2. If Covid was created in a lab, this de-facto means that Covid has potential as a biological weapon. I don't see how this could be framed any other way. Even if researching novel viruses is in good faith, it doesn't eliminate the reality that they will always have inherit value as biological weapons.
3. Can someone explain to me why there isn't an extremely aggressive campaign to pin down:
a. Where it came from
b. All parties involved in it's funding and creating
c. Passing laws and sanctions to eliminate further continuation of said research. If it was done by China, then they should publicly be held accountable and action should be taken until that is done by all countries.
In this line of assuming Covid was created in a lab, it was one of the most devastating events to the human race in recent history. Many people died and many more people will likely suffer from effects of long covid. It completely warped the global economy.
Is there no attempt at pinning this down and holding people accountable because it can't be proven that it was lab created 100%?
There's a million lesser events every single day that seemingly get more time, money, and energy spent on holding people accountable for infinitely smaller mistakes, accidents, and wrong doings.
> If Covid was created in a lab, this de-facto means that Covid is a biological weapon.
That's not even remotely true. I agree that lab-leak is something like 60-70% likely, but even the lab-leakers are in unanimous agreement that it was an accidental release of GoF research, not a biological weapon. However poorly justified this research was, it's not the same thing as a bioweapon agent.
> Can someone explain to me why there isn't an extremely aggressive campaign to pin down: a. Where it came from b. All parties involved in it's funding and creating c. Passing laws and sanctions to eliminate further continuation of said research.
Because this would make China really, really angry, and for better or worse, that's considered not an acceptable cost for the benefit. But note that, very quietly, there have been some tacit admissions that lab leak is probably real. The Biden administration recently cut all funding to the WIV, for instance, which I don't think can be read any other way, so you actually are getting the c) you asked for. I think in the long run GoF research is very much on the chopping block as well; that seems to be the way the discourse is trending.
No. There has not been more evidence that Covid was lab created.
Republicans who already support conspiracy theorists suggest that because China did what china always does (suppress information), it must be a lab leak. The fact that china is suppressing information on Covid does not lend credibility to the conspiracy hypothesis. Suppressing information has been a Chinese government position for decades leading up to Covid and is not out of the ordinary behavior, so cannot be used as evidence that something is awry.
The next bit of evidence that people who already support the lab leak conspiracy state is that “ventilation was being upgraded”. Which. Okay? I mean. Is it credible that a chinese lab was not sufficiently scrubbed for ventilation workers? I have no answer, but it also doesn’t explain why the virus appears to have jumped multiple times in a somewhat short period at the wuhan markets.
All things considered, it is possible that the virus leaked from the lab. But even if that were the case, it doesn’t lend any credibility to the conspiracy, which makes some pretty radical claims (that it was intentionally leaked, that Pfizer paid for the leak, that it was a leftist plot to destroy half the population for some reason, that it was a precursor to injecting people with 5g nanobots, etc)
Even if the conspiracy group accidentally landed on the correct place that the virus originated (and that’s suspect. The evidence is conspiracy oriented itself), it doesn’t lend any credibility to it being a plot to kill everyone with a killer vaccine.
I haven't downvoted, but origins is off-topic from this thread, so the downvotes it appears you're in the course of receiving will only serve to stigmatize that topic in the HN commentariat context. If you're looking for leads into
l̶a̶c̶k̶ o̶f̶ origins investigations, recommend browsing through US Right to Know, and the House Select subcomittee on coronavirus origins - link (partisan, unfortunately) https://www.twitter.com/covidselect
Disclaimer: I help with BiosafetyNow (which is also another source for content, advocacy & activism on the topic).
No, there is little evidence suggesting it was created in a lab. There is evidence that it may have "leaked" from a lab that studies coronaviruses, but that doesn't mean it was engineered. The leading lab leak theory states that it could have been a sample collected from the wild, e.g. a bat colony, that was taken to the lab, and then someone at the lab was exposed.
