Typical-Minding and School Reform

[Epistemic Status: Derived from thoughts I had just after waking up. Probably incomplete and definitely lacking rigor.]

In fourth grade, after a considerable struggle, my parents managed to get me admitted to the district's gifted program. This program, like most others of its sort, was a bit of a joke. "Gifted" education consisted of taking us out of class for one day a week (they're smart, surely they can afford to miss a day of class and still do their homework!) to pursue topics of our own interest--not that we got a whole lot of flexibility in the matter. To be fair, most of the ideas I floated were terrible and demonstrated a real lack of grounding in the world, but what do you expect from the son of two Mensans dropped into the slag heap of public education? Anyway, we got most of a day off each week for "gifted" education...then half a day...than an hour each day...then an hour each day if we could find time in our schedule.

I haven't seen what special needs education looks like, but I imagine they have much the same problem. Maybe they get more attention--my impression is that most attention directed at both ends of the bell curve is focused on making sure we look and act normal, and special needs tend to be more visible than gifted. But in either case, the central notion is people should behave like everyone else, you shouldn't be different, egalitarianism.

The school district couldn't afford, politically though possibly financially, to take all the gifted kids and shove them in their own corner. That would imply they're better than everyone else, and deserve more attention. How dare you imply my Johnny isn't as important!

Similarly, there's not many options for dealing with special needs kids. There isn't enough money to give them the attention needed to sort out those with potential from the duds. You've basically got two choices: take all of them and shove them in a corner to be neglected (How dare you imply my Johnny isn't as smart as everyone else!) , or leave them in the general population, slowing everyone down.

It's not popular to say this, but people are different. Some are faster than others. Some learn in one way, some in another. Some top out in third grade and some are graduating from Harvard at the same age.

Most of them are in the middle. Our educational system functions okay for these people. But we should realize that some people are faster than others. I'd argue we should have different school tracts for the various segments of the population--three to five should do. In a sense, we already have this, through Honors/AP classes, "regular", and the more remedial courses.

Why can't we say this publicly? I've been particularly surprised by the resistance I get towards these motions, even among those who would benefit from such an arrangement. I've long wondered why.

Enter typical mind fallacy.

Many smart people naively assume that everyone else is just as smart as they are, provided you can poke and prod them the right way to make their inner intelligence show. There's some validity to this--certain people function terribly in environments that others do fine in--but some are just not as mentally capable.

At the other end of the spectrum, it's common to see assumptions that the gifted students aren't actually that much better, just catered to. I'd be just as good, they say, if only someone gave me a chance.

Typical mind fallacy is at play here. It's uncomfortable to admit that some people are just put together differently than you. It's even more difficult to admit that these people-not-like-you are still people, if history is any guide.

Telling people that they aren't like each other, and that some of them are better than others, is not really viable in a democracy. And thus we get our current school system, where only the very rich have the option of taking their children out of the cesspool of public schools and families are slaving against Moloch to live in better districts.

Maybe we should just admit that people aren't actually equal, and make an effort to live with that uncomfortable reality, instead of fighting it.

Thoughts About Libertarians

Contrary to what some parts of the internet might suggest, libertarians are actually a very diverse bunch. (We're also very good at setting up echo chambers, which is why it can be easy to think your brand of libertarianism is the only one worth mentioning.) Today I'd like to focus on one particular aspect: the epistemic beliefs that lead to their adopting the philosophy.

Before we continue, I would like to be clear that the two belief structures examined below are the not only ways that people become libertarians. I'm not even sure that they're the most common. But they are the most interesting to me right now, so here we are.

First, there are those who become libertarians because they believe it is the right ideology. By right I do not mean morally right, so much as pragmatically best. Morality is often intertwined, though, especially from a rule-utilitarian standpoint. This sort of libertarian believes capitalism is the best economic system, democracy is the best form of government yet devisedimplemented, and the Constitution works pretty well.

Second, there are those who become libertarians because they don't believe they know how to run other people's lives. They see libertarianism as the only option for not forcing a belief system on others. These sorts tend to be divided on capitalism and democracy and definitely biased toward anti-constitution anarchism.

