Category: Education
How to Work and Sleep at the Same Time
An amazing result:
Many people have claimed that sleep has helped them solve a difficult problem, but empirical support for this assertion remains tentative. The current experiment tested whether manipulating information processing during sleep impacts problem incubation and solving. In memory studies, delivering learning-associated sound cues during sleep can reactivate memories. We therefore predicted that reactivating previously unsolved problems could help people solve them. In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented. The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement). Moreover, cued-puzzle solving correlated with cued-puzzle memory. Overall, these results demonstrate that cuing puzzle information during sleep can facilitate solving, thus supporting sleep’s role in problem incubation and establishing a new technique to advance understanding of problem solving and sleep cognition.
Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.
China fact of the day
Any Chinese person who has gone to elementary school or watched television news can explain the tale of China’s 100 years of humiliation. Starting with the Opium Wars in the 19th century, foreign powers bullied a weak and backward China into turning Hong Kong and Macau into European colonies. Students must memorize the unequal treaties the Qing dynasty signed during that period.
There’s even a name for it: “national humiliation education.”
Here is more from Li Yuan at the NYT.
Do Social Media Harm the Mental Health of Youth? Probably Not.
Time spent on social media has been blamed for increased suicides and depression, just as were other new technologies and pastimes such as phones and Dungeons and Dragons.
… but is social media the real culprit? Or are we engaged in a moral panic, perhaps not understanding the root of the problem? One major limitation of the current literature is that the vast majority of research on SNSs and mental health are cross sectional and cannot speak to developmental change over time or direction of effects. Additionally, research to date rely on traditional regression techniques that model between-person relations among variables. These techniques ignore individual processes that are vital to our understanding of the true relationship between these variables. Thus, the aim of the current study is to test a causal model of the associations between time spent using social media and mental health (anxiety and depression), using both between and within subjects analyses, over an 8-year-period of time, encompassing the transition between adolescence and emerging adulthood.
That’s from an impressive, 8-year long study. It’s not a random experiment but this is the most credible research on the question I have read to date.
Of course, this raises the question of why mental health is down and fragility is up among the young. One answer is that the evidence on mental fragility is flimsy, which is true in general, but the data on suicides is reasonably good and suicides among youth have increased a lot since 2000. I’m not sure of the answers but although social media fit the time trend I now down weight that explanation.
Hat tip: The awesome Rolf Degen.
My education podcast with Can Olcer
#7 Tyler Cowen (GMU) on less homework, Swiss science culture, and low university completion rates
In this episode with Tyler Cowen we talk about a broad range of topics. For example, why it’s important that students have less homework, the Swiss science culture, and the low university completion rates.
Here is the link, here is Can on Twitter. Can currently runs Kosmos School, a K-12 science school realized through Virtual Reality.
Education fact of the day
Estimates suggest an average annual consumption value of college as high as $11,600, with considerable heterogeneity across students. Incorporating these benefits raises the average expected return to college by as much as 14%.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Yifan Gong, Lance Lochner, Ralph Stinebrickner, and Todd R. Stinebrickner.
Learning from Night Lights
It’s well known that you can see the deleterious effects of communism from outer space but you can also learn about development, war, and international law as this video demonstrates:
Hat tip: Roman Hardgrave.
More me on Harvard admissions
Now consider that America’s top universities are among the most ideologically “left-wing” institutions in the country. At Harvard, for instance, 84% of faculty donations to political parties and political action committees from 2011 to 2014 went in the Democratic direction. The Democrats, of course, are supposed to be the party opposed to income inequality. So what has gone wrong here? Why should these elites be trusted?
If any institution should be able to buck social trends, it is Harvard. It has an endowment of about $39 billion (circa 2018), its top administrators are employable elsewhere, and most of its significant faculty hold tenured positions. It might also have the world’s best academic reputation, and it could fill its entering class with top students even after taking a big reputational or financial hit.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column, some parts in full mood affiliation mode.
From the comments — the power of professors
The PhD is a credential that graduate students need, and which the supervising professor uses to hold power over them. Doing away with the PhD as a valuable credential takes power away from professors. That may not bother Tyler, but most professors covet and zealously protect whatever institutional and personal power they can grasp.
That is from Tom Meadowcraft, commenting on my proposal to limit economics graduate study to three years.
What should I ask Henry Farrell?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event. As you read blogs, you might know Henry’s longstanding work over at CrookedTimber, and also his role in Monkey Cage. Henry is also professor of political science at George Washington University, has with Abraham L. Newman recently published a path-breaking book on the increasingly important concept of weaponized interdependence, is an expert on comparative labor relations, and is an all-around polymath, including on fiction, science fiction, and the politics of Ireland, his home country. Here is his home page.
So what should I ask Henry?
How to reform the economics Ph.D
This has been bothering me, so I’m putting it out there – The shift to 6 yrs for an Econ PhD is a TERRIBLE trend for female PhD students – & also some men, obviously – but especially for women. This issue warrants much more attention.
So says the wise Melissa S. Kearney.
Along those lines, I have a modest proposal. Eliminate the economics Ph.D, period. Offer everyone three years of graduate economics education, and no more (with a clock reset allowed for pregnancy). Did Smith, Keynes, or Hayek have an economics Ph.D? This way, no one will assume you know what you are talking about, and the underlying message is that economics learning is lifelong.
