> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things. I was chatting with various models and most pushed me in the direction of “you don’t have cancer” for a while. Just something to note.
This is certainly another data point for "never trust AI chatbots".
Statistically, it makes sense- most people asking AI if they have cancer don't have cancer, so a model that is lacking detailed information should basically be returning based on the basal rate of cancer in the population with a threshold applied.
Gemini says what I think makes sense (there are multiple responses which could make sense)
[ if I gave you a picture of something on my skin could you diagnose it as a melanoma ]
No, I cannot diagnose skin conditions or identify melanoma from a photograph.
AI-based image analysis cannot replace a professional medical evaluation. Skin conditions—especially potentially serious ones like melanoma—require a physical examination, and often a dermatoscope or biopsy, by a qualified healthcare professional such as a dermatologist.
> Or should it say it can't be sure and to ask a doctor?
It's an extremely slippery slope to having it say that about even the most basic medical information.
If you don't believe me, try any google search related to something as simple as hangover tips. The AI summary will tell you to call SAMHSA and then brutally stonewall you on anything else even tangential to alcohol.
I can't reproduce your claim. I get a medically correct response from the AI summary and then a link to the Mayo clinic at the top of the search results.
AIs often keep blabbering "ask a doctor" after every medical question and I absolutely despise this behavior.
99% of the time I'm asking the AI medical advice questions because (1) there is no specialist available on short notice (2) most specialists I actually see do not give me the sense they take things seriously enough (3) a lot of specialists are just incompetent.
Well the AI can’t order any diagnostics, so that’s good advice. And yes, specialists can be hard to schedule on short notice but if you’re in a major metro area, it may be worth trying multiple hospital systems.
Oh, it absolutely can. If it's bloodwork I can absolutely get that done through Function Health or similar platform without a doctor's order. If it's imaging I can fly to another country and get it done faster and cheaper (including flights and accommodation) than the insured price in the US.
I also give the AI access to all my medical records at 6 institutions in 2 countries over the past 15 years, and it draws upon that context. Doctors don't usually have time for that.
I meant “order” in the clinical sense: e.g. you have to involve a clinician to get more information.
An LLM might be great for summarizing that wealth of information for a doctor to consume, but it won’t compete with a doctor’s judgement or knowledge of their practice and institutional knowledge.
LLMs, even at their theoretical best, are limited to publicly recorded knowledge. If you want to know how extremely limiting this can be, look at the surgical outcome rates of surgeons by educational experience, vs outcome rates from surgeons based solely on experience. Surgeons with more experience have far better outcomes than those with any other attribute.
> it won’t compete with a doctor’s judgement or knowledge of their practice and institutional knowledge.
I vehemently disagree, based on the number of times doctors have misdiagnosed me, and AI or other internet searches have yielded a correct diagnosis and treatment.
It won't compete with the top 5% of doctors, but most of the time you are not going to get to see a top-5% doctor.
Doctors can have any of: good judgment, high experience, poor judgment, or low experience.
Having a doctor does not guarantee good judgement or good experience. But an LLM is guaranteed to have neither judgement nor experience.
Get a second opinion, or a third. Don’t get zero opinions.
And most of the time, you don’t need a 5% doctor, you need to find the one with the correct background of experience. Every misdiagnosis I’ve ever had was because I was at the wrong specialist. If you don’t think you’re getting the right care, sure, ask your LLM for alternatives. Then go speak to specialists in those fields.
They trained on reddit too hard. Everything is "Talk to a therapist, lawyer up, consult with your medical doctor". It's just used for deflection after someone gives (usually bad) advice.
Complaining that people giving bad advice are encouraging you to talk to a specialist? Wouldn’t it be worse if they encouraged you to listen to them and not ask a specialist?
I don’t see any other options: by definition non-specialists can’t give specialist advice. Specialists aren’t obliged to give free advice, don’t know your situation, and won’t want to prove their qualifications to comment on Reddit. Restricting free speech so nobody can talk outside their knowledge is rife with problems.
