Achievement And The Cognitive Time-Horizon

 At EconLog, Bryan Caplan has a great post on "unschooling," and specifically the fact that he thinks "unschooled" children ought to be required by the parent/instructor to do one or two hours of math a day, even though such a requirement violates the principle of "unschooling."

He thinks so because, in his experience, unschooled children are seldom strong in math. Here he is elaborating on the problem:

Won’t kids who would greatly benefit from math choose to learn math given the freedom to do so?  The answer, I fear, is: Rarely.  For two reasons:

First, math is extremely unfun for almost everyone.  Only a handful of nerds sincerely finds the subject engaging.  I’m a big nerd, and I’ve done piles of math, yet I’ve never really liked it.

Second, math is highly cumulative.  Each major stage of math builds on the foundation of the previous stages.  If you reach adulthood and then decide to learn math to pursue a newly-discovered ambition, I wish you good luck, because you’ll need it.

I think I'm less experienced than Caplan is, but for whatever it's worth, my experience has been this: The main difference between kids who become successful later in life and kids who don't is that the successful ones learn how to engage in "pain today" for "gain tomorrow." It's the ability to relate a current very unpleasant task to a handsome reward in a far-distant future. 

The kids I know and knew learned this skill from practicing either sports or music. Once they learned it, though, they were able to apply that skill to things like math, computer languages, foreign languages, and anything else that ended up giving them an advantage later in life. 

So, I like Caplan's keyhole solution here a lot; but I also wonder what the best way to teach this kind of perseverance is. As I said, the only way I really know how to teach this skill to somebody is by introducing them to a sport or musical instrument and helping him or her excel. The process of tirelessly practicing a thankless task like free-throws or etudes, followed by eventual success, imparts upon the child an indelible sense that hard practice over the course of weeks and months produces excellence. Once you've learned that, nothing in life can stop you.

But, what's your opinion? How do you think we can best teach this skill to children?

Excellence

Last night, I rented the movie Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words. It is a well-edited compilation of interviews with Frank Zappa over the course of his career. For the average moviegoer, the film has little to offer, but for the Frank Zappa fan, the film is a must-watch. I will not bother with a formal movie review, however, since Eat That Question mostly consists of footage available on YouTube that has been compiled nicely into a cohesive narrative, providing insight into Zappa's artistic vision. There is nothing new to say about this film footage. If you know about this film, chances are good that you already know whether you plan on seeing it. I'll let my "review" stand at that.

Just because all of this footage had been previously released, however, doesn't mean that I had personally seen it all. One particular moment in the film stood out for me the most. When asked why he thought everyone considered him a hippy rockstar and not a composer, Zappa said something to the effect of, "Probably because they haven't been conditioned for excellence."

This seems like an arrogant thing to say, but Zappa expounded on his point, and the point recurred a few times over the course of the film. He said that the American education system mostly focuses on turning American children into adults who will succeed at getting boring, low-level factory-type jobs and buy cheap merchandise. Elsewhere in the film, Zappa references a rejected article he wrote for Time Magazine. (The article was subsequently printed in Zappa's autobiography, The REAL Frank Zappa Book.) In that article, Zappa makes the claim that Americans have a preference for "cheese," which is Frank's euphemism for cheap, low-grade, low-brow cultural artifacts like cheeseburgers and "chrome dinettes." In the film, he contrasts this American proclivity to the tendency of much older world cultures to take pride in the thousands of years of cultural history they enjoy. He points out how silly it must appear to, say, Europeans, that Americans are so fond of something like a cheeseburger, when in Europe they enjoy recipes that date back literal eons, evolving along cultural lines all the while.

So, Zappa's point was about aesthetics. Zappa believed that people ought to learn how to appreciate art, and history, and music, and pretty much everything else by taking the long view. For Zappa, it made a lot of sense to tout the likes of Beethoven as the greatest composers of music of all time. Their work represents the culmination of hundreds if not thousands of years of musical development. The great composers were worth taking pride in, because they truly represented the evolution of music as art. When we compare that to the latest top 40 thing by... oh, let's just choose a name out of a hat and say Imagine Dragons... there is not much of a comparison to be had.

To be clear, Zappa's point wasn't that it's morally wrong to enjoy Imagine Dragons. His point was that the American culture and education system such as it is leaves people completely unequipped to make informed artistic decisions about what is artistic and what isn't. Instead, the mere suggestion that Beethoven might actually be superior to Imagine Dragons elicits social media vitriol: music is subjective, and what's wrong with liking Imagine Dragons? and I'd much rather listen to pop radio than some dumb orchestra.

Suffice it to say that none of these objections defeat Zappa's point.

On a related note, somebody compiled data from Goodreads.com and provided a list of the most beloved and most hated English language classic novels of all time. To my chagrin albeit not to my surprise, Moby Dick, the single greatest novel of all time, a literary accomplishment so profound that most people will never understand the extent of its genius, ranks as one of the most-hated classics. Why?

Part of it has something to do with what I just said about it: the genius of Moby Dick is so tremendous that I don't think most people can really even understand what Melville accomplished in writing it. Even understanding the profundity of that novel is a pale reflection of the white-hot flame of ingenious creativity that was required to conceive of it; and even conceiving of it is a pale shadow compared to the actual writing of it. Moby Dick tells a thoroughly unique tale with intensely philosophic moral symbolism and a disarmingly charming prose; and that, in and of itself should be enough to make it a great novel. But then Melville found a way to literally fuse the complete works of Shakespeare with the Holy Bible -- literally, I mean he literally wrote his novel by assembling passages from both Shakespeare and the Bible to craft the language of his own story, making symbolic references to each individually, and both simultaneously, all in the service of an entirely separate story he wrote himself. And the unsuspecting reader would be none the wiser, because the novel reads wonderfully and wittily throughout. This novel isn't just Treasure Island for adults; it's a true artistic accomplishment.

But that brings me to the other reason Moby Dick is such a hated novel, and this ties to Frank Zappa's opinions as articulated above. The modern American reader does not have the mental tools required to properly evaluate Moby Dick. It kills me to think that one of America's greatest contributions to mankind's artistic canon is beyond the educational platform of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

This is precisely what Zappa wanted to warn us about: we should be remembering Moby Dick for the ages. Moby Dick is what should be leaving a lasting impression on American culture. Instead, I think more Americans probably recognize the names of politicians, pop stars, and other such flashes in the pan. This is not because Americans are too stupid to understand greatness when they see it. Rather, it's because our culture, our media, and our education system have all failed to provide us with the tools required to evaluate culture and art, and Americans left to their own devices are disinclined to pick up the slack.

By coincidence, I happened to see a video on Facebook yesterday of someone cooking boiled prawns in the Southern style. The recipe went something like this:

• Put a bunch of water in a giant pot and bring it to boil
• Add a large concoction of spices, primarily salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper
• Boil corn on the cob and potatoes in the spice/water mixture
• Remove the corn and potatoes, then add raw crawfish, prawns, shrimp, whatever, and boil until cooked
• Remove some of the shrimp and put in a mixing bowl with some of the corn and some of the potatoes
• Pour a half cup of butter over everything
• Squeeze some lemon juice over everything
• Add a bunch of lemon pepper, pepper, cayenne pepper, "cajun seasoning," smoked paprika, and a bunch of other mixed spices that are all various kinds of salt, pepper, and chili powder
• Stir
• Dump on a plate

Here's a shorter version of this recipe: Boil three different ingredients, then cover them in butter, salt, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper. This isn't a recipe for crawfish, it's a recipe for butter and cayenne pepper.

Amazingly, the broth that was created by boiling seafood in water for a couple of minutes -- while not as flavorful as it could have been, had someone with a sense of taste undertaken to make seafood broth -- was probably the most flavorful part of the entire recipe. What did the cooks do with the broth? Nothing. It was a wasteful byproduct of boiled potatoes and shrimp covered in butter.

As I watched this video, I heard in my head the voice of an old French colleague of mine, who once complained to me about how disgusting American food looked when they served it. He thought it was revolting to see big, messy globs of food heaped onto plates with no sense of care. He was right. It's hard to find a restaurant in America that doesn't serve big, salty globs of stuff. I ran past Cracker Barrel this weekend, and it was packed; I went to a nice Syrian restaurant, and it was not packed.

