A Null Hypothesis Exception?

Alex Tabarrok writes,

What if I told you that there is a method of education which significantly raises achievement, has been shown to work for students of a wide range of abilities, races, and socio-economic levels and has been shown to be superior to other methods of instruction in hundreds of tests? Well, the method is Direct Instruction

Many years ago, I ordered a book on Direct Instruction. Trust me, you would hate it if you were a teacher. An you might hate it as a student. So it is quite counterintuitive that it works. It is very focused on repetitive drills.

On the other hand, I remember a 6th-grade math teacher who liked to hand out arithmetic speed drills. I didn’t hate those. And maybe having really solid fundamentals is what is important.

Me vs. Steven Pinker

In an interview, Pinker says,

I’m skeptical about that we’re going to see enhancements of human nature by genetic engineering, nanotechnology, or neural implants (though these technologies may be used to mitigate disabilities, a different matter). We now know that there is no “gene for musical talent” that ambitious parents will implant into their unborn children—psychological traits are distributed across thousands of genes, each with a teensy effect, and many with deleterious side effects (such as a gene that makes you a bit smarter while increasing your chance of getting cancer). Also, people are risk-averse (sometimes pathologically so) when it comes to their children and when it comes to genetic engineering—they don’t accept genetically modified tomatoes, let alone babies.

Just before I read this, I posted the following on a private discussion forum:

For those of you have read The Diamond Age, what feature of the future Stephenson depicts there do you find least plausible? I’ll nominate the Illustrated Primer. I bet that no educational technology that relies on communication with the student will ever prove as successful as the primer is portrayed. When it comes to achieving dramatic gains in cognitive skills, some form of biological intervention will prove workable sooner.

When I was in high school, SAT tutors were unheard of. The whole concept would have seemed distasteful. What parent would be so neurotic and competitive as to get their kid a tutor for the SATs? But once a few parents started doing it, other parents thought that they had to do it in order to keep up. Nowadays, I get the sense that any affluent parent who does not get their kid a tutor feels like they are handicapping their child. I’ve been predicting that in another generation, biological enhancement will go through a similar phase change–going from unthinkable to commonplace very quickly.

In your comments, please address substantive issues, leaving out your personal opinions of Pinker or me.

Caplan, Hanushek, and my own views on education

A reader asked me to comment on the debate between Bryan Caplan and Eric Hanushek on the extent to which education confers real skills or is merely a signal. I thought that the only point that Hanushek scored was when he produced data showing that the sheepskin effect is smaller than in other studies.

As a proponent of the Null Hypothesis, I am not the one to defend the human capital view. Where I differ from Bryan is that I am inclined to put even more weight on an ability-bias story, leaving less room for signaling. For example, my understanding is that the differences in earnings between people who are accepted to Ivy League schools and similar people who are not accepted ends up being pretty small. If it were mostly signaling, then losing out on the brand-name seal of approval should be more costly.

Jason Collins on Grit

He writes,

I will say that Duckworth appears to be one of the most open recipients of criticism in academia that I have come across. She readily concedes good arguments, and appears caught between her knowledge of the limitations of the research and the need to write or speak in a strong enough manner to sell a book or make a TED talk.

. . .But Duckworth does not address the typical problem of studies in this domain – they all ignore biology. Do the students receive higher grades because their parents are more demanding, or because they are the genetic descendants of two demanding people? Are they world-class performers because their parents model a work ethic, or because they have inherited a work ethic? Are they consistent with their extracurricular activities because their parents consistently keep them at it, or because they are the type of people likely to be consistent?

He points out that “grit” is mostly conscientiousness. The case that conscientiousness matters is sound. I do think there are some studies that show that conscientiousness can be coached, but I am not confident that it is settled science.

My essay on why economics does not progress

In Economists Wake Up: It’s the 21st Century, I write,

Along the Akerselva River in Oslo Norway, the buildings of the industrial era have been re-purposed or replaced. The same is true in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or Birmingham, England. But economists still inhabit the world of the 19th century, in which hordes of interchangeable workers in stark factories toil in the service of the owners of capital.

Read the whole thing, along with today’s other blog post.

Why Doesn’t Economics Progress?

Don Boudreaux offers one hypothesis.

Academic journals are not the place to repeat long-ago-discovered truths. A bias, however, arises from this role of academic journals and of the need for scholars to publish in them – namely, a disproportionate amount of attention is given in academic journals to speculative ideas and to exceptions to long-ago-discovered truths. Foundational ideas and long-ago-discovered truths appear only in the background of academic journals, or whenever someone discovers (or believes that he has discovered) an exception to these.

David Henderson has his own take.

I read this as suggesting that the bias toward novelty in academic journals retards progress in economic thinking, by crowding out established truths. That may be an issue. But I have a different issue, which I will get to.

First, on the topic of trade across borders, I share with Boudreaux the presumption that once you establish that A has voluntarily bought X from B and that this was an ethical transaction, you are done. It is not relevant which side of a border B happens to live on. To come up with a relevant distinction, you will have to try some fancy intellectual footwork, and even then you are unlikely to overturn the logic of the free trader.

