It’s not that americans are necessarily dumber than europeans, but that they’re worse educated, indisciplined, overconfident, and overzealous.
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-26 17:07:00 UTC
Theme: Education
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“DO SMART PEOPLE LACK COMMON SENSE?”– Well, there are a couple of issues here w
–“DO SMART PEOPLE LACK COMMON SENSE?”–
Well, there are a couple of issues here we can discuss.
1) IQ increases the rate at which you learn, and the degrees of indirection between what’s learned.
2) IQ is the most dominant personality trait, with industriousness second, and all others comparatively far less influential.
3) By and large, after the age of 22, we effectively sort by IQ. Or at least every 1/2 standard deviation (7 points). And it applies (generally) to all walks of life.
4) People with average IQ’s tend to collect information from peers. People with high IQ’s rely less on the opinions of others.
5) So average people network more and pursue less risky, or novel (innovative) ends, and smarter people do the opposite.
6) This is why science has been so important because as we have learned science and reduce errors, the ‘habits’ of scientific thought have been adopted by mainstream people and they ‘calculate’ together fairly successfully.
7) My point of view, is that together we create a sufficiently homogenous set of habits that we believe we understand far more than we do – (overconfidence) – when all we are doing is habituating norms that survived evolution and markets.
8) Roughly speaking, 140 innovates, 130 explains 120’s apply, 110’s organize, 100’s do, 90’s follow, 80s do the best they can and are generally angry about it, and 70s stumble through life despite the fact that no matter what they do it seems not to work. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s close enough that it serves as a general rule of understanding. We are just as specialized as ants, but the similarity of emotion, want, and language convinces us that we are more similar than we are.
Hence why we generally choose every aspect of our lives so that we function with people within six degrees of separation.
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-26 15:10:00 UTC
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Nassim: d) So my read is the law is taught as a craft (practiced) and the ‘liber
Nassim: d) So my read is the law is taught as a craft (practiced) and the ‘liberal arts” are taught as doctrines, and we are wasting a phenomenal amount of money not separating Techne(craft), Religion(obedience), and Law(Rule). Meaning the problem is the Academy (secular church).
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-26 14:40:50 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/989514645508706304
Reply addressees: @nntaleb @bryan_caplan @tylercowen
Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/989513856564256768
IN REPLY TO:
Unknown author
@nntaleb @bryan_caplan @tylercowen Nassim: c) And so, my reading of history, is that the aristocracy was taught to rule (meaning decide, not direct), and the nobility to govern (direct), and labor to obey. (Indo European Tripartism). Otherwise I’m certain your positioning of the ‘Doctrine’ vs ‘Techne’ is correct.
Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/989513856564256768
IN REPLY TO:
@curtdoolittle
@nntaleb @bryan_caplan @tylercowen Nassim: c) And so, my reading of history, is that the aristocracy was taught to rule (meaning decide, not direct), and the nobility to govern (direct), and labor to obey. (Indo European Tripartism). Otherwise I’m certain your positioning of the ‘Doctrine’ vs ‘Techne’ is correct.
Original post: https://x.com/i/web/status/989513856564256768
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EDUCATION. via Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) Distilling the conversation with @bry
EDUCATION.
via Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT)
Distilling the conversation with @bryan_caplan hosted by Tyler Cowen
1) There has been a traditional separation between:
+ “liberal education” for free men, (liber), who didn’t work for a living, &
+”technical education”, for those who labor.
2) For instance, mathematics as taught for “liberal” education, was theoretical mind exercise. Euclid’s theorem was never used in building.
Meanwhile builders (parts of guilds with trade secrets) were using their own heuristic, richer, geometry. (see #Antifragile)
3) The Anglo-Saxon world conflated the two, with aristocrat-envy:
+ Education to be civilized. (Literature, philosophy, poetry, abstract math, history, stamp collecting, etc.)
+ Education to learn to do things. (Engineering, medicine, accounting, law, belly dancing, plumbing)
4) So we need to separate “things to learn to be civilized” and “things you learn to do things” with separate institutions.
The only overlap I could find was mathematics, though not a strong argument since applied math is a v. different animal.
5a) The problem of the peer review system is selecting professors on theories abt subject never checked for basic knowledge of subject. It is common for people to know the “post colonial gender theory” of Levant, teach it, but never the actual facts.
5b) The French solved the problem with knowledge exams for educators (“aggregation”); you never end up having people judged solely by peers (See #SkininTheGame ).
6) The educational model is now imploding as the only thing people seem to learn at colleges is ideology by losers who became professors because they aren’t good enough to create things & got together to BS in a citation ring #RentSeekers (not just in economics, but everywhere)
7) Finally, we can split education:
+ Taught by nonskininthegame people (math, poetry, etc.)
+ Taught by skininthegame people (engineering, medicine, belly dancing, plumbing, finance, law, burglarizing, computer “science”, accounting, …)
In SEPARATE institutions.
8) The idea that liberal education makes free thinkers is about the greatest myth: empirically, liberal education creates the exact opposite of “thinkers” and “free”: indoctrinated and slaves.Nassim Nicholas Taleb added,
Patrick Lee Miller
9) Remember that the “University” system for this “liberal education” (trivium/quadrivium) was historically closely associated with, and supervised by, the Church.
Technical education was left to free thinkers.
10 In #Antifragile I document the confusion
Business =>Technology => Science,
far far far far more frequent than the reverse.
Problem is that academic, not practitioners, write the books.
