His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

Diamond Age by Neal StephensonThe most relevant aspect of Neal Stephenson‘s work to an audience of AI researchers was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from his 30-year-old novel The Diamond Age:

At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance. I’m happy with the fact that the Primer, as described in the novel, doesn’t invariably produce great results. That seems like a measured and realistic outcome. Nevertheless it’s clear that when I wrote this thing I was influenced by a strain of techno-utopian thinking that was widespread in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first becoming available to a mass audience. In those days, a lot of people, myself included, assumed that making all the world’s knowledge available to everyone would unlock vast stores of pent-up human potential.

That promise actually did come true to some degree. It’s unquestionably the case that anyone with an Internet connection can now learn things that they could not have had access to before. But as we now know, many people would rather watch TikTok videos eight hours a day.

[…]

The gist of it is that the system we’ve traditionally used for evaluating students’ performance — homework and tests — just happens to be exquisitely vulnerable to being hacked by students who simply use conversational AI systems to do all the work for them. And they are doing so on a massive scale, to the point where conventional education has essentially stopped functioning. The only way to fairly evaluate how much a student has learned now is by marching them into a classroom with no electronics, handing them a pencil and a blank blue book, and assigning them an essay to write or a math problem to solve. Even this is impractical given that many students never really learned to write by hand.

[…]

This question sent me down a rabbit hole on the topic of self-reliance. After all, if AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs. The euphemism for this role is “prompt engineer” which seems to be a way of suggesting that people who feed inputs to AIs are achieving something that should be valorized to the same degree as designing airplanes and building bridges.

If such a system actually did its job it would have the paradoxical effect of making students less, rather than more, reliant on the use of AI technology.

[…]

My thought last week was that Self-Reliance might contain some wisdom applicable to the challenge of how to educate people in the modern world to rely upon their own knowledge and skill set rather than using AI all the time.

Reader, I did not find anything like that upon re-reading this essay. More the opposite. The overall drift of what Emerson is saying here — and he says it over and over — is that each mind is uniquely positioned to see certain insights. The self-reliant person shouldn’t ignore those merely because they don’t match the conventional wisdom. “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray…God will not have his work made manifest by cowards….He who would gather immortal palms (i.e. be honored for great achievements) must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

That is all intoxicating stuff for a smart young man who styles himself as a free thinker and nonconformist, which is why, when I was in my early twenties, I inhaled it like fentanyl fumes off hot foil. But during the same years as I was poring over this essay and jotting down quotes in my notebook, I was writing by far the worst novel I have ever written—a book that has never been published and never should be.

Emerson grew up in Boston, attended Boston Latin and Harvard, then traveled around Europe and visited England where he hung out with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. His brain was preloaded with the best knowledge base that could possibly have been given a young person of that era. He’d been trained to think systematically and rigorously and to express himself with great fluency in English and probably Latin and other languages as well.

So, yes, when an idea popped into Emerson’s head, chances are it was a pretty damned good one. His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case. And I’d guess that the audience for this essay was similarly well educated. By the time any young person happened upon Self-Reliance, they were probably 99% of the way to being an intellectually mature, highly capable person, and just wanted a bit of self confidence to follow through on good ideas that were coming into their heads—as a result of being that well educated and trained.

When the same advice falls on the ears of people who are not as well informed and not as good at thinking systematically, though, it’s rubbish.

When I first read Self-Reliance, only a few years had passed since the premier of the first Star Wars movie. There’s a pivotal moment in that film when Luke Skywalker is piloting his fighter through the trench on the Death Star, making his bombing run against impossible odds, and he hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice in his head telling him to use the Force. Luke switches off his targeting computer to the consternation of the brass in the ops center. We all know the outcome. It’s a great moment in cinema, and it perfectly encapsulates a certain way of thinking emblematic of the 1970s late hippie scene: the seductive proposition that no one needs a targeting computer, that all we need to do is trust our feelings. Who doesn’t love to hear that? I loved hearing it from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and spent a couple of years of my life building a terrible novel on that foundation.

I have discussed The Diamond Age before.

Posted in Education, Technology | 1 Comment »

No one actually likes high expectations

Monday, July 21st, 2025

By the end of this past school year, Daniel Buck realized that rigorous education is far less popular on the ground than many policy wonks believe:

Of course, everyone pays lip service to high academic and behavioral expectations in general. But when it comes to the particulars, many people — parents, teachers, and administrators alike, most kids, too — bristle at what rigorous education means in practice.

