
An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society - champagnepapi
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-u-s-education-system-producing-a-society-of-ldquo-smart-fools-rdquo/
======
cperciva
Standardized tests are a lousy way of deciding things. But at least they're
better than _non-standardized_ tests.

At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high
school grades. That's _grades awarded by high schools_ \-- we used to have
province-wide grade 12 exams, but for almost all subjects those were abolished
a few years ago. It's widely recognized at the post-secondary level that a 90%
grade from some schools means much more than a 90% grade from some other
schools; but if anyone is actually adjusting high school grades to account for
these differences, they're not admitting it.

Entrance scholarships, and admission in one faculty (Business), is determined
partly based on high school grades and partly based on extracurricular
activities -- in most cases, volunteer activities. Great, we're bringing in
well-rounded students who are dedicated to helping the community, right? No;
it turns out that they admit that they're only volunteering in order to pad
their resumes -- in some cases because high-priced consultants hired by their
parents told them exactly what volunteering they should do and what to say
about it when they're writing their scholarship applications. (I've been
lobbying for years to get an analysis done of how the rating of student
extracurricular activities correlates with the median income of their postal
code. I'm still waiting.)

The SAT become popular because it could identify smart kids who would
otherwise have been overlooked due to their race, gender, religion, or class.
Is it perfect? Hell no. But as we discard standardized tests, I worry that
we're moving back to a world where university admission will depend less on
aptitude and more on having parents who have the money and the connections to
get you the "right" extracurricular experience.

~~~
cbhl
> but if anyone is actually adjusting high school grades to account for these
> differences, they're not admitting it.

I am pretty sure this was the standard line for campus tours at the University
of Waterloo -- that you should take high school exams at your school and not
at some diploma mill, because Waterloo _did_ adjust your entrance average
based on what high school you came from, and how those students did once they
got to university.

(That said, I also heard that there are so many "perfect" candidates that
they're contemplating rejecting students at random in order to hit class size
numbers, because scaling up requires more lecture halls and more dorms, and
those things take years to build out.)

~~~
vonmoltke
> that you should take high school exams at your school and not at some
> diploma mill

I have never heard this term applied to a high school before. Is this a thing
in Canada?

~~~
majormajor
It's a thing in the US too, especially in high-end athletic circles with
traveling teams, etc (the flip side of the argument is that elite athletic
prospects can't fit traditional high school schedules into their routines
easily).

------
jbscpa
My spouse is a classroom educator.

Her school participates in Great Expectations program.
[http://www.greatexpectations.org/](http://www.greatexpectations.org/)

It is a character development program "that provides teachers and
administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within
the school atmosphere"

There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1\. We will value one another
as unique special individuals 2\. We will not laugh at or make fun of a
person's mistakes nor use sarcasm or putdowns. 3\. We will use good manners,
saying, "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" and allow others to go first.
and so forth.
[http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations](http://www.greatexpectations.org/expectations)

In my opinion when the U.S. abandoned the judeo/christian ethic in the late
twentieth century character and wisdom training was denigrated as "old
fashioned" and unnecessary.

~~~
SeeDave
>2\. We will not laugh at or make fun of a person's mistakes nor use sarcasm
or putdowns.

I would have appreciated this as my public school experience was rife with
negativity, sarcasm, snark, jeering, insulting, etc.

I'm not sure what causes such anti-social behavior but I dream of a day where
all students can be kind, considerate, polite, and supportive of one another.

~~~
Kenji
In my early teens, I was the only one who used sarcasm in the classroom, and
none of my peers understood it. There needs to be more sarcasm in schools.

~~~
SeeDave
Why does there need to be more sarcasm in schools?

I'm willing to hear you out, but would appreciate it if you could clearly
explain the benefits of increased sarcasm in schools.

~~~
Kenji
Sarcasm is a great rhetoric tool.

------
grandalf
While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at
the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been
steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years.

Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization,
diligence, and repeated practice _at the expense_ of general intelligence.

When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who expected all
tests to be things that they could study for using the technique of rote
memorization and diligence. To a large extent, pre-law and pre-med curricula
offer this, and so many of the students who excel using that technique end up
in positions of social authority.

