Category: education

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments
  • Reclamations. Essays by University of California students about the harm done by student loans. Via Boing Boing. Being taught “how to think” (as many college professors claim they do because the details of their class are obviously useless) is fine when it’s a choice. (I support the study of esoteric seemingly-useless stuff — when it’s a choice.) When it’s required (to get a decent job) and very expensive (due to tuition), there’s a problem.
  • The Cobblestone Conservative: How Jane Jacobs saved New York City’s soul.
  • Robin Hanson surveys his students. “[Their] opinions [about “random policy questions”] strongly tend to support the status quo – mostly whatever is, is assumed good.” Same thing at Berkeley. Most of my students, for better or worse, were very conformist. My conclusion, which I imagine Robin agrees with, is that the reasons we give for our beliefs have roughly zero correlation with the actual reasons and shouldn’t be taken seriously (e.g., argued with). Professors who claim to teach their students “how to think” (e.g., lines of argument) are shutting their eyes to what Robin shows is right in front of them: the lack of importance of “thinking” in the determination of belief.
  • Edward Jay Epstein on Michael Milken. Great journalism.

Thanks to Ryan Holiday. If you send me a link that I post I am happy to link to your blog or website.

Public Speaking Advice From My Students

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In the Frontiers of Psychology class I teach at Tsinghua (Monday 3:20-4:55, Teaching Building 6, Room A113, visitors welcome) , the students will give several presentations each class period. So I decided to assemble a list of advice. I came up with Items 1-3, the students came up with the rest.

  1. Give a presentation that you would like to hear. Don’t worry about following a formula.
  2. Make your points by telling stories. Don’t just say “X is true”. Tell a story that will make your listeners think that X is true.
  3. Stay within the allotted time (e.g., 5 minutes). In real life — presentations at scientific conferences, for example — most presentations are too long. Listeners rarely like this. They think the speaker is selfish. If one person speaks too long, this usually means that other speakers will have less time to speak.
  4. Don’t read your talk.
  5. Use simple, spoken English. Don’t speak fast
  6. Smile and use body language to connect with the audience.
  7. Pause before the most important points.
  8. Ask questions to attract attention.
  9. Show the big structure of your talk.
  10. When telling a story, don’t go far from the point of the story (e.g., with unnecessary details)

To me, the most interesting item is #8 (ask questions). For example, instead of saying “Let us begin” I can say “Shall we begin?” Which is certainly an improvement over coughing, which is what one student said was the usual way officials began talks.

For example, which phrasing works better?

Why does question-asking work? I asked my students.

I asked my students why question-asking works.

The first way (“Why does”) grabs my attention more than the second (“I asked”). I did ask my students why it works. One said that when you hear a question you automatically try to answer it. I cannot do better than that. I suppose we notice questions much like we notice loud noises.

First Day of Class 2011

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Yesterday was the first day of one of my Tsinghua classes. It has about 25 students. I asked each of them to say their favorite book in English. Several were mentioned twice: Pride and Prejudice (mentioned three times), Harry Potter, Catcher in the Rye, The Little Prince, and — this surprised me — The Secret. The last student to answer this question said her favorite book was Lolita. The class oohed. Last year a student said his favorite book was Ulysses. I said my favorite book was Cities and the Wealth of Nations. (A close second is Totto-Chan.)

I said the class would have three underlying principles: (a) Every student is different. (b) The best way to learn is to do. (c) Reading group. Two years ago, a Tsinghua engineering student started a reading group to read some famous Chinese book. He put a sign-up sheet in the library. The idea spread and now there are maybe ten reading groups, which meet weekly. It’s a alternative and successful educational system, they must be doing something right. To try to learn from their success, I am going to imitate their most obvious feature, which is a presentation about the week’s reading. For the coming week I asked for volunteers to give 5-minute presentations about the reading assignment. I said that if you gave a presentation, you wouldn’t have to do the regular homework assignment (commenting on the reading) for two weeks. Three students volunteered. After class, as I was leaving, one of the volunteers came up to me. She wanted to do the homework anyway, she said. She had volunteered to do a presentation “to exercise my bravery”.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Tucker Max on Writing and the Importance of Understanding How You Differ

Seth Roberts24 Comments

I recently heard Tucker Max speak about writing books. He said he had succeeded because he told the truth about himself — including the unpleasant stuff. Most people don’t. That, plus an ability to make it entertaining, was what he could do that other people couldn’t. He was saying that “being yourself” — more precisely, building on how you are different — was the only good place to start. Imitating other people is not a good place to start. Jane Jacobs said the same thing about how cities should develop. She said it was pointless to try to imitate other cities — to imitate them by building a stadium or convention center, for example. Each city should figure out what its unique strengths are — what makes Springfield Springfield — and build on them. Amplify them.

I was pleased to hear Tucker’s remarks because I never hear such stuff said publicly (or privately), except from Jane Jacobs. When I was at Berkeley, now and then I’d tell other professors: It’s a mistake to treat all students in a class the same (by giving them the same assignments, the same tests, etc.). They’re not all the same. They differ greatly. A lot is lost by treating them all alike — a lot of self-esteem, for instance. My colleagues didn’t like hearing this. It was convenient to treat all students the same. And it was status-boosting. My fellow professors worked in a system where the dimension used to gauge success was something they were good at. The notion that there were many other useful ways to excel was undermining. If there is only one measure of success and I am #1 on that measure, I am #1 period. If there are thirty measures of success, all equally valid, and I am #1 on only one of them, my superiority is less clear.

Tucker’s presence at the Ancestral Health Symposium was criticized. Here is an email that the organizers (who include me) received:

One thing neither I nor my attendee friends can explain: Tucker Max as a speaker? Really? His claim to fame is having rough sex with drunk girls and then writing about it. I’m pretty sure the majority of his speaking gigs take place at bars and frat houses. From his own website:

“I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.”

If you have a chance, could someone please explain this choice of speaker? I’d love to support this conference in the future, and I’m all for challenging social norms, but not those that have to do with basic respect for other people.

I replied:

I wanted Tucker Max to come and went so far as to give up half my presentation time to allow him to speak.

Why did I want him to speak? Because he is a big supporter of paleo, because he had something fresh to say, because he would say it well (and he did), and because he is deeply respected by an audience it is crucial to reach — college students. Sure, some things he writes offend some people. I don’t think that means he doesn’t have something helpful to say.

I don’t think college students respect him so much because he writes about getting raging drunk, etc. I think they respect him because he speaks the truth about subjects where most people don’t speak the truth.

The connection between “being yourself” and speaking the truth about difficult subjects is simple: Being yourself inevitably involves being different and being different inevitably involves some people scorning you. As Tucker said things that caused people to scorn him. As some people scorn my self-experimentation. In a society where being yourself isn’t valued enough, the fear of scorn wins, people self-censor, and, as in the above email, they censor others. Everyone’s loss.

The effect of an educational lifetime of being treated the same — from kindergarten thru college — is that the notion that you are different and have something unique to add becomes less and less plausible to you. Because it becomes implausible, that possibility doesn’t enter into your calculations about what to do with your life — in particular, what job to choose. You begin to think that success = imitation of successful people, when that is misleading. Imitate successful people like you, yes, but most people aren’t like you. I chatted with Tucker after his talk. He said it isn’t enough to be different, you have to act on it, become better and better at exercising your unique talent. I agree. In a better world, you would do this starting young, like 10, and slowly become better so that by the time you needed to make a living you would have substantial skill. But our educational system, by treating everyone the same, or nearly the same, discourages this.

 

Top and Bottom Versus Middle: China, Schools, Health?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

My explanation of the Ten Commandments is that someone at the top (Moses) was trying to convince people at the bottom to join him. People at the bottom were being preyed upon. “Thou shalt not steal” meant, to Moses’s audience, “no one will steal from you — or at least we, your leaders, will discourage it.” At the very beginning of the Code of Hammarabi, another ancient set of rules, it says one purpose of the rules is “so that the strong will not harm the weak”.

I keep seeing this pattern — people at or near the top of the hierarchy making common cause with people on the bottom against people in the middle. I was reminded of it by this story:

One anecdote described a Hu Yaobang [top Chinese leader] visit that Mr. Wen arranged with Guizhou Province villagers — secretly, he wrote, because Hu Yaobang did not trust local leaders to let them speak freely.

In the 1960s, the U.S. civil rights movement gained considerable force and accomplishment when the very top of the government (first, President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, later President Johnson) weighed in on the side of the protesters (bottom) against the various state governments (middle).

The practical value of this alignment of forces is illustrated by How to Walk to School, a book about school reform (which I reviewed here). Two mothers of young children, Jacqueline Edelberg and another woman, wanted to improve their neighborhood schools before it was too late for their own children to benefit. On the face of it, this was impossible. But they found common cause with the principal of a local school (Susan Kurland). It goes unmentioned in the book but my impression, reading between the lines, is that the main thing that happened is that the worst teachers were shamed into leaving, above all by parents sitting in their classrooms. The principal alone could do nothing about terrible teachers; the parents alone could do nothing; together they did a lot. I spoke to Edelberg about this and she agreed with me.

I point out this pattern because it works. Judaism (Moses) still exists; people still read the Old Testament. Even more powerfully, all governments have lists of laws (Hammurabi). Jacqueline Edelberg’s neighborhood school is much better. The next big revolution in human affairs, I believe, will be health care. The current system, in which people pay vast amounts for drugs that barely work, have awful side effects, and leave intact the root cause (e.g., too little dietary omega-3), will be replaced by a much better system. The much better system will be some version of paleo. As Woody Allen predicted, people will come to believe that butter is health food.

How will it happen? I suspect this pattern will be the driving force. People at the top and people at the bottom will put pressure on people in the middle. Self-experimentation, self-quantification, and personal science (which overlap greatly) are tools of people at the bottom. They cost nothing, they are available to all. When you track (quantify and record) your health problem, and show your doctor, via numbers and graphs, that the drug he prescribed didn’t work, that puts pressure on him. When you bring your doctor numbers and graphs that show a paleo solution did work, that puts even more pressure on him. The point, if it isn’t obvious, is that numbers and graphs, based on carefully collected day-after-day data, amplify what one person can do. Not just what they can learn, not just how healthy they can be, but how much they can influence others. And this amplification of influence, which I never discuss, may ultimately be the most important.

Google Yes, Wikipedia Yes, Aaron Swartz No?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

We praise Google and Wikipedia for making knowledge more available — consider them two of the best innovations of the last 50 years — but after Aaron Swartz, a friend of mine, apparently tried to do the same thing he was charged with wire and computer fraud and faces up to 35 years in jail and a $1 million fine.

The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, made an interesting statement:

Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.

In my experience, tautological statements such as “stealing is stealing” or “correlation is not causation” do not bode well for that side of the argument. As Thorstein Veblen might say, the reason for the tautology was the need for it.

Ortiz’s statement shows that she, like the rest of us, thinks that what matters is amount of harm. Harm is hard to find here. The only clear harm is that MIT access to JSTOR was shut down for a few days. This is so minor that JSTOR’s statement about the case (which includes “it was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. . . . We [have] no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter”) doesn’t mention it. I don’t think many people will agree that this amount of harm justifies the charges that Ortiz has brought.

Sign a petition supporting Aaron.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The Torchlight List by Jim Flynn

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In college and afterwards, I tried to educate myself by reading well-written stuff. At first, I went through back issues of The New Yorker in the Caltech library. Later I stuck with books. For example, I learned about molecular biology by reading The Eighth Day of Creation. The Torchlight List by Jim Flynn (discoverer of the Flynn Effect, the slow increase in IQ scores) has the same underlying philosophy: a good way to learn is to read books you enjoy.

The Torchlight List describes 200 books in pleasant narrative prose that Flynn both enjoyed and found educational. Here are the first three:

  1. The Story of Language by C. L. Barber
  2. The Greek World edited by H. Lloyd-Jones
  3. The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick

Indeed, I read the Chadwick book and enjoyed it. I have yet to find a well-written book about language evolution (although I liked John McWorter’s lectures on the subject) so I look forward to the Barber book.

More people should write books like this; the underlying idea is very good. I found one important gap in Flynn’s categories of books (Science and Early History, American History, America Broods, The Human Condition 1, …): Books That Caused Discomfort (and are fun to read). There are not many such books. Robert Moses was intensely discomforted by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. (A recent enjoyable TV series that caused discomfort was The Kennedys.) Lolita was discomforting, far more than Nabokov’s other books. First prize in this category goes to The Man Who Would be Queen by Michael Bailey.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment