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ChristianKl comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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You do have this in a case like teaching the theory of evolution.
You have plenty of people who are quite passionate but making an unified decision to teach everyone the theory of evolution, including the parents of children who don't believe in the theory of evolution.
Germany has compulsory schooling. Some fundamental chrisitan don't want their children in public schools. If you discuss the issue with people who have political power you find that those people don't want that those children get taught some strange fundamental worldview that includes things like young earth creationism. The want that the children learn the basic paradigm that people in German society follow.
On the other hand I'm not sure whether you can get a motivation like that from reading the newspaper. Everyone who's involved in the newspaper believes that it's worth to teach children the theory of evolution so it's not worth writing a newspaper article about it.
Is it a secret persecution of fundamentalist Christians? The fundamentalist Christian from whom the government takes away the children for "child abuse" because the children don't go to school feel perscecuted. On the other hand the politician in question don't really feel like the are persecuting fundamentalist Christians.
The ironic thing about it is that compulsory schooling was introduced in Germany for the stated purpose of turning children into 'good Christians".
In a case like evolution, do you sincerely believe that the intellectual elite should use their power to push a Texan public school to teach evolution even if the parents of the children and the local board of education don't want it?
Yeah, when people in power create tools to help them maintain the power, if those tools are universal enough, they will be reused by the people who get the power later.
The trade-offs need to be discussed rationally. The answer would probably be "yes", but there are some negative side effects. For example, you create a precedent for other elites to push their agenda. (Just like those Christians did with the compulsory education.) Maybe a third option could be found. (Something like: Don't say what schools have to teach, but make the exams independent on schools. Make the evolutionary knowledge necessary to pass a biology exam. Make it public when students or schools or cities are "failing in biology".)
Why have governments control exams at all? Have different certifying authorities and employers are free to decide which authorities' diploma they accept.
That could work! On the other hand, it may set up a situation where a person who is only guilty of being raised in the wrong place may never get a decent job. Wonder what can be done to prevent that as much as possible?
And this differs from the status quo, how?
I was under the impression you wanted to improve things significantly. Hence why I mentioned that issue--and it IS an issue.
My point is that a child's parents are more likely to make good decisions for the child then education bureaucrats.
That depends on the parents. Yes, many parents (including mine and, presumably, yours) have the best interests of the child at heart, and have the knowledge and ability to be able to serve those interests quite well.
This is not, however, true of all parents. There's no entrance exam for parenthood. Thus:
An education bureaucrat, on the other hand, is a person hand-picked to make decisions for a vast number of children. Ideally, he is picked for his ability to do so; that is, he is not a total idiot, directly abusive, dead, or missing, and he has a reasonable budget to work with. He also has less time to devote to making a decision per child.
That's like claiming that bicycling is better than driving cars, as long as "driving cars' includes cases where the cars are missing or broken.
If the parents are missing, dead, abusive, or total idiots (depending on how severe the "total" idiocy is), they can be replaced by adoptive or foster parents. You would need to compare bureaucrats to parents-with-replacement, not to parents-without-replacement, to get a meaningful comparison.
A question: How many people are so attached to being experts at parenting that they would rather see children jobless, unhappy, or dead than educated by experts in a particular field (whether biology or social studies)? Those are the people I worry about, when I imagine a system in which parents/government could decide all the time what their children learn and from what institution. For every parent or official that changes their religion just to get children into the best schools, willing to give up every alliance just to get the tribe's offspring a better chance at life, and happy to give up their own authority in the name of a growing child's happiness, there are many, many more who are not so caring and fair, I fear.
Experts in a field are far more likely to want to educate children better BECAUSE the above attachment to beliefs, politics, and authority is not, in their minds, in competition with their care for the children (or, at least, shouldn't be, if those same things depend upon their knowledge). So, rather than saying we trust business, government, or one's genetic donors, shouldn't we be trying to make it so that the best teachers are trusted, period? Or, am I missing the point?
You have an extremely over-idealistic view of how the education bureaucracy (or any bureaucracy for that matter) works.
For evolutionary reasons, parents have a strong desire to do what's best for their child, bureaucracies on the other hand have all kinds of motivations (especially perpetuating the bureaucracy).
You haven't dealt with bureaucracy much, have you?
There are a lot of failing school systems with large budgets. Throwing money at a broken system doesn't give you a working system, it gives you a broken system that wastes even more money.
Evolution is satisfied if at least some of the children live to breed. There are several possible strategies that parents can follow here; having many children and encouraging promiscuity would satisfy evolutionary reasons and likely do so better than having few children and ensuring that they are properly educated. Evolutionary reasons are insufficient to ensure that what happens is good for the children; evolutionary reasons are satisfied by the presence of grandchildren.
Yes. That means that the problems in those systems are not money; the problems in those systems lie elsewhere, and need to be dealt with separately.
...not that much, no. I would kind of expect that, when dealing with someone who will be making decisions that affect vast numbers of children, people will make some effort to consider the long-term effects of such choices. (I realise that, in some cases, this will involve words like 'indoctrination'; there can be a dark side to long-term planning).
This may be over-idealistic on my part. The way I see it, though, it is not the bureaucrat's job to be better at making decisions for children than the best parent, or even than the average parent. It is the bureaucrat's job to create a floor; to ensure that no child is treated worse than a certain level.
Maybe elites that push their agenda have a much better chance keeping their power that don't? I'm not sure how much setting precedents limit further elites.
Basically you try to make the system more complicated to still get what you want but make people feel less manipulated.
Complicated and intransparent systems lead to conspiracy theories.