It's An Old Book But It Still Applies

I've been reading this book online recently written by a pyschologist in the early 1900's. It's a devastating review of the whole system of education of the time, but I think some of it still applies today. Here are some passages of interest, but really you should read the whole thing.

There are a lot of passages of general insight:

WE are stock-blind to our own barbarities; we do not realize the enormities of our life and consider our age and country as civilized and enlightened. We censure the faults of other societies, but do not notice our own. Thus Lecky, in describing Roman society, says: "The gladiatorial games form indeed the one feature which to a modern mind is most inconceivable in its atrocity. That not only men, but women, man advanced period of civilization,―men and women who not only professed, but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals―should have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this should have continued for centuries with scarcely a protest, is one of the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however, perfectly normal, while it opens out fields of ethical inquiry of a very deep, though painful, character."

Interesting to think about... Another interesting insight which relates the education of individuals to the previously accumulated progress of the species actually touches on the view I came up with and wrote about in an earlier post about culture:

The well known biogenetic law may, with some modifications, be applied to mental life. The development of the individual is an abbreviated reproduction of the evolution of the species. Briefly put: Ontogenesis is an epitome of Phylogenesis. This biogenetic law holds true in the domain of education. The stored-up experiences of the race are condensed, foreshortened, and recapitulated in the child's life history.

A good point on the fear of elitism which currently exists in our schools, thereby branding gifted programs as politically incorrect, while at the same time putting huge allocations of funds away for special education programs:

In levelling education to mediocrity we imagine that we uphold the democratic spirit of our institutions. Our American sensibilities a-re shocked when the president of one of our leading colleges dares to recommend to his college that it should cease catering to the average student.

There's also lots of great, admirably ascerbic alarmist rhetoric:

I ASSUME that as liberal men and women you have no use for the process of cramming and stuffing of college-geese and mentally indolent, morally obtuse and religiously "cultured" prigs and philistines.
...
The savage compresses the skull of the infant, while we flatten the brain and cramp the mind of our young generation.
...
We trust our unfortunate youth to the Procrustean bed of the mentally obtuse, hidebound pedagogue. We desiccate, sterilize, petrify and embalm our youth in keeping with the rules of our Egyptian code and in accordance with the Confucian regulations of our school-clerks and college mandarins. Our children learn by rote and are guided by routine.
...
We piously sacrifice our tender children and the flower of our youth to the greedy, industrial Moloch of a military, despotic, rapacious plutocracy.

I'm pretty sure that the situation is not as bad in most places today as the one he describes. Still I have to admit to finding a lot of truth in what he writes.

Not long ago we were informed by one of those successful college-mandarins, lionized by office-clerks, superintendents and tradesmen, that he could measure education by the foot-rule! Our Regents are supposed to raise the level of education by a vicious system of examination and coaching, a system which Professor James, in a private conversation with me, has aptly characterized as "idiotic."
Our schools brand their pupils by a system of marks, while our foremost colleges measure the knowledge and education of their students by the number of "points" passed. The student may pass either in Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not matter which, provided he makes up a certain number of "points"!

Now, obviously it's very difficult to think of a practical alternative to running schools by giving examinations, awarding grades, and counting credits...But I've always felt the system is imperfect because it does nothing to encourage initiative in learning, aside from whatever advantage having initiative in learning could confer in the way of earning good grades. What's rewarded is not how well you can apply what you know in an original way, which is in reality what leads to productivity outside of the classroom setting, school being quite unique in the context of larger life in rewarding narrow learning and memorization. The system probably needs to be structured as it is for practical reasons, but the saving grace is when individual teachers work independently to inspire students to see the world of inquiry and original application associated with what they're teaching beyond the books, assignments and pedagogy. There are a lot of good, inspiring people with an understanding of the individual aspect of learning at the teaching level. Or at least I've been fortunate to have encountered many throughout my education.

I have to say I pretty much totally agree with the following description of the purpose of education, provided at the very beginning:

I also assume that as men and women of liberal education you are not limited to the narrow interests of one particular subject, to the exclusion of all else. I assume that you are especially interested in the development of personality as a whole, the true aim of education. I also assume that you realize that what is requisite is not some more routine, not more desiccated, quasi-scientific methods of educational psychology, not the sawdust of college-pseudogogics and philistine, normal school-training, but more light on the problems of life.

Indeed. I don't know why it's so hard to find a coherent statement to that effect (ok, maybe not as ascerbic...) put out by the leading educational institutions or educational authorities of the day.

Listen! Buy!

I would like to direct my readers to a new album put out by my friend Dan. If I had to compare it to anything I would compare it to Stevie Wonder, but you should listen to the samples yourself. I would be surprised if anyone who likes music doesn't like this album.

