Tag Archives: Academia

Counter Indoctrination

By Robin Hanson · September 1, 2011 10:35 pm · Comments (32)

A case study and new micro-level data in Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) forcibly recruited thousands of youth and plied them with threats and violence in order to make them stay. The evidence suggests that child [soldier] recruits were less able than adult ones, so superior ability is not a driving force of child soldiering in this case. Rather, the Uganda data and interviews suggest that children were retained because they were more easily indoctrinated and misinformed than adults, and had more difficulty escaping—with ease of indoctrination being especially influential. … Initial data from a random sample of [African rebel] groups display two relationships consistent with our model. First, where we observe child recruitment we also tend to observe forcible recruitment (one of the most easily measured forms of coercion). Second, forced child recruitment is most common when punishment is cheap. … Child recruitment is inversely associated with military protection of refugee and displacement camps. (more)

The US military also relies heavily on near age 18 soldiers, even though age 28 soldiers are probably more skilled at most tasks. The US also probably prefers younger soldiers because they are more easily indoctrinated, misinformed, and intimidated. Which reminds us that interest groups often fight over who gets to train kids, as the winners get to choose their favored indoctrination. Which reminds us that the winner of such a fight indoctrinated you when young.

Once you are an adult who realizes that your younger self was unreasonably gullible, you should try to undo that bias, at least if you want to have accurate beliefs. If you can imagine how other powers would have instead tried to indoctrinate you, had they controlled your indoctrination, you might try to believe something in-between these various indoctrination extremes. Of course you should also add in whatever can be inferred from the fact that one particular power was in fact strong enough to win the contest to indoctrinate you. Though it is not clear why this would mean their indoctrination was more true.

So what biases we expect from young school indoctrination? Perhaps excess respect for:

  1. Teachers and their allies
  2. Life value of formal education
  3. Being quiet and doing what you are told
  4. Governments like those that run schools
  5. The region or nation where you lived
  6. Having regular workday, like at school
  7. What else?

Added 8a: The military is an especially capital intense industry, which makes it especially important to have skilled labor to complement all that expensive capital. All else equal, this would induce this industry to outcompete other industries for more skilled workers, such as 28 year olds. So there must be some other factor that pushes them to hire 18 year olds. It can’t be pure physical strength and stamina, as few military jobs today require that.

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Religion As Standard

By Robin Hanson · August 31, 2011 6:10 pm · Comments (36)

Systems often get locked into standards. For example, computer systems get locked into programming language and operating system standards. When people notice that existing standards have unsatisfactory features, they often try to create and promote alternate standards. Such attempts usually fail, however, due to the large costs of coordinating to switch to new standards, including the loss of complementary investments into old standards. In order to induce a switch, expected gains from a new better standard have be large enough to compensate for switching costs, and users need to coordinate their actions in order to switch.

Hopes for a libertarian revolution seem similar. Yes, there may be gains from transferring traditional government services (like schools, roads, fire protection) to private substitutes. But we have many complementary investments in an existing government-provision system that has many self-reinforcing elements. If most people see the potential gains from switching to be few and weak compared to the substantial cost of switching, it just won’t happen. So big change probably won’t happen until some new context where many folks expect private substitutes to work much better.

Strong atheist critiques of religion also seem similar. Religious people often say things that sound crazy, at least when interpreted as claims intended to say things similar to, and evaluated by the usual critical standards of, most other intellectual realms. Atheists want to apply relatively uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across wide ranges of intellectual claims. Such uniform standards should allow intellectuals to draw more reliable inferences combining insights from many diverse topic areas.

Religion, however, is a complex system integrating emotions, behaviors, relationships, and things that sound and are treated somewhat like intellectual claims. We have made many expensive complementary investments into this religious system, investments that would be expensive to translate to a substitute system. Religious folks understand that treating their religious claims as crazy would detract from the many complex functions that these claims serve within the complex religious experience. So they would rather apply different intellectual standards to these claims. They’d rather say “Don’t take this so literally, don’t be so reductionist; this kind of talk is just different.”

Of course defenders of religion also don’t want to say that they are just making comforting noises that have no intellectual meaning; a sense that their words are somewhat like intellectual claims is part of what lets those noises be comforting. And they don’t want to clarify in much detail just what exactly they are saying, in the usual intellectual terms. They’d rather say “Haven’t you got other topics to go investigate? Why come to our area and mess with things you don’t understand? How can you be so sure of your intellectual standards and your preferred interpretations of our words, so as to put at risk all this useful religious practice?”

It seems to me that religion will handily win this contest for a long time to come. The social support that can be mustered by a few intellectuals hoping for more uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across diverse topics seems quite weak compared to strong interests others have in the usual complex religious processes. Even if many broad-thinking intellectuals decide to pick a noisy fight over this, most of society will just shrug their shoulders and ignore it. Surely this fact is known to most atheists, so this can’t really be about inducing a social change to a new less objectionable religion substitute. So it is probably mostly about other things, such as status contests within the smaller world of intellectuals.

