This sound like a position similar to David Benatar’s anti-Natalist view. I heard him on a Sam Harris podcast. Each individual analysis step he took seemed to make sense but I didn’t find myself believing his conclusions. I don’t pretend to have studied them in any detail, but they definitely have some persuasive force.

I'd never heard of him or this before. Thanks.

Interesting position. No way to prove whether he's right or wrong. Philosophy I suppose.

I ZzZzZz really hard at these kind of people. Its some kind of faux intellectual position people love to circle jerk to. Its bordering interesting in a vacuum but completely out of touch with reality making it practically worthless which is (imo) its biggest and fatal flaw. You could say that about a lot of philosophy POVs but these are always the worst for me, extremely polarized and fatalistic.

I think I would indeed trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure imaginable.

Nice massacre
Coup attempt in Turkey
Syrian/ISIS chaos
Racist killings by cops
Cop killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge
Idiotic Presidential candidates
Zika virus
William Kassouf
Nixon's resignation in 74
black friday
obamacare
donald trump
rampant misogyny
Pokemon go
slutty girls on Maury Povich
USPS service
Me posting strat in NVG
Vladimir Putin
Chinese territorial ambition
Fight between Nima and ADR, hurting subscriber Steve Peralta
Climate change
RIP Harambe
Leaf blowers
Clayton Kershaw's back injury
General descent into entropy (and no MLYLT opus on the subject)
D.C. weather
Pete's complaint that this list is USA#1-centric, so we'll add "Brexit"
Too many lawyers
End of the poker boom
Munich shootings
Humidity
Quality of modern handbaskets
Rampant inflation
Jack-in-the-Box menu reductions
Political hypocrites
Umbrellas (SiMor, please enlighten us by describing a better design)
The general low quality of modern science fiction movies
too much perfume
Russian Olympics cheating
Japanese knife massacre
Common Core Math
Reality TV
Soap Operas
Paterno's Win Reinstatement
North Korea
Beliefs that Taylor Swift is ugly
Brilliant fiction writers spouting off on social/political issues (Stephen King does this too, and Michael Crichton used to do it as well)
Baylor rape indifference
Hot air balloon disaster
douchey 2p2 mods that mindlessly criticize this thread
golfnutt
Sterling Korb or Kolb or however you spell it
Feces-distributing hand dryers
Syrian gas attacks
Twitter fights

Might’ve missed it, but I think you forgot to add science denial to that list

Not enough leaf blower hate!

What's the end game? Law of conservation of leaves, mother****ers!

If there were a loud, smelly machine designed to push leaves into piles, I would be all for it. The leaf blower does the exact opposite, some ****tard stands in one place clearing and circle around himself and taking a **** all over everyone else.

People who criticize Common Core math!

Everyone bitches and moans that their math education sucked and then bitches and moans when their kids don't learn ****ty math the same way they learned ****ty math.

Sure sometimes Common Core is grossly overengineered, but it took me about 5 seconds to figure out what everything means. On the flip side of that 5 second burden, I get about 1,500 messages a day from ****tard parents who collectively spent 35,000 person-hours banging out angry E-mails about how nobody can just add two plus two any more.

**** you all and your sub-500 SAT math scores and your kids' future sub-500 SAT math scores because their parents can't figure out what a "ten box" is from pure context. My kid is going to destroy your kids in 10 years.

Math esp. common core isn't as much about the actual math itself, but training kids to learn critical thinking. With that said, it doesn't seem to be working.

The problem with common core is that its not how the teachers nor the parents learned math and so they are having to relearn this system at an age in which rate of learning slows.

A lot of the examples of bad common core assignments come from teachers who don't understand the concepts that well and incorrectly apply them.

In a world in which teachers and parents are well versed in Common Core concepts and application to general mathematics, Common Core can be a very powerful system.

However, in the current US education system, I am skeptical of its effectiveness.

I agree the stated goal was something lofty and unquantifiable, like "learning critical thinking," but this thread is entitled "The World is Going to Hell" so I'm going to be brashly cynical:

It's really about American kids getting their asses handed to them in every existing metric, so a new metric had to be invented. Chinese kids memorize their times tables up to 25x25, Americans can barely do up to 10x10, so instead of asking what 15x13 is and feeling inferior because USA #74, we craft word problems like "Trevor wants to build a garden in his backyard. The distance between his neighbors' yards is fifteen feet and there are some woods thirteen feet behind his house. What's the largest garden he can build?" Because now you can handicap all the Asians and Europeans and feel better when everyone gets the answer wrong equally.

I guarantee you Asian and Euro students will correctly answer that type of word question at a higher rate than American students.

The real problem with American education is simply there isnt enough practice. Its not isolated to math either, its not like the language skills or foreign language skills of the average American student can compete either.

