Author Archives: Arnold Kling

Schools: small is beautiful

Posted on by

Eric Wearne writes,

Large schools—public or private—cannot replicate the flexibility offered by ESAs [educational savings accounts, which can be used to pay a variety of providers to meet the needs of a given student], pods, or hybrid homeschools. They cannot personally tailor their programs to the same degree while at the same time maintaining the small community coherence that many families desire. In the U.S., hybrid homeschools have generally been open and operating (relatively) normally this school year. Most parents are ready for schools to re-open. But they are not looking for the return of business as usual. They are likely to pull their kids out much more quickly than they were in the past if things are not working well. They are seeking, somewhat paradoxically, more individualization and more community, and are often finding both by attending—or starting—hybrid homeschools.

He is talking his book, Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons.

Many major American institutions have degraded over the past 70 years, but I think that there is a case to be made that public schools have degraded the most.

Between 1950 and 1980 the number of school districts fell from 83,642 to 15,987. Today, it stands at 16,800.

That means that in 1950, there were about 1,820 Americans per school district. Today, there are roughly 19,700 Americans per school district. School boards are remote from their constituents. The influence of parents on public schools has waned. The influence of teachers’ unions has waxed.

If the larger districts have produced economies of scale, this is not evident. Spending on schools has soared, without any evident improvement in performance.

One argument for public schools is that they will take any child. But it seems that students with special needs are served better by smaller institutions. The affluent parents I know who have children with special needs send them to private schools. The parents are progressives who support public schools but “not for my child,” who they think could not possibly thrive in public school. Less-affluent parents deserve the same opportunity.

Another argument for public schools is that they provide common socialization. But the woke religion that today’s teachers are being taught and are passing along to children is not my idea of helpful socialization.

If we are going to continue to keep the public school concept, we need significant reforms.

1. Smaller school districts.
2. Much diminished power for teachers’ unions.
3. A totally different approach for training teachers, based on evidence rather than ideology.

The prospects for this being what they are, I have more hope for a voucher system.

Scout mindset and social epistemology

Posted on by

Commenter Handle writes,

I think there is a contradiction – or at least some tension – between this metaphorical framing of being a ‘scout’ and your conception of ‘social epistemology’.

The concept of social epistemology says that you are who you copy. If you copy people with a scout mindset, (a) you are likely to have a scout mindset and (b) the opinions you take on are likely to fit better with reality.

What we are observing in journalism and academia is the rapid abandonment of the scout mindset. That means that we have to search more carefully for people to copy. The heuristic of “trust the journalists to give us the news” or “trust academics to give unbiased analysis” works much less well today than it did a few decades ago.

Julia Galef watch

Posted on by

I found out about her from a FITs owner, who was very enthusiastic. It looks like he was right. Here is Michael Shermer reviewing her new book, The Scout Mindset.

Scouts, Ms. Galef explains, “revise their opinions incrementally over time, which makes it easier to be open to evidence against their beliefs.” They also “view errors as opportunities to hone their skill at getting things right, which makes the experience of realizing ‘I was wrong’ feel valuable, rather than just painful.” In fact, the author suggests, we should drop the whole “wrong” confession and instead describe the process as “updating”—a reference to Bayesian reasoning, in which we revise our estimations of the probability of something’s being true after gaining new information about it. “An update is routine. Low-key. It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin,” Ms. Galef continues. “An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.”

The Scout Mindset and FITs

Posted on by

I have started reading Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset. She depicts a dichotomy between: scout mindset, in which you continually test your beliefs in pursuit of truth; and soldier mindset, in which you put up defenses against changing your mind.

My Fantasy Intellectual Teams project tries to use metrics to reward the scout mindset. In contrast, Twitter’s metrics of likes, shares, and followers tend to reward the soldier’s mindset. How many times have you seen someone “like” a tweet that expresses a view with which they disagree?

Last night on Clubhouse with Erik Torenberg, a couple of April’s FITs owners and I talked about how paying attention to the metrics that we use can change the way you look at pundits. You see that some of the commentators you like operate in soldier mindset, and you start to raise your evaluation of commentators who do a better job of remaining in scout mindset.

For more about the FITs project, see this essay as well as some of the other essays at my substack site.

If you would like to help with the project, leave a comment here to that effect.

If you are interested in following the project to see how it goes, subscribe to me on substack (free).

Martin Gurri (also Andrey Mir) watch

Posted on by

1. Martin Gurri writes,

The information sphere teems with platforms of communication: that is its most typical and abundant feature. The governing elites are not forbidden or unable to speak. They are unwilling to compete for attention. They dread the thought that the public will shout back. This phobia has been the strategic advantage of populists like Trump, who achieve proximity with the public by engaging with it on digital platforms. Until more constructive politicians master the art of online communication, the crisis of the elites will only deepen.

It is a long essay, but worth your time.

2. Gurri interviews Andrey Mir. Mir says,

The internet revealed that the business of the news media rested not on information but on the lack of information. Those conditions are gone. The market is already willing to abandon newspapers, but society is not yet ready. Social habits have slowed down the process. But it is demographics that have begun the final countdown. This is why it is possible to calculate the deadline, figuratively speaking. Millions of students today have never even touched a newspaper. They simply do not know how to consume the press, nor are they aware of why they should do it. As soon as this generation takes command, newspapers are done. Hence the last date for the industry—the mid-2030s.

