Category: Education
What are the odds that the best chess player in the world has never played chess?
The more general issues are how well the modern world allocates talent and how much exposure you need to something you eventually will be very good at.
My view is that people who are born into a reasonably good educational infrastructure get exposed repeatedly — albeit briefly — to lots of the activities which might intrigue them. If the activity is going to click with them, it has the chance. To borrow the initial example, most high schools and junior high schools have chess clubs and not just in the wealthiest countries. Virtually everyone is put in touch with math, music, kite-flying, poetry, and so on at relatively young ages.
The idea of taking an economics class in college, or picking up some economics literature, strikes most educated people at some point, even if they squash the notion like a bug. If there is some other Paul Samuelson-quality-would-have-been who didn't become an economist, perhaps he preferred some other avocation even more.
Billions of people are not exposed to quality economics, math, music, etc., but those people also don't have the nutrition, the education, the infrastructure, or whatever, to excel at world class levels. The infrastructure and the exposure come together and in that sense we keep on mining the pool of potential talent. (Their only modal scenario to #1 for these individuals is an entirely different life altogether; mere additional exposure won't do it.)
Ernest Bazanye is blogging from Uganda.
Some people get stuck in local genres, such as a brilliant Nigerian learning funk or rap, in his teen years, but not modern jazz and besides he can't find a Nigerian market for the latter in any case. These "specialization corners" are less of a problem for math or economics, although the unification of those areas is fraying with time.
Magnus Carlsen's father suggested that if he hadn't had an older sister, he might not have taken up the game at all. Magnus was uninterested at ages four and five, but grew intrigued at age eight when he watched his father play chess with his older sister. I read this anecdote as suggesting he would have been exposed again to the game, one way or another, probably in school.
Two scenarios militate against my thesis. First, mistreated savants may not receive the necessary exposure to the activity. I am very much a believer in the potential productivity of mistreated savants. Still, I believe they often do best when not trying to be pure #1 in some commonly contested, measurable area but rather by filling unusual and hard to specify niches in a broader production process and benefiting from the division of labor to an especially high degree.
Second, a large number of children are placed on medication at early ages. This may not eliminate their exposure to an activity in the literal sense, but it may stop them from responding to potential interests.
In sum, I believe that the odds that "the best (modal) chess player in the world" has never played chess is well under fifty percent but probably above ten percent.
More Engineers in Jihad
Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.” (Tyler blogged this paper several years ago.)
Here is the latest bit of evidence:
Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa’s best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he went to Britain and enrolled at the University College London to study engineering.
Are Old Scientists Less Innovative?
Paul Romer is interviewed in From Poverty to Prosperity, an excellent new book from Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. When asked about threats to progress Romer says the following:
One factor that does worry me a little is the demographic changes. Young people, I think, tend to be more innovative, more willing to take risks, more willing to do things differently and they may be very important, disproportionately important, in this innovation and growth process.
And then he gives an example of his worry in practice:
…instead of young scientists getting grant funding to go off and do whatever they want in their twenties, they're working in a lab where somebody in his forties or fifties is the principal investigator in charge of the grant. They're working as apprentices, almost, under the senior person. If we're not careful, we could let our institutions, things like tenure and hierarchical structures and peer review, slowly morph over time so that old guys control more and more of what's going on and the young people have a harder and harder time doing something really different, and that would be would be a bad thing for these processes of growth and change. I'd like to see us keep thinking about how we could tweak our institutions to give power and control and opportunity to young people.
Here is a graph from Jason Hoyt showing how much the average age of NIH grant recipients has already increased.
Hat tip for the graph to Aleks at Statistical Modeling…. Data here.
More on Charter Schools
Charter schools are publicly funded but operate outside the regulatory
framework and collective bargaining agreements characteristic of
traditional public schools. In return for this freedom, charter schools
are subject to heightened accountability. This paper estimates the
impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data
from Boston, where charter schools enroll a growing share of students.
We also evaluate an alternative to the charter model, Boston's pilot
schools. These schools have some of the independence of charter
schools, but operate within the school district, face little risk of
closure, and are covered by many of same collective bargaining
provisions as traditional public schools. Estimates using student
assignment lotteries show large and significant test score gains for
charter lottery winners in middle and high school. In contrast,
lottery-based estimates for pilot schools are small and mostly
insignificant. The large positive lottery-based estimates for charter
schools are similar to estimates constructed using statistical controls
in the same sample, but larger than those using statistical controls in
a wider sample of schools. The latter are still substantial, however.
The estimates for pilot schools are smaller and more variable than
those for charters, with some significant negative effects.
Did the authors control for other factors and parse the statistics carefully? One of the authors is Joshua Angrist, nuff said.
Distilling famous thinkers
Following up on a discussion, Arnold Kling asks:
Should we approach famous thinkers by digesting distilled versions, or should we study them in the original?