I noticed it first with parents. Working mostly in schools of choice, it was easy to sell prospective parents with rhetoric about academic rigor, challenging curriculum, and the like. But those nodding heads at enrollment meetings often turned to disgruntled emails as the year began. Nightly homework? Demanding tests for which students would need to study for hours? Stressful academic gauntlets? The occasional bad grade or negative disciplinary report? You won’t give full credit for late assignments even if they’re good? No thank you. Give my child straight A’s, don’t mess with my evenings and weekends, and tell me all is well.

It’s odd what “high expectations” means in mainstream education, because I don’t think anyone would expect to maximize learning by spending 9-to-5 at a typical school and then doing homework all evening.

And it’s clear why high school students and their parents want easy A’s; they’re judged against students from other schools, on the same scale, but with little regard for what constitutes an A from class to class or school to school.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment »

A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy

Sunday, July 20th, 2025

Herman the German by Gerhard NeumannDavid Foster reviewed Gerhard Neumann‘s Herman the German ages ago, but I was recently reminded of it:

This is the autobiography of a man who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, apprenticed as an auto mechanic, attended engineering school, moved to China in 1938, was interned by the British as an enemy alien in 1939, transferred to the American forces, joined Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, repaired the first Japanese Zero fighter to be captured in potentially flyable condition, became a U.S. citizen by special act of Congress, and went on to run GE’s entire jet engine business, which he played a major role in creating. (The preceding may be the longest single sentence I’ve ever written in a blog post.) The book should be of interest to those interested in aviation, technology, management, social history, the WWII era, and/or China.

Gerhard Neumann was born in Frankfurt/Oder in 1917, where his father was owner of a factory that processed feathers and down. Gerhard’s parents were Jewish but nonpracticing–a Christmas tree was traditional in the Neumann home–and their approach to child-raising was closer to stereotypically Prussian than to stereotypically Jewish: “You did exactly as you were told by your parents. There was no such thing as saying no to them!…You were not to have a hand in your pocket while talking to grown-ups…Showing any emotion in Prussia was considered sissyish. There was no kissing between parents and children–only a peck on the cheek before going upstairs punctually at nine o’clock; and there was absolutely no crying.”

On the other hand, Neumann could do pretty much what he wanted with his spare time. In 1927, at the age of 10, he rode his bike out to a grass strip where someone was giving airplane rides for 5 marks, which he paid with money from his piggy bank. His parents weren’t angry at him for taking this flight without permission; indeed, they were so entranced with his description of the way the town looked from the air that they soon took an airplane ride themselves! At the age of 13, Neumann bought a folding kayak and, with some camping gear and a 12-year-old friend, took long journeys on the Oder River, all the way to the Baltic Sea. Few parents in America today–or in Germany either, I’d bet–would now allow this level of independence to a 12- or 13-year old.

Neumann had no interest in the family feather business; he wanted to be an engineer. A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy: Neumann’s father asked the 10 cab drivers of Frankfurt/Oder to recommend the garage where they thought the boy would learn the most, and the answers were unanimous: Albert Schroth’s. So began Gerhard Neumann’s apprenticeship, which, other than the technologies involved, could have been something out of the Middle Ages. “In winter my hands were frozen purple. Wear work gloves? ‘What’s the matter, boy, are you a girl?’ When my hands were bleeding, Herr Schroth pointed to the large bottle of iodine in the backroom and mumbled something about faules Fleisch (lazy flesh.) No Band-Aids, no pitying, no time out.”

At first, Neumann had second thoughts about the path he had chosen. “My friends were still continuing at the Gymnasium, spending their days in comfortable and clean surroundings; here I was, accustomed to a fine home and the luxury of two maids and a chauffeur, becoming a grease monkey for three long years.” But Neumann found the work interesting, and took pride in the high reputation of the shop.

At the conclusion of the three-year apprenticeship, Herr Schroth said “Thank you, Neumann”…the only time that he had ever said “thank you” to his apprentice, or called him anything other than “boy”…and sent a bouquet of flowers to Neumann’s mother. “I felt sincerely grateful when I, in turn, thanked Herr Schroth–the man whom I had always addressed as Meister and who had given me a solid groundwork for what I hoped would be a rewarding engineering future.”

Neumann says that up to the time he left Frankfurt to attend engineering college in the mid-1930s, he encountered no open anti-Semitism at all. Even at the Mittweide engineering college, where he was one of three Jewish students (each of their fathers had been soldiers in the First World War, which made them eligible for a college education), he says that he was never insulted by Nazi fellow students. Even allowing for the fact that attitudes toward Jews did differ considerably in different parts of Germany, these statements are hard to believe given that the Hitler regime had been in place since 1933.