I think it's a truism that naive computer science people who have watched the rise of computers, the internet, and AI will always believe that curing diseases is a straightforward process and that new tech will rapidly fix all the old problems.
The folks who actually go work in the field, understand the structural problems, the costs/benefits, and the long slog to bring successful treatments to patients are skeptical. But we're still more than happy to be proved wrong- if Anthropic (more than OpenAI) is working on life sciences and drops some amazing information that transforms cancer care with massive positive results, we all win.
Do we all? Or does anyone with enough money to pay for Anthropic's IP, win? Nothing states that Anthropic/OpenAI/... have to share information they have generated. As the crunch for income becomes real, I doubt valuable things will remain free.
I don't see any scenario where showing that we can tremendously improve medical care, even if it's IP/trade secret from an AI company, isn't a win, when integrated over all the variables.
If they succeeded, you can bet everybody else will be duplicating their results within 2-3 years.
Disagree. You don't take the evaluation at face value. You still push back and explore every thread. You don't abandon your own logical reasoning.
But you definitely want to scour the entire search space for solutions.
And the most efficient means for that is LLMs.
It's my experience that doctors are compartmentalized in their thinking, limited in their time, and definitely will not be extensively exploring your case.
E.g., I had 30 years of resistant hypertension. Multiple medications. Saw many cardiologists. Nephrologists. I was told to "just lose weight." BP was erratic over the years. ER visits. It was awful.
I googled. Pheochromocytoma. Hyperaldosteronism. Asked the cardiologist, "Could it be this?"
"NAAAAH, just lose weight."
But I insisted on a referral to an endocrinologist. And when I suggested it to them, given my extensive history, they were basically like, "Oh yes, we'll get you tested. I'm surprised you haven't been tested before?"
I had a left adrenalectomy 6 months later. BP has been controlled ever since.
Yeah I did not mean that as a indication to not trust AI. But rather to use it as a companion and pressure test things doctors say with AI and things AI say with doctors.
This is the opposite of the experience people have when googling symptoms, though, where you often find articles suggesting that you’ve got some very serious condition when you do not. Interesting that the human bias when reading WebMD type articles is the opposite of the bias of LLMs.
That's not universal. I work in genetics, and we did an investigation a few months back, by asking various AIs whether a particular mutation causes $DISEASE. Invariably they were very strongly biased towards saying yes, even for completely obviously benign variants. I think that's because the majority of the literature out there describing variants is describing pathogenic ones, because why would you write an article about a benign variant, so the only material it has ingested is articles describing variants as pathogenic. In reality, the average person has millions of variants, and almost all of them are completely benign, so there should be a very strong pre-supposition that a given variant is benign unless there is fairly strong evidence saying otherwise.
You were asking about individual mutations, like SNPs or small indels?
Very few diseases are caused by individual mutations like that (typically only monogenic Mendelian). Individual mutations typically cause an increased propensity, or severity, rather than being the sole or root cause of a disease.
I work with monogenic diseases, where a single mutation (or a pair in the same gene for recessive conditions) does cause disease. There's a lot of them. Your statement isn't true for these.
You're talking about polygenic traits. That's a different ball game entirely.
Sorry, I should have said: the preponderance of people with disease suffer from (a small number of) polygenic trait diseases, while if you sum up all the monogenic diseases, it's a smaller number of people with disease by far. You're correct that there are many monogenic diseases but the vast majority of them are extremely rare.
In short, if you solve a monogenic disease you help maybe 20-30 million worldwide (and then you have to solve other ones), if you solve CVD,type 2 diabets, hypertension- each of those is 500+M people. So in general, we would expect to have more impact with polygenic, although they tend to be far harder to treat because of the complexity.
True! However, don't both biases point to "don't (primarily) decide by googling or asking an LLM"? You'll either be extremely scared or extremely reassured.
Honestly it's horrifying how many people are happy to chat away with a bot about every medical condition they have. AI isn't your doctor and isn't bound by HIPAA. It's not a great idea to hand out such extremely sensitive information that can be sold to anyone willing to pay for it, or end up leaked, or stolen. I mean, depending on the diagnosis, they might not be around long enough to suffer the consequences, but people who plan on living for a while should give more thought about the impacts that could have on the rest of their life.
