Quotulatiousness

October 22, 2026

The Cold War era research grant model has been a disaster for universities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Military, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Before the Second World War, governments generally did not directly sponsor research in their universities. With the example of the Manhattan Project and other less-well-known directed research efforts, western governments all accepted the notion that it was part of their national defence mandate to push research efforts by way of indirect or direct funding. This spread from the STEM fields directly related to weapon development to pretty much every area of academia. Lorenzo Warby explains why this has been a major contributor to the decline of western universities and the quality of research they undertake:

By “crank the handle” notions, I mean analyses that focus so much on resources that they end up massively underestimating the importance of information — and information landscapes — in understanding human social dynamics, given that we are biological beings who use information and resources to maintain ourselves. So, a “just add capital” approach to foreign aid is a “crank the handle” approach. Attempted analysis of long-term economic growth based on some derivation of a Cobb-Douglas production function is a “crank the handle” approach. (The disastrous — and revealing — limitations of such production functions will be discussed further in the next post in the series.)

One of the many problems with the “crank the handle” approaches that the terms capitalism and capitalist so encourage — by implying use and control of capital is the crucial thing, regardless of information landscapes and reality-tests — is the innovation-is-good cargo cult that has generated disastrous incentives in and for academe. Like all cargo cults, the innovation-is-good cargo cult mimics some of the surface appearance of successful innovation without replicating (or understanding) any of the substance.

Yes, it is absolutely true that technological innovation generated mass prosperity. But there are several key features to note.

  1. Most new ideas are crap. (So are a lot of old ideas: especially those repackaged by folk who don’t have to make things work.)
  2. Technological innovation is not merely a process of invention, it also requires successful implementation.
  3. Commercial innovation has a strong reality-test: does it make a buck? The profit/loss continuum tests ideas (both old and new) and their implementation.
  4. The energy take-off that we call the Industrial Revolution arose from Britain being the first society to adopt learning-by-experiment at scale; so learning via inherent feedbacks from what did, or did not, work.
  5. That energy use take-off occurred because no elite coalition vetoed it.

The post-1945 adoption of the bureaucratically-delivered research grant system was a reaction in part to the Second World War — which was so much a technological war — and to the pressures of Cold War geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. War generates serious reality-tests for weapons and other military technology. This reality-testing of weapons continued throughout the Cold War, as both Western and Soviet weapons were used in various conflicts.

The bureaucratised research grant model — whether government or non-profit — used to fund “innovation” within academe fails to grapple with what made either industrial innovation (with its commercial reality-tests) or military innovation (with rather brutal reality-tests) work. There also turn out to be major problems with trying to bureaucratise the Scientific Revolution.

Bureaucratised research grants treat innovation as presumptively good, when most new ideas are crap. It treats mere invention as some achievement, when inventing new ideas is hardly difficult or reliably useful. Such invention is even less difficult if there is no reality tests; if those propagating and judging those ideas do not have to make anything work in any practical, seriously-constrained-by-reality — not-just-performative — sense.

Outside the military realm and STEM (Science Technology Engineering Medicine), there are no reality-tests systematically built into the research grant process: only what plays to academic status games due to academic approval becoming the operative test. Academic approval is an amazingly weak filter. Consider Adam Smith’s famous remark about English universities:

    An English university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.

Marxism and its derivatives (e.g. Critical Theory) come to mind. Any use of Marxism — or its derivatives — requires massive discounting and rationalising away of tens of millions of deaths and a couple of dozen tyrannies. (So, of course, does any use of Left as a positive moral category, given that being Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Kim il-Sung …)

Moreover, across much of academe, we do not see the use of experimentation or observation to test claims, but rather “findings” baked into the “research”. “Findings” that are validated precisely because they garner academic approval.

October 15, 2026

Nearly half of Cornell students report being “harassed”

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

William M Briggs discusses the most recent sexual harassment survey results from Cornell, where — if you take the numbers at face value — the situation is dire:

You may have heard of the depressing contretemps at Cornell of late (written in the lady’s (a hotelie) own words here, but I cannot recommended reading it). It is not a coincidence that Cornell recently asked all students about how much sexual assault and harassment they enjoyed. It is that survey which interests us, because it so closely matches the breed and we need to understand their shortcomings.

Don’t put too much blame on Cornell. New York has a law that makes them give this survey every two years. This allows bureaucrats and rulers to think that they have done something good, which is the main reason for their existence, regardless how silly the results are.