About 15% of the Mittweide students were foreign, and they were exempt from the requirement, binding on German students, to have previously undergone an apprenticeship. “Because they had never dirtied their hands or bloodied their knuckles in apprentice-type training, they did not benefit from the Mittweida-type education anywhere as much as did a German student.” The Mittweida approach to engineering education included drawings in which errors had been deliberately inserted–“We were taught to ‘get a feel’ for drawings laid before us. The question constantly posed was, Would it really do the job if it were built just as shown on this drawing?”

Engineering students were exempt from the draft while in school, but not after graduation. A few weeks before the end of 1938, Neumann noticed an item on the college bulletin board: the Chinese government was looking for German mechanical engineers. And the Chinese Nationalist government had arranged with the German Nazi government that these engineers would have their German military service requirement deferred.

“The notice was vague about the jobs, which apparently were somewhere in the interior of the Chinese mainland and were connected with defense. A job in faraway China sounded incredibly exciting…”

Incredibly exciting it turned out to be, and most of the book is concerned with Neumann’s remarkable adventures in China. It was also, surely, lifesaving–had Neumann remained in Germany, it is most unlikely he would have survived the Holocaust.

Read the whole review.

Posted in Education, Technology | 2 Comments »

Alpha School is doing something remarkable

Friday, July 18th, 2025

After twelve months, an anonymous parent (who follows Scott Alexander) is persuaded that Alpha School is doing something remarkable — but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

It isn’t genuine two-hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.

It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced-repetition algorithm”

It definitely isn’t teacher-free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.

The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age?matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

[…]

Normally in school you do your work, submit it, have it graded, and get it back some time in the future – if you are lucky after you finish a full problem set, if unlucky a week or two later. With Alpha 100% of the time you get feedback immediately after you answer each question. If you are wrong you both get to find out right away and find out what you did wrong so you won’t repeat the mistake on the next question.

[…]

When a student finishes all the lessons they need for a grade level subject they take a grade-level mastery test that covers all the material they were supposed to learn. If they get a high enough score on that test they move on to the next grade level (all of the questions they missed will still come back for later review though so they don’t move on with gaps). If they do not pass that test then they keep working on more lessons on the grade they are currently on with a focus on closing the gaps they need to pass next time.

[…]

Most schools are set up in traditional ways, and then adjust the best they can within that structure to serve the needs of their unique students the best they can. What is impressive about the Alpha program is that is seems to be built from the ground-up around three of the most powerful learning principles:

1:1 learning: It’s not really 1:1, but in practice every kids is working on stuff at the edge of their ability, rather than the median of a group.

Spaced Repetition: The system brings back topics on a regular basis “just before” the student forgets, so it is more likely to encode in long term memory.

Mastery: In most education settings school students learn some percentage of the material and then move on. This can work for a while, but eventually students who missed something will struggle because they don’t have the tools to learn the next thing on the ladder. This is particularly noticeable in mathematics, but it can be a problem anywhere. With “mastery learning” the kids are not allowed to move on without mastering the subject. If there is something they miss, the system will bring it back again and again until they have mastered it. Liemandt in particular thinks this is a very big deal, and believes it is a significant driver of Alpha’s success (and the reason many kids are failing in traditional schools).

[…]

People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.

The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.

I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids).

Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect.

[…]

Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation:

Incentives → Motivation

Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice

Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery

Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn’t “follow the data” on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension.

Alpha HAS followed the data. They have built deliberate and extensive incentive systems. But Alpha also knows what the general population thinks of incentives, so they don’t talk about it.

[…]

My kids are gifted. They love learning. They compete in academic bees and chess tournaments and musical productions for fun. But the GT incentive system has turbo-charged their academic learning well beyond that inborn desire to learn.

We decided to join the GT school in July, but, for logistical reasons, we could not start until October. For the 3.5 months I signed the kids up to iXL – the tool that Alpha students use for 80% of their academic work – including almost all of their Language, Math and Science lessons. I wanted to get the kids used to using it over the summer before they started school.

It did not go well.

We tried getting the kids to work on it for about an hour per day, but it was a fight every time. It was the same content they would be doing at GT, but without the GT structure, and it did not work.

But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”.

Was it bad that they were being bribed to do lessons? 76% of Americans would think so. But it definitely worked.

My middle daughter – who is the most driven by money – has completed more than two full grades of school in ~20-weeks (60% of the school year), and shows no signs of slowing down.

I have not noticed any reduced interest in learning outside of school. My oldest daughter does not like the idea of incentives at all. She doesn’t need the incentives and she thinks other kids shouldn’t need to be incentivized either. But the incentives are helping with her younger siblings, and, even if they aren’t pushing her to go harder, they definitely don’t seem to be hurting her internal drive.

