Kyle Roth

The PISA test tests common senses reasoning. The countries that did best on the test were a surprise to everyone. Finland, South Korea, and Poland were all standouts in their own ways, and Ripley compares the policies and learning environments in these countries with those of the US to determine why the US is falling behind, especially in math and science. We talk a lot about parent involvement in the US, but the US actually has above average parental involvement. It turns out it’s not very correlated with success. Parent involvement is most useful when it’s reading to your child every day or asking them deep questions about school and about their opinions of broader issues. In the US we have lots of superintendents over small school districts, so there’s a lot of overhead without much benefit. We’re also afraid of standardization, so each school district has to sort of reinvent the wheel when it comes to curricula and standards. Common Core is an attempt by state education departments to agree to standards together so that textbooks and schools can target their products and training toward a common, well-defined set of goals.

These notes are made while reading this with a Mormon theological background, so I skip noting some of the basic Mormon doctrines about the Atonement that he teaches. The Atonement is the central doctrine of Christianity. All scripture should be at least partially focused on it, and we’re invited to “speak of the atonement of Christ, and attain to a perfect knowledge of him” (Jacob 4:12). What is the significance of the Atonement? permalink Here are some of the ways that we come to understand the Atonement:

I read this book with Irresistible and the Social Dilemma on my mind, so I have a lot of notes here about addiction and big business. Just like everything else, capitalism has screwed over our diets by giving companies the incentive to put shareholders above customers. Food companies employ lobbyists to keep subsidies on sugar/corn syrup/meat, and keep a stranglehold on public organizations. They buy billions of dollars of ads to communicate the message that it’s laziness that has caused the obesity epidemic and to push their products that appeal to the unconscious desires of our brains to produce artificial hunger.

These are notes I made after finishing the book, so they’ll be more heavily weighted toward concepts discussed near the end. The first half of the book was primarily dedicated to a history of genetic research, which I think helped the reader understand the issues discussed in the latter half. playing God permalink It seems like our identity derives from a complicated combination of genes and chance environmental effects. Part of our strength as a species has been our natural variation, and to begin editing the genome is to assume that we can do it better than evolution has done up until this point. To choose to remove variations is to decide that normal is best. (Some of our most beautiful productions have been created by people who under our normal social environment would be considered mentally ill.) To remove variation or introduce variation thus has a literally existential effect on our identity. What does it mean for a process to understand its own instructions?

Elder Hafen struggled as a missionary with the concept of knowing versus believing: he felt he believed it was true, but not that he knew it. On the mission he felt pressure to bear testimony with the word “know”, but he chafed at that. In this book, Elder Hafen hopes to discuss the complex boundaries between believing and knowing, Richard Bushman, a prominent LDS historian, found himself in a similar situation. He felt that he didn’t have the right words to express his belief in the nuanced way that he needed, even though looking back he thinks he did believe. This makes me look forward to reading Bushman’s “Rough Stone Rolling”, to try to understand his language of faith.