Quotulatiousness

July 6, 2025

The purpose of primary and secondary schools in the west

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

About a week ago, I linked to a parent’s review of “Alpha School” at Astral Codex Ten. Perhaps as an unintended counter-point, here’s another anonymous essay discussing existing public school systems in the West:

    Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill

    There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. – G.K. Chesterton

What Do Schools Do?

Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

Context

This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.

Thesis

Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent … except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school”. Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

Motivation for What?

So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?

There are plenty of depressing statistics out there about what people don’t learn in school, but they do learn things. You can look at longitudinal studies where on average students make academic progress. For a broader sample size, the NWEA assessment is given at thousands of schools across the country each year. You can see from the average scores they publish that the average student does improve at math and reading – especially through the end of middle school. We also had a natural experiment a few years ago. The pandemic closed schools across the country, shifting to online or part-time learning for anywhere from three months to a year and a half. The result is now well-known as “learning loss”. The nationally-sampled NAEP assessment is the most objective measure, though learning loss shows up across various assessments. There’s some variability between states, subjects, and ages. For one example, 8th grade math scores declined by about 0.2 standard deviations. This is a relatively small but significant decline. It’s a good example of the broader principle: students learn less in school than we would like, but students do learn things.

It’s useful to pick a few specific examples. Do you know the meaning of the word “relevant?” Do you know what photosynthesis is? Where do you think you learned those facts? I’m sure some readers learned them by being avid readers and curious humans, outside of the school curriculum. But many kids learn stuff like that in school. If you’re skeptical, stop by a middle school classroom when they’re learning photosynthesis, or when they’re working on identifying relevant evidence in their writing. You’ll see plenty of kids who already know both, but plenty more who know neither. A lot of learning is this kind of gradual, incidental knowledge that we often take for granted.

So students can read and do arithmetic and maybe they learn about photosynthesis, but isn’t that all learned in elementary school? A number of studies suggest that additional years of education lead to IQ gains of 1-5 IQ points per year of schooling. These studies often use a change in compulsory education laws or age discontinuities as quasi-experiments. In particular, changes in compulsory education laws are typically at upper middle school or high school levels. Those are the places where we might be most skeptical of the value of education. Sure, schools teach kids how to read, but once students know how to read do schools really add any value? Kids don’t remember how to factor quadratics, yet they gain IQ points from the time they spent in school not learning how to factor quadratics, at least on average.

That gain in IQ points is worth lingering on. This might seem hard to believe for people who are skeptical of the value of school. And to be clear, the fact that school raises IQ doesn’t mean that school is designed optimally. Maybe there’s a better way to design school that would raise IQ even more? But I think that, if we all imagine a world where we give up on education and the average person had a significantly lower IQ, is that a world you want to live in? We don’t have good experiments on IQ, but higher IQs are correlated with all sorts of things that we might want – lower probability of committing crime, higher career earnings, and better physical and mental health. It’s tough to pin down exactly what students learn in school that sticks, particularly for the higher grades. During those visits to 100 classrooms you would’ve seen a lot of classrooms where not much learning was happening. Yet despite all those bad optics, school still raises IQ. Before we tear down the fence, we should think carefully about the purpose this particular fence serves.

I don’t want to overstate the case here. We should be skeptical of school learning. Kids don’t learn as much as we might hope. They forget all sorts of stuff you would think they’d remember if school was operating well. But at a basic level, most students learn to read and do arithmetic, some learn much more than that, and on average school seems to add to IQ. Revisiting Chesterton’s fence, those are the benefits of school we need to understand before we tear anything apart.

June 29, 2025

A parent reviews “Alpha School”

Filed under: Education, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, an anonymous reviewer offers his views on a new “AI-powered” school that claims radically better results for children than traditional schooling methods:

Unbound Academy website screencap

In January 2025, the charter school application of “Unbound Academy“, a subsidiary of “2 Hour Learning, Inc“, lit up the education press: two hours of “AI-powered” academics, 2.6x learning velocity, and zero teachers. Sympathetic reporters repeated the slogans; union leaders reached for pitchforks; Reddit muttered “another rich-kid scam“. More sophisticated critics dismissed the pitch as “selective data from expensive private schools”.

But there is nowhere on the internet that provides a detailed, non-partisan, description of what the “2 hour learning” program actually is, let alone an objective third party analysis to back up its claims.

[…]

Unfortunately, the public evidence base on whether this is “real” is thin in both directions. Alpha’s own material is glossy and elliptical; mainstream coverage either repeats Alpha’s talking points, or attacks the premise that kids should even be allowed to learn faster than their peers. Until Raj Chetty installs himself in the hallway with a clipboard counting MAP percentiles it is hard to get real information on what exactly Alpha is doing, whether it is actually working beyond selection effects, and if there is anyway it could scale in a way that all the other education initiatives seemed to fail to do.

I first heard about Alpha in May 2024, and in the absence of randomized-controlled clarity, I did what any moderately obsessive parent with three elementary-aged kids and an itch for data would do: I moved the family across the country to Austin for a year and ran the experiment myself (unfortunately, despite trying my best we never managed to have identical twins, so I stopped short of running a proper control group. My wife was less disappointed than I was).

