A higher-than-you-might-expect number of people I know have the opinion that education probably basically doesn’t do anything that will benefit society. Or maybe that learning basic maths and English is beneficial, but geography classes and history classes and physics classes might not do all that much, and university education probably doesn’t really provide you with any skills. It might
Some public intellectuals are pretty vacuous, but others (Caplan) make serious cases via data.
Maybe we just need more serious public intellectuals to figure out exactly where Caplan and these establishment authors are reading the data differently, and illuminate that point of difference so that we can figure out who's correct.
I definitely wasn't claiming that Caplan didn't have anything valuable to say, I think his book is really good and does make a serious case for the signalling model!
I think that there is a bit of a danger that someone can convincingly write a book that is incorrect and in contrast with not just the majority opinion but reality as well. I take the side that Caplan is actually correct. I think we can't really put any fault on him for writing well and in a fun manner.
Now, maybe it would be a concern if he was fun, but totally unrigorous. Is he insufficiently rigorous or is there evidence that he has not done a deep dive of the literature? I'm skeptical because he has explained his research process and been critical of others for not fully reviewing the literature such as in this debate linked below.[1][2]
Caplan: "There is the ideal thing, which is you go to google scholar yourself and try reading it. And of course, don't just do google scholar to find the paper that says what you want it to say but rather do a large search. By the way, one of the main when I search is I deliberately search for things that are going to say the opposite of what I want to believe and then take a look at that and read that as well as I can. "
The article that you linked to is critical of the signaling method and references Caplan and his arguments explicitly. Is Caplan less rigorous than those authors? Should we trust them because they are less fun or entertaining? Probably not. And you admit to not being certain of who is correct, which is fine but to note, my copy of Caplan's book has about 43 pages of references with roughly 19 per page, for a total of ~817 citations.
A very intelligent and interesting writer Philip E. Tetlock, who's career was largely based off critical analysis of expert opinion and how to accurately predict the future, says this of Caplan: "Bryan Caplan is as dedicated to discovering the truth as any scholar I've met in my 40 years in academia—plus a really nice guy." I am not sure what further arguments to make about the correctness of Caplan's argument without diving into the specific arguments, which I found convincing.
Imagine an opposite world in which ~99% of people believe that education is purely for the purpose of signaling and few people attends high school or college. In fact, the government spends 1 trillion dollars on discouraging people from attending high school and college. Within the contrasting 1%, there is an author who writes a book citing 817 sources making an argument that education is actually probably 80% human capital and only 20% signaling. But the book is chided as dangerous. Should we be against this public intellectual?
My take on this is that the burden of proof is far on the side of those advocating for the trillion+ dollar subsidies that are given to education. If Caplan is correct, this is a colossal waste of not just money, but time as well. This is literally millions of years of productive adults time spent engaged in a behavior that could potentially be mostly a waste of time. This level of waste is so incredibly large it boggles my mind if Caplan is correct.
I'd like to make a quick point. Imagine you started an Anki deck 4 years ago and haven't reviewed it longer than 1 month. Then someone hires you on the basis of your ability to retain those Anki cards. I think that would be pretty preposterous. It doesn't make sense, because you know--since you're familiar with Anki-- that you quickly forget what you do not recall. The memory decay function is exponential. Knowledge quickly approaches 0. It seems difficult to imagine the information learned being particularly worthwhile if it is not recalled. This is discussed more in chapter 2 of his book of course.
"Sometimes I write about political science and reference a couple of papers I’ve read without really knowing what I’m talking about. The last thing I would ever want is for someone to think that because I had said something, it was probably true." You write interesting things. I expect the individual facts to mostly be true but to not always agree with the interpretation or weigh the evidence in the same way. If I thought what you said wasn't at least probably true, then I wouldn't read you. If I thought it was nonsense, then literally nobody should read you. Your blog would just be pollution and noise. But obviously, you put thought behind things and you fairly interpret sources but make some mistakes or I disagree with interpretation, it happens. Don't see yourself _that_ short! ha
I might do a long explainer on why I'm actually sceptical of Caplan's view at some point, this post wasn't really intended to be a critique of his book. To clarify one thing - I wouldn't use the word 'dangerous' to describe Caplan, and I'm certainly not calling for him to be silenced or anything like that (I liked the book!), I just think it's a shame that people I know buy into the signalling model without really having engaged with any of the literature, and I think popular and interesting academics can distort people's views of what is and isn't a mainstream idea in academia.