In July of 2002, I wrote,

The newspaper business is going to die within the next twenty years. Newspaper publishing will continue, but only as a philanthropic venture.

Martin Gurri watch

Posted on by

Contrary to appearances, I argue that the center-left did not win in 2020.

As of 2021, both the Democratic and Republican establishments are reeling from what Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public. Both the left and the right must reckon with an illiberal, religiously fanatical constituency. On the right, Mr. Trump bullies and insults anyone who is less than worshipful toward him. The large body of his supporters that is willing to comply with his demands for personal loyalty represents the illiberalism of the right.

On the other side, there are the young progressive activists who are so certain of their moral rectitude that they see those who do not share their positions as heretics. They are unwilling to allow heretics even to enjoy gainful employment while holding dissenting beliefs. These activists represent the illiberalism of the left.

Don’t trust doctors as statisticians

Posted on by

1. Daniel J. Morgan and others write,

These findings suggest that many practitioners are unaccustomed to using probability in diagnosis and clinical practice. Widespread overestimates of the probability of disease likely contribute to overdiagnosis and overuse.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

In 2008, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres in Supercrunchers also reported that doctors tend to do poorly in basic probability. When I taught AP statistics in high school, I always used an example of bad experience inflicted on me by a Harvard-trained physician who did not know Bayes’ Theorem.

2. From a 2014 paper by Ralph Pelligra and others

The Back to Sleep Campaign was initiated in 1994 to implement the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) recommendation that infants be placed in the nonprone sleeping position to reduce the risk of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). This paper offers a challenge to the Back to Sleep Campaign (BTSC) from two perspectives: (1) the questionable validity of SIDS mortality and risk statistics, and (2) the BTSC as human experimentation rather than as confirmed preventive therapy.

The principal argument that initiated the BTSC and that continues to justify its existence is the observed parallel declines in the number of infants placed in the prone sleeping position and the number of reported SIDS deaths. We are compelled to challenge both the implied causal relationship between these observations and the SIDS mortality statistics themselves.

I thank Russ Roberts for the pointer. This specific issue has been one of my pet peeves since 2016. See this post, for example. I think that back-sleeping is a terrible idea, and I never trusted the alleged evidence for it. Doctors do not understand the problem of inferring causation from non-experimental data, etc.

UPDATE: A commenter points to this Emily Oster post, reporting on a more careful study that supports back-sleeping.

De-institutionalization just shuffles the institutions

Posted on by

Christopher F. Rufo writes,

The question now is not, “What happened to the asylums?” but “What replaced them?” Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary commitments, we have created an “invisible asylum” composed of three primary institutions: the street, the jail, and the emergency room.

Here is an issue that is better framed by conservatives than by progressives or libertarians, no?

Epistemology and social science

Posted on by

1. On substack, I wrote,

We learn socially, so that most of our beliefs come from other people.

This makes the problem of choosing which people to trust the central problem in epistemology.

What Eric Weinstein calls our “sense-making apparatus” can be thought of as a set of prestige hierarchies, at the top of which are the people who are most widely trusted.

Our prestige hierarchies are based largely on credentials: professor at Harvard; writer for the New York Times; public health official.

The incentive systems and selection mechanisms in the credential-based hierarchies have become corrupted over time, allowing people to rise to the top who lack wisdom and intellectual rigor.

I proceeded to expand on these sentences.

2. Rob Henderson writes,

In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel writes, “a substantial reason we evolved such large brains is to navigate our social world… A great deal of the value that exists in the social world is created by consensus rather than discovered in an objective sense… our cognitive machinery evolved to be only partially constrained by objective reality.” Our social brains process information not only by examining the facts, but also considering the social consequences of what happens to our reputations if we believe something.

Later on,

In her recent book Cognitive Gadgets, the Oxford psychologist Cecilia Hayes writes, “children show prestige bias; they are more likely to copy a model that adults regard as being higher social status- for example, their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender.” Hayes cites a 2013 study by Nicola McGuigan who found that five-year-old children are “selective copiers.” Results showed that kids were more likely to imitate their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender. Young children are more likely to imitate a person that adults regard as being higher status.

and later,

researchers Ángel V. Jiménez and Alex Mesoudi wrote that assessing competence directly “may be noisy and costly. Instead, social learners can use short-cuts either by making inferences from the appearance, personality, material possessions, etc. of the models.”

In my view, these observations/findings make the philosopher’s approach to epistemology seem wrong-footed. The philosopher wants to ask when I should believe my senses. I want to ask when I should believe Jack, especially when he disagrees with Jill. Or Fauci when he disagrees with Mowshowitz.

I pay attention to social learning because of my reading of Henrich and Laland. This predisposition is reinforced by what I found in the Henderson piece. I had an exchange with Michael Huemer on this after this post. I still think that philosophers ought to pay more attention to the issue of how one decides who is trustworthy.