Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
Summary and commentary on The Cult Of Smart by Fredrik DeBoer
Feb 18 | 273 | 1,124 |
Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.
DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.
He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.
But then how do education reform efforts and charters produce such dramatic improvements? DeBoer's answer: by lying. Programs like Common Core and No Child Left Behind take credit for radically improving American education. But DeBoer shows they cook the books: most graduation rates have been improved by lowering standards for graduation; most test score improvements have come from warehousing bad students somewhere they don't take the tests. When charter schools have excelled, it's usually been by only accepting the easiest students (they’re not allowed to do this openly, but have ways to do it covertly), then attributing their great test scores to novel teaching methods. Most of this has been a colossal fraud, and the losers have been regular public school teachers, who get accused of laziness and inadequacy for failing to match the impressive-but-fake improvements of charter schools or "reformed" districts.
All these reform efforts have "succeeded" through Potemkin-style schemes where they parade their good students in front of journalists and researchers, and hide the bad students somewhere far from the public eye where they can't bring scores down. The overall distribution of good vs. bad students remains unchanged, and is mostly caused by natural talent; some kids are just smarter than others. DeBoer reviews the literature from behavioral genetics, including twin studies, adoption studies, and genome-wide association studies. All show that differences in intelligence and many other traits are more due to genes than specific environment. This requires an asterisk - we can only say for sure that the contribution of environment is less than that of genes in our current society; some other society with more (or less, or different) environmental variation might be a different story. But at least here and now, most outcomes depend more on genes than on educational quality. Schools can't turn dull people into bright ones, or ensure every child ends up knowing exactly the same amount. But that means some children will always fail to meet "the standards"; in fact, this might even be true by definition if we set the standards according to some algorithm where if every child always passed they would be too low.
For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.
So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.
DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.
One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.
So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.
...but he realizes that destroying capitalism is a tall order, so he also includes some "moderate" policy prescriptions we can work on before the Revolution. First, universal childcare and pre-K; he freely admits that this will not affect kids' academic abilities one whit, but thinks they're the right thing to do in order to relieve struggling children and families. Second, lower the legal dropout age to 12, so students who aren't getting anything from school don't have to keep banging their heads against it, and so schools don't have to cook the books to pretend they're meeting standards. Third, lower standards for graduation, so that children who realistically aren't smart enough to learn algebra (it's algebra in particular surprisingly often!) can still get through. Fourth, burn all charter schools (he doesn't actually say "burn", but you can tell he fantasizes about it). And fifth, make it so that you no longer need a college degree to succeed in the job market.
(the astute among you will notice this last one is more of a wish than a policy - don't blame me, I'm just the reviewer).
II.
I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.
It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.
The Part About Meritocracy
I've complained about this before, but I can't review this book without returning to it: deBoer's view of meritocracy is bizarre. The overall picture one gets is of Society telling a new college graduate "I see you got all A's in Harvard, which means you have proven yourself a good person. To reward you for your virtue, I grant you the coveted high-paying job of Surgeon." Think I'm exaggerating? He writes (not in this book, from a different article):
I reject meritocracy because I reject the idea of human deserts. I don’t believe that an individual’s material conditions should be determined by what he or she “deserves,” no matter the criteria and regardless of the accuracy of the system contrived to measure it. I believe an equal best should be done for all people at all times. More practically, I believe that anything resembling an accurate assessment of what someone deserves is impossible, inevitably drowned in a sea of confounding variables, entrenched advantage, genetic and physiological tendencies, parental influence, peer effects, random chance, and the conditions under which a person labors. To reflect on the immateriality of human deserts is not a denial of choice; it is a denial of self-determination. Reality is indifferent to meritocracy’s perceived need to “give people what they deserve.”
At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.
The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.
This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.
The Part About Reform Not Working
The book sort of equivocates a little between "education cannot be improved" and "you can't improve education an infinite amount".
DeBoer admits you can improve education a little; for example, he cites a study showing that individualized tutoring has an effect size of 0.4. Although he is a little coy about the implications, he refers to several studies showing that having more intelligent teachers improves student outcomes. Also, everyone who's ever been in school knows that there are good teachers and bad ones. So even if education can never eliminate all differences between students, surely you can make schools better or worse. And surely making them better is important - not because it will change anyone's relative standings in the rat race, but because educated people have more opportunities for self-development and more opportunities to contribute to society.
I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.
DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.
Success Academy is a chain of New York charter schools with superficially amazing results. They take the worst-off students - "76% of students are less advantaged and 94% are minorities" - and achieve results better than the ritziest schools in the best neighborhoods - it ranked "in the top 1% of New York state schools in math, and in the top 3% for reading" - while spending "as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts." Its supporters credit it with showing "what you can accomplish when you are free from the regulations and mindsets that have taken over education, and do things in a different way.”
DeBoer will have none of it. He thinks they're cooking the books by kicking out lower-performing students in a way public schools can't do, leaving them with a student body heavily-selected for intelligence. Any remaining advantage is due to "teacher tourism", where ultra-bright Ivy League grads who want a "taste of the real world" go to teach at private schools for a year or two before going into their permanent career as consultants or something. This would work - many studies show that smarter teachers make students learn more (though this specifically means high-IQ teachers; making teachers get more credentials has no effect). But it doesn't scale (there are only so many Ivy League grads willing to accept low salaries for a year or two in order to have a fun time teaching children), and it only works in places like New York (Ivy League grads would not go to North Dakota no matter how fun a time they were promised).
I'm not sure I share this perspective. Success Academy isn't just cooking the books - you would test for that using a randomized trial with intention-to-treat analysis. The one that I found is small-n, short timescale, and a little ambiguous, but I think basically supports the contention that there's something there beyond selection bias. Teacher tourism might be a factor, but hardly justifies DeBoer's "charter schools are frauds, shut them down" perspective. Even if Success Academy's results are 100% because of teacher tourism, they found a way to educate thousands of extremely disadvantaged minority kids to a very high standard at low cost, a way public schools had previously failed to exploit. That's not "cheating", it's something exciting that we should celebrate. If it doesn't scale, it doesn't scale, but maybe the same search process that found this particular way can also find other ways? Surely it doesn't seem like the obvious next step is to ban anyone else from even trying?
And we only have DeBoer's assumption that all of this is teacher tourism. Success Academy itself claims that they have lots of innovative teaching methods and a different administrative culture. If this explains even 10% of their results, spreading it to other schools would be enough to make the US rocket up the PISA rankings and become an unparalleled educational powerhouse. I'm not claiming to know for sure that this is true, but not even being curious about this seems sort of weird; wanting to ban stuff like Success Academy so nobody can ever study it again doubly so.
DeBoer's second tough example is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of their schools, forcing the city to redesign their education system from the ground up. They decided to go a 100% charter school route, and it seemed to be very successful. Unlike Success Academy, this can't be selection bias (it was every student in the city), and you can't argue it doesn't scale (it scaled to an entire city!). But DeBoer writes:
After Hurricane Katrina, the neoliberal powers that be took advantage of a crisis (as they always do) to enforce their agenda. The schools in New Orleans were transformed into a 100% charter system, and reformers were quick to crow about improved test scores, the only metric for success they recognize. Whether these gains stand up to scrutiny is debatable. But even if these results hold, the notion of using New Orleans as a model for other school districts is absurd on its face. When we make policy decisions, we want to isolate variables and compare like with like, to whatever degree possible. The story of New Orleans makes this impossible. Katrina changed everything in the city, where 100,000 of the city's poorest residents were permanently displaced. The civic architecture of the city was entirely rebuilt. Billions of dollars of public and private money poured in. An army of do-gooders arrived to try to save the city, willing to work for lower wages than they would ordinarily accept. How could these massive overall social changes possibly be replicated elsewhere? And how could we have any faith that adopting the New Orleans schooling system - without the massive civic overhaul - would replicate the supposed advantages?
These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.
I also have a more fundamental piece of criticism: even if charter schools' test scores were exactly the same as public schools', I think they would be more morally acceptable. I'll talk more about this at the end of the post.
The Part About Race
DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.
But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.
Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.
He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".
Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)
Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way - I showed that the specific thing the journalist quoted wasn’t a reference to The Bell Curve, but I never answered the broader question of what I thought of the book. They demanded I come out and give my opinion openly. Well, the most direct answer is that I've never read it. But that's kind of cowardly too - I've read papers and articles making what I assume is the same case. So what do I think of them?
This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.
(Hopefully I’ve given people enough ammunition against me that they won’t have to use hallucinatory ammunition in the future. If you target me based on this, please remember that it’s entirely a me problem and other people tangentially linked to me are not at fault.)
That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.
But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.
Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.
(Feel free to talk about the rest of the review, or about what DeBoer is doing here, but I will ban anyone who uses the comment section here to explicitly discuss the object-level question of race and IQ.)
The Part About Social Mobility Not Mattering Because It Doesn't Produce Equality
DeBoer is skeptical of the idea of education as a "leveller". Instead, he thinks it just produces another hierarchy - maybe one based on intelligence rather than whatever else, but a hierarchy nonetheless. He scoffs at a goal of "social mobility", pointing out that rearranging the hierarchy doesn't make it any less hierarchical:
I confess I have never understood the attraction to social mobility that is common to progressives. Mobility, after all, says nothing about the underlying overall conditions of people within the system, only their movement within it. From that standpoint the question is still zero sum. What is the moral utility of increased social mobility (more people rising up and sliding down in the socioeconomic sorting system) from a progressive perpsective? For conservatives, at least, there's a hope that a high level of social mobility provides incentives for each person to maximize their talents and, in doing so, both reap pecuniary rewards and provide benefits to society. This makes sense if you presume, as conservatives do, that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest.
The appeal for the left is much harder to sort out. Why should we want more movement, as opposed to a higher floor for material conditions - and with it, a necessarily lower ceiling, as we take from the top to fund the social programs that establish that floor? Individual people (particularly those who think of themselves as talented) might surely prefer higher social mobility because they want to ascend up the ladder of reward. But why would society favor the interests of the person who moves up to a new perch in the 1 percent over the interests of the person who was born there? Why should we celebrate the downward mobility into hardship and poverty for some that is necessary for upward mobility into middle-class security for others?
As a leftist, I understand the appeal of tearing down those at the top, on an emotional and symbolic level. But if we're simply replacing them with a new set of winners lording it over the rest of us, we're running in place...as a socialist I see no reason to desire mobility qua mobility at all.
This is a compelling argument. But it accidentally proves too much. If white supremacists wanted to make a rule that only white people could hold high-paying positions, on what grounds (besides symbolic ones) could DeBoer oppose them? After all, there would still be the same level of hierarchy (high-paying vs. low-paying positions), whether or not access to the high-paying positions were gated by race. It seems like rejecting segregation of this sort requires some consideration of social mobility as an absolute good.
I think I would reject it on three grounds. First, the same argument I used for meritocracy above: everyone gains by having more competent people in top positions, whether it's a surgeon who can operate more safely, an economist who can more effectively prevent recessions, or a scientist who can discover more new cures for diseases. Social mobility allows people to be sorted into the positions they are most competent for, and increases the general competence level of society. I don't think this is a small effect - consider the difference between competent vs. incompetent teachers, doctors, and lawmakers. I don't know if this is what DeBoer is dismissing as the conservative perspective, but it just seems uncontroversially true to me.
Second, social mobility does indirectly increase equality. Spreading success across a semi-random cross-section of the population helps ensure the fruits of success get distributed more evenly across families, groups, and areas. A world in which one randomly selected person from each neighborhood gets a million dollars will be a more equal world than one where everyone in Beverly Hills has a million dollars but nobody else does. Many more people will have successful friends or family members to learn from, borrow from, or mooch off of. More schools and neighborhoods will have "local boy made good" type people who will donate to them and support them. I don't think this one is a small effect either - a lot of "structural racism" comes from white people having social networks full of successful people to draw on, and black people not having this, producing cross-race inequality. If high positions were distributed evenly by race, this would be better for black people, including the black people who did not get the high positions.
Third, some kind of non-consequentialist aesthetic ground that's hard to explain. Even ignoring the effect on social sorting and the effect on equality, the idea that someone's not allowed to go to college or whatever because they're the wrong caste or race or whatever just makes me really angry. It is weird for a liberal/libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself, but I am prepared to insist on this. Even if it doesn't help a single person get any richer, I feel like it's a terminal good that people have the opportunity to use their full potential, beyond my ability to explain exactly why.
The Part About There Being A Cult Of Smart
"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.
There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.
But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.
These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.
Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.
III.
The Cult Of Smart invites comparisons with Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. Both use largely the same studies to argue that education doesn't do as much as we thought. Caplan very reasonably thinks maybe that means we should have less education. DeBoer...definitely doesn't think that:
As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility each all of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone. One of the most profound and important ways that we've expanded the assumed responsibilities of society lies in our system of public education. Only 150 years ago, a child in the United States was not guaranteed to have access to publicly funded schooling. (Even 100 years ago it was not uncommon for a child to spend his days engaged in backbreaking physical labor.) When we as a society decided, in fits and starts and with all the usual bigotries of race and sex and class involved, to legally recognize a right for all children to an education, we fundamentally altered our culture's basic assumptions about what we owed every citizen. We did not make this profound change on the bais of altering test scores or with an eye on graduation rates or college participation. We did so out of the conviction that this suppot of children and their parents was a fundamental right no matter what the eventual outcomes might be for each student.
[DeBoer goes on to recommend universal pre-K and universal after-school childcare for K-12 students, then says:] The social benefits would be profound. For one, we'd have fewer young people on the street, fewer latchkey children forced to go home to empty apartments and houses, fewer children with nothing to do but stare at screens all day. Children who live in truly unhealthy home environments, whether because of abuse or neglect or addiction or simple poverty, would have more hours out of the day to spend in supervised safety. And the benefits to parents would be just as large. Today, many parents face an impossible choice: give up their career in order to raise young children, and lose that source of income and self-actualization, or spend potentially huge amounts of money on childcare in order to work a job that might not even pay enough to cover that care.
I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.
School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.
I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.
I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.
I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.
School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.
If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.
When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.
I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!
I don't have great solutions to the problems with the educational system. I am less convinced than deBoer is that it doesn't teach children useful things they will need in order to succeed later in life, so I can't in good conscience justify banning all schools (this is also how I feel about prison abolition - I'm too cowardly to be 100% comfortable with eliminating baked-in institutions, no matter how horrible, until I know the alternative).
But I think I would start with harm reduction. The average district spends $12,000 per pupil per year on public schools (up to $30,000 in big cities!) How many parents would be able to give their children a safe, accepting home environment if they got even a fraction of that money? If they could get $12,000 - $30,000 to stay home and help teach their kid, how many working parents might decide they didn't have to take that second job in order to make ends meet? How many kids stuck in dystopian after-school institutions might be able to spend that time with their families, or playing with friends? Or if they want to spend their entire childhood sitting in front of a screen playing Civilization 2, at least consider letting them spend their entire childhood in front of a screen playing Civilization 2 (I turned out okay!)
