School is all about signaling, not skill-building - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-credentials-20180211-story.html <comment><USER3> In my view, school does not admit to a singular purpose, even if a number of people seem to achieve similar results from it. Instead, different students can pursue different strategies through school, and get different things out of it. Even if signaling is a benefit of school, it doesn't need to be the only benefit.

School is a complex system. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt the pieces to make it do something useful for you. In short, hack school. It shocks me that a site devoted to "Hacker" news hasn't guessed that school is begging to be hacked, and makes me wonder how many true hackers there actually are.

Of course one possible hack is to follow a path of least resistance and emerge after 4 years with nothing but "signaling." But it's not the only hack. Signaling in the absence of real education could be viewed as a _pitfall_ of school, not its purpose. A dark pattern, if you will.

In another age, this message would have been expressed by elders to their children in some sort of patronizing way, such as: "What you get out of college depends on what you put into it." I've certainly told this to my kids, along with the somewhat more detailed explanation about hacking.

The coding interview is a clue. At its core is a question: "How did you hack school to your advantage?"

Can school be hack-proofed? Experience with complex systems suggests this might not be a good idea, as it can kill the good hacks along with the bad, or make even worse hacks emerge.

<comment><USER4> Well part of why I upvoted this is because it would have been useful information to me 15 years ago.

Certainly school can be used for any purpose (perhaps that's a truism). But the author's point also includes the fact that the market (and society) is largely indifferent to what you learn at school.

In order to "Hack" school we need to be real with ourselves about what the world after school looks like.

\- I've never been asked GPA once (one data point)

\- Most technical questions I get asked are basic and solvable with a hash map

\- I've never been asked to write a proof as part of an interview

\- My degrees (business/psychology) have never been useful in my career.

\- Many many people have asked my wear I went to college, and I can tell they care about the name of the school first and foremost.

\- Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)

<comment><USER5> * I've rarely been asked about my GPA either, which is good because I sucked. On the other hand, A good GPA would have made some things I wanted to do easier.

* Most technical questions are basic because most "technical" jobs are _very_ basic. However, there are people out there building operating systems kernels, secured software, and life-critical systems; I'm reasonably assured that you would have to demonstrate more than competence with a hash map.

* I too have never been asked to write a proof. But, thanks to my education, the techniques needed to write a proof are rather ingrained with how I understand writing code.

* I, too, ask people where they went to college, because if they went to the U. of Washington or Carnegie Mellon or someplace like that, I can't assume they'll know Kantian ethics but I can assume they'll have learned _something_ ; I can't make that assumption if they went to the U. of Phoenix, ITT Tech, or EPRI.

* Positions at the level of director do seem to be assigned by luck/politics/privilege. Positions at the level of internal medicine specialist, structural engineer, and the like tend not to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each).

Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you actually demonstrate basic programming skills very quick.

Software Engineering is a notable exception, most other fields don't quiz as part of the job interview process: soft skills and credentials or state licenses or bar exams are relied upon more heavily. Maybe signaling matters more in these fields? Again, signaling is no measure of real skill.

Obviously, like most people I'm upset about the pay-to-play scheme but in reality very, very few people choose that option. 99.9%+ of applications are not pay-to-play, so we should still hold a good deal of faith in our higher education system. It is imperfect and has many issues, but this article title is broadly incorrect about the purpose of higher education today.

edit:

> Researchers consistently find that most of education's payoff comes from > graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high > school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth > more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are > paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to > impart useful training?

My first company that hired me out of college got a much better deal waiting for me to complete my senior year. Yes, each year isn't worth the same. This makes sense. Senior year was my capstone -- building valuable communication skills in a team environment. Year 1? I was finishing the basics of CS 101. Of course the last year is worth more than the first.

Would you pay 50% the price for a half-finished version of Microsoft Word? Probably not. It'd be far less useful of a piece of software.

<comment><USER7> Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time?

Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day vs someone who is inconsistent.

<comment><USER8> Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work.

Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific tools and environments in order to actually study not to mention make any progress in the field are all about signaling.

<comment><USER9> The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?". It would be a peculiar coincidence if the vast majority of jobs required exactly the same amount of academic education. Why do so many people go on to do work that has little or nothing to do with their major?

Here in the UK, a large proportion of healthcare is delivered by healthcare professionals other than doctors. If I go to my GP (family doctor) with a minor ailment, I'm likely to be treated by a Nurse Practitioner, who may have a Master's degree in nursing or may have never attended college at all. If I have a minor surgery, the surgery might be performed by a Surgical Care Practitioner working under the supervision of a consultant surgeon.

Lambda School have conclusively shown that it doesn't take four years to make someone into an employable software developer. How many other job skills could be taught through a short bootcamp programme, intensive vocational training or on-the-job training?

<comment><USER6> Because most high school graduates don't have the soft skills (or the hard skills) to work in a corporate environment.

I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through 10-week coding programs. And it shows. They might've been taught a framework or a language, but their computer science skills aren't nearly as developed. Some things take years to click, and growth occurs from years of writing bad code.

<comment><USER10> College doesn't teach those soft skills. Jobs and skill training teach those skills

You don't need college to write years of bad code. Internships or hobby projects do fine.

<comment><USER6> The credential signifies that you indeed spent years writing bad code, and got better. Maybe it does have value there. Many companies are weary of hiring someone who has a few years of self-taught experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn't really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value of certification over actual learning"

Isn't this how Steve Jobs treated college? And "Apple" was his "diploma"?

<comment><USER12> One key thing this paragraph misses is the characterization of this sort of person. Imagine we have a person that would independently, without extrinsic reward or 'push', show up to classes completely of their own accord. And we must further assume that they would engage in all assignments and somehow try to regularly test their understanding - the feedback exams offer is _crucial_ to demonstrating understanding. And we assume they're doing well on Princeton quality and standard of work, all completely independently.

How did this person do in high school? Given high school is orders of magnitude more trivial, we can assume they were likely at or near the top of their classes, and probably would have shown remarkable results in skill assessment exams. And with that sort of motivation he also probably would have been involved in immense extracurricular and other such events. This person would likely have been able to get into any university he ever wanted.

Top universities do provide a certainly better than average education, but their main strength has nothing to do with their quality of education. It's the quality of their student body - which turns success stories into a self fulfilling prophecy. Imagine you start an 'basketball school' and only accept people that are at least 6'6", highly athletic, can dunk from _x_ feet, run 100 meters in _y_ seconds, etc. Go figure -- you're going to 'produce' a disproportionately huge number of NBA quality players simply because your admittance is already heavily biased to individuals who are already headed in that direction.

The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton which would be comparable to the sort of person that could get admitted to 'Basketball U'. Regardless of what happens during those 4 years, you're already almost certainly going to be ahead of 99% of the rest of the population. The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'. E.g. even if our basketball university had a pretty bad education system, you'd still see NBA quality players emerging from it at a way way higher rate than the population of non-admitted individuals.

<comment><USER13> Adult learners are a demographic that could be highly motivated as you describe but often wouldn't have any chance of getting in through the application process of an elite university. There are a lot of intelligent people out there who didn't engage well with school when they were young for whatever reason but come to place a high value on education later in their lives.

I think this group is quite poorly served by our current system.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. I was able to get into one of the best graduate programs in my field a few years after a mediocre undergraduate record. This took some preparation, but it came down to finding other avenues to prove myself. The committee knows your undergrad record doesn't mean much if it was many years ago. "What else have you got?" they might ask. It takes some effort and creativity, but it can be done.

Adults with a newfound motivation are valuable and they know that. But just saying so isn't enough.

<comment><USER13> That's awesome that it worked out so well for you! It's not something that I've tried myself, just the impression that I have. I do wonder though if grad school admissions might be another story compared to undergrad, since they probably see a lot more older applicants with work experience and are possibly more used to adjusting their evaluations based on what the most recent/relevant signals are (just as businesses do when hiring).

But leaving during undergrad (or just never going to college) then excelling in self-learning and industry seems to put you in a much more awkward position when it comes to continuing onward with education. You are far beyond most undergrad-level courses, but in most cases you need that bachelor's degree to even be considered for grad-level programs--or at least I believe that's the case? You end up needing to waste years of your life and tons of money just to qualify for the courses that would actually teach you something new.

So perhaps the problem is as much that there just aren't compelling tracks offered to people who don't fit neatly into the lines as it is about admissions flexibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be cool if early school was like a video game tutorial, to help children see their place in the world at large, as well as humanity's place in the cosmos:

 _Welcome to Earth.

You are a human, and this is [country/city], in the year 2XXX.

We share this planet with many species, but we are the only ones we know that can talk and invent and build.

The light in the sky is a star, and there are other planets around it, but this is the only one we know that has life.

There are many other stars out there that you can see at night, and all of them have planets of their own, and maybe someday you will visit them.

You are in school so you can learn how to do what you want._

...and so on, while showing a montage of places, creatures and inventions. :)

History classes should focus on the inconveniences and uglinesses our species has plodded through (" _We did not always have cars or phones or toilets.._ "), not just a droning journal of events.

Maybe some of you would be interested in creating a YouTube series like this? Perhaps like a Kurzgesagt [0] For Kids?

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q)

</comment><comment><USER16> Crazy story: my son actually did what the author suggested, he talked his way into a free education at Princeton!!!

He audited all the classes he wanted to... no diploma, but what a great experience (and a great story....)

From the article:

Ponder this: If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn't really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — ....

<comment><USER17> Not a US citizen, but AFAIK, a course includes lectures, office hours, assignments etc. How did he manage to fully understand the materials without all the resources that are provided only for registered students?

<comment><USER18> Also not a US citizen and I don't know how it works at Princeton, but in my experience, getting actionable feedback on assignments is rare. You may get told where your mistakes are, but not how you should have done it instead. Most of the value of assignments is in simply doing them; that forces you to review the necessary material.

As for office hours, I never went to any, but I assume that they're not going to check your student ID, just as they don't check before lectures.

<comment><USER19> At my UK uni (some time back) we had tutorials and "office hours". Tutorials would recap lecture material and have question/answer sessions, and set "homework" questions; and be optional. Office hours would give chance to talk with the professor, you just queued outside, or signed up for a time slot.

Tutorials were run by TAs recruited from the body of PhD students and so could be of mixed quality (my metaphysics tutor was better than the lecturer), but would at least have value in repitition.

Libraries were vital to me. As at the time were computer facilities (MathCAD, Maple, Excel, Fortran, etc.). For some of my courses there were laboratories (material science), and for Art History there were trips and a special picture library.

You could sit in the back of lectures back then, but I think they check your ID nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Come on, have we really swung so far on the "game is rigged" and "college isn't what it used to be" pendulum that we're acting like college doesn't build useful skills. Before college I had never written a program in my life outside of my TI-83. Coming out of college I was able to secure a full time job at a highly respected software company. They didn't hire me because my program was great (it wasn't that great), but they hired me because I can code well, or at least I like to think so.

<comment><USER21> We're in the minority. Most professions aren't engineering. Or medicine.

Think of the average student graduating with a generic business degree. What actual skills does this person possess after 4 years of schooling?

This is why so many Fortune 500 companies have new grad trainee programs that they funnel people through. The fact is, most of these generic "business" jobs can be done by anyone with a few months of on the job learning.

How many project managers, marketing managers, account executives, sales people, HR professionals, tech support, etc. could've stepped into those same roles without spending 4 years at an extremely expensive party (as they would have 50 years ago)?

<comment><USER22> Surprisingly few. New grad training programs still depend on the "grad" part.

It's not like Fortune 500 businesses are stupid. If they could hire random high school grads for all their jobs and pay them less, don't you think they would? As you point out, college degree requirements have not always existed, they were added. Chesterton's Fence is a useful mental guide here. People don't generally make things harder on themselves for no reason.

<comment><USER10> Many many jobs today that require a college degree used to require a high school diploma. Yes those require intelligence and studiousness in varying degrees, but these skills can be assessed by interviews and hiring people in entry level positions for 4 years (or less!), not making them sit through irrelet college classes.

Half of a US college degree curriculum (the liberal arts distribution) isn't part of the curriculum at all in the UK for a science degree; are those UK degrees producing useless employees?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I strongly disagree. _Elite_ colleges are all about signaling. But I don't doubt for a second that my CS degree taught me an enormous amount - <USER2> skill-building, lots of abstract thinking - that I wouldn't have been able to achieve as quickly as anywhere else.

<comment><USER24> Okay but how about this: Say you actually dropped out of your degree one day before completing it. Skillwise you are almost the same but your compensation will take a drastic hit on average.

<comment><USER25> It's not a good inference from the employer's perspective that he is skillwise almost the same. The dropout happened for a reason, i.e. he was not on track to meet the degree requirements, which at least creates doubt about the underlying skill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Article was fine until this:

      These behaviors make perfect sense if — and only if —
      employers are eager to detect workers who dutifully
      confirm to social expectations. In a society where
      parents, teachers and peers glorify graduation, failing
      classes and dropping out are deviant acts.

This is a misunderstanding. Employers pay attention to qualifications, e.g. on a CV, as an informational shortcut. If you don't get the qualification, then you are pooling with everyone else who didn't - including nonconformists, but also the incompetent and lazy. If you get the qualification, even only just, then you are in the category with everyone else who did, including brilliant top achievers.

Maybe employers do care about social conformity, maybe even overwhelmingly so - but this evidence doesn't show that. Looks like a journalist misreading the academic literature.

<comment><USER27> The author is an econ professor at George Mason.

<comment><USER28> The author has a book on the subject and is one of the main proponents of signalling in education :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In an ideal world, school is great. But, in a real world, it monopolizes knowledge and makes a huge propaganda that it _is_ the only way to learn. We have been doing this propaganda for decades.

Then, parents, who don't know any better, think that they need to send their kids to colleges _at all cost_. They don't even care much about which college or which subject it is. Then, some business capitalizes on that by making a low-quality college. Then, we have this strange issue with student's debt where the student is not really hireable.

I talked to my colleagues at Google anonymously through Blind. And a few, even at Google, said (and many agreed) that either they took the student loan or they became a drug dealer (or something equally bad). I was quite surprised that even googlers would hold this kind of views.

I agree though that being $xx,xxx in debt is better than being a drug dealer. But, in my opinion, those cannot possibly be the only two choices. I didn't grow up in US, so maybe I don't understand the situation here.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just like in startups, you get what you measure. In school, you measure by grades, so you get students who play the rules to get good grades.

Also see Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[0]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER31> Because this is Hacker News, let's stick with technology: have none of you guys ever experienced the power gap? Seriously?

I went to a decent school, not great but pretty well known. I had friends who went to community colleges and transferred to a school like mine, and friends who went to Ivy League schools. Our senior year, the Ivy guys were writing their own toy operating systems and compilers, and I was reading shitty PowerPoints about how one might do that. The lower tier group? I was still helping them with their homework, which was basically sorting algorithms. One of them barely understood classes, and one of them was _still_ struggling with properly constructing for loops after years of education. All of us paid absurd amounts of money to be where we were.

The Ivy guys were also well-off and came from good homes; that just means that money begets power begets money, not that their degrees were worthless paper. It makes sense that a professor of economics would write tripe like this, maybe it applies in his field but not here.

<comment><USER32> I've had this conversation with a coworker who was frustrated that people with wealth could leverage that wealth to create more opportunities for themselves. My response is essentially: "isn't that what you want to do for yourself?" He seems to think it is more fair if someone with less wealth got access to those opportunities, instead of the people with wealth. How is that more fair? Why does it matter who gets the opportunities, as long as they're going to people with a low risk of wasting them?

<comment><USER31> I agree with you 100%, the point was that degrees are not worthless, not that the system is inherently unfair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Researchers consistently find that most of education's payoff comes from > graduation, from crossing the academic finish line.

Not even. Just being able to show that you "went" to Harvard is a powerful enough of a signal. You can join, drop out immediately after, start a startup, fail, an then likely end up somewhere really prestigious anyway.

<comment><USER34> Yes, but Harvard etc is super special snowflake exception.

<comment><USER33> My point is that signaling works without any sort of coursework. The instant you make it into Stanford, you're a Stanford kid, which puts you into an elite group of desirable employees.

And of course these colleges are special snowflakes, they wouldn't be signals otherwise. Nobody cares if you went to a community college down the street, it associates no household name with you.

<comment><USER34> No, community college diploma is a strong signal compared to no diploma. You seem too preoccupied by concerns of top few percent.

<comment><USER33> Sure, I suppose you're right. I'm mentioning these top colleges because we're on HN, which is heavily oriented around the Bay Area tech ecosystem, which loves to dip into that pool.

<comment><USER34> I agree. Most of discussion is irrelevant to most HN people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's study showed that, if teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from children, then the children's performance was enhanced.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect)

</comment><comment><USER36> Technologies like online education would crush the existing education system if the playground is fair. Unfortunately the latter has public funding in it and prevents the society from moving forward.

<comment><USER37> Except online education is dominated by the existing players, and they are charging the same kind of money you would pay in person. If you're getting a STEM degree especially, Coursera will charge you something like $600/credit.

This is because of, wait for it, signaling. You don't actually need all that much education to be an entry level software engineer, especially outside silicon valley. But you do need those letters after your name.

<comment> barry-cotter Georgia Tech On Campus M.Sc. CS $40,000

Georgia Tech Online M.Sc. CS $8,000

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think the article seriously underestimated the effort to make it through a thre year degree at an elite college - let's say an MIT mechanical engineering degree - my understanding it is 80 hour weeks, with yearly inflection points where the faculty will try and eliminate the bottom 10% or so. get a first or 2.1 there and you are not signalling attendance but genuine effort. (Any alumni able to comment? )

There are signals and signals and disparaging an entire school is ... unfair.

<comment><USER39> I went to Stanford for Computer Science, and from my friends who went to Ohio State, equivalent courses sound significantly harder there to me - not much grade inflation, larger amounts of work. It's anecdotal but I think the primary difference is the power of the network you interact with - which feeds a virtuous cycle of ambition and drive, given how empowering having that network is. Not the difficulty or rigor of coursework, except in marginal ways (for instance, d.school was nascent in popularity when I was at Stanford, so I suppose I got a sneak peek into design thinking before it got more popular elsewhere) but that's not a dependable advantage of elite schools IMO and I probably would have run into the concepts in industry either way.

<comment><USER5> Ohio State is a fairly well respected CS program. (And I'm not just saying that because one of my advisor's more successful students is on the faculty.)

[https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science- sch...](https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science- schools/computer-science-rankings)

US News puts them at #30, but that's really the 13th group---there's a lot of ties.

I think I disagree with that list though---there's many schools higher in the list that I've never read a paper from. They can't be good.

(UT Austin has dropped to 10th!! I think I want my money back.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> School has been undermined in some cases to be a signaling thing because it's the last legal way to discriminate at scale, especially in lower rigor subjects.

</comment><comment><USER41> >> Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University and author of "The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money."

Here I was thinking this was an article that genuinely sought to engage my opinion, when in truth it was only an advert for someone's book.

I think I'll make it a habit from now on to scroll all the way to the bottom of opinion articles to save myself some time.

<comment><USER42> Trying to engage people's opinion is generally an advert for someone's ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are some things very wrong with the American education system, but I suspect a focus on "signalling" and a desire for job training over general education is going to miss all of the important ones.

In the first place, the concern only with reading, writing, and 'rithmatic along with standardized testing are probably destroying most of the value of the public education system. Thanks, everyone. Good job.

Secondly, the belief that any bachelor's degree is as good as any other, along with the corresponding rise of for-profit educational institutions (along with not-for-profit ones which behave like for-profit institutions) leads directly to this whole signalling flap.

A degree from Joe's Diploma Mill is a bad signalling indicator because the education Joe provides is crap. A degree from Stanford is a good signal because Stanford provides a good education. Don't go to Joe's; it's a waste of money and time.

Back at UT, many students and the occasional visiting job recruiter complained that the classes didn't cover "job-relevant" skills. (x86 assembler, anyone?) On the other hand, those same recruiters kept coming back, and showering money on recent grads; something they notably didn't do at, say, ITT Tech or DeVry, in spite of the fact that those schools taught nothing but "job-related skills."

Sure, a degree from Stanford is a signal that you are smart and hard-working. That's because Stanford is hard to get a degree from unless you are smart and hard-working. Some of that is simply jumping-through-hoops-ism, but most of it is because Stanford requires you to learn hard shit. And that's why smart and hard-working students go there.

(End of part 3; see part 2: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409381))

</comment><comment><USER5> (I'm going to break up my initial response to this article into several pieces, because if I don't, everyone will read the first sentence, down vote it, and ignore the rest. Plus, it gives everyone an opportunity to downvote me several times. :-))

Is it ironic that this was written by Bryan Caplan, Ph.D., a professor[1] of Economics[2] at George Mason University?

[1] I'm getting a certain amusement from the image of Prof. Caplan, at a meeting of the current Economics faculty discussing prospective faculty candidates, voting against all the U. of Chicago grads in favor of Earl, who has a GED and audited a few economics classes.

[2] Economics? Really? The most signally of the signaling degrees. The field which, aside from its ability to demonstrate rightthink, is worthless outside academia and politics, not least because of its long history of disconnection with reality.

(End part 1: mockery.)

<comment><USER43> My understanding is that of all schools of economics, the Chicago school is the least disconnected from reality, in that it rightly recognizes its own "dismal" science as a social science first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The article gives the impression that he is a professor at Princeton but he is not. He is a professor at George Mason University.

The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking that:

> If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn't really need to apply or > pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, > I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; > indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end > of four years at Princeton,

<comment><USER45> He got his PhD from Princeton though. That's probably why he mentions Princeton as his example.

<comment><USER44> It's super ironic that he would use the sleigh of hand in his writing in that way. Sure at the end it's disclosed that he is not (currently) teaching at Princeton.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Author is in one of my favorite EconTalk podcast episodes: "Bryan Caplan on the Case Against Education"

Probably similar content covered, but it's a good discussion. And he covers some of the points I see people trying to argue in the comments here.

[0] [http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against- edu...](http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone else feel like college is mostly about class gate-keeping? I am not saying education isn't important.

In these digital times is paying $100k+ really necessary to get the skills you need for a good career? or is it more about separating the haves from the have nots using a very expensive piece of paper?

</comment><comment><USER48> All these anti-education articles are pretty tedious. If you believe it's the schools who have it all wrong by teaching subjects that aren't useful for building phone apps, you're probably already pretty set in your worldview.

<comment><USER49> The article clearly is _pro_ education. It shows that the system is less so. Example quote:

> _Almost everyone pays lip service to the glories of education, but actions > speak louder than words. Ponder this: If a student wants to study at > Princeton, he doesn't really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply > show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make > near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly > curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, > though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The > fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of > dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value > of certification over actual learning._

> _You can see the same priorities when students pick their classes. Students > notoriously seek out "easy A's" — professors who give high grades in > exchange for little work._

Also, some comments here somehow manage to read into the article that it claims that you don't learn anything. Even just the quote above shows the opposite when the author describes the difference between going to Princeton lectures for free or for a piece of paper. From the second quoted paragraph, which is as testable statement, it seems that in practice _education_ is not the main priority - and I don't see how one could interpret the article in a way that he supports that. It clearly is a criticism of those sad facts.

The author clearly shows what he would like even in just this single sentence alone:

> _indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts_

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Has anyone seen a framework for companies to screen emotional skills such as resilience, drive and internal motivations for candidates and have done it well?

<comment><USER51> The voight kompff test is still in beta. People change over time and have complex motives which change in different environments. For instance, I know I work harder when my coworkers are more personally friendly, but generally despise work-related social events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Or both you know, that's also an option.

</comment><comment><USER35> Education = Teaching + Coaching

</comment><comment><USER53> It's an arms race tainting a lot more than education. Hopefully we can UBI + healthcare a détente.

