(2014-04-26) Alexander Stop Confounding Yourself Stop Confounding Yourself

Scott Alexander: Stop Confounding Yourself! Stop Confounding Yourself! Bullies are like sharks: horrible pinnacles of evolution. Animals have been learning to navigate social dominance hierarchies through violence since pecking orders in chickens, on through wolf packs and chimpanzees, and up into humans – and we are very good at it. The bully is the purest manifestation of the primal instinct, which is why he crops up untaught and unbidden in near-identical form in schoolyards from Los Angeles to London to Lanzhou. And like sharks, a good bully should be able to smell blood in the water and know when an opportunity to attack presents itself. (status)

they did that Bristol Social Adjustment Guide. I’m looking at it right now, and it’s asking the students’ teachers to rate items like “hostility towards adults” and “depression”. I don’t believe that teachers filling numbers into hokey little boxes can capture an assessment of a kid’s social skills as well as a bully trying to decide who can safely be picked on can.