This is a pretty bad analogy man. Education, starting with basic literacy & numeracy, improves virtually everyone who goes through it- which is why mandatory education is part of every society now. Literacy alone completely changes outcomes for say women in developing countries. Just mandating an extra 4 years of high school in agricultural countries that really could've used the teenage help in the fields was a huge step forward for humanity. Education is an improvement process more than a filtering process, no one is born knowing how to read, count, do algebra, code, etc. I agree it does contain a filtering element too, but societies where the construction workers & janitors can read are better than ones where they can't
Caplan makes a very compelling case that education, while inarguably teaching something, primarily serves to signal preexisting ability.
I find the core of his argument rests on the assertion that we all went through school and don't think we learned much of value/it didn't help us. What he's actually describing here is a form of the curse of expertise. Humans are incredibly bad at remembering what it was like to not know things, it's why people make such atrocious teachers without training. But educators are actually helping to build valuable skills and complex mental models that would not arise naturally.
If you interact with homeschooled children of deeply incompetent parents or certain alternative schooling systems (Scientology schools mess their kids up) you can see what the alternative provides, and it's not pretty.
Caplan actually goes through reams of evidence. As an extreme example, in 2008-9 there were 34000 new history graduates in the US. But there are only 3500 historians working in the whole country.
Now, are you trying to argue that history can actually measurably improve productivity in other fields, such as accounting, and it's just the curse of knowledge that prevents us from seeing this?
Also, incompetent homeschooling parents and Scientology schools are hardly the only alternatives to public schooling. One option that Caplan advocates strongly is vocational training. Instead of giving them history classes, let teenagers who chose to do so become apprentice carpenters, there are 900000 of those.
The US public school system is in need of wide reforms at all levels, I'm not going to defend it piecemeal because there are many pieces that are not defensible. None of that makes Caplan right though.
How much value is created through publicly funded education beyond basic literacy and numeracy, which Caplan cedes.
Whether Caplan's proposed changes to the education system are good ones.
As for the second point, I wouldn't bet my life on it. But I think the case is strong enough that experimental measures in that direction are warranted.
Then there is a bunch about how to build better schools. This seems reasonable in principle, since the way we teach especially in early years is still heavily influenced from by long ago times with different workforce needs and a different culture in general. But lets better not get into the actually mentioned proposals. And this still does hardly fit the "IQ unrelated from schools" narrative discussed in the comments here.
So back to those: If school has no impact, then were do those traits we aspire come from? Are here actually people who believe you can just dump an infant with perfect genes in front of a TV, feed (&co) it regularly, and then expect it to become a genius in adulthood? If not, then what makes the difference and why shouldn't some "school" help citizens apply whatever it is, supported by policy?
This isn't education's only function. Some learning undeniably still takes place. But in Caplan's estimation signalling is probably about 80% of the payoff.
This picture is supported by a large number of observations:
- Why do even top schools like Harvard make little to no effort to prevent non-students from attending lectures?
- Why do students cheer when class is canceled?
- Why does ratemyprofessor.com have the measures "overall quality" and "difficulty" but not an explicit "informativeness" measure and why is high difficulty considered bad?
- Why do students cheat on tests and why do teachers make such a large effort to prevent it?
- Why do employers rarely show concern that you might've forgotten what you learned?
- Why do statistics indicate that graduation year has a much greater effect on wages than all the other years?
All these points contradict the "education = learning" viewpoint but are straightforwardly explained with the signalling model.
And once you acknowledge the importance of signalling it puts statements such as
> And, a good education pays off even for less gifted people. Their lives are better, they contribute more to the economy and less to crime.
into a completely new perspective. As Caplan writes:
> The classic example: You want a better view at a concert. What can you do? Stand up. Individually, standing works. What happens, though, if everyone copies you? Can everyone see better by standing? No way. Popular support for education subsidies rests on the same fallacy. The person who gets more education, gets a better job. It works; you see it plainly. Yet it does not follow that if everyone gets more education, everyone gets a better job. In the signaling model, subsidizing everyone’s schooling to improve our jobs is like urging everyone to stand up at a concert to improve our views. Both are “smart for one, dumb for all.”
It seems that model doesn't even attempt to pretend anymore that our society gives equal opportunity to everyone? Now only the rich shall have the opportunity to signal? That's why I didn't want to go into the actual proposals in that critique... at best they seem to ignore all the complexity of the actual world we live in. Kinda reminded me of someone who just discovered Libertarianism and now thinks governments are totally unnecessary.
If his argument would be "we should reduce signaling", I'd totally love for that to be possible. But I'm not sure it actually is, when taking all the game-theoretic aspects of the real world into account. Maybe all he wants is to reset the out of control spiral of signaling for now? But if the only way we can do so is also a 0.1%er-capitalists wet dream, then I've little hope for the future. Signaling will always exist and be necessary as long as there is a competitive job market, and I don't see society working without.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond. I like the first observation, since it highlights how narrow the allowed path for effective signaling is. Just finishing the material isn't enough, you have to be accepted into the school through official ways. Some observations are kind of weak, though. Especially the second, since it boils down to many people preferring short term gratification over long term success. Students will cheer even if tests are standardized and those canceled classes thus will lead to worse grades => failure at signaling.
