Childhood

Since it’s been so long, I’m splitting this roundup into several parts. This first one focuses away from schools and education and discipline and everything around social media.

1. Sometimes You Come First.

2. Let Kids be Kids.

3. Location, Location, Location.

4. Connection.

5. The Education of a Gamer.

6. Priorities.

7. Childcare.

8. Division of Labor.

9. Early Childhood.

10. Great Books.

11. Mental Health.

12. Nostalgia.

13. Some People Need Practical Advice.

Yes, sometimes it is necessary to tell your child, in whatever terms would be most effective right now, to shut the hell up. Life goes on, and it is not always about the child. Indeed, increasingly people don’t have kids exactly because others think that if you have a child, then your life must suddenly be sacrificed on that altar.

This seems like the ultimate ‘no, what is wrong with you for asking?’ moment:

Charles Fain Lehman: Maybe this is a strong take, but I tend to think that adults who are not parents tend to intuitively identify with the kids in stories about families, while adults who are parents identify with the adults.

I’m not saying “people who don’t have kids are children;” I’m saying they are relatively more likely to think first about how the child would perceive the interaction, because that’s their frame of reference for family life.

Annie Wu: I ask this so genuinely — truly what is wrong with him?

Jenn Ackerman (NYT): Senator JD Vance of Ohio, during a podcast that was released on Friday, shared an anecdote about the moment former President Donald J. Trump called to ask him to be his running mate. His 7- year-old son, Vance recalled, wanted to discuss Pokémon. “So he’s trying to talk to me about Pikachu, and I’m on the phone with Donald Trump, and I’m like, ‘Son, shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu,” he said, referring to the Pokémon mascot. “”This is the most important phone call of my life. Please just let me take this phone call.”

JD Vance often has moments like this, where he manages to pitch things in the worst possible light. Actually telling your child to be quiet in this spot  is, of course, totally appropriate.

The amount of childcare we are asking mothers to provide is insane,  matching the restrictions we place on children. Having a child looks a lot less appealing the more it takes over your life. Time with your kids is precious but too much of it is a too much, especially when you have no choice.

[Note on graph: This involves a lot of fitting from not many data points, don’t take it too seriously.]

A thread about how to support new parents, which seems right based on my experiences. A new parent has a ton of things that need doing and no time. So you can be most helpful by finding specific needs and taking care of them, as independently and automatically as possible, or by being that extra pair of hands or keeping an eye on the baby, and focusing on actions that free up time and avoiding those that take time. Time enables things like sleep.

I mostly support giving parents broad discretion.

I especially support giving parents broad discretion to let kids be kids.

Alas, America today does not agree. Parents walk around terrified that police and child services will be called if a child is even momentarily left unattended, or allowed to do what were back in 1985 ordinary childhood things as if they were an ordinary child, or various other similar issues.

As in things like this, and note this is what they do to the middle class white parents:

Erik Hoel: btw my jaw dropped when I found this. Why is this number so high? How do 37% of *allchildren in the US get reported to Child Protective Services at some point?

Matt Parlmer: My parents got reported to CPS for letting us play outside.

There’s a large and growing (for now lol) class of people who really hate kids and they are not shy about using the state apparatus to punish kids and the people who choose to have them, even when they aren’t even directly inconvenienced.

Nathan Young: Yeah my parents said they nearly had social workers in over some misunderstanding. Wild.

Cory: We got reported to CPS because our daughter had an ear infection that we already had a doctor’s appointment for… The school even called us to ask if we knew about her ear ache.

Livia: I was reported once because of some thing my very literal autistic eldest child said once that was badly misinterpreted. (It was a short visit and she had no concerns.) My fiancé’s ex reported him once because their five-year-old said there was no food in the house.

Vanyali: My niece got reported to CPS by the hospital where she gave birth for the meds the hospital itself gave her during the birth and noted in her chart. CPS said they had to do a whole investigation because “drugs”.

Jonathan Hines: My parents got reported to cps when i was a kid bc my baby sister was teething at the time, and, I presume, a neighbor didn’t think having your bones slice through your own flesh could possibly cause a very young child to respond so noisily.

Poof Kitty Face: My parents once had someone call the cops on them for “child abuse.” They were just sitting in their living room, watching TV. I am their only child. I was 40 years old and live 200 miles away.

Samuel Anthony: Got called on me when my kids were younger. They were playing in our fenced in front yard with our dog at the time, I was literally out there the entire time on the patio, which was shaded so impossible to see me from across the street/driving by. Very wild experience.

Carris137: Had a neighbor who did exactly that multiple times because kids were playing outside without jackets when it’s 65 and a slight breeze.

DisplacedDawg: They got called on us. The kids were in the front yard and the wife was on the porch. The neighbor couldn’t see her. The wife was still sitting on the porch when the cop showed up.

Alena: lady at the pool called not only the cops and but also CPS because we were splashing too much. she wasnt even near the pool deck.

Donna: Got reported to CPS in middle school because I went to school having a panic attack. Over going to school. Because I wanted to stay home. And I had my anxiety already on record with the school as well.

Whereas this would the The Good Place:

Elise Sole (Today): Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard dabbled in “free-range parenting” by allowing their daughters to wander around a Danish theme park alone.

On a family trip to Denmark, Iceland and Norway, the couple took their kids Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9, to a theme park in Copenhagen, where they had complete freedom for the entire day.

…

“The hack is, when we went to Copenhagen, we stayed at this hotel that was right at Tivoli Gardens, which is a 7-acre theme park … Anyway, the hotel opens up into the theme park and so we just were kind of like, ‘Are we going to like free-range parenting and roll the die here?’”

Bell said her daughters enjoyed their independence at the park.

…

Bell said the freedom, including for her and Shepard, was “heaven.”

…

Bell added, “When we had our first child, we said we wanted to be ‘second child parents,’ and we made an agreement that if she wanted to do something, as long as it didn’t require a trip to the hospital, she’d be allowed to do it.”

The key detail is that they did this in Copenhagen, where you don’t have to worry about anyone calling the cops on you for doing it, despite the associated interpretations of ethics. So this was entirely derisked.

The idea that a nine year old being allowed to go out on her own is ‘free range parenting’ shows how pathological we are about this. Not too long ago that was ‘parenting,’ and it started a lot younger than nine, and we didn’t have GPS and cell phones.

By the time you hit nine, you’re mostly safe even in America from the scolds who would try to  sic the authorities on you. It does happen, but when it happens it seems to plausibly be (low-level) news.

I was told a story the week before I wrote this paragraph by a friend who got the cops called on him for letting his baby sleep in their stroller in his yard by someone who actively impersonated a police officer and confessed to doing so. My friend got arrested, the confessed felon went on her way.

This is all completely insane. There are no consequences to calling CPS, you can do it over actual nothing and you cause, at best, acute stress and potentially break up a family.

If we had reasonable norms once CPS showed up this would presumably be fine, because then you could be confident nothing would happen, and all have a good laugh. But even a small chance of escalating misunderstandings is enough.

Then recently we have the example where an 11-year-old (!) walked less than a mile into a 370-person town, and the mother was charged with reckless conduct and forced to sign a ‘safety plan’ on pain of jail time pledging to track him at all times via an app on his phone.

Billy Binion: I can’t get over this story. A local law enforcement agency is trying to force a mom to put a location tracker on her son—and if she doesn’t, they’re threatening to prosecute her. Because her kid walked less than a mile by himself. It’s almost too crazy to be real. And yet.

Whereas Megan McArdle points out that at that age her parents rarely knew where she was, and also, do you remember this?

That was the rule. If it was 10pm, you should check if you knew where your children are. Earlier on, whatever, no worries. As it should (mostly) be.

It is odd to then see advocates push hard for what seem like extreme non-interference principles in other contexts? Here the report is from Rafael Mangual, who resigned in protest from a committee on reforming child abuse and neglect investigations in New York.

The result is a report that, among other things, seeks to make it harder for a child in long-term foster care to be adopted. I refuse to put my name to this report.

The committee also wants to make it easier for felons to become foster parents. They want to eliminate legal obligations for certain professionals, like pediatricians and schoolteachers, to report suspected child abuse and neglect. And they want to eliminate people’s ability to report such concerns anonymously.

They also want to make it so that drug use by parents, including pregnant mothers, won’t prompt a child welfare intervention.

…

Last week, for example, The Free Press reported that Mass General Brigham hospital will no longer consider the presence of drugs in newborns a sufficient cause for reporting a problem, because this phenomenon “disproportionately affects Black people,” the hospital explained.

Mary (from the comments): I was a CASA volunteer for a few years (Court Appointed Special Advocate).

…

But by the training to become a volunteer, and more so as I interacted with the staff on my reports to the court, it was clear (sometimes directly stated) that the goal above all else was family reunification. I was counseled not to include anything in my reports that might be upsetting to the parent (as the reports are provided to the parent’s attorney and presumably to the parent).

This was to avoid the parent from feeling uneasy or unduly judged (even if the judgment was quite *due*). Being censored, and contributing to a system that put returning the child to the parent above the risk of continuing harm to the child… I couldn’t do it.

Notice the assumption here. Reporting potential problems is considered a hostile act.

The whole idea is to protect the child, who is also black. If the impact of reporting a drug problem in a black child is net negative to black people, then that is the same as saying reporting drug problems is net negative. So stop doing it. Or, if it is not net negative, because it protects the child, then not reporting would be the racist action.

For the other stuff, all right, let’s talk more broadly.

If you think that drug use by a pregnant mother should not prompt a child welfare intervention, at least not automatically? I can see arguments for that.

What I cannot see is a world in which you get your child potentially taken away when they are allowed to walk two blocks alone at age eight, but not for parental drug use.

In general, I see lots of cases of actively dangerous homes where the case workers feel powerless to do anything, while other parents go around terrified all the time. We can at least get one of these two situations right.

Similarly, I kind of do think that it is pretty crazy that you can anonymously say you think I am a terrible parent, and then the authorities might well turn my life upside down. And that it has terrible impacts when you legally mandate that various people be snitches, driving people in need away from vital help and services. The flip side is, who is going to dare report, in a way that will then be seen as attempting to ruin someone’s life and family, and invite retaliation? So it is not easy, but I think there is a reason why we have the right to face our accusers.

In other completely crazy rule news:

Carola Conces Binder: Today at the local park with my 5 kids, I was told I needed a permit to be there with a group of more than 5 people. I said that they were my own kids and he said I still needed a permit!

Tim Carney: Really? Where?

Carola Conces Binder: Apparently it’s because we were by the picnic tables.

A generalized version of this theory is to beware evolutionary mismatch. As in, we evolved in isolated tribes of mixed age with consistent world models, where kids would have adult responsibilities and real work throughout and competion with real stakes and gets smacked down by their elders when needed. 

Now we do the opposite of all of that and more and are surprised kids often get screwed up. We are not giving them the opportunity to learn how to exist in and interact with the world.

Instead, we have things like this.

0xMert: I’ve found it

The perfect sentence to describe Canada.

“Home runs are not allowed.”

How is this a real place man.

Also, don’t you dare be competitive or play at a high level. Unacceptable.

Also wow, I did not see this objection coming.

Divia Eden: Lots of people on online forums seem to be super against kids playing hide and seek, since I guess the thinking is that it teaches them to hide from their parents???

At the ages my kids were most interested in hide and seek they were… extremely bad at hiding lol.

This is one of many opinions I have yet to encounter in someone I have been in a position to have an actual back and forth conversation with

If you think playing Hide and Seek is dangerous you flat out hate childhood.

This comes from Cartoons Hate Her asking about insane fearmongering. The thread is what you think it will be.

Cartoons Hate Her: PARENTS: what is the most unhinged fear mongering thing you’ve ever seen in a mom group or parenting forum? Bonus points if it actually freaked you out. (For an article)

Not talking about actual deaths/injuries, more like safety rules or concerns

Miss Moss Ball Girl Boss: I’m sorry but it’s hilarious that every reply to you about some issue has multiple replies to them freaking out about said issue. It’s so funny.

Or here’s the purest version of the problem:

Lenore Skenazy: Sometimes some lady will call 911 when she sees a girl, 8, riding a bike. So it goes these days.

BUT the cops should be able to say, “Thanks, ma’am!”…and then DO NOTHING.

Instead, a cop stopped the kid, then went to her home to confront her parents.

Lenore is too kind. I mean, yes, sometimes they do call 911, and it would be a vast improvement to simply say ‘thanks, ma’am’ and ignore. But the correct answer is not ‘thanks, ma’am.’

The policeman assured her no, it wasn’t that. Rather, a woman had called the police because she was “upset that a child was outside.”

Eskridge informed the cop that it was not illegal for children to be outside. He agreed but implied that Eskridge needed to take that up with the woman.

There is another way.

Here’s the story of two moms who got the local street closed for a few hours so children could play, and play the children did, many times, without any planning beyond closing the street. This both gives ample outdoor space, and provides safety from cars, which are indeed the only meaningful danger when kids are allowed to play on their own.

There are a number of European cities that have permanently shut down many of their roads, and they seem better for it. We should likely be shutting down roads simply for children’s play periodically in many places, and generally transition out of needing to use cars constantly for everything.

The other finding is that this led to many more connections between neighbors, as families realized they lived near other families, including classmates, and made friends. You start to get a real neighborhood, which brings many advantages.

But even if we don’t do that, you can also simply let the children play anyway. Even the cars do not pose that big a threat, compared to losing out on childhood.

Strip Mall Guy, obviously no stranger to other places (and a fun source of strip mall related business insights), runs the experiment, and concludes raising kids is better in New York City than the suburbs. I couldn’t agree more:

Strip Mall Guy: We’ve been debating whether to stay in New York City long-term to raise our kids or move to the suburbs like many families we know have done.

We spent the past week in a suburban house to see how it compared. The quiet was nice, and we enjoyed swimming in the pool. My son loved having all that space to run around.

But one major downside stood out: our constant reliance on a car.

The hassle of getting the kids in and out, navigating traffic, finding parking, and then repeating the process at each stop was a real barrier.

In New York City, going out for lunch with the kids is as simple as walking a couple of blocks.

You don’t think about it—you just walk out of the lobby and head in any direction.

One time this week, we got home and realized we forgot something at the grocery store. In New York, one of us would just take four minutes to grab it. In the suburbs?

Forget it. It’s a whole ordeal in comparison.

Having your dentist three blocks away, walking six minutes for a haircut, four minutes for ice cream, or twelve minutes to the park is a game-changer when you have kids.

We don’t have a car in New York, and we never even think about it.

Is this a deal-breaker? No. But we’re not ready to make that trade-off any time soon.

It just feels so much easier to raise kids in the city.

50 times in and out of the car later….how do you guys do this 😝😝😝

There is one huge downside, which is that it costs a lot of money. Space here is not cheap, and neither are other things, including private schools. Outside of that consideration, which I realize is a big deal, I think NYC is obviously a great place to raise kids. It is amazing to walk around, to not have to drive to things, to not even have to own a car, to have tons of options for places to go, people to see and things to do.

This Lyman Stone thread covering decline in time spent with friends, especially in the context of being a parent, has some fascinating charts.

First, we have the sharp decline in time spent with friends, especially after Covid.

And we also have the same decline in time spent with friends plus children, which includes playdates.

Whereas time with children has not actually increased? Which is actually odd, given the increasing demands for more and more supervision of children.

Lyman Stone: So, what happened in the mid-2010s to change the social space of motherhood to make motherhood a more isolated experience? my theory? the mommy wars, i.e. branded parenting styles that “are just what’s best for kids.”