This is just adding more crimes to the indictment. Start prosecuting companies for the things the systems they run are doing and the problem gets solved quickly.
But the companies are not running the systems, someone else is, it's the whole point of the subcontractors and shell companies.
My uni got hacked, but the data is conveniently handled by a third party with 3 employees who just declared bankruptcy, and no one had to pay anything, and there was a new 3 employee cloud form popping up who could be the new vendor.
Does this actually do anything other than give a permissions framework for developers who actually want to try to secure their systems?
Do you think the developers at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google who were so sloppy as to not put a good sandbox on their cybersecurity tests before will use this technology correctly? They are supposed to be the experts and they couldn't come up with something similar to this? I am not convinced this voluntary tool will change much of anything.
Beyond Corp was and still is ahead of its time. No trusted internal network: access is granted per user, device, and service based on identity and policy, regardless of network location. Being in the office at Google is the same as being in a cybercafe anywhere on the planet.
"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."
This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:
"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."
Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.
So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.
Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution. It takes an endless amount of time before it's clear "problem is the parent" and by the time that is decided they're gone and on to the next parent who submitted their 6th absurd complaint this year and everyone starts over wagging fingers at the teacher's.
At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?
As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?
I think you are exactly right. This is the product of society which has more empathy towards the bullies, because they are the real victims, ignored and left behind by the society. On the other hand there is very little empathy towards actual victims themselves. And to go further probably the majority of teachers believe, support and vote for people holding such ideas.
I don't think society has sympathy for the bullies, in specific instances. It has sympathy for the bullies in aggregate, to the extent they represent societal social problems (especially in today's US).
That sympathy towards the aggregate seems to be a byproduct from apathy about fixing the underlying issue -- government ensuring positive social outcomes broadly across the population.
Post-90s US conservatism made it verboten to talk about the government's responsibility to create healthy social environments, especially for poor children, so there's no response portion of the conversation.
And because we can't talk about the home situation of the child who assaulted this teacher, in the sense of policy towards fixing that, the two political parties are left debating whether or not we feel sympathy for the assaulter.
... with true sympathy for teachers, front line medical professionals, and other social first responders lost in the shuffle.
If there was an inkling of a plan to strengthen the social safety net (e.g. funding mental healthcare for kids, recapitalizing shared public spaces, strengthening SNAP, universal kindergarten, mandating more parental leave), then we could face the problem honestly instead of treating teacher assaults as an awkward inconvenience of dysfunctional social policy.
Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.
I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".
They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.
Disagree. When you admit to a mistake you just took on a bunch of liability and risk being sued. Worker bees are not empowered to take on that liability. It is much cheaper to let things get bad and maybe get sued but the plantiffs have to prove their case versus hand people a slam dunk 'we messed up' in the eyes of management. Simple things I could address in the past I now have to just shut up and no longer talk to the customer at all. It all comes back to lawsuits causing societal level changes that yet again remove slack/productivity/the previous way a functioning society works.
Along these same lines, it seems to me that patients in the US can rarely afford the exorbitant and escalating cost of medical care, so with increasing frequency they expend considerable effort trying to identify any possible error that they think could get them a break on their bill or enough of a legal case to give them a fighting shot at beating medical bankruptcy.
I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
> I have personal knowledge ofcases with acknowledged errors and apologies that have also resulted in the hospital eating the full cost of care.
+1 of providers eating the cost of care due to insurance misfilings (e.g. failure to secure prior auth when the patient's plan required it, which for-profit plans are increasingly using as a disingenuous bullshit way to legally and effectively limit payouts for care that should be covered)
I don't work in medical or a hospital, but I am the person whose job it is to limit liability at my workplace. We have a bunch of language we have to advise people not to use when an incident happens.
It might come off a little impersonal, but unfortunately one wrong word in the wrong place can give someone an entire case when maybe they didn't have one before, unfortunately.
The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.
A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.
Wild how much of the successful entertainment coming out of South Korea (like Squid Game), is basically them dramatizing facets of their dystopian society, that a lot of it is actually based on real issues they face, and it's not all just made up fantasy.
Indeed. I haven't been to Korea but when I was in China, I met many Koreans and when I was taking Chinese lessons, some Koreans were in my class.
They are generally less friendlier than all the other foreigners I met, closed to outsiders, and somewhat racist (I asked a group of Koreans if I could join their game of Basketball, but they said they preferred to play by themselves. No Chinese ever said anything like that, nor any other foreigners I had joined to play with).
Also, they are quite a violent people. My classmates and I nearly came to blows over the window in the class; I wanted to open it because the indoor air was stale and probably toxic, but he didn't want the window open (for whatever reason, though the weather wasn't cold). Another non-Asian foreigner got into a fight with a Korean puncturing his eardrum which resulted in deafness. Outside the university, too, when they get drunk they become aggressive and seek fights. I guess it must be all the stress they're to put up with in their Dystopian country?
I seriously doubt any hospital in the US outside of a major metro area has an "armed tactical team". I've never even heard of such a thing despite working in a major metro area for most of my adult life.
If they mean explicitly stationed armed and vested police officers in level 1 trauma centers, absolutely.
Personally, I'm in favor. An ED deals with a lot of situations that would normally be met with force by law enforcement, every average Tuesday.
Having someone who's trained and comfortable with hospital procedures, staff, and "normal" there can mean avoiding prematurely escalating a confrontation and knowing when to immediately escalate to prevent injury or loss of life.
Not SWAT or SRT. They just called it the tactical team to differentiate them against regular security guards. The ones I've been around are not sworn peace officers, but are nonetheless armed. Usually they were previously peace officers or military combat arms, but I don't think that was a legal requirement. So they don't have the same use-of-force or arrest authority as peace officers, but can still act within the rights of the property owner.
Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own. I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
From a systems failure perspective, they are where the forces from system failure are being directed. Teachers cannot fix poor parenting.
(last I checked ~2 years ago, ~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers)
> teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own
Look at the recent Nicole Hannah Jones article on regretting her daughters education choices. The 'bad' school with the disruptive children had 52K of funding per student. Something is up but I'm not sure it's underfunding.
The teachers who didn't grade homework and passed students who hadn't actually learned anything? They're utterly powerless and more funding won't help them. The schools need to radically change their approach to education, top to bottom.
Those teachers wanted to fail the kids, but administration told them they couldn't.
Because of changes that mostly started with No Child Left Behind, which tried to not leave children behind by not letting them be held back when they didn't learn!
Why are kids suddenly so uneducated? Well what happened roughly one 18 year long education timespan ago? No Child Left Behind.
I'm calling BS here. The article on NHJ would have had the failure rate around 50% or higher based on how poorly the students performed. The school literally cannot accommodate so many students failing a grade level and being held back.
Further, no child left behind punished schools based on standardized test scores, not the artificially inflated grades the students were getting.
Instead, they are getting 52k per pupil to not even grade homework? That's definitely not a consequence of no child left behind.
This gets kinda tricky to analyze, and especially hard to compare to other countries, which may have very different ways of accounting for things.
That money goes to:
1) Salaries for school administrators.
2) Salaries for teachers.
3) Salaries for office support staff (e.g. secretaries)
4) Depending on how the accounting is done, that may include a fraction of the salaries of district admin (super and assistant superintendents, and Nb there can be several of the latter, even in smallish districts) and their office support staff.
5) Facilities construction and renovation, and/or servicing debt on bonds for past facilities construction and renovation.
6) Property and building maintenance. Mowing, fixing potholes and re-painting lines in parking lots, roof leaks, playground maintenance, whatever.
7) Transportation for students (e.g. busses). This can get pretty expensive in sparsely-populated areas.
8) Extracurriculars, including supplemental pay for coaches and sponsors, and maybe an equipment budget.
