Your Daily Tao

Does this book advise you to cut your education short, because you won’t learn much of value anyway? Absolutely not. In the signaling model, studying irrelevancies still raises income by impressing employers. To unilaterally curtail your education is to voluntarily leap into a lower-quality pool of workers. The labor market brands you accordingly. For a single individual, education pays. On this point, the standard “education as skill creation” and the “education as signaling” theories agree. The theories make different predictions, however, about what happens if average education levels decline. If education is all skill creation, a fall in average education saps our skills, impoverishing the world. If education is all signaling, however, a fall in average education leaves our skills—and the wealth of the world—unchanged. In fact, cutbacks enrich the world by conserving valuable time and resources. Suppose you agree society would benefit if average education declined. Is this achievable? Verily. Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it. The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies. This would not eliminate wasteful signaling, but at least government would pour less gasoline on the fire. The thought of education cuts horrifies most people because “we all benefit from education.” I maintain their horror rests on what logicians call a fallacy of composition—the belief that what is true for a part must also be true for the whole. The classic example: You want a better view at a concert. What can you do? Stand up. Individually, standing works. What happens, though, if everyone copies you? Can everyone see better by standing? No way. Popular support for education subsidies rests on the same fallacy. The person who gets more education, gets a better job. It works; you see it plainly. Yet it does not follow that if everyone gets more education, everyone gets a better job. In the signaling model, subsidizing everyone’s schooling to improve our jobs is like urging everyone to stand up at a concert to improve our views. Both are “smart for one, dumb for all.” To be maximally blunt, we would be better off if education were less affordable. If subsidies for education were drastically reduced, many could no longer afford the education they now plan to get. If I am correct, however, this is no cause for alarm. It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford. Ultimately, I believe the best education policy is no education policy at all: the separation of school and state. However, you can buy the substance of my argument without embracing my crazy extremism. You can grant the importance of signaling in education, and still favor substantial government assistance for the industry. If you conclude education is only one-third signaling, your preferred level of government assistance will noticeably fall, but not to zero. At the same time, I do not downplay potentially radical implications. If, like me, you deem education 80% signaling, ending taxpayer support is crazy like a fox. This is especially clear if, as I ultimately argue, the humanistic benefits of education are mostly wishful thinking.

This book is a pretty contentious one, so I thought this first passage about how what is true for a part might not necessarily be true for the whole would be good for setting the context behind the author’s reasoning.

If education’s primary function is “signaling”, then it might make sense for each of us to get as educated as possible to signal that we are more “capable” or “intelligent. However, if everyone in society get’s more educated, then we would have spent resources and effort just trying to get that paper certificate. It is this basic premise, that the author seeks to prove that education is largely about “signaling” than actual learning or developing serious cognitive life skills.

Of course, the core argument set by the author is a lot more nuanced than the title of the book. I don’t think he is against learning how to read, basic arithmetic and other core skills. I think much of what he is trying to say is that higher levels of education increasingly becomes more about separating yourself from the rest of the pack than about the actual benefits of learning.

What do you all think? Is higher education necessarily just about “signaling”? I’ll be sharing more passages expounding on the author’s arguments.

Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me. The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction. If managers were used to process conformity, encouraging individualism helped them to employ “ambidextrous thought,” and learn what worked in each situation. If they were used to improvising, encouraging a sense of loyalty and cohesion did the job. The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction. By the time of the Challenger launch, NASA’s “can do” culture manifested as extreme process accountability combined with collectivist social norms. Everything was congruent for conformity to the standard procedures. The process was so rigid it spurned evidence that didn’t conform to the usual rules, and so sacred that Larry Mulloy felt protected by a signed piece of paper testifying that he had followed the usual process. Dissent was valued at flight readiness reviews, but at the most important moment, the most important engineering group asked for an offline caucus where they found a way, in private, to conform. Like the one engineer said, without data, “the boss’s opinion is better than mine.” The more I spoke with Captain Lesmes, the more it seemed to me that he had felt strongly outcome accountable—searching for a solution even if it deviated from standard procedure—within an extraordinarily potent collective culture that ensured he would not make the decision to deviate easily. He had, as Patil, Tetlock, and Mellers wrote, harnessed “the power of cross-pressures in promoting flexible, ambidextrous thought.” The subtitle of that paper: “Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation.” Superforecasting teams harnessed the same cultural cross-pressure. A team was judged purely by the accuracy of its members’ forecasts. But internally the Good Judgment Project incentivized collective culture. Commenting was an expectation; teammates were encouraged to vote for useful comments and recognized for process milestones, like a certain number of lifetime comments. Prior to Challenger, there was a long span when NASA culture harnessed incongruence. Gene Kranz, the flight director when Apollo 11 first landed on the moon, lived by that same mantra, the valorized process—“In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data”—but he also made a habit of seeking out opinions of technicians and engineers at every level of the hierarchy. If he heard the same hunch twice, it didn’t take data for him to interrupt the usual process and investigate. Wernher von Braun, who led the Marshall Space Flight Center’s development of the rocket that propelled the moon mission, balanced NASA’s rigid process with an informal, individualistic culture that encouraged constant dissent and cross-boundary communication. Von Braun started “Monday Notes”: every week engineers submitted a single page of notes on their salient issues. Von Braun handwrote comments in the margins, and then circulated the entire compilation. Everyone saw what other divisions were up to, and how easily problems could be raised. Monday Notes were rigorous, but informal. On a typed page of notes from two days after the moon landing in 1969, von Braun homed in on a short section in which an engineer guessed why a liquid oxygen tank unexpectedly lost pressure. The issue was already irrelevant for the moon mission, but could come up again in future flights. “Let’s pin this down as precisely as possible,” von Braun wrote. “We must know whether there’s more behind this, that calls for checks or remedies.” Like Kranz, von Braun went looking for problems, hunches, and bad news. He even rewarded those who exposed problems. After Kranz and von Braun’s time, the “All Others Bring Data” process culture remained, but the informal culture and power of individual hunches shriveled. In 1974, William Lucas took over the Marshall Space Flight Center. A NASA chief historian wrote that Lucas was a brilliant engineer but “often grew angry when he learned of problems.” Allan McDonald described him to me as a “shoot-the-messenger type guy.” Lucas transformed von Braun’s Monday Notes into a system purely for upward communication. He did not write feedback and the notes did not circulate. At one point they morphed into standardized forms that had to be filled out. Monday Notes became one more rigid formality in a process culture. “Immediately, the quality of the notes fell,” wrote another official NASA historian. Lucas retired shortly after the Challenger disaster, but the entrenched process culture persisted. NASA’s only other fatal shuttle accident, the space shuttle Columbia disintegration in 2003, was a cultural carbon copy of the Challenger. NASA clung to its usual process tools in an unusual circumstance. The Columbia disaster engendered an even stronger ill-fated congruence between process accountability and group-focused norms. Engineers grew concerned about a technical problem they did not fully understand, but they could not make a quantitative case. When they went to the Department of Defense to request high-resolution photographs of a part of the shuttle they thought was damaged, not only did NASA managers block outside assistance, but they apologized to DoD for contact outside “proper channels.” NASA administrators promised the violation of protocol would not happen again. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that NASA’s culture “emphasized chain of command, procedure, following the rules, and going by the book. While rules and procedures were essential for coordination, they had an unintended negative effect.” Once again, “allegiance to hierarchy and procedure” had ended in disaster. Again, lower ranking engineers had concerns they could not quantify; they stayed silent because “the requirement for data was stringent and inhibiting.” The management and culture aspects of the Challenger and Columbia disasters were so eerily similar that the investigation board decreed that NASA was not functioning as “a learning organization.”

I used to think that having a congruent organization and everyone pulling in 1 direction was about conformity and lack of conflict. Lately, I’ve realized that having conflicts and differences in culture can actually be a good thing. You wouldn’t want everyone in your organization to think and agree on the same things. This leads to blind spots.

Talented people tend to have their own take on things and this generally leads to diverse opinions and potential conflict. Whats important in handling this diversity is the ability to pull everyone towards the common goal.

The crystal ball allure of the marshmallow test is undeniable, and also misconstrued. Mischel’s collaborator Yuichi Shoda has repeatedly made a point of saying that plenty of preschoolers who ate the marshmallow turned out just fine.* Shoda maintained that the most exciting aspect of the studies was demonstrating how easily children could learn to change a specific behavior with simple mental strategies, like thinking about the marshmallow as a cloud rather than food. Shoda’s post-marshmallow-test work has been one part of a bridge in psychology between extreme arguments in the debate about the roles of nature and nurture in personality. One extreme suggests that personality traits are almost entirely a function of one’s nature, and the other that personality is entirely a function of the environment. Shoda argued that both sides of the so-called person-situation debate were right. And wrong. At a given point in life, an individual’s nature influences how they respond to a particular situation, but their nature can appear surprisingly different in some other situation. With Mischel, he began to study “if-then signatures.” If David is at a giant party, then he seems introverted, but if David is with his team at work, then he seems extroverted. (True.) So is David introverted or extroverted? Well, both, and consistently so. Ogas and Rose call this the “context principle.” In 2007, Mischel wrote, “The gist of such findings is that the child who is aggressive at home may be less aggressive than most when in school; the man exceptionally hostile when rejected in love may be unusually tolerant about criticism of his work; the one who melts with anxiety in the doctor’s office may be a calm mountain climber; the risk-taking entrepreneur may take few social risks.” Rose framed it more colloquially: “If you are conscientious and neurotic while driving today, it’s a pretty safe bet you will be conscientious and neurotic while driving tomorrow. At the same time . . . you may not be conscientious and neurotic when you are playing Beatles cover songs with your band in the context of the local pub.” Perhaps that is one reason Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues in the military (chapter 1) failed to predict who would be a leader in battle based on who had been a leader in an obstacle course exercise. When I was a college runner, I had teammates whose drive and determination seemed almost boundless on the track, and nearly absent in the classroom, and vice versa. Instead of asking whether someone is gritty, we should ask when they are. “If you get someone into a context that suits them,” Ogas said, “they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.” Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts. Each “story of me” continues to evolve. We should all heed the wisdom of Alice, who, when asked by the Gryphon in Wonderland to share her story, decided she had to start with the beginning of her adventure that very morning. “It’s no use going back to yesterday,” she said, “because I was a different person then.” Alice captured a grain of truth, one that has profound consequences for the best way to maximize match quality.

