Sleep is also an interesting example of pathologies in American high schools. Why do they start so insanely early though every teacher knows that first period is a waste of time and every parent knows what happens to teenagers' circadian rhythms? The answers always seem to come down to the incentives: high school isn't actually about learning but is more about daycare and sports and the convenience of organized groups like teachers or parents, and when push comes to shove, the latter win.
Beware false dichotomies. It can provide a different set of things to some
stakeholders, without totally eliminating the value to others.
0[anonymous]6y
Agreed. I think that Hanlon's Razor also does an adequate job of explaining
apparent suboptimalities. In general, it seems that most things just are, with
no real effort on either side to make things bad or good, with our status quo
merely being the aggregate results of lots of people attempting to do their
thing.
3Dagon6y
That's absolutely not what I meant to convey. Most things are the result of a
mix of different definitions of "good", with plenty of effort on all sides
toward their needs/wants (aka their definition of "goodness"). This conflict,
however, is not zero-sum. There are plenty of behaviors that bring more value to
some stakeholders than it costs the others.
School as learning is good for some, school as daycare is good for a different
some, school as training to societal conformity good for a different subset.
Both because the time can be spent doing all three, and because there's overlap
in some of these subsets, the result is that we get all three AT THE SAME TIME,
not that we have to pick exactly one and prevent the rest.
0[anonymous]6y
Ah, okay. My bad for misinterpreting you above.
3eternal_neophyte6y
It's also about learning discipline. Building the habit of showing up somewhere
every day on time, well-dressed and well-groomed is valuable.
1Lumifer6y
I think this value is overrated.
Necessary for a clerk. Less necessary if you don't expect to be one.
1Dagon6y
Well over half of people who don't expect to ever have an clerk-like job
(including office clerks as well as retail clerks) are wrong. More importantly,
this discipline is helpful in almost all jobs. It may be overrated by some, but
you're underrating it here.
0Lumifer6y
I should have prefaced that by "Conditional on high IQ".
If your IQ is 80, that's a really useful habit. If your IQ is 140, not that
much.
Note that being able to focus and apply yourself is a highly useful skill for
everyone, but that's not quite what we are talking about here.
1Dagon6y
Confirmed that application and focus is a somewhat different thing (though
related, in my case at least), and we're talking more about conformance to
imposed schedules and external expectations of monitorable behavior.
Disagree that it's not useful at IQ 140. It's a lower proportion of success than
for someone closer to the mean, but still a nice still to have and removes some
barriers to establishing one's talents.
Also, I'm comfortable with not having significant accommodation for distant
outliers. Actually, for such people, the habits and skills of not getting killed
by one's "peers' is pretty important. High school sucks for those it's not
evolved/equilibriated for, but it's temporary.
4Lumifer6y
Sure and that is perfectly compatible with being overrated :-)
The situation is not symmetric. I really want to accommodate far-right-tail
outliers. They are what moves your science/tech/society forwards.
0Dagon6y
I think we're going to disagree a bit here on what 'accomodate' means here. I
want to mold and control the far-right-tail outliers (as well as the middle
hump) so they are more likely to move science/tech/society forward in ways that
I like.
0Lumifer6y
Well, everyone does X-/
The interesting question is what happens when you find out you can't. Double
down on suppression or relinquish control?
1Dagon6y
I wrote that too quickly. Forcing geniuses to learn to operate when the
less-gifted are in positions of power is good for the geniuses AND good for
society (though incredibly frustrating for all participants). It doesn't really
fit on a "suppression vs relinquish control" axis.
Relatedly, I don't believe it's possible to identify the top 1/2 of 1% all that
well, and even if we did, there's so much individual variation that we wouldn't
be able to predict what differences we should accommodate vs allowing/forcing
the student to figure out how to (appear to) comply.
0Galap6y
I think you're right that the top 1/2 of 1% are much more varied and
idiosyncratic than the norm, because they are all going to be gifted in very
unique and divergent ways.
However, honestly I think the best way to utilize them (and remove tremendous
frustration on both their part and the part of people who would manage them) is
treat them like a black box; tell them, "ok, go off and act as you would by
default. We'll make sure no one will bother you. Sink or swim on your own,
though. Try to find something interesting. Good luck.
Some of them may not produce all that much of use, but it's no big loss since
they're only a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population. And some
of them will find and create very unique and interesting things, things that
only they could find and create. And that more than offsets the losses from the
ones that by chance don't work out.
0Lumifer6y
When I wrote "I want to accommodate" I meant "create conditions where they would
be productive and effective" -- it wasn't really about command-and-control.
Again, sure, but no one is suggesting building some sort of a refuge for the
gifted (Galt's Gulch?) where they could be spared the ravages of the dumb normie
society. The are forced to learn in any case.
The whole "show up neatly groomed and dressed" thing is teaching kids to emit
particular social signals, it's just that these signals are more suited (heh)
for some situations (e.g. you're applying for a sales clerk position at Macy's)
and less suited for others. If you are looking to hire a programmer and the
candidate shows up in a fancy business suit (while showing all signs of being
comfortable in it) with a carefully attended-to hairdo, I don't think those
signals would be well-received.
1niceguyanon6y
I don't think that the "show up neatly groomed and dressed" thing is teaching
kids to emit particular social signals that is less suitable to a programmer
coming to an interview. Both scenarios are about conforming to social norms and
for students that happens to be literally neatly groomed/dressed, which for the
programmer means no business suit. It's just more useful to use the phrase
neatly groomed/dressed than socially appropriate because for most things
socially appropriate is neatly groomed/dressed.
Being socially appropriate is not overrated conditional on IQ – you have already
established that the programmer (presumably your high IQ example) is aware of
the dangers of coming in like a weirdo in a business suit to an interview. Why
wouldn't the younger version of this person also want to not look like a weirdo
to their peers while in school?
0Lumifer6y
I think you are talking about a more sophisticated version ("being socially
appropriate") and in the context of schools teaching kids its' considerably more
basic (e.g. for boys "get a short, neat haircut, no one will hire if you look
like a hippy").
0Dagon6y
It's been a long time since I was in high school (disclosure: I barely passed
many classes, and was not in competition for a prestigious university, though I
did manage to get 20 AP credits and aced the math SAT), but I don't recall that
the version of "groomed and dressed" then was a particularly different
requirement than my current employment as a principal engineer at a large tech
company.
Showing up on time for appointments remains rather important. Behaving
compatibly with a range of others likewise. Truly bad grooming is, in fact, a
hindrance. Formal coiffure and sartorial prowess isn't particularly helpful, but
is less of a hindrance than aggressively-casual (stained sweats and flip-flops).
If it was "show up acceptably groomed and dressed, and with a base level of
politeness in behavior to people around you", would you be happier with the
description?
0Lumifer6y
I don't dispute that being able to meet middle-class social norms of dress and
grooming is helpful. What I said is that I think it's overrated (conditional on
high IQ). Looking like everyone else is useful but not that useful.
1ZankerH6y
I'd argue that this is not the case, since the vast majority of people who don't
expect to be "clerks" still end up in similar positions.
0Galap6y
Have any stats on that?
(note I'm not trying to be that annoying guy who asks for statistics to try and
win an argument if the other party fails to produce them; I really want to see
info on people's expected vs actual employment outcomes)
0Lumifer6y
See my answer to Dagon.
0eternal_neophyte6y
There's a relationship between having regular habits and mental health, I
believe. I can't prove it off the top of my head but you'll find similar ideas
if you look into writing about for example keeping clean living-spaces, getting
into the habit of dressing well, etc. and it aligns with my personal
experiences. It seems to me the chief benefit is that forcing yourself to go
through with things that aren't fun but which are necessary for living above the
level of an animal acts like acid to the narcissistic patterns of thought that
provoke people to convince themselves that they're too good for discipline.
0Lumifer6y
At the extremes, yes. If your habits are very very regular and you are very very
attached to them, you might have OCD :-P
That line of thought is well expressed in early Protestantism -- see e.g. the
Puritans.
0eternal_neophyte6y
Does the fact that Puritans said it make it wrong?
0Lumifer6y
The Puritans were very concerned with saving souls from eternal damnation. What
are you very concerned with?
0eternal_neophyte6y
Saving my own psyche from limited damnation.
0Lumifer6y
Sure. But why do you think this generalizes?
0eternal_neophyte6y
Because I've seen the relationship between irregular lifestyle and depression in
other people around me in my life. If there is research on the topic that you
know about or some contrary observations you want to forward then feel free. But
at this point this seems like this conversation is heading towards "well can you
prove that" territory. And in short, no I cannot prove it.
0Lumifer6y
And which way the causality arrow points?
In any case, I'm trying to say that there is a difference between saying
"Orderly life helps some people I know manage their mental state" (which is a
statement about some people you know) and "There's a relationship between having
regular habits and mental health" (which is a statement about how the world
works).
0eternal_neophyte6y
There's a difference, but induction isn't black magic.
It's conceivable that it it can point both ways simultaneously. What is in a
person's power to alter is their actual behaviour.
0Lumifer6y
The typical mind fallacy isn't black magic either.
2eternal_neophyte6y
And what is it other than the atypical mind fallacy if one regards himself as
too far above the level of the plebes who work as clerks to subject himself to a
schedule, unless he has some strong concrete evidence that basically compels him
to acknowledge his own brilliance?
If John von Neumann or Paul Erdos woke up at 2 PM and argued that their brains
worked better at night, I'd be inclined to take them seriously. If someone
without anything to show for their irregular lifestyle nevertheless believed
that keeping a schedule would damage their progress, that would be a delusion.
0Lumifer6y
It's interesting how we started with
and ended with
A fair bit of distance between the two, don't you think?
2eternal_neophyte6y
No, I don't agree. Rergarding yourself as superior to plebs and therefore as
above routine is at least weak evidence for narcissism. In combination with
absence of clear evidence for the idea that you are in fact superior, it would
be strong evidence for narcissism.
1Lumifer6y
Actually, there is no need for any evidence of general superiority. All you need
is evidence that the disordered lifestyle works for you -- regardless of your
brilliance or dimness -- and that would be quite sufficient.
0eternal_neophyte6y
In the types of cases that I was referring to, where irregular lifestyle
coincides with depression, that evidence too would be unavailable.
0Lumifer6y
Why so? If you assert -- as I think you do -- that ordered lifestyle helps, that
implies that you can get evidence what kind of lifestyle helps and, presumably,
the same evidence could point in a different direction.
0eternal_neophyte6y
Because if you're depressed then your disordered lifestyle is not in fact
working for you. Someone for who depression has become the water they swim in
might fail to see it that way but depression isn't the default state of mind for
a human being.
0Lumifer6y
But isn't the situation symmetric? I can say "if you're depressed then your
disciplined lifestyle is not in fact working for you" and that would have the
same validity.
0eternal_neophyte6y
Yes that would be correct; and I can imagine how this could be the case for
somebody like a very high-powered lawyer that wakes up at 4 AM, goes to bed at
midnight and shows up to work dressed for success every day; but still feels the
whole thing to be hollow and meaningless. Regularity/schedule/discipline may be
necessary without being sufficient.
0Lumifer6y
OK, so if the situation is symmetric, why do you believe that disciplined life
helps (some) people, but are unwilling to believe that disordered life also
helps (some) people?
0eternal_neophyte6y
I'm not unwilling to believe that a disordered life helps some people. I'm
saying that, as an individual, each one of us has to be very careful into
letting ourselves believe we are one of those people in the absence of strong
counter-evidence; because the ( admittedly intuitively assessed on my part )
prior probability of that being the case is not great.
0Lumifer6y
So basically you have a strong prior that disciplined life is considerably more
helpful than disorganized one. I assume it's based on your own experience and
the experience of other people in your circle. That's all fine. What I am
doubtful about is how much does that generalize. "Induction" is not a good
answer because it's applicable to absolutely anything.
0eternal_neophyte6y
A prior probability is generalized by nature.
2username26y
Because if they didn't the students' sleep cycles would shift further and people
like you would be complaining that the new first period (former second period)
is a waste of time.
So what happens to them. I believe they tend to stay up late and be extremely
night shifted. Wouldn't starting school late only make the problem worse?
The phase-response curve of the circadian rhythm to light shifts with age, with the equilibrium position of the wake point latest in the late teens and earliest in early childhood and old age.
As long as the "insanely early" hours do not involve starting school before
dawn, this is a non-issue. Anyone can adjust their circadian rhythm by just
going to sleep earlier, and/or by napping throughout the day in order to
compensate for any sleep deficits; we should be raising awareness about these
solutions among students. Simply starting school later would not have
substantial effects in the long run, anymore than, say, changing to DST, or
moving to a different timezone would.
Anyone can adjust their circadian rhythm by just going to sleep earlier, and/or by napping throughout the day in order to compensate for any sleep deficits; we should be raising awareness about these solutions among students.
No, they can't. Students do nap during the day (that's part of the problem!), and they can try but fail to just go to bed earlier. That's why they don't go to bed. If your claims were true, there would never be any problem and the experiments in changing school times would never show any benefit. There is a problem and the experiments do show benefits. You are just offering folk psychology speculation and fake willpower solutions which don't work. People are not ghosts in the machine, they are the machine, and 'just go to bed earlier' doesn't do anything about the zeitgebers and biology of the thing.
That's not solid proof. What's relevant is whether different school times can
possibly affect things in the longer run, well after the effects of the
transition itself are over.
"Folk psychology speculation" is a good way to describe the assumption that some
teenagers are just "night owls" and cannot possibly manage to retrain their
sleep cycle.
"Just going to bed earlier" encompasses making reasonable efforts that might
also involve changing these environmental cues and zeitgebers. Of course if your
evening routine involves drinking strong coffee, "just going to bed earlier"
might not work very well. The solution is to change that habit.
7Lumifer6y
So, remind me, why does the West have that obesity epidemic going on? Clearly,
"the solution is to change the habit" so why isn't it working?
0bogus6y
Well, a simple conjecture is that many obese people in the West care more about
their obesity being "accepted" in a way that's fully open and free of "unwanted
discrimination", than about losing weight in the first place. (Many of them are
also not too happy about being made aware of the clearly negative effect of
being obese on their own health.) Such attitudes of entitlement seem to be a
rather pervasive problem in contemporary Western culture.
"Anyone can just do x" is an insane and unrealistic way to frame solutions to a problem. Like saying "to stop the obesity epidemic we just need to tell people they have to eat less and exercise more." or "we should tell people to save more money for retirement" the fact that you can frame a solution in simple terms does not in fact make it a non-issue.
also for much of the year in America going to school DOES in fact involve getting up well before dawn.
I for one had to get up at 5 AM and do homework until midnight most weekdays.
0bogus6y
Well, if by 'obesity epidemic' you mean "people complaining about how fat they
are" (by analogy with the complaint about school starting too early), then yes,
that's exactly what should happen. Start exercising, reduce your intake of
highly-processed foods/drinks, and you'll be losing weight. Part of being
rational involves being willing to shoulder responsibility for things that are
quite easily under your direct control.
1Elo6y
Is it? Source of more information? Or do you have extended reasoning for that
idea?
Edit: did you mean agency?
0drethelin6y
Part of being rational involves not trying the same thing over and over that
doesn't work. Giving people the factually correct, simple advice that you
believe does not work.
1Good_Burning_Plastic6y
Wait... DST makes sunrises and sunsets later by civil clocks, so I would expect
its effects to be quite the opposite of starting school later (and pretty
similar to those of starting schools earlier). Did you mean to say something
like "abolishing DST" instead, or am I missing something?
1Good_Burning_Plastic6y
No, the circadian rhythm doesn't work that way. Perhaps you don't notice because
your chronotype is earlier than your lifestyle required so you never had much
trouble falling asleep even when going to bed relatively early, but people with
later chronotypes if they go to bed earlier will just take more time to fall
asleep.
2bogus6y
Everyone has trouble falling asleep when they're going to bed earlier than
usual, at first. If you keep at it and are consistent about avoiding things like
bright artificial lights, high general arousal, strong drugs like coffee and
other adverse environmental cues later in the day, you'll fall asleep and your
"chronotype" will shift back as intended.
2gjm6y
So how about some actual evidence for these claims?
I mean, the medical profession has terms like "advanced sleep phase disorder"
and "delayed sleep phase disorder" and "non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder" and
seems to take the view that "just go to bed later/earlier/regularly and it'll
sort itself out" is not a helpful response. Now, obviously, those are just
doctors; what do they know? But it might be helpful to know how it is you know
that they're wrong.
Or, when you say "Anyone can ...", is it possible that you don't actually mean
anyone?
4bogus6y
I don't think this follows from what you said earlier. "Advanced sleep phase
disorder" and "delayed sleep phase disorder" are indeed taken seriously as
genuine problems, but they're invariably 'treated' with lifestyle interventions,
such as (in the 'delayed' case) avoiding bright/artificial light late in the
day, and (conversely) letting sunlight into the bedroom some time before you're
scheduled to wake up. Sometimes these interventions are also aided by taking
melatonin (or a comparable supplement), but come on, this is hardly a "medical
treatment" in the usual sense!
0Brillyant6y
It is?
5fubarobfusco6y
In many towns in the US, high school sports (especially football) are not just a
recreational activity for students, but rather a major social event for the
whole community.
I wrote this for my high school friends as a treatment of game theory and Moloch in the American high school system. It's not typical LW-fare (the concepts like tragedy of the commons and Goodhart's Law are pretty basic), so I didn't post it directly.
Good schools have competition-culture. Bad schools have fields of fucks which are entirely barren. Hint: you want to be in a good school.
When you have a scarce resource (e.g. spots in a Prestigious University), merit-based competition for it (even if the merit is the ability to function well while sleep-deprived) is not a bad solution. Consider other solutions, e.g. money or power or random chance. Do you think you like them more?
It is true that not everyone can be Exceptional. Some people will end up being peasants. Do you think it will... (read more)
Ironically, this actually happens in schools all over the US. Guidance
councilors at high schools are measured (there's Goodhart's Law again) by the
college acceptance rate of their students. Thus, they have a strong incentive to
direct the students who ask them about college choice to lower ranked colleges
that are easier to get into.
I have a lot of friends from Prestigious U's, and a huge number of them told me
that their councilor tried to dissuade them from applying to the college they
ended up graduating from.
1Lumifer6y
A classic case of selection bias, isn't it? :-)
But as far as I know, the common practice for a high school senior is to have
one or two "reach" schools (say, a couple of Ivies), one or two "safety" schools
(say, the local state college), and the rest being reasonably well matched to
the SAT/GPA/general cuteness.
0[anonymous]6y
I agree that a competition-based school is far and away better than what could
potentially pass off as education. That being said, I do think that we could do
better. When it comes to competing for spots at a Prestigious University, I
think that nudge-like solutions like limiting the amount of schools someone can
apply to, seem fairly sensible and could help reduce the amount of public
commons being burned.
I also think that it'd be crushing to tell people who aren't doing well that
they're not doing well, but I also think that this is different from confronting
reality. You want to people to dream high, but you also want them to calibrate
their expectations to how the world is, yes? I can imagine there are more
tactful ways to help people rescale their expectations, e.g. getting them both
calibrated/inspired by looking at really Exceptional people.
0Lumifer6y
I don't see any public commons being burned. I a see a competition, a normal
plain-vanilla competition which will have winners and losers. This is not a
common-good project which requires joint effort, this is a contest with the
number of gold medals being quite limited and silver/bronze medals being not
plentiful either.
To agree to not compete looks to me like Olympic runners agreeing to not run too
fast because then they won't huff and puff that much.
3bogus6y
Many, perhaps most competitions do in fact waste resources - it's only under
rather strict conditions that they can lead to globally-optimal outcomes, and
the competitions we see in schools and sports do not satisfy these conditions.
You can in fact view the banning of performance-enhancing drugs in the Olympics
as a gentleman's agreement among Olympian runners that they're not going to "run
too fast".
0Lumifer6y
Compared to what?
By that logic capitalism with its constant competition is highly wasteful.
Surely a system where a wise man (or a wise Latina) just tells you what to do is
going to work better... right?
No, I don't think so, because by the same argument you can ban any training.
It's not a gentlemen's agreement, anyway, it's a rule imposed from above by
governing bodies which are mostly interested in selling the performance for
money.
2bogus6y
Capitalism does not really involve more "competition" than is inherent in human
nature anyway. What it does WRT competition is precisely to try and ensure that
it leads to favorable outcomes, largely by making property rights more
well-defined and more easily protected. ('Tragedy of the commons' scenarios
result from competing over an exhaustible 'commons' for which neither property
rights nor customary access rules are defined.)
You might be assuming that professional athletes are not collectively
"interested" in having their performance be popular when it gets sold for money.
The opposite is very much the case. Yes, much of the appeal of sports is in its
"fair contest" aspects - we would not be happy with a "pure entertainment"
surrogate where the outcome of every contest was actually pre-determined in
advance! But of course every sport has its rules.
0Lumifer6y
So does then socialism of the Soviet variety involve considerably less? I am not
sure of the point you're making.
4bogus6y
Soviet socialism involved more wasteful competition than modern free-market
('capitalist') economies, by far. Much of that competition played out in the
political arena, through the handing out of all sorts of special privileges and
permits as "prizes" to be won. I'm not sure what a social system that involved
"considerably less" competition might actually look like. Neo-cameralism of the
Moldbuggian variety is often said to have some (rather minor) benefits in
reduced social competition, but the costs are rather uncertain and potentially
quite high.[1]
[1] (I actually think it might have a useful role to play, but only for the
narrow use case of transition from weak authoritarian government like what you
see in most of the non-Western world, to something like modern liberal
democracy.)
0Lumifer6y
Citation needed. This looks plain false to me.
In any case, we started with you saying competition is wasteful. So what are the
alternatives?
0bogus6y
I've tried to outline feasible options for the issues in the OP elsewhere in the
comment thread. Anyway, 'we started' with you saying competition among
high-school students has to be desirable and non-wasteful, precisely because it
is a competition. My point was just that this is not quite correct.
0Lumifer6y
Sigh. Bullshit. Quote me, please.
It's only a few comments upthread and you already can't distinguish between me
and a straw monster living inside your mind.
0[anonymous]6y
Surely we can agree that competition usually leads to local maxima and not
Pareto-optimal outcomes?
As a student myself, I'm noticing this general system and trying to point how
things don't seem to be very good. I think that if we want to do better,
acknowledging how incentives are set up is important.
0Lumifer6y
In reality? No, we can't.
By the way, there was a fellow named Coase who had something to say about Pareto
efficiency...
0[anonymous]6y
Coase's Theorem is new to me (I'm not well-versed in econ or game theory),
thanks for the link.
The thing I'm trying to point at is that there definitely seem to be ways to
make incremental improvements in lots of systems which would be Pareto
improvements.
I think that is agreeable? EX: Starting school later would likely be generally
helpful for most students.
2Lumifer6y
Real-life systems generally have multiple agents with different incentives and
different amounts of power. Usually, if a system works in particular way it's
because this particular way benefits someone with power (often, at the expense
of someone without power). Real-life systems also tend to be quite complex with
many relationships not visible on a cursory glance -- what looks like a Pareto
improvement to you might look like an attack on an established right to someone
else.
This is not to say that existing systems can't be improved. But there are
reasons why they are what they are and unless you understand these reasons and
have enough power to apply to leverage points, talking about incremental Pareto
improvements is not likely to lead to anything.
0[anonymous]6y
Thanks; that helps clear things up, and it improves my view of things.
0Dagon6y
Something that benefits "most students" to the detriment of some students and
other participants (parents, teachers, etc) is NOT what pareto-efficient means.
Starting school later means some mix of less total school, more school days, or
ending school later, none of which have obvious unanimous support.
0[anonymous]6y
Given that there's lots of factors here, I don't disagree with the technical
point you're making about my misuse of terminology above.
2MrMind6y
Do Ivy League schools actually provide for better education or it's just
signalling and status?
In the former case, "better education" is a scarce resource because having it
for everyone would be more beneficial that having it only for some, as is for
example the case of Olympic medals.
In the second case, there's no common being burned but there's a suboptimal
equilibrium caused by Moloch, which could be seen as a cost opportunity being
too high (a sort of negative common not being consumed?)
0Lumifer6y
Both (defining "education" as "various consequences of attending this college").
0Dagon6y
Both, as well as forced socialization with an impressive peer group. But Lumifer
has this one right - both are scarce resources, and this particular mix of the
two is a scarce resource, but it's not being burned because it's not a commons.
They are successfully accepting only those they think will do well there and
improve the environment for each other.
It's a plain old competition, and I've seen no evidence of suboptimality. Are
there other highly-competitive endeavors which you think are optimal? You
mention Olympic medals - I've known some Olympic hopefuls, but they burned out
or were injured before making the team. That's not pleasant, but it's not
suboptimal, it's what has to happen in order to identify the best performers.
1bogus6y
What's being burned here is not the benefits of being accepted to an Ivy. It's
the wasteful effort involved in, e.g. the marginal hours of intensive
preparation on the SAT, that will affect the final score by a handful of points
at best. (No one denies that some amount of test prep can be very useful for
anyone, both academically and in terms of improving the test outcome!) To a
first approximation, the positive payoff of the former is exactly offset, in
expectation, by the negatives of the latter.
0Lumifer6y
Yep. Basically, the "waste" of competition is the price you pay to acquire
information about performance.
Asian kid at Irvington, wants to get into a high competition school in the US, needs to differentiate.
Strongly suspect that legally changing his name to 'Yacouba Aboubacar', listing French as a language on his application, checking 'African American' instead of 'Asian', and writing an admissions essay about the challenges of having an African name in a high-pressure academic environment would, dollar for dollar (name change fees might be close to a single sat prep class fee) be a better investment of resources than just about anything else he can do.
You may not like the admission bias in the Ivies (I do not, either - the
discrimination against Asians is of course especially damning, since Asians do
not even share the putative "White man's burden" of their ancestors having
wronged minority ethnicities in the past, that's often invoked - however
dubiously - as a moral justification for "affirmative action"), but the amount
of "Yacouba Aboubacar's" being admitted in any given year is so low in practice
that this does not measurably affect the arms race we're talking about here.
Even doubling or trebling the number of admission spots at each Ivy would not
change things much!
0RedMan6y
Exactly, you gotta differentiate. How hard is it really to build a fusor like
the Taylor Wilson kid the article references did as a teen?
Just have a hook, make the news, and you'll be golden. You can't just be a
smarty pants, you have to be a smarty pants and an 'oh isn't that interesting'.
When you're in a terrible game with a perverse incentive structure...either play
to win or don't play. If his blog took anonymous comments, I'd suggest starting
an 'Irvington community college' with the kids who didn't want to go to low
prestige schools, passing the hat in that community could pay real dividends and
in a generation, it might become one of those high prestige schools...I mean, if
that kid is average for his high school...
3[anonymous]6y
Hey, author of the article here.
I actually think it'd be probably net-positive if we had people trying to go
lots of different routes to differentiate themselves. This seems like the sort
of positive competition that leads to good externalities. (There's an example
somewhere where Luke and Scott got into an arms race for writing good
articles...)
Anyway, I'm interpreting the above to say that...students at Irvington should go
to community college, which will have net benefits in the long run? Not 100%
sure I'm parsing the second half of your third paragraph.
0RedMan6y
Thank you for the reply. I'll rephrase.
I assess that the following statements are true, please correct me if I am
wrong:
-Based on your writing samples, you personally are probably capable of handling
the academic workload at a high prestige college.
-You are typical in terms of ability in comparison to your peer group
-Race and geographic location may be working against you and your peers in your
admissions process
-You and your peers will find yourselves scattered to the four winds attending
less prestigious universities that you're not particularly happy with.
In light of the above, I suggest that you should look into founding (or taking
over, I don't know what the community college landscape looks like where you
are) a community college explicitly to serve the interests of members of your
community affected by the above truths.
You have the most important ingredient for a successful college, which is to
say, you have a cohort of motivated learners. From a business and legal
standpoint, founding such an institution is an attainable objective. You are
right next door to a lot of companies that need talented people, these companies
could be persuaded to invest in infrastructure for churning out a future talent
pool. You have enough money in Fremont (pass the hat, do a lottery, it's there)
to rent property, hire instructors, pay for subscriptions to professional
journals, and probably build a lab or two.
If you're not going to get the 'big name', stay local, work within your own
community, and build something better.
3bogus6y
It's not clear how founding a new college would solve the underlying issue here,
which is a demand for educational prestige. There's plenty of community colleges
in the US anyway and most of them are not that bad, the issue is that they're
not perceived as 'prestigious' compared to e.g. the Ivy League.
0RedMan6y
The prestige the ivies have in the eyes of the families of Irvington is
misplaced. Anything to promote that community's pride in itself, rather than
investment in a declining institution, is probably a win.
Winning within the rules is obviously taking a toll, the prize isn't really
worth it, so exit is an option, and in my opinion, it isn't a bad one.
2[anonymous]6y
I would actually put myself in the top 95 percentile of people at my school in
terms of cognitive ability and general awareness. This may impact your analysis.
I would say that the sort of "staring at the system and trying to optimize"
attitude I have is fairly uncommon, and it's often hard to get my peers to do
the same.
(Hence part of the motivation for writing this essay that tries to be appealing
to the high school demographic.)
Also, there have been efforts locally to try and stir up the college scene. I'm
also a little skeptical of the whole plan, as this sounds good in theory, and
I'd expect that many things can go wrong. (There seems to be lots of things in
the whole causal chain that need to go right). I'd also not trust myself at this
point to run anything of the sort. (Having the relevant experience seems very
useful for such an endeavor.)
0bogus6y
That's beautiful. We need a "Dunning–Kruger quote of the month" thread for this
sort of stuff!
6arundelo6y
We need downvotes for this sort of stuff. ^
Edit: By which I mean bogus's comment, which does nothing beyond insulting
lifelonglearner. Also, I'd guess quite a few commenters on this website are in
the 95th percentile of (say) IQ at their school.
4gjm6y
Strongly agree: bogus's comment was stupid and well out of order. Yes, Dunning &
Kruger found that some incompetent people think they're good. That doesn't mean
that everyone who thinks they're good is incompetent. I bet lifelonglearner is
absolutely right about being in the top 5% in his school.
(Perhaps bogus is just saying "hahahaha, he said "top 5 percentile" where he
should have said "95th percentile" but sorry, that too is stupid;
lifelonglearner's words were perfectly clear as they were.)
0[anonymous]6y
Yikes! Edited the above comment to more properly reflect things.
5Dagon6y
Ignore that comment. If you want, post whatever evidence you have of your
ranking in your school, but don't feel pressured to do so. Internally, to
yourself, I'd recommend an outside view of this number - your ranking on various
dimensions (intelligence, scholastic achievements, etc.) and what evidence you
have to support or disconfirm those beliefs.
Top 5 percent is incredibly easy to believe on this site. But you should
double-check often. You should also be aware that top few percent on one of
these dimensions doesn't make you particularly special by itself. There are
roughly 15 million high-school students in the US alone, so 750,000
5-percenters.
0[anonymous]6y
Seems good. I don't really feel like add'l validation would be useful here, so
I'm fine leaving the claim as-is.
Thanks for the general note about epistemic hygiene.
The kid says that school is competitive, and that's bad--why can't they all agree to work less hard (presumably so they can have more time to play video games)? "Getting students to accept the reality that they might just not go to the best schools is good, I guess. But unless it also comes with the rallying call of engaging in a full-on socialist revolution, it doesn’t really deal with the whole issue."
This kid is the straw man conservatives present of socialism--the idea that the purpose of labor unions and socialism isn't to have a decent wag... (read more)
There's a difference between 'working hard' and actually inhumane conditions,
which, while I did not experience them in high school, seem to pop up by default
in a lot of situations. So I wouldn't be really surprised if it happened in some
high schools, because there isn't much defending against it there.
So yeah the labor unions having the goal of 'not having to work hard' is a
protection against a very serious and insidious problem.
1Viliam6y
The situations like: "Hey, I am not telling you to work so hard that you will
damage your health. You would never hear me saying something like that; that's a
horrible strawman. Actually, please sign these papers that you were specifically
instructed to take great care about your health, so that you can't sue me if
anything happens. Thank you! Now I want to remind you that if you get
outcompeted by people who are less careful about damaging their health (which I
officially know nothing about, because I prefer not to care about such details
and only look at the outcomes), you may get fired. It's your choice, though, and
I take no responsibility."