Why do Americans prefer boiled Southern potatoes to braised Syrian lamb? Why do they prefer Harry Potter to Moby Dick? Why do they prefer Imagine Dragons to Beethoven?

Because Frank Zappa was right: Americans lack the tools to evaluate culture properly, so we queso dip while other cultures get remoulade. It's baffling. Don't we want more for ourselves?

The Incrementalist's Mannifesto

Last night, I bought a book that I hope to review on this blog sometime soon. It's called Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code, and its author is Zed A. Shaw.

I didn't go into the bookstore looking for a book on Python. I went because we found a bunch of gift cards lying around that we wanted to use up before they expired. When I got to the bookstore, I decided that what I wanted was a book that taught me some kind of practical skill. I seldom have time to read these days, and if I'm going to read anything at all, I'd like it to be something useful, rather than just some excuse to pass the time. (I have many other, more interesting ways to pass my time than reading.) Maybe I could learn how to draw, I thought to myself, as I perused the arts section. Maybe I could find a book on classical or flamenco guitar technique, I thought to myself, as I perused the music section. Maybe I could find a cookbook that could teach me to expand my cooking repertoire, I thought, as I perused the food section...

I found no such books in any section, because all of the books that potentially could teach me such things are written all wrong. I don't want to sit and read for two hours, taking notes, studying supplemental information, and committing concepts to memory. If I were going to do all that, I'd just enroll in a class. I don't have time for all of that. What I need is a way to learn a new skill through short, concentrated, daily practice. That's how we learn musical instruments. That's how we learn languages. That's how we train our bodies. New skills should work the same way.

So, I was slightly encouraged when I arrived at the Technology section and found a variety of programming books in which coding is taught through the use of short projects and case studies. That seemed like something I could work with. Python is also heavily utilized in my career industry, so this wouldn't merely be a practical skill, but also a professional one. I was narrowing down my search.

What sold me on Learn Python the Hard Way was looking at the Table of Contents: The book is organized into a series of coding exercises. I browsed the book's Introduction, and was pleased to discover that the book was written using the Direction Instruction teaching method. Direct Instruction is the method we used to teach our daughter how to read, and it's the preferred teaching method in all the best schools. The reason is because it really works. It breaks a subject down into small sequential lessons in which each lesson builds incrementally upon the one preceding it. By the end of a full set of lessons, students tend to absorb material better and retain it for longer than any other teaching method. Direct Instruction can be a little boring, and the first lessons are often the most difficult -- hence the name "...the Hard Way." But if one persists in this kind of instruction, one stands to gain more than any other competing instructional technique.

So here we have small, incremental changes that add up to major successes in the long run. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because I've blogged about it before. In fact, I write about it all the time. The other day, I wrote about how I was using this approach to modify my current running regimen. More to the point, I wrote a blog post six years ago entitled "Incremental Fitness," that quickly laid out the general idea. The truth is, over the years, I've discovered that the absolute best way to improve your fitness is to stick to a fundamentally sound routine while making small changes to it week-by-week or month-by-month. This ensures that the body has enough time to adapt to new exercises and improve upon them, without ever gaining so much efficiency that fitness improvement is sacrificed to mastery of technique.

Then there's music. I've been keen to improve my guitar technique. I'm pretty fast, but I'm not the kind of player I'd like to be. I'm not the kind of player who can take an interesting passage or lick and play it comfortably with tone and feeling as soon as I think it up. I stumble through a lot of what I want to play. I play well enough to impress laypeople, but not enough to impress fellow players. I want to change that. To that end, I picked up a book recommended by Dweezil Zappa (I think), called Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson. Again, the idea here is very simple: One lick per day, every day, for 365 consecutive days. The licks increase in difficulty week by week until, by the end of a year's time, one will have hopefully improved his playing dramatically. Best of all, the time commitment to these practice sessions is minimal. I can work my way through each lick a number of times and still have a little time left over to practice or write my own material. All the while, I'm becoming a better player, day by day.

I've applied the incremental approach to personal finance, stowing away daily, weekly, and monthly amounts of money, based on certain criteria, and funnelling that money into a diversified set of savings and investment instruments. I also stopped buying things that I wanted outright, and instead created a dedicated account for my own personal entertainment expenses. This account grows by a miniscule amount, but it grows every day, and within just a few short weeks it was easy to learn the fundamental lesson here: It doesn't take very much money to add up quickly if you save it consistently.

You don't have to clean every room in your house on "chore day." All you really need to do is commit to spending just five minutes cleaning the house each day. That will add up, and if it doesn't solve your clutter problem, add a sixth minute. Big deal. I don't know what the magic number is for you; maybe it's seven, eight, ten, or fifteen minutes. Whatever it is, it's a small and doable number for you to use to incrementally clean your home, rather than relying on a large and unpleasant house-cleaning project.

Again and again, the lesson presents itself in every conceivable context. If you want your life to get a lot better, don't try to work through a major catharsis. Forget about "new year, new you" and all such nonsense. What works better than anything is to simply identify one small thing that can be slightly improved, make a tiny (but permanent) change to that one thing, and then continue on about your day. Changes like this, made consistently over time, will eventually result in your whole life being better.

I call this approach Incrementalism. It's not a revolutionary idea, and I'm not the first person to have thought of it. But it does have the power to revolutionize your life, and if reading about it here gives you an idea to improve your situation in some small way, that's a good thing. 

Take The Time To Notice Your Loved Ones' Accomplishments

An ex-colleague of mine once told me that, when he had his first child, he created a spreadsheet that charted his son's first words. He listed each new word his young son learned, and the date on which it was observed. Then, after some time, he created a graph with time on the x-axis and the count of known words on the y-axis. He said it was interesting to see the line. It was roughly "exponential" in shape.

(I guess I should say that the line was convex and increasing. I have no idea whether it truly resembled an exponential function, and likely neither did my coworker. Hurray for pedantry.)

When you learn Bangla, it can be hard to learn all the different written verb conjugations that exist, and then to learn all the different spoken verb conjugations. Written and spoken conjugations in Bangla all line up one-to-one, but they're different. Khaisi is a different word than kheyechhi, even though they mean the same thing. One you'll only ever experience in written form, and the other you'll only ever experience in spoken form. Written and spoken conjugations each have their own rules, but luckily they both do have rules, and the rules can be learned and applied. The hard part is figuring out what the rules are. Once you know the rules, though, it's no more difficult to conjugate khawa than it is to conjugate kora or any other verb.

It took me about six months of daily practice to get good enough at playing chords on a guitar that I could learn and strum any old pop song I wanted to. That first six months was excruciating. My fingers hurt, and it wasn't any fun trying to sing and play a song because there was a large gap between the strumming of each new chord, as my fingers fumbled for the correct position. That, too, if I didn't have to look up how to play the chord in a book or chart! Memorizing a chordal lexicon and then training your hands to play each chord via muscle memory fast enough to be able to play a song on-tempo is a difficult and slow-going process on the guitar. But it's about six months of work. After that, the number of songs a person can learn increases at an increasing rate.

So, I think it's safe to say that the concepts described above generalize. The hardest part of learning anything is learning the fundamentals. Once you know them, applying them is a relatively straight-forward process. It takes more time to learn and understand the fundamentals than it does to apply the fundamentals to new concepts, so our rate of learning will tend to increase over time. When we know nothing, the learning is slow; when we know a little more, the learning comes much easier.

Of course, learning to communicate, learning to speak a new language, and learning to play a new instrument are activities that all involve much more than the fundamentals. There are subtleties and implications. There are inferences that must be made. There are greater levels of accomplishment to be had. Even though we learn at an increasing rate as time goes on, there are perhaps an infinite number of concepts leading up to mastery, if mastery is even possible. And thus, after a time, our additional accomplishments become less noticeable to outsiders even if we're learning more now than ever before.

This morning, my daughter correctly guessed how to spell the word "habitat." She's four years old, so this is somewhat impressive. She can read, and that was impressive when it finally happened. She knows some good words, words beyond what the average four-year-old knows, among which I count the word "habitat;" and her having a good vocabulary is impressive to me. Still, it doesn't elicit the same kind of emotional reaction in me the way it did when I heard her say "Dada" for the first time. That's not because it isn't equally as impressive, it's just because hearing a child's first word is a leap into interpersonal communication, whereas hearing a young child spell the word "habitat" is a fully anticipated outcome of her having been taught the phonic principles of reading.

