Reflections on my first podcast, a "great man theory" for why Scott Aaronson was mobbed while Bryan was not, and mental ordering as an explanation for the unobservable value of education
I think there’s something to that, though I’m not sure it maps onto the Scott/Bryan situation completely. For one thing, Scott isn’t exactly an apostate since he still considers himself a feminist even today.
I would also point to the much harder blowback Bryan (and Robin Hanson) got for individual blog posts that critiqued feminism years before Jordan Peterson arrived on the scene. My sense is that despite being responsible for a much milder version of opposition in those cases, the punishment was a lot worse. Robin Hanson writes,
“Most of my “cancellation” (which has substantially harmed my career) has been due to people who saw themselves as feminists aggressively misinterpreting a few neutral things I said as anti-feminist, and most observers going along with that move.”
Re your point at the end about mental ordering being important for gaining knowledge and intelligence, if we have lots of evidence for very little knowledge gain, why assume we have any mental ordering going on? If there are intangible things happening that lead to tangible benefits downstream we put to be able to see those benefits downstream at some point, even if in an attenuated way.
I see the argument that schools teach kids to love learning, or teach them to learn to learn. Yet if the kids don’t love learning enough to read, or learn details and subjects, what evidence do we have that they are getting any benefit to their ability to learn?
I think the burden of proof is on Bryan to show that education doesn’t produce learning. Universities have existed for hundreds of years with many antecedents and it seems clear people at the time believed that it was useful for that purpose.
Additionally, to your point about observable downstream effects we do see a large earnings premium for educated people. There are alternate explanations for that premium, but actual learning is the simplest and fits the stated motivations of nearly everyone involved to at least some extent.
In my own life I can perceive ways in which I benefited from the structure that formal education imposed upon me. By going through the motions of organizing study materials, writing papers, and yes, preparing and turning in busy work, I believe I cultivated internal capacities that may have remained undiscovered or undisciplined in the absence of that experience.
After reading Bryan's persuasive arguments I can also see times where education was just wasteful signalling and made me miserable while preventing me from doing more useful things. I think modern education has become overly rigid and bureaucratized to the point that there is too much of it. Homework eats into far too much of children's time, especially pre-college and that impedes much of what they can do to pursue their own interests and direct their own learning.
TL;DR: There is some optimal balance between formal and informal learning which we have overshot by "feeding the beast" of the educational establishment to an extreme degree. Some paring back is necessary, at least to avoid crowding out valuable self-directed opportunities for mental ordering, but I still think that a larger percentage of formal education is useful than does Bryan.
And of course a high percentage of students on the current margin of college attendance drop out or end up with a tremendous amount of debt. Many of these would clearly be better off if we subsidized education less.
Sorry if that was excessive lol, I wasn’t trying to push back overly hard or anything, mainly just thought it was a great question and was excited to share some of the things I wrote in my first draft that didn’t make the cut.
For a long time I was a die hard Caplanian on education, but have reconsidered to some extent recently.
I think there is an important difference between maybe "Platonic ideal education" and "education as done now." When we (economists, education researchers) say "education" we mean the latter: sitting in school, rote facts, super easy for smart kids to the point of being difficult for some, pretty miserable for everyone. What is measured is "how long your butt is in the chair.
Now, you sometimes get some "Platonic ideal education" in there, almost by accident, either from a good teacher, or something just clicking. You do learn some skills, with the usual caveats of some people learning more than others, as well as not knowing what people would have picked up otherwise. (There's a joke/not joke in education research that "If we started kids in school at 8 months old, within one generation everyone would swear it was impossible for kids to learn to walk without formal education.")
Caplan I would say does a very good job demonstrating in his book that there is very little actual skill acquisition for the vast majority of students in K-12 and/or college. Of course, that supports my personal empirics teaching college and marveling how little freshmen-seniors know on average, as well as working in industry with new (and not so new) college grads, so it might just be confirmation bias. For the vast majority of people, however, for spending ~20 or so years in school they come out knowing remarkably little.
Now, that said, I absolutely agree with your TL;DR that we could WAY cut back how much formal schooling we do, and WAY improve the outcomes of that schooling. I expect that Caplan would agree, really. I think that Caplan is mostly (90%) arguing against how we actually do education, not education in it's ideal state. I say that having been his student and co-author while he was finishing up the book, so the necessary grain of salt is a little smaller :D
It is worth noting, though, that while a few exceptional individuals (you, apparently) really benefitted from school, you are by far not the norm in the current system. I also might question whether or how much help you really needed. I mean, how many people who don't like learning inherently go by "Infovores" as their nom de plume? :D I, for one, tried to avoid letting my schooling get in the way of my education, but alas I think most students equate schooling and education, and so come out with a bad result. Worse than if they had just avoided everything past basic reading and math (which, depressingly, many American students fail to get by graduation.)
