> Personally I see the name as more a jokey play on the stereotype of boring middle aged men who find such things interesting.

#nailedit

There are two Dull Men's Clubs on Facebook. This article covers both.

Both have around 1.8M members. The smaller one features Andrew McKean, the main topic of that article. The other one--with the registered trademark symbol in the name on FB--appears to be more of a commercial enterprise, run by the Grover Click character.

I learned that the article is wrong on a point. All contemporary Dull Men's Clubs are copycats. The original is from 1980 and no longer exists.

If the test is good, then “teaching to the test” is desirable.

The problem with standardized testing in education is the following question: standardized for who?[0]

The ultimate "sin", if you will, is that they tied test outcomes to funding and in practice is used to hold teachers to an arbitrary standard, not to help understand and guide the learning for students.

For example, what could be done with standardized tests is that schools could use them at regular intervals to understand where each student is at, and adjust their learning resources accordingly to help students that aren't at grade level reach appropriate grade level academically, like if a student tests poorly in Math but not English Comprehension, it would make sense to adjust their schedule to give them more time to learn what they're struggling with and assigning resources appropriately, be it an extra half hour of math learning time with a tutor. That would actually make them useful.

Instead, they're used to bludgeon teachers and school districts, and really the student outcomes are at best secondary to the whole operation, and since so much critical funding comes from sources tied to these outcomes, both good and bad outcomes mind you, hence the reason for the deliberate bell curve. Thats the real issue.

In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes

[0]: Not to mention that the pace of learning and aptitudes is varied by individual, some students will excel in X but not Y. This is a related, but for the purpose of this discussion, separate issue. Not to mention how much environment plays a role (a good home vs bad home situation for example).

>In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes

I.e. exactly what those pesky naysayers decades ago said would happen eventually.

This nuance becomes reasonable in high school / college. For elementary schoolers, it's actually a great binary. Can you do two-digit addition or not is a pretty straightforwards question? Same with... can you identify grammar errors in this English sentence? Binary questions.

The assessments to guide student learning are not the standardize tests meant to measure school performance and do state-level planning

Have we found an exception to Goodhart's Law?

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is good."

I don't think so. You can still teach to a good test badly. For example: reading a variety of books and letting people do more on their own would be would be better overall than reading just things on the level of the test, asking just the test style questions and spending time learning the answering style to get 100%.

It's kind of like those articles about young kids passing IT certifications. Those tests are reasonably good, but those kids just memorised lots of material and never actually worked as, for example, a networking engineer.

Or like in IELTS style language test you can easily score higher (even than a native English speaker) if you learn the format enough.

… so if the test is good …

Reading is such a basic skill it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to come up with a decent test.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, except when the measure is something basic, like teaching reading"?

Has the last twenty years of teaching to the test proven that out?

'Teaching to the test' has not caused the drop in literacy. Rather, it's teaching reading using bizarre methods, like whole word recognition instead of phonics. This has nothing to do with 'teaching to the test', since phonics would teach more to the test than whole word anything. A phonetically competent adult would be able to make out almost any English word. A whole word one would not.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, unless the teacher is poor"?

This 'truth' is not always true. For binary questions, teaching to measure makes sense

Unfortunately, "is someone literate" is not a binary question. There's a whole range of possible answers there.

Is there a way to teach reading, which increases reading test scores, that is bad? I’m having a hard time imagining what that would look like. Just because someone comes up with a pithy saying that some people call a “law” doesn’t make it a universal truth.

you trying to establish some sort of measure for Goodhart's law?

The test is never that good.

In education, nothing is ever good enough.

This is my take: the real issue with education in the US goes back to trying to square two ideals.

One is the meritocracy[0]. I believe that No Child Left Behind Act was sold to the public as a way to promote meritocracy in education and having some reasonably unbiased[1] way of doing so. The foundation of which is a way for parents to hold institutions responsible much more easily[2][3]

The other is social and political stratification. This isn't merit based. Good examples of this would be the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, the formerly legal practice of segregation by race, the drawing school district lines that keep students of wealthy parents away from folks who come from less economically advantaged backgrounds and enforcing this with district based school eligibility and funding.

These two don't exactly square very well. Which is why the top level idea sold to the public - meritocracy - is used to sell these policies, but in practice they are using it to pull levers to further political and social stratification.

[0]: Americans generally have a positive view of the term. I personally believe that most people don't have a proper understanding of the term to begin with, nor conceive what issues it could have in practice if they were given it.

[1]: Leaving out the other half of the narrative, which is how much macro and micro levels of a students environment will influence how well they learn.

