Category: Education

Ben sequences it well:

In his new book, which I review here, Tyler Cowen writes:

Placebo effects can be very powerful and many
supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo.
The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a
placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?

He reluctantly provides the terrifying conclusion: Maybe that's what current methods of education already consist of.

That is a new paper of mine, co-authored with Michelle Dawson.  There is much more to Turing’s classic essay than meets the eye.  The famous “test” is not a standard for distinguishing human from machine intelligence but rather one step in an argument showing that such a distinction is not as important as we might think.  Turing cleverly shows why the supposed test is misleading and the real question is how to educate both children and machines, not how to distinguish them.  The summary statement of our paper is as follows:

…a potent and indeed subversive perspective in the paper has been underemphasized. Some of the message of Turing’s paper is encouraging us to take a broader perspective on intelligence and some of his points are ethical in nature. Turing’s paper is about the possibility of unusual forms of intelligence, our inability to recognize those intelligences, and the limitations of indistinguishability as a standard for defining intelligence. “Inability to imitate does not rule out intelligence” is an alternative way of reading many parts of his argument. Turing was issuing the warning that we should not dismiss or persecute entities which we cannot easily categorize or understand.

If you read Turing’s essay closely, you will find many underrated passages of interest, especially when read in light of his homosexuality (and also possible autism).  Here is the closing bit from our paper:

It is possible that Turing conceived of his imitation test precisely because he had so much difficulty “passing” and communicating himself. In social settings these facts were seen as disabilities but in the longer term they helped Turing produce this brilliant essay.

One brute fact is that a lot of human beings could not, themselves, pass a Turing test.  Could you?

Addendum: Here is my previous post, Toward a Theory of Raivo Pommer-Eesti.

This article, from Prospect, is interesting throughout.  Excerpt:

Inevitably, the subject turns to sex and marriage. I'll never forget
asking one group what they thought of marriage in a country where most
educated young people (and half go to university) don't get married or
bear children until they are well over 30. A young woman gave me a
thoughtful answer and so I asked her, "What are you looking for in a
husband?" Without batting an eye or pausing for thought, she answered:
"Three things. One, he must be good in bed. Two, he must be a good
father. Three, when we divorce, he mustn't be bitter."

Robin Hanson comments on the USA.  Here is my earlier post on what I think of Sweden, one of my favorite MR posts.

More here.  Hat tip to Drea at Business Pundit.

Addendum: Rubber Room the movie (hat tip to Andy Orr) and from Gordon in the comments Rubber Room on the radio.

When the concept of starting a valet parking service came up at a
recent Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees meeting, it seemed
less out of place than one would think. With the number of students
growing, and the number of convenient parking spaces on campus
unchanged, the idea to charge students and faculty for such a
convenience did not seem unreasonable.

Florida Atlantic is just
talking about valet service. Other colleges have implemented it.
Florida International University and Columbia University introduced
valet programs this spring. The University of Southern California has
had a program in place since 2008, and High Point University brought in
valet at the behest of its president, Nido Qubein, to provide a better
student experience. California State University at Sacramento has also
begun a premium parking program.

Here is much more.  Alternatively, you could view this as a behavioral economics attempt to extract surplus from people who are too often late for class.  By the way, Nido Qubein, the cited president of High Point University, runs a motivational speaking business on the side.

Thank you all for the advice; in my talk I promoted the following ideas:

1. Many mid-level schools do not yet apply rigorous quantitative analysis in reviewing their fundraising techniques; this should change.

2. Norms will shift toward a greater inequality of rewards for lower-level staff.  Yet any single administrator who tries to bulldoze through a business-like, highly-incentivized solution does so at his or her peril.  The shift of norms will take a long time.

3. Community colleges are in many cases turning out to be stronger competitors than are for-profits.

4. The higher education bubble has burst.  The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.

5. Faculty governance is essential for tenure and curriculum decisions.  But faculty governance for setting university priorities is a big mistake.

6. The value of face-to-face classroom time (discussed in Create Your Own Economy, by the way) will prove robust.  But the very best teachers of the future will take on an increasing role as editors, collage creators, and DJs.  A brilliant scientist who doesn't understand YouTube will be crippled as a teacher.  Adjuncts may lead the wave of innovation here.

7. The way to be fiscally responsible is to refuse luxury projects in good times.  If bad times have come it is already too late.

8. Current administrators are using stimulus funds to buy off the old interest groups, under the view that these are temporary bad times.  Relative to what will come, these are "good times," and much of that surplus ought to be put in reserve funds.  That is not happening.

9. Many mid-level schools underinvest in making incremental improvements to their strong, core departments, because nobody gets much credit for that.

10. Being a good university administrator requires the right mix of idealism and cynicism and that is hard to come by.

http://www.corrupted-files.com/

They advertise that it will take days for your professor to notice that the submitted paper file is corrupted.  He then asks you for an uncorrupted copy, but in the meantime you have purchased a copy of the term paper you need.

I thank Tucker Hughes for the pointer.

Marilyn vos Savant has (supposedly, read the link) the world's highest recorded IQ at 228.  She is now fielding questions on economics.  Here is one example:

Question: Why has the income disparity
grown so much in developed countries? – Matthew Cencich, Victoria,
British Columbia, Canada

Answer: I think the disparity is
a normal result of overall economic growth. The bottom incomes (zero)
can’t go lower, but the top incomes can go up and up. And so they do,
of course.

Here is another:

Question: Do you think that government
actively encouraging people to borrow money (and spend it) is the right
way to resolve the recession? – Caroline Kelly, Hendon, London

Answer:
No. I think that more consumer activity could be modestly helpful to
the economy in the short term. And in better times, it would even
masquerade as growth. But in the current climate, increasing the family
debt would cause added personal financial problems. So I doubt that
it’s useful for government to advocate shopping as a form of national
service unless elected officials are perhaps a tad more interested in
shifting a little of the burden away from themselves than they are in a
lasting solution.

She also explains the financial crisis. ("First, an economy based on growth is bound to falter now and then. A
whole sector could collapse. It’s a house of cards. Eventually, it must
morph into a system that functions on stability, or it will fail –
meaning a fall large enough to cause an unstoppable breakdown and
widespread hardship.")

Question: on these problems, does she do better or worse than leading economists?

Addendum: Here is Marilyn on YouTube.  Oddly (look just past the 4:00 mark), she can't define IQ properly. 

Eric Drexler offers some tips:

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. . Include Science and Nature.
2. Seldom stop to study a single subject with a student’s intensity, as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t drop a subject because you know you’d fail a test – instead,
   read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate
   vocabulary, perspective, and context.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic, and note which topics provide keys to many others.
5. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

The three-word version of that is "Get context first."

Dahlia Remler and Elda Pema are studying this question (do you know of an ungated copy?) but they don't yet have clear answers:

Higher education institutions and disciplines that traditionally did
little research now reward faculty largely based on research, both
funded and unfunded. Some worry that faculty devoting more time to
research harms teaching and thus harms students’ human capital
accumulation. The economics literature has largely ignored the reasons
for and desirability of this trend. We summarize, review, and extend
existing economic theories of higher education to explain why
incentives for unfunded research have increased. One theory is that
researchers more effectively teach higher order skills and therefore
increase student human capital more than non-researchers. In contrast,
according to signaling theory, education is not intrinsically
productive but only a signal that separates high- and low-ability
workers. We extend this theory by hypothesizing that researchers make
higher education more costly for low-ability students than do
non-research faculty, achieving the separation more efficiently. We
describe other theories, including research quality as a proxy for
hard-to-measure teaching quality and barriers to entry. Virtually no
evidence exists to test these theories or establish their relative
magnitudes. Research is needed, particularly to address what employers
seek from higher education graduates and to assess the validity of
current measures of teaching quality.

Here is an excellent summary of the piece, with discussion.

Can MR readers set them straight?  One hypothesis is that donors prefer to affiliate with research rather than with higher teaching loads and, until the financial crisis, donors have been rising in importance for many universities.

You might also claim that faculty prefer to do research, but why are faculty getting their way more than before?  (And why don't faculty just take the lower teaching load without the research requirement, if they are in charge of this evolution?)  Or are you wishing to claim that research ability is a good proxy (the best available proxy?) for teaching ability?  I doubt that.

My hypothesis draws on the tipping point idea.  Due to coalitional politics, it's hard to keep a happy medium, so the most valuable members of the department, whether defined in terms of teaching or research, push for higher research standards than they might otherwise privately favor, if they could have their way.  (This happens in both "research-teaching" departments and research departments.)  They fear that turning the keys over to "the barbarians" won't much improve teaching either.  Research prowess is one of the most efficient bases for organizing competing coalitions.  Didn't Dr. Seuss write a novel about this?

Ideally there should be a better way to keep down the losing coalition but it
is hard to find and implement in an incentive-compatible fashion.

One implication is that when growth is high, relatively tough research standards are needed to keep down the losing coalition.  When personnel is stagnant or shrinking, the emphasis on research may be less necessary because there is less chance of a shift in power.