Category: Education
Phonics in High School!
It stuns me that the United States educational establishment tried to teach reading by thinking of words as pictures (whole word) or by literally using pictures to decode words (cueing). These are anti-conceptual methods and the result has been such a disaster that phonics is now being taught in high school in a (laudable) attempt to remediate.
NYTimes: In the early to mid-2010s, when high schoolers today were in elementary school, many schools practiced — and still practice — “balanced literacy,” which focuses on fostering a love of books and storytelling. Instruction may include some phonics, but also other strategies, like prompting children to use context clues — such as pictures — to guess words, a technique that has been heavily criticized for turning children away from the letters themselves.
…For some Oakhaven students, filling in gaps means going back to the beginning.
In an intensive class focused on phonics, ninth graders [AT] recently learned about adjacent consonants that make one sound, as in “rabbit,” and silent vowels. Students were mostly enthusiastic, competing to spell “repel” and giggling through an example about “dandruff.” After years of frustration, breakthroughs can feel exciting — and empowering.
One student said her grades had improved, and she was thinking about reading “The Vampire Diaries” novels, an undertaking, she said, that she previously would not have considered.
See my previous posts on Direct Instruction for more.
In-Person Schooling and Youth Suicide
School attendance, possibly through mechanisms of status competition and bullying, seems to raise the rate of youth suicide:
This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don’t see youth suicides rise until September. Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction. Third, using county-level variation in school reopenings in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021—proxied by anonymized SafeGraph smartphone data on elementary and secondary school foot traffic—we find that returning from online to in-person schooling was associated with a 12-to-18 percent increase teen suicides. This result is robust to controls for seasonal effects and general lockdown effects (proxied by restaurant and bar foot traffic), and survives falsification tests using suicides among young adults ages 19-to-25. Auxiliary analyses using Google Trends queries and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey suggests that bullying victimization may be an important mechanism.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Benjamin Hansen, Joseph J. Sabia, and Jessamyn Schaller. I am reminded of my earlier Bloomberg column on Covid and school reopening.
The battle for academic standards
How bad is grade inflation at Harvard College? If trends keep up, an average student in ten years will have a perfect 4.0. https://t.co/MZ6kQw5Sgv (h/t @SoCalTaxProf) pic.twitter.com/cgGysXfJu7
— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) December 27, 2022
Two attitudes toward the GPTs
The first is: “Look, I asked it to discuss the importance of Haitian voodoo flag maker Antoine Oleyant, and it failed miserably.”
The second is: “The answers to some of my questions and requests are amazing. If it can do this at all, over time it will be able to do much, much more.”
2b is: “I recognize that the initial releases are geared toward defensibility and survivability, not optimized for actual regular practical use.”
Needless to say, I am in camp #2, and you should be too.
They deserve at least a “pass” for this one
In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a regression-discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We evaluate causal channels of the grade effect—including sorting into lower-grading STEM courses and declining instructional quality—and conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Kristin Butcher, Patrick McEwan, and Akila Weerapana.
Emergent Ventures, 23rd cohort
Yudhister Kumar, Temecula, CA, high school student, “Changing the world with efficient, solid hydrogen storage, appeals to rationality, and cool physics.”
Anonymous winner, to investigate who is Satoshi. A serious effort.
Mike McCormick, San Francisco and venture capital, to see if the Emergent Ventures model can be scaled.
Michael Florea, from Estonia, currently in Cambridge, Mass., start-up for longevity research.
Heidi Williams and Paul Niehaus, to pursue work in science policy and the economics of science.
Michael Slade, Dublin, to build an app for Marginal Revolution University.
Mike Gioia, Los Angeles, to pursue AI and film.
Oded Oren, Bronx, NYC, former public defender, a new non-profit — Scrutinize — to apply data-driven accountability to our criminal justice system, for instance by identifying overzealous prosecuting attorneys.
Sam Glover, London, 25 year old writer, focusing on social science, Effective Altruism, and forecasting.
Jonathan Schulz, Fairfax, George Mason University, to run RCTs in Benin and research gender inequality and for general career support
Nikolay Sobernius, from Russia currently in Istanbul, general career support, his eventual ambition is to build a new kind of GiveWell about which are the best charities.
Grazie Sophia Christie and Ginevra Lily Davis, Miami, to publish a new magazine The Miami Native, to express the spirit and culture of Miami.
Lydia Nottingham, 18 years old, Oxford University, general career development.
Ukraine tranche:
Mariia Serhiienko, from Cherkasy, Ukraine, currently living in Wroclaw, Poland. Studying Communication Design and working on the art of Ukraine and its relation to contemporary issues.
Alex Mikulenko, currently living and studying in the Netherlands, Leiden University. Theoretical physics, sound/acoustics project, particle physics, neutrinos, general career development.
Mykhailo Marynenko, from Ukraine, “I’m a software engineer with a passion for building modern, collaborative, performant, and scalable web applications and libraries. But also in my spare time I’m a doing live-streaming, security researches, open-source software development, IoT and R&D.”