</comment><comment><USER54> There's a long history behind education, types of it, and the reasons, rationales, and interests behind these. One of the better synopses of these I've found is Wes Cecil's "Myths of the Modern American Mind: Education" (61 minutes, audio only):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c)

He traces the history back to Babylonia and scribal training, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, medieval education, scholaticism and the rise of the Seven Liberal Arts with their Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Maths, Geometry, Music (or harmony) and Astronomy), the emergence of the modern physical and social sciences, and the Prussian Educational System which is the foundation of contemporary Western education.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education)

Throughout virtually all of this there's been a sharp division between _intellectual_ and _technical_ education. The _liberal_ arts were distinguished from the _technical_ arts, also called Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts), servile arts, or vulgar arts, originally: tailoring and weaving, agriculture, architecture and masonry, warfare and hunting, trade, cooking, and blacksmithing and metalurgy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae)

Since 1800 or so, the distinctions have largely been between pure skills, including trade, vocational, and technical skills (including STEM), professional training (law, medicine, military, religion, and general administration), and humanities or liberal arts. The relative prestige of these has shifted fairly markedly over this period, as well as the increased specialisation within academic curricula and programmes, with the University of Virginia offering eight fields of study in 1825, and Johns Hopkins University using the term "major" for the first time in 1877. The emergence of technical schools, such as M.I.T. (1861) with specialised courses of study helped drive this transformation.

Cecil's treatment is on the light side, but engaging.

John Stuart Mill's observations on the indoctrinational role of education are also interesting. As others have said, schools play multiple roles.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_role_of_universities_and_primary_education/)

[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't really want to dig into the details of the arguments for the value of a "generalized, liberal arts education" here, mostly because I need to do some research on those arguments before evaluating them.

But, on the other hand, I really do believe that an education in ye olde trivium ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium)), quadrivium ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium)), and a number of other areas are important for the citizens of a modern, democratic republic, quite aside from how "Literacy and numeracy are vital, but few of us use history, poetry, higher mathematics or foreign languages after graduation."

I see this education as important on at least two levels. First, to fight the natural human tendency to assume that everyone else is like us (and that anyone who is different is deviant): we're all programmers here, right? And anyone who doesn't think in discrete, logical steps, is the bizarre alien _them,_ right?

More seriously, I had to take Texas government and history classes in college, the requirement for which (a history professor informed us with glee) came out of a number of soldiers from Texas who were captured during the Korean War and who decided to stay in China after the war. (Honestly, I have no idea how those things fit together.) But those classes and others like them, while not directly benefiting me as a computer programmer, did provide some background and common ground between me and a huge number of other people who would otherwise have nothing in common with me.

Secondly, to fight the natural tendency for someone who is well skilled in a certain field to assume that field is all that exists. (You should recognize this from this very forum, where people suggest technological fixes for problems which are not technological in nature. And yes, there are problems which are not technological nature.)

As for the wisdom of the students, choosing easy classes and complaining about those on topics they'll never use in real life? I took Spanish as a foreign language which I never really learned and promptly forgot, took four semesters to get through two semesters of calculus (badly; all my math be discrete), and those damn semesters of government and history. Guess what? None of those things were useful to me in my subsequent career. Nope, not even calculus, that horrid waste of time and grade points.

On the other hand, _I_ regard my lack of knowledge as a bad thing. A usable foreign language would have been nice. Other programmers do use calculus; I just had to avoid those jobs.

So, yeah, I pretty much disagree with everything in this article.

(End of part 2. See part 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409228))

</comment><comment><USER55> "You study arcane subjects year after year, knowing you'll never use most of what you learned after graduation"

Well, that wasn't true for me, and I'm pretty sure for those in engineering or science, it isn't, but even the history, philosophy, and economics courses I took I recall and use. Even Steve Jobs, who merely audited a class on calligraphy, took a great value from it.

The fundamental flaw of Capland argument, who seems to be pushing this theme for years, is to view education purely in terms of economic benefit. It could simultaneously be true that the vast majority of your salary comes from signalling, but it could also be true that you gained great value from your education. Not everyone who gets an advanced education tries to maximize salary.

Capland's analysis, for example, would completely ignore the value of someone who chose to become a teacher or open source contributor.

Also, by induction, you could apply his argument to high school. Do we have evidence during the industrial revolution where blue collar factory work started to require more than an 8th grade education, that it made any difference besides signalling on salary?

Or, if you look at developing economies, where people often experience significant increases in wages as they move up the industrial ladder, sometimes without even full literacy, but merely from on the job experience. Should we assume education isn't worthwhile if you can't show a correlation between education and wages other than signalling?

One of the frustrating things about these kinds of economic analyses is that they narrowing look at only a sliver of what it is to be a human being, or the potential positive market externalities by having educated population. If we just measure the overall social improvements from the education of women, not in terms of individual wage performance, but in terms of overall health of society itself, it can't be reduced to a micro-analysis.

As a side note, I've seen Bryan's work forwarded within libertarian and right wing forums, in large part, to justify arguments to defund and dismantle support for college, both from a cultural aspect (Colleges seen as liberal/left institutions) but also from a notion that they don't want the government funding it. The fact that he's funded by the Cato Institute raises my suspicion that there's a political angle involved.

Even if you could argue college is not producing economic gains, but merely a signal, one has to look at a future where structural unemployment from automation may make a lot of work unneccessary, period. Do we eliminate education when work is no longer a necessity? Or could it be, that it might be better if people have a lifelong opportunity for intellectual enlightenment, it might be cheaper than funding prisons to house them, or falling back to religious institutions to give humans something to do that has meaning besides straight up consumption.

<comment> barry-cotter > "You study arcane subjects year after year, knowing you'll never use most of > what you learned after graduation" Well, that wasn't true for me, and I'm > pretty sure for those in engineering or science, it isn't, but even the > history, philosophy, and economics courses I took I recall and use. Even > Steve Jobs, who merely audited a class on calligraphy, took a great value > from it.

The average graduate of a major in a foreign language can't speak it at a professional level. Given that I think we can at least say the average person's high school foreign language study is totally wasted. The average US citizen doesn't know each state has two Senators. People who retain knowledge that they were not originally interested in and use regularly are abnormal, nerds. Most people retain astonishingly little. I know someone with a Geography degree who couldn't identify the major rivers and mountain ranges of Europe on an unlabelled map.

> The fundamental flaw of Capland argument, who seems to be pushing this theme > for years, is to view education purely in terms of economic benefit. It > could simultaneously be true that the vast majority of your salary comes > from signalling, but it could also be true that you gained great value from > your education. Not everyone who gets an advanced education tries to > maximize salary.

That's not his argument. His argument isn't just that education is in large part wasteful signalling. It's also unpleasant. Most people care as little for literature as I do for American football. Forcing them to learn about it leads to no lasting knowledge or appreciation and makes their lives actively worse.

> Also, by induction, you could apply his argument to high school. Do we have > evidence during the industrial revolution where blue collar factory work > started to require more than an 8th grade education, that it made any > difference besides signalling on salary?

Average education levels in England went down during the Industrial Revolution, not up, as manual labour became less skilled.

>Or, if you look at developing economies, where people often experience significant increases in wages as they move up the industrial ladder, sometimes without even full literacy, but merely from on the job experience.

Yes, we can see that education is over supplied on a strictly economic basis if we look at China, which grew richer much, much faster than it grew educated once Deng opened it up, or if we compare changes in education levels with changes in economic growth rates. No relationship.

> Should we assume education isn't worthwhile if you can't show a correlation > between education and wages other than signalling?

No, education is pleasant for some, just as spending time with friends is, or smoking. But we shouldn't subsidise smoking and make non-smokers pay.

> One of the frustrating things about these kinds of economic analyses is that > they narrowing look at only a sliver of what it is to be a human being, or > the potential positive market externalities by having educated population.

If there are externalities the government should subsidise education. It does, to an extent far above any plausible positive externalities. The credentialism this makes possible is a massive negative externality.

> If we just measure the overall social improvements from the education of > women, not in terms of individual wage performance, but in terms of overall > health of society itself, it can't be reduced to a micro-analysis.