~~~
kyleschiller
Yeah, people with law degrees are probably overrepresented in politics, but
pre-med?

~~~
dragonwriter
Healthcare is one of the biggest areas of government, and administrators in
the field often have medical and/or public health degrees on top of pre-med or
substantially similar undergraduate coursework.

For that matter, I think that medical doctors are substantially
overrepresented in elected general government office (state and federal
legislatures, etc.) even though not nearly so much as lawyers. (e.g, Congress
is 2.8% physicians, while the US adult population is around 0.4% physicians.)

------
kartan
The article mixes two ideas that partially contradict each other.

1\. Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE [...] You end up with people who are good
at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good
skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a
better place.

2\. Do we know how to cultivate wisdom? Yes we do.

I agree with the second statement, and its implications are huge. If we give
people good education and good role models, that people are going to be wiser.

I don't agree with the first statement. There is still a lot of prejudices
against software developers and other high skilled professionals that are part
of America's culture. It correlates high IQ with low creativity. Can't high IQ
people learn wisdom? Is not part of the second thesis that it can be taught?

The best example I have against the first thesis is how developers behave at
the companies that I have worked for. These are Swedish companies that value
collaboration, personal live balance, and other social skills. People at this
companies are social, technically brilliant, they participate in team building
activities, we go for beers together, there is more gender parity (but still
is very low), etc.

If a company values and rewards this values day to day, people are social
animals and behave as such. If a company asks developers to work weekends and
has no vacation time. Are you surprise to find only angry, non creative, non
social people?

~~~
watwut
Why do you think American developers are non creative non social people? Both
conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to
potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are way
more social then they like to admit. Non-social people tend to produce culture
that is less fanatic to various socialization ways. Add to it companies that
really follow agile processes extremely close teamwork and occasional pair
programming and you get industry where shy or introverted person is at pretty
high disadvantage.

I mean, so many here measure developer worth by participation on hackatlons
and talks on meetup. Introverted or loner engineer is in serious disadvantage
there.

~~~
kartan
> conference/hackatlon/meetup culture and startups who sell themselves to
> potential employees on cool cultures suggest that American developers are
> way more social then they like to admit

That's my point. They are social, but they can't be like that in companies
that value long hour days and weekend work.

It is not the developers that are not social, but that "old fashioned"
companies force them in a more restricted, non-creative behavior. In a
traditional waterfall model, developers are supposed to be implementers, not
thinkers. In that kind of company, everything is hierarchical and creativity
is not expected. So their developers behave that way. And I will guess that it
is that the model of developer that the article is talking about.

The article, for sure, is not talking about the developers that you describe.
And that's my problem with the assumption in the article that people that are
good at a technical problem are not social. :)

~~~
watwut
It is startups who require the most hours per week and proof of out of work
passion, not just old fashioned companies. Maybe even not mostly old fashioned
companies. I think that stereotype of non-creative non-social developer is
largely overblown - fed more by movies and gossip then actual reality. I have
seen some statistic about developer being more introverted then general
population, but that is about the difference. Introverted does not mean non-
social.

I don't really know what you mean by traditional waterfall model and
creativity - waterfall was more of process organization. Whether you get to be
creative or not depends mostly on business company works in and personalities
involved. You can not be creative if you implement insurance calculation and
you can be creative when you are styling cheezy art shop.

------
pirocks
As a high school student I find the hating on the SAT/ACT a little concerning,
since once you remove standardized testing, admissions is primarily based on
GPA(which imo has massive flaws the most important flaw being lack of
consistency across schools). Also this article doesn't sound all that
"scientific" to me.

~~~
oculusthrift
honestly it seems to me that many that bash them are just insecure they didn't
do well and therefore claim that it isn't a valid measure.

