Category: education

Michael Perelman on the Purpose of College

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In a talk, Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at CSU Chico, said this:

Each semester, I tell my class that each of them has the potential to be the best in the world at something. The most important thing they can do in school [= college] is find out what that something is.

That is a sane view of college. At Berkeley, I told undergrads: “Take as few classes as possible and do as many internships as possible.”

Perelman’s talk, an intellectual autobiography, has all sorts of interesting details, such as “As the economy faltered, economists would express doubts about how the economy functioned but once the economy recovered, challenges to market fundamentalism would become rare.”

 

Appreciative Thinking and Buddhism

Seth Roberts4 Comments

After I mentioned appreciative thinking in a recent post, my friend Carl Willat wrote me:

Part of Buddhism I think is that gratitude is the secret to happiness. Â It’s always possible to want more, so you won’t be happy by trying to get all the things you want. Instead, being grateful for what you have is where happiness lies.

That’s a good way to put it. Not matter what article you read, no matter what study you do, there are always ways it could be better (what others call flaws). Be grateful for what the article or study tells you. That’s how to learn something from it.

The Wisdom of Tsinghua Freshmen

Seth Roberts3 Comments

This semester at Tsinghua University — the most selective college in China — I taught a freshman seminar about recent psychology research. Three weeks ago I gave my students a choice of five articles from Psychological Science, all published in 2008. They were to read one of them and comment.

Mostly I try to teach appreciation but three weeks ago we focused on how articles could be improved. I have never tried to teach this, yet the students made some very good points. Here are some of their comments:

1. This article said that we believe women make better leaders when there is within-group conflict and that men make better leaders when there is between-group conflict. One student pointed out that Rwanda was a good example. After the genocide (within-group conflict), far more women were elected to office.

2. This article studied the effect of cleanliness on moral judgments. One experiment compared two groups: subjects in one group had recently washed their hands, subjects in the other group had not. Before the time when the handwashing happened, both groups saw unpleasant scenes from a movie. Students pointed out an important confounding not mentioned in the article: The two groups differed not only in handwashing but also in the time from movie to test (because handwashing took time). Perhaps subjects who washed their hands remembered the movie less well.

3. The name-letter effect is a tendency to favor outcomes (broadly defined) that involve the first letter of your name. This study involved Belgium workers. The authors found that workers were more likely to be employed by a company whose first letter matched the first letter of their name. The correlation was small but reliable. Two students pointed out that this might reflect the company’s choice of whom to hire rather than the employee’s choice of where to work. One student pointed out that the correlation might be due to name-place correlations across Belgium. Perhaps certain regions favor certain names for both people and companies. As you move closer to the French border, perhaps French names become more common among both people and companies.

In all of these cases, had I been the editor, I would have required the authors to change their article appropriately.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds described cases where averages of estimates made by non-experts did very well, sometimes out-performing experts. These three examples don’t involve numerical judgments nor averaging, but they do show non-experts (freshmen) doing better than experts (journal editors and reviewers) in certain ways. Each paper was read by about eight students.

More It isn’t easy to convey how impressed I was. The comments about Rwanda and about name localization certainly deserve a letter to the editor (if Psychological Science published them). Both of them are sophisticated methodological comments. The Rwandan one says that after you write an experimental article, try to find out if real-world events support your findings. That may be a helpful lesson in many cases. The name localization one suggests that psychologists who use survey data should be learning more about how to analyze survey data. Several other times my students surprised me with how good their comments were. One was during a discussion of possible reasons for the Holocaust, another was about why women in ancient China bound their feet, a third involved proposals for Mindless-Eating-type experiments.

How I Write Letters of Recommendation

Seth Roberts5 Comments

As all professors know, it is letter-of-recommendation-writing season. I write them differently than anyone else I know. I meet with the student and write the letter during our meeting. I ask questions, type, ask questions, type, etc. The student inevitably remembers details of the class and how well they did better than I do. I ask questions that try to elicit the strengths of their case — about relevant experience, for example. Anything I find convincing I put in the letter. Sure, maybe they described the same stuff in their statement of purpose but I’m sure I can do a better job — professor to professor — than they can. (Statements of purpose are usually badly written.) I speak professorese, they don’t.

I like to think it’s win-win-win. It’s good for me because the letter is written quickly, easily, on time, and with good content. It’s the strongest possible truthful letter I could write — so I feel I’m doing my job. It’s good for the student because I make their case in the best possible way. It’s good for whoever reads the letter because it’s factual and well-argued. I don’t just say the student is this or that; I give examples. Most letters of recommendation do not give examples. Without examples, I ignore them.

What I’ve Learned From Climategate (So Far)

Seth Roberts11 Comments

Google “Climategate” you get 31 million hits. “Obama” returns 40 million. Yet mainstream media, such as the New York Times, have said little about it. The New Yorker has said nothing about it. Given so much interest, that will change.

