Average GRE is useless. Elementary teachers have far lower GRE scores than secondary school teachers, and are about average in verbal and below average in math. Secondary school content teachers are above average in verbal and average in math. However, close to half of all secondary school teachers get higher than 600 on the math section, which is more than the number of math and science teachers. While I suppose it's possible that math and science teachers have terrible math scores and the English/history teachers are scoring those 600+ scores, I'm figuring it's far more likely that math and science high school teachers have eminently respectable GRE scores in math, and that English/history teachers have higher than average verbal.

Anyone who claims that teachers are stupid is using propaganda instead of ETS data.

<A href="http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/teacher-quality-pseudofacts-part-ii/">Cite for SAT scores</a> and for <a href="http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/teacher-quality-pseudofacts/">GRE scores</a>

http://www.k12grants.org/samples/grantkay.pdf

First, the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation leap out at me immediately.

I just read that grant in its entirety. I noticed one possible typo, but did not find other bad grammar or spelling.

Second, the claim in the post that grant proposals are written to describe what they're doing, rather than what they're intending to achieve, holds up, for this grant at least.

The are asking for a grant to get equipment, primarily computers and software, for use in teaching students. It is not really a research project. What is the outcome hoped for from a grant like that? That students will be taught using these computers. They make a feint at claiming it will raise grades or enrolement, but really if I were a science teacher, my real goal would be to get the stuff and sit students down in front of it and teach them with it. I think that is pretty accurately reflected.

I'll look at the ipad grant, and kudos for finding the site and bringing me that much closer to real contact with the kinds of grants under discussion.

"Hack your psyche" was Daenerys' phrasing, but I'd approximately endorse it. Basically, there are ways that are brain works, badly. For example, we tend to want to shy away from harsh truths, and look for excuses not to do a lot of work. Reading Litanies of Tarski is explicitly supposed to build into yourself the idea that you are a person who IS capable of re-evalulating beliefs, regardless of how comfortable they are. Reciting the litany may or may not actually be useful for this, especially in group settings. I actually lean towards it NOT being that useful, but being harmless and fun. (More on this later)

In "The Value and Danger of Ritual" I go into how I used the ritual-development process to make myself the sort of person who cared about the world and was willing to work to improve it, even if it meant accepting math that felt intuitively wrong to me.

If any of my friends suggested doing any of this at any holiday party I've been to, I (and most other people present) would look at them as if they had spontaneously gone stark raving mad. If the host of the party were the one suggesting this, and if they managed to make it happen, I would seriously consider never attending any of their holiday parties again.

I do understand your visceral response to this (I can easily imagine similar visceral responses of my own to things that are only slightly different), but you make a leap from "the host does this thing which I am not used to" to "the host appears stark raving mad." There's a big gap there where I think you think something actually bad happened, but which you haven't articulated any negative consequences beyond your instinctive aversion.

I recognize that this is asking a fairly hard question, and don't feel obligated to respond right away. But I'd like to you to articulate, if you can, which of the following, you feel revulsion to:

Singing songs
Singing songs about things you believe strongly in
Singing or reciting things in groups

Making any deliberate effort to build group cohesion and signal tribal loyalty
Having candles
Deliberately lighting and extinguishing candles to produce an effect
Deliberately manipulating lighting to produce an emotional effect

Reading excerpts from authors you like
Reading excerpts from authors you respect a lot and who have shaped your worldview
Reading excerpts from only one particular author you respect (I share this concern, I'll address it in an upcoming post)

Giving a speech in deliberately manipulated lightning (taboo "sermon")
Giving a speech in to an audience whose emotional state has been deliberately altered
Giving a speech whose goal is to build group unity
Giving a speech whose goal is to call people to action towards a difficult goal

Having some meetups featuring group activities that some portion of the potential community won't enjoy (examples include music, as well as strategy games, presentation on material you don't care about)
Having some group activities that some portion of the potential community actively dislikes

Deliberately provoking emotional responses (without attempting to build group cohesion or call to action)

Do any of those trigger a response individually? Can you identify which ones either cause a visceral response, or you feel would cause a negative consequence to occur? Either individually, or collectively?

Advocate for the obvious position using the language and catchphrases of its opponents. I remember once saying, "Well, have we ever tried blindly throwing lots of money at the educational system?" Everyone agreed that this was a wise and sophisticated thing to say, even though I was by far the least knowledgeable person in the room on the subject and was just advocating the default strategy for improving public schools. Other examples:

"Greed is good."

"The chief virtue of a $professional is $vice."

"I'm a tax-and-spend liberal, and I think there should be much more government regulation. For example, the sad truth is that the realities of medical care require the existence of death panels, and I'd rather have them run by government bureaucrats than corporate accountants."