Ironically, her spelling "habitat" is probably more impressive on objective terms, even though it didn't rock my world quite the same way. She spoke her first word at about an "age-appropriate" time. It was a developmental milestone that she crossed at roughly the time the average parent might expect. By contrast, she learned to read earlier than average, and I don't know any other four-year-old who knows the word "habitat," much less knows how to read it or spell it.

So, in fact, I am more impressed that she did this today, but it requires some introspection on my part to fully appreciate it. That got me thinking: How many other things will she learn today that would impress me this much, if I but merely took the time to think about it for a second?

I'm not writing this to brag to the world about cool stuff my daughter did. The lesson to be learned here is that I think we should occasionally take the time to appreciate the remarkable things our friends and loved ones do. We don't always notice what's going on. We don't always take the time to consider how impressive it is that they've managed to accomplish what they have. We're naturally impressed when people learn a new set of fundamentals, but after that, we stop paying attention. It becomes harder and harder to differentiate between a person's being able to play The Entertainer and The Moonlight Sonata, except to people familiar with piano-playing. But we don't have to be familiar with piano playing if we merely take the time to follow along with our loved ones as they work through their own sets of accomplishments.

So, the bottom line here is to take that time. Recognize what your loved ones have done. They'll amaze you, if you're paying attention!

Institutions Of Higher Social Status

By now, you must be aware of this week's "scandal," which is that B-tier celebrities and other folks committed what the police are calling "mail fraud." In this case, the "fraud" consists of pretending that their kids were athletes or faking their kids' SAT scores, plus paying a few hundred-thousand dollars, to gain admittance to universities like Stanford and USC.

Well, I'm not a legal expert, so I can't comment on the integrity of the legal case against them. It does strike me as being a little odd that faking your SAT score counts as "mail fraud," instead of just "application denied." But melodrama is sign of the times, and calling this turn of events "mail fraud" helps insulate the reputation of the universities involved. After all, you can't blame the universities for running a payola college-entrance scheme if they were poor, pitiful victims of fraud!

And there is plenty more cynicism to go around. Some are calling it "a victory for the signaling model of education," which states that education is itself meaningless beyond the system's ability to give you a certificate that says, "let the bearer of this bond be paid $40,000 per year or more." Others are saying that colleges brought this scandal upon themselves by submitting to Affirmative Action; after all, a policy that admits unqualified applicants for demography reasons is no better than a policy that admits unqualified applicants for financial gain, or so their argument goes.

For my part, the question is much different. All of the above commentary is based on the assumption that universities ought to be high-status institutions. Even though the majority of college educations are financed by debt, even though we all know that the average holder of an English Literature degree is no more intelligent than the average high-school-educated network administrator, even though anyone can learn any of this material for free on YouTube, we still cling to the notion that universities are super-special places where only the best people in society go.

That assumption belongs to one of the two competing ideas of what education should be. If we assume that universities are "institutions of higher status," then the university model as it currently exists makes perfect sense. Of course you should fund your education with debt; this is your ticket to the high life! Of course universities should be extremely choosey about who gains admittance; if they left everyone in, then we'd never be able to tell which ones of us really deserve higher social status! Universities are places for the Beautiful People to go, so that they can learn how to Be Beautiful. We can't question this assumption without rupturing the whole system.

But there is a competing viewpoint, one that I first encountered some fifteen years ago. I, too, resisted this viewpoint when I first heard of it, but eventually I got over my resistance and warmed to it. Here's the pitch: Universities should admit everyone. By "everyone" I mean 100% of applicants who can pay their tuition. College, you see, ought to be a place where you purchase lectures and graded exams, and ultimately diplomas. If you can afford the price, who cares how many times you fail a class? Who cares what your high school grades were? Who cares what your SAT score was? If you can afford to buy a seat in the classroom, does any of that other stuff really matter? Of course not, not if college is just a place where you can go to buy lectures, grades, and diplomas.

There are usually two objections to this competing idea of college. The first is raised by proponents of free college, who warn that by making college a matter of money, we'll create a two-tiered society of people who can afford to buy their way into college, and those who can't. Well, gee, take a look at the news headlines this morning. What do you think you see?

The second objection is the one I raised when I first heard the idea: If colleges let everyone in, then they'd run out of space and resources. The answer here, of course, is to just use the tuition money to build more space. So long as tuition is covering the cost of doing business, there is no problem. Let everyone in.

The unstated assumption behind both objections, however, is the tacit plea that college "mean something," that it retain its protected position as an "institution of higher social status." We can't leave it up to crass things like the ability to pay. We have to keep it exclusive; after all, ever everyone could get an Economics degree, then I wouldn't be any better than anyone else!

And isn't that what we really want?

It Must Be That Harvard Education

Here's a comment I left at Marginal Revolution:

When I was in college, some friends of mine enlisted my help in driving a wealthy Asian foreign student around town so that he could buy furniture and appliances for his dormitory. I tried to help him choose the products with the best value-for-money, but he wasn't interested. He was under the impression that whatever was priced the highest was of the highest quality; so, that's what he bought.

I don't think all Asians are like my old friend here, but I do think that his attitude reflects one widely held about universities. There will always be wealthy and/or high-performing students who go to Harvard simply because it's expensive and hard to get into. And because so many wealthy and/or high-performing students feel this way, it makes Harvard a place filled with wealthy and/or high-performing students.

So Harvard is the best because everyone thinks Harvard is the best. You can get a better and less discriminatory education elsewhere. But what you can't get is a Harvard education.

Apropos of nothing, he's a social experiment you can do at home: Buy two identical necklaces for your wife, and then place one in a Tiffany's box...

 

Books That Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen reminds us of a blog post he wrote seven years ago, “Books which have influenced me the most.” At the end of this earlier post, Cowen writes, “I would encourage other bloggers to offer similar lists.” It sounds like fun, and I’d like to do just that.

First, though, I need to add a caveat. Cowen’s book lists are interesting predominantly because Tyler Cowen is very secure in who he is. He clearly understands his role as a blogger. He’s a cultural critic as much as an economist, if not primarily a cultural critic. Every day we learn a little bit more about his personal tastes in books, music, food, and ideas. On his blog, he presents himself as the kind of person who can add interesting commentary to virtually any topic, the kind of person who functions as the most important guest at a party, even if not the life of the party. He’s the sort of man who can keep conversation headed down interesting and elucidating pathways, mostly by knowing how to ask the right questions. But if no one’s asking the right questions, he’ll gladly answer them himself, and then put the question back to everyone else when he’s finished.

In short, we’re interested in what books influence a man like that because a man like that is very interesting and has diverse tastes and thoughtful observations.

By contrast, who am I? I don’t mean to say that I’m unimportant or a nobody or that people shouldn’t care much about me – that’s not for me to say, anyway. I just mean to ask the question, if you happen to come across my blog for some reason, why should you care which books influenced me the most? It’s unlikely that you’re curious about that because you’re curious about how I think. I’m not the life of the party and I’m only recently learning how to ask the right questions. My observations can be controversial, but they’re unlikely to cause anyone to think and ponder for a long time.

No, you’d more likely be interested in a list like this to either get some random ideas for book suggestions, or to compare my list to the list of books you like best.

I’ll present my list in that light. This changes the contents of the list a bit, but don’t worry about that.

So here they are, in no particular order:

I. The Castle by Franz Kafka. I was already a Kafka fan when I found my copy of this book – a 2^nd English language edition – in the back of a moldy used book store somewhere in California. The thing I love most about this book is that, at the time I read it, I didn’t have a lot of experience with bureaucracy and didn’t fully understand what the book was about; yet as my life unfolded, my thoughts would return again and again to this book each time I encountered a relevant experience in my life. So the book and its themes and messages stuck with me even though I didn’t come to understand them until later.

II. Epistemological Problems of Economics by Ludwig von Mises. After Human Action, I think this is Mises’ most important work. Because of my personal interests, I learned far more from the former than I did from the latter. It is a wonderful book for learning “the economic way of thinking.” It’s also quite a bit lighter reading than Human Action, which helps its contents stick to your grey matter a little better. I think this should be required reading for undergraduate economics students.

