DocWatts

Trump wouldn't be Trump if he wasn't grifting: all he's doing is moving money around (illegally) and calling it a 'gift', hoping that our service members are too stupid to tell the difference.

I can speak to this - the Dem's brand is in the toilet because the Democratic base wants: 1) A party that fights back against Trump's authoritarian power grab. 2) A bold agenda centered around affordability. Instead, current Democratic leadership seems content to roll over for fascism, and make small tweaks to an economic system that's not working for ordinary people. Unlike the GOP which is a Cult of personality with a built-in approval rating floor (around 30% of the country will support Dear Leader no matter what), the Dems have to earn their approval rating. And Democratic leadership is doing a terrible job, practicing an outdated style of politics from thirty years ago. This isn't about the age of people running for office (at least not entirely), it's about an Old versus New style of politics (think Chuck Schumer versus Mamdani).

Thought I might share this podcast series, about a disastrous social experiment that's contributed to an illiteracy crisis in the United States, The podcast traces out how American educators were sold a story about a now-discredited paradigm about how people learn to read and write, called 'whole word comprehension'. Advocates of whole world comprension claimed that phonics (learning how to decode printed words by sounding them out) was outdated and unnecessary, and that kids learn to read through contextual clues alone. This is a well meaning assumption that's utterly incorrect. What wasn't understood was that whole word comprension isn't actually teaching kids how to read - it's how functionally illiterate people muddle their way through sentences. The podcast traces out how something as seemingly apolitical as basic reading and writing got politicized, and how well intentioned people working from bad information were training kids throughout the country to be functionally illiterate. Sold A Story Podcast: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Fair point, but my personal experience is that a lot of academic philosophy is convoluted to an unnecessary degree. To return to Heiddegar, Being-In-The-World is a genuinely useful concept - that we're embedded within the world before we start reasoning about it - that's weighed down by overly technical, precise language. There's a tradeoff between splitting hairs and writing in a way people can actually comprehend. Quality philosophical writing has a good economy of accessibility relative to its precision. (I.e., 'Don't make your writing more difficult than it needs to be')

One more, courtesy of Heiddegar: "In the name ‘being-in-the-world,’ ‘world’ does not in any way imply earthly as opposed to heavenly being, nor the ‘worldly’ as opposed to the ‘spiritual.’ For us ‘world’ does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the openness of Being. Man is, and is man, insofar as he is the ek-sisting one. He stands out into the openness of Being. Being itself, which as the throw has projected the essence of man into ‘care,’ is as this openness. Thrown in such fashion, man stands ‘in’ the openness of Being. ‘World’ is the clearing of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown essence. ‘Being-in-the-world’ designates the essence of ek-sistence with regard to the cleared dimension out of which the ‘ek-’ of ek-sistence essentially unfolds. Thought in terms of ek-sistence, ‘world’ is in a certain sense precisely ‘the beyond’ within existence and for it. Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a ‘subject,’ whether this is taken as ‘I’ or ‘We.’ Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject-object relation." What's actually being said here, just in the most inefficient way imaginable: "Mind and world are entangled. We live in the world before we start making sense of it."

Most academic philosophy in a nutshell:

It's the foundation of how people learn to read. It's not cheating. It's how we connect what's on the page to the spoken language. English isn't Mandarin - it's a phonetic language. Knowing how to sound out words is essential.

The point of phonetics is to connect written words to spoken words that are already in your vocabulary. It's not a replacement for building a vocabulary. Maybe an example would make this more clear. Think of an 8 year old knows what a porcupine is. If shown a picture he could point to it and say "porcupine!" Then he comes across the word porcupine in a book. If he hasn't been taught phonetics and hasn't encountered the word already, there's no way for him to connect it to a word in the spoken language that he already knows. Beginning readers who lack phonetics aren't struggling to decode Floccinaucinihilipilification - they're struggling with the written version of spoken words that they already know. Like confusing 'invite' and 'invade' for example, because they're the same length and both start with 'i' (they use this example in the podcast). Encountering the written word 'automobile', knowing what the spoken word means, but being unable to decipher it on page, because they've memorized 'car' but not 'automobile'.

