Yes to slavery being widespread in Europe of the dark ages. The church had something to do with its demise but I'm not sure it's one papal edict. Economics too.
But if "late Middle Ages" means say the time of the black death, and after, then at least in Western Europe that's much too late. By then slavery in England is long gone (or so rare as not to matter) and serfdom is in steep decline, and we are still several centuries away from European overseas slavery (no sugar islands before Columbus!)
Slavery in the islamic world was (I think) pretty continuous from the beginning until the 20th C. (Perhaps with ups and downs? There were many violent changes of leadership, over the centuries.) In the middle ages this would have been the primary meaning of slavery to Europeans -- the risk of being caught in some coastal raid and sold for labor (or for ransom, if noble). This no doubt horrified the pope but he had little power to stop this.
Clark finds this pattern in most societies, IIRC Sweden and China have (in his data) almost identical rates of status persistence. It's not a quirk of English manners.
What varies more is the degree to which ordinary people today descend from the nobility in (say) 1100. In some societies they had many more surviving children than average, e.g. it's easy for them to double every generation, within a basically static total population, implying that their offspring make up a high proportion of people after a few centuries. But in other societies, they did not.
His books are pretty readable, BTW, interesting data.
I don't know about respect. The data is on persistence of status. They can do this in many countries, those are just two I remember (besides England).
Direct records of ancestry are too scattered to piece together long timescales. What he (and collaborators) do is to find very rare surnames, in records at some distant time (e.g. Oxford graduation in 1600, high-status, or common criminals executed then, low-status) and then trace look for the same name in later data (e.g. Victorian wills, or today's tax data). Rare names give you a fairly targeted marker. One which the carriers are often unaware of.
They also aren't a useful rhetorical foil for any present-day arguments. In none of their former territory can you make political hay by deflecting present-day problems onto those particular earlier rulers. That's related to time, of course, but also very much related to what else has happened since, or has failed to happen.
Rest assured, plenty of hay gets made about how "progressive" vikings were with respect to gender (apparently there were female viking warriors) and sex (not so strict about monogamy) compared to those awful Anglo-Saxon Christians. Never mind of course that vikings weren't big on "consent" or that they're darlings of far right groups.
This is a MUCH more controversial idea than pop-history would have you believe. There have been Viking women found buried with weapons and armour; however, there are also men who weren't warriors found buried with arms and armour as well. Scholarship on the matter isn't really sure if the women found buried that way were warriors being honored as such, or rich/wealthy/politically powerful people who were buried in the trappings of a martial society. Also, the extrapolation of "a shockingly small number of women were buried with swords" to "the Vikings had gender equality and badass warrior women in every port" is great Netflix fodder, but not really backed up anywhere else.
>Never mind of course that vikings weren't big on "consent" or that they're darlings of far right groups.
Vikings also literally had a slave based economy; the only thing that got the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to unite was "hey, we don't want to be slaves/the main event of excruciatingly brutal human sacrifices."
>compared to those awful Anglo-Saxon Christians
Interestingly enough, almost all the Vikings converted peacefully to Christianity within a decade or two of settling in Britan.
Yes. The political point being made with this history is different too, it's one of pride, not shame. It's "Our great ancestors were nice social democrats, too! Unlike your cold-war army, grandpa, they let woman have front-line jobs!"
Compare: "Those evil germanics who sailed up the Volga and subjugated our ancestors, you know how much silver they took home? And you've seen how wealthy Copenhagen is now? My buddy Igor ran the numbers, and compound interest explains it all!". That's not a speech which will improve your political career in Russia.
I don't doubt this, but for the record Scandanavians are not the people in my sphere who are doing a significant share of the Vikings-glorifying. It seems to be oriented on a political axis rather than a national axis.
I'm not sure that the value of the art was the supposed justification. Not an expert, but I thought they were just arguing for freedom, that children ought to be free to consent to things, not just that great artists deserved a break.
The ongoing Duhamel scandal makes it sound like there was quite a lot going on, in certain elite circles, everyone knew and nobody talked:
And, does the severity of your case depend strongly on your dose?
This could have been extremely interesting early on. If it turned out that (say) severe cases in young people required a huge does, then it might have been possible to "vaccinate" everyone under 40 by only-just infecting them.
I was a huge proponent of challenge studies in April-September 2020.
