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David Perkins

@tecknow.grumbleware.com

Gay, disabled, curmudgeon, nerd. 40+ (he/him) Blog updates at @grumbleware.com

339 Followers  |  184 Following  |  226 Posts  |  Joined: 19.10.2023  |  2.626

Latest posts by tecknow.grumbleware.com on Bluesky

Being counted as opposing your own positions feels real bad and people are not required to react well to it.

And people will interpret any attempt to end subsidies for suburban living as an attack on their way of life in favor of urbanism. I've not seen one word dealing with that.

19.11.2025 19:34 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

So part of the reason that people are rightfully angry about this today. Is that it completely discounts both the coercion and miscounting that are going on. If I live in the suburbs because it's what I can afford, I count as one of those people who apparently prefers it against my own will.

19.11.2025 19:34 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

You're probably right. I wonder what the separation is? I also wonder if you can leverage the ability to reliably read a complex math expression to help them learn to repeatably read a sentence.

I bet you can, but it would end up looking like training them out of 3-cueing.

12.11.2025 06:42 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Some kids are never taught to read a sentence the same way twice and that makes programming nearly impossible. I imagine it impacts basically all math and instruction-following too.

12.11.2025 05:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I've listened to interviews about this before (probably with the same person) and it really seems like, as far as they're concerned, only fiction exists?

I help people learn to program and learning about 3-cueing helped explain some huge hurdles that some students faced.

12.11.2025 05:43 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Sorry about the wonkiness, I use speech to text when I'm not near a keyboard and sometimes I don't have the motor skills to go back and edit it.

12.11.2025 02:31 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Phonics and whole word and other evidence-based methods of teaching reading are about supporting the process of orthographic encoding. Kids and adults don't continue sounding out gamiliar words forever.

12.11.2025 02:14 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Phonics teaches lots of key words that are hard to sound out with basic phonic rules. As sight words. There is no purity test.

And even setting that aside, the ability to sound out most words frees up cognitive resources for dealing with the exceptions.

12.11.2025 02:14 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

You could have started with the observation that many people taught with phonics can distinguish those words and then ask how they were taught or expected to figure it out? But you didn't do that either.

12.11.2025 02:14 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

If you were actually curious, you could just look up how phonics was actually taught? Or maybe investigate some of the other alternatives besides three queuing, like whole word? What do whole word and phonics have in common with each other but not with three queuing? Maybe the answer is there?

12.11.2025 02:09 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

If you don't accomplish your goals, then you don't have those goals. Might not be the standard that we want to apply to us, or that we use against other people, but it is absolutely how huge proportions of people operate, and you have not actually made any case that they cannot or should not.

10.11.2025 19:31 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Are you under the impression that because I'm willing to view what the Democrats do with complexity, other people are required to do the same? Or to view my support of them with equal consideration? They are not.

10.11.2025 19:31 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Sorry, Are you under the impression that my goal here is to refuse to grant them that complexity? I already said I continue to support them. I don't even disagree that the threats brought to bear were worth responding to. I'm not projecting any of this onto the Democrats.

10.11.2025 19:31 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

And even if someone were willing to try, the consequences of ending the shutdown and the subsidies will be greater on a larger number of people than any action I could ever personally take.

People are entitled to treat you in accordance with the effects you have on their life.

10.11.2025 19:15 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

The idea that the results of our actions don't reveal our goals only makes sense. If the person we're talking to imagines us with enough complexity to allow goals, actions, and consequences to be different. We are not entitled to demand that of other people, and most people will not grant it.

10.11.2025 19:15 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

At a minimum, because they abandoned that goal, it isn't a goal that we share. It's also entirely possible to argue that since I'm not going to withdraw my support for Democrats over this, I don't have that goal either. Hence, I'm lying when I say that I do.

10.11.2025 18:38 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

At the moment question support for the expanded ACA subsidies. That was the Democrats' stated goal for the shutdown. It ended without accomplishing that, therefore it wasn't their actual goal. I support the Democrats as the best available option, so what does that say about me?

10.11.2025 18:38 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

The Democrats are responsible for producing a constant stream of high quality evidence that my support for Democrats means I'm lying about my positions. It's true, that's not everything. But it's not nothing.

10.11.2025 18:22 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

So the engineers assumption must be that it will collapse until that possibility is foreclosed.

Null hypotheses are how you encode your goals.

I assume corruption because that's what I seek to prevent. What's the evidence it was prevented?

10.11.2025 17:29 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Implicit collusion operates without coordination, and I never said there couldn't be evidence for it, I said it wasn't helpful to demand evidence for the thing you're trying to reject.

The onus is on the engineer to show that the bridge won't collapse under foreseeable conditions, even rare ones.

10.11.2025 17:29 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

You are asking people to present evidence in favor of a null hypothesis. That's not how evidence works. That's not how design works. That's not how anything works.

You enumerate all of the things you don't want to be true and then you try to gather enough evidence to the contrary to reject them.

10.11.2025 17:05 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

If the protests are among the biggest but they still don't work then that's strong evidence in favor of giving up. Giving up is an outcome to be avoided at all costs, therefore premises that would enable it should be denied.

I'm sure you already know this.

16.10.2025 17:18 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

It's not particularly difficult to reason that even someone with the best of motivations might want to downplay the protests. For the same reason that giving counter-evidence to a conspiracy theorist only reinforces their commitment to their conspiratorial beliefs.

16.10.2025 17:18 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I think a lot of people - correctly! - recognize that they wouldn't be allowed to hold a position like that, so they won't accept it from someone else. And anyway, it's not useful to them because they can't agree with or copy it. And Sanders, despite everything else, knows his audience.

05.10.2025 17:25 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

If we were to decide to de-prioritize,say car ownership or home, those would be economic policies with a massive social element. You'd need to determine how to overcome social resistance to do the economic policy at all.

Which we are largely failing at.

29.09.2025 18:22 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

We are capable of rejecting the common argument that in our grandparents or great-grandparents generation. Only rich people had fridges or microwaves or whatever, therefore, people who have those things can't be poor. Right?

Social conditions have material consequences.

29.09.2025 18:22 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Hey, can you think of anything bad that might happen to someone because their neighbors perceive them as poor, regardless of how they would be perceived in a different community? Because I can. And as long as that's the case, the threat of feeling poor exists outside the person who perceives it.

29.09.2025 18:22 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I once saw a description of how conservatives see elections as "trying to tune in [a weak signal] from god" and I think it's generally applicable. If everyone independently reacts the same way at the same time then they're probably reacting to - and thus measuring - an external thing.

19.09.2025 17:03 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Which makes obsessing over the fractional risks of joining a mailing list or whatever more appealing. Especially if you don't want to admit - to yourself - that you're worried about validity or that you're not sure it's an argument you could win.

19.09.2025 10:21 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

The thing that this brings to mind for me is arguments about Rosa Parks. A shocking proportion of people who should know better think that learning her resistance and the following boycott were planned makes them invalid.

I think that many people worry that planned protest is less worthy.

19.09.2025 10:21 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

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