I came to libertarianism from neoconservatism through the first camp. I was very confident in capitalism, but didn't find social conservatism (or religion in general) very appealing. Moral behavior without government enforcement was interesting but didn't seem very viable. It wasn't until discovering Objectivism that the possibility of morality in a godless universe was really presented to me in full, and thus becoming a libertarian became much easier.

Since that time, I've spent some time in that other camp, especially when those ideas are popular (for example, Gary Johnson's campaign in 2012 relied heavily on that rhetoric), though it wasn't a comfortable experience. In part, those arguments lack rigor. It's easy to say "I don't know how to run your life better than you do", but for a significant segment of the population, having someone else take over would be a vast improvement, from reduced responsibility/stress levels if nothing else.

A better argument would be to point out that, in the space of possible policies, most will do more harm than good. However, committing to the position of not-knowing is not a good move in the greater debate. Libertarians have long been able to switch between the two mindsets depending on what the conversation demanded. This is a pretty basic motte-and-bailey strategy, which the more rational subsections of the movement should attempt to avoid.

In all fairness, there's a possible middle ground between these two positions. The argument goes something like this:

The space of possible policies is incredibly huge, and it's very difficult to determine which are superior. This is true whether we're talking about macroeconomics or how to decorate your bedroom. Because this is so, we think people should be left to their own devices so that they can experiment with policies at their own discretion until they feel satisfied. However, I have opinions about what the optimal policies are.

The discerning reader will notice a problem here. Laissez-faire in the realm of personal lives is very different from laissez-faire in the realm of, say, fiscal policy. If you do a terrible job decorating your bedroom, that affects you and maybe your immediate family. If the economy crashes, that affects millions of people, sometimes quite significantly.

Good luck winning debates with that approach. To argue for hands-off economic policies, you should have evidence (or at least theory) that indicates doing so produces better outcomes. That's a bit more difficult and, I believe, the more rational thing to do.

Back to School--ish

It's a new school year! Except, well, I haven't had a term off since 2013. Summer classes have given way to something more closely resembling a proper academic load. Right now I'm signed up for Introduction to Aerospace Engineering, Computing for Engineers, Astrobiology and Russian Culture. Hopefully that'll hold, because I still haven't be formally admitted to the engineering school. I'm not buying textbooks till I find out.

Emotionally, I'm at a dead end. Getting to the fall semester was the extent of my thinking. Get through spring. Get through summer. Visit Mary in Minnesota. Start in the fall.

Now I need "goals" and "plans" again. For the time being, my plan is to go to class and stay on top of my schoolwork. I anticipate success: math and hard science classes were an academic drag, hoovering up far more time than they warranted. Now that I'm done on both counts, we can focus on what matters: spacecraft.

We're not doing that yet, but I've got Kerbal Space Program to sate me during these lower-level classes. We are building a drone this semester, which is more than Purdue can say.

Beyond that...I'm not sure. My professor for Intro to Aerospace was quite clear that he didn't believe engineering students have free time, period. Whether that's accurate is anyone's guess--but it's probably more accurate than not. All too many students come to college expecting it to be all fun and games, when really it's stress and all-nighters.

Was there really a time when I thought getting in would be the most ruthless part?

More Questions Than Answers

"More questions than answers", they say, as if that makes them sound wise. This study, or expedition, or mission raised more questions than it answered. But did it?

Twenty days ago we didn't know what Pluto looked like, let alone anything significant about its atmosphere and surface features. Today we have this:

New Horizons revealed a world we'd never truly seen before—and a world we'll never not know again. Venkatesh Rao has some thoughts on the matter, but I want to address a different problem.

New Horizons did not do a thorough survey. A great deal of Pluto was not imaged in such high resolution, and what was imaged was not truly studied at length. Already we have new questions: why is there haze in the atmosphere? What's causing those ice flows in Sputnik Planum? How about the terrain of Tombaugh Regio?

Some of these will be answered as the rest of New Horizon's flyby data is downlinked over the next several months, but some will persist for decades. It may be that New Horizons raises more questions than answers, but the statement doesn't sit well with me. Information is missing.

When one says "more questions than answers", they don't say anything about the kind of questions. Specifically, the questions that New Horizons raises are questions we never knew to ask before. Our overall picture of the universe has improved, and now we're working on the details.

I'm reminded of Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong, in which he writes:

I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.) 

It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight. 

I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930. 

These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. 

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal. 

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." 

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

Asimov is right, of course. Some ideas are less wrong than others. Saying the earth is flat is less wrong than saying it is concave, and saying it is spherical is less wrong still. In truth, we live on oblate spheroid which is biased towards the south, with a considerable number of irregularities.

But we expect short inferential differences. We expect to say either the earth is flat or the earth is round. Explaining what's meant by "oblate spheroid" is too much for Greek commoner who has only the loosest grasp on astronomy and geometry. Similarly, the modern public expects scientific questions to have simple, straightforward answers. Most outstanding questions either have not been investigated or have considerable evidence on both sides. That's a level of nuance even those members of the public interested in serious questions has to muster. When you say "more questions than answers", most listeners aren't envisioning an ever expanding and detailed worldview. They see a list of questions getting longer, faster than we cross them off.

It frustrates me when space advocates say things like this. If we want to get a follow up mission to New Horizons (principal investigator Alan Stern has some ideas), it's going to take a better approach to science communication than that. The public is interested, but that interest could easily wane over the many years before another spacecraft can be designed, approved, constructed, and launched.

I love cool toys as much as the next person, and New Horizons is absolutely delightful in that regard—but that isn't why our governments spend billions of dollars every year to fund their space agencies. We're doing it understand our universe, our world, and ourselves. Space exploration is about exploration. We need enthusiasm for learning about the cosmos as we pursue the future of human spaceflight.

Irresponsible Amateur Punditry: GE 2015 Edition

Wikimedia Commons

For those who haven't been paying attention (in other words, most of North America), the UK had their 2015 general election last night.

A quick summary: The Conservatives, formerly in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, won a full majority. Their erstwhile partners were absolutely destroyed, winning a total of just eight seats. SNP won almost every seat in Scotland, making it the third-largest party by number of MPs.

The leaders of the Liberal Democrats, Labour, and UK Independence all resigned after their parties' poor showings. David Cameron remains Prime Minister.

This isn't at all the result the polls predicted. Pollsters had the Conservatives in the lead, but not winning a majority. No one expected the Liberal Democrats to do just as badly as they did. It seemed very plausible that a progressive coalition between Labour, Lib Dems, and the SNP would form the next government.

Nate Silver and the rest will have very interesting things to say about poll bias and herding over the next few days, but I'd like to discuss something else: Duverger's Law.

The UK has long been treated as a counterexample to the rule that first-past-the-post voting tends to produce two party systems. Despite being underrepresented in MPs per votes received, the Liberal Democrats have held their place as the third-largest party, swinging elections and occasionally a coalition government. But after yesterday, they hold less than 2% of the seats in Parliament.

At first glance, it seems that SNP has just replaced the Liberal Democrats as the nation's centrist party. However, the SNP won all of its seats in Scotland--it's a strictly regional party.

In the rest of Britain, the division between Conservatives and Labour is considerably sharper. The UK is suffering from the same polarization that all first-past-the-post electorates suffer from. Votes are cast tactically, to deny the least-favored viable party the win.

To illustrate this for Americans, let's say you have a simplified ballot with the Greens, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, and UKIP. If you lean right, you might favor UKIP over the Conservatives, but fear Labour will squeak out a win if you vote for them. You vote Conservative.

On the other side, you might favor the Greens over Labour, but fear a Conservative win if you do. You vote Labour. Moderates face a similar choice--which of the two major parties seems like the worse choice?

(It's important to remember that in many constituencies, there's really only two serious contenders. The UK is often less a three party systems and more a patchwork of interlocking two-party systems. However, the same principle applies when voters start thinking on the national scale.)

The fate of the smaller parties isn't really clear at this time. Maybe they'll rebound in time for the next general election, and we'll see another coalition government in the 2020s. Maybe they'll reform into protest vote parties, forcing Conservatives and Labour to alter their platforms or lose seats. Maybe they'll attach themselves to major parties, shifting their center of balance.

The best hope for political diversity, however, is to abolish the first-past-the-post voting system. There's a lot of different ways to go about doing this (personally I favor Singe-Transferrable Vote, but the Alternative Vote would probably be easier to implement). Regardless, I encourage you to watch C.G.P. Grey's series on the subject. I've embedded the first video below.

Disdain for Elections, or Why I'm (probably not actually) Moving to Canada

Recent post to the contrary, this is still a political blog.

We're seven months out, and I'm already getting worried about the 2016 Presidential Primaries. Specifically, the seeming inevitability of both parties nominating a terrible candidate. Right now, it looks like we'll be seeing another Bush or Clinton in office, despite the fact nobody actually wants either of them.

Obviously party nominations are Molochian process riddled by lies, misperceptions, and short-term thinking. But this is a uniquely frustrating problem for me, since I've yet to come up with a solution that's politically viable. Neither party will nominate better candidates, no one will vote for third parties, and no one will support actual voting reform. So what do we do?

I have no idea. Maybe I should just move to Canada. They seem to be stable, above us on both conservative and liberal freedom indices, and a fair bit less partisan. The big problem, of course, is that I hate the cold.

New Zealand is always a substitute.

On a Personal Note

I'm less than six weeks from finishing this semester at community college, and less than two months from returning to a conventional university. Unfortunately, my work and familial obligations are doing their best to keep me from devoting the proper effort to academics. Revealed preferences are fun.

All this has got me thinking  about conscious living, interpersonal relationships, and egoism, but conclusions are a long way off. There's a lot of other things I'd like to write about, but again, there's no time to ruminate on them properly. I'm in the process of setting up a less public blog where I can reflect on various small things without the pressure to state things completely.

For the time being, I'm not going to worry about it. If something comes up that can be written out quickly, it will be; otherwise, this blog will be in effective hiatus until June. Hopefully I can resume regular posting at that time.

Year In Space

This blog is intentionally not focused on current events, but I'm making an exception to remind everyone that the NASA/Roscosmos Year In Space mission launches tomorrow from Baikonur Cosmodrome for the International Space Station.

It's a far cry from the duration called for by most Mars mission architectures, but this is a large step forward. Astronaut Scott Kelly will set a new duration record for American astronauts, while cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will spend more time in space than any Russian since the deorbiting of Mir. 

The third passenger on their Soyuz flight to the ISS, Gennady Padalka, has been practically forgotten by the media. Padalka will only spent the normal six months on orbit, but upon landing will emerge with the human time-in-space record.

Of course, it's not all butterflies and rainbows. Kelly and Kornienko will occupy slots that could have been assigned to other astronauts and cosmonauts, delaying when they get more flight assignments. Considering how much more science year-long missions will yield, it's entirely possible this is the new normal. However, the astronaut corps has shrunk significantly in the post-shuttle years, so I may be worrying about a non-issue.

Altogether, this is a very exciting time in our push to the planets. Let's hope for a nominal launch.

Smarter Every Day interviews Scott Kelly

Pi versus Tau: a case of nominative determinism?

Tomorrow is Pi Day, which to most people is a day to celebrate mathematics and pretend to like nerds. It seems like good, clean fun, but behind the false front, a battle rages on. Do we keep π, or abandon it in favor of τ?

For those who don't know, τ is a mathematical constant which can be approximated 6.2831853071... or precisely 2π. Many argue that τ is a more elegant and efficient way choice, and a better way to teach mathematics. But that debate is not what this post is about.

No, I want to investigate a different phenomenon: the effect one's name has on their position in the debate.

This first occurred to me when I was watching a Numberphile video on the debate. Brady Haran cleverly replaced letters from the debater's names with their respective constants. It's just two data points, but it got me thinking: do the letters in your name affect how your opinion?

