Intuitive and non-intuitive findings of systems theory, like what adding a second queue does or increasing the variability of a flow rate or changing the size of a buffer.
Relatedly and perhaps even more fundamentally, the basic discipline of thinking about a system and implementing a mathematical model or simulation to explore these topics, which drove the insights you mention. And in many ways, it's easier to test without worrying about people gaming the system, because you can give new examples and require them to actually explore the question.
also signing Dath Illan's nonverbal language, because why would you only make use of the visual modality when you happen to have access to a pen and writing surface?
Given the following charts, statistics, and arguments based on those charts and statistics, point out the important flaws in the arguments and state what unjustified conclusions the arguers are trying to cause you to reach.
Eliezer wrote:
Eliezer Yudkowsky: That covers a lot of territory! But if I tried to zoom in at the most general level of difference, there's very much an understanding among Very Serious People that if you require anything to get access to a job (like a credential) that is difficult to get or has finite supply, people can burn the whole surplus value of the job to them in order to get it, even if that thing is of lower value to the employer. In other words, they would recognize "occupational licensing" or college as a sickness and move to prevent it while it was still getting started. In general, demanding something from somebody other than their actual job skill is recognized as a potential civilizational problem.
The thing I'm trying to get at, is not so much "a test that is required in order to be able to get any job" (as the US high school diploma accidentally became), but rather, "a test which can identify the Very Serious People".
Topics are selected based on cost/benefit; something that takes a long time to learn would need to be a lot more useful, or have major positive externalities to more people knowing it.
There's more that's going into a good test. A good test is not about whether a person learned a topic but about whether the person is likely perform well in whatever they want to do.
Dath Ilan is going to have many different tests for different jobs. There will be regular evaluations of how the test predicts performance in the job and the test will be adapted to optimize for predicting performance.
Instead of picking topic by putting in "a lot of thought" the main way will be picking topics empirically by looking at whether the knowledge predicts performance.
The only thing that does need thought is thinking about how to prevent goodharting.
What topics belong on it?
That completely depends on the job. It doesn't make sense to have a uniform test that everyone is taking given that as a society you want diversity in skills in your population.
Partly agree with your criticism of the quoted claim, but there are two things I think you should consider.
First, evaluating tests for long-term outcomes is fundamentally hard. The extent to which a 5th grade civics or math test predicts performance in policy or engineering is negligible. In fact, I would expect that the feedback from test scores in determining what a child focuses on has a far larger impact on a child's trajectory than the object level prediction allows.
Second, standardizing tests greatly reduces cost of development, and allows larger sample sizes for validation. For either reason alone, it makes sense to use standardized tests as much as possible.
My case for trigonometry: We want to people understand social cycles. For example, heroin becomes fashionable among young people because it feels good. Time goes by and problems emerge with tolerance, addiction, and overdose. The next cohort of young people see what happened to aunts and uncles etc, and give heroin a miss. The cohort after that see their aunts and uncles living clean lives, lives that give no warning. They experiment and find that heroin feels good. The cycle repeats.
These cycles can arise because the fixed points of the dynamics are unstable. The classic simple example uses a second order linear differential equation as a model with a solution such as $e^{at} \sin kt$. We really want people to have some sense of cycles arising from instabilities without anyone driving them. We probably cannot give simple examples of what we mean with trigonometric functions.
I'd say that this is a better argument for calculus and PDEs than trigonometry- the sine function can be defined purely from a calculus point-of-view, and that definition is more similar to what you describe than the trigonometry perspective
Well, before we can discuss the "answers" the first step is to come up with an algorithm that measures how much a given piece of civics knowledge pays rent. Is it useful to know the nominal structure of the government (vs the 'actual' structure in practice)? Is it useful to know the retold tales of George Washington, victorious general and American hero? (not to mention the high probability of errors in the 'knowledge' given the time that has passed and the likely bias)
A reasonable argument could be made that in our form of democracy, civics knowledge is of little use to the average citizen. This is because that each of us has such an infinitesimal 'vote', and each person well educated in civics has their vote drowned out. If 1 in 1000 citizens are genuinely well educated in civics, and nearly all elections are decided by a margin greater than 0.1% (or this is below the noise floor for the voting machinery itself...), civics knowledge is useless.
If this hypothesis is true (not saying it is or isn't), the culprit would be a failure of colleges and others to be accountable to a measurable cost/benefit ratio for the things that they teach. Instead of using measurable metrics they use arguments like "this knowledge is clearly worth it because of what it is" or "tradition says we have to keep teaching it".
This is one reason why we all had to waste some of our lifespan on trigonometry and literature instead of say learning to use Python more effectively. Arguably knowing how to tell a machine to do your math for you effectively is thousands of times more valuable than useless derivations you won't need to know unless you become a mathematician.
A reasonable argument could be made that in our form of democracy, civics knowledge is of little use to the average citizen. This is because that each of us has such an infinitesimal 'vote', and each person well educated in civics has their vote drowned out.
IMO the assumption that civics knowledge is only useful when voting, is itself a concerning failure of civics education. Above-average civics knowledge might reveal high-value opportunities such as advocacy, focussed policy submissions, talking to friends about particular policies, raising public a...
A point in defence of George Washington and literature: having a shared culture, with a common background knowledge of legends and sacred texts, is extremely important for maintaining high trust and coordination. These stories have an enormous utility as such, even if the information is not directly useful. The reason why we teach children about George Washington is not because the historical facts about him are directly, instrumentally important, but because we want to maintain the mythopoetic commons by ensuring that everyone has a common grounding in th...
Suppose it were possible to write down a list of every fact or algorithm known by a living human being. This isn't impossible, if you could use an AI system to translate audio recordings of someone's entire life to text, and everything they ever read, you would have it in a file. Then you would map from [text] to [common fact or algorithm] by comparing thousands of these files and to fact or algorithm written in sources like encyclopedias. Or more likely you would find commonality with a clustering algorithm.
The "knowledge that pays the most rent" is either the most common fact or algorithm known by all humans, or the most common one that separates successful humans from failures. (if there is a measurable difference)
Then an education system adds the most value by teaching the or algorithms in order of greatest value to least value, or reordering in complexity tiers, and in each tier teaching the most value elements first until the time allotted for education is over.
If civics has any value at all, this algorithm would find it. (though as described it is subject agnostic)
May want a further filter, to look specifically for facts/algorithms that people know because they received explicit instruction or training (or some measure of knowing it better and more deeply because of explicit instruction)
Otherwise you end up duplicating things that people were already learning informally. Potentially taking those things into the "ownership" of formal teaching and convincing people you need to be taught them in a classroom for it to count.
Why do you dismiss the positive utility of literature? and Why would a world that operates solely on cost efficacy be superior than one that doesn’t?
A curriculum can only fit so many things, so everything that's included means something else can't be. Think of it this way: Would you rather spend 100 hours learning basic programming and 100 hours learning moral philosophy, or 100 hours learning geography trivia and 100 hours learning Shakespeare? And would you rather live in a world where everyone else knew basic programming and moral philosophy, or a world where everyone else knew geography trivia and Shakespeare?
Cost/benefit analysis works best if you're broad in what counts as a cost and what counts as a benefit. Eg if students find learning Shakespeare enjoyable, that would count as a benefit. My subjective experience, though, was that school literature courses didn't line up with what I actually wanted to read, so they weren't particularly enjoyable, and they were a lot less informative than an equal number of hours of nonfiction blogposts would have been.
Dath Ilan is a parallel Earth on which human civilization has its act together, in ways that actual-Earth does not. Like actual-Earth, citizens of Dath Ilan sometimes take standardized tests, both to figure out what sort of jobs they'd be suited for, to make sure that its educational institutions are functioning, and to give people guidance about what they might want to study. Unlike Earth's, Dath Ilan's tests have had a lot of thought put into the choice of topics: rather a lot more economics, rather a lot less trigonometry and literature. Topics are selected based on cost/benefit; something that takes a long time to learn would need to be a lot more useful, or have major positive externalities to more people knowing it.
I want to create a test, that will tell people what topics they ought to learn, and enable people to make their knowledgeability legible.
What topics belong on it?