~~~
deepnotderp
Well it stands to reason that if a test isn't a valid measure then those who
are hurt most by it will be the most vocal complainers. That doesn't
invalidate what the complainers have to say. There are numerous studies
showing the poor validity of these standardized tests.

~~~
oculusthrift
depends what you mean by validity. they have been shown to strongly correlate
with IQ.

------
jdietrich
There is an extraordinarily dangerous subtext to this argument and it isn't
very well hidden.

>Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own
selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a
common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-
order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.

The author is essentially arguing that "intelligence" should be redefined to
include not only practical problem-solving abilities, but a specific set of
moral values. He is arguing that it is acceptable to reject an otherwise
excellent college candidate because they're a nihilist or an objectivist or a
nationalist, so by his standards are "unwise" or "lacking in ethical
intelligence".

Right now, America is in the midst of a vast rebellion against the scientific
consensus. Millions of Americans reject essential and well-proven scientific
theories, in large part because they believe that academia is a highly
politicised liberal institution. They don't believe the data and they don't
trust the objectivity of the people who collected it. I very much doubt that
making college admission contingent on holding a certain set of ethical
beliefs will help to challenge that view.

Conservatives are vastly under-represented in academia and have been for many
decades. Many conservative students and academics feel that they are actively
discriminated against on an institutional level. Whatever your political
beliefs, this should be deeply concerning to you, if only because of the
ammunition that it hands to the likes of Trump.

[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674059092)

~~~
awinter-py
I'm with you. Defining wisdom as out-group altruism makes it a sort of
zealous, unconsidered enforcement of the status quo.

I think there probably is a case to be made that semantic intelligence at
scale harms a society, but this sciam interview doesn't present a good
argument.

------
nostrademons
There's an assumption in this article that virtue - using your intelligence to
benefit humanity rather than self or tribe - is a character trait, either one
that's inborn but should be selected for or one that can be imbued by
education and then is relatively unchanging. There's pretty ample evidence
[1][2][3][4] that this assumption is false, and that people are highly
situational in their moral reasoning.

In particular, expectations of abundance and reciprocity seem to factor
particularly highly in peoples' moral calculus. Most people are quite willing
to undertake pro-social, common-good actions when a.) they will not be
personally hurt by it and b.) they have a reasonable expectation that the
beneficiaries of their largess will turn around and either pay it back or pay
it forward. When those conditions are not met, people have a tendency to act
like locusts [5], and try and secure their personal resources before
considering what that might do to sustainability or the larger world around
them. Doing so is evolutionarily adaptive, as it ensures that they'll be the
ones to survive and pass on their genes even if the rest of humanity dies.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem)

[5] [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-
economy/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/)

~~~
neogodless
The article/interview claims that we can cultivate and test for virtue
(creativity and wisdom), and that our current tests used to funnel
intelligence into higher education and intelligence work isn't currently
accounting for it. I'm not sure where in the article the claim is made that it
cannot be improved upon.

~~~
nostrademons
"Improved upon" assumes something that is constant on the level of long-term
worldview, not something that may change situationally. You wouldn't usually
say that your choice of what to have for dinner or which sweater to buy can be
"improved upon", but many of the individual choices we make that lead to the
world we currently live in are on that level.

I guess the article does mention engaging the ethical reasoning centers of our
brain and training them to realize that it's an ethical problem at all, but my
argument here is that there's a _reason_ most citizens in developed countries
don't think about the moral implications of, say, buying an iPhone made in a
sweatshop in China that uses rare-earth minerals that pollute the environment,
and that's because the number of choices we face on a daily basis and the
moral complexity of all the consequences of these would paralyze us into
inaction if we did - in which case, those people who don't bother to think
about it would dominate consumption.

~~~
neogodless
I see what you're saying about the virtues being "different based on the
situation and/or other variables." However, that doesn't mean you can't
"improve upon" the ability to make virtuous choices.

In your dinner example, if someone has only math and finance education, they
might simply say that fast food is the best choice for dinner. But if they get
some nutrition education, suddenly they're wondering if maybe something
healthier might be worth the financial trade off. So you can absolutely
improve decision making with education. That example didn't include virtues,
though it could include making decisions for others (i.e. your family) that
improve their lives. Of course, wisdom about nutrition is a more direct
example of something you might not teach or test for, but in this case, it is
useful.

Sure, there are situations where the choices are just between two fast foods,
and neither choice will seem wise, but again, if only taught the individual
math rather than creativity, they might not realize that there's also a fresh
produce market (i.e. a third choice!) hiding around the corner.

