N.S. Lyons on Strong Gods; Jack Despain Zhou and Lillian Tara on education; David Donaho on frictionless research exchange; Tyler Cowen on AI in education
Really fantastic NS Lyons post this time. Could hardly get a better description of Yascha Mounk's
" passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals" which Lyons claims, and I hope, "seems to be ending."
Lyons gives the steelman ideal: "The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom." If it had worked, it would have been fine. It failed. Because humans are not equal, and cultures are not equal, and the forced toleration of law violation to support DEI is a clear violation of the Rule of Law.
If "liberals" are unwilling to support laws against perjury, bribery, destruction of evidence, and of course border laws, than we don't have Rule of Law, we don't have L Liberalism. We have crony liberalism & crony capitalism.
Trump: not the symptom, nor cause, but the embodiment of the "End of the Era".
Thank God.
I do.
With reasonable fears about the bad stuff that might follow in the Creative part, after quite a bit more Destruction.
"We are entering an era of frictionless research exchange, in which research algorithmically builds on the digital artifacts created by earlier research, and any good ideas that are found get spread rapidly, everywhere…"
I'm skeptical of this claim. It would be an ideal world for scientific advancement, but from what I've seen, scientists and other researchers are very jealous of protecting their data and methods. If this is true, and stays true, they will learn to obscure the key parts of their research, so that others can't appropriate it easily. Part of this, I'm afraid, is to assure that sloppy methods, p-hacking, and outright fraud are hard to detect.
As one minor example, I remember the "Climategate" incident from 2010. In that incident, some researchers refused to release their data, even though the research was done at publicly-funded universities and the data was owned by the government and should have been disclosed under freedom of information requirements. Phil Jones said, in one of the leaked emails, that he would destroy his data rather than release it to opponents. And then his data disappeared, although he denied deliberately destroying it.
Re. the Center for Educational Progress, I understand that their idea of educational progress is oriented primarily toward giving the "best" students more opportunities to excel, rather than to raise up the lowest-performing to meet "standards", or to raise up averages.
This objective could be advanced by pushing for more advanced courses (like AP) or more rigorous curricula (like International Baccalaureate). I don't object to the objective, but I'm not sure whether there's a problem there needing solution. Of course, the publicized efforts to remove advanced courses (like California encouraging elimination of 8th grade algebra) are a step in the wrong direction.
The corresponding risk is enhancing what Freddie deBoer calls "The Cult of Smart" - slotting the best students not only into the most advanced classes, followed by the most competitive colleges, but also the best jobs in the best companies. I don't think there's good evidence that the best students make the best innovators, or the best managers or leaders.
"We've spent over fifty years with a system whose core goal is not to lift students, but to close all gaps between them. Education schools have aligned policy and research towards that end, dismissing, deprioritizing, and attempting to discredit everything else."
The second sentence might indeed be true but whatever is happening in education schools, it simply is not having a large effect in k-12.
The first sentence is not true. Every location is different but I'd argue most students are sorted. Starting in 7th grade, my classes were sorted by ability and past performance. For my kids this started when they first went to public school in second grade. Maybe there is less high school vocational training but it is still quite common. That is sorting. I'll bet big that there are more AP and Baccalaureate classes available now than 50 years ago. I'd make a smaller bet that there are more magnet schools, maybe not all competitive entry but all still sort by willingness to apply. The biggest sort is by zip code. Wealthier school districts and poor districts very strongly sort by aptitude. Is this sorting perfect? No. Personally, I think perfect sorting would be worse than no sorting but that's a whole other can of worms.
You are absolutely right that most every school system has some sorting. Not so much in elementary school (though there are "pull-outs" for kids who have, say, difficulty in reading) but in middle school and beyond. By high school, most classes are offered in average and advanced form, what in my town were optimistically called College and Honors.
