As an FDB reader I don't necessarily think it's correct to say he is obsessed with the positional aspects of education. His point is really that everyone else is obsessed with the positional aspects of education, and all our measurement tools implicitly focus on percentile scores (relative status) rather than just measuring learning directly.
I don't speak for him, but my impression from his body of work is that he thinks improving education is a good thing, and he also thinks making school a safe, pleasant place for kids to spend their days is a good thing in its own right, even aside from the educational benefits. His main critique is that people want education to close positional gaps between different groups of kids, something which it is unlikely to ever achieve.
I don’t think FDB is arguing that education is bad or not worth it , rather he evaluates it as a measure to reduce income inequality (or even movement in socioeconomic classes) and - I think correct.y - concludes that 1) education will not have much impact if the RELATIVE “academic knowledge” between the classes remains little changed and 2) that relative gains are VERY hard to achieve.
My experience with private schools in the Boston area with Covid was the exact opposite, they opened much quicker because they were taking in kids whose parents were fleeing remote school.
Thing a guy on Twitter (and a blog) named EdRealist whose loathesome on many aspects of education, but is honest and consistent has pointed out, along with other people, is that for all the talk of the evil union teachers not listening to science is that many times, the parents were on the sides of the teachers, especially non-white parents. Consistently, non-white parents were more in favor of virtual schooling being available.
This also bleeds into what I think an underrated aspect of anti-vaccine sentiment in the non-white community wasn't typical "f masks, f vaccines, freedom" arguments, but people who were anti-vaccine, but still pro-mask.
The funny thing about Matt's "that's life" habit is that this reflects the totally banal, psychologically healthy recognition that life is not always as we would wish it to be, so rather than rage against reality we ought to find ways to advance our objectives working within those constraints. But it seems like that's part of what makes Matt such a distinctive and polarizing voice on Twitter, because there raging about and bemoaning how terrible things are and how they ought to be different is practically a recreational activity, and it seems to infuriate people when someone doesn't participate in it.
It wasn't perfect, but it's always weird to hear these stories (largely from people who were frankly, from more well-off families than I was) about how school was this terrible place they hated, when I, as a poor smart kid who wasn't the most charismatic or best looking, still did perfectly well, wasn't bullied (outside of like one weird incident in 1st grade that barely counts), and largely enjoyed the vast majority of time, yet every podcaster, Silicon Valley-adjacent person on Twitter, etc. have these horror stories, and I'm like, was my school in exurban Florida in the late 90's some weird outlier?
you're definitely not. Must be a selection bias. We all like to use the comments mostly to critique so naturally those who had mostly good school experience would be less drawn to share?
not sure, but on a different point I think school experience really biases us (or better, shapes our views). I think Matty mentioned he didn't like his school at all. I think that's a big reason why he is generally cynical about good schools and the inherent value of education, even though today he demonstrated he is not a fanatic in his materialist approach to the subject. I think the same goes for a lot of the commentators. But the converse is also true. I am a big believer in quality education, beyond "connections" material benefit, etc. but rather the value of the actual academic stuff and the teaching itself and that it matters a ton if you're in a good school or not. I do have good arguments for this (I hope), but I also think my good subjective personal experience must be affecting my judgement as well. I've seen what it can be like so I believe in it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
I thought it was mainly when people used it pejoratively, but I'd always appreciate a clarification from Matt so I'm not stuck under a false assumption.
Really? Had no idea. Did he mention it here at any point (not all of us are on Twitter…)? anyhow the idea of course is MattY, which many here use and I thought is neat but I can revert to MY I suppose
I can't recall him mentioning it here, but I don't see a lot of people do it here either. It's probably not a super big deal to do it every now and then, but I wanted to flag it to you because I used to sometimes use it myself from all the way back in his ThinkProgress days and when I found out he disliked it, it made me feel bad because I was never intending to be rude by the use of it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
The positional aspects of education thing reminds me that it’s probably bad that a country 5x the size of the UK has, at the top of its schooling structure, about the same number of seats as Oxbridge.