[2]: Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.

[3]: Not to mention, it completely ignores micro and macro issues that students can have, be it poverty, domestic issues, systemic issues and a whole host of other things.

> Which made it easier for Republicans to continue to go after public education. They've been pushing for the voucher system for decades as a backdoor way to dismantle the public school system, reasons for wanting to do so vary but it all converges on this point.

in practice, republicans are perfectly happy with public schools when the schools are are "good enough" for their kids. so this caricature seems incorrect. there's a lot wrong with USA public schools, so something must be done. some very not-for-profit voucher schools have been doing excellent work where the public school systens have utterly failed, for example green dot animo in inglewood, or, dramatically, green dot locke in watts.

what is not a caricature: the vast majority of policymakers who want to keep status quo in the public school system send their kids to private schools.

> Republicans

Short hand for 'elected officials of the republican party', which have been systematically targeting public education for decades

you can make an evidenced argument that elected officials of the Democratic party have been systematically destroying public education for decades (for example cancelling algebra in California, repeat child abusers not let go in LAUSD, see "mark berndt" for an example of a multidecade offender that bounced between schools)

really, Republicans arent helping, but they arent necessary to destroy American schools thats happening just fine in ~one-party democrat states like California and hawaii.

Republicans are not perfectly happy when public schools are good enough ... they seek to defund them and vilify them anyway. Their complains have very little to do with reality of those schools and a lot to do with the project of privatization. Plus, you see conservatives who send their kids to private schools or home school to attack libraries in public schools.

No, that's simply not true. You can very easily overfit even good metrics.

that's a downright ponderous conditional at the beginning of this comment

Phony. He’s just clinging to power.

This ends Matt’s lordship over Wordpress. Nothing more, in the long run.

Canceling Matt is was WordPress needs.

If you’re in oversupply, as the parent comment suggested, then is the effect of additional buyers meaningful?

If you have extra supply of houses needing renovation, as in the comment, and renovations require labor and/or materials to complete, having foreigners pay to renovate houses to be livable will decrease the ability of Spaniards to renovate houses to be livable.

For example, let's assume renovations are 100% completed by local crews. Any crew working for a foreigner is working for them because A) the foreigner is paying more than a local for the work B) the foreigner is paying enough to make a profit and the local isn't (which is a subset of A). There is no situation in which adding foreign money results in more houses for locals. If you eliminate the ability for foreigners to renovate, the renovation crews will take the money that the locals can pay. There will be fewer renovation crews, because some crew will not be profitable at the lower rate, but more crews working to renovate houses for Spaniards.

Similarly, for materials, given supply and demand curves (and assuming that the marginal units added won't cause economies of scale) eliminating the ability for foreigners to buy materials for renovations will move the curve intersection down to a lower price and volume.

> There is no situation in which adding foreign money results in more houses for locals

Assuming fixed supply, yes, it's (probably) a zero-sum game.

> eliminating the ability for foreigners to buy materials for renovations will move the curve intersection down to a lower price and volume

Assuming a frictionless market and no economies of scale, yes. In reality, you'll have a smaller set of options for locals at a slightly (but not dramatically) lower price. (Again, for an example look at all the markets foreign investors shun.)

> will be fewer renovation crews, because some crew will not be profitable at the lower rate, but more crews working to renovate houses for Spaniards

You absolutely cannot conclude this from first principles.

You make valid points. They just need to be followed up with data. The systems you're talking about are too sensitive to generalise like this.

Question 1: Will this un-break uBlock Origin?

What’s the point of this article?

The very next line, which you elided:

>Unfortunately, though this did clear the error, it landed on (and got stuck) the exact same error when I tried my card lol

He didn't actually fix anything. It's still broken.

There wasn't so much as a screen shot, nor was the system explored or restored.

This post is way below any reasonable standards for a site like this and should have been buried, not promoted to the front page.

It starts poorly:

> Leaders command people.

No, that’s administration.

Leaders may need to administer, too, but come on, leadership isn’t administration!

> If you like someone's YouTube content, how would you suggest they be compensated?

Not my problem to solve.

Perhaps content creators or those who host their content can find less offensive ways of monetizing?

Sure, they could charge you per view, which is being done indirectly now through ads. You're not entitled to free content no matter how much you think you are.

I'm absolutely entitled to whatever bytes some server is happy to send to my machine. It's up to my machine to then decide which ones of those bytes to actually turn into light and sound.

I am not entitled to anything, but as long as I have control over my devices, I will surely exercise that control :)