14 ms·

An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society

143 points by champagnepapi 9y ago

pnathan 9y ago
The ancient Western word for this is virtue: to cultivate virtues as part of an education. It's not a novel concept, but it rather got shot in the head in the postmodern revolution in education, and we're a lesser society for it.
- triangleman 9y ago
  Do you have links to old educational material where this sort of thing was part and parcel of the pedagogy? I am interested in getting into homeschooling, especially focusing on character development. I suppose an emphasis on the humanities would be a good first step, but I don't know where to find the "leading lights" in this kind of old-school education.
  - Bulkington 9y ago
    Well, here's a/the start to "old school": http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html
  - paganel 9y ago
    Not the OP, and it's a rather old book, relatively speaking, but you might also give Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, or On Education a chance. It's got nothing pedagogically scientific in it, at least compared to today's standards, but were I to have a kid I'd base my trying to teach him about things in life on what this book has taught me (it also talks about lots of other interesting things, not only pedagogy). Reading it I realized that my dad was at certain points following this book almost by the letter (I've never asked him if he had read it, though), and on the book's wikipedia page there's mention of the Montessori method being some sort of follow-up to what Rousseau was thinking in terms of educating children.
  - csa 9y ago
    I would look into experiential education/learning. Dewey is considered the modern father of experiential education. The main text is Experience and Education (1938). Kolb (and many other folks) have written on this topic more recently. When done well, this is an amazing way to learn.
  - pnathan 9y ago
    The keyword is "Classical" education when you're looking for homeschooling materials.
- bbctol 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the idea that there was a 'postmodern revolution' in education (or even what that would look like?) What changes are you referring to?
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Education as job training rather than education for intrinsic value.
    - accountyaccount 9y ago
      Makes sense considering the U.S. is a society where you have no value unless you work. The presiding political party doesn't think you should have food and housing unless you have a job.
      - mmirate 9y ago
        > you have no value unless you work This subjunctive clause, stands alone as a true statement. How else does one earn money?
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        > This subjunctive clause, stands alone as a true statement. How else does one earn money? Well, one can gain money from passive rents on capital without work.
        accountyaccount 9y ago
        You're equating value with money. I wasn't.
        mmirate 9y ago
        > You're equating value with money. Well, unless we regress from currency to bartering, value is measured in money.
    - 9y ago
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  For a short book-length explanation of this, see "The Abolition of Man" by C. S. Lewis.
svend 9y ago
I stopped reading at "IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world.."
- reefoctopus 9y ago
  The Flynn effect says IQ rises 2.93 points per decade. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The Flynn effect documents an increase in IQ, but does not say there will be a consistent 2.93 point increase --- in fact, the increase is not consistent, but rather concentrates in areas of lower socioeconomic status.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tlb 9y ago
  That is well studied. A large meta-analysis claims 2.93 points per decade, over most of the 20th century. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/
- watwut 9y ago
  Kids eat better and we focus way more on both their early development and schooling then before. Why would be better results so surprising?
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    yes it seems mostly to be from the nutrition aspect as IQ is supposedly supposed to be immutable otherwise
    - tptacek 9y ago
      That's not true. It is definitely not settled that IQ is believed by scientists to be immutable, and, in fact, a widely held hypothesis for the increase (shared by Flynn himself) is that the cognitive environment has become increasing complex, which is having the effect of "training" higher IQ.
MichaelBurge 9y ago
TLDR: The Republicans won the election, so the education system is flawed. The professor advocates different admissions tests, presumably selecting for people who can be convinced to vote Democrat and buy into Democrat save-the-world rhetoric. > If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged — one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping? > We have a guy [representative-elect Greg Gianforte of Montana] who allegedly assaulted a reporter and just got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives—and that’s after a 30-point average increase in IQ. We had violence in campaign rallies. > What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. There is a separate discussion to be had about testing criteria causing schools to narrowly focus on them, but I don't really see that in the article. There's another discussion about smart people being ineffective - which I thought he was going for at first - but which I didn't really see much of. There's yet another discussion that could be had on smart people needing more ethics, but his examples were mostly political. I can see the abstract appeal of saying that testing for wisdom or ethics will incentivize schools to teach them better, but it's a bit sinister if all the examples are political or based on something he saw in the news. The first two sentences here might sound provocative, but 100% of his specific examples were recent political news and he literally writes admissions tests. There were so many other directions he could've gone in if he were talking about wisdom/ethics more generally. I'm not sure what else to think other than e.g. if you don't believe that income disparities are a problem, then you lack wisdom & ethics and the admissions tests should screen you out. You're probably better off finding another article that focuses on one of these other more specific issues if you want to discuss the US education system.
- sidek 9y ago
  In fact, current elite US college admissions seem to select for people who vote Democrat well enough. It would be hard to increase that percentage very much. Just look at the political affiliation reported by e.g. Harvard students. If anything, I would think that an institution which tested for wisdom might shift conservative a percentage point or two.[ Not because I think conservatives are necessarily more moral in the US; but because I think more conservatives are religious and churches teach the language of virtue, which probably at least better tells you what the 'right' answer on wisdom tests is, whether you live that answer or not.]
untilHellbanned 9y ago
"Excellent sheep" is same idea by another former Yale Prof, William Deresiewicz http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-sheep http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-sheep
accountyaccount 9y ago
Probably a step up from people who are simply fools?
jbscpa 9y ago
My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns. 3. We will use good manners, saying, "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" and allow others to go first. and so forth. http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations In my opinion when the U.S. abandoned the judeo/christian ethic in the late twentieth century character and wisdom training was denigrated as "old fashioned" and unnecessary.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  I'd love to understand what you base that last sentence on.
- Retric 9y ago
  In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.) If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    That's not all that surprising: outward religious formality is a sign of religion being tribal identity rather than substantive ideology. There's a degree to which some degree of tribalism sis useful for promoting continuity of community and preservation of ideas, but there's also a persistent danger of degeneration into empty tribalism preoccupied with outward form.
  - prewett 9y ago
    Sounds like you have an axe to grind, especially since you cite no evidence yourself... How would you measure "less ethical," anyway? Are we more ethical now than 200 years ago or less, in your view? According to Gallup, 91% of Americans in 1948 claimed to be Christian, compared to 69% in 2016. [0] I would assume "formally religious" is tracks similarly. Personally, I think we are less ethical, but since I wasn't around in 1948, hard to say. I think ethics is related to your value of what is right and wrong. In 1948 people by and large had a "Christian" outlook on what is right and wrong and why. In 2016, the more popular claim is moral relativism, namely that there is no absolute right or wrong. Given that I can make up right and wrong and they only apply to me and not you, that seems to be a recipe for unethical behavior. In fact, I'm not sure "ethics" is a meaningful word if you subscribe to moral relativism. Say what you like about "formally religious," but I think it offers a much better framework for ethics than the moral relativism we have now. [0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx
Shivetya 9y ago
Look at the hundreds of billions of dollars the DOE has spent since its inception under President Carter and ask, why have scores and graduations rates not show real improvement? Why are we still asking the same questions we did back then? If there were one Federal agency in dire need of dissolution it is that one. Give the money to states in grants and see which one comes up with the better solution
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  A DARPA for education. I like that idea. EARPA. By what metrics would we measure their sucess, since people can't seem to agree on that?
- mturmon 9y ago
  What if your kid lives in one that comes up with the worst solution?
  - adjkant 9y ago
    Agreed this is an important question. I think the second question is "is the worst solution significantly worse than what we have now?". I don't know the area well enough to take a stance here, but it seems the parent is claiming there is little to lose and lots to gain. So do you agree with that, particularly the little to lose part?
    - mturmon 9y ago
      My pushback was against the comment above mine, which blithely suggested doing an experiment where the states would sort it out. Of course, the worst solution will be pretty far off the charts. Never underestimate how far "worst" it can get! There are states/regions that either don't have their shit together, or neglect their second-tier schools.
kartan 9y ago
The article mixes two ideas that partially contradict each other. 1. Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE [...] You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place. 2. Do we know how to cultivate wisdom? Yes we do. I agree with the second statement, and its implications are huge. If we give people good education and good role models, that people are going to be wiser. I don't agree with the first statement. There is still a lot of prejudices against software developers and other high skilled professionals that are part of America's culture. It correlates high IQ with low creativity. Can't high IQ people learn wisdom? Is not part of the second thesis that it can be taught? The best example I have against the first thesis is how developers behave at the companies that I have worked for. These are Swedish companies that value collaboration, personal live balance, and other social skills. People at this companies are social, technically brilliant, they participate in team building activities, we go for beers together, there is more gender parity (but still is very low), etc. If a company values and rewards this values day to day, people are social animals and behave as such. If a company asks developers to work weekends and has no vacation time. Are you surprise to find only angry, non creative, non social people?
- watwut 9y ago
  Why do you think American developers are non creative non social people? Both conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way more social then they like to admit. Non-social people tend to produce culture that is less fanatic to various socialization ways. Add to it companies that really follow agile processes extremely close teamwork and occasional pair programming and you get industry where shy or introverted person is at pretty high disadvantage. I mean, so many here measure developer worth by participation on hackatlons and talks on meetup. Introverted or loner engineer is in serious disadvantage there.
  - kartan 9y ago
    > conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way more social then they like to admit That's my point. They are social, but they can't be like that in companies that value long hour days and weekend work. It is not the developers that are not social, but that "old fashioned" companies force them in a more restricted, non-creative behavior. In a traditional waterfall model, developers are supposed to be implementers, not thinkers. In that kind of company, everything is hierarchical and creativity is not expected. So their developers behave that way. And I will guess that it is that the model of developer that the article is talking about. The article, for sure, is not talking about the developers that you describe. And that's my problem with the assumption in the article that people that are good at a technical problem are not social. :)
pirocks 9y ago
As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning, since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that "scientific" to me.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  honestly it seems to me that many that bash them are just insecure they didn't do well and therefore claim that it isn't a valid measure.
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    Well it stands to reason that if a test isn't a valid measure then those who are hurt most by it will be the most vocal complainers. That doesn't invalidate what the complainers have to say. There are numerous studies showing the poor validity of these standardized tests.
    - oculusthrift 9y ago
      depends what you mean by validity. they have been shown to strongly correlate with IQ.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    There studies that seem legitimate that have found that a certain amount of prep can boost your score multiple tens of points. This is problematic if you want it to be a valid measure because it lets people artificially close the gap. Do you want the student with such a well-rounded education throughout their life that they got a >=99.9% score without needing to study, or the one who caught up by grinding for a few weeks without that same broad underlying fundamental base? If your test can't tell that apart, it's flawed, because access to the right prep is going to become a significant part of what you're measuring, and that access is (for obvious economic reasons) distributed along unequal lines, reinforcing the already-fortunate. My suspicion, since I doubt we can come up with a test to prep, is that the best answer is either (a) nobody preps or (b) everyone gets access to a lot of prep. The former seems impossible to enforce, plus is the sort of "individual liberty"-constraining thing that the politically dominant swathes of America hate. They want to be able to make their kids the best, they "earned it." The latter would be easier, but isn't without some complications, and of course is time that could be better spent on something other than maximizing a single metric.
andrewclunn 9y ago
> If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged—one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping? We're making huge strides in alternative energy sources, both natural gas and renewable energy. Violent crime is down in the developed world. Income inequality is a red haring. Trump's election is not "a problem." So yeah, more left wing trolling here.
CogitoCogito 9y ago
I see many parallels with the post and my own experience. I got my PhD in math and taught many college math courses during that time. I was always saddened at the number of students that essentially viewed math as just an exercise in the memorization of algorithms (memorize differentiation and integration rules and chug away at problems). I would avoid teaching this way and instead give them fewer, "deeper" problems that "exercised the concepts". Students (the "good" and "bad" ones would usually go through the same transition throughout the semester: they would first be very uncomfortable and generally dislike it, then after a few weeks they would start to get used to the process of thinking things through, and finally they would tend to like it much more than what they used to do (of course some students would absolutely despise the process even at the end). Some of the students that liked the process the most where the "bad" ones who were historically worse at the algorithmic style (and unsurprisingly some of the ones who were very good at that style took the longest to convince). Personally I think it's very important to focus on such a style of teaching. If students apply Calculus at work, they'll usually be using some form of abstract reasoning (say finding a reasonable model for some phenomenon) or they will be applying numerical methods (or both), but rarely will specific memorized differentiation rules be necessary. Ironically I believe that the memorization of the steps is most useful to those going into theoretical mathematics where of course being able to do as many "basic" things without thinking will always help you focus on the "true problem". The main issue with this approach is that it is hard for students to know if they understand something correctly (which I would argue may be the single most important intellectual skill to learn in life). They can't just look up an answer and see if they got it right, instead they basically have to ask themselves if their reasoning makes sense. The difficulty in this causes a huge amount of student