Phonetics is foundational for learning to read phonetic languages like English. We learn to speak before we learn to read, phonetics let's us decode words by sounding them out into the spoken language.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that learning to decode 'Being & Time' was like learning a second language - this is NOT a credit to its author. Heiddegar was a deep thinker but rubbish at communicating his insights in a straightforward manner. Most academic philosophy texts are written for other professional academics. In 80-90% of cases I would recommend finding someone who's already decoded these texts into something that's intelligible for normal humans. No need to reinvent the wheel, unless you're doing so for a very deliberate purpose (like if you're writing a book on 'everyday phenomenology').

What people don't seem to understand is that a gradual transition into the type of universal health care system that every other developed nation takes for granted is the compromise - and what happened to Brian Thompson is the alternative. Stranger still is the idea that people are just going to meekly consent to impoverishment and death just so a handful of sociopaths can enrich themselves at their expense. Protesting United Health Care does jack shit when the for-profit healthcare industry has thoroughly captured the political institutions that are supposed to be regulating their behavior. When money is equated to free speech (thanks SCOTUS!), lobbying becomes a legalized form of bribery. Personally, I'd greatly prefer that we channel this rage into a passing constitutional amendment to get money out of politics and then pass some form of universal healthcare, rather than having assassinations of healthcare executives. But I'm not going to feel a deep sense of shock and outrage over an administrative murderer getting iced by one of his victims.

@Elliott Over a 200 year timespan - yes, people are more literate than today than they were in 1820. But what I've heard in Sold A Story also corroborates what I've been hearing from teachers, who've described that the 11-14 year olds are making it into their classrooms lacking basic reading and writing skills. That said, it was never my contention that Whole Word Comprehension is the only reason for this - America's public education system has always had sharp inequities (the quality of the education you receive is heavily dependent upon your zip code). And iPads making their way into the hands of 4 year olds has been disastrous for developing the kind of attention span that lets that child become a good reader. Here's a 5 min vid of Millennial describing her experiences as middle school teacher, and these sorts of experiences aren't uncommon: https://www.tiktok.com/@heymisscanigetapencil/video/7579812040152288567

And so was a concentration camp guard. Fact of the matter is that Brian Thompson became fabulously wealthy denying people access to health care. The fact that we view intentionally denying people access to life saving care as ethically different from walking into an intensive care unit, unplugging those patients from their life support, and dumping their bodies out on the street just shows how inconsistent our ethical intuitions are.

Yes, schools still teach vocabulary lists and reading comprehension, of course. But for these practices to have their desired effect, readers have to first be able to decode written words - and phonics is indispensable for learning how to decode words, because we learn to speak before we learn to read. Or that's how it is for heavily phonetic languages like English, at any rate. Phonics was the traditional approach for beginning readers for many decades before it was deemphasized in favor of an experimental approach (whole word comprehension) that sounded plausible in theory, but didn't pan out in practice. Our brains are evolved to pick up spoken languages very easily if we're exposed to them early in life. So it was assumed that the same might also hold true for written languages (ie, "just give kids books and a supportive environment they'll eventually learn to read") - but the scientific evidence doesn't bear this out. Kids need both explicit instruction and lots and lots of practice to learn how to read. Again, everything I've been saying in this thread is just a condensed summary of that Sold A Story podcast - if you're curious, I'd recommend giving the first episode or two a listen.

If you believed you were putting a mass murderer in the ground, how much remorse would you have over it? Brian Thompson almost certainly killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden - he was just doing it from behind a desk by denying people access to health care that they paid for, rather than by flying planes into buildings. I'm not advocating for extra-judicial killings, but let's be real: America is a two tiered society where the rich and powerful can get fabulously wealthy through admirative murder (and get away with raping kids if they're the president), while ordinary people can have their lives ruined over a bag of weed.

I'm summarizing the 10-15 hours of the Sold A Story podcast that I've listened to so far. Full transparency, I'm a writer but an actual linguist could explain this much better than I ever could. It sounds like you learned to read through a phonics approach, as I did - what you described is exactly how I was taught. Problem is that many schools across the country adopted an approach that either didn't include phonics, or heavily de-emphasized them.

