Category: Education

Attendance decisions are due May 1, so what should you do?  If parents (and their children) are loaded with biases, is behavioral economics useful? 

I suspect the core bias is parents wanting to feel they have done everything possible to help the kid, rather than maximizing the kid’s (or the world’s) expected return.  This will lead parents to ignore the upsides of risky courses of action.  Who wants to send the kid to the wrong school and feel guilty for the rest of your life?  But if the school works out especially well — your kid wins a Nobel Prize rather than your kid "merely" receiving tenure at an Ivy League school  — the parents are not so much happier.  "More pride" is only a little better than "pride," and most of your kid’s accomplishments you will overvalue and exaggerate anyway.  So parents put too much stress on the possible downside and not enough weight on the potential upside of a choice.

If your kid is very smart and takes plenty of initiative, maybe you should send him to a large school with lots of resources.  He will be able to hook up with the interesting people and they will have a better choice of peers.  If your kid has true intellectual upside, those extra resources will yield a very high return.  Even if Middlebury gives a better undergraduate education than Harvard, the best undergraduate senior economics major at Harvard will have a bigger head start in his or her career.

That being said, if you follow this advice you probably will regret it.  It is not geared toward the median case or the modal case.  Perhaps you already are upset at this blogger for suggesting that your kid should be a sacrificial lamb, offered up to the altar of scientific progress.  Or perhaps you (and your kid) feel flattered.

Another view is that most people overestimate the intelligence of their kids.  Too many parents obsess over Harvard when they should be wondering about Podunk U..  That point is well-taken, but being a fan of overoptimism, I find the first story more plausible.  So look at the total endowment of the school, not the per capita endowment.

Your thoughts?  Don’t focus on general advice for parents, tell us what you think the relevant behavioral bias is, how to correct for it, and distinguish between returns for students, parents, and the broader world. 

Often after I’ve heard of something for the first time – a food, a place, a person — I start hearing about it everywhere.  Shouldn’t there be a word for this?

"Newbiquitous" is suggested.

Is there a word for the common experience of saying something to your child and then realizing — often with a shock — that you sound like one of your own parents?

"Mamamorphosis" is one idea.

My husband and I are in search of a word for the fear of throwing a party and having no one show up.

"Guestlessness"?

How about people who hit the "send" button for email without first attaching the file?

"Deficit sending" is recommended.  Or "sends of omission."

Jonathan Zuber wants "…a verb meaning ‘to go do something and return having absentmindedly done one or more other things instead.’""

Any ideas?

You can put other requests, or suggestions, in the comments…

Here is the next Slate.com installment on New Orleans.

"Even if you care more that we go to this event together, that is only choice at the margin.  Looking at the total summation of our time, I need you more than you need me.  Husbands need wives more than vice versa; the data on this are clear."

"I don’t care how tall he is.  If you can’t see the top of his [Kobe Bryant’s] head, the specifications on the TV screen are causing distortion."

"Hey, I’ m more efficient than you are!"

Are Germans pushier when waiting in line?  (Or are Italians more emotional with family members?)  Under one view, this is a cultural difference.  Germans aren’t pushier "on the inside," their society simply has a different standard for how a given temperament should manifest itself in public.  Under another view, Germans really are pushier.  Yes their culture is different but that is because they are pushy.

Let’s say (for purposes of argument alone) you are weird.  Could you ever excuse your own weirdness on the grounds that, well, you are weird all the time? (Hat tip to Derek Parfit.) No matter what you think of the Germans, the first approach to their pushiness is in principle possible.  Maybe they simply have a standard with different calibration.  Why should the application of such principles be restricted to the group level?

Whenever you see or hear of me doing something weird, think twice.  I am actually behaving normally, and no offense is intended.  Quite the contrary, I am flattering you by behaving normally in your presence.  You just haven’t yet solved the signal extraction problem which would allow you to differentiate between my actual weirdness and my different standards for what weirdness should be.

Are people who are only sometimes weird "weirder" than those who are weird all the time?  What if, for this reason, you seek "weirdness all the time" — to prove your normality — but overshoot?

Here is my earlier post on why weird men should marry foreign women.

I have never been much of a university-basher, and in my new book Good and Plenty I attempt to explain why:

The university also injects diversity into the broader societal discovery process. Faculty tenure is based on two principles: free inquiry and intellectual autonomy. Taken together, these principles also could be described by the less favorable sounding phrase "lack of accountability." A tenured faculty member simply is not very accountable to deans and department chairs. This absence of accountability, while it comes under heavy criticism, is part of the virtue of the university. The university works by generating and evaluating ideas according to novel and independent principles, relative to the rest of society. Direct commercial considerations drive most sources of ideas in society, including corporate research and development, commercial culture, advertising, and celebrity culture. The university is an alternative and complementary mechanism for producing and evaluating social ideas. In the university professors are, at least in theory, insulated from direct commercial pressures. Most academic rewards are determined by peer evaluation.