Cornell gave the “instrument” — toot, toot — to 6,000 students, but only had “757 full completions”, which is a return rate of just over 12%.

How would the missing 88% have answered? This is a key question. The assumption sociologists make is: exactly the same. Yet, as we’ll see, it is far from impossible that those who blew off the survey would have responded differently than those who did answer, especially on the questions I’ll highlight.

Naturally, a lot more ladies than men answered, because women like to “play quiz” more than men. They also had a handful of students who, it seems, were unable to identify their sex; non-science majors, one supposes. All the extra ladies would have been fine if Cornell had broken the results out by sex, which they always didn’t. It will make a difference.

Cornell reported 49% of the students claimed that they “experienced any form of harassment”. My guess, since I am an arch sexist, is that the great bulk of that 49% were female reports. We never learn, but never mind. Let’s take the number as given.

If we extrapolate the survey results, as all good sociologists and rulers do, we would announce that half of all students were harassed. Half. Half, my dear readers, is an enormous number. Half would suggest that a small army of mouth-breathing harassers, likely from the Poetry Department, skulk around campus hiding behind bushes waiting for their chance to harass. Who could tolerate such an environment where half of all students are so abused?

I’ll tell you who: students. They can tolerate it. Because similar numbers of harassed were also reported in 2021 and 2023. Which can only mean one of two things. One: students come, they get harassed, then they come back for more of that rousing hands-on experience. They must be loving them some harassment to stick around when half get the business.

Or two: the survey and its results are, to use a technical word, bullshit.

I favor the second explanation, though I don’t entirely dismiss the first.

October 7, 2026

QotD: The cultural dominance of “Yankeedom”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

People like to point out that the political Right in America, split as it is between redneck populists and classically-liberal free marketeers, lacks the European conservatives’ emphasis on order and tradition, place and class, throne and altar and blood and soil and so forth. And, pace various European immigrants over the years and a few weirdos on the Internet, that’s true. But it’s interesting to imagine what our politics might look like today if Tidewater had remained a force on the national stage and if any substantial strain in America could say, with John Randolph of Roanoke, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.”

So there’s Tidewater, lost and forgotten except for some guys in Virginia who still put on red jackets to hunt foxes from horseback — and maybe in slightly different voting patterns. What about the nation that won, the one that’s everywhere?

I refer, of course, to Yankeedom.

“But Jane,” you say, “Yankeedom isn’t everywhere! Scroll back up to your own map — it’s in New England, sure, and, uh, northeastern Ohio and, wow, okay, the entire Upper Midwest. But that’s not everywhere.” But ignore the map for a moment: that’s Woodard’s idea, based on settlement patterns and voting behavior. What is Yankeedom, really? What are its fundamental beliefs, its vision of how life ought to be, and where do they show up today?

Of course you know the story of Yankeedom’s founding: radical Calvinists from East Anglia, settled around the Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and 30s, funny hats? Maybe you made one of those hats for your construction paper turkey in first grade — or, if you’re a little younger, maybe you learned a nice poem about welcoming new immigrants for a glowing future of multiculturalism and prosperity. In fact the emphasis on “the Pilgrims” in American civic mythology — never mind the traditional Thanksgiving menu, heavy on quintessentially New England dishes like pie1 — is itself a product of Yankeedom’s cultural dominance, as is the insistence in that familiar story that they left England for religious freedom. It’s true! They did! But there’s a very important final bit that we somehow leave out of the version we teach to elementary schoolers: religious freedom for themselves.

The earliest Yankees imagined their new society as a Protestant utopia, a new Zion, in which they would work out their collective salvation. Any deviation from the straight-and-narrow could doom everyone, so enforcing moral and religious conformity — through banishing heretics or, if necessary, even executing them — was of paramount importance. Yankeedom was meant to be a “city on a hill”, a model for mankind: if only they could be good enough, pure enough, and holy enough, God would bless them abundantly — and then everyone else, seeing their manifest blessings, would naturally emulate them and become holy themselves! The important thing, then, was not merely to do right but to be seen to do right, as an example to neighbors and foreigners alike. Yankeedom also put a tremendous emphasis on education (literacy was necessary to read the Word of God), encouraged subordinating the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community, and saw government as an extension of the citizenry. Government, then, since it was run by and for the people, was naturally called to propagate God’s will in a corrupt and sinful world by prohibiting or regulating immoral activities.

