> Higher education has never been a worse investment.

While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?

The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree. I previously suspected it was slightly higher, like maybe 10 or 20 percent, and I felt like that would be a big number, but the fact that it’s double across everyone in America is massive, and a bit mind blowing to me. The income gap is 3x if you get an advanced degree. That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?

From the article:

> [Article] These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, Rogeberg said.

> [Article] The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the “Flynn effect,” a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education, according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.

> [Article] Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.

> While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?

I'm saying that higher education has never been a worse investment. Not that it's a bad investment. It's just higher risk and higher cost than ever.

> The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree.

That's really tiny considering that it costs 4 years of income + potentially a huge amount of debt with serious compounding interest.

> That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?

It seems like it can be a fine investment for some people. If you're rich and won't take on debt it's a great investment.

Worrying about 15 years is short-sighted too, that’s not very long. If you pay it off in 15 years, and then you have 2x the income of someone who didn’t go to school, you’re 35 making great money and in a job with better prospects and mobility than if you didn’t have debt but took a job that didn’t require a degree. This is, of course, statistically speaking. Some people do manage to do very well without a degree, but it’s pretty important to understand that it’s not even close to the average outcome.

My personal experience with student debt was that it got me a job out of college that paid well enough that I paid off my student loans much faster than I’d anticipated. I thought it was going to be 10 years, but it was more like 3. (To be fair I didn’t borrow that much, and cost of college has been rising faster than inflation ever since I graduated.)

I don’t see a lot of reason not to invest in education. The fear that it might not pay off doesn’t (for me anyway) push back that much on the strength of the nationwide correlation between degrees and high income.

I’m a little sad about reducing it just to money too, education is an investment in other ways too. When done well, it can be time spent gaining knowledge, investigating history, helping people understand more of the context of what’s happening here and now. Education provides freedom to explore, both now while you’re studying, and in the future with your career. I don’t have a lot of belief in the idea that the opportunity cost is too high.

What other investment at that age has a better expected ROI?

The way the information is presented implies causation. Get a degree, earn twice as much.

There’s been a ton of study of the question of whether people succeed because of the skills they gained working on the degree versus the credentialism of just having a degree. The answer across many papers is that it’s a healthy mix of both, that there is a large component of causality (getting a degree leads to success) as well as a large component in the other direction (being smart & driven leads to getting a degree).

Do note that a wide swath of our economy is based on jobs that require a degree, and are not based on being “successful” with or without. It’s not a fair playing field where there’s equal opportunity to people without degrees. A big part of the income gap happens because our system is setup to reward degree earners, and so it’s guaranteed to be at least partly causal.

Also really important to pay more attention to what actually happens as opposed to what could happen theoretically. Yes people might succeed with or without degrees, but how often does that actually happen? There are some amazing and compelling anecdotes, but ignoring the stats is a bad idea if you’re trying to decide whether to go to college or not.

Look at patents in the US as an example of how people might succeed with or without a degree. There is no degree requirement and nothing stopping people from inventing without a higher education, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of patent holders have degrees, the majority are advanced degrees beyond bachelor.

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...

Thank you for providing measured, balanced, and considered explanations, expansions, and clarifications.

First rate.

I'd really like to see a breakdown by major and institution. I don't think going and getting just any 4 year degree is going to make you a success.

I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on average, appears to value degrees.

Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP.

Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right?

The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right?

It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.

I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved.

The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt.

Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal.

> I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation

Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for.

I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers.

This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.

The 10 years and many loans it took to get through bachelor's and PhD were the best and most important investment I made in myself to get out of the factories and warehouses and into an office with great pay, and oh incidentally an amazing job.

> a certain amount of wading-through-the-bullwhip tenacity (useless but mandatory curriculum -> non-questioning serf mentality)

And I think a lot of people (though not me and maybe not you) would find that that is a good description of attributes employers would like. And for many people the point of a college degree is appealing to employers rather than proving oneself to be intelligent.

Moreover it's painfully easy to exploit your way through especially if you're already rich. Just go doctor shopping with Mommy so you can get a 504 and accomodations and stimulant medications.