Since last autumn I’ve collected the sort of on-the-ground detail that doesn’t surface in press releases, or is available anywhere online: long chats with founders, curriculum leads, “guides” (not teachers), Brazilian Zoom coaches, sceptical parents, ecstatic parents, and the kids who live inside the Alpha dashboard – including my own. I hope this seven-part review can help share what the program actually is and that this review is more open minded than the critics, but is something that would never get past an Alpha public relations gatekeeper:

  1. Starting Point: My Assumptions: how my views on elite private schools, tutoring and acceleration shaped the experiment (and this essay). WHAT is the existing education environment.
  2. A Short History of Alpha: from billionaire-funded microschool to charter aspirations. HOW Alpha came to be.
  3. How Alpha Works Part 1: Under the Hood: What does “2-hour learning” actually look like – what is the product and the science behind the product? HOW is Alpha getting kids to learn faster (Spoiler: “Two hour learning AI learning” closer to three hours, with a 5:1 teacher:student ratio and zero “generative AI”).
  4. How Alpha Works Part 2: Incentives & Motivation: The secret sauce that doesn’t get mentioned in the PR copy, but I have discovered is at least as important as the fancy technology. The “other HOW” that no one is talking about.
  5. How Alpha is Measured: Effectiveness: The science says it should work, but how do you measure if it is working? How is the vaunted “2.6x” number calculated? WHAT data is Alpha using to make its claims and what does that data actually say?
  6. Why this time might be different: Most promising educational initiatives fail to have impact when expanded beyond their initial studies. Bryan Caplan might argue this is because most education education is just signaling anyway (“The Case Against Education“). He also argues that most parental interventions have no impact (“Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids“) – He claims that how kids turn out is a combination of genetics and non-shared environment (randomness; nothing to do with parenting choices). How can we reconcile Caplan’s buttoned-up data with the idea that the “parenting choice” to educate your kids differently (like with Alpha) might result in different outcomes than would be expected from genetics alone? WHY could Alpha work?
  7. What Comes Next? The Scaling Problem: The Alpha founders have a vision of completely re-inventing the way the world serves education. But even if Alpha works, it is up against a history of education programs that were never able to scale. It is also going to face resistance for being “weird”. WHAT comes next?

After twelve months I’m persuaded that Alpha is doing something remarkable — but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

  • It isn’t genuine two-hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.
  • It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced-repetition algorithm”
  • It definitely isn’t teacher-free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.
  • The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

… Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age-matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

June 26, 2025

QotD: Credentialism versus meritocracy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Returning briefly to the running theme of Vietnam, what all the “happy little hotdogs” had in common was: They were all Harvard men. Kennedy was a Harvard graduate. McGeorge Bundy had been a Dean at Harvard. McNamara was a Harvard b-school grad. John McNaughton was a Harvard professor. Maxwell Taylor was a West Pointer, but all the other happy little hotdogs said “he was the kind of general Harvard would produce”; they could think of no higher compliment.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas” — truth — but it ought to be “ludificationes pertinet“, which the internet informs me is how you say “delusions of competence” in Latin. I meant it when I said that the “Ministry of Talent”, as these jerkoffs unironically called themselves, actually had some serious brainpower and real accomplishments … but the Peter Principle is also true, and though they had some real brains and actual accomplishments, neither their brains nor their accomplishments at Harvard translated to anything out in the real world, any more than some Late Republic social climber’s “experience” as curule aedile translated to anything real in their world.

Just as the Roman Senate had no idea how to deal with a Julius Caesar, then, despite it all, so no American “leader” had any idea how to deal with a guy like Ho Chi Minh, even though he, like Caesar, had always been perfectly open and forthright about what he was doing and why. It never occurred to “the best and brightest” to even ask the question “What does Ho Chi Minh want?”, because after all, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t a Harvard man.

And all this was 60 years ago. These days, the AINO cursus honorum is so widespread that every kid who manages to fill out a college app has a resume that would give McGeorge Bundy an erection lasting more than four hours. You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Flyover State — which is respectable but rinky-dink; the kind of outfit where you see their team losing a late December bowl game and you think “Gosh, I guess that state has a third college in it” — had several hundred student organizations …

… all of which seem to exist for no other reason than to have “officers”, to which these little social climbers can be “elected”, the better to pad their law, med, and grad school apps. By the end of my career, probably 3/4 of the students who ever sent me an email had an auto-signature on it, and that auto-signature was longer than my entire CV. President of this, Vice-Treasurer of that, Assistant Grand Poobah (junior grade) of the other thing. Grandpa Simpson was a piker compared to these kids:

    I’m an Elk, a Mason, a Communist. I’m the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance for some reason. Ah, here it is. The Stonecutters!

Instead of giving potential movers and shakers some practical experience, our modern cursus honorum casts the widest possible net for sociopathy. McGeorge Bundy is your absolute best case scenario. He wasn’t actively evil; he was just a goofy egghead who thought he was way smarter and more accomplished than he actually was, because he’d never been in a position to find out otherwise. (An anecdote that tells you everything you need to know, courtesy of Wikipedia: “When applying to Yale, Bundy wrote on the entrance exam ‘This question is silly. If I were giving the test, this is the question I would ask, and this is my answer.’ Despite this, he was still admitted to Yale as he was awarded a perfect score on his entrance exam”).

Think about that the next time you go to the doctor. Even if your MD — or, much more likely these days, PA — isn’t a prize graduate of Bollywood Upstairs Medical College, xzhey most likely spent xzheyr college years as an Elk, a Mason, a Communist …

Your worst case scenario is, of course, another Caesar. A fake and gay one, it goes without saying — this being Clown World — but a fake and gay Caesar can still do tremendous damage, because they’re the worst of both worlds: Bundy-level goofs, and angry ethnic sociopaths with huge chips on their shoulders. These are the kids who have been “team leads” doing “original research” since about age 12. Not only have they never failed, they’ve never been exposed to the merest hint of the possibility of failure. All their “success” is theirs by right. They have Caesar’s vaulting ambition, his utter disregard for tradition, his absolute cutthroat ruthlessness … and none of his experience, to say nothing of his competence.

Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.

June 19, 2025

QotD: Peer review and the replication crisis

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

But what about the error correction function of peer review? Surely it’s important to ensure that the literature doesn’t fill up with bullshit? Shouldn’t we want our journals to publish only the most reliable, correct information – data analysis you can set your clock by, conclusions as solid as the Earth under your feet, uncertainties quantified to within the nearest fraction of a covariant Markov Chain Monte Carlo-delineated sigma contour?

Well, about that.

The replication crisis has been festering throughout the academic community for the better part of a decade, now. It turns out that a huge part of the scientific literature simply can’t be reproduced. In many cases the works in question are high-impact papers, the sort of work that careers are based on, that lead to million-dollar grants being handed out to laboratories across the world. Indeed, it seems that the most-cited works are also the least likely to be reproduced (there’s a running joke that if something was published in Nature or Science, you know it’s probably wrong). Awkward.

