learn from puppies

Implicit in my post on intelligence versus wisdom is the idea that kids need to be educated alongside other kids with roughly the same intelligence and maturity level. And I stand by that. First of all, it's flat out easier to teach kids who know about the same amount and learn at about the same rate than kids that don't. Until we have an excess of good teachers, we have to consider the efficient use of the ones we have. Second, being noticeably smarter, dumber, less mature, or more mature than your classmates can lead to a lot of problems. At the very least it's isolating. It also means you don't get practice for the inevitable time you are the smartest/dumbest in the room.*

But cyrstalpyramid raises an excellent point in the comments of said post, which is that if you're surrounded by people like you all day, you tend to assume all the people you don't see are like you as well. This leads to all sorts of problems- not understanding why poor people eat junk food when it's cheap to eat well, without understanding the non-economic costs of doing so, and how being poor increases those costs. Calling to close payday lenders without investigating whether the alternatives of the people who use them are worse. Being shocked by the existence of people who aren't outraged by the pornoscanners. Not understanding friends who take substandard housing because their parents can't afford to loan them a security deposit. And a complete inability to understand political arguments you don't agree with.

Faced with people who are making such wrong decisions and lacking the empathy to determine why they are doing it, political discourse breaks down. I can't think of a single thing I like about Sarah Palin, but it bugs me when my mom dismisses people who do like her as Palin-bots, because doing so shuts down any chance of learning what it is these people get from her.

So we need to educate kids mostly with other similar kids, because it's more efficient and most likely to produce an environment where their effort controls the outcome, which is essential for development. But we also need not only expose them to kids dramatically unlike themselves, we need to do it in such a way that they connect with and empathize with the not-them children. This is one of the strongest arguments for sports and arts in schools that I can make.

*Animal behavior tangent: when puppies with large size differentials play, the big one usually lets the small one win at least occasionally. Part of that may be to keep the little puppy interested, but it's also hypothesized that the purpose of play isn't just to get stronger and better at hunting, it's to practice the social skills needed for both winning and losing. And honestly, if we just told gifted kids "pretend to lose so you can practice losing gracefully," I wouldn't have a huge problem with it. My preference is to put the kids in situations where they'll naturally have a decent win/loss ratio, but if you can't do that, honestly admitting what you want from them is the next best thing. The problem arises when we imply they're doing something wrong by being smart. And of course the fact that we would never tell a kid to throw a football game so he can practice losing.

Sick systems: poverty

Everyone's read Issendai's post on sick systems, right? You should, it's genius. In a nutshell, she suggests that to keep someone with you forever (in a romantic or work relationship), all you have to do is keep them so busy with small crises that they never have the energy to fix the ultimate problem by leaving you. In her follw up post she admits that the cost this inflicts on the person who's creating these crises is at least as great as that it inflicts on the supposed victim, who we could always recast as an enabler. This is why I love her for focusing on sick *systems* rather than sick people: both people are failing to take care of themselves by remaining in the system, both people are harming others by supporting the system. You can try to assign fault all you want, and as a fan of knowledge for knowledge's sake I think that's great, but it doesn't actually help you solve the problem.

I'm not saying anything new when I say poverty is a sick system. Too busy to think? Check. Too tired to think? Check. Emotionally involved? How could you not be? Intermittent rewards? Hell fucking yes. What interests me now is how anti-poverty intervention, by both the government and charities, makes the system more or less sick.

( I take a long time to solve absolutely nothing here )

So yeah, I'm depressed and have managed only the tiniest improvements over the existing system. I sure hope some research reveals private charities to be awesome real soon.

Making the world a little less depressing

Figuring out how charities in general do at supporting or breaking the sick system of poverty is not going to happen because there are four hundred billion charities in the world and I restart work tomorrow. Which I'm actually looking forward to. Hurray for good jobs. Anyways, I can't check what every charity does, but I figured I could at least check the two I donate to:

Treehouse for Kids: A Seattle local charity that servers foster children. I love this place so much. Some of it is money thrown at problems, like paying for clothes or extracurriculars for the kids. Throwing money has a bad reputation, but in this case I think it's the perfect response. Some of the things these kids lack can be purchased with money, so they do that. My usual concerns about in-kind donations versus cash are irrelevant because these are children. Treehouse also does the obvious non-monetary stuff, like tutoring. But I think their true brilliance is in doing things like arranging transportation so foster kids can finish a school year in the same place they started, and generally advocating for kids at schools. That is so incalculably valuable I can't stand it. I checked in to the services section of their website and the form they require is simple enough I could fill it out, they take applications by e-mail (and only e-mail, but the form is designed to be filled out by professionals, so I guess that's okay), and answer questions by e-mail. I have no way of determining their response time: when I e-mailed them offering to buy them software from work, it took them weeks to get back to me, but that's not necessarily indicative of their response time to actual problems: there's no established procedure for those kinds of donations and apparently they had to talk to several people.

Modest Needs: so many people get trapped in poverty because one shitty thing happens (car break down, employer goes bankrupt and skips out on payroll, primary breadwinner falls and breaks a wrist) and it spirals. Modest Needs is designed to prevent that from happening by providing targeted intervention for the solutions to these one shitty events- money for car repairs, moving to new jobs, emergency medical services, etc- to people who are normally able to meet all of their expenses. It does this by certifying requests for help as falling within certain guidelines, and then posting them on their website for donors to support individually. It's not a solution to all of poverty, but it is a great solution to one very specific part. From the FAQs on their website, it appears they can determine eligibility very quickly, which is great. They also get points for being completely up front about the fact that their funding model means there is no guarantee how quickly you will receive money, if you ever do. I was already suspicious of the direct donor funding because it encourages a queen for the day letter writing contest that seems to degrade everyone involved. On the other hand, I really liked being able to choose exactly who I donated to, and I bet a lot of other people do too. They imply a week is a reasonable time frame for getting your request fulfilled; the website has lots of requests over a month old, but without knowing the number of fulfilled requests that's useless to me. So let's call it "a problematic time frame arising inexorably from a funding model that has some merit to it". Modest Needs actually needed to be reminded that I had offered to buy them software, which is probably not a good sign.

If you have any specific information on receiving charity, or a charity you'd like to plug, feel free. I'm especially interested in small charities that might enjoy gifts of software, because my employee discount is astoundingly large and even given the problems inherit in non-cash donations, it turns out everyone benefits if I buy software.