III. The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. It’s not his most popular book, but this one was seemingly written just for guys like me. It’s a book about a young man who commits himself to loving from afar. He never endeavors to win the heart of his love so that he can continue cherishing her from afar. This decision serves to influence everything else that happens in his life. In true Eco fashion, the various events in the story all come together in a superb metaphor unlike anything I’ve ever read before. And the ending is open-ended, left up to the reader on purpose. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but Eco allows us to finish it as we please, which is of course the whole point of the story.

IV. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Screw the haters. Much has been written about what a terrible book this is. I always found the book to be a wonderful character sketch, probably because I actually knew people in real-life who had parallel characters in the story. The ideas in that book won me over from the more left-leaning political traditions, kindled my interest in economics, and served as a source of inspiration for many, many years. I’ve read this book several times and, sadly, I now feel a pang of shame whenever I pick it up, not because of what I think, but because of how badly people are excoriated for enjoying it. That’s not fair. This is a good book. It’s made big waves for valid reasons. No book is perfect. This is a good book.

V. Moby Dick by Herman Melville. This one just might get my vote for the greatest novel in the history of mankind. Surely it is the greatest novel in American history. I first read this book in junior high school, heavily abridged. We’d skip whole chapters and focus entirely on the action in the story. As a result, much of the meaning in the story was lost on me at the time. I still enjoyed the book, but not like I do when I read it now. To be honest, I am surprised the modern school systems allow this book to be taught as standard curriculum. It’s boldness in challenging sacrosanct American virtues like Christianity and Existentialism make it the kind of book that would likely be banned if more people understood what it was really about. But that’s the beauty of it, really. There are easter eggs in every paragraph of this book. The prose is directly allusive to specific works of Shakespeare, and to the Bible. Yet all the same, Melville manages to tell the tale in a merry, witty way, in a voice all his own, and to teach us something about “chasing the dragon” along the way. It’s a masterpiece.

VI. A Profile of Mathematical Logic by Howard DeLong. This is essentially a textbook of mathematical logic. As such, there is not a lot I can say about it that will interest blog readers, except to say that it is perhaps the clearest and most elucidating book on mathematical reasoning I’ve ever read. I’ve always been “just okay” at math. Reading this book helped me become “a math guy.” I’m still not a great mathematician, but at least now I can engage in mathematical thinking without fear. If you have the prerequisite math background, I can confidently say that this book can do the same for you.

VII. The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I thank my sister for introducing me to this book. It is full of sex, drug use, and fowl language, but it is one of the best books a well-read person could possibly read. Almost every major book is referenced somewhere in this novel, and usually lampooned. The story is confusing and psychedelic. It’s reflective of the hippy culture that influenced. It’s a great book for all the wrong reasons, but it still somehow manages to present a wonderful vision of libertarian possibilities and radical freedom. I don’t recommend it for kids, but I do recommend it.

VIII. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. This classic and cautionary tale about vengeance and obsession is the kind of book that every youth reads about ten years earlier than they really should. While it’s certainly accessible to the more youthful reader, the situations it describes simply don’t mean as much until after one has a few more years under his belt. Unlike Dumas’ more popular The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo’s primary source of action is its nail-biting dialogues. I think it’s superb how, over the course of the book, we gradually go from cheering for the hero to… possibly cheering against him? Hoping that someone stops him and that he learns his lesson? Again, younger readers will be dissatisfied by the fact that the hero doesn’t remain a hero all the way through, and that we’re left with a deeply flawed human being who could have been a hero. By adulthood, we can better appreciate ideas as heroes, rather than people.

IX. Better Training for Distance Runners by David Martin and Peter Coe. This is another textbook, one on exercise physiology. The technical sections can be a little dense, but if you don’t mind learning the basics, then the rest of the book will reward you with an excellent primer on how to train, really train, as a distance runner. I think a revised version of this book, with more simplified physiology sections and more compelling prose, would make an excellent book for high school coaches and athletes, and would make a lot people healthier and happier with their running.

X. Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng. This book is a personal account of what it was like to live through the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. It is important as a documented account of communist life, but it is perhaps even more important as a lesson in the universality of human reactions. The Cultural Revolution produced nation-wide witch hunts that evoke the mob mentality that envelopes any country when a mass delusion takes hold, whether it come in the form of “terrorists” or “drug lords” or “racists” or anything else. Liang Heng is a wise man who lived through a terrible set of circumstances, came out on top, and was willing to pass along his life lessons for the rest of us.

The Best Advice I Never Followed

I was eighteen years old and planning my college career when I had a very interesting conversation with an old mentor of mine.

This man, let's call him G, was about six years my senior and had been a star distance runner in high school and had gone on to have decent college running career afterward. I had met him when he was still in high school, but at the time of this particular conversation, he was donating some of his free time to being an assistant coach to my own high school cross-country team.

Because my school had never had a particularly great running program, it did not tend to garner a lot of attention from college athletics recruiters. As a result, I had to spend some of my time as a high school senior writing letters to college athletics programs in which I was interested, making them aware of both my interest in their program and my athletic career thus far. I certainly had the race times and competitive results to qualify for an athletic scholarship. What I didn't have was the attention of any of the recruiters.

So, as I went through this letter-writing and phone-call-making process of attempting to get an athletic scholarship, G presented me with a rather novel idea. At the time, my focus had been on local schools, where I wouldn't have to pay out-of-state tuition fees and would be close to home. G questioned my approach.

"I went to an out-of-state junior college for my first two years," he told me. "You save a ton of money on tuition, because you're at a junior college. If you get good grades for those two years, you can get an academic scholarship to a major university, no problem."

It got better. "Everyone [that was, all of the best high school distance runners - ed.] goes to a four-year university straight out of high school. You'll be a big fish in a small pond, one of the best runners at the junior college level, and then you'll be able to get a great scholarship to a four-year college once your two years are over."

His argument swayed me immediately. Part of it was the fact that it was a good argument that made a lot of sense, but I have to admit that the main selling point to me - which he never mentioned - was that I'd be able to escape the rather oppressively conservative Utah culture and hopefully find a place I'd fit in better.

After my conversation with G, I excitedly presented the argument to my parents. To my great disappointment, they poured water all over the idea. That alone was frustrating, but what really broke my heart was that they presented no argument for their case. They simply became angry and shut the conversation down. For reasons still unclear to me, they did not want me to leave the state. I guess they wanted me to stay nearby. I invested a couple of frustrating hours just trying to get them to admit to the bare minimum: that even if I didn't take G's advice, it was still good advice for somebody. My parents stubbornly dug in their heels and refused to admit even that much.

I stopped pursuing the idea and eventually found my way to a local university. I spent one year on an athletic scholarship, running for the team, but the environment was a bad match for me. Surrounded by the same "Happy Valley" culture from which I was desperate to escape, I eventually slipped into depression, quit the team, and found my destiny elsewhere.

In hindsight, though, I now wonder why I didn't completely disregard my parents' irrational insistence. Why didn't I just take up G's advice and go out of state? I was the one reaching out to all the college-level coaches, so I could have easily written a few letters to some out-of-state colleges. Had I been offered a scholarship from one such college, I would not have been reliant on my parents' money for my education. I could have found my own way there. In short, I can think of no reason why I didn't just do it anyway.

In fact, later in my university career I would spend summers taking "general education" courses from junior colleges, anyway, because the tuition was much less than what it would cost to take the same courses at my university. I'd take my diploma-track coursework during the Fall and Spring semesters at my university, and the gen-ed courses at a junior college during the summer while I was working. This, of course, highlights the fact that junior colleges are in many ways a much better deal than four-year universities. This was the late-nineties, and we were just discovering this; by now, it's common knowledge. G was ahead of his time.

College is a time for young people to find themselves and start out "on their own." Perhaps I just wasn't ready to cut the cord during my senior year of high school. Still, if I had done so, I would have avoided years of depression, saved a ton of money, and probably would have spent more years running in college. I'd likely be a more independent person than I am today.

G's advice might have been the best advice I ever received. I'll never know.

What Do We Tell The Children?

