Thread

Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?

148 points · 332 comments · obscurette

Ambolia · 1790606557 · focus · HN ↗
That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
1. dash2 · 1790607028 · focus · HN ↗
  Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.
  1. vlyan · 1790608758 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    zug_zug · 1790614723 · focus · HN ↗
    So what?
    Let's take aside the charged component of this and just suppose hypothetically that 100% of the assaulting students belonged to some subgroup. So what?
    They may be 100% black, or 100% male, or something, but it's not like you can reasonably just say "So no males at our school." Regardless of whether you can find a subgroup who this belongs to with a very low specificity, you still need policies that tackle the behavior itself rather than trying to find some really weak predictor.
    criagsbkbk · 1790616090 · focus · HN ↗
    I'll bite. The importance is this: if you do not acknowledge a disproportion of a certain group committing the offenses, then you cannot enforce punishments without them seeming inequitable. If 90% of the suspensions of students come from a certain protected group, if you refuse to believe they are 90% of the offenders, we must roll back the policies because they are clearly bias.
    mahboi · 1790617956 · focus · HN ↗
    Or the simpler way is to not acknowledge what group is committing offenses and not care what group is receiving punishment. People rightfully get suspicious when it's about groups.

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