angst and pushback making it more uncomfortable for the students and more work for the teachers. I think the main reason why we teach math as mainly rote learning is because it's the easiest way to teach. It's my job to go through the motions and your job to learn the algorithms as best you can. From the teaching perspective, this is relatively easy to teach, grade and defend. As a final example, I think that the focus in Calculus on the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is misplaced. It _is_ fundamental from a theoretical perspective, but essentially no numerical integration is done that way and instead the actual way that integrals are computed is some application of Riemann's methods. (The counterexample being languages like Mathematica which are specifically designed to solve things symbolically.) I found a very good exercise to write Riemann integrals in Python (which students could quickly understand as pseudocode) and use different methods (left-endpoint rule, midpoint rule, etc.) to compute the integral in different ways and verifying that the convergence matches errors predicted. I think this is the sort of reasoning that should be focused on much more rather than having students find anti-derivatives all day and simply repeating "remember plus C". This is a bit of a long-winded and rambling post, but I do miss that aspect of teaching. Pushing students to realize their ability to reason about math was always very fulfilling. Not everyone enjoyed it, but the majority would come out realizing that they too can reason about math given enough patience and time.
nostrademons 9y ago
There's an assumption in this article that virtue - using your intelligence to benefit humanity rather than self or tribe - is a character trait, either one that's inborn but should be selected for or one that can be imbued by education and then is relatively unchanging. There's pretty ample evidence [1][2][3][4] that this assumption is false, and that people are highly situational in their moral reasoning. In particular, expectations of abundance and reciprocity seem to factor particularly highly in peoples' moral calculus. Most people are quite willing to undertake pro-social, common-good actions when a.) they will not be personally hurt by it and b.) they have a reasonable expectation that the beneficiaries of their largess will turn around and either pay it back or pay it forward. When those conditions are not met, people have a tendency to act like locusts [5], and try and secure their personal resources before considering what that might do to sustainability or the larger world around them. Doing so is evolutionarily adaptive, as it ensures that they'll be the ones to survive and pass on their genes even if the rest of humanity dies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [5] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
- neogodless 9y ago
  The article/interview claims that we can cultivate and test for virtue (creativity and wisdom), and that our current tests used to funnel intelligence into higher education and intelligence work isn't currently accounting for it. I'm not sure where in the article the claim is made that it cannot be improved upon.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    "Improved upon" assumes something that is constant on the level of long-term worldview, not something that may change situationally. You wouldn't usually say that your choice of what to have for dinner or which sweater to buy can be "improved upon", but many of the individual choices we make that lead to the world we currently live in are on that level. I guess the article does mention engaging the ethical reasoning centers of our brain and training them to realize that it's an ethical problem at all, but my argument here is that there's a reason most citizens in developed countries don't think about the moral implications of, say, buying an iPhone made in a sweatshop in China that uses rare-earth minerals that pollute the environment, and that's because the number of choices we face on a daily basis and the moral complexity of all the consequences of these would paralyze us into inaction if we did - in which case, those people who don't bother to think about it would dominate consumption.
jrochkind1 9y ago
> What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have I think he left out the most important category -- empathy/compassion/caring/"emotional intelligence".
Cozumel 9y ago
It puts me in mind of the three minute degree[0] > Education can produce what the Village wants. > "A row of cabbages," Number 6 objects. > "Indeed," Number 2 agrees. "But knowledgeable cabbages [0]http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/thegeneral.htm http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/thegeneral.htm
Glyptodon 9y ago
So the 30 point IQ thing, is that a reference to a global increase driven by access to education, or am I missing something? Because it's not like 130 is the new normal IQ score? But at the same time haven't they always been normalized around 100 in industrialized countries?
- defen 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
grandalf 9y ago
While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years. Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization, diligence, and repeated practice at the expense of general intelligence. When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence. To a large extent, pre-law and pre-med curricula offer this, and so many of the students who excel using that technique end up in positions of social authority.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence. I remember being accosted by a squad of students, who were there to make sure I was going to be a good little TA and run my course according to those "rules."
  - ghaff 9y ago
    I did some tutoring in a graduate program. There were definitely some students who were, for reasons of academic background or otherwise, barely able to hang on. And they were very focused on exactly what was going to be on tests and what they really needed to know to squeak through.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  Yeah, people with law degrees are probably overrepresented in politics, but pre-med?
  - adjkant 9y ago
    Ben Carson is heading HUD after all, welcome to 2017.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Healthcare is one of the biggest areas of government, and administrators in the field often have medical and/or public health degrees on top of pre-med or substantially similar undergraduate coursework. For that matter, I think that medical doctors are substantially overrepresented in elected general government office (state and federal legislatures, etc.) even though not nearly so much as lawyers. (e.g, Congress is 2.8% physicians, while the US adult population is around 0.4% physicians.)
stcredzero 9y ago
...IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”... A lot of coding pathologies and programming language pathologies seem to be the product of such "smart fools." (Mea culpa!) There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Come to think of it, a big chunk of, "The devil is in the details," can be translated to, "The hardest problems are the emergent problems."
- dmix 9y ago
  > There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Do you have any good examples of this in programming? I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust). It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular languages/platforms. Which might be more about the nature of how languages are adopted rather than the individual attributes and qualities of the language.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Do you have any good examples of this in programming? The CORBA "sea of objects" concepts infesting Linux distributions and making everything sinfully slow. (Sometime just after Red Hat 7.) My own Smalltalk meta-level "browser helper" wrappers in the "new" ObjectStudio Smalltalk browser. (For making the browser extensible, great, but didn't really have to be instantiated until actually operating on the class.) The Smalltalk-inspired implementation of "everything is an object" by making everything a pointer to a different struct. (Not good for cache coherence!) I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust). So it goes. Same thing happened with many OOP concepts -- both good and bad. I'm not saying that everything that rises is scum. The cream also rises. I did not say that all things which seem like good, elegant ideas are actually programming pathologies in disguise. It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular languages/platforms. And some of the good, elegant ideas turn out to be bad ones when you start to scale in different ways.
shmageggy 9y ago