~~~
nostrademons
Sure, and this type of moral education is actually done in schools. I grew up
in the 80s and 90s, and we had a unit on water conservation; a unit on energy
efficiency; a play we wrote about rainforest destruction, endangered species,
and global warming; recurrent reminders to recycle; programs for anti-drug and
anti-smoking initiatives; sex ed; and pervasive lessons on respecting each
other and authority.

I haven't had any connection to the school system since 2000, but from what
I've heard, kids these days also get lessons on nutrition and on diversity &
inclusion.

But here are three major complexities:

a.) A good portion of America believes that this sort of moral education is
indoctrination. You're seeing the rise of Christian homeschooling as a
reaction to it, for example, which proponents of these values find just as
morally abhorrent.

b.) There's an opportunity cost to everything you teach. So while diversity &
inclusion has gotten a lot more classroom time of late, the importance of free
speech seems to have fallen by the wayside. While we hear a lot about global
warming or fossil-fuel exhaustion, there's little about groundwater pollution,
rare-earth mining, or labor rights.

c.) Once people get into the real world, they discover markets. Markets reward
people who supply what others do not, which means that if you have a cohort of
idealistic young conformists, the one defector can make lots of money simply
by breaking the consensus. In many ways, this is exactly what moralists
complain of, and what led off this article: people who break common ideas of
virtue are getting very rich off of it. And yet we don't want to get rid of
markets, because they supply the things that we want but somebody else would
rather not supply us with.

~~~
petra
That's a good analysis , particular the part about defectors .

And under that analysis, it seems that wisdom education , even of the deeper
style that Buddhists or Christians do , will likely to fail, because a single
defectors amplified by tech could do so much damage.

So are there any solutions to that?

~~~
nostrademons
The trick is to teach people to express their values by _consumption_ , not by
_production_ or _investment_. Most people have the intuitive sense that they
are a moral person when they personally don't perform any acts they consider
immoral. This sense fails when they can pay someone to perform an action that
they would consider immoral but with a consequence they desire, all without
their knowledge.

The one place, in a capitalist market economy, where values have a place is in
the endpoint, at the consumer. Consumer markets really depend _only_ on
values; by definition, they are those goods that people buy because they value
them inherently, not those that they buy to achieve another goal. The rest of
the economy self-adapts to produce those goods as efficiently as possible,
which often means production practices that people would find morally
repugnant.

If people trained themselves to a.) seek out as much information as possible
about the supply chains of the companies they buy from and b.) not buy from
them if the externalities introduced by the company aren't in accord with
their values, then the market would self-adapt to reflect those preferences.
It effectively creates a market for intelligent entrepreneurs to do the right
thing, by influencing consumption desires so that there's a profit potential
in being good.

There are still some very significant challenges in bringing this information
to the consumer, and in people integrating all that information into their
choices. A lot of the benefits of market economies is that they condense a lot
of information from each stage of the production process into one number, a
price, which propagates throughout the value chain so that self-interested
actors end up producing a good in the most maximally efficient way. If you
want to encode moral judgments and pass them through the value chain, you need
a lot more information to go from producer to consumer. And businesses have a
lot of incentive to cheat and conceal this information, so accurately
recording & transmitting it is challenging.

Actually, I just had a crazy half-baked idea around using vectors instead of
scalars for prices and encoding this information in a cryptocurrency, but the
margin of this HN comment is too small to contain it. Maybe someone else can
run with it.

------
newtem0
I dropped in on a physics class at my uni and i was surprised at how poor the
students understanding of physics was. These are super sharp people and they
struggled with simple problems. Its because they learn in this testing way.
They dont actually understand the material. Thats the most direct example of
this problem that ive seen. In order to fully understand things like you ought
to, you have to take the initiative yourseld on top of studying for tests that
are often made arbitrarily hard with memorization and other things of that
nature. Most of the college kids i know dont really know anything. And just
like this article said, they are only good at gaming the system and advancing
their own self interests. There is no big picture. They never wonder how they
might be changing society and they never wonder how they might want to shape
society. Even my 40 year old room mates dont. Its a death scentence for this
country. An absolutely lethal development. I think the recent political
developments are only the beginning of things to come due to this problem of
apathy.

