There has been a related message that parenting quality is not very important, based on lack of effect on IQ. That argument suffers from a lot of the same flaws.
Jul 9, 2023·edited Jul 9, 2023Liked by Age of Infovores
Thanks for writing this. I'm generally anti-formal-education (and, in general, I think humans suck at teaching themselves and others, modern humans especially so), but your survey and opinions are still informative.
Regarding point #1, what - if any - is the standard of evidence that you think is fair for the pro-status-quo side ? On the one hand, you say that Bryan Caplan's demands of "Beyond Reasonable Doubt" evidence of them is too much. On the other extreme, we have the Chesterton's Fence standard, which say that the reformer have all the burden of proof on their shoulders but the status-quo side has none. Which point in between those do you think the pro-status-quo side has to occupy and defend ?
One other angle I have noticed in formal education but which doesn't seem to be brought up or even noticed by many people in the debate is how utterly redundant and wasteful formal education is. In my K12 education, I have learnt the exact same rehashed (and bad) formulation of some classical euclidean geometry theorems each year for about 3 or 4 years. I have learnt the exact same set of English grammatical rules each year about 7 or 8 years (and of course teaching grammar is the worst way to teach a foreign language). History is the exact same narrative structure from antiquity to early 21st century repeated with slightly more details and spice each year for about 8 or 9 years (and of course, forget about being taught actual history or historical methodology and questions. It's either a bunch of state propaganda stories or a disconnected set of useless facts and dates).
In my University years, I studied Computer Science. Each year has anywhere from 40% to 70% of courses unrelated to actual Computer Science, a useless (and extremly superficial and badly taught) Thermodynamics course, a useless (and extremly superficial and badly taught) Quantum Physics course. Actual CS courses have endless filler. An Image Processing course where the professor went on and on at length about 1980s techniques that nobody use anymore and are vastly superseded by modern yet very accessible techniques. A neural networks course where the professor started talking about neural networks in the last 2 lectures, the first of which was spent explaining what an artificial neuron is and making bad pop-science analogies to human brains that everybody who has remotely read about or used neural networks know to be untrue and a relic of 1950s AI hype. An embedded software course that consisted of an embarrassingly incompetent professor rattling off examples of Petri Nets (without understanding them) and reading facts about Arduino which anyone can get from the documentation. On, and On, and On, it goes.
Even ***if*** formal education is any good, it can be easily and lossless-ly compressed to 33% of its current size.
It seems obvious to me that formal education needs reform. Formal education was concieved in the 19th century by nation states to train kids for factory work, we're living in the 21st century where most people work Bullshit Jobs at corporations. Neither is a good model for the education of self-respecting human intellects. Fields and Disciplines advance at Blitzkrieg pace, someday you will have to study the entirety of your life to make a novel contribution in the final 5 minutes on your deathbed, and the day after that it won't be enough. K12 education, already built on a dysfunctional factory model where kids for the first time in history have no role models but other kids exactly as clueless as they are, is grows more and more irrelevant, more and more regurgitating of the exact same facts and models it teaches since 1950 mixed in with continuously evolving state propaganda. How does anyone see good in this system ?
(The above is largely not dependent on any specific country or education system, I'm not from the USA nor has studied there but I nod my head along whenever someone like Bryan Caplan speaks. Just like the Nation State and the Corporation were first forged in Europe and USA before spreading to the entire world, institutions like K12 education systems also had the same journey. Universities has more variance even on a per-specialization basis, and I might be wrong more often there.)
I think Bryan’s take in the book is pretty reasonable. He says that his evidence should be enough to overcome presumption toward the status quo to the tune of a 20% reduction in education spending and enough to support an 80% cut for those who share his very strong ideological priors.
My point in the piece is that since the book has come out, fans of the book have come to believe that the evidence itself shows objectively that 80% or more of the education system should be cut, which I find plainly indefensible.
Cut some education spending, oppose free college for all, and expand school choice. But let’s not overstate the case.
Jul 7, 2023·edited Jul 7, 2023Liked by Age of Infovores
I think Caplan's signaling model finds a lot of purchase with the blogosphere because most of the people reading this stuff were really good at building their own human capital, and then signaling that! On a personal note, I have never been more swayed by an argument and then realized that I really enjoyed school and generally felt motivated by teachers who read my stuff and commented, and perhaps things weren't so bad.
