One of the big wins of capitalism is that it creates strong private incentives for some kinds of social change. If someone has an idea for change, they can get investors and employees to work with them, in the hope of rewards if the change earns profits.
What about an "abolish X" movement? Following the movement rewards you because you have experience working without X and like with masks, you can brag if your side wins. For the student evaluation example, this would be departments or universities without them. Participants (professors, investors in universities and even students) may choose the abolish student evaluation movement in hopes that their department or university will produce more capable and prestigious students. The "keep student evaluation" side would do the same, in the same hope.
Somewhat unrelated question: how could we even design a student-side evaluation whose only goal is to measure how much students learned? If I take a course in subject S but don't know much about S before taking the course, I have no way to measure how much I've learned compared to how much I could have learned in the same amount of time. If the course was "difficult", I don't know if the difficulty is due to poor course design or inherent subject difficulty that no course could avoid.
There's so many resources available online now that such a evaluation scheme would help sift through the various online courses, videos, books, software, etc available.
There's the separate incentive issue of truthfully following whatever evaluation is designed, but lets suppose that can be overcome for the moment.
Similar question for evaluating the general applicability of what is learned. "Here are 5 steps that lets you do X" vs "Here's how you can come up with some steps, maybe 5, to do X, but also tweak it to do other things".
And what of the adversarial case where a banker tries to sell me an investment product but I also need to learn about investing through them (or another source, which may also have an incentive to sell me a possibly different investment product). How do I (self-)evaluate how much I am actually taught?
>In summary, then, with the exception of the study by Weinberg et al. (2009), these studies present evidence that students tend to evaluate more positively the courses in which they did not learn a great deal. Or, as Braga et al. (2014) concluded, “teachers, who are more effective in promoting future performance receive worse evaluations from their students” (p. 81).
Ryerson university banned evals citing bias: https://www.insidehighered..... You would think that lefty unis everywhere would already be rolling back evals but the administration has powerful incentives to keep them around to drive grade inflation and keep student/consumers happy.
Isnt the most common kind of incentive to join such a movement just that you will be associated with a change that people see as good and valuable.
I think the problem with futuracy is less about long term rewards (if successful all the same incentives that apply to a movement to eliminate the gold standard or etc do) and more about the fact that in the intermediate term joining the movement exposes one to ridicule and not being taken seriously. Absent that aspect it seems it has the same incentive situation as many social movements.
What about an "abolish X" movement? Following the movement rewards you because you have experience working without X and like with masks, you can brag if your side wins. For the student evaluation example, this would be departments or universities without them. Participants (professors, investors in universities and even students) may choose the abolish student evaluation movement in hopes that their department or university will produce more capable and prestigious students. The "keep student evaluation" side would do the same, in the same hope.
Somewhat unrelated question: how could we even design a student-side evaluation whose only goal is to measure how much students learned? If I take a course in subject S but don't know much about S before taking the course, I have no way to measure how much I've learned compared to how much I could have learned in the same amount of time. If the course was "difficult", I don't know if the difficulty is due to poor course design or inherent subject difficulty that no course could avoid.
There's so many resources available online now that such a evaluation scheme would help sift through the various online courses, videos, books, software, etc available.
There's the separate incentive issue of truthfully following whatever evaluation is designed, but lets suppose that can be overcome for the moment.
Similar question for evaluating the general applicability of what is learned. "Here are 5 steps that lets you do X" vs "Here's how you can come up with some steps, maybe 5, to do X, but also tweak it to do other things".
And what of the adversarial case where a banker tries to sell me an investment product but I also need to learn about investing through them (or another source, which may also have an incentive to sell me a possibly different investment product). How do I (self-)evaluate how much I am actually taught?
Student evals may be negatively correlated with learning outcomes: https://www.tandfonline.com...
>In summary, then, with the exception of the study by Weinberg et al. (2009), these studies present evidence that students tend to evaluate more positively the courses in which they did not learn a great deal. Or, as Braga et al. (2014) concluded, “teachers, who are more effective in promoting future performance receive worse evaluations from their students” (p. 81).
Ryerson university banned evals citing bias: https://www.insidehighered..... You would think that lefty unis everywhere would already be rolling back evals but the administration has powerful incentives to keep them around to drive grade inflation and keep student/consumers happy.
Just being associated with liked change is a very weak incentive, and so usually insufficient.
Isnt the most common kind of incentive to join such a movement just that you will be associated with a change that people see as good and valuable.
I think the problem with futuracy is less about long term rewards (if successful all the same incentives that apply to a movement to eliminate the gold standard or etc do) and more about the fact that in the intermediate term joining the movement exposes one to ridicule and not being taken seriously. Absent that aspect it seems it has the same incentive situation as many social movements.