Some parents wouldn't feel up to teaching their kids, or would prove incompetent at it, and I would support letting those parents send their kids to school if they wanted (maybe all kids have to pass a basic proficiency test at some age, and go to school if they fail). I would want society to experiment with how short school could be and still have students learn what they needed to know, as opposed to our current strategy of experimenting with how long school can be and still have students stay sane. Did you know that when a superintendent experimented with teaching no math at all before Grade 7, by 8th grade those students knew exactly as much math as kids who had learned math their whole lives? Sure, cut out the provably-useless three hours a day of homework, but I don't think we've even begun to explore how short and efficient school can be. Obviously I would want this system to be entirely made of charter schools, so that children and parents can check which ones aren't abusive and prefentially go to those.
(if we ever figure out how to teach kids things, I'm also okay using these efficiency gains to teach children more stuff, rather than to shorten the school day, but I must insist we figure out how to teach kids things first.)
If parents had no interest in having their kids at home, and kids had no interest in being at home, I would be happy with the government funding afterschool daycare for those kids, as long as this is no more abusive on average than eg child labor (for example, if children were laboring they would be allowed to choose what company to work for, so I would insist they be allowed to choose their daycare). But as with all institutions, I would want it to be considered a fall-back for rare cases with no better options, much like how nursing homes are only for seniors who don't have anyone else to take care of them and can't take care of themselves. It shouldn't be the default first option.
I think people would be surprised how much children would learn in an environment like this. Certainly it is hard to deny that public school does anything other than crush learning - I have too many bad memories of teachers yelling at me for reading in school, or for peeking ahead in the textbook, to doubt that. I don't think totally unstructured learning is optimal for kids - I don't even think Montessori-style faux unstructured learning is optimal - but I think there would be a lot of room to experiment, and I think it would be better to err on the side of not getting angry at kids for trying to learn things on their own than on the side of continuing to do so.
Together, I believe we can end school. Until DeBoer is up for this, I don't think he's been fully deprogrammed from The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education (formerly known as The Cult Of Smart).
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Parents who want better, and have the time, and the awareness of the bureaucracy, and possibly the contacts with the school system . . .
To a first approximation, the well-off (or at least better off) white-collar parents.
There are two words spelled “desert”, one of which is pronounced like “dessert”. Your “just deserts” are what you “deserve” (which may or may not involve dessert, depending on whether you ate all of your vegetables)
Oops. You're right. --I guess I got my just deserts. WIll delete.
Though etymologically the two words pronounced "dessert" are the same. The reason sweet dishes at the end of a meal are called that way isn't that no people live in them.
The same root of 'serve' with a different prefix: one is de-sert and the other is dis-sert, both filtered through French (apparently a desert is what you deserve but a dessert is a "disservice", i.e. what you have when the food service is removed).
Oh, I just assumed that dessert (in the food sense) was called that because it's something you should deserve (as a calque of Latin "merenda")
Amateur pedantic here!
Actually, desert (as in what you deserve) and dessert (as in the thing that you eat after all of the courses have been cleared from the table) link up etymologically in the French "deservir" which denoted descent. The former word dates back to the late Latin servir while the latter shows up in mid 16th century France. Even today, both can still be sweet!
Desert is off on its own although it was spelled "desart" in the 18th century, which we should maybe return to using so as to lessen an already crowded field?
(Note: I had to delete my original post because I misspelled the final desert as dessert!)
Even the <i>phrase</i> "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
You missed some HTML cursive or whatever.
Thanks, fixed.
Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "guy who missed some HTML cursive or whatever"
😂
Charter schools admissions is by lottery
. There is no entrance test. There is no selection. Read or listen to Thomas Sowell on charter schools.
This is true in principle but not always in practice. See eg https://www.edweek.org/leadership/charter-schools-more-likely-to-ignore-special-education-applicants-study-finds/2018/12 . My guess is DeBoer thinks they do a lot of this kind of shady thing. But I agree I should correct the article to mention that this is hard and would have to be done subtly if at all.
When I had my son apply to a charter high school founded by teachers at his middle school, I was told that admission was by lottery only, but the parents had to show up in person to find out if their child was picked at random.
When I showed up to find out if my son's name was on the list, the person holding the list was his old middle school math teacher. I nervously asked if he'd been picked in the lottery? His teacher said, without looking at the list: "Of course he did." I asked if he could check the list just to make sure. The charter school teacher said: "Don't worry about it. He's in."
"I was told that admission was by lottery only, but the parents had to show up in person to find out if their child was picked at random."
Your story is typical of the type of shenanigins that go on with charter schools.
Charter schools know that "skimming" is verboten, so what they end up doing is shifting the selection pressure from the kids to the parents. Charter schools make parents jump through all sorts of hoops: a tedious admission's process, frequent and inconvenient parent-teacher conferences, etc. This means that only the most dedicated parents survive. It's skimming of kids by proxy.
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that the hoops to get into charter schools were mostly regulatory and likely in place to "defend" public school systems and teachers (not nominally but effectively).
That seems like another point in favour of the 'intelligence is genetic' hypothesis!
Not really. We already know that All Good Things are Correlated. IQ is correlated with everything positive. Bigger support networks, better mental health, more involved parenting, fewer divorces, better home environments, lower lead intake, lower trauma incidence, etc. And all that stuff is in turn correlated with all the rest of that stuff.
This isn't evidence that IQ is heritable (let alone genetic); it's evidence that the tangled ball of all-positive-characteristics is heritable. Which absolutely noone argues with. The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
Hence the use of adoption and twin studies, which is how we know a significant part of sexual orientation is genetic.
My impression came mostly from this podcast, which described basically trying to filter based on parents' dedication. (Which presumably correlates with parents' ability to supervise kids doing homework and other stuff that helps with academics.) https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
An example was appointments for the child to be fitted for a uniform as a requirement for entering the lottery.
How did you and your son find the school experience?
He wound up getting a scholarship offer to an expensive private school, which turned out to be a good experience.
By the way, I used to be a true believer in the social science theory that the amount of money spent by a school per pupil has no influence on anything. However, seeing what a very well-run private school administration can do with a whole lot of money to spend has made me more skeptical.
I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack.
I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better.
Do you have a good sense of why it started out so heavily selected? Was it just that smarter kids were more interested in going there, or did they have some kind of filter mechanism?
Whose parents were involved enough, interested enough in education, valued education enough. Simple as that, I think.
Are we opposed to using votes to mean "this is correct" on ACX? I'm not sure if I should indicate that this conforms to my own research on the topic by posting a small comment or clicking the heart button.
We are opposed to using votes at all. Scott mentioned them as one of the default Substack features he wants to get rid of.
But then how will I know which opinions I'm supposed to agree with?
Mine. Now you know ;)
What kind of sad little person uses likes that way?
Jokes aside, apparent social concensus *feels* like validation of an idea, as much as that may not actually be true.
TBH that feels less bad to me than posting a comment reply just to say "I agree".
What if we changed the little "heart" icon to like a little gold star or something? Surely no one can object to giving out gold stars.
The irony of handing out gold stars in this particular thread would be delicious.
Yeah that was intentional
Change it to a thumbs-down icon for a random 50% of users.
I'd do random 50% of posts per reader to try and avoid hate/love spamming but otherwise agree
*You* are opposed to using votes. I'm quite fond of them, and from past results it seems that a large minority of the site feels the same way - the comments I made on Scott's post about this got a lot of likes, and I think the DSL poll when I suggested adding likes was about 30-40% in favour.
It would be really fun if there were three kinds of votes: "true", "kind", and "useful".
Ceterum censeo (I'm repeating from OT157, but this issue WILL come up for all eternity if it does not find a satisfactory solution):
Ditch the hearts. Replace with a line of buttons:
- an LED ("this comment enlightened me")
- a flame ("this comment inflamed me")
- a "+1" or "This!" (no need to clutter the comment list just for this)
- a "-1" or "Nope!" (ditto)
The first pair would put a number on the famous light/heat ratio and constitute the SSC equivalent to up- and down-votes, and the second would be a nanoscale survey on the comment's position.
I find I also give out hearts in this system (i.e. substack) for comments that I quite simply enjoyed reading. Others seem to agree with me; there's a clever joke upthread with 25 or so likes, and climbing - largest number I've seen in the thread, by a lot.
in what ways? im not discounting your experience but this doesnt really help overcome my priors
So you have to have a certain amount of investment in order to figure out what's a "good" school to get into and how to apply to it. You also have to be willing to invest a certain amount of ongoing effort into your kid's school -- a charter school will usually not be as convenient as sending your kid to the literally closest public school. Your kid may not actually want to go to the charter school, if their friends from a lower school level/the neighbors are going to the close-by public school, so you have to override them.
None of these are gigantic burdens, but you put them together and you get a pretty strong effect where the kids who go to the district's best charter schools are the ones whose parents are conscientious and invested in education.
The experience described above about attending charter schools only noted that the initial class was not representative of the overall school population. It did not, however, know if it was representative of the losing lottery applicants.
At the charter school where I had my son apply, they had a lot of hoops to jump through to winnow down to the more education-oriented parents: e.g., applications had to be dropped off in person and you had to come in person to find out if your child had been chosen.
Also, the more education-oriented parents were aware that this charter high school was being started by the best teachers at the middle school. The more apathetic parents likely didn't agree that these were the best teachers or didn't know or didn't care.
It's at least partially selecting for people who have more free time. If someone is a single parent working two full time jobs to pay rent, they probably don't have the time and definitely don't have the energy to do those type of things. Perhaps that's not the average case, but certainly the people who have the most money to start with are going to be the people who have the most ability to get their kids through those processes.
Possibly money too. Was the charter school on public transit? If not - or if the public transit is slow/unreliable etc. - that's selecting for parental car ownership. Possibly even ownership of 2 cars, if one parent was at work (with their car) at the time of the meeting.
There's also a self-perpetuating character to this. Once the school has a reputation for being a "school for smart kids," parents whose kids might qualify just don't bother to apply because they think that they won't be accepted.
There is obvious bias in who applies, but that’s why they study charter lotteries that are oversubscribed and compare the winners to the losers. The winners do better.
If the comment above is accurate, a precondition for being a winner is that your parents attend the drawing in person. That's a nonrandom sample, and probably also implies that other nonrandom interventions are happening both before and during the lottery.
Different schools have different processes. I think the ones studied are genuine lotteries.
And to complete the thought: the losers go back to public school, and their classmates will be kids whose parents didn't participate in the lottery. Thus, in general, a performance difference between charter and non-charter can potentially be explained by differences in the composition of classmates rather than differences in the schools themselves. (man, science is hard.)
You know, to be perfectly honest, I do sometimes wonder to what extent the students themselves help or hinder a learning environment. The focus is always on the teachers but to be honest I found in high school especially a huuuuuge amount of time was taken up by those completely unmotivated and also this had the more pernicious and hidden effect of limiting the kind of activities and teaching strategies that the teacher could do in the first place (a cool activity but one that requires effort isn’t possible if there’s too much apathy)
Judith Rich Harris' emphasis on the impact of peer culture is sadly neglected, for the most part, in education debates. She points out that children adopt the language of their peers rather than their parents, whether or not their friends smoke is a better predictor of smoking then parents smoking, etc. Peer culture is immensely important in learning.
This is neglected? Seems to me like it drives trillions of dollars of economic activity - that concern is exactly what "good school districts" mean in practice.
De facto, yes, but the public policy debate rarely discusses the importance of peers and peer culture. If peer attitudes and behaviors were regarded as more important for student outcomes than, say, curriculum, teacher training and credentials, expenditures, etc. then we'd be having a very different public conversation on educational policy and its relationship to outcomes. Poor parents who can't afford "good school districts" might be even more aggressive than they currently are on behalf of school choice.
In general, what is said in the press about education is about 180 degrees opposite of how people in the press act about education when it comes to their own children.
The late Ed Lazear had a fascinating simple model of classroom interruptions and ability that fits the stylized facts about class size and achievement and a few others.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696418?seq=1
That was interesting just for the idea on the title page, that one reason it's hard to find correlations between class size and success is that the size of class consistent with good learning depends on the level of discipline among the students.
There are, in fact, many ways that lotteries can be gamed. Here's a taste: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions/special-report-class-struggle-how-charter-schools-get-students-they-want-idUSBRE91E0HF20130215
There are others, such as refusal to backfill. Everything can be gamed. It is in the best interest of charter schools to manipulate the lotteries, very much including their financial best interest. And in many cases they are more or less operating on the honor system. To not assume fraud would be profoundly foolish.
The deeper question is this: if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim, why would the schools that we know cheated have cheated at all? Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?
Because of choice. You are forced to go to public schools, so all the school administrators need to do to keep their jobs is to show good numbers and they're good. In wealthy areas, the parents have a much more vested interest, but otherwise, your customers—students and parents who can't move to wealthy areas—are always forced to go back. Therefore, there isn't as much incentive to perform as great as charter schools where there is the threat of closure.
That's not actually an answer to the question Freddie asked.
The actual answer is that the incentive for charter schools to cheat exists regardless of whether they really are better, at least within the range that seems plausible. Even if they really do give better outcomes than normal public schools on the margin, gaming the system to make the difference look bigger can only help them.
Yes, pretty obviously this. For example, someone might write a book saying "shut down all charter schools because, while they do get better results, this is all just an illusion". So it's nice if the gap is big enough to make that person look wrong, even if you have to cheat a little.
More generally, you might both believe in your secret sauce and be a little uncertain of how soon - if ever - it will be able to deliver results. So you cheat.
Even if you have magic teaching dust it doesn't follow that it works uniformly or that you wouldn't still prefer more enthusiastic kids and parents over kids with behavioral issues and bad parents.
The real question is how much gain happens because in a group of motivated students, the social prestige revolves more around academic success. That is, how much do the outcomes show that it's beneficial for high-performers to get clumped together so that they can focus on learning rather than socialization. What if spreading the high and low- performance/study discipline students into a homogenous distribution might hinder the former without changing much for the latter?
I think "focus on learning rather than socialization" is an understatement of the problem as it manifests in a lot of schools. In the schools which are pulling down the average of our national scores, it's often the case that few students feel like it's socially acceptable among their peers to care about learning at all.
It's not either/or. Many cheaters in gaming and sports were excellent players who wanted an extra boost. Even if charter school magic is real, selection effects are presumably just as or even more powerful. As long as oversight is lax, why report 10% higher test scores when you can report 25% higher test scores?
I'm much more of a capitalist than you are, but even I think there's a good reason for governments to do truth-in-advertising regulations. I agree that fraud here is bad, but I think there's vastly more reasonable fixes than banning charters.
By definition, they select for people who are not satisfied with the public schools and have enough initiative to make an effort. That is a pretty significant filter, by itself. But I wouldn't call it cheating or "rigging" their results.
There's a lot of cheating and rigged results in public schools already, come charters go charters.
Scott - I am so glad you are back. Thank you.
This essay went an interesting direction in the end. I guess I see a few types of concerns:
1) Signalling: How do we make sure the right competency signals exist in a post-school world. If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests.
2) How will we ensure basic competencies? I don't think the current model does a great job, but I get the feeling that many home-schooled children are products of self-selection.
3) How do we wish to warehouse children until they're adults?
I get the impression that the US likely does a terrible job at all of this relative to other nations. However, I am still interested in the sorts of responses.
(Also that tie-in with intelligence & worth is an interesting one, and one that is really hard to unpack in a good way. I get the feeling that IQ differences matter less after certain thresholds relative to personality dimensions. )
1. You’re going to want participation in group activities for that one. Chess club, softball league, or whatever.
2. GED or SAT tests.
3. We don’t. Instead we just let them run around outside all day every day if that’s what they’re into, or let them sit inside and read or play computer games, or let them get part time jobs for spending money, or whatever. Basically their lives will be like summer vacation all year long.
I just realized I was thinking in terms of my childhood in small town Americana, and that it might be somewhat more necessary to warehouse your children if you live in a place like San Francisco, where people feel obligated to maintain up to date maps of human sidewalk feces.
Are you aware what low IQ trends tend to when left to run around outside all day? They form gangs and commit crime.
*teens not trends
First, I won't accept that without evidence. Second, preemptive incarceration is not an acceptable crime prevention tool in any other context, and I don't think it should be acceptable for children either.
I suspect you are broadly correct. Children are not adults.
Or to put it another way: when my high-IQ wife was young and let roam free without supervision, she & her friends played with explosives.(no joke!)
I mean, no matter where we start on this. Society has already come to the conclusion children are not to be trusted alone. So some sort of warehousing makes sense, even if the current school system isn't appropriate.
Young as in elementary school age.
Children were able to be raised for thousands of years without anything like "warehouses". Typically the slightly older children would look after the slightly younger ones. "It takes a village" was the expression taken up by Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't imply it takes a warehouse.
They were also more fungible thousands of years ago too. Did you not notice in the Book of Job that it was considered adequate for God to replace Job's dead children with a new set of living children?
Child warehouses are a modern necessity in the same sense as accounting, tax systems, or the internet. I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but not wildly so. We can talk about a more Montessori-based childcare system, or a million other things, but risk-tolerance has gone down over the last thousand years, and this drives a lot about child care & management. Most of the rest of the system has also adapted to remove this as a reasonable possibility.
I think risk-tolerance is inconsistent. Parents will subject their children to certain risks on their own, and schools may acceptably subject them to certain risks, while other ones will get them sued.
It's still consistently higher than letting them wander around without supervision for 8+ hours during the day.
People don't reason consistently, so inconsistency doesn't necessarily prove much by itself.
(And to be clear to an earlier point on the rest of the system adapting: if you pay attention to Leave It To Beaver, the large # of stay at home moms gives Beaver & his friends plenty of people watching out for him, and places to go if he needs help.)
"over the last thousand years" is way missing the mark. 50 years ago children played outside unsupervised all day long in the Summer, no problem.
"50 years ago children played outside unsupervised all day long in the Summer, no problem."
In their neighborhood, while a parent was at home, almost certainly within shouting distance.
Certainly not within shouting distance.
Well, that's why Mr Wilkins had to shout so much for Corey to come home.
I certainly remember walking to get the mail, about a quarter mile from the house in New Hampshire where we spent our summers. Not shouting distance.
When I was no more than twelve, I had permission to ride my bike to the county library on Saturday afternoons. Google Maps puts that as a 4.7 mile ride. My mother's lungs weren't *that* good.
We're thinking of different age ranges. Twelve year olds aren't constantly supervised today. Hell, last year I had a twelve (maybe thirteen?) year old watch my kids while the wife and I had a date.
But I remember the summers of my early childhood, when my mom would kick us out of the house and tell us not to come back before lunch. When people talk about the changes, that's where my head goes.
At that age (1968), my neighbors and I had unstrained permission to go into downtown Houston on buses and hang out all day if we liked. We could bicycle as far as our stamina would take us.
When I was 12 in 1989, I was visiting my grandmother in Maryland. As the end of the trip, she said goodbye and I left her house alone, walked to the metro, took the subway to national airport, took the shuttle to Logan airport, grabbed a bus to my suburban town and walked home from there with no adult supervision. And I loved it, I was so proud of myself that I could manage something like that on my own. I can't imagine anything like that happening today, my parents would get arrested.
If you don't mind, how old are you? I don't think you understand how different things were.
Fair. I'm 45, so I'm thinking of the eighties. We played all day in our neighborhood, but we didn't travel around town. I've been assuming that the previous generation was the same, but it sounds like I'm mistaken.
Pre-modern peoples take/took an even more free-range approach to children than mid-century Americans.
For thousands of years, children only needed to be illiterate hunter gatherers And they wil form gangs and hunt by instinct. Its just that in in the context of a modern society, a hunting gang is a criminal gang.
It still takes skills to be a hunter-gatherer, and there was a lot of knowledge in low-tech agricultural societies.
I dare say. The point is that if you you transplant hunter-gatherer behaviour into an urban environment, it amounts to crime, because everything is owned already.
I played with lots of explosives and fire as a kid, despite being "smart" in the formal-education and IQ senses. I turned out fine. Kids are a lot more resilient and less abjectly stupid than we give them credit for. I am of the opinion that kids need a chance to play with dangerous stuff and subvert authority in porwntially harmful ways -whether it's building a rickety clubhouse out of scrap wood or riding around dirt roads on the roof of a joyride van. It teaches them self-reliance, the natural consequences of their actions, and the extent of their power over the world.
Sounds like survivor bias.
I wouldn't be surprised if you did turn out fine, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the death rate, or rate at which children are maimed would be higher under those circumstances. It gets really hard doing that utilitarian calculus where "Johnny loses a foot", and most heuristics would tell us that Johnny losing a foot outweighs most non-quantifiable outcomes.
There's a joke among unschooling parents that sooner or later most unschooled kids will set something on fire in the backyard.
Well, I set our garage on fire when I was only four, before schooling was an issue. I put it out with the garden hose before it did more than char a bit of the wood.
I can think of half a dozen friends who played with explosives, and I remember no stories of injuries in a high school with 800 students per class level. My father played with explosives throughout his high school and college years.
I remember coming home after hearing the kid in front of me say you should smoosh the matchheads in a pipe bomb tightly to make sure you have a good bang. He had street cred from a bandaged hand and a bandaged eye after a couple weeks off from school.
And my parents were sharing academic gossip. Someone had wanted to give a lecture to my school about anorexia risks to the prettiest, most popular girls. Principal said no, given the results of a previous year's lecture about the risks to the boldest young fellows from making homemade fireworks and even pipe bombs.
Hong Kong used to have no anorexia. Then Hong Kong media did a series about the risk to the prettiest, most popular girls from anorexia. Since then Hong Kong has anorexia. 'Crazy Like Us', Ethan Watters.
You raise an interesting question-- it used to be pretty common for kids (smart kids?) to play with explosives, but I haven't seen mention anywhere of injuries or deaths resulting from that. Does it just not get mentioned because it would interfere with light-hearted stories about playing with explosives, or were injuries actually very rare?
I actually know quite a few tales of incidents when kids played with explosives. It still happens a lot every year in Germany, not only among kids, at the end of the year, because of our obsession with personal fireworks on new years eve.
I've personally produced quite some impressive fireworks several decades ago when I was younger. Some left overs served me well end of 2020, because selling fireworks was forbidden due to the Corona crisis. But I was more into flames then explosions, so my mishaps didn't turn into a catastrophe back then.
I suspect injuries are somewhat rare, but I also have heard about stories where somebody is maimed from an explosive. In that social circle, I believe there was one maiming??? But I'd have to consult my wife, as it isn't my story, and I may be mixing up her life with somebody else's childhood explosive-maiming story.
Low IQ teens with limited alternative options to generate income form gangs. And even the low IQ part might be inaccurate or irrelevant.
1) If you want to signal your capabilities, then in a system where public funding is gone, you can buy whatever products to complete that demonstrate it - and you will only do what is actually profitable for you to do.
You would need to rely on a Udacity or Coursera like system, and these would rely on buyers.
Probably not MOOCs as the pass rate is generally low.
Non-sense - in the absence of public school, you’d just go to private school. That’s the product which you’re buying.
Ah, my apologies. I was originally writing about the radical critique of schools, not like a voucher system.
I don't think school does a good idea of protecting us from high-IQ sociopaths.
DeBoer has never heard the saying "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard"
What is hard work to a workaholic?
I get paid well because I love to sit down and solve a complex software puzzle. It’s not work to me at all. I’d do it and have done it for free.
Working hard is a talent, same as looks or smarts. If it turned out that educational outcomes were more correlated with executive function than IQ, I don't think DeBoer would be any happier.
I understand his objection to be with any kind of false equivalency between traits and worth. If we traded the cult of smarts for the cult of hard graft, it wouldn't be a better world for DeBoer (as far as I understand Scott's explanation of what Scott thinks DeBoer thinks, anyway...)
I find it hard to believe that actions, like consistent work / working hard (however you would like to define it), could be considered as inherent as genotype or phenotype. Environment certainly has an impact on ones ability to 'work hard'.
Yeah I completely agree environment likely as a huge impact on the choices one makes, such as whether to work hard or goof off.
It's not clear to me why it would matter to our judgement of someone's intrinsic worth whether their traits are the product of genes or of circumstance, though.
Imagine it's the night before a big exam, and both Alice, Bob and Claire get a message from their friends asking them to come out for a drink.
Alice is genetically high scrupulosity and is prone to worrying, so she turns down the offer in favour of some last minute studying and a good night's sleep. She does well on the exam.
Bob has ADHD and finds it hard to follow through on things. He finds procrastination pretty tempting and wants to say yes. However, he came from a stable and understanding family who have instilled values around the importance of education and of working hard to get ahead. He turns down the offer and does well on the exam.
Claire has no particular natural traits that make her a sticker or a quitter. She tends to make time for the things she cares about, but her parents have never really seen the point of education and have never supported her schooling. Her mother often tells her that having kids is the end of freedom, and to have fun while she's young. Claire decides that she'd rather die unqualified and happy than a lonely and boring A student, so she goes out and parties until 3am. She flunks the exam and ends up in a miserable and unfulfilling job.
Alice, Bob and Claire are equally smart. Alice and Bob have advantages to their ability to work hard and meet commitments - Alice has genetically influenced personality traits, and Bob has the advantage of a good work ethic instilled at home. Claire has none of these things and as a result isn't much of a hard worker.
I'm with Scott that the Alices and Bobs of this world make better lawyers and doctors than Claire would. If I were interviewing for a job I'd want to hire them instead of Claire. But it doesn't seem to me that Claire 'deserves' to live in a small house, struggle to feed her kids, and work a boring job to make ends meet - even though from one perspective it looks like she 'wasted' her intelligence, she was never set up for success. It still feels like Alice and Bob are lucky in their personalities, and Claire is unlucky, just as if they were smarter than her.
DeBoer presumably thinks the solution here is a Marxist revolution and a complete decoupling of occupation from wealth. I'd disagree - I think incenticising achievement is the best way to get it, and I'm willing to accept wealth inequity to get a more functional society. However, I do think society has a duty of care to people like Claire and that progressive taxation and a social net is a good way to balance out some of Alice and Bob's good fortune at being high functioning people to offset Claire's bad luck at being a washout.
Do we have to assume that Claire is also incapable of learning that there's a connection between conscientiousness and getting more material goods or a more interesting job, if she finds that those are important to her?
Thanks for this comment. That's certainly one way to end up with a Claire - either she might not acknowledge that others work harder, or she might attribute their success to being more naturally talented.
Alternatively she might just be very akrasic - "I know I need to study and every time this happens I promise myself I'll try harder, but in the moment I always have a ready excuse that lets me off the hook". You could model this as a lack of willpower, unusually sharp future discounting, lack of reflective self-awareness - but in any case there's definitely a kind of person who is bad at doing things they know they need to do. (I suppose I said Claire is generally OK at sticking with things she really cares about, so perhaps we should call this new archetype 'Dave').
People like Claire and Dave seem to exist, one way or another, and it's hard to imagine there's something other than nature and nurture that makes them behave the way they do.
I do not believe this is true. I have not worked particularly hard in my life. As a result, I am paid about half as much as my equally talented peers that graduated from the same law school. Meanwhile I still keep in touch with people from my high school that were untalented, but hard workers. I make approximately twice as much as them. This situation does not seem unique. No matter how hard they work, they can never do the job I have. Meanwhile, when I am at my job, I take breaks to read articles like this and post comments like this.
I think there are likely thresholds where hard-work takes precedence over IQ, and IQ takes precedence over hard work. If you're high-IQ enough, then diligence (or other factors) likely explains outcomes more. However, until you're there, IQ is generally very important, if not more important.
I could be wrong though & would be happy to hear from others. If I had to guess, this threshold situation is partially a result of how our signalling systems work. Or to put it another way: once you're all smart enough to pass the bar exam, the bigger question is who does more "stuff".
Yes, both are important and not always in equal measures. Musk is a billionaire because he is both a genius and a workaholic. If he was 10% less genius but 10% more workaholic, or vice versa, hard to say.
When I was reading the book, I found the term "meritocracy" to be one of the worst issues. I think the problem with it is ultimately that people-like-Scott and people-like-DeBoer use it in different ways. Scott defines "meritocracy is when people who are good at a thing do that thing - teachers should be people who are good at teaching, construction workers should be people who are good at construction work, surgeons should be people who are good at surgery, and so on." Fairly obviously good, and that's how even all communist countries have worked. DeBoer defines it more like "meritocracy is when people who are good at things have a good life while people who are bad at things have a bad life." This seems bad, given the assumption that everyone should have a good life and you can't really improve on how good you are at different skills.
Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle. I suspect that's what DeBoer wants, but his conflation of terminology helps no one.
We really really just need to get rid of "meritocracy" and its cognates and replace them with "selecting/screening for ability" or similar and then debate the tradeoffs and uses of that. I usually dislike language policing, but this term replacement would be an unalloyed good: it not only makes thought and expression clearer but deprives opponents of ability-based selection of a rhetorical weapon they can use to unfairly smear supporters of such selection as elitists.
To be specific: saying "ability-based selection" instead of "meritocracy" makes it clear that the point of selection, screening, sorting, whatever you want to call it is *not* to set the worthier above the less-worthy. Rather it is to put the more-able-in-some-dimension in an organizational/institutional environment that lets them make the most productive use of that dimension of their ability. Any rational set of social institutions, be it libertarian or socialist or social-democratic or whatever, should want to do this. And if we can agree on that then we can get onto harder and more useful questions, like how to tradeoff the inevitable biases and unfairnesses of real-world selection processes against the utility of even imperfect sorting by ability.
That possibility sounds like the Star Trek economy of people working demanding jobs due to prestige: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/star-trek-as-fantasy.html
I've watched some Star Trek, but not all that much. Do we ever get to see the lives of people who don't have prestigious jobs like, starship officer, to see how the demanding-but-unglamourous jobs get done?
I've watched even less than you.
Honestly, the closest I see is DS9, however, that has a lot of capitalist intermixings as seen with the role Quark plays in the entire system. Quark literally represents their economy. The only unglamorous character I believe I've seen is Rom, and... yeah... he isn't a particularly helpful example.
