Wanting What is Best

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant.

(You may have noticed that Sarah and I swapped last Friday for this Tuesday. This was intentional, be not alarmed.)

The nature of being a musician is that I know a lot of teachers. My students play in school groups, my performing peers are often school teachers, their friends are teachers . . . a good amount of my local social circle is spread from Kindergarten teacher to tenured professor. And my parents were professors, so the overall multi-generational social circle . . . anyway, teachers everywhere.

And the thing is, they all mean well. They have good intentions. They want what’s best for their students. (I know there are ill-intentioned teachers, because humans, but I don’t know them personally. Well, except for two who . . . but that’s a different story for another time, and I’m absolutely sure those predators thought they were in the right all the way to prison.)

Which is the problem. Wanting what is best and actually knowing what is best are two very different things, and having the right to decide for another person is an entirely separate matter altogether.

Our educational system, by its nature, is central planning oriented. One teacher plans the classes for her many students, one principal plans the policy for her teachers, one dean directs her college. So conformity is a valued trait, by the nature of the system. To get employed and stay employed the teachers jump through hoops. (And tenured professors more than others, because PhDs are a dime a dozen and if you don’t conform you don’t get tenure, and you probably won’t land another position, at least not easily. It quickly becomes habitual, and habits stick.) If the person at the top of the hierarchy has decided that recess is good, teachers conform to that. If she’s decided that peanut butter is bad, teachers conform to that.

People who mean well who are selected for conformity. (And of course have a preference for students who match their own characteristics, and encourage students’ characters in that direction.)

That’s the educational establishment in this country.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: if the thing being conformed to is good, then it’s a very good thing indeed. But if the thing being conformed to is bad, then it quickly becomes very bad. Take Zero Tolerance, for an example. Zero Tolerance of bullying is a very good idea on the surface. No one wants bullies tolerated. They should be disciplined until they reform. In practice, though, it’s the victims who get disciplined when they finally retaliate. Why? The simplest explanation is that no one actually notices until the victim reacts. Often, though, there’s good evidence that the teachers did know, and ignored the bullying because the bully was of a group deemed to need extra help and support. Giving extra help and support to kids who need it is itself a good thing. Tolerating bad behavior because the kids need extra help and support is the opposite of good, but if we allow the common prior that people behave badly because of bad circumstances, it follows that the kids will just be good if helped and supported enough, so the victim who retaliates is actually the bad kid because he is in good circumstances and yet acted badly in retaliation. (Rationalizing FTW? Humans.)

And there we see the slow application of pavement of good intentions leading right to hell.

There’s yet another case of a teacher secretly transitioning a kid in the news. I guarantee you that teacher believes that she is doing this thing in the kid’s best interest. The state agrees. The parents don’t. It’s before a judge.

How do we decide what is best? When do we have the right to decide what is best for someone else?

The traditional answer goes something along the lines of conforming to the general society in ways that lead to successful survival is what is best, and that the head of the family/tribe/clan has the right to decide for the people within the group.

The religious answer is something like obey God, even if it leads to failure of personal survival, is what is best, and the head of the family/tribe/clan decides for the group, but the individual within the group is right to rebel if the order is against God’s law.

The modern American answer is actually pretty unclear about what is best, but pretty solid on as you choose for yourself, provided you are in fact an adult.

The whole debate right now is focused on who decides for non-adults, and exactly what is a non-adult. Is a sixteen year old a non-adult unless she wants an abortion? Is a twenty-five year old a non-adult if he’s on his parents’ health insurance? What constitutes mistreatment of a non-adult that terminates parental authority over the non-adult and moves her under government guardianship? Is the government automatically guardian over all non-adults within it’s jurisdiction? Do the parents have to pay if they have no authority over the non-adult? Is everyone actually under government guardianship and has freedom to act only with governmental permission?

This is on the ballot in a number of states this November, in various forms. When you read the propositions-and look up and read the actual text, not just the ballot summary, don’t just think about that particular issue, think about the broader principals of who decides what is best for another person and in what situations.

