once i asked mom to buy me the most expensive knife and fork of the store, she looked at me and said: you are so silly and dumb! later that year she gave me a golden spork. since then all my meals are much better
the entire field of K-12 education also is based on a bunch of "non sense" historical stuff, like tests; which came from industrial revolution times where owners wanted to check who would be less likely to break their expensive machines by comparing who remembered more operation steps... which by now pedagogic science knows it's a great way to retain information but as it's done in most school environments is a completely absurd. go try to suggest a change on the system or even implement something effective, cheap and well known as retrieval practice on the school schedule
transfer of learning is a scientific fact but what are the applications of a bunch of stuff we need to learn as teens? Linus Pauling's thesis that won a Nobel? again, transfer of learning isn't a magic bullet that its effects spans across everything you do in your life, nor it's an easy concept to explain to children and get them convinced that learning stuff that you'll forget in some months or years is actually good!
then we have the amount of stuff parsed to children. take a look at data showing the amount of subjects of science taught on North Americans schools and Japanese; now take a look which culture has a better understanding of science!
etc.
schools needs to grow on other areas than parsing knowledge of the natural world, like emotional resilience, collaboration skills, how to deal with grief, not increasing score metrics that also has a problem on its own, like letting behind some districts (thus making it worse) that don't have resources to keep with advancement; and to make a counterpoint with the website OP, i strongly believe and trust professionals teaching children these skills than a bunch of unprepared parents that i have my doubts even half of them actually spend any time reading evidence based tips on how to grow children, let alone meta-thinking about their relationship with them
>schools needs to grow on other areas than parsing knowledge of the natural world, like emotional resilience, collaboration skills, how to deal with grief
I too support more investment in good old fashioned sports and arts.
i don't know why people are taking Duolinguo and relatives as the definitive course to learn a language... they even cite at their FAQ about the need of going outside the app if you want 'fluency'
some people are quite fine learning a limited number of phrases to lurk in a country. a great part of communication among humans also happens with the body/eyes. no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
Frankly, people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up.
This happened to me about ten years ago.
I too had not bothered to understand pedagogy. It is only when I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and struggled with it, that I got pissed off at the lack of progress and began looking around. There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff:
- Alexander Argüelles
- Steve Kaufmann
- Luke Ranieri
I might be missing a few others.
You first have to know what your problem is, before you can solve it.
> no one needs to discuss their phD dissertation in 4 different languages
True. In culturally homogeneous countries, you don't need four languages to make yourself understood.
It becomes somewhat necessary in places like mine where different groups of acquaintances/relatives/friends speak different languages and finding a single language at the intersection of those groups can be hard.
> You want to learn French or Spanish for fun. Duolingo claims that it can help you. So you join, try for a few days and give up.
is that Duolingo fault or users? because that happen in any hobby. heck, take indie gamedev.! hundreds give ups for a single released game. we could also say that there are people who tried Duolingo and years later they are fluent because the app was the kickstart
you have to be quite naive/lazy to stick ONLY with Duolingo for a year or 2 and expect that you will be fluent. there's also different ways of approaching the app... like each lesson allowing one to read or discuss it with the community; meta-thinking stuff like "am i learning or just rushing through lessons?" etc.
i heard podcasts about psychologists suggesting that fluency is subjective and it happens at +4 years time span of active engagement after mastering the basics
Fluency is a different topic. In the initial stages, I am more concerned about the size of my vocabulary and my ability to understand what is written than trying to speak or listen. This is where reading lots and lots of material in the target language helps.
I have seen lifelong scholars of the Sanskrit language struggling to speak in Sanskrit because they are simply not used to it.
> people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. [...] There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff [linguistics/pedagogy]
That's true, but the opposite extreme can be even worse. In YouTube and Reddit I see so many people procrastinating in their quest for the perfect learning method instead of just sticking with any of the good enough methods they already have. I know because I've also kind of fell for that trap myself sometimes.
In fact, I imagine that the average Hacker News user is far more likely to fail at language learning because they procrastinate on linguistics and pedagogical theory and not because they churned 10,000 hours at a slightly suboptimal learning methodology.
This is generally because of a lack of definite purpose. If you were serious about reading ancient Latin literature, you would use YT to try to figure out a reasonable way to achieve the purpose and then put the theory into practise instead of continuing to watch these people talk about the same things over and over. Imagine Vermeer, Moebius or Frazetta continuing to watch art tutorials on YT in their 30s and 40s instead of working on their craft.
For some people, it is because they are unsure of which method works for them. So they wander from one theory to the other.
The rest simply enjoy the meta aspect of the journey more than the journey itself.
profiting 180 billion USD per year should put them in a position to also provide grants for hiring workforce for the necessary amount of years that will take to popularize their current and new AR/VR technology (if it'll ever be popular)
even if Godot starts also being the backend for non-gaming applications (which i don't know how the discussion about this went/is going), which AVP could also benefit, i doubt the investement of time to maintain this PR will pay itself, i.e. the few developers releasing software for Apple VR will make enough money and will donate enough for covering maintainer(s) to keep up with a (so far niche) new OS in Godot!
you can also say the Saharan desert played a major role on turning what Amazon is...
now, wow, calling it a grassland before humans 10,000 years ago is to smoke too much pot before reading/making papers. 5,000,000 AD then yes, maybe... /s but Terra Preta and other indigenous interferences is not even 10% of Amazon territory. various other animals are responsible for spreading diversity be it by shitting seed or just moking stuff around to make nests or impress some partner. the rainforest are also there because mountains changing courses of rivers.
This is common knowledge. Even the Wikipedia page states:
> There is evidence that there have been significant changes in the Amazon rainforest vegetation over the last 21,000 years through the last glacial maximum (LGM) and subsequent deglaciation.
the Wiki citation doesn't even have a source, nor is calling that indigenous people made it
your last link is about Llanos de Moxos, which isn't in Amazon. you don't seen to understand even basic geography... even if Llanos was 100% man-made (and isn't) and it was part of the Amazon (and not a region that borders it) it would be the equivalent of 2.6% of the whole Amazon area. concluding such a thing because 3% of an area that benefited (soil quality wise) from billions of years of geologic events and was partly modified by humans is ignorant but again, Llanos isn't even Amazon
it was common knowledge among middle age that Earth was flat. doesn't seem an argument to me
>it was common knowledge among middle age that Earth was flat. doesn't seem an argument to me
And you don't seem to know basic history, casting doubt on other things you say. Nobody serious in the middle ages (or since much further back than that either) thought seriously that the Earth was flat.
actually i meant "geocentrism" but it was too late to edit but you are right, middle age didn't thought Earth was flat
now if you are defending this absurd commentary that Amazonia was a grassland 10,000 years ago and turned out to be what's because humans, i think you both are on the level of flat earth 21° century people
No, not defending that, since evidence points to it having been a forest, but that a place like the Amazon could form from grassland in the span of a few thousand years is absolutely possible.
the western part once turned into a huge wetland, after the Andes emerged from the ocean. that was more than 10 Ma ago although. that was also what made the western Amazonia part differ on its biodivesity
humans may altered the biodiversity of Amazonia by breeding only wanted species. but we don't have too much evidence of that (yet). but if it was, the biodiversity of pre-humans was probably richer, as indigenous apparently managed the forests with fire and farmed hyperdominant cultures [0]
There were elephants there that humans hunted to extinction, elephants typically keep forests down and create grasslands. So it seems likely it happened, and that humans was the cause (by killing the elephants).
Edit: So it is likely that the change happened and had nothing to do with the soil change.