But for the most part, the problem in academic economics is not that truth has stood still and economists have moved away from it. On the contrary, I am struck that the economy is evolving faster than economics. Economists are still using 19th-century apparatus, such as the capital-labor distinction and marginal-cost pricing theory, in a 21st-century economy that those concepts do not fit very well. Even worse, many economists have so much confidence in their work that they are willing to advocate policy schemes based on very unreliable analytical methods. This gap between antiquated and inadequate models and the hubristic claims of economists is the issue that most disturbs me.

We are not white-coated scientists dealing with brainless inanimate objects or unintelligent lower creatures. We are not continuously cutting down on our ignorance and increasing the share of economic behavior that we understand.

We are studying phenomena that can change at a faster pace than we can acquire knowledge. We are studying humans who are embedded in institutions that are more nimble and clever than we are. In the markets where we attempt to make policy, such as health care or banking, there is usually much more knowledge embedded in the people and organizations that work in those fields than there is in our long-distance observation of them. And we are not gaining on them. They are gaining on us.

Jeremy Bailenson on Virtual Reality

The book is called Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality is, How it Works, and What it Can Do. It was a useful corrective to a lot of my naive impressions of the technology.

A few excerpts:

By January 2015, our lab’s state-of-the-art HMC, the one that cost more than some luxury cars, had been replaced by developer models of consumer HMDs like the Oculus Rift and the Vive.

HMD = head mounted display

if someone sees his avatar get lightly poked with a stick, and also physically feels his chest getting poked synchronously, the avatar is treated as the self. People “transfer’ their consciousness into it, according to dozens of studies.

People in taller avatars negotiate more aggressively, people in attractive avatars speak more socially, and people in older avatars care more about the distant future.

Virtual reality is going to become a must-have technology when you can simply talk and interact with other people in a virtual space in a way that feels utterly, unspectacularly normal.

But we are not close to that point.

One reason we might prefer avatars to video for communication is latency. . .videoconferencing at its essence is designed to send everything the camera sees over the network, regardless of how important the feature is concerning communication.

The neat thing about VR is that you don’t need to send all those pixels over the network over and over again. . .

Tracking the actions of two speakers, transmitting them online, and applying them to the respective avatars all occur seamlessly, and all the participants feel as if they are in the same virtual room

I have little doubt that virtual reality will be an excellent tool for spreading propaganda.

VR is about exploration, and storytellling is about control.

People who make movies are used to having control of where the user is focused. Good VR gives the user the freedom to focus anywhere. Contrast Hollywood movies with video games.

The educational field trip is the elusive unicorn.

Again, the conflict between exploration and control emerges.

by analyzing the body language of teachers and learners while a class was being taught, we could accurately predict the test scores of the students later on.

Very interesting result to think about.

To the extent that it is the teacher’s nonverbal communication that matters, and to the extent that students respond individually to nonverbal communication, students might learn better from avatars:

Virtual reality makes it possible for one teacher to give one-on-one instruction to many students at the same time. . .from a nonverbal standpoint

A useful statement of Jordan Peterson’s worldview

I found this essay by Matthew Pirkowski the best articulation of Petersonism so far. It is focused on a theory of tyranny as derived from an unwillingness to face the uncertainty and inevitable difficulties that arise in life.

It is difficult to excerpt, but here is a taste:

One must ally with Courage to tolerate uncertainty in all its forms: suffering, randomness, chaos, and failure — to admit to oneself that these forces exist as inevitable features of the human experience. When one discovers new explanations for mismatches between one’s beliefs and one’s current reality, it requires Courage to actually test them in the world of actions, to confront uncertainty with new and unproven strategies.

Off Topic: Cultural Appropriation and Dance

Ira Stoll is angry about a NYT interview with an Israeli modern dance choreographer.

Israelis stole folk dancing from the Palestinian Arabs in an act of “cultural appropriation,” The New York Times claims.

I think that he is over-reacting. In response (without referring to his piece), I wrote,

it was the most liberal-minded Jews who enjoyed Israeli dances that incorporated steps modeled on Arab debkas. Some of the choreographers had come from Arab countries and were proud of their heritage. Others wanted to promote their idealistic vision, which was for an ethnically and culturally integrated state, with Arabs blended seamlessly into the economy and life of Israel. In hindsight, this vision may seem naive , but it was well intended.

Off Topic: what I’m reading

Dan Hofstadter, The Love Affair as a Work of Art. I think I saw a book review he did and I liked his writing. When I got a sample of his book, I was intrigued because he starts with Benjamin Constant, although it turns out that Constant’s ideas are not discussed. Not sure I’ll finish it, even though he writes well. I don’t care so much about the people that he profiles.

The book is a chronicle of famous French love affairs of the early 1800s, in which introspection, infatuation, and letter-writing feature prominently. These French romantics approach relationships in a way that may seem foolish and self-absorbed, but gosh. . .compared with what we see now. . .how can we dare to criticize?