[…]

Unlike Alpha I have not found any elite school who has shared the MAP improvement rate for the students at their school.

I expect these elite schools are very good for all the reasons the selective private school I sent my kids to before GT was good: They have a select group of peers, they have great teacher:student ratios, and they have incredible resources. I also expect most of these schools do NOT accelerate (I could very well be wrong here and would be happy to be corrected). If they are like the schools I am familiar with they allow their students to advance through the material at the “normal” pace, with the normal pedagogy, but, because those kids are so bright, that leaves them plenty of time for enrichment.

Posted in Education | 6 Comments »

Are we born to succeed or are we made to succeed?

Friday, June 20th, 2025

Are we born to succeed or are we made to succeed? Lizah van der Aart illustrates a recent Nature Human Behaviour article:

SES 1
SES 2
SES 3
SES 4
SES 5
SES 6
SES 7

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

Technocratic quants who coincidentally happen to be lifelong Democrats

Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Bryan Caplan has inhabited two distant ideological worlds within his profession: mainstream economics and free-market economics:

Despite Berkeley’s far-left reputation, UC Berkeley and Princeton econ were barely distinguishable. Both stood securely at the top of the academic pecking order and squarely in the intellectual center of the discipline. At each school, I studied under a future winner of the coveted John Bates Clark Medal: Matt Rabin taught me intermediate microeconomics at Berkeley, and David Card taught me Ph.D. microeconomics at Princeton. I performed well in both programs, but was no star.

At both Berkeley and Princeton, at least 80% of economics professors presented themselves as technocratic quants who coincidentally happened to be lifelong Democrats. They rarely suggested that their research turned them into Democrats, and would have been livid if you suggested that their Democratic identity even slightly swayed their research. Technocratic quant and lifelong Democrat: From all I’ve heard, these paired identities are now more prevalent than ever not just at Berkeley and Princeton, but every top-twenty econ department. That includes the University of Chicago, formerly a glaring free-market outlier. In mainstream economics, we’re all technocratic quants now — and we’re all lifelong Democrats now.

The biography of a typical mainstream economist starts with a conventional left-wing teenage intellectual from an upper-middle-class home. His parents and school are center-left, but their complacency disturbs him. They pay lip service, while he believes. In college, he discovers economics — and realizes that the world is more complex than he thought. Eventually, the budding economist concludes that a few conventional left-wing views are overstated or mistaken. Support for rent control is a classic example. If you know no economics, rent control sounds like a fine idea: Want the poor to have affordable housing? Then pass a law requiring wealthy landlords to rent at affordable rates. Intro econ highlights rent control’s big negative side effects: shortages, low quality, and dwindling quantity. Politically, though, “a few conventional left-wing views are overstated or mistaken” is normally the end of the line. If you start out as a conventional teenage leftist intellectual, undergraduate economics turns you into a slightly-contrarian twenty-something leftist intellectual.

For most students who fit this profile, admittedly, intellectual curiosity is only a phase. They end up in non-intellectual jobs and turn into their center-left parents. They may even forget that a few conventional left-wing views are overstated or mistaken. The future mainstream economists, however, stay the course. Soon after earning their undergraduate degrees, they continue on to graduate school, where they acquire two new sets of skills.

First, they spend two years grappling with mathematical economic theory. This is demanding material, but too otherworldly to shift grad students’ economic policy views. High theory presents dozens of esoteric ways for markets to fail, but Ph.D. students normally learned all the standard market failures as undergrads. If you’re already deeply worried about imperfect competition, asymmetric information, and externalities, discovering more exotic market failures rarely makes you like markets less.

Second, unless they become pure theorists, grad students immerse themselves in one or two bodies of ultra-specific empirical research. This immersion occasionally shifts economists’ policy views in their areas of specialization. Yet the maximum effect is small because the volume of research is so massive that most economists end up with no more than a few narrow topics of expertise. In all other areas, mainstream Ph.D. students graduate with virtually the same policy views they held when they started grad school. Minor tweaks aside, that’s where they stay for the rest of their careers. They transition from conventional teenage leftist intellectuals to slightly contrarian twenty-something leftist intellectuals to slightly-contrarian mature leftist intellectuals. Possibly with truly contrarian economic policy views in a few ultra-specific areas they know best. Otherwise, mainstream economists barely connect their life’s work to economic policy. When policy comes up, most take off their researcher hat, and put on their slightly-contrarian left-wing intellectual hat.

