12 ms·

While the premise is interesting, I really do not buy some of the contemporary examples given at the end of the post. In particular the one about physics exams.

While the premise is interesting, I really do not buy some of the contemporary examples given at the end of the post. In particular the one about physics exams. It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love... I teach university physics. Intro classes are easier and the exams in these classes are meant to test whether you have learnt physics, not uncover "gifted geniuses". Once you have shown interest in the early classes, you can decide to go into the more challenging classes, whether the classical "problem based" ones celebrated in this blog post, or the more recent "project based" ones which are just as challenging, just a different style of challenging. Which is good, we should encourage all types of genius, not only the masters of algebra. However, yes, we should avoid belittling the masters of algebra in these conversations as well, the same way we learnt to stop belittling "nerds" and "geeks". For what is worth, the bad "problem based" classes that the author bemoans, have always existed. Edit: A sibling comment explained that the Socrates quote I used is probably wrong. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/

osipov 5y ago
Your username betrays an Eastern European origin. Your entire comment is a self-serving argument about "kids these days". No one cares that you teach university physics. You are not the candidate elite. You are a hired slave, an educated slave, but a slave nonetheless, toiling away for your slave wages. Hence, as a slave you are not privy to the problem of "elite" overproduction. In your home country you may have considered an educator role to be a a role allocated to local elites. However in your current place of employment you are just hired help. Until you recognize your place in the society you chose you will have no opportunity to move beyond where you are.
joe_the_user 5y ago
I always shake my head when confronted with "rationalist" positions. They often consider important questions and issues but just as often mix these considerations with remarkably immature and historically ignorant thinking. Which isn't to dismiss them but it seems there's barrier they need to overcome.
- IAmEveryone 5y ago
  Most “rationalists” have a barrier to adulthood they need to overcome… That Scott guy is/was somewhat problematic, but recognizably smart. It’s one of maybe five people where I consciously notice someone’s intelligence. The rest of that community is toxic and misguided, starting with the idea that emotions are somehow “bad’.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    They aren't bad, they just shouldn't control you.
    - jkubicek 5y ago
      It's fine to let emotions control you, you just need to be aware that they are and make sure it's the right emotions controlling you. I'm happy to continue living in California because emotionally: * I like the weather * I like living close to mountains and beaches and deserts * I like my house and I'm too lazy to move Rationally I should take the 10% pay cut to go full remote and move to a suburb of Indianapolis.
      - bottled_poe 5y ago
        This implies that satisfying your emotional needs is irrational, which is not a healthy frame of mind.
        tsimionescu 5y ago
        And yet, it is the rationalist ethos. This was GP's point - many rationalists believe some quite misguided things.
        pmontra 5y ago
        Maybe GP means that satisfying emotional needs could be the rational choice.
nyolfen 5y ago
one third of americans have a college degree; this number used to be in the low single percentages. do you think we've all gotten that much smarter?
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Maybe if you define smartness as academic smartness, which is learned on a course. Practical smarts has probably declined as a result.
  - bumby 5y ago
    >Practical smarts has probably declined as a result. I know the stereotype, but is there any evidence that “book smarts” and “street smarts” are mutually exclusive? Is it possibly an artifact of an economy rewarding hyper-specialization?
    - lmm 5y ago
      It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture.
      - dnh44 5y ago
        >It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture. I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      I’m not taking innate ability here - which is something else - just there is finite time to learn so 3 - 6 years focused on academia is less time focused on other things.
jltsiren 5y ago
I saw it more as "teachers these days" than "kids these days". There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure. In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident. One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.
- krastanov 5y ago
  You are absolutely right! The only thing I would add is that it is important to choose the appropriate type of exams for intro classes (the ones that verify understanding and hopefully intellectually entertain but do not excessively challenge) and for advanced classes (the ones that might even have unsolvable problems, there is an established understanding that a 100% is not expected, and that provide for a great sense of intellectual challenge (and achievement)).
- pyinstallwoes 5y ago
  How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? It doesn't display understanding along any axis of intrinsic knowledge. Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.
  - krastanov 5y ago
    That is true about bad exams like the SAT and the GRE. And to be fair, even good exams (text problems that take the student on an adventure through deriving a curious phenomenon, for instance) suffer as their results are confounded with whether you deal well with stress. However, it has long been trivial to make good exams that are explicitly not about memorization: take-home exams, open-book exams, exams in which collaboration is encouraged, project-based exams, some forms of oral exams, and more.
lumost 5y ago
I once was a Physics student and recall both grading regimes. There were grading practices on both ends of the spectrum from the average grade being a 50% on a test to the average grade being 95%, with the former camp being a minority of professors. Having a grading philosophy that boils down to pass/fail A-F distributions is great from the perspective that there are students who paid for a class and the professor ensured that they had acceptable knowledge by the end of the course. The wide grade distributions tended to be hated by most students, but the few folks who scored well could make up for bad homeworks etc. Now the curious thing about these two grading approaches is that I always recall the material of the classes with wide grade distributions with more fidelity than those graded on 100% or bust curves (which is saying something after 11 years). In hindsight I believe the "harder" problems sets lead to deeper learning as once could always see what the next skill progression was and incentivized taking risks on spending an extra few hours studying or working a problem to try and get a better score. I also wasn't afraid of coming up with a wrong answer through brave effort vs. looking for a pre-baked solution. The Featured Article's core claim is that by adopting the 100% or bust style of grading that students optimize to avoid errors. This strongly incentivizes students to crib off of each others work, past homeworks, and other online sources to ensure that they've identified a truly correct answer. It also forces professors to keep problems closer to the book/lectures such that students are largely guaranteed success given some amount of student effort. It could be that the older method of grading wasn't doing its job by selecting geniuses - but by incentivizing students to take risks. Is it that surprising that students who spent 16 years of school optimizing to avoid mistakes are extremely risk adverse?
- krastanov 5y ago
  Each style has its place. Just like you, I found the "harder" problem sets and related classes much more interesting and exciting. That significantly correlates with me being in this field after all. That is also a poor style to pick for an intro class, as the intro class needs to provide an overview of the field and teach many diverse skills in relatively minimal depth. The intro classes are not meant to teach mastery. Good schools pay sufficient attention to their students to bump up the occasional student that is taking the intro class instead of the more appropriate for them mastery class.
EarlKing 5y ago
Honestly there's nothing particularly novel in this thesis. It's more a less a restatement of anacyclosis or the principle behind Hesiod's Ages of Man.
coldtea 5y ago
>It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong. And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still: (a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated) (b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated) (c) be sometimes true and sometimes true There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint". In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct. So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".
- nindalf 5y ago
  When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction. Gen 1 says "we were great as kids, but kids these days are terrible". Gen 2 claims they were great as kids and it's Gen 3 that's terrible. Gen 1 and Gen 2 are contradicting each other. Was Gen 2 good or bad as kids? Depends on if you ask them or their elders. It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it. What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.
  - oldsecondhand 5y ago
    > When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.
philipov 5y ago
All models are wrong, but that doesn't stop them from being informative. Looking at things like the Revolutions of 1848, it's easy to see how the idea applies, as so many of them were driven by University students who had no money, had no prospect of being absorbed by the existing power structures, and were not allowed any political participation. The result? Revolutionary agitation.