What Kind Of Equality?

Swarthmore professor Tim Burke asks the important question "what kind of equality?" There is equality in the sense of equal opportunity, which may of course end up resulting in actual economic inequalities, or a reduction of the distance between rich and poor, or a more absolute rigid egalitarianism.

Disregarding the normative natural right justification as pseudo-religious and just generally unsound, there are still reasons why inequality is desirable. I would never wish for absolute equality. As I said before, a certain amount of inequality provides positive incentives for risk-taking and provides a healthy social outlet for the expression of ambition and competitive urges.

However, I think that common sense tells us that the effect is subject to highly diminishing returns. Someone ought to do a real psychological study testing the effect of different levels of incentive on effort, ambition and productivity. But without even having access to the study, I think it's clear what the results would be, and why they would turn out that way. Productivity can't be a linear function of incentive. For one, the conclusion is preposterous because it presumes that the workers have unlimited capacity to work harder as wealth disparities grow ever greater. Is this realistic? Does the average worker even have the ability to produce at 5, 10 or greater times an observed baseline level, which would represent the ratio of highest to average wealth roughly? If resources are in fact limited, not only would there be an upper ceiling beyond which a person simply cannot respond with increased productivity, the productivity function will almost certainly have diminishing returns. This is not a matter of incentive, it's a matter of resources - psychological or economic. Consider the following thought experiment:

Assume that x times the disparity in wealth equals x times the incentive - though in reality it's probably less. Psychologically, how would you expect someone with limited resources working relativity close to capacity to respond to a doubling of the (internal) incentive? I think the intuitive answer is that it would take into account how close to capacity the person is. That is, the response will be to increase their utilization of resources by some fixed fraction of their remaining resources.

To put it a little more formally, say M is the maximum level of resources, or the total reserve of resources. Presumably people start working at a reasonable fraction of their total capacity, say B. Then, the total increase in resource utilization corresponding to a doubling of incentive is f(M-B) where f is some fixed fraction. Any value of f could correspond to a given multiplication in the incentive; I guess you could say it reflects the sensitivity of a person in responding to incentives. The next doubling of incentive will result in f(1-f)(M-B), the next f(M-B - f(1-f)(M-B) - f(M-B)) = f(1- f(1-f) - f)(M-B) = f(1-f)^2(M-B). Or, for n doublings of incentive, the marginal contribution to productivity will be f(1-f)^n(M-B), which gets very small very quickly.

Perhaps you don't like this model because you think that how people respond to incentives does not depend on how close to their maximum working capacity they are. This is a psychologically plausible position. Then you have a situation where people exhaust their resources, presumably after a short period of time. The practical implications of this are that there will be a definite ceiling beyond which increases in incentives do not lead to any corresponding increase in productivity. If this is the case, beyond this point there wouldn't be any utilitity, in terms of motivation, in having greater inequality of wealth at all. In the first case, there would be greatly diminishing reason to promote greater inequality of wealth as it gets higher. Either way it seems like a losing policy.

This seems to mean that great differences in wealth have no motivational function; the motivational rationale for economic inequalities becomes null very quickly. So this would lead me to believe that some degree of inequality is beneficial, but only in small amounts.

Equality of opportunity is a harder thing to work out on its own. People who have more resources naturally are going to have an advantage over people with less resources in a capitalist system. There are actually a whole bunch of "scientific" justifications for supporting policies that perpetuate economic advantages through families. Suffice it to say that I think they're all bad, in both senses. So I think equality of opportunity is something we should strive for. The answer to me seems to be that in keeping actual inequality to a minimum, the playing field of opportunity will stay level also. Radicalization of starting points, aside from being prohibitively impractical, would probably not even be desirable, because it probably would lead to a situation little different from the current one. This is not to say that we are doing a perfect job ensuring equal opportunity, just that an equal opportunity scheme would also probably lead to great inequalities if left untempered.

Manifesto Continued

I know you've been anxiously awaiting the rest of my manifesto loyal readers. Here it is, in all it's humble glory:

Partisanship should be the means not an end. What do I mean by this? Generally, the more people consider themselves beholden to a particular party, the more the members of the party adhere to a kind of groupthink which is governed by the rules of mob psychology rather than rationality. I know that sounds rather alarmist but let me explain. When there is absolute conformity, conditions become especially conducive to autocracy. When conformity is a given, arbitrary forces or a single influential leader can sway entire bodies of followers whichever way and they will not dissent. Entire well-developed and respectable nations have made disastrous choices this way because of singular allegiance to a bad idea in the name of country, ideology, even science. The genius of the constitution is that it allowed free speech and dissent to flourish so that autocracy, whenever and wherever it may appear, can be freely dissented. On the other hand, there's nothing systematic about fascism (total conformity) that necessitates an autocrat, yet ever major instance of fascism in history has been accompanied by a dictatorship, which should tell you something.