And also hyperbolic. There is no current science that suggests the ability to create such a difference in individuals by genetic engineering.
Complicated, polygenetic traits with virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors? Much more difficult.
Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification.
For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably.
No, complex traits too. Come on. Dog intelligence and personalities? The domesticated foxes? Any of the many mouse/rat selective breeding experiments like Tryon? Personality, intelligence, these sorts of traits are all highly heritable and about the only thing everyone can agree on that heritability means is that you can select on it. 'virtually unlimited interactions between genes and environmental factors'? Give me a break!
> Add in the serious consequences of mistakes. The limited supply of subjects. The difficulty of grading the success of any modification.
??? None of that is a real problem. You are wildly gesturing at hypotheticals and making stuff up. Being 'polygenetic' is not a problem, it's a blessing.
> For intelligence, we don't even know what kinds of changes we would want to make, even if we could make them reliably.
Yes, we do. The PGSes have identified hundreds of variants at genome-wide significance, and there are thousands at high posterior probability, with nontrivial cumulative predictive power in the general population.
The number of subjects absolutely does matter. Selecting mice for intelligence is all nice and well, but you have to breed thousands, and "discard" most of them. Both in traditional breeding as well as with genetic engineering, you have to have sufficient number of trials to conclude anything.
With Human subjects, given ethical and practical constraints (lifespan), that's going to be a lot tougher.
You can reliably quantify the intelligence of a mouse at a few weeks of age and breed it soon thereafter (though you would probably use that "IQ" to score its parents). You can't reliably quantify health and intelligence of a Human within years, especially if you are aiming for "multiple standard deviations" above average. At the very least the practical generational span is 20 years, and usually much longer if the subjects have any say in the matter.
Genome wide association studies... another thing people get terribly confused about. The mutations they screen for are virtually never causal, but merely markers associated with actually causal sequences. There may be occasional better-researched mutations here and there. But overall the individual contributions of any such marker are already extremely low and don't sum up to a significant portion of the suspected heritability. And heritability of intelligence in Humans is another problem where people don't seem to understand what the research is actually saying. Whenever people say things like "IQ in Humans has a heritability of 40-80%", they are at best summarizing in a misleading fashion if not outright lying.
To my knowledge there are virtually no candidate genes/mutations proposed for genetic improvement of intelligence in Humans. Especially not with the confidence you'd need to even attempt this. Even without ethical considerations.
The number of 'subjects' is elastic. If applied to IVF, that's everyone who uses IVF. In embryo selection, you are selecting out of available embryos, eg 1 out of 5. With other techniques like ovarian biopsy or gametogenesis, you are potentially selecting 1 out of 100+. Hence, plenty of subjects.
> You can reliably quantify the intelligence of a mouse at a few weeks of age and breed it soon thereafter (though you would probably use that "IQ" to score its parents). You can't reliably quantify health and intelligence of a Human within years, especially if you are aiming for "multiple standard deviations" above average. At the very least the practical generational span is 20 years, and usually much longer if the subjects have any say in the matter.
All irrelevant, since no one is suggesting phenotyping. That's the point of the polygenic scores.
> The mutations they screen for are virtually never causal, but merely markers associated with actually causal sequences.
Also irrelevant. When you are doing prediction for selection, all you need to do is predict the one with the highest scores. There is zero need to identify even a single causal variant. GWASes are so predictive because the SNPs are in LD with the causal variants, and the LD does not change abruptly in a single selection step.
However, since you think that none have been identified, you should go read the appendix to Lee et al 2018, among other IQ GWASes, where they do estimates, and turn up scores of SNPs which have causal probabilities >90%.
But the Bessemer process does create steel. I'll be the first to agree that education doesn't give much knowledge (apart from basic reading and arithmetic, which take a few months at most). But it gives you something else:
1) Ability to show up on time
2) Ability to sit still and do boring stuff for hours every day
3) Belief in importance of grades
Basically it's a forced personality change, turning children into worker bees. That's why it takes years and why it's so valuable to employers.
This doesn't necessarily follow. It assumes the variance on IQ will remain the same, but a (potentially large) part of the variance comes from genetic differences.
Teaching people to read and write and do basic arithmetic significantly improves their overall outcome by almost any measure you care to look at. How is this not enrichment?
And "dry rag" very seriously devalues people. Maybe doing that is the catch itself. One does wonder.
Good education is more than a filter.
Great people are a combination of nature and nurture.
How do we break the cycle?
More likely, it will be abused, come with some unforeseen consequences, and diverse.
Smarts will not be all that is attempted.
Augmentation by combining biotech with electromechanical will happen too.
There will be factions of various kinds.
Who says We will have any meaningful control over the really smart augmented people, for example? They may mature, look around at the mess and have very different ideas on how this all goes.
Should be a very interesting time.
A fallacious, inappropriate personal attack backed by implied, unjustified, blatantly wrong comparisons.
Make an actual argument please.
Regardless, 5 standard deviations is enormously huge. Every person born would be as smart as the most elite scientists today. The most elite scientists in the future will be far smarter than anyone who ever lived.
This has enormous military consequences, much larger than squeezing the dry rag of education.