If it selected for adaptation the curriculum would be different, things like figuring out the area of a circle using given materials, not abstract shit. If it selected for intelligence there would br a huge battery of exceptions, handicaps for the working class kids, because they have to put in way more effort than the kids living with their parents who are unemployed, likewise with non-traditionals.

https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/504faq.html

Is this being abused?

I cannot fathom a successful professional that does not balance 'I must innovate the sysyem even if it hurts me' against 'I will work within this system for my own personal benefit by providing exactly what is requested of me'

- Rich people can painfully easily exploit something to make their ROI much higher

- That something can be an immensely valuable investment for the non-rich

bls.gov tells a more complete story, in that machine operators make significantly less and job openings grow at a significantly lower rate than software, aerospace, robotics, and AI specialists, many of which require a degree, (and the siccessful outliers are not worth pushing as a good model for the 90%)

I can't say there wasn't a different, even a better road to some measure of success and an enjoyable career, but I can say this path was a miracle of positive life changes for me and every penny of debt I pay back to the fed is absolutely a victory lap.

While I see your point - a whole lot of people do have salary increases over a 10 year span - a whole lot of jobs people want require "X piece of paper for Y years of experience" and you cannot get that experience to begin with without either 1) the piece of paper or 2) knowing someone.

Going to University doesn’t affect IQ much, IQ is not learned.

I have never seen anyone I would consider really smart who took these tests seriously.

Even so, most of the discussions about IQ are about individual scores and a lot of pseudoscience.

I consider myself a person of average intelligence who learned very early on that preparation can set me ahead of the group.

I practiced interviewing, public speaking, coding, writing, test taking, etc, and it's helped immensely. I mean, most tests tip their hand later, which allows you to go back and revise earlier answers. most writing is formulaic, you just have to find a good example. any system that you are evaluated by can be learned.

To prep for grad entrance exams, I wroke up early every Friday, got ready, drove around, sat down and took a timed practice exam at 930 sharp. all to emulate my Friday 900am exam appointment. I got the score I wanted.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -- Goodhart's Law

QS World University rankings assigns 40% to Academic reputation, and 20% to Citations per faculty, so it's pretty dominant.

I don't even know what that means. That sounds like they'd be ranked only a tenth of a percent lower than US universities, which doesn't jive with the rest of your point.

His premise is that higher education offers little to no value. What theoretical value a higher education might provide is squandered because people are too busy living their lives, namely working to make ends meet, in order to leverage it. This certainly has proven true economically as we can see that incomes held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary attainment, contrary to assumptions of the past that speculated that college graduates would be able to earn more as a result of having a higher education. Similarly, and perhaps related to, he posits the features tested by IQ are not being practiced because people are too busy to carry out that practice.

and reading does develop a certain sort of intelligence that is important and is very useful...I saw my own youthful reading and its good effects in the computer science classes that I passed and where 80% of the class just could not do the work...intelligence counts....when you spend your youth reading books for hours a time, year in and year out, your brain grows "smart muscles"...and that makes it easier to focus on difficult problems...

I saw a lack of that sort of intelligence when I worked for a large government agency and when people lacking in that sort of intelligence made a huge mess of designing the business processes for that agency...intelligence counts...

society at large and especially those at the top pretend that intelligence no longer matters...but they are wrong...

> and one reason why we read more was that television was just not as good as it is today...

I feel like there's a little disconnect between these two statements. It's not that television is taking priority, it's that the times when people used to break out a book -- that they carried in their back pocket or purse! -- now break out their phones and engage with social media, or they check their work email, or respond to slack messages, or they get involved in texting, or they play some video game just to make the time go faster. I suppose some of them put in headphones and watch Netflix, but I don't see that often, to be honest.

The world has gotten so busy and defaulting to 'on' that no one feels they can default to reading a book, but you can. You just have to decide to carry a book and, instead of breaking out a phone at those times to stay connected, you just let yourself be disconnected, and you read a book. Or meditate.

That's how I go about my life, and frankly I don't understand why more people don't. I never use my phone unless it's an emergency. I get a lot more out of life meditating and reading books than checking my email, playing candy crush, and engaging with twitter.

TBH looking at how the future is going to look like (no not utopia), those general skills seem to be more and more important on the contrary.

Being “too specialized” will hurt society in the end.

I agree and disagree. There are arguments in favor of both sides. Look at what happened in software development alone. Where you were only expected to push basic code before, many employers now expect you to be a flexible mini-IT department on top of having the social skills to communicate with customers and managers. At the same time, they specialized other things to a degree you're now a "dotnet developer", "java developer" etc., as if specializing in that direction was ever the goal of software development / computer science.

Me too. But I read way more than I read when I devoured scores of books. I just do it in the web browser.

I always had very short temper with books. If the book didn't captivate me with first few pages it never got read by me. I just moved to another one.

I always really liked anthologies of short stories, because amount of the ideas to amount of text was the best there. Way better than when the author stretched just a handful ideas into a novel.

So now, with internet filled with so many interesting texts I have real trouble with books, because my short temper got even shorter. I also know a lot more of the ideas than I did when I was younger so it's hard to encounter something novel to me. So a book, that's captivating, dense and novel is really a hard find. And others get ditched by me at some, usually very early, stage. I just have even less patience for them than I had ever before.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

Also curious what you mean by thinking of education as an investment being part of the problem. What is the problem, and why does framing education as investment contribute? Are you talking about purely financial forms of investment? Education is widely viewed as social, cultural investment by society, as well as economic investment, and this is widely agreed to be a good thing, isn’t it? At the personal level, education is also viewed as a career & future financial security investment, and this also seems reasonable, no? I feel like the most important investment my education bought me was the freedom to choose my career path over time. Had I not gone to university, I do believe my choices would be more constrained than they are today.

ther are a usually few general courses (civics, economics, etc) at every undergrad, but these are usually low quality, mostly useless, and absolutely dwarfed by the usual introductory classes (usual STEM for STEM, etc)

for example https://offertaformativa-unitn-it.translate.goog/it/l/inform...

That's literally the opposite of what any empirical research on IQ shows.

I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?

IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.

My understanding is that IQ researchers invented a lot of the statistical techniques used across the social sciences today, and I think faired the "reproducibility crisis" fairly well. It's about as empirical as the social sciences get.

> I've seen many of the claim correlations of IQ with "success" like career trajectories, divorce rates, better health and longevity, etc.. However, I've yet to see any strong correlations. Does IQ have a correlation stronger than 0.5 with anything?

0.5 correlation is pretty big in the social sciences. I mean, think about: there are probably hundreds or thousands of factors that influence your life outcome. Much of the differences we see tends to come down to what researchers call "non-shared environment", which is just a fancy term for all the random stuff that happens in your life.

For a single factor to have such a large effect is pretty amazing.

> IIRC, I am pretty sure parental income, or lack thereof, is a better predictor of "success" than IQ.

A lot of which can be explained by the parents' IQ.

IQ doesn't explain everything, not by a long shot. It just explains more than any other single factor, and should generally be something researchers should control for whenever they attempt to measure some other phenomenon.

So don't. Read little bits here and there as you get a chance. I frequently read a few pages while I'm waiting for people to get ready, stuck in waiting rooms or sometimes in a slow moving queue.

Paperbacks travel just fine.

Some of my favourite time with two of my friends is going to a bar or restaurant in the afternoon and reading together. The tradeoff is I watch less TV and have basically disengaged from social media. But that’s more than worth it to me.

IQ tests mostly measure the hardware part (pattern recognition, working memory, spatial reasoning, attention to detail, speed, focus, reasoning about abstract rules)

the software part is mostly about applied epistemological rationality, how good one's life strategy is, and how well one can execute that. (of course there's a hardware component to this too. someone with good emotional resilience, low neuroticism, high self-motivation achieves things with relative ease given the opportunities)

then there's a measurement problem. if someone is taught the importance of attention to detail since they were very little, taught to control their emotions better (eg. boredom), then they will likely score better on the hardware test too.

that said our collective knowledge is much greater than decades ago, our teaching methods are better too, but alas not everyone received the same top quality teaching.

plus there is a big issue with the curriculum. most people are tragicomically underskilled in dealing with themselves and other people, hence they are bad at recognizing and solving problems that brutally impact their lives (and the lives of those around them).

aaand of course there's the plain old resource availability problem (everyone inherits, the question is what. advantaged people get advantages with very high probability, disadvantaged people get disadvantages...)

I've experienced this as well, and the only solution I have found is to take periodic breaks from my phone and all social media. Within a day or two of minimizing phone use that natural curiosity and desire to learn and motivation to read reemerges.

My hypothesis is the availability of low quality passive entertainment 24/7 - namely tv - is what leads to iq scores declining.

When did tvs become affordable for everyone, 1970s perhaps?

We've now come into an era where there is also an abundance of information: Pretty much anything you can imagine is just a button-click away.

Young people in particular have to carefully select what information to consume, and there's a whole attention-economy built around wasting people's time, trying to manipulate them into buying shit they don't need.

Humans didn't evolve in such conditions - everything was always scarce. So I think that's why a lot of people have a hard time dealing with it. I believe there's a huge potential market for software that acts in the interest of the user, helping to deal with this abundance of information (pretty much all software that currently exists mainly works to the benefit of the company, in particular ads/data collection). But it doesn't need to be that way. So let's build solutions.

Reading books. So at Stanford nobody watched TV. I think later Netflix, a bit. The only time I knew a peer was watching television was some girls in my dorm getting together to watch Gossip Girl, and only that. Just that show. And it was a very abnormal thing, nobody else anything at all. Keep in mind you can play eg Super Smash Bros at the library, there's a video game section in the library and you can play video games if you want. You can try out new titles. I did that.

If you watch TV, you won't get into Stanford, basically.

The ideas and ideals of Asian academics produced very strong results, but were not unassailable. And in this case there was adherence to tradition, sticking to what works, so the ideas and ideals were similar to other East Asian cultures. So generalization was possible, at a first approximation.

Well there's differences but they are hidden from first view, so for instance there's differences in study habits between North and South Choson Korea, the North students were systematically were scored adversarially but passed the Confucian Exam all the more. Those Koreans from the North (especially in the most mountainous regions) were doing exactly what Asian students are doing now in American Universities: "the more you push us down, the stronger we'll be, and the more success we will attain, the tighter the quota the more we'll fuck the quota."

Same goes for Jews before the Holocaust. Hard, hardcore, especially with medical schools, I heard a story of Columbia (or NYU?) medical school refusing their own college valedictorian just because he was a Jew. Simple as that.

But then...it got watered down, unconstitutional, I don't know, things just ain't the same. Still work like fuck, but...just not the same desperation. The muse that helped me most.

The best muse.

Yes, I thought it was explicit in the conversation that we're talking about averages. The claim that spatial intelligence is European also doesn't mean an eg individual black person should feel disadvantaged in the realm of spatial intelligence.

So it sounds like these are things that make no money but Africans can be good at but that's just a glitch in the economy. For instance an American President really has to be very very frosty. 10 Hertz at least. In that capacity Barack Obama Jr. was among the best presidents, perhaps the best in clock speed. Yeah his policy persecuted me from the first month to the absolute end of his term, but I can still look at the bigger picture. Trump also, look at him in the Ali G show DVD, that's how frosty he is. Steve Jobs, and Ross Perot. Ross Perot outclocking Steve Jobs, Perot would have made a great president. I would say faster than Obama or Trump.

There's other forms of intelligence too. Like tied to the senses. Intuition. Having beautiful dreams, doesn't matter if they're forgotten when awaking. Autism obviously, but that's too easy. Mental retardation, in particular in how dead on it makes them on the straight and narrow, that's a priceless blessing.

Because the only real worth of a person is if they're good, and not bad. There is nothing else.

Intelligence is ability to build mental models that predict reality. If you see a lightning strike, build a correct mental model of it and use it to create electricity to power a light bulb - that's intelligence. But cracking a clever joke about the lightning strike that rhymes with something doesn't need intelligence - that's a purely mechanical skill.

Intuition is a very different quality. If intelligence lets you build a somewhat accurate map of reality, intuition is a bird's eye view of that reality.

All my money. I can only see it in the reflections off eyeballs. Not even in the mirror. It's a spectator of spectator sport.