1bogus6y
I'm not sure that there is a consistent "straw man" in a way that's relevant to
this post. You might as well say: "See, this kid neatly disproves the other
straw man conservatives present of socialism--the idea that the purpose of labor
unions and socialism isn't to have decent workloads and working conditions, but
just plain greed." Six of one, half a dozen of the other...
0[anonymous]6y
Hello, I'm the kid.
I think the quote is taken out of context:
To be clear, I don't actually think that socialism is a good solution (I didn't
list it as an actually feasible solution), and it was meant to be humorous.
1PhilGoetz6y
Sorry. I've been reading English literary journals and lit theory books for the
past year, and the default assumption is always that the reader is a Marxist.
Interesting blogpost, but I think the problems you point to are fundamentally unsolvable as long as people keep competing for what are perceived as "prestigious" colleges. The closest thing to a partial solution is to improve the baseline of a good education by expanding things like MOOC's and open educational resources. (Even this would only help to the extent that it reduces the disutility of going to a "bad" college, or potentially of skipping traditional college ed altogether. We don't even know what makes some colleges "more prestigious" than others; to the best of our knowledge, it's simply a matter of luck and/or self-reinforcing popularity contests.)
Sleep is also an interesting example of pathologies in American high schools. Why do they start so insanely early though every teacher knows that first period is a waste of time and every parent knows what happens to teenagers' circadian rhythms? The answers always seem to come down to the incentives: high school isn't actually about learning but is more about daycare and sports and the convenience of organized groups like teachers or parents, and when push comes to shove, the latter win.
http://www.oxfordsparks.ox.ac.uk/files/preferences.png
The phase-response curve of the circadian rhythm to light shifts with age, with the equilibrium position of the wake point latest in the late teens and earliest in early childhood and old age.
No, they can't. Students do nap during the day (that's part of the problem!), and they can try but fail to just go to bed earlier. That's why they don't go to bed. If your claims were true, there would never be any problem and the experiments in changing school times would never show any benefit. There is a problem and the experiments do show benefits. You are just offering folk psychology speculation and fake willpower solutions which don't work. People are not ghosts in the machine, they are the machine, and 'just go to bed earlier' doesn't do anything about the zeitgebers and biology of the thing.
Do you see why this comparison doesn't work?
"Anyone can just do x" is an insane and unrealistic way to frame solutions to a problem. Like saying "to stop the obesity epidemic we just need to tell people they have to eat less and exercise more." or "we should tell people to save more money for retirement" the fact that you can frame a solution in simple terms does not in fact make it a non-issue.
also for much of the year in America going to school DOES in fact involve getting up well before dawn.
I wrote this for my high school friends as a treatment of game theory and Moloch in the American high school system. It's not typical LW-fare (the concepts like tragedy of the commons and Goodhart's Law are pretty basic), so I didn't post it directly.
A few observations.
Good schools have competition-culture. Bad schools have fields of fucks which are entirely barren. Hint: you want to be in a good school.
When you have a scarce resource (e.g. spots in a Prestigious University), merit-based competition for it (even if the merit is the ability to function well while sleep-deprived) is not a bad solution. Consider other solutions, e.g. money or power or random chance. Do you think you like them more?
It is true that not everyone can be Exceptional. Some people will end up being peasants. Do you think it will... (read more)
Asian kid at Irvington, wants to get into a high competition school in the US, needs to differentiate.
Strongly suspect that legally changing his name to 'Yacouba Aboubacar', listing French as a language on his application, checking 'African American' instead of 'Asian', and writing an admissions essay about the challenges of having an African name in a high-pressure academic environment would, dollar for dollar (name change fees might be close to a single sat prep class fee) be a better investment of resources than just about anything else he can do.
Hi... (read more)
The kid says that school is competitive, and that's bad--why can't they all agree to work less hard (presumably so they can have more time to play video games)? "Getting students to accept the reality that they might just not go to the best schools is good, I guess. But unless it also comes with the rallying call of engaging in a full-on socialist revolution, it doesn’t really deal with the whole issue."
This kid is the straw man conservatives present of socialism--the idea that the purpose of labor unions and socialism isn't to have a decent wag... (read more)
Interesting blogpost, but I think the problems you point to are fundamentally unsolvable as long as people keep competing for what are perceived as "prestigious" colleges. The closest thing to a partial solution is to improve the baseline of a good education by expanding things like MOOC's and open educational resources. (Even this would only help to the extent that it reduces the disutility of going to a "bad" college, or potentially of skipping traditional college ed altogether. We don't even know what makes some colleges "more prestigious" than others; to the best of our knowledge, it's simply a matter of luck and/or self-reinforcing popularity contests.)