Category: Education
Start your podcast (from my email)
This is all from Andrew Mitrak, I will not double indent:
“Back in January, I listened to your interview on the Frames of Space podcast. You shared some advice that I haven’t seen you share elsewhere, so I’m pasting a transcript below here (transcribed with Gemini 2.5 Pro)
Host: Do you see podcasts in general, especially podcasts from academics, as a way to bridge the gap between humanities academia and the real world.
Tyler: I don’t think they need to be from academics. Maybe on average academics are worse at doing podcasts because they are not forced to get to the point by their other training.
But I think if you have good content and a clearly defined niche, you can get considerable mind share from important and influential people by doing podcasts and there’s still room for more.
If you do something Joe Rogan-like you can make a lot of money. That’s not mainly how people can succeed, but if you want an actual audience, I would say try doing a podcast. Just make it good and don’t worry whether or not you’re an academic.
Host: Make it good and make it consistent, and that’s all that matters.
Tyler: And have it, you know, it should have a clear image. So if your podcast is well, you know, I focus on the dobro guitar. Like that’s an obscure thing, right? But in fact, there are people out there who play the dobro. They probably don’t already have their own podcast. And if you’re thinking of doing that, you should do it.
I heard this while I was putting together my own niche podcast about marketing history. I had doubts about whether the podcast was worth pursuing, and your advice hit me at the right time and encouraged me to follow through on it. I’m a few months into the podcast and your advice has proven correct. I get to speak with some of the most interesting authors, academics, and marketers I admire just because I host a podcast. Other important and influential people have discovered my podcast, either organically or through podcast guests sharing the show. It’s not topping the Spotify charts, but these connections have been incredibly rewarding.”
Science podcast with Hrvoje Kukina
Here is the YouTube link. Here is part of the episode summary:
I had a wonderful conversation with Professor Tyler Cowen. We discussed his view of economic growth, the chase for GDP growth, the most underrated risks to global economic stability, and whether capitalism will survive the next century. Other topics included universal basic income, behavioral economics, how cryptocurrencies challenge the traditional role of central banks, and what would it take for cryptocurrencies to become a significant driver of economic growth. We also explored whether Bitcoin’s role as ‘digital gold’ is sustainable or an overhyped narrative, whether cryptocurrencies democratizing finance should prompt nation-states to adopt their own digital currencies, and how to design a regulatory framework that fosters crypto innovation while protecting consumers.
Jonathan Bechtel on AI tutoring (from my email)
You recently mentioned the Alpha School and their claims about AI tutoring. I share the skepticism expressed in your comments section regarding selection bias and the lack of validated academic benchmarks.
I wanted to highlight a more rigorously evaluated project called Tutor CoPilot, conducted jointly by Stanford’s NSSA and the online tutoring firm FEVTutor (sadly they’ve since gone bankrupt). To my knowledge, it’s the first and only RCT examining AI-assisted tutoring in real K-12 school districts.
Here’s the study: https://nssa.stanford.edu/studies/tutor-copilot-human-ai-approach-scaling-real-time-expertise
Key findings:
- Immediate session-level learning outcomes improved by 4-9%.
- Remarkably, the tool impacted tutors even more than students. After six weeks, inexperienced tutors reached performance parity with seasoned tutors, and previously low-performing tutors achieved average-level results.
Having contributed directly to the implementation, I observed tutors adapting their interactions based on insights from the AI. This study did not measure its impact on more distal measures of learning like standardized tests and benchmark assessments, but this type of research is in the works at various organizations.
Given your recent writings on AI and education, I thought you’d find this compelling.
Some history of higher education
To Dr. Damrosch, who has studied academic culture at colleges, the current turmoil was vaguely reminiscent of a 1940s episode at the school now known as Iowa State University.
The school’s economics department — in a paper on economic policy for wartime food production — had proposed replacing butter with margarine, said Dr. Damrosch. The dairy industry and its supporters in the state legislature “went ballistic,” he said, pressuring the school’s president to place the department under receivership.