Some of my prior beliefs — that empirical support for the view that man has caused global warming is weaker than we’re told, that bloggers are a powerful force for truth — are stronger. But here are a few things I didn’t think of until now:

1. The truth leaks out before it gushes out. Laurie David’s children’s book — its egregious mistake, her blithe dismissal of that mistake — is an example of the truth leaking out. In the Ranjit Chandra case, little facts implied he was a fraud long before this became utterly clear. An example is the claim in one of his papers (published in The Lancet!) that everyone asked agreed to be in his experiment.

2. Teaching is even better done via scandals than via stories. The number of hits for Climategate is an indication of how much people are learning from it. As I blogged earlier, they’re learning a lot about science. A mere story about science would never attract so much attention. I should think more about how to use scandals to teach stuff. When Nassim Taleb is scathing about this or that, he has the right idea. Spy was the perfect example. It taught me a lot about New York City.

3. Jane Jacobs was wrong. Or at least missed something very important. In Dark Age Ahead, her last book, she pointed to a number of disturbing signs. One was the rise of crappy science. She was quite right about that — as scientists have become more professional they have become more status-oriented and less truth-oriented. She didn’t foresee that the Internet would be an enormously powerful corrective force, as is happening now. Climategate is a (relatively) small example of even bigger force: the rise of the power of sophisticated amateurs/hobbyists. Who, unlike professionals, with jobs and status to protect, have complete freedom. The first big example was printed non-fiction books, as I blogged earlier (which are written with great freedom, usually); but now the Internet provides another great outlet, much faster, cheaper, and more accessible than books, for independent thought.

Philip Greenspun on Universities

Seth Roberts9 Comments

This essay by Philip Greenspun, about the trouble with American college education, is most notable for its description of a class lecture by Robert Schiller at Yale:

  • 0-4:30: name of course, name of professor, names of TAs, pictures of TAs [all stuff that could easily have been on a handout or Web site]
  • 4:30-5:15: bragging about how many important people on Wall Street took his course, bragging about how great the course is even for people who aren’t going on to Wall Street
  • 5:15-6:20: talking about how every human endeavor involves finance, e.g., if you’re a poet it will help you get published to know how finance works [my haiku: AIG bankrupt; your taxes gone to Greenwich; no one hears your screams]
  • 6:20-7: talking about an unrelated course, Econ 251, and who taught it in previous years [big excitement at a university: some guy other than the usual lecturer taught it because Kahuna #1 was on leave]
  • 7-10: history of why two intro finance courses exist, glorious biography of teacher of the other course, [after several minutes, we learn that the other course has a bit more math]
  • 10-11:30: show of hands for who is interested in organic chemistry, discussion of how Robert Shiller is reading about this because he has such broad intellectual interests [implicit comparison to finance wizards, though Shiller is not able to cite an example of how organic chemists managed to bankrupt their shareholders and wreck the world economy]
  • 11:30-15:00: writes authors of textbook on blackboard, says it is “very detailed”, discusses reactions of previous classes of students to this book, talks about his vacation in the Bahamas with some other important guy, reading textbook by the pool unlike the other stupid tourists who were reading novels. Discussion of what number the current edition is. “I met a really prominent person on Wall Street” who told him that his son had dropped out of the course because the textbook was too hard. Apparently Yale students are too stupid/lazy to read this book intended for undergrads at schools with more motivated students.
  • 15-16: discussion of how library is obsolete in the Internet age, how Franco Modigliani is 2nd author of primary textbook, a Nobel Prize winner, and “my teacher at MIT”

Funny! Spy had a similar article about 24 hours of an all-sports-talk radio show. Okay, Robert Shiller is full of himself. The most telling criticism of the modern university is in a comment by Mike Lin:

The first day of Statistics 100 at the University of Michigan, the professor said our final grade was either the average score of our midterm and final, or the score of the final — whichever was greater. Our labs and homework assignments did not impact our course grade. My roommate, also enrolled in the same course, didn’t make the first class. I told him about the grading system. Neither of us attended another class, nor took the midterm.

Before the final, we spent two days straight, reading the material and doing problem sets. I got a B+. He got an A-. [Shades of Tucker Max.]

I am ashamed to admit that I wasted all those lectures and labs that my family paid for. But what does it say about inadequacy and inefficiency of the lecture system when we arguably learned the practical application of our course material with 24 hours of self-study spread over two days and a $100 textbook?

It says a lot.

Via Aaron Swartz.

Climategate: Its Educational Value (continued)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In a response to the comments on my previous post, I say that the primary attitude of science isn’t to be skeptical, it is to think for yourself. (Which, in practice, means ignoring what fancy hot-shot scientists at prestigious universities tell you to think.) Funny that fancy hot-shot scientists at prestigious universities never teach that.

Or almost never. In another comment on that post, Andrew Gelman mentions the Feynman Lectures as books from which you can learn about science. Having read Volume 1, I have no idea what he means. I was a freshman at Caltech. Feynman was a professor there at the time. The Feynman Lectures had been published but they were judged too difficult for most of the freshmen! I am not kidding. The faculty had learned that they were too hard to understand. They didn’t teach what the faculty called “problem-solving” — that is, deriving predictions from theories. So there were two tracks of Intro Physics at Caltech: the Feynman track (fewer students) and the non-Feynman track (more students). I was in the Feynman track. He wasn’t the professor, but we used his book. That’s how I came to read Volume 1. I liked it, but it didn’t teach me anything important about science.