A number of people have asked me privately what we should tell our children about the fact that Donald Trump is now the president-elect. This question seems to presuppose that children are waiting for us to explain something. They’re not. As difficult as it might be for some of us to understand, children really care very little about politics. Any attempt you make to provide an “explanation” for the outcome of an election, beyond the mere fact that more people voted for X than for Y, is an attempt to indoctrinate your kids. Don’t do that.

In a recent article in The New York Post, Karol Markcowicz writes:

Dr. Jonathan Friedman, director of psychology with The COR Group, advises, “Parents should make every effort to shield their children from the vitriol and mudslinging of politics, particularly during a campaign as divisive, salacious and ugly as this one has been.”

Amazing that this has to be said.

It’s hard to totally shield our kids from politics’ ugly side, but we certainly shouldn’t be the one emphasizing it to them to make our own political point. Friedman says “rather than communicating harshly about those with whom they may vehemently disagree, they can instead emphasize the importance of everyone having a right to express their opinion through their vote, and how sacred this right is to us all.”

Children need to be reassured and protected. If you’re wondering what to say to reassure them and protect them from the current political climate, then maybe you need to ask yourself why your children are already so invested in politics in the first place.

This is a particularly important message for those friends of mine who are teachers as well as parents. As teachers, we are entrusting you to present school curricula to our children. That’s it. We don’t need you to be friends with them. We don’t need you to provide them with a moral framework (that’s our job as parents). We certainly don’t need you to arbitrate the outcome of an election. We don’t need you to go out of your way to explain something to them just because they asked. A mature person in an influential teaching role ought to be able to say, “Most of us adults struggle to find rationality in politics; it is understandable that you kids are having a hard time. The truth is, you may never figure it out for as long as you live. The best we can do is wait and see what happens. If you have more questions, I encourage you to talk this over with your parents.”

Children don’t think the way adults do. To us, an election is about competing ideologies. We think that people voted for Trump because those people are racist idiots. Or we think people voted for Trump because the liberal elites aren’t listening to them. Or we think that Wikileaks and the FBI engaged in a conspiracy to topple Clinton. This is nuts. Ask yourself: do you really want your child to think like that? They are living comparatively idyllic lives. True, many of them will have to face discrimination, and many of them are dealing with it now. Do you really think you’ll be able to explain the eons-old faults of the human condition to them in the context of a single US presidential election? Please…

I don’t think people are truly looking for an explanation to give to the children. I think they are looking for an explanation to give to themselves. That’s perfectly understandable, but it’s important to remember that, and to avoid drawing our children into our own personal existential crises. That causes harm to them. They deserve better from us. We have to think through the complexities of the world on our own time, away from our children. Anything less puts them at risk.

The existential considerations we ought to be thinking about are incredibly important. I encourage everyone to please think them through. But if you’re not there, if you’re still struggling to make sense of it all, what makes you qualified to deliver a message about world politics to impressionable young children?

What should we tell our children? We should tell them, “I love you. Please don’t worry too much about these things. Please treat other people with kindness and respect. Please go outside and have some fun.”

Some Links

1. Jakob Thusgaard is getting progressively closer to a proverbial GPS fitness app "Rosetta stone." Check out his handy guide for app-syncing right here. For background on this problem, you can see my previous posts here and here.
2. Much to my chagrin, my local area is in for unseasonably cool temperatures within the next week or so. We're talking highs in the mid-50s, and keep in mind that the weather is in the mid-90s today. So this is a 40-degree (Fahrenheit) plummet in temperatures over the course of about 2-3 days, at least according to forecasts. Time to get my cool-weather running gear in order.
3. Alex Tabarrok links to an excellent blog post from Mike Rowe, on why he elected to work jointly with the allegedly nefarious Koch Industries.
4. Adam Gurri continues his struggle with understanding the nature of morality, this time as a response to Paul Crider. My response to Adam is the same as my response was to Paul: I believe I have already solved these problems (here, here, here, and here). In order to accept my solution, however, one has to bid farewell to many of one's treasured philosophical hobby horses.
5. Labor Day was yesterday, but it's never too late to link to a great article by my favorite economist and libertarian, David R. Henderson.
6. I haven't seen others blogging it yet, but the fact that ITT Technical Institutes has shuttered its doors - all of them - strikes me as pretty huge news. The company blames overregulation, and while I am sympathetic to their argument, the specific amount asked for by the DOE seems low for a company that size. Perhaps ITT Tech was already over-leveraged.
7. I have before never heard of doctors' prescribing oral antidiabetes medicine for the treatment of type 1 diabetics. According to this article, patients receiving a combination of insulin and two different oral medicines can expect a 0.66% reduction in their a1c levels, along with a 6-8% increase in blood cholesterol levels and a significant increase in DKA. Sounds like a lousy deal to me, but make your own decisions here. The article is interesting nonetheless.

Is The Problem With PC Its Political Agenda?

At EconLog, Scott Sumner writes a blog post on what he feels is wrong with political correctness. It's not that he opposes student safety and comfort, but that the PC movement aims to prevent discomfort "for the wrong reason." What is that reason, according to Sumner?

The primary agenda is to advance a partisan political cause, not to make people feel comfy.

He continues (emphases added):

People on the left don't see the political aspect of PCism, for roughly the same reason that liberals don't see that NPR is liberal, and fish don't notice that they are wet all the time. (Disclaimer, NPR is my favorite radio station--but I do see its liberalism.)

In other words, Sumner believes the point of the PC movement is to advance left-liberalist politics. Against this narrative, I have an anecdote to offer.

When I was a young boy in elementary school, we all hit puberty at about the same age and were invited to a "maturation program" provided (officially) by the school faculty. Some students from very conservative families were excused from the program if their parents provided a formal written request that they be excluded. Instead, they stayed in their primary classroom and worked quietly on their homework.

We didn't have the language of "safe spaces" back then, but the comparison is a perfect one. Very conservative students were given a safe space to avoid being triggered by frank talk about human biology.

Long story short, I don't think it's reasonable to say that all PC demands align with the same political agenda, thus I don't think Sumner's criticism here is fair. There are some instances in which political correctness has served non-leftist political agendas, too.

So if political correctness isn't about one political agenda in particular, what is it really about?

I will speculate that people - and therefore also students - are growing increasingly hyper-sensitive to narratives that don't support their own beliefs, whatever they are. The postmodern insistence that perception is reality has unwittingly encouraged us to manage our perceptions in an effort to control our reality. If the only difference between my reality and yours is my perception that, say, minimum wage can increase the poor's quality of life without reducing their employment rate, then I can claim that this is true for me. After all, I perceive it to be so.

In such a world, facts start to become irrelevant to perceived reality. If I only allow myself to see blue light, then the whole world is blue. Your efforts to shine red light on my reality could be perceived as a threat - how dare you attempt to forcibly alter my perception?

This is only a story, of course, but it's one intended to cast light on the thinking of the politically correct. I don't believe these folks are actively trying to promote a political agenda so much as they are afraid to consider any reality beyond the one that they have carefully curated for themselves. Accusations that these folks are too sensitive are more accurate, in my opinion, than accusations that they are too politically motivated.

Long before the university years, we should have taught our children that perceptions and beliefs can be highly inaccurate, and that the proper way to live one's life is by dismantling one's own illusions and relentlessly pursuing truth, wherever that leads. But our modern-day philosophers relish opportunities to cast doubt on the existence of both truth and reality, and therefore a lot of us are simply ill-equipped to teach our children how to exist in a world in which some ideas are hotly contested, and no one group has a monopoly on reality (perceived or otherwise).

I'm relentlessly criticized for referencing Ayn Rand, but she accurately predicted and described all of this in her essay "The Comprachicos," from The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. There is much to criticize in that book and that essay, but the thrust of her ideas still rings true despite whatever discussions we might have about her tone or the details of her philosophy.

Contra Jones, Henderson, Adamson, and Caplan On "High-IQ"

David Henderson is a fan of "Scott Adamson's" critique of Garrett Jones' new book, and he [Henderson] cites Bryan Caplan to buttress the case.

Here's The General Idea

Jones argues that high-IQ societies are more cooperative because high-IQ people, whoever they are, are smart enough to realize that cooperation produces better outcomes than noncooperation. In short, Jones suggests that people don't cooperate because they're nice, but rather because they're smart enough to cooperate - and if they're not smart enough, they don't cooperate (hence IQ).