FYI, some relevant quotes from the atheism critic James Wood: Continue reading "Religion As Standard" »

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Theory And Fashion

By Robin Hanson · August 22, 2011 9:45 am · Comments (25)

Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.

They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few. The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for “the end of ideology,” “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was. If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. …

The real cause may be information itself. … In the past, we collected information … to convert it into … ideas that made sense of the information. … But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to. … If a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention. (more)

While this article adds little to the basic concept, it is a basic concept worth pondering: are big ideas actually less popular today, and if so why? This claim fits with my perception of idea fashion today vs. my memory of thirty years ago, but I have personally changed so much that I don’t trust such memory comparisons.

If this trend is real, I don’t find the “more information” explanation compelling. The amount of available information has been increasing relatively steady for centuries, yet this trend, if real, has only been going for a half century or less. I expect this is more just a long term cycle in intellectual fashion. Once the old established elites get really good at theory, new “young turks” can better make their mark via switching to a fashion where details matter most, and then once those folks are old established elites, there’s a new opening for a fashion favoring theory. Alas for me that, being more a theorist, I happen to reach my peak when theory is most out of fashion.

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How Many Levels?

By Robin Hanson · August 17, 2011 6:45 pm · Comments (12)

Some firms teach students how to apply to MBA schools:

Graham Richmond, founder of Clear Admit, helped one client get into Wharton by persuading her to scrap her essay about an energy deal she worked on and focus on something else: shooting guns. The Texas-based private-equity firm she worked at was a male-dominated environment where the senior executives liked to talk business at the shooting range. So the Asian American learned to fit in by joining them for target shooting.

“I was all about getting her to understand who’s reading the file,” Richmond said. “The people reading the file are more like your high school English teacher than the colleague sitting next to you at an investment bank,” he said; they’re more interested in getting a good sense of who you are than your business experience. (more)

This seems a vivid example of learning to signal. You may recall a month ago I said school need not be simple learning nor simple signaling; it could be learning how to signal:

People in business signal to each other all the time. In fact, most of the on-the-job business learning that employees do after college, such as how to dress well, how to give presentations, how to write memos, how to talk with clients, etc. might be skills that are mainly useful to signal innate features to bosses, co-workers, clients, etc. So employers might pay more for students with prestigious degrees because such degrees show an ability to learn how to later send good business signals. (more)

So we could have firms helping applicants learn to signal to MBA schools, schools that teach students how to signal well to businesses that such students will be good at learning on the job how to signal to bosses, co-workers, clients, etc. How many levels of signaling are there anyway?!

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Indulging In Indirection

By Robin Hanson · August 14, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (7)

Readers actually enjoy stories more when authors are less coy:

Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck. Subjects read stories as-is and with introductory paragraphs that gave away the endings, or spoilers. In almost all cases, they preferred the “spoiled” stories. The same held true for mysteries. … Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones. (more; study; HT Patrick Salsbury)

Students also learn from teachers who are more direct:

When Detterman began teaching…

I thought it was important to make things as hard as possible for students so they would discover the principles for themselves. … Now … I try to make it as easy for students as possible. Where before I was ambiguous about what a good paper was, I now provide examples of the best papers from past classes. Before, I expected students to infer the general conclusion from specific examples. Now I provide the general conclusion and support it with specific examples. (more; HT Bryan Caplan)

If readers enjoy stories without surprises better, and if students learn better from teachers who are similarly direct and unsurprising, why are authors and teachers so often indirect, and why do readers and students support them?

Two obvious complementary explanations stand out:

1) Readers and students prefer to signal their cleverness at figuring out what an author or teacher is saying. Overly direct authors or teachers insult us via visibly presuming our inability to follow subtleties.

2) Homo hypocritus is in the habit of speaking indirectly:

It is easier to use play talk to evade talk rules if groups develop a very local culture and language – particular words and associations that have particular meanings due to the local history. This makes it harder to clearly convince outsiders that something illicit was communicated. (more; see also)

I recently read Pride & Prejudice, and noticed how much the author flatters the reader, and how much the characters flatter each other, by speaking indirectly yet presuming that listeners understand the intended meanings. Only fools speak directly when indirection is possible, it seems.

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Pigheaded Specialists

By Robin Hanson · August 1, 2011 11:15 am · Comments (21)

Kumar: “Excuse me, Professor Jones, could you explain why I was rejected for graduate study in your illustrious science program. I’m Vinay Kumar.”

Jones: “Ah yes, Mr. Kumar. You had excellent grades and test scores, and your teachers testified to your intelligence and work habits. However, you scored poorly on our new `scientist’ personality test – your pigheadedness score was near the bottom. We are sorry, but the NSF’s new rules for promoting progress give us no choice but to reject you.”

