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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.
Worse than outdoor diffusion was spraying surfaces. Everybody knew, or should have known, that COVID was spreading aerially. Remember the much-publicized cruise ships where they all got sick despite staying in their rooms and washing their hands? It was coming in the ventilation system. I'd imagine that it would be trivial for a microbiologist to use a microscope and see 'oh this is a very small particle so it's spreading by air as opposed to surface contact'. Or they could do experiments to quickly find out. Even from a symptoms perspective - it wrecks your lungs so clearly it has a method of getting in there. What more obvious way to get into someone's lungs than being breathed in?
And yet everyone was spraying surfaces like a maniac, until 'the science changed' about a year in, if not longer. A close friend (who has an obsessive trust in the media) was spraying her own shoes with disinfectant after going shopping. I was made to spray the surface of my table after eating communal meals by my institution. How much toxic chemicals were we spreading around, how many man-hours were wasted globally? People were doing the same things in elevators, spraying down surfaces three times a day.
Few were thinking about ventilation, I can't recall anyone doing anything about that outside Japan, where they had machines measuring CO2 concentration as a proxy for ventilation. I conclude that most people just obey instructions without thinking about them. I also conclude that the medical communications apparatus is completely useless and should face serious consequences.
In the Seven Years War, 1756, the British Admiral Byng was sent out to relieve Minorca which was being besieged by the French. His ships were in poor condition, local forces were inadequate, the whole operation was ill-concieved and he then lost the battle with the French. Minorca fell. Byng was relieved of his command and executed for 'failing to do his utmost'. It was a bad start to the war, Britain was losing on several other fronts and there were food riots. So they decided to find a scapegoat.
Many have criticized the decision as unjust and politically motivated. But since then, British naval commanders were much more aggressive. In Voltaire's words:
I'm not calling for a massive Stalinist-style purge. But if our ancestors could kill Byng, a man who really did nothing wrong other than failing to provide a superhuman performance whilst set up to fail by his superiors... We can kill officials who completely drop the ball and totally fail to provide rational advice, wasting enormous amounts of time with nonsense like spraying surfaces as opposed to useful recommendations. We can kill the reckless and highly suspicious Ecohealth people, who look like they have megadeaths on their hands from negligent gain-of-function coronavirus/furin-cleavage-site insertion. Even if they weren't responsible, it would certainly encourage other researchers not to tempt fate and court death, a valuable boon.
People must have skin in the game, especially in matters of vast importance. There should be prizes for success, punishments for failure. The British retook Minorca in the peace treaty of 1763 - we will never get back all those who died.
If you want to talk about the incentives this creates, consider how many people will try to avoid jobs where they have any real responsibility, lest they be executed because someone somewhere suspects that they didn't do everything perfectly. A plane crashes and it cannot be determined conclusively whose fault it was? There go the thousands of engineers who worked on it, every technician who inspected or serviced it, and the entire management of the airline.
I think it's reasonable to assume that they were doing their best and their mistakes can be attributed to the need for a fast response in a complicated and novel situation. In other words, no one could have (realistically) done better.
Outside of internet conspiracy theories, is there any indication they actually did anything wrong?
I specifically stated I wasn't calling for Stalinist style mass purge. The whole point of 'responsibility' as a concept is that it incentivizes people to do a good job. That's why it exists, it balances the wealth and status that these people get.
If you sell someone an aircraft that thinks it's a Stuka and sometimes automatically nose-dives and hundreds of people die, you deserve severe punishment. $20 billion in fines is not enough, it's not like executives are paying from their own pockets. They need a stronger incentive to balance the enormous wealth they receive from the company, an incentive that has them actively pursue a culture of precision and care.
At any rate, this disastrous error would only cause a few thousand deaths over thirty years, it's a nothingburger compared to COVID. A prison sentence for the one who oversaw the 737 MAX project would be appropriate.
There's a tonne of evidence. These people (Daszak and Ecohealth) were asking for money to put furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses, they were importing them from Laos, they were training them on humanized mice. Lo and behold we get a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site whose closest known biological predecessor is from a bat in Laos, well adapted to human biology.
And then Daszak has the temerity to go rally together some scientists to publish a Lancet paper accusing everyone of publishing dangerous conspiracy theories unless they accept that some unknown sick bat from Laos got to Wuhan, infected a pangolin and then a human - where none of these animals have been found. By far the most parsimonious explanation is that of gain-of-function research and a lab leak. But of course the medical establishment is going to drag this out as long as possible lest they be smeared with the blame for the disaster they negligently caused. Donald Trump would never find Donald Trump to be criminally negligent and responsible for the greatest disaster of the century thus far - why would we expect anyone else to admit responsibility even if it's clearly their fault? They can find specious technical arguments against a lab-leak and hide behind their status as experts. Daszak delenda est.
I could have done better. From the Diamond Princess and Ruby Princess onwards I was confident that it was spread primarily by air, cleaning surfaces was a waste of time. I wouldn't have gone for the 'oh masks don't work' angle either and then backflip - it's obvious that masks work. That's why doctors wear them! They took months and years to fix these stupid, inexplicable errors, it's not a snap decision like those of the battlefield. They created doubt in their own wisdom and effectiveness - then they complained that people weren't trusting them sufficiently. Why would you trust anyone who gets away scott-free for lying to you, wasting immense amounts of time and creating the crisis in the first place?
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Which, to be fair, was a completely valid assumption... and then they started supporting the protestors/rioters intentionally violating their rules because they support a political cause they favor while simultaneously prosecuting everyone else for the same kinds of gatherings.
The deadliest job in history is "politician" for a very, very good reason; not only do they get summarily executed from time to time (be it partisan action or not), but hilariously there are even some countries that actively encourage their citizens to retain the capacity to do this. The only crime they need commit is "fail to be seen to have done the utmost", and that definition is not only pretty vague, but can be retroactively defined to mean just about anything that any person or group with the resources to impose it wants it to.
And honestly, that's probably OK; not only do they know the price of hilariously gross failure, but the rewards (though they need not be completely monetary nor immediate) are generally enough that it's worth taking the risk.
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All this would achieve is dramatically reducing the number and quality of applicants to civil service positions.
There needs to be a balance between reward and punishment. If you get things done quickly and effectively, there should be a bonus. If you save the state millions of dollars, there should a significant prize. But if you make a huge disaster like the Afghanistan war, you should be punished severely. Not a single general or politician has been so much as imprisoned, let alone executed. Why should we expect them to do any better in the future without skin in the game?
Quality is already abysmally low. We have people squandering vast amounts of money on all manner of things, pursuing terrible policies incompetently. We need a shake-up.
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