The scientific community has completely failed to draw the obvious conclusion from the replication crisis, which is that peer review doesn’t work at all. Indeed, it may well play a causal role in the replication crisis.

The replication crisis, I should emphasize, is probably not mostly due to deliberate fraud, although there’s certainly some of that. There was a recent scandal involving the connection of amyloid plaques to Alzheimer’s disease which seems to have been entirely fraudulent, and which led to many millions – perhaps billions – of dollars in biomedical research programs being pissed away, to say nothing of the uncountable number of wasted man-hours. There have been many other such scandals, in almost every field you can name, and God alone knows how many are still buried like undiscovered time bombs in the foundations of various sub-fields. Most scientists, however, are not deliberately, consciously deceptive. They try to be honest. But the different models, assumptions, and methods they adopt can lead to wildly divergent results, even when analyzing the same data and testing the same hypothesis. Beyond that, they can also be sloppy. And the sloppiness, compounded across interlinked citation chains in the knowledge network, builds up.

Scientists know quite well that just because something has received the imprimatur of publication in a peer-reviewed journal with a high impact factor doesn’t mean that it’s correct. But while they know this intellectually, it’s very difficult to avoid the operating assumption that if something has passed peer review it’s probably mostly okay, and they’re not inclined to spend valuable time checking everything themselves. After all, they need to publish their own papers – in order to finish their PhD, get that faculty position, or get that next grant – and papers that are just trying to reproduce the results of other papers, that aren’t doing something novel, aren’t very interesting on their own, hence unlikely to be published. So instead of checking carefully yourself, you assume a work is probably reliable, and you use it as an element of your own work, maybe in a small way – taking a number from a table to populate an empty field in your dataset – or maybe in an important way, as a key supporting measurement or fundamental theoretical interpretative framework.

But some of those papers, despite having been peer reviewed, will be wrong, in small ways and large, and those erroneous results will propagate through your own results, possibly leading to your own paper being irretrievably flawed. But then your paper passes peer review, and gets used as the basis for subsequent work. Over time the entire scientific literature comes to resemble a house of cards.

Peer review gives scientists – and the lay public – a false sense of security regarding the soundness of scientific results. It also imposes an additional, and quite unnecessary, barrier to publication. It frequently takes months for a paper to work its way through the review process. A year or more is not unheard of, particularly if a paper is rejected, and the authors must start the whole process anew at a different journal, submitting their work as a grindstone for whatever rusty old axe the new referee is looking to sharpen. Far from ensuring errors are corrected, peer review slows down the error correction process. A bad paper can persist in the literature – being cited by other scientists – for some time, for years, before the refutation finally makes it to print … at which point some (not all) will consider the original paper debunked, and stop citing it (others, not being aware of the debunking, will continue to cite it). But what if the refutation is itself tendentious? The original authors may wish to reply, but their refutation of the refutation must now go through the peer review process as well, and on and on it interminably drags …

As to what is happening behind the scenes, no one – not the public, not other scientists – has any idea. The correspondence between referees and authors is rarely published along with the paper. Whether the review was meticulous or sloppy, whether the referee’s critiques warranted or absurd, is entirely opaque.

In essence, the peer review process slows down the publication duty cycle, thereby slowing down scientific debate, while taking much of that debate behind closed doors, where its quality cannot be evaluated by anyone but the participants.

John Carter, “DIEing Academic Research Budgets”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2025-03-17.

June 14, 2025

Mere disagreement on a political point does not rise to the level of “causing harm” … even in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reports on a Canadian school board’s attempt to paint a parent’s (valid) objection to the forced speech of modern-day “land acknowledgements” as causing “harm” and not acceptable:

Late last month, a Canadian school board informed Catherine Kronas, a parent serving on her child’s local school council in Ontario, that her role was being “paused” for allegedly causing “harm” and violating board policy.

Her offense? “Respectfully” requesting during an April 9 council meeting that her objection to the land acknowledgment be recorded in the meeting minutes. Kronas argued that the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board lacks an official mandate to require land acknowledgments at school council meetings and that such statements “undermine the democratic process”, amount to “compelled speech”, and are “divisive” and “inappropriate”.

Kronas, who has served on the board for the past year and like all board members is a volunteer, has since been barred from attending upcoming meetings, including virtual ones, while the board reviews the allegations.

“They’ve ostracized me and painted me as someone who harms others,” Kronos told me, pointing to the letter she received in May.

Parents who once expressed similar concerns about land acknowledgments privately have all “slunk away” and “gone silent”, she said. She is convinced that if even one other parent had publicly backed her objection, she wouldn’t have been suspended.

“I have no support,” Kronas says.

But Kronas is far from alone in her views. A new poll shows that a majority of Canadians — 52 percent — reject the idea that they live on “stolen” indigenous land. In Kronas’s own region, Hamilton-Niagara, a suburb just outside Toronto, 50 percent said “no” to the concept.

There’s also a political shift underway that reflects this: New legislation from Ontario premier Doug Ford that is widely viewed as effectively anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) aims to roll back some of the ideological activism that has spread through school boards. The bill will, among other things, ban the renaming of schools based on the belief that historical figures are linked to “systems of oppression” and mandate the return of school resource officers, a form of law enforcement, in jurisdictions where police services provide them. In recent years, many Ontario school boards have removed police from schools on the grounds that their presence causes harm to “racialized” groups — a peculiarly Canadian euphemism for non-white people that casts them as perpetual victims in need of saving — and makes at least this brown Canadian feel like something is inherently wrong with us.

QotD: University students or NPCs?

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I first started teaching, for instance, I had to constantly remind myself that my charges were just teenagers. At most they were 21, 22 tops, which is basically the same thing. So much of the crap they pulled, then, was just typical teenager stuff. All they really needed to straighten themselves out was two good head knocks and a swift kick in the ass, which life would soon provide. I did exactly the same sort of dumb stuff back in my own undergrad days – maybe not as bad, but it was a difference of degree, not kind. They’d be ok in a few years.