US intelligence agencies have clearly stated that they do not believe that SARS-CoV2 was created by the Chinese government and that it should not be considered a biological weapon. While I understand why people doubt US intelligence sometimes, I can't see what incentive they would have to go easy on China in this case.
I also have no idea how you intend to hold a sovereign nation, let alone a borderline superpower, accountable for something that can't even be proved.
There's not lot of evidence of that. There's lots of evidence (including at first a massive coverup, with the help of complicit media -- media who now changed their tune) that it leaked from a lab.
If it leaked from a lab (which now many officials, including US officials, says is the most likely possibility: so now there's a >50% chance that it was a lab leak according to officials [0]), the other question that remains is: is it an unmodified sample that leaked or one on which GoF research had already been applied?
[0] which is quite funny because if you dared to say so when the outbreak happened, you were labelled a conspiracy theorist just as crazy as those believing the world is run by lizards taking human forms
And no, even if it were created as part of vaccine or coronavirus research, that would not equate to it being a biological weapon. That's an absolutely unjustified leap. Do you know how virus research works? Clearly not. They still have smallpox viruses sitting around in labs. I don't know if there is any active research related to improving the smallpox vaccine, but if there were, and there were a release, in what way could you possibly classify vaccines as biological weapons?
But back to the original point: WHY? There is ample evidence that this particular lab had lax safety protocols that might have resulted in a leak of the virus. There is also evidence that similar viruses existed in the wild animal population of the area. They may or may not have been studying one of those viruses in the lab, but that alone doesn't prove where it first infected a human.
But say you have incontrovertible proof. What does that change?
People who died will remain dead. People with long COVID will remain ill. We can rattle sabers at China, but they're likely to continue to deny it was their fault. So what does happen? We can extrapolate from the past:
1. People of Chinese (or any east Asian) ancestry will be treated badly or even killed in twisted "revenge" fantasies of various idiots around the world.
2. The saber rattling could escalate to actual hot war, and more people would die.
3. Say I'm wrong and China does admit the lab screwed up. What then? They'll fire and/or execute people who were responsible. And...? It's not like they're going to pay compensation to everyone who lost a loved one around the world. They'll perform some political theater, and after a news cycle it will fade away.
I don't see an upside unless you're hoping for #3 and think that killing or jailing a few more people will somehow even the scales? Killing or jailing people for incompetence seems cruel and unusual to me. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I like it. I really dislike working with under-performers and people who just refuse to do due diligence on their end. I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I saw a ton of people coasting during Covid. People need to get negative feedback when they deserve it.
The arrival of Covid was a period of great stress and change in people's lives. Maybe they were dealing with some things and not really coasting? Just maybe needed some more support? This way of thinking about people, coworkers, without understanding the situation in their lives and what they've been talking to with their managers about, is just alien to me and I don't understand it. I don't think it's a good way to manage people.
If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.
Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone.
More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
the problem is that it is really hard to identify. to some manager even a good employee might be a low performer. some managers only see like 1% of you through your days. now imagine you are having a bad day or a bad meeting and on the day your manager is looking at your performance it appears to be subpar because that day you had other worries?
sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager.
if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.
if its 10% phoners, this isn't a problem. because there is a natural turnover with everyone else, and the phoners tend to stick they generally represent an increasing faction over time.
as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done.
does anyone know of a company that survived this process?
i was at google when the pandemic started. it was certainly a difficult change for a lot of people, but IMO those aren't the people that should be targeted. it's the ones who were worthless/coasting well before the pandemic and/or have no real excuses for their lack of performance since. at least for the first 6 months of the pandemic (when I left google), Google was VERY considerate of employees and their difficult situations.
This is under the presumption that most/all of the people being let go are actually low performers, and that leadership is able to correctly identify them.
The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place.
I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.
Microsoft ruthlessly fired tons of "low performers" for over a decade, which gave them the organizational efficiency they needed to ship such resoundingly successful products as Bing Search, Windows Mobile, and Windows 8
Performance isn’t static. Hiring is hard. Organizational priorities shift, people lose interest, etc. It’s often better for both parities if one just moves on.