Kumar: “So I’m too pigheaded to be a scientist?”

Jones: “No, you are not pigheaded enough. You are too likely to objectively evaluate research on its methods, rather than on whether its conclusions match your previous positions. You are too willing to change your mind when evidence changes.”

Kumar: “But isn’t such objectivity a scientific ideal?”

Jones: “Well some say so, but the wise know otherwise. If all scientists were like you, they’d agree too much, and all work on the same projects. For robust scientific progress, we need different scientists to work on different projects. And to get that, we need them to pigheadedly draw different conclusions from the same data.”

Kumar: “But our modern economy is based on a vast specialization of labor. Are you saying that modern economies would be impossible without us all being pigheaded, because otherwise we’d all do the same job? Can’t we just pay people to do different jobs?”

Jones: “Money might motivate ordinary people to do different jobs, but in the magestarium of science money matters not. Scientists only pick research topics based on scientific beliefs. So to get different research, we need different beliefs.”

Pretty crazy, right? Behold this oped by Cordelia Fine in Saturday’s New York Times:

Scientists … rated the paper’s methodology, data presentation and scientific contribution significantly more favorably when the paper happened to offer results consistent with their own theoretical stance. … This is a worry. Doesn’t the ideal of scientific reasoning … shun the ego-driven desire to prevail over our critics … ? Perhaps not. Some academics have recently suggested that a scientist’s pigheadedness and social prejudices can peacefully coexist with — and may even facilitate — the pursuit of scientific knowledge. …

An irrational tendency like pigheadedness can be quite an asset in an argumentative context. A engages with B and proposes X. B disagrees and counters with Y. Reverse roles, repeat as desired — and what in the old days we might have mistaken for an exercise in stubbornness turns out instead to be a highly efficient “division of cognitive labor” with A specializing in the pros, B in the cons. It’s salvation of a kind: … by way of positive side effect, these heated social interactions, when they occur within a scientific community, can lead to the discovery of the truth. (more; HT Eric Schliesser)

This idea that humans disagree because disagreement is good for society, by getting people to take different actions, is an old one. I’m rather skeptical about it in general, and especially regarding academic research. Academics are easily motivated by money and other personal perks, and if such payments are insufficient, I see no advantages to a diversity of beliefs that a diversity of values can’t supply. Given enough value diversity, I see no net social gain from folks being unwilling to update based on evidence.

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Teachers As Dictators

By Robin Hanson · August 1, 2011 9:35 am · Comments (10)

Thousands of teachers traveled across the country to protest in front of the White House on Saturday. … Their message boiled down to one point, which was summed up by the sound check before the first speaker took the stage: Tap. Tap. “No testing, no testing, 1-2-3.” … Under that “failing” label, Romero’s school has cut back time for physical education and recess, and she has been required to use a new reading curriculum, she said. The regimen “stifles imagination,” she said. (more)

Schools are designed to, and do, stifle student imaginations. So why would we care much if teacher imaginations get stifled in the process? Do we care if prison guard imaginations gets stifled? This makes more sense once you realize just how much autonomy teachers were used to having:

In the early 1970s [sociologists] carried out a large survey of superintendents, principals, and teachers in San Francisco school districts. The initial reports indicated that something was amiss in these organizations. Reforms were announced with enthusiasm and then evaporated. Rules and requirements filled the file cabinets, but teachers taught as they pleased and neither principals nor superintendents took much notice. State and federal money flowed in and elaborate reports went forth suggesting compliance, but little seemed to change in the classrooms. Studies of child-teacher interactions in the classroom suggested that they were unaffected by the next classroom, the principal, the district, the outside funds, and the teacher training institution. (more)

In a [2011] study of nearly a million Texas children, … researchers found that nearly identical schools suspended and expelled students at very different rates. … The analysis used more than 80 variables, including race, economics, test scores, attendance, teacher salary and experience, and expenditures per student. ….

While some high-poverty schools suspended students at unexpectedly high rates, others with strikingly similar characteristics did not. The same discipline gap was clear for prosperous, suburban schools and small, rural schools. … Suspension or expulsion greatly increased a student’s risk of being held back a grade, dropping out or landing in the juvenile justice system. …

97 percent of disciplined students got in trouble for “discretionary” offenses, which can include serious fights but often refer to classroom disruption and insubordination. Fewer than 3 percent were ousted for violations with state-mandated punishment, such as bringing weapons or drugs to school. … African American students had a 31 percent higher likelihood of being disciplined for a discretionary offense, compared with whites and Hispanics with similar characteristics. (more)

So why do we tolerate dictator levels of teacher autonomy? As with our tolerating excesses in homework, early hours, and frequent evaluation, this makes much more sense as a way to train and select compliant workers than to teach course “content.”