Rom eventually enlists in the Bajoran Militia and becomes a Maintenance Engineer FC because he’s an engineering genius. He has one of the most beautiful character arcs in DS9.
I hate Rom's character, but you can suffice to say that Rom isn't a good starting point for any model of economics.
Honestly the whole thing is very poorly thought-out in Trek, and the latest episodes of Discovery have seen a bit of subversion of it.
However...
Picard's brother was a winemaker. He was presented in TNG as living more or less exactly the life that a winemaker in France would have been living in the mid-20th century. He was critical of Picard for seeking prestige in space rather than living up to his family's expectations of winemaking. The two had a fist fight. Later, his character was revealed to have died in a fire.
Sisko's father was a restauranteur. He made jambalaya in New Orleans. He too was presented in more or less the way a modern New Orleans restaurant owner would have been presented.
So the idea seems to be that regular 20th/21st century occupations still exist on Earth, but people do them out of habit or personal interest in wine/jambalaya/etc. more than out of the necessity to earn a living.
It's never explained why the Picards can own a vineyard and a chateau or what the criteria are to be allowed to operate a cajun restaurant in a dense city, absent the ability to actually sell anything that you make. The series Picard critiques this implicitly when a black woman character who lives in a trailer and has a drug problem essentially accuses Picard of white privilege because he gets to live in a big chateau with his Romulan servants and his antique furniture and she's stuck in a trailer growing space marijuana for her vape stick. Needless to say, the fan base was... let's say, divided... on this particular critique and the way in which it was made.
But the emerging consensus in canon seems to be that the "postcapitalist utopia" is more propaganda than anything else and structural equalities still exist despite Picard's protestations in TNG that they had moved beyond materialism. DS9 did a good job of interrogating Trek's utopianism and Picard and Disco are cranking that interrogation up to 11, with mixed effects.
I think the actual answer is: Gene Roddenbery died without working out the details and his successors in charge of the franchise don't believe in it and therefore subvert it.
Hah, you say that as if working out the details to a postscarcity utopia is some trivial matter that Gene could have handled if he'd been given a couple more years on this Earth.
I read recently that Gene objected to the plot of "Measure of a Man" because he felt that his utopia wouldn't have lawyers. He thought they wouldn't be needed, because crime would have been eradicated by simply brainwashing anyone who might do crimes into not doing crimes.
It seems to me a lot like Gene defined "utopia" as "a place where things I don't like don't exist" as opposed to some coherent viable system. That's not really a critique - I love Trek, obviously - but its social commentary was more about allegory and less about detailed worldbuilding of space communism.
Hmm, no, I think Gene didn't work out the details at all, and just assumed them and expected everyone else to share his assumptions.
But, while he was alive, you had the option of just asking him what his assumptions were and then writing to them. Once he was dead, you either had to find someone else with the same assumptions or actually work out a coherent system.
They did neither, they just decided it wouldn't work and write Trek as being decidedly a potemkin utopia.
I kind of think the progression of Trek's portrayal of the Federation mirrors the zeitgeist of American exceptionalism during and after the Cold War, which have since faded away, revealing that our grand ideals and self-concept, while not exactly untrue, definitely obscured a bunch of nasty stuff that many people would prefer not to acknowledge.
Haven't you ever, even temporarily longed for a simple, low-stress job where the chance of failure is low, or where failure wouldn't have catastrophic consequences for anyone who depended on you? There's a place in the world for people who gravitate toward both prestigious and unprestigious jobs.
I agree that the two senses of meritocracy get unnecessarily conflated.
The first sense of meritocracy is the idea of filling positions with the people who would be the best at the job. This is an amazing piece of social technology, and certainly not the norm in human societies throughout history; the norm is to fill positions through nepotism and back-scratching. Societies and institutions which manage to get their shit together for long enough to practice _some_ form of meritocracy will vastly outperform their peers, at least until they revert to the mean and go back to the old nepotism-and-back-scratching methods.
The second sense of meritocracy is the idea that greater rewards should accrue to the people in the more competitive positions, the ones that require a greater degree of merit. A surgeon gets paid more than a flower salesman. It is at least possible to imagine the first kind of meritocracy without the first -- surgeon positions are highly selective and flower salesman positions aren't, but the surgeon doesn't make any more money than the flower salesman -- but in this society who would want to be a surgeon rather than a flower salesman?
People who like saving lives? People who don't like flowers? Certainly some people become surgeons because of the money but I hardly think all of them do.
I agree, some people would still become surgeons, but the overall quality of surgeons would be lower.
On the upside, the quality of flower salesmen would be higher! Or rather, since flower salesman is a relatively pleasant job, flower salesmen would be selected through nepotism and back-scratching.
Who would do the unpleasant _and_ low-status jobs? No idea.
I suspect that socially necessary unpleasant jobs would very rapidly become prestigious or respected. If we imagine a world, for example, where there has been an abolition of work-based income - for whatever government-policy related reason - then very quickly, our houses would get filled with excess garbage. Our streets would start to overflow with it. And, sooner, rather than later, we would be very thankful to whoever ultimately took the garbage away.
Jobs that are more opaque about their effects - sewage workers who clean out the tunnels, say, and are out of sight out of mind - would probably take a bit longer, but I think ultimately people would be very thankful to whoever it was that made their toilets flush again. We don't have any difficulty considering a medical researcher to be prestigious despite us interacting with their work in only the most peripheral way, after all.
Medical schools are selective, and retain a somewhat medieval guild mentality. Dalits in India who have unpleasant work reserved to them aren't prestigious. My guess is that if we couldn't incentivize necessary but disliked work with money, we'd sentence prisoners to do it (and then start coming up with reasons why more people need to be imprisoned).
I wonder if there are any historical examples of this we could perhaps profit from learning about. Hmmmm......
One obvious answer: conscription. Considered necessary, and even prestigious, but commonly provided with forced labor. Not even that "historical" since it still exists in many places, including the usually economist-approved Singapore.
In a world where the government has abolished work-based income, I suspect that the next thing that would happen is that someone would come up with a loophole that allows work-based income. I'm envisioning garbagemen who will pick up your garbage, but only in exchange for a blowjob.
A more realistic outcome is for workers to compensate themselves, by performing less work. It's the one lever they still control.
A similar experiment has already been run. It gave rise to the saying “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. “
> I suspect that socially necessary unpleasant jobs would very rapidly become prestigious or respected.
No, you would get immense corruption where people have to secretly pay (or otherwise compensate) their doctors to get good treatment. We see this in every country where doctors get very low pay.
I've always suspected that certain pink-ghetto jobs got done really well 50-70 years ago because even high-IQ women were stuck in them.
A useful comparison would be countries where doctors aren't paid as much as the US. E.g. in most western european countries surgeons earn a respectable wage around the level of teachers and other professionals, but not the much higher levels in the US, and they have no shortage of doctors.
If anything you might get more doctors if everyone who wanted to be one could become one without the massive costs of college then medical school.
This is not true according to salary explorer. For example in Germany Average physician salary is ~100K€ and average teacher salary is ~34K€. This is about a multiple of three. In the United States the average teacher salary is $75,000 a year and the average physician salary is $240,000 a year which is slightly higher than a multiple of three. Even a cardiothoracic surgeon only makes a multiple of about 4.5 $343K/yr) while in Germany a CT surgeon averages 183K€/yr (5.2X)
Rewarding people for doing jobs well is one way of sorting people into the jobs they are good at, possibly the only decentralized way that works. But someone who accepted DeBoer's arguments could propose solving that problem with an IQ tax. IQ correlates with lots of positive outcomes in life — that was part of the point of _The Bell Curve_. So if you have a good way of measuring it, one that can't be gamed by people who want to conceal their high IQ, you can tax high IQ people, subsidize low IQ people, and so redistribute the positive outcomes.
The US military sort of follows this model. Everyone who is the same rank gets paid the same, but before enlistment we take an aptitude test to see what we would be good at. An E-3 infantryman ("flower salesman") gets paid the same as an E-3 cryptologic linguist ("surgeon"). Certain jobs suck more than others; imagine being an E-3 cop in the Air Force and your job is to stand in front of a jet for 12 hours. As opposed to an E-3 honor guard member who gets to do drill and ceremony for diplomats at fancy military banquets/possibly the US president (and maybe even meet the president).
Even if it were possible to funnel competent people to the most value-adding jobs, pay them the same as everyone else, and avoid any significant incentive effects, would that even be desirable? Just consider, if Carl is a cashier and Sam is a surgeon, won't Sam have higher status? Maybe we could rewrite status norms to make cashiers as prestigious as surgeons? But, logically, if every job has equal prestige, then none have any. Status-seeking and status-games are innate to human psychology. If people see Sam as high-status, they'll smile at him more often, laugh at his jokes more easily, and listen to his opinions more readily. He'll likely have better mating prospects and a more intact family. There'd still be hierarchy, just motivated by status over profit, providing social rewards, instead of material. Wouldn't DeBoer still find that world deeply unsatisfying?
Yep. Marxist utopias work for naked mole rats, bees, and ants and that’s it.
> Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle.
You don't even have to do that. It's possible to have a baseline below which no one falls (e.g. UBI), so that nobody has a "bad" life, and yet still have a world where surgeons get paid more than flower salesmen.
I think we can divide jobs in two different dimensions; one is the utility they generate for other people, the other is the utility they generate for the person doing the job.
Generally, we pay people according much more to the first than the second - you'd expect that a job that a lot of people enjoy doing to be paid less than one that employees hate, but that's not generally true.
I suspect that if we had a system where people do not have to work on point of starvation (either the US welfare system where you can't claim unemployment indefinitely, or the UK one where you lose your unemployment if you turn down a job offer or leave your job voluntarily), then most jobs wouldn't be much affected, but the unpleasant and badly paid would have to pay a lot more. I bet that jobs like "office toilet cleaner" would get big raises.
Until people redefine "bad" life to include one in which anyone has to confront the horror of inequality, as in, a world in which anyone else has something he can't have. How often do we hear people claim to prefer a society with lower average wealth, and even lower wealth for the least wealthy, as long as it's more "equal"?
"Notably, you can achieve the first 'meritocracy' while avoiding the second 'meritocracy'! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology...."
Then it's not possible, and you can't achieve it. As a theoretical possibility, this is only worth talking about if you're an SF writer or possibly a eugenicist. Otherwise, discussions of what the hypothetical New Soviet Man or whatever could do if unbound from pesky human psychology get into "Do you want mountains of skulls? Because this is how you get mountains of skulls" territory.
You can't do this with real humans because, A: real humans respond to incentives, and while "if you do this especially productive thing we'll reward you in ways that make your life better than those of the people who are less productive" isn't the *only* incentive that matters it is sometimes the one that matters most. And because B: even if you disallow or equalize the tangible objectives like material wealth, people will still pursue intangible objectives like status and power. And because C: in order to get some especially productive stuff done, you have to give them control over resources that they can with a bit of cleverness use to make their lives better than those of the people who were only tasked with keeping the floor clean.
If we pretend that this isn't so, that we're building a utopia for the New Socialist Man and that New Socialist Men will evolve to thrive in this environment, then we can see what happens by looking to the Soviet Union. An awful lot of what could have been valuable productive effort gets diverted to status and power games and things like getting tight with the functionary who decides who gets what apartment. An awful lot of what should be valuable productive resources get inefficiently diverted to lifestyle improvement for corrupt bureaucrats where it would have been more efficient to just let an honest businessman take some of the profits and buy the nice things he wants. And while the Soviet Union could sometimes incentivize materially productive people to achieve great things, this was weighted towards high-profile, high-status things like space rockets and hydrogen bombs and not so much things like making the heat and plumbing work and ensuring that your society's logistics could keep the shops filled with goods.
I think DeBoer's problem is not with smarter people becoming surgeons or whatever, it's with smarter people getting rich. You could perfectly well have a system in which everyone gets exactly the same salary but the top jobs still go to the smartest people. Or how about a world in which the highest salary is twice the lowest salary? I would say that the question of different material rewards is completely separate from the question of whether the best candidate gets the job. I think Scott confuses the issue by refusing to make this distinction; Scott assumes that smart people will only be surgeons if they get paid more for it. But that does not follow.
Exactly. I know this is going to be buried but the book “Head, Hand, Heart.“ Has a much better take on this exact issue than Freddie’s
I think to some extent, the problem is that if you incorporate the meritocracy arguments about why the sorting exists, His case becomes: "merit if unearned, but we still need a capitalistic sorting mechanism, however we can alleviate inequality via fiscal transfers to poor people to flatten the income curve". Which is to say, indistinguishable from social democracy on policy itself, save that the justification (people start with unequal opportunities so it's only moral to flatten income inequality vs people start with unequal capabilities ...) is very marginally different.
I think there is a synthesis of that position with the Bryan Caplan position that exists. Which is to say, clearly explaining that if ensuring equality through education isn't as important, it could be optimized for sorting purposes, making labour signals clearer and stronger.
Did Scott just come out as a libertarian?
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
I was mostly being tongue in cheek, I just don't think I've ever seen you explicitly call yourself a libertarian, and have had the impression that that's not a label you'd seek out.
Also, thank you for alerting me to the Burrito Test, that's both useful and concise. I'm right there with you on the schools as prisons analogy, the schedule alone thoroughly sabotaged my own middle and high school experience, and I feel like I still have a certain reflexive contrarianism and skepticism of authority due to years of arbitrary and capricious school rules and policies.
To be fair, though, at what age would you want to give a group of children unfettered and unsupervised access to a microwave oven? Ninety percent of five-year-olds will blow up the microwave by accident, and five percent of fifteen-year-olds will blow up the microwave on purpose.
Overall I'm skeptical of the opinions on child-rearing from people (like Scott) who have been children but never had children. Once you've been on both sides of the table, then things that used to seem like arbitrary and capricious rules imposed by uncaring authority figures instead start to seem like tricky and desperate line-ball decisions made under circumstances of constant near-disaster.
I don't think an actual, literal burrito should be required for the spirit of the test, though. Schools have lunch periods. My mom and dad were allowed to walk home every day and have a homemade lunch, or stay in the cafeteria and buy lunch. In contrast, my middle school lunch period was 22 minutes long, of which I spent at least 5 and sometimes 10 in the line to buy lunch. And aside from that, while my elementary school had a designated snack time each morning, anything outside of that, or any period in middle school, we weren't generally allowed to eat anything or to drink anything other than water. This included time between classes.
(Aside: My middle school was also figure eight shaped, the school designated and enforced one way hallways and staircases to control traffic, time between periods was only 3 minutes, and teachers were *not* required to dismiss class right when the bell rang. As a result, in at least one instance I was frequently unable to make it on time from a classroom right next to the stairs, to another classroom on the other floor right next to those same stairs).
Slight exception: in high school after freshman year I asked for, and received, permission to *not* take a lunch period so I could take an extra class, and each year I was able to find a teacher willing to let me eat lunch in their classroom provided I did so quietly, but I don't think they would have extended that permission to other students broadly. Also, the one time I had a study hall period, I wasn't allowed to eat during it, even though it was held in the cafeteria.
For what it is worth, I have both been a child and had children. The two children of my present marriage were both home unschooled, and we are happy with the results. Part of the reason we did it that way was that both my memory, of a very good private school, and my wife's, of a reasonably good suburban public school, were mostly of being bored. We thought we could do better for our children.
When our son was very little we did make sure that the sharp knives were high enough so he couldn't reach them, since he regarded them as toy swords. I don't think there were any arbitrary or capricious rules, and we were always willing to consider arguments from the kids against such rules as we had.
Hi, Professor Friedman. I’ve seen you discuss the benefits of families making decisions by reasons rather than arbitrary dictates by those who happen to be in authority (the parents), both in the context of your childhood and of your parenting. I see merit in that view, but what happens when the parent and the child are unable to agree on the most prudent course of action? Did your parents (and did you as a parent of minor children) ultimately resolve differences by dictate where reason failed to produce agreement? Did you handle such situations in some other way? Or did you never experience situations where parents and child were unable to reach agreement through argument? I admire your work.
"Ninety percent of five-year-olds will blow up the microwave by accident, and five percent of fifteen-year-olds will blow up the microwave on purpose."
Says who? Do you in fact have any children? All my children have unfettered access to the microwave as soon as they are physically capable of using it and forever more after that. Never had one issue.
I like the Burrito Test but it seems disingenuous to apply it to a place where you go home at the end of the day instead of staying full time. By that logic you could say an amusement park is an institution.
Going home at the end of the day doesn't seem like the right test. In that case even jail wouldn't be an institution if you were only incarcerated for a few hours.
The better way to look at it might be that you are allowed to microwave a burrito if you're allowed to leave at will and go somewhere else to microwave a burrito.
For what it's worth (I've never been to a Montessori school), Montessori claimed that children can be meticulous and responsible if they're taught how. Anyone have experience?
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Quite possibly. I'm replying to the idea that children and teenagers can't be trusted to use microwaves on their own.
You now nowadays all the cool left libertarians call themselves neoliberals! You've got to get with the times.
No. Any word with the prefix "neo" is a hold over from the 80's when we thought that the Japanese had already overtaken us and that we better copy them to stay cool. Also it feels like most people use neoliberal as an insult.
Scott, aren't you best described as a liberaltarian?
I think liberaltarian was one of those fusion words that people were trying to make happen during the Bush administration that never really ended up happening.
Ordoliberalism might be the right word for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism
There's a ton to examine here and it's very late and I should be in bed so a few quick reactions off the top of my head.
"Second, lower the legal dropout age to 12, so students who aren't getting anything from school don't have to keep banging their heads against it, and so schools don't have to cook the books to pretend they're meeting standards."
We had that. My parents left school early (around ages 12-14) and this was partly because the schools *were* terrible but also partly because they had to start earning money to help their families. All their lives they felt the lack of education and it did hold them back. So sure, you can have kids leaving formal education at the age of 12 - but then what? Unless we bring back child labour which may not be a solution we want, they'll be hanging around at home or, more likely, hanging around street corners.
"But they'll have the opportunities to learn at home by accessing the Internet, libraries, and following their own interests with supportive and engaged parents!"
"If they could get $12,000 - $30,000 to stay home and help teach their kid, how many working mothers (or fathers!) might decide they didn't have to take that second job in order to make ends meet?"
Yeah, about that. Skipping ahead to the "let parents teach kids at home", we're getting a great example of how this is working during the various lockdowns in countries all over the world. And the consensus seems to be "my God, when is the government going to re-open the schools because we can't manage having the kids at home all the time?" Part of that is not able to homeschool, running out of energy/enthusiasm, needing to work from home, needing to go to work as usual, etc. It is not generally a new flourishing of "why do we need schools anyway?" Old-fashioned "mom is a full-time homemaker who stays at home and looks after the kids" is not the rule anymore, in part because of the necessity for two incomes nowadays, in part because of the whole "an adult needs to go out and interact with other adults" and "your value is determined by having a Real Proper Job and child-minding is not that, unless you're doing it outside the home and being paid a wage for it".
Thirdly, the morning and after-school caretaking. You'll need somebody to do that - be it childcare workers, teachers, whomever. And if they're at work from 6-9 a.m. mornings and 4-8 p.m. evenings looking after your kids, they can't be at home looking after their own kids. Which will result either in people not having children because they're too busy working (hey, didn't we talk about this being a problem?) or a case of 'the cobbler's children have no shoes' because their parents (okay, I mean mothers here, because childminding is a majority female job) are working minding other people's kids.
"The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development."
Yes, that's horrible. It's also due to the rise in parents suing schools over little Johnny falling in the playground, insurance premiums going UP UP UP because parents are suing schools, teachers not wanting to be sued for personal liability because little Johnny fell in the playground when they were supervising breaktime, etc. Solve that problem first and we can go back to the old days where unless a limb was severed, nothing was thought of the usual knocks and bumps and bruises.
"YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO."
Yes, this is where the rest of us go "so, what the heck is a 'hall pass' anyway?" and when we get the explanation, we go "what the hell is wrong with you, America?" The first thing my father taught me before I started school was the phrase "an bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas" which means "may I have permission to go to the toilet?", where if you need to go you raise your hand, utter this magic phrase, and get told "all right but hurry up". We don't have hall passes, bathroom passes, or the likes.
(The only time this didn't work was when I was seven, for no reason I suddenly felt unwell, asked to go, was told to wait for a few minutes until it would be break time, and then I threw up all over my desk. I *think* I may have told the teacher "I told you I was going to be sick". But that's the only time I've ever experienced being refused).
"It's also due to the rise in parents suing schools"
Is that actually true? I have never heard of a parent suing schools (here in the UK) and the courts here have a habit of excessively siding with schools (recently the Supreme Court decided schools could fine parents for child absences on the basis of a law that requires "regular attendance" at school).
I understood all this stuff as an attitude that drives a general ratcheting of behaviours that are in-theory risk averse but are in-practice nonsense.
One of my kids' schools had no doors on the toilet cubicles, because doors could be dangerous if misused. Parents were not allowed on-site at all and had to stand on the pavement because of the fear of on-site child abuse.
To use the monkey bars are another kids' school, they have to pass a monkey bar "driving test" to show they can safely use the monkey bars. My son one day was spotted going the non-prescribed direction on the monkey bars (I assure you they're symmetrical) and had his confiscated, banning him from the monkey bars.
This shouldn't be confused with over-protective instincts. One day my son screwed something up. So they decided to punish him by not feeding him. He was 5. We only found out when we picked him up. (We had words and they never did that again.)
"so, what the heck is a 'hall pass' anyway?"
One of my friends in London told me her daughter's school had a rule that children can only go to the toilet at break times. One lesson her 5 year old daughter forgot to go at break time, and was told she had to wait until the next break, and some time later wet herself.
All the teachers involved seemed like lovely people that decided to be teachers because they love kids... that somehow adopted these horrible ideas working in these places.
Asymmetric risk. If I let a five-year-old wander the school alone, the worst thing that happens is she gets abducted and I'm to blame. If I don't let a five-year-old wander the school alone, the worst thing happens is that she wets herself and I'm not to blame.
Hm, I don't think this example works because there are so many safeguards against abduction in the school, that if one of them failed it would be that safeguard (the teacher who failed to lock the door, or failed to screen someone) who would be blamed, not the one who allowed someone to go to the toilet.
But yeah, this sort of thing.
I don't know of a name for this, but there's this failure-mode in humans, I think, wherein under-stress they become panicky and intolerant of perceived uncertainty even when it is counter-productive.
And if enough people are like this enough of the time in an institution then maybe being more relaxed and sensible about things you start feeling like you're being reckless or complacent. Upward-spiral-style.
"Is that actually true? I have never heard of a parent suing schools (here in the UK) " Yes, unfortunately in the US, the dark hand of the lawsuit lawyers is everywhere, governing much public policy. Legal fees is a large line item in the budgets of most school districts.
I don't know that very many parents sue schools, but it only takes a few lawsuits to make schools frightened.
I think most of what Scott's focusing on is allowing choices. There may be a lot of parents who hate homeschooling and just want the schools to be open again, but there's also some who may find it better, especially considering some of the horrors he talked about (though, like you, I never had the hall pass thing).
My impression (with no data backing this up) is that while there are a lot of people who don't like the distance learning thing, there are some who find it much better. Of course, this isn't the same as homeschooling, but you get some of the same benefits. I know one family who, when a parent had to travel to a different state for a job, just moved the whole family there for a month. Making homeschooling a more affordable option would make stuff like that much easier.
> Thirdly, the morning and after-school caretaking. You'll need somebody to do that
Of course, but one worker can take care of many kids, leaving the rest of the parents free. Ideally, they'd be the ones most able to spare the time, or at least compensated fairly for it, though I guess in practice we all know how that can turn out. At the very least, I don't think it'd be worse than any other job with evening hours.
"Yeah, about that. Skipping ahead to the "let parents teach kids at home", we're getting a great example of how this is working during the various lockdowns in countries all over the world. And the consensus seems to be "my God, when is the government going to re-open the schools because we can't manage having the kids at home all the time?""
From everything I've seen, the stress is trying to manage that WHILE also working. If the extra $12k-30k means one parent no longer has to work, that becomes a lot more manageable (though obviously still a lot of work, speaking as someone who was homeschooled by a SAHM).
Honestly having children at home all day is pretty draining even if you are a SAHM and don't need to work.
I'm just not super interested in hearing anyone's opinions on 'parenting' , or the optimal approach to child rearing, etc., who isn't a parent, in the same way that I'm indifferent to anyone offering advice on how to react in a fire fight that's never been in a combat zone.
If that's addressed at me I'm a parent.
I'd also like to meet these legions of parents who are making $6-$15hr who would love to be able to discuss the nuances of Aristotle with their kids if they could just pry themselves away from work for 40 hrs a week.
For all the people who I know that would consider 'home school an option' if everything broke right, $30k a year- or less- is not moving the needle. And I was a roofer for 14 years, so it's not like I'm just making a guess here.
Homeschooling no longer means the parent has to teach the kid. The parent becomes a "project manager" that makes sure their kid takes the right classes, does homework, passes the tests, troubleshoots their access/wifi if needed and sets up outdoor extracurriculars and playdates with other kids. k12.com takes care of the curriculum.
Right. And I'm for that, actually ( I home schooled my son for 7th grade), so it's not the notion of home school that I'm opposed to. It's the idea of financially incentivizing parents to do it that I think is a bad idea.
Just because you are worried about cases where parents take advantage of the system to either:
A. Pocket the money without educating their children
or
B. Use it to keep their children at home and abuse them
or C. something else?
Because when I see those objections I think "man, good thing our education system never pockets money without educating children or results in child abuse!"
I'm being a bit facetious here, but I do wonder if you are falling for some status quo bias. But since you haven't stated your argument yet I may just be responding to a strawman, in which case, I apologize in advance :)
Hi A-H,
Basically, my problem with it comes down to the fact that the calculations made for this kind of thing always identify the average cost, but not the marginal cost, for educating a kid. So, yes-- if the school's budget is $10m, and they have 500 kids, then I guess you can say it's 'costing' $20k a year per kid. But a lot of that $10m goes to fixed costs, so that kind of accounting is deceptive.
If another kid enters the school, bringing the total to 501 kids, it isn't costing $20k to educate her. The marginal cost is probably a couple thousand dollars, at best. So giving someone $20k to keep their kid out of the school is a wild overpayment, because that doesn't reflect anything close to what it would actually cost to keep that one kid in school for the next year.
If this is true, it would follow that average cost is much lower in large schools. Is it? School size went up a lot in the past, and my impression is that average cost per student went up, not down.
What fixed costs are you thinking of? Heating a building 90% as large costs about 90% as much, and similarly for the cost of janitors' services and the like. Are you assuming that the number of students goes up or down but everything else stays fixed? That's true in the short run but not in the long.
Hi David,
All other factors being constant, the avg total cost is much lower in large schools ( consider two schools that are completely identical, except that one has 2 students and one has 20. The avg total cost for the second is going to be lower than the first).
You mention that 'School size went up a lot in the past, and my impression is that average cost per student went up, not down', and this is my impression too-- but it's down to factors independent of the relationship between avg cost and marginal cost: I.e., money into athletics, higher insurance premiums, more students getting IEPs, increases in special ed and ancillary support services, etc."
Fixed costs would be any expense that doesn't go up as the number of students go up. Once the school is built, for example, you're stuck paying off the bond issue, whether one kid is enrolled or 1000 are. Or, another example, once you've paid someone to teach a section of Intro to American Lit, the marginal cost of adding another student to that class is basically $0. The marginal cost can be thought of 'educating the next kid who enrolls', and that cost is almost always going to be really low-- so if we're going to give people vouchers, or just cash refunds for not enrolling their kid, the value of those vouchers/refunds needs to reflect that.
Once the school is built, you cannot easily change its size. But if there are five schools in town and they are all down to 80% full you can close one and sell the building for another use. The small private school we were part of for a while was operating in one part of what had been a public school campus. Or a school that is 80% full can rent out part of its building to a private school or some other use.
You are missing the organizational diseconomies of scale. The bigger the school, the less the incentive for any parent to try to fix things, since his influence is smaller. The more layers of administration between the principal and the classroom. There is a reason why very few industries consist of a single firm.
The point isn't that they'd 'discuss the nuances of Aristotle' at home. The point is that discussing the nuances of Aristotle is completely useless for most kids and they'd be better off just doing what actually interests them or playing around.
I can't speak to elementary school, but in high school when I taught, hall passes were a thing because some students would cut class and wander the halls, sometimes disrupting other classes, etc. A hall pass was needed to allow administrators know who was out of class for a legitimate reason, and who was not.
Also, I think people are overstating the significance of a hall pass. In most cases, a hall pass is simply a written permission slip. So, in practice, most teachers' practice was exactly what you experienced: "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Yes, but please hurry, and write a pass for me to sign."
I don't know how broadly true this is, geographically or temporally.
I was in high school in the early 2000s on Long Island, and over the course of that time my school went from most teachers just handing out an eraser or piece of wood with "hall pass" written on it to the school mandating that every student in the halls during classes getting detention, even if the bell just rang and they're across the hall from the room they're supposed to be in, unless they have a hall pass written on specific paper and filled out with the date, time, reason for being in the hall, and teacher's signature. Also, all but two of the school bathrooms (out of I think eight) were locked throughout the day, so when you did get a pass, you'd be gone at least twice as long, and teachers weren't supposed to give out more than one bathroom pass at a time. Also also, we were required to wear our student IDs on a lanyard at all times, even during class sitting at our desks, and yes, school staff working as hall monitors did occasionally look into a classroom from the hall and interrupt classes to give detentions to students who took their IDs off.
I can recall attempts to implement something similar, because 1) shockingly, some students use bathroom passes not to go to the bathroom, but to engage in tomfoolery of varying degrees of severity (I recall one student who asked for a bathroom pass on the first day of class; I told him, "I will never give you a pass all year, because last year I saw you roaming the halls every day); 2) many problems on campus, especially serious problems such as violence, are caused by nonstudents who come on campus; hence, the ID policy. The interrupting class thing strikes me as very, very much not the norm.