------
shmageggy
> _I think it’s hurting everything. We get scientists who are very good
> forward incrementers—they are good at doing the next step but they are not
> the people who change the field. They are not redirectors or reinitiators,
> who start a field over. And those are the people we need._

I doubt the problem is with the scientists. I know and work with lots of
really smart and creative people in an academic environment, and I'm sure some
of them would be capable of redirecting, reinitiating, of starting a field
over -- were they given a chance. But just try to get funded for anything at
all that isn't incremental and see how well you do. Scientific funding is so
scarce, and becoming more and more so, that funding agencies only approve
grants that are practically guaranteed successes, and those tend to be the
incremental ones.

Maybe narrow testing is responsible for the plague of incremental science, but
if so it's probably not the scientists' fault, but more likely because we've
cultivated a society that isn't creative and thoughtful enough to appreciate
the value of really novel science.

~~~
bluGill
Most of the need in science is in advancing another step. For every major
advancement we need tens of thousands of small advancements to refine and work
out all the details. Physics was 99% solved in 1880 with just the work of
finishing out the constants. In that 1% we were missing was relativity and
quantum mechanics, and we know that there is something more but not what.
However as big as those two are they are still < 5% of the physics needed are.
(The numbers don't add up because now that we know about relativity we know it
is more than 1%, but it isn't a significant factor in most real world needs
which still get by on newton physics)

Yes there are areas of complete unknown in science (all over). However they
are complete unknowns: you can spend a lifetime in false starts.

In Computer science the P=NP problem has been an important unknown for years
and many have spent a large part of their lifetime on it and we still are not
close to a solution. This is a known unknown, must of what remains is not even
that well defined, just a case where "something funny" happens and we have no
idea why and often can't figure out how to replicate it on demand.

------
pnathan
The ancient Western word for this is _virtue_ : to cultivate _virtues_ as part
of an education. It's not a novel concept, but it rather got shot in the head
in the postmodern revolution in education, and we're a lesser society for it.

~~~
triangleman
Do you have links to old educational material where this sort of thing was
part and parcel of the pedagogy? I am interested in getting into
homeschooling, especially focusing on character development. I suppose an
emphasis on the humanities would be a good first step, but I don't know where
to find the "leading lights" in this kind of old-school education.

~~~
paganel
Not the OP, and it's a rather old book, relatively speaking, but you might
also give Jean-Jacques Rousseau's _Emile, or On Education_ a chance.

It's got nothing pedagogically scientific in it, at least compared to today's
standards, but were I to have a kid I'd base my trying to teach him about
things in life on what this book has taught me (it also talks about lots of
other interesting things, not only pedagogy). Reading it I realized that my
dad was at certain points following this book almost by the letter (I've never
asked him if he had read it, though), and on the book's wikipedia page there's
mention of the Montessori method being some sort of follow-up to what Rousseau
was thinking in terms of educating children.

------
johan_larson
"Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own
selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a
common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-
order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values."

That's a really odd definition of "wisdom". That's more like "unselfishness"
or maybe "benevolence".

~~~
clock_tower
I think it's a tolerably accurate definition; it's almost always more wise to
cultivate enlightened self-interest instead of the unenlightened kind. Another
generation of the current state of affairs, and the US will probably have
another civil war -- and it'd be the height of folly to let things escalate to
that point.

------
CogitoCogito
I see many parallels with the post and my own experience. I got my PhD in math
and taught many college math courses during that time. I was always saddened
at the number of students that essentially viewed math as just an exercise in
the memorization of algorithms (memorize differentiation and integration rules
and chug away at problems). I would avoid teaching this way and instead give
them fewer, "deeper" problems that "exercised the concepts".

Students (the "good" and "bad" ones would usually go through the same
transition throughout the semester: they would first be very uncomfortable and
generally dislike it, then after a few weeks they would start to get used to
the process of thinking things through, and finally they would tend to like it
much more than what they used to do (of course some students would absolutely
despise the process even at the end). Some of the students that liked the
process the most where the "bad" ones who were historically worse at the
algorithmic style (and unsurprisingly some of the ones who were very good at
that style took the longest to convince).

