u/Low-Sector-7879

Some people think that over the course of several million years, Australopithecus became Homo habilis resulting later in us. For this to happen the embryos of this organism would have to remain viable, allowing the organism to develop into an adult stage. I'm not sure why anyone believes millions of years of evolution via natural selection pressures will achieve this. When you try to simulate the embryo evolution over hundreds of millions of years on a computer, or just do the math with a pencil, the embryos always die, so they do not even make it to early development, let alone adulthood, so why would you think they could do it over a few million years?

If you try to do this in a lab with a real embryo, I don't think anyone's ever seen a similar thing happen with living apes. It seems like the simplest explanation is that chimpanzees and humans don't actually have a common ancestor, and they were simply always around, or if there were some phenotypic changes due to natural selection, they were small.

Most people think we need the free market and that it's hard to regulate it, because regulating it has all sorts of unintended consequences. This is not true. In fact, it's possible to implement a very simple central planning program in the US that keeps most of capitalism but provides a constraint, namely:

"Only 10 kinds of cereal are allowed. A person who wants to make a different cereal must go into oatmeal or soda or something, but is not allowed to make cereal."

It is remarkable to me that we have not implemented this rule, and simply allow one company, or several, to fill our grocery stores with 80 different options for cereal.

The same goes for soda. We have even tried to tax people for buying soda. You would think if we're going to make it more expensive, we would first think to get more people out of the soda business by only having 20 different kinds of soda.

Now you might say that it's hard to develop a cheap food that makes use of the ingredients these farmers supply, so this will hurt farmers. But I thought you were free market fans? The market has a solution, the aspiring cereal entrepreneur now has a golden opportunity to sell solutions and services to farmers and launch exciting new products with their ingredients, or convince them to supply different products!

Now if you want to stop at cereal and see how it goes, that's fine. I predict it would go quite well, and when it does, there are plenty of other industries that have hundreds of companies copying each others products which hire plenty of smart people that could be spending their careers doing something they enjoy more, so we should probably cap products in those industries in the same way.

Most conservatives seem to be only interested in local or municipal help, that is, if you're a conservative in Tampa, you don't really care that much if a policy helps a person in Miami, and similarly, if you're a conservative in Miami, you don't really care about people in Tampa that much.

A leftist in Tampa thinks bigger, usually they want to help people that are not even in Florida, sometimes even in other countries.

So for someone to know how you think about policy, you can simply say the number of people within a certain distance from you that you care about. "10 million" if you're in Miami means you care about the 10 million people spatially closest to you. This immediately tells me how ambitious you are about the power of government, the power of private institutions, and so on. If the number is very small, you probably are very skeptical that laws and private organizations can do much for you at all.

This also gives people an easy way to know whether talking to you is a waste of time. If your numbers are very different, then it's unlikely this is the kind of person that will help you with your goals, because they are either naively idealistic and have too much time on their hands, or they are too cynical and interested in their own friends and neighbors.

We might add another number if it's not too confusing, to represent confidence in government versus their community or private organizations. This can simply be the percentage of government employees they think they need to solve the problems they care about (relative to the total number of government employees right now). If that number is close to 0, they are probably too confident about the private sector, and you can compare this number to the first number to understand more about how they see federal versus local politics. If both numbers are close to 0, they are probably very libertarian and think we should all figure out how to fix our own problems, if the employee count is 0 but the number they care about is 300 million, they are probably an anarchist and think we need to overthrow the US government, etc.

What are your numbers? I'd say mine are 8 billion and 50% (I think government is overly bloated, and am very unrealistically optimistic and ambitious about what US policies and citizens can do for the world).

There are nuances that eliminating all conservative and progressive vocabulary in favor of two numbers does not capture, but I think it's convenient because it removes a lot of the ideological baggage.

Many teachers teach in schools where many students perform poorly because the teacher has to use textbooks that do not work, computer programs that do not work, and has to reteach material to students who are below grade level.

Presumably, if the teacher was only there because they wanted to push the students interested in the material to excel further, and found it an interesting intellectual challenge to see how advanced they could get these students to be, they would just leave and go to a school with only high performing students.

If they were simply interested in teaching as a career that pays decently and lets them stay sharp on various subjects, they would also make the same decision.

