Ray Kurzweil on the future; Peter Gray really dislikes Common Core; Alice Evans and Oliver Kim on East Asian exceptionalism; Aaron Renn on elite university connections
Kurzweil wrote: "By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect." How many have those aspirations? For many, that freedom would be a disaster. Indeed, we may already be seeing the effects of a widespread ability to get by without the struggle to meet basic needs.
I came here to make the same point. That sentence is simply nonsense. People who want to/have the desire to: learn, create, and connect will go on to do these things but I'm not convinced that most people have such noble goals.
What's bothers me with public school/teacher's union apologists like Grey is that they seem to take as an examined assumption that things like Common Core are ADDING requirements to teaching that were not there before, and so to meet these new requirements other things we like have to be cut back. It seems to me that Common Core is really just a subset of what was done previously anyway in addition to the things we like. The issue is that schools were not even doing the smaller range of things they were supposed to do, and so once they had requirements they cut out all the extra things to attempt to do what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.
In other words, inefficient and incompetent people doing an unexamined job are going to look like they are doing all sorts of stuff. If you then start looking at one portion of what they were supposed to be doing anyway, and they stop doing all the other stuff, that doesn't mean you screwed up by measuring things, it means you screwed up by letting them work without supervision because they were not doing what you believed they were doing.
I'm a bit more cynical; it's not schools have been doing worse, it's that it can't be avoided that there are large numbers of "low-functioning" people. Grandpa may have been functionally illiterate and not very numerate; but society was heavily geared towards having many such people. Now it's not.
I think you central premise there is incorrect; US illiteracy was in single digits by 1910 (https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp) Whether or not that is a great measure, literacy has been pretty common for quite some time. Numeracy has historically been lower, but then again the amount of numeracy most people need is quite basic; many office workers seem to get by with just a bit of algebra at most. I think the standards in schools have been getting lower and lower over the years, and as a result we have more low functioning people than we used to. Not because they are dumb (though there are plenty) but because they are ignorant. They've spent a lot of time in schools that did not teach them literacy or numeracy.
I am going to call nonsense on that claim. There are plenty of decent jobs that require relatively little intellect, and plenty of people with enough intellect to do a lot better work than they are doing.
AI have to be trained and the answers they give are only as good as the training they have received. Let’s imagine we have the newest, most powerful AI ever developed. To test it we ask some representative questions. One question deals with global warming and the AI gives a very politically incorrect answer that global warming isn’t a serious problem and recommends investing in natural gas fired combined cycle power plants. Do you think that answer would ever see the light of day? Instead the developers would retrain the AI with the “correct” literature until it gave the “right” answers. And if the AI says so it must be true.
I think it's likely AI will make a significant difference even if not what he predicts. You are exactly right that one of the obstacles it is unlikely to overcome is human nature.
While I'd love to be an optimist at the level of Kurzweil, it seems impossible to me given inherent human fallibility. I think of a chart with one line tracking technological progress over the last 10,000 years, and another line tracking human progress (moral achievement, capacity lift each other up instead of tearing down, etc). The first line is a hockey stick and the second is flat.
"Within the lifetimes of most people alive today, society will achieve radical material abundance, and medicine will conquer aging itself."
Lol. Optimism is one word for this. I can think of others somewhat less complimentary. But don't get me wrong. I think today is better than the past and tomorrow will almost certainly be better than today. It's just that I don't see getting nearly this far in ~50 years, nevermind how our expectations will grow to soak up "abundance."
"By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect."
Really? Is that the current trend of tech advancement? An easier path to meeting basic needs?
The question: "If you had seeded a country in Africa or the Middle East with a lot of schools, would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?" would be NO. It wouldn't be genetics but "culture". Even with statistical IQ differences between groups we are talking about massively overlapping distribution curves in groups with idiots and geniuses in both. It is about giving the social rewards of all types to the top of the distributions and making sure the cream is allowed to float to the top.