osipov 5y ago

Your username betrays an Eastern European origin. Your entire comment is a self-serving argument about "kids these days". No one cares that you teach university physics. You are not the candidate elite. You are a hired slave, an educated slave, but a slave nonetheless, toiling away for your slave wages. Hence, as a slave you are not privy to the problem of "elite" overproduction. In your home country you may have considered an educator role to be a a role allocated to local elites. However in your current place of employment you are just hired help. Until you recognize your place in the society you chose you will have no opportunity to move beyond where you are.

joe_the_user 5y ago

I always shake my head when confronted with "rationalist" positions. They often consider important questions and issues but just as often mix these considerations with remarkably immature and historically ignorant thinking. Which isn't to dismiss them but it seems there's barrier they need to overcome.

IAmEveryone 5y ago
Most “rationalists” have a barrier to adulthood they need to overcome… That Scott guy is/was somewhat problematic, but recognizably smart. It’s one of maybe five people where I consciously notice someone’s intelligence. The rest of that community is toxic and misguided, starting with the idea that emotions are somehow “bad’.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  They aren't bad, they just shouldn't control you.
  - jkubicek 5y ago
    It's fine to let emotions control you, you just need to be aware that they are and make sure it's the right emotions controlling you. I'm happy to continue living in California because emotionally: * I like the weather * I like living close to mountains and beaches and deserts * I like my house and I'm too lazy to move Rationally I should take the 10% pay cut to go full remote and move to a suburb of Indianapolis.
    - bottled_poe 5y ago
      This implies that satisfying your emotional needs is irrational, which is not a healthy frame of mind.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        And yet, it is the rationalist ethos. This was GP's point - many rationalists believe some quite misguided things.
        pmontra 5y ago
        Maybe GP means that satisfying emotional needs could be the rational choice.

nyolfen 5y ago

one third of americans have a college degree; this number used to be in the low single percentages. do you think we've all gotten that much smarter?

quickthrower2 5y ago
Maybe if you define smartness as academic smartness, which is learned on a course. Practical smarts has probably declined as a result.
- bumby 5y ago
  >Practical smarts has probably declined as a result. I know the stereotype, but is there any evidence that “book smarts” and “street smarts” are mutually exclusive? Is it possibly an artifact of an economy rewarding hyper-specialization?
  - lmm 5y ago
    It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture.
    - dnh44 5y ago
      >It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture. I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    I’m not taking innate ability here - which is something else - just there is finite time to learn so 3 - 6 years focused on academia is less time focused on other things.

jltsiren 5y ago

I saw it more as "teachers these days" than "kids these days". There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure. In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident. One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.