Ruth and I hear from so many parents who worry that they’re doing something “wrong.” Or like if they parent the way they think is right, the Parent Police will jump out of the bushes and arrest them. Or have (legitimate) fears somebody will call CPS.

If I let my kid play in the back yard will somebody call CPS? What about the front yard? It’s worth noting just between 2017 and 2021, the rate of “screened out” (i.e. not credible) CPS calls rose from 42% to 49%: people are making more unfounded CPS calls.

…

The upshot here is a lot more parents are carrying around the idea that there’s a narrow range of acceptable parenting practices, and deviating from that range meaningfully harms kids, and being perceived to deviate could have severe consequences.

…

My theory is that as parenting has just gotten more debated, heterogenous, and seen as high-stakes, it has become uniquely hard for women to socialize as mothers.

I’m not sure the right solution to this. I’m not here to promote the new parenting style of No Labels Parenting. But I see these dynamics on all “sides” of the Mommy Wars. The Boss Moms, the Trad Wives, they’re all peddling these stories about their parenting style.

Whole thread is worthwhile. I essentially buy the thesis. When kids are involved, we increasingly are on hair triggers to disapprove of things, tell people they’re doing something wrong, and even call social services. And everyone is worried about everyone else. It is infinitely harder to start up conversations, make friends with other parents, chill, form an actual neighborhood and so on.

Also, of course, the competition for your attention is way higher. It’s so, so much harder than it used to be to engage with whoever happens to be there. Phone beckons.

First you tell them they cannot play outside. Then you tell them they can’t play inside.

Multiplayer online games (and single player games too) have varying quality, and many have questionable morality attached to their content. But for those that are high quality and that don’t actively model awful behaviors, they seem pretty awesome for teaching life skills? For socialization? For learning to actually do hard work and accomplish things?

I mean, yes, there are better options, but if you won’t let them do real work, and you won’t let them be on their own in physical space, isn’t this the next best option?

Prince Vogelfrei: I swear on my life having access to a world away from authority where you sink or swim on your own terms and are trying to accomplish something with friends you choose is one of the most important experiences any teenager can have. For many the place that’s happening is online.

John Pressman: It’s especially incredible when you consider that the relevant experiences are nearly totally simulated, and with AI will likely eventually be totally simulated. It has never been cheaper or safer to let kids have such experiences but we’re moral panicking anyway.

Prince Vogelfrei: Horror stories circulate among parents, the “it saved my life” stories only circulate among the kids and then a few years after the fact.

John Pressman: Looking back on it, it likely did save my life. I was relentlessly bullied in middle school and had negative utilitarian type depression over it. The Internet let me have friends and understanding that there existed a world beyond that if I kept going.

Prince Vogelfrei: Yep, also wouldn’t be where I am now without College Confidential, was raised in an isolated environment where the kinds of knowledge on that forum were otherwise inaccessible.

My principle has consistently been that if my kid is trying to improve, is working to accomplish something, and is not stuck in a rut, then that is great. Gaming is at least okay by me, and plausibly great. You do have to watch for ruts and force them out.

Cognitive endurance is important. Getting kids to practice it is helpful, and paper says it does not much matter whether the practice is academic or otherwise. Paper frames this as an endorsement of quality schooling, since that provides this function. Instead, I would say this seems like a strong endorsement for games in general and chess in particular. I’d also echo Tyler’s comment that this an area in which I believe I have done well and that it has paid huge benefits. Which I attribute to games, not to school. I’d actually suggest that school often destroys cognitive endurance through aversion, and that poor schools do this more.

In South Korea, babies born right after their World Cup run perform significantly worse in school, and also exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental well-being. This is then described as “Our results support the notion of an adverse effect on child quality” and “Our analysis reveals strong empirical evidence that the positive fertility shock caused by the 2002 World Cup also had a significant adverse effect on students’ human capital formation.” And that this ‘reflects a quantity-quality tradeoff.’

I can’t help but notice the part about higher mental well-being? What a notion of ‘quality’ and ‘human capital’ we have here, likely the same one contributing to Korea’s extremely low birth rate.

The proposed mechanisms are ‘lowered parental expectations’ and adverse selection. But also, perhaps these parents were and found a way to be less insane, and are making good decisions on behalf of their children, who are like them?

From everything I have heard, South Korea could use lowered parental expectations.

If you use price controls, then there will be shortages, episode number a lot.

Patrick Brown: Child care in Canada is starting to look a lot like health care in Canada – nominally universal, but with long waiting lines acting as the implicit form of rationing, particularly for low-income parents.

Financial Post: According to the poll, 84 per cent of B.C. families with young children (i.e., aged one to 12) either strongly agree (52 per cent) or moderately agree (32 per cent) that “long waiting lists are still a problem for families who need child care.” Among parents who have used child care in B.C., 39 per cent say that for their youngest child the wait time before a child care space became available was more than six months, including 15 per cent who say it was more than two years.

To make matters worse, the families who are poorest and who need child care most are the ones with the least access. Among parents who currently have a young child, 43 per cent report waiting over six months and 19 per cent over two years; among households with annual income under $50,000, 49 per cent report a wait time over six months and 25 per cent a wait time over two years.

Allocation by waitlist rather than price seems like a rather terrible way to get child care, and ensures that many who need it will go without, while some who value it far less do get it. Seems rather insane. Seriously, once again, can we please instead Give Parents Money (or tax breaks) already?

Sweden is going the other way. They are paying grandparents for babysitting.

Tyler Cowen approves, noticing the gains from trade. I have worries (about intrinsic motivation, or about the ease of fraud, and so on). But certainly paying grandparents to do childcare seems way better than paying daycare centers to do childcare? It is better for the kids (even if the daycare is relatively good) and better for those providing care. Indeed it seems massively destructive and distortionary to pay for daycare centers but not other forms of care.

Here’s an interesting abstract.

Abstract: This paper asks whether universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) raises parents’ earnings and how much these earnings effects matter for evaluating the economic returns to UPK programs. Using a randomized lottery design, we estimate the effects of enrolling in a full-day UPK program in New Haven, Connecticut on parents’ labor market outcomes as well as educational expenditures and children’s academic performance. During children’s pre-kindergarten years, UPK enrollment increases weekly childcare coverage by 11 hours. Enrollment has limited impacts on children’s academic outcomes between kindergarten and 8th grade, likely due to a combination of rapid effect fadeout and substitution away from other programs of similar quality but with shorter days.

In contrast, parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents’ earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families, almost entirely from parents’ earnings gains. This return is large compared to other labor market policies.

Conversely, excluding earnings gains for parents, each dollar of net government expenditure yields only $0.46 to $1.32 in benefits, lower than many other education and children’s health interventions. We conclude that the economic returns to investing in UPK are high, largely because of full-day UPK’s effectiveness as an active labor market policy.

Tyler Cowen: Note by the way that these externalities end up internalized in higher wages for the parents, so at least in this data set there is no obvious case for public provision of a subsidized alternative.

The obvious case for the subsidy is that it is profitable. Even if you assume a relatively low 20% marginal tax rate, for every $1 in costs spent here, parents will pay an additional $1.38 in taxes, and also collect less from other benefit programs.

Perhaps parents should be willing to pay up in order to internalize those gains. But the results show very clearly that they are not willing to do that. In practice, if you want them to do the work, they need the extra push, whether or not that is ‘fair.’

Tyler Cowen reports via Kevin Lewis on a new paper by Chris Herbst on the ‘Declining Relative Quality of the Child Care Workforce.’

I find that today’s workforce is relatively low-skilled: child care workers have less schooling than those in other occupations, they score substantially lower on tests of cognitive ability, and they are among the lowest-paid individuals in the economy. I also show that the relative quality of the child care workforce is declining, in part because higher-skilled individuals increasingly find the child care sector less attractive than other occupations

My response is:

1. Good.

2. Not good enough.

As in, we have massive government regulation of those providing childcare, requiring them to get degrees that are irrelevant to the situation and needlessly driving up costs, along with other requirements. Prices are nuts. Skill in childcare is not going to correlate with ‘tests of cognitive ability’ nor will it be improved by a four-year college degree let alone a master’s.

The real problems with childcare are that it is:

1. Too expensive.

2. Often too hard to find even at expensive prices.

3. Often understaffed, because staff is so expensive.

4. Hard to monitor, so some places engage in various forms of fraud or neglect.

I would much rather have cheaper childcare, ideally with better caregiver ratios, using a larger amount of ‘lower skilled’ labor.

You are sending your child off to camp.

Would you pay $225 per trunk to have everything washed, folded and returned to your front door? I wouldn’t, because I presume I could get a much cheaper price. But I’d pay rather than actually have to handle the job myself. My hourly rate is way higher. I do not think this task helps us bond. I do find the ‘won’t let the housekeeper do it’ takes confusing, but hey.

Now suppose the camp costs $15,000, and comes with a 100+ item packing list. Would you outsource that if you could? Well, yes, obviously, if you don’t want to have your kid do it as a learning experience. I sure am not doing it myself. The camp is offloading a bunch of low value labor on me, is this not what trade is for?

Also, 25 pairs of underwear and 25 pairs of socks for a seven-week camp? What? Are they only giving kids the chance to do laundry twice? This is what your $15k gets you? Otherwise, what’s going on?

A lot of this seems really stupid. Can’t the camp make its own arrangement for foldable Crazy Creek chairs?

Another example:

Tara Weiss (WSJ): “Color War” is its own sartorial challenge. At this epic end-of-summer tournament, campers sport their team’s color and compete in events. But since the kids don’t know what color they’ll be assigned, parents often pack for four possibilities.

The  packing service price is higher than I’d prefer, but it sure beats doing it slower and worse myself:

Anything not already marked gets labeled along the way. For prep and packing days, Bash charges $125 per hour, and $100 per hour for an additional packer. It takes three to six hours, depending on the number of campers per household.

…

Camp Kits’ bundles of toiletries, costing from $98-$185, magically appear on bunks before camp starts -without the parents lifting a finger.

I see why people mock such services, but they are wrong. Comparative advantage, division of labor and trade are wonderful things.

Of all the Robin Hanson statements, this is perhaps the most Robin Hanson.

Robin Hanson: Care-taking my 2yo granddaughter for a few days, I find it remarkable how much energy is consumed by control battles. Far more than preventing harm, learning how to do stuff. Was it always thus, or is modern parenting extra dysfunctional?

You’d think parents & kids could quickly learn/negotiate demarcated spheres of control, & slowly change those as the kids age. But no, the boundaries are complex, inexplicit, and constantly renegotiated.

No, I would not think that. I have children.

It does confuse me a bit, once they get a few years older than that, why things remain so difficult even when you provide clear incentives. It is not obvious to me that it is wrong, from their perspective, to continuously push some boundaries, both to learn and to provide long term incentives to expand those boundaries and future ones. The issue is that they are not doing this efficiently or with good incentive design on their end.

Often it is version of ‘if I give you some of nice thing X, you will be happy briefly then get mad and complain a lot. Whereas if I never give you X, you don’t complain or get mad at all, so actually giving you a responsible amount of nice thing X is a mistake.’

The obvious reason is that kids are dumb. It is that simple. Kids are dumb. Proper incentive design is not hardwired, it is learned slowly over time. And yeah, ultimately, this is all because kids are dumb, and they don’t have the required skills for what Hanson is proposing.

What’s your favorite book, other than ‘the answer to a potential security question so I’m not going to put the answer online’?

Romiekins: Sorry for being a snob but if you are a grown adult you should be embarrassed to tell the class your favorite book is for nine year olds. Back in my day we lied about our favourite books to sound smart and I stand by that practice.

The context is reports that many new college students are saying their favorite books involve Percy Jackson.

C.S. Lewis: When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown.

I cannot endorse actual lying, but I do want people to be tempted. I want them to feel a bit of shame or embarrassment about the whole thing if they know their pick sucks, and to have motivation to find a better favorite book. You have a lot of control over the answer. For all I know, those Percy Jackson books are really great, and you definitely won’t find my favorite fiction book being taught in great works classes (although for non-fiction you would, because my answer there is Thucydides).

Drawing children’s attention to poor mental health often backfires, to the point where my prior is that it should be considered harmful to on the margin medicalize problems, or tell kids they could have mental health issues. Otherwise you get this.

Ellen Barry (NYT): The researchers point to unexpected results in trials of school-based mental health interventions in the United Kingdom and Australia: Students who underwent training in the basics of mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy did not emerge healthier than peers who did not participate, and some were worse off, at least for a while.

And new research from the United States shows that among young people, “self-labeling” as having depression or anxiety is associated with poor coping skills, like avoidance or rumination.

In a paper published last year, two research psychologists at the University of Oxford, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, coined the term “prevalence inflation” — driven by the reporting of mild or transient symptoms as mental health disorders — and suggested that awareness campaigns were contributing to it.

“It’s creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional,” said Dr. Foulkes, a Prudence Trust Research Fellow in Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who has written two books on mental health and adolescence.

…

“Really, if you think about almost everything we do in schools, we don’t have great evidence for it working,” he added. “That doesn’t mean we don’t do it. It just means that we’re constantly thinking about ways to improve it.”

Obviously, when there is a sufficiently clear problem, you need to intervene somehow. At some point that intervention needs to be fully explicit. But the default should be to treat problems as ordinary problems in every sense.

David Manuel looks at Haidt’s graph of rising diagnoses of mental illness, points out there are no obvious causal stories for actual schizophrenia, and suggests a stigma reduction causing increased reporting causing a stigma reduction doom loop.

1. Decrease in stigma leads to an increase in reporting¹

2. Increases in reporting lead to a further decrease in stigma

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 over and over

Ben Bentzin: This could just as likely be:

1. Increase in social status for reporting mental health issues

2. Increases in status leads to a further increase in reporting

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 over and over

That’s effectively the same thing. Reducing stigma and increasing resulting social status should look very similar.

Could this all be ‘a change in coding,’ a measurement error, all the way?

Michael Caley: lol it’s always a change in coding.

I don’t think this means it’s fine for kids to have social media at 14 but it’s a compelling explanation of the “mental health crisis” data — we are mostly not having a teen mental health crisis, we just are doing a better job looking into teen mental health because of Obamacare.

Alec Stapp: This is the most compelling case I’ve seen against the idea that smartphones are causing a mental health epidemic among teens. Apparently Obamacare included a recommended annual screening of teen girls for depression and HHS also mandated a change in how hospitals code injuries.

No. It is not simply a ‘change in coding,’ as discussed above. There is a vast increase in kids believing they have mental health issues and acting like it. This is not mainly about what is written down on forms. Nor does a change to how you record suicidal ideation account for everything else going up and to the right.

Are we getting ‘better’ at looking into mental health issues? We are getting better at finding mental health issues. We are getting better at convincing children they have mental health problems. But is that… better? Or is it a doom loop of normalization and increasing status that creates more real problems, plausibly all linked to smartphones?

I think any reasonable person would conclude that:

1. Older data was artificially low in relative terms due to undermeasurement.

2. Changes in diagnosis and communication around mental health, some of which involves smartphones and some of which doesn’t, have led a feedback loop that has increased the amount and degree of real mental health issues.

3. Phones are an important part, but far from all, of the problem here.

Do modern kids have ‘anemonia’ for the 90s, nostalgia for a time they never know when life was not all about phones and likes and you could exist in space and be a person with freedom and room to make mistakes?

I don’t know that this is ‘anemonia’ so much as a realization that many of the old ways were better. You don’t have to miss the 90s to realize they did many things right.

That includes the games. Every time my kids play games from the 80s or 90s I smile. When they try to play modern stuff, it often goes… less well. From my perspective.

Natalian Barbour: No kid remembers their best day in front of the TV.

