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I just got back from drowning my sorrows into a patty melt at a local bar I frequent. I normally go at night, so the daytime servers were new to me. Got a 40ish year-old lady server who was overworked because everywhere is understaffed now. I asked for some tea because I hadn't had caffeine yet, and she looks at me puzzled and says, "like hot tea?" And I say "Yes! Black please, but green is ok too if you don't have it." And she looked at me, still confused, and said, "Well i don't know what that is, but we have regular hot tea I can bring you with some hot water." After she left to put in my order, I couldn't stop thinking about this exchange.
This article gives me the same exact feeling. Whatever is happening that allows adult SERVERS to be unfamiliar with one of the most popular drinks on the planet. Whatever allowed it so so many people didn't even realize Biden had dropped out...is the reason we lost to trump. It's the reason Democrat weren't able to break through on any issue. We were either talking to brick walls, or black holes. It's no ones fault but that servers that she was unaware of black tea. You can't force people to be intellectually curious or skeptical or even open minded. And these same people get to vote. And that's why we can't have nice things.
I was once teaching a student introductory programming when I was in my undergrad.
The problem was to draw two circles on the screen of different colours and detect when the mouse is inside of one.
I said, "So our goal is simple: Let's draw a circle somewhere on the screen. Consider what you'd tell me as a human - I've got the pencil, and you want to tell me to draw a circle of a certain size somewhere on this paper. We have three functions. Calling a function will draw a shape. Each function draws a different shape. We have rect(), circle(), and line(). Which of these sounds like the one we want to use? Which would get me to draw the correct shape?"
".... Rect?" "Why?" "It draws a shape." "What shape would rect draw?" "I don't know." "Guess." "A circle?" "Why do you think that?" "We need to draw a circle." "If I said that rect draws a rectangle, which of the three functions would we want to use then, to draw our picture?" "Rect?"
I've now been teaching for many years, and those situations still come up a lot. When I put up a poll in class, with the answer still written on the board, about 25% of people in a 100+ student class will get it wrong - of people who were not only admitted to a competitive university program, but have passed multiple prerequisite courses to be here.
Not only is it unknown gaps in knowledge, there is just a thought process I haven't been able to crack through that some people really can't see what is immediately before them.
I got angry reading this. These people should not be allowed to vote on anything.
I can appreciate that. Arguably these folks might be more likely to vote because they aren't stuck in the mud of nuance, answers they see are more clear and obvious and the other ones may as well not exist. Not contemplation of what they don't know, in a way.
But - on the other hand, as mentioned we can't really pick who votes without opening Pandora's Box - and the best thing we can do is not to punish, but to rehabilitate. To model stronger behaviours, to identify why they behave in this way, and to try to help them build stronger critical thinking skills. Punishment is polarizing.
Fun, maybe related note: I've researched some more classical AI approaches and took classes with some greats in the field whom are now my colleagues. One of which has many children who are absurdly successful globally, every one of them. He mathematically proved that (at least this form of AI) when you reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour (correct responses, incorrect responses), the AI takes much longer to learn and spends a long time stuck on certain correct points and fails to, or takes a long time to, develop a varied strategy. If you just reward correct responses and don't punish incorrect responses, the AI builds a much stronger model for answering a variety of questions. He said he applied that thinking to his kids, too, to what he considered a great success.
I think there's something to that, and I've seen it in my own teaching, but the difficulty now has been getting students with this mindset to even try to get something correct or incorrect in the first place, so they just.... Give up, or only kick into action after it's too late and they don't know how to handle it at that stage because they didn't learn. Inaction is often the worst action, as it kills any hope of learning or building the skills of learning.