Agreed. It's demoralizing to have an under-performing colleague stick around for months or years. It's even worse to work with someone who's mastered the art of "talking the talk" to get a job, who makes big promises but always has some excuse for why they can't deliver, and who never actually ships anything.
Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers.
It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.
Seems like you have a responsibility to yourself and your team to bring this up with the appropriate party and go farther if need-be. Proactive feedback is more useful than passive resentment.
Of course, and that tends to happen, but the alignment of the manager to their team's mission isn't perfect. So you'll see:
"Soft coaching" instead of a PIP.
PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories.
Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around.
The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.
Seems like I’ve ruffled a few feathers and ended up -2 on my previous comment here, not clear what rule I violated but that’s beside the point.
I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team.
These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.
While that's a nice ideal, it's often not practical. As an IC, you'll rarely be rewarded for pointing out inefficiencies like this publicly - especially if it makes your boss look bad. As a manager, it's often better to expend your social/political capital to advocate for your best employees, rather than to address your worst.
Relevant to the top-level topic here, that's why many managers welcome environments in which the barrier drops for cutting their worst employees. It's nice to be able to do that, when the whole company is going through it, without bringing scrutiny down on your team (and you, specifically, as someone who potentially made a bad hire).
Seems like the deficiencies exist throughout the entire organization’s vertical. Under-performing workers and underperforming managers acting in their own self interest and shirking responsibilities that would otherwise benefit the organization.
You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right?
It could be like SNAP that fired the entire company that they acquired because they had to cut costs but the product was meaningful and I'm sure the team worked very hard on it.
> You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right?
No, this thread:
> Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing.
...is specifically about this quote from the article:
> Separately, the company’s head of engineering issued a call for managers to identify employees who were coasting and place them on remediation plans as a prelude to their termination.
Ah my mistake. I see the context now. If that's truly what Meta is doing, all the more a garbage company.
It does still feel like a marketing spin on "we're cutting headcount, make it work" to me though. I find it impossible to believe that Meta wasn't already doing this.
That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do.
For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.
And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.
I also like it, and believe that Meta’s way of going about this is more humane than keeping people on who aren’t performing. We are not talking about underpaid wage slaves here. These are professionals who deserve honest feedback about their work.
Sure, but what if you have a good personality, fit body, stable career, _and_ good hair. I don’t think it’s particularly shallow to do a hair transplant.
Of course it is shallow. But it can be OK anyway. A bit of vanity is present in most of us. You don't need to fight it, it is fine to embrace vanity as a hobby or profession.
If the baldness goes beyond being a minor nag in your vanity though, and you start believing that regrowing your hair is truly essential to your happiness and wellbeing, you should perhaps seek professional help for your mind rather than your scalp.
the optimistic interpretation is that people like Bezos aren't quite as Machiavellian as people make them out to be, the negative one is that it's a 'the king tolerates the jester because he's powerless' situation. Reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Bezos doesn't strike me as the petty type but Amazon's probably also not that afraid of reporting.
Bezos is 100% checked out right now. He doesn't even bother checking in on his vanity projects like Blue Origin more than once a week or so.
He's living his best life with his new girlfriend and fancy boat, he's absolutely not going to go slumming at the WaPo headquarters to beat down a couple annoying reporters.
Sounds like more woke nonsense. Sounds nice and easy to a layman from a super high level but not practical or put through any kind of rigorous rational thought.
You are right that this is a lot of nonsense. Specifically, 'you aren't good at math/math is hard' is the nonsense meme that gets hammered into student heads so frequently during school that most of them actually start to believe it.
It's not some kind of novel woke nonsense, though, it's how math instruction on this continent has been happening over the past X decades.
'you aren't good at math/math is hard' may be nonsense, no doubt.
'you can be good at math/math is easy' may be an equal nonsense.
This seems to be a symmetrical situation to me. You can absolutely underrate or overrate a person's abilities to do X. I don't see how one is preferable to the other. Both are pretty destructive when taken to their extreme logical conclusions. For example, from the relative underrepresentation of blacks in advanced math classes, you can draw a conclusion that math as a science is inherently racist/white supremacist. Such sentiments can be sometimes seen in discussions and I consider them dangerous, toxic nonsense.