Kelsey Piper: When I ask people about their most treasured childhood memory, video games are on there pretty frequently. It changed how I think about parenting.

Good video games are awesome. They are absolutely a large chunk of my top memories. Don’t let anyone gaslight you into thinking this is not normal.

Mason reminds us of the obvious.

Mason: “Parenting doesn’t impact children’s outcomes” is an absolutely senseless claim made by people who don’t understand how variables are distinguished in the studies they cite, and yes, that’s a different argument than “genetics don’t matter.”

For the record, people who say this don’t actually believe it, and if they did they would have dramatically different opinions about how children should be produced and raised.

It is a deeply silly thing to claim, yet people commonly claim it. I do not care what statistical evidence you cite for it, it is obviously false. Please, just stop.

Dominic Cummings provides concrete book and other curriculum suggestions for younger students. Probably a good resource for finding such things.

Can three car seats fit into a normal car? This is highly relevant to the questions of On Car Seats as Contraception. I’ve seen claims several times that, despite most people thinking no, the answer is actually yes:

Timothy Lee: I keep hearing people say three car seats won’t fit in a normal five seat car and it’s not true. We have three close-in-age kids and have managed to get their car seats into multiple normal sized cars.

Specifically: Subaru Impreza and Kia Niro. Both small hatchbacks/crossovers. Oldest and youngest kids are 5 years apart.

No apple no life: Is one of them a booster without high back?

Timothy Lee: Yes.

No apple no life: Cool. Two high-backs/car seats and one backless booster will definitely fit in a Model Y as well but it’s going to be a tight squeeze and probably not something i’d want to take on a road trip.

David Watson: I have just two, and it just _looks_ like it’s impossible, but I haven’t yet had a reason to check

Eric Hoover: It’s more about the age spread so that all 3 aren’t the big high back booster

The LLM answer is ‘it is close and it depends on details,’ which seems right. There are ways to do it, for some age distributions, but it will be a tight squeeze. And if you have to move those seats to another car, that will be a huge pain, and you cannot count on being able to legally travel in any given car that is not yours. Prospective parents mostly think it cannot be done, or are worried that it cannot be done, and see one more big thing to stress about. So I think in practice the answer is ‘mostly no,’ although if you are a parent of three and do not want a minivan you should totally at least try to make this happen. 

If you ever want to do something nice for me?

Paul Graham: Something I didn’t realize till I had kids: Once people have kids it becomes much easier to figure out how to do something nice for them. Do something that helps their kids.

I am not always up for working to make new (adult) friends, even though I should be (he who has a thousand friends has not one friend to spare). But I am always looking for my kids to make more friends here in New York City. 

Childhood roundup #5 excluded all developments around college. So this time around is all about issues related to college or graduate school, including admissions.

What went wrong with federal student loans? Exactly what you would expect when you don’t check who is a good credit risk. From a performance perspective, the federal government offered loans to often-unqualified students to attend poor-performing, low-value institutions. Those students then did not earn much and were often unable to repay the loans. The students are victims here too, as we told them to do it.

Alas, none of the proposed student loan solutions involve fixing the underlying issue. If you said ‘we are sorry we pushed these loans on students and rewarded programs and institutions that do not deserve it, and we are going to stop giving loans for those programs and institutions and offer help to the suffering former students, ideally passing some of those costs on to the institutions’ then I would understand that. Instead, our programs are moving dollars mostly to relatively rich people who can afford to pay, and by offering forgiveness we are making the underlying problems far worse rather than better. Completely unacceptable even if it were constitutional.

Colorado governor Jared Polis, who really ought to know better, signs bipartisan bill to make first two years of college free for students whose family income is under $90k/year at in-state public schools. Technically this is 65 credits not counting AP/IB, concurrent enrollment, military credit or credit for prior learning, so there is even more incentive to get such credits.

The good news is they do have a full cliff, this falls off as you approach $90k, so they dodged the full version of quit-your-job insanity. The obvious bad news is that this is effectively one hell of a tax increase.

The less obvious bad news is this is setting up a huge disaster. Think about what the student who actually needs this help will do. They will go to a local college for two years for free. If they do well, they’ll get to 65 credits.

Then the state will say ‘oops, time to pay tuition.’ And what happens now? Quite a lot of them will choose to, or be forced to, leave college and get a job.

This is a disaster for everyone. The benefits of college mostly accrue to those who finish. At least roughly 25% of your wage premium is the pure Sheepskin Effect for getting your degree. If you aren’t going to finish and were a marginal student to begin with (hence the not finishing), you are better off not going, even for free.

I do not think we should be in the business of providing universal free college. There are real costs involved, including the negative externalities involved in accelerating credentialism. However, if we do want to make this offer to help people not drown, we need to at least not stop it halfway across the stream.

The real life version of the college where there degree students who pay for a degree but aren’t allowed to come to class versus the non-degree students who get no degree but are educated for free. To be clear, this is totally awesome.

David Weekly: This seems kinda…radical? ASU makes its courses available to anyone for $25/course. After you take the class, if you want the grade you got added to an official transcript with a credit you can use, +$400. These are real college credits. 8 year olds are getting college credits!

Emmett Shear: This is cool to me because you can see the core of university economics right there. Bundling $25 worth of education with $400 of credentialist gatekeeping. I’m not blaming ASU, it’s cool they’re doing this, but that is deeply broken.

Sudowoodo: Totally understand your comment but this is the best possible instance of a college credit system I’ve seen. One course for $400 equals 120 credits of a degree for $16k (plus the $25 per course), or an additional major for just a few thousand dollars.

Emmett Shear: Right, but that just goes to highlight how absurdly overpriced the credentials are vs the actual education.

James Hulce: I did 70+ credits under this program. During the early years of the pandemic ASU reduced the credit conversion fee to $100 and waived the $25 enrollment fee, so I took a wide variety of courses. Overall very happy with the quality and delivery.

Aside from being virtual, this product is vastly better than the normal one. You get to try out courses for $25 and bail if they are no good. If you struggle, or you get bad grades, you can start over again for another $25 or bail. You are never stuck with a bad grade. Then at the end, after you pay for the credits, it is still a deep discount, an entire degree for $16k.

Of course, this is Arizona State University, so the real product (by reputation) is neither education nor credential. Rather it is the cool parties. This program cannot help you with those. But if you are cool enough and show up, they are also close to free.

The big picture is that trust in academia, like many American institutions, is rapidly collapsing, among essentially all groups.

Here is one theory on (one aspect of) what happened.

Derek Thompson: Why is trust in US institutions—esp colleges—collapsing? Here’s a theory. The 21st c has became the age of the unfocused institution—the age of mission inflation, goal ambiguity, and complex orgs losing any clear sense of priority, or identity.

Odalisk Flower: The university is supposed to solve the perennial question of the American Experiment: How do we get the benefits of an intellectual elite without the drawbacks of a hereditary aristocracy?

What has changed recently is common knowledge that this particular solution has failed.

In fact, it has failed so spectacularly that dissidents are now floating suggestions that perhaps a hereditary aristocracy isn’t so bad after all. For most, this is still outside the Overton window, but it’s wild how fast that window is moving.

I have not noticed rising whispers of the potential wisdom of hereditary aristocracy, indeed neoreaction seems to be fully dead. From where I sit, there is broad recognition that the universities and our other institutions have failed, without any particular suggestion about what plausible replacement would be superior beyond building private local alternatives. My expectations is that the replacement will emerge out of the transformations wrought by AI, whether or not it is an improvement.

Harvard students are highly stressed, despite having made it to Harvard, says Harvard Crimson. I would note that getting mental health counseling is often a function of how and when counseling is provided as much as it is about actual mental health – if we applied today’s standards to 2017 I bet the graph starts substantially higher.

Is this despite, or because, of the very high grades?

Article goes into the usual suspects, overscheduling, lack of social time, social media, hyper-competitiveness and perfectionism. Everyone running between ‘pre-professional’ activities trying to stand out. Harvard, the author says, is now a group of students obsessed with their relative status. Sounds like what would happen if you filter for exactly that type of young person, then put them all in the same place to compete, without the ability to differentiate themselves with grades because everyone who wants one has a 4.0.

Not that everyone in the Ivy league actually has a 4.0. Grade inflation is high, but these percentages of A grades from Yale are still a lot less than 100%, and inflation may have at least temporarily peaked:

The patterns here are clear, such that small surprises stand out and seem meaningful. Are we not appreciating what is happening in psychology? Their studies may not be replicating, but the grades are not either. You have to respect that. Whereas physics seems to have gone rather soft.

What does it say about the students who choose various majors and classes, given this wide distribution of grades? One could say that students going into education studies are smarter because they knew to secure better grades. Or one can say they went that way because they can’t hack it, or did not care to. Or one could say that your 4.0 in education studies means nothing (above getting into Yale in the first place) and everyone will know that.

Obviously we need a meaningful range of grades, otherwise students cannot differentiate themselves based on grades, so they both won’t care about doing well and learning, and they will become obsessed with other signals and status markers.

Ben Golub: This is real and is creeping outside Harvard to most elite private schools grades should be made to matter again, and instructor evaluation practices should be adjusted to give them a free hand to give bad grades!

Orin Kerr: Very interesting essay by Harvard undergrad @aden_barton, arguing that Harvard undergrads don’t spend a lot of time on classes and studying—which he attributes mostly to grade inflation. If grades are compressed around “A”, there isn’t much to study for.

Aden Batron (essay in Harvard Crimson): In the final class, each student was asked to cite their favorite readings, and the professor was surprised that so many chose readings from the first few units. That wasn’t because the students happened to be most interested in those classes’ material; rather, that was the brief period of the course when everyone actually did some of the readings.

Despite having barely engaged with the course material, we all received A’s. I don’t mean to blame the professors for our poor work ethic, but we certainly would have read more had our grades been at risk. At the time, we bemoaned our own lack of effort. By that point in the semester, though, many other commitments had started requiring more of us, so prioritizing curiosity for its own sake became difficult.

And therein lies the second reinforcing effect of grade inflation, which not only fails to punish substandard schoolwork but actively incentivizes it, as students often rely on extracurriculars to get ahead. Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, made this point in a recent New York Times interview, saying that “Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.”

How bad is it? Oh my lord.

Zalman Rothschild: I was a teaching fellow for two classes at Harvard College when I was at HLS. One was taught by an amazing visitor from Dartmouth. He enforced a strict curve. The other was taught by a Harvard prof. He informed us TFs that an A is the default grade. A- would require justification.

Orin Kerr: Jesus H.

Maggie Wittlin: No no, that’s the law school system.

Matt Yglesias says students in college should study more, and we should hold them to actual standards.

Right now, they are doing remarkably little real work.

When you add in-class education, homework, other educational activities and outside work (which I would say largely counts as educational and is often necessary for support), we get 5.1 hours for ‘full time’ college students, or 35.7 hours a week.

Matthew Yglesias: Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have shown that over the decades, students have been spending less and less time on studying — “full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week.”

I agree with Yglesias that to fix this we would need a dramatic reversal of grading practices. You need willingness to actually punish students who are not getting it done, with actual life consequences on more than the margin, or it won’t work.

Matt Yglesias: The nascent Summers-era crackdown was turning A-s into B+s and B+s into Bs. That generated some whining from students, but ultimately, to restore old-school academic values, schools will need to hand out Cs and Ds that put students at the risk of real negative consequences, like loss of scholarships, getting kicked out of school, or heading into the job market looking like a real fuckup.

And then you get the problem that Hunham confronted: Is this what students and their parents want?

It is indeed not what most parents and students want. Which means we know what product they are mostly buying, and the universities are mostly selling.

And like so many other things these days, there is remarkably little product differentiation. Almost no one is willing to say, this is something different, and we will get those who want that different product, and employers or prospective citizens or what not who want that product can reward that. It is odd to me that this is rare. If all the selective universities are rejecting most applications, so what if 90% of students and parents recoil in horror, so long as the other 10% are excited? Or 98% and 2%?

The killing of Harvard’s Math 55. John Arnold contrasts an ‘06 Crimson article on how hard the course is, with a ‘23 Crimson article showing how it is no longer special. One can reasonably argue that if 70 start, 20 finish and only 10 understand, maybe that is bad actually, but I disagree. I think that math is a place for exactly that, because failure is an option. You want to provide the real thing, and it is fine if the majority can’t hack it and drop out. If we can’t fail here, where can we fail?

Claim that in the wake of their donors pulling out complaining about antisemitism, the price for Ivy league admission via donation has effectively been slashed on the order of 90%, from $20 million to $2 million. That seems clearly below the market clearing or profit maximizing price? The optics of doing large volume on this also seem pretty terrible. Kids whose parents can pay $20 million are someone you want as a peer so you can network, but at $2 million that advantage mostly fades. At some point the damage to the student body adds up. So I’m skeptical.

To what extent are we seeing a shift lowering the value of Ivy league degrees?

Nate Silver: This speaks to the story I wrote earlier this week. Yes, the value of your Ivy League degree is going to be affected if people start to associate your school with political activism instead of academic rigor.

Andrew Ross Sorkin (NYT): Businesses may be unlikely to rush into formally patrolling universities’ policies by adopting either of these theoretical maneuvers, but they might amp up the pressure in some other way through their informal preferences. As Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said of campus protests in an interview with CNBC this week: “If that action or those protests reflect the values of the campuses where they’re doing it, we wouldn’t be interested in recruiting students from those campuses.”

John Arnold: Anecdotal, but I’ve had several conversations in recent years with people who hire undergrads for highly competitive jobs (tech, finance, consulting etc) that are moving away from the Ivies and towards flagship state universities, citing better cultural and professional fit.

Now confirmed with data. Forbes surveyed managers with hiring authority. When asked whether more/less likely to hire vs 5 years ago:

Ivy League: 7% more likely; 33% say less likely

Public univs: 42% more likely; 5% less likely

Selective privates: 37% more likely; 5% less likely

I would classify the selective privates at least half with the Ivies, not mostly with the public universities, if I was doing this style of recruitment.

Preston Cooper provides an entry in the genre where you measure the financial ROI of various college degrees given different universities and majors. 31% of degrees were negative ROI, once you factor in time costs and risk of not finishing.

Every time we run this test we get a graph of majors that looks like this:

That then interacts with different colleges, which differ in many ways including completion rates. And of course, if you switch programs based on this information, you do not suddenly get the completion rate (or net life impacts) of the degree you switch to, even if the original study was done fully correctly.

The return on master’s degrees was not so great.

Preston Cooper: What about grad school? It’s complicated.

Med school & law school have huge payoffs.

But nearly half of master’s degree programs leave students in the red.

How much government funding goes to programs with no return? We can answer that thanks to new data.

Programs in the ROI database received $418bn in funding from 2018 to 2022.

Of that, $122bn (29%) flowed to negative-ROI programs.

It would be highly reasonable to tie government funding to program ROI, if we had a good measurement of that, but that is not how our government works.

Here is the data dashboard. In which I learned that my degree and major had negative ROI by this metric, whereas if I had switched majors from Mathematics to Economics like I considered, I would have had a vastly easier job all around and also picked up almost three million dollars (!) in expected value.

I don’t buy the full result there, but if this reflects reality even somewhat, letting me make this mistake and stick with Mathematics, without even a warning, was deeply, deeply irresponsible.

Ideally we would get a more detailed breakdown, but yes.

Derek Thompson: Before the pandemic, new england colleges had more than 2x more applicants than southwestern colleges.

At current trajectories, southwestern college applicants will surpass new england in two years.

Nate Silver: This is pretty interesting in light of yesterday’s post.

There’s an inverse correlation between the left-wingness of the colleges in each region and growth in applications.