> I think it’s hurting everything. We get scientists who are very good forward incrementers—they are good at doing the next step but they are not the people who change the field. They are not redirectors or reinitiators, who start a field over. And those are the people we need. I doubt the problem is with the scientists. I know and work with lots of really smart and creative people in an academic environment, and I'm sure some of them would be capable of redirecting, reinitiating, of starting a field over -- were they given a chance. But just try to get funded for anything at all that isn't incremental and see how well you do. Scientific funding is so scarce, and becoming more and more so, that funding agencies only approve grants that are practically guaranteed successes, and those tend to be the incremental ones. Maybe narrow testing is responsible for the plague of incremental science, but if so it's probably not the scientists' fault, but more likely because we've cultivated a society that isn't creative and thoughtful enough to appreciate the value of really novel science.
- bluGill 9y ago
  Most of the need in science is in advancing another step. For every major advancement we need tens of thousands of small advancements to refine and work out all the details. Physics was 99% solved in 1880 with just the work of finishing out the constants. In that 1% we were missing was relativity and quantum mechanics, and we know that there is something more but not what. However as big as those two are they are still < 5% of the physics needed are. (The numbers don't add up because now that we know about relativity we know it is more than 1%, but it isn't a significant factor in most real world needs which still get by on newton physics) Yes there are areas of complete unknown in science (all over). However they are complete unknowns: you can spend a lifetime in false starts. In Computer science the P=NP problem has been an important unknown for years and many have spent a large part of their lifetime on it and we still are not close to a solution. This is a known unknown, must of what remains is not even that well defined, just a case where "something funny" happens and we have no idea why and often can't figure out how to replicate it on demand.
johan_larson 9y ago
"Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values." That's a really odd definition of "wisdom". That's more like "unselfishness" or maybe "benevolence".
- clock_tower 9y ago
  I think it's a tolerably accurate definition; it's almost always more wise to cultivate enlightened self-interest instead of the unenlightened kind. Another generation of the current state of affairs, and the US will probably have another civil war -- and it'd be the height of folly to let things escalate to that point.
cperciva 9y ago
Standardized tests are a lousy way of deciding things. But at least they're better than non-standardized tests. At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high school grades. That's grades awarded by high schools -- we used to have province-wide grade 12 exams, but for almost all subjects those were abolished a few years ago. It's widely recognized at the post-secondary level that a 90% grade from some schools means much more than a 90% grade from some other schools; but if anyone is actually adjusting high school grades to account for these differences, they're not admitting it. Entrance scholarships, and admission in one faculty (Business), is determined partly based on high school grades and partly based on extracurricular activities -- in most cases, volunteer activities. Great, we're bringing in well-rounded students who are dedicated to helping the community, right? No; it turns out that they admit that they're only volunteering in order to pad their resumes -- in some cases because high-priced consultants hired by their parents told them exactly what volunteering they should do and what to say about it when they're writing their scholarship applications. (I've been lobbying for years to get an analysis done of how the rating of student extracurricular activities correlates with the median income of their postal code. I'm still waiting.) The SAT become popular because it could identify smart kids who would otherwise have been overlooked due to their race, gender, religion, or class. Is it perfect? Hell no. But as we discard standardized tests, I worry that we're moving back to a world where university admission will depend less on aptitude and more on having parents who have the money and the connections to get you the "right" extracurricular experience.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't think Sternberg is advocating for ending standardized testing: "My colleagues and I developed assessments for creativity, common sense and wisdom... we doubled prediction [accuracy] for academic performance, and with Kaleidoscope we could predict the quality of extracurricular performance, which the SAT doesn’t do." It sounds like he just wants to reform them, and has some strong initial results to suggest that we could do much better.
  - nindalf 9y ago
    Any metric can be gamed. It only works until people figure out how.
germinalphrase 9y ago
We need reliable ways to measure student achievement, knowledge and skill level. If we're not satisfied with the cost and negative externalities of standardized testing, then IMO we should be seeking ways to make the assessments that teachers are using in their lessons more accurate and trustworthy. We're already paying people to do the work, but we just don't trust the results. That's the problem - so let's fix it.
- kyleschiller 9y ago
  Yeah, isn't this exactly what Sternberg is saying? It sounds like he's done a lot of work precisely on improving the assessments.
  - germinalphrase 9y ago
    Sternberg is arguing that what the tests measure isn't desirable (but presumably the implementation of the tests would be the same/similar to current tests?). I suppose my suggestion is a little off topic as I'm addressing some criticisms of standardized testing with respect to cost/relevance to desired learning outcomes/inability for use in guiding a student's learning or teacher's pedagogy/taking time away from primary learning for test prep/and so on. We currently spend a little less than ~2 billion a year on standardized testing, but the problems inherent in the form/format of these tests isn't changing. I believe we could get better results for much less if we turn our attention to creating a way for teacher to implement trustworthy assessments in their own classrooms and lessons. Why pay third parties so much money to do something that already being done (but which needs to be improved to make it trustworthy).
mikekij 9y ago
Misleading title. Thought this was about Cucumber.
- mikekij 9y ago
  ^ Sarcasm.
newtem0 9y ago
I dropped in on a physics class at my uni and i was surprised at how poor the students understanding of physics was. These are super sharp people and they struggled with simple problems. Its because they learn in this testing way. They dont actually understand the material. Thats the most direct example of this problem that ive seen. In order to fully understand things like you ought to, you have to take the initiative yourseld on top of studying for tests that are often made arbitrarily hard with memorization and other things of that nature. Most of the college kids i know dont really know anything. And just like this article said, they are only good at gaming the system and advancing their own self interests. There is no big picture. They never wonder how they might be changing society and they never wonder how they might want to shape society. Even my 40 year old room mates dont. Its a death scentence for this country. An absolutely lethal development. I think the recent political developments are only the beginning of things to come due to this problem of apathy.
pacaro 9y ago
This article was odd to me. It seemed to be advocating a MAGA world view, that kids used to be taught "values" in school. Is this article a reflection of serious scholarship, or partisan pandering?
jdietrich 9y ago
There is an extraordinarily dangerous subtext to this argument and it isn't very well hidden. >Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values. The author is essentially arguing that "intelligence" should be redefined to include not only practical problem-solving abilities, but a specific set of moral values. He is arguing that it is acceptable to reject an otherwise excellent college candidate because they're a nihilist or an objectivist or a nationalist, so by his standards are "unwise" or "lacking in ethical intelligence". Right now, America is in the midst of a vast rebellion against the scientific consensus. Millions of Americans reject essential and well-proven scientific theories, in large part because they believe that academia is a highly politicised liberal institution. They don't believe the data and they don't trust the objectivity of the people who collected it. I very much doubt that making college admission contingent on holding a certain set of ethical beliefs will help to challenge that view. Conservatives are vastly under-represented in academia and have been for many decades. Many conservative students and academics feel that they are actively discriminated against on an institutional level. Whatever your political beliefs, this should be deeply concerning to you, if only because of the ammunition that it hands to the likes of Trump. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092
- awinter-py 9y ago
  I'm with you. Defining wisdom as out-group altruism makes it a sort of zealous, unconsidered enforcement of the status quo. I think there probably is a case to be made that semantic intelligence at scale harms a society, but this sciam interview doesn't present a good argument.