Oh yes it can. If you can point to what health of a society means we can make a first pass at measuring it.

> Even if you could argue college is not producing economic gains, but merely > a signal, one has to look at a future where structural unemployment from > automation may make a lot of work unneccessary, period. Do we eliminate > education when work is no longer a necessity?

No, for the same reason we won't eliminate drinking coffee or walking in the park. We're rich. We like it, we can afford it. Let's do it.

> Or could it be, that it might be better if people have a lifelong > opportunity for intellectual enlightenment, it might be cheaper than funding > prisons to house them, or falling back to religious institutions to give > humans something to do that has meaning besides straight up consumption.

Intellectual pleasure is consumption, a pleasure for a relatively small minority of people. School is the closest to prison most people get, the most locked down, unfree environment they will ever encounter, sitting for hours doing as they are told, when they are told, asking permission to use the bathroom.

<comment><USER55> >It's also unpleasant. Most people care as little for literature as I do for American football. Forcing them to learn about it leads to no lasting knowledge or appreciation and makes their lives actively worse.

>School is the closest to prison most people get, the most locked down, unfree environment they will ever encounter, sitting for hours doing as they are told, when they are told, asking permission to use the bathroom.

Summary: Kids hate school. I don't wanna eat my veggies. Your conclusion: compulsory education is bad. My conclusion: make education fun and delightful. Look at the Finnish model for example.

Even if most of humanity could survive economically, not being literate, the world is far better off with universal education and literacy in innumerable ways.

It's shocking to see someone even arguing that kids shouldn't be compelled to be educated. Perhaps you could argue that adults shouldn't, but education overall in sociological studies has been shown to be an inoculation against violence.

Hatred of having to learn things you don't want to learn is not a condemnation of education. People often don't even know whether or not they will like something until they are exposed to it, and anyone with children knows this, how "I don't wanna do this" can suddenly turn into "hey, can you drive me to class, I don't want to miss this"

I absolutely hated history class in high school. I hated economics and philosophy in college. Until after I had taken them, I then became intensely interested in the subjects and voraciously read everything I could find.

We are headed into a world where people won't be able to delegate critical thinking skills to institutions, because institutions will have trust in them destroyed by fakery everywhere. Teaching people to think critically and be skeptical, to reserve judgement, demand peer reviewed facts, to hedge against rash action will be critical to stability in society in the future IMHO.

> Oh yes it can. If you can point to what health of a society means we can > make a first pass at measuring it.

Many studies have correlated the education of women with numerous variables that represent non-economic quality of life: reduction in infant mortality, increases in life expectancy, reductions of violence. The UN and OECD have many variables beyond economics that measure well being. There are even surveys of overall satisfaction and happiness.

I also question conclusions that people "don't use" stuff they learn in college. That treats learning as a vocational enterprise. You don't just _apply_ specific things you've be taught by rote memorization and practice, but you develop connections between subjects you've only briefly been exposed to, that can affect your decisions later in life, sometimes serendipitously and unconsciously. The same people who say they never use algebra or calculus, end up solving problems in Excel using the same skills they learned solving word problems in school.

I took 4 years of French in high school. I forgot most of it. However, when I travel, most of the latin roots I learned have helped me decipher signs in countries where I couldn't even speak the language beyond Helloy. And the experience of what I did wrong in French, later helped me learn Mandarin by avoiding the behaviors that turned me off in French.

I hated taking "required" classes in college. Now I am glad I did, because I was so narrow minded and pigheaded at that age. I also used to hate travel, really hate it. I was introverted, bored of long rides, uncomfortable in foreign lands where I didn't understand anything. But after being dragged all over the world, traveling and living abroad, my perspective on many things changed.

Too many people want to live circumscribed in a bubble. Education in all its forms, be it primary school, college, voracious reading, or travel, moving people outside their comfort zone has many benefits.

Eat your veggies, they're good for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I get where the author is coming from, and agree that higher ed isn't particularly efficient and has some serious problems. And yes, it is a 'game' to an extent. I've worked with 100+ colleges & universities and found their approach to educating large numbers of students to be sorely in need of revision. However, I also found this article simplistic and very much the product of an economist with a particular agenda rather than someone with more of a background in learning whose take on it is reasoned and informed.

First, and this is important, he seems to value only knowledge/information currently known. Part of learning is forgetting, and knowing that you've forgotten something. His argument doesn't take this into account at all, and essentially places equal value in someone who never knew something vs someone who once learned something but forgot it. These are not equivalent at all, but its a very economist way of reducing the world and accidentally losing fidelity in the process.

A great deal of higher ed is about exposure to the breadth of ideas that make up our current understanding of the world. You get a chance to explore fields of study and use frameworks, processes, etc from them. All these shape your perception and approach to life, help you discover what motivates you, and provide on-ramps for re-learning later on. Contrast this with someone who's never been exposed to things, and they simply wouldn't know what they didn't know. In the age of Google and being able to find a solution to anything, you still need to know what question to ask, and that requires an exposure to different fields and approaches and to know what you once knew or were exposed to, but have since forgotten. It builds intellectual humility, versus the self-assuredness of ignorance.

Next, the turn of phrase in the intro that students "have to soak up precious knowledge like a sponge" is basically the theory that the mind is an empty vessel to be filled, which is a common misunderstanding of how humans learn. We learn through interaction with our environment, and the things we learn are as much perspective, approach & process, etc as it is about fact-based knowledge. Not sure if author is using this term interchangeably with learning, but based on other reading it seems like he may not have strongest grasp of this distinction.

These learning science nuances are just one thing the author has a blind spot for. I also don't see him mentioning anything about the role of education beyond simply a job market feeder. This isn't and hasn't ever been the sole metric higher education has ever held itself to - only trade schools focus on this metric. It's incredibly reductive to view education in this way, not least of which because you lose a necessary precondition for successful democracy (an informed citizenry).

Here's another telling quote, clearly showing his argument has a pretty narrow focus:

> Researchers consistently find that most of education's payoff comes from > graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high > school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth > more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are > paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to > impart useful training?

According to Amazon reviews of this guy's book, he likes to set up a lot of straw men, and this is an example of one. Of course employers are _not_ necessarily paying for acquired skills, but they're also not just paying for signaling (his focus) - they could be paying for acquired experience, perspective, demonstration of sticking things through, self-knowledge, etc.

Again I think it's important to look at the words he's using to get a sense for whether he understands the nuances of what he's talking about. "Skill" is a particular thing that most of higher ed intentionally doesn't focus on because they're not trade schools. Either he doesn't quite get that, or he's choosing to reinterpret education's purpose for the sake of his straw man. If we reduce everything to a market-oriented "skill", knowledge, theory, perspective, etc have no value. A good economist doesn't leave value on the table like that, unless they're trying to fit it into their particular argument.

His anecdote about a guerrilla student auditing a degree's worth of classes and not having them valued isn't a particularly smart take even from an economics perspective. That's a one-off libertarian fantasy argument of sticking it to the system. At scale this idea collapses, because a) schools would crack down on free-riders, and b) once this good is more available in the market, the market would respond by pricing it better. But with an n=1, the market can't price it, because they don't know what it means. Did this student actually show up to these classes, or just say they did? Did they get to know their classmates and learn from them? Did they understand anything they were being taught? As an entrepreneur who's had to hire quite a bit, I'd see a prospective employee's claim of having attended Princeton for four years but not getting a degree as needing _serious_ verification.

I think an economist's perspective is important to add to the discussion on how to make higher ed better, and signaling is an area that higher ed needs to get better at (see microcredentialing as one solution for instance). However, while the author makes some good points about grade / degree inflation and alludes to a few other things that really matter like rising costs, I also don't think he's got the macro perspective really well sorted, at least from the blind spots above - either he's willfully ignoring them for sake of argument, or genuinely doesn't know them because he wasn't exposed enough to those fields. Teaching a couple years at Princeton doesn't make one an expert on the system as a whole, much as just getting an education doesn't mean you know the first thing about how education works. Elite colleges work very differently from other forms of post-secondary education, and lessons learned & opinions formed there are not necessarily broadly applicable. Elite colleges are so much more about signaling that its easy to over-index on that and form a theory that sounds nice but isn't very accurate.