A lot of students just want to go to college to drink beer, hook up, go to football games, and emerge with a degree that will give them gainful employment. They far, far outnumber the political activist types. And they’re voting with their feet, it looks like.

Most students care primarily about things other than political activism. The problem for them is that college is a package deal. (Almost?) all the selective colleges have lots of political activism and force you to care deeply about things that are neither fun nor going to be useful to your future or part of getting a traditional education. And at least faking those things is deeply tied to your admission to those schools and to your social life and experience in class and administrative rules set once you arrive.

Colleges are reversing course, and admitting that yes standardized test scores are required for admissions.

It was completely insane to drop this requirement. Doing so only hurt the exact people they claimed to be trying to help. The good news is, while we have a long way to go, we seem to be past peak insanity in such matters.

Nate Silver: The critique that universities are run like for-profit corporations that are mostly concerned about the bottom line is correct. Also, that’s what might save them.

A new way has been found to discriminate.

Steve Miller: UCSD announced a new policy April 9 to exclude students whose parent is college educated and makes over $45,000 from enrolling in computer science or other selective majors, unless spots are available after first generation or low income students enroll.

Nearly 40% of all UC San Diego students are first generation students.

So if you are not a first generation student or low income, it will likely become virtually impossible to enroll in computer science or other selective majors.

This policy applies to students seeking to enroll in selective majors after their initial admission to the university, as the policy linked in the original post specifies.

Separate preferences for first generation students apply in admission.

This likely effectively means that if you are not a first-generation college student (and an in-state student) then you will not be able to transfer to a selective major, no matter your other GPA. Those making these decisions have made their motivations and intentions clear, so go in with your eyes open, both reading the fine print and realizing that they could add more fine print later.

But also, it seems odd that students want to major in computer science, and we are saying no rather than expanding the program? Isn’t that exactly what we want?

Perhaps our children are learning after all. They can solve for the equilibrium.

That was back in 2021. Presumably this number has only gone up since then.

The Hill:

1. A survey found that 34 percent of white students who applied to colleges falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application.

2. Most students, 48 percent, claimed to be Native American on their application.

3. Seventy-seven percent of white applicants who lied about their race on their application were accepted to those colleges.

…

According to Intelligent.com Managing Editor Kristen Scatton, the prevalence of applicants who claim Native American ancestry is possibly due to the popular narrative that for many Americans, a small percentage of their DNA comes from a Native American tribe.

It is not clear this is helping the applicants much, whether or not they were caught. Liars got accepted at a 77% clip, but the typical acceptance rate overall is already about 65%, and it is not clear this is ‘accepted at any given college’ rather than at all, and there are various other factors in both directions.

What’s totally crazy is doing the math on this.

1. About 50% of college applications are from white students.

2. White students report they lied 34% of the time.

3. Of those students, 48% pretended to be Native American.

4. That means that 5.8% of applications are falsely claiming to be Native American.

But the rate of real Native American applications is only about 1%. So that means, even if the other half of applications never lie: If you mark Native American, there is an 85% change you are lying. Meanwhile, several percent of those who lied checked the box for AAPI, which presumably only hurts your chances even if they believe you.

So yes, I doubt checking that box helps you much on its own.

Phil Magness: If you want to genuinely disrupt higher education for the better, impose severe limits on the number of mandatory GenEd classes that students must take. These courses are the lifeblood of hyper-politicized woke departments that otherwise wouldn’t attract many students.

Most students would be better served by starting their majors earlier and taking more classes in skills and subjects related to their degrees. Most GenEds, as currently taught, are complete wastes of time at best, and political indoctrination at worst.

Those same GenEds serve another function though: they create jobs for faculty in otherwise unpopular disciplines. And the depts that have the heaviest presence on the GenEd curriculum (e.g. English) also tend to be the largest departments on campus, despite drawing few majors.

It’s unethical to require economically precarious 18-21 year olds to pay for classes they don’t need just to keep a horde of English, Sociology, and Foreign Language professors employed.

I had a highly extensive set of general required courses I had to take, something like 40 credits. You could make a reasonable case for the 16 that were reading the ‘Great Works’ of literature and philosophy. There wasn’t a problem with wokeness back then (the closest thing was when I sort of tried to cancel The Symposium for all the praising of child rape, and got told to STFU about it and come to class or else), but still the rest was pointless, a waste of time taking up almost a full year of coursework.

Phil Magness notes that students could instead start their majors. That implies that when you arrive on campus, you should know what major is right for you.

That is another issue with all the required classes. There is little room for exploration, most of those slots are already spoken for. If I had wanted to switch majors to something other than Mathematics, I had almost no opportunities to sample alternatives in time to do this. Realistically I could have probably made it to Physics or Economics, and that’s about it.

Which majors are most often regretted? Humanities.

Jacob Shell: What they don’t tell you in high school or college advisor offices is some of these are “winner takes all” majors and others aren’t. The comp sci normie is making a nice living right now, but the physics major is a sunlight-deprived lab tech for 30 years in a row.

I would have thought the physics majors were mostly not now doing physics? It still makes sense that regret rates are high. Math majors are mostly not doing math all day anymore, but they seem fine with it. As a math major myself, I am an exception, and I do regret it, although perhaps the signaling value made it worthwhile after all.

Here is a different survey that asks the same question. Will you regret that major? This time the answer is, probably.

Regret is an imprecise measure, but these are not small differences.

Thread of what Basil Halperin learned in graduate school. Increasing returns to effort for specialization in terms of skills, whether that translates to world improvement or pay is another question. Nothing here made me think anyone should go to grad school.

Then again, do you go there for the learning?

Here is Bryan Caplan on when to get which Econ PhD. The algorithm is essentially:

1. Only get an economics PhD at all if you want a job that needs it, such as an economics professor.

2. If you can get into a top-25 Econ program and endure the pain, go there instead.

3. If you can’t do either or both of those, you can go with GMU.

4. When to get a Masters? When you drop out before finishing your PhD.

5. In any case, if you want this, apply to at least 15 schools, process is super random.

It is no surprise given his other opinions that Bryan Caplan’s answer to that question is a very sharp no. In Caplan’s model the purpose of graduate school is to get a job that won’t hire you without one. That is it.

I think he’s right.

Nate Silver offers related Good Advice.

Nate Silver: Real, non-trollish life advice:

If you’re a smart young person and you really want to go to graduate school, then by all means go. But if you’re on the fence, probably don’t. That’s not where the action is. And it’s not where the action is going to be for the foreseeable future.

The specific exception is if you go to graduate school with the intention of being a sleeper agent to improve academic (or government/broader nonprofit research) culture. That is potentially quite valuable for society (though it won’t necessarily be lucrative for you personally).

I do not believe you when you say you are going to be a Sleeper Agent. I expect you to either get worn down and be a normal academic, or to run away screaming in horror at some point, because man does that all sound miserable. It is a noble thing to do, of course, to be the change you want to see and fight for it, if you can.

It emphasizes that my basic advice here would be that going to graduate school is something you should only do with a very specific purpose, and generally only if you can attend an elite institution. Do not go because you have nothing better to do. Have a specific career path in mind, that either does not face or justifies the long odds usually against such paths. Know what you want to learn, and want to prove.

Or, ideally, if you possibly can, go do something else instead.

What is academia for, then? Presumably something else.

Aella: It’s insane how much academia is not about figuring stuff out. The current state of academia is not what it would look like if we went “hey I wanna figure out the truth behind a thing.”

Fred Scharmen (QTing): “Hey I wanna figure out the truth behind a thing” is like what an elementary schooler thinks that grad students are supposed to be doing. I hope this person grows up eventually.

Hazard: Good example of the general vibes and tactics used to haze people into fucked up social orders and institutions without ever having to defend them.

You just mock people who don’t know the scam is a scam.

I’ve written about this before.

It’s a load bearing tactic for maintaining normalization of deviance.

It is worse than that.

I get mocking someone for actually being confused here. One should not do even that. But yeah, if someone with experience straight up said ‘I am shocked, shocked to fund that things other than searching for truth are going on in here, how can that be, I am so confused’ then then mockers gonna mock.

This is not someone saying ‘I do not understand why someone is slurring their words in this cafe’ in a world where the cafes were called cafes but were actually bars. This is ‘it really is insane the amount of hard drinking going on in all the cafes, did you notice how rare it is for anyone to get a coffee anymore, they are actually bars’ and someone mocking you, saying ‘coffee is what an elementary schooler thinks people drink at cafes.’ And then everyone went back to pretending cafes only served coffee.

As Dilan Esper and Andrew Rettek note here, the right thing on free speech is to defend everyone’s right to speak. It is in the context of very much not doing this in other contexts, treating a wide variety of far less harmful speech as ‘violence,’ that this sudden claim of realizing of one’s principles in this one case rung hollow. No one is pretending this is a new set of general pro-speech principles to be universally applied.

As Jill Filipovic and Jonathan Haidt each note, it would be great if universities used the recent protest moment to realize they their systematic error, and broadly once again embrace free speech the way they used to do.

This is the letter the ACLU sent out in 1978 after they defended the right of actual Nazis to march in order to defend free speech for all of us.

You have to let them talk. This is America, man. Or at least, it used to be.

Alas, I am not holding my breath for such an outcome.

If it does happen, Charles Murray has kindly offered to allow the presidents to prove their devotion to free speech by letting him host a talk.

We are not letting them talk. FIRE found that 3% of current college students have been punished for speech, which translates to 5% over four years, which is enough for a hell of a chilling effect especially given how risk averse college students are now.

Jill Filipovic urges us all to rise to the standard of the old ACLU, no matter what others have done, and stand firm for free speech even asymmetrically. Do not call, she says, for more restrictions in the name of even-handedness. That is a tough sell. It is also not obvious which path leads to more free speech. Si vis pacem, para bellum?

Larry Summers points out that Harvard’s multiple Antisemitism Taskforces, which are accomplishing nothing, are the wrong approach, an alternative to both moral leadership and standing up strongly for free speech. Instead, Harvard continues to allow official support antisemitic positions without allowing the voicing of pro-Israel positions.

Paul Graham links to Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, who says people in academia now feel more space to speak their minds after recent events.

Here are some examples of other cases where free speech could have been stood up for, and universities chose a rather different path.

Harvard declares it is now mission first. It will no longer make ‘official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.’ I put up a prediction market on whether they stick to it. Good luck, Harvard!

What is Harvard’s mission? Harvard.

Nate Silver: Notable exceptions to free speech:

Incitement

Defamation

Criticizing Harvard

Lawrence Bobo (Dean of Social Sciences, Harvard): A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors – be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.

Lawrence Summers: It takes something extraordinary to bring me into agreement with Israel demonizing faculty like Walter Johnson. That is what Harvard Dean Lawrence Bobo has done with his call for punishing faculty who publicly challenge university decisions.

I cannot understand why his boss Dean Hopi Hoekstra has not condemned the idea. Nor can I understand how someone who believes faculty who believes in punishing dissent can be allowed to set faculty salaries, decide on promotions or be involved in faculty discipline.

How can it be according to Harvard leaders that it is fine to call for an end to Israel as a Jewish state but not to criticize the University administration?

Students from the University of Waterloo computer science programs have been enjoying oversized success, despite it being a relatively young university founded in 1957. Henry Dashwood looks at what makes Waterloo different. They have a five year program that does not break for the summer, the culture focuses on working on projects rather than partying or sports, they have a startup accelerator on campus, and despite having a lot of CS students they are very selective (claimed 4% acceptance rate).

So it is exactly the story one would expect based on what startup culture says. Focus on building things, cut out everything else.

I am curious if that model will long survive moves like this, although I appreciate that they have a distinct department for pure mathematics:

Chris Brunet: The Department of Pure Mathematics at @UWaterloo is hiring a math professor.

”Eligible candidates for this search must self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, nonbinary and Two-Spirit people.”

Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering is also hiring an engineering professor.

”Eligible candidates are required to identify as a woman or gender minority, which is defined to include individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, gender-fluid, non-binary, or twospirited.”

Also, 2 professors of computer science.

Joshua Rauh nots that his training on DEI included an example of where someone saying ‘DEI has gone too far’ is the first sign of prejudice and on the job discrimination.

Alex Tabarrok in response: DEI has gone too far.

Indiana signs a bill introducing ‘intellectual diversity’ as a standard for tenure decisions. Tyler Cowen suggests it will backfire, that observance will be addressed via technical box-checking, and that universities could retaliate by not hiring any actual conservatives (even more than they already do) at all for fear they would be forced to grant such people tenure later. It is extremely difficult to get a bunch of academics who want it to be one way, with only left-wing (or often only far-left-wing) viewpoints welcome in academia, to agree to have it be the other way via a law. Tyler does not lay out what he would do instead. I can think of ways to do it, but they involve big guns.

Wisconsin’s universities initially voted down a compromise to get rid of some DEI positions in exchange for funding for raises and new buildings, but they came around.

Washington Post Editorial Board comes out against DEI statements in hiring.

WaPo Editorial Board: The last thing academia — or the country — needs is another incentive for people to be insincere or dishonest. The very purpose of the university is to encourage a free exchange of ideas, seek the truth wherever it may lead, and to elevate intellectual curiosity and openness among both faculty and students. Whatever their original intent, the use of DEI statements has too often resulted in self-censorship and ideological policing.

Here is what they are opposing.

Paul Graham: People in the sciences thought they could ignore the fools over in the humanities and just focus on their research. But now the fools’ ideology is colonizing the sciences.

John Sailer: NEW: Yale University’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry requires all job applicants to submit a DEI statement.

Here’s the evaluation rubric, which shows the exhaustive DEI criteria for assessing any scientist hoping to work in the Yale department.

Here is the full post from The Free Press.

When making hires at Yale’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision,” according to a document tucked away on its website. 

To what extent does that mean an applicant’s DEI score impacts their chance of being hired? If you have a 12 versus an 8 versus a 0, what happens? One cannot be sure. It is compatible with ‘anyone under 11 need not apply’ and also with ‘no one actually cares.’

How easy is a high score? My guess is you can get to about a 7 (3/2/1/1) with a willingness to bullshit and use ChatGPT. Higher than that likely requires either lying or being willing to spend (and commit to spending) substantial amounts of time.

What about Columbia? How much do they care? What do they want?

John Sailer: NEW: For hiring new professors, Columbia University recommends valuing “contributions to DEI” on par with “research.”

The sample evaluation tool also weighs DEI more highly than teaching.

That’s an especially wild default given how Columbia defines “contributions to DEI”

Columbia provides an in-depth rubric for assessing DEI credentials. Which, of course, is pretty important if DEI might carry the same weight as research. Take a look. The rubric gives a low score to candidates who are skeptical of racially-segregated “affinity groups.”

You can feel the attitude coming off these rubrics.

This looks like a substantially tougher test to handle if you mainly care about your subject or are trying to muddle through without a huge time sink or ethical compromise. They mean business.

Given how numerical scores usually work, you do not have much margin for error. Getting a 15 here, if you are willing to do what it takes and spend the time, is easy, and probably so is getting a 9-10 in ‘service’ and that is probably highly linked. I doubt they have that high a bar to get to 8+ on teaching, and a 10 might be pretty easy there too. That does not leave much room to make up points, which has to be done with research. And a third of that is ‘curricular fit’ so those who are gaming the system are going to get full credit there too, while plans are pretty easy to fake.

Your entire actual ‘research track record’ is only worth five points. So yeah, if you are not heavy DEI for real, good luck. You’re not going to make it here.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences eliminated the requirement for DEI statements in hiring (source). Instead they are asked to submit a ‘service statement,’ which can include DEI if you want that. As an applicant, you now must ask: Do you think the requirement went away, or that they are testing you to see if you realize that it didn’t?

One must ask, what exactly did Sally Kornbluth believe before?

John Sailer: BREAKING: A university spokesperson has officially confirmed to me that MIT will no longer use diversity statements in faculty hiring—making it the first elite private institution to backtrack on the controversial policy.

As recently as late 2023, MIT required prospective nuclear scientists to submit “a statement regarding their views on diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” No longer. In a statement provided to me by MIT, Sally Kornbluth said these statements “impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Was she unable to get rid of the statements until now?

Did she think they both worked and that they didn’t impinge on freedom of expression? I can see one thinking that perhaps they work. I can’t see how one can claim they don’t impinge on freedom of expression. You either care about that, or you don’t. So, revealed preferences on priorities, then?

NYU opening a new campus in… Tulsa? Seems like an excellent source of diversity.

For this iteration I will exclude discussions involving college or college admissions.

There has been a lot of that since the last time I did one of these, along with much that I need to be careful with lest I go out of my intended scope. It makes sense to do that as its own treatment another day.

Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school. Thread is extensive, these are the highlights translated into my perspective. A lot of it is that a bully has experience and practice, they know how to work the system, they know what will cause a response, and they are picking the time and place to do something. The victim has to respond in the moment, and by responding causes conflict and trouble that no one wants. Also we are far more willing to punish generally rule-following people who break a rule, than we are to keep punishing someone who keeps breaking the rules all time, where it seems pointless.

Study finds bullying has lifelong negative effects.

Abstract: Most studies examining the impact of bullying on wellbeing in adulthood rely on retrospective measures of bullying and concentrate primarily on psychological outcomes. Instead, we examine the effects of bullying at ages 7 and 11, collected prospectively by the child’s mother, on subjective wellbeing, labour market prospects, and physical wellbeing over the life-course.

We exploit 12 sweeps of interview data through to age 62 for a cohort born in a single week in Britain in 1958. Bullying negatively impacts subjective well-being between ages 16 and 62 and raises the probability of mortality before age 55. It also lowers the probability of having a job in adulthood. These effects are independent of other adverse childhood experiences.

My worry, as usual, is that the controls are inadequate. Yes, there are some attempts here, but bullying is largely a function of how one responds to it, and one’s social status within the school, in ways that outside base factors will not account for properly.

Bullying sucks and should not be tolerated, but also bullies target ‘losers’ in various senses, so them having worse overall outcomes is not obviously due to the bullying. Causation is both common and cuts both ways.

Ever since Covid, schools have had to deal with lots of absenteeism and truancy. What to do? Matt Yglesias gives the obviously correct answer. If the norm is endangered, you must either give up the norm or enforce it. Should we accept high absentee rates from schools?

What we should not do is accept a new norm of non-enforcement purely because we are against enforcing rules. The pathological recent attachment to not enforcing rules needs to stop, across the board. The past version, however, had quite the obsession with attendance, escalating quickly to ‘threaten to ruin your life’ even if nothing was actually wrong. That does not make sense either.

Then in college everyone thinks skipping class is mostly no big deal, except for the few places they explicitly check and it is a huge deal. Weird.

I think the correct solution is that attendance is insurance. If you attend most of the classes and are non-disruptive, and are plausibly trying during that time, then we cut you a lot of slack and make it very hard to fail. If you do not attend most of the classes, then nothing bad happens to you automatically, but you are doing that At Your Own Risk. We will no longer save you if you do not pass the tests. If it is summer school for you, then so be it.

New York State is set to pass S6537, a long overdue bill summarized as follows:

Decreases the frequency of lock-down drills in schools; directs that such drills shall be implemented with a trauma-informed approach; permits parents to opt their children out of such drills.

Reduced frequency, from the currently required four per year (seriously what in the world? An actual 2% chance each school day that you will simulate getting shot at?) to one is a big win.

So is the opt out. I actively attempted to opt out when one of my sons was attending a public school and was told there was no legal way to do that. I hope most parents take that option once it is available, rendering the drills pointless or at least mostly harmless.

I also note that a ‘trauma-informed approach’ does seem better than a ‘trauma-uninformed’ approach, but also if you need a trauma-informed approach then this strongly suggests that the ‘trauma-informed’ approach to active shooter drills would be to… not have active shooter drills?

So yes, yay for a 75% reduction and opt out clause. Still 25% to go.

A study on what books are actually banned. A school library is much smaller than the set of books, or the set of age-appropriate reasonable-to-stock books. So any given library will ‘ban’ most books. The important question is what kinds of books are more likely to be stocked, not whether efforts conspicuously remove certain books sometimes. If books advocating your worldview and perspectives end up in lots of libraries, and those advocating mine don’t, then that is what matters.

If your controversial book is in 50% of school libraries but has been removed from 25% of them, and my controversial book was never in the libraries to begin with, whose has been banned?

Then again, if your book was not that interesting or popular, so we don’t care, that’s not a ban either. And of course, if no one checks the book out either way, it did not matter if you stocked it.

Mostly I noticed, when reading about this, that I care mostly about whether they stock good books, classic books, books I actively want people to read. All this talk about recent books that seem highly ephemeral, who cares, what I want to know is why only 75% of schools carried The Communist Manifesto, and be sure that 100% have The Wealth of Nations.

No, seriously, that is not me or anyone else putting on a label.

The organization is literally named Woke Kindergarden.

Carl: Woke Kindergarten is a real organization that sells their services to schools. Their mission is teach kids we can abolish work, landlords, Israel, and borders! One Bay Area school paid them 250k and watched student scores drop. Their “woke wonderings” are sadly hilarious.

Noah Smith: The craziest thing about “Woke Kindergarten” is that THAT IS ACTUALLY ITS REAL OFFICIAL NAME.

I never want to hear anyone complaining about the use of the term “woke” again 😂😂😂

Now, let’s not be too hasty, that 250k was over three years. So only 83.3k per year.

Included are some of those ‘wonderings’ that the government paid to put on classroom walls, the places children were forced to go on threat of violence:

To be fair, I do think that at least two of these are very good questions, although they seem a bit complicated and difficult for Kindergarten given I have never seen a plausible answer for either of them.

Anyone reading these signs knows what is going on here, but also: How many students can read these signs?

Here is their website, which highlights gems like:

And (these are directly from their website):

They follow this motto:

Do you… feel… safe?

Meanwhile, test scores fell even further, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and under 12% at grade level in English, both down 4% since the program started.

San Francisco Chronicle: District officials defended the program this past week, saying that Woke Kindergarten did what it was hired to do. The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates, and that the school was no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from the Chronicle that the school was not only still on the list but also had dropped to a lower level.

Matthew Yglesias calls for improving student tracking. He points out some obvious things I doubt anyone reading this fails to understand, that different kids that are the same age need different lessons and if you don’t do this many kids will be lost or bored, neither of which leads to learning.

He also notes that a lot of this is framing. If you call it ‘advanced coursework’ everyone realizes it is good but if you say the word ‘tracking’ people freak out. And that a lot of it is that there is a left-wing idea that standardized tests are racist.

He says that without standardized tests you can’t tell where to put different kids without risking huge bias. I think that is not true. There is a very simple way to do this, which is to let families choose, if they can pass the most recent test in the advanced class. If the kid is acing everything, you suggest moving them up. If the kid is failing, you urge them to move down. If they outright fail you force it. That is it.

I do not think this addresses anyone’s true objection, because I believe the true objection is that tracking is unequal. Those objecting for real, who actually don’t like such proposals, disagree with my and I hope your position that it is good when more children learn more things. What they care about is that all the children learn the same things, and about certain particular things they learn.

As in, they oppose eighth grade algebra because you did not bring enough cupcakes for the whole class, if everyone can’t solve for x then x must remain a mystery. Or, rather, that one child has a mild gluten allergy and can’t eat cupcakes, so no one can ever have any cupcakes.

There is the Bryan Caplan case against formal education, saying it fails to educate people and is mostly signaling, and there are better ways to learn. I largely buy that.

Then there is the case against education that says that kids learning things is bad.

There’s the whole ‘ban eighth grade algebra because if not all kids know math then none of them should’ idiocy, but oh, we can do so much better.

Omar Shams: never seen a case of brain worms this bad, now I understand why SF banned algebra education for children.

Emily Mills: Here’s a slide deck from Mentava, a company Garry Tan is invested in with his Network State bros where they claim they’re gonna have kids done with Algebra 2 in fourth grade. It’s called Mentava and is selling itself as cheaper than private school.

And why do these folks want kids learning math so fast? They want their labor and productivity to “accelerate human achievement.”

These investors literally want the kids’ labor. Here’s a video with Amjad Masad of Replit, who also invests in Mentava, speaking at the Network State conference.

Replit is *specificallynamed in Bajali’s scheme to create a “parallel education system.”

At the same conference, Balaji said: “Imagine a thousand startups, each replacing a different legacy institution. They exist alongside the legacy in parallel, gaining in strength, till eventually they pull away all the users.” To start a new country.

I looked at the slide deck and this all looks awesome, actually. Devil of course is in the details, I will believe you can make iPad apps that work this well when I see them in action. But surely we can agree that if this product was good, and you could buy hypereffective education in short periods of time for $5k/year, that would be great?

I mean, they’re only raising a few million. My first question was, are they taking angel money? Not asking for a friend. Alas, it looks like I was far from alone, and now it was too late.

Niels Hoven (founder): How it started [see above] vs. How it’s going.

I do notice that he searched for ‘stripe’ and dates are not listed, so this might not be all that impressive. Still, seems too late.

Also they are constantly getting more encouragement.

Steven Sinofsky: Seattle has long had a rivalry with SF. While SF just did away with algebra, Seattle said hold my beer.

Rachel Bowman: Seattle closes gifted and talented schools because they had too many white and Asian students, with consultants branding black parents who complained about the move ‘tokenized.’

Seattle has ended all of its gifted and talented programs. If you complain that making everyone worse off is bad, actually, then they call you names.

This chart was very surprising to me.

Rosey: Did not realize home schooling was up this much, gonna have a lot more weirdos in the future.

What surprises me is how much the additional home schooling has stuck so far.

I would have expected a huge peak in 2020-22, to roughly this level, with the pandemic making schools a different level of dystopian nightmare than usual, then most people throwing in the towel. That was what we did.

Instead it looks like 80% of the increase stuck around for 2022-23. It seems this was a case of there being a lot of startup costs and network effects. Once you learn how to homeschool and you try it, most people decided to keep going and the change was sustainable.

This is a strong endorsement of home school by the families that tried it.

Many kids despair for our world, and not because of AGI.

Conor Sen: Most parents of young kids are looking at this chart and thinking “How do I keep my kid from tracking that?”

Yes, it does seem like girls outshine boys in essentially all media now, and there are tons of pro-girl messages but almost no pro-boy messages or good boy role models. And girls seem to be crushing boys in school more every year, as you would expect given how schools increasingly work. One commentator notes that Bluey (a fantastic show all around, it is odd how literal everyone agrees on this, myself included) is fully neutral, and that even this is remarkable.

Here are some thoughts on graphs like this one:

Matt Grossmann: Depression & anxiety have been increasing, especially among young girls; increasing social media & smartphone use are likely an important factor.

Matt Blackwell: Seems like increases in schizophrenia might provide some decent negative control for the effect of smartphones on mental health outcomes. That is, I doubt phones cause schizophrenia, so maybe there are other (time-varying) confounders for all the mental health outcomes.

As Matt points out down thread, increases in reporting and decreases in stigma are hard to rule out as confounders.

I totally buy reporting and stigma as confounders. We definitely need to correct for those. The 67% increase in schizophrenia seems like it shouldn’t obviously be smartphone related, and could be a proxy for measurement adjustments, as could the 57% for bipolar. Then you need to explain how all this isn’t causing much ADHD, which is only up 72%, but seems like something phones would make much worse and also something with a big diagnosis and stigma shift.

And all that still leaves way too much depression and anxiety.

What should they be?

snav: I remember seeing a 100 year old ad for a university targeted at parents, where the selling point was that a humanities education would prepare your child for taking over executive leadership of your business.

I feel like whatever change in humanities education people have been decrying for a while is directly, fiscally downstream of university education no longer being for the purpose of training business executives. a well rounded sensitivity to the human condition isn’t relevant.

Harold Lee: Remarkable how much “what you want for your kids” has changed among wealthy parents.

I went to school with some pretty rich kids and they had the same anxieties and strove for the same McKinsey/tech/academia careers as the rest of us. Starting over from square one.

Aiming for McKinsey is of course a tragedy, although they pay well. Academic jobs are mostly a trap and I am sad my parents did not warn me, although I got away clean before any major damage. If you are rich, the pay cut and rough market might not matter so much, since failure is an option. Tech jobs are fine modulo AI concerns.

None of them seem anywhere near ‘take over the family business’ if that is an option for you. That seems great. Nor do they hold a candle to ‘start your own business’ if you have what it takes to do that, and having the funding is a great start.

Why would you want a ‘normal job’ if you are very rich? The whole point of such jobs is risk aversion and paying the bills.

Obvious exception if you have a real passion. Some people really, really want to do academic work, or be a doctor or a teacher or what not. If so, go ahead, and plan for that. But if you are rich and your kid is spending their childhood working towards a generic job they have no passion for, I feel like you messed up.

Is our children learning? In developing nations, they got 5.4 years of schooling in 2000, versus 1.6 years in 1960. But schooling is not learning or education. The time spent in school is a cost, which one must not confuse with what one would hope to be the intended benefit. Lauren Gilbert asks in Asterisk, are we getting the benefit, and was it even the goal?

Basic components of such production are frequently absent. And by basic components, I mean the teachers and students.

Consider perhaps the most basic measure of a functioning school: that there are teachers in the school teaching classes. On any given day, nearly a quarter of teachers in rural India simply do not show up. And when they do turn up, they’re often not teaching. A World Bank report found that even when Kenyan teachers were present, they were absent from their classrooms 42% of the time.

Students, too, are regularly absent. In Kenya, one in ten students skips school on any given day; in India, it’s one in three; in Mozambique, it’s over half. And there’s a very real chance these numbers are underestimates; students and parents claim that they show up² more often than unannounced spot checks would suggest.

…

For instance, in Rwanda, English is the official language of instruction across all grade levels. Yet just 38% of teachers have a working command of the language, and so Rwandan schools end up as a comedy of errors. Teachers who don’t speak English attempt to teach children who also don’t speak English in English, out of English language textbooks.

The limited budgets cause a host of other problems as well. The results are what you would expect.

Somewhere between 70–80% of children in primary school in a low-income country cannot read a simple story. More than half will still be unable to read by age 10.

…

Up to 70% of rural Indian third graders cannot subtract, and 70% of fifth graders cannot do division.

But then, were reading, writing and arithmetic ever the point?

I am going to quote this passage at length, because people keep (fnord) not seeing it:

Policymakers in developing countries tend to believe the primary purpose of schooling is none of these. Instead of focusing on either economic returns or personal development, they would prefer schools to create dutiful citizens.

In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education⁷ were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones.⁸ For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.

This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.

In 1899, the U.S. commissioner of education, William T. Harris, said exactly this. He wished U.S. schools had the “appearance of a machine,” one where the goal was to teach students “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.” At that time, emphasis was considerably more on the “dutiful” part of “dutiful citizens.”

Developing–country schools are trying to achieve much the same ends. Students learn to memorize, to obey, and to not question — but they do not particularly learn to read or write.

…

The same study suggests that policymakers’ second priority is to shepherd pupils through secondary school. This, too, they are making progress on.

