One of my favorite podcast episodes, because Russ pushes back so hard and of course Bryan debates effectively. For example, Bryan says,
I would say if there is no designable test that can show that people learn something, then they haven’t learned it. You might say the test is bad, in which case I would say, ‘Fine. Design a better test, and then show it to me.’ But, if you want to say that people have been transformed but it’s a way that no one can actually show, no matter how hard they try, then I’m going to say, ‘No. That just sounds like wishful thinking.’
Later, Bryan says:
I’m weird in this way, in that when I read something that seems true to me, like I just feel this incredible, this weight on the world: ‘I must repent. I can’t keep living the way I used to live any more. I’ve got to go and incorporate this knowledge into my decisions, day after day. And, I’m a sinner if I don’t.’ But even that is such a weird response to a book. Most people read Tetlock’s Superforecasting and say, ‘Oh, yeah. So interesting. Some people are really great at this stuff. Yeah. Right.’ And then they go back and live their normal lives.
This is interesting. Maybe there is an “ability to learn” that reflects hyper-sensitivity to new information. And can formal education affect the degree of sensitivity to new information?
Bryan I think is responding as a true philosophical realist–other things exists, and we can know them.
Idealists, moderns, or post-moderns may object to any or all of that (that things exist, or even if they do exist that we can know anything about them, etc), and I am sure he runs into his fair share of people that at least spout those views around the college campus.
But I think there is a more common self-centered variety of anti-realism, that while acknowledging the reality of things and of knowable truth in lip-service, live as if it were all entirely subjective. New information about the world is submitted merely for the judgment (using Bryan’s word) of “interesting” or “not-interesting”, not really, fundamentally, “true” or “false”. This also offers the feature that one may hold many, completely contradictory “interesting” ideas at the same time.
Someone who really believes in the truth lives in a kind of constant tension and even judgment, since their entire life has to be, in some real sense, ordered to the truth; anything less would be to choose to live out a deliberate lie, and yet, to live according to the truth sometimes makes difficult demands, in fact it sometimes demands everything.
I really like Roberts and his whole series, but I must say I found this one to be a disappointing performance on the his part, and if he pushed back hard, he didn’t do so with the kind of sharp, intellectual precision that could possibly pierce the arguments in Caplan’s book. Caplan had an easy time flatly rejecting everything Roberts said.
Now, some of that could be because Caplan’s conclusion is basically true, and it’s inherently hard to make strong valid arguments that a true thing is false (which is alas different from successfully achieving the public acceptance of invalid arguments.)
But, for example, Russ could have really tried to emphasize the point that there seems to be a big difference between different courses of instruction these days – between STEM and the rest – and differences also in retention in other subjects between what we observe today and what we can infer about previous generations. Or Russ could have hit harder on the question of how much trust can we place in the accuracy of zero-stakes testing as the CLA is on most campuses? “Of course it looks like no one learned anything, they are all blowing off a test that has no importance to them.” But that just raises the question of why it has no stake, which is just Caplan’s answer yet again.
I don’t believe Russ engaged well with the literature on the predictive power of IQ, and pointing out that uncorrelated traits could be more essential to success in certain jobs doesn’t imply that IQ still doesn’t strongly explain differences in income and success rates between members of the group of people sharing that set of other uncorrelated traits and within the field of competition for those jobs.
But Russ’s simultaneous insistence that one can be justified in believing education to be critically important while also being confident that one “can’t measure that” criticism seems oddly anti-empirical and follows the script of a kind of God-of-the-gaps retreat from inconvenient data, and it has an almost metaphysical or even New-Agey mystical character. “I just know it’s importantly influential in, and beneficial to, my life, and all our lives, yet you can’t possibly test or produce evidence of that, but one is still entitles to believe it because it’s real and powerful and explains the mysteries of our world.”
Well, ok, sometimes that could be true. But let’s just say in other contexts of intellectual discussions between academics, that kind of argument would not get much traction.
The “possibility of subtle influences on neural network formation,” (apparently also without measurable effects) is like popping an intellectual smoke grenade in the room by introducing unnecessary complicating factors in an effort to create such a large space of unknowable possibilities that it could salvage one’s preferred hypothesis even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
More to the point, it is moving the goal posts. “Education is important because of the learning.” – “The kids aren’t learning. We ask them what they know, most only retain the tiniest fraction of the material in the published curricula for the classes on their transcripts.” – “Ok, they aren’t learning ‘facts’, but maybe they learned ‘skills’ and …” – “No, we measure the skills too, and it’s the same.” – “Ok, well maybe it’s not skills per se, but an exercise in acculturation to class norms and reigning orthodoxy that can’t be accomplished in any less indirect a manner, or maybe it’s subtle influences on neural network formation …” When one is getting into matters of unfalsifiable hypotheticals one is now longer having a scientific conversation.
Most formal schooling, very little education happens, surrenders to inculcating “school helplessness”. Not surprising since it increases the student’s dependence on formal schooling.
“In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar “school helplessness”; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.”
How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
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If you read earlier pundits on education, you find that very little progress in education has been made in the last 130 years:
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., remarks that the common schools of Massachusetts cost $4,000,000 a year; and adds, “The imitative or memorizing faculties only are cultivated, and little or no attention is paid to the thinking or reflective powers. Indeed it may almost be said that a child of any originality or with individual characteristics is looked upon as wholly out of place in a public school. … To skate is as difficult as to write; probably more difficult. Yet in spite of hard teaching in the one case and no teaching in the other, the boy can skate beautifully, and he cannot write his native tongue at all.”*
* “Scientific Common-school Education.” Harper’s Magazine,
November, 1880
Formal education definitely affects the degree of sensitivity to new information that our Solons require. But not for the better.
Add the degree and subtract humility. “The wisdom of humility” is T.S. Eliot’s line. “Humility is endless.”
Was Hayek’s humility, or Smith’s, part of Jonathan Gruber’s education? Or McGeorge Bundy’s? People are pieces on a chess-board. That’s a very expensive education reduced to its broadest outline.
Sent out into the colonies, tasked with ruling over the natives, what did our governors learn? To never doubt themselves? To push on, undaunted?
Read not to contradict and confute;
nor to believe and take for granted;
nor to find talk and discourse;
but to weigh and consider. – Bacon
I believe the “ability to learn” is more developing the habit to weigh and consider what you read and hear. Perhaps the university exposed students to more of those who had this habit than they would encounter back on the farm, but these days, it is far easier, and with some modern universities, more likely, to find these individuals on the web in blogs and podcasts.
It is quite easy to go through 4 or 8 years at a university, and even when encountering such individuals, not develop the habit. More likely if you end up in an environment like the one in the anecdote regarding his cousin, Sherwin Rosen, Joseph Epstein tells in the Uncommon Knowledge podcast below, if as related, those involved, in this case Gary Becker, don’t realize their error and self-correct. If the program rewards gameshow knowledge and washes out those who weigh and consider, then as they say, incentives matter.
https://youtu.be/JF2eJSHKKd0?t=1050