army1987 comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (318)
Nice article (as usual, if true). Minor nitpick:
I think you mean "in the US" - things are different in France, or in Finland, or in Japan, or in China. You may see some similar patterns, but I think the whole "black/white" thing is pretty specific to the US; you get complicated relationships between ethnic groups in many countries, but they work differently (look at Belgium, or Ireland, or Canada, or China, or Rwanda, or Egypt, or Singapore - though Australia seems to be one of the rare countries comparable to the US).
I think taking a more international perspective is useful not only to be more accessible to non-US readers, but also to detach the issue from local politics (especially with examples from countries whose politics are quite different), and get a larger sample size in which it's easier to see which theories hold water.
Huh. Even I, who am usually very peeved by that kind of things, automatically took “everywhere” to mean ‘in the US’ in that context without even noticing. (Possibly because the first paragraph explicitly mentioned the US twice, and because of the “county” and “state” earlier in the same sentence.)
Everywhere is all-quantified concerning the location, so obviously it means on other planets and in other civilizations as well. Elementary, my dear Watson.
(In certain posts, I do have trouble determining whether the writer is talking about the US, the Anglosphere, the western world, the developed world, the whole world, or what.)