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I hate this kind of unfounded anti-scientism. If it's so obviously wrong, it should be simple to design a study that demonstrates the opposite, why don't you tr

I hate this kind of unfounded anti-scientism. If it's so obviously wrong, it should be simple to design a study that demonstrates the opposite, why don't you try?

wombatpm 3y ago
A well defined experiment on human Children is incredibly difficult to get past the IRB. Very hard to get informed consent from children and parents. You are left with comparisons between school districts and/or states
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  Yes this is true. I got into education research from physics because I thought the dynamics of learning could be very interesting to model. But we simply lack the institutional ability to implement such observations necessary to build such a model. So I zoomed out and built models on how students made choices between semesters at their university (what class they will take, will they switch their major, will they drop out). But ultimately I got bored. Now I work on ai related to acoustics. It's a shame. There are data sets out there that can be mined, I was offered a postdoc with a company in Minnesota doing it with data from millions of school children. But they were more interested in me modelling whether a student would have a behaviour problem tomorrow so they could integrate it into their platform and sell as a product to schools. I wasn't much interested in helping to build something like that.
khzw8yyy 3y ago
I'm not anti-science, I'm anti performative science for the sake of "doing science". And anti "we can't do proper science so let's throw up our hands". Helping individual kids and yes, relying on anecdotes would do much more good in this specific scenario than a study. Let me explain. Doing a "simple" study like this is nigh-impossible within the science establishment we have today. Like you said, let me try. Let's walk through the steps. A PI would have to get a grant to help not the underserved/underprivileged kids, but rather those who are perceived to have an advantage. They have to work with hundreds of schools (gifted kids are rare). Within that set of hundreds of schools they have to control for cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and so on. Having succeeded they'll have to get this published (and probably fight some accusations of being elitist in the process). All I am saying is: this PI better already have tenure. This problem is not just about gifted kids. A commonly heard complaint in the field of psychiatry for example is that we only study the minds with pathologies. We don't at all look at how to improve things for healthy people. Come to think of it, that is true in medicine in general.

I hate this kind of unfounded anti-scientism. If it's so obviously wrong, it should be simple to design a study that demonstrates the opposite, why don't you try?

wombatpm 3y ago

A well defined experiment on human Children is incredibly difficult to get past the IRB. Very hard to get informed consent from children and parents. You are left with comparisons between school districts and/or states

mnky9800n 3y ago
Yes this is true. I got into education research from physics because I thought the dynamics of learning could be very interesting to model. But we simply lack the institutional ability to implement such observations necessary to build such a model. So I zoomed out and built models on how students made choices between semesters at their university (what class they will take, will they switch their major, will they drop out). But ultimately I got bored. Now I work on ai related to acoustics. It's a shame. There are data sets out there that can be mined, I was offered a postdoc with a company in Minnesota doing it with data from millions of school children. But they were more interested in me modelling whether a student would have a behaviour problem tomorrow so they could integrate it into their platform and sell as a product to schools. I wasn't much interested in helping to build something like that.

khzw8yyy 3y ago

I'm not anti-science, I'm anti performative science for the sake of "doing science". And anti "we can't do proper science so let's throw up our hands". Helping individual kids and yes, relying on anecdotes would do much more good in this specific scenario than a study. Let me explain. Doing a "simple" study like this is nigh-impossible within the science establishment we have today. Like you said, let me try. Let's walk through the steps. A PI would have to get a grant to help not the underserved/underprivileged kids, but rather those who are perceived to have an advantage. They have to work with hundreds of schools (gifted kids are rare). Within that set of hundreds of schools they have to control for cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and so on. Having succeeded they'll have to get this published (and probably fight some accusations of being elitist in the process). All I am saying is: this PI better already have tenure. This problem is not just about gifted kids. A commonly heard complaint in the field of psychiatry for example is that we only study the minds with pathologies. We don't at all look at how to improve things for healthy people. Come to think of it, that is true in medicine in general.