Posted in Economics, Education | 5 Comments »

In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount

Monday, June 9th, 2025

Older generations continue to surrender moral authority, Rob Henderson notes, to the most naive, narcissistic, impulsive, and dishonest age group:

In his appearance on Bill Maher’s podcast Club Random, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky described ongoing generational conflicts between older and younger adults: “When we were young, we didn’t want to be ‘The Man.’ It wasn’t cool to be The Man. Our generation [baby boomers] grew up not wanting to be the adult. Now college administrators refuse to be the adult because they remember when they were in college and were demonstrating against their college administrators, and they don’t want to be like them.”

I can’t help but think of “Homer Goes to College”:

As author and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist observes, “In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”

A social-class element may be at work here. Growing up in a dusty working-class town in California, I noticed that adults paid little attention to what children thought. Not that this is always a great thing—parents and guardians were often neglectful or totally checked out. School-bus drivers regularly told kids to shut up. Teachers had little time for kids’ interests. One teacher in one of my elementary schools in 2000 knew what Pokémon was—he didn’t pronounce it “Poe-Kee-Man”—and by default, that made him the “cool” teacher.

Many poor kids grow up with negligent parents, but many wealthy kids are overprotected by helicopter parents. Parents in this educated class care too much about what young people think.

For better or worse, the educated class largely molds the culture. I witnessed this firsthand shortly after I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force and went to study as an undergraduate at Yale. I was at a breakfast with some fellow students. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious and spent most of his time answering questions from us. His answers were often variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.” This mystified me. This guy was in his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experience in leadership roles, and he was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was slightly older) that older adults were relying on them?

In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. Feedback was encouraged, and commanding officers would regularly consult lower-ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that occurred only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.

I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis.) My 17-year-old self heard that and thought: he’s probably right. I thought of the busloads of other ungainly young guys I saw waiting in the endless processing lines.

Then I got to college and learned that, even though any seat—at least at selective schools—can be filled immediately with another bright applicant, students seldom get expelled for showing disrespect to professors, or anyone else. In the military, the first message was: you are a peon, less than nothing, and we can easily replace you (this changes, at least to some degree, as you advance in rank). In college, the first message was: you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (though, for some, also marginalized and erased), and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.

Older people are now reluctant to say that they have accrued some knowledge and have some wisdom to impart. Yet young people have a massive hunger for this wisdom. Part of the reason they behave so erratically, I think, is to test where the line is, and to see what knowledge older people can share to steady their anxieties.

Older adults are also reluctant to exert such authority. They might want the prestige that comes with having power, but they don’t want the responsibility of exerting it when challenged by a bunch of naive and pampered kids who have experienced zero percent of real life and its attendant hardships.

Why should older generations reclaim their authority and leadership? Because everything we know about the brain and behavior shows that they are more responsible, reflective, and stable than the young. In his classic text Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, published in 1966, the sociologist Helmut Schoeck observes: “In the United States cases of vandalism involving the children of the middle and upper middle classes are becoming more frequent…. [T]he culprits may be turning against too perfect an environment which they did not themselves help to create. They are trying to see how much grown-ups are prepared to stomach.”

In other words, young people act out to see what they can get away with.

Posted in Education | 2 Comments »

Palantir’s Meritocracy Fellowship

Tuesday, May 27th, 2025

Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence, so Palantir has announced its Meritocracy Fellowship:

Based solely on merit and academic excellence, students will be invited to interview, and select applicants will receive an internship offer at Palantir.

Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.

[…]

What We Require

  • U.S High school certificate of graduation at the start of the internship
  • 1460 or higher SAT score / 33 or higher ACT score
  • Candidates cannot be enrolled in an accredited US university
  • Taking the full fall 2025 semester off (4 months) to work at Palantir. Candidates cannot be enrolled in university classes

Salary

The salary range for this position is estimated to be $5,400/month.

Posted in Business, Education | 2 Comments »

Investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive

Tuesday, May 13th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanArctotherium summarizes Bryan Caplan’s Case Against Education and notes that the chief implication of the signaling model of education is that investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive:

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits (i.e., “Goodharting”). Educational attainment has been a target for a very long time, so it’s not surprising that it has been aggressively gamed.

[…]

If you’ve ever spent time tutoring, attended a college admissions prep course, gone to a selective institution like Stuyvesant High School, or done STEM at a selective college, you might have noticed a glaring omission in all of the articles linked in the introduction. Not one of them mentions Asian immigration—except in the context of Asians being harmed by affirmative action at elite colleges.

Stereotypes suggest that Asian immigrants put much more effort into Goodharting education (and other zero-sum status signals) than other groups in the United States. Don’t take my word for it: Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented their daughters to maximise status.