143 points by champagnepapi 9y ago

The ancient Western word for this is virtue: to cultivate virtues as part of an education. It's not a novel concept, but it rather got shot in the head in the postmodern revolution in education, and we're a lesser society for it.

triangleman 9y ago
Do you have links to old educational material where this sort of thing was part and parcel of the pedagogy? I am interested in getting into homeschooling, especially focusing on character development. I suppose an emphasis on the humanities would be a good first step, but I don't know where to find the "leading lights" in this kind of old-school education.
- Bulkington 9y ago
  Well, here's a/the start to "old school": http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html
- paganel 9y ago
  Not the OP, and it's a rather old book, relatively speaking, but you might also give Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, or On Education a chance. It's got nothing pedagogically scientific in it, at least compared to today's standards, but were I to have a kid I'd base my trying to teach him about things in life on what this book has taught me (it also talks about lots of other interesting things, not only pedagogy). Reading it I realized that my dad was at certain points following this book almost by the letter (I've never asked him if he had read it, though), and on the book's wikipedia page there's mention of the Montessori method being some sort of follow-up to what Rousseau was thinking in terms of educating children.
- csa 9y ago
  I would look into experiential education/learning. Dewey is considered the modern father of experiential education. The main text is Experience and Education (1938). Kolb (and many other folks) have written on this topic more recently. When done well, this is an amazing way to learn.
- pnathan 9y ago
  The keyword is "Classical" education when you're looking for homeschooling materials.
bbctol 9y ago
I'm not familiar with the idea that there was a 'postmodern revolution' in education (or even what that would look like?) What changes are you referring to?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Education as job training rather than education for intrinsic value.
  - accountyaccount 9y ago
    Makes sense considering the U.S. is a society where you have no value unless you work. The presiding political party doesn't think you should have food and housing unless you have a job.
    - mmirate 9y ago
      > you have no value unless you work This subjunctive clause, stands alone as a true statement. How else does one earn money?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > This subjunctive clause, stands alone as a true statement. How else does one earn money? Well, one can gain money from passive rents on capital without work.
      - accountyaccount 9y ago
        You're equating value with money. I wasn't.
        mmirate 9y ago
        > You're equating value with money. Well, unless we regress from currency to bartering, value is measured in money.
  - 9y ago
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
For a short book-length explanation of this, see "The Abolition of Man" by C. S. Lewis.

svend 9y ago

I stopped reading at "IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world.."

reefoctopus 9y ago
The Flynn effect says IQ rises 2.93 points per decade. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
- tptacek 9y ago
  The Flynn effect documents an increase in IQ, but does not say there will be a consistent 2.93 point increase --- in fact, the increase is not consistent, but rather concentrates in areas of lower socioeconomic status.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tlb 9y ago
That is well studied. A large meta-analysis claims 2.93 points per decade, over most of the 20th century. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4152423/
watwut 9y ago
Kids eat better and we focus way more on both their early development and schooling then before. Why would be better results so surprising?
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  yes it seems mostly to be from the nutrition aspect as IQ is supposedly supposed to be immutable otherwise
  - tptacek 9y ago
    That's not true. It is definitely not settled that IQ is believed by scientists to be immutable, and, in fact, a widely held hypothesis for the increase (shared by Flynn himself) is that the cognitive environment has become increasing complex, which is having the effect of "training" higher IQ.

MichaelBurge 9y ago

TLDR: The Republicans won the election, so the education system is flawed. The professor advocates different admissions tests, presumably selecting for people who can be convinced to vote Democrat and buy into Democrat save-the-world rhetoric. > If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged — one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping? > We have a guy [representative-elect Greg Gianforte of Montana] who allegedly assaulted a reporter and just got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives—and that’s after a 30-point average increase in IQ. We had violence in campaign rallies. > What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. There is a separate discussion to be had about testing criteria causing schools to narrowly focus on them, but I don't really see that in the article. There's another discussion about smart people being ineffective - which I thought he was going for at first - but which I didn't really see much of. There's yet another discussion that could be had on smart people needing more ethics, but his examples were mostly political. I can see the abstract appeal of saying that testing for wisdom or ethics will incentivize schools to teach them better, but it's a bit sinister if all the examples are political or based on something he saw in the news. The first two sentences here might sound provocative, but 100% of his specific examples were recent political news and he literally writes admissions tests. There were so many other directions he could've gone in if he were talking about wisdom/ethics more generally. I'm not sure what else to think other than e.g. if you don't believe that income disparities are a problem, then you lack wisdom & ethics and the admissions tests should screen you out. You're probably better off finding another article that focuses on one of these other more specific issues if you want to discuss the US education system.

sidek 9y ago
In fact, current elite US college admissions seem to select for people who vote Democrat well enough. It would be hard to increase that percentage very much. Just look at the political affiliation reported by e.g. Harvard students. If anything, I would think that an institution which tested for wisdom might shift conservative a percentage point or two.[ Not because I think conservatives are necessarily more moral in the US; but because I think more conservatives are religious and churches teach the language of virtue, which probably at least better tells you what the 'right' answer on wisdom tests is, whether you live that answer or not.]

untilHellbanned 9y ago

"Excellent sheep" is same idea by another former Yale Prof, William Deresiewicz http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-sheep http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-sheep

accountyaccount 9y ago

Probably a step up from people who are simply fools?

jbscpa 9y ago

My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns. 3. We will use good manners, saying, "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" and allow others to go first. and so forth. http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations In my opinion when the U.S. abandoned the judeo/christian ethic in the late twentieth century character and wisdom training was denigrated as "old fashioned" and unnecessary.

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
I'd love to understand what you base that last sentence on.
Retric 9y ago
In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.) If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  That's not all that surprising: outward religious formality is a sign of religion being tribal identity rather than substantive ideology. There's a degree to which some degree of tribalism sis useful for promoting continuity of community and preservation of ideas, but there's also a persistent danger of degeneration into empty tribalism preoccupied with outward form.
- prewett 9y ago
  Sounds like you have an axe to grind, especially since you cite no evidence yourself... How would you measure "less ethical," anyway? Are we more ethical now than 200 years ago or less, in your view? According to Gallup, 91% of Americans in 1948 claimed to be Christian, compared to 69% in 2016. [0] I would assume "formally religious" is tracks similarly. Personally, I think we are less ethical, but since I wasn't around in 1948, hard to say. I think ethics is related to your value of what is right and wrong. In 1948 people by and large had a "Christian" outlook on what is right and wrong and why. In 2016, the more popular claim is moral relativism, namely that there is no absolute right or wrong. Given that I can make up right and wrong and they only apply to me and not you, that seems to be a recipe for unethical behavior. In fact, I'm not sure "ethics" is a meaningful word if you subscribe to moral relativism. Say what you like about "formally religious," but I think it offers a much better framework for ethics than the moral relativism we have now. [0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