The famous “marshmallow test”, where a kid’s ability to ignore eating a marshmallow indicated the level of “grit” the kid had and hence, the kid’s future success. Its easy to buy into such narratives and that’s why these spread and plant itself in our minds.

However, there more to that story, as shown in this excerpt. What we always need is context. A person can be extremely resilient and hardworking in 1 environment, but can be lazy and unmotivated in another. Just like how an athlete could be the most hardworking in their sport, but not necessarily in their studies. Context matters.

Its also why if you find yourself consistently demotivated and tired, it can be good to self reflect and sometimes the problem is not just you. It can also be about finding what kind of environment and tasks works for you. This fits within the overall concept of the book, where it might be good to explore different things and find out what environment enables the best version of yourself.

It is what it sounds like—leaving time between practice sessions for the same material. You might call it deliberate not-practicing between bouts of deliberate practice. “There’s that eighth-grade classroom followed a typical academic plan over the course of the year, it is precisely the opposite of what science recommends for durable learning—one topic was probably confined to one week and another to the next. Like a lot of professional development efforts, each particular concept or skill gets a short period of intense focus, and then on to the next thing, never to return. That structure makes intuitive sense, but it forgoes another important desirable difficulty: “spacing,” or distributed practice. It is what it sounds like—leaving time between practice sessions for the same material. You might call it deliberate not-practicing between bouts of deliberate practice. “There’s a limit to how long you should wait,” Kornell told me, “but it’s longer than people think. It could be anything, studying foreign language vocabulary or learning how to fly a plane, the harder it is, the more you learn.” Space between practice sessions creates the hardness that enhances learning. One study separated Spanish vocabulary learners into two groups—a group that learned the vocab and then was tested on it the same day, and a second that learned the vocab but was tested on it a month later. Eight years later, with no studying in the interim, the latter group retained 250 percent more. For a given amount of Spanish study, spacing made learning more productive by making it easy to make it hard. It does not take nearly that long to see the spacing effect. Iowa State researchers read people lists of words, and then asked for each list to be recited back either right away, after fifteen seconds of rehearsal, or after fifteen seconds of doing very simple math problems that prevented rehearsal. The subjects who were allowed to reproduce the lists right after hearing them did the best. Those who had fifteen seconds to rehearse before reciting came in second. The group distracted with math problems finished last. Later, when everyone thought they were finished, they were all surprised with a pop quiz: write down every word you can recall from the lists. Suddenly, the worst group became the best. Short-term rehearsal gave purely short-term benefits. Struggling to hold on to information and then recall it had helped the group distracted by math problems transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory. The group with more and immediate rehearsal opportunity recalled nearly nothing on the pop quiz. Repetition, it turned out, was less important than struggle. It isn’t bad to get an answer right while studying. Progress just should not happen too quickly, unless the learner wants to end up like Oberon (or, worse, Macduff), with a knowledge mirage that evaporates when it matters most. As with excessive hint-giving, it will, as a group of psychologists put it, “produce misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery that will not survive the passage of substantial periods of time.” For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run. If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, so that the test will be more difficult when you do. Frustration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.

Learning comes from frustration. To really enhance our learning, what we need to do is to inject difficulties in our learning. From this passage, spacing out your practice or learning sessions can be an easy way to make your learning more difficult. If you’ve ever realised that you have forgotten most of the things you learned in school over a short curriculum, it is because the content was mostly stored in your short term memory. Putting in the effort and setting up barriers to master content will allow you to learn for the long term.