So I assume that the teachers at these schools often are interested in encouraging the low performers to excel. Perhaps they are interested in seeing if they can get them to be high performing.

If that is the case, and the low performing students and teacher have to tolerate curricular materials and technologies that don't really help them much, why wouldn't they just leave the school entirely and go into tutoring, micro schooling, developing curricular materials for homeschoolers, and so on?

Perhaps they think that they would never reach a sufficient amount of students that way, but presumably if they thought this, they could simply start a school, or join an independent school that is not forced to use these materials and does not force them to teach in any particular way.

Basically, many public and private schools have families that continue to send their children there, despite knowing that most students in the school are below grade level, and teachers continue to teach there despite knowing this. That is very odd. If the parents cannot afford to start a separate alternative to the school, then presumably the parents and teachers could agree to tell the school board "if you do not stop purchasing ineffective materials or allow us to create our own, we will choose other people for the board" and then they would either stop or not be elected again. Neither of these things seems to have happened in the past several decades in any large US cities, since if it did, the large publishing companies that continue to sell materials to these ineffective schools would not be here anymore, and neither would the ineffective schools. So what keeps blocking it from happening?

Over the past 70 years, I can't really think of any examples of non-profits that have made much of a dent in any of their goals, so it's pretty clear they do not seem to work. I wonder, then, why someone would choose a career in them. I imagine there are many intentions one might have, for instance, they might want to learn how the law in that particular area, like shelters and medicaid, work, so that they can go into the private sector or can work in government.

But I imagine that a large group of people join these organizations because they actually want to directly move the numbers up and down. So I wonder, why does there not seem to be a non-profit that was invented for the sole purpose of telling people at various non-profits "if you actually care about this problem, we have a list of organizations that actually do things about the numbers here, and we can help place you at one".

For example, in education, your two options for increasing the number of students that get As are:

1. Start a publishing company that is so good that all the other publishers who refuse to publish good materials go bankrupt.
2. Start a school or network of micro schools or pods and convince all the families to get their children out of the ineffective public, private and charter schools.

Presumably, all the education political advocacy and lobby groups have some "true believers" that you could recruit from to direct them down these pipelines. You can also, internally, as this non-profit dissolving non-profit, think of more kinds of pathways for them to move the numbers, and have a media group, of course, to aggressively point out that all the other non-profits do not actually work.

Perhaps some rich people will get very mad that you are disrupting their philanthropies, and try to shut down this anti-non-profit-non-profit. But rich people try to do that all the time to other non-profits, like code pink, and yet code pink is remarkably successful, despite having almost no friends and many enemies across party and class lines.

Labeling leftist as "leftist" and centrists as "centrist" and so on implies that there are "degrees of leftism" along which you can organize political beliefs. This is not true. Someone who believes in abortion access but is republican is not "less republican" or "less conservative" than a conservative who has some different mixture of supposedly "leftist" or "conservative" beliefs.

You might think that even though there is no ordering, we should still have labels for different combinations of beliefs, but this is very arbitrary. There is no particular reason to bundle views about family planning, civil unions, housing, crime, and so on together in an ideology called "social democracy" or "tradcon" or something. It is a massive waste of time.

You could maybe do something like personality types where there are 5 letters for different issues, and someone can quickly give you their letter combination, but what if other people care very little about those particular 5?

In reality, political parties should be able methodologies or social technologies. Instead of being the "communist" or "social progressive" or "conservative" party, you can be the "taxation party". The taxation party emphasizes using taxes aggressively to solve many issues, like education or public safety or infrastructure.

By contrast, you might have the "participation" party, which focuses on creating and mandating social groupings either locally or nationally to have democratic processes that resolve poverty, grocery prices, and so on.

This would make people much less dogmatic, because no one is married to a particular social tool. Someone who is a leftist has emotions and sentiments attached to it for a very long time, as does someone who is conservative. These have little to do with the reality of the complex society we live in, and prevent people from switching sides or admitting the other side is right on certain things. By contrast, people are much more open to collaboration and changing their minds when a party is rendered obsolete because the technology it advocates for is outdated.

Just look at the flairs on this subreddit, you have a bunch of economic, social, historical, and so on types of ideologies which have little to do with each other or are not even in the same category. Picking one tells you nothing about the person. I picked "centrist" and I'm not even a centrist!