I now remember the Mark Harmon movie "Summer School" where a kid asks for a bathroom pass on the first day and isn't seen again until the final exam.
Did he pass? I also recall being a long term sub, and there was one kid ("Johnny Smith") who was constantly disrupting class, every day, for weeks. Then, one day, another kid shows up and says, "Hi, I'm Johnny Smith." It turns out that the original kid knew that the real Johnny Smith was going to be out indefinitely, so he figured it would be fun to cut class and pretend to be him
Yeah, IIRC I don't think the interrupting class thing lasted more than a semester or two, it was probably more part of the suddenly-implementing-poorly-thought-out-policies overreaches.
I find it odd that you, of all people, are skeptical of the idea of people learning things outside of the school system. If most of your education, as demonstrated in conversations on SSC, comes from your schooling, Ireland must have a very impressive educational system.
I'm not sceptical of people learning outside the system, I'm sceptical of them getting the chance. The notion of "pay the parents the $12,000 a year so one can stay home and teach the kids" is a nice one, but how it would work out in practice is a different matter. Some people will have the ability, desire and interest to make it work. Many people won't, or will not be able to juggle responsibilities enough to make it work. I think a lot of kids would be told "oh just look something up online" or would be let run feral - as long as they're out of the house and out from under the adult's feet, who cares?
I think school also provides a structure and a range of subjects - there's constant arguing over the curriculum and dropping 'useless' subjects, but it does give everyone a chance to have a taste and see if they do have a talent for languages or maths or music or art or science. Again, plenty of kids will be totally uninterested in how they're presented, or only want to learn one or two particular subjects, but that's life.
We've got a system and it's not ideal by any means, but poking and prodding at it in bits and pieces is rather like dismantling a car while you're travelling in it. You have no right to be surprised if you don't get to your destination after you've unbolted the engine and it fell out five miles back.
The main, big question is "what do we want from school? what is the purpose of education?" and everybody has a different answer. And it's still mainly potential employers who want good employees. Maybe the emphasis has changed from "we want people who will stand for hours on assembly lines doing repetitive manual work" to "we want critical thinking and STEM skills" but the end result of that is still "so they can fit in to a job being productive and making money for our business", not "for the general sake of having a body of citizens who can think critically".
Until we sort that out, we are still going to be loading school with more and more unattainable functions - of not alone educating kids so they can all be coders and get good-paying jobs, but of being Good Citizens and childminding them and feeding them and the other tasks that are the purview of the parents and the family.
I agree with Freddie that no, school is not a magic wand where you can just cram in more "education" and make sure that 100% of the class all graduate with dazzling test scores and go on to middle-class white collar professional jobs even if Dad was a laid off coal miner or Mom was an inner city single parent. No matter how much money you throw at it, or fancy new types of schools, or fancy new paedogogic theories, or social justice activism where you teach anti-racist mathematics instead of the old-fashioned kind about getting the correct solution - https://www.todos-math.org/statements - that is not going to change this fact.
(Actually, being thick as two short planks when it comes to maths, I would flourish like the green bay tree under an anti-racist maths and addressing social and emotional needs in maths classrooms structure during my schooling, but I still wouldn't learn any maths).
So what do we put in place? Having worked, as I've mentioned, in clerical support on an early school leavers' programme, I can tell you from first hand experience that letting kids leave at 15 is not going to result in every single one going on to learn for themselves or get a job or be productive. The most vulnerable need a heck of lot of support (often psychological). The little potential criminals prefer to smoke weed, do petty crime, and be pains in the arse of every person who has to deal with them.
"Ireland must have a very impressive educational system."
Ah, I went to school to the nuns - the Mercy Order, the same ones that ran the Mid-western hospital Scott worked at (I still remember the photo he shared of the interior and me going "I recognise that, that's the Mercy Cross!" https://www.mercyworld.org/newsroom/the-mercy-cross-281/). You'll have to ask our host for the benefits or not associated with that 😁
You'll have to ask our host his opinions on the benefits or not
Scott,
I appreciate this review a lot.
All your ALL-CAPS yelling especially is appreciated.
I've been a teacher, outside the systems, for basically my whole 30 year career ... and I've home/un-schooled my 5 kids.
Burn it all down and replace it with nothing would be better than the Child-prison complex we have now.
I hope you eventually bite the bullet, and finish your path on this.
And thanks for this. your vituperation was especially appreciated.
You're a lot more interesting and engaging when you talk about your personal experiences than when you wriggle on and around the IQ of black people, and I was pleasantly surprised by this sincere turn at the end. FYI, Intelligence isn't a real journal - they've been known to publish absolute trash papers, and for all its 'predominance' in the field of 'intelligence research' its impact factor is < 3 which is a joke. Generally speaking, the entire field of 'intelligence research' is a joke and you shouldn't listen to their 'specialists' (listen to geneticists instead).
Wait, hang on a second. You're acting like DeBoer is trying to make school more mandatory. But it sounds like he's just trying to make it more available.
Did he also propose banning homeschooling or something? Is the universal childcare supposed to be mandatory?
Or would your anti-school response be equally applicable to any non-abolitionist educational position, with this rant just landing on DeBoer because you happened to be reading his book?
Maybe I'm just having a hard time understanding because I liked school and was treated well there, but this doesn't really feel like a rational response.
(Also, you are really underselling how bad child labour is.)
Yeah, I read the book and a lot of DeBoer's points seem to be "allow kids to not go to school at all, but also allow them to go to school if they want to, and somewhat encourage it because education is good and homeschooling takes up parent time," which seems entirely reasonable and not at all what Scott is arguing about.
Or is this first and foremost inspired by his opposition to charters?
There's a thin line between mandatory and available for school, given that parents decide whether or not to send their children there, and given social expectations/rat races. I don't think people *wanted* to be competing to get their kids into the best preschools, but here we are.
I am mostly concerned about eliminating charter schools, which I think are a useful escape route.
Isn't that "thin line" a fully general argument against the availability of anything good for children?
Take for example private tutors. They do some good. If we increased access to tutors, then the rat race might make it socially required. In fact, that specific rat race has already occurred in South Korea.
We could tax positional goods, like education.
So there are cases in life where escape routes only available to some (and encompassing all decision makers and influencers) allow a addressable problem to go unaddressed.
I guess this isn't HIS argument against charter schools (which I am assuming means schools you have to pay to go to).
Or as Gabriel says, they can make a problem worse by creating a rat race (I think this is what is going on with mortgages in the UK and house prices for the past few years).
My personal answer to this is that I am happy for my friends who can afford to send their kids to private schools, where their kids are generally much happier and get a better time. My kids and I will continue to muddle through the state-school-system, which seems so systematically horrible it is baffling to me.
All the state-schools in this area follow the "cloud chart" system. They have a massive blue area on the wall, with a cloud in the middle, and going in one direction you have progressively worse weather (rain, storms, lightning, volcanos) and in the other direction you have the opposite. Everyone has a little picture with their name on a moveable label. They all start the day on the cloud. Then for each act of good or bad behaviour they are moved up or down this ranking. Part of the idea is the public celebration or humiliation as reward and deterrent. It really messes up the kids and everyone I've met who wasn't trained as a teacher in the state-sector thinks it's an offensively bad idea (but I say this wondering if I'll get an interesting response here) -- but the state-school-teachers all buy it.
"I guess this isn't HIS argument against charter schools (which I am assuming means schools you have to pay to go to)."
You are assuming incorrectly. Charter schools are more analogous to Academies - publicly funded, but outside the control of the local education authorities, with greater freedom to decide how to go about their business. America does also have private schools, but they're not the subject of this discussion.
Thanks! Also sounds similar to "free schools" in the UK (where free refers to freedom from the local authority, rather than cost-free, but they /are/ cost-free).
Yes, absolutely; I think I'm right in saying that Free Schools are a subset of Academies rather than an entirely distinct category, but I'm not au fait enough with the nuances (on either side of the Pond) to say whether they're more or less similar to US Charters than other types of Academy.
not to be cnn philosophical but an escape route from what/who? if society bases decisions on something else are you “helping” any child by avoiding it? maybe but at what point is the decision the childs not the parents?
I think the issue with charter schools is a collective action one. They may provide an escape for some students, but at the cost of making the situation for the remaining students worse, by reducing the incentive to change by removing the most politically influential parents. (Same applies to private schools). So if you care about maximising total outcomes you should tradeoff the worse experience for the small number who can escape now for making the system better for everyone.
Or to put it another way, if the rich had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor, they'd probably be better. (This is also an issue with the local property tax model of school funding in a lot of the US)
This sounds like holding rich kids hostage until someone figures out a way to deal with poor kids, though no one has a clue what can be done to improve education for the members of a group many of whose families, for whatever reason, send kids to school who can't readily learn and/or can't avoid disrupting the learning process for everyone around them. And we would lose the advantage that giving at least some people an exit option always confers: the monopoly, deprived of its captive audience, is required to innovate until it improves its performance somehow.
I made a different top-level comment about this but deleted it when I found yours.
Freddie definitely wants people to be able to drop out at 12, so he doesn't want people to be required to go to schools.
"If they exist, parents will send them there" seems like a different problem to fix. Once school is not *required*, it gives the students bargaining power with their parents. Obviously some parents would never care what their kids say, but overall I don't think we should be running society for what the worst parents do. (And if we run them as if we're just trying to worry about "what the worst parents do" we would *definitely* require kids to be in schools away from them.)
"I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work"
It's weird that you say this about one person, but then don't read Marx and uncharitably characterize his work as "Fallacious" (never giving an actual citation of any fallacy, of course). When pressed on this, you say that you only have a "gestalt impression" of Marx. If you only have a "gestalt impression" of Marx then how can you judge the writings of other socialists such as DeBoer?
If you're such a fan of DeBoer, don't you think that you should give a honest re-assessment of Marx? Certainly there seems to be a large rhetorical distance between ;
"I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him."
And
"Singer is a known person who can think and write clearly, and his book was just about the shortest I could find, so I jumped on it, hoping I would find a more sympathetic portrayal of someone [Marx] whom my society has been trying to cast as a demon or monster. And I don’t know if this is an artifact of Singer or a genuine insight into Marx, but as far as I can tell he’s even worse than I thought."
I for one eagerly await Scott's review of Das Kapital. Hell, the Civil War in France or the Eighteenth Brumaire will do
"The primary sources – especially when they’re translated, especially when they’re from the olden days before people discovered how to be interesting – just turn me off."
When exactly was 'how to be interesting' discovered by the way? Nerds like myself often highly value reading difficult, dense texts like Marx. I find it interesting and enlightening that Scott Alexander apparently does not value this.
marxbro1917, you are to be congratulated on your willingness to struggle through dense texts, a skill that does have real value. But personally, I find that's much easier to do when the subject of the text really interests me, as I presume it does in your case with Marx. But when a dense text does not hold inherent interest for the struggling reader, the likeliest outcome is not enlightenment but sleep.
If the subject (Marxism) does not hold inherent interest for Scott then the question becomes why has he included it in multiple essays. There's clearly _something_ that interests Scott about Marxism, yet in many many years he has failed to grasp even the basics of Marxist political philosophy. It's sort of a strange situation for a Rationalist subculture which upholds charitability and outgroup thinking.
I kinda feel the materialist view of history would mesh fairly well with some aspects of rationalist thought, especially some of the game theoretical ones, so I've always wanted this too.
It's not that weird, because the respecting-enemies thing was said to be specific to Freddie, not Scott. And it's entirely possible to judge DeBoer's writing on education on its own grounds without having to read Marx first. DeBoer may be writing from a Marxist perspective, but he didn't write his book just for students of Marx.
Ah ok, Scott only respects and is charitable to certain Marxists, I understand.
>And it's entirely possible to judge DeBoer's writing on education on its own grounds without having to read Marx first. DeBoer may be writing from a Marxist perspective, but he didn't write his book just for students of Marx.
"So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says."
How does this relate to Marxism? Without reading Marx, how can one assess the (supposedly) Marxist demand of "equality of results"?
If people aren't familiar with Freddie they may be surprised he actually favors equality of results rather than (the more popular among the American political center) equality of opportunity. That makes Freddie's Marxist relevant, although if he'd been an anarcho-syndicalist that could have served the same purpose of illustrating his distance from the political center.
But 'equality of opportunity' vs 'equality of results' are bourgeois American political categories and debates, not Marxist ones. So I'm afraid that Scott, not being very familiar at all with Marx (a "gestalt impression" by his own admission), is not really understanding the way Marxists approach this issue.
He's explaining to bourgeois Americans what Freddie's positions are in categories they would understand. And "equality of results" sounds an awful lot like "to each according to his needs".
>He's explaining to bourgeois Americans what Freddie's positions are in categories they would understand.
This is necessarily a lossy way of coding information (to use a metaphor). If Scott wants to truly explain Marxist material he needs to be familiar with people like Marx and the specific language they use. Otherwise you end up implying things that were not implied in the original texts, and even misrepresenting thinkers. It is surprising to me that Scott Alexander is not more sensitive to this problem given his own recent experiences in the NYT.
>And "equality of results" sounds an awful lot like "to each according to his needs".
No it doesn't, because different people have different needs and therefore have different results.
Scott didn't copy-paste the entire book into this review, nor did he encode with with lossless compression. Of course this is necessarily a lossy way of coding information! People need to read the actual book for the lossless info!
If diabetics need insulin in order to not die, and they get insulin while non-diabetics don't, then it's expected they will have the equal outcome of not dying.
"Scott didn't copy-paste the entire book into this review, nor did he encode with with lossless compression. Of course this is necessarily a lossy way of coding information! People need to read the actual book for the lossless info!"
What I'm expressing here is that "equality of result" is not a good way of expressing the aims of Marxists. If that's what DeBoer wants, then that's an extremely unorthodox take within Marxism, which should be noted by Scott. However, Scott isn't familiar with Marxism and cannot make these kinds of observations.
"If diabetics need insulin in order to not die, and they get insulin while non-diabetics don't, then it's expected they will have the equal outcome of not dying."
But the result of spending time in a hospital, having people nurse them, taking up resources - these are all unequal results. This is why Marxists tend not to talk about "equality of result" - equality in one category usually means inequality in another. Marxists are all about rational organisation of an economy, not making sure that every little petty equality is maintained.
The degree to which Freddie's Marxism is orthodox is irrelevant to Scott's point, which is that Freddie does not have the positions of the political center.
Taking up resources is an input, not an output.
Dude, it's a joke. A funny description of Freddie as an inversion of a quote, and then a reference to it later in the text.
Scott, please. We're begging you. We know you've found the ban button by now because you've banned a couple of other people.
I've expressed all my criticisms in an extremely fair manner, I don't swear and I'm open to debate and discussion. I don't really understand why Rationalists are calling for my banishment and censorship.
Because you're boring. Or at least that's why I'm skimming discussions where you show up.
