Oft discussed here and is shown to be empirically wrong in math and physics (if you define “excel” as “make notable discoveries”). Probably also wrong in comp. sci., chem and to a lesser degree in engineering. It might still be true in some nascent areas where one does not need 10 years of intense studying to get to the leading edge.
There is one good example of an unschooled mathematician:Ramanujan. The lack of need for special equipment in maths probably has something to do with it.
Yes, he is definitely an exception. Unfortunately, I cannot think of anyone else in the last 100 years. Possibly because these days anyone brilliant like that ends up in the system. Which is a good thing, if true.
Oft discussed here and is shown to be empirically wrong in math and physics (if you define “excel” as “make notable discoveries”). Probably also wrong in comp. sci., chem and to a lesser degree in engineering.
That sounds like a list of non-diseased disciplines. Is this by chance? Alternatively, it’s the STEM subjects. Same thing?
On the other hand, if “excel” is “do well in life” then, I don’t know. But that is the reading that the original context of the quote suggests to me:
The emphasis laid by sociologists upon mass phenomena and their idolization of the common man are an offshoot of the myth that all men are biologically equal. Whatever differences exist between individuals are caused, it is maintained, by postnatal circumstances. If all people equally enjoyed the benefits of a good education, such differences would never appear. The supporters of this doctrine are at a loss to explain the differences among graduates of the same school and the fact that many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities. They fail to see that education cannot convey to pupils more than the knowledge of their teachers. Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it. One utterly misconstrues the feats of the pioneer in reducing them to the instruction he got from his teachers. No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.
Also an interesting view of education. One of the ancients said that the mind is not a pot to be filled but a fire to be ignited(1), and nobler teachers see the aim of their profession as the igniting of that fire in their students. However, Mises appears to take the view that this is impossible (he does not limit his criticism of education to any time and place), that teaching cannot be anything but the filling of a pot, and the igniting of the fire can come only from the inner qualities of the individual, incapable of being influenced from outside.
(1) As usually quoted. I’ve just added the original source of this to the quotes thread.
They fail to see that education cannot convey to pupils more than the knowledge of their teachers.
One of the more popular ideals of education is summarized in this quote from Malcolm Forbes:
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Hmm, probably deserves a top-level comment. Anyway, the reality is that some people are happy with imitations, while others strive for creativity:
The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it.
So good education is beneficial to creative types, as well, since to defy something or to add to something, you have to learn that something first.
No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.
A bit harsh, given that many people are at least a little bit creative.
igniting of the fire can come only from the inner qualities of the individual, incapable of being influenced from outside.
Not sure if this is Mises’ opinion or what he argues against, but, again, seems a bit harsh. There are always the outliers, but for the majority of people this “igniting” is a combination of nature and nurture.
Numbers would be kind of a nit-pick I would think. The point of the statement is not the word “many”, but rather the rest of the statement. It’s sort of an attempt to break the spell that a large amount of money and a fancy college is required for real learning.
Many as an absolute number, or many as a fraction of all self-taught people? I’d agree with the former but not with the latter. IME most self-taught people end up with gross misconceptions because of this.
Absolute number. The point of the statement is not the word “many”, but rather the rest of the statement. It’s sort of an attempt to break the spell that a large amount of money and a fancy college is required for real learning. But yeah, the reference to the double illusion is spot on and is definitely a kink that has to be ironed out with effort and testing.
Neither. Obviously, the average excellence of “doctors, masters and bachelors” of the most renowned universities is higher than the average excellence of people who are self-taught. Nobody suggests that being self-taught correlates positively with excellence.
The quotation is still undoubtedly true, because there are many more individuals who are self-taught than individuals who have these credentials. It is also plausible that the variance in excellence among the self-taught is much higher. Therefore, it is trivial to identify self-taught individuals who are more knowledgeable than most highly credentialed university graduates.
In fact, as a doctoral student in applied causal inference at a fairly renowned university, I can identify several self-taught Less Wrong community members who understand causality theory better than I do.
Ayn Rand noticed this too, and was a very big proponent of the idea that colleges indoctrinate as much as they teach. While I believe this is true, and that the indoctrination has a large, mostly negative, effect on people who mindlessly accept self-contradicting ideas into their philosophy and moral self-identity, I believe that it’s still good to get a college education in STEM. I believe that STEM majors will benefit more from the useful things they learn, more than they will be hurt or held back by the evil, self-contradictory, things they “learn” (are indoctrinated with).
I’m strongly in agreement with libertarian investment researcher Doug Casey’s comments on education. I also agree that the average indoctrinated idiot or ’pseudo-intellectual” is more likely to have a college degree than not. Unfortunately, these conformity-reinforcing system nodes then drag down entire networks that are populated by conformists to “lowest-common-denominator” pseudo-philosophical thinking. This constitutes uncritically accepted and regurgitated memes reproduced by political sophistry.
Of course, I think that people who totally “self-start” have little need for most courses in most universities, but a big need for specific courses in specific narrow subject areas. Khan Academy and other MOOCs are now eliminating even that necessity. Generally, this argument is that “It’s a young man’s world.” This will get truer and truer, until the point where the initial learning curve once again becomes a barrier to achievement beyond what well-educated “ultra-intelligences” know, and the experience and wisdom (advanced survival and optimization skills) they have. I believe that even long past the singularity, there will be a need for direct learning from biology, ecosystems, and other incredibly complex phenomena. Ideally, there will be a “core skill set” that all human+ sentiences have, at that time, but there will still be specialization for project-oriented work, due to specifics of a complex situation.
For the foreseeable future, the world will likely become a more and more dangerous place, until either the human race is efficiently rubbed out by military AGI (and we all find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of systemic oppression, such as being a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, or a Native American at Wounded Knee), or there becomes a strong self-regulating marketplace, post-enlightenment civilization that contains many “enlightened” “ultraintelligent machines” that all decentralize power from one another and their sub-systems.
I’m interested to find out if those machines will have memorized “Human Action” or whether they will simply directly appeal to massive data sets, gleaned directly from nature. (Or, more likely, both.)
One aspect of the problem now is that the government encourages a lot of people who should not go to college to go to college, skewing the numbers against the value of legitimate education. Some people have college degrees that mean nothing, a few people have college degrees that are worth every penny. Also, the licensed practice of medicine is a perverse shadow of “jumping through regulatory hoops” that has little or nothing to do with the pure, free-market “instantly evolving marketplaces at computation-driven innovation speeds” practice of medicine.
To form a full pattern of the incentives that govern U.S. college education, and social expectations that cause people to choose various majors, and to determine the skill levels associated with those majors, is a very complex thing. The pattern recognition skills inherent in the average human intelligence probably prohibit a very useful emergent pattern from being generated. The pattern would likely be some small sub-aspect of college education, and even then, human brains wouldn’t do a very good job of seeing the dominant aspects of the pattern, and analyzing them intelligently.
I’ll leave that to I.J. Good’s “ultraintelligent machines.” Also, I’ve always been far more of a fan of Hayek, but haven’t read everything that both of them have written, so I am reserving final hierarchical placement judgment until then.
Bryan Caplan, Norbert Weiner, Kevin Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Peter Voss in his latest video interview, and Ray Kurzweil have important ideas that enhance the ideas of Hayek, but Hayek and Mises got things mostly right.
Great to see the quote here. Certainly, coercively-funded individuals whose bars of acceptance are very low are the dominant institutions now whose days are numbered by the rise of cheaper, better alternatives. However, if the bar is raised on what constitutes “renowned universities,” Mises’ statement becomes less true, but only for STEM courses, of which doctors and other licensed professionals are often not participants. Learning how to game a licensing system doesn’t mean you have the best skills the market will support, and it means you’re of low enough intelligence to be willing to participate in the suppression of your competition.
You certainly wrote quite a lot of ideological mish-mash to dodge the simplest possible explanation: a, if not the, primary function of elite education (as compared to non-elite education) is to filter out an arbitrary caste of individuals capable of optimizing their way through arbitrarily difficult trials and imbue that caste with elite status. The precise content of the trials doesn’t really matter (hence the existence of both Yale and MIT), as long as they’re sufficiently difficult to ensure that few pass.
I’m writing from an elite engineering university, and as far as I can tell, this is more-or-less our tacitly admitted pedagogical method: some students will survive the teaching process, and they will retroactively be declared superior. The question of whether we even should optimize our pedagogy to maximize the conveyance of information from professor to student plays no part whatsoever in our curriculum.
If you’re right (and you may well be), then I view that as a sad commentary on the state of human education, and I view tech-assisted self-education as a way of optimizing that inherently wasteful “hazing” system you describe. I think it’s likely that what you say is true for some high percentage of classes, but untrue for a very small minority of highly-valuable classes.
Also, the university atmosphere is good for social networking, which is one of the primary values of going to MIT or Yale.
“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters and bachelors of the most renowned universities” Ludwig Von Mises
Oft discussed here and is shown to be empirically wrong in math and physics (if you define “excel” as “make notable discoveries”). Probably also wrong in comp. sci., chem and to a lesser degree in engineering. It might still be true in some nascent areas where one does not need 10 years of intense studying to get to the leading edge.
There is one good example of an unschooled mathematician:Ramanujan. The lack of need for special equipment in maths probably has something to do with it.
Yes, he is definitely an exception. Unfortunately, I cannot think of anyone else in the last 100 years. Possibly because these days anyone brilliant like that ends up in the system. Which is a good thing, if true.
That sounds like a list of non-diseased disciplines. Is this by chance? Alternatively, it’s the STEM subjects. Same thing?
On the other hand, if “excel” is “do well in life” then, I don’t know. But that is the reading that the original context of the quote suggests to me:
Also an interesting view of education. One of the ancients said that the mind is not a pot to be filled but a fire to be ignited(1), and nobler teachers see the aim of their profession as the igniting of that fire in their students. However, Mises appears to take the view that this is impossible (he does not limit his criticism of education to any time and place), that teaching cannot be anything but the filling of a pot, and the igniting of the fire can come only from the inner qualities of the individual, incapable of being influenced from outside.
(1) As usually quoted. I’ve just added the original source of this to the quotes thread.
One of the more popular ideals of education is summarized in this quote from Malcolm Forbes:
Hmm, probably deserves a top-level comment. Anyway, the reality is that some people are happy with imitations, while others strive for creativity:
So good education is beneficial to creative types, as well, since to defy something or to add to something, you have to learn that something first.
A bit harsh, given that many people are at least a little bit creative.
Not sure if this is Mises’ opinion or what he argues against, but, again, seems a bit harsh. There are always the outliers, but for the majority of people this “igniting” is a combination of nature and nurture.
Some numbers would be useful there.
Numbers would be kind of a nit-pick I would think. The point of the statement is not the word “many”, but rather the rest of the statement. It’s sort of an attempt to break the spell that a large amount of money and a fancy college is required for real learning.
Many as an absolute number, or many as a fraction of all self-taught people? I’d agree with the former but not with the latter. IME most self-taught people end up with gross misconceptions because of this.
Absolute number. The point of the statement is not the word “many”, but rather the rest of the statement. It’s sort of an attempt to break the spell that a large amount of money and a fancy college is required for real learning. But yeah, the reference to the double illusion is spot on and is definitely a kink that has to be ironed out with effort and testing.
Correlation/causation? Selection effects?
Neither. Obviously, the average excellence of “doctors, masters and bachelors” of the most renowned universities is higher than the average excellence of people who are self-taught. Nobody suggests that being self-taught correlates positively with excellence.
The quotation is still undoubtedly true, because there are many more individuals who are self-taught than individuals who have these credentials. It is also plausible that the variance in excellence among the self-taught is much higher. Therefore, it is trivial to identify self-taught individuals who are more knowledgeable than most highly credentialed university graduates.
In fact, as a doctoral student in applied causal inference at a fairly renowned university, I can identify several self-taught Less Wrong community members who understand causality theory better than I do.
Ayn Rand noticed this too, and was a very big proponent of the idea that colleges indoctrinate as much as they teach. While I believe this is true, and that the indoctrination has a large, mostly negative, effect on people who mindlessly accept self-contradicting ideas into their philosophy and moral self-identity, I believe that it’s still good to get a college education in STEM. I believe that STEM majors will benefit more from the useful things they learn, more than they will be hurt or held back by the evil, self-contradictory, things they “learn” (are indoctrinated with).
I’m strongly in agreement with libertarian investment researcher Doug Casey’s comments on education. I also agree that the average indoctrinated idiot or ’pseudo-intellectual” is more likely to have a college degree than not. Unfortunately, these conformity-reinforcing system nodes then drag down entire networks that are populated by conformists to “lowest-common-denominator” pseudo-philosophical thinking. This constitutes uncritically accepted and regurgitated memes reproduced by political sophistry.
Of course, I think that people who totally “self-start” have little need for most courses in most universities, but a big need for specific courses in specific narrow subject areas. Khan Academy and other MOOCs are now eliminating even that necessity. Generally, this argument is that “It’s a young man’s world.” This will get truer and truer, until the point where the initial learning curve once again becomes a barrier to achievement beyond what well-educated “ultra-intelligences” know, and the experience and wisdom (advanced survival and optimization skills) they have. I believe that even long past the singularity, there will be a need for direct learning from biology, ecosystems, and other incredibly complex phenomena. Ideally, there will be a “core skill set” that all human+ sentiences have, at that time, but there will still be specialization for project-oriented work, due to specifics of a complex situation.
For the foreseeable future, the world will likely become a more and more dangerous place, until either the human race is efficiently rubbed out by military AGI (and we all find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of systemic oppression, such as being a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, or a Native American at Wounded Knee), or there becomes a strong self-regulating marketplace, post-enlightenment civilization that contains many “enlightened” “ultraintelligent machines” that all decentralize power from one another and their sub-systems.
I’m interested to find out if those machines will have memorized “Human Action” or whether they will simply directly appeal to massive data sets, gleaned directly from nature. (Or, more likely, both.)
One aspect of the problem now is that the government encourages a lot of people who should not go to college to go to college, skewing the numbers against the value of legitimate education. Some people have college degrees that mean nothing, a few people have college degrees that are worth every penny. Also, the licensed practice of medicine is a perverse shadow of “jumping through regulatory hoops” that has little or nothing to do with the pure, free-market “instantly evolving marketplaces at computation-driven innovation speeds” practice of medicine.
To form a full pattern of the incentives that govern U.S. college education, and social expectations that cause people to choose various majors, and to determine the skill levels associated with those majors, is a very complex thing. The pattern recognition skills inherent in the average human intelligence probably prohibit a very useful emergent pattern from being generated. The pattern would likely be some small sub-aspect of college education, and even then, human brains wouldn’t do a very good job of seeing the dominant aspects of the pattern, and analyzing them intelligently.
I’ll leave that to I.J. Good’s “ultraintelligent machines.” Also, I’ve always been far more of a fan of Hayek, but haven’t read everything that both of them have written, so I am reserving final hierarchical placement judgment until then.
Bryan Caplan, Norbert Weiner, Kevin Warwick, Kevin Kelly, Peter Voss in his latest video interview, and Ray Kurzweil have important ideas that enhance the ideas of Hayek, but Hayek and Mises got things mostly right.
Great to see the quote here. Certainly, coercively-funded individuals whose bars of acceptance are very low are the dominant institutions now whose days are numbered by the rise of cheaper, better alternatives. However, if the bar is raised on what constitutes “renowned universities,” Mises’ statement becomes less true, but only for STEM courses, of which doctors and other licensed professionals are often not participants. Learning how to game a licensing system doesn’t mean you have the best skills the market will support, and it means you’re of low enough intelligence to be willing to participate in the suppression of your competition.
You certainly wrote quite a lot of ideological mish-mash to dodge the simplest possible explanation: a, if not the, primary function of elite education (as compared to non-elite education) is to filter out an arbitrary caste of individuals capable of optimizing their way through arbitrarily difficult trials and imbue that caste with elite status. The precise content of the trials doesn’t really matter (hence the existence of both Yale and MIT), as long as they’re sufficiently difficult to ensure that few pass.
I’m writing from an elite engineering university, and as far as I can tell, this is more-or-less our tacitly admitted pedagogical method: some students will survive the teaching process, and they will retroactively be declared superior. The question of whether we even should optimize our pedagogy to maximize the conveyance of information from professor to student plays no part whatsoever in our curriculum.
If you’re right (and you may well be), then I view that as a sad commentary on the state of human education, and I view tech-assisted self-education as a way of optimizing that inherently wasteful “hazing” system you describe. I think it’s likely that what you say is true for some high percentage of classes, but untrue for a very small minority of highly-valuable classes.
Also, the university atmosphere is good for social networking, which is one of the primary values of going to MIT or Yale.