Personally I think it's very important to focus on such a style of teaching.
If students apply Calculus at work, they'll usually be using some form of
abstract reasoning (say finding a reasonable model for some phenomenon) or
they will be applying numerical methods (or both), but rarely will specific
memorized differentiation rules be necessary. Ironically I believe that the
memorization of the steps is most useful to those going into theoretical
mathematics where of course being able to do as many "basic" things without
thinking will always help you focus on the "true problem".

The main issue with this approach is that it is hard for students to know if
they understand something correctly (which I would argue may be the single
most important intellectual skill to learn in life). They can't just look up
an answer and see if they got it right, instead they basically have to ask
themselves if their reasoning makes sense. The difficulty in this causes a
huge amount of student angst and pushback making it more uncomfortable for the
students and more work for the teachers. I think the main reason why we teach
math as mainly rote learning is because it's the easiest way to teach. It's my
job to go through the motions and your job to learn the algorithms as best you
can. From the teaching perspective, this is relatively easy to teach, grade
and defend.

As a final example, I think that the focus in Calculus on the Fundamental
Theorem of Calculus is misplaced. It _is_ fundamental from a theoretical
perspective, but essentially no numerical integration is done that way and
instead the actual way that integrals are computed is some application of
Riemann's methods. (The counterexample being languages like Mathematica which
are specifically designed to solve things symbolically.) I found a very good
exercise to write Riemann integrals in Python (which students could quickly
understand as pseudocode) and use different methods (left-endpoint rule,
midpoint rule, etc.) to compute the integral in different ways and verifying
that the convergence matches errors predicted. I think this is the sort of
reasoning that should be focused on much more rather than having students find
anti-derivatives all day and simply repeating "remember plus C".

This is a bit of a long-winded and rambling post, but I do miss that aspect of
teaching. Pushing students to realize their ability to reason about math was
always very fulfilling. Not everyone enjoyed it, but the majority would come
out realizing that they too can reason about math given enough patience and
time.

~~~
oculusthrift
there is definitely two distinct intelligences. one that relies on knowledge
and memorization and one in reason. Much of math is taught the knowledge way,
similiar to history or biology, and a certain type of person excels at this.
However, a different set excel at the reasoning approach. i don't think one
approach can teach all people howeverZ

~~~
CogitoCogito
It's definitely true that there is no one size fits all. It's unfortunate that
we can't truly tailor learning individually in a class setting (well maybe
technology can successfully change this, but I still don't think it's the
case). When teaching one on one it is much easier to quickly hone in on a
specific student's difficulty, but rarely are you afforded the opportunity.

Also I don't want anyone to think that I believe that rote learning is bad per
se. Memorizing basic steps is extremely important. That is what allows you to
focus on the important aspects of a problem as opposed to the details. For
example, you would be a fool to try to learn German grammar before you get a
good enough base of vocabulary. In fact, I think one of the best first steps
when learning something new is really memorizing the basics well.

However, I come from the perspective that rote learning has been overdone.
Most people come through their math education and never leave that learning
style. That is what I find unfortunate and wish were different.

------
Glyptodon
So the 30 point IQ thing, is that a reference to a global increase driven by
access to education, or am I missing something? Because it's not like 130 is
the new normal IQ score? But at the same time haven't they always been
normalized around 100 in industrialized countries?

~~~
defen
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)

------
jrochkind1
> What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by
> creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have

I think he left out the most important category --
empathy/compassion/caring/"emotional intelligence".

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untilHellbanned
"Excellent sheep" is same idea by another former Yale Prof, William
Deresiewicz

[http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-
sheep](http://www.billderesiewicz.com/books/excellent-sheep)

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pacaro
This article was odd to me. It seemed to be advocating a MAGA world view, that
kids used to be taught "values" in school.

Is this article a reflection of serious scholarship, or partisan pandering?

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stcredzero
_...IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially
selecting and rewarding “smart fools”..._

A lot of coding pathologies and programming language pathologies seem to be
the product of such "smart fools." ( _Mea culpa!_ ) There are many things
which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work out well in practice.

Come to think of it, a big chunk of, "The devil is in the details," can be
translated to, "The hardest problems are the emergent problems."

~~~
dmix
> There are many things which seem like good, elegant ideas, which don't work
> out well in practice.