On some of this stuff, I think there's a more articulate argument hiding in the background. Like, for instance, people cheating, and people dropping out. I agree that, in theory, cheating would be evidence against Bryan's case, since it detracts from the signal. But I think that, in fact, the signaling model and the HC converge on the following points:
1) It is v. difficult to disentangle signaling from human capital.
2) The academic work is, often, not the point. The point is the conformity (said without any ill will, ok maybe a little), scheduling, tediousness, socialization, etc. (1)
3) This means that a lot of metrics regarding education are sort of fluff, sort of not, which is far more easy to get away with than if the metrics were complete fluff.
And it's weird to start with conclusions, and end with premises, but it's the premises that brings us here today:
1) We spend a lot of time and money on education.
Bryan's contribution seems to me:
2) Surely some of that money is poorly spent. Probably lots.
The Onion once ran a parody video with the opening, "A new study shows the US spends 82% of its education budget on whales. Is that enough?" If you've ever been in a terrible college class, you've watched a grown adult detract from the writing abilities of 30-100 people an hour at a time, or watch someone use the classroom as a bully pulpit for some personal crusade that no corporate executive would be allowed to engage in. I think part of the reason Bryan's argument is so popular is because people in this crowd want a higher-quality education, and feel betrayed when they thought they'd be learning instead of sitting still and being punctual. Furthermore, it isn't apparent that spending on quality vs. low-quality is all that different in education. My best teachers and worst teachers weren't paid remarkably differently until college, and even there the quality of my best high school teachers was much higher than my worst college teachers.
I seem to recall Gwern mentioning that colleges will all let you sit in classes without paying, but all require memberships for the gym and won't let you in just because you showed up. Gwern pitched working out as an alternative to education, since it involves socialization, discipline, some level of signalling, etc. (I think rich high schools focus on sports for this reason!) Furthermore, sports metrics are much more evident that education metrics, so there's more honesty throughout, especially in production. For someone like, say Tyler Cowen, who is singlehandedly producing more as an academic than what most people could do in several lifetimes, it is easy to say things like "School is good because you learn, here's the types of jerks in the world, here's some of the projects you can work on, etc.", in other words, "we are getting our money's worth." I don't disagree! But a lot of the frustration comes from how poorly the education system is perceived as functioning, and how much time and money goes into it. Whether or not it functions well for you personally depends on a host on unmeasured variables, and Caplan has written a very persuasive argument for anyone who's ever felt like they aren't being treated like a paying customer.
(1) Like many nerds, I learned several counter-productive lessons from school, like "If you're smart you don't need to write down the homework due tomorrow because you can finish it in class." This didn't carry over into real life, and has only bitten me, I don't know, a billion times?
Thank you for writing this! I find myself nodding in agreement to a lot of it.
A couple specific thoughts…
> I think Caplan's signaling model finds a lot of purchase with the blogosphere because most of the people reading this stuff were really good at building their own human capital, and then signaling that!
Couldn’t agree more. I would also add that emphasizing signaling as the reason for education’s earnings premium can itself be an effective way for someone to signal that they are intrinsically great. If they are successful they get more of the credit for that in signaling world and if they are not they get less of the blame.
> I think that, in fact, the signaling model and the HC converge on… It is v. difficult to disentangle signaling from human capital.
I agree with this too. For a while I debated even writing this piece since so much of it boils down to that one important point. But hopefully the other points help contextualize things.
> The academic work is, often, not the point. The point is the conformity (said without any ill will, ok maybe a little), scheduling, tediousness, socialization, etc.
Cue Robin Hanson “education is not about learning”—largely true, at least in the way people expect.
Though I naturally resist conformity every step of the way, experience has taught me that it is often a virtue. While I am disappointed in people who conform too much, they seldom cause as much unnecessary suffering and trouble for themselves and others as those who conform too little. (though naturally there are big, important exceptions)
> We spend a lot of time and money on education. Bryan's contribution seems to me: Surely some of that money is poorly spent. Probably lots.
True and important. I like the book as a defense against college for all and as an argument for some moderate cuts. What I find less palatable is filtering the entire experience of education through the lens of the snarky slacker whose response to everything is “when am I ever going to use this?”
>I seem to recall Gwern mentioning that colleges will all let you sit in classes without paying, but all require memberships for the gym and won't let you in just because you showed up.
