Right. Here is DD denying that TCS is revolutionary:
we should always strive to use or adapt existing traditions, preferably ones that have evolved to meet independent criteria, rather than try to design something wholly new. In my opinion, TCS already does this very well.
He’s wrong. That article would be a good one to critique if someone knew how and cared to.
Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for. I strongly disagree with large portions of the quote you provided.
I don’t understand what’s important about the bucket theory of mind in this analysis, besides the fact that some educators (and some bad economists lol) happen to believe in it. It’s completely possible to have a traditional educator who is also a Popperian: if asked what he’s doing, this Popperian teacher could say that he is using a coercive method to get his students to learn some important material, and that—like all knowledge acquisition—the actual learning happens through the students’ own self-generated conjecture and criticism.
Such an educator could be criticized for being coercive, but as I think has been shown multiple times in this thread, it’s hard to imagine how almost any social institution that does difficult/good things could function without coercion.
Such an educator could also be criticized on the basis that he’s wrong about what he deems to be “important,” but a) the younger the kids are, the more likely the educator is to be correct that what he’s teaching them is going to help them solve their problems, and b) the older the kids get, the more options they have to choose what they want to be coerced into learning about (or drop out of school and go their own way).
great
I don’t think laughing at Caplan without providing arguments is a good idea. And summarizing some info from that wikipedia page, the book says:
Problem: School is 80% signaling and 20% learning.
Policy recommendations: Drastically reduce government funding of education and have more vocational schooling.
That seems pretty good.
I can see signs on the page that I wouldn’t agree with all his reasoning, plus I already knew some partially negative things about the author, but I think it’s bad to bring him up tangentially, just to mock him without explaining what he says about the bucket theory of mind – it’s not a useful example without more information.
Education is currently dominated by non-Popperians. It’s designed around some ideas, including the bucket theory, but not others. It’s hard to say what the world would be like if Popperian ideas were way more influential. How to use those ideas in classrooms, in textbook writing, in school design, etc., is not obvious.
And I think basically that trying to use pressure, force, coercion, intimidation, or anything like that, is not a reasonable way to get people to learn much of anything if the learner himself has to do 80% of the work/thinking. Whereas if the learner is mostly a passive receptacle of knowledge, it’s much more realistic to use pressure tactics and expect a good result, since you aren’t relying on much cooperation. So whether coercive education is very effective depends on issues like whether the bucket theory of mind is correct.
I just want to be clear that this isn’t actually my point in my posts.
I think that in current society, people are coerced much of the time. So you can’t reasonably avoiding doing things that will cause someone else coercion because people get coerced over lots of things. (You can and should still try to act reasonably, not be a jerk to people, and things like that.)
But I don’t think the issue is that coercion is actually required for institutions to function.
I think the issue is more like coercion happens on an individual level, in each person’s mind. A lot of it has to do with how people interpret things and how they perceive their own situation. Our culture supports and teaches thinking about things in a win-lose way and viewing many things in our lives as coercive. So, given that people are mostly coerced in their own personal lives, they are also going to be coerced in their interactions with other people.
I actually think that having less coercion in your life is something useful to strive for, and it is something that could be achievable. And if people were able to be less coerced in general, they would be able to do other things like run institutions with less coercion as well.
I think TCS had things a bit backwards because it encouraged people to stop coercing their children first, without solving the coercion in their own lives. I think it would have made more sense to first figure out how to have less coercion in your own life, and then you can figure out how to help your child in less-coercive or non-coercive ways.
Yeah fair enough. The reason I included it is that a substantial part of his book is based on this model he has of education as filling up a leaky bucket (and his case against education is basically that investing in filling up a leaky bucket has significant diminishing returns). I agree with some of his conclusions but I think his argument is badly wrong.
It was unreasonable of me to not bother explaining this though, and it distracts from the topic I actually wanted to discuss.
I don’t accept your grouping of all these tactics together. I’m also against physical force and intimidation in education, and I agree they aren’t a way to get good results.
When it comes to coercion though, I think it’s more complicated. A lot of what I’ve learned in my life has happened with some amount of coercion working somewhere in the background, e.g. the teacher assigns homework, and I’d rather not do the homework, but I really want to get a good grade so I do it anyway—and learn in the process. If I wasn’t being coerced, I wouldn’t have learned the content that the homework was intended to teach me.
Could you be more specific? I didn’t find anything relevant by searching the book for “bucket” or “leak”.
Sure, I don’t think it’s required by the laws of physics that institutions are coercive, and it sounds plausible to me that if people could conquer their own inner coercion or whatever then none of our institutions would need to be coercive.
I think coercion “works” to get students to memorize and learn school work.
But I don’t think it actually has a high success rate with getting people to learn things in a Popperian way. It doesn’t get them to learn in the way that Elliot meant when he specified “if the learner himself has to do 80% of the work/thinking”.
School work does not actually require the learner to do 80% of the work/thinking. He just has to do the required readings, do the assigned homework, show up to class, listen to lectures, etc. He doesn’t really have to figure things out for himself.
And school doesn’t actually test people for whether they have a good/thorough understanding of the material. It tests for things like whether you did the readings you were supposed to do and whether you can repeat back the opinions and keywords you were supposed to have heard and remembered from the lectures and readings.
To be honest, I haven’t read the book: I was going off what I remembered from a conversation with a friend like a year ago. I looked into it a bit more and I think I misunderstood my friend or something, because I don’t see how what I remembered fits with Caplan’s actual argument.
Turns out my snarky unsubstantiated accusation was even worse than you thought.
Doesn’t a learner technically always have to do 100% of the work/thinking himself, since all learning is an active process of conjecture and criticism? What am I missing?
What is “the Popperian way” of learning things? As opposed to what other way?
Yeah, I agree that grades are not an objective measurement of a student’s understanding of the material. However, if a student can learn a subject well then he will usually have the option of getting a good grade, and this motivates (coerces) many students to learn things that they would not otherwise be motivated to learn.
So in other words, the coercive motivation system used by schools can achieve the goal of getting a certain corpus of knowledge into students’ heads, just like the coercive methods used by businesses can achieve the goal of getting employees to make burgers, or the coercive methods used by book clubs can achieve the goal of getting members to read books.
If you are learning an existing idea people already have knowledge of different ways of explaining that idea.
Somebody who wants to help you learn can choose among the existing ways of explaining that idea to tailor it to what you want to learn. For example, photography and designing optical fibres both involve optics, but the parts of optics you should learn for those two topics are different.
In addition, when an idea is first invented people often make errors in understanding and applying the idea and learn from those mistakes. So people who want to explain that idea can help others avoid common errors by explaining what’s wrong with them.
DD is coerced and unproductive frequently. I’ve commented more in the DD megathread: David Deutsch Megathread - #71 by Elliot
This post was misleading and makes my situation sound way better than it is.
Progress is possible, and I’ve made some, but I still deal with serious coercion regularly. I’m not any sort of master of coercion-free living or a model to follow. I’m still a n00b. Some of the stuff I’ve engaged with that’s actually been useful for addressing coercion (e.g. meditation) is a relatively recent development for me that’s only partially-integrated into my life and thinking.
When you’re learning, other people can guess what you’re thinking about and design communications to help you. They can understand what you’re missing, what’d be good to learn next, etc., and tell you. When they do that, they’re doing something. They’re involved in the learning process. They don’t have the primary role but they do have a role.
I think I agree with Elliot.
Ultimately you have to make the ideas part of your mind to learn them. Nobody can do your thinking for you. But other people can present ideas for you in such a way that it makes it easier for you to learn them. This is part of why books and tutoring can be a value. If competently done, they can help you learn things faster/more effectively than if you were just trying to figure out everything yourself.
Maybe there is a good analogy with food. You need to eat and digest your food yourself. No one can do your eating and digesting for you. But other people can prepare the food in such a way that it makes it easier and more convenient for you to cook/eat. You don’t have to go shoot animals or milk a cow to get meat or milk. This lets you spend less time on food-related tasks and more time on other tasks. This is all true even though you ultimately have to eat & digest the food by yourself.