This is a great point that's making me revise my position on some right wing commentators. Still, I'm struggling to think of any actual examples of this behavior in action: we don't actually tell religious people who believe wrong things "well god ain't real deal with it". We point out how their assertions are incompatible with their own teachings, and with the legal system, and scientific findings etc. We don't keep all the flaws we see in their position back in reserve.

Moreover most of the serious commentators on the skeptical side of the issue argued only one of the points in question, whether it was the statistics showing warming or the economics implied by it or (cue rim-shot) sunspots, it's only journalists and politicians who skipped from one to the other, which is where I got the impression they'd only looked at the issue long enough to find a contrarian position.

Airplanes were invented in 1903 and we still don't have a scanner that can copy birds.

To keep the metaphor precise, we'd need only to copy the bird's technology of flight, which is its physical shape and its flying technique, not the whole internal structure. The reason we don't do it is that we already have better means of air transportation, rather than unfeasibility of bird emulation.

I'm a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn't novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.

Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn't convey information, I can't see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn't be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it's controversy.

In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.

Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between "all sex is rape" and "pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon" in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.

Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that's further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it's real Laius, socialism.

The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from "it's not happening" to "well we didn't do it" to "well we can't do anything about it without doing more harm than good" should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the "straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority" variety, give us a bit of pause. If there's any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.

On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I'd like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?

25mg of "ephedra extract" might as well be 5mg of actual ephedrine. Seems like the most likely point of failure. Try with stronger ephedrine - if you don't see decent appetite suppression I'll be surprised.

Fat:carb ratio isn't really relevant, but most modern diets are pretty low in protein and micronutrients, barely enough. If you cut amount of your food by 1/3 without changing composition, you might put your protein and micronutrient consumption below healthy threshold, what will result in all sorts of badness. Micronutriens are easy (multivitamin pill). Most bodybuilders keep protein intake pretty much constant on cutting and bulking, so they're on moderate protein on bulking, and high protein when cutting. Plus proteins don't store well in our bodies (we have fat storage obviously, plus carb storage in liver and sort-of- in muscles (it's can only be used for muscle work, never gets released back to blood), but no protein storage), so you pretty much have to eat multiple small protein-containing meals a day if you want to efficiently lose fat without losing muscle.

If you do not know any women, something is wrong.

This isn't quite Silas' complaint. Clearly, he does know some women. What he is looking for is women who are receptive to his attempts to date them. This means he needs to know them in a context where he can actually make advances, and he needs to know how to actually make advances (which are appropriate to that context). His other complaint was that he was getting a date, but then it fizzled because she lost interest.

I won't speak of Silas' specific situation, but I will emphasize that there are many men who are decent guys from the standpoint of society, and who don't have anything major wrong with them psychologically, physically or financially, but who don't have significant options with women. This isn't because they don't know women, but because the women they know aren't available to them because the women don't find them attractive enough (since women are more selective, the average women is going after men with above average attractiveness, not after her average male friends), and/or because they are insufficiently knowledgeable of all the societal rituals around dating. Those rituals place a higher burden on the male for initiating things, and men don't have that stuff encoded in their DNA. It's something that the cooler kids learned in adolescence, and the less cool ones didn't.

The result is that by high school, it's common for males with certain personality traits such as introversion and systemizing (i.e. personality traits typical of males who identify as rationalists) to be so far behind socially that their ability to get something going romantic with the women around them is limited, even to the extent of being practically locked out. Women with similar personality traits will also experience difficulties, but not to the same magnitude since they aren't typically expected to be the initiators, and because personality traits like confidence (that can easily be damaged during adolescence) aren't so important for their attractiveness. This is not to say that women don't experience challenges and difficulties in relationships; they do, but their primary challenges occur at different points (e.g. once some sort of dating has actually started, not so much difficulty getting any kind of date) and are a totally different subjects (e.g. being seen only sexually).

It is possible for a man to be surrounded by women, yet be walled off from them. As someone who experienced this years ago, I can say that it was no fun. And meeting friends of friends isn't any use if you can't capitalize on it, not to mention that it's a slow and unreliable way of meeting people. And even if you can get a date, there are a million more ways for the male to bungle than for the female to bungle it (again, women are more selective, and male behavior is a larger factor in female attraction than female behavior is in male attraction... just think about the ways women use words like "weird" or "creepy" in describing potential suitors), which enforces a steep learning curve that is difficult to climb when you don't know what you are doing.

You might say that there is a problem these guys have, which "needs to be addressed on their end," and you would be absolutely right. But that is exactly Silas' complaint. What is the nuts and bolts of what these men need to address such that they can successfully date the women all around them, and who is going to show them how to do it? Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn't.

interesting. I wouldn't want to rule out the "dark arts" , i.e. highly non rational methods of persuasion.

Robotics is not advanced enough for a robot to look scary, though military robotics is getting there fast.

A demonstration involving the very latest military robots could have the intended effect in perhaps 10 years.