If you believe in the wisdom of self-correcting systems you naturally think this prospect is terrible. The real value of partisanship, as it was actually explained to me by one of my peers, is in enhancing one's personal political influence through coalition-building. If you're willing to support multifold agendas within a party, it's more likely that the ones you care about will come through also. Compromise is going to have to happen at some point, whether it's at the individual or the group level. As far as I'm concerned, this is the origin of good partisanship.

I've been thinking a little more on the inequalities of wealth thing, and another argument that could be made for it occured to me. That is, it is a natural right for me to make more money than you; it is the natural right of every person to make as much money as they want and are able to even if it means making much more than the next guy.

Natural rights are always very fuzzy concepts. For instance, couldn't the case just as persuasively be made that it is everyone's natural right to be treated as an equal? There are various religious / ethical lines of thought that could justify including some form of equality as a natural right. On the other hand there are solid philosophical and scientific underpinnings to claiming that the opposite is a natural right - or perhaps it could be put a bit more neutrally, a natural law. Any scientific findings that support the conclusion that there are differences among people in terms of abilities are absolutely devastating to the natural law case for equality, and there is very much such evidence. People differ in terms of aptitude, and even in a non-economic setting, inequalities in ability, status, hierarchy are going to exist. Furthermore, the theory of evolution is predicated on the existence of inequalities. The fit flourish while the unfit are selected out, and the result is a net good, considered from the perspective of the species as a whole, taking this as the assumed operative unit. So there is much in nature that reflects an unegalitarian scheme.

But here's why I'm not convinced by this argument: for every argument that humans should do something or be allowed to do something because it is natural, there is a corresponding argument of a very different nature, that humans should not behave a certain way, or conduct affairs a certain way, because it is primitive and is fit for the brutes, not a species as elevated and refined as humanity. And the second argument is always equally compelling. For instance, would anyone argue that humans should strive to govern in the same way as a pack of wolves? Should instant violent retribution without due justice process be allowed because it is exhibited in various species of beasts? Everyone would argue that these things shouldn't be permitted precisely because they are characteristic of the lower animals.

When it comes down to it, the natural right and negative natural right arguments seem so evenly weighted that I'm inclined to ignore the rationale altogether and say the categorization of natural is inconsequential to how things should be. And I think this makes sense for any rational person. It essentially involves a leap of faith to make the jump from a descriptive scheme to a normative arugment. Who's to say that just because something occurs naturally, that means it should be. There is no logical connection there, only a faith in an falsely santified entity that can be refered to as Nature. Blind faith isn't how rational people should make decisions.

Welcome Jung!

I'll be taking a break for a month so because I have both schoolwork and planning-related issues and don't want to be tempted to procrastinate as much. But taking over for me will be Jung, who I'm sure has an interesting perspective on lots of topics. I may post a thing or two after this, but enjoy the break and expect me to be back at the end of the semester.

If A Tree Falls In A Forest...

...does an arbitrageur care? Or something like that. I've been big on the academic-style posts lately, and this post is no exception. Today's topic is economics. Here's a question from the MA exam in economics given at George Mason University:

You can't take it with you. A private owner of a natural resource, like a forest, therefore, will want to clear-cut the forest before he dies in order to maximize his consumption stream (assume the owner has no children or other bequest motive). True or False. Explain.

A George Mason professor provides the answer as follows:

False. The owner can sell the forest. As a result, the owner of a forest has an incentive to continue to seed it even if seeds planted today won't produce trees until after the owner is dead. The same idea applies to any long-lived productive asset. I think this insight is very beautiful. It's precisely the fact that the forest is owned that gives the owner an incentive to take into account how other people value the forest.
The basic logic doesn't require perfect competition or fully efficient markets but if these assumptions do hold then the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a "social planner."

I think I understand why the author chose a natural resource like a forest to illustrate the principle he was trying to get across (because it's tragic when forests are cut down! [pub -- he's expressing his sincere feelings here]), but I don't think it's the best choice of example for this question.

But first, there's an interesting aside to this question that I want to ask: does the logic imply that the forest will always be reseeded in the interests of enhancing its value to the next owner, or will it eventually be cut down by one of its owners? This has important consequences because no one likes it when forests are destroyed! (pub -- better - much more convincing.) I think the answer is that the forest will eventually be clear-cut by an owner, or in other words, there exists a circumstance in which the owner has incentive to clear-cut the forest rather than maintain it. Here's why I think this is:

The essential insight of the answer is that the value of the forest to the owner equals its value on the market (or to the highest bidder among future owners of the forest). Since future owners will be able to produce much more profit out of the forest over the course of their lives than an owner near the end of his life will, it will be worth more to them than to the owner, and thus the owner has an incentive to maintain the forest rather than harvest it for his own profit. Normally, the productive potential of the forest to a future owner will be greater than the actual saleable value of the forest to the current owner who has limited time left in which to transform the forest's product into profits.

But say that its value on the market is declining because, say, the demand for houses has decreased (there will be a natural delay between a decline in the demand for wood and a decline in the value of the forest because of imperfect information and the time it takes information to be transmitted). If the rate of decline in the value of the product of the forest is sufficiently great, and is expected to stay that level for the lifetime of the next generation of owners, the profit to be derived from harvesting the entire forest right now will be greater than the potential profitability of the forest to the future owner (or arbitrageurs or series of arbitrageurs, etc.) This makes sense because:

1) It takes time for the purchase to be completed and for the forest to change owners, time during which the value of the forest will further decline.

2) A steadily declining value for the forest takes away a major incentive for purchasing it: that is purchasing it for its continued profitability over an extended period of time.

Put another way, if the forest's greatest value is projected to be the value of its produce right now, why would anyone want to purchase it?

Such an answer assumes that long-term information is not perfect, which is a realistic assumption for the real world I think. If long-term information were perfect (long-term meaning for the purposes of this problem: knowledge of the future value of the forest beyond the lifespan of a single owner), then arbitrageurs would be willing to buy the forest in the intermediate term, even when the price is declining rapidly, with the aim of selling the forest back to forest industry people when demand for wood goes back up. I'm assuming that this is not possible, so that when the profitability of having a forest goes down, people assume that it's going to be down for the forseeable future, and are unwilling to pay higher for it than its current profit potential. Is this a reasonable assumption? I'm not sure, but I would think that 40 years or so is a reasonable span of time beyond which future demand for a product and market conditions would not be predictable.

So all this would suggest that, in the cold world of profit-maximizing forest owners, the will come a time when every forest is leveled. It's interesting to note that the forest is clear-cut when demand for wood goes down. Just something to think about...

Now back to the original reason for the post: I wanted to take issue with the professor's assertion that "the private owner will choose investment decisions exactly as would a 'social planner'." As I said before, I can understand why the creator of the question chose a forest as the asset, but in particular with a forest, I think, the market outcome will not be the same as the socially optimal outcome.

If the asset was, say, a stock of tree seedlings, and the choice was between preserving them and using them to spawn more tree seedlings, and selling them to nurseries, then it's true that the investment decisions of the owner will coincide exactly with what a social planner would do. But a forest is different because one of the principal benefits of the forest, recreation, is enjoyed by people who are not in the market for purchasing forests. Thus a large part of the social utility of forests is not represented by the price of the forest. I suppose you could construct a reality in which private owners of the forest also charge admission to individuals, but that's a stretch. Thus, the behavior of owners of the forest will only represent the interests of other potential-owners of the forest, which is a small segment of the people who have a use for the forest. Additionally, a forest has environmental value, which will be ignored by the decisions of profit-driven owners. So I don't think the market for forests is a particularly good example of socially-optimal market outcomes.

Ok, enough of this post. It's time for me to do real academics.

A Farewell Manifesto

Well, that's it, the political season is over. And while it may not have ended how I would have preferred, rest assured that I will not continue to fight. That's right. Now that the election is over I will most probably post much less frequently on political matters, if you can even consider my very undeft attempts at political analysis to have been worthwhile in the first place. I'm generally much less involved than I should be when it comes to politics, and while I believe it is every citizen's duty to participate when the time comes and maintain a minimum level of knowledgeableness in order to participate intelligently, it really seems that there are so many differing sources of information out there that it would require a person to either devote a substantial portion of their time to wading through all of them, or be especially interested in it, neither of which I am willing to do. One of the incentives for starting a blog for the election cycle was that it would force me to follow my first voting-age presidential race more closely and chronicle my thoughts along the way. It was a learning experience for me, and it was good. But I don't know how much more I have to say on politics, and I'd like to post more about other stuff that interests me. As a kind of closing manifesto though, I'd like to lay out the things I do have strong personal beliefs about politically:

Large concentrations of wealth are bad. I know this is economic, not political, but still our economic policies are set in large part via a political process. I'm sure none of the reasons I can provide in supporting this position are original, since the matter has been argued for centuries by political theorists and intellectuals far more learned than I. But, at the risk of being superfluous, I'll state why I think this is the case.

I actually think it's easier to see why this is bad by starting with the justifications given for why they are good. The first, and probably predominant argument is that distributions of wealth are determined by markets and markets must not be tampered with. Some people with a religious-type adherence to the free market are not likely to have big problems with large differences in wealth, because they see the large differences in wealth as somehow the natural product of the free market. But one need only look to trusts and natural monopolies to see that sometimes intervention in free markets is more efficient than no intervention. Additionally, reverence for a system, however ingenious and perhaps philosophically pleasing, should never supersede honest analysis of all of its consequences, good and bad. Capitalism may be the best economic system ever invented, but that doesn't mean some of its consequences aren't undesirable and would be better if they were corrected.

Of course a necessary premise of capitalism is the profit-incentive or self-interest, which cannot exist without inequalities of wealth. In the real world, inequalities in wealth provide positive incentives for risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurship, all of which are essential to a well-functioning economy. Conversely, lack of possibility for inequalities in wealth led to the failure of communism on the massive scale. However, as I understand the argument, as a justification for the existence of larger inequalities of wealth, the profit-incentive argument must assume that there are constant or even increasing returns to greater and greater levels of inequality. This to me seems patently false. Does the typical middle-class person respond with 5 times the risk-taking, or, put another way, do 5 times as many middle-class people decide to take risks when the average income of the top 10% is increased by 5 times? It's true that this doesn't take into account certain macroeconomics multiplying effects that might translate to a greater than 1:1 contribution to the total economy for each unit of additional capital. Still, my argument is that there has to be a certain point where the marginal contribution to positive incentives of an increase in the income disparity is negligible. On a practical level, is a $50,000-earning member of the middle class considerably more motivated to take certain risks if he is able to earn $2,000,000 rather than $1,000,000?

There's an assertion that the rich invest (save) proportionally more money than non-rich citizens. I don't have any data on this, and can't find any on a quick search. Maybe someone who has some knowledge regarding this can leave a comment about it. Take it as true that the rich do re-invest a higher portion of their income than the non-rich. On the one hand, they're reinvesting it, so while it does briefly go through their hands and they receive the interest on the investment, they're really just acting as a proxy to distribute capital wherever it's going to go. On the other hand, they're investing in the most profitable ventures which will probably belong to other rich people who already have the substantial capital needed to cover the considerable overhead cost of a highly productive venture. So it's not clear how much this extra investment would "give back" to the population. Of course my knowledge of economics is pretty elementary and there very well could be a flaw somewhere.

There are obvious reasons why greater equality (not absolute equality) is good including reduced social tension, preservation of upward mobility, and an abundance of philosophical / ethical inquiry defending it as an inherent good that I can't possibly begin to address here. Historically, the existence of classes possessing fixed, differing levels of status has led to conflict and revolution. One of the things that has made America great and probably revolution-free is the lack of a class-system, which, wherever it existed in Europe, was subsequently overthrown in favor of democratic, capitalist systems. While today there is no danger of anything resembling a formal class system re-appearing, policies should be constructed so as to mitigate possibility of the formation of a de facto economic class division. I believe in policies formed with this aim in mind.

There are more things I feel strongly about, but since I'm tired of this post they will have to wait to future posts.

Update: Discussion continued here.

How To Be Less Narcissistic 101

When I started this blog I assumed it would provide my friends and family with an entertaining and hopefully interesting read, and maybe the occasional google user with highly sough "1st-person commentary" - and maybe even some information. But I never expected to be providing self-help information. But if you do a search on Google (right now!) for "How to be less narcissistic" I come up on top! Even over the thousands of websites that actually address this issue (total list 150,000!). Ironically, the better an authority I become on being less narcissistic, the less narcissistic I become. Or so google says. Or something like that... But hopefully the guy in search of that info has, uh, gotten something about it.

Update: I've been bumped to number six. Aw, Shucks.

Pet Peeves

A pet peeve of mine is when people conflate opinion with fact. For instance, can I have an opinion on whether the explosives in Iraq disappeared before or after fighting began? No. The explosives were either there or they weren't. I can present evidence why one of them is the case, but I can't have an opinion on it. Now, can I have an opinion on whether Bush is a good president? Yes. This seems to be a question that is a matter of opinion.