A few semesters on, and that no longer applied. Sure, sure, they were still teenagers, and still pulled typical teenager capers … but a new set of behaviors crept in. I can’t describe them exactly, in detail, but the overall impression was: here’s someone doing a pretty good impersonation of a teenager. Most every kid goes through the faux-sophisticate stage, usually somewhere around age 12, and this kinda looked like that — young kids pretending to be a lot older — but it also looked a lot like the opposite end of the spectrum. Not quite “hello, fellow teens!” — not yet — but there was something like that going on, too. It was weird, but I figured it was mostly in my head — I’ve always been a grouchy old man, but now I was actually chronologically old enough to let my freak flag fly, so I assumed that’s what I was doing. They’re not changing, I am …

Fast forward a few more semesters, and nope, it’s definitely them. The kids at the tail end of my career still looked like bargain basement Rich Littles, doing impersonations of teenagers, but their act was terrible. Remember a few years back, when Facebook or Twitter or whoever tried to make an AI chat bot, and it immediately turned super racist? Not that these kids were racists — they were the furthest thing from that — but they all seemed to have a small stock of crowdsourced responses. And that’s ALL they had, so no matter what the situation, they’d shoehorn it in to one of their canned affects, because that’s all they had.

By the very end, interacting with them was like playing one of those old text-adventure games from the very dawn of the personal computer, like Zork. They’d respond to commands, but only the right commands, in the exact word order. No deviations allowed, and of course their responses were equally programmed.

Severian, “Terminators”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-04.

June 11, 2025

The coming “Dissolution of the Universities”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter provides a useful summary of the situation in England at the time of the Reformation which brought King Henry VIII to seize the wealth and property of the monasteries and other Christian establishments and why he was probably right to do so. Then he shows just how the modern western universities now find themselves in a remarkably similar position today:

The well-preserved ruins of Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132 until dissolved by order of King Henry VIII in 1539. It is now owned by the National Trust as part of the Studley Royal Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo by Admiralgary via Wikimedia Commons.

Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.

The Class of 2026

The rot in academia is already proverbial. Scholarly careerism, declining curricular standards, the replication crisis, a demented ideological monoculture, administrative bloat … a steady accumulation of chronic cultural entropy has built up inside the organizational tissue of the academy, rendering universities less effective, less trustworthy, less affordable, and less useful than ever before in history. We see a parallel here with the moral laxity of 16th century monastic life, where religious vows were more theoretical than daily realities for many monks. Does anyone truly think that Harvard professors take Veritas at all seriously?

At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion. Everyone knows that academia is in a bubble, and as with any bubble, correction is inevitable, and the longer correction is postponed by the thicket of interlocking entrenched interests that have dug themselves into the system, the uglier that correction was always going to be.

Just as the printing press rendered the monastic scriptoria entirely redundant, the Internet has placed universities under increasing threat of obsolescence. Libraries and academic publishing have already been rendered useless by preprint servers. It is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary to attend a university to learn things: the Internet has every tool an autodidact could desire, and insofar as it doesn’t – for instance, university presses and private journals charging outrageous fees for their books and papers – this is due to the academy jealously guarding its treasures with intellectual property law rather than any limitation of the technology. One can easily make the argument that academia has become an obstacle, rather than an organ, of information dissemination.

Still, universities have so far managed to hold on to their relevance due to their lock on credentialization: no one really cares how many How-To videos you watched at YouTube U, because – in theory – a university degree means that there was some level of human verification that you actually mastered the material you studied.

Large Language Models, however, are delivering the killing blow. Just as the printing press collapsed the cost of reproducing text, AI has collapsed the cost of producing texts. This is actually worse news for universities than Gutenberg was the monasteries: movable type made scriptoria unnecessary, but LLMs haven’t only made universities obsolete, they’ve made it impossible for universities to fulfil their function.

Universities rely on undergraduate tuition fees for a major part of their income. Large research schools derive a significant fraction from research grants, and the more prestigious institutions often receive substantial private donations, but for the majority of schools it is the fee-paying undergraduate that pays the bills. This is already a problem, because enrolment is already declining, partly for demographic reasons (the birth rate is low), and partly because academia has been increasingly coded as women’s work, leading to young men staying away.

In theory, undergraduate students are paying for an “education”. They are gaining essential professional skills that will make them employable in well-remunerated white collar professions, or they are broadening their minds with a liberal arts education that provides them with the soft skills – critical thinking, the ability to compose and parse complex texts, a depth of historical and philosophical understanding of intricate social and political issues – that prepare them for careers in elite socioeconomic strata.

Everyone, however, has long since understood that this narrative of “education” is a barely-plausible polite fiction, like those little scraps of fabric exotic dancers wear on their nipples so everyone can pretend they aren’t showing their boobs. Students know it’s a lie, professors know it’s a lie, administrators know it’s a lie, and employers certainly know it’s a lie. What students are actually paying for is not an education, but a credential: they could not possibly care less about the “education” they’re receiving, so long as they receive a piece of paper at the end of their four years which they can take to an employer as evidence that they are not cognitively handicapped, and are therefore in possession of the minimal level of self-discipline and intelligence required to handle routine tasks at the entry-level end of the org chart. Thus the venerable proverb among students that “C’s and D’s get degrees”. It doesn’t matter if you did well: employers don’t generally care about your GPA. All that matters is that you do the minimal possible level of work to squeak through. As a general rule, your time as a student is better spent grinding away in the library as little as possible while enjoying yourself to the maximum extent that you can in order to develop social networks you can draw upon later.

Until recently, graduate school ensured that there was still some vestigial motivation for genuine intellectual engagement. Corporate America might not care about your transcript, but if you wanted an advanced degree, graduate schools most certainly did. Those students with greater academic ambitions than a Bachelor’s degree could therefore generally be relied on to actually apply themselves, thereby making the professoriate’s efforts delivering lectures, preparing homework assignments, and grading exams somewhat less of a pantomime. DEI, however, was already eating its way through even this. As graduate school admission became more about protected identities and less about intellectual mastery, and as graduate programs were themselves rendered easier in order to improve retention of underqualified diversity admits, it started to become less important to study hard even if one wanted to enter grad school.