"Adamson," et al. rejoin that if Jones were correct, then we'd see U.S. presidents "pillage the country," since they have at most eight years to extract as much personal gain as possible. The idea here is that, while it may be generally true that cooperation produces the best results, in certain specific cases, it's more rational to "pillage the country." High-IQ people would certainly understand this, and thus we would see them do this to a greater degree than low-IQ people do.

But Dispositional Analysis Can Only Take Us So Far

I haven't read Hive Mind and thus I only skimmed "Adamson's" review of it. I also hate to sound like a broken record, but here are my thoughts anyway:

All of these analyses are steeped in dispositional psychology - individuals behave a certain way because that's how those individuals behave. Caplan's analysis is a little better because he acknowledges the differences among for-profit, a not-for-profit, and public service environments, i.e. the situation matters.

But to take Situationism seriously, we have to let go of dispositional theories for a minute. We already know that merely telling a child that she is high-IQ produces behavior consistent with a high-IQ child (including improved intellectual achievement) even when the child isn't really high-IQ. The mechanism in this case was - you guessed it - situational factors. We also know that motivation matters more to every criterion in a person's life that matters when determining success than IQ does.

These and other results have been studied and replicated many times by many people. I don't see how the empirical data could be more conclusive. It's not the child, it's the situation. It's not the inherent, inert, genetic personal disposition that counts, it's the circumstantial, dynamic, environmental social situation.

Taken seriously, this means that it's not the "high-IQ" societies that are producing good institutions, it's the good institutions producing high-IQ societies.

This Has Important Implications

It means that removing emigrants from bad political situations will not just improve their wage rates, it will improve their actual economic productivity. Don't take that up with me, take it up with the economic evidence - here's some to chew on: increasing employment in a US state has been found to increase productivity by 0.5% for every 1% employment increase attributable to immigrants.

It means that scientists who believe the developing world can't develop because of their lower IQs have lost the plot: Change the situation in a country, and you change the people.

But it's so difficult to get people to seriously question the concept of IQ in this day and age that true, serious social psychology looks incompatible with economics, even though social psychology has it right on this one.

Epilogue

"Racialists" (think Steve Sailer) often criticize others for not being willing to consider race-based explanations for variations in outcome. When Charles Murray says IQ matters, the "racialists" take that idea and run with it. Then, when others criticize them for being racist, they ask why they shouldn't explore politically incorrect or potentially ideas if they happen to be true.

One criticism I have of the "rationalist community" (of which "Scott Adamson" considers himself a member) is that they, too, take the idea of IQ too seriously.

It's easy to understand why both groups would. The racialists are attracted to the idea that the fearsome outsiders will destroy good society because they are dispositionally inclined to do so. The "rationalist community" is attracted to the idea because that community fancies itself a collection of high-IQ individuals who must surely know how irrational their lessers can be.

Both groups are making the same mistake by refusing to consider the extensive, empirical, replicable, clinical countervailing evidence found in social psychology. There is a mountain of evidence out there attesting to the fact that situations matter. When will all these smart people be intellectually honest enough to take a look?

Zwolinski's Affirmative Consent Red Herring

Over at a website called LearnLiberty.org, Matt Zwolinski has a piece defending recent California legislation that would revoke state funding to institutions of higher learning if those institutions did not add "affirmative consent" language to their sexual assault policies.

In his defense of "affirmative consent," Zwolinski highlights three scenarios in which "no means no" is an insufficient policy because, in some cases, victims of sexual assault cannot say no (footnote omitted for brevity - click through to view it):

Intoxicated: After consuming a significant amount of alcohol in A’s presence, B passes out on the couch. A then undresses B and has sexual intercourse with her. 

Afraid: A and B meet in a bar and go back to A’s apartment. B rebuffs A’s advances. A smiles at B and says, “Look, you’re alone with someone you don’t know, who’s much bigger and stronger, and, for all you know, has beaten and raped several women. Maybe I’m not as nice as I seem.” B is very frightened by A’s remarks and does not resist A’s advances.* 

Incapable: B is a 19 year-old woman suffering from a severe intellectual disability, with an IQ of 59. A is aware of B’s condition, and begins to play a “touching game” with B, involving mutual undressing and touching of genital areas. B engages in this activity without protest.

There's only one problem: All three of Zwolinski's examples are already violations of the "no means no" guideline and existing sexual assault laws. Zwolinski has argued a red herring - nobody who opposes the new California Senate Bill disputes the illegality of any of the above scenarios under current law.

So how does identifying three indisputable violations of an existing law build a case for a new law about new guidelines? It doesn't.

Zwolinski spends the bulk of his article defending the moral validity of the concept of affirmative consent, and on that I definitely do not disagree with him. But who does? As far as I can tell, no one. This amounts to a second red herring - who are all these people who don't feel that they need affirmative consent during a sexual encounter? Who is Zwolinski arguing against, exactly?

There is one final problem with this senate bill, one that Zwolinski suspiciously does not mention in his defense of it: The law holds universities responsible for enforcing affirmative consent policies, even though affirmative consent doctrine is not actually part of the legal definition of consent. Thus, universities' enforcement of this policy presents two threats to democracy.

The first is the fact that the legal definition of consent can be changed without direct legislation to that affect. The senate bill doesn't change the law about sexual assault, it changes the law about publicly funded institutions of higher learning. It requires that universities adopt a certain guideline - one that is different from the exact letter of the law, and one which both Zwolinski and the bill's proponents expect the university to enforce on its studentbody.

Which brings me to the law's second threat to democracy: It turns university administrations into quasi-judicial bodies expected to investigate, try, and enforce sexual assault cases extra-legally. The problem here isn't merely that the law turns universities into judge, jury, and executioner (although, it does). The problem is that all of this is happening without due process of LAW.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why a self-professed libertarian would think this kind of legislation would be an overall improvement to liberty. Perhaps Zwolinski will at some point clarify his thinking here. Right now, though, I just don't get it.

Bryan Caplan On Homeschooling

Bryan Caplan has decided to home-school his children during their middle school years. In rationalizing his decision, Caplan anticipates possible criticisms based on his noteworthy views on behavioral genetics and the signalling model of education, and then responds to each. (Read the whole thing.)

Caplan does indeed seem to have thought through some valid criticisms, and I believe he answers them effectively. What's striking to me, however, is the list of criticisms he has not answered at all. In that spirit, here are a few angles Caplan may not yet have considered:

First, what if homeschooling proves to be such a pleasant experience for his children that they find it difficult to adjust to "normal school" when they are reintroduced to it in high school? This could plausibly set them back in the long run. A basis for my thinking here is the difficulty most college educated people have when they work for a few years and then attempt to go back to graduate school. Having enjoyed the full liberties of an adult life and an adult income, they often struggle to readjust to academic life, in which studying is seemingly the most important thing in the world, and every penny must be mercilessly pinched.

Second, I'm genuinely surprised that Caplan has not fused his views on workplace conformity with his views on education. In fact, in this most recent blog post, he calls himself a "strategic non-conformist" and links to a previous blog post on the topic. But Caplan has stated before that education is mostly a signal of conformity. Well, what could be more non-conformist in today's American society than home schooling? Caplan makes his own case against his decision as follows:

An interesting implication is that high-IQ people who don't go to college are actually signaling that they are unusually lazy and/or weird. It's easy for a high-IQ person to breeze through school. If one fails to do so, a sensible employer will naturally ask "What's wrong with him?" It's not surprising, then, that few employers will give an eighteen-year-old genius a responsible job. The very fact that you refuse to go to college suggests that you aren't going to be as good at your job as your test scores would normally indicate. 

I hasten to add that I don't mean to disparage my self-taught readers. I'd probably really enjoy meeting you. But I'd be lying if I said I'd be eager to hire you. No offense intended - if I were running a business, I wouldn't hire myself either!

I myself am an ardent critic of conformity-as-a-value, but Caplan seems not to be, hence I wonder about the cognitive dissonance here.

Third, and further to the conformity angle, kids need opportunities to learn to communicate with their fellow children. I don't think public schooling is the best or only way to achieve this, but other home-schoolers I know provide their children with a robust faith-based community in which to be socialized. Caplan is such a fan of his self-described "bubble" that I wonder if he is perhaps compromising his children's own ability to choose a "bubble" of their own.

