Patrons Only: The Gang Fixes K-12 Education, Katie Interviews Her Wife, And Jesse Attempts To Interview Brianna Wu's Assistant

It's not hard to get a union construction job. You just sign up. The waitlist can be long bc the pay is good. Elevator pays among the highest bc it's incredibly high-skilled, risky, difficult, complex work. It's a 5-yr apprenticeship and they have to become proficient in welding, electrical, mechanical work, etc. On top of that, it's not uncommon for the trades to put in insane overtime. One of the elevator guys I know was regularly working 60 hr weeks.

Agreed with the other commenters that “Pearl” was a very pleasant guest. Her humor, great voice, and excellent diction mean that she is definitely a threat to Jesse’s future employment on the show.

Friendly note, but Massachusetts is a two-party consent state -- so had you gotten the ostensible Natalie O'Brien on the line, as the law stands in MA you'd have been in legal trouble unless you told her you were going to record (...maybe before you started recording? idk). I tend to think two-party consent laws are unconstitutional -- if I can listen to something and then immediately turn around and describe it to someone else, perhaps even with complete accuracy if my memory is good enough, why should I be forbidden to record it? But the courts haven't caught up to my understanding yet.

Jeff Walden

100% agree that statistics is so much more important than most math taught in school. Its strikes me that basic statistics and just like... science reasoning about data ... is so much easier than advanced algebra. And so much more useful.

Personal financial success is very important to happiness in this world, however I'm not sure it should be taught at school. Ok, maybe some basic personal finance at school. I would like to say that your parents should teach you about this, but most kid's parents don't know anything about it either. My advice to Katie is, start reading the forums at Bogleheads.com. This info is priceless.

The thing about "they ought to teach this at school" is that it doesn't really work very well. I mean, we can agree that people *ought* to know things like critical thinking and finances, etc. But we've had a century-and-a-half of schools forcing kids to study history and science and math and literature, with a minority of kids responding well to it, and even fewer retaining the information into adulthood. I think it's less about *what* needs to be taught, and more about *how* do humans learn best? Certainly, we have the data to show that age-segregated, authoritarian environments where compliance is *the* key to "success," measured in 18th century "grades," is, by the institutions' own 0-100 assessment tool, an abject failure. School needs to be reimagined, not just the subjects. https://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U?t=13

I was so impressed with Pearl, and of course, Katie, too. Wonderful episode. Brave, real, and ultimately kind. Thank you!

David Yves

If you do a feature on Kiwi Farms, you should try to interview Josh.

geedubber

good episode, loved the interview with Katie's lovely wife. for the sake of symmetry please interview a horse next week

I'm of two minds of this. On the one hand, I'm a medieval lit phd currently working in a well-paid financial position; on the other hand, had I not wasted my twenties studying a profitless and marginally beneficial field, I'd probably be in a financially stronger and intellectually more satisfying position. Hard to compare the counterfactual, though.

Michael

Dear Katie and Jesse, Please don’t join the chorus trying to turn our educational system into a giant training program. In my 25 years as an industrial physicist my work has benefitted as much from Prof Molly Hite’s classes on Modernist Literature and Pynchon and Lessing as it benefitted from Duncan Steel’s classes on Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Optics. (Hite was/is a professor at Cornell, Steel is a professor at U of Michigan). Yes, people need to learn how to invest and learn to do their taxes, but schools can not be the only places where people learn.

Katie’s wife is as cool as I’d expect

D C

Thank you for the comment on my prize - I think it means I get to be Michael Faraday for a year but I have not read the small print (https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/awards/michael-faraday-prize/). I am up for this as Faraday had an experimental light house, and I would like one of those (https://www.trinitybuoywharf.com/architecture/lighthouse).

One catalyst for GamerGate was that both Reddit and 4chan banned discussion of Zoe Quinn, even on boards like /b/ that historically took an extremely radical free speech absolutist approach to moderation. Another catalyst was one of Zoe's friends advised her to use the DMCA takedown process to remove defamatory content that uses imagery from Depression Quest without her permission (which was terrible advice). Reddit and 4chan globally banning content seemed to confirm conspiracy theories about Big Tech because both sites previously were pretty lax. In 2015, Reddit banned openly racist subreddits but the mainstream left wanted Reddit to ban virtually all bigoted content. So I think GamerGate was really fundamentally about distrust because people had come to expect that they could get away with posting almost anything online so long as it wasn't a "direct threat" or child pornography. The censorship made it easier for people to believe that all game journalists are part of some cabal. At the very least, the insinuation was that Zoe Quinn had enough connections with people who work at game studios or Big Tech companies that Reddit made an exception to its lax censorship policies for her. Giant Spacekat made the decision to design Revolution 60 around feedback from "casual" players rather than players who identified as "gamers," which isn't all that unusual because it was initially a mobile game for iPhone and iPad and mobile games tend to target a casual audience. The game got an aggregate Metacritic score of 73 out of 100 based on 8 reviews, which isn't good enough to get money from investors for a future project. User reviews were overwhelmingly negative, but I think that's partially because people who post reviews are more likely to identify as "gamers" and partially because of GamerGate. Giant Spacekat raised $12,000 on Kickstarter to port the game to PC and Mac with additional content that had to be cut due to budgetary constraints, released in September 2016. While it's easy to convert an iOS app to run on Mac or Windows, you can quickly run out of $12,000 making voice acting and animation for additional content. The game doesn't really deal with social justice themes at all and isn't viewed by feminist game critics as particularly feminist or progressive. Also I doubt Wu's backers care whether their money went to a real Natalie O'Brien or not.

Why would GamerGate be involved in a vaccine for a pandemic that hadn't occurred yet? That's like holding it against Woodrow Wilson that he never endorsed Kirk as the best Star Trek captain.

It’s usually both, though it’d be amused to find out if the Sino-Soviet split exists on Tankie Twitter. It’s usually a spectrum in terms of edginess: first you start defending the Cuba and the non-Stalin USSR, then you graduate to the Viet Kong and Mao, then Stalin and Xi Jinping, and finally, the Kim Family and North Korea, along with some random obscure communists like Enver Hoxha or the Shining Path.

Manuel Fernandez

Natalie O'Brien is actually my cat. No joke.

Katie’s wife was great and I like the idea of an occasional “ask my spouse” interview. Please find opportunities to have her back from time to time.

Kevin Nyberg

😂 I fell in love with her when I heard that line

(Natalie) O'Brien and Murphy

The lizard emoji is for detransitioners, not for GC

Can Pearl replace Jesse going forward?

Most GCs I see are using the suffragette colors (green, white, purple) in their profile

Really? Like what? Seriously like what? I dont build anything. I dont think I've ever successfully hammered a nail (but I dont think math is to blame there), but I do work in finance ,although admittedly not as a quant. My math skills beyond basic arithmetic are pretty much only used when I watch Jeopardy or read a book about a mathematician. Other than that I dont get much fancier than "absolute value". I never, say, fire up the old Set Theory. Nor have I ever had to find a sine or cosine outside of a classroom. Although there was once an Irish Bar I lived near called Sine. I spent years thinking it was some inside math joke that I didn't quite get until I realized it was pronounced "Shin-ay".

I took a class on Critical Thinking when I was in Community College and it was the 2nd-most valuable undergraduate class I ever took.

Manzell Blakeley

Gahhh, I was SO disappointed by the outcome of that phonecall!

is the pod being censored by the PRC? I mostly see "tankies" referring to CCP supporters these days, not the soviet union

Alternatively what gets taught varies a lot from school to school.

Susannah

I get so annoyed when people say the math they learned in school isn't useful in regular life. If you aren't using your high school math its probably because you don't remember it or simply don't like it. It's especially useful if you are fixing stuff or building stuff.

I’m a teacher. All the things Katie mentioned, besides podcasting, is taught in my school. I’m really annoyed about people who aren’t teachers complaint about shit that we teach “not being taught”. Y’all just never paid attention in class.

I thought the interview with Katie’s wife was very interesting. They sound like a lovely couple.

katie's wife is such a thoughtful queen, love this interview with her. i feel like i will be tossing the phrase "leg wrestle every spineless zygote" around a lot in future lmao

Right here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/patrons-only-for-55147937

Personal finance and home economics (along with basic nutrition) in k-8 schools +1! In a country where people carry ridiculous amounts of personal debt and obesity is epidemic, this should be obvious to a lot more people.

Very unexpected JF gareipy cameo there

My boyfriend is in the elevator union and I’m about to shake him down

If this comment was my waiter at a restaurant, I wouldn’t have left a tip.

Edward A.

Also, “march into The Stranger and leg-wrestle every little spineless zygote in that place into oblivion”? That’s a keeper.❤️

Great episode but where is the Nathan Robinson content!? I've been looking forward to you guys digging into that all week haha

I'm personally sick of GamerGate. It's Eternal September 2.0. Feminist game criticism isn't about taking away your video games or telling you that you can't masturbate to pictures of beautiful lesbian humanoid lizard girls. Just stop being misogynist idiots and don't harass people just because they annoy you. Also get vaccinated if you haven't already. I'll post a 50 minute video airing ill-considered personal grievances I feel against Anita Sarkeesian if GamerGate can verify it has convinced 1,000 people to get vaccinated.

The Gecko is Detransition

Katie! Yes, Lady! Yes! CTE and Trade Education, like they do in Germany, and Home Ec. The time is ripe RIPE for a major shift in education.

If this episode was a meal at a restaurant I would have sent it back.

Is it more likely Jesse's girlfriend takes Ivermectin because she's into the IDW or she's a horse with a parasite problem?

Jordan Bickett

The salamander emoji 🦎 on Twitter isn’t a gender critical thing exactly. It’s usually used by detransitioners, especially ones who have had surgery — because salamanders have such incredible regenerative properties (regrowing amputated limbs, etc.). Unsurprisingly, people who feel they have been the most harmed by an ideology sometimes become the greatest critics of it.

Askini later claimed to have gotten the coronavirus *very* early on and to have gotten stuck with an exorbitant bill: https://time.com/5806312/coronavirus-treatment-cost/ I wouldn't have doubted this if it were anyone else. And the Trans Lifeline stuff is documented in this tax form on TLL's website on page 39: https://translifeline.org/financial/2017-990.pdf The embezzlers were the founders. I don't think a single media outlet of any political stripe reported on it.

Caleb Wilkins