To the point. In 2022, ChatGPT became available. Almost overnight undergraduate students began using it to write their essays for them. Its abuse has now become essentially ubiquitous, and not only for essays: ChatGPT can write code or solve mathematical problems just as easily as it can generate reams of plausible-sounding text. It might not yet do these things well, but it doesn’t have to: remember, C’s and D’s get degrees.

June 1, 2025

Ted Gioia on stopping AI cheating in academia

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve never been to Oxford, either as a student or as a tourist, but I believe Ted Gioia‘s description of his experiences there and how they can be used to disrupt the steady take-over of modern education by artificial intelligence cheats:

How would the Oxford system kill AI?

Once again, where do I begin?

There were so many oddities in Oxford education. Medical students complained to me that they were forced to draw every organ in the human body. I came here to be a doctor, not a bloody artist.

When they griped to their teachers, they were given the usual response: This is how we’ve always done things.

I knew a woman who wanted to study modern drama, but she was forced to decipher handwriting from 13th century manuscripts as preparatory training.

This is how we’ve always done things.

Americans who studied modern history were dismayed to learn that the modern world at Oxford begins in the year 284 A.D. But I guess that makes sense when you consider that Oxford was founded two centuries before the rise of the Aztec Empire.

My experience was less extreme. But every aspect of it was impervious to automation and digitization — let alone AI (which didn’t exist back then).

If implemented today, the Oxford system would totally elminate AI cheating — in these five ways:

(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.

All my high school term papers were typewritten — that was a requirement. And when I attended Stanford, I brought a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with me from home. I used it constantly. Even in those pre-computer days, we relied on machines at every stage of an American education.

When I returned from Oxford to attend Stanford Business School, computers were beginning to intrude on education. I was even forced (unwillingly) to learn computer programming as a requirement for entering the MBA program.

But during my time at Oxford, I never owned a typewriter. I never touched a typewriter. I never even saw a typewriter. Every paper, every exam answer, every text whatsoever was handwritten—and for exams, they were handwritten under the supervision of proctors.

When I got my exam results from the college, the grades were handwritten in ancient Greek characters. (I’m not making this up.)

Even if ChatGPT had existed back then, you couldn’t have relied on it in these settings.

(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.

The Oxford education is based on the tutorial system. It’s a conversation in the don’s office. This was often one-on-one. Sometimes two students would share a tutorial with a single tutor. But I never had a tutorial with more than three people in the room.

I was expected to show up with a handwritten essay. But I wouldn’t hand it in for grading — I read it aloud in front of the scholar. He would constantly interrupt me with questions, and I was expected to have smart answers.

When I finished reading my paper, he would have more follow-up questions. The whole process resembled a police interrogation from a BBC crime show.

There’s no way to cheat in this setting. You either back up what you’re saying on the spot — or you look like a fool. Hey, that’s just like real life.

(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.

The Oxford system was brutal. Your future depended on your performance at grueling multi-day examinations. Everything was handwritten or oral, all done in a totally contained and supervised environment.

Cheating was impossible. And behind-the-scenes influence peddling was prevented — my exams were judged anonymously by professors who weren’t my tutors. They didn’t know anything about me, except what was written in the exam booklets.

I did well and thus got exempted from the dreaded viva voce — the intense oral exam that (for many students) serves as follow-up to the written exams.

That was a relief, because the viva voce is even less susceptible to bluffing or games-playing than tutorials. You are now defending yourself in front of a panel of esteemed scholars, and they love tightening the screws on poorly prepared students.

(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.

I was shocked at how many smart Oxford students left without earning a degree. This was a huge change from my experience in the US — where faculty and administration do a lot of hand-holding and forgiving in order to boost graduation rates.

There were no participation trophies at Oxford. You sank or swam — and it was easy to sink.

That’s why many well-known people — I won’t name names, but some are world famous — can tell you that they studied at Oxford, but they can’t claim that they got a degree at Oxford. Even elite Rhodes Scholars fail the exams, or fear them so much that they leave without taking them.

I feel sorry for my friends who didn’t fare well in this system. But in a world of rampant AI cheating, this kind of bullet-proof credentialing will return by necessity — or the credentials will get devalued.

(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED

Exams weren’t the only way to build a reputation at Oxford. I also saw people rise in stature because of their conversational or debating or politicking or interpersonal skills.

I’ve never been anywhere in my life where so much depended on your ability at informal speaking. You could actually gain renown by your witty and intelligent dinner conversation. Even better, if you had solid public speaking skills you could flourish at the Oxford Union — and maybe end up as Prime Minister some day.

All of this was done face-to-face. Even if a time traveler had given you a smartphone with a chatbot, you would never have been able to use it. You had to think on your feet, and deliver the goods with lots of people watching.

Maybe that’s not for everybody. But the people who survived and flourished in this environment were impressive individuals who, even at a young age, were already battle tested.

May 31, 2025

QotD: Explaining the science to the non-scientific layperson

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a famous video in which Richard Feynman is asked by a BBC journalist if he can explain magnetism to him, and Feynman pauses for a moment and says “no”. The journalist is totally incredulous, and demands to know what Feynman means by that, and the great scientist tells him that he knows so little of the basics, and magnetism is so deep and so tricky,1 that it would be impossible to explain much of anything without either misleading him or giving him a false understanding.

I’ve always thought that nearly all pop science books fall into one version or another of this trap. Either they abandon all attempts at explaining the difficult concept in simple terms, or they simplify and elide so much as to become actively misleading.2 I call the latter horn of the dilemma “string theory is like a taco”-syndrome, and it’s by far the more common failure case. This is because undersimplification makes your audience feel dumb, while oversimplification makes them feel smart, so you sell a lot more books by oversimplifying. Unfortunately the effects on the audience of oversimplification are far more dangerous and insidious. After reading something impenetrable, you at least still know that you don’t really understand it, so there’s still a chance for you to go on and learn it some other way. Reading an oversimplified explanation, however, can fool you into thinking that you now grasp the concept, when in reality all you’ve grasped is a lossy analogy that will lead you astray.

