This argument may hold for things like languages or thinking habits, or other skills that take root early, but having tackled an undergrad maths syllabus at both ages 18 and 28, I’ve found an adult work ethic beats the pants off youthful ‘plasticity’ any day of the week. Any skillset mandatory to a specialised vocation will probably mostly be learned well into adulthood anyway.
Why can’t we have both? A plasticity pill wouldn’t inherently destroy your work ethic. Having this useful ability, without the crippling shortcomings of youth (mostly various forms of inexperience, not to mention developmental/hormonal distractions) would be one hell of a combination.
Well, at the moment we can’t have both because brain plasticity pills don’t currently exist. If someone asked me tomorrow to optimise the education system, “educate people at the point in their lives when that education would be most useful to them” would come considerably higher up the list than “invent brain plasticity pill”.
The win from skilled use of childhood plasticity maxes out at around 15 well-filled years of highly plastic learning. The win from a pill maxes out at a lifetime thereof. So if a pill were close to technologically plausible, it would be a much better use of effort.
Assuming it’s possible to get the ‘plasticity’ gains without a significant trade-off. Childhood brains are so flexible because they’re still developing; concordantly they don’t have a fully developed set of cognitive skills.
By way of analogy, concrete is very flexible in its infancy and very rigid in its adulthood. The usefulness it possesses when rigid is based on how well its flexibility is utilised early on. If you come up with a method to fine-tune the superstructure of a building on the fly later on in its lifetime, cool beans. If all you come up with is a way to revert the whole thing to unset concrete, I’d rather focus on getting the building right first time.
Childhood brains are so flexible because they’re still developing
Hmm. I don’t trust that. It sounds too much like a just-so story.
What I know is that most species have a learning-filled childhood followed by an adulthood with little to learn.
I also know that evolution hates waste—it will turn a feature off if it isn’t used. So if anything the relatively high human ability to learn in adulthood looks to me like neoteny.
Concrete is a poor analogy—rigidity is not an advantage to adult humans!
I think rigidity fits well into the Aristotelian framework.
Too rigid and you hold fast to wrong ideas. Too plastic and you waste mental effort challenging truths that should have been established.
Yes, we don’t want to be too rigid in our beliefs, but there’s a high opportunity cost to mental thought. I’ve run into too many hippies who are “open-minded” about whether or not 1=1. We have to internalize some beliefs as true to focus on other things.
I worry some in this community are so used to getting others to reconsider false beliefs they forget there’s sometimes a good reason to sometimes have rigid beliefs. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
By the way, if I recall correctly, in the proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, moss was originally intended to be a good thing, but most people now take it to be a bad thing.
Re: rigidity and humans, I suspect you would find it very difficult if you continued to adjust your speech patterns to accomodate every irregular use of the English language you’d heard since the day you were born. Your ability to rapidly learn language stopped for a reason. In that sense, rigidity is pretty advantageous.
I suspect you would find it very difficult if you continued to adjust your speech patterns to accomodate every irregular use of the English language you’d heard since the day you were born. Your ability to rapidly learn language stopped for a reason.
I’m tempted to call this a just-not-so story.
Not only do I disagree with the general point (about “rigidity” being advantageous), but my sense is that language is probably one of the worst examples you could have used to support this position.
It strikes me as wrong on at least 4 different levels, which I shall list in increasing order of importance:
(1) I don’t think it would be particularly difficult at all. (I.e. I see no advantage in the loss of linguistic ability.)
(2) People probably do continue to adjust their speech patterns throughout their lives.
(3) Children do not “accommodate every irregular use [they have] heard since the day [they] were born”. Instead, their language use develops according to systematic rules.
(4) There is a strong prior against the loss of an ability being an adaptation—by default, a better explanation is that there was insufficient selection pressure for the ability to be maintained (since abilities are usually costly).
So, unless you’re basing this on large amounts of data that I don’t know about, I feel obliged to wag my finger here.
I’m tempted to agree. When adults spend as much time focussed on learning to speak a language as children do they learn faster.
I read a good, if not new, article about this recently. It’s relevant to a couple posts in this thread, but I figured this was as good a place to insert it as any.
I’m happy to concede the point on childhood learning, but maintain that educational reform is significantly more implementable than brain plasticity pills.
I’m happy to concede the point on childhood learning, but maintain that educational reform is significantly more implementable than brain plasticity pills.
Absolutely. Plain plasticity does very little without a quality learning environment in place. (And a quality learning environment is one of the most powerful ways of fostering brain plasticity!)
TL;DR: As people get older, it’s common for people to acquire responsibilities that make it hard to focus on school (ex: kids, elderly parents). Fairly high confidence that this is a big factor in community college grades.
As someone whose parent teaches basic math at community college, and who attended community college for 2 years myself (before transferring)...
I have absolutely seen some people pick up these skills late. The work ethic & directedness of community college high-achievers is often notably better than that of people in their late teens.
They also usually have healthier attitudes around failure (relative to the high-achieving teens), which sometimes makes them better at recovering from an early bad grade. Relatedly, the UCs say their CC transfers have much lower drop-out rates.
One major “weakness” I can think of, is that adults are probably going in fully-cognizant that school feels like an “artificial environment.” Some kids manage to not notice this until grad school.
From my mom’s work, I know that the grading distribution in high-school-remedial math classes is basically bimodal: “A”s and “F”s, split almost 50-50.
The #1 reason my mom cites for this split, is probably a responsibilities and life-phase difference?
A lot of working class adults are incredibly busy. Many are under more stress and strain than they can handle, at least some of the time. (The really unlucky ones, are under more strain than they can really handle basically all of the time, but those are less likely to try to go to community college.)
If someone is holding down a part-time job, doesn’t have a lot in savings, is married, is taking care of a kid, and is caring for their elderly mother? That basically means a high load of ambient stress and triage, and also having 5 different avenues for random high-priority urgent crises (ex: health problems involving any of these) to bump school out of the prioritization matrix.
(Notably, “early achievers” on the child-having front usually also end up a bit crippled academically. I think that’s another point in favor of “life phase” or “ambient responsibility load” theory being a big deal here, in a way that competes with or even cannibalizes academic focus/achievement.)
My take-away is that if you have a bunch in savings, and don’t have a kid, then my bet is that learning a lot of curricula late is likely to not be a problem. Might actually be kinda fun?
But if you’re instead juggling a dozen other life responsibilities, then God help you. If your class has tight deadlines, you may have to conduct a whole lot of triage to make it work.
Some of the other F-grade feed-ins, for completion’s sake...
A lot of people went to a bad high school. Some have learned helplessness, and don’t know how to study. Saw the occasional blatant cheating habit, too.
Community colleges know this, and offer some courses that are basically “How to study”
So much of many middle-class cultures is just hammering “academics matter” and “advice on how to study or network” into your brain. Most middle-class students still manage to miss the memo on 1-2 key study skills or resources, though. Maybe everyone should go to “how to study” class…
Personally? As a teen, I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I couldn’t stand sounding like an idiot. Might have saved myself some time, if I’d learned how to do that earlier.
Nobody uses office-hours enough.
At worst, it’s free tutoring. At best, it’s socially motivating and now the teacher feels personally invested in your story and success.
“High-achievers who turned an early D into an A” are frequently office-hour junkies.
Someone with a big family crisis, is probably still screwed even if they go to office hours. Past some threshold, people should just take a W.
A few people just genuinely can’t do math, in a “it doesn’t fit in their brain” kind of way
My mom thinks this exists, but only accounts for <1%
Come to think of it, beating the pants off youthful plasticity accounted for why I didn’t do a lot of studying in college.
More seriously: yeah, IME the idea that 18-year-olds are more able to learn than 30-year-olds is mostly a socially constructed self-fulfilling prophecy.
I often think that more of pre-adult education should be about teaching people how to put effort into things, and a good work ethic, rather than just facts.
A thousand THIS. Learning the same or similar things 30+ is far easier, as I don’t only have a better work ethic, but I also have the practical experience to actually understand theoretical things that looked bullshit to me when I was 20.
Definitely practice, experience should be given before teaching theory, not after. Work on something, follow rules, also experiment with not following rules and fuck a bit up, and then people get curious and actually listen when you tell them why exactly the rules work.
It differs per country, but I think most ones the worst thing about education as a global average is that the majority of it is simply classification. Our average music class was preparing for tests like “name 5 brass instruments”. The whole idea is that you know such categories, classes, like how brass instruments are a subset of aerophones and consist of two subsets, valve brass and sliding brass and for extra points you can also call them labrosones. This is more than just the teachers password, it is the whole philosopy that knowledge equals classification of words while you have no idea how a mellophone sounds… I think this is why I hated education, this is its worst part. However I have heard that in English-speaking countries this kind of thing is less bad, there is more hands-on experience going on.
This argument may hold for things like languages or thinking habits, or other skills that take root early, but having tackled an undergrad maths syllabus at both ages 18 and 28, I’ve found an adult work ethic beats the pants off youthful ‘plasticity’ any day of the week. Any skillset mandatory to a specialised vocation will probably mostly be learned well into adulthood anyway.
Why can’t we have both? A plasticity pill wouldn’t inherently destroy your work ethic. Having this useful ability, without the crippling shortcomings of youth (mostly various forms of inexperience, not to mention developmental/hormonal distractions) would be one hell of a combination.
Well, at the moment we can’t have both because brain plasticity pills don’t currently exist. If someone asked me tomorrow to optimise the education system, “educate people at the point in their lives when that education would be most useful to them” would come considerably higher up the list than “invent brain plasticity pill”.
The win from skilled use of childhood plasticity maxes out at around 15 well-filled years of highly plastic learning. The win from a pill maxes out at a lifetime thereof. So if a pill were close to technologically plausible, it would be a much better use of effort.
Assuming it’s possible to get the ‘plasticity’ gains without a significant trade-off. Childhood brains are so flexible because they’re still developing; concordantly they don’t have a fully developed set of cognitive skills.
By way of analogy, concrete is very flexible in its infancy and very rigid in its adulthood. The usefulness it possesses when rigid is based on how well its flexibility is utilised early on. If you come up with a method to fine-tune the superstructure of a building on the fly later on in its lifetime, cool beans. If all you come up with is a way to revert the whole thing to unset concrete, I’d rather focus on getting the building right first time.
Hmm. I don’t trust that. It sounds too much like a just-so story.
What I know is that most species have a learning-filled childhood followed by an adulthood with little to learn.
I also know that evolution hates waste—it will turn a feature off if it isn’t used. So if anything the relatively high human ability to learn in adulthood looks to me like neoteny.
Concrete is a poor analogy—rigidity is not an advantage to adult humans!
I think rigidity fits well into the Aristotelian framework.
Too rigid and you hold fast to wrong ideas. Too plastic and you waste mental effort challenging truths that should have been established.
Yes, we don’t want to be too rigid in our beliefs, but there’s a high opportunity cost to mental thought. I’ve run into too many hippies who are “open-minded” about whether or not 1=1. We have to internalize some beliefs as true to focus on other things.
I worry some in this community are so used to getting others to reconsider false beliefs they forget there’s sometimes a good reason to sometimes have rigid beliefs. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
By the way, if I recall correctly, in the proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, moss was originally intended to be a good thing, but most people now take it to be a bad thing.
In what way does it sound like a just-so story?
Re: rigidity and humans, I suspect you would find it very difficult if you continued to adjust your speech patterns to accomodate every irregular use of the English language you’d heard since the day you were born. Your ability to rapidly learn language stopped for a reason. In that sense, rigidity is pretty advantageous.
I’m tempted to call this a just-not-so story.
Not only do I disagree with the general point (about “rigidity” being advantageous), but my sense is that language is probably one of the worst examples you could have used to support this position.
It strikes me as wrong on at least 4 different levels, which I shall list in increasing order of importance:
(1) I don’t think it would be particularly difficult at all. (I.e. I see no advantage in the loss of linguistic ability.)
(2) People probably do continue to adjust their speech patterns throughout their lives.
(3) Children do not “accommodate every irregular use [they have] heard since the day [they] were born”. Instead, their language use develops according to systematic rules.
(4) There is a strong prior against the loss of an ability being an adaptation—by default, a better explanation is that there was insufficient selection pressure for the ability to be maintained (since abilities are usually costly).
So, unless you’re basing this on large amounts of data that I don’t know about, I feel obliged to wag my finger here.
I’m tempted to agree. When adults spend as much time focussed on learning to speak a language as children do they learn faster.
I don’t quite agree with this, at least as a general rule. (Red King, etc.)
I read a good, if not new, article about this recently. It’s relevant to a couple posts in this thread, but I figured this was as good a place to insert it as any.
I’m happy to concede the point on childhood learning, but maintain that educational reform is significantly more implementable than brain plasticity pills.
Absolutely. Plain plasticity does very little without a quality learning environment in place. (And a quality learning environment is one of the most powerful ways of fostering brain plasticity!)
TL;DR: As people get older, it’s common for people to acquire responsibilities that make it hard to focus on school (ex: kids, elderly parents). Fairly high confidence that this is a big factor in community college grades.
As someone whose parent teaches basic math at community college, and who attended community college for 2 years myself (before transferring)...
I have absolutely seen some people pick up these skills late. The work ethic & directedness of community college high-achievers is often notably better than that of people in their late teens.
They also usually have healthier attitudes around failure (relative to the high-achieving teens), which sometimes makes them better at recovering from an early bad grade. Relatedly, the UCs say their CC transfers have much lower drop-out rates.
One major “weakness” I can think of, is that adults are probably going in fully-cognizant that school feels like an “artificial environment.” Some kids manage to not notice this until grad school.
From my mom’s work, I know that the grading distribution in high-school-remedial math classes is basically bimodal: “A”s and “F”s, split almost 50-50.
The #1 reason my mom cites for this split, is probably a responsibilities and life-phase difference?
A lot of working class adults are incredibly busy. Many are under more stress and strain than they can handle, at least some of the time. (The really unlucky ones, are under more strain than they can really handle basically all of the time, but those are less likely to try to go to community college.)
If someone is holding down a part-time job, doesn’t have a lot in savings, is married, is taking care of a kid, and is caring for their elderly mother? That basically means a high load of ambient stress and triage, and also having 5 different avenues for random high-priority urgent crises (ex: health problems involving any of these) to bump school out of the prioritization matrix.
(Notably, “early achievers” on the child-having front usually also end up a bit crippled academically. I think that’s another point in favor of “life phase” or “ambient responsibility load” theory being a big deal here, in a way that competes with or even cannibalizes academic focus/achievement.)
My take-away is that if you have a bunch in savings, and don’t have a kid, then my bet is that learning a lot of curricula late is likely to not be a problem. Might actually be kinda fun?
But if you’re instead juggling a dozen other life responsibilities, then God help you. If your class has tight deadlines, you may have to conduct a whole lot of triage to make it work.
Some of the other F-grade feed-ins, for completion’s sake...
A lot of people went to a bad high school. Some have learned helplessness, and don’t know how to study. Saw the occasional blatant cheating habit, too.
Community colleges know this, and offer some courses that are basically “How to study”
So much of many middle-class cultures is just hammering “academics matter” and “advice on how to study or network” into your brain. Most middle-class students still manage to miss the memo on 1-2 key study skills or resources, though. Maybe everyone should go to “how to study” class…
Personally? As a teen, I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I couldn’t stand sounding like an idiot. Might have saved myself some time, if I’d learned how to do that earlier.
Nobody uses office-hours enough.
At worst, it’s free tutoring. At best, it’s socially motivating and now the teacher feels personally invested in your story and success.
“High-achievers who turned an early D into an A” are frequently office-hour junkies.
Someone with a big family crisis, is probably still screwed even if they go to office hours. Past some threshold, people should just take a W.
A few people just genuinely can’t do math, in a “it doesn’t fit in their brain” kind of way
My mom thinks this exists, but only accounts for <1%
Come to think of it, beating the pants off youthful plasticity accounted for why I didn’t do a lot of studying in college.
More seriously: yeah, IME the idea that 18-year-olds are more able to learn than 30-year-olds is mostly a socially constructed self-fulfilling prophecy.
I often think that more of pre-adult education should be about teaching people how to put effort into things, and a good work ethic, rather than just facts.
A thousand THIS. Learning the same or similar things 30+ is far easier, as I don’t only have a better work ethic, but I also have the practical experience to actually understand theoretical things that looked bullshit to me when I was 20.
Definitely practice, experience should be given before teaching theory, not after. Work on something, follow rules, also experiment with not following rules and fuck a bit up, and then people get curious and actually listen when you tell them why exactly the rules work.
It differs per country, but I think most ones the worst thing about education as a global average is that the majority of it is simply classification. Our average music class was preparing for tests like “name 5 brass instruments”. The whole idea is that you know such categories, classes, like how brass instruments are a subset of aerophones and consist of two subsets, valve brass and sliding brass and for extra points you can also call them labrosones. This is more than just the teachers password, it is the whole philosopy that knowledge equals classification of words while you have no idea how a mellophone sounds… I think this is why I hated education, this is its worst part. However I have heard that in English-speaking countries this kind of thing is less bad, there is more hands-on experience going on.