As Yankeedom moved west, out of the strict control of the Congregationalist ministers who dominated the New England colonies, they began to abandon their specific religious tenets. Sometimes this meant exciting new religious — the Yankee-settled western portions of New York State gave rise to such religious enthusiasms that people began to call it the “Burned-Over District“2 — but just as often it meant becoming a Methodist, Unitarian, or Baptist. Wherever they went, though, the Yankees clung to their belief that you could make earthly society resemble Heaven, or at least that there was no excuse for not trying as hard as you could. Yankees were at the heart of every push for social reform, from abolitionism and the temperance movement to Reconstruction, the minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and an end to child labor. For example, the members of New York City’s Committee of Fifteen, which militated against gambling and prostitution, were mostly Yankees or German-Jewish immigrants; none were culturally New Netherlanders.

By now this should all be sounding familiar. Heavy emphasis on education, embrace of the government regulation or prohibition of immoral behavior as the central bulwark of societal virtue, extremely visible adherence to highly specific rules and norms of behavior as proof of righteousness? Oh, look, it’s woke! It’s the ideology of the professional-managerial class, the meritocratic elite — it’s the same people with the same bumper stickers on the same Mercedes SUVs in the Whole Foods parking lot that you see in every major American city, regardless of which “nation” most of the other residents belong to.

There are two things going on here, I think: first, high-cultural capital Americans are far more mobile than they used to be. Plenty of people spend a few years in DC, then a few years in Austin, or maybe San Francisco or Boulder or Brooklyn, regardless of where they grew up. Second, and perhaps more important, is the role of education. Maintaining or improving your class position depends far more on a “good” college than it used to (witness the to-do when someone claims the distinction of Harvard on a night school degree!). The Yankee emphasis on education means that most of America’s prestigious colleges and universities are in Yankee-settled areas.3 Thus, membership in a higher stratum of society practically depends on four or eight years marinating in Yankeedom. What’s a kid from rural Nebraska to do?

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.

  1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Oldtown Folks, as quoted in Albion’s Seed:

    2. “The pie is an English institution, which, planted in American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum plies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, — pies with top crusts, and pies without, — pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when let loose in a given direction.”

    For more on the history of distinctly American pies, including why they’re so different from the English pies you may have seen on The Great British Bake-Off, I highly recommend BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, which is somehow both the best history of American sweets I’ve ever read and the best cookbook for them.

  2. Famous alumni of the Burned-Over District include the Seventh-Day Adventists, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community, and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. (Yes, Mormons are Yankees. Obviously.) But my favorite wacky Yankee religious enthusiasm — actually in Massachusetts, where they weren’t branding people with H for heretic any more — was John Murray Spear‘s “New Motive Power”, an attempt to build an electric perpetual motion machine Jesus.
  3. The exceptions are generally the flagship school of a large non-Yankee region or in California, the culture of which I’ve entirely elided for reasons of brevity. Sorry. The tl;dr is that Woodard argues the “Left Coast” is a hybrid of Yankees settling the cities and Greater Appalachia in the countryside, which leads to culture fairly similar to that of Yankeedom.

October 6, 2026

QotD: The decline of academic standards over the years

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… while I was on the road, I went to visit a buddy who’s still deep cover in academia. He teaches at a really SPLAC-y SPLAC, the kind that bills itself as “Minnesota’s answer to Princeton”. He’s part of a team running this course that, back in my undergrad days thirty years ago, would’ve been called “Paideia” or something similarly pretentious, taught to the “honors college” (or equivalent). Twenty years before that, it would’ve been called “Western Civ I” and required of all incoming freshmen, regardless of major.

Twenty years before that, and it would’ve been called “basic cultural literacy”; the kind of thing any college man — indeed, any graduate of a remotely decent high school — would know cold. I’ve written many times that the not-elite-but-certainly-very-respectable school which awarded my PhD wouldn’t have admitted me as an undergrad as late as 1960; they would’ve been sticking me in some serious remedial classes as late as 1980. Watching my buddy struggling mightily — and failing miserably — to get even the ridiculously watered-down, extremely fake and utterly gay version of this stuff across to the brown-nosing test-acers of the Current Year sent me sobbing into the arms of Jack Daniel.