Among my personal friends are a family with a child with a rare genetic mutation incompatible with life, long-term. They are part of a foundation of families supporting the researchers working towards cures for this class of mutations. Which is to say, one-off genetic engineering on a living person, which cannot be tested for safety with double blind studies . . . who decides on taking the risk of trying the genetic engineering on the child, if the researchers get to the point they think they may succeed?

And then for adults, we’ve recently seen a couple whistle blowers over organ donations intended to be taken from living, responsive, adult humans, who would have been killed by the donation. Who decides what is best?

When your relative is too old to decide for himself anymore, who decides for him? Who decides he is too old? What’s in his best interests?

The perfect person who perfectly knows what is best for everyone else doesn’t exist, and would be overwhelmed with sorting out the entire world population if she did, anyway. Given that, letting the individual figure out what he thinks is best for himself, and letting the closest kin of those who cannot decide for themselves, however we decide who cannot decide for themselves, determine what is best for them, is the route to the best results for the majority, even though there will always be those individuals who make bad choices for themselves and for those they have control over among us.

Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, as someone much wiser than I once put it.

31 thoughts on “Wanting What is Best”

  3. One thing that infuriated me about being a teenager was the way my age was always held against me. If it was something I didn’t want to do, I was “practically a grown-up” and expected to shut up and obey; if it was something I DID want to do, (drink a beer with dinner, see an R-rated movie…horrible, awful things like that) it was “You’re still a child! You can’t do that! You’ll be corrupted!” Yeah, right! Look, people, I was on the Take at age twelve! Any corrupting that could have happened happened before I turned thirteen! But we refuse to differentiate between toddlers, school-age children, and teenagers who in the Good Old Days would have been considered adult for all practical purposes.

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  4. Interesting questions.

    Is a sixteen year old a non-adult unless she wants an abortion? Nope. Conversely, you could ask is a boy a non-adult unless he wants his paramour to have an abortion?

    Is a twenty-five year old a non-adult if he’s on his parents’ health insurance? Nope. Because he’s not fully independent, yet.

    What constitutes mistreatment of a non-adult that terminates parental authority over the non-adult and moves her under government guardianship? Causing harm to the child that does not help them to grow. All children require a certain amount of adversity to struggle against in order to grow and become stronger. Making them feel bad when they misbehave. Giving them an immediate swat on the butt when they act in an unsafe manner. Discipline is often best applied as a lesser, still unpleasant, consequence of poor behavior or choices.

    Is the government automatically guardian over all non-adults within it’s jurisdiction? Nope. Because they can only act with the consent of the governed, and if a sufficiently large group decides to not agree, too bad.

    Do the parents have to pay if they have no authority over the non-adult? No. That’s clearly theft.

    Is everyone actually under government guardianship and has freedom to act only with governmental permission? No. The government doesn’t get to decide in a vacuum whether I live or die; I get a vote, and if they decide die, then I’m voting with the ammo box until I’m dead, or all the ones in the government trying to kill me are dead. I have the right to speak my mind, to demand redress of wrongs committed to me by the government, and to revolt and replace it (if I can) if they fail to do so.

    Who decides on taking the risk of trying the genetic engineering on the child, if the researchers get to the point they think they may succeed? I’d say the parents, unless the child is old enough to understand what death is, and can comprehend the risks when carefully and fully laid out for him or her to understand. Again, the moral choice is going to be whichever one tends toward survival. How old is your kid? How mentally mature your is kid? How soon is certain death? What is the chance of treatment not working? How wrong can the treatment go, and how probable are those bad outcomes? What are the chances of partial success and what do they mean? How long can you expect to live if everything goes right? Same questions I faced a couple years ago when I found I had 98% blockage in my heart arteries.

    Lethal organ donations from living, responsive, adult humans? Not without their free consent. i.e no pressure or coercion. Lord knows Canada’s MAIDs program is a God-less abomination when it comes to organ harvesting.

    Age doesn’t matter if you’re an adult making decisions for yourself. If they own their own home and can afford to continue living there, it is theft to force them to move into an assisted living facility if they don’t want to go. (Offer to get them a Lifeline if you’re that worried about them.) Doesn’t matter if some day you find out they died a week earlier and was only just discovered. That’s part of freedom of choice.

