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Notes -
A Case For/Against Education, Intuition.
My submission to @FiveHourMarathon's Essay Competition.
Education - Catchall term to refer to mass primary+secondary schooling, not specifically the act of educating oneself through any means.
Intuition - Defined as follows in the paragraphs below.
The case against education is well trodded territory among The Motte users. Bryan Caplans and Freddie deBoers work can be considered to be a part of the 'Rationalist Canon'. Of course, the majority of the rationalists who speak of educations ills are not blind ideologues. They do concede that there are a certain set of benefits to education. However, a benefit that I (think that I) benefit from strongly yet hardly ever see talked about, is intuition building.
I am not talking about intuition in the sense of "learning how to learn", or transferring patterns of thoughts/ideas from one domain to another, those ideas rest on shaky foundations, to say the least. I am referring to a very narrowly defined type of 'intuition', intuition of material/mechanical systems of The World. More specifically, I am referring to the ideal outcome of well-integrated baseline knowledge of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. This subset of general intuition in my estimation is a proxy for one's "bullshit detector", if something runs afoul of 5th grade science, there is (probably) something fishy afoot (treat it as a loose heuristic and spare us the string theory).
One can make the case that a large number of people, especially educated people lack that body of intuitions. However, I think the reason I do have those intuitions is largely because I generalized the latent ideas of certain topics taught in middle/high school. But one can absolutely argue that the mass failure to impart these intuitions means the education system is not doing its explicit job well enough.
It's difficult to highlight successes of said type of intuition, but it is very easy to highlight failures of a lack of said intuition.
Case Study 1: Outdoor Mask Mandates/Adherence
(I would extend it to mask adherence at all, but I'll steelman myself here)
Outdoor Mask Mandates (OMM) are idiotic. The evidence they "work" is nonexistent. Despite its (I assume) obvious idiocy; They were adopted in practically all of South America, East Asia, and some countries in Europe. OMMs being a spectacular form of Security theatre can explain their being used as policy more than well enough. The shocking revelation for me was that a large number of people, including "well-educated" people actually could not parse out that fact and act as such. Everyone has seen some confused bastard wearing a mask alone while walking in the park, and sometimes even performatively distancing themselves as they walk past people.
Where does my formulation of intuition tie into this? If you recall reading your textbook in middle school physics class, there were probably pictures of the process of diffusion. Usually demonstrated by adding a drop of food coloring to a beaker full of water, and showing how the water picks up the color. It doesn't take much creativity to infer that, that same drop of food coloring added to the ocean would practically 0 effect on the ocean. Is the logic not the same with someone wearing a mask outdoors (especially if they are alone, for the steelman)?
The fact that fluids diffuse/disperse is fundamental to my baseline understanding of the physical world. In that what I intuit about physical reality without exercising any thought. I wonder what went wrong for anyone to mask outdoors ever at all and not see the futility of it.
Do those people know something I don't? Did they not internalize what is essentially 6th-grade physics? Whatsoever the reason, their model of physical reality is much unlike mine.
Case Study 2: Reflexive HBD Skepticism
Once again, we are back at middle school biology. Most middle schoolers learn that certain traits are determined by genetics (and that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell). Examples are usually explored via differently colored flowers, eyes, corn, cauliflower, and dog breeds (Not only their color but their behavior as well). Being middle schoolers by all means they still don't have a clue how about genetics works, and neither do I. But the seed intuition is valuable nonetheless, that genetic determinism exists at all to begin with, and that its a powerful force.
Of course I would have to fight a weakman to claim that HBD skeptics or the "race is a social construction" people literally don't believe in genetic determinism. But It seems to me that if you studied middle school biology at all, genetic determinism should be your prior, your null hypothesis (literal meaning not hypothesis testing meaning).
By all means, it seems like a modeling failure to me if your model assigns negligible weight to the overwhelming force that turned wolves into dogs and selected all sub-par vitamin d synthesizing skin havers out of Scandinavia (also taught in middle-high school).
Case Study 3: Newton's Third Law, The First Law of Thermodynamics.
In the most simplest terms, the essence of the aforementioned laws are "something can't be created out of nothing". Although both these laws apply to specific instances in physics, the essense generalizes to justt about every domain. Economics has its analog, There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The failure to internalize and crystalize this group of ideas is responsible for just about all of left-wing economic theory.
A loose extension of these body of ideas is the acknowledgment of the idea of complex systems. A lot of the seed intuition is imparted in physics and biology class (food chain, ecosystems, etc). I'm sure there was plenty of support for fucking about with complex systems in the last two years. I'm aware that to tamper or not with complex systems just boils down to liberalism vs conservatism, but I am highlighting the lack of intuition towards the system's existence at all to begin with, not the insistence to act otherwise with proper knowledge.
Okay, but how do you account for the fact that all of your highlighted examples likely don't lack the baseline knowledge you're promoting? I've never heard of economic lefties denying any laws of physics (well at least not since the Science Wars era), I'm pretty sure most mask mandate supporters have used food coloring before, and, though they sometimes seem like they may selectively be so (though in my experience they more commonly retreat to "Well actually genetics is complicated in a way you're too uneducated to understand, so complicated that the conclusion obviously supported by the data actually isn't true because [mountain of misdirection]"-style arguments), most HBD skeptics are not genuinely genetics denialists overall and probably understand their middle school Punnett squares about as much as anybody else.
If you truly think that A (a basic understanding of thermodynamics, genetics, etc.) should inevitably lead to B (a rejection of left-wing economics, mask mandates, etc.) here (which I think is still a debatable premise) then it seems to me that the issue can quite obviously not be one of knowledge (as there is plenty of evidence showing that quite a few people know A quite well but do not conclude B) but rather its application, that is, critical thinking. And I do not necessarily believe this to be fully teachable because I think abilities of comparative and analogical reasoning may be neurologically/genetically/IQ limited by the space of one's working memory along with the natural interconnectivity of one's brain.
That is, is the problem that people don't know the concepts, or is it that for some people, concepts in their mind are like chains of islands, whereas for others they form dense, interlinked cities?
I believe in some extent to critical periods for learning to think, and debiasing, but can we please stop the ineptia/hypocrisy and admit we live in a degenerate world that is at the level 0 of teaching critical thinking/epistemology, it's not that it's hard to do it is that we are not doing it at all, ever.
This is a kind of consensus-building rhetoric (along the lines of "everyone knows")--it is not allowed here.
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""Critical thinking""e is, itself, modern concept. There weren't any critical thinking teachers in medieval towns or primitive cultures. Meanwhile, modern schools explicitly attempt to "teach critical thinking".
There doesn't need to be a concept for something for that thing to exist. There's also no reason to assume modern schools explicitly attempting to teach critical thinking actually improves it, rather than impairs it.
I take issue with the idea of critical thinking (it has no low-level differences from other kinds of thinking), but you're right that needs to be argued for, which GP didn't do.
As for schools 'improving' thinking - thinking isn't a monolith, "improving thinking" doesn't mean much, but schools clearly teach a lot of useful things to some people. e.g. high school science or math for researchers and engineers. Or people like academic historians usually claim that high school was useful in teaching them the basics of reading, writing, and thinking about sources that they build on in their careers, which seems related to what is called "critical thinking".
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