I think you make some good points, certainly we have to evaluate the education system as it is not how we would like it to be!
Where I’m most inclined to compromise with you is that I think my education experience might not generalize to other people. Not so much because I was a super student or anything, just that I think I got very lucky in terms of the schools and teachers that I had. I suspect my individual treatment effect is larger than the true average treatment effect.
As an aside, one thing I wonder about sometimes is what effect Caplan’s book has on people who are actually in school. Seems pretty demotivating to believe that signaling is the main reason you’re doing everything. (Ofc it’s not actually justified to work less hard in school based on Caplan’s book because a signaling wage premium is still a wage premium and even in his model 20% is human capital, but people aren’t fully rational and a lot probably just misunderstand the finer points of the argument to begin with.) It seems that even if Bryan is right at a systemic level, the argument could do damage in its typical application at the individual level.
Anyway, always appreciate your comments. They make me think :)
Well sure, but I think that there are some very good reasons why he didn't publish this particular book until recently. If you consider the blog posts he wrote touching on similar topics way back when and look at the level of blowback he got just for writing those, it's a very different environment from what we're in now. He's being interviewed politely at think tanks.
He was writing other books in the past. He incorporated a men's rights theme into the graphic novel he wrote years ago, and he didn't restrain himself from publishing for fear of blowback, it instead just wasn't at the state he wanted it to be.
If Bryan had written "Don't Be a Feminist" around the time that Aaronson was mobbed or when Noah Smith was trying his hardest to end Robin Hanson's career, do you think he wouldn't have faced similar treatment?
Noah Smith never had any ability to end Robin's career. And Bryan's book still hasn't gone very viral, for better or worse. I think that there has been a change in the salience of feminism... but as Scott Alexander noted, it's because it was displaced by race (and, to a lesser extent, trans issues) among SJWs.
Looks like it was very interesting. Thanks for small link to the transcript?
I think you're right about Jordan Peterson opening the "Overton Window" to help Bryan after Scott A was mobbed -- but also the earlier mobbing of Larry Summers. Yet with each year there are more and better studies showing real differences between men & women. The Bryan as enemy compared to Scott as traitor is also significant. No feminists will feel betrayed by Bryan; some did or thought some would, by Scott.
Mass-ed schooling helps condition workers into being mass-production producers, as well as mass-consumer consumers. Rich business decision makers are looking for bright, boot-licking, mostly-obedient good servants, er, employees. College assignments help weed out those who do less of these.
Mini-rant on education by IQ:
We need to separate education benefits much more by IQ: High IQ (>110), Low (<90) & avg (90-110).
Low IQ folk need to be taught how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic - to handle money. Education expecting little need for abstract thought, and far more direction of "do this; now this; now this". Humans are capable of DOING huge numbers of cool things. Pushing low IQ kids towards abstract thinking & homework rather than making stuff that can be made is socially negative.
There is, finally, a pushback against whole-word learning to read, back to phonics. I think there are better basic ways to teach simple math to simple folks.
The biggest current AND future challenge in OECD civilization is how to get more low IQ workers to get jobs and make the lifestyle choices that allow them to keep the jobs and be productive.
High IQ folk do better with college signaling - but don't need it otherwise. After getting a "good job", the college grad will learn what is needed to do that job and usually nothing from most college courses are a genuine pre-requisite (not true for research).
Avg IQ folk, with avg other talents, mostly shouldn't go to college, and putting them in college prep High School courses is usually sub-optimal. They'd be better off in an apprentice program.
DI is WAY underrated! You're reading my mind, because my next two posts (part 2 on AI mentorship and another on education as a public good will both draw on the direct instruction track record).
Larry Summers is another interesting data point. That was January 2005, which is also quite a bit higher on the graph than present day. I wonder what explains the decline from 2004 to 2011 before it starts rising again.
That said, I’m pretty sure the destigmatization of dissent from Feminism does not extend to the Harvard presidency. I would still be surprised to see someone in Summers position survive those remarks, and it’s possible they would fare even worse than he did back then.
The apostate is sanctioned much more severely than a heretic
I think there’s something to that, though I’m not sure it maps onto the Scott/Bryan situation completely. For one thing, Scott isn’t exactly an apostate since he still considers himself a feminist even today.