[…]

This grind culture is found in first- and second-generation immigrants, and I would expect it to dissipate by the third generation. (Sample sizes are too small to check, but Jews had a similar reputation in mid-20th century America and don’t any more). Pro-immigration conservatives often use this focus on education status-signaling as evidence of immigrant moral superiority, but it is in fact destructive and wasteful.

[…]

Korean private tutoring schools or “hagwons” are infamous. About 78% of Koreans between first and twelfth grade attended a hagwon in 2022, as did 83% of five-year-olds in 2017, and about 95% of Koreans do at some point in their student lives. The average hagwon student attends for 7.2 hours a week, in addition to regular studies and homework, and as a consequence the average South Korean student works 13 hours a day. South Korea spends three times the OECD average on private schooling as a percentage of GDP, the highest in the world. These thousands of hours of studying are all to get high scores on the CSAT, the standardized test that determines most college admissions in South Korea. Government regulations and crackdowns to try to stop South Korean parents from spending so much time and money on wasteful zero-sum signaling have thus far failed.

[…]

About 73% of junior high schoolers in Taiwan attend some form of cram school, for an average of 6.24 hours per week. About 70% of Singaporean students do the same. China is much poorer than South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and therefore has far fewer resources to spend on costly signaling. Yet the Chinese education industry grew at 11.3% per year between 2019 and 2023. This provoked a massive government crackdown in 2023–24 that banned people from offering classes in English, Chinese, or mathematics for profit. As with South Korea, demand is so high that the ban led to an explosion in underground quasi-legal tutoring. Note that China also relies primarily on standardized tests for college admissions.

China and India are both infamous for cheating—to the point that there have been riots by students in both countries when students were prevented from cheating by investigators. (China now threatens students with jail time for cheating.) International Asian SAT takers are also notorious for cheating, with common methods including impersonation14, purchasing tests from insiders at College Board, buying questions and answers from test takers in other time zones, and smuggling in vocabulary lists. The persistence of traits would suggest that this doesn’t stop when they enter the US, and indeed anecdotes from teachers suggest that recent Asian immigrants are dramatically overrepresented in cheating rings.

[…]

The SAT score gaps between every major race in the United States have been roughly constant since the late 1970s (Native Americans have small samples), with all trending up and down together in line with test changes, external factors such as the COVID lockdown, the rise of the test prep industry, and other things that might affect scores—with one glaring exception. Asian-Americans have gone from testing approximately equal to whites to breaking away from the pack like Secretariat at Belmont, to the point that they are now about 100 points ahead on average.

[…]

A remarkable 25% of Asians in Michigan (which forces all high schoolers to take the SAT and hence is more representative than other states) scored between 1400 and 1600 versus 4% of white students.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

What’s Really Wrong With Standardized Tests

Tuesday, April 29th, 2025

Standardized testing is glorious, Bryan Caplan proclaims, but many standardized tests royally suck:

The worst prominent test is almost surely the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). About 9% of test-takers get a perfect score of 170 on the Quantitative part of the exam. A score of 169 puts you at the 87th percentile, and by 166 you’re already out of the top quarter. Most of the STEM majors taking the exam did the relevant coursework in middle school, so for fields that emphasize math, marginally lower scores largely capture not incomprehension but carelessness.

This is especially ridiculous when you remember that only top programs are highly selective. So when the focal standardized exam bunches all the top students together, the exam delivers near-zero value. At least in STEM fields, the point of the GRE is no longer to pinpoint the stars who deserve admission to top programs. The point is to weed out the manifestly unqualified. So the final cut almost has to be grotesquely “holistic.”

The regular SAT math is, by comparison, vastly better. Something like 1% get a perfect score — roughly one-tenth the share that get a perfect score on GRE math. But in absolute terms, the SAT still sucks. At least for STEM students, the problems are easy, so marginally lower scores again primarily capture carelessness rather than incomprehension. Since about two million students take the SAT, roughly 20,000 have perfect math scores — more than enough to fill all the spots in the Ivy League.

[…]

Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.

Out of all the well-known standardized tests, the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) best satisfies these conditions. A perfect score is, bizarrely, 528. The fraction that gets a 528 in a given year is about .02%.

[…]

When your goal is to find the best of the best, the ideal test is so demanding that you get a big clump of scores not at the top of the distribution, but at the bottom.

At least one such standardized test exists: the Putnam Competition. As you’d expect, it’s a test of mathematical prowess. To call the test “hard” is a severe understatement: In 2025, the median score was 2 out of 120. Which is historically high! In many years, the median score is exactly 0 for the roughly 4000 test-takers, who are already highly selected. At the other end of the distribution, only five perfect scores have ever been achieved.

