This post laid out a clear, neat mechanism for replacing expensive costly signals, to be used for education, which seemed like a great innovation to me. Then Qiaochu explained that it fails if one of the signals is for conformity, which is a key insight (which Qiaochu got from Bryan Caplan’s book on education), that has changed how I think about the education problem. I still think back on this post from time to time as having caused me to crystalise that insight.
I’m nominating this post in conjunction with Qiaochu’s comment on it.
This post laid out a clear, neat mechanism for replacing expensive costly signals, to be used for education, which seemed like a great innovation to me. Then Qiaochu explained that it fails if one of the signals is for conformity, which is a key insight (which Qiaochu got from Bryan Caplan’s book on education), that has changed how I think about the education problem. I still think back on this post from time to time as having caused me to crystalise that insight.