I’m reminded of a couple of students at a German university last year who studied all the material by dividing up the classes between them and exchanging notes, took all the exams, and passed in a few months. The university then turned around and sued them for studying too fast.
It is not in a University’s interests to do a good job. It’s like any other company: The aim is to extract the most $$$ from you while they give up the least value in return.
In highly competitive markets this leads to fairly marginal profits. But formal education is not a competitive market. Not at all. Very tightly regulated.
The competition for education comes almost entirely around costs for most people. They view education as an expense, not as an investment—which is quite reasonable when you consider the likely quality they’re going to get—and aim to minimise that expense. Offer people a better education and the majority of them won’t be willing to pay much for it, offer them a cheaper education though, or a faster one—which amounts to more or less the same thing....
That’s the financial side of things anyway, and one of the reasons I think your idea’s just never going to happen.
#
Assorted
One would determine what to learn based on statistical studies of what elements are, by and large, most desired by employers of/predictors of professional success in a certain field you want to work in.
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t think this data’s going to be available or reliable. Google did their own research on this, which suggests to me that the data wasn’t available when they looked for it elsewhere. One thing’s just that everyone’s going to record things slightly differently—there’s not an industry standard for measuring this sort of stuff that I’m aware of. The other is that most places are not particularly rational about their HR procedures—there are a set of skills that go into even the basic recording of data that I’d not expect them to have. I’d expect it to be more like they sit there with a sheet of paper that they’re marking 1-10 based on their subjective opinion of your answer to a question. That’s probably the extent of any data most people will be expected to generate and, perhaps, keep.
In the case of desired by employers I suspect you might find the data was actually contradictory to predictors of success a lot of the time too. I know, when I go for interviews, I tone down a lot of the qualities that let me do things easily—the corollary of don’t dress better than the boss is don’t act smarter/more skilled than the boss—most people like to hire people they can use as tools for their own success, not colleagues who they have to work with. Especially considering lots of economic behaviour seems to be self-justifying/rent-seeking.
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That said, I would imagine that what you really want to do is to follow up with people who’ve left university, both those who won and those who lost, and ask them what they wish they’d known then that they know now. Certainly, a few years out of the gate, I could give my university a great deal of feedback.
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2 . The incentives in HR seem to be to be risk averse. To find reasons not to take people on. If you hire someone and they do really well then you don’t get rewarded, whereas if you hire someone and they’re awful then your job is at risk. If that’s heavily weighted in the decision maker’s consideration, then giving people more granular data will result in dramatically fewer hires, since the probability of a concurrent set of criteria being fulfilled is the multiple of its individual probabilities. Even if the individual probabilities are quite high, HR managers will be able to talk their way into using a great number of individual criteria and then you’ll be hung.
3 . It makes the market more competitive, not necessarily in a good way. Students take on a great deal of the financial risk in education these days. Which honestly seems the wrong way around, but there you go. If rich people can afford to grind their way higher up the tech tree, then you’re essentially pricing poor people out of the market. The rich person only has to be ahead by one or two points—you’re probably going to pick someone who’s even slightly better on paper over someone worse. So there’s an incentive to have large steps in your pricing.
I’m reminded of a couple of students at a German university last year who studied all the material by dividing up the classes between them and exchanging notes, took all the exams, and passed in a few months. The university then turned around and sued them for studying too fast.
As an undergraduate, I studied many subjects in parallel, and I gather that my performance set a national record. I was once expelled for studying too much, after the head of Umeå University psychology department discovered that I was concurrently following several other full-time programs of study (physics, philosophy, and mathematical logic), which he believed to be psychologically impossible.
there’s not an industry standard for measuring this sort of stuff that I’m aware of
Thank you for bringing this up. One of the huge deals of the Industrial Revolution, together with the American System of Manufacturing (basically, building in spare parts) and the Patent System, was the extensive development of Standards: originally, everyone agrees to do things the same way because it makes it easier to divvy up tasks between competing msnufacturers, and makes things cheaper.
Then there were safety standards and regulations, which, in practice, are often about who to blame if anything goes wrong; like taxes, there’s a strong sense of “it ain’t cheating unless you’re caught”.
And then there’s this more recent movement for getting ISO certifications in the workplace and in universities. I haven’t been been in the front-lines for that, but it would appear that it’s being kind of a huge deal: standardized organization, standardized customer service, and so on and so forth. The buzzword is !quality”.
To sum it up, the standardization of stuff is a work in progress, and people do realize the value in it.
tone down a lot of the qualities that let me do things easily—the corollary of don’t dress better than the boss is don’t act smarter/more skilled than the boss—most people like to hire people they can use as tools for their own success, not colleagues who they have to work with.
And that’s terrible! Do we have a name for that bullgum, or shall we just call it an instance of the Tragedy of Commons? Aren’t there studies on how this attitude is wrong for a company’s future and how to disincentive it from within the company? Or maybe pay a third party to do the hiring?
If you hire someone and they do really well then you don’t get rewarded.
?! Why is—Huh? I’m sorry, I’m dumbfounded by how freaking stupid this is.
giving people more granular data will result in dramatically fewer hires
That doesn’t sound economically sustainable for me: the law of conservation of work force (which I just made up) dictates that, in a steady state of work output and productivity, what comes out must come in.The number of hires needed is the number of hires needed. Unless we’re in an economic crunch and companies are explicitly downsizing, adding hoops to jump through is an expensive zero-sum game between HR people and departments, not something prospective employees should be worried about.
If rich people can afford to grind their way higher up the tech tree, then you’re essentially pricing poor people out of the market.
Isn’t that already so, though? Only the well-off, and those so brilliant that they get scholarships (and how many full scholarships are there still?) can bear to go through the excruciatingly long, overly detailed and wide studies we have nowadays. I suspect that things wouldn’t change much from today: middle classes and rich immigrants would invest in education because they can’t live off capital alone, lower classes usually won’t bother taking the risk and will stay where they are, and upper classes won’t bother making the effort, or will just study whatever they please at their own leisure.
And that’s terrible! Do we have a name for that bullgum, or shall we just call it an instance of the Tragedy of Commons?
I haven’t seen this dynamic discussed in the cog sci literature, but colloquially it sounds like an instance of tall poppy syndrome. Tragedy of the commons doesn’t sound right—there isn’t a shared resource being exploited, and coming to individual understandings doesn’t further incentivize those not bound by them.
I thought TPS was for people who were already equals, not for acquiring new resources.
More importantly, how does one work around that? What is it that makes people not mind the success of others? What is it that makes them supportive of said success?
What is it that makes people not mind the success of others? What is it that makes them supportive of said success?
I think I am like this, but I am not sure why. Introspection has its limits, but here is my guess about the contributing factors:
1) I feel good about myself. I love myself, unconditionally. No matter how much success other people achieve, I will always be my precious me. You can’t make me feel bad about myself by being better than me, because that’s completely unrelated. At worst, you can make me curse my akrasia more (which in far mode I would consider a good thing, so thank you for that). -- Funny thing is that this trait is often perceived negatively by other people; it probably violates the social pecking order. (Who am I to feel good about myself, when our superiors and leaders often don’t?)
2) I focus on cooperation. If you have a skill I don’t have, I want you to develop that skill as much as possible, because then we could do more impressive projects together. It’s as if I am outsourcing the skill to you. And if you have the skill I have too, I want you to develope that skill as much as possible, to that I can learn from you. Both cases assume that you are my friend, of course. But if you are not my friend, I can usually simply ignore you. Actually, there are so many existing skills and subskills that whatever you focus on, I am most likely not doing exactly the same thing, so in some sense we are not competitors.
3) I see the big picture. Something like that Eliezer’s drawing where you have the village idiot next to Einstein, and there is a lot of space above them. From that perspective, all our local advantages and disadvantages seem trivial. We are a bunch of stupid monkeys and most likely we are all going to die, aren’t we? Competing with other people is like running at the special olympics. Even if you win, you’re still retarded.
4) I usually ignore other people, so I often simply don’t notice their success. -- It’s not the only factor, because I also feel supportive when I notice. But perhaps reducing the total amount of perceived success is helpful; maybe more perceptive people are overwhelmed by what they see. (I mean, if you know 99 people as successful as you, and if you perceive their every success, then 99% of the success you see is not yours. Perhaps that makes people sad.)
EDIT: Assuming this model is correct (which is doubtful), the important question is whether this can be taught. Seems to me that people usually go for (1) for their children and fail to achieve that; which in my opinion does not mean the goal is impossible, just that they are doing it wrong, probably because they don’t have the skill themselves. Part (3) seems easy to teach, part (2) should be possible with longer training and experience. Part (4) probably requires to be born as an aspie; and if it can be taught, it would be rather controversial.
I’m reminded of a couple of students at a German university last year who studied all the material by dividing up the classes between them and exchanging notes, took all the exams, and passed in a few months. The university then turned around and sued them for studying too fast.
http://www.thelocal.de/education/20120703-43517.html
It is not in a University’s interests to do a good job. It’s like any other company: The aim is to extract the most $$$ from you while they give up the least value in return.
In highly competitive markets this leads to fairly marginal profits. But formal education is not a competitive market. Not at all. Very tightly regulated.
The competition for education comes almost entirely around costs for most people. They view education as an expense, not as an investment—which is quite reasonable when you consider the likely quality they’re going to get—and aim to minimise that expense. Offer people a better education and the majority of them won’t be willing to pay much for it, offer them a cheaper education though, or a faster one—which amounts to more or less the same thing....
That’s the financial side of things anyway, and one of the reasons I think your idea’s just never going to happen.
#
Assorted
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t think this data’s going to be available or reliable. Google did their own research on this, which suggests to me that the data wasn’t available when they looked for it elsewhere. One thing’s just that everyone’s going to record things slightly differently—there’s not an industry standard for measuring this sort of stuff that I’m aware of. The other is that most places are not particularly rational about their HR procedures—there are a set of skills that go into even the basic recording of data that I’d not expect them to have. I’d expect it to be more like they sit there with a sheet of paper that they’re marking 1-10 based on their subjective opinion of your answer to a question. That’s probably the extent of any data most people will be expected to generate and, perhaps, keep.
In the case of desired by employers I suspect you might find the data was actually contradictory to predictors of success a lot of the time too. I know, when I go for interviews, I tone down a lot of the qualities that let me do things easily—the corollary of don’t dress better than the boss is don’t act smarter/more skilled than the boss—most people like to hire people they can use as tools for their own success, not colleagues who they have to work with. Especially considering lots of economic behaviour seems to be self-justifying/rent-seeking.
================
That said, I would imagine that what you really want to do is to follow up with people who’ve left university, both those who won and those who lost, and ask them what they wish they’d known then that they know now. Certainly, a few years out of the gate, I could give my university a great deal of feedback.
================
2 . The incentives in HR seem to be to be risk averse. To find reasons not to take people on. If you hire someone and they do really well then you don’t get rewarded, whereas if you hire someone and they’re awful then your job is at risk. If that’s heavily weighted in the decision maker’s consideration, then giving people more granular data will result in dramatically fewer hires, since the probability of a concurrent set of criteria being fulfilled is the multiple of its individual probabilities. Even if the individual probabilities are quite high, HR managers will be able to talk their way into using a great number of individual criteria and then you’ll be hung.
3 . It makes the market more competitive, not necessarily in a good way. Students take on a great deal of the financial risk in education these days. Which honestly seems the wrong way around, but there you go. If rich people can afford to grind their way higher up the tech tree, then you’re essentially pricing poor people out of the market. The rich person only has to be ahead by one or two points—you’re probably going to pick someone who’s even slightly better on paper over someone worse. So there’s an incentive to have large steps in your pricing.
That in turn reminds me of Nick Bostrom:
Thank you for bringing this up. One of the huge deals of the Industrial Revolution, together with the American System of Manufacturing (basically, building in spare parts) and the Patent System, was the extensive development of Standards: originally, everyone agrees to do things the same way because it makes it easier to divvy up tasks between competing msnufacturers, and makes things cheaper.
Then there were safety standards and regulations, which, in practice, are often about who to blame if anything goes wrong; like taxes, there’s a strong sense of “it ain’t cheating unless you’re caught”.
And then there’s this more recent movement for getting ISO certifications in the workplace and in universities. I haven’t been been in the front-lines for that, but it would appear that it’s being kind of a huge deal: standardized organization, standardized customer service, and so on and so forth. The buzzword is !quality”.
To sum it up, the standardization of stuff is a work in progress, and people do realize the value in it.
And that’s terrible! Do we have a name for that bullgum, or shall we just call it an instance of the Tragedy of Commons? Aren’t there studies on how this attitude is wrong for a company’s future and how to disincentive it from within the company? Or maybe pay a third party to do the hiring?
?! Why is—Huh? I’m sorry, I’m dumbfounded by how freaking stupid this is.
That doesn’t sound economically sustainable for me: the law of conservation of work force (which I just made up) dictates that, in a steady state of work output and productivity, what comes out must come in.The number of hires needed is the number of hires needed. Unless we’re in an economic crunch and companies are explicitly downsizing, adding hoops to jump through is an expensive zero-sum game between HR people and departments, not something prospective employees should be worried about.
Isn’t that already so, though? Only the well-off, and those so brilliant that they get scholarships (and how many full scholarships are there still?) can bear to go through the excruciatingly long, overly detailed and wide studies we have nowadays. I suspect that things wouldn’t change much from today: middle classes and rich immigrants would invest in education because they can’t live off capital alone, lower classes usually won’t bother taking the risk and will stay where they are, and upper classes won’t bother making the effort, or will just study whatever they please at their own leisure.
I haven’t seen this dynamic discussed in the cog sci literature, but colloquially it sounds like an instance of tall poppy syndrome. Tragedy of the commons doesn’t sound right—there isn’t a shared resource being exploited, and coming to individual understandings doesn’t further incentivize those not bound by them.
I thought TPS was for people who were already equals, not for acquiring new resources.
More importantly, how does one work around that? What is it that makes people not mind the success of others? What is it that makes them supportive of said success?
I think I am like this, but I am not sure why. Introspection has its limits, but here is my guess about the contributing factors:
1) I feel good about myself. I love myself, unconditionally. No matter how much success other people achieve, I will always be my precious me. You can’t make me feel bad about myself by being better than me, because that’s completely unrelated. At worst, you can make me curse my akrasia more (which in far mode I would consider a good thing, so thank you for that). -- Funny thing is that this trait is often perceived negatively by other people; it probably violates the social pecking order. (Who am I to feel good about myself, when our superiors and leaders often don’t?)
2) I focus on cooperation. If you have a skill I don’t have, I want you to develop that skill as much as possible, because then we could do more impressive projects together. It’s as if I am outsourcing the skill to you. And if you have the skill I have too, I want you to develope that skill as much as possible, to that I can learn from you. Both cases assume that you are my friend, of course. But if you are not my friend, I can usually simply ignore you. Actually, there are so many existing skills and subskills that whatever you focus on, I am most likely not doing exactly the same thing, so in some sense we are not competitors.
3) I see the big picture. Something like that Eliezer’s drawing where you have the village idiot next to Einstein, and there is a lot of space above them. From that perspective, all our local advantages and disadvantages seem trivial. We are a bunch of stupid monkeys and most likely we are all going to die, aren’t we? Competing with other people is like running at the special olympics. Even if you win, you’re still retarded.
4) I usually ignore other people, so I often simply don’t notice their success. -- It’s not the only factor, because I also feel supportive when I notice. But perhaps reducing the total amount of perceived success is helpful; maybe more perceptive people are overwhelmed by what they see. (I mean, if you know 99 people as successful as you, and if you perceive their every success, then 99% of the success you see is not yours. Perhaps that makes people sad.)
EDIT: Assuming this model is correct (which is doubtful), the important question is whether this can be taught. Seems to me that people usually go for (1) for their children and fail to achieve that; which in my opinion does not mean the goal is impossible, just that they are doing it wrong, probably because they don’t have the skill themselves. Part (3) seems easy to teach, part (2) should be possible with longer training and experience. Part (4) probably requires to be born as an aspie; and if it can be taught, it would be rather controversial.