Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

DOOLITTLE’S LAW OF EDUCATION

1) Children’s potential is 80% genetics, and 20% early physical development, and nearly zero anything else.

2) You cannot improve on genetics – and all temporary gains measured will dissipate within one forgetting cycle (3 years).

3) You can harm children’s development through trauma and exposure to malincentives and bad behavior, but you cannot improve it beyond their genetic potential.

4) People are wealthier or poorer because they are more or less sexually, socially, economically, politically, and militarily valuable to others (“Genetic Market Value” – GMV ).

5) Peoples GMV is determined by physical appearance, personality traits (particularly industriousness and agreeableness), and intelligence. In general, all positive traits increase and decrease together, and intelligence is the proxy. People perform worse not because they are poor, they are poor because they perform worse, and they perform worse because of their genes. All else is just statistical outlier.

6) Human groups differ by rates and depths of sexual maturity, with slower developmental and depth rates yielding better results, and faster and deeper rates worse behavioral results. We are domesticated animals like all other domesticated animals, and human groups have varied in our degree of self-domestication (limiting depth and rate of sexual maturity).

7) When the USA was founded there was 1000 years of middle class genetics trapped by the dead capital in the church. Those middle class genetics existed because northern europeans practiced manorialism, aggressive hanging, suffered the plagues, and frequent wars. This caused the downward distribution of middle class genetics into the lower economic classes. By the time we reached 1900 that genetic capital had been redistributed, and the dead capital of the church redistributed. Beginning in 1964 the prohibition on underclass immigration was lifted, and we immigrated vast numbers of underclasses that were not static human capital. Instead, we have been spending increasing amounts of money trying to compensate for an increasingly poor stock of human capital.

8 ) A teacher is born not taught. Teaching is an art (talent) not a skill. All the evidence we have to date is that a teacher succeeds in the first six months or not, and no further improvement is made. Teaching is simple for the talented and beneficial to the taught. For the untalented each student is effectively punished by the experience. The truth is that teachers are largely from the bottom of the intellectual pool and this is the primary difference. Not pay: lack of intelligence, and lack of life experience outside the classroom. Tenure merely institutionalizes incompetence.

9) All we can do is help teachers perform better is teaching them project planning (curriculum development), like all other industries teach project planning. Project planning is a basic, necessary, human life skill. This is not a complicated skill. The problem for managing the project of education is the ‘art’ of teaching individual minds in a group, and a constantly rotating curriculum and the materials teachers need to teach it. The fact that budgets are not in the hands of teachers, and curricula are not marketed on the academic equivalent of amazon is the problem.

10) The fact that teachers do not ‘own’ the schools themselves is the origin of the problem, since there is absolutely zero evidence that the entire hierarchy of the school system provides any value. Education evolved as colleges (collections of professors) and that is the optimum model. The voucher system would redistribute purchasing power. Political control of education as a means of indoctrination would be eliminated. Market forces not ideology would provide the competitive education children need given their genetics and family circumstances. (or lack of family as is mostly the case of underperforming children).

11) Other than reading, writing, history, geography, basic sciences, mathematics, almost every other course is a waste of time with no results. The competitive advantage of western civilization is our law and our economics that favor entrepreneurship and innovation at all costs, and we do not teach money, checkbooks, financing, micro, macro economics basic statistics, and basic contracts when these are the skills most valuable to citizens. Worse we teach falsehoods about our government which was never designed and never should be converted to, a democracy. Democracies always fail. This educational content should be corrected.

12) After grade six it appears we would invest better in our children by reducing their school hours and putting them into the workplace and then bringing them into apprenticeship programs (as is common in Germany). The central problem is making use of labor so that labor produces sufficient multiples, that labor creates wealth rather than costs it.

13) Professors are often bad because the university is organized to market it’s top professors, but deliver its bottom professors and its graduate students.

14) Teaching professors are not rewarded, since publications are required. Yet there is no correlation between the quality of teaching and the quality of publication.

15) Universities stack large first and second year classes knowing that the students will fail out, or that the class material is worthless. This money is used to fund the bureaucracy. If we do the basic math, it should cost about 15K + Room and Board for a college education at the outside. Anything above this is extraction.

16) Worse, we have many fake degrees. If a field does not require calculation (math, logic, programming) then it is a craft, not a profession. Calculation determines the difference between a craft and a profession. The reason being that one can sense a craft directly, but cannot sense a profession directly – and must rely upon calculation.

17) ….

(more later….)