They do a really thorough job explaining the mechanics of the whole word approach in the podcast, but here's a simple example. So a whole word approach would present kids with a sentence like: "The bee was in the ____." And then the teacher would show them a picture of a tree, and ask them what word what makes sense here. 'Is it a tree?' This 'works' for a simple three year old picture book story, but it falls apart when the pictures go away and the sentences become more complex. If instead of a bee it's another type of bug in the tree, like a tarantula, the kid doesn't have a way to decode the word. They've memorized 'bee' but are unable to sound out 'tuh-rant-you-lah', and connect it to a spoken word. What was discovered is that kids weren't actually reading, they were memorizing the simple stories they were presented with, rather than decoding the words and sentences.

English is a phonetic language - phonics is how you decode words, including words you've never encountered before. You do this by sounding them out, connecting them to the spoken language. Whole word comprension is how people who can't decode words use contextual clues to guess at the meaning of an unfamiliar word. This works okay when the text is very, very simple and there are pictures in the book to tell you what the story is about - but it falls apart very quickly as what you're reading gets more complex.

Yes! And the podcast goes into that. One reason why it took so long for it to become evident that whole word comprension wasn't working is that many parents were quietly getting their kids private phonics tutoring because the public school system had failed to teach their child how to read. And just to be clear, your parents absolutely did the right thing - no shade at parents for making the right decision for their child amid a larger systemic failure.

@Thought Art To clarify: The now-discredited paradigm called 'Whole Word Comprehension' claimed that phonics was outdated and unnecessary. This assumption by advocates of Whole World Compression was incorrect. The science of reading shows that phonics is absolutely indispensable for learning how to read. Hope that clears things up. I'll go back and edit the OG post to make that more clear