9) Supplies for "specials" classes, including stuff like band instruments and maintenance of those instruments (lots of places you bring your own, but that's not true for all instruments, often the really big ones, especially, will be school-provided) and art supplies and all that.
10) Electronics and computer services. Powerschool licenses, laptops, "smart" projectors, all that stuff.
11) Special educators and paraprofessionals who will have much smaller student-counts they're responsible for than classroom teachers. This can get as low-count as a dedicated para for a single student, following around and helping them all day.
12) ESOL services. Districts with lots of students speaking English as a second language (if at all...) bear higher costs.
13) Special services for kids who can't fit into the mold of ordinary school. This can look like a district budget paying for transportation to and from a fairly distant magnet or private school, which school will probably cost a lot more than ordinary public schools because they'll have far lower student-to-staff ratios.
14) School lunches, and maybe breakfasts. The food, the staff to serve it, health code compliance and appliance maintenance, all that. IDK if the spending figure would include money students put into accounts for their kids to use for this purpose, but lunches are often subsidized to at least some degree, if not 100%.
15) Other support staff and services (nurses, counselors and psychologists, librarians, janitors)
16) Other supplies. Books, paper, toner, et c.
(and probably more stuff I'm forgetting about)
The result is that actual spending for a given student, if we restricted it to only the things they're directly benefiting from, can be a ton lower than average per-student spending. Meanwhile, some students soak up well over $100k in spending per year, all on their own.
Also, it's easy to pick out some of the above that might plausibly not count as part of the school's budget, in, say, another country that simply made different choices about what budget each thing belongs in, or might just naturally have far lower costs due to geography or demography or whatever.
TL;DR average spending per-student doesn't tell you a lot on its own, and you definitely can't usefully compare one school to another based on such a figure without gathering a lot more context.
Also doesn't capture parental spend in places where the per-student cost is "lower". The district only spends $nK, but then the parents add in private tutoring, study materials like books and computer programs/subscriptions, etc. Even something as basic as the monetary value of "supervision during study", where another child is on their own because both parents have to work just to afford rent and food.
In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
Whose responsibility is a kid's behavior if not his/her parents'?
Being a parent is a big responsibility, and (barring rare exceptions) you don't become one unintentionally.
Unfortunately, I see plenty of people out in the wild who act like their kids' behavior is none of their business. There was a time when parents unable to control their children would be asked to leave public establishments, but now, everyone is supposed to stand by impotently, and anyone who dares speak up is accosted by the bad parent(s).
> In many cases (not this one) parents are also the scapegoat of system failure. This occurs in debates about age verification. People say "why can't parents just parent" like it's a thought-ending cliche.
~40 percent of pregnancies annually are unintended in the US (per the Guttmacher Institute), so lots of folks parenting who didn't want to or didn't intend to parent. As unintended pregnancies are driven down over time (via education and contraceptives), this should reduce aggregate load off the system of people who do not want to or cannot parent effectively. We avoid, to the best of our ability, people who don't want kids having them, we get parents to success to the best of our ability with the kids that are here today (because there is no other option). We can predict future demand for systems needed to support children based on the US projected fertility rate curve (US total fertility rate stands at ~1.58 as of this comment, and will continue to trend down into the future: https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...).
> There are approximately 7.3 million standalone single mothers and about 15.7 million single-mother family households in the United States, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau and demographic data tracking. Roughly 23% of children under 18 in the U.S. live with a single mother.
> The places with the most single parents tend to be, to put it bluntly, struggling. The strongest predictors of single parenthood are high poverty rates and high shares of the population receiving government assistance." There are ~13.6M single parents in the U.S. raising over 21M children. This means single parents head roughly one in three households and approximately 34% of all U.S. children live in a single-parent family.
> Lastly, many other caregivers assume primary caregiving responsibility when parents cannot, thus acting as a critical safety net for children. In recent years, there has been a notable increase in such individuals taking on caregiving responsibilities for children, with approximately 2.4 million children being raised by grandparents, other relatives, or family friends, without their biological parent(s) in the household.
(think in systems, and overlay this issue with how many K-12 schools are closing across the US every year due to structural demographics and total fertility rate decline)
Shrinking student populations cause spike in public school closures across U.S: Limited funds and low enrollment forced districts to close more than 1,000 schools in 2025-26 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/07/20/school-c... | https://archive.today/4r4uo - July 20th, 2026 ("We call it the big shrink," said Marguerite Roza, who tracks school funding as director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “Enrollment at public schools is declining, partly because there are fewer kids in the U.S.")
> Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further reducing the number of kids at some schools.
(TLDR pay teachers a living wage, get class ratios to whatever the science says is best before diminishing returns to optimize for student success, and continue solving for avoiding unwanted children with education and contraceptives; k-12 schools, as well as colleges [https://college-cuts.com/], will continue to close well into the future due to structural demographics, optimize accordingly)
> Like management and shareholders aligned against workers, parents and administrators are aligned against teachers, who are underpaid, under resourced, and being asked to deliver far beyond what they can accomplish on their own.
Teachers are not underpaid. We live in a free market society and they have extensive collective bargaining agreements. If anything, they’re overpaid vs a totally free market.
Those who can and want to use those same talents in a different progression are free to do so. Nobody is forced into the progression (okay maybe grad students but that’s something else…).
> I recommend being a teacher to no one, and will help any teacher who wants out into a better career or industry.
People who genuinely want to teach should be teachers. Just as people who genuinely want to cure the ill should be doctors.
I happen to have a friend group that has a few teachers in it.
Most teachers have 14-16 weeks a year off. That alone is a tough counter argument to surmount. In a few of our local districts, on average teachers are making $130k/yr if you scaled their pay to a normal 48 week career schedule. This is on top of gangbusters benefits.
Beyond that, once you get a few years into it and have your scaffolding built, you can kinda just cruise control for the rest of your career with only minor changes.
Yes, the job is challenging and stressful, but lowkey most $130k/yr jobs are.
The real devotion of teaching is being willing to have so much unproductive time which would be filled in a different higher paying career.
14-16 weeks off a year is no compensation for dealing with little shits 5 days a week (and their parents), while attempting to teach the minority that want to learn.
it's very dependent on state and most states are underpaid even including getting summers off. The benefits aren't very good in my state and we're one of the better paying states in the region.
There are some huge outliers like California but most states teachers are just treading water. I know this in my state because I was trying to get accredited earlier this year.
1) There aren't plenty. It's hitting the lowest-paying and least-otherwise-desirable areas first, but there's an ongoing staffing crisis that's been worsening for years. Enrollment in teaching programs has plummeted.
2) People often talk about wanting the median teacher quality to be higher, and to be able to fire more bad teachers. A nigh-necessary early step toward addressing that complaint is to increase pay. A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
> A major implicit component of such complaints is that supply of good teachers is too low, suggesting we need to raise wages.
This would be a fine argument if we could somehow align incentives, fire low performing teachers, and rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
Why can't we fire them? The typical answer is "unions" but a bunch of states de facto don't have teachers' unions (as far as unions with any ability to collectively bargain or meaningfully protect teachers from firing), and still have to retain all but the very worst teachers... because the supply of good teachers is too low. These same states tend to have poor educational outcomes, further suggesting that ability to fire, on its own, isn't helping much.
> rate them retroactively based upon the outcomes of their respective students.
This, unfortunately, turns out to be a really hard problem. It's been sincerely attempted in a bunch of ways and they've all turned out to suck, is the short history of the notion.
Almost all states offer pensions, or hybrid pensions and direct contribution plans. You have to add 1/3-1/2 or more (especially for states with retirement health plans) to yearly salary to appreciate real compensation.
> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits
It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.
That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.
They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.
We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?
The ugly secret is that vast amounts of teachers are leaving the field, but there's also an inexplicably vast fresh supply of new teachers coming out of universities, so it sort of perpetuates the conditions.
I don't anticipate change until this fresh supply dries up and people start asking why.