Tenure and non-accountability work especially well for a process that depends on intellectual or creative superstars. The average producer might use lack of accountability to shirk, or to pursue self-indulgent ideas of little value. But the superstars will use lack of accountability to pursue their own visions without outside hindrance. We like to think of "creative freedom" as good, and "lack of accountability" as bad, but in fact they are two sides of the same coin. If most of the value added comes from the superstars, the gains from their freedom may exceed the losses from the shirking of the average producer. Given that most artistic experiments are failures, effective discovery procedures often succeed by supporting the extremes, rather than trying to generate a good outcome in every attempt. 

Since we should evaluate institutions as a bundle, the excesses of the university, which include conservatism and overspecialization, should be seen as part of a broader picture. All methods of producing ideas involve biases. The question is whether these biases tend to offset or exaggerate the other biases — usually commercial — that are already present in the broader system. To the extent the biases are offsetting, the benefits of the university are robust. Counterintuitively, one of the great virtues of commercial society is its ability to augment non-commercial sources of support, including the university. Academic institutions, whatever their particular failings, increase the diversity of the social discovery process, including in the creative arts.

The still under-valued Megan (non-McArdle) writes:

Moving on, Sean asked me how I flirt with the guys I like. “Well, you
know how I am usually friendly and smiley and I talk about dorky
things? Just like that, only more.” “So if you saw a guy you liked…” “I
would probably give him a hug like everyone else, and then tell him
about the things I’ve been thinking about recently. Like right now I’m
super into Geoffrey Chaucer’s blog, so I would be all ‘hah, hah, hah, and then, he makes fun of John Gower, hah hah’.”    “And you still don’t score?” said Sean.  “Remarkable.”

Here is the full and articulate post.  Here are the writer’s two (false) premonitions.  Here is some background on the competition.  Here is the author.  Please restrict your thoughts to the polite, and apply game theory if at all possible.

Gilles Trehin is an autistic [TC: Asperger’s?] 28-year-old. Since the age of 12, he has been designing an imaginary city called Urville, named after the “Dumont d’Urville,” a French scientific base in Antarctica. He has created detailed historical, geographical, cultural, and economic descriptions of the city, as well as an absolutely extraordinary set of drawings. His Guidebook to Urville will be published later this year.

Here is the link, with images and video.  Here is more on Gilles, who I might add is cosmopolitan in his philosophical inclinations. 

Read here, this is from Paul Romer’s notable on-line education company Aplia.

1. Many more of the propositions increased your perceived self-importance than decreased it.  Very long life or immortality was an especially popular notion.  No one expected to die tomorrow, or suggested that they might be more of a rat-faced git than the rest of us.

2. I was surprised how long it took for non-human animals to be mentioned.

3. Frankly I found most of your ideas pretty absurd. 

4. That being said, I too thought Ishtar was a good movie.

5. Only in the blogosphere might it be considered "absurd" to call space elevators "a dead end."

6. My favorite absurd idea was from Megan (not McArdle, at least I think not): "I believe that if you go to the beach, but you do not give the ocean a
chance to taste you, she will come take her taste when she chooses."

7. I also like am’s notion that: "beliefs are they are defined do not exist in any meaningful sense. We
use the word only to provide a sense of narrative continuity to our
decisions and actions."

8. After reading other people’s absurd ideas, how many of you have begun to view your own idea as not only absurd but downright wrong?  If so, please enter and explain your recent epistemic revelation in the comments.

Dare I call this Markets in Everything?   Thanks to Mitch Berkson for the pointer.  It just went for $12.50, 22 bids, and yes you get the zip-loc bag too.

Bryan Caplan says my most absurd view is philosophic pragmatism.  I say Robin Hanson’s most absurd view is to overestimate the chance we all become uploads in the next century.  I am not sure Alex has a most absurd view, except perhaps his notion of what my most absurd view is (hint: "one in twenty").

What is your most absurd view?  Comments are open.  Yes your comment should be crazy but serious too.  It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre.

Read the debate.  Steve says U. Chicago would nix him for lack of undergraduate mathematics classes.  He believes that Harvard or MIT "might still take a chance on me today." 

I am a strong believer in having at least one top school — Chicago once played this role — which accepts virtually everybody and lets competition sort them out in brutal fashion.  I am also a strong believer in having more graduate students at top schools know economic history than real analysis.  I don’t expect either of these wishes to come true anytime soon.