3 ms·

> what you describe is the behavior of your classmates, not the purpose of the system While the GP used the word "purpose", thus prompting your is-ought commen

> what you describe is the behavior of your classmates, not the purpose of the system While the GP used the word "purpose", thus prompting your is-ought comment, knowing Caplan, I suspect it was inaccurate. Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things. Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams). Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention. One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...

analog31 6y ago
That's fair, and perhaps I could have described it in a different way, which is that purpose aside, the education system is eminently hackable. One such hack is to let your friends take bird courses while you take meaty courses. Another is to find a way to learn from the bird courses while your classmates sleep through them. In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.
- tw25506007 6y ago
  Indeed, individually your preferences can lead you to make choices that are different from the aggregate, and in so doing your choices marginally contribute to what emerges. Sort of like considering a market price too high, thus not buying. To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.

analog31 6y ago

That's fair, and perhaps I could have described it in a different way, which is that purpose aside, the education system is eminently hackable. One such hack is to let your friends take bird courses while you take meaty courses. Another is to find a way to learn from the bird courses while your classmates sleep through them. In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.

tw25506007 6y ago
Indeed, individually your preferences can lead you to make choices that are different from the aggregate, and in so doing your choices marginally contribute to what emerges. Sort of like considering a market price too high, thus not buying. To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.