Keeping up with the FITs, 7/15
Freddie deBoer on the Null Hypothesis: Balaji on culture and politics; Bill Honig on ethnic studies; Maxwell Tabarrok on science funding
in education research, if you just keep betting on the null, you’ll never go broke. Put more simply and sadly, nothing in education works.
The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.
you get a totally different society if 99% of people allocate their limited moral memory to principles like “hard work good, meritocracy good, envy bad, charity good” than if 99% of people have internalized nostrums like “socialism good, civility bad, law enforcement bad, looting good.”
I am slowly reading The Networked State. Going into it, my thought is “starting a new state is easy. Coming to an agreed-upon separation from existing states will be the hard part.” We’ll see if he addresses the hard part.
A brewing controversy has erupted over what kind of ethnic studies school districts should adopt. Should it be inclusive or “liberated”?
This debate comes as California school districts are readying to spend $50 million the state just released for their ethnic studies curriculum development and teacher preparation.
My thought is that CRT proponents (the “liberated” camp) are going to have a huge incentive to fight, given the amount of money at stake. Schools have enough difficulty teaching reading and math. At best, “ethnic studies” is a waste of time. At worst, it is dangling money in front of grifters. My prediction is that they will eventually get it, no matter what parents would prefer.
While this government support has significantly increased the number of PhD researchers and the volume of published papers, the outputs of scientific progress that we care about no longer seem to be tracking with these metrics. Half of all scientific papers ever published were published in the last 12 years, but it is clear that much less than half of all scientific progress occurred in that time. The number of published papers, citations, and patents are becoming decoupled from total factor productivity growth, per capita energy use, travel speeds, and construction costs.
This is because government turns scientists into grifters.
even though only one scientist will get the grant, hundreds of scientists are spending resources in competition to get it. So the gains we might be seeing from transferring resources to one researcher are dissipated multiplicatively across all the scientists who spent time and money competing for the grant but didn’t get it. The aggregate time costs to our brightest minds from this application contest system are quantifiably large, possibly entirely offsetting the total scientific value of the research that the funding supports.
Researcher Guided Funding would take the ~$120 billion spent by the federal government on science each year and distribute it equally to the ~250,000 full-time research and teaching faculty in STEM fields at high research activity universities, who already get 90% of this money. This amounts to about $500,000 for each researcher every year.
My concern with his proposed solution is that any system will be gamed. My guess is that within a few years there will be 3 or 4 times as many “researchers” claiming to qualify for funds. Note also that currently the NSF funds research in social science. Under Max’s proposal, social scientists would receive nothing from the government. That isn’t necessarily a bug. It might be a feature.
The most practical solution to your links on education is the Arizona school choice bill that just passed. This should become the core platform of the GOP to implement over the next few years of what looks like a red wave. There will never be a more favorable time for such a impactful practical change. I would devote 110% of all efforts toward this and regard nearly everything else as a distraction.
Freddie doesn't really believe in the Null Hypothesis. He believes two contradictory and irreconcilable things, which the mainstream progressive / woke left notices and is why they generally reject his writings on education. If he were to pull the Charles Murray trick in "Coming Apart" and just consider whites, he could maintain the NH and insist - in line with the overwhelming weight of evidence - that environment and educational interventions seem to make very little difference in terms of one's rank of academic ability relative to the distribution of one's own race, and that above a certain minimum of nutrition, resources, and education, the big driver of outcomes seems to be genetic. In classic Rawls-Lefty style, he could just say, even without oppression, life is just naturally unfair, and so it's more just to intervene to make it more fair for people and to redistribute from those who were born with good luck to those who were born with bad luck, a kind of social insurance plus. "Socialism Within One Ethny."
But then when it comes to explaining the large gap in means between the distributions of different races, he totally forgets all that and switches gears and attributes it 100% to environment, resources, education, culture, oppression, and insert all the usual official mumbo jumbo here. Rejects the Null Hypothesis with p=0.999999. There hasn't been any significant lead pollution for generations now, and we know that by measuring levels in blood, but I'm sure someone will throw in lead, why not?
Well, he can't have it both ways. If the black kid would have had to potential to be at the 50th percentile of the population but is knocked down to the 35th percentile purely due to environmental factors, and that changing those environmental factors the other way would have pushed him back up, then environment is super important and likely the dominant factor, interventions have enormous potential for positive change for anyone being held back including lots of underperforming kids from other races, and what is all the genetics talk nonsense?
More to the point, the "Luck-based Socialism" model might justify redistribution as an ideological or moral matter - akin to transferring money from the able to the disabled - what it *doesn't* justify is the story of affirmative action somehow not being an explicit deviation from competency-based meritrocracy, "This person can perform at just as high a level as anyone else here, and the only reason there are disparities in track records or representation is discrimination, yadda yadda." That is, while it might justify the 'Equity' as a purely pecuniary matter, is does not at all justify the Diversity and Inclusion legs of the woke stool, of being able to make those all-but-in-name racial and sexual quotas and putting thumbs on the scale of selections of personnel to make the numbers come out right.
That is, it doesn't justify what is in fact the greatest quid pro quo that the woke progressive political formula has to offer its clients, which is that we will spin the narrative to justify giving you not just cash, but jobs and status as well, however the actual test scores or fair competition would have turned out.
Well, Freddie can't satisfy everybody. One can satisfy nobody by being right where they are wrong. But one can also satisfy nobody by being wrong where they are right. Which is what he's done.