The first goal of such school is obedience. The second goal of such school is more school. The third goal is literacy.

It is odd that even the author steps back from the obvious implications.

In the developed world, it almost goes without saying that you go to school in order to learn academic skills. These skills — referred to as “cognitive skills” in the academic literature — are a major determinant of what you earn as an adult. The more you learn, the more you earn.

This very much does not go without saying. Or rather, it does, except that is a bad thing, because the statement is false. Yes, cognitive skills are rewarded in the job market, but that is entirely compatible with school being about other things.

If you did want to teach students to read and write, there are known highly effective techniques to do that, that work at scale, relative to current efforts of going through fixed motions:

Targeting lessons to what students know — rather than what their official grade level is — is considerably more effective. This has been shown to be successful at scale in India. In one case, students learned as much in a 10-day Teaching at the Right Level “learning camp” as they would have in four years of “regular school.”

In other words, if you teach students what they do not already know and also are ready to learn, you get two orders of magnitude more learning. I am not sympathetic to this being ‘hard to implement.’

If you actually cared, you could – for example – implement this by sending all the students home 75% of the time so you could have the resources to do this during the other 25%, and have them spend the 75% of the time reading books and using ChatGPT. Or 90%.

An American who is one standard deviation above average at math will make 28% more over their lifetime, but the labor market for a math whiz in rural Kenya is quite different from the one faced by a New York City math genius.

If that statistic is accurate, and they are indeed controlling for literacy, then it seems odd to claim that intelligence has only a modest impact on earnings. Seems like the actual thing is valued quite a bit. As the author notes here, we cannot assume this kind of value will transfer to developing countries, but I am going to go ahead and say math and literacy have very high practical utility in almost every context, and are super valuable economically within the ranges considered here. That does not rule out soft skills as also valuable.

I will leave this here:

Courtney Meyerhofer: Kids are insatiably curious…

Yet many dread going to school.

It’s not the kids that are broken.

It seems our children are not learning, in many places.

Marina Medvin: Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. As state spending per student goes up in Illinois, student performance goes down. Why is that? Most of the problematic schools are in Chicago.

If schools commonly have literal zero students at ‘grade level’ in math, and we continue to give them increasingly large amounts of money per pupil to not teach those students, one can only conclude that our schools, too, are not about learning.

In what is remarkably good news considering everything, San Francisco is paying millions of dollars to ‘pilot’ the return of 8th grade algebra, including $300k for ‘pilot data collection and analysis.’ This should of course cost $0, go back to what you did before, but is also worth the price.

Another more straightforward place our children are not learning, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation: 130 million adults in the USA, 54% of the population, lack proficiency in literacy, meaning sixth grade level reading skills.

By contrast, The National Center for Education Statistics in 2019 estimated only 43 million adults possess ‘low literacy skills,’ but even in that much better case, that’s still 21% of the population.

So while this is still a vast, vast improvement over historical literacy rates when you take the sufficiently long view, it is not exactly what you love to see.

I absolutely plan on talking this way increasingly over time, because it is true. Indeed, I eagerly await the day I can teach my children such lessons. They are not yet ready.

Patrick McKenzie: It occurs to me that I have explicitly explained to my children that teachers respond well to guessing their password and that a rule of the game is you aren’t supposed to explicitly say that is what you are doing.

“Remember this is just game, not all games have the same rules.”

The sooner they learn that school is not real, the better.

Wisconsin passed Act 10, discontinuing teachers’ collective bargaining over salary schedules, allowing institution of flexible pay schedules. What happened next was what you would expect.

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform some districts switched to flexible compensation.

Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement.

If increased teacher quality was due to transfer from other districts, then that part of the change does not leave students overall better off. The students are however better off if better teachers enter, and worse teachers exit, and teachers increase in quality in response to the incentives, which will also happen.

The most interesting part of this is that many districts, freed from collective bargaining, used that freedom to raise rather than lower teacher pay. So what was previously being collectively bargained for was a regime with lower overall salaries, and the union had to be busted to raise wages.

I’ve heard this point before but this was unusually well put.

Cirkelnio: It’s depressing how much mainstream math education is actively misleading about what “math” even means… imagine going to music class for 6 years and it’s exclusively about memorizing “twinkle twinkle little star” in perfect detail. like ofc you’d grow up thinking music sucks

Math is also stuff like the tarski undefinability theorem which says that if you have a set of rules describing an object, you can’t know which object you’re actually describing – there’s no way to answer arbitrary yes/no questions about that object a priori. Isn’t that a trip.

maybe the “twinkle twinkle” metaphor is a bit strained but I hope you see how frustrating I find it for a subject which I’d describe as “the generalized study of patterns in reasoning” be reduced to memorizing multiplication tables…

Ideally you can find patterns while incidentally getting the memorization done in the background, you do it because it is obviously the thing to do. At some point for everyone that stops working, and then everything goes to hell.

Good news:

Etienne: this is strangely heartwarming: the canadian pediatrics association now recommends that children engage in risky play—”thrilling and exciting forms of free play that involve uncertainty of outcome and a possibility of physical injury”—because of benefits e.g. to mental health

I strongly endorse. You of course want guardrails against disaster, but you can have vastly better such guardrails than anyone in the past ever dreamed about while still getting most of the benefits here, because cell phones, if only you could be confident others wouldn’t call the cops. The extent to which the risk is ‘load bearing’ and needs to stay, versus it being hard to avoid but not inherently valuable, varies.

Or we could keep doing things like this:

Lenore Skenazy: Child development much?

A “top” school in NC enforces silent lunch because admins “found that 15 minutes was not enough time to eat if the children were allowed to talk.”

Less talking = more instruction time! Better test scores! All that matters!

What is the net impact of ‘enrichment activities’ that we enable or often force children to do, including homework? New paper says Not Great, Bob:

Using time diary data from the Child Development Supplement (CDS) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that the net effect of enrichment on cognitive skills is small and indistinguishable from zero and that the net effect of enrichment on non-cognitive skills is quite negative and significant. This negative effect on non-cognitive skills is concentrated in high school, which is when enrichment activities become more oriented around homework and less oriented around social activities.

There are obviously many different such ‘enrichment activities,’ with the paper examining the overall practical average. No doubt some of them are net positive, others are net negative. It also matters what other activities are being displaced. These results still clearly suggest we overschedule and overburden children in general.

My presumption is that homework is a highly below-average ‘enrichment’ activity.

I would also guess that activities kids actively want to do are overall net positive.

I would also add that this result is entirely consistent with the system pushing children towards more such activities. The activities have other purposes, most importantly signaling to aid in college applications and to have everyone feel they are accomplishing something and being responsible. Who thought homework was about learning?

On the flip side, I strongly endorse that it is good for children to be able to do modest amounts of real work. It is good to learn what that is like and what is expected of workers, screw up when the price of doing so is still low, develop responsibility and good habits and earn some cash.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: I started babysitting for pay at age 11, got my first non-babysitting job—food service at the community pool (so many microwave pizzas!)— at age 14. I really hope experiences like these aren’t going extinct because of our ongoing, excessive infantilization of adolescents.

Suderman: I started working summers and after school at age 13, via a parent-run community yard work service. Got my first real paycheck job at a hotel pool at 15. Waited tables at a crazy Florida tourist trap for many summers. Crappy paid work taught me more than most classes.

There is of course a limit where it turns abusive and quite bad, but the correct amount of economically useful labor for a child to do is very obviously not zero. The craziest of course is babysitting, where not only do we let an 11-year-old babysit, we actively require a babysitter for them in turn. Which, in most cases, is nuts.

Paper finds that spending more on basic school infrastructure like HVACs and removing pollutants raises test scores but not home prices, whereas spending on things like athletic facilities raises home prices but not test scores. Thus, house prices are responding to the impression of the school, not to the quality of the education, on the margin, counting on the correlation to make that reasonable. This implies that, if you are paying close attention, you can do arbitrage.

This also emphasizes the importance of pollution and clean air. If HVACs are great investments for schools, investing in good air filters at home should have great returns as well.

If you want to argue against school choice then at minimum you need to ensure all the schools meet the minimum standard of ‘a child who goes here might learn something.’

Wayne: This is my local high school. Here’s the thing progressives need to understand: you literally couldn’t pay me to send my kids to this school. It’s not going to happen, so just shut up about it. They are not going there.

There is literally no value in criticizing charter schools or private schools or homeschooling or anything else so long as fewer than 1% of the students at my local high school are proficient in math. My kids just simply will not attend school with peers who are that far behind.

Notorious S.E.B.: I don’t like charter schools, but there is a massive blind spot on the left about the apocalyptic state of public education in most cities. It goes almost completely un-talked about, progressives and liberals put forth no solutions

the reason the unholy alliance between conservatives who ideologically hate public schools and usually black urban liberals on this issue is that the situation is so, so bad, and the left is not putting forth any solution, or even really talking about the problem.

I do not know how to fix such public schools. What I do know is ‘support our teachers and schools and give them more funding’ is not going to be sufficient. They are starved for funds in practice, but it seems there are systems that will eat any budget increase without benefiting students, and even if not money would only go so far. And we have had a lot of time to fix such situations using such solutions, without much success.

You also are not going to fix the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist:

Brennan Colberg: Here’s mine. Yeah, I’ll do it myself instead, thank you very much.

The punchline? two members of the school board responsible for these incredible numbers are running for the OR legislature on their strength (as the 91% graduation rate was only 89% six years ago!). One proclaims that he “knows our leaders must be accountable for outcomes.” Hmmmm

If you do not have reading and mathematics ‘proficiency’ you should not graduate until such time as you do. Period. The threat of choice and competition seems like the only reasonable option, if things reach this level.

Alabama funds students instead of systems, becoming the 11th state with universal school choice.

This was the main topic of a recent CWT with Jonathan Haidt, which I cover here. I covered Tyler’s additional thoughts with the section Antisocial Media in AI #59, along with additional thoughts from Matt Yglesias and Sean Patrick Hughes.

We also have Jean Twenge writing that Smartphones are Damaging Our Kids.

Jean Twenge (National Review): Imagine that a company began mass-producing a new toy. This was not a toy for little kids; instead, it appealed most to adolescents. The toy became wildly popular, first with teens and eventually with younger children as well. The toy was so engaging that some teens stayed up until 2 a.m. just to play with it. Before long, teens spent so much time using the toy that they cut back on socializing in person.

This is not a fictional story. The toy is the smartphone, and this is the story of teens’ lives beginning around 2012.

…

By 2023, U.S. teens were spending an average of nearly five hours a day using social media, according to Gallup.

That certainly does not sound like teens now have a handle on social media use.

One should remember these graphs (note the y-axes do not start at 0):

That is an additional 15% of kids not sleeping seven hours, and a 25%+ drop in socializing that mostly pre-dates the pandemic.

I would also note the dramatically difference between socializing in 10th grade versus 12th grade, which I was not previously aware of. Wow.

The piece presents the case well, but is also long and mostly duplicative of previous discussions. So if you’ve been following the whole time, you can safely skip it.

I did notice this at the end:

Last year, leaked internal documents revealed that Meta valued each teen user at $270 of “lifetime value.” Is it really necessary to argue that our children’s mental health is worth more than that?

That is obviously way smaller in magnitude than the lifetime value of being a customer of Meta. There is a 99%+ chance that either you should pay $1,000 for lifetime access to Meta, or you should pay $1,000 to have a lifetime without (at least full) access to an account with Meta. Meta has a remarkably poor ability to profit from the endless hours you spend with their apps.

At Vox, Eric Levitz offers a contrasting perspective, seeing the evidence as mixed.

Eric Levitz: In truth, it’s not entirely clear that there even is an international decline in teen mental health that requires explanation.

That’s a bold strategy. The case is laid out in the first section of the case against the case. Essentially, the counterargument is that suicide rates are higher among American adults as well, whereas suicide rates of teens elsewhere are not rising, and everything else is potentially ‘diagnostic inflation.’

Data on hospital visits for self-harm, suicidal ideation, and mental health problems are vulnerable to similar distortions, University of Oxford psychologist Andrew Przybylski told Vox.

This is because hospital systems’ recordkeeping protocols can change over time. In 2015, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) — a World Health Organization guide that instructs hospitals how to code diagnoses in official records — implemented a new edition, which recommended multiple major changes to coding practices.

If this is purely because there was a step change in recordkeeping protocols, then we can correct for that. Otherwise, this seems mostly like it should be real.

This is distinct from the question of whether suicide rates in teens are up because suicide rates are up for everyone, which of course does not make the teen situation better. Also here is a graph?

It seems highly disingenuous to look at this graph and say young people in America do not have a suicide problem? I notice I am confused by this claim?

The second counterargument is that social media use only explains 15 percent of variation in mental health issues. Wait, ‘only’? Especially when part of the effect is network effects and overall changes? What exactly were we expecting? Obviously there are also many other things going on that impact one’s mental health. I don’t get why this is a counterargument.

The third counterargument is to argue against Haidt’s specific experimental evidence, and perhaps they are right that it was weak, but I wasn’t relying on this particular evidence at all and had forgotten it existed.

The fourth counterargument is that Haidt’s natural experiments are contradicted by better data. They claim that changes in broadband subscriptions in areas in 202 countries over 19 years did not predict teen mental health outcomes. I agree that is some evidence.

Then the section concludes with a classic Law of No Evidence invocation.

“There’s nothing here that isn’t present in any of the past panics about video games, Dungeons & Dragons, or silent movies,” Przybylski told Vox. “Each of these, you have a new technology, a vulnerable group and a new mechanism. It’s always ‘This time it’s different,’ but there’s nothing in these claims that actually distinguishes it in terms of scientific evidence.”

I roll my eyes at statements like that. If you cannot differentiate this from Dungeons & Dragons panic, which was only played by a few million kids, typically for only a few hours a week, was a niche business and involved spending time with other kids in person doing play? If you can only look at data that has been properly filed and analyzed into the proper scientific format, and do not think what has been presented counts?

Similarly for silent movies, the average child saw between one and two movies a week. This is simply not that much time compared to social media.

Whereas for television, by 1961 the average child ages 3-12 was watching 21 hours a week. And to those who say that turned out fine and was a false alarm, I would ask: Did it? Was it? I am not at all convinced. I think the alarm case there as basically correct, we simply paid the price, and the price was high but not existential.

For video games, I think that if children had typically spent hours a day on them, a moral panic would have been highly reasonable. And indeed, if your child spent five hours a day playing video games, then depending on circumstances you might want to panic a little. It might be fine but it is a rather large effect on their life and development. Whereas at the height of the panic over video games, typical use was about half an hour a day. There was also a panic over the violence, which was misplaced, but that seems like a clearly distinct case and that is not hindsight talking, I was very much alive and of that opinion at the time.

I do think ‘evaluate only the strictly peer-reviewed evidence-backed claims and see whose stack up’ is a useful thing to do, and perhaps the conclusion reached here that this in particular is mixed is reasonable. I just don’t think that is the right way to do Bayesian evidence and decide what to believe. Indeed, the final section is called ‘I still suspect phones are bad,’ of course if evidence is inconclusive that suggests ‘suspecting’ it anyway. And indeed, the reasoning in this final section is very simple common sense.

Could this turn out to mostly be one big moral panic in the end? I suppose this is possible. But at minimum, I believe it is a justified panic, based on what we know at the time. If there was a new thing invented, and within a decade young people were spending hours a day on it, and you did not have serious concerns about that, this seems like your mistake even if you happen to be right?

Andrej Karpathy warns against ‘learn this in 10 minutes’ videos, advises getting your entertainment and education separately and deciding which one you want now. For education, he says, allocate four hour windows. Dive into textbooks.

Ethan Mollick: Classes that actively involved students upped test scores in a Harvard class by 33%… but students thought they were learning more from non-active lectures.

The paradox; being challenged results in learning, but it also shows us how little we know, which makes us feel ignorant.

That is one theory. My theory has always been that ‘active learning’ is typically obnoxious and terrible as implemented in classrooms, especially ‘group work,’ and students therefore hate it. Lectures are also obnoxious and terrible as implemented in classrooms, but in a passive way that lets students dodge when desired. Also that a lot of this effect probably isn’t real, because null hypothesis watch.

Before we begin, I will note that I have indeed written various thoughts about the three college presidents that appeared before Congress and the resulting controversies, including the disputes regarding plagiarism. However I have excluded them from this post.

Washington Post Editorial Board says schools should ban smartphones, and parents should help make this happen rather than more often opposing such bans in order to make logistical coordination easier.

I agree with the editorial board. Even when not in use, having a phone in one’s pocket is a continuous distraction. The ability to use the phone creates immense social and other pressures to use it, or think about using it, continuously. If we are going to keep doing this physically required school thing at all, students need to be fully device-free during the school day except for where we intentionally want them to have access. Having a phone on standby won’t work.

The Netherlands is going to try it for January 2024, including all electronic devices.

Jonathan Haidt, man with a message, highlights Vertex Partnership Academies, which locks all student electronic devices away all day and claims this is a big win all around. They say even the kids appreciate it. With phones available, other kids know you have the option to be on your phone and on social media, so you pay a social price if you do not allow constant distraction. Whereas with phones physically locked away, you can’t do anything during school hours, so your failure to do so goes unpunished.

Some old school straight talk from David Sedaris. He is wrong, also he is not wrong. He is funny, also he is very funny.

This explanation is one more thing that, as much as I hate actually writing without capital letters, makes me more positive on Altman:

Sam Altman: mildly interesting observation:

i always use capital letters when writing by hand, but usually only type them when doing something that somehow reminds me of being in school.

And of course, your periodic reminder department:

Alyssa Vance: In California, it is legally rape for two high school seniors to have consensual sex with each other. This is dumb, and people should be allowed to say it’s dumb without being accused of coddling rapists.

I do not pretend to know exactly what the right rules are, but this is not it. If there is no substantial age gap, it shouldn’t be statutory rape.

A disobedience guide for children, addressed to those facing physical abuse. The issue is that children mostly only have the ability to inflict damage. You can break windows, or hit back, or tell people you’re being abused, or run away, or otherwise make the situation worse to get what you want. A lot of unfortunately this is a symmetric weapon. A child can inflict a lot of damage and make life worse if they want to do that, and can do that with any goal in mind however righteous or tyrannical. The asymmetry hopefully arrives in a selective willingness to go to total war.

Bad stuff that happens to you in childhood makes you a less happy adult (direct). Bad stuff here includes financial difficulties, death of a parent, divorce, prolonged absence of a parent, health issues, bullying and physical or sexual abuse. Definitely a study I expect to replicate and that we mostly did not need to run, yet I am coming around to the need to have studies showing such obvious conclusions. People are often rather dense and effect sizes matter.

The effect sizes here seem moderate. For example, divorce was associated with an 0.07 point decrease in happiness on a scale where very happy is 3 and not too happy is 1. That’s a big deal if real, also not overwhelming.

What worries me are the controls. Adverse childhood events are often not accidents or coincidences. Associating bad events with bad outcomes does not tell us much about how much of that relationship is causal. I do not find the additional variables in their regression models to be doing enough to capture the hidden variables.

That was me being polite. The top comment at MR rips into the paper and writes it off as useless, pointing out all the bad outcomes and causes are correlated.

We constantly face the clash between the story of nature, where genetics is claimed to overwhelmingly be the main determinant of outcomes and who claim to back it up with robust statistics, and nurture, where we can look at or talk to people and see the obvious impact of the events in their lives, and who are now trying to back that up with statistics. Genetics obviously matter a lot as any parent of multiple children knows, but also the events that happen doubtless matter a lot too. I would expect very bad outcomes from any parents who actually believe otherwise. Luckily, as in the case of Bryan Caplan who clearly puts in tons of mindful effort, this does not seem to often translate into actually acting as if the other stuff doesn’t matter.

A different kind of choice: Letting children skip grades causes gifted (top 1% in math) adolescents to earn more doctorates, publish mor papers, file more patents, and do it all at earlier ages.

Emmett Shear: Anecdotally, from knowing many close friends who skipped multiple grades, the primary impact seems to be academic. Grade-skippers seem to excel in school, but at the cost of other areas of achievement. Which makes sense because you’re ramping academic difficulty.

My anecdata is that everyone I know who skipped grades came out far the better for it, and we should do vastly more of this. The whole ‘emotional development’ form of argument seems crazy to me. Why would you want to take such a child and force them to ‘emotionally develop’ with dumber children their own age?

Ideal of course are schools that track each subject on its own, so you can skip kids around as appropriate and avoid boring them out of their minds.

Sweden’s schools minister declares their free school system a failure. Why? The schools have gotten international acclaim, but recently performance is on the decline, so she is blaming the possibility that someone, somewhere might be earning a profit. There is wide declaration that ‘joint stock companies are not a long-term sustainable form of operation to run school activities’ as the union claims. But, again, why? What makes this different from all other services?

The core justification is that the state of paying, and this allows profit from spending less and providing poor quality education. But if that is the case, why not compete by offering a better school that is still profitable? No explanation is given.

Gated paper claims private school competition is very good for public schools, ungated working version here.

Abstract: Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students’ outcomes as the program matured and scaled up.

We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending public schools with more preprogram private school options as the program matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both independently related to student outcomes.

This could easily have gone the other way. We have two stories:

1. Private schools steal resources and the best students from public schools.

2. Private school competition forces public schools to get their act together.

Everything in the left-wing, anti-market, statist and collectivist perspective says story one is a nightmare and story two is not a thing.

Everything in the pro-market, pro-freedom and standard economic perspective says story two should dominate, although the selection effect is still a concern.

It is correct to update quite generally, if this finding holds up.

Los Angeles Zones of Choice (ZOC) allowed some students to choose which school to attend, paper finds student outcomes improve markedly in proportion to the amount of competition faced by schools. Whatever one thinks of vouchers, letting students choose between different public schools seems obviously beneficial.

Matt Yglesias makes a case against school choice, arguing that school choice would create a competition for prestige and to attract the best students, similar to that among top colleges. And that this… would be bad. That this would come at the expense of results.

Scott Sumner: Yes, there’s a danger that the school choice movement could make our K-12 system of education as successful as Harvard. But I’m willing to take that risk.

The basic argument is that what makes school work is things like ‘boring drill,’ that Washington is going to hold schools accountable and ensure they produce good results, whereas school choice would not hold schools accountable for good results.

That all seems pretty crazy. If you wanted to steelman the argument and consider it properly, what are the mechanisms that might make this happen?

1. Children would have a say in which school they choose, and they would tend to choose schools where they will do worse.

I find this highly unlikely. I do not think that in general students want to go to ‘easier’ schools, or ones that teach them less well. Nor do I think they ultimately have that much of the decision making power at such ages.

2. Parents would have a say in which school they choose, and they would choose schools based on factors that anti-correlate with results.

What would those factors be? Is the worry that they will choose schools that spend their budget or time on signaling wokeness (or anti-wokeness)? That focus on looking nice or on fooling the parents in other ways or tell them what they want to hear? That the schools will try to create lifestyle convenience for parents, in ways that we don’t think should factor in? Or is it the prestige thing?

This is some combination of preference falsification, saying parents (or children) will choose in ways we dislike, and also that they will be fooled and choose wrong.

I think that parents will care about outcomes in math and reading at least as much as the state does. I am confused why you would not expect this. Yes, they might also care about other things, but that should not be a problem. Competition should improve math and reading outcomes here.

3. Parents will do a relatively poor job evaluating school academic performance.

Unlike with colleges, it is feasible to measure incoming and outgoing skill levels in such matters, and also the parents get to observe student outcomes and talk to each other.

Meanwhile, the baseline is that the state essentially doesn’t evaluate. Low performing schools do not lose students. They do not close. High performing schools do not gain students. They do not franchise. Why should we expect selection here to be worse than that? Sounds absurd.

4. Prestige and sorting concerns will be destructive.

Yglesias frames this as a conservative would-be worry, citing comparisons to Harvard. The thing is that conservatives very much do not object to Harvard sorting the best students from the worst students. What they object to is that Harvard has various fingers on various scales, both in admissions and in what is taught and by who.

Also, Harvard doesn’t matter, and is not typical. It is the extreme outlier or outliers. All colleges, obviously, feature school choice, you can go wherever. Most college students go to a state or local college. And also they have flexibility in what they can and will charge, they pass on the expenses, and no one is measuring educational outcomes or much caring about them. There’s no reason to think this will translate.

Most important is the role of distance. If I got into Harvard, I would have gone, no matter where I lived at the time around the world. If I got into Harvard Middle School, would my family have moved for it? If it had the same impact on life outcomes as Harvard College and the alternative was where I actually went, then I think they would have, but again that’s an extreme case. If they could instead send me to Columbia Middle School and keep their lives and jobs since it was a mile away from our apartment, they’d definitely have chosen that.

Distance will still matter a ton. This will severely limit prestige spirals caused by school choice rules. You don’t need to fight for selection effects against that many other schools in most places.

You know who does get massive selection effects? The places that provide great schools and then use real estate to price out everyone who is not rich. They get this benefit. Allowing neighboring students to crash such parties would reduce, not amplify, such effects.

The other choice is home school.

Chrisman: When friends start homeschooling they are invariably shocked at how little time is needed for academics. School just fills the time.

Ryan Briggs: This stunned me during Covid. We accidentally did ~2 years of the curriculum in under a year doing 1 hr/day of focused work

What is odd to me is that everyone finds this surprising. Didn’t they all go to school? I member. All that time spent looking at the clock, staring out the window, listening to teachers drone on or talk to other students. Dealing with discipline issues and administrative tasks. Moving between classes. Teaching things you already knew, over and over again, with or without minor variations.

So why is being able distill this activity down dramatically so surprising? One hour a day being good enough to learn at twice the usual overall rate does exceed my baseline prediction, but a dramatic improvement being possible seems obvious.

Among people I know, it is essentially assumed that home school focused on academics using a dedicated teacher who knows what they are doing (let alone proper aristocratic tutoring) would blow away any school on academics.

With the advent of ChatGPT, that should only become more true, assuming regular schools do not adapt so well to it.

A study of 2k children allocated via lottery to attend or not attend one of 280 charter schools showed dramatic long term impact from KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter schools if and only if the kids stay from middle through high school.

John Arnold: Results released today of a new study following the long term impact of KIPP charter schools are incredible and highly policy relevant.

One of my critiques of program evaluations is they tend to judge short term measures (like test scores) when what matters is long term outcomes (higher ed completion and income). So we @Arnold_Ventures sanctioned the 1st study to follow kids who attended a KIPP charter school for 10 years.

While earlier research showed kids who attended a KIPP middle school had significant improvements in test scores, this study shows that kids who subsequently did not attend a KIPP high school only had minimal improvement in college attendance and completion.

But for kids who attended both a KIPP middle and high school, the impact was enormous: nearly doubling the % of kids who graduated with a 4-year degree. As the researchers wrote: “An effect of this size, extrapolated nationwide, would be large enough to nearly close the degree-completion gap (for Black and Hispanic students).”

Why the very large impact? Students who attended a KIPP high school received college prep coursework (including AP classes) and wrap-around supports to and through college. I suspect many other schools did not do the same. Given most of the students come from first-gen college households, receiving these supports in school has enormous value.

But it’s also true not every student wants to attend a 4-year college. Indeed, even at KIPP the majority of students did not earn that degree. KIPP has since enlarged its mission to prepare kids not only for college but also for a career or military service.

The role of K-12 should be to prepare students to be successful in life, whatever they desire to do. In my opinion, KIPP does this as well if not better than any large operator. That some states still fight their expansion is outrageous.

KIPP combines many of the obvious things one would be inclined to try if you thought the solution was More School and to School Harder. Kids get longer hours, more homework, get called upon more, get stricter discipline, face AP and other advanced classes.

Did this matter? If it was only the middle school, not so much:

Slightly more kids entered college, but all the extra enrollees failed to graduate, so treatment here had minimal net impact. To get the impact, you have to stay in the program, this is the finding Arnold was quoting:

The problem is, if both of these graphs are accurate, what would the fourth graph look like, covering students who did the KIPP middle school but not the high school?

We can do the math. 47.6% of the control group enrolled in a four year college. 51.4% of the treatment group (middle school admission) enrolled in a four year college. 76.6% (!) of those who attended KIPP middle school and high school enrolled in a four year college. 36% of the treatment group attended a KIPP high school. Which means 37.2% of the KIPP-for-middle-school-only group went to a four year college.

That is much worse than the control group. Presumably this means that KIPP high school is a strong selection effect, since I doubt KIPP middle school on its own massively backfires. It likely does backfire on a small subset of kids who can’t or don’t want to handle it, most of whom do not proceed to KIPP high school.

If given the opportunity, should you send your child to a KIPP middle school with the option to go to a KIPP high school?

If your goal is to get them onto the strict academic track, you think the family can handle and support that and the alternative is a public school, and you are willing to make the quality of life sacrifices involved in not letting your kid be much of a kid for a while, it seems hard to turn down the resources involved. It makes sense to think you can beat the odds.

The net benefits for all children, however, including from the high schools, do not seem to be clearly different from zero. Probably a lot of families do not know what they are getting into, or fool themselves into thinking they can handle it.

Nate Silver points out this fun little passage, in a piece mostly making terrible justifications for school closures under Covid:

Nate Silver: TFW the motivated reasoning hits so strong and you’re so terrified to admit that critics of school closures had a point that you start going with “School is bad, actually”.

John Ehrenreich (Slate): Schools have a darker side. At school, children may face sexual assault and harassment and racism. One in five high school students reports being bullied on school property. Schools create stress over academic performance, pressure students to fit into normative gender roles, force invidious social comparisons on children, and conjure up feelings of failure and shame and humiliation over academic failure. Perhaps as a result, a recent Yale University study reported that nearly 75 percent of high school students’ self-reported feelings related to school were negative. Other studies show that teen suicide rates are highest during the months children are in school and lowest during the summer.

Those are not the main considerations one would note if taking the question ‘is school bad, actually?’ seriously. But it is important to note that school should not be assumed to be good and a benefit, rather than bad and a cost. By default it is an expensive thing (in time and money and coercion) that generates benefits. During the pandemic, in practice, the alternative was ‘remote learning’ which was the worst of all possible worlds. Compared to that, school in person is clearly good and a benefit, as would be doing nothing. But compared to a more enlightened alternative, this is far less clear.

Babies need people, not devices. Stop giving them screen time. Easy for her to say, but also yes. This seems clear. Being a parent has made it abundantly clear that screen time must be minimized, even when the uses are ‘educational’ or otherwise curated, that too much of it too early is not healthy.

Such screens of all sizes are also, of course, immensely useful to you, the parent. With all the demands placed on parents now, some compromise on this will be necessary. And I wouldn’t be terrified of the television being on, or anything. But, yeah.

Somehow the statistics get worse every time on what kids are allowed to do. A survey found half of parents of 9-to-11 year olds won’t let their kids go to another aisle at the store. Utter madness.

We have a natural experiment proving teacher preparatory programs are useless.

Daniel Buck: NEW DATA: 5,800 teachers received emergency licenses during the pandemic.