Mere cleverness, or important evidence?

I wondered if this extended beyond Steve and Matt, so I started looking around. My name, in case you forgot, is Nathaniel. It has a T, like Steve, but also has an H right next to it. Where do I stand on the issue? Well, I think τ is more beautiful, but the switching costs are too high to attempt an actual change. I'd rather we just introduce the concept when teaching trigonometry.

My friends are relatively nerdy, but the sample size is too small to drawn any conclusions. I might be seeing a trend, but then again I might be fitting data to the theory. Until I see a rigorous psychology of science study on the subject, I'm putting this one down as "plausible."

No More Politics?

For some time, I've been disinterested in your everyday object-level politics. However, I've taken a sort of hiatus from even metapolitics, and it's quite pleasant. It's quite possible I'm not going to go back.

There's several reasons why this is the case. For one thing, it's draining. You argue and explain and grind away, and it never seems like you're making any progress. In the end, you're faced with a dilemma: explain the 101 material for the umpteenth time, or veer into more advanced territory that's off-putting to newcomers. A Grunted and Hinged post on beginners and burning out described this process in detail. My experiences with libertarianism/Objectivism conform pretty well to the model.

Politics is also mind-killery. I don't think I need to walk anybody through this one. We've all felt it, that frenzy when your beliefs are being attacked. We instantly lose all ability to reason, fixating on discrediting our opponent's position, no matter how eloquently the argue or how much evidence they put forward.

That sensation is a product of our ape brains, still mostly optimized for life on the savanna. To my knowledge, there isn't a direct solution for this, but there are a few hacks to avoid being in that situation to begin with. The most popular tactic is keeping your identity small--or, if you prefer more colloquial terms, "being independent." Of course, Independent and Person-With-A-Small-Identity are still identities, and people will attack you for them.

(If you're thinking "I could be independent without making that part of my identity," I'm afraid it's too late. You also just lost the game.)

Furthermore, there's usually a reason someone starts identifying with a particular ideology or movement. You don't wake up one day saying "I think I'll be a feminist!" Going back to Gruntled and Hinged:

Let’s oversimplify a bit, and presume that the only question that feminism seeks to answer is whether or not women and men are equal.  So you, New Feminist, get involved in feminism (for the purposes of this exercise, and because I’ve already slightly oversimplified, please assume you’re female). You start identifying as a feminist, and as a result start having conversations/arguments/discussions about whether or not men and women are equal.

I emphasize this point, not to comment on feminism, but because your beliefs necessarily contribute to your identity, which then contributes to your behaviors.

Take my own example. I decided I valued natural rights, the Constitution, and limited government, and consequently began thinking of myself as a libertarian. Since I was a libertarian, I began discussing libertarian ideas. Wasted countless hours on the internet arguing about politics, and wasted my vote* on Gary Johnson.

But what did all that accomplish? I stressed over things I couldn't control and didn't shift the political landscape significantly. Meanwhile, my education (both formal and informal) languished. I paid the price for that, too--itself a reason to get out.

So now, I'm realigning my identity away from politics. My beliefs have shifted** and so have my priorities. How I label myself is important, because it's a way of caching the self. What political label you use will impact the direction your beliefs update. As a libertarian, I became more anarchistic and extreme, as a radical centrist the reverse occurred.

You should also try to replace the symbol with the substance. For a long time, I called myself a nerd, because it seemed like an accurate identifier. Even if we ignore the social connotations, though, it wasn't very useful. Nerd implies a lot of things to different people. For me, however, it referred to a relatively succinct set of interests in ideaspace. Now, I'll say "I'm interested in philosophy and spaceflight" instead of introducing myself as nerd. I still am one, but a very particular type of nerd.

The same goes in politics, but that's a lumper's game. Nuance dies upon first contact with the political. If you want to talk about complex ideas intelligently, getting out of politics is the way to go.

*I don't actually consider my vote wasted, since Romney was guaranteed to win Kansas. You could argue that voting at all was a waste of time (especially since I had to do the mail-in forms), but I was 18 and really wanted to.

**More on that later.