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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Right, but most times I see it come up that's not what I see. In mass discourse, "the trolley problem" is "can you pull the lever and save five by letting one die?" That's totally missing the point, but that's mostly how it comes up.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Almost any time you see "the" trolley problem getting Discourse, it's _just_ the version with the lever. But in context "can you pull the switch?" was never the question—the answer is supposed to be "obviously" yes. The question is to explore the tension with the fat man case.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Very relatable. As a younger-than-you faculty member, my biggest complaint is that it seems like the administrators _should_ see their job as making it easier for me to do the things I'm doing, but they _actually_ see it as getting me to do additional things.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A lot of bad pedagogy theory is trying to skip the "do examples as a foundation" bit and jump straight to "deep understanding", and that doesn't work. I feel the same way about premature category theory for math majors. There's no real point or payoff if you haven't already seen algebraic topology.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Yeah, there's a real problem that lots of problems are easy once you understand the deep ideas, but it's really hard to build that abstract understanding without having lots of examples to draw on, so you need to do a lot of problems anyway.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think a lot about the way sports and dance and music teach kids. They have a much more developed praxis for instruction. Music lessons for kids make them do scales. But also try to convince them that "The C-D-E Song" is a real thing. (And get them to play simple tunes as soon as possible.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

But there's a major school of thought that is not on board with drill for addition/multiplication facts—or, frequently, with communicating formulas to students or telling them how to solve problems. Understanding is important but that doesn't mean we should make kids re-invent math for themselves.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Then I'm not sure you're disagreeing with Matt. He's criticizing education researchers who think drill and directly developing mechanical skills is a bad thing. I can assure you they are real and reasonably common. It's also true that drill isn't everything and conceptual work is important.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

But then you're disagreeing with the handout Matt is criticizing, right? It definitely thinks one column is right and the other is wrong. Like, I agree with you that there's value in both aspects. Whoever wrote that handout doesn't!

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

We shouldn't really expect a reasonable ethics to be consistently and compactly describable. That means any ethical /theory/ will misfire badly on edge cases; but theorists kind of have to dwell on those edge cases. So they all wind up continually saying things wavering between dumb and horrific.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The problem with contempt and derision, of course, is that you can ostracize the views of 5% of the country, and probably even 20%, but not 40% or even 30%. We hope the contempt can keep it to the 5%, but once it's already up to the 30% we have to switch tactics. (The enemy also gets a vote.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Can strongly recommend the Getty-Dubay "Write Now" workbook for anyone who wants to actually do this!

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I think that's exactly the opposite of what we're seeing. The options suck because people vote for dumb performative expressive bullshit, rather than dispassionate policy analysis. We're dealing with a deficit of technocracy, not a surplus!

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Now strategically, maybe to succeed a political party needs to build identity and community. The world isn't always as I wish it were. But "building identity and community" is at best a cost we have to pay to get a better deal at the democracy store. It's not a virtue!

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

That's a fair critique, but it's different from the one I'm responding to, right? And like, I agree with you. Democratic policy positions aren't great and I'd like them to be better (though we probably have major disagreements on what would be "better"). But that's not an issue of "community".

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I feel like half my political advocacy is "please, for the love of god, treat politics like making a purchase at the democracy store and stop trying to get identity or community or belonging out of it."

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I think this thread explains why a lot of us keep talking past each other. "Brand I spend my vote on at the democracy store" is what I want parties to be! A decent chunk of my political views are "stop trying to get identity from your vote and just spend it on the best deal at the democracy store."

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Not necessarily! For all the reasons other people have been stating, there are major forces keeping the maximizing price down--the market has gotten much bigger! But also fixed costs have gone up tremendously for AAA games.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

If you wanna go full econ, the fair price is, like,the profit-maximizing price. I'm genuinely all for that lens, but it's not really relevant to this Discourse. In value for money terms, while I have tremendous nostalgia for the games I played in 1994, games today are at least twice as good.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

But in the other direction games are much bigger now, in basically every dimension. Final Fantasy IV was made by a team of fourteen in a year. The credits to Final Fantasy XVI take thirty minutes to scroll.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

For me it's books. A new paperback book should cost six dollars, maybe seven. (Partly inflation, and partly the death of the mass market paperback format in favor of trade paperbacks. And I assume partly ebooks.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Found myself wanting to say that "consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch" and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

We also had really good results with wall-to-wall Billy bookcases. We left off the backs so that the painted wall came through behind, and got the height-extending tops, and it really does look like we have built-in shelving.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

As far as I know you've only written about it here acoup.blog/2021/05/28/c... and it seems like you agree with him, since this seems like a capsule summary of most of his argument:

I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event. The ‘killer technologies’ that made the conquest of the New World possible were (apart from the ships) old technologies in much of Afroeurasia; a Roman legion or a Han Chinese army of some fifteen centuries earlier would have had many of the same advantages had they been able to surmount the logistical problem of actually getting there.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

I've never been able to figure out what the actual objection to Guns, Germs, and Steel is; every time I look into it, it seems like historians object to the book but accept the central thesis for why Eurasia was dominant over the Americas, and possibly also Africa.

acoup.blog

Collections: Teaching Paradox, Europa Universalis IV, Part IV: Why Europe?