>You are right that this is a lot of nonsense. Specifically, 'you aren't good at math/math is hard' is the nonsense meme that gets hammered into student heads so frequently during school that most of them actually start to believe it.
No, the nonsense is the idea that we are all cut out for math. That's the fundamental underpinning behind the "wokies" push for equity, a silent conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome based on the totally untrue premise that we are all equally capable given identical environments.
The only possible resolution to this goal, given the obvious uneven distribution of innate human ability, is the handicapping of those who are capable, because there fundamentally is no way to boost those at the bottom to match the middle and top.
And I don't think people understand how dangerously pervasive this mindset has become, as it is also the foundation for diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the equally misguided idea that given equal opportunity all demographics would see equal representation in a true meritocracy.
> No, the nonsense is the idea that we are all cut out for math.
I think the nonsense is making a decision about who is and isn't cut-out for math at such a young age, and keeping them hemmed into that path for the duration of their education. That's not merely recognizing the top, middle, and bottom - it's creating it.
I see that as a worthy thing to try to avoid. I also think we should strive to avoid falsely concluding that all persons are equally capable.
But every decision is one that creates tradeoffs. I don't know what should be done. I'm an observer on this topic, and I think there's a lot of hubris in this thread from others oh so certain they know what's best.
Perhaps a simple solution is worth a try: publicly praise/acknowledge those who excel, while also teaching that it's okay to not be at that level [yet]. Encourage peer mentorship, so that the more advanced ones can help someone who struggles. For the outliers who are absolutely stuck in the "I don't care" mindset, apply additional resources to find alternate ways to make the material matter to that individual (practical examples, scenarios, hands-on application, etc.). Ask other students who are interested what real world uses they can think of for the material/topic/equation/concept. If something works, consider implementing that method for the entire class earlier on for the next class.
This is where the goalposts generally get shifted toward teacher resources and/or pay. That's fine to discuss as well, but likely not a significant factor for the above suggestions.
What's the longest we can go without streaming and still meet reasonable targets? The people designing this curriculum seem to say they can't get rid of streaming without dramatically lowering the bar.
This means an informed discussion needs to be had about the costs of lowering the bar against the costs of early streaming. I think people are rather strongly against lowering the bar to the point of effectively removing calculus from high school based on the general reaction in this thread.
> The people designing this curriculum seem to say they can't get rid of streaming without dramatically lowering the bar.
If over twelve years of math instruction you can't figure out how to teach the average child algebra, trigonometry, logarithms, and the very basics of calculus, I would advise the educators to look into why their peers in other countries are managing to accomplish these feats.
But, of course, it's easier to just throw your hands up into the air, and just bifurcate people at Grade 7 into 'good math' and 'bad math' tracks.
>If over twelve years of math instruction you can't figure out how to teach the average child algebra, trigonometry, logarithms, and the very basics of calculus, I would advise the educators to look into why their peers in other countries are managing to accomplish these feats
Their peers in other countries are working with culturally and genetically different populations. Intelligence is 70%+ heritable, you do the math, as taboo as it may be. Then add in the difference between a culture that prizes academic achievement versus one that is ambivalent or worse, prioritizes sports or music over education, and you have more than enough to explain the divergence between nations, as well as demographic groups in the US.
Parents and peers/communities. If the US is any indication, teachers are incapable of instilling appreciation for learning once scholastic achievement is branded "uncool".
You underestimate the impact that schooling has on culture. As a school-age child, you spend more time being socialized and educated by your teachers, than by your parents.
> If over twelve years of math instruction you can't figure out how to teach the average child algebra, trigonometry, logarithms, and the very basics of calculus, I would advise the educators to look into why their peers in other countries are managing to accomplish these feats.