I absolutely hate when people write editorials about facts, essentially making an assertion that something unknown is or is not the case, and then retreats from the duty of rigorously defending their case under the auspices of it just being their opinion. You know this kind of maneuver. Don't get me wrong. There isn't anything wrong with including facts for the purpose of supporting your opinion, or making an entire editorial a list of facts if that's what you want to do, but you can't opine on a fact. At this point, my relationship with editorials, specifically the kind you find written in major newspapers, is like the relationship you have with a bad soap opera series. You don't have any respect for the content, but you keep coming back week after week out of some sick fascination with the fact that they just keep going.

Msnbc doesn't seem to share my opinion (pop quiz: is it proper to call this an opinion?) about opinions and hence proliferates fundamentally flawed onlines polls asking things like "Will the Iraq elections take place in January?" What!? What's the point of doing a survey on that? Does anyone know what will happen in January? Does anyone have any useful information that could lead to a useful prediction?

I would classify this as soliciting an opinion in the place of what is, in fact, a fact. Philosophically speaking, whether elections will take place in January is a fact, although it could be categorized in the proper sense as a "future fact" that is not presently evident. (I believe you can categorize it this way without assuming any kind of determinism.) But what the survey is asking for, I would argue, is an opinion, because:

1) No one knows what will happen at a future date. The best anyone can do is to make sound factually-based predictions. Unless you are operating under the assumption of a very strong determinism, which would say that it is possible to know what is going to happen in the future by surveying conditions at a given point in time, it cannot be said that a prediction of any future event is "a fact."

2) Even if strong determinism were assumed, respondents to online polls are absolutely ignorant of anything factually relevant to the issue being polled. Therefore, even if there were factual basis for a certain answer, people's answers are not likely to reflect it.

Thus these online polls are guilty of opining on facts, which to me is a capital intellectual sin. This is eclipsed only by my second pet peeve: people posting academic work (or college entrance essays (!?)) on their personal websites. It might be entertaining to come up with other equally irrelevant poll questions; I'll leave that as an intellectual exercise to the reader.

The Other Side

Worthwhile for seeing how a long-time Bush supporter is seeing things around this time if nothing else:

See, it's kind of cute, like watching a goldfish swim into the side of his bowl over and over again.

Bush Was Re-elected Plus Girls And Math

Ok, I've got a ton of work to do, which means...I've got to update this biznotch. For some reason, whenever I have the most work to do I'm at my most independently creative. For me it kind of functions as a reason to never quite have all my work done. Then again, another result of never having your work done is that you're slightly pre-occupied all the time, which is unavoidable no matter how flippant an attitude you may have.

Ok, most importantly, the results of the election. Bush was marginally elected by a very divided electorate. Which is fine. Compromise is what makes democracy work. Although on an intellectual level I like the idea of a multi-party parliamentary system better. However I don't have enough political knowledge back that up with substantive arguments, other than that it ensures the government more closely represents the will of the people. But in America it's winner take all. So when Kerry called Bush to formally concede the presidency and congratulate him, he made a point of mentioning how divided the country was, and how he thought that was a bad thing, which I think we all can agree on. And I think Bush agreed, which is good.
So then Bush goes and releases this 6 point plan for his domestic agenda:

• Continuing to raise accountability standards in public schools.
• Upholding "our deepest values and family and faith.”
• Halving the record $413 billion deficit.
• Expanding health care coverage.
• Seeking a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
• Moving “this goodhearted nation toward a culture of life,” a reference to the abortion issue.