I'm for distilling, for reasons Arnold offers, but I'm also for reading the originals. Here are a few reasons why, drawn from a number of longer sources I have read and digested:
1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers.
2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No. So you have to read a few. Shouldn't one of these then be Keynes himself? Yes.
3. The errors of top thinkers are often more interesting and instructive than their successes. Distillers have a hard time capturing these errors and their fruitfulness.
4. We often read great thinkers not to learn what they understood but also to set our minds racing and to find interesting new questions. Great thinkers are usually better at supplying this service than are their distillers.
5. Sometimes the value is in having read common sources and benefiting from the commonality per se. Great thinkers are usually more focal than any of their distillers and thus reading them is a good input for discussions with others.
6. Original sources often help you challenge or reexamine your world view or intellectual ethos. Distillers very often pander to that world view, while pretending to challenge you.
7. Consider a simple comparison. You can read either Adam Smith's two major books or any ten or even twenty books on him, toss in articles if you wish. It's a no-brainer which you should choose.
8. The best distillers often are original sources in their own right (and in part unreliable expositors), such as in Charles Taylor's excellent book on Hegel.
9. Distillation works best in very exact sciences, such as physics and mathematics. If you rely on distillation for an inexact science, you will do best at capturing its exact parts. You will be left with a systematic bias, and knowledge gap, regarding its inexact parts.
I could say more, but I fear this post is already too long.
Ben Casnocha’s rules of thumb wiki
You'll find it here. In theory they are for business but what is business but another form of human action? Here are a few from the list:
Email is a communications medium, not a collaboration medium. When confused as a collaboration tool, efficiency plummets. – Ben Casnocha
A bad reference is as hard to find as a good employee. – Robert Half
Rather than telling an associate, "You look good in that suit," tell the person, "That suit looks good on you." – Dale Carneigie
Falsified Research
Addendum: The Daily Show beat me to it last night. Hat tip J-Walk Blog and Daniel Lippman.
Condom Law: NSFW
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is lobbying California to require the use of condoms in porn movies. Their argument is that this is an employee safety issue–like requiring workers to wear hard hats–and so should fall under the Cal/OSHA laws.
But in an op-ed at Forbes.com Alex Padilla points out that to fall under the law will require classifying porn stars as employees rather than as performers and that has surprising consequences.
…the adult film industry would have to make every performer an employee to satisfy the California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, laws. This would be detrimental: California's anti-discrimination laws prohibit requiring an HIV test as a condition of employment; therefore the adult film industry's current testing process, in which every performer is tested for HIV monthly, would be illegal. Nor would adult film producers be allowed to "discriminate" by refusing employment to HIV-positive performers. As a result, untested and HIV-positive performers would be able to work in the industry, raising the risks of HIV outbreaks–particularly since condom breakage or slippage can occur.
My suspicion is that the AIDS lobbyists are not really so concerned with the performers but they do want to increase condom use by the general public and they think seeing more condoms in porn movies will help with that goal. A legitimate goal perhaps, but more likely the industry will move to Nevada or will further go online amateur.
Hat tip to Ed Lopez at Division of Labor.
Online Education and the Market for Superstar Teachers
I have argued that universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities. The full online model is not here yet but I see an increasing amount of evidence for the superstar model of teaching. At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research.
I do not think GMU is unique in this regard–my anecdotal evidence is that the market for professors is rewarding great teachers with higher wages and higher placements than in earlier years.
The online aspect, which enhances the market for superstars, is also growing. Here from a piece on online education in Fast Company are a few nuggets on for-profit colleges which have moved online more quickly than the non-profits.
Today, for-profit colleges enroll 9% of all students, many of them in online programs. It's safe to assume they'll soon have many more….for-profits are the only sector significantly expanding enrollment — up 17% since the start of the recession in 2008….the University of Phoenix, which with 420,000 students is the largest university in North America.
Interesting explanation for why for-profits still lag:
Since there are no generally accepted measurements of learning in traditional higher education, the proxy for the value of a diploma on the job market is prestige. Rankings like those of U.S. News & World Report depend on reputation; spending per student, including spending on research; and selectivity — a measure of inputs, not outputs. On all these measures, for-profits come up short.
But how long can we expect the inability to measure to protect academia when there are big profits to be made? Robin Hanson would argue that most of what is going on is signaling, i.e. that prestige is what is being bought and sold and not prestige as a proxy for some other measure of quality. No doubt there is some truth to that but there are plenty of fields, dentistry, engineering, computer science where measurable quality matters as well.
It's true that the university equilibrium has lasted a long time but that doesn't mean it can't break down very quickly.
Addendum: Bryan Caplan laughs but Arnold Kling has the right idea.
From the comments
People are not always eager to lay down good vs. evil thinking. I don't mean to pick on any single commentator but here is one example:
…E T Jaynes is spinning in his grave that you used Bayes to justify an increase[d] belief in AGW based on scientist's personal beliefs when they lacked the to support their own conclusion.
They believed something so strongly they faked data? A scientist should only believe something so strongly because they have the data to support their belief!
This was perhaps the most misunderstood blog post (including by other bloggers) I've written, yet the original text is quite literally clear, though perhaps it confuses people by not offering up the emotional valence they are expecting. I did not try to justify any absolute level of belief in AGW, or government spending for that matter. I'll repeat my main point about our broader Bayesian calculations:
I am only saying that #2 [scientists behaving badly because they think the future of the world is at stake] deserves more than p = 0.
Nor is my point that p is large, but rather if you don't consider this p at all your reasoning is incomplete. People simply do not wish to hear that sometimes they should pay heed — incomplete heed at that — to the opinions of evil others. It's remarkable how many people responded to this blog post by attacking either the scientists or, in some cases, me.
What determines a professor’s reputation?
In economics, that is. A new paper by Daniel Hamermesh and Gerard Pfann tries to answer that question. Their abstract is worded a little awkwardly, I would summarize their results as follows:
1. Adjusting for citations and other measures, "reputation" (defined both in terms of awards and the quality of the department you inhabit), does not rise with the quantity of articles published by an individual.
2. Adjusting for citations and other variables, having your citations in a single dominant piece, rather than scattered across a greater number of pieces, does not predict reputation.
3. The quantity of articles published does predict mobility and salary (adjusting for quality), even though it does not predict reputation.
I take the lesson to be that lots of schools — non-top departments — want to hire churners with a lot of published output. I'm a little worried about which quality measures should be predicting which in this paper, but nonetheless the results rang true to my ear. The paper (NBER) is here. Angus also comments.
The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Student Achievement
Preliminary results are in, and they suggest it has helped with math skills but not with reading achievement, as measured in the 4th and 8th grades. Via Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob:
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design
school-accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The
effect of this Federal legislation on the distribution of student
achievement is a highly controversial but centrally important question.
This study presents evidence on whether NCLB has influenced student
achievement based on an analysis of state-level panel data on student
test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP). The impact of NCLB is identified using a comparative
interrupted time series analysis that relies on comparisons of the
test-score changes across states that already had school-accountability
policies in place prior to NCLB and those that did not. Our results
indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the
average math performance of 4th graders (effect size = 0.22 by 2007) as
well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also
evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly
among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles.
However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in
either 4th or 8th grade.
That is from an NBER paper, I do not yet see an ungated copy on-line. To my skewed perspective, this is an intuitive result. Math skills are more the result of drill, whereas you have to learn how to love to read and much of that happens within the family, not at school. Math is therefore easier to "teach by central planning," so to speak.
The “paradox of choice” is not robust
I missed this one while traveling, so I am grateful to the loyal MR reader who pointed it out to me:
… the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.
Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.
But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.
After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect.
The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way. There seem to be circumstances where choice is counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much about what they are. Overall, says Scheibehenne: “If you did one of these studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.”
That's by Tim Harford. In my view, the so-called paradox of choice is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences. The full account is here.
Sweet Trade
Here is a fun, easy and effective experiment that instructors can use to illustrate the gains from trade. The instructor puts chocolate bars ("fun-size") or other candy in bags, one bag for each student. (Alternatively, you can use the type of small items that you can find at a dollar store. Filling the bags is where the most work comes in especially if you have a large class). Students open the bag and are then asked to write down how much they would be willing to pay for the bag's contents. But before snacking, students are allowed to trade. After a few minutes of trade, ask the students to write down their valuation again. Voila! Gains from trade. With a few numbers pulled at random from the students you can do a back of the envelope calculation for the total increase in value. The experiment doesn't take long and the students will appreciate the candy!
A hat tip to Randy Simmons who first introduced this experiment to me.
The lessons of “Climategate”
I've had many readers emailing me, asking what I think of the "trove" of emails unearthed from climate change researchers. I'll admit I haven't read through the rather embarrassing revelations, I've only read a few media summaries and excerpts. I see a few lessons:
1. Do not criticize other people in emails or assume that your emails will remain confidential, especially if you are working on a politically controversial topic. Ask a lawyer about this, if need be. "Duh," they will say to you.
2. The Jacksonian mode of discourse, or mode of conduct for that matter, can do harm to your cause, especially if you are otherwise trying to claim the scientific high ground.
The substantive issues remains as they were. In Bayesian terms, if it turns out that many leading scientists do not practice numbers one and two, I am surprised that you are surprised. It's very often that the scientific consensus "sounds that way."
In other words, I don't think there's much here, although the episode should remind us of some common yet easily forgotten lessons.
I should add that this episode will seem very important to you, if you conceive of the matter in terms of the moral qualities of "us vs. them."
Addendum: Robin Hanson offers a similar opinion. I wrote my post before reading his, yet we come to the same conclusions I think.