krastanov 5y ago
You are absolutely right! The only thing I would add is that it is important to choose the appropriate type of exams for intro classes (the ones that verify understanding and hopefully intellectually entertain but do not excessively challenge) and for advanced classes (the ones that might even have unsolvable problems, there is an established understanding that a 100% is not expected, and that provide for a great sense of intellectual challenge (and achievement)).
pyinstallwoes 5y ago
How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? It doesn't display understanding along any axis of intrinsic knowledge. Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.
- krastanov 5y ago
  That is true about bad exams like the SAT and the GRE. And to be fair, even good exams (text problems that take the student on an adventure through deriving a curious phenomenon, for instance) suffer as their results are confounded with whether you deal well with stress. However, it has long been trivial to make good exams that are explicitly not about memorization: take-home exams, open-book exams, exams in which collaboration is encouraged, project-based exams, some forms of oral exams, and more.

lumost 5y ago

I once was a Physics student and recall both grading regimes. There were grading practices on both ends of the spectrum from the average grade being a 50% on a test to the average grade being 95%, with the former camp being a minority of professors. Having a grading philosophy that boils down to pass/fail A-F distributions is great from the perspective that there are students who paid for a class and the professor ensured that they had acceptable knowledge by the end of the course. The wide grade distributions tended to be hated by most students, but the few folks who scored well could make up for bad homeworks etc. Now the curious thing about these two grading approaches is that I always recall the material of the classes with wide grade distributions with more fidelity than those graded on 100% or bust curves (which is saying something after 11 years). In hindsight I believe the "harder" problems sets lead to deeper learning as once could always see what the next skill progression was and incentivized taking risks on spending an extra few hours studying or working a problem to try and get a better score. I also wasn't afraid of coming up with a wrong answer through brave effort vs. looking for a pre-baked solution. The Featured Article's core claim is that by adopting the 100% or bust style of grading that students optimize to avoid errors. This strongly incentivizes students to crib off of each others work, past homeworks, and other online sources to ensure that they've identified a truly correct answer. It also forces professors to keep problems closer to the book/lectures such that students are largely guaranteed success given some amount of student effort. It could be that the older method of grading wasn't doing its job by selecting geniuses - but by incentivizing students to take risks. Is it that surprising that students who spent 16 years of school optimizing to avoid mistakes are extremely risk adverse?

krastanov 5y ago
Each style has its place. Just like you, I found the "harder" problem sets and related classes much more interesting and exciting. That significantly correlates with me being in this field after all. That is also a poor style to pick for an intro class, as the intro class needs to provide an overview of the field and teach many diverse skills in relatively minimal depth. The intro classes are not meant to teach mastery. Good schools pay sufficient attention to their students to bump up the occasional student that is taking the intro class instead of the more appropriate for them mastery class.

EarlKing 5y ago

Honestly there's nothing particularly novel in this thesis. It's more a less a restatement of anacyclosis or the principle behind Hesiod's Ages of Man.

coldtea 5y ago

>It sounds a lot like "kids these days" fallacy which has been the standard complaint of each adult generation since the start of history First, pedantically speaking it's not a fallacy (as in "logical fallacy"). It's just a statement that can be right or wrong. And this is regardless of whether it has been repeated "since the start of history". It could still: (a) be always true (everytime it has been repeated) (b) be always false (everytime it has been repeated) (c) be sometimes true and sometimes true There's no logical necessity that it has to be (b) just because it's a "standard complaint". In fact, given what we know about periods of acme and decline, and also for periods of stability, it's obviously (c). Sometimes the complain is correct. So, the question is whether in this case, for this period, it has been true or false -- not a facile dismissal with the non-argument that "people has been saying that since forever, so it must always be false".

nindalf 5y ago
When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction. Gen 1 says "we were great as kids, but kids these days are terrible". Gen 2 claims they were great as kids and it's Gen 3 that's terrible. Gen 1 and Gen 2 are contradicting each other. Was Gen 2 good or bad as kids? Depends on if you ask them or their elders. It's possible that there is a constant decrease in standards, such that every generation is worse than the one before it. But I doubt it. If such a steady decline had been happening since the 8th century BC civilization ought to have collapsed several times over. Tellingly, no one ever says "kids these days are much better behaved than we were as kids", even when it's empirically true. For example, kids these days in the UK drink less than their parents did at that age, but they don't get any credit for it. What's actually happening is likely sampling bias, where the person making the pronouncement is looking at a few bad apples as well as nostalgia biasing their recollection of their childhood.
- oldsecondhand 5y ago
  > When successive generations complain about "kids these days", there is a contradiction It's not a contradiction, if each successive generation is more terrible than the one that came beforehand.

philipov 5y ago

All models are wrong, but that doesn't stop them from being informative. Looking at things like the Revolutions of 1848, it's easy to see how the idea applies, as so many of them were driven by University students who had no money, had no prospect of being absorbed by the existing power structures, and were not allowed any political participation. The result? Revolutionary agitation.