I saw this first hand back in the 1950's when I was part of the "fast car" and very "working class" culture in LA and visited the home of a Japanese friend from school (when we get stuck in all the same classes with his English language issues cutting him out of the advanced science classes in High School). At his house the dinner conversation with his family with 3 brothers was which "major university" will you be attending (no other option was allowed), while the guidance people were recommending "shop" classes for me. Dumb luck had me giving a ride to my friend to UCLA where he was taking the exam to get into the Engineering school and I took the exam out of boredom. I apparently did very well and we both ultimately ended up with Ph.D.'s.
With the outsize influence of the top 0.01% in determining the success all the Woke beliefs about groups of check boxes being so important is nonsense. With massive overlapping distributions of all relevant human properties in all these check boxes from height (for basketball) to IQ and math ability make the check boxes a false classification and useless tool for analysis.
"would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?" would be NO. It wouldn't be genetics but "culture"."
I don't want to minimize the role of culture but you seem to miss two important counter points. Yes they are anecdotal but I'm skeptical we have adequate evidence to dismiss them.
1 One of the most educated and economically successful immigrant groups in the US comes from Nigeria.
2 Your own life story suggests the only way you got to college was via a high IQ and not culture.
If I had to have one recommendation that I would just shove down the public schools throats by fiat, it would be to demand that all elementary schools have a mandatory three hour recess/lunch break every day and homework be abolished.
If I had only one recommendation, it would be to end compulsion. And if I can't get that, dial the age of compulsion back to under 16, which it was when I was a kid, from the current under 18.
If I had only one recommendation, it would be to redirect all the money currently spent on K-12 schools directly to parents in the form of vouchers or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Placing these billions of dollars in the hands of consumers (parents) would stimulate the growth of a robust for-profit education industry. Government-run schools could then be privatized and auctioned off to these for-profit school companies.
No, it wouldn't. Private schools have much more teacher attrition than publics, and even assuming that the ESAs would cover the cost--which they wouldn't--it would do nothing to improve outcomes and likely make them much, much worse.
Very stupid to waste your recommendation on such bullshit.
32 states don't set the age at 18, but at 16 or 17. The other 18 have lots of outs at 16 or even younger. And you'd find nothing in the way of better or worse outcomes based on that age, which in many cases goes back far before "when you were a kid".
Try actually knowing what you're talking about. It would require a lot of effort in your case, though.
The whole paragraph on what he thinks is wrong with schools is just ludicrous--like, literally untrue and demonstrably so. I started to write a comment and decided to turn it into an article.
Thanks. That's very helpful--and encouraging. My father, who was a high school teacher in Carman, Manitoba, where I was in high school, noticed that I kept getting sick and staying out of school in Grade 12. I had turned 16 in November of that last academic year. He pointed out that I didn't have to go to school. That was liberating. I made a deal with the principal that I would go when I wanted to. We had what were called "Departmental Exams," which every 12th grader wrote at the same time for each subject, which were graded anonymously in Winnipeg, and so I worked on doing well on those.
In the "as things used to be" way - imagine if children were once more allowed to walk home for lunch - an incentive for mothers to be home. Similarly, kindergarten should just end at noon, lunch at home.
Just an incentive. Plenty of kids would prefer to remain at school, eat quickly, play on the playground. The children of working mothers could of course stay and eat at school. The kindergarteners of working mothers could stay and eat and then be provided daycare the rest of the day (no further "academics"!) just as they've been used to all their short lives.
The tell will be if this is derided as unfair because everyone was not doing the exact same thing.
Much like this, which Austin ISD explicitly did, on putatively other grounds but essentially the same impulse:
"when someone emphasizes cultural support for education as an explanation for East Asian countries outperforming other Third World countries after World War II, one should wonder whether genetic factors are doing the work. ... If you had seeded a country in Africa or the Middle East with a lot of schools, would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?"
