Category: education

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Ryan Holiday, Matt Cassel, Tom George and Dave Lull.

Law Schools Sued For Lying About Post-Grad Employment

Seth Roberts15 Comments

If it isn’t clear for whom law schools exist, now it is clearer:

The saga began last year, when Strauss and Anziska, both veterans of corporate legal work, filed lawsuits against New York Law School and Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan. The allegation: That Cooley and NYLS, by allegedly inflating post-graduate employment numbers, had committed fraud and violated local consumer protection acts. . . . The job market for lawyers has been contracting for years; hiring is down across the board. At the same time, law schools have continued to crank out young lawyers at an alarming rate.

This is the legal version of the joke that people go to law school because they aren’t good at math. So far twelve schools have been sued. I look forward to learning how the teachers at those schools react. Which side will they take? .

More about the lawsuits. I blogged about the deception a year ago. The California Culinary Academy in San Francisco was successfully sued for similar deception a few years ago. Inside the Law School Scam, a blog.

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Seth Roberts2 Comments

Tokyo Restaurant Recommendations — and Why They Might Be A Bad Idea

Seth Roberts9 Comments

An earlier post asked for Tokyo recommendations. A kind reader (Andrew Clarke) provided the following recommendations of off-beat restaurants:

One place I always recommend is Andy’s Shinhinomoto, in Yurakucho: https://www.frommers.com/destinations/tokyo/D61101.html. I have never seen a travel show that has covered the place, but it’s a best kept secret within the ex-pat community. Its menu is a standard Japanese Izakaya (pub) menu with some of the freshest sashimi (and fish in general) in Tokyo, and the strangest thing – it’s ran by a long-term British ex-pat, who is so renowned for his ability to pick good ingredients that he selects and delivers fish for several local sushi shops. Upstairs seating is best for atmosphere, but the food is the same downstairs. They have an English menu, and I’d also recommend the fish head and tempura. It’s also not super expensive, somehow I never manage to spend more than 7000Y with alcohol.

Teyandei is another one that I would generally recommend: https://www.bento.com/rev/2133.html. You’ll be lucky if you manage to find this one, most taxi drivers I have ever asked couldn’t find it even with GPS, it’s located in a residential area of the back of Roppongi. Great atmosphere, and again Izakaya style but not fish oriented, and not strictly traditional. The most memorable dish I had was a french baguette, vanilla ice cream and maple syrup slider – which was very good, but to be enjoyed occasionally. Outside of that they have many great dishes, with more of a meaty or stuff on sticks vibe.

Last general recommendation is for sushi: https://tokyofood.blog128.fc2.com/blog-entry-52.html. I used to live in Tsukiji town and this place is a friendly joint that attracts many locals in the evening. Probably because it’s not super-expensive, but great quality and I particularly recommend the Uni if that is your thing. Their ‘aburi (blow torched)’ dishes are great too, and the Aji (mackerel) and the tsuki maguro (marinated tuna).

[follow-up:] The Moroccan place, I’m not sure why I didn’t include this the first time, as it is possibly the most strange and off-the-beaten-path: https://www.dalia58.com/d_map.html. Google Maps. The owner is a Japanese lady who spent 1 year in Morocco on a home stay. She loved the home cooked food and fastidiously learned to replicate them the way only Japanese people can. I learned about from a Moroccan co-worker who swears it’s the most authentic Moroccan food he has had out side his homeland. You definitely need to book ahead, there are only maybe 12 seats in the place and only 4 of those are not on the ground. The menu is fairly small and changes every once in a while as the owner travels back to Morocco regularly, but usually I have the meatball tagine (best), fish tagine, freshly baked wheat bread and vegetable couscous. I have never been there alone, you’d need at least two people to eat all that.

Alexandra Harney, author of The China Price, who has spent years in Tokyo, recommended:

My favorite watering hole: Asahi Shokudo in Nogizaka, near Tokyo Midtown. Unless you speak Japanese, the best thing to do is probably to have someone call ahead, make a reservation (a very good idea) and fax you a map. Their tel: 03-3402-6797. GREAT food, very good atmosphere, sake good too. It’s not fancy, but authentic and creative.

Tyler Cowen’s forthcoming book (An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules For Everyday Foodies) says a lot about Japanese food and restaurants. In an email he said “Pierre Gagnaire Tokyo was the best meal I’ve ever had…that is expensive, though.”

I am in Tokyo now. Last night I took a long walk around my hotel (Hotel Changtee), which is in Ikebukuro. I have stayed here three times before. On my walk, for the first time, I noticed a Spanish restaurant (Agalito) a few blocks from my hotel. In Beijing, I often have Japanese food, so I decided to try it. The menu (mostly tapas) looked good. It wasn’t expensive (Ikebukuro is full of relatively cheap restaurants).

I had seven dishes. Every one surprised me and tasted great. I had pickles, a vegetable terrine, deep-fried shrimp and avocado (the avocado was also deep-fried), mackerel, a dish of large mushrooms and bacon, marinated cherry tomatoes (skins removed), and baked/grilled cheese and tomatoes. Far better than the tapas I had in Barcelona (or anywhere else). Far better than the tapas at a Berkeley restaurant (Cesar) next to Chez Panisse owned by Alice Waters’ ex-husband. The pickles were a small dish of carrots, cucumber, cabbage, and red pepper. The best pickles I’ve ever had, and I’ve had pickles hundreds of times, as anyone who knows my passion for fermented food will understand. They are a staple of Japanese and Szechuan cuisine. I’ve had Japanese pickles at dozens of places. The carrot pickles were so good, such a great blend of sweet and sour, so perfectly crunchy, that I want to start trying to recreate them. I didn’t know carrot pickles could be that good.The tomato and cheese dish also opened my eyes. I never knew that cheese and tomatoes could go so well together. I want to get special equipment (the baking pan) just to make this one dish. I want to try many different cheeses and tomatoes to find the best pairing. No meal at Chez Panisse or anywhere else has pushed me to do two new things. A tiny number (five?) have pushed me to do one new thing.

This restaurant is a few blocks from my hotel. No one recommended it. The meal, with drink, cost $60. I’m told that if you ask a Tokyo resident what are your favorite restaurants? they look at you blankly. Now I see why. There are so many great restaurants it doesn’t matter. This meal also taught me that recommendations may be counter-productive. Recommended restaurants are often expensive. Expensive food is likely to require lots of labor, special tools, and expensive ingredients. Making it harder to copy and thus less inspiring. Whereas this “plain” meal, with cheap ingredients and relatively little labor, will continue to influence and teach me whenever I do stuff it has inspired me to do.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts9 Comments
  • More evidence that the SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet) diet really helps people with Crohn’s Disease. “Since starting this diet, I have had no pain. Some might attribute this to surgery, but I am convinced the diet has so much to do with it. My blood work is normal, and it hasn’t been in 8 years. The sed rate level in the blood is normal instead of elevated outrageously.”
  • How to improve on lectures when teaching physics.
  • More selenium, less risk of cancer. Contrary to what the researcher quoted in this article says, there is already substantial evidence that selenium reduces cancer risk. For example, in a county-by-county map of USA cancer rates, there is a clear rift in the north east. On one side of the rift rates are clearly higher than on the other side of the rift. The rift corresponds to geological fault line. On the low-cancer side of the rift, there is more selenium in the soil. There are also rat experiments. You certainly should take selenium supplements.
  • American health care plays a surprisingly large role in an excellent story by Peter Hessler in The New Yorker about the Japanese yakuza (mafia). 1. From 2000 to 2004, four yakuza members got liver transplants at UCLA at a time when liver transplants were hard to get. A few months later they made large donations to UCLA. The money went into a general fund at the surgery department. According to a UCLA spokesperson, there was no connection between the transplants and the donations. According to a UCLA press release, “No money or donation was offered or paid to anyone at UCLA as a quid pro quo for getting a transplant or moving up on the list.” Because a general fund is not a person, this is literally true. 2. In the early 1990s, at a Columbia, Missouri hospital, a nurse was suspected of killing patients. Hospital administrators covered it up. “Everyone took part in the coverup was promoted, everybody who tried to expose it was punished,” said someone who tried to expose it.

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • Harvard professors behaving badly: Alan Dershowitz. “In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor [of California], declaring, “My letter to the Governor doesn’t exist.” But when pressed on the issue, he said, “It was not a letter. It was a polite note.”” Dershowitz wrote the Governor of California to try to keep the University of California Press from publishing Beyond Chutzpah by Norman Finkelstein, which calls The Case for Israel by Dershowitz “among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict”. Finkelstein’s book says nothing about whether Dershowitz actually wrote it. According to a statement from the UC Press, “[Finkelstein] wondered why Alan Dershowitz, in recorded appearances after [The Case For Israel] was published, seemed to know so little about the contents of his own book.”
  • Umami Burger takes Manhattan.
  • The trouble with measuring students on only one dimension: South Korea
  • Why do twins differ? Both twins have autism spectrum disorder, but one has the disorder much more than the other. Guess which one was “given powerful drugs to battle an infection”?

Bryan Caplan Disses College

Seth Roberts28 Comments

In this post, Bryan Caplan says (again) that college is vastly overrated. Like me, he says that the only thing college professors know how to do is be professors and that is all they can actually teach. Graduate school, where professors teach students who want to be professors, makes sense. Undergraduate school, where almost no students will become professors, does not. Like me, he ridicules the idea that professors teach students “how to think”.

He omits half of my criticism. It isn’t just teaching (“how to think” — please!), it’s also evaluation. Professors are terrible at evaluation. Their method of judging student work is very simple: How close is it to what I would have done? The better you can imitate the professor, no matter what the class, the higher your grade. This is one size fits all with a vengeance because there is no opting out. Sure, you can choose your major. But every class is taught by a professor. What if your strengths lie elsewhere — in something that your professors aren’t good at? Tough luck. Your strengths will never be noticed or encouraged or developed.

At Berkeley (where Bryan went and I taught) and universities generally, the highest praise is brilliant. Professor X is brilliant. Or: Brilliant piece of work. People can do great things in dozens of ways, but somehow student work is almost never judged by how beautiful, courageous, practical, good-tasting, astonishing, vivid, funny, moving, comfortable, and so on it is. Because that’s not what professors are good at. (Except in the less-academic departments, such as art and engineering.) To fail to grasp that students can excel in dozens of ways is to seriously shortchange them. To value them at much less than they are worth — and, above all, to fail to help them grow and find their place in the world after college.

At Berkeley, I figured this out in a way that a libertarian should appreciate: I gave my students much more choice. For a term project, I said they could do almost anything so long as it was off-campus and didn’t involve library work. What they chose to do revealed a lot. I began to see not just how different they were from me but how different they were from each other. One of my students chose to give a talk to a high-school class. This was astonishing because she has severe stage fright. Every step was hard. But she did it. “I learned that if I really wanted to, I could conquer my fear,” she wrote.

One of my Tsinghua students recently asked me: “Are you a brave man?” (She wanted to give me a gift of stinky tofu.) I said no. She said she thought I was brave for coming to China. Perhaps. I have never done anything as brave as what my student with stage fright did. I have never done something that terrified me — much less chosen to do such a thing. Her homework hadn’t been very good. When I read about her term project — conquering stage fright — I realized how badly I had misjudged her. How badly I had failed to appreciate her strengths. I saw that it wasn’t just her and it wasn’t just me. By imposing just one narrow way to excel, the whole system badly undervalued almost everyone. Almost everyone had strengths the system ignored. And it’s a system almost everyone must go through to reach a position of power!

This is related to what I call the hemineglect of economists — they fail to see that innovation should be half of economics. Diversity of talents and interests is central to innovation because new things are so often mixtures of old things. By rewarding only one kind of talent, colleges suppress diversity of talent and thereby reduce innovation. (It’s no coincidence that Steve Jobs, whom we associate with innovation, didn’t finish college. He saw his talents wouldn’t be valued.) Psychologists are also guilty of this. Many psychologists glorify IQ. Somehow having a high IQ is crucial to success . . . somehow a society that doesn’t encourage people with high IQs will do badly. And so on. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray showed that high IQ scores correlated with other measures of desirable social outcomes (e.g., income — people with higher IQ scores made more money). Like many successful people, they failed to see the possibility that the whole world had been shaped to reward the things that the people in power (i.e., they themselves) are good at. Not because those talents work (= produce a better economy). But because they are easy to measure (by college grades). The glorification of IQ has had a solipsistic aspect and has ignored what should be obvious, that diversity of talents and skills promotes innovation. Without a diverse talent pool, any society will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise.

“Setting Students on Fire” at Universities: An Alternative

Seth Roberts2 Comments

The first paragraph of an article by Anthony Grafton called “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?” contains this:

At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.

Grafton means this as praise, of course: Wow, these professors are doing a great job! I disagree. I think there are a million things in the world to be enthusiastic about — the structure of crystals and the structure of poems are two examples, no better or worse than the rest. I also think it is fundamentally foolish for a professor to try to make every student in his or her class as enthusiastic about X as the professor happens to be. It is foolish because it ignores human variability, which is great along these lines. (I think diversity of interest and enthusiasm is large because such diversity helps produce diverse economies.) It would be much better for the students if the professor were to help them develop their own unique enthusiasms.

I suspect Grafton has never considered this possibility. In discussions at Berkeley that I attended about how to be a good teacher, including special seminars, it never came up. Yet I taught a class at Berkeley (Psychology and the Real World) where I did just that: I allowed students to do volunteer work off-campus about almost anything they wanted. They chose the work, not me.

 

“We are Heroes, They are Villains”: My Brilliant Students

Seth Roberts10 Comments

At Tsinghua University, which is like a Chinese MIT, I am teaching a small class (25 students) called Frontiers of Psychology. It is required of freshmen psychology majors. There are a few students from other majors. So many of my students do brilliant work that it is hard to keep track. For example, two classes ago I started having presentations (short talks related to the reading). In the very first one, a student talked about her dysmenorrhea and self-experimentation to stop it. Later, during a discussion of how to give a talk, another (female) student said, “I could not have given such a talk.” “That’s a compliment, right?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. Which is only to say what a radical and stunning talk it was.

For this week’s class I assigned several readings, from which students chose one. The shortest and most popular paper, by Joshua Knobe, a Yale professor of philosophy, was about judgments of intentionality. Knobe showed subjects various scenarios and asked them whether the side effects of a action described in the scenario should be considered intentional or not. Changing one word had a big effect. Knobe concluded that we tend to see bad side effects as intentional, good side effects as unintentional. I assigned it because the effect of changing one word was large and I liked the source of data (“Subjects were 78 people spending time in a Manhattan public park”).

Here is one student’s comment:

When I was in primary school, we had a very kind English teacher who was quite close to me. After she left school, she sent some photos to me and I found it a great honor to deliver them to my classmates. Later on, a math teacher got married and she gave another pupil some sweets to deliver the class. I felt unpleasant since not every student could get a sweet. I thought it unjust.

However, in both cases, photos and sweets, there weren’t enough for the whole class. The only difference was who passed them out. When I did, the main issue I cared about was “I’m the one to deliver them”; in the other case, “Why can’t everyone get one?”

She titled her comment “We are the Heroes, They are the Villains”. Her point was that Knobe’s results could be explained by the idea that we slant our judgments of others and ourselves to make them look worse and us look better — an explanation that Knobe didn’t consider.

Knobe isn’t the only one who didn’t think of it. Other students proposed other plausible explanations. But I think the “we are heroes” explanation is quite plausible because three other students made the same point in other ways. One of them repeated a story from a test preparation book:

A teacher had a student do ten math problems on the board. Then she asked another student to describe what he saw. “Two of the answers are wrong,” he said. “What about the eight correct answers?” said the teacher.

Not a true story but surely based on actual events. Another student told of the time her teacher had made her push her fellow students to exercise for an half-hour per day. The students complained to her about their loss of time. Later, however, her class had finished first in a physical competition — much better than usual. Her classmates did not give her any credit for this.

To emphasize how unobvious this idea is, here is what two professors make of Knobe’s results:

This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere. ‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe.

My students disagree. Their proposed explanations, such as the “we are heroes” idea, were not “much more complex”.

I believe they have noticed a broad truth about human nature that has escaped many psychologists, not just Knobe. In this excerpt from his new book, my former colleague Danny Kahneman describes what he calls “the illusion of validity”: personality judgments were considered more predictive than they actually were by the people who made them. Could this be another example of “we are heroes”? The “we are heroes” idea also explains the Lake Wobegone Effect: Most people consider themselves above average. The technical name for this is illusory superiority. The Wikipedia article about illusory superiority does not mention the Knobe Effect and vice-versa. In this important aspect of human nature, professors (including me) have had trouble seeing that the trees make a forest.

Inside Chinese Higher Education: A Hidden Strength

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China has hundreds of colleges. Tsinghua and Beijing University are at the top (top tier), followed by perhaps 20 colleges considered second-tier. A friend of mine attends a third-tier school. In all of her classes, class consists of the professor reading the textbook. Word for word. (Which, by the way, doesn’t happen at Tsinghua, I checked.)

Perhaps you grimace. I think this is a great thing. It means students can easily skip class — any sensible person would. Being able to skip class frees them to do internships, visit the National Museum, explore the off-campus world however they want. My friend took advantage of this to do three internships. At Berkeley I told students to take as few classes as possible and take as many internships as possible. I taught a class called Psychology and the Real World whose sole purpose was to help students learn off campus. When I was a freshman at Caltech, the school had an unintentionally similar feature: all freshman grades were pass/fail. This made it much easier to skip class, which I did most of the time. Even better than the Chinese system, I no longer had to study much. I used my abundant free time to explore my own interests, which included reading Veblen and Freud. I taught psychology to under-privileged eighth-graders. The freedom provided by pass/fail grading allowed me to explore my own interests and started me on the path to becoming an experimental psychologist. I am not kidding: this is a great hidden strength of Chinese higher education.

By the same twisted logic am I glad that American colleges are becoming insufferably expensive — because then fewer people will attend them? Not yet. I think most American high school students think not attending college is dangerous. Reading the textbook at home and doing an internship isn’t dangerous.