This is a pretty blunt sort. The College classes had young people who were well below average in intelligence, and often in motivation and self-control. Honors classes may take up to 40% of the student body, which places a limit on how challenging they can be. I taught mostly Honors Physics, mostly juniors, and I tried not to go on unless most all the students "got it" in a particular unit. That meant I never covered the whole curriculum. There was a wide range in student performance. One class always was "the slowest".
I used to think that a fascinating experiment would be to divide my four Honors classes simply by freshman and sophomore science grades. (Of course, that would be a scheduling nightmare.) How much faster would the "smartest class go? My hypothesis was considerably faster. We would even finish the curriculum.
It is worth noting that what you describe is mostly part of a scheduling/logistical/class size problem. It is not due to an attempt to close gaps between student outcomes.
On the other hand, we were constantly told how important it was to close gaps. Meanwhile, there was a constant push by the ed schools and progressive educational opinion to have no tracking whatsoever, on the ground that it was undemocratic and exclusive, and doing more harm than good--mostly harm to the lower performing students who, it was asserted, would not be left behind with an "inclusive classroom".
Could you please restate the Educational Null Hypothesis to clarify the following. Do you mean that there is no educational intervention that will close the achievement gaps between students? Or do you mean that no there is no educational intervention that will accelerate learning? I think there are educational interventions that inhibit learning, such as mixing students of uneven ability in a class or allowing rowdy students to disrupt the classroom. I do think there are ceilings on some people's ability to learn, but I think we can take action to shorten the time required to get there.
The "strong gods" may be "the objects of men's love and devotion", so the google AI tells me; but I'm not sure they have a prayer against the idol that is "management".
Many of us familiar with one corner or another of government will have our own windows into the changes being wrought in a decapitation fashion - but actually, that's just it. Musk's approach is not cutting off the head of the snake.
In the area I am familiar with, so far, a *great* biologist has been fired (he was in the "probationary" period) while the really useful employees of long standing will very possibly quit and take the bailout (if that's something that Musk can actually authorize).
The deadwood, typically women in management, will probably be untouched.
The people whose best skill is how to say no to doing the work, knowing 10 reasons why something can't happen, circumlocution office-like - will probably be untouched.
With Musk's other commitments, that may be fine with him (not that he will know about it) - but the government has many legitimate functions and it will be a shame, and somewhat ironic, if the least capable, least intelligent people are left standing.
And of course, the judiciary - the source of most of our problems of the last 75 years - remains ... unpunished, uncorrected.
I realize there may have been no other way to do this.
McMurphy vs Ratched is a breathtakingly bad analogy. If anyone is analogous to Ratched it is the sadist and proto-dictator Donald Trump. I am surprised you are not more positively disposed toward enlightenment values. I kind of liked the open society consensus.
The Tyler Cowen post got me thinking. So I started playing around with ChatGPT on my phone giving it hard questions. It knows quite a bit more than me on the topics that I asked it. Then I asked it, “When is AI typically wrong?” It told me. And so Tyler is suggesting for students to learn in what cases does AI go wrong.
This motivates students to know more than AI regarding certain topics. This is a good thing.
This teaches students that some AIs are more reliable than others. This is a good thing, but perhaps isn’t imparting timeless and fundamental knowledge. AIs are just products — making this task resemble Consumer Reports research. I would think very soon here we will see a Consumer Reports for AI, if it doesn’t exist already.
Further, without access to the underlying architecture of the AI, students may not understand why a certain architecture will fail. This would motivate learning more about various AI architectures however. This is a good thing, but how many AI architects do we need? Not that many.
Overall I like Tyler’s suggestion, but I wouldn’t emphasize the differences in the AIs but rather emphasize knowing how to know more than the AI.
This should help us better understand our ignorance of certain topics, which is a very good thing.
Really fantastic NS Lyons post this time. Could hardly get a better description of Yascha Mounk's
" passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals" which Lyons claims, and I hope, "seems to be ending."
Lyons gives the steelman ideal: "The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom." If it had worked, it would have been fine. It failed. Because humans are not equal, and cultures are not equal, and the forced toleration of law violation to support DEI is a clear violation of the Rule of Law.
If "liberals" are unwilling to support laws against perjury, bribery, destruction of evidence, and of course border laws, than we don't have Rule of Law, we don't have L Liberalism. We have crony liberalism & crony capitalism.
Trump: not the symptom, nor cause, but the embodiment of the "End of the Era".
Thank God.
I do.
With reasonable fears about the bad stuff that might follow in the Creative part, after quite a bit more Destruction.
"We are entering an era of frictionless research exchange, in which research algorithmically builds on the digital artifacts created by earlier research, and any good ideas that are found get spread rapidly, everywhere…"
I'm skeptical of this claim. It would be an ideal world for scientific advancement, but from what I've seen, scientists and other researchers are very jealous of protecting their data and methods. If this is true, and stays true, they will learn to obscure the key parts of their research, so that others can't appropriate it easily. Part of this, I'm afraid, is to assure that sloppy methods, p-hacking, and outright fraud are hard to detect.
As one minor example, I remember the "Climategate" incident from 2010. In that incident, some researchers refused to release their data, even though the research was done at publicly-funded universities and the data was owned by the government and should have been disclosed under freedom of information requirements. Phil Jones said, in one of the leaked emails, that he would destroy his data rather than release it to opponents. And then his data disappeared, although he denied deliberately destroying it.
Re. the Center for Educational Progress, I understand that their idea of educational progress is oriented primarily toward giving the "best" students more opportunities to excel, rather than to raise up the lowest-performing to meet "standards", or to raise up averages.
This objective could be advanced by pushing for more advanced courses (like AP) or more rigorous curricula (like International Baccalaureate). I don't object to the objective, but I'm not sure whether there's a problem there needing solution. Of course, the publicized efforts to remove advanced courses (like California encouraging elimination of 8th grade algebra) are a step in the wrong direction.
The corresponding risk is enhancing what Freddie deBoer calls "The Cult of Smart" - slotting the best students not only into the most advanced classes, followed by the most competitive colleges, but also the best jobs in the best companies. I don't think there's good evidence that the best students make the best innovators, or the best managers or leaders.
"We've spent over fifty years with a system whose core goal is not to lift students, but to close all gaps between them. Education schools have aligned policy and research towards that end, dismissing, deprioritizing, and attempting to discredit everything else."
The second sentence might indeed be true but whatever is happening in education schools, it simply is not having a large effect in k-12.
The first sentence is not true. Every location is different but I'd argue most students are sorted. Starting in 7th grade, my classes were sorted by ability and past performance. For my kids this started when they first went to public school in second grade. Maybe there is less high school vocational training but it is still quite common. That is sorting. I'll bet big that there are more AP and Baccalaureate classes available now than 50 years ago. I'd make a smaller bet that there are more magnet schools, maybe not all competitive entry but all still sort by willingness to apply. The biggest sort is by zip code. Wealthier school districts and poor districts very strongly sort by aptitude. Is this sorting perfect? No. Personally, I think perfect sorting would be worse than no sorting but that's a whole other can of worms.
You are absolutely right that most every school system has some sorting. Not so much in elementary school (though there are "pull-outs" for kids who have, say, difficulty in reading) but in middle school and beyond. By high school, most classes are offered in average and advanced form, what in my town were optimistically called College and Honors.
This is a pretty blunt sort. The College classes had young people who were well below average in intelligence, and often in motivation and self-control. Honors classes may take up to 40% of the student body, which places a limit on how challenging they can be. I taught mostly Honors Physics, mostly juniors, and I tried not to go on unless most all the students "got it" in a particular unit. That meant I never covered the whole curriculum. There was a wide range in student performance. One class always was "the slowest".