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    1. Re: the risk of trying the genetic engineering, there’s also the fact that risk is relative. If you know what will happen if you do not take the risk, that can influence the decision.

      For example, under most circumstances, jumping out of a third-story window is a Very Bad Idea. You might die, you’re likely to break your legs even if you live… It would be a stupid decision to jump out of the window. Unless the house is on fire and you’re cut off from all other means of escape. When the alternative is between possible death + likely injury, vs certain death if you do nothing, then taking the risk becomes the smart alternative.

      And so if you have a condition that’s likely to kill you within a few years, the risk of trying an experimental treatment might be high, but it’s still likely to be the best choice for you.

      And as you say, the person who should make that choice is the individual themselves, or (if they’re not old enough to understand the concepts involved, of death and of relative risk) the people whose responsibility is caring for that person (usually the parents). We’re in complete agreement there.

      P.S. I know you already understand these concepts, but I like spelling things out; sometimes it can lead to interesting discussion.

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    2. Not to mention that it’s often not clear which way survival lies. Should parents consent, for their three-year-old with sickle cell anemia — who’s already had a stroke — to an operation that kills every fifth child on the operating table?

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  5. Lord knows Canada’s MAIDs program is a God-less abomination when it comes to organ harvesting.

    Oh now there’s a terrible thought. Has Canada expanded its MAID program because China ran out of Uighurs to harvest?

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    1. Or is it the cold calculation that these people can be moved from the expense to the income category simply by applying the MAID program to them? It is both bureaucratic and G-d-less. Efficient as well, if you are the State. (“This is the State above the law, the State that exists for the State alone …” as Kipling put it.)

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      1. Well… I kind of thought that part was a given. The “greater availability of harvested organs” was on top of that.

        When you pay for your own healthcare, you are the customer and there’s incentive for the health-merchants to keep you alive.

        When the government pays for your healthcare, suddenly you’re an expense to be cut.

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  6. I have no idea what is best for my students. Note, I have not yet attended a university Education class, because teaching in a public school was never what I wanted to do or planned to do. What I learned was “here’s how you teach people so they don’t crash the airplane,” and then built from there.

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  7. The pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee of happiness, because face it some people will never be happy.

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  8. Beautiful hummingburst header image!

    Was idly checking on a late acquaintance’s kid the other day. He wound up, oddly, at the same small LibArts school in MI where his dad was on the faculty and where my wife taught Math for over a decade. I knew him as a young teen. He’d been there for a couple years, long after we had come back to CA, and I noticed from the school website he had been granted tenure.

    That was last year. This year, he bailed for a faculty position at UMichigan Ann Arbor.

    Everyone I knew at the school (except for this young-ish man) is retired, if not passed. But I know the culture there. Leaving like that would be like a kick in the teeth.

    But I bet he believes the move is in his best interest, and a move from a minor 1,100 student school to UM would arguably be a good career move for an academic. I wish both him, and the little school, well.

    —

    There does seem to be something of an oversupply of handbaskets these days.

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    1. Thought about ‘young-ish’. Our friends were about 10 years ahead of us in family; we were using their experience as kind of a guide.

      10 years ahead of our son makes their son now mid-50s. Egads!

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  9. https://prestonbyrne.com/2026/09/13/aligners/

    Old Byrny here is a bit too polite and respectful to note that everyone who specifically wants AI /alignment/ is very likely to be from a murderous lunatic cult. For them, AGI and artificial superintelligence have very strong medicine power as totems, and the magical power to exterminate humanity is very related in their eyes.

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    1. So let me get this straight…

      The head of OpenAI has the literal name Altman, i.e. Alt-Man.

      The CEO of Anthropic has the name Amodei, which is Asmodei absent a single letter. And Asmodei is a variant form of Asmodeus.

      WHO’S WRITING THIS PLOT!!??

