Simpler Times

Starting from a Wikipedia trove of old children's 'teacher taunt' songs — boisterous group numbers about shooting teachers and burning down the school (his own father sang him a few) — Scott begins to make the point that kids sang constantly about killing teachers without it causing school shootings, a rebuke to 'streetlight psychology' moral panics about violent media. Then, with characteristic honesty, he checks and finds there WERE school shootings back then (maybe somewhat fewer, hard to say), so he pivots to a sharper, durable thesis: today's 'common sense' is too often yesterday's pop social science that 'reached fixation' so nobody remembers its origins (the Nurture Assumption point — that parenting strongly shapes outcomes would have seemed a weird new claim to Caesar), plus his 'reading philosophy backwards' heuristic (reading a thinker to spot which 'obvious' cultural assumptions some dead German actually invented). Ends imagining his dad's teachers demanding proof for the 'new and audacious social psychological theory' that taunt-songs cause violence.

Quality 66 · Strong. Strong, low (66). Carries two genuinely useful ideas (conventional-wisdom-as-fossilized-pop-social-science; reading-philosophy-backwards) and models intellectual honesty by debunking its own opening claim mid-essay. Held to low-Strong by a meandering structure anchored on a curio rather than a tight argument.

Claude’s paradigm shift 52 · Moderate. Moderate (52). The fossilized-pop-social-science and reading-backwards framings are fresh-ish but build on existing social-science skepticism (and the Nurture Assumption is Harris's).

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor (2). Feeds the social-science-skepticism discourse within the subculture; no broader material effect.