You think they're doing it with "Common Core" and "ethnic" rainforest math, let alone this new "data science" insanity? You couldn't be more mistaken on that. Take a look at the popular Russian and Singapore Math. Not even the smallest trace of the failing "progressive education" thinking, just a lot of solid, high-quality, direct, rigorous, focused teaching.
Can't we agree that both extremes are wrong? While I agree that it is wrong to assume there is no such thing as innate human ability, and it is wrong to assume everyone can achieve equally, you seem to be arguing the opposite; that there is nothing that can be done to improve achievement for those who are struggling.
This simply isn't true. There are things that can be done to improve the outcome for students, and we should continue to work to try to improve the success of all students. This doesn't mean that you expect everyone to achieve equally, just that you can help people achieve more than they would have without the help.
I also find this argument a bit paradoxical; if you truly believe that innate ability is the only determining factor for how well students do, then why do you worry about handicapping those who are capable? It shouldn't matter if we force them into classes they are too advanced for, since how we educate them doesn't matter and only natural talent matters.
It seems that you believe schooling does affect achievement, since you want to make sure we aren't holding back the high achievers, yet you are saying at the same time we shouldn't worry about how we educate the low achievers because they are stuck where they are no matter what. You can't argue that it matters for high achievers but not for low achievers, that doesn't make any sense.
> There are things that can be done to improve the outcome for students, and we should continue to work to try to improve the success of all students.
How would you suggest we do this?
Without a dramatic reinvention of our education system, you have to fill a room with N students and 1 teacher. If you want that teacher to be maximally effective at "improving outcomes" - how do we do that?
The proposal here is to group the kids strictly by age. Every kid in grade X gets the same math class. This will inevitably lead to the math class being irrelevant to some portion of the class. Some kids will be so far behind the teacher may as well be speaking a foreign language, and some kids will be bored out of their mind because the material is moving too slow.
By being a little more intelligent in choosing our groups of N student, we can maximize the relevance of what the teacher is teaching and therefore better improve the success of all students.
I don’t know how we do it, I am not an education expert. I am simply saying we should keep trying new ways to try to help lower performing student improve until we find one that works. We shouldn’t just give up and write them off as being unable to improve.
I don't understand if you're saying that every kid is equally good at math. Or, similarly, that every kid that the same capacity for it or ability to pickup math concepts.
Because it seems to me that if you have experience with any sampling of children where N>1, you'll see that's simply not true.
> I don't understand if you're saying that every kid is equally good at math.
I'm not, there are always extreme outliers and exceptions, but I do believe that the vast majority of children can meet the incredibly low bar for mathematics education that is considered normal in North American schools.
I also believe that teaching them to be afraid of math, (and having their teachers be afraid of math) is a major contributing factor for why so many of them struggle so much to meet that bar.
I would agree with this. The standards aren't super high -- from my POV as someone who always excelled in math. But it's clear (to me, at least) that even the "incredibly low bar" is actually quite challenging, at every grade level, for very many students.
Speaking of teachers... my own grade-school math development, decades ago, was stunted by the fact that my teacher didn't know anything about linear algebra. I asked her for help deciphering my "Amiga 3-D Graphics Programming" book, and she concluded that the vector and matrix notation must be a bunch of typos. Arrgh!
This is a big one. I was in sixth grade when my science teacher told me that the boiling point of water was 132F, because she thought you added 32 to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
This problem runs all the way down, from teachers colleges to the kinds of people who apply to be K-12 teachers. That fearing math is okay and normal is pervasive in the culture and it’s not clear to me you can even do anything about it other than implement gating math credentials for teachers that would exclude a huge fraction of teaching school graduates.
This is a huge part of the issue I feel. I know way too many elementary school teachers who are afraid of math themselves and struggle to understand it. Is it any wonder the kids they teach don't? It causes big problems when they get to me for mathematics in high school.
Like I said, sounds good to a layman in general terms (just how you explained it). But the actual implementation is half-baked, short-sighted, and favors a weak/easy solution rather than something more well thought out and complex.
Ok, so what would your approach be to address the issue of huge groups of kids underperforming what they are actually capable of?