Note our love of teacher autonomy even deters us from having independent bodies administer the tests by which we evaluate teachers are – they test themselves, which of course leads to lots of cheating.

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Sleepy Kids Learn Less

By Robin Hanson · July 31, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (14)

I’ve posted before that ever though most homework doesn’t seem to help learning, I predict we’ll keep assigning it, “to get kids used to doing a lot of work, in preparation for their future industry era jobs.” Similarly, I predict we’ll keep making kids start school early, even though that hurts learning:

This study identifies the causal effect of school start time on academic achievement by using two policy changes in the daily schedule at the US Air Force Academy along with the randomized placement of freshman students to courses and instructors. Results show that starting the school day 50 minutes later has a significant positive effect on student achievement, which is roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by one standard deviation. (more)

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Tests For Hedgehogs?

By Robin Hanson · July 20, 2011 10:25 am · Comments (8)

Philip Tetlock famously showed that hedgehogs, who focus on one main analytical tool, are less accurate than foxes, who used a wide assortment of analytical tools, on simple long-term forecasts in political economy.

Over at Cato Unbound, two famous hedgehogs recently replied to Tetlock. John Cochrane argued that no one can do well at the unconditional forecasts that Tetlock studied, but that hedgehogs shine at conditional forecasts, such as GDP change given a big stimulus. Bruce Bueno De Mesquita noted that his hedgehoggy use of game theory is liked by the CIA and by peer review.

Today at Cato Unbound, I note that since Tetlock’s data is hardly universal, that leaves room for counter-claims that he missed important ways in which hedgehogs are more accurate. But I find it disappointing, and also a bit suspicious, that neither Cochrane nor De Mesquita express interest in helping to design better studies, much less in participating in such studies. I note that “it is certainly possible to collect and score accuracy on conditional forecasts”, and conclude:

Research patrons eager to fund hedgehoggy research by folks like Cochrane and De Mesquita show little interest in funding forecasting competitions at the scale required to get public participation by such prestigious folks. So hedgehogs like Cochrane and De Mesquita can continue to claim superior accuracy, with little fear of being proven wrong anytime soon. All of which brings us back to our puzzling disinterest in forecast accuracy, which was the subject of my response.

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School Signal Investing

By Robin Hanson · July 9, 2011 8:20 pm · Comments (36)

Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan have been arguing about the signaling theory of education. Bryan’s latest is here, Tyler’s here. Tyler cites two recent empirical papers which estimate that “signaling accounts for one-third of the educational wage premium.” Such papers generally try to predict later income as a function of schooling years and quality, plus other covariates. Today I want point out two bits of “armchair econ” data that complicate such discussions.

Datum #1: Pretty much no one cared about the grades I got before tenth grade.

As long as my grades weren’t very low, I was consistently promoted to the next level. If I got into special classes for gifted students, that was based on IQ tests, not grades. Colleges later cared about my high school GPA, but not about any earlier GPAs. So since no one was watching my earlier grades, they couldn’t possibly be signals right?

Not so fast. Assume for the sake of argument that employers want high GPA grads of good colleges entirely for signaling reasons – students never learn anything useful for future jobs, but merely show innate abilities. But also assume that it takes years of training and effort for kids with high innate ability to learn to do well in school. Given these assumptions third grade schooling is entirely an investment in a signal to later show employers. GPAs then only help kids see how well they are learning school stuff, which will later help them send a good signal. So even though no signaling is happening in third grade, everything third grade students do might be an investment in later signals.

Datum #2: When I visit private firms, people there often mention the prestigious degrees they have.

Yes, they may do this more often for academic visitors, but the point remains. Firms want to impress customers, suppliers, investors, etc. with the quality of their employees, and hiring graduates from prestigious schools helps them signal such quality. Hiring such graduates can also help a manager to impress his bosses, potential employees, and sister divisions about the quality of his employees. Thus even once a boss has determined the “real” productivity of his or her employer, he or she should still be willing to pay extra for employees with prestigious degrees.

Furthermore, people in business signal to each other all the time. In fact, most of the on-the-job business learning that employees do after college, such as how to dress well, how to give presentations, how to write memos, how to talk with clients, etc. might be skills that are mainly useful to signal innate features to bosses, co-workers, clients, etc. So employers might pay more for students with prestigious degrees because such degrees show an ability to learn how to later send good business signals. And this extra pay for top degrees could be entirely an investment in signaling, even if after hiring someone no one ever knew of or mentioned their degrees, and even if schooling makes students better able to please employers.

Bottom line: If much of human interaction is signaling, then much of human investment is in ways to better signal. Businesses that signal are also willing to invest in better signals. The fact that attending school seem to cause changes in students that employers are willing to pay for does not show that school isn’t all about signaling.

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