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-26 10:23:00 UTC
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THERE ISN’T ANY SHORTCUT TO WISDOM Bill just made a good point that I sort of be
THERE ISN’T ANY SHORTCUT TO WISDOM
Bill just made a good point that I sort of beat around the bush about.
There isn’t any shortcut.
You are either going to read enough basic history, and then learn the operational deconstruction of incentives from me, or you aren’t.
There isn’t any shortcut. There isn’t one book. There is however a series of books that are the minimum you’ll need. But that’s not easy.
My book will teach you the science and logic of natural law, and all that it entails. But it will simply explain how to make all the knowledge of all the disciplines, commensurable – into a single universal language.
That said, history provides the storytelling. And it’s the stories we remember.
Stories serve as search algorithms.
Logic serves as recipes.
Science insures we don’t err.
We have had enough of us working to gether now that very smart people with a scientific education and knowledge of computer science, and a bit of history can grasp the ideas within a year.
For most people it takes two to understand, and another one or two to master the use of.
Which is like any other STEM discipline.
‘Cause it’s like any other STEM discipline…..
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-25 18:23:00 UTC
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READING? —“Curt, What are the top 3 nonfiction books (the less known, the bett
http://propertarianism.com/reading-listRECOMMENDED READING?
—“Curt, What are the top 3 nonfiction books (the less known, the better) you would recommend?”—
I don’t think I can narrow it to three. Maybe three in each discipline. My reading list is at propertarianism.com/reading-list http://propertarianism.com/reading-list and the first section “the short list’ includes what I recommend. Notice that I rarely if ever recommend philosophy, and almost always recommend history.
I think If I had to suggest the minimum it would be:
BASICS (EASY)
1 – Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligence (The Brain)
2 – Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind (The Moral Intuition)
3 – Hazlitt: economics in one lesson
4 – Durant: Lessons of History
HISTORY
1 – Keegan’s History of Warfare
2 – Karen Armstrong : The Great Transformation
3 – Emmanuel Todd: The Invention of Europe
4 – Milsom: Natural History of the Common Law.
THE PROBLEM
7 – Fukuyama: Trust (The Political Objective)
8 – Fukuyama: The Origins Of Political Order 1
9 – Fukuyama: The Origins Of Political Order 2
Roughly speaking that gives you military, religious, economic-cultural, and legal history, which comprise, as I understand it, the social sciences.
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-25 09:51:00 UTC
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READING? —“Curt, What are the top 3 nonfiction books (the less known, the bett
http://propertarianism.com/reading-listRECOMMENDED READING?
—“Curt, What are the top 3 nonfiction books (the less known, the better) you would recommend?”—
I don’t think I can narrow it to three. Maybe three in each discipline. My reading list is at propertarianism.com/reading-list and the first section “the short list’ includes what I recommend. Notice that I rarely if ever recommend philosophy, and almost always recommend history.
I think If I had to suggest the minimum it would be:
BASICS (EASY)
1 – Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligence (The Brain)
2 – Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind (The Moral Intuition)
3 – Hazlitt: economics in one lesson
4 – Durant: Lessons of History
HISTORY
1 – Keegan’s History of Warfare
2 – Karen Armstrong : The Great Transformation
3 – Emmanuel Todd: The Invention of Europe
4 – Milsom: Natural History of the Common Law.
THE PROBLEM
7 – Fukuyama: Trust (The Political Objective)
8 – Fukuyama: The Origins Of Political Order 1
9 – Fukuyama: The Origins Of Political Order 2
Roughly speaking that gives you military, religious, economic-cultural, and legal history, which comprise, as I understand it, the social sciences.
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-25 09:51:00 UTC
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um. the way to think about it is that undergraduate university is serving the fu
um. the way to think about it is that undergraduate university is serving the function of trade school, and grad school is now university level. And this does mirror the Iq distribution. So we have just switched from cheap trade schools (physical), and cheap colleges (clerical) to large expensive universities and moved what used to constitute university education up into the graduate level (and in some cases the phd).
Source date (UTC): 2018-04-23 12:22:00 UTC
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Simplify Education and Increase Socialization
Roughly speaking, about 1/4 of people should go through STEM university training, and the rest should graduate high school able to work. The problem is that we teach nonsense after 6th grade. Roughly half of all educational hours are wasted. In my understanding we should enter people into the workforce between 12 and 14 given their rate of maturity, and teach life tools a few hours a day: money, accounting, economics, basic contracts. In fact, it’s very interesting that we teach all the sciences OTHER than the one that is most important: COOPERATION. Instead of cooperation we teach SUBMISSION. If we were to do this we would extend work lives, and reverse infantilization, as well as all but eliminate the difficulty entering the work force. We would have vast programs of teaching-in-the-workplace at very low wages, and produce the highest skilled people in the world. We could have fully socialized people, a more competente work force, have children in our late teens and twenties, and far lower costs.
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Simplify Education and Increase Socialization
Roughly speaking, about 1/4 of people should go through STEM university training, and the rest should graduate high school able to work. The problem is that we teach nonsense after 6th grade. Roughly half of all educational hours are wasted. In my understanding we should enter people into the workforce between 12 and 14 given their rate of maturity, and teach life tools a few hours a day: money, accounting, economics, basic contracts. In fact, it’s very interesting that we teach all the sciences OTHER than the one that is most important: COOPERATION. Instead of cooperation we teach SUBMISSION. If we were to do this we would extend work lives, and reverse infantilization, as well as all but eliminate the difficulty entering the work force. We would have vast programs of teaching-in-the-workplace at very low wages, and produce the highest skilled people in the world. We could have fully socialized people, a more competente work force, have children in our late teens and twenties, and far lower costs.