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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.
Sounds good, doesn't work. No matter what they know of first principles of a domain, people do not generalize it to real world automatically, and their experience in school cannot teach them when to generalize scientific principles. Some learn it on their own. Most learn... something else.
The official premise of basic school education is murky in itself. It's such a vast enterprise with such questionable returns that its advocates can't help but peddle it as a panacea, I guess. There's the plausible-enough aspect of teaching people object-level trivia (although they forget virtually all of it); the dubious claim of teaching advantageous habits of mind (e.g. the shift from concrete operational to formal operational thinking that Flynn believed explains some of the eponymous effect), the related basically-misleading promise of raising intelligence and thus improving outcomes (beyond the contribution of credentials themselves, and isolation from antisocial environments for the most unfortunate kids... who are lucky enough to get into schools for higher strata). All of that list is pretty worthless in my book, in comparison to the human cost of a decade of imprisonment (I'm essentially with EB/JB on this one). Then there are less popular but more convincing arguments, «school as a day care» mainly.
But the key error undermining the premise, I think, comes all the way from the conceit of actual teachers, who are overwhelmingly not bright enough for high-fidelity metacognition and theories of mind. You don't upload data into a child. You do not even «train» a child. You prompt experiences, and children learn from those experiences. Their intuitions are grounded in the context of their interactions with the curriculum, teachers and each other. And I posit that intuitions they form are the opposite of what you'd like them to get.
Among my abandoned Substack drafts is one dedicated to Stonetoss meme about HBD/dog breeds (dogwhistle, as it were), or rather to its edit (Taken from Twitter. Apparent origin on reddit). Some excerpts:
For whatever reason, you are confident in your ability to apply principles of natural science to the real world. I'd venture a guess that you're used to being smarter than your peers and the teacher too. A regular person, meanwhile, learns that reality has a surprising amount of detail, that figuring out nontrivial questions is way over one's head, and pattern-matching the problem to password-generators is the way to go. What is the teacher's password to «are masks useful outdoors»? You claim diffusion is enough to say no. But a normal person remembers the punishment for overconfidence, the sense of getting stuff wrong. And if you really think about what you've learned in school, there's wind direction, laminar and turbulent flows, uncertainty about survival rates of viral particles, and sufficient loads, and relative movement of people, and probabilities of them coughing in your general direction, and... conclusion: the correct password is «trust the Science», where the Science will be defined by the consensus of Experts. I'm saying it like it's bad, and the Stonetoss example is IMO sufficient to show how it might be harmful... but it's honestly a reasonable intuition for a normie.
The sort of intuition that doesn't get forgotten after school.
Can you share your Substack? Wasn't aware you had one.
There's nothing there, it's preemptively abandoned. Was supposed to be here.
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