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TimS comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion

65 Post author: ThinkOfTheChildren 08 April 2013 09:29PM

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Comment author: TimS 09 April 2013 01:36:09AM 2 points [-]

My experience is that school districts have a strong not-invented-here bias. For example, special education laws require research based interventions, a requirement that is generally ignored.

Comment author: atucker 09 April 2013 01:38:09AM -1 points [-]

Maybe slightly vary the parameters to make the model "new"? Like, fit it to data from that district, and it will probably be slightly different from "other" models.

Comment author: TimS 09 April 2013 01:40:42AM 0 points [-]

But that requires effort, and school districts don't generally want to put in effort to do things differently.

Comment author: atucker 09 April 2013 01:44:45AM -1 points [-]

I think the hard part of refitting the model would probably just be getting access to the data -- beyond that it seems like a statistician or programmer would be able to just tell a computer how to minimize some appropriate cost function.

Something like most of the marginal effort is devoted to gathering the data, which presumably doesn't require that much expertise relative to understanding the model in the first place.

Comment author: TimS 09 April 2013 01:59:37AM 1 point [-]

In practice, there are substantial privacy law issues, although those can be gotten around if the district is clever.

More importantly, collecting, collating, and ensuring coder reliability is expensive. What you called "marginal effort" is quite difficult for just about any large bureaucracy.

Comment author: atucker 09 April 2013 03:11:36AM -1 points [-]

Marginal effort within the bounds of a consulting agency offering a service "tailored" to each school district.