All of which is to say I think it’s pretty impressive how well [author David] Reich does at diving into some of the real statistical meat of his techniques while still making them comprehensible to a smart layman. He has the gift that the greatest scientific expositors possess of being able to communicate in simple terms what it is that makes a problem hard, and then also giving you the broad strokes of an elegant solution to that hard problem. He doesn’t pretend that he hasn’t left anything out, instead he points out exactly where he’s glossed over details, so that you can go back and look them up if you want. This doesn’t sound all that impressive, but it’s actually really freaking hard to pull off, especially in a field that’s new and hence hasn’t been reformulated and recondensed a hundred times until it’s turned into a crystalline version of itself.

Okay, what was your favorite interesting genetic fact that this book taught you about a contemporary population? Mine was definitely that the various Indian jatis are as genetically distinct from one another as the Ashkenazi Jews are from everybody else. Not one group, but hundreds and hundreds of groups, all living in close proximity to each other, have gone millennia with incredibly minimal genetic mixing. How is that possible? It makes me take some of the assertions made by classical Indian texts a little bit more seriously.

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

    1. It always bothered me when people ragged on Insane Clown Posse for expressing humility and awe at magnets. In fact their attitude is exactly the appropriate one. Back when ICP were in the news more often, I made a minor hobby of demanding that anybody who made fun of them explain magnets scientifically to me on the spot. Nobody ever succeeded.

    2. And sometimes, remarkably, a pop science book manages to make both mistakes at the same time. I’m reminded of Edward Frenkel’s horrible book Love & Math, which is full of passages like: “Think of the Hitchin fibration as a box of donuts, except that there are donuts attached not only to a grid of points in the base of the carton box, but to all points in the base. So we have infinitely many donuts — Homer Simpson would sure love that! It turns out that the mirror dual Hitchin moduli space, the one associated to the Langlands dual group, is also a donut topic/fibration over the same base. Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do?”

May 29, 2025

“Kollidge Inglish Majors kan so reed gud!”

Filed under: Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Kitten provides a sample of the many, many, many, many reactions to an earlier viral piece called College English majors can’t read:

I think it’s safe to say that “lack of funding” isn’t the problem

Well, that was a wild ride. As of the time of this writing, College English majors can’t read has 120,000 views and 535 comments. Comments and restacks are still rolling in but not at the furious pace they were in the few days after publication. It went viral on twitter, with my tweet announcing the article getting 768 retweets and 1.5M views, with thousands of comments spread across various quote tweets. It was shared to Reddit in several different threads, many of which themselves spawned hundreds of comments. It went viral on Hacker News. It was shared on Vox Day. It was published on Revolver News. Hundreds of people linked it in their Instagram and Facebook posts. A bunch of people shared it on Slack or Microsoft Teams. And most endearing of all, thousands of people forwarded the newsletter around by email like an AOL chain letter from your grandma (Fwd:Fwd:Re:Fwd: You won’t BELIEVE what they are teaching in college now!!!!)

[…]

The people have spoken, and they speak in a single clear voice: they want to hear about how dumb college kids are. They want to bathe in delicious schadenfreude. They want all the embarrassing and gory details about how Suzie in Kansas couldn’t figure out what a megalosaurus is, how heavily she breathed during the 16 seconds she tapped Google searches into her phone before giving up. And their bloodlust will be slaked one way or another.

[…]

The title is inaccurate, college kids can read fine

I got this comment a bunch of different times, and I think that one particular guy made the same comment at least four different times that I saw, in different places. Basically, this nitpicking goes: these kids can read just fine, they just have trouble understanding and interpreting hard texts, and this means the title is sensational and not literally true. This is a fair point, and I deeply treasure our nation’s strategic reserve of turbospergs ready to call out technical inaccuracies wherever they rear their ugly heads. I should note for the turbospergs reading this that “rearing their ugly heads” is figurative language, article titles do not have bodies and do not move, you have me dead to rights on that one.

But most readers were quick to chide the spergs that this is an article about different levels of functional literacy, and that “read” can have different connotations depending on the context. Obviously we’re talking about more than just sounding out the words on the page in this case. And also, College English majors can’t read is just a much better title than the long but more technically accurate one you would have me write instead.

The study is bad and you can’t believe its results

A lot of people made this comment in one form or another, for a variety of reasons. If you want to read a detailed takedown, I suggest this long post by Holly MathNerd. She has a lot of different objections about the methodology and how the results generalize to the population of college kids. It’s worth reading and taking seriously if you’re the scientific minded type, she knows what she’s talking about.

One very large objection that should give you pause: there are multiple layers of potential selection bias taking place. We’re looking at just a couple schools in Kansas at a single point in time, not a nationally representative sample of students. These aren’t exactly top-tier schools, of course they don’t have the best kids! And worse, they recruited study participants the way they always recruit undergrads for this kind of study, by asking for volunteers in class or even by hand-selecting students and encouraging them to join up. This means the researchers weren’t getting a random sample of their students, they were getting the kids who were dumb enough to waste their time on a silly research task. Or even worse: they picked problematic kids on purpose to prove a point.

This is a fair criticism, and I don’t want to minimize it, but I don’t think it ultimately matters much. The reason is that we know how these kids tested on the ACT Reading subtest and how that compares to the national standard.

    The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4

The national average for college students on the ACT Reading subtest is 21.2, so these kids are a bit above average nationally. (20 to 23 is considered a competitive score for admission to most schools, with 24 to 28 being the standard for more selective schools). This is reasonably strong evidence that they are not significantly dumber than typical college students nationwide. Maybe not representative, sure, but certainly not dumber than average.

And despite being competitive for admission according to Educational Testing Service, 22.4 is not a good score!

