New data suggest that the damage from shutting down schools has been worse than almost anyone expected.

Huh, remember when liberals were in the phase during the pandemic that they swore up and down that no one really needed social contact, that in-person schooling didn’t matter, and that kids just fucking loved being cooped up in their homes for months or years at a time (they had STUDIES! So many STUDIES!)?

I remember. Turns out all of that was absolute clownish hogwash. Well, not “turns out” exactly. Quite a few people — including me — told you how harmful all that was at the time. But the narrative certainly leaned hard to the “lockdown forever” crowd for a while there and now we’re all gonna have to deal with it.

I think for most people telling them to “just work harder” to get better at math is probably fine. I think it’s probably true for ~60% of people. But it definitely was not true for me. For the other 40%, telling them to work harder is like telling a chronically ill person to “just get better.” Doesn’t help, only hurts.

I watched a friend of mine in high school learn math topics in minutes that I struggled for months to learn — and never did master how to do the problems. He spent 5-10 minutes and I put in 100+ hours sometimes, with no results to show.

No one could ever explain to me why I should waste so much time on something I was so obviously ill-suited for while at the same time, the things I was good at were barely taught.

No wave of deaths in the U.S. from Omicron variants so far.

It's been two months since the wave of cases from the Omicron variants began, so there's been ample time. Fingers crossed that death waves are over. pic.twitter.com/H8A2doz46M

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) July 6, 2022

Vaccines and infection-based immunity — and that a lot of the most vulnerable are already dead.

Love is hard to predict.

Using machine learning & tons of psychological variables, this study was unable to predict which relationships will improve (or fall apart) over time. The only factor that mattered was how satisfied the couple is right now, and even that was marginal. pic.twitter.com/oC2Fqns42Z

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) July 6, 2022

Life is too contingent, events too unpredictable, and emotions too responsive to unquantifiable near-ephemera for science to ever have any predictive power here I think.

The libs will tell you “vaccines ain’t workin’.” But they are working mighty fine.

Basic ability in the subject [math] isn’t the product of good genes, but hard work.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Yeah, a lot of people have amped themselves on Twitter (and other places) to believe some really weird shit. I don’t quite understand it, but I guess everything is feeling apocalyptic right now.