Of note that Kafka-esque is predicated on an impenetrable morass of regulations and procedures.
Imho, we've overly and prematurely optimized to address negative outcomes without remembering that adding red tape also decreases the efficiency of delivering good outcomes.
It'd be nice to see a lot of professions move back towards 'we'll regularly audit to see if there are problems, then address them if they appear' postures.
Time spent in pre-compliance when there would have been no problem is simply lost efficiency.
That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.
We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.
Your dog whistling argument can be easily countered by peeling a few more layers of the onion... The trouble is, as usual, some things we just dont talk about.
> How are “conservatives” to blame for increasing violence in school systems that are overwhelmingly run by liberals?
They aren't, because it isn't [0]. Violence in school systems has been on the decrease since the 1990's, with the notable exception of a spike during the COVID epidemic.
If my data is wrong, please cite proof that there is "increasing violence in school systems", and while you're at it, "school systems that are overwhelmingly run by liberals".
Pretty odd language for someone who claims they don't want it to be "a political thing".
both extremes have really bad takes, the middle path is the way
The underlying basis for current "conservatives inspire more violence" is largely drawn from clips taken from the manosphere-podcast realm. There is an amount of war hawks always being on the right that predates all of this.
I've seen similar from the left wing, though they don't have good podcast game or modern communication generally.
Yes, but I am not even talking about that. I am talking about conservative ideal of masculinity as projected by evangelicals demanding "more muscular Christianity", conservative pundits, opinion writers, preachers, politicians and thinkers. And as practiced by Hegseth, Vance, Proud Boys and so on and so on.
Manosphere is just the same thing, but more open and direct rather then hidden. Dominance and subjugations are the one and only way to be manly, caring about others is not. Caring is accepted only as part of leaderships role. It is philosophy that alienates. It also leads to violence, partly because you have no real solution to "others dont really accept your dominance" situation and partly because resulting relationships are unsatisfactory anyway.
The people setting disciplinary standards in schools aren’t childless manosphere “podcast” bros. It’s parents, teachers, and administrators. Out of those, you do have the “war hawk” types. But they exercise violence in a very abstract way. I guarantee you Dick Cheney’s kids wouldn’t have dreamed of talking back to a teacher, much less laid a hand on one.
I grew up around the Dick Cheney type back when northern virginia was a red area in an even redder state. I recall almost no fights between students, much less anyone attacking faculty. Hitting a teacher would have gotten you sent to some alternative school with armed guards.
Yeah, my wife is friends with one of the founders. They are conservatives who don’t want to use taxpayer dollars to pay for books in schools that contain material they find objectionable. Their kids are super fucking well behaved. These are the types of people who ran the Virginia schools when I was growing up in the 1990s. We had Bill Clinton-funded abstinence-focused education in northern Virginia back then. Violence against teachers was unheard of back then.
In the last 10-15 years, traditional conservatives have largely been pushed out of school administration, even in places like my current county, which was a Romney 2012 county. Groups like Moms4Liberty have zero influence on how schools discipline kids.
> there is nothing civilized about violence
Violence against potential threats is necessary for the maintenance of civilization. But violence against elders within your community, which is what we’re talking about here, is completely unacceptable.
What part do you dispute? Are you saying that kids of christian conservatives are known for hitting teachers in schools? You’re making a very bizarre argument here.
Or are you disagreeing that violence is necessary to maintain civilization. Why do you think literally every country has police and an army?
> And this is ignoring the unsubstantiated claim that school systems are overwhelmingly run by liberals.
Are you actually trying to argue that they're not? When was the last time you were in a K-12 school? Neo-pride flags everywhere. Also, at the very least, it's a female-dominated field and women tend to be extremely left-leaning.
It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.
If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.
The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.
Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.
They mandated prison-style policies at my alma mater, which is one of the nation's top public schools, as part of a blanket policy for the county. It was clearly not a good fit for that particular school, and my observation was that incidents rose after. I was speaking partially from that anecdote, and remain convinced that prison-style discipline is the issue (even if it precedes metal detectors).
