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course where the professor went on and on at length about 1980s techniques that nobody use anymore and are vastly superseded by modern yet very accessible techniques.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.)
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?
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.
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 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?
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.