Do you have any good examples of this in programming?

I'm starting to see a lot of the great parts of languages like Haskell,
Erlang, Clojure, and other FP languages starting to flow upwards into more
popular languages or in new more accessible forms (Elixir, Swift, Kotlin,
Rust).

It's possible that many of the good, elegant ideas aren't exactly the wrong
solution but are stuck in less accessible, fringe, or merely unpopular
languages/platforms. Which might be more about the nature of how languages are
adopted rather than the individual attributes and qualities of the language.

~~~
bluGill
Java (1.0) had checked exceptions, if you threw something you had to say what
it was in your interface. It Seemed like a good, elegant idea: if I use your
API I know exactly what exceptions I need to watch for. It works well in
trivial programs, but in anything larger it fails because adding a new
exception to something core requires thousands of modifications to the API
specification for an exception that I will catch only in a few places.

I think Java has made some improvements on this since 1995, but I haven't done
java since then so I don't know what.

~~~
watwut
Huh? Checked exceptions are great tools for API and are still in use -
especially in large systems. They fail within small modules, because they are
less practicall in that context.

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Cozumel
It puts me in mind of the three minute degree[0]

> Education can produce what the Village wants.

> "A row of cabbages," Number 6 objects.

> "Indeed," Number 2 agrees. "But knowledgeable cabbages

[0][http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/thegeneral.htm](http://daviddeley.com/profdeley/thegeneral.htm)

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germinalphrase
We need reliable ways to measure student achievement, knowledge and skill
level. If we're not satisfied with the cost and negative externalities of
standardized testing, then IMO we should be seeking ways to make the
assessments that teachers are using in their lessons more accurate and
trustworthy. We're already paying people to do the work, but we just don't
trust the results. That's the problem - so let's fix it.

~~~
kyleschiller
Yeah, isn't this exactly what Sternberg is saying? It sounds like he's done a
lot of work precisely on improving the assessments.

~~~
germinalphrase
Sternberg is arguing that what the tests measure isn't desirable (but
presumably the implementation of the tests would be the same/similar to
current tests?).

I suppose my suggestion is a little off topic as I'm addressing some
criticisms of standardized testing with respect to cost/relevance to desired
learning outcomes/inability for use in guiding a student's learning or
teacher's pedagogy/taking time away from primary learning for test prep/and so
on.

We currently spend a little less than ~2 billion a year on standardized
testing, but the problems inherent in the form/format of these tests isn't
changing. I believe we could get better results for much less if we turn our
attention to creating a way for teacher to implement trustworthy assessments
in their own classrooms and lessons. Why pay third parties so much money to do
something that already being done (but which needs to be improved to make it
trustworthy).

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accountyaccount
Probably a step up from people who are simply fools?

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mikekij
Misleading title. Thought this was about Cucumber.

~~~
mikekij
^ Sarcasm.

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Shivetya
Look at the hundreds of billions of dollars the DOE has spent since its
inception under President Carter and ask, why have scores and graduations
rates not show real improvement? Why are we still asking the same questions we
did back then?

If there were one Federal agency in dire need of dissolution it is that one.
Give the money to states in grants and see which one comes up with the better
solution

~~~
mturmon
What if your kid lives in one that comes up with the worst solution?

~~~
adjkant
Agreed this is an important question. I think the second question is "is the
worst solution significantly worse than what we have now?". I don't know the
area well enough to take a stance here, but it seems the parent is claiming
there is little to lose and lots to gain. So do you agree with that,
particularly the little to lose part?

~~~
mturmon
My pushback was against the comment above mine, which blithely suggested doing
an experiment where the states would sort it out. Of course, the worst
solution will be pretty far off the charts. Never underestimate how far
"worst" it can get! There are states/regions that either don't have their shit
together, or neglect their second-tier schools.

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svend
I stopped reading at "IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the
world.."

~~~
reefoctopus
The Flynn effect says IQ rises 2.93 points per decade.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)

~~~
tptacek
The Flynn effect _documents_ an increase in IQ, but does not say there will be
a consistent 2.93 point increase --- in fact, the increase is not consistent,
but rather concentrates in areas of lower socioeconomic status.