Any call for blowing up a system needs to be put in a larger context that any large organization / institution is going to be inherently pretty inefficient, but this doesn't mean the absence of it is a good alternative. Thing is he has a particular POV on this, if you read more of his bio [1]. He works in a very libertarian-focused economics dept at GWU and is funded by folks that are taking a particular agenda toward education and have taken a (highly unusual) active role in faculty selection [2]. This background alone shouldn't be disqualifying (lots of agendas exist in ed, good to have diversity of perspectives), but can be a lens through with you read this and whether he's being intellectually honest in all his arguments.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george- mas...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mason.html)

</comment><comment><USER57> Admissions based on standardized test scores ONLY. Make colleges co-sign loans. Fixed it.

<comment><USER25> The usual complaint about wealthy families buying college access is explicitly standardized test prep courses and tutors.

<comment> barry-cotter Why Elites Dislike Standardised Testing

> It is absolutely true that the SAT is the reason this scandal occurred. But > for standardized testing requirements, the millionaires and celebrities > charged in this scheme would not have needed to search for "side doors" to > get their children into elite colleges; they could have walked right in > through the front.

...

> SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable > with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly > heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child's IQ is the IQ of the > child's parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That > means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average > kids and higher than average incomes.

> The educational attainment of an SAT taker's parents is about as strongly > correlated with higher scores as high income is; the median student whose > parents hold graduate degrees scores a 560 on critical reading and a 576 on > math, only slightly lower than the richest students in the dataset by > income, and a full standard deviation higher than students whose parents > hold only high school diplomas.

[https://quillette.com/2019/03/13/standardized-testing-and- me...](https://quillette.com/2019/03/13/standardized-testing-and-meritocracy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The upper class view education as necessary for signaling, the middle class view it as necessary to build skills, and the lower class view it as useless.

</comment><comment><USER59> The main problem is that students in the US are insanely busy. The curriculum is substandard no matter where you go. In the future, I'm hoping to see more individual studying encouraged by the school. It's a good skill to pick up, esp considering skills might age faster.

Classes are a waste of time, out of the 1.5 hrs, there's maybe 20 minutes of content.

Teachers tend to be full of themselves and incompetent.

Professors are busy with research, grants etc. curricula tends to be out of date.

God when I think about the shit I could have done in the 16 years that I spent in school I legit want to puke.

But the worst people are the administrators. I'm yet to see a single school administrator make a rational decision. This is particularly apparent in the responses to school shootings. Yeah, make it more like prisons, thats are gonna help. Also the prevalence of women in school administration is not good for the male school population, they make decisions that tend to ignore certain gender differences.

Don't even get me started on the idiocy that is school athletics.

<comment><USER60> Why didn't you drop out then?

<comment><USER59> Visa.

<comment><USER60> So you added to the demand for this otherwise mediocre product (education), and then wonder why the product quality isn't better? I think it is just supply-demand economics.

<comment><USER34> In my opinion all education criteria must be eliminated as soon as possible from all immigration rules worldwide, but until then, what can I do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cell Biologists Often Skip a Simple Test That Could Verify Their Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/12/10/368776420/scientists-often-skip-a-simple-test-that-could-verify-their-work

<comment><USER2> Specifically, biologists working with cells. I clicked on this expecting something that was relevant to science in general. It's not.

<comment><USER3> We s/scientists/cell biologists/'d the title.

<comment><USER2> Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


This Might Hurt: Archaic Instruments from the Attic of a Montreal Hospital - <AUTHOR> http://thewalrus.ca/this-might-hurt/

<comment><USER2> Why is the electro-coagulator under 'quackery'? It was undoubtedly dramatically effective for its day.</comment>


6-8 Weeks Until Bitcoin Debit/Credit Card, says BitInstant - <AUTHOR> http://codinginmysleep.com/6-8-weeks-until-bitcoin-debitcredit-card-says-bitinstant/ <comment><USER2> I hope it's for real.

I was just looking for a backup debit card for international travel. This would give me a low-risk but high-utility reason to finally try bitcoin. And avoid opening another damn bank account

<comment><USER3> An honest question: assuming you have more than 1 credit card, aren't all/most of them international? Are local-only credit cards the norm in the U.S.?

And do you really need a bank account per credit/debit card? I'd assume you have "external" credit/debit cards, where the only connection to the account is that it is charged monthly.

<comment><USER4> Many cards in America have foreign transaction fees. There may be other fees associated as well.

That said I have looked into cards with no foreign transaction fees for future international travel. They do exist, but one more issue is making sure they support "chip and pin" for European countries.

<comment><USER5> The Chase card I have for use here in Italy works fine with no chip. There's an annual fee though, so I'm not sure whether I'll keep it beyond the first year; I'll have to look and see how much it's saved me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This will be a huge factor in increasing demand for bitcoin if it comes through. The biggest problem with bitcoin now is that it's not widely accepted for payment (i.e., it's not yet a medium of exchange). A debit/credit card is a big step in allowing people the ability to exchange their bitcoins for real goods. What will be really exciting is the day when you can actually see goods priced in bitcoin. E.g., that cupcake is going to cost you 0.1 bitcoins.

<comment><USER7> Really you think THAT is the biggest problem with Bitcoin.

Not the fact that its value fluctuates so wildly ?

<comment><USER8> > Not the fact that its value fluctuates so wildly ?

This does not worry me at all, since the value has been mostly fluctuating upwards. The positive risk outweights the negative.

With this card, people can invest in to bitcoin small amount each month, and they still can use their bitcoin reserves when they need.

<comment><USER9> BUY BUY BUY [1]

SELL SELL SELL [2]

BUY BUY BUY [3]

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/ICznv.jpg>

[2] <http://i.imgur.com/YeS9o.jpg>

[3] <http://i.imgur.com/IXsjv.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >6-8 Weeks

After Stack Overflow, we should really start referring to this as an "Atwood period".

<comment><USER11> Can you explain?:)

<comment><USER10> When asked how long version 1.0 of Stack Overflow would take to produce, Jeff Atwood famously replied "six to eight weeks" without any sort of serious planning or consideration. It took quite a bit longer. Listeners of the Stack Exchange podcast got to hear Joel Spolsky make fun of Jeff for this many times.

<comment><AUTHOR> And since then, nearly every major upgrade, feature request, etc. has been scheduled as "6 to 8 weeks" or occasionally some variant like "6 to 8 months"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > You own the address on the card, though BitInstant has not yet determined > the best way to hand over your private keys, or whether they should even > offer such an option

Sounds like trouble.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting how Bitcoin is now becoming exactly what Bitcoin was always against: a centralized bank. A bad and unreliable one at that.

It kind of shows you the evolution of our banking systems and why we need one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if I concede the point that Bitcoin is becoming a centralized bank - which I don't - how exactly is it "bad and unreliable"? At least this bank is run algorithmically by the crowd/cloud and can't rape pillage or otherwise screw you out of your money on the whim of a handful of rich white men... Perhaps I'm showing my politics too clearly here, but I do honestly believe that math is a better tool for deciding what happens to my money than the board of directors at Goldman-Sachs.

<comment><USER14> Bitcoin has deflation baked into the system. Deflation is _terrible_ for the economy because it encourages people to hide cash under mattresses instead of spending it on useful projects. (Or in more abstract terms, deflation raises the minimum viable rate of return on investment.) We've learned this lesson well. All the really terrible depressions --- the 1870s, the 1930s --- featured crippling deflation that kicked the economy while it was already down. When Williams Jennings Bryan seared "you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold", he was talking about how using gold for money kept inflation too low and hurt ordinary people in the economy. (Bryan's "free silver" movement would have been inflationary and beneficial.)

One important thing stopping the current depression from being as catastrophic as the great depression is the policy of the Federal Reserve (which is hugely influenced by Goldman Sachs) of printing money and keeping interest rates at 0%. If they didn't do that, we'd be far worse off right now.

So yes, as far as regulating the money supply goes, I'd trust the directors of Goldman Sachs over some algorithm any day, especially when that algorithm seems to have been designed by people with a very dogmatic theory of value, a theory that history demonstrates is incompatible with happiness.

<comment><USER15> This is what one school of thought says. Another school of thought says that people still buy deflating computers, mobile phones and other electronics, and Intel would have gone bankrupt long time ago if "mattress theory of deflation" is valid.

Another school of thought also says that inflation is a second form (after the taxes) of government oppression over the citizens; and that truely free currency should avoid both forms of government oppression: inflation and taxation.

<comment><USER16> He's talking about economy wide price level deflation, not some particular group of products. Inflation is a necessary element of capitalism, since productivity growth would have a deflationary outcome if prices staid flat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should change the name to Bitstant. It's two syllables and rolls off the tongue more smoothly.

<comment><USER18> The sound of BitStant reminds me of "stunt" like a trick, or stunted like stunted growth. Either way not words i'd like associated with my brand were I a credit card company.

<comment><USER19> Also, BitInstant, for its length, is more memorable and makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If MasterCard actually lets this happen I'll eat my hat.

</comment><comment><USER21> This seems like an excellent opportunity for authorities to physically track people who use their bitcoins for illegal purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Only if they're stupid enough to fund cards tied to their real identities with coins from a shady past. Bitcoin is as anonymous as you make it, put in the effort and you'll be ok - don't put in the effort and expect sirens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would be more fun to have card balance in BTC. I do not know how fast will it be to load the card with new BTC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Card balance can be kept in BTC, according to the IRC logs at least. It's an international card so it can apparently hold balances in multiple currencies at once. Also, according to the logs, BTC transactions < $1,000 USD will be accepted on the first confirmation, so about 10 minutes to load the card.

<comment><USER22> Can you quote user bitinstant from the IRC log on this. I see only the following:

> <bitinstant> JimN, the card is denominated in USD, EUR, GBP so far

<comment><AUTHOR> <ThomasV_> bitinstant: is there an option to keep the deposit as BTC until the card is used to make a payment or withdrawal?

<bitinstant> ThomasV, yes

Then later...

<sharpfocus> so the card can have fiat and btc on it concurrently presumably

<bitinstant> sharpfocus, yes precisly

Extra lines redacted to reduce noise :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone of you got more bitcoins then me?(0) ;) I tried to get a single bitcoin for multiple times, but it never worked out ;) I guess my hardware is too bad.

<comment><USER24> Consumer-grade mining is a temporary phenomena. In a few months, the block reward will be dropping in half, and most people with GPUs will no longer be able to operate them profitably for mining. This is because FPGA mining hardware has been shipping in volume.

In addition, if ASIC hardware starts shipping, GPU is completely out of the game and FPGAs will be hard pressed to stay powered on.

GPU mining had a good run for nearly two years, but it is about to be obsoleted.

<comment><USER23> So, the only way to get some bitcoins for a single person would be hacking sites like bitcoinica or users? Also, is there a live statistic, which shows how much bitcoins exists right now?

<comment><USER19> Hacking?

You can buy them, you know. That's the whole point of Bitcoin exchanges.

<comment><USER25> Maybe he likes to pay the iron price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm still so afraid the market will crash again, it still makes me hesitant to take bitcoin seriously.</comment>


How did I ever live without VIM? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/88h7m.png

<comment><USER2> Emacs perhaps? Maybe Textmate? How about e?

Vi is almost ubiquitous in *nix environments, so it is hard to argue against vim. And, it is very powerful!

However, it hasn't been intuitive for the majority. If you aren't using something that others can easily use, pair programming with those people can be difficult. Other than that though, go for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pair programming is a vile stench on the world that is software development. Damn socialist hippies.

Seriously though, I have used Textmate and e, neither run on Linux (very well irt e), Textmate is no longer active development and neither is e (the recent forced upgrade to 2.0 and the fact that you had to pay AGAIN for something that wasn't updated for two years and had no significant update from 1.4 to 2.0 except that you had to pay again is what led me to just start using vim).</comment></comment>


Python vs Julia – an example from machine learning - <AUTHOR> http://tullo.ch/articles/python-vs-julia/? <comment><USER2> As others have pointed out improvements could be made to improve performance of the Cython code. However it seems to me the take away from this post should be in this application Julia has a better performance profile while being as simple and expressive as Python [1].

As a Python programmer that often works with these sorts of problems this reinforces my perception that Julia, while not suited to all programming problems offers a productivity gain when it comes to mathematical/algorithmic computing.

Sure I could sit and tweak the Cython code or rewrite the hot loops in C++, but it seems to me Julia hits a sweet spot where I am less likely to have to compromise programmer performance for computational performance.

[1] I will note however that the code in the OP doesn't seem like the clearest implementation of the algorithms in either language, some of that heavy nesting should be factored for a start.

<comment><USER3> Another subtle but important point is that the Julia code can be very easily made completely generic without sacrificing any performance or clarity. All you need to do is _remove_ those Float64 annotations and replace the 0.0 values with `zero(y[1]*weights[1])`. With that small change, the same exact code will work for Float32, Rational, BigFloat, Complex (if that even makes sense), etc. – even new, user-defined numeric types that didn't exist when you wrote this code and that you know nothing about, as long as they can be compared, multiplied, added, and divided.

This kind of generality isn't necessary for a lot of user-level code, where there's a specific application, but it is quite important when writing libraries that need to be as reusable as possible. And this is where the Cython solution has some problems – sure, you can make it pretty fast, but in doing so, you lose the generality that the original Python code had, and your code becomes as monomorphic as C.

<comment><USER4> Cython does have limited support for generics in the form of its fused types [1]; it can be made to generate C code for different primitive types, for instance. It's nowhere near as flexible as Julia in that regard, since you can't redefine operators for working on Complex numbers for instance, but if you want the interoperability and maturity (read: available programmers and existing libraries) that Python offers, you don't need to trade away generics completely. I'd love to live in a completely-Julia ecosystem, but unfortunately that's not quite reality yet, and luckily Cython is more than capable for making do.

[1] [http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/fusedtypes.html](http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/fusedtypes.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the objective is to get a fast implementation of isotonic regression, I think the priority would be to choose the right algorithm. PAVA is indeed one of the fastest such algorithms and has a running time bound that is linear in the number of data points. I may be wrong, but from a quick look at the code it seems neither the [P/C]ython version nor the Julia version has an implementation that ensures linear time. The files are named Linear PAVA so I believe there was an expectation that they are indeed linear time.

Consider applying it to this sequence

         1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, -30.

It seems that the number of operations required according to these implementations would be quadratic in the size of the sequence. (It will average the tail repeatedly.)

I cannot read Julia yet, so not sure about the Julia version, but the others do indeed look very much a quadratic time algorithm at the least. The behavior will of course depend on input, so on certain inputs they may have a runtime that scales linearly. Complexity addresses the worst case behavior and as I showed coming up with such bad cases is not hard, and they need not be very un-natural either.

       OTOH:

If the objective was to compare speeds of CPython, Cython and Julia, then it does not matter whether an efficient algorithm was chosen for the task. My hunch is, because the current implementations computes more than necessary, it is going to magnify the speed difference between Cython and Julia.

Does Julia do any inlining ? Or are there any plans for such.

If so, that would be one aspect where it could shine. As mentioned in the comment the Cython version is _unfactored_ and manually inlined for performance. If Julia inlines in its JIT pass, such measures would be unnecessary and would allow one to write cleaner code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I implemented a guaranteed O(N) PAVA in Julia (see [https://github.com/ajtulloch/Isotonic.jl/blob/master/src/poo...](https://github.com/ajtulloch/Isotonic.jl/blob/master/src/pooled_pava.jl)), and experimented with one in Cython - it was uniformly slower than the 'linear' PAVA across a few sample datasets I tried. See e.g. [http://bit.ly/1oDF7nH](http://bit.ly/1oDF7nH) for some graphs.

I'm not claiming I've written the fastest possible implementations or anything though - please feel free to improve any of this code and submit to scikit- learn if you find some improvements!