Their students showed the same👏🏼exact👏🏼growth👏🏼in reading and math as their traditionally trained counterparts

Why do we still have university teacher prep programs exactly?

It was actually strictly better by some metrics people care about:

Calder report, Abstract: Relative to the novice teacher workforce before the pandemic, Temporary CE teachers were substantially more diverse without any significant effects on teacher performance or student test scores.

Matthew Yglesias has a gated write-up, in which he notes this is consistent with prior research, which makes it even crazier that we went back to the requirements.

In New Jersey, he notes that those teachers also included many who had actively failed a certification step in the past. If people you are rejecting do as well as the people you accept, in a profession with a perpetual labor shortage, maybe stop that.

Paper claims having male teachers in primary school in Finland was greatly beneficial to students of all genders. It is based on the natural experiment that there used to be quotas to ensure 40% male teachers, then the quotas went away.

Patrick McKenzie presents: Adventures in American math education:

Problem: Cindy has less than ten $5 bills in her pocket. How much money could she have?

Lillian (9): … Any amount.

Me: That’s my girl! Now, to write some math fanfiction.

(Lillian’s rationalization included a) most money isn’t bills, b) Cindy could have yen or something, c) didn’t say anything about $1 bills so can have as many as she wants and d) most money isn’t in a wallet because Cindy isn’t stupid.)

(The math fanfiction that this 3rd grade problem wants is “She has less than fifty dollars because 5 times 10 is 50 and she has less than that.”)

(Elsewhere in math homework twice tonight she said something which phrased slightly differently would be acceptable in a proof and I had to tell her that her intuition is wonderful but the password is phrased differently in third grade.)

“Steve has some pairs of socks. Does Steve have 17 socks?” “No.” “How do you know?” “Eight twos is 16. Nine twos is 18. There is no number between eight and nine.” “… Absolutely good logic. Now, do you remember even and odd?” “This nonsense again?” “Yes.” “‘17 is odd.’ *sigh*”

As flawed as those are, they’re not actually so bad. It gets so much worse.

Another way it gets worse is that if you have rules against expulsion of bullies, then you are effectively bullying and expelling the targets of bullies. New York Post covers an 11-year-old girl who has been continuously bullied at a gifted and talented school in New York, who has been offered a ‘safety transfer’ because the system has no punishments that can deter or prevent bullying however blatant.

Post on: What the algorithm does to young girls. First focus is Instagram, where influencers pushed into your customized feed push both themselves and viewers into cosmetic surgery, often ending up strictly worse off for it. Then mental health, with everyone discussing their issues on Tumblr and then all discussions reduced to TikTok trends. All ‘engineered to be massively addictive.’ What ‘chance does the next generation stand,’ Freya India asks, even without considering AI. She warns not to let children open social media accounts until at least 16 and for children to generally get off screens, which seems wise.

If there are products known to be massively addictive and harmful, but which one can choose to simply not consume, the play seems obvious? I realize the talk of ‘network effects’ and all that but I mostly do not buy it. These are not the previous wave of social networks and feeds. I realize I am on Twitter all the time and it would be healthier not to be so I’m not zero percent a hypocrite, but I am there in large part to do a job.

Chicago mayor, after promising not to, announces plan to ax their high achieving selective enrollment high schools to boost equity. As always, if X

My heart sank as I read this post entitled ‘Math Team.’ The author spent hours each week on math competitions, hating every minute of it, finding it utterly boring, in order to get into a good college. Where the math team was a trick that relied for its funding on getting kids into the top colleges. He missed out on early decision at Princeton then ultimately landed at Stanford, notorious for telling me to apply based on my math competition scores despite being certain to reject me (which they did), causing my parents to force me to burn one of my seven application slots on a <1% chance. This is what happens when everyone is optimizing against each other for a fixed pool of slots and sacrificing actual everything to get one.

The author of The Great AI Weirdening, the source of the above post, extends this to further academic admissions and also hiring in AI, thinking of it as the AI catching everyone in maximizing rat races. With frictionless reproducibility, it is argued, requirements can multiply endlessly in a recursive rat race.

This might well be happening in AI research, but I do not blame AI. This is humans doing human things, trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods with a wrong model of the world and having their mistakes fail to cancel out. If it is no longer a signal of anything but grit and time wasted to have lots of publications, why should I hire you based on your publication counts or repo scores?

Especially because I could read your best paper, see your best code, interview you, give you real tests of skill. The best will do that. I have a hunch that OpenAI does not much care how many papers you published.

NY Times reports that many schools have made it almost impossible to fail, even if you do not show up for class or cannot do the work at all.

Not everything is a mystery.

Rob Henderson: A real head scratcher.

Rob Henderson: I spent some time in the LA Unified school system when they were marginally less stupid in the 1990s. My favorite example of their bumbling ineptitude was later in 2013 when they bought 700,000 iPads thinking it would boost learning outcomes for low-income kids.

Naturally, it backfired. Grades plummeted because kids used their iPads to surf the internet and play games.

Danny Muth: I’m a teacher in Sacramento. Last year our school board implemented a grading policy that sets a 50% floor for all assignments- even missing assignments. Grades soar.

Scores in the ACT, which is a test of knowledge, versus GPA, which is a test of something else. Note the scale on the Y-axis, but still.

Oregon again says students don’t need to prove basic mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color.

Padme: The harm is that they aren’t mastering reading, writing and math, right?

Oregon is not alone.

Razib Khan: Going to make explicit what seems to be happening in high schools.

There are differences in graduation rates by socioeconomic status and race.

Education establishment does not like this. Looks bad.

Solution: pull away objective metrics/filters that cause this imbalance

⬆️ graduation rates by removing filters that hit low SES & minorities is a total win for the education establishment. equity

BUT, it is bad for the low SES/minority kids for whom HS diploma is an important signal that they’re one of the ‘good ones’

When you give everyone a credential the credential is worthless. ppl like those who are mostly reading this tweet HS diploma is kind of irrelevant; you’re focused on the bachelor’s degree but for working and lower class kids who have brains, focus and conscientiousness it’s not.

To be charitable… they may not even understand this logic. it’s up to policy ppl to guide them.

Woodgrains (QTing abovee): To make it more explicit, this is happening systematically at every level of institutions, with high schools only one particularly salient example breaking the thermometer turns out to be rather easier than changing thee weather.

The only four ways to make graduation rates and performance equal are:

1. Equalize actual learning by helping everyone learn better. Seems hard.

2. Equalize actual learning by sabotage, a la Harrison Bergeron. Has been tried.

3. Equalize graduation rates by making graduation automatic. Oregon and company.

4. Equalize graduation rates by using unequal thresholds and failing kids as needed.

Do you want your children taught by a system that is optimizing to not know things?

Study confirms that SAT scores are one of our best predictors of college performance, superior in this to high school grades, although grades alone can explain a lot of the variance if you don’t control for SAT scores first. Attending elite high schools outperforms both, but everyone seems to be comfortable actively discriminating in college admissions against those who go to elite high schools. This likely is part of why such kids overperform.

How easily are people fooled by grade point averages?

Tyler Austin Harper: I find it *insanethat the Ivy League does crazy grade inflation and — seeing that — so many people at non-Ivies insist on grading “rigorously,” thereby re-enforcing the pre-existing opinion of employers that elite uni kids are geniuses (he’s a 4.0!) and state school kids idiots

Even if you believe grades are effective measures of student learning and provide crucial motivational functions — which I do not — they are meaningless when every university has wildly different grading cultures and the institutions at the top rig the system for their graduates.

All you are doing by insisting on stringent grading standards is lending material support to the inequalities that keep elite university grads at the top and others beneath them. I find it maddening. And so many profs who are infuriatingly woke in other ways grade like fascists.

Nate Silver: If I were hiring right now I’d prefer high-achieving state school students >>> undifferentiated Ivy League students. Not a remotely close call.

I am with Nate Silver and my answer is ‘not very.’

Everybody knows, at this point, that the Ivies and other hyper-selective colleges are practicing grade hyper-inflation. Your grades there are essentially meaningless. A 4.0 from Yale means only slightly more than ‘I got into Yale.’ I am highly skeptical that such graduates are then getting much additional job market mileage out of their GPAs, even for their first job.

Whereas at state schools your grades mean something. Often I will watch for the top ‘student athletes’ and even with a presumed finger on the scale no one on the team could rally above a 3.6. That means that if you are an exceptional student, you can prove it and differentiate yourself. Which is very important when making it into the school is not itself a strong signal. That’s the point.

Percent of young adults who say that a college degree is very important has dropped over the last 10 years from 74% to 41% (!), according to NYT. Stunning drop.

Tyler Cowen makes the case for college sports. He notes that college athletes make more money than non-athletes, partly by more often entering business and finance, and also make more money for the schools. If anything, that makes it sound like we do not give enough weight to athletics in admissions.

I do not think this is a convincing argument that athletics teaches useful skills, so much as an argument that the non-athletic components of college mostly do not do so, and competitive sports are at least as good for character as classrooms. And that physical prowess is rewarded in today’s marketplace, as it always has been.

Certainly I would be happy to see my children playing a sport competitively purely for its own sake, and it seems better than a lot of what college students spend their time doing. I am all in favor of college sports, including the ones in which I have zero interest.

Perhaps there should be a greater shift towards the sports ‘of the people’ and away from ‘rich person’ sports, then again perhaps this too is fine? What the children of the rich most need is hard work and competition on a level playing field. Lacrosse or boat racing do have barriers to admission in the form of money, but past those barriers they are fair, and they are real tests. I can get behind this.

Math homework is rigged, engineered to have easy answers, and even more than that easily formulated and selected questions. This means it is little help with allowing you to set up real world problems and find their practical solutions. I have made a lot of money out of doing math. Almost all that math is deeply, deeply simple at its core. The hard part is figuring out what math to do. I still remember that one time I got to write an integral sign on a piece of paper in real life. I did a dance of joy.

Or as John Cook puts it: “What kind of math does your consulting involve?” “Sometimes fancy stuff, but often high school level math.” “Why would anyone hire a professional mathematician to do high school math?” “Because a professional mathematician can wield high school math like a professional.”

Exactly. Tighten pipe, $5. Knowing which pipe to tighten, $495. Worth it.

The case for copywork: Physically copying the work of others. I buy that it is (part of) the best way to learn to play an instrument. I do not buy the case made here that it is the best way to learn how to write, done with pen and paper. Seems very much like a virtue previously born of necessity, when people like Ben Franklin had little to work with and made the most of it. Back then, this made sense. Now, we can do better.

Then again, will we do better? Or is copywork still effectively a win, like many other traditional practices that cause you to do the work at all? It depends on the person. It does sound, if you choose passages that appeal to you and speak to you, like copywork is a better use of time than many other traditional exercises.

Emmett Shear on college-level organic chemistry. His experience was that the class was composed of a mix of science track and premed track students. The science students are there to actually learn and retain the material, so even though it’s a massive amount of compounding facts you have to learn, they do fine. Whereas the premed students are happy to do the work, but are thinking of the class as a structural barrier rather than source of information, so they cram rather than retaining information, and then struggle. So it is a question of motivation. How do we get students, across the board, to be motivated by actually caring about the material?

This well matches my experience. Any time my internal motivation was ‘pass this class’ and ‘pass this test’ and ultimately ‘get through this’ then information did not build, I did not learn in a way that stuck, and pretty soon I was struggling. It never went well. Whereas in classes where I actually wanted to learn something, it went far better even during the class and I also often retained useful knowledge.

There isn’t quite no point in having a student in a class that does not want to be there for the knowledge, but it is pretty damn close.

How is Auburn University spending so much money, especially with so little football success? Wall Street Journal investigates this test case. Nice amenities, new facilities, debt service and quite a lot of administrators.

Another trick academia and colleges use is to claim credit for everything. Talib talks about this a lot, where a tinkerer or businessperson will figure something out, then someone in academia writes it up and claims the intellectual credit.

Or, alternatively, we have someone who comes up with something, and then associates with academia in order to get the idea taken seriously and to get the credit, so the credit then gets taken by academia.

Case in point: Effective Altruism.

Ian Bogost: This article wasn’t the place to go into it, but, we need to face a difficult truth in academia: Original thought—truly original, creative research ideas—are extremely rare now. Scholarship is mostly careerist incrementalism, the profession deserves sneers for it.

Nate Silver: Half-troll, half-serious Q: What are the most influential ideas to come out of academia over the past 10-20 years, excluding hard sciences? Effective altruism? (EA also has significant non-academic influences.) Critical theory? (Academic origins date back >> 20 years.)

Andy Masley: I remain extremely bullish on EA and suspect it’ll be a clearer and clearer contender for one of the most influential ideas to come out of recent academia.

Oliver Habryka: I really don’t think describing EA as having its origin in academia is accurate. It seems like one of the least academic intellectual communities and movements that I know about. Which academic publications are supposed to have much to do with EAs founding?

Andy Masley: I’m mainly thinking of Parfit + academic analytic philosophy. Not claiming that EA is especially academic, just that some of the key ideas came from pretty academic environments.

Oliver Habryka: Hmm, I guess I haven’t seen that much influence from Parfit, though like, it does seem like one of the three sets of intellectual influences was somewhat though not hugely influenced by Parfit, but that seems far from sufficient to classify EA as “coming out of academia”.

Like, my model is that Paul Graham, the economics blogging community, the fallacies and biases literature, Peter Singer’s popular writing, the 20th century hard sci-fi community, and early contributors to the field of AI all had a greater or at least equal contribution to Parfit.

[more discussion, including how much weight to put on Oxford, follows]

The counterfactual influence of academia on Effective Altruism is large in the sense that EA uses Oxford and other top colleges as prime recruiting grounds. If they didn’t have that affordance, things would be very different. In terms of the core ideas, it seems to me to mostly lie elsewhere, and for those at Oxford who contributed to have not done so thanks to any affordances they got from Oxford.

A lot of things seem to be like this. Academia increasingly is not the source of important new ideas. And when it is the source of important new ideas, they are important because academia is succeeding at spreading their Obvious Nonsense, whereas a sane civilization would shrug the same concepts off as ludicrous.

We talk about the cost of college a lot in the United States, but the average resulting debt burden here does not seem so unusually large?

It helps that we are richer. It also makes it easier to pay off the debt.

Jewish families picking colleges now forced to choose largely on the basis of worries about antisemitism and physical safety. If one must choose, it is noted that the Universities of Florida and Miami have been taking relatively strong steps to keep Jewish students safe. If, as one student notes in the post, the issue is the ‘other politics’ going on in Florida, I would suggest that is a misunderstanding of what one should prioritize. I would also suggest that this is a sign to not go to college at all, do not lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from and will not be worth it in the new AI age anyway, and instead start a business.

A young woman, with a marketing degree and $80k in student debt, complains that she can’t get any decent jobs that use her degree because they all require ‘experience.’ The degree, she says, was the experience. Which is the kind of thing only said by someone with no experience, expecting to get the six-figure jobs right off the bat because she has a degree. She could indeed get a job in marketing, to get the experience, but it would mean an ‘insane’ pay cut. She didn’t realize that, didn’t plan for it and can’t stomach it.

Inez Stepman: Unpopular opinion: instead of dunking on her, we should be going after the predatory university system that has shown for decades and especially in the last week that it does not deserve our public $ nor our trust.

She should’ve never been given an $80,000 loan at 18, no bank would’ve given it to her. But USG will!

At a minimum, before we give kids gigantic loans to go get a degree, perhaps we should check for reasonable market expectations on what that degree might enable them to do? And also, if we do not think they should be forced to pay it back but do want them to have the money, give them a grant instead?