Comment Permalink

I've transcribed a minute:

What happened in college was during my first course it was a psychology class and the professor gave an example in class that completely changed my realationship with education, He said if a child is misbehaving in class, let's say, no, if a child is misbehaving in a playground, that's what it was, you can turn to some-one and say "Johnny is misbehaving" or you can say in the past hour Johnny has kicked four kids slapped five and punched three.

And that changed my life,because from then on... What he did was he explained a notion of empiricism, it was not necessarily just saying that Johnny was bad but (saying) describing what you saw and then letting others arrive at their own conclusion of whether or not that's bad and how bad that is. And so for a period after that I would,every conversion I had with some-one I would always say "what do you mean?" I wanted them to define exactly what they meant, but that changed my relationship with learning and education, from then on I was always looking to define things that were being said, to specify, to get the empirical essence of what was being discussed, so that little example changed things for me.

See in context

7 A Rationality Click Moment

by NancyLebovitz

20th Sep 2011

1 min read

7

In an interview, Angel Harris, author of Kids Don't Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap, who'd been in the bottom tenth of the students in high school, describes the moment in college when a professor talked about listing a child's behaviors and letting a listener draw their own conclusions, rather than just calling the child bad-- this level of empiricism was a revelation to Harris and permanently changed the way he thought. This starts about 3 minutes into the recording and only runs for about five minutes.

His general point is that a lot of the gap between black and white students can be explained by teachers giving up on the black students-- he's got studies-- and that a lot of what looks like oppositional behavior is actually frustration from students who are being expected to learn things that they weren't given the prior education to understand.

I'd say his more general point is to have more respect for the idea that people are showing ordinary human reactions to their situations rather than there being something weird about them explaining what they're doing.

Personal Blog

7

A Rationality Click Moment

New Comment

17 comments, sorted by

top scoring

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:55 AM

[-]CharlieSheen13y260

While what you point out is worth reading and it is definitely a real phenomena, the following quote from the link:

Understanding the causes of the racial achievement gap in American education—and then addressing it with effective programs—is one of the most urgent problems communities and educators face.

Sends bad signals about the author to me. Far too much ink has already been and is being spilled and far too much effort wasted on the same ineffectual tactics and the same recycled few theories.

No friends. Closing The Gap is not the most important issue which educators should worry about. While its perfectly possible I've been reading too much Steve Sailer or was too impressed with Murray's Real Education, what isn't possible is that Closing The Gap is low hanging fruit. And there is low hanging fruit in education.

What is further more unlikely is that we haven't yet hit diminishing or perhaps even negative returns with the current approaches. And don't think for a moment anyone's actually come up with anything new in the last decade or so, the only new thing is a fresh mix of applause lights and false rationalizations as to why it "works" and even these are more and more just reruns. The last 20 years in particular have seen schemes that have provided ever greater incentives for fraud on a massive scale in schools (don't think the schools haven't responded) and cooking up various tests like the SAT to try and Close The Gap as much as possible on paper without sacrificing too much of their predictive value.

For many years, the most popular explanation for the achievement gap has been the “oppositional culture theory” the idea that black students underperform in secondary schools because of a group culture that devalues learning and sees academic effort as “acting white.” Despite lack of evidence for this belief, classroom teachers accept it, with predictable self-fulfilling results. In a careful quantitative assessment of the oppositional culture hypothesis, Angel L. Harris tested its empirical implications systematically and broadened his analysis to include data from British schools. From every conceivable angle of examination, the oppositional culture theory fell flat.

Despite achieving less in school, black students value schooling more than their white counterparts do. Black kids perform badly in high school not because they don’t want to succeed but because they enter without the necessary skills. Harris finds that the achievement gap starts to open up in preadolescence—when cumulating socioeconomic and health disadvantages inhibit skills development and when students start to feel the impact of lowered teacher expectations.

Kids Don’t Want to Fail is must reading for teachers, academics, policy makers, and anyone interested in understanding the intersection of race and education.

We have been on this merry go round before. So. Many. Times.

I can't even muster the will to try and RP what Charlie Sheen would say.

[-]GLaDOS13y190

No friends. Closing The Gap is not the most important issue to which educators should worry about, while its perfectly possible I've been reading too much Steve Sailer or was too impressed with Murray's Real Education, what isn't possible is that Closing the Gap is low hanging fruit. And there is low hanging fruit in education.

Upvoted for this. There are just so many counter indications in so many countries both developed and developing for such a long period of time that we should have realized that closing the gap is hard and additional increases in spending cognitive capital to try and solve it rather than manage it uneconomical. People who want to do good things for children should try and figure out how they can learn more or learn the same amount with less stress, how all the kids can do better, rather than stress that some kids are doing so much better than others.

Massive investments in the tried approaches due to egalitarian concerns are pure moral posturing and signalling at best, and very bad entrenched science at worst. For anyone who has the stomach to shut up and multiply the opportunity costs paid for this are simply staggering. Because signalling matters and this provides a neat source of makework for educators (keeping them fed, employed and feeling they are productive) I'm ok with not scaling down, but any additional effort has so much greater pay off's elsewhere that I simply have to speak up.

[-]NancyLebovitz13y10

Maybe I should have just posted my first paragraph-- the most Less Wrongian aspect may have been a person snapping into much more rationality as a result of encountering a pretty ordinary kind of of thinking more clearly. Is there anything which can be done (behind just making rationality, even of the most ordinary sort) more common, to improve the odds of it registering as a clue?

On the other hand, after he's spent some decades with that mental habit, perhaps what he's thought could be worth noting.

On yet another hand, one of the interesting bits from the interview was a mention that black kids go into first grade enthusiastic about school, and aren't enthusiastic a few years later. A similar pattern has been noticed in white kids, even if it doesn't cause as much damage. This is part of what fueled the home schooling movement.

People who want to do good things for children should try and figure out how they can learn more or learn the same amount with less stress, how all the kids can do better, rather than stress that some kids are doing so much better than others.

Agreed. The Khan Academy would be one starting point.

[-]GLaDOS13y00

the most Less Wrongian aspect may have been a person snapping into much more rationality as a result of encountering a pretty ordinary kind of of thinking more clearly. Is there anything which can be done (behind just making rationality, even of the most ordinary sort) more common, to improve the odds of it registering as a clue?

Yes, that's why I think the title was a good one "Rationalist click". I think its just basically being forced to recognize that the map dosen't match the territory no matter how pretty the map. Getting the territory intrude directly on your senses seems a pretty strong potential trigger of this. Maybe strong enough to even dispel belief in belief at some times (some religious de-conversions seem to follow this pattern as well).

And I think the encounter probably did shift him closer to reality. The reason why the example has caught an underwhelming response so far is that many LWers (like me) probably wanted to get out of the way many of the other stuff he seems to signal that he's obviously getting wrong or pretending to get wrong because of self-interest in order to not inadvertently promote them to LWers who may not be familiar with the subject (and don't think this couldn't happen first solution to a problem someone hears has clear privileges, mere exposure effect, halo effect, ect.).

On yet another hand, one of the interesting bits from the interview was a mention that black kids go into first grade enthusiastic about school, and aren't enthusiastic a few years later. A similar pattern has been noticed in white kids, even if it doesn't cause as much damage. This is part of what fueled the home schooling movement.

Indeed.

Agreed. The Khan Academy would be one starting point.

The approach of Khan Academy does do a lot to help with what you tried to point out with your example. It lets kids catch up on knowledge that they missed in the past (and the data does show that some do indeed do this in a way we don't see in more traditional mass schooling).

[-]NancyLebovitz13y60

I think its just basically being forced to recognize that the map dosen't match the territory no matter how pretty the map.

The thing was, he wasn't forced-- somehow, the little bit of input met his internal state in a way that worked. It wouldn't surprise me if he'd been criticized as a child without being given specifics, so the idea of breaking "bad boy" down into evidence and then allowing evaluation as a separate process wasn't just abstract for him, but I'm guessing.

[-][anonymous]13y00

Good point, he didn't impact the hard ground of reality, he was hit by a pebble that should have been easy to rationalize.

While calling it a breach of compartments is just giving it another name, and isn't in itself an explanation, do you think the terminology is descriptively accurate and could be used (to keep our terminology consistent and as simple as possible)?

[-]NancyLebovitz13y00

I think you've got a concept there which should have a name, but I'm not sure "breach of compartments" is quite it. My connotations are of a ship which has compartments for very good reasons.

"Widened context" seems closer, but not quite there. "Spontaneous context expansion" is closer, but doesn't give your sense of why such things don't happen more often.

[-]AlanCrowe13y120

I've transcribed a minute:

[-]prase13y40

Whitvement

A typo has occured.

[-]NancyLebovitz13y10

Corrected-- thanks.

[-]Emile13y30

I'd personally prefer if this kind of topic / example was avoided on LessWrong, it has too much potential for mind killing and flame wars (or at least discussions where each sides distrusts the other's motives).

[-]lessdazed13y40

Not downvoted due to the use of "avoided" rather than "banned" or similar.

[-]MrMind13y10

This belief implies that lesswrong readers are still weak on rationality.

[-]NancyLebovitz13y50

Yes, it does. It's a commonplace idea here that politics is the mindkiller, and this is reasonable. It's also reasonable to choose training which is difficult but possible, and politics and related subjects were probably too hard for LW in the past.

However, I think the group has become somewhat more capable in this area, and I think my judgement that my post was something that wouldn't blow up was correct.

[-][anonymous]13y50

But on second thought my previous comment isn't the reason why this otherwise neat example of a "click moment" hasn't received more attention for its content. Considering that CharlieSheen's (!) comment has been up voted to ~20, I think what's produced a collective twitch of the LW community is that Angel Harris is just so far away from the quiet consensus that seems to have emerged on some educational matters and the near consensus on the intellectual validity of scepticism towards given explanations for the gap (a large minority basically endorses a hereditarian explanation, while (I speculate since there haven't been polls on the matter due to signalling concerns) a major espouse agnosticism regarding what the given explanations being wrong entails).

He thus comes of as conspicuously wrong on some of the stuff written in his book and on the page you linked to. He's not even wrong in a unpopular brave thinker kind of way, he's just wrong in the standard way we keep running into and that probably bothers rationalists like a bad itch they can't quite reach. I suspect someone bringing up a particularly lucid moment of instrumental rationality in one of Ratzinger's theological writings that was followed by its application to immaculate conception would have received a similar response. Perhaps even slightly better, because we seem to now view religion as obviously silly and relatively cheap to reject for most fresh new rationalists on the site.

Perhaps we can together digg for more examples of this, to try and illustrate this point further and perhaps spark a productive debate (that I think the "click" moment deserves)? At the very least the high up vote (and probably a few downvotes) of the comment of the thread indicates lots of people have read this thread.

[-][anonymous]13y20

The group has. Politics is far less a mindkiller now than it was before, we can touch on nearly any subject with the exception of gender relations and have a pretty decent exercise in rationality.

Individuals who are just stumbling onto LW haven't.

I don't think either of you where considering the opportunity costs involved when making this comment. We do want to keep LW growing while maintaining its current quality don't we? So much action has been taken to keep this so, from the HPMoR fanfiction, to the site redesign, to the newly written up introduction to rationality, to a more tolerant approach to religion (basically we still see it as a major rationality failure, but we've come to realize its just one of many equally potent rationality failures), ect.

[-]AlanCrowe13y00

I've transcribed a key minute hoping to keep conversation focused on the click - so that is what empiricism is about.

Also I get to try to the playback slower slower feature on the VLC media player. Click it three times and my typing nearly keeps pace with the speech, making transcription practical.

Moderation Log