<comment><USER5> > I'm not claiming I've written the fastest possible implementations or > anything though

Oh I never thought that you were claiming so. Thanks for clarifying the implementation. Julia is indeed something that I want to pickup. BTW what data-structure does this snippet invoke

        ydash = [1 => y[1]]

fixed length array ?

> please feel free to improve any of this code and submit to scikit-learn if > you find some improvements!

Ah! then you would all hound me for my insistence of keeping [https://bitbucket.org/sreangsu/libpav](https://bitbucket.org/sreangsu/libpav) LGPL. A discussion I dont want to engage in. BTW I am not even sure if libpav would be faster as it stands now, because it does some really stupid stuff, like unnecessary allocation/deallocation on the heap. Its an old piece that I wrote years ago to entertain myself (proof: comments like these

       // I hereby solemnly declare
       // that 'it' is not aliased
       // with anything that may get
       // deleted during this object's
       // lifetime. May the  runtime
       // smite me to my core otherwise.

[https://bitbucket.org/sreangsu/libpav/src/dcc8411b10a0d4e220...](https://bitbucket.org/sreangsu/libpav/src/dcc8411b10a0d4e2202e95fc2fec29480ea5da61/src/under_oath.h?at=default#cl-48) and the perverse namespace pollution).

Its such a strange coincidence: I started hacking on it again just a few days ago, and lo and behold a thread on HN on PAVA. Now motivated enough to fix my crap :) Once I get rid of that damned linked-list I think it would be decent enough, although there is a fair chance that it would be faster than the current Julia version.

That said, libpav does a lot more than just isotonic regression, its more of a marriage between isotonic regression and large margin methods like SVM. Even for just the isotonic regression case, it can work with any abstraction of an iterator (so it is container agnostic) can take a _ordering_ operator, and is of course fully generic (meaning can handle float32, double64 without any change).

@jamesjporter Thanks

<comment><USER6>
        ydash = [1 => y[1]]

creates a Dict that maps for from Int64 to Float64, `=>` is used for declaring Dict literals in Julia. c.f.: [http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/stdlib/base/?highlight=d...](http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/stdlib/base/?highlight=dict#associative- collections)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. We had a similar experience when implementing the Simplex method for linear optimization, except we evaluated PyPy versus Julia instead of Cython. Its similar in that it benchmarks "just" the language, not BLAS, which is common pitfall I see when people compare the two. I guess at this point, a year or so later, it isn't surprising to me anymore that Julia is as fast as it is for these sorts of computational tasks - its been demonstrated pretty comprehensively at this point.

Slides: [http://www.mit.edu/~mlubin/informs2013.pdf](http://www.mit.edu/~mlubin/informs2013.pdf)

Paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1431](http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1431)

<comment><USER8> I am always confused by this. I think the primary reason for picking a language is how simple it is to write something in it.

So if I can call scipy and get the result easily in one line, I would do that. When implementing new algorithms, it will indeed be easier with Julia.

Pypy unfortunately cannot be used by most people who would benefit a lot from it because numpy/scipy isn't currently supported.

I am curious if you tried running your pypy code with Numba.

<comment><USER9> Depends on your requirements. In many applications, performance matters a whole lot more than "how much can I accomplish in one line of code."

<comment><USER8> In those applications, everyone would be writing everything in C then and such benchmarks would be useless.

<comment><USER10> Why spend time increasing the amount of unsafe code in the world, if comparable speeds can be achieved in better designed languages?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks dodgy to me. The purple and red lines on the graph don't end up parallel, so the active set algorithm appears to have time complexity O(n) in Julia, but O(n^2) or O(n^3) in Python. Can that be explained?

</comment><comment><USER12> No kidding the Active Set solution in Cython is slow, it barely leverages Cython at all! It uses a Python list which is managed by Python and uses none of Cython's static typing.

Implement the algorithm inside a "with nogil" and you will see some nice speed-ups. It won't look pretty, but for certain performance-sensitive code it will be worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here.

Yeah, the active set implementation in Cython is relatively slow - see [1] for where I discussed how I benchmarked the existing algorithm and demonstrated the PAVA implementation was faster.

Then again, until two days ago the Cython active set algorithm was the production implementation of isotonic regression in scikit-learn, so it's not like it was a strawman example that I made up.

[1]: [http://tullo.ch/articles/speeding-up-isotonic- regression/](http://tullo.ch/articles/speeding-up-isotonic-regression/)

<comment><USER12> Try this implementation for PAVA:

[https://gist.github.com/gustavla/9499068](https://gist.github.com/gustavla/9499068)

Also, how are you timing Python? When I run this on a sample size of 10 using IPython's %timeit, it takes a few microseconds, which is 2 orders of magnitude from what you report.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Coming from R, I have to ask... Why am I seeing 'for' and 'while' loops? Why isn't this code vectorized? It looks like both implementations suck.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it's a big change in mindset for Julia.

Basically, the reason MATLAB/Numpy/R folks harp so much about vectorizing code is because their interpreters are _slow_ , and within a vectorized function they can punt to some C/C++/Cython implementation. But Julia loops compile down to almost ideal assembly; they are remarkably fast. In fact, verbose loops acting in-place almost always beat the vectorized alternatives because they don't need to allocate space for the result.

The wonderful thing about Julia is that you can code it vectorized first, and if that's not fast enough (or if it uses too much memory), you can easily rewrite it in the same language.

<comment><USER13> You can't parallelize a for-loop the way you can apply a function on every member of a vector. If code can be vectorized in Julia, that is what I'm interested in seeing. These samples are obviously not intended for distributed compute. Thousands of CUDA cores sit idle waiting for this synchronous for- loop to finish.

<comment><USER15> Cython has a construct for parallelizing for loops.

[http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/parallelism.html](http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/parallelism.html)

I wouldn't want to claim an informed opinion about whether it is a good style or not, but a block with no side effects isn't that far off from a function with no side effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Where is the source for this benchmark?

2.[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org) could be a bit more representative of broad-based algorithmic performance.

3\. There are lots of Python libraries for application features other than handpicked algorithms. I would be interested to see benchmarks of the marshaling code in IJulia (IPython with Julia)

</comment><comment><USER15> How much time is Cython spending making the copy into the solution array?

(Or is Julia making a copy and I just don't see it?)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you need speed wouldn't the ability to write as a C extension beat using Julia?

<comment><USER18> Writing performant extensions for (C)Python requires knowing both C and the CPython API. In Julia it is easy to call C shared library functions directly with no overhead (similar to PyPy with CFFI).

<comment><USER19> CFFI works fine with CPython, and ctypes loads shared libraries without issue as well.

<comment><USER18> Both of which have non-trivial overhead in CPython.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another good example how dynamic languages can be made to execute faster with good native code generation support than having to force people to use C or similar.

Looking forward to Julia's JIT improvements. This is only the early days.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wait, are we looking at the same graphs? Doesn't this show that for large problem sets cython and julia are pretty much equivalent as long as you choose the best algorithm?

</comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr: Julia is killing it.

<comment><USER22> In every benchmark article: you are doing X wrong. Use Y method instead.

<comment><USER23> Yes, it's as if those people think that instead of trying to measure rough relative speed for similar implementations of some algorithm (which is what you want when you benchmark), you are interest in finding the optimal algorithm for the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why not use C++11 if performance matters?

<comment><USER25> "Why not use Fortran 2008 if performance matters?"

<comment><USER26> Well, why not? Julia is very different from Python, if I am willing to use a completely different tool then the field is wide open and includes anything that has better performance on average

<comment><USER3> Julia's mental programming model for many things is not much different from Python: dynamically typed, pass by sharing, the implicit scoping rules are even quite similar. Sure, Julia has a few extra bells and whistles, like type annotations and dynamic multiple dispatch (which you can ignore and you have something very much like Python but faster), but still, Fortran and C++ are much more different from Python than Julia is.

<comment><USER27> Any tentative idea when Julia 1.0 will be released?

<comment><USER3> Possibly late 2014 or early 2015, but we're not going to rush it if things don't feel ready yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why are you not using typed memory views in Cython? That might easily close the performance gap.

</comment><comment><USER29> Would love to see numba added into this benchmark.</comment>