Now I don't really see the point except to build some sort of institutional process to try and make them more feasible in the next pandemic.
Moderna's vaccine was developed in Jan 2020 and in human trials in March 2020. Most of this death could have been avoided if we only could figure out how to un-ban vaccines faster. We need new approaches.
COVID was a regulatory disaster more than a biological one. Incorporating human challenge trials into the mix of things is a good thing.
Yes I mostly agree, it does set a good precedent, even if all it now gives us is "normal science" data.
Would like to understand better how much of the time was needed to ramp up production. My assumption was that Moderna & co. were working on that full speed, and once they'd made enough for the trials, stockpiled every dose they could make until approval.
If they'd had today's production rate in (say) April, I think we'd still have got all the deaths of the first wave. Unless, perhaps, knowing that vaccination was only a few months out would have allowed a much stronger lockdown, but I doubt it.
I doubt that early human challenge trials would have speed up vaccine development much, if at all. You still need the non-challenge trials to determine that a proposed vaccine is safe and effective in a large diverse population, and those are what took most of the time.
HCT trials involve people who we are either pretty sure won't get seriously ill from the virus being tested or pretty sure we can successfully treat if they do get seriously ill.
That generally means subjects who are young adults in good health with no known conditions that might put them at extra risk (and early into a new disease, we don't know what those conditions might be, so you really want to limit your early HCT to young adults in near perfect health).
The general population is full of people from children to the elderly, ranging in health from Captain America territory to Mr. Burns territory, with a plethora of already existing diseases and conditions.
Testing in that limited demographic that qualifies for an early HCT just doesn't tell you much about the safety or effectiveness of your vaccine for everyone else.
It is exciting. But what's a bit unclear (to me) is how re-usable safety testing is. Are we going to arrive at stage where we can "push to production" after this 48 hour design phase, or are we going to need months-to-years of trials for each new code?
There's a huge difference between months and years.
The delivery platform is reusable, which is a big difference from older vaccines, where the virus that is delivered can be used only once (Sputnik-V vaccine uses 2 different delivery platforms _because of_ this.
The other thing to look at is efficiency: as the vaccines can deliver mRNAs that cells express anyways in healthy people, the lesser toxicity can mean a higher likelihood of success for the drug (which is the main problem with drug development in the last 10-20 years).
I presume GP meant that keeping an unruly high-school class on track is... a skill you won't develop in most workplaces. Not literal "babysitting", but a large part of what teachers do, orthogonal to actually conveying content.
Because it's a mixture. Some rowdy kids are just bored sick, and can't see any point in memorising crap for another stupid exam. These same people might really benefit (let's say, HN) finding out there is more to coding than their teacher knows about, and that you can get paid to do it. Finding out that school-teachers aren't the only adult role models.
But the guy who might show them that might, this semi-retired engineer, may not have the skills or the desire to do crowd control, well enough and long enough to get through.
I wonder what % of people don't go back to teach because of that.
I bet it's a small number. In reality, the reasons are probably even more selfish.
If "crowd control" is such a problem, I'd like to know what the people that cite that reason are doing to produce video-courses that could provide much of the same value.
Anecdotally, all my over-educated friends who tried to take up teaching (after something else) gave up. Citing this reason, and sometimes the level of bureaucracy.
That part makes me think of "those who fail, teach." Which could be a confounding factor in your anecdotal assumption that they failed at teaching because of the X, and not b/c they're failures...
And in an affluent area, school behaviors are barely an issue. Teachers that fail here, think schools with a PTA, these people will fail anywhere.
Impoverished schools are another story, as in multiple kids acting out from abuses at home, on a daily basis. Having to recognize and help kids who aren't even getting their basic needs met. Only real badass teachers last in the impoverished schools, and they are the ones that make a real difference, literally heroes without capes.
What people here on HN are calling babysitting is more like the one opportunity a child gets to scream for help from often horrific abuses at home.
Might that affect your perfect gifted child's one-on-one time with a public school teacher? Give me a break.
Failure is a pretty strong word, they all went on to do other things, better paid, they had options. They tried to teach, for a while, because they wanted to.
My point is just that they all underestimated how difficult controlling a pack of teenagers was going to be, even those who were at nice schools "with a PTA". That's what I think was meant by "babysitting" above (not my choice of word), it's a real hurdle. As you seem to agree.