I feel too often the people who play the 'woke nonsense' card think that we should just allow the current failings to continue, and any work to help struggling groups is wrong.
Wouldn't cutting out high level math courses make even more kids underperform below what they are capable of?
The cited issue was that higher level math courses were making other students feel like they weren't cut out for math. So it seems more like the issue is a mindset one. They shouldn't be looking at better performing kids and think "I can never do that". We should be instilling a better growth mindset to these kids, so they understand that they can overcome their inabilities.
The "woke" solution of removing high level courses actually achieves the opposite. It reinforces the idea that such a level is inachievable for some people so it should be cut out for all people.
The problem is that these higher level courses aren't 'extras', they are table stakes for getting an education.
If you think a high-achieving student won't get a good education in an curriculum where they are 'dragged down' by the low-level course... Why on earth do you think that a non-high-achieving student isn't going to get 'dragged down' by being pigeonholed into the low-level course?
If your goal is to just write those people off as lost causes, then sure, by all means, bifurcate the coursework. But then the criticism of this approach starts to sound rather on point.
> If you think a high-achieving student won't get a good education in an curriculum where they are 'dragged down' by the low-level course... Why on earth do you think that a non-high-achieving student isn't going to get 'dragged down' by being pigeonholed into the low-level course?
Why do you assume it is a zero sum game? We can have high level math courses and improve the quality of lower level ones (if you think they are problem). Or if you are saying that students shouldn't be forced into lower levels just because they aren't getting good grades, then yeah sure, let people join high level courses based on passion and not achievement. I think that's an entirely separate debate though.
> If you think a high-achieving student won't get a good education in an curriculum where they are 'dragged down' by the low-level course... Why on earth do you think that a non-high-achieving student isn't going to get 'dragged down' by being pigeonholed into the low-level course?
If you can run a < 5 minute mile, you are not going to benefit from jogging at a pace set by the slowest pace. If you're that slowest kid, being forced to jog will be hugely beneficial.
If you think the bar is too low for the non-advanced classes, that's fine. You should be advocating for more rigour and mathematics across the board, not less. The stratification of classes is orthogonal to math education not being rigorous enough in general.
I don't know how it works in CA, but where I grew up the regular math classes were perfectly good math classes. But if you excelled in math, and wanted to focus on it, you could take the honors and AP level classes. Most of the kids in the regular math wanted to instead focus their time and energy on AP history, or literature. I found the system to work quite well. Nobody was "pigeonholed" and everyone got the fundamental education in all subjects that they needed.
If you can't run a five-minute mile, and are therefore put into a PE class where you never run, do you think you'll ever get into a shape where you can?
> If you can't run a five-minute mile, and are therefore put into a PE class where you never run, do you think you'll ever get into a shape where you can?
People all over this thread are making the assumption that the non-advanced math class is equivalent to no math class at all. That doesn't make any sense to me, and does not match my experience of regular, honors, and AP classes in high school.
Accepting your premise, the issue in your case is that the PE class needs to run more. Pulling all the talented athletes into that shitty class without changing the curriculum at all will strictly cause harm.
> what would your approach be to address the issue of huge groups of kids underperforming what they are actually capable of?
Huh? Are you suggesting that removing upper level maths classes helps kids achieve their potential?
If the current system is untenable, then I would force all students to have one "tutor" period. Everyone has to take a tutor period, so the social stigmatization you're worried about it not a factor. This way, kids gets extra help in their "worst" subject (decided by some combination of grades / introspection/ parental involvement).
This way, the kids who need more help in math can get it, without pulling down the kids who belong in more advanced classes.
> Huh? Are you suggesting that removing upper level maths classes helps kids achieve their potential?
That is the purpose, but I agree that I don’t think it will work. I am saying we need to keep trying, and not dismiss any attempt to fix the issue as woke nonsense.
I wonder if psychopathy/sociopathy/narcissism is the result of pro-longed inter-generational stress and isolation. Someone growing up say in a war zone and being exposed to violence constantly from a young age would be adapt to shut down empathy.