I don't understand the point you're making. It seems to me that cultural support for education, based on Confucian values, is (potentially) a potent explanation for East Asian countries' success. You could hardly transplant these attitudes to Africa or the Middle East merely by starting lots of schools.
An all-knowing God could surely tell us whether genetic differences between racial groups contribute to differences in average IQ, but I don't think he'll tell. We poor mortals seem incapable of addressing the question honestly and rigorously, so I don't see much point in going there.
Being back in K-12 (and higher Ed) environments for a few years now, I see limited evidence for any culture of continuous improvement. There are no processes, aside from patchy professional development meetings, to generate, capture, or promulgate better techniques. I saw this too in US healthcare, "more training" is seen to be the answer to everything, meanwhile core processes stay the same. Other factors (e.g., recruiting challenges, counter-productive training) contribute but continuous improvement is a discipline and one of the very few ways to sustain progress.
Networking at elite schools is overrated. I’ve been eating out on my Columbia Law degree for 25 years, no question, but I’ve never called about a friend from school for help getting a job, nor has anyone (other than the occasional stranger) from school asked for my help. Nor was I able to measurably able to help out the strangers.
There are random networking effects, sure; Thiel and whoever seem to have found one, but that feels more like networking in the sense that George Harrison was networking in the Liverpool music scene.
I can think of a very real networking effect at elite schools: the ivies, including Columbia Law while I was there, has a huge contingent of world aristocracy present: children of tycoons, actual royalty, celebrities. But simply going there doesn’t give you access to them. They largely mingled with themselves and maybe a few proles who were already obvious superstars in some way. And they all did seem to go into business with each other. But that doesn’t impact the rest of us who attended. They aren’t attached to the school, they’re attached to their class.
It seems that Gray is blaming Common Core for all that ills public k-12 education. Here's three problems with his piece.
As best I can tell, CC started in 2010. Teaching to the test was a common problem starting with No Child Left Behind in 2002 and probably before that. CC didn't create that problem and I'm skeptical it made it worse.
Like teach-to-the-test, I'm skeptical CC had much if any impact on other activities. I would bet lunch and recess were reduced to meet instruction time requirements having nothing to do with CC. Likewise, I would bet music and art were reduced to save money. And at least 20 years ago with my kids it was clear teachers preferred grading t/f and multiple choice over writing. It was probably true ~50 years ago when I was in school but as someone who didn't like writing as a kid, I wasn't about to look what I saw as a gift horse in the mouth.
Using the baby and bath water analogy, having some shared standards on what to teach and when seems logical and rational as long as it is a limited part of the school day (which it might not be). These other problems are bathwater.
I don't follow his reasoning that CC is the main cause for the problems he cites. If this were a more formal argument, it would be like:
A, B, C, D, E, and F were but-for causes of Z, where Z is the problem with the children today, as defined by an amalgamation of charts Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Therefore, F, the implementation of Common Core, was the chief cause, and so Common Core is blameworthy. I understand that he places particular stress on the expert papers that he cites, but I have no idea what those papers mean or how reliable the underlying data is.
One could just as easily, perhaps, construct a case for A or C by simply citing more papers that argued A or C. Jonathan Haidt does something rather like that in his book, which blames Z on phones et alia. That's a genre of argument which Scalia characterized in a different context as looking out at a crowd and picking out your friends.
Kurzweil wrote: "By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect." How many have those aspirations? For many, that freedom would be a disaster. Indeed, we may already be seeing the effects of a widespread ability to get by without the struggle to meet basic needs.
I came here to make the same point. That sentence is simply nonsense. People who want to/have the desire to: learn, create, and connect will go on to do these things but I'm not convinced that most people have such noble goals.
AI frees us to make art, but surpasses us as artists...I don't think that's as rosy an outcome as Kurzweil seems to think.
It forces artists to consider if they were into art or more into having a job involving art. In theory the love of art precedes occupational concerns.
