What Khan and Thrun and others are creating is a new educational paradigm, which promises not only much greater scalability than anything we’ve had until now, but also higher-quality education.
The puzzle is why firms pay huge sums to big name consulting firms, when their advice comes from kids fresh out of college, who spend only a few months studying an industry they previous knew nothing about. How could such quick-made advice from ignorant recent grads be worth millions? Why don’t firms just ask their own internal recent college grads?…
My guess is that most intellectuals underestimate just how dysfunctional most firms are. Firms often have big obvious misallocations of resources, where lots of folks in the firm know about the problems and workable solutions. The main issue is that many highest status folks in the firm resist such changes, as they correctly see that their status will be lowered if they embrace such solutions.
The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide. Coalitions can often successfully block a CEO initiative, and yet not resist the further support of a prestigious outside consultant.
To serve this function, management consulting firms need to have the strongest prestige money can buy. They also need to be able to quickly walk around a firm, hear the different arguments, and judge where the weight of reason lies. And they need to be relatively immune to accusations of bias – that their advice follows from interests, affiliations, or commitments.
All three of these functions seem to be achieved at a low cost by hiring good-looking kids from our most prestigious schools. These are the cheapest folks you can buy with our most prestigious affiliations, they are smart enough to judge where reason lies, and they have few prior affiliations to taint them with bias. They can not only “borrow your watch to tell you the time,” but can also cow you into submission in accepting that time.
An open question is “Is being purely functional, even excepting I/O, worthwhile?” Or is it, as was suggested to me via email earlier this year, the equivalent of writing a novel without using the letter ‘e’?
Versions of these drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks. And when we reviewed the literature on attention-deficit drugs again in 1990 we found that all children, whether they had attention problems or not, responded to stimulant drugs the same way. Moreover, while the drugs helped children settle down in class, they actually increased activity in the playground. Stimulants generally have the same effects for all children and adults. They enhance the ability to concentrate, especially on tasks that are not inherently interesting or when one is fatigued or bored, but they don’t improve broader learning abilities. And just as in the many dieters who have used and abandoned similar drugs to lose weight, the effects of stimulants on children with attention problems fade after prolonged use.
Some experts have argued that children with A.D.D. wouldn’t develop such tolerance because their brains were somehow different. But in fact, the loss of appetite and sleeplessness in children first prescribed attention-deficit drugs do fade, and, as we now know, so do the effects on behavior. They apparently develop a tolerance to the drug, and thus its efficacy disappears. Many parents who take their children off the drugs find that behavior worsens, which most likely confirms their belief that the drugs work. But the behavior worsens because the children’s bodies have become adapted to the drug. Adults may have similar reactions if they suddenly cut back on coffee, or stop smoking.
Subscribing to the ethos of amateurism became a way to ensure that the upper classes continue to have the upper hand in sports.
When I asked the N.C.A.A. about the Boatright case, the response I received was deeply disingenuous. Refusing to discuss the actions of its investigators, it essentially said that Connecticut, not the N.C.A.A., declared Boatright ineligible. That is technically true. Schools declare athletes ineligible because if they don’t, the N.C.A.A. will deprive them of scholarships, force them to forfeit games and prevent them from playing in postseason games. Most astonishing, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman told me that the organization does not have the legal authority to compel cooperation from parents. Again, technically true: Its real weapon — the threat of destroying their sons’ careers — is far more potent than any mere subpoena.
Over the past three weeks, as I’ve written a series of columns about the abuses of the N.C.A.A., one question keeps reverberating in my head: How can this be happening in America?
Here’s the gotcha. Keep in mind that this really happened. Suppose you divide patients in the trial up into those with large kidney stones, and those with small kidney stones. Then even though treatment A was effective for a higher overall percentage of patients than treatment B, treatment B was effective for a higher percentage of patients in both groups, i.e., for both large and small kidney stones. So your Doctor could just as honestly have said “Well, you have large [or small] kidney stones, and treatment B worked for a higher percentage of patients with large [or small] kidney stones than treatment A”. If your Doctor had made either one of these statements, then if you’re like most people you’d have decided to go with treatment B, i.e., the exact opposite treatment.