That said, if I had the opportunity to include my child in a peer group that included Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, Garett Jones, and Nathaniel Bechhofer, I must admit that I would jump at it. I echo EconLog commentator "Ben's" hope that Caplan continues to blog about it.

Lifelong Signaling

Gallup reports that post-graduates have an "edge" in lifelong learning, being about 14% more likely (3-in-4 versus 2-in-3 among the general population) to self-report that they "learn or do something interesting every day." This shouldn't really surprise anyone since post-graduates are typically employed in academia and research occupations. Obviously, those who work in professions that require that they learn something will be more likely to report that they actually do so.

No, the interesting aspect of the Gallup results are contained in a separate "opinion" piece that appears today on Gallup's website, entitled "No Evidence That Bachelor's Degrees Lead To Lifelong Learning."

Why is that an important finding? As author Brandon Busteed writes,

Nearly every single college and university promotes "lifelong learning" as a core goal for its students and graduates. So much so that it's written into most mission or purpose statements of higher education institutions. And although most Americans -- students and parents especially -- say their No. 1 reason for attending or valuing college is "to get a good job," lifelong learning -- to most academics -- is considered a core mission of higher education. Given how much emphasis is placed on lifelong learning as a goal, it would be reasonable to think that higher education institutions have measured whether this outcome is being achieved.

Setting aside post-graduates, education levels make absolutely no difference in the likelihood that people learn or do something interesting every day.

Meanwhile, college grads do make substantially more money than their less-educated counterparts, but as Busteed observes,

The academic world, however, is quick to dismiss purely economic outcomes as the sole purpose of higher education and for good reason. The common refrain then goes something like, "Yes, but it's not just about a job, it's about creating lifelong learners and engaged citizens." At which point everyone just nods approvingly without ever demanding any evidence. It's time to start digging for that evidence -- and quickly! So far, what Gallup has found doesn't look very good.

Busteed goes on to cite evidence that the reason people might not become lifelong learners is due to poor, or at least unengaging, college instructors. Another possibility, however, is that "purely economic outcomes" really are the sole purpose of higher education. It's possible that people are primarily driven to complete a bachelor's degree so that they can get a good job, or at least that employers are motivated to weed-out college non-graduates in search of the best field of candidates for positions.

This "possibility" has a name: The Signaling Model of Education. You're not there to learn, you're there to jump through hoops so that you can get a job.

Before you object, consider what I wrote last year in a post entitled, "What They Should Have Told You About School:"

College is your opportunity to select your tax bracket. When you take that to heart, the decision becomes much easier. Lower tax brackets involve much less responsibility, and that is a choice that appeals to many people. In fact, there's nothing wrong at all with preferring a life of modest means and modest achievements, if that's what your choice is.

... 

If you really do want to achieve something later in your life, then it is in your best interest to choose a high tax bracket during your college years. That means: Choose a college diploma that gives you very high earnings potential and work your tail off to be at the head of your class. Then, leverage that diploma and those grades toward getting the highest-paying job you can possibly find. It is at that point that all of the pieces finally fit together in your head. 

Ten years later, ten years after graduating college, you will finally know what you want to do for a living. It might not be what you're doing, but you will have the means to pursue it, whatever it is. By "means" I mean both the financial ability to pay for it and the work experience required to earn a place in that position, whatever it might be.

You'll be expertly positioned for a lifetime of success in a field you enjoy. That's what you want, right?

Stay On The Right Side Of The Law

A few days ago, Michael Esch published an excellent article at Liberty.me. The article was ostensibly about teaching his son chess, but more importantly, the article was about better alternatives to modern educational  methods.

In particular, he writes (emphasis in the original):

Educators can nurture these desires, but they cannot make learning happen. We cannot force a person to live a certain way. Many parents and teachers believe that they should force a child to do certain things. If the child does not want to participate, then he is punished. This type of conditioning will only insure that the child becomes blindly obedient to future authority figures. We should teach our children to do what is right, not what is commanded.

One problem with modern education is the fact that it has become a sort of de facto day care for busy modern parents, who can't seem to be bothered to do like Mr. Esch, and help guide their own children toward greater knowledge.

I certainly don't claim that doing so is easy - quite the contrary! Still, the dangers of a 20-year-old government day care program make themselves felt when I come across stories like the one I read at WFAA this afternoon:

GUSTINE, Texas — Here in Gustine, population 457, what happens at the schoolhouse affects nearly everyone. And something happened Monday that is causing a big controversy in this small town. 

"I felt uncomfortable, and I didn't want to do it," said 11-year-old Eliza Medina. "I felt like they violated my privacy." 

She was one of about two dozen elementary students who were rounded up in the small town 90 miles southwest of Fort Worth. 

Eliza's mother, Maria Medina, said boys were taken to one room, girls to another, and they were ordered "To pull down their pants to check them to see if they could find anything."

Every day our society faces a choice between making our children blindly obedient to civil servants who inevitably treat our children as though they are in fact the state's children, not ours, or reducing the size and scope of our public services.

Maybe you believe that all education might be public, and I don't want to pick that fight today. But if education is to be public, shouldn't we at least minimize our children's exposure to it in the same way that we minimize our own exposure to the TSA at the airport, or the DMV?

When we see educators practically forced to abuse their power because we have asked them to step in as surrogate parents, haven't we taken the idea of "public eduation" a little too far?

Friday Rapid Fire

It's more than just links - it's rapid fire!

1) School Is Boring
Bryan Caplan writes on boredom in American public schools as though it were a serious problem. David Friedman agrees, and says it's one of the main reasons he chose to home school his children. You can say it's silly, but the fact that Caplan and Friedman believe school boredom to be a major problem nudges me toward agreement. Like most people, my initial reaction is, "Yeah, so what? It's school. It's work. It's not supposed to be fun." But there is a difference between not fun and boring. Learning might not always be fun, but when should it ever be boring? Yes, it is a problem. Yes, changes should be made.

2) Should People With Controversial Opinions Be CEOs?
Tyler Cowen offers his thoughts. They consist of three main points:

1. Producers of free products have to be more publicly palatable than producers of products that are purchased. The idea is that the company image is where the competition is happening, since it's not happening on price.
2. "[A]mbitious young people just got more boring."
3. People are trending toward "outbursts" that can be "recanted" later, as compared to a consistent, long-run pattern of beliefs or behavior.

Of Cowen's three points, the first seems pretty obvious and uncontroversial, but I think he has the mechanism running in the wrong direction. Mozilla doesn't fire controversial CEOs because they are bad for business, they fire them because signalling tolerance is good for businesses. His second point is, as far as I can see, groundless. Cowen doesn't really establish who he's talking about. Brendan Eich is in his 50s, so he's clearly not an "ambitious young person." His third point is true, but old news. This has been the trend in politics for the majority of my lifetime. It's the same as saying, "I take full responsibility" and then moving on as if nothing happened.

My view: The Chief Executive Officer is fast becoming the public persona of a corporation. It stands to reason that, so long as they remain CEOs, they will have to watch what they do. Eich could have easily passed his money through a 3rd party that could have made the controversial donations, but he did not. It is not unacceptable that people would object and hold him accountable for it.

3) Male Circumcision
Yesterday's post at The Reference Frame got me curious about male circumcision. Motl calls it a "cruel ancient ritual," which is consistent with the views of anti-circumcision activists. But the post was heavy on the opinions and light on the science, so I did a little digging of my own.

First let me tell you what I expected to find: I expected to find that the evidence definitely stacks up in favor of either circumcision or non-circumcision. I expected the matter to have been studied in-depth and the answer to be relatively clear cut.

What I actually found was a lot of idiocy on both sides of the issue, and relatively weak science. That is, the benefits of male circumcision are greatly overstated. While there is an unequivocal reduction in the risk of certain complications when a boy is circumcised, those complications aren't particularly common, and can often be eliminated by simple non-surgical self-care (like wearing condoms and keeping yourself clean).

This knowledge puts quite a different spin on the issue. Foreskin removal is non-invasive and does not reduce a person's quality of life in any appreciable way; even so, it's benefits are minimal. Despite all the chest-pounding on both sides of the issue, it really does appear to be mostly a choice, a preference. Calling it cruel and barbaric on the one hand, or akin to vaccination on the other is terribly misguided. It's a simple elective surgery. Choose what you prefer for your child, or perhaps leave it up to him to decide later on.