Shivetya 9y ago

Look at the hundreds of billions of dollars the DOE has spent since its inception under President Carter and ask, why have scores and graduations rates not show real improvement? Why are we still asking the same questions we did back then? If there were one Federal agency in dire need of dissolution it is that one. Give the money to states in grants and see which one comes up with the better solution

24gttghh 9y ago
A DARPA for education. I like that idea. EARPA. By what metrics would we measure their sucess, since people can't seem to agree on that?
mturmon 9y ago
What if your kid lives in one that comes up with the worst solution?
- adjkant 9y ago
  Agreed this is an important question. I think the second question is "is the worst solution significantly worse than what we have now?". I don't know the area well enough to take a stance here, but it seems the parent is claiming there is little to lose and lots to gain. So do you agree with that, particularly the little to lose part?
  - mturmon 9y ago
    My pushback was against the comment above mine, which blithely suggested doing an experiment where the states would sort it out. Of course, the worst solution will be pretty far off the charts. Never underestimate how far "worst" it can get! There are states/regions that either don't have their shit together, or neglect their second-tier schools.

kartan 9y ago

The article mixes two ideas that partially contradict each other. 1. Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE [...] You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place. 2. Do we know how to cultivate wisdom? Yes we do. I agree with the second statement, and its implications are huge. If we give people good education and good role models, that people are going to be wiser. I don't agree with the first statement. There is still a lot of prejudices against software developers and other high skilled professionals that are part of America's culture. It correlates high IQ with low creativity. Can't high IQ people learn wisdom? Is not part of the second thesis that it can be taught? The best example I have against the first thesis is how developers behave at the companies that I have worked for. These are Swedish companies that value collaboration, personal live balance, and other social skills. People at this companies are social, technically brilliant, they participate in team building activities, we go for beers together, there is more gender parity (but still is very low), etc. If a company values and rewards this values day to day, people are social animals and behave as such. If a company asks developers to work weekends and has no vacation time. Are you surprise to find only angry, non creative, non social people?

watwut 9y ago
Why do you think American developers are non creative non social people? Both conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way more social then they like to admit. Non-social people tend to produce culture that is less fanatic to various socialization ways. Add to it companies that really follow agile processes extremely close teamwork and occasional pair programming and you get industry where shy or introverted person is at pretty high disadvantage. I mean, so many here measure developer worth by participation on hackatlons and talks on meetup. Introverted or loner engineer is in serious disadvantage there.
- kartan 9y ago
  > conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way more social then they like to admit That's my point. They are social, but they can't be like that in companies that value long hour days and weekend work. It is not the developers that are not social, but that "old fashioned" companies force them in a more restricted, non-creative behavior. In a traditional waterfall model, developers are supposed to be implementers, not thinkers. In that kind of company, everything is hierarchical and creativity is not expected. So their developers behave that way. And I will guess that it is that the model of developer that the article is talking about. The article, for sure, is not talking about the developers that you describe. And that's my problem with the assumption in the article that people that are good at a technical problem are not social. :)

pirocks 9y ago

As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning, since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that "scientific" to me.

oculusthrift 9y ago
honestly it seems to me that many that bash them are just insecure they didn't do well and therefore claim that it isn't a valid measure.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  Well it stands to reason that if a test isn't a valid measure then those who are hurt most by it will be the most vocal complainers. That doesn't invalidate what the complainers have to say. There are numerous studies showing the poor validity of these standardized tests.
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    depends what you mean by validity. they have been shown to strongly correlate with IQ.
- majormajor 9y ago
  There studies that seem legitimate that have found that a certain amount of prep can boost your score multiple tens of points. This is problematic if you want it to be a valid measure because it lets people artificially close the gap. Do you want the student with such a well-rounded education throughout their life that they got a >=99.9% score without needing to study, or the one who caught up by grinding for a few weeks without that same broad underlying fundamental base? If your test can't tell that apart, it's flawed, because access to the right prep is going to become a significant part of what you're measuring, and that access is (for obvious economic reasons) distributed along unequal lines, reinforcing the already-fortunate. My suspicion, since I doubt we can come up with a test to prep, is that the best answer is either (a) nobody preps or (b) everyone gets access to a lot of prep. The former seems impossible to enforce, plus is the sort of "individual liberty"-constraining thing that the politically dominant swathes of America hate. They want to be able to make their kids the best, they "earned it." The latter would be easier, but isn't without some complications, and of course is time that could be better spent on something other than maximizing a single metric.

andrewclunn 9y ago

> If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged—one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping? We're making huge strides in alternative energy sources, both natural gas and renewable energy. Violent crime is down in the developed world. Income inequality is a red haring. Trump's election is not "a problem." So yeah, more left wing trolling here.

CogitoCogito 9y ago

I see many parallels with the post and my own experience. I got my PhD in math and taught many college math courses during that time. I was always saddened at the number of students that essentially viewed math as just an exercise in the memorization of algorithms (memorize differentiation and integration rules and chug away at problems). I would avoid teaching this way and instead give them fewer, "deeper" problems that "exercised the concepts". Students (the "good" and "bad" ones would usually go through the same transition throughout the semester: they would first be very uncomfortable and generally dislike it, then after a few weeks they would start to get used to the process of thinking things through, and finally they would tend to like it much more than what they used to do (of course some students would absolutely despise the process even at the end). Some of the students that liked the process the most where the "bad" ones who were historically worse at the algorithmic style (and unsurprisingly some of the ones who were very good at that style took the longest to convince). Personally I think it's very important to focus on such a style of teaching. If students apply Calculus at work, they'll usually be using some form of abstract reasoning (say finding a reasonable model for some phenomenon) or they will be applying numerical methods (or both), but rarely will specific memorized differentiation rules be necessary. Ironically I believe that the memorization of the steps is most useful to those going into theoretical mathematics where of course being able to do as many "basic" things without thinking will always help you focus on the "true problem". The main issue with this approach is that it is hard for students to know if they understand something correctly (which I would argue may be the single most important intellectual skill to learn in life). They can't just look up an answer and see if they got it right, instead they basically have to ask themselves if their reasoning makes sense. The difficulty in this causes a huge amount of student angst and pushback making it more uncomfortable for the students and more work for the teachers. I think the main reason why we teach math as mainly rote learning is because it's the easiest way to teach. It's my job to go through the motions and your job to learn the algorithms as best you can. From the teaching perspective, this is relatively easy to teach, grade and defend. As a final example, I think that the focus in Calculus on the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is misplaced. It _is_ fundamental from a theoretical perspective, but essentially no numerical integration is done that way and instead the actual way that integrals are computed is some application of Riemann's methods. (The counterexample being languages like Mathematica which are specifically designed to solve things symbolically.) I found a very good exercise to write Riemann integrals in Python (which students could quickly understand as pseudocode) and use different methods (left-endpoint rule, midpoint rule, etc.) to compute the integral in different ways and verifying that the convergence matches errors predicted. I think this is the sort of reasoning that should be focused on much more rather than having students find anti-derivatives all day and simply repeating "remember plus C". This is a bit of a long-winded and rambling post, but I do miss that aspect of teaching. Pushing students to realize their ability to reason about math was always very fulfilling. Not everyone enjoyed it, but the majority would come out realizing that they too can reason about math given enough patience and time.

