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gwern comments on A philosophy professor elicits college students' reactions to Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Yes, interesting.
Some of them read like the student did not do much reading at all; a number echo strongly previous comments; and some put way too much stock on one post (eg. the Google one). They are overall suspiciously positive - we all should know that there is some extremely wrong or extremely unobvious or extremely unpopular positions taken on LW, so to see only positive or very luke-warm reactions...?
This is probably related to apparently you not providing any specific pointers or articles into LW. If you try it in the future, it'd be interesting to see if you get significantly better results by linking to a mix of the best and the most controversial articles, or even just a list of random articles.
How did you know whom to email? I can't find any identifying info on the blog; it almost appears deliberately suppressed.
OP was posted to OB-NYC ML as well.
But the OP doesn't contain any information either.
Is there a reason the rest of us can't know who and where this is?
The professor did link his name/email to the post by mailing us; and he specifically said "Please do not leave a comment on the class blog."
I am guessing he wants students to feel free to write what they think without worrying about being criticized or corrected on every point by aggrieved LWers.
But did he say "please don't tell anybody who I am or where I teach?" This is completely orthogonal to the question of preventing comments from LWers, aggrieved or otherwise.
I wasn't interested in writing a comment on the blog (except possibly to ask where the course was -- and I might very well have done so, since Luke's post does not contain any instruction to the contrary! So if info was somehow being hidden with the goal of preventing comments, it would have directly backfired.).
No, but it is a closed list and the public materials are, as you noted, apparently sanitized. What is the reasonable inference?
Indeed; Luke is perhaps lacking in discretion, or someone passed the URL on to him without also passing on the request.
I have no idea. It just looks like bizarre crypticness to me; like there's some inside joke that I'm not in on.
If it is a closed list, then why is it being posted to LW? And especially, why is it being posted without acknowledgment of the fact that the source was a closed list?
Conspicuous secrecy is rude.
The fact that the list itself is closed is not a good argument by itself not to post the link given that the link is to a public and easily accessible website. However, it probably would have made sense of it had included the request not to the post to the blog.
The post should have included an explanation of the lack of information (e.g. "the instructor posted this to a private mailing list that I subscribe to, and does not wish himself or his institution to be identified" -- if this is in fact the case; otherwise, the information should have been included).
He really should edit the OP to contain the "please don't comment on the class blog" instructions.
I'm already imagining a foaming at the mouth angry LWer vivisecting with sadistic glee a post of a poor freshman yelling at him "how dare you say you like us for the wrong reasons!". And once LWers see one such comment, the scent of blood will drive them into a commenting frenzy.
My model of typical LWers disagrees. I don't think the student comments there look like tempting targets even to those among us who like to correct people.
The typical LWer wouldn't do this agreed, but there are plenty of LWers.
I was able to figure out what university the course is from information in the comments with high probability and an trivial amount of googling but I'm not sure if it would be socially appropriate to share the results.
What bothers me more at this point is the apparent expectation on the part of at least three people (the anonymous professor, lukeprog, and gwern) that we wouldn't be curious.
But it was socially appropriate to share the method for coming to those results?
Not sure that it was, but there is a limit to how much I'm willing to limit myself to avoid violating social norms that may not even exist.
For fun though: Can you introspect what considerations you applied to come to that limit? Why exactly was the limit drawn at the method rather than the results?
I see. Upvoted.
The responses are almost entirely bullshit. The students want to earn the maximum amount of credit for their responses; the maximum amount of credit is small compared to the exams; they're uncertain about how their comments will be evaluated; and the context of the blog doesn't encourage them to put much thought into them. Less Wrong is presented as a homework reading and is therefore authoritative. Thinking critically about the material on Less Wrong would require too much time and effort for such a trivial assignment, and comes with the risk of falling out of favor with an instructor who might not like critical thinking.
College is weird.
People keep making this sort of claim and friends seem to have a lot of anecdotes backing it up. But I don't think all college experiences are like this. In college I had a fair number of professors who seemed to delight in arguments going against their ideas. This was especially true with the philosophy professors although the phil professor I interacted with most was an expert in philosophy of science who had a physics degree so that may be relevant. (She did come out of the semester apparently worried that I had a gambling problem because in a discussion about probability related issues I corrected her on what the valid bets in roulette were.)
When I was an undergraduate, I had many professors who were open to debate and encouraged students to disagree with them. I had 2 professors (Keith Gallagher and some Jesuit theologian whose name I forget) who responded negatively to disagreement from their students. I received As and Bs in every other class, but Cs in classes from those 2 professors, seriously damaging my GPA.
So, it only takes a small number of such professors, to make the rational decision by a student be to always agree with the professor.
Sorry, Gallagher is a CS professor. How could he have graded you poorly for disagreement? I can see how that can happen in the social sciences or humanities but it isn't clear to me what that would even mean for a CS prof.
It's not as if all CS classes have to use objective standards of grading.
It's also not the case that objective standards of grading can't be gamed.
It's also, also not the case that objective standards of grading exist beyond, say, multiple-choice exams, which are more or less useless for testing practical knowledge.
My confusion is more how one can disagree with someone in a CS class given that almost every issue is pretty objective.
Whether a program or a proof is "correct" is fairly objective. But there's a couple places where subjectivity enters in.
In practice, there are important mitigating factors. Big lower-division or required upper-division undergraduate courses are autograded as much as possible, reducing subjectivity. Elective upper-level and graduate courses tend to give As to everybody anyway, since the professors want to keep people in the class and don't want to make trouble for "their" students.
(In American universities, often there's a rough division between first-two-years (lower division) and last-two-years (upper division). Upper division classes are normally for students who've already been admitted to the major, lower division will include prospective majors as well as interested outsiders.)
There are plenty of issues to disagree over. I remember some argument over what issues were important in program efficiency. He was probably right about that. I was dismissive of the practicality of pure LISP with no extralogicals and no sequencing (no 'seq' or indexed iteration). I was probably right about that.
It didn't help that I was a bit of an arrogant twit at the time.
But, the key wasn't grading. The most important factor was his claiming, at the end of the semester, not to have received an important homework from me. I had thrown it out by then, so I couldn't prove I'd done it; and he gave me a zero on it.
This could have been accidental. But it never happened to me in any other class.
I feel you on the arrogant twit past. I stumbled across one of my old pseudonyms, call him paper-machine_2004. It was massively embarrassing.
Definitely there are many college professors who will appreciate a well-thought out and coherent attack on their views. I have in my time profited by this. However, not all professors will (I have in my time lost because of this), and nobody appreciates a poorly-thought out and incoherent attack on their views. Given this payoff matrix you would have to be supremely confident in how well-thought out and coherent you were in order to make speaking up have better expected value than smiling and nodding.
Very few professors appreciate poorly-thought out and incoherent defenses of their views.
It's easy to say what is basically a glorified "Yes Socrates" and get away with not going into detail. It's harder to get away with that if you're contradicting.
Keep in mind that the problem with contemporary academic philosophy is not that it is insufficiently tolerant of dissent. The field practically self-defines as an unresolvable argument and the archetypal intro to philosophy curriculum involves learning and analyzing the debates between philosophers who disagree with each other about the most fundamental issues one can disagree about. Students are usually graded on 1) how well they learned the philosophies they studies and 2) their ability to put forward interesting thoughts of their own on the subjects discussed. The grading spectrum for a paper looks something like: Incoherent (F) -> Failed to understand source material (D) -> Repeated Source Material without saying anything interesting about it (C) -> Makes an interesting, but derivative or tangential point (B) -> Makes a central or extremely insightful point (A). Whether or not the student flatters the professor's own views is at worst good for half a letter grade in my experience.
Now the situation may be worse in other subjects and that may well affect the strategies the students are using-- but this says more about the situation in high school (where these students learned to write like this) than it does about college. Indeed, in my experience students often do poorly on their first philosophy paper precisely because they've failed to recognize the need to change strategies.
Also, the grading for blog comments is very likely to be only a participation grade and the students are likely to know this.
I agree with this. Academic philosophy may represent an example of a field not being dogmatic enough, which is a relatively rare failure mode.
Exactly. It is also seems like a relatively new failure mode- all the examples that come to mind are in the last 60 years. The anti-dogmatism meme seems to be very well adapted to the recent changes in the cultural environment.
In the academy, it's not enough to be sensible: there is an expectation that you should have convincing reasons for your view and be aware of objections. If a student is trying to end up near where the instructor is, the instructor will notice if the student got there by a route the instructor thought about but rejected for being overly simplistic or worse.
I've also noticed this in my daily life. I wince when somebody I agree with at a high level gets horribly tripped up in the details. I assume it's because I want to believe that people who agree with me do so for good reasons.
This is pretty much the whole point, isn't it?
(And this is ignoring the other obvious factor, which is how much you care about what professors appreciate.)
I find it interesting that you're only actually disagreeing with the last and most trivial claim. (Well, except "College is weird", which I personally don't agree with - all life is like this in my experience.)
Well, I'll quibble with this claim as well:
I have been given homework reading (in a history class, and a class typically taken just to fulfill requirements, no less) that was not intended by the professor to be reliable, and I would expect that to be especially common in philosophy classes. Of course, I could just be wrong about that, and it may actually be rare; and regardless of whether I'm correct, the students may be new and still thinking of homework reading in general as authoritative.
Edit: I see now that a similar point has been made by other commenters who point out that this sort of bullshit tends to not be very helpful in philosophy courses, and that the students are probably still thinking in high-school mode.
I spent the majority of a semester arguing with a philosophy professor over epistemology; I undoubtedly came out of that as her favorite student of the year, but likely only out of appreciation that I was the only one in the course who actually understood the material well enough to actually have an opinion.
Nisan's description sounds more like elementary school or high school than college to me. That said, the comments also looked more like something that I'd have expected from high schoolers than college students...
As an American college student, I'm shocked by how poorly some of my peers write; I suspect that many American high schools didn't put enough emphasis on writing.
This example seems to support that conclusion, but then again, these are comments on a blog rather than formal essays, so maybe the students were told not to worry about grammar or spelling.
And yet, somehow, we seem to manage basic grammar, spelling and word choice on this blog, even though there's more anonymity and less incentive.
This is a fact about the map, not a fact about the territory. You just need to calibrate your expectations downward.
I think the karma system has a lot to do with this, along with the fact that good grammar and style are community norms here.
ETA: The most important thing, though, is the instructions the students were given--if the professor advised them not to worry about grammar, then that's what the students will do.
Agreed, and I have drastically adjusted my expectations since I started reading my peers' work. Upon reflection, what I really meant by "I'm shocked by how poorly some of my peers write" is "I used to be surprised at how poorly they write, and even though I have come to expect it, it still bothers me." Sorry if this was ambiguous or misleading.
Grades aren't equivalent to the karma system? Good grammar and style aren't community norms in a college philosophy class? Edit: Well, maybe it's just me, but I'd be embarrassed to make such basic grammar errors in any situation, whether I was 'advised not to worry' or not.
Now this I agree with. I had the unfortunate experience of an entry-level English class that practiced peer review / cooperative editing; it can be effectively summed up as this repeated fifteen or so times over the course of a semester.
Same here, but I've observed that this just isn't the case for a lot of other students. I took a philosophy class last year, and I quickly learned that some people just don't care.
I strongly agree, and I've had a few similar experiences (though not as bad the one as you described).
Well, this is an introductory class, so a lot of the students probably started their first semester of college this month. That said, I've done peer editing for graduating seniors whose work I would have been ashamed to hand in in middle school.
Anecdotally, I've heard that European college students are more mature than American college students.
I estimate p=.8 that the set [do not find these facts intuitively obvious] has a 90% overlap with the set [have not attended college in the last twenty years]. Anyone disagree?
Most students will just jump through the hoop the way they've been trained. But a few will actually think about it seriously, whether they agree or disagree with what they find. I predict we'll get at least two LW participants who acknowledge finding the site through the course.