This may in part be a case of positive vs negative externalities. If someone is really excited to learn and shows up to class, they add to the experience of the entire class. If someone shows up at the gym they mainly take up space and wear down the facilities.
(I agree sports are a positive disciplining institution too, especially for boys)
> Caplan has written a very persuasive argument for anyone who's ever felt like they aren't being treated like a paying customer.
I wonder sometimes whether it’s better or worse for educational institutions to be more responsive to the customer. Some of the current problems seem to reflect too much responsiveness to student demands.
But even if that’s the case locally, I see a lot of merit in letting students who want to learn select out of classrooms of people who don’t. More school choice and a diversity of institutional approaches seems like a positive future to work for.
Thoughtful observations. Point #9 seems to me the weakest. I spent way too many years learning French and never became remotely good at speaking it. One term/semester of French culture appreciation would have done more to learn about the culture and appreciate it.
I agree, though it is hard to teach culture directly without provoking an immune response. Study abroad is perhaps underrated… can teach you a lot about foreigners, other Americans, and yourself.
Classmates who spent a summer in France definitely did way better than me! I have a hard time studying things that I have no motivation to study. If I lived in the country and had to speak it, I'm sure I would have done much better. I'm currently learning Spanish from DuoLingo. I have some motivation because they are so many Spanish speakers here in Arizona.
The language-learning argument seems weak to me. Language isn’t well taught, on average, in the US, possibly because it starts too late and competent oral instruction is limited. However, the many hundreds of millions of people around the world who speak reasonably good English primarily learn it in school, and some countries do an excellent job of teaching it. Also, setting the bar at fluency seems contrived. As a lifetime language learner and someone who interacts with a lot of English leaners, I know that you can speak and understand a language pretty well without ever reaching a point where you feel fluent, that is, where speaking it involves little deliberate effort and you aren’t self-conscious of your limitations.
Something I wonder about sometimes is how much of the comparison between US student performance and students in other countries who spend a lot less is confounded by incentives to do well.
If you’re a student in the US, you can often get away with not trying very hard and still end up doing just fine in material terms, relative to most times and places. But in many countries you really have to work diligently to have even a shot at that.
I bet I could learn Chinese in an American school if my life depended on it to that extent.
There has been a related message that parenting quality is not very important, based on lack of effect on IQ. That argument suffers from a lot of the same flaws.
Hahaha, the oblique reference to "the black robes of a false priesthood!"
Thanks for writing this. I'm generally anti-formal-education (and, in general, I think humans suck at teaching themselves and others, modern humans especially so), but your survey and opinions are still informative.
Regarding point #1, what - if any - is the standard of evidence that you think is fair for the pro-status-quo side ? On the one hand, you say that Bryan Caplan's demands of "Beyond Reasonable Doubt" evidence of them is too much. On the other extreme, we have the Chesterton's Fence standard, which say that the reformer have all the burden of proof on their shoulders but the status-quo side has none. Which point in between those do you think the pro-status-quo side has to occupy and defend ?
One other angle I have noticed in formal education but which doesn't seem to be brought up or even noticed by many people in the debate is how utterly redundant and wasteful formal education is. In my K12 education, I have learnt the exact same rehashed (and bad) formulation of some classical euclidean geometry theorems each year for about 3 or 4 years. I have learnt the exact same set of English grammatical rules each year about 7 or 8 years (and of course teaching grammar is the worst way to teach a foreign language). History is the exact same narrative structure from antiquity to early 21st century repeated with slightly more details and spice each year for about 8 or 9 years (and of course, forget about being taught actual history or historical methodology and questions. It's either a bunch of state propaganda stories or a disconnected set of useless facts and dates).
In my University years, I studied Computer Science. Each year has anywhere from 40% to 70% of courses unrelated to actual Computer Science, a useless (and extremly superficial and badly taught) Thermodynamics course, a useless (and extremly superficial and badly taught) Quantum Physics course. Actual CS courses have endless filler. An Image Processing course where the professor went on and on at length about 1980s techniques that nobody use anymore and are vastly superseded by modern yet very accessible techniques. A neural networks course where the professor started talking about neural networks in the last 2 lectures, the first of which was spent explaining what an artificial neuron is and making bad pop-science analogies to human brains that everybody who has remotely read about or used neural networks know to be untrue and a relic of 1950s AI hype. An embedded software course that consisted of an embarrassingly incompetent professor rattling off examples of Petri Nets (without understanding them) and reading facts about Arduino which anyone can get from the documentation. On, and On, and On, it goes.
Even ***if*** formal education is any good, it can be easily and lossless-ly compressed to 33% of its current size.
It seems obvious to me that formal education needs reform. Formal education was concieved in the 19th century by nation states to train kids for factory work, we're living in the 21st century where most people work Bullshit Jobs at corporations. Neither is a good model for the education of self-respecting human intellects. Fields and Disciplines advance at Blitzkrieg pace, someday you will have to study the entirety of your life to make a novel contribution in the final 5 minutes on your deathbed, and the day after that it won't be enough. K12 education, already built on a dysfunctional factory model where kids for the first time in history have no role models but other kids exactly as clueless as they are, is grows more and more irrelevant, more and more regurgitating of the exact same facts and models it teaches since 1950 mixed in with continuously evolving state propaganda. How does anyone see good in this system ?
(The above is largely not dependent on any specific country or education system, I'm not from the USA nor has studied there but I nod my head along whenever someone like Bryan Caplan speaks. Just like the Nation State and the Corporation were first forged in Europe and USA before spreading to the entire world, institutions like K12 education systems also had the same journey. Universities has more variance even on a per-specialization basis, and I might be wrong more often there.)
I think Bryan’s take in the book is pretty reasonable. He says that his evidence should be enough to overcome presumption toward the status quo to the tune of a 20% reduction in education spending and enough to support an 80% cut for those who share his very strong ideological priors.
My point in the piece is that since the book has come out, fans of the book have come to believe that the evidence itself shows objectively that 80% or more of the education system should be cut, which I find plainly indefensible.
Cut some education spending, oppose free college for all, and expand school choice. But let’s not overstate the case.
I think Caplan's signaling model finds a lot of purchase with the blogosphere because most of the people reading this stuff were really good at building their own human capital, and then signaling that! On a personal note, I have never been more swayed by an argument and then realized that I really enjoyed school and generally felt motivated by teachers who read my stuff and commented, and perhaps things weren't so bad.
On some of this stuff, I think there's a more articulate argument hiding in the background. Like, for instance, people cheating, and people dropping out. I agree that, in theory, cheating would be evidence against Bryan's case, since it detracts from the signal. But I think that, in fact, the signaling model and the HC converge on the following points:
1) It is v. difficult to disentangle signaling from human capital.
2) The academic work is, often, not the point. The point is the conformity (said without any ill will, ok maybe a little), scheduling, tediousness, socialization, etc. (1)
3) This means that a lot of metrics regarding education are sort of fluff, sort of not, which is far more easy to get away with than if the metrics were complete fluff.
And it's weird to start with conclusions, and end with premises, but it's the premises that brings us here today:
1) We spend a lot of time and money on education.
Bryan's contribution seems to me:
2) Surely some of that money is poorly spent. Probably lots.
The Onion once ran a parody video with the opening, "A new study shows the US spends 82% of its education budget on whales. Is that enough?" If you've ever been in a terrible college class, you've watched a grown adult detract from the writing abilities of 30-100 people an hour at a time, or watch someone use the classroom as a bully pulpit for some personal crusade that no corporate executive would be allowed to engage in. I think part of the reason Bryan's argument is so popular is because people in this crowd want a higher-quality education, and feel betrayed when they thought they'd be learning instead of sitting still and being punctual. Furthermore, it isn't apparent that spending on quality vs. low-quality is all that different in education. My best teachers and worst teachers weren't paid remarkably differently until college, and even there the quality of my best high school teachers was much higher than my worst college teachers.
I seem to recall Gwern mentioning that colleges will all let you sit in classes without paying, but all require memberships for the gym and won't let you in just because you showed up. Gwern pitched working out as an alternative to education, since it involves socialization, discipline, some level of signalling, etc. (I think rich high schools focus on sports for this reason!) Furthermore, sports metrics are much more evident that education metrics, so there's more honesty throughout, especially in production. For someone like, say Tyler Cowen, who is singlehandedly producing more as an academic than what most people could do in several lifetimes, it is easy to say things like "School is good because you learn, here's the types of jerks in the world, here's some of the projects you can work on, etc.", in other words, "we are getting our money's worth." I don't disagree! But a lot of the frustration comes from how poorly the education system is perceived as functioning, and how much time and money goes into it. Whether or not it functions well for you personally depends on a host on unmeasured variables, and Caplan has written a very persuasive argument for anyone who's ever felt like they aren't being treated like a paying customer.