I have two experiences which have soured me on what was probably the well-intentioned ADA. The first is that I live in a town which used to be rural/exurban but has seen a significant increase in population the last twenty years. It's more urban and walkable now but unfortunately the streets were built without sidewalks. The town wanted to add sidewalks and got partway through the planning process but the ADA (or perhaps it was a state law similar to the ADA, I'm not 100% sure) said that any new sidewalks had to be wide enough for two wheelchair users to pass each other on the sidewalk, which if you think about means that the sidewalks have to be incredibly wide compared to ones installed earlier. Unfortunately, this meant the town would have to eminent-domain too much land from the abutting property owners and make it too expensive so the idea was canceled. Which means that wheelchair users are actually worse off as now they have to ride up the side of the street.
My second negative experience with this law is that my brother-in-law owned an animal-feed store in the central valley in California that wasn't wheelchair accessible. He got sued by a lawyer in a wheelchair who lived two counties away, didn't own any animals, and passed two other feed stores to get to his. The cost of the judgement against him and the required improvements to the building in order to be compliant were more than he could afford so he instead closed down the business. So wheelchair users who need animal feed are no better off than they were beforehand.
For your first anecdote, a quick search indicates that passing lanes (5-ft wide) only need to be incorporated every 200 ft and can include things like driveways; otherwise the width just needs to be 3 ft. Of course, it may be that there is a more stringent requirement in your town!
It really feels like ADA compliance should be handled more like health and safety inspections, where complaints prompt inspections and compliance deadlines.
Our tendency to try enforcing laws through the profit motive seems uh bad.
If nothing else, there should be a Safe Harbor provision where you can pay for an annual inspection that confirms you are compliant and then any case would be dismissed.
Obviously, to the extent that your compliance relies on corporate policy rather than physical facilities, then the plaintiff might be able overcome the dismissal by demonstrating that staff were not actually complying with the policy (e.g. if there is a separate entrance for wheelchair users that was locked, or the accessible toilet was unhygenic due to not being cleaned, even though the non-accessible toilets were clean).
But that last is an understandable risk - you always know that if your staff treat customers badly, then you run a risk of being sued; the ADA doesn't really change that.
One of the problems with the ADA is that it sets a standard that isn't all that clear and isn't defined - and delegates the power to define how accessible things have to be and how quickly they have to come into compliance to the courts, rather than to administrative rule-making. Which means that instead of there being an OSHA guide you can follow and inspections to confirm that you are compliant, you have to ask a lawyer who will say "you'll get sued for that; you'll be OK with that; that last one, you might win and you might lose, depending on how good your lawyer is, how good their lawyer is, and which judge you get".
"I think Freddie deBoer’s obsession with the positional aspects of education is bizarre. I imagine some 18th-century version of FDB explaining that there’s no point in investing in mass literacy education because the kids of the elite will just come up with some new arbitrary signal that they belong on the top of the heap."
This seems to miss the point. FDB is not arguing that education is bullshit, and that it's not possible to teach people stuff. He's arguing there's no evidence to suggest that the relative attainment of smarts and knowledge is movable by the education system of the last 100 years. Smart kids do well; less smart kids do less well. Throwing tons and tons of money at this has not helped. And since the American economy gives vast rewards to people with top-end educational credentials, this seems like a germane topic of discussion. It's orthogonal to the inherent moral benefits of education.
I agree about FDB, reading that question killed me, and Matt's response was no picnic either.
It's obvious to me why Freddie spends so much time on relative attainment: almost all educational research and policy is driven by the idea that it will increase social mobility.
The point is that the average student in 2022 (hopefully) performs better than the average student in 1922. Not relative to their own peers, but relative to the average in 1922.
Literacy is a good one to bring up because it’s so obviously transformative. Whatever its moral qualities, it’s just better to have a world where I can throw a manual at you rather than be on hand to personally help you.
I agree that's MY's point, and I don't disagree with anything you said. And as far as I know, neither does FDB. All of these things are to the good. But as I said, FDB's "obsession" has large material ramifications for society, because the economy provides rewards to people relative to their peers, not relative to an average person in 1922.
"Reading is good" seems like kind of a cheap shot in defense of the excesses in school. I remember pretty well the kind of work I drove myself crazy on late at night to try to get into the best possible college. It was, like, papers about symbolism. Biology vocab. Memorizing trig identities and weird derivatives. Plugging and chugging physics formulas. Identifying the mystery element based on how it reacts to different things. Some of these things were boring, some were fun, but none strike me now as remotely important enough to have sunk as much time and worry into as I did.
…. while also taking seriously facts like “it’s good for people to have access to energy” and “it’s good for human beings to exist and flourish.”