[…]

There are many lines of defense in the War Against Merit. The first is to get rid of standardized tests entirely. The second is to go “test-optional.” But if these approaches are too blatantly corrupt, there is a third option. A stealthy way to pretend applicants are far more equal than they truly are.

Just use lousy top-coded tests.

[…]

Admissions to graduate econ programs could be greatly improved simply by requiring the AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics exams. They’re flawed tests, but if you can’t get 5’s on both, you’re not ready for grad school. Indeed, graduate admissions could probably be sharply improved across the board if programs required 5’s on all subject-relevant APs. Would-be historians should have 5’s on the U.S., European, and world history APs just to apply, and would-be literature professors should have 5’s on English literature and language.

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate

Monday, April 28th, 2025

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanWhen Bryan Caplan started writing The Case Against Education, he expected to confront a massive research literature claiming that education definitely has a massive effect on economic growth:

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that — despite overwhelming pro-education bias — the massive research literature on education and growth hadn’t found much of anything. Contrary to conventional stories about the positive externalities of education, mainstream estimates of education’s national rate of return were consistently below estimates of education’s individual rate of return. Just as the signaling model predicts.

[…]

New ideas are the root of progress. People today live far better than they did in 1800 because people today know far more than they did in 1800. Earth in 1800 contained all the materials required to make an airplane or iPad. But until the right ideas came along, the materials lay fallow. Why did mankind have to wait so long for the right ideas to arrive? Part of the answer is that ideas, once created, are cheap to copy. As a result, innovators glean only a sliver of the value they create.

These truisms lead straight to a stirring sermon on “Education, Foundation of a Dynamic Society.” While most students are not creative, heavy K-12 investment fertilizes society’s creative potential by giving everyone the mental tools to innovate. Heavy investment in colleges and universities, similarly, brings top students up to the research frontier and provides innovation leaders with employment and funding. If consistently investing 10% of national income in education elevates the annual growth rate from 1% to 2% without any further benefits, the social return is a hefty 11%.

Unfortunately, this stirring sermon is wishful thinking.

[…]

While the evidence is messy, education seemingly does less for countries than individuals. At the national level, it’s not clear that education increases living standards at all, much less that education makes countries’ living standards increase at a faster rate. If you can’t tell if your machine moves, you may safely assume it’s not a perpetual motion machine.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 6 Comments »

It failed because it was based on a lie

Sunday, April 27th, 2025

In 2001, an overwhelming bipartisan majority passed the worst education policy in decades, Tracing Woodgrains says, No Child Left Behind, a bill based on the idea that all children should be expected to learn at the same pace:

It doled out punishments and rewards to schools based on what percent of students could meet arbitrary thresholds, asserting on the basis of nothing but a wish that it could get all schools to the same arbitrary thresholds within 12 years. This both punished educators serving disadvantaged students—blaming them for the students’ slower paces—and encouraged the systematic neglect of above-average ones—who, after all, were already past the thresholds schools were told to care about. Year after year, it failed to meet its targets. It did not fail because of complex implementation issues. It did not fail because people did not try hard enough. It failed because it was based on a lie: that all kids should learn at the same pace.

At the same time, “detracking”—forcing fast and slow students into the same classrooms and expecting teachers to somehow differentiate instruction—has become the common wisdom among groups of educators like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and in school districts around the country. San Francisco waged a years-long battle to prevent any of its eighth grade students from learning algebra. Cities like Seattle and Boston dismantled their gifted programs.

Often, objective measures of performance themselves become targets, as educators find it easier to smash the thermometers than to change the temperature. Universities perennially look for excuses to abolish entrance tests, kicking against their own findings that those tests work before reluctantly slinking back to them. Activists have waged the same wars against high schools with admissions tests, targeting some of the best free schools in the country—from Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to New York’s Stuyvesant, Philadelphia’s Masterman to San Francisco’s Lowell High School. At the same time states weaken these schools, they often ban alternatives altogether, forbidding charter schools from using comparable tests.

[…]

In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned the most expensive education research project in history, comparing elementary school curricula against each other. One program, Direct Instruction, defied all the conventional wisdom: teachers taught in ability-grouped, orderly classrooms, drilling kids via whole class call-and-answer approaches. When Direct Instruction clearly outperformed the rest on preliminary measures, it was a “horrifying surprise” to many of the established education figures funding the study. As a result of lobbying, the study’s final results aggregated all its programs together, obscuring the success of the most effective approaches and producing a headline result that the study had failed. From there, people moved on.

In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.

That same year, a movement to “detrack” schools—removing advanced classes—took off with the release of Jeannie Oakes’s book Keeping Track. Letting stronger students go faster, Oakes alleged, was inequitable, and before long education schools and education policy circles agreed. That the best evidence at the time indicated that ability grouping helped the strongest students and did not harm the weakest ones did not matter. The consensus had been set.

