthood
• it's not possible for teachers or schools to "equalize" smart kids and less-smart kids, or privileged kids and unprivileged kids, but equality-minded liberals and leftists expect them to be able to do that
• the American public education system generally does okay given what's asked of it. Not great, but okay. A lot of the criticism it gets is undeserved.
• Allocating more money to schools probably would not lead to kids being any smarter or performing any better. Increased school funding only leads to better student performance up to a certain point, and the US is well past that point.
• the SATs and ACTs are fairly good assessments of who's smarter than whom, and of who is more likely to succeed in a four-year university
  • the criticism that they are biased in favor of affluent/white students is off the mark, or, at least, the alternatives to SATs/ACTs (like GPA and extracurriculars) are even more biased in that way
  • related to this, conventional IQ tests are fairly good at testing general intelligence, and left-leaning people are wrong to dismiss them
• the idea that there are huge disparities in school funding between white/rich areas and nonwhite/poor areas is incorrect. Yes, local school funding comes from property taxes and therefore will be variable between different localities, but state-level and federal-level school funding is redistributive enough that it overcomes that issue
• the achievement gap between white and black students (including the gap in standardized test scores) is not because of anything that's being done particularly wrong by our education system
• only 5-10% of variation in student performance is attributable to in-school factors; the other 90-95% is due to outside-of-school cultural/social/environmental factors, and/or is just endogenous to the students themselves
  • he sometimes makes an even stronger version of this claim, and asserts that even the environmental and cultural factors can be more or less set aside, and the real reason for differences in student performance is genes. But he's also backed away from that at times and said that "whether it's environment or genetics, my point still stands".
• there's no such thing as "good schools" or "bad schools", just schools with good students and schools with bad students
• the idea that American students are "falling behind" other countries is wrong. The reality is that American students kind of always were behind. US students have performed kind of mediocre in international comparisons with other rich countries for basically as long as these tests have been conducted; it's not a new problem. This was even the case in the 1950s-1970s, but it didn't stop the US from being the scientific & industrial leader of the world in that time. We still were curing polio, and landing on the moon, and leading the way in computers, and generally kicking ass.

if you research the absolute madness that got published, specially after generative ai became popular, in the fields of biology and engineering, you'll be shocked.

Do you have any examples that you could pull up quickly?

I'm not really doubting your claim, but having some examples of obviously bad scholarship in engineering/biology/physical sciences would be helpful in the future.

Yeah you're right. Furthermore, the graph that they show for "Did Joe Biden drop out" isn't even in absolute units, so we can't actually tell how many people are making this query. They normalize it so that the maximum is always represented by 100, but that still might only be like <1000 people.

Thanks, I'll make sure to read these later this week

looks interesting. thanks

Thanks, this seems like exactly what I was looking for

This is really good, thanks

so this is it, right? We're, like, definitely in WW3 now?

been thinking about this a lot this morning.

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Idk, unless there are actual allegations I don’t really see it. Adin Ross seems too stupid to take advantage of anyone.

Indeed, by the time we get to today, it would turn out that having ancestors who fled from the same persecution is much less meaningful a similarity than what the people alive today actually make of that history.

Fair point

This is probably far-fetched, but I'd like to think that Crooks was the first republican to actually be intellectually honest about Trump's connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and decided to take "kill your local pedophile" to its logical conclusion

You know what, good points. I shouldn’t have fallen for it so quickly

this guy disagrees: https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1812366460955562225

Yeah I've been having similar thoughts.

2014-2020 or so was a period of significant ideological change & realignment in the US in a number of ways, but now things have kind of reached a new equilibrium, so the current ideological terrain is probably what we're going to have for a while. I think this is mostly because the internet & social media reached maximum penetration around 2014, and the 2014-2020 period was just the US's ideological terrain adjusting to that step change.

(Admittedly, I also might be biased because 2014-2020 is also basically the period when I was 18-25 years old, so of course it seemed to me like a lot of things were in flux)

precisely