nostrademons 9y ago

There's an assumption in this article that virtue - using your intelligence to benefit humanity rather than self or tribe - is a character trait, either one that's inborn but should be selected for or one that can be imbued by education and then is relatively unchanging. There's pretty ample evidence [1][2][3][4] that this assumption is false, and that people are highly situational in their moral reasoning. In particular, expectations of abundance and reciprocity seem to factor particularly highly in peoples' moral calculus. Most people are quite willing to undertake pro-social, common-good actions when a.) they will not be personally hurt by it and b.) they have a reasonable expectation that the beneficiaries of their largess will turn around and either pay it back or pay it forward. When those conditions are not met, people have a tendency to act like locusts [5], and try and secure their personal resources before considering what that might do to sustainability or the larger world around them. Doing so is evolutionarily adaptive, as it ensures that they'll be the ones to survive and pass on their genes even if the rest of humanity dies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [5] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/

neogodless 9y ago
The article/interview claims that we can cultivate and test for virtue (creativity and wisdom), and that our current tests used to funnel intelligence into higher education and intelligence work isn't currently accounting for it. I'm not sure where in the article the claim is made that it cannot be improved upon.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  "Improved upon" assumes something that is constant on the level of long-term worldview, not something that may change situationally. You wouldn't usually say that your choice of what to have for dinner or which sweater to buy can be "improved upon", but many of the individual choices we make that lead to the world we currently live in are on that level. I guess the article does mention engaging the ethical reasoning centers of our brain and training them to realize that it's an ethical problem at all, but my argument here is that there's a reason most citizens in developed countries don't think about the moral implications of, say, buying an iPhone made in a sweatshop in China that uses rare-earth minerals that pollute the environment, and that's because the number of choices we face on a daily basis and the moral complexity of all the consequences of these would paralyze us into inaction if we did - in which case, those people who don't bother to think about it would dominate consumption.

jrochkind1 9y ago

> What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have I think he left out the most important category -- empathy/compassion/caring/"emotional intelligence".

Cozumel 9y ago

It puts me in mind of the three minute degree[0] > Education can produce what the Village wants. > "A row of cabbages," Number 6 objects. > "Indeed," Number 2 agrees. "But knowledgeable cabbages [0]http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/thegeneral.htm http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/thegeneral.htm

Glyptodon 9y ago

So the 30 point IQ thing, is that a reference to a global increase driven by access to education, or am I missing something? Because it's not like 130 is the new normal IQ score? But at the same time haven't they always been normalized around 100 in industrialized countries?

defen 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

grandalf 9y ago

While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years. Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization, diligence, and repeated practice at the expense of general intelligence. When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence. To a large extent, pre-law and pre-med curricula offer this, and so many of the students who excel using that technique end up in positions of social authority.

stcredzero 9y ago
When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote memorization and diligence. I remember being accosted by a squad of students, who were there to make sure I was going to be a good little TA and run my course according to those "rules."
- ghaff 9y ago
  I did some tutoring in a graduate program. There were definitely some students who were, for reasons of academic background or otherwise, barely able to hang on. And they were very focused on exactly what was going to be on tests and what they really needed to know to squeak through.
kyleschiller 9y ago
Yeah, people with law degrees are probably overrepresented in politics, but pre-med?
- adjkant 9y ago
  Ben Carson is heading HUD after all, welcome to 2017.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Healthcare is one of the biggest areas of government, and administrators in the field often have medical and/or public health degrees on top of pre-med or substantially similar undergraduate coursework. For that matter, I think that medical doctors are substantially overrepresented in elected general government office (state and federal legislatures, etc.) even though not nearly so much as lawyers. (e.g, Congress is 2.8% physicians, while the US adult population is around 0.4% physicians.)

stcredzero 9y ago

...IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”... A lot of coding pathologies and programming language pathologies seem to be the product of such "smart fools." (Mea culpa!) There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Come to think of it, a big chunk of, "The devil is in the details," can be translated to, "The hardest problems are the emergent problems."

dmix 9y ago
> There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice. Do you have any good examples of this in programming? I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust). It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular languages/platforms. Which might be more about the nature of how languages are adopted rather than the individual attributes and qualities of the language.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Do you have any good examples of this in programming? The CORBA "sea of objects" concepts infesting Linux distributions and making everything sinfully slow. (Sometime just after Red Hat 7.) My own Smalltalk meta-level "browser helper" wrappers in the "new" ObjectStudio Smalltalk browser. (For making the browser extensible, great, but didn't really have to be instantiated until actually operating on the class.) The Smalltalk-inspired implementation of "everything is an object" by making everything a pointer to a different struct. (Not good for cache coherence!) I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin, Rust). So it goes. Same thing happened with many OOP concepts -- both good and bad. I'm not saying that everything that rises is scum. The cream also rises. I did not say that all things which seem like good, elegant ideas are actually programming pathologies in disguise. It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular languages/platforms. And some of the good, elegant ideas turn out to be bad ones when you start to scale in different ways.

shmageggy 9y ago

> I think it’s hurting everything. We get scientists who are very good forward incrementers—they are good at doing the next step but they are not the people who change the field. They are not redirectors or reinitiators, who start a field over. And those are the people we need. I doubt the problem is with the scientists. I know and work with lots of really smart and creative people in an academic environment, and I'm sure some of them would be capable of redirecting, reinitiating, of starting a field over -- were they given a chance. But just try to get funded for anything at all that isn't incremental and see how well you do. Scientific funding is so scarce, and becoming more and more so, that funding agencies only approve grants that are practically guaranteed successes, and those tend to be the incremental ones. Maybe narrow testing is responsible for the plague of incremental science, but if so it's probably not the scientists' fault, but more likely because we've cultivated a society that isn't creative and thoughtful enough to appreciate the value of really novel science.