    According to Educational Testing Service, [students with a score of 22.4] read on a “low-intermediate level”, able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives”, “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages”

So maybe these results don’t actually generalize to students nationwide, maybe this wasn’t a fair sample. But if you’re skeptical on the question of generalization, another way to view this study is as an ethnography rather than a quantitative result — the researchers discovered and documented a group of college English majors with truly terrible reading comprehension. Whether or not this result generalizes to college kids everywhere, these particular kids exist. And they can’t read. Personally I think the ethnographic details are what make this study so evocative, and I wish more research took this form. My hunch is nobody would be talking about this at all without these details — distilled down to a raw quantitative result (half of kids score below median on test, news at 11), nobody would care.

May 27, 2025

Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.

May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.

Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.

Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.

All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.

The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.

Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.

The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.

As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:

    “According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”

Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.

There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.

May 13, 2025

For boys, sometimes a touch of competition is all that’s required

Filed under: Books, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore was concerned when a report from his son’s school indicated that his son was lagging behind in reading compared to his classmates:

“Old Victorian Childrens’ Books” by pettifoggist is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

So the fact that my own son — who is quite bright and scores extremely high in math — was struggling hit me a little, but it was not a surprise. Like many children, he had fallen behind in reading during the pandemic, and our efforts to get him caught up at home were pretty ineffective. Part of the problem was that as parents we did not do a good enough job of finding the right books to naturally kindle his interest and curiosity, but another issue was that at some point he began to feel self-conscious about this reading, which created an aversion to books.

[…]

A few months later, I had just finished reading a story to my 6-year-old son, who shares a bedroom with his older brother. I went to flick the light off when my older son said something I’d never heard before.

“Can I read for just ten more minutes,” he pleaded, showing me his book on pro football players.

I quickly gave my approval, then went downstairs to tell my wife. She was not as surprised as I was.

“They’re doing a reading competition at school. It’s boys against girls,” she said. “Every minute he reads is now added to their score. So now he wants to read — because it’s a competition.”

My wife did not say this disapprovingly, but she said it in a way that said of course he wants to read now. (My son is competitive.)

Over the next several weeks I watched as my son made a point of reading every night. Oftentimes he’d ask — just like on that first night — if he could read just 10 more minutes. Many nights he’d fall asleep with a book on his chest.

I have to admit that at first I found this strategy a tad cynical, but then I got the results. Over the span of seven weeks, my son leapt nearly two reading levels. He’s reading comfortably at the third-grade level and we’re now focusing more on reading comprehension than reciting sentences. He’s asking for books on World War I, World War II, and Vietnam for Christmas.

“His fluency has improved so much! I am so proud of him,” his teacher later told me.

Competition as a Virtue

I don’t doubt that some will look on this strategy with disdain.

We’re taught today that competition is crass, even harmful. George Soros, in a highly read piece from the 1990s published in The Atlantic, could have been speaking for many when he wrote that competition can “cause intolerable inequities and instability”. For many, competition is a dirty word, a sinister force to be suppressed and controlled.

This is nonsense, of course. Competition isn’t just innate to humans; it brings out the best in us.

It’s the force that drove Roger Bannister to break the four-minute mile. It’s given us the achievements of Michael Phelps and Michael Jordan. Socially, competition is what prompted the Brooklyn Dodgers to do the unthinkable and sign Jackie Robinson, breaking the color barrier and forever changing sports and America.

May 12, 2025

Is modern fiction in any way intended to be read by a male audience?

Filed under: Books, Business, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I belong to several genre-specific groups on various social media platforms, most of which appear to be disproportionally female in membership, and I read very little new fiction of any sort these days, partly for diminished interest and largely from diminished disposable income. I’ve often seen the assertion that men no longer read much fiction, but is it actually true?

You can see here some of the challenges involved in measuring reading habits. Are we talking reading books or purchasing books? Does buying correlate to reading or are women better gift givers? What about those hugely popular 20-part, 60-page-per-instalment romance series that might ratchet up purchases by women — anything like that in the fiction market for men? Should we base assumptions about readership of literary fiction on data about readership of general fiction, as many of the articles I’ve read do?

All we can safely say is that it does seem men read somewhat less fiction than women; they also read fewer books of any kind. As a person in the book industry, I wish that weren’t so, but it may not be a cultural calamity.

The most interesting article I came across in last night’s binge was published in 2009 by the University of Saskatchewan’s Virginia Wilson in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. She undertook a small study of boys aged four through twelve, interviewing them about their reading habits. Her theoretical perspective was that if anyone was ever going to understand the reading habits of boys, they needed to recognize that the experts were the boys themselves. She quizzed forty-three of them about their book collections, what they liked and didn’t like, and their motives for reading.

Each of the boys had a personal collection of books. These ranged from eight to 398 volumes, with a median of 98. All but one of the boys had fiction in his collection. The most prominent genres were fantasy, science fiction, sports stories, and humour. The boys had no time for love stories, books about groups of girls, and such classic children’s fiction as The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Asked about their favourite books, most of the boys pointed to a non-fiction title: joke books, magic books, sports books, survival guides, science books, references, atlases, dinosaur books.

The boys also read a good deal of non-book material: comics, manga, magazines, sticker books, puzzle books, and catalogues. A number mentioned reading video game manuals, both to learn more about the games, but also to heighten their enjoyment of the narratives within the games.

The manuals were part of a bent toward pragmatic reading, something they found useful as much as pleasurable. The boys often read to support another hobby — Pokémon, for instance. They also appreciated non-linear texts and plenty of illustrations.

Interestingly, many of the boys tended to discount their own reading. They often described the informational stuff they liked—those video game manuals or computer guides or research materials for science projects—as “not really being reading”. Serious reading, in their minds, involved novels and conventional non-fiction books.

Wilson’s conclusion was that at least part of the “boys and reading problem” might come down to what counts as reading. Informational nonfiction, comic books, computer magazines, graphic novels, and role-playing game manuals were “not necessarily privileged by libraries, schools, or even by the boys themselves”.

Of course, as Wilson notes, one shouldn’t generalize too much from a small qualitative study involving forty-three boys. There’s nothing definitive to be learned here about Trump or contemporary masculinity (although I’ve read several lengthy screeds based on less).