What's bothers me with public school/teacher's union apologists like Grey is that they seem to take as an examined assumption that things like Common Core are ADDING requirements to teaching that were not there before, and so to meet these new requirements other things we like have to be cut back. It seems to me that Common Core is really just a subset of what was done previously anyway in addition to the things we like. The issue is that schools were not even doing the smaller range of things they were supposed to do, and so once they had requirements they cut out all the extra things to attempt to do what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.
In other words, inefficient and incompetent people doing an unexamined job are going to look like they are doing all sorts of stuff. If you then start looking at one portion of what they were supposed to be doing anyway, and they stop doing all the other stuff, that doesn't mean you screwed up by measuring things, it means you screwed up by letting them work without supervision because they were not doing what you believed they were doing.
I'm a bit more cynical; it's not schools have been doing worse, it's that it can't be avoided that there are large numbers of "low-functioning" people. Grandpa may have been functionally illiterate and not very numerate; but society was heavily geared towards having many such people. Now it's not.
I think you central premise there is incorrect; US illiteracy was in single digits by 1910 (https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp) Whether or not that is a great measure, literacy has been pretty common for quite some time. Numeracy has historically been lower, but then again the amount of numeracy most people need is quite basic; many office workers seem to get by with just a bit of algebra at most. I think the standards in schools have been getting lower and lower over the years, and as a result we have more low functioning people than we used to. Not because they are dumb (though there are plenty) but because they are ignorant. They've spent a lot of time in schools that did not teach them literacy or numeracy.
Yea. Many people today were simply born too late in the advancement of capitalism's stages to feel economical useful. That's not their fault.
I am going to call nonsense on that claim. There are plenty of decent jobs that require relatively little intellect, and plenty of people with enough intellect to do a lot better work than they are doing.
AI have to be trained and the answers they give are only as good as the training they have received. Let’s imagine we have the newest, most powerful AI ever developed. To test it we ask some representative questions. One question deals with global warming and the AI gives a very politically incorrect answer that global warming isn’t a serious problem and recommends investing in natural gas fired combined cycle power plants. Do you think that answer would ever see the light of day? Instead the developers would retrain the AI with the “correct” literature until it gave the “right” answers. And if the AI says so it must be true.
Yes, inherent in Kurweil's piece is that AI will solve all problems. You've pointed out one of many it will not.
#1: Well, that AI better have a lot of subscriptions for all those paywalled research papers! Damn, none of that stuff is going to come true.
I think it's likely AI will make a significant difference even if not what he predicts. You are exactly right that one of the obstacles it is unlikely to overcome is human nature.
While I'd love to be an optimist at the level of Kurzweil, it seems impossible to me given inherent human fallibility. I think of a chart with one line tracking technological progress over the last 10,000 years, and another line tracking human progress (moral achievement, capacity lift each other up instead of tearing down, etc). The first line is a hockey stick and the second is flat.
The second isn't flat but it might look that way compared to the first.
"Within the lifetimes of most people alive today, society will achieve radical material abundance, and medicine will conquer aging itself."
Lol. Optimism is one word for this. I can think of others somewhat less complimentary. But don't get me wrong. I think today is better than the past and tomorrow will almost certainly be better than today. It's just that I don't see getting nearly this far in ~50 years, nevermind how our expectations will grow to soak up "abundance."
"By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect."
Really? Is that the current trend of tech advancement? An easier path to meeting basic needs?
The question: "If you had seeded a country in Africa or the Middle East with a lot of schools, would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?" would be NO. It wouldn't be genetics but "culture". Even with statistical IQ differences between groups we are talking about massively overlapping distribution curves in groups with idiots and geniuses in both. It is about giving the social rewards of all types to the top of the distributions and making sure the cream is allowed to float to the top.