(1) Like many nerds, I learned several counter-productive lessons from school, like "If you're smart you don't need to write down the homework due tomorrow because you can finish it in class." This didn't carry over into real life, and has only bitten me, I don't know, a billion times?
Thank you for writing this! I find myself nodding in agreement to a lot of it.
A couple specific thoughts…
> I think Caplan's signaling model finds a lot of purchase with the blogosphere because most of the people reading this stuff were really good at building their own human capital, and then signaling that!
Couldn’t agree more. I would also add that emphasizing signaling as the reason for education’s earnings premium can itself be an effective way for someone to signal that they are intrinsically great. If they are successful they get more of the credit for that in signaling world and if they are not they get less of the blame.
> I think that, in fact, the signaling model and the HC converge on… It is v. difficult to disentangle signaling from human capital.
I agree with this too. For a while I debated even writing this piece since so much of it boils down to that one important point. But hopefully the other points help contextualize things.
> The academic work is, often, not the point. The point is the conformity (said without any ill will, ok maybe a little), scheduling, tediousness, socialization, etc.
Cue Robin Hanson “education is not about learning”—largely true, at least in the way people expect.
Though I naturally resist conformity every step of the way, experience has taught me that it is often a virtue. While I am disappointed in people who conform too much, they seldom cause as much unnecessary suffering and trouble for themselves and others as those who conform too little. (though naturally there are big, important exceptions)
> We spend a lot of time and money on education. Bryan's contribution seems to me: Surely some of that money is poorly spent. Probably lots.
True and important. I like the book as a defense against college for all and as an argument for some moderate cuts. What I find less palatable is filtering the entire experience of education through the lens of the snarky slacker whose response to everything is “when am I ever going to use this?”
>I seem to recall Gwern mentioning that colleges will all let you sit in classes without paying, but all require memberships for the gym and won't let you in just because you showed up.
This may in part be a case of positive vs negative externalities. If someone is really excited to learn and shows up to class, they add to the experience of the entire class. If someone shows up at the gym they mainly take up space and wear down the facilities.
(I agree sports are a positive disciplining institution too, especially for boys)
> Caplan has written a very persuasive argument for anyone who's ever felt like they aren't being treated like a paying customer.
I wonder sometimes whether it’s better or worse for educational institutions to be more responsive to the customer. Some of the current problems seem to reflect too much responsiveness to student demands.
But even if that’s the case locally, I see a lot of merit in letting students who want to learn select out of classrooms of people who don’t. More school choice and a diversity of institutional approaches seems like a positive future to work for.
Thoughtful observations. Point #9 seems to me the weakest. I spent way too many years learning French and never became remotely good at speaking it. One term/semester of French culture appreciation would have done more to learn about the culture and appreciate it.
I agree, though it is hard to teach culture directly without provoking an immune response. Study abroad is perhaps underrated… can teach you a lot about foreigners, other Americans, and yourself.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/im-nyu-student-studied-abroad-174958709.html
Classmates who spent a summer in France definitely did way better than me! I have a hard time studying things that I have no motivation to study. If I lived in the country and had to speak it, I'm sure I would have done much better. I'm currently learning Spanish from DuoLingo. I have some motivation because they are so many Spanish speakers here in Arizona.
The language-learning argument seems weak to me. Language isn’t well taught, on average, in the US, possibly because it starts too late and competent oral instruction is limited. However, the many hundreds of millions of people around the world who speak reasonably good English primarily learn it in school, and some countries do an excellent job of teaching it. Also, setting the bar at fluency seems contrived. As a lifetime language learner and someone who interacts with a lot of English leaners, I know that you can speak and understand a language pretty well without ever reaching a point where you feel fluent, that is, where speaking it involves little deliberate effort and you aren’t self-conscious of your limitations.
Something I wonder about sometimes is how much of the comparison between US student performance and students in other countries who spend a lot less is confounded by incentives to do well.
If you’re a student in the US, you can often get away with not trying very hard and still end up doing just fine in material terms, relative to most times and places. But in many countries you really have to work diligently to have even a shot at that.
I bet I could learn Chinese in an American school if my life depended on it to that extent.