The move triggered an immediate backlash and mass departure of faculty members.
It might have also played a small role in the reshaping of the higher education landscape: At least six professors fled to Chicago, where they helped build one of the most renowned economics departments in the world.
Here is the full NYT piece, mostly about Columbia, via Anecdotal.
My first trip to Haiti
This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton. I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia. But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous. It seemed impossible to visit such places. It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, rather the option simply was not part of my mental toolkit.
But somehow I started thinking about visiting Haiti. It seemed like it would be the most dangerous place I could possibly choose. I had this recurring mental image that I could not even set out on the street without someone coming along and cutting off one of my arms with a machete.
And so I bought my ticket. I suppose I viewed this as a kind of challenge. I also knew that if it went OK, I would end up going to a lot of other places as well.
Not long before the trip, I was on the phone with my friend Christopher Weber, the renowned investor, writer, and Offenbach scholar. I mentioned I was going and next thing you know Chris, being a “bounder of adventure,” was coming along with me.
I arrived in Haiti first. As I walked into the baggage and pick-up area of the airport (lovely live compa music), some men immediately grabbed my bags and took them from me. “Uh-oh.” In fact they brought them to the cab and wanted a tip, and they didn’t want anyone else carrying my bags first. High-trust oases in low-trust countries remains a very interesting topic to me, to this day.
I stayed in Pétion-Ville, the wealthier “suburb” of Port-au-Prince, known for its restaurants and nightlife, and I loved the place. The food, music, and art were all amazing, and they were everywhere. You could find interesting artwork on many of the street corners and for very low prices. A known artist might be selling a work for $200. I bought a political satire piece by Maxan Jean-Louis entitled “Aristide’s Wedding,” showing his semi-forced alliance with the United States military. I also bought “Soccer Angels” by the great Jean-Baptiste Jean, and a Claude d’Ambreville painting of women with basket on their heads, now a Haitian standard. That set me off buying art.
The architecture was amazing — think a more elaborate New Orleans style — but very badly ailing, you could even say collapsing.
My favorite dishes were the “combie hash,” the Dinde (a small turkey, best I have had), and the seafood mixing French and Caribbean influences. The tender conch (lambi) is arguably the Haitian national dish. The rice and beans cooked in mushroom juice was another delight, totally new to me. At the time it was obviously the best food in the Caribbean.
My arms remained intact, and walking around Petitionville required some basic caution but did not feel dangerous. Furthermore, the population at that time was hopeful for the future, so it felt very good to be there. The storytellers communicated an appropriate sense of drama.
After a day of walking around, Chris and I rented a car, which was in retrospect an unsound thing to do. We drove to Moulin Sur Mer, a “resort” on the ocean, originally an 18th century sugar plantation. Only a few other people were staying there and one of them appeared to be a Dominican drug lord family. Inside one of the buildings was a list of all the Haitian presidents, and at times the rate is about one leader per year — “model this.” I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.
The water was lovely, but the drive to and from Moulin Sur Mer was not uneventful. On the way back, at a service station, a man pulled a submachine gun on Chris and asked for a rather favorable exchange rate on our gasoline purchase. Another man ran at the car and tried to jump on the roof as we drove past. I still am not sure whether he wanted to commandeer the vehicle or simply was looking for a free bus ride (Haitians frequently ride on the tops of their buses).
In any case we pressed on, and it didn’t all seem that dangerous after all. I went away vowing to return, and indeed over the years I was to make four more trips to Haiti, as it became one of my favorite countries. The next time I went I met Selden and Carole Rodman in the line boarding the flight from Miami, and that was to change my life yet again…
Public Choice Outreach Conference!
The annual Public Choice Outreach Conference is a crash course in public choice. The conference is designed for undergraduates and graduates in a wide variety of fields. It’s entirely free. Indeed scholarships are available! The conference will be held Friday May 30-Sunday June 1, 2025, near Washington, DC in Arlington, VA. Lots of great speakers. More details in the poster. Please encourage your students to apply.