I would also point to the much harder blowback Bryan (and Robin Hanson) got for individual blog posts that critiqued feminism years before Jordan Peterson arrived on the scene. My sense is that despite being responsible for a much milder version of opposition in those cases, the punishment was a lot worse. Robin Hanson writes,
“Most of my “cancellation” (which has substantially harmed my career) has been due to people who saw themselves as feminists aggressively misinterpreting a few neutral things I said as anti-feminist, and most observers going along with that move.”
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/09/evaluating-feminism.html
My pithy phrase would be—the first heretics are sanctioned much more severely than the latter ones piling on :)
Re your point at the end about mental ordering being important for gaining knowledge and intelligence, if we have lots of evidence for very little knowledge gain, why assume we have any mental ordering going on? If there are intangible things happening that lead to tangible benefits downstream we put to be able to see those benefits downstream at some point, even if in an attenuated way.
I see the argument that schools teach kids to love learning, or teach them to learn to learn. Yet if the kids don’t love learning enough to read, or learn details and subjects, what evidence do we have that they are getting any benefit to their ability to learn?
I think the burden of proof is on Bryan to show that education doesn’t produce learning. Universities have existed for hundreds of years with many antecedents and it seems clear people at the time believed that it was useful for that purpose.
Additionally, to your point about observable downstream effects we do see a large earnings premium for educated people. There are alternate explanations for that premium, but actual learning is the simplest and fits the stated motivations of nearly everyone involved to at least some extent.
In my own life I can perceive ways in which I benefited from the structure that formal education imposed upon me. By going through the motions of organizing study materials, writing papers, and yes, preparing and turning in busy work, I believe I cultivated internal capacities that may have remained undiscovered or undisciplined in the absence of that experience.
After reading Bryan's persuasive arguments I can also see times where education was just wasteful signalling and made me miserable while preventing me from doing more useful things. I think modern education has become overly rigid and bureaucratized to the point that there is too much of it. Homework eats into far too much of children's time, especially pre-college and that impedes much of what they can do to pursue their own interests and direct their own learning.
TL;DR: There is some optimal balance between formal and informal learning which we have overshot by "feeding the beast" of the educational establishment to an extreme degree. Some paring back is necessary, at least to avoid crowding out valuable self-directed opportunities for mental ordering, but I still think that a larger percentage of formal education is useful than does Bryan.
And of course a high percentage of students on the current margin of college attendance drop out or end up with a tremendous amount of debt. Many of these would clearly be better off if we subsidized education less.
Sorry if that was excessive lol, I wasn’t trying to push back overly hard or anything, mainly just thought it was a great question and was excited to share some of the things I wrote in my first draft that didn’t make the cut.
For a long time I was a die hard Caplanian on education, but have reconsidered to some extent recently.
No worries :)
I think there is an important difference between maybe "Platonic ideal education" and "education as done now." When we (economists, education researchers) say "education" we mean the latter: sitting in school, rote facts, super easy for smart kids to the point of being difficult for some, pretty miserable for everyone. What is measured is "how long your butt is in the chair.
Now, you sometimes get some "Platonic ideal education" in there, almost by accident, either from a good teacher, or something just clicking. You do learn some skills, with the usual caveats of some people learning more than others, as well as not knowing what people would have picked up otherwise. (There's a joke/not joke in education research that "If we started kids in school at 8 months old, within one generation everyone would swear it was impossible for kids to learn to walk without formal education.")
Caplan I would say does a very good job demonstrating in his book that there is very little actual skill acquisition for the vast majority of students in K-12 and/or college. Of course, that supports my personal empirics teaching college and marveling how little freshmen-seniors know on average, as well as working in industry with new (and not so new) college grads, so it might just be confirmation bias. For the vast majority of people, however, for spending ~20 or so years in school they come out knowing remarkably little.
Now, that said, I absolutely agree with your TL;DR that we could WAY cut back how much formal schooling we do, and WAY improve the outcomes of that schooling. I expect that Caplan would agree, really. I think that Caplan is mostly (90%) arguing against how we actually do education, not education in it's ideal state. I say that having been his student and co-author while he was finishing up the book, so the necessary grain of salt is a little smaller :D
It is worth noting, though, that while a few exceptional individuals (you, apparently) really benefitted from school, you are by far not the norm in the current system. I also might question whether or how much help you really needed. I mean, how many people who don't like learning inherently go by "Infovores" as their nom de plume? :D I, for one, tried to avoid letting my schooling get in the way of my education, but alas I think most students equate schooling and education, and so come out with a bad result. Worse than if they had just avoided everything past basic reading and math (which, depressingly, many American students fail to get by graduation.)
