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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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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:

It's so bad I can't help but share it. It's deceptive, has negative entertainment value and is the opposite of what a good meme must be. Yet I welcome you to contemplate it. Worse yet, I ask you to focus on a single frame.

Frames 3-6 are dumb in their own right. But it's the second one which is truly rage-inducing and, I think, illustrates the core failure of the currently dominant left-liberal philosophy as it pertains to epistemology, communication, science, education, humor, art and political behavior writ large, as a coherent, self-perpetuating memetic ecosystem (to the extent such things exist) shutting a plurality of strongly online people out of the real world.

The most baffling part is the fact that saying «phenotypic diversity» adds nothing over «dogs look so different».

Nevermind that this (representative) definition is inseparable from the issue of genetic causation: this is just not an answer. The older figure (henceforth Teacher) pretends to respond to the younger (Child), casually showing off his mastery of scientific terminology, but merely restates the question. It's tautological, it's Molière's virtus dormitiva. Why? Or rather, why would the edit's author deem it clever and proper and edifying, as did his audience?

I think this is a sure way to 1) assert authority and 2) kill scientific curiosity in a child. [...]

Humans have the capacity for developing a theory of mind. Much more efficiently than current language models that infer hidden instructions, like InstructGPT [this is an old draft] children use it to apply feedback to every level of abstraction: what the dialogue is about, what having a dialogue can be about, what does it mean for anything to be about something. If the teacher's confident answer doesn't make sense, this is not yet grounds to doubt the teacher: it indicates that your question has had a meaning different from what it seemed to have, and was generated in confusion.

To continue with ML analogies: ultimately, instruction inference («theory of mind») leads to children meta-learning the teacher's preferred inductive biases.

In simple words: for all the role of heredity, it is possible to teach people not just facts but high-order patterns of thought, simply by giving answers that communicate how the question is understood.

Now why would a question about, say, the reason dogs are unlike each other elicit a condescending non-response? Because what matters is names, not your silly «why»'s; verbal correlations, not causality and predictive power of communicable models. And – just as well! – social feedback approximates distributed backpropagation, so one updates and learns to guide attention accordingly. Children can drive you mad asking about names of things; that's curiosity too. That's cute, when children do it. But in terms of cognition, that's the opposite of grokking: that's memorization, a strategic dead end. In terms of mental behavior, shifting the balance towards memorization lays the foundation for the opposite of science: for magical thinking. People who are consistently trained in such magic develop certain notions which are very odd when laid out explicitly.

For example: education itself. In this paradigm, being educated means getting properly socialized, a matter of convention akin to table etiquette, rewarding prosocial conformism and good recall (but also allowing for relativism with regards to the value of ideas conveyed by the program). Technically it is the procedure of having a pupil memorize a score of magic character strings and behaviors, doing what Eliezer Yudkowsky calls guessing the teacher's password. A person who says «wow dog breeds sure look different» is ignorant; one who knows the True Name Of The Thing understands there's nothing special to this pattern, merely Phenotypic Diversity. Vygotsky used to say that learning of systematic, well-defined scientific concepts by children bootstraps their generalization ability and abstract reasoning over mundane ones; here, scientific labels are used to prevent correct generalizations from forming.

Crucially, this is not just a normative belief but part of these people's genuine world model (such as there is), informing their stance on many contentious topics, e.g. meritocracy, school funding, fairness, cognitive testing, biases or «socioeconomic factors» from the original meme. They robustly believe that superior performance is a matter of having received in advance, maybe through guile or unnoticed privilege, some correct passwords, and refuse to believe – no matter the evidence – that culture-fair testing is conceivable or that it's possible to discuss the capacity for thought as such. That's simply not how thinking works in their world.

Science, then, as an outgrowth of education (through school-to-degree pipeline), is a social domain one gains access to after having collected enough passwords, mastered the advanced protocol; it is high-status in a way, because «in this house we believe ... science is real» and what scientists say is received as truth. But all its prestige is inseparable from following the protocol [...]

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.

Among my abandoned Substack drafts

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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