Not because I would’ve done better, mind you, but because I would’ve done so much worse. The only way I got through my last few semesters in academia was to regard it as acting. The University is paying me to stand on stage and say my lines, so I’ll stand there and say them. Aside from that, all they want to do is check the appropriate box: Students have attended thus-and-such class, taught by someone with a PhD (crucial for those “best college” rankings!), and … there it is.

What actual knowledge am I supposed to be conveying? What skill set? What world view?

Category error. If it doesn’t fit on the standardized test, which is the only thing that matters to the bottom line, then it’s useless.

Severian, “On the Absurdity of Life”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-12.

October 3, 2026

More on that change to student loan eligibility rules

Filed under: Education, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Larry Correia’s comments on Trump’s executive order changing eligibility for federally guaranteed student loans generated a fair amount of discussion, so I felt linking to Copernican’s post on the same topic would be of interest to many of you:

As a White Western Man, I am unaccustomed to seeing or hearing “good news” in a larger geopolitical sense. That is, actions of our leaders tend to lead one to be somewhere between depressingly blackpilled and defiantly optimistic even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Recently, Donald Trump and his Department of Education have engaged in some more executive shenanigans. Once again bypassing our Congress, whose dysfunctional role is best thought of as the kidneys in our diabetic, alcoholic body politic. With that said, a relatively minor update to the Department of Education rules regarding underwriting federal student loans might have a dramatic long-term effect on our entire cultural system.

Take a look for yourself:

    Of all the actions the Executive Branch can take, this is one of the best. Most notably, because it’s boring. Changing the rules on federal fiscal underwriting is boring, so the media and the population at large will have a hard time holding on to it as a talking point. The most dramatic cultural changes are precipitated from the most boring types of fiscal action. Flashy is fun, but boring is often effective. Something to keep in mind when our generation finally seizes the reins of power.

The recent update that takes effect in 2027 is functionally removing the federal guarantee from student loans for useless degrees. Predominantly degrees that fall under the “female daycare” category. That is, the reason why every employer in the United States demands a degree to flip burgers or fill out spreadsheets is due to the fact that everyone can get a degree. Removing a significant portion of the federally backed degree-mill system will force a top-down restructuring of the American cultural academic-caste system.

The fallout from this decision is going to be immense, but we won’t see it unless the current policy holds long enough for several generations of university students to grow up under it (say around 12 years). First, it’s going to cut off universities from the endless money of cheap federal student loans that’s been flooding into useless departments. Women’s studies, social studies, English majors, and early-childhood-education majors are about to see a significant drawdown in the number of attending students.

As many have pointed out, it’s only an Executive Order, so it can be easily set aside by the next president, but it may have a salutary effect on those who do see a university degree as just a way to stay out of the working world for a few more years.

October 1, 2026

Trump’s student loan policy change

Filed under: Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia applauds President Trump’s decision to stop providing goverment-backed student loans for courses that don’t provide students who graduate with a viable career path:

Now this sounds like a good policy.

Only they’re not “banning” anyone from majoring in anything. Kids can still major in whatever dumb shit, gender studies, no job having degree, they want, and liberal academics will still make bank ripping off those kids and their parents.

This is just the rest of us tax payers not being on the hook for their good times.

Most regular loans the bank isn’t going to lend you money unless there’s some assurance that they’re not going to get screwed. If you went to your bank with a business plan that said you needed $250k up front so you could make $20 an hour after, they’d laugh at you.

Student loans were the one goofy ass outlier because Uncle Sam said it’s cool to go a quarter million dollars into debt to get a useless degree that qualifies you to get some specific $20 an hour job … except wait, due to all these loans for bullshit degrees the supply of eligible employees far exceeds the demand, so all those $20 an hour jobs are already filled, so now you’re working fast food where your coworkers are teenagers or illegal aliens, only you’re still $250k in debt.

Of course none of what I am saying will make sense to people who majored in the degrees in question because they weren’t required to take any math, econ, or accounting classes.

The headline says social work, art, religious studies, and music will be hardest hit! (teaching aides need a degree? WHY?!?) And now I’m gonna get yelled at by people who think what America really needs is more social workers.

Going off of what I’ve seen from creative writing degrees, MFAs, and the many art and music professionals I know, I’m guessing art and music degrees are mostly a huge waste of time. Just go get a real job to pay the bills and practice your art on the side until you get good at it (says the bestselling novelist who got an accounting degree).