I saw this first hand back in the 1950's when I was part of the "fast car" and very "working class" culture in LA and visited the home of a Japanese friend from school (when we get stuck in all the same classes with his English language issues cutting him out of the advanced science classes in High School). At his house the dinner conversation with his family with 3 brothers was which "major university" will you be attending (no other option was allowed), while the guidance people were recommending "shop" classes for me. Dumb luck had me giving a ride to my friend to UCLA where he was taking the exam to get into the Engineering school and I took the exam out of boredom. I apparently did very well and we both ultimately ended up with Ph.D.'s.
With the outsize influence of the top 0.01% in determining the success all the Woke beliefs about groups of check boxes being so important is nonsense. With massive overlapping distributions of all relevant human properties in all these check boxes from height (for basketball) to IQ and math ability make the check boxes a false classification and useless tool for analysis.
"would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?" would be NO. It wouldn't be genetics but "culture"."
I don't want to minimize the role of culture but you seem to miss two important counter points. Yes they are anecdotal but I'm skeptical we have adequate evidence to dismiss them.
1 One of the most educated and economically successful immigrant groups in the US comes from Nigeria.
2 Your own life story suggests the only way you got to college was via a high IQ and not culture.
If I had to have one recommendation that I would just shove down the public schools throats by fiat, it would be to demand that all elementary schools have a mandatory three hour recess/lunch break every day and homework be abolished.
If I had only one recommendation, it would be to end compulsion. And if I can't get that, dial the age of compulsion back to under 16, which it was when I was a kid, from the current under 18.
If I had only one recommendation, it would be to redirect all the money currently spent on K-12 schools directly to parents in the form of vouchers or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Placing these billions of dollars in the hands of consumers (parents) would stimulate the growth of a robust for-profit education industry. Government-run schools could then be privatized and auctioned off to these for-profit school companies.
No, it wouldn't. Private schools have much more teacher attrition than publics, and even assuming that the ESAs would cover the cost--which they wouldn't--it would do nothing to improve outcomes and likely make them much, much worse.
Very stupid to waste your recommendation on such bullshit.
32 states don't set the age at 18, but at 16 or 17. The other 18 have lots of outs at 16 or even younger. And you'd find nothing in the way of better or worse outcomes based on that age, which in many cases goes back far before "when you were a kid".
Try actually knowing what you're talking about. It would require a lot of effort in your case, though.
Thanks. What are some of the outs that the 18 states have?
Not sure how much effort it will take you to answer, but apparently, by your own admission, it will take you less effort than it will take me.
Sorry for my crankiness. Really directed at Arnold's absurd paragraph.
GED is the big one at 16, but here's a list.
https://www.justia.com/education/compulsory-education-laws-50-state-survey/
Also, which part of Arnold's paragraph did you find absurd and why?
The whole paragraph on what he thinks is wrong with schools is just ludicrous--like, literally untrue and demonstrably so. I started to write a comment and decided to turn it into an article.
Thanks. That's very helpful--and encouraging. My father, who was a high school teacher in Carman, Manitoba, where I was in high school, noticed that I kept getting sick and staying out of school in Grade 12. I had turned 16 in November of that last academic year. He pointed out that I didn't have to go to school. That was liberating. I made a deal with the principal that I would go when I wanted to. We had what were called "Departmental Exams," which every 12th grader wrote at the same time for each subject, which were graded anonymously in Winnipeg, and so I worked on doing well on those.
In the "as things used to be" way - imagine if children were once more allowed to walk home for lunch - an incentive for mothers to be home. Similarly, kindergarten should just end at noon, lunch at home.
Just an incentive. Plenty of kids would prefer to remain at school, eat quickly, play on the playground. The children of working mothers could of course stay and eat at school. The kindergarteners of working mothers could stay and eat and then be provided daycare the rest of the day (no further "academics"!) just as they've been used to all their short lives.
The tell will be if this is derided as unfair because everyone was not doing the exact same thing.