Scientists and members of the general public are about equally likely to have artistic hobbies, but scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation. And those who have won the Nobel Prize are more likely still. Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still. The most successful experts also belong to the wider world. “To him who observes them from afar,” said Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.” The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “This breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain-specific expertise alone.” Those findings are reminiscent of a speech Steve Jobs gave, in which he famously recounted the importance of a calligraphy class to his design aesthetics. “When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” he said. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.” Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed that logic problems could be solved like math equations. It resulted in absolutely nothing of practical importance until seventy years after Boole passed away, when Shannon did a summer internship at AT&T’s Bell Labs research facility. There he recognized that he could combine telephone call-routing technology with Boole’s logic system to encode and transmit any type of information electronically. It was the fundamental insight on which computers rely. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both those fields at the same time,” Shannon said.

Having creative pursuits helps you identify new patterns. I remember reading how neural networks are a pretty good initiation of how our brain works. We see, recognise and identify patterns and reinforce them over time. If we never engage in different creative pursuits out of our line of work, these patterns don’t get formed.

Progress in innovation rarely works in a linear fashion. Next time you’re pursuing your hobby or creating something, try to see it as exercise for your brain rather than just a “waste of time”!

The origin of sex differences in human behaviour is a rich seam of misunderstanding about innateness and culture. Our culture relentlessly reinforces the stereotype that little boys prefer to play with trucks and little girls prefer to play with dolls. The toy shops are divided into pink girls’ and blue boys’ aisles, pandering to the fact that adults are quite happy to see girls and boys in conventionally different ways. This enrages many feminists, who insist that the very origin of these sex differences lies in the way they are forced upon children by the prevailing culture. But they are confusing cause and effect. Parents buy trucks for boys and dolls for girls not because they are slaves to hegemony, but because experience tells them that is what their children want. Experiment after experiment has shown that given a choice, girls will play with dolls and boys with trucks, no matter what their previous experience. Most parents are happy to reinforce sex differences, but have no interest in starting them from scratch. In the early 2000s, the behavioural scientist Melissa Hines really put the cat among the pigeons by showing that the very same preference is true of male and female monkeys. Given the choice, female monkeys will play with dolls, males with trucks. This experiment caused fury and criticism from other psychologists determined to find fault with it. But it has since been repeated in a different species of monkey, with the same result. Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts. In a triumphant vindication of Judith Rich Harris’s argument, it has now been conclusively shown that the aisles of toy shops, with their rampant sexism, are responding to innate preferences in human beings, not causing them. These differences were not imposed, they evolved.

The author describes how cultural stereotypes and possibly preferences were a result of evolution from innate preferences. In this case, it was this experiment where female monkeys were more likely to play with dolls and males with trucks.

I tried finding out more about this monkey experiment. The scientist, Melissa Hines, has also gone on to do many more different experiments to try and determine how prenatal hormones exposure can shape difference in our preferences.

Monogamy eventually conquered even the nobility with the rise of the merchant class, and by the nineteenth century Queen Victoria had tamed the appetites even of royal men to the point where every man had at least to pretend that he was the faithful, attentive and lifelong devotee of one woman. It is no accident, says William Tucker in his brilliant book Marriage and Civilization, that on the whole peace comes to Europe as a result. Peace, that is, except where societies continue to be based on polygamy, such as much of the Muslim world, or where polygamy was suddenly reinvented, as in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons’ polygamy caused huge resentment among neighbours, as well as tensions among Saints, and cycles of terrible violence followed them on their peregrinations all the way to Utah. It culminated in the Mountain Meadow massacre of 1857, carried out in revenge for the killing by an enraged husband of a Mormon who had lured the man’s wife into joining his harem. The violence died down only with the outlawing of polygamy in 1890. (Unofficial polygamy persists to this day in a very few Mormon fundamentalist communities.) The foremost anthropologists of cultural evolution, Joe Henrich, Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson, have argued in an influential paper called ‘The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage’ that the spread of monogamy in the modern world can best be explained by its beneficial effects on society. That is to say, not that clever men sat around a table and decided upon a policy of monogamy in order to bring peace and cohesion, but more likely that it was a case of cultural evolution by Darwinian means. Societies that chose ‘normative monogamy’, or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight. This made such societies more productive and less destructive, so they tended to expand at the expense of other societies. That, the three anthropologists think, explains the triumph of monogamy, which reaches its apogee in the perfect nuclear family of 1950s America, with Dad going out to work and Mom at home cleaning, cooking and looking after the kids.

This book is about how most, if not all positive things come from a bottom up approach and evolved rather than being planned top down. With such a theme, the book definitely does have quite a bit of confirmation bias. However, there are indeed some interesting passages and insights that I remembered while reading this.

This passage is on how monogamy, as a societal structure, turns out to be popular because societies which adopt monogamy tend to be more productive as compared to polygamous societies. Why monogamy turned out to be the system we adopt today isn’t a result of defining moral principles and selecting the best one, but a natural process of Darwin like evolution.