I think you make some good points, certainly we have to evaluate the education system as it is not how we would like it to be!
Where I’m most inclined to compromise with you is that I think my education experience might not generalize to other people. Not so much because I was a super student or anything, just that I think I got very lucky in terms of the schools and teachers that I had. I suspect my individual treatment effect is larger than the true average treatment effect.
As an aside, one thing I wonder about sometimes is what effect Caplan’s book has on people who are actually in school. Seems pretty demotivating to believe that signaling is the main reason you’re doing everything. (Ofc it’s not actually justified to work less hard in school based on Caplan’s book because a signaling wage premium is still a wage premium and even in his model 20% is human capital, but people aren’t fully rational and a lot probably just misunderstand the finer points of the argument to begin with.) It seems that even if Bryan is right at a systemic level, the argument could do damage in its typical application at the individual level.
Anyway, always appreciate your comments. They make me think :)
Bryan was endorsing "men's rights" long before Peterson came on the scene.
Well sure, but I think that there are some very good reasons why he didn't publish this particular book until recently. If you consider the blog posts he wrote touching on similar topics way back when and look at the level of blowback he got just for writing those, it's a very different environment from what we're in now. He's being interviewed politely at think tanks.
He was writing other books in the past. He incorporated a men's rights theme into the graphic novel he wrote years ago, and he didn't restrain himself from publishing for fear of blowback, it instead just wasn't at the state he wanted it to be.
If Bryan had written "Don't Be a Feminist" around the time that Aaronson was mobbed or when Noah Smith was trying his hardest to end Robin Hanson's career, do you think he wouldn't have faced similar treatment?
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/fake-asperger-guys.html
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/evaluating-feminismhtml
Noah Smith never had any ability to end Robin's career. And Bryan's book still hasn't gone very viral, for better or worse. I think that there has been a change in the salience of feminism... but as Scott Alexander noted, it's because it was displaced by race (and, to a lesser extent, trans issues) among SJWs.
Looks like it was very interesting. Thanks for small link to the transcript?
I think you're right about Jordan Peterson opening the "Overton Window" to help Bryan after Scott A was mobbed -- but also the earlier mobbing of Larry Summers. Yet with each year there are more and better studies showing real differences between men & women. The Bryan as enemy compared to Scott as traitor is also significant. No feminists will feel betrayed by Bryan; some did or thought some would, by Scott.
Mass-ed schooling helps condition workers into being mass-production producers, as well as mass-consumer consumers. Rich business decision makers are looking for bright, boot-licking, mostly-obedient good servants, er, employees. College assignments help weed out those who do less of these.
Mini-rant on education by IQ:
We need to separate education benefits much more by IQ: High IQ (>110), Low (<90) & avg (90-110).
Low IQ folk need to be taught how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic - to handle money. Education expecting little need for abstract thought, and far more direction of "do this; now this; now this". Humans are capable of DOING huge numbers of cool things. Pushing low IQ kids towards abstract thinking & homework rather than making stuff that can be made is socially negative.
There is, finally, a pushback against whole-word learning to read, back to phonics. I think there are better basic ways to teach simple math to simple folks.
The biggest current AND future challenge in OECD civilization is how to get more low IQ workers to get jobs and make the lifestyle choices that allow them to keep the jobs and be productive.
High IQ folk do better with college signaling - but don't need it otherwise. After getting a "good job", the college grad will learn what is needed to do that job and usually nothing from most college courses are a genuine pre-requisite (not true for research).
Avg IQ folk, with avg other talents, mostly shouldn't go to college, and putting them in college prep High School courses is usually sub-optimal. They'd be better off in an apprentice program.
Direct Instruction, is, AFAIK, the only teaching method that provides guaranteed demonstrable gains among children.
Teachers hate it, and have united around making sure that school districts don't use it.
DI is WAY underrated! You're reading my mind, because my next two posts (part 2 on AI mentorship and another on education as a public good will both draw on the direct instruction track record).
The latter is a rebuttal to this TWS guest piece:
https://sotonye.substack.com/p/most-education-is-wasteful-and-immoral
Tweet version of the DI debate:
https://twitter.com/ageofinfovores/status/1619751561227534336
Larry Summers is another interesting data point. That was January 2005, which is also quite a bit higher on the graph than present day. I wonder what explains the decline from 2004 to 2011 before it starts rising again.
That said, I’m pretty sure the destigmatization of dissent from Feminism does not extend to the Harvard presidency. I would still be surprised to see someone in Summers position survive those remarks, and it’s possible they would fare even worse than he did back then.
Here’s the transcript:
https://sotonye.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-feminist-an-interview-with