What would you like me to do in my posts to liven them up a bit?
Well, at least that's an interesting question.
You could improve your average by writing about other parts of your life and opinions. For example, how was your school experience? Has it affected your opinions about politics or anything else?
I don't know whether this is a direct answer, but you seem to assume that there are rules for social engagement, and if you don't break the rules (rules that you seem to have chosen according to your preferences), then you don't have to listen to any criticism of what you're doing.
Unfortunately, I'm not very interested in Marx, and you write about getting Marx right a *lot*. I don't see any way for you to make that more interesting to me, and probably not to other people.
I can barely remember my school experience and I do not really take any information from it. It was probably mixed, as most decade+ long experiences tend to be. It would only be one person's anecdote anyhow. I consider my life to be one long grey blur; it's not so interesting. I usually forget details of my life pretty quickly, I just don't think it's very important information usually.
The rules I play by are standard etiquette in Rationalist circles. In other circles I confirm to different etiquettes.
He's one of the last priests of a dead religion. As Nietzsche said, even though God is dead, his gruesome shadow lives on.
Marxism isn't a religion, it's a political position. And it isn't dead, there are still many Marxist political parties in the world and even entire countries like Cuba.
Now you've hit a pet peeve.
Anti-cursing is a bourgeoisie norm not a working class or Gaelic origin norm. The public broadcasters of most countries that prohibit soft cursing have a narrow definition of public.
I don't think I will say fuck a lot but I reserve the privilege for the appro moment when the alien spaceships arrive in their glory.
There is both geographical and generational variation here, I think. My experience in England is that bourgeois opposition to swearing is rare among those born after perhaps 1960, but that some working class communities - especially in places that had a strong Methodist presence - preserve it. I've got far more black looks for swearing in a pub in a Northumbrian mining town than I ever have in bougie old Oxfordshire.
I'm not personally anti-cursing. It just seems to be a norm within Rationalist circles to never swear much or insult people, so I'm adhering to it.
Once upon a time I lived a large part of my online life on the site metafilter. The mods there referred to behavior such as yours as "axe-grinding". It was a ban-worthy offense because axe-grindy people are exhausting to deal with -- they tend to suck up all of the oxygen in the room, meaning they distract from the main event. They verge on being spammers.
Here in this thread you've used the presence of the word "Marx" in the body of the post to tenuously connect it back your favorite topic of how that one time Scott said this one thing about Marxism and he was wrong and let's continue to talk about it forever.
I get it -- you want a direct response and you're willing to be persistent about it. There are more constructive ways to go about this though. Why don't you write a post about this of your own that lays out your whole case in detail and then link to it and ask for responses in the next open thread?
Also, a suggestion if you do this: you will want to address exactly "Why this is important".
It's important because Marx is an outgroup thinker and his works have large implications for our political economic situation. I think he should be read and understood properly, not dismissed with a few pithy lines.
This is a review of a book by a socialist, and the piece mentions Marx and communism directly. So I feel completely comfortable bringing up the fact that Scott Alexander has shown many times that he hasn't really understood Marxist political theory.
Ehh, insistent cluelessness doesn't seem ban-worthy and if I were Scott I wouldn't want to set such a precedent. Personally I'm learning to get a certain amount of entertainment out of marxbro1917's predictable comments, kind of like watching reality TV or something. It helps to remember that as a matter of intellectual charity I can't take his stuff seriously-- he's practically a straw man for Marxism.
How am I a strawman for communism? This seems like a very mean and uncharitable thing to say about someone as genuine and scholarly as myself.
For example, can you show that anything I've said about Marxism is a 'straw man' as compared to what Marx said? i.e. prove the disunity between my claims and the claims of Marx, using primary sources.
Totally sincere question, but I'm having a hard time reading tone here:
> This seems like a very mean and uncharitable thing to say about someone as genuine and scholarly as myself.
Is this sarcasm?
No that is not sarcasm.
> For example, can you show that anything I've said about Marxism is a 'straw man' as compared to what Marx said?
Honestly I've read a lot of your comments, and have learned nearly nothing about Marxism from them. If you could take the time to explain your interpretation of Marxism, rather than merely throwing around accusations that others are interpreting it wrong, you wouldn't be getting so much flak.
What do you want to know about Marxism?
I am increasingly liking the idea of volume limits -- X comments per person per unit time. (Per post or across all of them, I'm not sure it matters much.)
I happen to be a fan of token-bucket systems, so perhaps something like: you get one comment-token when a post goes live, and another one for each hour that passes after that. You can accumulate up to, say, 6. (And obviously spending a token lets you make a comment.)
You could also do something like HN based on nesting depth. Perhaps quadratic: a top-level comment can only be replied after 1 minute, a second-level comment after 4 minutes, a third-level comment after 9 minutes...
But really, I think 11 comments in 3 hours, of which about 9 are essentially (and predictably) offtopic, is worth just banning and moving on.
I don't think banning is necessary as long as people who don't want to read a comment thread can just collapse it. Unfortunately Substack doesn't seem to support that yet.
It does: click the vertical line to the left of a set of comments to collapse them.
Thanks!
"I am increasingly liking the idea of volume limits -- X comments per person per unit time. "
Many people respond to my posts, so I respond to many people. This is logical. The idea that I have to censor myself and conform to certain time limits on my posting is quite ridiculous. I am trying to have in depth discussions and debates, which means the volume of my work is often quite long. I find that idea that people don't like my writings because I write a lot to be strange; many rationalists write a large volume of text.
One of the things I like about blogging's erosion of the writer vs commenter is that commenters can easily start their own blogs. I would recommend you do that so niche discussions can move there.
This is a polite request to censor myself and move it elsewhere so that the window of discussion on Scott Alexander's blog is made smaller. E.g. The outgroup should get out.
And no, I won't be conforming to your request.
I don't want you to avoid making your initial comments. But once the back-and-forth goes on a few comments, it gets unreadable here. I've created a post where you can put your comments you'd like me to respond to here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/a-place-for-marxbro1917-to-continue-his-comments-on-ac10s-review-of-the-cult-of-smart/
I've initially password-protected it with your username (I thought, incorrectly, that would keep it off the front page of my blog), but I'll make it public once you comment there.
I enjoy the back and forth here and I also sort of enjoy the aesthetics of the unreadable posts. I would much prefer continuing to respond here (I only have so many websites I can keep up-to-date with)
If you want to discuss things with me outside of Scott's blog I would recommend to PM me on my reddit account
https://www.reddit.com/user/MarxBroshevik/
I check this website (reddit) on a semi-regular basis, it's a bit easier than checking your own personal wordpress blog.
I am gobsmacked by your statement about unreadable posts.
I don't have a reddit account and don't plan on getting one. Sorry.
What you’re describing is you coming in, starting flame wars, and eventually wearing out your conversation partners through sheer insistence alone. You make isolated demands for rigor around anything even remotely having to do with Marx. If the discussion has nothing to do with Marx, you somehow manage to bring Marx into it anyway.
Rationalists write a large volume of *interesting* text. You haven’t hit that bar, not even close. Your writing is one-note and not at all illuminating. The most common thing you do is just demand that people go back to primary sources and read Marx directly, which is not a reasonable demand of anyone’s time. You do this as if to cast shame on the people that haven’t read it, and as a method of invalidating any criticism related to communism and Marxism that isn’t perfectly aligned with Marx’s original writings.
You have the capacity to be much better. You can describe Marx’s ideas in your own words, much like Scott did here for this book. You can describe how this relates to the topic at hand, rather than just admonishing Scott for not reading Marx for the umpteenth time. You can make people *interested* in Marx by talking about what you personally got from the primary sources.
So far, you haven’t been doing that. You’ve been filling up comment section after comment section with admonitions, goading people into arguing with you, and nitpicking people until their frustration gets the best of them. You can do better.
I fully expect you now want to reply to this with a dismissal, or a rebuttal, or a nitpick of some sort where you say “technically, I didn’t do this” or “can you prove where I did this”, at which point I will give up because going through your comment history to win an argument with you is not worth my time. My point is not to win this argument with you. My point is to express what it feels like to read your comments, and to impress on you that if what you want is to actually discuss Marx’s ideas, then you’re doing it badly and making people hate both you and Marx.
In other words: you’re treating discussion like a competition.
It feels like you’re commenting to “win” and to make yourself feel smart e.g.:
“Nerds like myself often highly value reading difficult, dense texts like Marx. I find it interesting and enlightening that Scott Alexander apparently does not value this.”
Instead of using it to actually come to a shared understanding with other people.
Treating every conversation like an adversarial competition is arguably a bullying tactic, and so you shouldn’t be surprised that it makes people want to not deal with you anymore.
It's not a competition. If Scott Alexander does not value difficult texts like Marx then that's his entirely subjective tastes, and he has every right to express those tastes. I'm just saying that I find it interesting that there are a subsection of nerds (and let's face it, Rationalists are usually self-proclaimed nerds) that do not highly value dense, rich texts that examine nerdy things like philosophy and economics in such erudite detail.
You just got some very good advice from Kronopath. Instead of any moment of reflection, you doubled down on telling everyone how much better you are because you value rich, dense, luxurious, exquisite (are you talking about Marx or are you quoting a shampoo commercial?) texts. The repeated uses of "I find it interesting that.." are poorly veiled insults.
Again, Kronopath gave you some real feedback. If you really want to have productive discussions, you should attempt to understand the perspective from which it came and try to modify your behavior accordingly. If you are instead attempting to be the metaphorical equivalent of the person who litters everyone's cars in a parking lot with Marx pamphlets that demand people never discuss anything tangential to Marx without having thoroughly read all of it, by all means, carry on.
I'm not demanding that people have read "all" of Marx (such a thing would take many, many years) - I am asking people (in this case Scott Alexander) to cite their statements. If Scott Alexander says that Marx has fallen prey to some sort of Fallacy (going far enough to attempt to name it after Marx) then I think it should be a fairly standard requirement to cite the primary sources in which Marx made such a fallacy. This was never done. In subsequent conversations Scott Alexander admitted that he had only a "gestalt impression" of Marx's work.
Given this information, one then wonders why he is trying to coin a phrase against his ideological outgroup without any actual proof that this outgroup thinker (Marx) actually committed said Fallacy.
My phrasing are not "poorly veiled insults". I mean what I write and I'm very open about my beliefs. If you think that I'm being insulting by simply saying what I find interesting about some matter, then I'm not sure how well suited you are for Rationalist discourse. I don't see why you would assume that statements about what I find interesting are "insults".
"making people hate both you and Marx."
Unfortunately I have very little control over other people's emotional reactions. I don't think people's "frustration" should get the better of anyone after I ask Scott to perform the most basic of sourcing and citation. You may find what I do to be "nitpicking", but I take small details such as.... finding a primary source... to be quite important when we are discussing what people said and if they actually committed any fallacies.
I would oppose volume limits. This is already my eighth comment on this post and I don't think I'm being in any way excessive. There are a lot of different subtopics branching off the main post. I also wrote 21 comments on the coronavirus open thread, and I'd invite critique on any of them but so far they all seem to have passed without bothering anyone.
I suspect there are a lot of people who are making a large number of comments per post but you aren't noticing the volume because they aren't drawing your attention.
Marxbro is by far the most interesting commenter on ACX and it's not even a competition. He's the only one who brings actual intellectual diversity in the usual tedium of milequetoast liberalism peppered with the occasional mask-slipping posts about IQ and race. If he were banned my respect for Scott would be considerably lower.
People who use the phrase 'mask-slipping' are invariably uncharitable wokescolds. If the prevailing view here is indeed 'milquetoast liberalism', then what exactly is the mask supposed to be concealing? Or if, as the phrase implies, they're secretly fash, then you should be applauding the intellectual diversity of a site that brings together Marxists with crypto-fascists.
I think the 'mask-slipping' comment would refer to people who say one thing in private (for example, in their correspondence to a close friend or lover) but another thing in semi-public spaces (for example on their blog). I talk a lot about my own politics, but in some instances it's probably a good idea to lay low. I mean, just look how much the Cambridge Five achieved!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt1Muj_4rdM
I think that's fairly normal but it does clash a bit with our (i.e. Rationalists') goals of discussing things openly, even unpopular ideas. Or, as Marx would say:
"It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself."
No, I agree - and kudos for the Mask reference, by the way; I enjoyed it - but I think the accusation of 'mask-slipping is made in bad faith here. It's suggesting that anyone who subscribes to, or even entertains, the Idea That Must Not Be Named is likely far-right or concealing some unsavoury political view.
One of the great virtues of this blog, and the rationalist blogosphere more generally, is the ability to discuss issues like that one with intellectual candour without worrying that a) you're just giving succour to someone who is a genuine racist or b) that the people you're talking to will accuse you of racism for doing so.
If people really do wear masks I don't think 'accusations' of mask-slipping are necessarily made in bad faith.
I'm not sure why anyone openly discussing something as taboo as race and IQ would bother disguising their other views. But the accusation assumes that the only reason anyone would hold that view is to legitimate fascism, which just ain't so.
"I'm not sure why anyone openly discussing something as taboo as race and IQ would bother disguising their other views."
People disguise their views all the time. Do I really have to make the case for that on this blog?
"But the accusation assumes that the only reason anyone would hold that view is to legitimate fascism, which just ain't so."
You're the only one who brought up fascism, not me, and not Thrmm:
"Or if, as the phrase implies, they're secretly fash"
Where was this implied? I think you are reading implications where no implication exists.
If someone expresses a belief in HBD, what view is the mask concealing? Or is the view that the mask is concealing simply a belief in HBD? In which case, the implication is that a belief in HBD is intrinsically disreputable, regardless of the moral/political conclusions your draw from it.
'One of the great virtues of this blog, and the rationalist blogosphere more generally, is the ability to discuss issues like that one with intellectual candour without worrying that a) you're just giving succour to someone who is a genuine racist or b) that the people you're talking to will accuse you of racism for doing so.'
A) would only be true if the community didn't contain any racists? What's the reason for thinking that?
A matter of probability. Genuine racists (and perhaps you and I differ on what constitutes a racist, but I subscribe to Scott's 'definition by motive') don't tend to congregate in circles inhabited by people who are likely to challenge their views. And if they do, they're usually pretty up-front about their beliefs.
I guess I'd need to have a slightly better understanding of what you mean by definition by motive before I know whether I agree with it or not. (I have re-read Against Murderism recently). If the claim is that you have to be aware that you dislike people of a certain race because of their race, or because of some characteristics genetically tied to their race and deliberately attempting to fuck them over or get other people to realize how inherently bad they are to be "racist" then I think I disagree that this is a definition that tracks ordinary usage or is particularly helpful. On the other hand, if the claim is just that you have to have some kind of emotional bias against people of a certain race, whether or not you are aware of it, in order to count as racist, that seems to be at least a plausible claim about the ordinary concept, and I'm less opposed to people defining racist that way*. (I mean, I guess there will be weird edge cases that the definition doesn't cover, like a really apathetic orthodox Nazi who doesn't actually care about whether what he thinks is politically right happens, but that's true for any definition; no non-mathematical concept is definable**).