Greetings and salutations! I thought I might share this in-depth write-up I made which explores Theories Of Everything (or TOEs): not only the human drive for coherence behind these attempts at a Grand Syntheses, but the epistemic limitations that they run ashore of - and how to use them responsibly. Below is the first half or so of the article. The full text can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/so-you-say-you-want-a-theory-of-everything ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ So You Say You Want A Theory Of Everything One Theory To Rule Them All: What our attempts at a Grand Synthesis reveal about our hunger for coherence and the partiality of our perspectives “One theory to rule them all. One framework to find them. One perspective to make sense of it all, and in the ambiguity bind them.” — Some budding theorist who’s definitely figured it all out The Appeal Of A Master Key There’s something undeniably alluring about a Theory Of Everything. After all, what serious thinker wouldn’t want the equivalent of a universal cipher - a framework so elegant in its reasoning and so comprehensive in its applicability that no problem is beyond its reach? Little wonder, then, that these unified visions have been a perennial staple of our collective meaning-making. Whether they find their expression in the contemplation of a mystic, the precise technical language of a philosopher, or the speculative models of an ambitious scientist, the underlying impulse is the same. Uniting these varied approaches is an intrinsic hunger for coherence: that habitual drive to assemble fragmented observations and experiences into a living narrative that allows us to make sense of the world. This drive towards coherence is something we all do, regardless of whether or not we’re conscious of it as it’s happening. Theories of Everything are an attempt to bottle this process, and direct it towards more intentional aims. But how do these visionary ambitions pan out in practice - and what do they have to teach us about the partiality of our perspectives? A Theory of Everything (or a TOE, as we’ll be abbreviating it) is an attempt to integrate insights from a multitude of domains into one comprehensive explanatory framework. The aim of these unifying frameworks is to bring coherence to some core dimension of our lived experience - be it our internal landscape, or the external structures that shape this experience. As a result, the terrain these cartographies of meaning seek to chart can be incredibly broad. In one sweeping gesture, a TOE may cast its net over the structures of consciousness, the trajectory of societies, and the laws governing physical reality. For the most audacious, these domains, already worlds unto themselves, might be but a prelude to an expedition into the nature of existence itself. Call it hubris, but no one can fault their architects for a lack of vision. Yet there’s a tension that haunts these ambitious projects from the very start. Searching For Meaning On Seas Of Incommensurability From Daoism to the Great Chain Of Being to the Clockwork Universe of the Enlightenment, totalizing explanations have a long and storied history in our shared cultural frameworks. And within a more bounded intellectual landscape, a comprehensive map of the whole expanse can feel like it’s just within reach. Yet these boundaries are never stable for long - pioneers have continually pushed against them, just by venturing into new territories that entail greater degrees of specialization. And as these specialized domains solidify into walled gardens with escalating entry requirements, connecting them all becomes a game of trade-offs. Thus does every would-be cartographer face a choice: render a curated slice of this horizon from a familiar corner, or create a flattened impression of the whole expanse in broad brush strokes. And here’s the kicker: neither path escapes partiality - they just enact different flavors of it. None of these ambitious projects offers a complete guide to Reality, but that’s not really the point. A well constructed TOE illuminates something about the world through its partiality - holes and all. While the world stubbornly shrugs off our attempts to capture it in its entirety, don’t tell that to those who’ve already embarked on one of these quests. So what sort of geography are these mad cartographers working with? Not a unified landscape, but archipelagos of understanding separated by oceans of incommensurability - each region governed by its own logic, language, and assumptions. Together, these form a tacit grammar of meaning that doesn’t always map cleanly onto its nearest neighbors, let alone distant shores. Thus does every high-level synthesis bump up against epistemic constraints that no philosophical sleight-of-hand can resolve, because they’re baked into the territory itself. Buy the atlas, take the flight: there is no map apart from what it’s supposed to accomplish and where its users stand in relation to the world. With all of this talk about what TOEs are ‘for’, it might sound like we’re building towards some inevitable end point - as if the Goddess Coherence were patiently revealing herself through our storied attempts at a grand synthesis. But don’t get it twisted: this is no backdoor teleology, and what’s being captured isn’t some linear march from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ explanations - just a story of shifting motivations and concerns across different contexts and circumstances. A teleology is the belief that things inevitably develop towards some predetermined end goal. In practice, it’s often a sneaky way of projecting our own aspirations and values onto processes - like ‘history’ or ‘evolution’ - that no one is actually steering. What we’re witnessing, then, isn’t some fixed hierarchy of progress, but an endlessly creative process of adaptation, messy in all the best ways. One where TOEs shift in response to what we need from these integrative frameworks - with no fixed destination in sight. Yet the realities of this adaptation have reshaped the TOE-scape in some counter- intuitive ways. The sheer scope and complexity of the territory to be synthesized has pushed these integrative frameworks into increasingly remote corners. The Haunts Where Modern TOEs Take Shape The haunts where serious TOE-building takes shape today tend to be cordoned off from daily life. Ontology, hermeneutics, speculative cosmology: if these esoteric domains don’t ring any bells, you’re in good company. Most people don’t know they exist, much less what goes on within them. Small surprise, then, that the atlases they produce tend to linger far from the public consciousness. Even among those with a passion for big ideas and an informed interest in the territory TOEs attempt to chart, hardly anyone reads the dusty tomes where these totalizing frameworks are laid out. Today’s intelligentsia certainly isn’t cracking open seminal works like Whitehead’s ‘Process And Reality’ or