Yet — during the exact same time, freshman year — Feynman himself did teach me something important about how to be a scientist. He taught me (= encouraged me) to think for myself. Not in any obvious way. On Wednesdays at 11:00 am, Feynman would answer questions for an hour. Anything except textbook problem-solving questions. There were more than a thousand students at Tech but maybe 20-30 attended these little sessions. One day I asked: “I’ve read some philosophy. It doesn’t make sense. Yet lots of people say it’s important. Am I missing something, or does it have as little value as I think it has?” Feynman’s answer: He agreed with me. There was one book of philosophy he liked, a survey by Bertrand Russell, but for the rest of it, it was people talking and talking and saying nothing.

Wow, he agrees with me, I thought. I had reached what I thought was a very minority opinion — an opinion I’d read nowhere else, had heard nowhere else — and this famous person who I respected agreed with me! It certainly taught me to think for myself.

Climategate: Its Educational Value

Seth Roberts25 Comments

Before the printing press, there were very few books. It was extremely hard to learn math; you had to pay a tutor. Of course literacy was very low — but all knowledge that could be transmitted through books (such as math) was very low.

Science cannot be taught through books. You can learn a lot about calculus by reading books. You can learn almost nothing important about science. Science is not a collection of facts, it is a method, a way of gathering knowledge. Almost always it is taught by doing — by working in a lab, for example. Just as, before printed books, almost no one could do any math, it is true today that almost no one can do any science. (Most doctors think the bigger the sample size, the better.)

If you look at a biology textbook, it is full of conclusions. It says practically nothing about the process by which those conclusions were reached. For some reason biologists have decided not to teach that — perhaps because it is difficult and messy to teach. And someone might be offended. Whatever the reason, the process goes undescribed. And it’s all sciences, not just biology. (Until recently, economists avoided teaching data. At least in introductory economics, data was too messy for them.)

As long as you have to learn science by doing it practically no one will understand it — just as almost no one did math when you had to hire a tutor to learn it. But now we have the Internet. And blogs. Two new things have entered the picture: a great deal of emotion (blogs are full of emotion, unlike textbooks); and unlimited space. Now science can begin to be taught without actually doing an apprenticeship. If you add enough emotion, anything becomes riveting. And there is now plenty of room for all the false starts and messy details. I suppose most scientists who blog are too worried about being dignified to say anything emotional or messy, but that doesn’t matter because there are so many bloggers.

According to Stephen Dubner, “if you are fan of science, this [Climategate] is a pretty grim day.” I think it’s a great day. As great as the day the first math text was printed. It’s the first time a large number of people are getting a real lesson in science. Mainstream media coverage is pathetic but there are so many bloggers it doesn’t matter. You can read about it endlessly. As you do, you will painlessly and unforgettably learn what Leonard Syme taught his students for years, and what I blogged about a few weeks ago: The apparent consensus on any difficult issue is more fragile than it looks. You are learning how conclusions are actually arrived at. It isn’t pretty — which textbook writers and professors, seeking dignity above all else, fail to mention.

“Some of Them Will Have the Wrong Answer”

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In Exploratory Data Analysis, John Tukey tells about visiting a high-school chemistry class. Each student in the class had done an experiment to determine a physical constant. Tukey suggested to the teacher that they gather and plot the results. The teacher didn’t like this idea. Some of the students will have gotten the wrong answer, said the teacher. Tukey didn’t know what to say.

In a previous post, I said there is great stagnation in health care. Obesity and mental illness are the examples most obvious to me, but there are many other problems on which our health care system has made little progress for a long time. (Sure, we should have universal health care but the idea that this will do much about the obesity epidemic, the autoimmune disease epidemic, the autism epidemic, and so on, is absurd. Doctors don’t know how to get people to lose weight. A reasonable health care system would focus on prevention. That is something the current batch of doctors doesn’t know how to do.) I added that a reasonable health policy would empower those who benefit from change.

That’s a difficult thing for people in power to do. Not only does it mean giving up power, it also means giving it to “the wrong people”. The people you like to demonize. People who are . . . not respectable. Not clubbable, John Cheever might say. And, quite apart from that, some of them will have the wrong answer. Tukey’s high-school chemistry class was at a fancy private school, where we might expect such elitist attitudes. But I heard the same thing from colleagues at UC Berkeley when I would suggest giving students much more power to determine what they learned in a psychology class. Some of them will want to learn the wrong things, said my colleagues. I think Tukey was trying to say that the chemistry teacher didn’t understand variability but I think the psychological point of his story is even more interesting.

Med School Interview Questions

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Here is what Brent Pottenger was asked during a recent interview at USC medical school:

  • What drives/motivates you?
  • Describe a challenge you overcame?
  • Describe a fulfilling experience that made you want to be a physician?
  • Why USC?
  • What do you bring to the entering class?
  • What area of medicine are you interested in?
  • What would you do for health reform?
  • What do you do outside of school for fun?
  • If you could improve something about yourself, what would that be?
  • What are you looking for in a medical program?