Going deeply into debt for a “religious studies” degree from a university baffles me. Go to church. Read your scriptures. Serve your fellow man. But mostly I’m betting they included this one to try and pull at conservative heart strings because we all know in reality this policy change is going to overwhelming hit liberals.

But, Correia, you barbaric anti-intellectual* with the free taxpayer money faucet shut off this will irreparably harm America’s pretentious snooty sheltered ivory tower scholars of pointless fields who exist in a state of perpetual bossy uselessness in their little university bubble!

Oh no! Anyways.

    * for the record, I’m not anti-intellectual. I’m all in favor of scholarly pursuits. I just think much of the education business is a scam, and the people who label themselves “intellectual” usually aren’t.

September 19, 2026

Internal migration patterns in the United States

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s become a commonplace to see yet another tech company pulling up stakes and leaving California … and the state government seems determined to get rid of many of their biggest economic contributors with new legislation to make life harder for companies and wealthy individuals (see the second item, for instance). But it’s not just California losing population to other states:

Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons

Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference — where their children attend college — and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.

In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.

For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin — these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.

But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.

Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC — an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants — has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.

This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.

States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.

Affordability, too, plays its part, and Americans have noticed that a nationally respectable degree from a Southern flagship costs a fraction of what state flagships elsewhere demand for a comparable credential, at a moment when the public’s confidence in the value of a degree generally has become, to put it charitably, provisional.

One of California’s most impactful proposed pieces of legislation has been their “Billionaire tax”:

California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they’ve founded. Even if it doesn’t pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.

[…]

The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting

Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California’s economic prospects; it’s also based on bad research. According to the report’s author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, “this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation”. Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that “the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent”, while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman “estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires”.

The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis — and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren’t subject to peer review.

“Saez and Zucman’s empirical work on the California billionaire tax proposal retains these same unconventional accounting practices from 2019 without addressing their conflict with the mainstream corporate tax incidence literature,” cautions Fors.

The Independent Institute report observes that privacy laws prevented Saez and Zucman from drawing on personal income tax and other financial records. They relied on the Forbes 400 list, and “a 2010 study by a group of IRS statisticians found that the Forbes 400 dramatically overestimates the net worth of individuals in their lifetimes when compared to probate records of their estates after death”. Adjusting for that discrepancy produces estimates of “an average effective tax rate of 38 percent between 2018 and 2020, as compared to the 24 percent claimed by Saez and Zucman for this period”.

September 18, 2026

One disruptive kid can ruin class for all the others

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I remember talking to the teacher who taught the special needs kids at my middle school … Mr. Gibson was the only black teacher in the school and he was far more qualified than any of the others. It also helped that he had the patience of a saint: I doubt any other teacher there could last more than a day with the kids he looked after. At some point in the decades since I was in school, the powers-that-be decided that integrating all the children together was the right decision. By any sensible reckoning, it has been the worst thing they could have done, both for the special needs children and all the other children, as GenX Anecdotes relates on Substack Notes:

GenX Anecdotes didn’t include this in her post, but I thought it to be appropriate, in a way.

Having worked in schools and hearing my daughter’s experiences, it just can’t be the case that a tiny minority of extremely disruptive kids ruin the learning for all the others. Yet I have seen time and time again how one or two disruptive kids with severe behavioural issues can derail a whole lesson.

The dogged insistence that all the kids must be thrown together regardless of capabilities and behaviour is insane to me.

I have seen the amount of time, effort and extra staff required to deal with just ONE kid who clearly needs “round-the-clock” close supervision.

I have often thought those kids should not be in a “normal” class or school. They need to be somewhere else where they can get specialist support. And I don’t care how many times you shout “inclusivity” at me. Those kids would be better off somewhere else too.

I have watched kids who, during lunchtime, will smash up a whole table of kids’ lunches and try and run out of the school gates; kids continually shouting in lessons; bully and “hit” other kids repeatedly; demand all the other kids play games exactly as THEY want them to be played; derail a whole lesson and be continually brought out of the classroom, but only to be brought back in again!

Then I see the adults pander to the disruptive ones time and time again and expect all the other kids to suck it up and put up with their bullshit. All under the guise of some “neurodivergent” excuse. If their “neurodivergence” continually negatively impacts everyone around them, then they need to be removed from everyone else. Sorry. It’s not everybody else’s responsibility to put up with it.