Ok, well the first point calls a giant federal program, something liberals can relate to. And I honestly don't know the liberal / conservative breakdown on supporting the "No Child Left Behind" program. I do know that it's generally recognized to be a big failure, one reason being that it is massively underfunded, and I can't imagine liberals feeling feeling any differently. And what does the second point mean? Not even in policy terms, but as a statement? How do you uphold family (other than issuing a constitutional ammendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, which is already covered by point 5)? Then there's the last two points which address the two most divisive domestic issues. I honestly am surprised that the consitutional ban on gay marriage is in there again. I really thought it was intended to energize the base for the election and was not a heartfelt policy. I do like halving the deficit though because of how lofty and ambitious it is.
So this does seem like a hard agenda to unify people on but we'll see.
The second thing I've been thinking about is girls and math. Nothing lewd or anything. Specifically, you know the common wisdom that girls are not as good at math as boys. Well there are two issues, whether that's fundamentally true, and then if so, why it's true. On the first point, I tend to believe that to the extent that being good at math equates with performing in math, girls are not as good, but in the sense of raw potential, I don't think there's a difference. It think the first point is undebatable, that girls' performance is not as high. There are many reasons put forth to explain this. Some have it that this is a social phenomenon. This argument has it that girls are just not encouraged to be good at math, so few become good at it. This may explain why some girls who are good at math are just as good as boys who are good at math, but the overall distribution is shifted much more toward the not good end. Some allege it has something to do with visual-spatial skills. The predicates of this argument have merit: men do have superior visual-spatial abilities. There's an evolutionary reason for this. If you buy into the story that long ago men were hunters who navigated and traveled and women were gatherers who traveled shorter distances, it makes sense that men would be selected for spatial and directional abilities, and that if these traits are in fact sex-linked, they would be propogated along to their male ancestors. The problem I see with this argument is that the assumed link between spatial abilities and math not clear. For instance, does it take spatial ability to understand algebra or calculus? The answer isn't clear to me. Granted that many of math's most useful applications are physical, but men could just be more drawn to physical things which seems an easier and more direct answer than they somehow use their spatial inclinations to be good at math. According to the simpler is more likely to be correct law, I support the former view.
This is slightly off-topic, but there's a fascinating theory for why more often men show exceptionally high ability in things like math that demand a high IQ. According to the general theory, some of the alleles that are important for intelligence are X-linked, meaning that they only appear on the X chromosome. For those who need brushing up on their biology, males have both an X and a Y chromosome, and females have two X chromosomes. Therefore male descendents of males get their Y chromosome from their father and their X from their mother, and female descendants get an X chromosome from each parent.
There is a strong and a weak version of this theory. The strong version of an X-linked intelligence trait theory would have it that genes encoding for high intelligence only occur on the X chromosome, meaning that they are only transmitted to a male through the mother, which can be considered disproved since if it were true, pedigrees of smart families would show a clear X-linked pattern, which would be quite evident and vindicate the theory conclusively. But there is a weaker form of the X-linked theory that makes more sense. Imagine if X chromosome alleles had proportionally more importance in determining intelligence. Then any mutation or natural variation that should happen to occur in the single X chromosome of a male would automatically be manifested. Of course the probability of a single fluke occurence is greater than the probability of two coincident fluke occurences, so for this reason there would be more variability in male intelligence than in female intelligence, where the actual expression of the X chromosome trait is somehow a combination of two inherited X alleles. The prediction of greater variability is exactly consistent with the established observation that there are more male mentally retarded people, and more male creative geniuses, but the mean intellectual ability for the sexes is the same. From an evolutionary perspective, if intelligence is assumed to be an adaptive trait, then it makes sense why the most transparent variability of the trait occurs in the more easily "selected" sex. (Whereas the man can be selected at the tip of a hat, thousands of times over in the course of a year, a female can, theoretically, only be selected once every nine months or so.)
Of course this doesn't seem to offer explanation for the higher apparent mean math ability in men. But I have a personal view, although it might be mundane compared to the alternatives. Men like competition, especially the type where if someone wins someone else loses. It just goes along with our competitive nature, which can also probably be explained as some sort of evolutionary thing. The thing that distinguishes math and, to a slightly lesser extent, science from other forms of intellectual discourse is that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. English is self-evidently vague and, to me, relativistic. Even with something like language, in which women are purported to be more adept, there isn't one correct way to say something, there are multiple ways of saying it, within the constraints of proper grammar. Math dovetails nicely with guys' desire to be right about stuff. To be the one person who gets the solution to a problem while everyone else is in sheepish ingorance is kind of appealing for dominance-loving creatures, though admittedly this isn't an admirable trait. One corollary of this theory would be you'd find more guys interested in things like trivia. And it's true that there are more guys on shows like Jeopardy than girls.
All right, now that I've got that out of my system maybe I'll get something done...

K.I.S.S.

People tell me I don't do enough personal entries (you don't do any -- pub), and this is a blog after all, so here you go. What follows is the rapid-fire unraveling of my brain.

Readers of this blog will likely know that I occasionally have exhibited symptoms of disillusionment and apathy towards school. However, I feel that some degree of questioning things and questioning your path is healthy by the time one reaches college age. College, unlike high school, is a choice. You choose which college to attend, you choose what field of knowledge to pursue, you choose what classes to take. Many people choose to go to college over doing other financially lucrative things (albeit very few). Therefore I'm not concerned that I'm questioning the point of what I'm doing. So I've been thinking about the purpose of school lately, not in a social or institutional sense, but in the sense of what use it serves the student. For most all professions, you have to go through lots of school if you want to be succeessful. So school is a kind of have-to, which is fine with me. It sure beats going to work at some menial deathly boring that you have to work years at in order to even have the chance of advancing to something more interesting. It also tops a system where good jobs are awarded according to connections, family origin, reciprocal favors or worse. So I'm not complaining about it. But does it give you something else? Is it reasonable to expect school to provide other kinds of fulfillment than just social advancement? Or is it most reasonable to just try to make it as pleasant as possible a step in the larger rat race of which it is a part?