What makes me more mad are American parents complaining that their kids have too much homework. Its like man, you dont even know how good your kids have it.

I thought the common core curriculum for both of my daughters was very poor in elementary school and as a result sent them to Kumon for several years. That forced hours of painful but effective repetition. Repetition of basic numerical and algebraic concepts is IMO an essential foundation for math fluency. I think I’ll on this basis add two items to the list:

Common core

parents who ***** about common core

What irks me is also the idea that creativity, critical thinking training and repetitive practice are mutually exclusive. The reality is that with enough repetition, you develop creativity, because repetition is by definition experiment by trial and error. As you do something more and more, you notice efficiencies, short cuts, and peculiarities that you won't notice taking an arms length view.

Repetition shouldnt be the only type of training done as you do need contemplation and reflection but there seems to be this false pervasive idea that if you just contemplated, you can skip practice and develop critical thinking and creativity.

Partisan politics!

How many of us have significant political disagreements with our spouses or close friends or even direct reports at work and somehow manage to get along?

Why then, do so many people feel ridiculous kinship with 100,000,000 other people who have checked the same box as you on a form?

I mean, yeah, maybe some people just don't get along with anyone around them and just live in their parents' basements with their little persecution complexes singing karaoke "All By Myself" every night. But the vast majority of these rabid partisans are probably otherwise semi-functioning adults who somehow convinced someone else to have sex with them on a regular basis, and somehow manage to disconnect the "let's find a way to make Us work" part of their lives from the GAAAAAAAH YOU ONLY VOTE WITH ME 98% OF THE TIME YOU ****ING TRAITOR PURITY OF ESSENCE PURITY OF ESSENCE PURITY OF ESSENCE part.

I went through 10 years of school in former Soviet Union and 3 years after that in Germany. For me was pretty shocking how low level math was in school in Germany. In Russia, I still remember, last two years the homework for a week in math was between 100 and 200 small problems. Correspondingly you just started to see the solution faster, because you had to go through such volume. We had an excellent teacher. I owe her so much. In Germany it was may be 5 problems or no homework at all.

^ I still wouldn't buy a Russian engineered car

Plastic in the ocean

America doesn't respect or value teachers. So you get **** teachers for **** pay.

Then they try to take a high concept approach from the top down, like CC, and wonder why the teachers don't even understand it, let alone teach it.

What's the value in memorising times tables up to 25x when everyone carries a smartphone? It's just another outdated skill surpassed by technology. Oh the horror, those kids don't know how to shoe a horse anymore, or fletch an arrow for that matter.

This is such an ignorant position.

Whats the value in learning anything since you have a smartphone? You can toss everything from k-12 and most of undergrad out the window.

If you want to use your leaf blower one weekend a year to blow leaves be my guest, but your ****ing yard maintenance crew doesn't have to use it every week to make sure every last blade of cut grass is blown off the sidewalk and driveway and walkways around your house. https://www.theguardian.com/environm...lastic-bottles

Nice massacre
Coup attempt in Turkey
Syrian/ISIS chaos
Racist killings by cops
Cop killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge
Idiotic Presidential candidates
Zika virus
William Kassouf
Nixon's resignation in 74
black friday
obamacare
donald trump
rampant misogyny
Pokemon go
slutty girls on Maury Povich
USPS service
Me posting strat in NVG
Vladimir Putin
Chinese territorial ambition
Fight between fraudster Nima Jooyandeh and ADR, hurting subscriber Steve Peralta
Climate change
RIP Harambe
**Leaf blowers**!
Clayton Kershaw's back injury
General descent into entropy (and no MLYLT opus on the subject)
D.C. weather
Pete's complaint that this list is USA#1-centric, so we'll add "Brexit"
Too many lawyers
End of the poker boom
Munich shootings
Humidity
Quality of modern handbaskets
Rampant inflation
Jack-in-the-Box menu reductions
Political hypocrites
Umbrellas (SiMor, please enlighten us by describing a better design)
The general low quality of modern science fiction movies
too much perfume
Russian Olympics cheating
Japanese knife massacre
Common Core Math
Reality TV
Soap Operas
Paterno's Win Reinstatement
North Korea
Beliefs that Taylor Swift is ugly
Brilliant fiction writers spouting off on social/political issues (Stephen King does this too, and Michael Crichton used to do it as well)
Baylor rape indifference
Hot air balloon disaster
douchey 2p2 mods that mindlessly criticize this thread
golfnutt
Sterling Korb or Kolb or however you spell it
Feces-distributing hand dryers
Syrian gas attacks
Twitter fights

Science denial
Lazy criticisms of Common Core Math
Partisan/tribal politics

Please note added emphasis to leaf blowers

This is why you see idiots at the poker table banging numbers into a poker odds calculator on their smartphones instead of dividing by 120 by 3.5 like a non-idiot.