bluGill 9y ago
Most of the need in science is in advancing another step. For every major advancement we need tens of thousands of small advancements to refine and work out all the details. Physics was 99% solved in 1880 with just the work of finishing out the constants. In that 1% we were missing was relativity and quantum mechanics, and we know that there is something more but not what. However as big as those two are they are still < 5% of the physics needed are. (The numbers don't add up because now that we know about relativity we know it is more than 1%, but it isn't a significant factor in most real world needs which still get by on newton physics) Yes there are areas of complete unknown in science (all over). However they are complete unknowns: you can spend a lifetime in false starts. In Computer science the P=NP problem has been an important unknown for years and many have spent a large part of their lifetime on it and we still are not close to a solution. This is a known unknown, must of what remains is not even that well defined, just a case where "something funny" happens and we have no idea why and often can't figure out how to replicate it on demand.

johan_larson 9y ago

"Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values." That's a really odd definition of "wisdom". That's more like "unselfishness" or maybe "benevolence".

clock_tower 9y ago
I think it's a tolerably accurate definition; it's almost always more wise to cultivate enlightened self-interest instead of the unenlightened kind. Another generation of the current state of affairs, and the US will probably have another civil war -- and it'd be the height of folly to let things escalate to that point.

cperciva 9y ago

Standardized tests are a lousy way of deciding things. But at least they're better than non-standardized tests. At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high school grades. That's grades awarded by high schools -- we used to have province-wide grade 12 exams, but for almost all subjects those were abolished a few years ago. It's widely recognized at the post-secondary level that a 90% grade from some schools means much more than a 90% grade from some other schools; but if anyone is actually adjusting high school grades to account for these differences, they're not admitting it. Entrance scholarships, and admission in one faculty (Business), is determined partly based on high school grades and partly based on extracurricular activities -- in most cases, volunteer activities. Great, we're bringing in well-rounded students who are dedicated to helping the community, right? No; it turns out that they admit that they're only volunteering in order to pad their resumes -- in some cases because high-priced consultants hired by their parents told them exactly what volunteering they should do and what to say about it when they're writing their scholarship applications. (I've been lobbying for years to get an analysis done of how the rating of student extracurricular activities correlates with the median income of their postal code. I'm still waiting.) The SAT become popular because it could identify smart kids who would otherwise have been overlooked due to their race, gender, religion, or class. Is it perfect? Hell no. But as we discard standardized tests, I worry that we're moving back to a world where university admission will depend less on aptitude and more on having parents who have the money and the connections to get you the "right" extracurricular experience.

kyleschiller 9y ago
Yeah, I don't think Sternberg is advocating for ending standardized testing: "My colleagues and I developed assessments for creativity, common sense and wisdom... we doubled prediction [accuracy] for academic performance, and with Kaleidoscope we could predict the quality of extracurricular performance, which the SAT doesn’t do." It sounds like he just wants to reform them, and has some strong initial results to suggest that we could do much better.
- nindalf 9y ago
  Any metric can be gamed. It only works until people figure out how.

germinalphrase 9y ago

We need reliable ways to measure student achievement, knowledge and skill level. If we're not satisfied with the cost and negative externalities of standardized testing, then IMO we should be seeking ways to make the assessments that teachers are using in their lessons more accurate and trustworthy. We're already paying people to do the work, but we just don't trust the results. That's the problem - so let's fix it.

kyleschiller 9y ago
Yeah, isn't this exactly what Sternberg is saying? It sounds like he's done a lot of work precisely on improving the assessments.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  Sternberg is arguing that what the tests measure isn't desirable (but presumably the implementation of the tests would be the same/similar to current tests?). I suppose my suggestion is a little off topic as I'm addressing some criticisms of standardized testing with respect to cost/relevance to desired learning outcomes/inability for use in guiding a student's learning or teacher's pedagogy/taking time away from primary learning for test prep/and so on. We currently spend a little less than ~2 billion a year on standardized testing, but the problems inherent in the form/format of these tests isn't changing. I believe we could get better results for much less if we turn our attention to creating a way for teacher to implement trustworthy assessments in their own classrooms and lessons. Why pay third parties so much money to do something that already being done (but which needs to be improved to make it trustworthy).

mikekij 9y ago

Misleading title. Thought this was about Cucumber.

mikekij 9y ago
^ Sarcasm.

newtem0 9y ago

I dropped in on a physics class at my uni and i was surprised at how poor the students understanding of physics was. These are super sharp people and they struggled with simple problems. Its because they learn in this testing way. They dont actually understand the material. Thats the most direct example of this problem that ive seen. In order to fully understand things like you ought to, you have to take the initiative yourseld on top of studying for tests that are often made arbitrarily hard with memorization and other things of that nature. Most of the college kids i know dont really know anything. And just like this article said, they are only good at gaming the system and advancing their own self interests. There is no big picture. They never wonder how they might be changing society and they never wonder how they might want to shape society. Even my 40 year old room mates dont. Its a death scentence for this country. An absolutely lethal development. I think the recent political developments are only the beginning of things to come due to this problem of apathy.

pacaro 9y ago

This article was odd to me. It seemed to be advocating a MAGA world view, that kids used to be taught "values" in school. Is this article a reflection of serious scholarship, or partisan pandering?

jdietrich 9y ago

There is an extraordinarily dangerous subtext to this argument and it isn't very well hidden. >Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values. The author is essentially arguing that "intelligence" should be redefined to include not only practical problem-solving abilities, but a specific set of moral values. He is arguing that it is acceptable to reject an otherwise excellent college candidate because they're a nihilist or an objectivist or a nationalist, so by his standards are "unwise" or "lacking in ethical intelligence". Right now, America is in the midst of a vast rebellion against the scientific consensus. Millions of Americans reject essential and well-proven scientific theories, in large part because they believe that academia is a highly politicised liberal institution. They don't believe the data and they don't trust the objectivity of the people who collected it. I very much doubt that making college admission contingent on holding a certain set of ethical beliefs will help to challenge that view. Conservatives are vastly under-represented in academia and have been for many decades. Many conservative students and academics feel that they are actively discriminated against on an institutional level. Whatever your political beliefs, this should be deeply concerning to you, if only because of the ammunition that it hands to the likes of Trump. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092

awinter-py 9y ago
I'm with you. Defining wisdom as out-group altruism makes it a sort of zealous, unconsidered enforcement of the status quo. I think there probably is a case to be made that semantic intelligence at scale harms a society, but this sciam interview doesn't present a good argument.