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I've found that in adulthood, I've still been judged on results, not effort, and unless we're going to drastically reduce student:teacher ratios, I don't see ho

I've found that in adulthood, I've still been judged on results, not effort, and unless we're going to drastically reduce student:teacher ratios, I don't see how you even could judge on effort. Some kids are going to learn more quickly than others, and for them, no effort will be required. At best you might assign them busywork, but that doesn't take effort just as it wouldn't take effort for an adult to do the work.

strogonoff 2y ago
In regular life we are all judged by others based on results, of course. When learning, however, you are best judged on effort. > Some kids are going to learn more quickly than others, and for them, no effort will be required. If no effort is required, then the bar is wrong.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  As long as we don't have the resources to devote 10+% of the workforce to teaching, the bar will be wrong. The bar was wrong for me during school and university, and I found teachers who gave high weights to homework or even attendance quizzes to be extremely obnoxious. On setting up expectations for adulhood, I think this is exactly backwards: > If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood. Praising a child for effort without results seems way more likely to set them up for a surprisingly bad time as an adult. My personal experience has been that the "good grades/rewards without effort" thing has continued and seems pretty likely to continue through adulthood as long as you go into some kind of engineering.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Yes, this is a failure some or all school systems suffer from today, as I pointed out in my comment. > My personal experience has been that the "good grades/rewards without effort" thing has continued and seems pretty likely to continue through adulthood as long as you go into some kind of engineering. Based on my observation, people who are comfortable doing the work in engineering achieve completely different heights than people who got used to coasting. As applied ML spreads across industries, the difference between the competitiveness of those two categories will only become more pronounced. Furthermore, from my observation those who got used to coasting suffer from issues like perfectionism, narcissism, rejection aversion, and similar. Sooner or later in adulthood not doing the work stops achieving results deserving praise. > Praising a child for effort without results seems way more likely to set them up for a surprisingly bad time as an adult. Not “without results”. Results are critical. However, if results do not comply with whatever requirements, that is not a factor in whether to reward, unless you reward compliance. Rewarding compliance has to happen to some degree, but should not be overdone unless your goal is to foster uncreative cogs.
alias_neo 2y ago
I also don't think effort can be recognised in some spaces; as a programmer, I often produce results that in the end, result in very few lines of code written, looking at the end result alone doesn't indicate much. It's like looking at a hand carved match-stick judging the result as low effort, not knowing that they started with a seed.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  The end result is never the code itself. In fact, the end result exists over time, and often the shape of the result in the time dimension is better the shorter the code and the more thorough the intangible forethought. But yes, I don’t know how clear must I be about it—this is learning (for very young humans still psychologically immature), that’s exactly why it has to be spelled out that evaluation must be on the effort, precisely because it is never on the effort in any other activity in adulthood.

strogonoff 2y ago

In regular life we are all judged by others based on results, of course. When learning, however, you are best judged on effort. > Some kids are going to learn more quickly than others, and for them, no effort will be required. If no effort is required, then the bar is wrong.

ndriscoll 2y ago
As long as we don't have the resources to devote 10+% of the workforce to teaching, the bar will be wrong. The bar was wrong for me during school and university, and I found teachers who gave high weights to homework or even attendance quizzes to be extremely obnoxious. On setting up expectations for adulhood, I think this is exactly backwards: > If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood. Praising a child for effort without results seems way more likely to set them up for a surprisingly bad time as an adult. My personal experience has been that the "good grades/rewards without effort" thing has continued and seems pretty likely to continue through adulthood as long as you go into some kind of engineering.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Yes, this is a failure some or all school systems suffer from today, as I pointed out in my comment. > My personal experience has been that the "good grades/rewards without effort" thing has continued and seems pretty likely to continue through adulthood as long as you go into some kind of engineering. Based on my observation, people who are comfortable doing the work in engineering achieve completely different heights than people who got used to coasting. As applied ML spreads across industries, the difference between the competitiveness of those two categories will only become more pronounced. Furthermore, from my observation those who got used to coasting suffer from issues like perfectionism, narcissism, rejection aversion, and similar. Sooner or later in adulthood not doing the work stops achieving results deserving praise. > Praising a child for effort without results seems way more likely to set them up for a surprisingly bad time as an adult. Not “without results”. Results are critical. However, if results do not comply with whatever requirements, that is not a factor in whether to reward, unless you reward compliance. Rewarding compliance has to happen to some degree, but should not be overdone unless your goal is to foster uncreative cogs.

alias_neo 2y ago

I also don't think effort can be recognised in some spaces; as a programmer, I often produce results that in the end, result in very few lines of code written, looking at the end result alone doesn't indicate much. It's like looking at a hand carved match-stick judging the result as low effort, not knowing that they started with a seed.

strogonoff 2y ago
The end result is never the code itself. In fact, the end result exists over time, and often the shape of the result in the time dimension is better the shorter the code and the more thorough the intangible forethought. But yes, I don’t know how clear must I be about it—this is learning (for very young humans still psychologically immature), that’s exactly why it has to be spelled out that evaluation must be on the effort, precisely because it is never on the effort in any other activity in adulthood.