How well do humans understand dogs?
Dogs can’t talk, but their body language speaks volumes. Many dogs will bow when they want to play, for instance, or lick their lips and avert their gaze when nervous or afraid.
But people aren’t always good at interpreting such cues — or even noticing them, a new study suggests.
In the study, the researchers presented people with videos of a dog reacting to positive and negative stimuli, including a leash, a treat, a vacuum cleaner and a scolding. When asked to assess the dog’s emotions, viewers seemed to pay more attention to the situational cues than the dog’s actual behavior, even when the videos had been edited to be deliberately misleading. (In one video, for instance, a dog that appeared to be reacting to the sight of his leash had actually been shown a vacuum cleaner by his owner.)
Here is the full NYT piece by Emily Anthes. Here is the original research. How well do humans understand humans?
Have humans passed peak brain power?
In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25 per cent on average in high-income countries, and 35 per cent in the US.
Dalton Conley in genes-environment interaction
The part of this research that really blows me away is the realization that our environment is, in part, made up of the genes of the people around us. Our friends’, our partners’, even our peers’ genes all influence us. Preliminary research that I was involved in suggests that your spouse’s genes influence your likelihood of depression almost a third as much as your own genes do. Meanwhile, research I helped conduct shows that the presence of a few genetically predisposed smokers in a high school appears to cause smoking rates to spike for an entire grade — even among those students who didn’t personally know those nicotine-prone classmates— spreading like a genetically sparked wildfire through the social network.
And:
We found that children who have genes that correlate to more success in school evoke more intellectual engagement from their parents than kids in the same family who don’t share these genes. This feedback loop starts as early as 18 months old, long before any formal assessment of academic ability. Babies with a PGI that is associated with greater educational attainment already receive more reading and playtime from parents than their siblings without that same genotype do. And that additional attention, in turn, helps those kids to realize the full potential of those genes, that is, to do well in school. In other words, parents don’t just parent their children — children parent their parents, subtly guided by their genes.
I found this bit startling, noting that context here is critical:
Looking across the whole genome, people in the United States tend to marry people with similar genetic profiles. Very similar: Spouses are on average the genetic equivalents of their first cousins once removed. Another research project I was involved with showed that for the education PGI, spouses look more like first cousins. For the height PGI, it’s more like half-siblings.
Dalton has a very ambitious vision here:
The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way. For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it’s already underway.
I am not so sure about the postulated newness on the methodological front, but in any case this is interesting work. I just hope he doesn’t too much mean all the blah blah blah at the end about how it is really all up to us, etc.
Emergent Ventures winners, 41st cohort
Claire Wang, Cambridge, Mass. whole brain emulation.
Minji Kim, high school, Seoul, to build a running app.
Collin Juurakko, Vancouver, UBC, cryobiology.
Stevie Miller, Carnegie Mellon, to write for Works in Progress, general career development.
Ruhan Khanna and Louis Merriam, WDC Sidwell high school, to decipher the Indus script.
Marwa Attaii and Anush Mutyala, Vancouver UBC, for a student-run nanofab.
Malhar Manek, University of Chicago, Mumbai, general career support.
Lan Dao, San Francisco, a non-profit for artificial wombs.
Adam Jarvis, in support of @teortaxes, Palmerston North, NZ, and Argentina, @teortaxes trip to the Bay Area.
Ashley Mo, Toronto, and Aoi Otani, Cal Tech and Harvard, biomedical innovation.
Raahim Lone, Saudi Arabia, Eastern province, Al Khobar, background Pakistan, sophomore in high school, a query optimizer to reduce database latency.
Matt Faherty, New Platz, NY, study of the National Science Foundation.
Mehran Jalali, San Francisco, doing LIDAR of Mesoamerica.
Mark Lutter, Washington, DC, American free cities and governance.
Sulaiman Ghori, San Francisco, Khan Space Industries, self-replicating space probes.
Arc Prize, Greg Kamradt, San Francisco, measuring AI progress.
Nucleate DoJo, and Iris Sun, toward a house and other support for biomedical researchers.
Daragh Jordan, Galway, Ireland, AI to manage social media feeds.
Abe Callard, San Diego/Chicago/Japan, to make a movie about conversation.
Epoch AI, and Jaime Sevilla, Madrid and remote work, AI safety and measurement.
Again, here is the AI engine, built by Nabeel Qureshi, for searching through the longer list. Here are previous cohorts of EV winners.
Model this, child care vs. college costs
The cost of child care now exceeds the price of college tuition in 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to a new analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute.
The left-leaning think tank, based in Washington, D.C., used 2023 federal and nonprofit data to compare the monthly cost of infant child care to that of tuition at public colleges.
The tally increased five states since the pandemic began. EPI’s last analysis relied on 2020 data, which showed child care costs outstripped college costs in 33 states and Washington, D.C., said EPI spokesperson Nick Kauzlarich.
The organization released a state-by-state guide on Wednesday showing the escalating cost of child care. Average costs range from $521 per month in Mississippi to as much as $1,893 per month in Washington, D.C., for households with one 4-year-old child, EPI found.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
Visiting the New Jersey shore
Did you know that the rest of the country (world?) calls it “the beach”? New Jerseyans call it “the shore.” (Why?)
While growing up, my mother would take my sister and me to the New Jersey shore for a week, each summer. My father would drive down and visit, but he was too much of a workaholic and too antsy to stay for long.
One of the first things you learn, living in The Great NJ, is that each and every town has its own identity. It feels quite different from the next town over, and has an individualized history and often a quite different ethnic mix. Before I knew any other social science, I learned that place really matters. And hovering at the horizon is the NYC skyline, a regular reminder that things can change rather quickly once you cross a line, in this case taking a bus across a river. I started thinking about “invisible borders” seriously and at a young age. Later, in high school, the kids were from either Hillsdale (my town), or from River Vale, one town over. We thought of them as the “wuss kids.”
So just about everyone is a regional thinker, and in New Jersey your “region” refers to your town or maybe county, not to the state.
This importance of place is true of shore towns as well. We spent time in various locales:
Asbury Park: This was early on, and I barely have memories of it. We decided it was “a dump,” and had seen better days. It had once been a glamour spot of sorts, with dance halls and gazebos. Later in life I would go back there for some of the older architecture, Bruce Springsteen landmarks, and Puerto Rican food.
Ocean Grove: The place we went when we were young. This town has fantastic Victorian homes, and an unusual role in the American history of religious revival camps. Holly and called it an “old people’s town.” Plus there was no boardwalk and everything was closed on Sundays. The ocean was wonderful and the walks were easy, but we always wanted to be somewhere else.
Point Pleasant: I haven’t been in so long, but I think of this as one of the most typical and representative of New Jersey shore towns. Holly and I were OK with this place.
Seaside Heights: This for us was the best, especially for my sister. It had lots of other young people, an active, retro-flavored boardwalk (I loved that game where you throw the ball up and try to have it land in the right slots for points), and the ocean water seemed rougher in a fun way. Eventually we settled on going here each year. Later the setting for Jersey Shore, the TV show.
I also went to some chess tournaments in Atlantic City (pre-gambling, quite run down), where I did very well, and when we were all grown we would meet up in Spring Lake, which is perhaps the actual nice shore town. Belmar and Cape May also received earlier visits, and we would stop for root beer in Toms River.
Even in the early days it was exciting to drive from one town to the next, like in Europe crossing from Germany into Luxembourg.
I did a lot of reading on the beach, for instance tackling both LOTR and Karl Popper’s Open Society books. In later years, Holly would be off with friends, and my mother and I would drive around, listening to Beatle songs on a weird 8-track tape that split up the songs when it changed tracks.