A good, necessary principle for dealing with CO2 emissions (or any other policy problem), its seems insufficient.
As regards the problem of the harms to be caused by CO2/methane accumulation in the atmosphere it overlooks several aspects.
A) Like other externalities, this cannot be approached as a moral dichotomy: emissions bad emissions reduction good.
B) Consequently, there is best quantity of net emissions that changes over time with changing estimates of the costs of reducing net emissions and harm from further emissions (including the costs of minimizing those harms.)
C) Consequently, not every measure that purports to or even that actually does reduce net emissions is good. [This is not to say that as a practical political reality every set of measures has to be perfect, but the cost of deviations from optimum should be kept in mind by those making the political compromises]
"I saw the case for doing it in the Colorado Senate race (where it didn’t work)"
If anything, the Colorado effort backfired in my case. While I rarely vote for Republicans in the general election these days, I'm still registered as a GOP voter for the sake of being able to vote in primaries for saner candidates and specifically voted for the less Trumpy candidate because I was horrified by the campaign literature that apparently was sent by the Democrats promoting the other guy. (I didn't realize the source until after I'd already turned in my mail-in ballot. I saw some news coverage mentioning Democrats supporting the Trumpy candidate, so I went and dug out the mailings from my recycling and discovered the tell-tale mark of Democratic-produced campaign materials: a tiny union
That's been my modus operandi here ever since the GOP closed their primaries circa 2008, and now I feel like a hipster in this regard because many people are doing this now, realizing that if you think the Republican candidates are bad now, it can get much, much worse.
Which is why I think the Idaho GOP are a prime candidate to be one that outright abolishes its primaries some day soon.
I think reporters are more of the problem than congressional staffers. Reporters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and it really seems to affect their coverage. So. I think that the channel to affecting policy is through setting the media agenda.
Side note, easily the best thing Elon Musk could do for Democrats is to just shut Twitter down.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. There's already too much focus on the Twitter Bubble zeitgeist and we see politicians, particularly in the House, devoting more and more staff resources to social media and communications at the expense of policy.
MY seems to have different, more snarky and less gracious behavior on Twitter. That isn't a dig on him, that just what the platform incentivizes.
I coded myself a custom Twitter feed, so I may not be the right person to ask this. Without that, I'd otherwise just go directly to his account (twitter.com/mattyglesias) and read what he's saying there. Also add "/with_replies" to the end of that if you want to see how he's interacting with other users.
You should be seeing his tweets in your home feed, but it's possible the algo is feeding you a mix of other crap as well. Assuming that's the problem, to get around it, at the top middle of your home page, click the little star-like image and select sort by latest tweets instead of top ones.
And as I understand this, you might have to click this a few times over time in order for Twitter to get the hint, otherwise they'll nudge you back to the bad algorithmic view.
I'm assuming you have an account? I didn't for a while, but twitter kept blocking me from reading past a couple of tweets, so I finally gave in and created one.
I was just virtue singling how truly little I know about Twitter. :) Yes, I somehow acquired an account sometime in the past, even noted down my password. And sure enough when I logged in, there was Matt!
MY's answer about killing all the mosquitos shows exactly how he is misreading the themes of Jurassic Park when he takes it as an anti-progress narrative. The problem and central theme in the book/movie isn't about progress per se, its the lack of humility and hubris of science. Killing all the mosquitos would probably save a lot of lives and could be a good idea regardless but no amount of double and triple checking is going to save us from the unintended consequences of such a dramatic decision that affects the whole world.
As an FDB reader I don't necessarily think it's correct to say he is obsessed with the positional aspects of education. His point is really that everyone else is obsessed with the positional aspects of education, and all our measurement tools implicitly focus on percentile scores (relative status) rather than just measuring learning directly.
I don't speak for him, but my impression from his body of work is that he thinks improving education is a good thing, and he also thinks making school a safe, pleasant place for kids to spend their days is a good thing in its own right, even aside from the educational benefits. His main critique is that people want education to close positional gaps between different groups of kids, something which it is unlikely to ever achieve.
I don’t think FDB is arguing that education is bad or not worth it , rather he evaluates it as a measure to reduce income inequality (or even movement in socioeconomic classes) and - I think correct.y - concludes that 1) education will not have much impact if the RELATIVE “academic knowledge” between the classes remains little changed and 2) that relative gains are VERY hard to achieve.
