Very few of these are controversial here. The only ones that seem controversial to me are
Schools teach too much, not too little
...
That’s all, actually. And I’m not even incredulous about that one, just a bit curious.
Although aging and death is terrible, I don’t think there’s much point in building a movement to stop it. AGI will almost certainly be solved before even half of the processes of aging are.
Everyone has his pet subject which he thinks everybody in society ought to know and thus ought to be added to the school curriculum. Here on LessWrong, it tends to be rationality, Bayesian statistics and economics, elsewhere it might be coding, maths, the scientific method, classic literature, history, foreign languages, philosophy, you name it.
And you can always imagine a scenario where one of these things could come in handy. But in terms of what’s universally useful, I can hardly think of anything beyond reading/writing and elementary school maths, that’s it. It makes no economic sense to drill so much knowledge into people’s heads; division of labor is like the whole point of civilization.
It’s also morally wrong to put people through needless suffering. School is a waste, or rather theft, of youthful time. I wish I had played more video games and hung out with friends more. I wish I scored lower on all the exams. If your country’s children speak 4 languages and rank top 5 in PISA tests, that’s nothing to boast about. I waited for the day when all the misery would make sense; that day never came. The same is happening to your kids.
Education is like code—the less the better; strip down to the bare essentials and discard the rest.
Edit: Sorry for the emotion-laden language, the comment turned into a rant half-way through. Just something that has affected me personally.
You make a very strong point that I think I can wholly agree with, but I think there is more here we have to examine.
It’s sometimes said that the purpose of public education is to create the public good of an informed populace (sometimes, “fascism-resistant voters”. A more realpolitic way of putting it is “a population who will perpetuate the state”, this is good exactly when the state is good). So they teach us literature and history and hope that this will create a cultural medium whose constituents can communicate well and never repeat their civilization’s past mistakes. If it works, the benefits to the commons are immeasurable.
There isn’t an obvious upper bound of curriculum size where enriching this commons would necessarily stop being profitable. The returns on sophistication of a well designed interchange system are greater than linear on the specification size of the system.
It might not be well designed. I don’t remember seeing anything about economics or law (or even, hell, driving) in the public curriculum, and I think that might be the real problem here. It’s not that they teach too much, it’s that they don’t understand what kind of things a creator of the public good of a good public is supposed to be teaching.
First, let’s get disagreements about values out of the way: I hate the term “brainwashing” since it’s virtually indistinguishable from “teaching”, the only difference being the intent of the speaker (we’re teaching our kids liberal democratic values while the other tribe is brainwashing their kids with Marxism). But to the extent “brainwashing” has a useful definition at all, creating “a population who will perpetuate the state” would be it. In my view, if our civilization can’t survive without tormenting children with years upon years of conditioning, it probably shouldn’t.
Second, I’m very skeptical about this model of a self-perpetuating society. So “they” teach us literature and history? Who’s “they”? Group selectionism doesn’t work; there is no reason to assume that memes good at perpetuating themselves would also be good at perpetuating the civilization they find themselves in. I think it’s likely that people in charge of framing the school curriculum are biased towards holding those subjects in high regard that they’ve been taught in school themselves (sunken cost fallacy, prestige signaling), thus becoming vehicles for meme spread. I don’t see any incentive for any education board member to stop, think and analyze what will perpetuate the government they’re a part of.
I also very much doubt the efficacy of such education/brainwashing at manipulating citizens into perpetuating the state. In my experience, reverse psychology and tribalism are much better methods for this purpose than straightforward indoctrination, particularly with people in their rebellious youth. The classroom, frequently associated with boredom and monotony, is among the worst environments to apply these methods. There is no faster way to create an atheist out of a child than sending him through mandatory Bible study classes; and no faster way to create a libertarian than to make him memorize Das Kapital.
Lastly, the bulk of today’s actual school curriculum is neutral with respect to perpetuating our society—maths, physics, chemistry, biology, foreign languages, even most classical literature are apolitical. So even setting the issue of “civilizational propagation” aside, there is still enormous potential for optimization.
It’s hard not to, when you don’t know what people are going to end up doing. If you know that the son of the blacksmith is going to be a blacksmith, the problem gets much simpler.
Why? It’s not obvious that that is better than teaching a bit of everything. For instance, if 10% of jobs need a little bit of geography, then having only candidates who know nothing about geography is going to be a disadvantage to those employers.
Because people not knowing geography could be a disadvantage to employERs as well as employees. A minimal education system could be below the economic optimum.
This is like saying we need the government to mandate apple production, because without apples we might become malnourished which is bad. Why can’t the market solve the problem more efficiently? Where’s the coordination failure?
Very few of these are controversial here. The only ones that seem controversial to me are
Schools teach too much, not too little
...
That’s all, actually. And I’m not even incredulous about that one, just a bit curious.
Although aging and death is terrible, I don’t think there’s much point in building a movement to stop it. AGI will almost certainly be solved before even half of the processes of aging are.
Everyone has his pet subject which he thinks everybody in society ought to know and thus ought to be added to the school curriculum. Here on LessWrong, it tends to be rationality, Bayesian statistics and economics, elsewhere it might be coding, maths, the scientific method, classic literature, history, foreign languages, philosophy, you name it.
And you can always imagine a scenario where one of these things could come in handy. But in terms of what’s universally useful, I can hardly think of anything beyond reading/writing and elementary school maths, that’s it. It makes no economic sense to drill so much knowledge into people’s heads; division of labor is like the whole point of civilization.
It’s also morally wrong to put people through needless suffering. School is a waste, or rather theft, of youthful time. I wish I had played more video games and hung out with friends more. I wish I scored lower on all the exams. If your country’s children speak 4 languages and rank top 5 in PISA tests, that’s nothing to boast about. I waited for the day when all the misery would make sense; that day never came. The same is happening to your kids.
Education is like code—the less the better; strip down to the bare essentials and discard the rest.
Edit: Sorry for the emotion-laden language, the comment turned into a rant half-way through. Just something that has affected me personally.
You make a very strong point that I think I can wholly agree with, but I think there is more here we have to examine.
It’s sometimes said that the purpose of public education is to create the public good of an informed populace (sometimes, “fascism-resistant voters”. A more realpolitic way of putting it is “a population who will perpetuate the state”, this is good exactly when the state is good). So they teach us literature and history and hope that this will create a cultural medium whose constituents can communicate well and never repeat their civilization’s past mistakes. If it works, the benefits to the commons are immeasurable.
There isn’t an obvious upper bound of curriculum size where enriching this commons would necessarily stop being profitable. The returns on sophistication of a well designed interchange system are greater than linear on the specification size of the system.
It might not be well designed. I don’t remember seeing anything about economics or law (or even, hell, driving) in the public curriculum, and I think that might be the real problem here. It’s not that they teach too much, it’s that they don’t understand what kind of things a creator of the public good of a good public is supposed to be teaching.
I disagree on multiple dimensions:
First, let’s get disagreements about values out of the way: I hate the term “brainwashing” since it’s virtually indistinguishable from “teaching”, the only difference being the intent of the speaker (we’re teaching our kids liberal democratic values while the other tribe is brainwashing their kids with Marxism). But to the extent “brainwashing” has a useful definition at all, creating “a population who will perpetuate the state” would be it. In my view, if our civilization can’t survive without tormenting children with years upon years of conditioning, it probably shouldn’t.
Second, I’m very skeptical about this model of a self-perpetuating society. So “they” teach us literature and history? Who’s “they”? Group selectionism doesn’t work; there is no reason to assume that memes good at perpetuating themselves would also be good at perpetuating the civilization they find themselves in. I think it’s likely that people in charge of framing the school curriculum are biased towards holding those subjects in high regard that they’ve been taught in school themselves (sunken cost fallacy, prestige signaling), thus becoming vehicles for meme spread. I don’t see any incentive for any education board member to stop, think and analyze what will perpetuate the government they’re a part of.
I also very much doubt the efficacy of such education/brainwashing at manipulating citizens into perpetuating the state. In my experience, reverse psychology and tribalism are much better methods for this purpose than straightforward indoctrination, particularly with people in their rebellious youth. The classroom, frequently associated with boredom and monotony, is among the worst environments to apply these methods. There is no faster way to create an atheist out of a child than sending him through mandatory Bible study classes; and no faster way to create a libertarian than to make him memorize Das Kapital.
Lastly, the bulk of today’s actual school curriculum is neutral with respect to perpetuating our society—maths, physics, chemistry, biology, foreign languages, even most classical literature are apolitical. So even setting the issue of “civilizational propagation” aside, there is still enormous potential for optimization.
It’s hard not to, when you don’t know what people are going to end up doing. If you know that the son of the blacksmith is going to be a blacksmith, the problem gets much simpler.
It’s easy to prepare kids to become anything. Just teach what’s universally useful.
It’s impossible to prepare kids to become everything. Polymaths stopped being viable two centuries ago.
There is a huge difference between union and intersection of sets.
Why? It’s not obvious that that is better than teaching a bit of everything. For instance, if 10% of jobs need a little bit of geography, then having only candidates who know nothing about geography is going to be a disadvantage to those employers.
And thus, knowing geography becomes a comparative advantage to those who choose to study it. Why should the rest of us care?
Because people not knowing geography could be a disadvantage to employERs as well as employees. A minimal education system could be below the economic optimum.
This is like saying we need the government to mandate apple production, because without apples we might become malnourished which is bad. Why can’t the market solve the problem more efficiently? Where’s the coordination failure?
The market can’t solve (high school) education because education is mostly public.