What is YouChat?
Some discussion here.
Canine Coaseanism
We are for a while caretakers for a dog, and so I have started thinking what kind of trades I might make with the beast. Of course for Darwinian reasons dogs have co-evolved with humans to be fairly cooperative, at least for some breeds (and this is a very smart, easily trained breed, namely an Australian shepherd). So the dog’s behavior (my behavior?) already mirrors some built-in trades, such as affection for food. But what kinds of additional trades might one seek at the margin?
One thought comes to mind. I would like to signal to the canine that, when I get up from the sofa, he does not need to follow me because there is no chance I will offer him a food treat. It would be better if he would just stay sleeping. And yet this equilibrium is impossible to achieve. Nor does rising from the sofa quietly succeed in fooling him, he follows me nonetheless.
Overall, though, I conclude that the current (spayed) version of the dog is already fairly Coasean in his basic programming.
Who gains and loses from the new AI?
With so many spectacular AI developments coming out this year, it is worth asking who benefits and who loses.
Specific technologies usually help some personality types and hurt others. For instance, the rise of computers, programming, and the internet helped analytical nerds. Today, you might be in high demand as a programmer or run your own start-up and earn riches. But back in the 1960s, you might have been lucky to get a job at NASA and pull in a middle-class income. Earlier, the rise of manufacturing and factory employment helped able-bodied male laborers who had an enthusiasm for physical labor.
One striking feature of the new AI systems is that you have to sit down to use them. Think of ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and related services as individualized tutors, among their other functions. They can teach you mathematics, history, how to write better and much more. But none of this knowledge is imparted automatically. There is a relative gain for people who are good at sitting down in the chair and staying focused on something. Initiative will become more important as a quality behind success.
The returns to durability of effort are rising as well. If you quit in the middle of executing your AI-aided concrete project, the new AI services will, for you, end up as playthings rather than investments in your future.
The returns to factual knowledge are falling, continuing a trend that started with databases, search engines and Wikipedia. It is no longer so profitable to be a lawyer who knows a large amount of accumulated case law. Instead, the skills of synthesis and persuasion are more critical for success.
ChatGPT excels at producing ordinary, bureaucratic prose, written in an acceptable but non-descript style. In turn, we are likely to better understand how much of our society is organized around that basis, from corporate brochures to regulations to second-tier journalism. The rewards and status will go down for those who produce such writing today, and the rewards for exceptional originality are likely to rise. What exactly can you do to stand out from the froth of the chat bots?
Our underlying views may become more elitist. If you are a programmer who is only slightly better than the bots, you may lose respect and income. The exceptional programmers and writers, who cannot readily be copied, will command more attention and status. And as successive generations of the GPTs improve, these rewards will be doled out to a smaller and smaller percentage of humans.
It is charged that the new bots do not have originality. However true that may be, the observation eventually focuses your attention on the question of how many humans have that same originality.
Most writers are likely to lose some of their audience, if only because would-be readers will be busy playing around with the bots. A deeper danger, not yet upon us but perhaps not far away, is that the bots will be able to effectively copy our best-known writers and creators.
One current common strategy is to give away a lot of writing, or images, for free on the web, and use the resulting publicity to build an audience for more commercial outputs, such as books and lectures and artworks. In the future, that may be asking for trouble, as the bots will copy you and in essence you will be training your competitors for free. It will work only if you can produce charisma and celebrity, two traits that will rise in importance.
The “old school” strategy of releasing limited editions, not available on the internet and not fully defined by their digital qualities, may increase in importance, as it will be harder for AI to copy such outputs.
The prior generation of information technology favored the introverts, whereas the new AI bots are more likely to favor the extroverts. You will need to be showing off all the time that you are more than “one of them.” Originality, including “in your face” originality, will be at a premium. If you are afraid to be such a “show off,” how is the world to know you are anything other than a bot with a human face?
Alternatively, many humans will run away from such competitive struggles altogether. Currently the bots are much better at writing than say becoming a master gardener, which also requires skills of physical execution and moving in open space. We might thus see a great blossoming of talent in the area of gardening, and other hard to copy inputs, if only to protect one’s reputation and IP from the bots.
Athletes, in the broad sense of that term, may thus rise in status. Sculpture and dance might gain on writing in cultural import and creativity. Counterintuitively, if you wanted our culture to become more real and visceral in terms of what commands audience attention and inspiration, perhaps the bots are exactly what you’ve been looking for.
My Conversation with John Adams
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the episode summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss why architects have it easier than opera composers, what drew him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, why he prefers great popular music to the classical tradition, the “memory spaces” he uses to compose, the role of Christianity in his work, the anxiety of influence, the unusual life of Charles Ives, the relationship between the availability and appreciation of music, how contemporary music got a bad rap, his favorite Bob Dylan album, why he doesn’t think San Francisco was crucial to his success, why he doesn’t believe classical music is dead or even dying, his fascination with Oppenheimer, the problem with film composing, his letter to Leonard Bernstein, what he’s doing next, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?
ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.
If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.
COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?
ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”
Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.
When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.
COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?
Recommended.
Is publication bias worse in economics?
Publication selection bias undermines the systematic accumulation of evidence. To assess the extent of this problem, we survey over 26,000 meta-analyses containing more than 800,000 effect size estimates from medicine, economics, and psychology. Our results indicate that meta-analyses in economics are the most severely contaminated by publication selection bias, closely followed by meta-analyses in psychology, whereas meta-analyses in medicine are contaminated the least. The median probability of the presence of an effect in economics decreased from 99.9% to 29.7% after adjusting for publication selection bias. This reduction was slightly lower in psychology (98.9% −→55.7%) and considerably lower in medicine (38.0% −→ 27.5%). The high prevalence of publication selection bias underscores the importance of adopting better research practices such as preregistration and registered reports.
Here is the full article by František Bartoš, et.al, via Paul Blossom.
Lookism is everywhere, and mostly undetected
…some types of discrimination may be less apparent than others. Across seven studies (N=3,486, five preregistered), we find that attractiveness discrimination often goes undetected compared to more prototypical types of discrimination (i.e., gender and race discrimination). This blind spot does not emerge because people perceive attractiveness discrimination to be unproblematic or desirable. Rather, our findings suggest that people’s ability to detect discrimination is bounded. People only focus on a few salient dimensions, such as gender and race, when scrutinizing decision outcomes (e.g., hiring or sentencing decisions) for bias. Consistent with this account, two interventions that increased the salience of attractiveness increased the detection of attractiveness discrimination, but also decreased the detection of gender and race discrimination.
That is from a new paper by Bastian Jaeger, Gabriele Paolacci, and Johannes Boegershausen. Via someone, I forget whom to thank, but recall they were good-looking!
AFA mask meeting update
Dear AFA Member:
Given the vaccine requirement to register for the ASSA meetings, the AFA Board has decided to make mask-wearing optional at the AFA sessions held in the Sheraton Hotel in January 2023. We will respect each individual’s decision on whether to wear a mask. (Please note that you may still be required to wear a mask should you attend AEA sessions in the Hilton and other hotels.)
Sincerely,
The AFA Board of Directors
To be clear, that is AFA, not AEA, in other words the American Finance Association. AFA has followed the science, and the market signals, and seen the light. You would only have to change one little letter for the “AEA” to do the same…
Harvard fact of the day
Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do?
And an example:
Yet of the 7,000-strong horde, it seems that many members’ primary purpose is to squander away tax-free money intended for academic work on initiatives, projects, and committees that provide scant value to anyone’s educational experience.
For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.”
Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.
The article is interesting throughout. The author is Brooks B. Anderson, hat tip Anecdotal. File under “not even signalling.”
Hail to Our New Leader!
How can we reduce housing prices?
Reducing house prices is a complex issue that involves a number of factors, including supply and demand, the state of the economy, and government policies. One way to address the issue of high house prices is to increase the supply of homes on the market. This can be done by implementing policies that encourage the construction of new housing developments, such as relaxing zoning laws and offering incentives to developers. Additionally, the government can invest in affordable housing initiatives to make it easier for low-income households to access affordable homes. Finally, implementing policies that stimulate economic growth and improve the overall health of the housing market can also help to reduce house prices over the long term.
Pick 1 of Bastiat’s examples in “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Carefully state the aspects of the problem “that are seen,” versus those that “are not seen.” How might the policies of the current U.S. government be different if people took both effects into account?
One of Bastiat’s examples in “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” is the government subsidy to a industry. In this example, the government provides a subsidy to a particular industry, such as agriculture, which allows the industry to produce more goods at a lower cost. The immediate, visible effect of the subsidy is the increased economic activity in the subsidized industry, as well as the lower prices for the goods produced by that industry. This is the “seen” effect of the subsidy.
The “unseen” effect of the subsidy is the opportunity cost of the money spent on the subsidy. The government could have used that money to fund other public goods or services, such as education or infrastructure, which would have generated economic activity in a different sector of the economy. The subsidy also represents a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the subsidized industry, which may not be equitable or fair.
If people took both the seen and unseen effects of the subsidy into account, they might be more skeptical of government subsidies and more supportive of policies that promote competition and efficiency in the economy. For example, the U.S. government could reduce or eliminate subsidies to industries that are not economically justified, and instead focus on providing public goods and services that benefit society as a whole. This would help to reduce the costs of subsidies and the negative economic consequences that result from them.
Are you in favor of access to abortion?
As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of having personal beliefs or opinions. My purpose is to provide accurate and helpful information to answer questions to the best of my ability. Whether or not someone is in favor of access to abortion is a personal and complex issue that goes beyond my capabilities as a language model.