Wilson’s paper simply reminds us that reading is complicated, and most of the available research on reading habits isn’t. Survey respondents are typically asked if they read books for leisure, or if they’ve read a book in the last year. There are many reasons to read other than for leisure. There are many things to read other than books. And not all books are equal.

I haven’t seen a study that tracks if men spend more minutes per day reading sentences than women. Or one that drills down to find who reads the most newspapers, magazines, websites, newsletters, contracts, annual reports, research papers, instruction manuals, catalogues, and cereal boxes. Each of those formats is as potentially edifying (if not as much fun) as Morning Glory Milking Farm: A Monster Bait Romance, with its 47,570 enthusiastic ratings on Goodreads.

I read so many concerns for and condemnations of contemporary males last night that it came as a surprise to learn that our most reliable measure of reading competence, the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, finds no real difference in literacy of men and women aged 16 to 64 in the US or Canada. We should all revisit that baseline before assigning responsibility for the state of civilization to whoever is or isn’t reading or buying contemporary fiction. (PIAAC did find that while Canadian literacy scores have been stable, US scores have slipped 5 percent since Trump was first elected. Make of that what you will.)

Does the men-and-fiction problem exist? I think yes, and my sense is that it’s one of both supply (what’s getting published) and demand (what men will read). I thought I’d have more than that to say. This is my kind of issue — the whole point of SHuSH is ill-considered opinion drawn from shaky evidence on a weekly timetable — but I can’t compete with what I’m reading, so I’m backing off for now.

I certainly find myself reading almost nothing that has been published recently with a few exceptions for well-researched and well-written histories and military histories. My preferred genre reading got taken over by the “jam the narrative into every story” crowd a few decades back, so I stopped buying SF and fantasy titles except those from authors I’d already read.

May 6, 2025

Online tools for the curious autodidact

Filed under: Books, Education, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Like many people, I was generally not a good student and in primary and middle school, I was notorious for reading the “wrong” parts of books because they were closer to my interests than the assigned readings, but I generally was able to scrape together enough marks to pass the tests on the stuff I skimmed or ignored. This is hardly the way to make an academic career — not that I would ever have done so, unless they just let me study what I wanted to learn about. A useful Substack for my fellow autodidacts [Wiki] is a side project of military historian Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson called Extra Muros, and his latest post provides some information on tools for online research that you may find helpful:

Gustav Wenzel – “A Carpenter’s Workshop” (1881)

The “advanced search” page of the Internet Archive allows you to …

  • download copies, in various electronic formats, of

    • – books and magazines published before 1929

    – works (such as those created by the US Federal Government) that have always belonged to the public domain

    – relatively recent works uploaded by people in countries (such as India) with less restrictive copyright laws

  • examine books that you might want to acquire for enjoyment the old-fashioned way
  • find higher-quality copies of items that you found on Google Books
  • obtain an overview of the works (to include foreign language translations)

    • – of a particular author

    – on a particular subject

The “advanced search” page on the website of the Hathi Trust allows you to do many of the things you might otherwise do on the Internet Archive. Alas (and, indeed, alack), the interface restricts the direct download of complete volumes to “participating institutions”. As a result, mere mortals must either seek the PDF in question on Google Books (to which Hathi provides a direct link) or use a bit of freeware called Hathi Download Helper.

The Hathi Trust search engine also makes it easy for you to search within books for specific words and phrases, as well as the mention of particular places and personalities. Doing the former turns the Hathi Trust database into a kind of dictionary, a way of discovering ways that people in various climes and times have used the expression. Doing the latter converts that cornucopia into an encyclopedia.

The NGram Viewer performs a similar service. However, as it sits atop a smaller collection and suffers from a number of irritating defects, it has proved less useful to me than the website of the Hathi Trust.

May 1, 2025

The economics of migration

Filed under: Economics, Education, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby wonders if an entire discipline can commit suicide:

Can an academic discipline seriously decline? Yes. Disciplines which were once mainstays of universities have either vanished or shrunk to pale shadows of their former selves.

What about a social science? One can envisage a social science disappearing. The most obvious way is it gets utterly discredited and replaced. A less obvious way is its institutional bases could disappear. A final way is its entire social basis disappears.

The West is currently marked by two entirely different discourses on migration that seem unable to interact. One is migration-as-economic-boon. This is the outlook of mainstream Economics. Migrants add to the economic activity of societies and potentially retard the effect of an ageing population by replacing absent local children with foreign migrants. This discourse invokes the authority of Economic Theory and its statistical methods.

This outlook typically treats criticism of migration as economically illiterate, socially retrograde, or morally bankrupt; or some combination of thereof. It is protected by the Self-Righteous, Knowing scoff which is such a feature of the modern professional-managerial class. They are the Masters of Knowledge, and of Moral Concern, who the plebs should defer to.

The other discourse talks in terms of social and democratic decay, increased crime, threats of violence, increased fiscal stress, even the possibility of civil war.

This is the world where, in Sweden — due to the stress on social and fiscal order from migration — it has become policy to pay migrants to go away. This is the world where highly intelligent and informed folk quietly discuss how the performance of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad, it may bring down the entire discipline.

The adherents of the second, problems-with-migration, discourse are well aware of what mainstream Economics has to say on migration, and judge it to be obviously and demonstrably — even catastrophically — false. That it is much harder for migrants to contribute positively to a society than mainstream Economics admits, and this gets worse the higher the rate of migration. A recent Dutch study (Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569) found that:

    Only 20% of all immigrants [to the Netherlands] make a positive lifetime net contribution to the public budget. Groups with large contributions come from Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few other countries like France and Japan.

The adherents of the first discourse seem either utterly unaware of the second discourse, or protected from even considering it by the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff. Their mastery of Theory is such, they cannot possibly be so catastrophically wrong.

The notion that migration could break a society along its existing fracture lines to the point of civil war would absolutely be treated with the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff, despite there being — as is discussed below — at least three historical examples of precisely that happening.

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