As for whether the community contains racists on either version of the 'definition by motive':
On the one where it just involves some kind of negative emotional and cognitive bias against blacks it seems overwhelmingly to me that it does. Some people in the community are big into Reaction (yes, I know it is a minority and many readers are liberal; for one thing I am a very regular reader and I'm broadly left-liberal, though not socialist). And it's not hard to see why that would be potentially attractive to people who on some level *want* to believe negative things about blacks. People-even rationalists who are are careful about having evidence for more specific and empirical claims mostly pick their broad ideological views for emotional reasons. Combined this with the fact that there were quite a lot of reactionaries in the community and that very many non-racists in the current US have a strong emotional bias against reactionary type views, and so would be underrepresented amongst reactionaries even if the views weren't positively attractive to racists, and that the community is hundreds of people at least, and it seems pretty damn likely some racists (on my reading of 'racist') are members. Indeed, I've seen reactionaries express their views here or possibly on LessWrong (pretty sure it was Konkvistador, but I don't have a link if you doubt me) say things like 'blacks clearly have a lower capacity for civilization than other groups', which certainly *sounds* like the phrasing a racist would use to express a Murray-ish view on race/IQ (For contrast, think how hard it is to imagine Scott himself expressing the view quite like that, even if he became totally converted to it.) Some of the beliefs held by some reactionaries sound like beliefs you would be (in my view extremely) *unlikely* to arrive at without racism in at least this sense: i.e. Moldbug's admiration for Carlyle's writings on slavery.
On the 'must know they dislike X race and be consciously motivated to act against it' it's harder to say. I think that kind of thing is quite rare, and mostly confined to open Nazis and perhaps Nation of Islam-type black supremacist groups. It wouldn't astound me if some reactionaries in the community fell into this category, but I haven't checked to see. (Note, I am not doubting your or Scott's opposition to this sort of thing.)
I actually think there's a mistake you're making here that doesn't have a left-right/red-blue valence. You are treating a bias-racism-like it is something only people who are generally irrational would have. But it's basic Rationalist doctrine, and also obviously true, that everyone is biased, even people with a liking for careful cognition and rational argumentation.
*With the fairly major caveat that I have some sympathy for the idea in this post that 'racist' can be applied to societies on the basis of how they operate, even if no one is motivated by racial animus, though I think this is a complex issue, as its clear that just having a social rules that happen, by sheer coincidence to favor one race over another isn't a sufficient condition for a society being racist: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6j0i9x/against_against_murderism/
**MAYBE, "bachelor" can be defined as "unmarried man", but Jerry Fodor's question of 'is the Pope a bachelor?' makes even this unclear.
‘If the claim is that you have to be aware that you dislike people of a certain race because of their race… if the claim is just that you have to have some kind of emotional bias against people of a certain race, whether or not you are aware of it…’
Something more like the second concept. Certainly, I think people can be unconsciously racist, according to ordinary usage. Perhaps we need to distinguish the two types, or react to them differently; someone who has an unconscious racial bias while believing himself racially unbiased likely requires a different approach from, at the extreme end, a member of the KKK.
‘Some people in the community are big into Reaction…’
Yes, I might have been hasty in declaring that it’s safe to assume that the person you’re talking to isn’t racist in the above sense. But my original comment related to an accusation of ‘mask-slipping’. Advocates of Reaction typically go beyond a belief in HBD to espouse a certain set of (reactionary!) policies which they see as following from that belief.
I don’t see how knee-jerk accusations of that kind (‘mask-slipping’ in relation to HBD) help to distinguish between a) those who are consciously motivated by racial animus b) those who aren’t but have some unconscious racial animus and unwittingly hold beliefs derived from it which they seek to rationalise and c) those who hold no racial animus but have been sincerely persuaded of the truth of HBD.
‘You are treating a bias-racism-like it is something only people who are generally irrational would have. But it's basic Rationalist doctrine, and also obviously true, that everyone is biased, even people with a liking for careful cognition and rational argumentation.’
This is a fair point but I think the sorts of biases to which even rationalists are prone – confirmation bias, for example – would play out in this case as ‘I have a prior belief in HBD, therefore I will disregard evidence that seems to disconfirm that’.
That leaves open the question of *how* that belief was formed in the first place and, while I don’t doubt that rationalists are capable of forming beliefs on the basis of emotion, I would say it’s prima facie less likely that their belief will have been formed on the basis of (conscious or otherwise) dislike of a certain race.
Why? Because a) racism, certainly of the overt kind, seems to be a low-IQ phenomenon b) racism is usually correlated with other forms of prejudice and, stipulatively, the HBD proponents we’re talking about don’t hate LGBT people et. al (this may be more ambiguous in the case of Reaction proponents, I suppose), and HBD proponents usually admit that Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQs, when typical racists aren’t fans of these groups either, and c) because I think someone genuinely committed to eliminating their own cognitive biases would fairly quickly detect a bias against other races or a particular race.
You really find someone telling someone that what they've said about Marx's view is wrong over and over again, without elaborating on what Marx's views actually are "interesting"?
I've quoted Marx multiple times in this comments section.
Okay, I somewhat take that back, I haven't read every corner of the thread. But you have *also* done a lot of what I said.
For the most part I operate under Christopher Hitchen's razor ""That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." If someone claims that Marx's position was _x_ then I just ask them for evidence that he said _x_, using primary sources.
I do this because I've often written long posts about Marx, often quoting Marx at length, and people either don't read my post, or don't read (or don't understand?) the excerpts of Marx I'm quoting.
So yes, I'm making people do a little bit of work. I've often compared sloppy citations and unsourced work to making a mess in the kitchen. It only takes 20 seconds to smash plates on the floor and throw flour everywhere, then it takes 20 minutes for someone else to clean it up. Similarly, someone can claim something like 'Marx wanted everyone to earn an equal amount of money' - it takes them 10 seconds to write this. There may be actual malice in this occasionally, but I think most Rationalists are just repeating misunderstandings that they heard elsewhere and only vaguely remember. Then it takes takes me 20 or 30 minutes for me to find the best quotes where Marx explains that's _not_ what he's advocating at all.
Can you see why this would be quite annoying for someone like me and why I'm advocating for clear citations of outgroup thinkers?
If Marxbro had pointed out some relevant things Marx said about education, his posts on this thread would be interesting. Otherwise they amount to no more than relentless complaints that Scott is unfairly dismissive of the works of Marx. Which may well be true, but once would be enough to point it out.
If Scott never corrects his mistakes regarding Marx, then no, once was not enough.
Hey, why not do this corrective work in a manner which does not disrupt the comment threads as much. You have to agree that bringing up mistakes from old posts are often a bit of-topic, and could be better explained fully also to people who have not read your comments on earlier posts. Maybe you could make a post somewhere called “litany of Scott’s anti-marxist mistakes”, and post a link to this in every blogpost - with a note for every new sin you have added to the doc from the post. It could then be legible to people who would not know what you are talking about when you mention “gestalt impression”, without being as noisy.
If the list was well written and made some good points I personally would be very interested in seeing Scott answer it in depth; even though I feel he is mostly justified in not responding to each (sometimes a bit nitpicky - I mean citations for a joke post, really?) comment you make.
I would have loved to see you comment what Marx said about education, or what you think a Marxist approach to the topic would be, in relation to the blogpost - but I have not seen it because of focus on earlier mistakes.
The "joke" post that Scott wrote featured a joke that shows he doesn't understand the basics of Marx's philosophy. This is failure of an Ideological Turing Test and it serves no purpose except for getting people to sneer at the outgroup (Marxists).
I have written a short post here: detailing some of Scott's more obvious errors:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gc27k5/author_reacts_to_ssc_book_review/fpbulfv/
I may work on a much longer post in future.
People! Stop interacting with this guy. Each time he claims Scott mischaracterized Marx and demands “primary sources” to support Scott’s characterization. Each time commentators provide primary sources (including myself) showing Scott’s interpretation of Marx was reasonable. He never responds and never cites primary sources himself. He gives no indication of having read anything by Marx or having anything other than a superficial knowledge of Marx.
I think we have a coordination problem.
The co-ordination problem is that I'm bringing up valuable points yet others are begging to either ban or ignore me. That's definitely a co-ordination problem.
Which primary source and how does it show Scott's interpretation was reasonable?
You have never responded to the many people citing Marx’s words to you and don’t appear to be familiar with his work. Scott’s characterization would be uncontroversial to almost anyone familiar with Marx’s work.
Which characterization are you referring to?
He did cite a primary source at least one time.
> It is weird for a libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself, but I am prepared to insist on this.
IMO, the concept you're looking for is better termed "orthogonality" rather than "equality". It's not about making things equal, but rather about making sure that in all cases only what's relevant is considered -- or, as Eliezer would say, hugging the query.
Do you think it is different from 'egalitarian'?
Would like you to know that as soon as you started ranting about how terrible Child Prison is, I started pumping my fists in the air and going "yessssssssssssssss!" out loud, earning me stares from my housemates.
Don't know if that's ever happened to me before, reading a blog piece.
You must be new to Scott's writing then. :)
Been reading for about four years now. I just really, REALLY hate public schools.
"This is a compelling argument. But it accidentally proves too much. If white supremacists wanted to make a rule that only white people could hold high-paying positions, on what grounds (besides symbolic ones) could DeBoer oppose them? After all, there would still be the same level of hierarchy (high-paying vs. low-paying positions), whether or not access to the high-paying positions were gated by race. It seems like rejecting segregation of this sort requires some consideration of social mobility as an absolute good."
Disagree, I think you are wrong.
He is rejecting the idea that more social mobility -> better outcomes.
This is not the same as thinking less social mobility -> better or equal outcomes.
I read that quote as meaning that social mobility is fine as it is.
He's specifically saying: "Why should we as leftists want more social mobility...."
Also "only white people holding high paying positions" would be increased social mobility, since currently not only white people hold high-paying positions.
DeBoer would argue that for this, a bunch of whites need to get up first, whilst a bunch of non-whites need to get kicked down.
Therefore this scheme is social mobility. Also not helpful to any goals of DeBoer, so at best irrelevant.
But this wouldn't be conservative either, since it would be unjustified by their standards as well. Such a shuffle would have nothing to do with a pecuniary reward incentive for the most capable to maximize their potential for the benefit of society.
DeBoer disagrees with this conservative position as a case for social mobility.
But he probably would agree with the implied conservative position, that kicking the capable down and arbitrarily pushing the less capable up, is not a great benefit to society.
Also in DeBoer world with its raised floor and lowered ceiling, social mobility itself must mean much less since there's less space to be mobile in.
Everyone has a job and has food to eat and is safe. There is little pressure to excel or push yourself hard to compete with your peers. You wait ten years for your car and it's a Trabant. If you're well connected and a doctor, you get your car faster and it's a Wartburg!
[That's the GDR experience incredibly simplified and I'm not saying that he wants the scarcity. Just pointing to an example of how that would look/feel like.]
"He is rejecting the idea that more social mobility -> better outcomes. This is not the same as thinking less social mobility -> better or equal outcomes."
I'm a bit confused - isn't this claiming that we're exactly at the one spot where we've maximized the ability of social mobility to improve outcomes. Why would we expect ourselves to be there?
I read DeBoer as more saying "trying to change the social hierarchy by replacing one rich person with one otherwise-identical poor person is useless, and having a hierarchy at all is bad" while you're arguing against the much weaker position "the current social hierarchy is the best hierarchy there can be," which DeBoer certainly doesn't believe.
He doesn't share your assumption that social mobility matters that much, to begin with.
Like, assume social mobility could span from 0 to 1 and everything above 0.3 is good.
Everything above 0.7 is bad. But anything between 0.3 and 0.7 is more or less the same.
Just avoid the extremes and social mobility isn't an issue worth looking into more.
So the question goes the other way:
Why would you expect that there is a sharply defined maximum and that moving there is straight-forward and worth the cost?
Mind you, I definitely have no opinion on this. I just think that's what he means. Or a more plausible interpretation than yours at least. He could have written that, but he probably didn't expect to need to address a white-supremacist thought experiment. That might be the Spanish inquisition among possible objections :)
I can also only go by that quote and not by having read the whole book. So I might just be misinformed.
deBoer is actually much clearer about this than the review acknowledges.
The third paragraph in the quoted passage goes on to say:
"This is not to suggest that we will ever achieve true equality in all aspects in our society, as any variation between individuals will inevitably result in inequality. Rather the point is that equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation is a realizable and noble goal."
*equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation*, i.e. not stoner surgeons or a homogenous society that denies or suppresses differences in ability.
Social mobility might be progression if using activity as a metric and the value of the whole system is going up at the same time but then there's the possibility it could turn into the Trip to Jerusalem party game where chairs are subtracted in each round - lots of mobility but it's a loser's game because there is a movement cost and the number of niches in society could be static or falling.
He seems to be saying that social mobility is exactly equal in aggregate:
> Mobility, after all, says nothing about the underlying overall conditions of people within the system, only their movement within it. From that standpoint the question is still zero sum.
He seems to be saying that in any system with a hierarchy, it doesn't matter how people move around because the hierarchy still exists. Scott's example shows that some hierarchies are better than others, i.e. ours is better (I think you'll agree?) than one that is rigidly segregated by race.
Yes, the current hierarchy is better than a rigidly race-segregated one.
But DeBoer is not forced to disagree with that statement if he followed his prior logic of a cliff, like Scott implied.
And yes, he focusses on social mobility being a zero sum status competition and rejects the conservative view of it being a virtue discovery mechanism as...... well he doesn't say it's false, he says it's the conservative view.
But he's not completely against a hierarchy.
What he wants is the "winners not being able to lording [their privelege] over the rest of us". There can be a hierarchy without losers having to feel bad about being at the bottom. If being at the bottom is very pleasant.
Lowering the ceiling is necessary to raise the floor.
But he doesn't need this to happen without anyone losing their relative position in the ranking. Everything just gets compressed.
So social mobility can stay the same, increase or decrease now..... it matters even less than before. Being kicked down is no longer a pitiable state of affairs and being raised up is no longer all that enviable.
Honestly, I can only hope I'm getting this right. This is an alien mindset to me and I'm trying my best here.
But I don't see the world in terms of fairness, resentment, status, deserts, moral rights or competition.
I think there's some sort of "typical mind" analogue that occurs whenever people talk about their experiences in school. "I had an awful time in grade school" becomes "Grade schools are prisons" instead of "I went to shitty schools/school district" or even "I'm not the typical student schools were meant to deal with."
I don't say this because I think public schools are great or that there's anything uniquely attractive about the way we do public schooling now. I'm just not sure that dramatic changes would be beneficial to [all, most, X percentile] students, and I think there's a fair chance it could be harmful.
I think Scott is mostly advocated for allowing choices and experimentation. Don't forcibly change everyone's school hours to 9-3, but try it for some and see what happens. If it turns out that this causes all the students to fail or something, then it was a failure and you can get rid of it.
Certainly people have different experiences in school, but I don't think it's a coincidence that hating high school is a common trope, at least in the US. And even if it is a small minority, having more choices would only help those suffering.