My experience with private schools in the Boston area with Covid was the exact opposite, they opened much quicker because they were taking in kids whose parents were fleeing remote school.
"I wish the people who covered Capitol Hill were more curious about this stuff."
They are not in the curious business. They are in the information suppression business.
Thing a guy on Twitter (and a blog) named EdRealist whose loathesome on many aspects of education, but is honest and consistent has pointed out, along with other people, is that for all the talk of the evil union teachers not listening to science is that many times, the parents were on the sides of the teachers, especially non-white parents. Consistently, non-white parents were more in favor of virtual schooling being available.
This also bleeds into what I think an underrated aspect of anti-vaccine sentiment in the non-white community wasn't typical "f masks, f vaccines, freedom" arguments, but people who were anti-vaccine, but still pro-mask.
RE: meaninglessness of life, can't we all try to live lives that are meaningful at least to US?
The funny thing about Matt's "that's life" habit is that this reflects the totally banal, psychologically healthy recognition that life is not always as we would wish it to be, so rather than rage against reality we ought to find ways to advance our objectives working within those constraints. But it seems like that's part of what makes Matt such a distinctive and polarizing voice on Twitter, because there raging about and bemoaning how terrible things are and how they ought to be different is practically a recreational activity, and it seems to infuriate people when someone doesn't participate in it.
The responses to the education part make me wonder if I’m the only person on Earth who genuinely liked school.
I quite enjoyed school as well.
It wasn't perfect, but it's always weird to hear these stories (largely from people who were frankly, from more well-off families than I was) about how school was this terrible place they hated, when I, as a poor smart kid who wasn't the most charismatic or best looking, still did perfectly well, wasn't bullied (outside of like one weird incident in 1st grade that barely counts), and largely enjoyed the vast majority of time, yet every podcaster, Silicon Valley-adjacent person on Twitter, etc. have these horror stories, and I'm like, was my school in exurban Florida in the late 90's some weird outlier?
you're definitely not. Must be a selection bias. We all like to use the comments mostly to critique so naturally those who had mostly good school experience would be less drawn to share?
I’m going to guess it’s… damn… I forget the name of it. It’s this bias where cynicism and criticism sound smarter to people, all else equal.
The steady encouragement through that.
not sure, but on a different point I think school experience really biases us (or better, shapes our views). I think Matty mentioned he didn't like his school at all. I think that's a big reason why he is generally cynical about good schools and the inherent value of education, even though today he demonstrated he is not a fanatic in his materialist approach to the subject. I think the same goes for a lot of the commentators. But the converse is also true. I am a big believer in quality education, beyond "connections" material benefit, etc. but rather the value of the actual academic stuff and the teaching itself and that it matters a ton if you're in a good school or not. I do have good arguments for this (I hope), but I also think my good subjective personal experience must be affecting my judgement as well. I've seen what it can be like so I believe in it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
I thought it was mainly when people used it pejoratively, but I'd always appreciate a clarification from Matt so I'm not stuck under a false assumption.
Really? Had no idea. Did he mention it here at any point (not all of us are on Twitter…)? anyhow the idea of course is MattY, which many here use and I thought is neat but I can revert to MY I suppose
I can't recall him mentioning it here, but I don't see a lot of people do it here either. It's probably not a super big deal to do it every now and then, but I wanted to flag it to you because I used to sometimes use it myself from all the way back in his ThinkProgress days and when I found out he disliked it, it made me feel bad because I was never intending to be rude by the use of it.
It's worth noting that Matt doesn't like to be called "Matty." (He mentioned this rather pointedly on Twitter several months ago.) I doubt you'll be banned for it, but just wanted to flag it as your use may be inadvertent.
The positional aspects of education thing reminds me that it’s probably bad that a country 5x the size of the UK has, at the top of its schooling structure, about the same number of seats as Oxbridge.
I have two experiences which have soured me on what was probably the well-intentioned ADA. The first is that I live in a town which used to be rural/exurban but has seen a significant increase in population the last twenty years. It's more urban and walkable now but unfortunately the streets were built without sidewalks. The town wanted to add sidewalks and got partway through the planning process but the ADA (or perhaps it was a state law similar to the ADA, I'm not 100% sure) said that any new sidewalks had to be wide enough for two wheelchair users to pass each other on the sidewalk, which if you think about means that the sidewalks have to be incredibly wide compared to ones installed earlier. Unfortunately, this meant the town would have to eminent-domain too much land from the abutting property owners and make it too expensive so the idea was canceled. Which means that wheelchair users are actually worse off as now they have to ride up the side of the street.
My second negative experience with this law is that my brother-in-law owned an animal-feed store in the central valley in California that wasn't wheelchair accessible. He got sued by a lawyer in a wheelchair who lived two counties away, didn't own any animals, and passed two other feed stores to get to his. The cost of the judgement against him and the required improvements to the building in order to be compliant were more than he could afford so he instead closed down the business. So wheelchair users who need animal feed are no better off than they were beforehand.
For your first anecdote, a quick search indicates that passing lanes (5-ft wide) only need to be incorporated every 200 ft and can include things like driveways; otherwise the width just needs to be 3 ft. Of course, it may be that there is a more stringent requirement in your town!
As for your second one, this is definitely a problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/magazine/americans-with-disabilities-act.html
It really feels like ADA compliance should be handled more like health and safety inspections, where complaints prompt inspections and compliance deadlines.
Our tendency to try enforcing laws through the profit motive seems uh bad.
If nothing else, there should be a Safe Harbor provision where you can pay for an annual inspection that confirms you are compliant and then any case would be dismissed.
Obviously, to the extent that your compliance relies on corporate policy rather than physical facilities, then the plaintiff might be able overcome the dismissal by demonstrating that staff were not actually complying with the policy (e.g. if there is a separate entrance for wheelchair users that was locked, or the accessible toilet was unhygenic due to not being cleaned, even though the non-accessible toilets were clean).
But that last is an understandable risk - you always know that if your staff treat customers badly, then you run a risk of being sued; the ADA doesn't really change that.
One of the problems with the ADA is that it sets a standard that isn't all that clear and isn't defined - and delegates the power to define how accessible things have to be and how quickly they have to come into compliance to the courts, rather than to administrative rule-making. Which means that instead of there being an OSHA guide you can follow and inspections to confirm that you are compliant, you have to ask a lawyer who will say "you'll get sued for that; you'll be OK with that; that last one, you might win and you might lose, depending on how good your lawyer is, how good their lawyer is, and which judge you get".
"I think Freddie deBoer’s obsession with the positional aspects of education is bizarre. I imagine some 18th-century version of FDB explaining that there’s no point in investing in mass literacy education because the kids of the elite will just come up with some new arbitrary signal that they belong on the top of the heap."
This seems to miss the point. FDB is not arguing that education is bullshit, and that it's not possible to teach people stuff. He's arguing there's no evidence to suggest that the relative attainment of smarts and knowledge is movable by the education system of the last 100 years. Smart kids do well; less smart kids do less well. Throwing tons and tons of money at this has not helped. And since the American economy gives vast rewards to people with top-end educational credentials, this seems like a germane topic of discussion. It's orthogonal to the inherent moral benefits of education.
I agree about FDB, reading that question killed me, and Matt's response was no picnic either.
It's obvious to me why Freddie spends so much time on relative attainment: almost all educational research and policy is driven by the idea that it will increase social mobility.
The point is that the average student in 2022 (hopefully) performs better than the average student in 1922. Not relative to their own peers, but relative to the average in 1922.
Literacy is a good one to bring up because it’s so obviously transformative. Whatever its moral qualities, it’s just better to have a world where I can throw a manual at you rather than be on hand to personally help you.
I agree that's MY's point, and I don't disagree with anything you said. And as far as I know, neither does FDB. All of these things are to the good. But as I said, FDB's "obsession" has large material ramifications for society, because the economy provides rewards to people relative to their peers, not relative to an average person in 1922.
> the economy provides rewards to people relative to their peers, not relative to an average person in 1922.
Actually, I'd say it does both.
I think Freddie has a point insofar as we are sometimes asking the impossible of the education system.
"Reading is good" seems like kind of a cheap shot in defense of the excesses in school. I remember pretty well the kind of work I drove myself crazy on late at night to try to get into the best possible college. It was, like, papers about symbolism. Biology vocab. Memorizing trig identities and weird derivatives. Plugging and chugging physics formulas. Identifying the mystery element based on how it reacts to different things. Some of these things were boring, some were fun, but none strike me now as remotely important enough to have sunk as much time and worry into as I did.
…. while also taking seriously facts like “it’s good for people to have access to energy” and “it’s good for human beings to exist and flourish.”
A good, necessary principle for dealing with CO2 emissions (or any other policy problem), its seems insufficient.
As regards the problem of the harms to be caused by CO2/methane accumulation in the atmosphere it overlooks several aspects.
A) Like other externalities, this cannot be approached as a moral dichotomy: emissions bad emissions reduction good.
B) Consequently, there is best quantity of net emissions that changes over time with changing estimates of the costs of reducing net emissions and harm from further emissions (including the costs of minimizing those harms.)
C) Consequently, not every measure that purports to or even that actually does reduce net emissions is good. [This is not to say that as a practical political reality every set of measures has to be perfect, but the cost of deviations from optimum should be kept in mind by those making the political compromises]
"I saw the case for doing it in the Colorado Senate race (where it didn’t work)"
If anything, the Colorado effort backfired in my case. While I rarely vote for Republicans in the general election these days, I'm still registered as a GOP voter for the sake of being able to vote in primaries for saner candidates and specifically voted for the less Trumpy candidate because I was horrified by the campaign literature that apparently was sent by the Democrats promoting the other guy. (I didn't realize the source until after I'd already turned in my mail-in ballot. I saw some news coverage mentioning Democrats supporting the Trumpy candidate, so I went and dug out the mailings from my recycling and discovered the tell-tale mark of Democratic-produced campaign materials: a tiny union
printshop logo.)
That's been my modus operandi here ever since the GOP closed their primaries circa 2008, and now I feel like a hipster in this regard because many people are doing this now, realizing that if you think the Republican candidates are bad now, it can get much, much worse.
Which is why I think the Idaho GOP are a prime candidate to be one that outright abolishes its primaries some day soon.
“But in truth, my tweets are probably more influential than the columns. “
That makes me sad because Twitter is bad in so many levels.
It makes me sad because it suggests staffers either don't have the time or the attention span for a deeper dive than a tweet.
I think reporters are more of the problem than congressional staffers. Reporters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and it really seems to affect their coverage. So. I think that the channel to affecting policy is through setting the media agenda.
Side note, easily the best thing Elon Musk could do for Democrats is to just shut Twitter down.
I don't think Elon is interested in doing something good for democrats.... or was that your point?
It is a vicious circle.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. There's already too much focus on the Twitter Bubble zeitgeist and we see politicians, particularly in the House, devoting more and more staff resources to social media and communications at the expense of policy.
MY seems to have different, more snarky and less gracious behavior on Twitter. That isn't a dig on him, that just what the platform incentivizes.
My fiery hot take is that on balance, Twitter is good.
Stupid, personal Twitter question. I clicked "follow" Matt some time go and nothing happened. Do I have to go looking every day?
I coded myself a custom Twitter feed, so I may not be the right person to ask this. Without that, I'd otherwise just go directly to his account (twitter.com/mattyglesias) and read what he's saying there. Also add "/with_replies" to the end of that if you want to see how he's interacting with other users.
You should be seeing his tweets in your home feed, but it's possible the algo is feeding you a mix of other crap as well. Assuming that's the problem, to get around it, at the top middle of your home page, click the little star-like image and select sort by latest tweets instead of top ones.
And as I understand this, you might have to click this a few times over time in order for Twitter to get the hint, otherwise they'll nudge you back to the bad algorithmic view.
I have a home page? :) :)
twitter.com/home
I'm assuming you have an account? I didn't for a while, but twitter kept blocking me from reading past a couple of tweets, so I finally gave in and created one.
I was just virtue singling how truly little I know about Twitter. :) Yes, I somehow acquired an account sometime in the past, even noted down my password. And sure enough when I logged in, there was Matt!
Woah but it’s just so bad!
The bad stuff just drowns out all the attention from the good stuff.
MY's answer about killing all the mosquitos shows exactly how he is misreading the themes of Jurassic Park when he takes it as an anti-progress narrative. The problem and central theme in the book/movie isn't about progress per se, its the lack of humility and hubris of science. Killing all the mosquitos would probably save a lot of lives and could be a good idea regardless but no amount of double and triple checking is going to save us from the unintended consequences of such a dramatic decision that affects the whole world.