From The Mouths Of Babes

Here's another one that's been making the rounds on social media.

An organization that calls itself the American Association of University Women has been promoting an article about twin girls who created "a website devoted to educating other students about Title IX’s history and value." The website is here.

“My friends had never heard of this law before, and the thing I wanted to stress to them is how Title IX was a social revolution and how [it created] all these opportunities,” says Kavya.

Okay, I admit it: Criticizing the politics of an eighth graders is a pretty cheap shot. So that's not what I'm going to do. Instead, I'm going to point out how disturbing it is that anyone would laud young people for creating and spreading state propaganda.

The award-winning website's "Road to Title IX" page cites only one source: The Title IX legal manual published by the US Department of Justice. The website provides only two quotes outlining criticism of the law: one good and one bad. The good one comes from former president of the National Women's Organization, Judy Goldsmith, who said that the law was a "setback." The bad one was a quote from a seemingly random university student. The rest of the website is devoted to promoting the law.

I'm no historian, so I can't say whether Title IX has been the main driver in the push to more equal rights for women. Presumably, a website that purports to teach about the history of the law would tell me something about that. Unfortunately, all I get from the website is goose-stepping.

It's not a good thing to teach our children to sing praises for federal legislation. That is not a practical skill. It is not even a laudable skill. It is something reasonable people can do at the dinner table, nothing more. If the Ramamoorthys had created a website devoted to providing a historical account of women's rights, then I think that is a laudable endeavor. But to simply promote a highly contentious law as a "social revolution" is not worthy of our praise. It is propaganda.

Credentials

This chart from LinkedIn shows the educational background of 79 people who applied for a job that pays $47,000 per year (median household income in the same area is about $51,000):

Note that the problem is not a lack of STEM-trained applicants.

My guess is that a sizable majority of these applicants could indeed perform the required tasks.

What They Should Have Told You About School

Part One:

When I was in my 3rd year of medical school and we all had to select our tax bracket, the Asian women went into surgery, ophthalmology, or the last two years of a PhD program, you know where the borderline sleeves went? Pediatrics, which I think is technically sublimation but I'm no psychiatrist. The logic was straightforward: they wanted kids, and, unlike surgery, pediatrics offered future doctor-moms a bit of flexibility, while the Asian women apparently didn't worry about working late because their kids would be at violin till 9:30.

-- The Last Psychiatrist, "Don't Hate Her Because She's Successful"

Part Two:
In a former life, back when I considered myself intellectually exceptional and precocious - in other words, back when I was a mere boy - I suffered from many of the common conceits of boys in my position. The first was the belief that I possessed an above-average level of personal career ambition. The second was the belief that I possessed an above-average intellect. There are an uncomfortably high number of seedy details in the story of how and why I believed such things about myself, but they are mostly insignificant because, like a lot of people in my position, exposure to the real world beat a sense of humility into me. (This is absolutely true, even if it is not obvious from reading my blog.)

Perhaps I now suffer from a conceit of a different color: the vanity of believing that my own experience is reflective of a broader truth. If so, I implore the reader to engage in a little suspension of disbelief for the purpose of finding out whether or not it actually is true; and also - hopefully - entertainment. That is to say, allow me the vanity of believing that I'm not so different than other people, after all.

Like a good, intelligent, ambitious young man, I set myself on course for excellence! I declared upon admission to university a double-major: political science and economics. The reason I chose economics is because I found it interesting; the reason I choice political science is because it said "Pre-Law." Thus, I decided I would pursue a career as - don't laugh - no, wait, go ahead and laugh - a criminal defense attorney! 

A few weeks into my university career, during the course of a mandatory meeting with my academic advisor in the Economics Department, I was informed that the phrase "Pre-Law" does not actually mean anything, because everything is a "pre-law" degree. Law schools don't require a "pre-law" specialization in the same sense that, say, medical school requires a biology specialization.

Get that? I planned on going to law school, and I actually had no idea that all you needed for law school was a degree in anything else. As you can see, research was not my strong suit back then.

Well, that ended my political science career forever. For a time after that, I decided a dual-major in economics and accounting was the right way to go. After falling asleep in each and every lecture of an entire semester's worth of Managerial Accounting, however, I concluded that what my "dream job" had always really been was neither criminal defense attorney nor captain of industry. Rather, my dream job was that of academic economist! I would grow a beard, lose my hair, wear a plaid shirt, and ride a scooter. For the rest of my life. (Okay, I'm being too hard on myself. I actually wanted to be John Cochrane.)

Sometime during the final months of my bachelor's degree, life happened, and I found my way to other adventures. That's not important. What's important is what everyone had been telling me since the day I scrawled the word "economics" on my college application:

Get a useful degree, Ryan, and get a nice job out of college. What will you do with an economics degree? Major in engineering. Go to med school. Study computers.

And so on.

"Bah!" I thought, and so thinks every pseudo-ambitious, pseudo-intellectual young man during his college years. "I don't need to study something useful! I need to study something I am interested in! I can make a career out of my passion!"

Part Three:
The funny thing is that every adult tells every young person the same thing when it's time to pack up and go to college, and every young person has a million arguments for why it's bad advice. People get jobs no matter what they choose to study. You can't force yourself to graduate at the top of the heap if you can't even keep your eyes open because the subject matter is boring! (Well, that one I do agree with.) So you might as well study what you enjoy. College is about the experience, anyway! Wheee...!

Parental advice never sinks in with kids because the parents are making their point poorly. No young person will ever care about getting a "good job." There's no such thing as a "good job." Jobs suck. The only "good job" out there is the one that pays you millions of dollars a year and asks precious little of you for it - which is to say no job at all.

But young people do understand that we must work for a living. Those who haven't figured it out by the time they reach their college years end up figuring it out in college. It's true, and everyone knows it.

There is one thing, however, that young people - and even most adults - do not properly understand, which is this simple truth: Every job out there is about equally as hard as every other job. Every job demands some overtime; every job demands that you sell yourself and turn yourself into a schmuck; every job demands that you put in some face-time and do some networking; every job (these days) demands that you know how to do some basic computer code-writing; every job involves and over-bearing boss, a report that nobody reads, and a bunch of meetings that no one enjoys.

In short, pretty much every job is the same. You might have a unique love for the outdoors, in which case you would rather be a lumberjack than a computer programmer, or a construction worker rather than a graphic designer. Or, you might have a unique love for creative pursuits, in which case you might rather pursue jobs that require more creativity from you and less quantitative analysis. Whatever. Those kinds of details aren't all that important from the standpoint of the big picture. All that really means is that, whatever you decide to do for a living, you should try to work your way into the industry that feels like home for you.

But whatever. Details.

Part Four:
Once you wrap your head around the fact that all jobs are more or less the same, then a student's choice of major in college becomes a much clearer decision. It becomes less important to "study what you want." It becomes less important to "get a good job after school." What remains is a single, crucial choice, one that will follow you for the rest of your life.

There is a reason I lead-in with that quote from The Last Psychiatrist. In it, he very casually mentions the whole purpose of a college education.

He writes, "When I was in my 3rd year of medical school and we all had to select our tax bracket...."

College is your opportunity to select your tax bracket. When you take that to heart, the decision becomes much easier. Lower tax brackets involve much less responsibility, and that is a choice that appeals to many people. In fact, there's nothing wrong at all with preferring a life of modest means and modest achievements, if that's what your choice is.

But if believe, as I did when I was that age, that financial success will come to you if you make the most of your intellectual passions, then the message I would like to give you is simply this: You are squandering your intellect.

If you really do want to achieve something later in your life, then it is in your best interest to choose a high tax bracket during your college years. That means: Choose a college diploma that gives you very high earnings potential and work your tail off to be at the head of your class. Then, leverage that diploma and those grades toward getting the highest-paying job you can possibly find. It is at that point that all of the pieces finally fit together in your head.

Ten years later, ten years after graduating college, you will finally know what you want to do for a living. It might not be what you're doing, but you will have the means to pursue it, whatever it is. By "means" I mean both the financial ability to pay for it and the work experience required to earn a place in that position, whatever it might be.

You'll be expertly positioned for a lifetime of success in a field you enjoy. That's what you want, right?