I used to think that a fascinating experiment would be to divide my four Honors classes simply by freshman and sophomore science grades. (Of course, that would be a scheduling nightmare.) How much faster would the "smartest class go? My hypothesis was considerably faster. We would even finish the curriculum.
Agreed.
It is worth noting that what you describe is mostly part of a scheduling/logistical/class size problem. It is not due to an attempt to close gaps between student outcomes.
On the other hand, we were constantly told how important it was to close gaps. Meanwhile, there was a constant push by the ed schools and progressive educational opinion to have no tracking whatsoever, on the ground that it was undemocratic and exclusive, and doing more harm than good--mostly harm to the lower performing students who, it was asserted, would not be left behind with an "inclusive classroom".
I didn't contest that push. I said the outcome(s) mostly suggest it hasn't had much success.
Could you please restate the Educational Null Hypothesis to clarify the following. Do you mean that there is no educational intervention that will close the achievement gaps between students? Or do you mean that no there is no educational intervention that will accelerate learning? I think there are educational interventions that inhibit learning, such as mixing students of uneven ability in a class or allowing rowdy students to disrupt the classroom. I do think there are ceilings on some people's ability to learn, but I think we can take action to shorten the time required to get there.
"Do you mean that there is no educational intervention that will close the achievement gaps between students?"
It can only be partially closed by holding back higher achievers or offering them significantly less support than lower achievers.
"Or do you mean that no there is no educational intervention that will accelerate learning?"
Learning can almost always be accelerated.
Mixing has both positives and negatives. As the differences increase, the negatives tend to increase too.
Disruptive students are an issue no matter their ability and no matter what "level" they are placed.
The "strong gods" may be "the objects of men's love and devotion", so the google AI tells me; but I'm not sure they have a prayer against the idol that is "management".
Many of us familiar with one corner or another of government will have our own windows into the changes being wrought in a decapitation fashion - but actually, that's just it. Musk's approach is not cutting off the head of the snake.
In the area I am familiar with, so far, a *great* biologist has been fired (he was in the "probationary" period) while the really useful employees of long standing will very possibly quit and take the bailout (if that's something that Musk can actually authorize).
The deadwood, typically women in management, will probably be untouched.
The people whose best skill is how to say no to doing the work, knowing 10 reasons why something can't happen, circumlocution office-like - will probably be untouched.
With Musk's other commitments, that may be fine with him (not that he will know about it) - but the government has many legitimate functions and it will be a shame, and somewhat ironic, if the least capable, least intelligent people are left standing.
And of course, the judiciary - the source of most of our problems of the last 75 years - remains ... unpunished, uncorrected.
I realize there may have been no other way to do this.
McMurphy vs Ratched is a breathtakingly bad analogy. If anyone is analogous to Ratched it is the sadist and proto-dictator Donald Trump. I am surprised you are not more positively disposed toward enlightenment values. I kind of liked the open society consensus.
The Tyler Cowen post got me thinking. So I started playing around with ChatGPT on my phone giving it hard questions. It knows quite a bit more than me on the topics that I asked it. Then I asked it, “When is AI typically wrong?” It told me. And so Tyler is suggesting for students to learn in what cases does AI go wrong.
This motivates students to know more than AI regarding certain topics. This is a good thing.
This teaches students that some AIs are more reliable than others. This is a good thing, but perhaps isn’t imparting timeless and fundamental knowledge. AIs are just products — making this task resemble Consumer Reports research. I would think very soon here we will see a Consumer Reports for AI, if it doesn’t exist already.
Further, without access to the underlying architecture of the AI, students may not understand why a certain architecture will fail. This would motivate learning more about various AI architectures however. This is a good thing, but how many AI architects do we need? Not that many.
Overall I like Tyler’s suggestion, but I wouldn’t emphasize the differences in the AIs but rather emphasize knowing how to know more than the AI.
This should help us better understand our ignorance of certain topics, which is a very good thing.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/ignorance-is-a-virtue-too