Other than there are three things I can identify that school gives us:

1) School teaches you knowledge. Going to school provides you with a unique opportunity in your life in which you can focus exclusively on enriching your knowledge. Therefore one should look at school as a convenient time in which to pursue what fascinates you.

This is all well and good. If you're interested in a science and your school has a decent science program then the classroom format can be valuable in faciliating the process of learning your subject. Many sciences are hard, and for most students the learning process is aided by the rigor and scrutiny provided by regular problem sets. If you're at a university, then you have to the advantage of being at the frontier of knowledge where new knowledge is being created daily. That clearly presents an educational advantage over just reading books, if nothing else because the newest knowledge hasn't found its way into books yet. At the very least it's inspiring and makes one want to explore knowledge to be in such an environment.

If you're interested in humanities, the concept of knowledge is defined a little differently. Whereas most science course end up presenting a fairly standardized curriculum across different schools, humanities courses that deal with similar topics are more variable; it's harder to say what it means to be a properly educated English major, or even U.S. history major for that matter, than a physics major. Although, even for an English major there is a core group of works that are considered neccessary to be familiar with in order for one to be considered well educated. Now, assuming that the contents of this group is common knowledge, it's a little less clear to me what one gains from reading these works as part of a course syllabus as opposed to on one's own, since understanding or grasping the material doesn't require the same kind of repetition and rigor that a difficult scientific concept would. But I can already hear the response that the knowledge you derive from an English course, for instance, isn't contained within the pages of the book, it comes from the interpretation of what's in the book. And to that end, the more interpretations the better. Hence, the discussion aspect of a literature course is essential to the knowledge derived from the course. Another argument might be that the wisdom derived from literature derives from the way it is to be understood in relation to life, and thus more it is discussed, the more insights it can provide.

All in all, I'm not sure how much greater an advantage for acquiring new knowledge school offers a motivated and capable person. The resources are out there, now more accessible than ever, and if one is motivated enough to seek them out and assemble them sensibly, and capable enough to learn and understand without the oversight of teachers, I'm convinced one can get just as good an education without college. Where school does present an advantage is in providing that structure and incentive, and providing a pedagogical structure. The pardox is that the people I know who are truly expert in the field they are studying - that is, those who have the most to gain from school - are also the ones who are most self-directed, and with the most self-derived interest, and thus most likely to do well for themselves without the guidance of school. What school provides for people who have the interest, the means, and the will to succeed in an area of life, or an area of inquiry, is still unclear to me. Still, you do get four years to just learn things and recognition for having done it. That's worth something.

2. School is a challenge, specifically a challenge for your intellect.

This is only appealing to a particular type of person. But it's probably true that most high acheivers got there in part because they enjoy flexing their intellectual muscle. Most (not all) people would prefer a challenging job to an unchallenging job. People like challenge. There's an inherent joy in testing the limits of one's capabilities. If you perform well, you get to feel good about yourself and that you are a smart person. There's a certain wrestling with things mentally that school provides, and although it's not as dramatic as say the lone scientist deriving on his own the fundamental formula of nature, or solving a hitherto unsolved problem, it still feels good to feel yourself making intellectual progress.

3. Doing well in school is a way to prove yourself to those who would want to hire you or otherwise evaluate you.

Now the one that everybody cares about. It would be hugely inefficient to introduce inexperienced workers directly into the labor force without first being evaluated in a neutral medium like school and placed accordingly. While the system does have its flaws, things that school measures like discipline, intelligence, dedication are highly correlative with traits that result in success in the workplace. As such, the better you do in school, the more you prove that you would be capable of doing whatever you want to do after school. For types who are always concerned about the next step, this is a highly motivating reason to do well and work hard in school, even if they're not particularly interested in the course material.

There are many different values and purposes to school, and often I find it hard to understand how they're packed together in the same institution. I definitely have a difficult time balancing these objectives, usually because I focus too narrowly on one of them, and try to make the whole thing into something it isn't. I think that if you honor only one of them, you're not going to be successful: If you see it as only an education and have any semblance of independence of thought you're going to be frustrated when school requirements and pedagogy conflict with your personal educational aspirations. If you see it as just a mental challenge then you'll come out not having learned anything useful to take into the next stage. If you regard it as just a prelude to your future career you'll find the work more tedious and pointless than other people who are fascinated by the subject matter and will possibly burn out. Of course, I'm sure I'm missing some other equally important purposes of school but I want to keep this short and these are just my immediate thoughts.