After the three years is up, you would be free to look for a job, or alternatively you might find someone to support you to do additional research, such as in the newly structured “post doc without the doc.” The researchers who absolutely need additional training would try to glom on to a lab or major grant, but six years would not be the default.
Of course, in that setting, schools could take chances on more students, and more students could take a chance on trying economics as a profession. Furthermore, for most of the most accomplished students, it is already clear they deserve a top job by the time their third year rolls around, usually well before then. Women would hit their tenure clocks much earlier, also, easing childbearing constraints. A dissertation truly would become just a job market paper, which has already been the trend for a long time. Why obsess over the non-convexity of “finishing”? Finish everyone, and throw them into the maws of some mix of AI and human evaluators sooner rather than later.
Over time, I would expect that more people would take the first-year sequence in their senior year of undergraduate study, and more first-year jobs would have zero or very low teaching loads. All to the better.
And if you’re mainly going to teach Principles at a state university, three years of graduate study really is enough. You’ll learn more your first year teaching anyway.
Which other fields might benefit from such a reform?
People, you have nothing to lose but your chains.
How Harvard makes admissions decisions
Here are some new and very thorough results from Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and the excellent Tyler Ransom:
The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.
Am I allowed to observe that this seems wrong to me? And that our “liberal elite” (not my preferred term, but what you see in the discourse and I don’t know which other referent to use) has failed us?
And from Garett Jones:
Controlling for academic traits and much else, being Asian American predicts a substantially lower probability of Harvard admission… And being female predicts a substantially higher probability of admission.
Here is the full paper. For the pointer I thank various MR readers.
My MRU videos with Ian Bremmer, on globalization
Here’s the first video in the three-part series.
And a description of the curriculum:
Globalization, Robots, and You
Students have important decisions to make about their educations and careers – wouldn’t it be nice if they better understood the forces of globalization and automation first?
Imagine if they could deftly navigate data from the BLS occupational handbook, academic research, and more to gauge salary prospects, the risk of automation, and foreign competition when comparing their options.
Imagine no more: Tyler Cowen and MRU have partnered with Ian Bremmer and Eurasia Group Foundation to build a five-day curriculum that covers globalization, automation, creative destruction, the elephant graph, and more! Then we apply those concepts to help students rethink personal choices of education and career. 100% free.
The curriculum is chock-full of interactive games, discussion prompts, research assignments, assessment questions, and includes three new videos.
And here are links to video #2 – Creative Destruction: Technology and Trade and video #3 – Are There Winners and Losers of Globalization?
Here is a link to the curriculum.
They solved for the equilibrium
Yet GWU is taking a surprising and radical step that has prompted deep faculty anxiety: It is choosing to shrink — a lot.
Over the next five years, the private university just west of the White House aims to slash the undergraduate population of its D.C. campuses 20 percent. That would mean 2,100 fewer students, less tuition revenue and tough choices on whether to reduce faculty and financial aid or find other ways to balance the budget.
Many colleges have scrambled in recent times to cope with falling enrollment amid demographic upheaval. GWU provides the rare case of a school announcing in advance, as a public strategy, that it wants to get smaller…
LeBlanc declined to rule out faculty layoffs or other significant steps to reduce expenditures. He said those issues will be hashed out in consultation with faculty, trustees and others in the development of a strategic plan.
Here is more from Nick Anderson at The Washington Post. Keep in mind that universities cannot do much to control their labor costs in the short or even medium-run, and thus shifts in demand can have a spectacularly large impact on finances.
Developing object permanence around flinches
Many years ago, I did an exercise where I made a list of thoughts that I flinched away from. Then, I made spaced repetition cards with the thoughts.
The cards were statements like: “As of March 2009, I am currently uncomfortable with the idea that quitting my job might be the right move.” (Totally fake example to communicate the format.)
I think it was a really useful exercise, and it’s pretty easy to implement, and I basically recommend it to people.
I don’t think the part about spaced repetition software specifically was all that important–I think the idea was that I developed something like object permanence around these mental flinches of mine, and that was the way I accomplished that.
If you try this, I wouldn’t try to force yourself to consider the uncomfortable thought at the object level. I would try to internalize that you are in fact uncomfortable considering it at the object level, and maybe meditate on possible cognitive chilling effects of that situation.
Because, in my experience, human brains are pretty good at back-propagating these flinches, and that can cut off a lot of otherwise useful thought. (The linked article is very good, but includes a framing and approach that are, IMO, importantly different from what worked for me. YMMV.)
From Divia Eden, via Alexey Guzey.
The college football surveillance culture that is Alabama
Saban, the Alabama football coach, has long been peeved that the student section at Bryant-Denny Stadium empties early. So this season, the university is rewarding students who attend games — and stay until the fourth quarter — with an alluring prize: improved access to tickets to the SEC championship game and to the College Football Playoff semifinals and championship game, which Alabama is trying to reach for the fifth consecutive season.
But to do this, Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step: using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.
“It’s kind of like Big Brother,” said Allison Isidore, a graduate student in religious studies from Montclair, N.J…
Greg Byrne, Alabama’s athletic director, said privacy concerns rarely came up when the program was being discussed with other departments and student groups. Students who download the Tide Loyalty Points app will be tracked only inside the stadium, he said, and they can close the app — or delete it — once they leave the stadium. “If anybody has a phone, unless you’re in airplane mode or have it off, the cellular companies know where you are,” he said.
Here is the full NYT piece, via Anecdotal.