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MugaSofer comments on Education control? - Less Wrong
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The real trouble with calling the existing curriculum a "control" is that it encourages people to think of it as part of the background of life rather than a system that was built to serve a purpose, and using thougrilly non-empirical heuristics.
And, lo and behold, we find that an actual control may do as well or better than the "control".
But... doing the experiment in the first place is to test whether you ought to change that background. It's already an assumption of our society, and the people doing the experiments are already trying to do better.
Except people don't do experiments to test the control. A control is what you call "not experimenting".
It's a framing thing.
o.O
They're testing the new thing, whatever that is, with the idea that if it's better, we go out and do that instead. The test is in the comparison.
The very idea that they're testing this with the existing program as a control sounds like a criticism of the existing method, saying, "We can probably do better than this!"
Seriously - if you want to convince people to change the educational regime, you had better include the current educational regime as one your experimental groups (whether or not it's given the name 'control'). If you don't, the experiment will not directly address the question of whether whatever else you were trying was any better than what we've got now.
I think you're misreading my comments. I'm not complaining that someone finally tried checking if the current educational regime was better than no regime at all; I'm complaining that this wasn't the first thing they checked, like it is in every other field.
Just try getting that past an ERB. Holy crow.