Time and time again, the needs of a minority of kids prioritise the needs of many.

I remember when I worked in one junior school, attending a training day for teachers and support staff, which was conducted by the school head teacher.

When I raised this issue, he just went over to his laptop and brought up that “equity” meme of the three people standing on boxes looking over a wall onto the big screen and said THIS is why.

He didn’t like the fact that I had brought this up, especially since some of the teachers agreed with me. He very quickly shut me down, and his whole tone was this kind of patronising and smug “you don’t understand at all do you?” Like he was having to explain basics to me. There were a thousand things I wanted to say about it, but I didn’t.

What really got me was how all those teachers who had agreed with me looked at the meme and were nodding! They were impressed by it and acted like they hadn’t seen it before. It was beyond infuriating. I SO wanted to get up and go over to the laptop and find the other “equity in reality” meme, which is far closer to the truth.

But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to derail the whole thing and be the only “disrupter” in the room.

It was close to lunchtime, and it was already running over, and everyone was clearly eager to get out of there, so I didn’t want to turn it into an ideological battle of wits. In hindsight, I wish I did.

But I wasn’t brought up to be that person. And yet, ironically, here we are. Raising a generation of people who WOULD totally hold everyone up and much worse.

I left that job soon after that. It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things related to this. I watched daily as things that I thought could actually be quite easily made better with some practical adjustments were continually and self-evidently made worse for EVERYBODY because of an adherence to this arrogant and utterly insane ideological bullshit.

It drove me nuts.

QotD: Higher education as a vast money laundering racket

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Have I mentioned my theory (which I regard as a certainty) that Higher Education is best understood as a massive money laundering operation? We all had a good chuckle, I’m sure, at that title [“fellowship at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College in London”], just as we’ve had good chuckles at the ridiculous titles of all the Angry Studies programs infesting colleges nationwide. We’ve probably concluded — correctly — that these are just make-work for otherwise unemployable PhDs who check a few of the Diversity quota boxes.

But when you consider just how much money is involved, it’s a lot harder to laugh. Your average tenured prof makes north of $100 K, and for every one of them, there are at least two administrators, four outreach coordinators, and uncountable Special Assistants to the Assistant Provost’s Special Assistant for Diversity and Inclusion. Not to mention all the classroom space, office space, etc. that this requires (including paying the very real people who have to coordinate that stuff — no easy task — the custodial staff and so on). I’d bet that just one of these programs, all in, runs at least a million dollars per year when you throw in bennies and whatnot.

That’s a LOT of scratch, for one or two classes a semester that barely even make their enrollment numbers.

I dunno what nefarious purpose the Angry Studies programs serve (aside from the obvious, perpetual one of “burning down ambient civilization, just because”), but the “national security” ones I’m sure are basically just “diplomatic” cover for cloak and dagger shit. They used to use academic conferences like that back during the Cold War — who else but an officially credentialed diplomatic representative gets to travel around his enemies’ territory? In this case, of course, none of these people are actually going anywhere near war zones (with the exception of Mx. Kagan, of course, who decided to take command of American forces in the field). But academic “conferences” are good ways to make contacts and pass suitcases full of cash and other goodies around …

… I suspect.

Severian, “Klown Kollege”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-28.

September 15, 2026

“Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education”

Filed under: Education, Europe, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

InfantryDort responds to a complaint that military leaders are taught Clausewitz without the career of Napoleon for context:

THE THING WE STILL CAN’T TEACH

I’ll bite on this one. Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education. Why? Let me take a stab at it …

Jomini watched him and tried to turn the phenomenon into rules. Anyone in the U.S. Army has seen this before. If you do something exceptional on the field (especially in training), then you’re often coached that you went outside the lines and need to get back in. You may have succeeded, but it COULD have been a disaster. So we try “putting baby in a corner” because the science of war is safe. The art scares people.

Clausewitz watched the same fire in Napoleon and concluded that rules would never be enough. Two centuries later we are still dissecting the campaigns, naming principles, drawing arrows on maps, and trying to explain what exactly lived inside that man.

Again, why?

There is a part of command that refuses to become curriculum. T.E. Lawrence called it the “kingfisher flash”. Clausewitz reached for the genius. It’s the instant when one mind sees through fog what a hundred educated men cannot see at all, then possesses enough violence of will to act before the moment disappears.

Read that last part again 👆

You can feed that gift with history, sharpen it through hardship. But you CANNOT manufacture it with another degree. It MUST be revealed.

Yet modern institutions are built around the opposite assumption. We stack schools, evaluations, gates, boards, and credentials high enough and convince ourselves that eventually genius will emerge from the assembly line. It won’t. It can’t. Ever.

Worse, the machine often recognizes the dangerous talent and rejects it precisely because it cannot reproduce it. The unusual man is “reckless”. The instinctive one is “unserious.” The officer who refuses the approved path becomes “unqualified”.

READ. IT. AGAIN. 👆 👆 👆

Then war arrives and burns the paperwork. That is the lesson Napoleon keeps trying to teach us from two hundred years away. You can study the flame forever. You still have to recognize it when it walks into the room.

The closest we can come to discovering this genius is testing our officers on it. No more reliance on pure paperwork. I say to these officers: Show us the gift you’re supposed to possess for the highest commands.

Or step aside for someone who will.

September 7, 2026

“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Along with the earlier post on the recent steep decline in basic literacy, here’s Christopher Gage discussing the same phenomenon of younger Brits’ increased dependency on videos while also demonstrating reduced verbal skills. A mere co-incidence, we can be sure:

La Cigarette by Henri Lebasque (1921)

A friend of a friend of a friend — a primary school teacher — reckons her pupils spend so much time glued to screens that they speak in YouTube English.

Rather than greet one and other with “Hello” they say, “Hi, guys! Welcome to my channel!” When saying goodbye, it’s “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Apparently, these little dopamine fiends cannot endure one moment without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad. With their scrolling fingers they tear the pages in strange, ad-free artefacts once known as “books”. Reader, I don’t know if this little fable is entirely true or some semblance of the truth. But it rings truer than false.

Am I being facetious? Not really. The British government, in a rare bout of usefulness, conducted a study into screen-time amongst primary school children. That recent study by the education department found that the more a child spends scrolling on a screen, the less good their vocabulary be.

Please excuse that example of mongrelised English. Then again, perhaps we should call it Future English given that, in just a few years, the YouTube kids will speak in that very bastardised tongue.

According to a bleak wave of childhood study, spending hours tethered to screens quite literally dissolves learning. Researchers found that the “heavy users” — a term usually reserved for heroin addicts — recalled significantly fewer words from a list than their less addicted peers. These screen-addled sprogs spend more than five hours chasing that dopamine dragon. In Plain English, them don’t talk good and shit. At least when compared to their mates who spend less than one hour on a screen. Them kids know more words and shit.

They asked kids to recall words from a list of 34. The ones double-stitched to iPads upwards of five hours daily recognised barely half the words whilst their peers recalled two thirds. Eighty-six minutes. That figure represents the tipping point between literacy and a life talking in the mangled English of a failed rapper.

The study arrived at a rather chilling conclusion: If a child spends over an hour and a half each day thumbing through brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube, their grasp of language withers faster than a doormat outside a crack den.

Of course, these are hyper-sensitive times. The researchers keenly doled out the old “correlation doesn’t imply causation” disclaimer mandatory in a neurotic culture which treats truth like hazardous waste. And who am I to judge? The ability to express one’s thoughts isn’t utterly essential. The development of language — I’m sure a Foucault-addled academic might agree ­— is elitist and racist and sexist and ableist and all that.

And so, I am intensely relaxed about this brave new world in which the brains of the next generation dissolve in a swamp of TikTok reels and YouTube videos. There is nothing to worry about. This is progress. And progress must always progress. Words are just words and you can still talk good and shit without knowing them words in them things that don’t even have videos on them pages.

An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?

The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.

Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?

But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.

Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.

September 2, 2026

Americans’ notorious disinterest in learning foreign languages

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Malevitus points out some of the sensible reasons most Americans don’t learn how to speak other languages … and why it makes perfect sense for this situation:

There’s a common complaint about Americans online that goes something like this: “Americans are so dumb. They only know one language, most of the rest of the world is at least bilingual. Why can’t they learn to speak another language?”

To be fair, we Yankees are a pretty monolingual bunch. Only about 20% of Americans speak a language other than English, and for those that do, its mostly because they’re immigrants or children of immigrants. That doesn’t compare favorably to Western Europe, where the majority of adults can speak at least one foreign language (guess which one?)

This is often brought up in the long list of America Bad™ talking points. It’s yet another example of American idiocy. “Europeans can master four languages while Americans are too stupid to master one.” This is pretty much pure copium.

The American Empire

The world we live in is an American world. Since at least the 1990’s (and arguably since the 1940’s), the US has been the undisputed economic and cultural hegemon of the world. Americans don’t learn French or German for the same reason that a Roman in 100 AD would balk at learning Gaulish or Illyrian. Provincials learn the imperial tongue, not the other way around.

For your average non-Anglophone, learning English opens up opportunities in international business, makes it easier to keep up with news from the imperial core, and lets you talk to people around the world (who learned English for all the same reasons you did). For your average American, speaking not-English is a cool trick that takes 600+ hours to learn.

As with any respectable empire, the culture of the periphery is downstream of the core. The influence is largely unidirectional. A typical Frenchman has probably seen Avatar and Titanic. A typical American has definitely not seen Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis or La Grande Vadrouille. The world is buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music.

[NR: Emphasis mine.]

August 24, 2026

It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):

We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.

There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.

Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.

But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.

The use and abuse of moral mascots

The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.

The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.

The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.

In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.

History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.

The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.

Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.

The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.

The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.

QotD: The difference between “book smart” and “street smart”

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Joca @jocadbz
    Translated from Portuguese
    How many geniuses have you heard about in recent years? They all had very superior IQs and were supposedly going to change the world
    Know what happened? Nothing. Nothing ever happens

We hear a lot of people go on about the difference between “book smart” and “street smart”.

But psychologists who test and study intelligence know there’s no such thing. Smart is smart. So is this all just a way of coping with envy of higher IQs?

No. We’ve all met that guy who is clearly very intelligent, but can’t seem to accomplish anything outside a cloistered academic environment.

But we always seem to find him in a academic environment, don’t we?

“Book smart” is an incorrect name for a person who is intelligent, but has been mentally and psychologically harmed by an educational system, to the point where he can’t actually use that intelligence properly for tasks outside that environment.

Ironically, the more a child is obviously intelligent, the more the education system conspires to destroy him … because everyone with a “degree in education”, almost without exception, is either actually stupid, or is himself the end product of this same sort of mental mutilation.

Here’s how it works.

There are two types of intelligence tasks: answer tasks and result tasks.

A result task is graded by the reaction of the environment to your work. Either your software runs, or it doesn’t. Either your rockets fly, or they don’t. Customers buy millions of your product, or none.

You have unlimited tries unless you run out of money, but there’s no partial credit, and you can’t talk the universe into accepting your answer if it doesn’t.

Result tasks typically require a lot of work, are data-intensive, and have lots of sub-problems, because the ones that didn’t are already solved.

Result tasks are why we care about smart at all. Because smart people are the ones who can do this. And every human advancement or achievement ever was a result task.

Answer tasks are quite different. They are artificial problems created by a human being for another human being, whose goal is to produce the known answer.

Tasks like this have useful features. They can be tightly calibrated for appropriate difficulty. They are easy to grade. They can be used to teach particular subjects or skills.

But there are certain things they don’t teach.

How to do the boring parts that don’t impress anyone with how talented you are.

How to fail and try again.

How to change the question instead of answering it, because the question itself was wrong.

How to absorb from others what they had to learn the hard way, instead of reinventing the wheel.

How to deal with problems that have no solutions, only tradeoffs.

How to work with others and pass the ball.

How not to adapt instead of freezing when the universe gives the exam before the lesson.

How to substitute the adequate you can afford for the ideal you can’t.

How to prioritize what is needful over what is elegant or cool.

Without this learning, and other similar lessons, the talent child turns into an adult with an unbalanced intellectual development, like a bodybuilder who skipped far too many leg days.

You’ll find a lot of men like this in academia because it provides them with a sheltered, tightly controlled environment, where the problems are abstract if not utterly fake, and the persuasiveness of a solution trumps its workability.

They tend to scorn achievers, especially achievers with modest academic credentials or none, and this invites scorn in turn from people with real jobs.

But really what they are is victims. Entire campuses and networks full of what was potential greatness, crippled in it youth by bureaucracies that claim to serve it.

Homeschool your children.

Give them projects, not puzzles.

Teach them to build things.

Devon Eriksen, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-05.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress