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roystgnr comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (318)
If I hadn't recently seen that "students fighting segregated prom" story from credible news sources, I'd have considered this part of the story to be nearly conclusive evidence of trolling. I should be more charitable than that.
It's still evidence, though. Who could fail to anticipate the devastatingly bad PR from "iPods vs Makeover/mani/pedis"? For that matter, why didn't the devastatingly bad PR occur? Surely the students and their parents weren't under NDA too.
Yet a Google search for 'ipod makeover school -"chic school girls"' doesn't seem to find anything relevant, with or without outraged commentary attached. This random lesswrong page comes up for me in the first couple dozen hits, even on a browser with no Google login or cookies that might trigger personalized rankings.
Nobody ever felt it was worth blogging about how their kids were being given these prizes at school?
If that program exists, it was tiny, which increases the odds that there' would be no public notice.
I suspect we overestimate how much of the world (not just the proportion of people, but the proportion of what's going on) is online.
The only people aware that the project happened, as far as I know, are myself, my boss, the man in charge, and the 56 students (who were in 6-8th grade at the time, and all from poor black families). The issuer of the grant was the local government, and they issue so many grants that I seriously doubt there's anyone looking at all of them.
If a student with poor parents in that age group get's a free iPod, his peer and parents are likely to notice.
The idea that you can give a school a grant worth $800,000 and only one adult in the school knowing about the grant also seems strange.
If a lot of the student got the second iPod makeover, and iPod touches were more expensive at the time the whole thing might have cost $20000. That means $780,000 just disappeared. If that kind of money disappears people are bound to be interested.
I can imagine some lesswrong users thinking it would be terribly clever for them to create a sock-puppet and "test" how gullible the lesswrong readerbase is via a post like this. If such a case were ever identified I would like to see the user banned by IP rather than rewarded with status and congratulations.
Banning by IP is useless at best and harmful in most cases (where hapless customers of an ISP get the old IP address of a troll). There is no way to prevent attempts to test how gullible we are; therefore we need to be generally immune to all attempts and not only to specific cases or instigators.
I'd estimate a 30% probability (but with a fairly large variance) that at least some elements of this article are inaccurate and an attempt at trolling. The "best" trolls are 90% truth with one or two outrageous elements using the halo effect to gain belief.
CarlShulman's comment has no satisfactory replies yet. What is the probability that the article's profound accusations are a) completely true, b) otherwise unreported, and c) first reported on lesswrong? It seems more likely that an actual whistle-blower would choose a more widely read media outlet (Wikileaks even?), and probably more than one. b) and c) could just be my inability to find similar information reported elsewhere. It seems to be fairly common knowledge that the education system is broken but not with the specific detail in the article.
The more widely read the media outlet, the higher the probability of the whistle-blower's anonymity getting blown.
Once it's released anywhere the risk of losing anonymity is basically the same in the end. Either it's a troll and will die here or it's true and will be disseminated everywhere. Such a strategy would only make sense if the original poster thought that this forum would replicate the research and publish it with no mention of the original source, but that seems more like the kind of thing an investigative journalist would do.
Huh? Why?
Maybe the person applying for the grant was himself black. Then it would be considered acceptable for the same reason rap lyrics are considered acceptable.