You can't even touch student and don't even think about slap. Some years ago I witnessed the case where teacher grabbed the student (14y old) who ran around screaming, kicking things and other students. A teacher was charged with a criminal offense (physical violence against a minor) and must now comply with behavioral supervision. What happened with kid? Nothing. He had a bad day and don't have skills to regulate his emotions yet.
For the rare few cases it may have been warranted, it wasn't a bad idea. The problem is that for the vast, vast majority of cases in which it was used, it wasn't warranted.
Remember: schools don't have tribunals to judge which student was or wasn't actually guilty of what, to which extent, with which attenuats if any, etc., to then decide who was going to be beaten and how much. The teacher merely looked at you, decided you were guilty because you didn't look into his eyes while he was speaking (autistic children were typical cases of this), and decided to traumatize you for life, fully unjustly.
When modern schools do the same but in the opposite direction, unjustly punishing teachers, that simply shows they haven't changed one iota from what they have always been.
If it has gotten to a jury, it has already taken a significant amount of time and resources from the district and the teacher.
That moves it to an earlier point where it is dismissed much sooner. If it is not dismissed before discovery (and why would it be?), then that too takes a lot of resources from the district and the teacher.
So it then moves to a "the district settles early so they don't have to deal with the lawsuit" and it becomes a "sue the district and get a payday since they'll settle."
To get it moved to a "this can be dismissed as a matter of law rather than a matter of fact", then the corresponding laws need to be in place to protect the teacher.
The education profession in the United States has become a black hole that gives people who don’t plan the illusion of a career.
I don’t think this is a societal problem- it’s that people with the endurance for a “career” in this field succeed through the establishment of co-dependent rat-kings for organizational structure.
I advise against using Google for things like that, because Google results are very dependant on how Google classified you, and it might differ from how Google classified me.
Are you sure you wanted to point me to some Facebook post, which is the nr. 1 result for me?
Wow thanks for pointing that out. I figured the ai response would give you something. But a Facebook post as your #1 result that is really something haha.
The legal system is meant to be a backstop, not a standard mode of operation. What I despise, and what makes me feel embarassed by proxy, is when the imagined solution involves using the legal system as a deterrent (to either the kids or their parents). I think there's a systemic cultural failure if parents are not emparting proper morals and imposing proper consequences, so much so that we need the law to be involved to protect teacher from harm.
> school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.
No different than any other employer-employee relationship - the school has a responsibility to protect itself. Teachers have rights too, if she believes her employer contributed to harm or has taken retaliatory action against her she can bring her own suit.
If you tax unrealised gains, say Elon Musk's SpaceX shares, all that means in practice is the government takes a certain percentage ownership stake in SpaceX every year until he has nothing left to tax, or he sells it to someone else and pays tax on that sum (but who would buy anything if it's going to be taxed away?)
What a nonsensical argument. Yes, that's why we're all living in government owned housing, because if you tax something, it inevitably gets taken away, and nobody wants to buy houses, cause the government is just gonna take it away...what?
If your wealth is 100% ownership of Tesla, say, and the government imposes a 5% wealth tax, you have to sell 5% each year of your ownership stake (because the lie of all this is it isn't wealth being taxed, it's ownership) and give it to the government. Until you don't own it any more.
And if you think "well, it doesn't have to go to the government", who else will take it? Who would buy something that they would have to sell 5% of each year? The government, being the only thing that wouldn't be affected by a wealth tax, would become the de facto buyer.
You want a phone that "does a few things very well" and then you list "personal agent" and "your interface with the world". This would encompass everything anyone does with a phone, except maybe interacting with creative media (video games, ebooks). That's the exact opposite of "a few things". I think you're confusing actual functionality with AI marketing phrases.
What is the point of this? It details a bunch of failed real-world experiments and invites the reader to run their own real-world experiment with their own money?
If you too, want to waste thousands of dollars having an LLM "run" a business, Pion might be for you.
This is certainly another data point for "never trust AI chatbots".
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