Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

And voting adds legitimacy to it.

Thank you.

#annoyedbymotivatedcognition

And voting adds legitimacy to it.

Thank you.

#annoyedbymotivatedcognition

Harvard and Yale produce great leaders whether seeded with with rich children or poor children

I find it very strange that you speak of Harvard and Yale educating "children", but I'm guessing you mean the Yale and Harvard's of primary school education.

I do however agree it doesn't much matter if you put rich or poor talented people into those colleges, their graduates will still be quality.

I do hope you realize that many poor children are not talented.

It is merely an excercise in science to determine what the essential features of a rich child's upbringing are that must be provided by the state to poor children to keep this virtuously productive cycle going, but the good news is we already have such great indications of success in our society.

Oh you probably don't. No problem I'll explain it to you. High IQ is useful for climbing out of poverty, this is a robust finding of social science. Poor children are on average dimmer than rich children. In the First world this is probably mostly due to genetics. IQ is mostly heritable. This doesn't necessarily the causes are genetic differences. But since we also know that above some very low plateau (nearer to mild abuse than mild neglect) education, better nutrition and nearly anything else tried doesn't show any sustained gains in IQ it is the explanation that best fits the evidence.

I do think that spending rich people's money to genetically engineer improved chances for poor people's children is a ridiculously wise investment for a society to make. If I thought the same potential of great gains existed for education, I would support making greater investments into it as well. But I happen to think that formal education beyond the primary school level is mostly a sorting mechanism with elaborate signalling races developing around it. Now don't get me wrong signalling is necessary, but escalating signalling races are negative sum games because they eat up resources.

I also think primary school education as it currently exists is very badly designed from the perspective of "do no harm to children", since it is practically designed to introduce conformity, stifle creativity and in general produce very weird socialization patterns (like what is this deal with sorting children into pseudo-military regiments based on their date of manufacture?). There might be good reasons to do so. Maybe such traits are good to have for the average person in our society. Maybe they are bad for the individual but have positive externalities for others. But I'm suspicious since the institutions claim that they are trying their best not to produce many of the effects they quite clearly do create precisely by their efforts.

In many ways primary school's best function is to serve as free day care that takes advantages of economy of scale (consider the organizational similarity between the average school and the average early 20th century factory). Parents do have to go to work and we believe their children can't work along side them and learn via apprenticeship as they did in previous eras. Arguably technology could soon make this function of school obsolete. Much of parental & adult supervision can be automated.

Now obviously the parent setting certain limitations on the day care machine before going to work sounds heartless, but describe in your mind a regular school day the same way a anthropologist from a different time would have. Sounds about as heartless to me.

I also think primary school education as it currently exists is very badly designed from the perspective of "do no harm to children", since it is practically designed to introduce conformity, stifle creativity and in general produce very weird socialization patterns (like what is this deal with sorting children into pseudo-military regiments based on their date of manufacture?).

First off, it seems to me the PRIMARY advantage of humans over other animals is that we can work cooperatively in highly complex ways in very large groups. I don't kno... (read more)

-1mwengler14y

This flies in the face of my experience. And I do believe I can cite evidence against it but it is not from studies per se. I actually had a very good public school education, in a well off suburban school district in 1960s and 1970s Farmingdale, New York. In addition to this being a well funded district that people moved to for its reputation, I was sorted from 3rd grade through 9th grade into a special program with even better teachers and curriculum aimed at the top 2% in IQ terms of the district. Even with that excellent background, it was not until Swarthmore College that I understood why missing a day of class could possibly be of any concern (because the pace was so fast). Further, I would estimate that I learned, hard to say, 10X as much science and math in 4 years at Swarthmore than I had in 12 years of Farmingdale. I then spent 2 years as a technician working with radio astronomers at Bell Labs. Yes, I learned so much there that for a while I would tell people I did my undergrad at Bell Labs. But to be fair, it would probably be more analagous to having done my MS at Bell Labs. My undergraduate education was superb. I then went to graduate school at Caltech, and surprisingly instead of signalling my sorting, I learned and did independent research, presented my results to the elite, and developed into somebody who could reasonably say that if he didn't understand a particular physics/astronomy presentation, that it was the presentation that sucked, not me. Yes, I learned LOTS MORE even in graduate school, in math methods and statistics/probability, and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and, holy of holies, electromagnetics, my own specialization. Oh and in solid state physics, I was working on superconducting devices. So my own experience is I learned gobs and gobs and GOBS of stuff in college and gradual school. Does the possibility exist I could have learned this on the job? Sort of but not really. First off, classes were INTENSE, much harde

1mwengler14y

I think these are great examples of where "wisdom" and "preference" smear across each other's boundaries. The truths you cite above are matters of degree, we probably both agree on that. Where we don't agree probably is that the low hanging fruit of more better people and fewer expensive criminals and morons are the fairly large minority of poor children who are brought down by lousy home environments. You assert that here this is probably mostly due to genetics, implying we've got the environment "good enough" for either everybody or mostly everybody. I constantly hear of studies like Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects showing significant and persistent gains from early intervention with the right population. In the United States, that self-proclaimed paradigm of the first world. Now as far as I am concerned, the more interesting point is NOT whether the US being a benign enough environment so that poor people with good IQ genes have already climbed out of poverty, or whether there is still plenty of raw human material unexploited. The more interesting point is that we have different preferences in those regards, and we can't easily separate our judgements on the preponderance of the evidence from our preferences. And in a democracy, I don't have to convince you necessarily that I am closer to right than you are, I just have to convince some complex mix of people and interests corresponding to what, with other factors, will tend to get me 51% of the vote. My aesthetic preference would be to actually convince you, that would be winning and make me more confident that I was right and not just deluded by my preferences. But by deciding the democracy is beautiful, by having a meta-esthetic, I can enjoy the process whether I am winning or not. By the way, as far as the conclusion that above a certain fairly low threshold, grooming children for success is wasted, it seems rather telling to me that 1) you never see a rational rich person sending their children

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Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

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Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

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