This is the fourth and last part of our series (I, II, III, IV) examining the historical assumptions of Europa Universalis IV, Paradox Interactive’s historical grand strategy computer game se…

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Wasn't there a story back when DOGE was going to be coheaded by Musk and Ramaswamy, that Ramaswamy was going in to all the offices and having deep dives with the people who ran them about what the most important work was, and then (therefore?) he got kicked out?

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Also reminds me of the claim that a Great Book "has no accidents". It's an attitude towards reading that starts from the presumption that the text Is Great and we should fundamentally defer to it. (How do we know it's Great? Because of its Greatness, obviously.) x.com/olivertraldi...

Excerpt from an interview of Mansfield by Tyler Cowen. Highlighted: "There are no accidents in a great book. Everything is as it should be. To understand it, you don't want to go to some second-rate explanation that doesn't take account, or rather departs from, the text."

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

RHG's attitude towards Livy makes me think of a religious attitude towards scripture—sure, it was created in some specific historical circumstances, but the important thing is that it's Divine Revelation/Classic Literature and we should be learning from it rather than evaluating it.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Education involves information, motivation, and certification. Disruptors and reformers mostly focus on the first and third, but the second is the hard part. MOOCs would work in a world where motivation wasn't constraining. LLMs make the problem of motivation harder.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The core problem of MOOCs was (and is, and ever shall be) getting students to actually engage with them seriously. The core problem of LLMs is that they give students a way to avoid engaging in their courses seriously.

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Sam Ottewill-Soulsby @samottewillsoulsby.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Going through an issue of the TLS from last December, I find a philosophy pun courtesy of Nigel Warburton that surely deserves wider currantsy.

Yet, although he imagined the possibility of a serious and good philosophical work told as a series of jokes, Wittgenstein didn’t think it should be a series of pithy sayings. He made this point with an aphorism: "Raisins may be the best part of a cake; but a bag of raisins is not better than a cake.” (We might call this Wittgenstein's “Critique of Pure Raisin”.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

For anyone with this issue, I worked through the Getty-Dubay handwriting book a few summers ago and it made a dramatic improvement in how quickly, clearly, and comfortably I could handwrite.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Someone suggested it wasn't "academic" speak, it was "non-profit" speak, and I think that's correct. There's a general pattern where academic jargon escapes to the wider professional world stripped of context and nuance, and then people say very silly things that /sound/ academic-ish.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman both think we should make income tax rates fairer: Mankiw thinks they should be lower and flatter, and Krugman thinks they should be higher and more steeply progressive.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

"Fairness" is one of those magic words that basically everyone agrees they want, but no one agrees on what it means. It can paper over a lot of disagreement.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

A couple of them seem just obviously correct to me, though I don't think I really qualify as an "expert".

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Compare the riffs when the Big Arch marketing clip went viral, and the number of people who said the McDonald's CEO /should/ be, and look like, a guy who's obsessed with hamburgers.

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Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

His answer: we don't engage with the world as it is. We engage with "pseudo-environments", simplified pictures of reality we construct from the information available to us. We act on those pictures as if they were the real thing.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Not saying you need a full on ABA aria that spends four minutes on three sentences, but even in Wagner and Puccini (or Nixon in China!) you get extended sequences of one or two characters singing about their emotions. And for me that's where the most compelling musical work happens.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

And other modern operas I've been to haven't been that stark, But they lean a lot more heavily on unstructured or semi-structured dialogue. Dialogue is great, and recitatives are useful and functional, but no one walks out of The Magic Flute humming "O zittre nicht".

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

I almost feel like a lot of modern opera has gotten eaten by recitative. Like, I went to The Crucible this past weekend, though sadly I had to leave at intermission. And in the first act there were basically no arias and one only chorus—the rest was all back-and-forth dialogue.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

I make almost all purchases, large or small, on my computer. Even using a laptop feels cramped and uncomfortable.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

The number of students who attend my office hours absolutely cratered a couple years ago. At first I assumed it was just a slow semester but it's been consistent. I assume that instead of asking me questions, they're asking ChatGPT instead. Not yet sure if that's a good thing.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Math is a humanities discipline that studied short persuasive essays within a very restrictive set of genre rules and assumptions. It just has a lot of interconnections with actual sciences. This also sheds some light on the "Elements" example—one of the original works that defines the genre!

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

This is why math is a humanities discipline, not a science. (Obviously math is STEM, by construction.) But in math we're not studying phenomena in-the-world; we're studying proofs, which are texts. The written paper IS the work. (And if you don't have it written you haven't done the work.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Disadvantage to Substack that I hadn't thought about before: can't use a library to check out That One Article you need access to.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-09-29

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Bailey McCann @baileymcc.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

This is 1) incredibly stupid 2) very bad

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Also the snow was removing some lanes and there were a couple of blocks shut off by police. I don't usually drive in the morning but I had to today, and it was like ten minutes out and then an hour back.

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