      Liked by 1 person

      3. Let’s not forget the current crop of villains, both foreign and domestic, who are *straight* out of central casting.

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  10. Here in the lamentable state of Washington, the answer to all those questions as they pertain to people not yet adult, and even many people who are adults, is The Government. They passed a law. I’m surprised that we haven’t seen one of these secret transitioning cases break into the news from WA, but you can be guaranteed that they’re happening.

    Heads. On. Pikes.

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  11. A version of the above mentioned genetic treatment ready for possible use might fall under Trump’s “Right to Try” order, which allows people who have a terminal illness to try cures that haven’t gone through full FDA approval yet.

    It occurred to me earlier today that news of bad guys using Anthropic’s AI to plot attacks arrived just as Anthropic initiated its push to regulate AI.

    Huh. What a coincidence…

    They desperately want to reign in Musk. Musk has had an interest in AI for quite a while now, and was an early investor in OpenAI, back when the stated goal was a non-profit organization (he left and filed a breach of contract lawsuit when they shifted priorities, and leaked e-mails suggest that he has a case). Additionally, if Musk’s space-based data centers plan works (and given his track record, it likely will despite what the nay-sayers claim), then he might very well have the easiest access – via SpaceX and Starship – to the least expensive data centers.

    And Musk’s track record with X suggests that he absolutely will not accept the kind of government control of Grok that the Globalists want to impose on AI.

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    1. I favor the program of “right to try” because it forms things in the correct direction.

      It’s not, “nothing matters, may as well off myself, it’s– “there’s a one in a million, but it might work.”

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      1. Plus if I was going to die anyway, might as well risk the experiment and hope information could be gained to help others.

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          1. Pretty much.

            And then there’s the British NHS, which would tell you that you *must* stay behind in the building and wait until the heat or smoke kills you.

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            1. “Oi! Do you have a window jumping license? Can’t jump out of a burning building without a license. Wouldn’t be fair to the other folks.”

              The British bureaucracy is a particular flavor of nightmarish that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Even the most tinpot socialist in the US can’t match the petty tyranny that seems to happen every day over there. Their busybodies have a ton of institutional/cultural cover that they’d have to scrape and claw for over here.

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          2. Thinking of last week’s nasty kerfluffel regarding Natalie Harpman (?) who went to work for Trump because he instituted right to try and she used it and was cured. Nasty, nasty people then trying to insinuate something other than gratitude between them.

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  12. I get the feeling the current official public education system is staggering, wounded and bleeding, along the cliff edge, blindfolded. So many cracks and chunks falling off, gross failures exposed with just shrugs as a response, and so many power structures trying to hold everything together by force of government and pretending real hard.

    And unlike way back when, home schooling is fundamentally normalized, and for long enough that adults now out in the world leading productive lives were only home schooled until they went to college, talking about it openly as just normal, and raising their kids that way as standard practice.

    I saw another report on the insane remedial education efforts colleges have to go through because the public school systems feeding them don’t actually teach the topics, but the percentage of 4.0 GPA admissions has never been higher.

    And then there’s the LLM AI rollout, which no matter what else can be really good at figuring out and adjusting lesson plans based on performance on tests for a given topic – I was quite impressed with datarepublican’s recent substack article on using an AI to design and manage getting her son’s grammar and math up to par after the public schools left him several grade levels behind. Fascinating application of what LLM AIs are really good at.

    So I have the feeling it will all get massively rejumbled and will not be recognizable in a few years. Sort of a education singularity.

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  13. I looked up the local public swimming pool. The hours it’s open were shown as 11PM to 12AM. Either that pool is open for one hour per day in the middle of the night or something is seriously wrong with the government’s internet services.

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    1. 2300-0000 UTC is not a bad hour for a west coast pool to be open.

      The biggest advantage of going to constant DST is that “meridian” gets a stake driven through its heart and “am”/”pm” can finally die in fire as 24-hour time takes over.

      Then we could finally get rid of time zones. We will have already decided that the position of the sun and the time on the clock are not related. Once you’ve taken that step, time-zones become irrelevant.

      On the other hand, humans are remarkably resistant to change. “OMG! DST in winter makes my kids wait for the bus in the dark!” Uh. Have you considered changing when the school day starts? Without time-zones, they’d have to.

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