Much like this, which Austin ISD explicitly did, on putatively other grounds but essentially the same impulse:
https://thelunchtray.com/op-ed-asks-affluent-parents-to-skip-packed-lunches-buy-school-meals-my-thoughts/
"an incentive for mothers to be home. "
Oh, my god, what lunacy.
Probably. But it's so far short of abolishing public school!
"when someone emphasizes cultural support for education as an explanation for East Asian countries outperforming other Third World countries after World War II, one should wonder whether genetic factors are doing the work. ... If you had seeded a country in Africa or the Middle East with a lot of schools, would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?"
I don't understand the point you're making. It seems to me that cultural support for education, based on Confucian values, is (potentially) a potent explanation for East Asian countries' success. You could hardly transplant these attitudes to Africa or the Middle East merely by starting lots of schools.
An all-knowing God could surely tell us whether genetic differences between racial groups contribute to differences in average IQ, but I don't think he'll tell. We poor mortals seem incapable of addressing the question honestly and rigorously, so I don't see much point in going there.
Being back in K-12 (and higher Ed) environments for a few years now, I see limited evidence for any culture of continuous improvement. There are no processes, aside from patchy professional development meetings, to generate, capture, or promulgate better techniques. I saw this too in US healthcare, "more training" is seen to be the answer to everything, meanwhile core processes stay the same. Other factors (e.g., recruiting challenges, counter-productive training) contribute but continuous improvement is a discipline and one of the very few ways to sustain progress.
Networking at elite schools is overrated. I’ve been eating out on my Columbia Law degree for 25 years, no question, but I’ve never called about a friend from school for help getting a job, nor has anyone (other than the occasional stranger) from school asked for my help. Nor was I able to measurably able to help out the strangers.
There are random networking effects, sure; Thiel and whoever seem to have found one, but that feels more like networking in the sense that George Harrison was networking in the Liverpool music scene.
I can think of a very real networking effect at elite schools: the ivies, including Columbia Law while I was there, has a huge contingent of world aristocracy present: children of tycoons, actual royalty, celebrities. But simply going there doesn’t give you access to them. They largely mingled with themselves and maybe a few proles who were already obvious superstars in some way. And they all did seem to go into business with each other. But that doesn’t impact the rest of us who attended. They aren’t attached to the school, they’re attached to their class.
It seems that Gray is blaming Common Core for all that ills public k-12 education. Here's three problems with his piece.
As best I can tell, CC started in 2010. Teaching to the test was a common problem starting with No Child Left Behind in 2002 and probably before that. CC didn't create that problem and I'm skeptical it made it worse.
Like teach-to-the-test, I'm skeptical CC had much if any impact on other activities. I would bet lunch and recess were reduced to meet instruction time requirements having nothing to do with CC. Likewise, I would bet music and art were reduced to save money. And at least 20 years ago with my kids it was clear teachers preferred grading t/f and multiple choice over writing. It was probably true ~50 years ago when I was in school but as someone who didn't like writing as a kid, I wasn't about to look what I saw as a gift horse in the mouth.
Using the baby and bath water analogy, having some shared standards on what to teach and when seems logical and rational as long as it is a limited part of the school day (which it might not be). These other problems are bathwater.
Re: Peter Gray
I don't follow his reasoning that CC is the main cause for the problems he cites. If this were a more formal argument, it would be like:
A, B, C, D, E, and F were but-for causes of Z, where Z is the problem with the children today, as defined by an amalgamation of charts Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Therefore, F, the implementation of Common Core, was the chief cause, and so Common Core is blameworthy. I understand that he places particular stress on the expert papers that he cites, but I have no idea what those papers mean or how reliable the underlying data is.
One could just as easily, perhaps, construct a case for A or C by simply citing more papers that argued A or C. Jonathan Haidt does something rather like that in his book, which blames Z on phones et alia. That's a genre of argument which Scalia characterized in a different context as looking out at a crowd and picking out your friends.