Heidegger’s ‘Being And Time’ - and for good reason. These manuals have a reputation that precedes them: vast, dense, and intimidating. Yet scope and minutiae aren’t what keeps people away - at least not entirely. After all, millions will happily spend their hours poring over the sprawling lore of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but vanishingly few will make it through a dozen pages of Heidegger. Precise, technical prose that’s so dense it might as well be encrypted is a hard sell, even for the motivated. More fundamentally, without a way to connect these integrative visions to what we actually care about, there’s little reason to put in the effort. No small potatoes, as far as barriers go - which makes it all the more fascinating that some TOEs do manage to break into the broader culture. So what’s the catalyst for this transition? It’s not how finely they split hairs, that’s for sure. But before you mistake this for a knock against these breakthroughs, don’t confuse accessibility with a lack of depth - that’s just intellectual snobbery dressed as discernment. The point is that encyclopedic breadth and microscopic precision aren’t what strikes a chord with most people - it’s their ability to tell a story that makes the world feel coherent. Stories: Not Just Fiction, But Essential So what is a story? Not just fiction, though stories can certainly be fictional. When you strip them down, they’re a way of giving shape and meaning to some sequence of events. In practice, stories are how a bunch of stuff that happened is transformed into a coherent whole, with some kind of takeaway we can carry forward. A job interview or a date or a car accident isn’t just a disparate stream of occurrences - it’s a structured narrative that holds some sort of meaning for us, explicit or implied. Likewise, it would be extremely weird for someone to give a play-by-play of placing their right foot on a pedal while gripping a wheel and looking through a pane of glass at some colored lights. A normal person just says that they drove to work. So stories are structured, but that’s not the whole picture - they’re also adaptive. The same events can be narrated in different ways as our understanding evolves, or as the situation changes. Whether or not meeting up with someone for drinks is a date, for instance, might depend on how the evening goes! Given their ability to encompass and transform raw events, stories act a bit like containers for experience itself. Without them, day-to-day life would be a flood of disconnected actions and sensations. Stories allow us to bracket this activity into manageable chunks that we can understand, remember, and learn from. And this same principle scales all the way up to our relationship with the world itself. Humans everywhere generally want to know where we fit within the grand scheme of things, and what it all means for us. So we create stories that weave a larger tapestry of meaning out of patterns we’ve observed in nature, society, and human behavior. While each one of us inhabits a living narrative about the world, most remain unwritten and unsystematized. Nothing so formal as a TOE, our everyday meaning-making is more like an improvisational patchwork of tacit assumptions about how the world works. Not something we work out explicitly, but something we absorb just by living in the world. Storytelling Is Always Situated Within The World While this ongoing narrative is deeply personal - no one else has quite the same one - we aren’t its sole authors. Our imagined control over the loom where our personal tapestry is woven certainly feels intuitive enough - who but ourselves would be directing its course, after all? For there’s undeniable comfort in being the supposed master of our own destiny. Yet the pattern that emerges is never ours alone. The people who surround us and the systems we participate in aren’t a neutral backdrop - they’re our foundation for relating to the world. Which means that we’re embedded within the world before we start making sense of it. And this embeddedness determines the templates we start from, even if what we ultimately make of them is in our hands. Not because we have total control over how the pattern develops, but because we’re active participants in its unfolding. Those core threads that are so central to our identity - what we care about, how we define ourselves in relation to others - emerge as we take these initial templates and adapt or subvert them to fit our actual circumstances. The time, place, and body we’re born into don’t dictate who we become, but they do structure our affordances - playing a defining role in what we’re given support to pursue, what we’re discouraged from attempting, and what we must fight for. Thus our tapestries of meaning are both given and made - and each of us navigates this tension through our lived engagement with the everyday world. And the resulting stories we inhabit are both constrained and enabled by the social and material realities we navigate. Thus, these ‘stories’ are no superfluous fabrications - they’re vital scaffolding for how we perceive, interpret, and ultimately inhabit our Reality. And this is just as true for a factory worker as it is for a physicist or a priest. Which is to say, no one’s exempt from this because it’s part and parcel of being human. And while there’s a wide scope for building scaffolding that works, not every story serves a worthwhile purpose. Some are woefully mismatched for the terrain they’re attempting to chart, others serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests, and still others are little more than psychic wounds projected outwards onto others (hello, Adolf). So we’re right to be discerning about which stabs at coherence we take seriously. As we’ve seen, most attempts to systematize this living dialogue with the world remain obscure, for reasons that are deserved. Which makes the breakout successes all the more worth examining. So what does it take to humanize one of these esoteric frameworks in ways that connect to what people actually care about, while keeping its insights intact?

It 'works' if you value industrialization without democracy. As the US backslides from a democracy into a hybrid regime (mixed authoritarian-democratic regime), it's also becoming poorer, crueler, more corrupt, and more dysfunctional. Needless to say, naked, unaccountable power shouldn't be the end goal of a civilized society.

You wouldn't take a vacation to Berlin in 1935. I can't in good conscience recommend that folks travel to the United States right now unless they absolutely have to. The Trump regime is abducting people to meet detention quotas, and classifying common beliefs as 'terrorism'. NSPM-7 Memo defines common beliefs as domestic terrorism

@Leo Gura You're very welcome, thanks for hosting this awesome space.

I'm anti-nuking the US, but if you wanted to smuggle some stink and glitter bombs into Mar-A-Lago, and maybe jam the toilets with paper towel, be my guest