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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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My own deeply unhelpful yet deeply held belief is that nobody can teach anybody anything; you simply place people in various combinations of prison/laborcamp/cult/skinnerbox and alternately whip them/ give them treats until their brain falls into the correctly shaped hole and they learn something almost by accident.

I'm a good teacher, and I can see so with the outcomes of those I tutor. A degree of intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for being one.

For example, I teach my brother and his fellow med students in my free time, and I get something out of it myself because I skimmed or forgot a lot of foundational knowledge during my med education, and I get to brush up on it. Often, I find that my practical experience as well as further study for later exams means I can more clearly understand both what is important, and concepts that a beginner might trip up on. Keep in mind that this is a highly filtered set of students, and I understand that most teachers in schools lack the luxury of knowing that their pupils want to be there or are eager to learn. Even then, at least in this one case, I improve outcomes, or at the very least reduce the mental pressure they face learning without my guidance.

I've met plenty of enthusiastic and intelligent professors who are simply bad at conveying their thoughts or priors, or are simply too far removed from the perspective of a med student that they don't understand where one might get tripped up, or worse, think they understand a concept when they don't. This is why I said that intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.

At any rate, schools typically have more constraints, and the most empirically effective didactic method, being tutored 1:1, is cost prohibitive in most settings.