Posted in Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers

Wednesday, March 5th, 2025

Good luck finding the smoking gun, Robert Pondiscio says to anyone hunting for waste in the US Education Department:

The agency’s roughly $240 billion annual haul isn’t a slush fund for whimsical bureaucrats — it’s mostly a conveyor belt, dutifully delivering dollars to programs Congress has already blessed.

Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse.

He calls our attention to the Department’s “Dear Colleague” letters to schools and districts:

These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers.

Thinly veiled as “guidance,” they’re closer to a shakedown: Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding.

And when that vision skews ideological — as it often did during the Obama and Biden years — the result is a cascade of spending and disruption that leaves educators scrambling and taxpayers poorer.

All without a single line-item to point to in the federal ledger, much less any measurable benefit to students.

Take the April 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence. A noble aim — protecting students from harassment — morphed into a bureaucratic sledgehammer.

Schools and colleges were told to adopt a lower “preponderance of evidence” standard for adjudicating cases of alleged campus rape and sexual assault, and to sidestep legal protections like cross-examination of witnesses and accusers.

The result was an explosion in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each earning $150,000 a year or more. The cost of compliance rose by at least $2 million per year at some universities.

Multiply that across thousands of institutions, and you’re staring at hundreds of millions yearly — state and local dollars, mind you, not Uncle Sam’s — until the letter’s 2017 rescission.

[…]

The Biden administration similarly sought to warp Title IX to its liking. Its 2021 executive order decreed “gender identity” would come under Title IX’s umbrella.

The Education Department dutifully followed up with a “Notice of Interpretation” a few weeks later, nudging schools to toe the line — and shoulder the cost — or risk their federal funds.

Then there was the January 2014 discipline letter, a joint production with the Justice Department that tackled racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.

[…]

Districts suddenly wary of “disparate impact” on racial minorities embraced trendy fixes like restorative justice, or simply stopped disciplining unruly kids altogether.

Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.

A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.

Posted in Education, Policy | 4 Comments »

Who should skip college?

Thursday, February 20th, 2025

The central thesis of The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan explains, is that education has a low (indeed, negative) social return, because signaling, not building human capital, is its main function — but the selfish return to education is negative, too, for many students, depending on ability:

First and foremost: know thyself.

  • Don’t base your life choices on what your immediate social circle finds “demeaning.” As Dirty Jobs repeatedly proves, people routinely get used to jobs that initially disgust them.
  • Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
  • Don’t rule out options because they require “declining status.” If your family’s initial status is above average, declining status is the mathematical norm. That’s what “regression to the mean” means.

What should you do instead? First and foremost: Get objective evidence on your own intelligence.

  • If your SAT score is at 1200 or greater, your odds of successfully finishing a “real” major are quite good.
  • If your SAT is in the 1100-1200 range, it’s a toss-up.
  • If you’re in the 1000-1100 range, only try college if your peers consider you an annoyingly hard worker.
  • Below 1000? Don’t go.

[…]

What will go wrong if you ignore my advice? The most likely scenario is that you spend years worth of time and tuition, then fail to finish your degree. Maybe you’ll keep failing crucial classes. Maybe you’ll keep switching majors. Maybe you’ll die of boredom. The precise mechanism makes little difference: Since about 70% of the college payoff comes from completion, non-completion implies a terrible return on investment.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

There will always be prigs

Monday, January 13th, 2025

The word “prig” isn’t very common now, Paul Graham notes, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar:

Google’s isn’t bad:

A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.

This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it’s an instance of a much older one.

There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

[…]

Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they’d protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them.

A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting was that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember noticing that aspect of political correctness at the time. It wasn’t simply a grass-roots student movement. It was faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty members. In that respect it was like the Cultural Revolution.

[…]

Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase “people of color” is considered particularly enlightened, but saying “colored people” gets you fired. And why exactly one isn’t supposed to use the word “negro” now, even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his speeches. There are no underlying principles. You’d just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.

The danger of these rules was not just that they created land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you’re orthodox you’re better than everyone who isn’t. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.

[…]

One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We’re so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it’s pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn’t expect people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want to share it.

[…]

For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren’t directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it.

[…]

This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence.

[…]

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money: headlines during his first administration mentioned his name at about four times the rate of previous presidents.

[…]

Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.

[…]

Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It’s not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can’t call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.

[…]

The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks of aggressively performative moralism — is of course harder. Here we’re up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.

We all laughed and laughed at the lunacy of Political Correctness…

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

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