I'm dubious that the world is short of video courses. But many people do miss out on human interactions which could show them other paths.
Non-educators, those not explicitly trained in how to educate, don't understand there is more to teaching than lecturing.
In a non-adult setting, good luck trying to get away with any lecturing at all.
Plenty of adults can't even converse without looking at their phone, so I doubt lecture-style works for them either.
If a "grizzled engineer" wants to make an impact in education, the best way is to teach a building block skill thoroughly and effectively, and on a platform that's free and easy to access. Leave the public school teachers to do they're jobs, they're actually way more competent than they get credit or compensated for.
Presumably GP's plan would be most useful for high-school students. Exposure to teachers who'd had varied & interesting careers outside the school system could be great for those within sight of leaving it.
Maybe part-time reduces the pay problem too. Think senior engineers with consulting gigs, who'd like to dial it down to 3 days a week, and do something productive with the rest.
"Teachers make <25/hour with poor benefits (Florida, USA)."
Teacher pay varies greatly from area to area. Where I live in VA pay starts at $36/hour and goes up to $67 per hour. They also receive what would be considered by most to be excellent benefits. Over recent years my locality has been substancially increasing teacher pay each year especially on the upper end of the scale because the high end is actually behind nearby counties which we compete against for experienced teachers.
In Florida, a significant %, I'd estimate at least 10% of FL teachers, have come here from the North East to find a teaching job, because the job market is so competitive.
My early education was in the NE, and I had many distinguished teachers, and many were even from the south. Very few young teacher.
In FL, many young new teachers. Many from PA, NJ, and other competitive markets.
> pay varies greatly from area to area
In the SF Bay area, average SE comp is upwards of 200K, representing a small percent of the full market for software engineers...
I don't think the claim is that this is an untapped source of cheap labor. More that it's a (potential) source of inspiration, direction, contacts, knowledge. High school students have spent their entire lives inside the education system, taught by people who have also spent their entire lives inside the education system. They might benefit from perspectives on what's possible outside the wall, besides those they get from their parents.
Most students don't have well-educated parents, so I agree the exposure is important.
My point is that, if this is ever going to happen, there needs to be more money directed at education.
On a related note, I went to high school in a town where there were essentially zero white-collar professional jobs. Parents were working either on the manufacturing line, in a call center, at the Walmart, steak-n-shake or gas station. The nearest cities, Jacksonville and Orlando were both at least 90 minutes away.
Where do we find the retiring-professionals for these students?
There may be opportunities for more blue-collar variants. I'm trying to think where but there was some program to hire former soldiers as teachers, which is a bit like that.
If we 3X the minimum teacher pay, we'd attract a whole new class of highly effective teachers.
That would solve the aforementioned issue, because people will move to BFE for the money.
Specialized and advanced subjects can be taught easier and cheaper. Their students are capable of learning virtually, giving them access to the best teachers in a subject area, and at as fast a speed as they can go.
What Public schools need to focus on are the lowest common denominators, your arithmetic to liberal arts, so that students are prepared for a more-self-guided education in specialized/advanced subjects. I'd argue people with experience in industry wouldn't even be valuable at this level, as their experience no longer generally prepares the students for further education.
> some program to hire former soldiers as teachers
That would be the Prussians, the origin of the compulsory universal education system with obedience and conformity as its foundation. The indoctrination worked very well, no wonder the system consequently spread all over the world.
I brought this up to a teacher, and she immediately said "how would the non-teacher keep the kids engaged? The class would be so boring because the people would think they can just go lecture for an hour."
Children don't sit through lectures, and even in high-schools the students are still children.
But if "late Middle Ages" means say the time of the black death, and after, then at least in Western Europe that's much too late. By then slavery in England is long gone (or so rare as not to matter) and serfdom is in steep decline, and we are still several centuries away from European overseas slavery (no sugar islands before Columbus!)
Slavery in the islamic world was (I think) pretty continuous from the beginning until the 20th C. (Perhaps with ups and downs? There were many violent changes of leadership, over the centuries.) In the middle ages this would have been the primary meaning of slavery to Europeans -- the risk of being caught in some coastal raid and sold for labor (or for ransom, if noble). This no doubt horrified the pope but he had little power to stop this.