So early on I learned the idea of “local travel,” namely that a nearby trip can be no less fascinating. I consider that one of the most important practical ideas you can imbibe, along with “regional thinker.” I got them both quite young, and in a very convincing fashion.
Games we played
I always loved games and card games, and they played a big role in family life. It was one activity that everyone, including my grandmother, could partake in enthusiastically, and on a more or less equal footing.
The big card game was euchre, yes euchre. It is a trick-taking game with trumps, think of it as a much simpler bridge. The jacks are the strongest cards, and they are called the Right and Left Bower. The dramatic moment would come when you played with four people, and one player would announce that he or she wanted to “play it alone,” feeling confident of winning enough tricks without cooperation from the partner.
I recall sister Holly and I going to school, chatting with other kids, and being mystified that they never had heard of or played euchre. According to Wikipedia, it is “commonly played” in “Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Upstate New York, and the Midwestern United States.” I am not sure I have ever met another human being who mentioned the game of euchre of me, not outside the family that is. Not even when I was living in New Zealand. Arguably it has Alsatian origins? At the time I assumed it was vaguely Scots-Irish, due to the family origins.
Somehow the custom of the game was transmitted through my grandmother’s “Uncle Benny,” have you ever wondered who really was an actual uncle back then?
We loved the French card game Mille Bornes. You are in a road race and trying to accumulate miles. Different types of cards were for hazard, remedy, safety, and distance. The card colors in that game were so nice, and I much preferred it to any American card game. The flat tire cards were my particular favorite. And looking back, one has to wonder whether the family ever played by anything resembling the actual proper, written rules of the thing.
As an aside, my sister and I regarded my grandmother as “speaking French,” even though I do not think this extended much beyond playing Mille Bornes, singing “Frere Jacques” and knowing a few worlds like “merci.”
I learned poker and blackjack, but never loved them. I would play solitaire over the summer when I was alone. Rummy and hearts were part of the family repertoire too. I also liked to read books about games.
As my sister and I grew up and reached our early teens, Scrabble become dominant. But if someone was tired and didn’t feel like concentrating too much, we would switch back to euchre. At Scrabble I did very well.
When I was eight or nine, my Uncle Tom taught me the rules to chess, but at first the game did not interest me, not until I was ten years old. The very first time I played he beat me with the Queen Anne’s mate trick, culminating in Q x f7. I felt swindled — why were we playing this kind of game?
Overall I am struck by what a rich menu of games we had back then. Loyal MR readers will know I am no Luddite, but I never wish we had had more technologically advanced games at our disposal. I recall also that only games brought the whole family together, because television was too divisive, due to diversity of taste. Two of us could find common shows, but it stopped there. My sister and I watched Dragnet and Adam-12 together, with my mother I watched Star Trek, and with my father Frankenstein movies. My grandmother watched only soap operas.
I also find that games and gaming are some of my most vivid and enduring memories from childhood. A lot of the rest has escaped into the fog. Today, however, I don’t play games at all.
How AI is changing and will change the world of writing
Here is my 68 minutes with David Perell, who is excellent in such settings:
Here is David’s Twitter take, here is a short bit on how to use different AI tools. Here is the transcript. Self-recommending.
Do female experts face an authority gap? Evidence from economics
This paper reports results from a survey experiment comparing the effect of (the same) opinions expressed by visibly senior, female versus male experts. Members of the public were asked for their opinion on topical issues and shown the opinion of either a named male or a named female economist, all professors at leading US universities. There are three findings. First, experts can persuade members of the public – the opinions of individual expert economists affect the opinions expressed by the public. Second, the opinions expressed by visibly senior female economists are more persuasive than the same opinions expressed by male economists. Third, removing credentials (university and professor title) eliminates the gender difference in persuasiveness, suggesting that credentials act as a differential information signal about the credibility of female experts.
Here is the full paper by Hans H. Sievertsen and Sarah Smith, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.