Now, I’ll confess that before learning about Simpson’s paradox, I would have unhesitatingly done just as I suggested a naive person would. Indeed, even though I’ve now spent quite a bit of time pondering Simpson’s paradox, I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t still sometimes make the same kind of mistake. I find it more than a little mind-bending that my heuristics about how to behave on the basis of statistical evidence are obviously not just a little wrong, but utterly, horribly wrong.
The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole. Supporters of both political parties endorse, or at least tolerate, all manner of government punishment without so much as the pretense of a trial, based solely on government accusation: imprisonment for life, renditions to other countries, even assassinations of their fellow citizens. Simply uttering the word Terrorist, without proving it, is sufficient. And now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed — its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business rendered impossible — based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.
But the defining power that had everyone so up in arms about SOPA — shutting down websites with no trial — is one that already exists in quite a robust form, as any thwarted visitors to Megaupload will discover.
When the N.C.A.A. investigates an athlete for breaking its rules, not only is he presumed guilty but his punishment begins before he knows what he’s accused of. He is not told who his accuser is. The N.C.A.A. will delve into the personal relationships of his relatives and demand their bank statements and other private records. And it will hand down its verdict without so much as a hearing. Reputations have been ruined on accusations so flimsy that they would be laughed out of any court in the land. Then again, the N.C.A.A. isn’t a court of law. It’s more powerful.
In a frank statement posted to his Facebook page on Wednesday, Rubio hinted at a Beltway truth that many other wavering Protect IP and SOPA supporters have been hesitant to admit: More than one lawmaker signed on to the legislation without understanding its technical workings and potential problems, believing it to be an uncontroversial, bipartisan bill that would support American industries.
So, the starting point for me, when thinking about how economics works as a discipline, is to realize that the traditional model of submit, get refereed, publish, and then people will read your work broke down a long time ago. In fact, it had more or less fallen apart by the early 80s.Even then, nobody at a top school learned stuff by reading the journals; it was all working papers, with the journals serving as tombstones.
The “conservative estimate”— that is, the one that won’t get you laughed at by Very Reasonable People— is that 500,000 Indonesians were slaughtered, all under the considerable support of the United States. Some Indonesians I know find that estimate a laughable, inflammatory underestimation, but okay. Render unto Caesar. Half a million people, stuff underground or thrown into the sea. Lined up and shot in the back of the head, or hacked to death with machetes, after having been forced to dig their own graves and those of their families. You’ve heard it before. You’ve likely even heard that we supported it in every way conceivable, providing intelligence, arms, and funding to the new junta, including a literal hit list. If I know the average political mind today, many could read about these events with only eye rolls. They don’t deny the factual accuracy of the claims. They don’t even deny their horror. They just react as if talking about them is something gauche, uncool, boring. Few could deny their truth, at this point; the declassified CIA documentation is, as always, terribly frank. You’d be amazed at how many offer justifications to me. These people were commies, after all.
If you think that 1965 is ancient history, and that you are thus free from the burden of responsibility, I would remind you that the Clinton administration backed the Indonesian government in its atrocities against East Timor, where perhaps a third of the population was murdered; that Dennis Blair, former Obama intelligence official, had direct authority in our support of those war crimes…
I hardly need to tell you that our support of Indonesia and its military is ongoing. We are up to our elbows in the current regime, just like we were with the Suharto regime. (A Clinton apparatchik called him “our kind of guy.”) And in a democracy that makes it our responsibility. A foreign army that takes our money and our training and applies them to the harassment, oppression, and murder of its own people— that’s our responsibility. Yours and mine.
— It’s not about Ron Paul. It’s about you. — Freddie DeBoer
This article is a candidate for “blog of the year”. Also:
End the CIA.
Finally, I’ll included his update II to the post, which speaks for me as well as him, just to be clear:
Update II: I want to stress again, as this has been a source of consistent confusion in this debate, that I don’t and couldn’t support Ron Paul’s bid for the presidency, on any number of disqualifying issues.
This is a blatant attempt to invalidate the NIH’s requirement that taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available. The internet was initially developed to allow researchers to easily share information…and that’s precisely the function this bill is intended to cripple.
Who could possibly support such a bill? Not the scientists, that’s for sure; and definitely not the public, unless we keep them as ignorant as possible. The corporations who love this bill are the commercial publishers who profit mightily from scientists’ work. And first among these is Elsevier, the gouging publisher scientists love to hate.
