Steven Pinker: What Colleges Should Teach

What should Colleges teach? Steven Pinker offers this approach:

I don't think it's that difficult to outline a positive vision for higher education, something that neither legacy universities nor UATX have been able to do. Here's my own attempt (from my New Republic essay "The Trouble with Harvard https://newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests):

"It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.

On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery."

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Michael Strong: The Problem with Compliance in Education

Fantastic conversation. I transcribed it:

Interviewer:

"I was looking at these John Taylor Gatto quotes, and I've got another one. It's a little long, but I'm going to read it because I want to get your reaction to it.

'I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 30 years of teaching, schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me, because 1000s of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers, aids and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.'

So how can that be how can individuals be good and the system be rotten?"

Michael Strong:

"So good question.First of all, John Taylor Gatto, essential reading, his "Seven Lesson School Teacher." Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year. Absolutely essential reading for anyone in education, as that quotation is one of my lodestars, absolutely. Going back into how the system can be when you think about it, you've got, first of all, we all know we don't want to work for two bosses or three bosses. Everybody in a school system is working for the school district governed by the school board. They also have State Department of Education rules. They also have federal Department of Education rules, and these rules are not always consistent.

So to start with, we have three different bureaucracies all imposing compliance going back to the school district level. Once I knew a wonderful superintendent, and he said the worst part of the job is he had to hang out with other superintendents, and part of it is there are politicians in charge of bureaucracies. How do you maintain tenure as a superintendent of a school district? You avoid as many controversies as possible, and you basically keep these school board members happy while not making any waves. And so you become an expert in being a politician, enforcing compliance and not doing anything too different. There are superintendents that try to do little innovations, but it's so risky. They're by nature, necessarily risk averse, and you can go down the ranks. So which principles win? Well, compliance is number one. Doing well by kids is number 3, 4, 5, 6,

You know. And again, even teachers. There's a joke that the teachers of the year are the ones that break all the rules. If your job is to teach this curriculum in this manner, in this timeline, it's all about compliance, and everything great in the human history is by creative and entrepreneurial people who have broken rules, who've decided to do what they believe is right or interesting, often with little evidence, often with social pressure against them. That's the whole story of innovation. And so you can look at school as an anti innovation machine. And yet, going back to Gatto's point, everything valuable is created by innovators. And so it filters out anybody who would want to do something differently."

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About Focusing on One’s Priorities

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." Socrates

As a gift to myself this year, I've been doubling-down on my need to spent my waning hours my intentionally. Waning? I'm 68, so I've already lived most of my life. That said, I'm in good physical shape and I'm passionate about my work as a civil rights attorney (especially First Amendment). Every day I treasure opportunities to engage with friends and family, especially the love of my life, Beverly, who I met one year ago today. I am a serious musician and an exhibiting artist. I'm lucky in more ways than I can count.

But numbers don't lie. Last year I made an intrepid assumption that I'll live about 20 more years. Simple math reveals that this is only 240 more months. Last month went quickly. In fact, the better I am at living a mindful, principled and socially engaged life, the more quickly the months flash by. My endgame: If I'm really fortunate, I'll be able to look back at my 20 year Plan and consider that it was a life well-lived, which will make it much easier to deal with my inevitable decay and death. But how do I keep on track, giving my cravings to attend to more things than I can possibly absorb?

This year I committed to unsubscribing from emails lists that seemed like good ideas at the time. There are also many commercial emails that keep popping in, unsolicited. In the past few weeks, I have unsubscribed from about 200 email lists, which makes my inbox much more inviting. Now, most of my inbox consists of emails that I will either read or at least scan. This has also addressed my concern that I might overlook important emails because they are hidden among low (or no) priority emails. I recommend this to everyone. If an email list seems interesting, but not interesting enough to subscribe to, I follow the organization or person on X (Twitter), which circumvents my inbox.

I also decided to commit (for the umpteenth time) to do a better job of making and adhering to a daily to-do list that I create either that morning or the night before. I use a combination of paper and pen at my desk and the Reminders app on my iPhone. This simple tactic works extremely well.

I also make better use of my iPhone DND feature when trying to focus, sometimes for hours. This is heaven. How did we ever get to this point where so many people assume that you will immediately respond to texts and phone calls?

These three simple things have made a noticeable difference to help me spend quality time on the things that I have personally identified as my priorities. The alternative is the lose time chasing squirrels all day, which is admittedly sometimes valuable for generating unexpected but important insights, ideas and projects, but this daydreaming and brainstorming time needs to be consciously kept in check or else it destroys one's ability to deeply concentrate one's own priorities.

Today I received a mass emailing from Cal Newport announcing a new online course called Life of Focus. I won't be signing up, but I do appreciate his three goals for his course, which closely align with my own resolutions:

Month 1: Establishing deep work hours. You'll restructure your work life to feature less distraction and more depth.

Month 2: Conducting a digital declutter. You'll implement a digital declutter to help you break screen additions and cultivate a more deliberate relationship with the digital tools in your personal life.

Month 3: Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages your mind and your soul in something meaningful.

v Along these same lines I recommend Newport's book: "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

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RFK, Jr.: The Problem with Experts

RFK, Jr.:

Newsweek asked RFK Jr. "why he doesn't stop promoting conspiracy theories".

This was his reply:

"My father told me when I was a little boy that people in authority lie and the job in a democracy is to remain skeptical. I've been science-based since I was a kid. Show me the evidence and I'll believe you, but I'm not going to take the word of official narratives."

"The way you do research is not by asking authoritative figures what they think. Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it's not a feature of democracy. It's a feature of religion and totalitarianism."

Compare with this passage from The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (p.88):

I argue that liberal science’s distinctive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conversation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are

- The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.

- The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based...

Here is a problem, though, with the funnel metaphor. The boundaries of the reality-based community are fuzzy and frothy, not hard and distinct, and the same is true of knowledge itself. What has and The Constitution of Knowledge has not been validated? Who qualifies as an expert reviewer? Who is doing good science or journalism, who is doing bad science or journalism, and who is not doing science or journalism at all? Distinguishing science from pseudoscience and real news from fake news and knowledge from opinion will never be cut and dried. Among philosophers of science, a debate over what kind of thing is and is not science, the so-called demarcation problem, has been going on for a long time without resolution, which makes philosophers unhappy.

In fact, however, efforts to define who is or is not a scientist or what science does or does not do miss the point. The beauty of the reality-based community is that it can acquire all kinds of propositions and organize all sorts of arguments, and it can do all kinds of things to resolve those arguments, so long as its methods satisfy the fallibilist and empirical rules. In the real world, checking does not need to mean falsifying a factual statement in some precise, authoritative way. It means finding a replicable, impersonal way to persuade people with other viewpoints that a proposition is true or false. The reality-based community is thus not limited to handling factual disputes. It can work its will on any kind of proposition which its members and rules can figure out how to adjudicate, and it can drive many kinds of conversation toward consensus.

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