Another not-totally-fleshed-out-idea: The counterfactual world is not one where people are critically reviewing the literature themselves. Nor are they even doing the work to determine expert consensus. Absence someone grabbing their attention, their opinion will be shaped by some combination of intuition and local authorities (parents, grade school teachers, religious leaders). Those are all great ways to come up to speed on local, concrete knowledge, but are not clearly better Vs. “public intellectuals“ when both are venturing far outside of their domains.
This is a good point, although I think in many cases people just won't have a strong opinion on something. E.g. if I had asked one of the Caplan readers whether they thought education actually gave people useful skills before they had read Caplan, I assume they would have said something along the lines of 'I would assume education does give people useful skills, but it isn't something I really know a lot about', whereas now the response is basically 'It seems very likely that the evidence that the human capital gains from education are hugely overstated'.
Oh that’s interesting; looks like we have hugely different priors on the effect of content-volume in opinion-strength. I’d be 50/50 in the question among the *very* small group of people who consider epistemic humility a virtue. And maybe that’s the implied context of this blog.
Outside of that, as long as there is a keyword like “education” in the question, I strongly suspect people will have a confident opinion regardless of time spent consuming/considering relevant content.
I guess it depends on how you framed the question, I think if I hinted at the fact that some academics took the signalling model seriously, people I know would not dismiss it out of hand (nor would they instantly back it), whereas if I casually asked whether they reckon it's possible that education doesn't actually do much for people, they might push back on that strongly if I didn't allude to some broader academic debate. But it's true that the people I know might have much more of a tendency towards epistemic humility than most people, I'm not sure.
I’d have to nail down some logistics, but I could imagine sending out a poll to a few general communities I am part of. Definitely open to ideas about how to frame the question, they almost certainly will not have heard of Caplan‘s book
It's hard to trust the boring stuff too. Someone who makes a better case without too many appeals to academic studies is more convincing.
On education: the paper you linked was not convincing at all. Their only source that the certification value of US university degrees are small is Kane and Rouse (1995), a 28 year old study which looked at both 2 and 4 year degrees. That's the best academia can do to defend itself?
There’s a trend of publishers and academics amolifying messages delivered by other academics, not because they have solid grounding on evidence but because they resonate with certain audiences. Grit and growth mindset, for instance, are interesting constructs that intuitively make sense, but evidence for both is relatively weak. Now, Haidt’s new book on cellphone use by kids sounds reasonable, but it also makes claims that go beyond what evidence supports, and BTW he’s not an expert in the topic. I intuitively agree with all of the above (not with Caplan, though), but still acknoeledge that the evidence is not as strong as the claims.
These are the most compelling points about the model to me from a bird’s eye view:
1. We pump an enormous amount of money into the educational system, incentivizing fraud and waste.
2. The vast majority of curriculum has no relevance to what we do at our jobs.
3. Most people forget what they learn unless they use it (this dovetails with 2) meaning that they will forget most of it since they won’t use it.
4. Most college students spend approximately no time studying, so it’s not even clear that they learn literally anything - signaling aside.
5. Various methods of testing applicants for intelligence are banned by law.
6. Education is a socially desirable concept to defend. In a debate the person defending ever increasing education spending is viewed positively regardless of the facts.
7. Subjectively, it appeared to me as if the entire point from the beginning was signaling. Most students performed poorly, no one except those majoring in difficult fields spent much time at all in the library. College students never came across as well-read to me. It seemed like the point was to skate by and graduate, signaling that you had actually achieved something. This seemed like something of a consensus among those at my school.
In other words, the aggregate behavior was that of a signaling model.
>It might signal you have some skills, because you were able to get into a good university and had the willpower and intelligence required to pass all the courses
Yes, immensely so. But the word for that is not "signalling" (even less so within a false dichotomy with "human capital building") -- the word for it is "filtering". "Filtering" in a world where not all people were created equal, and where the employers are looking for a subset-of-all-people that was *filtered* in a very particular fashion.
The word "signalling" implies superficiality and shallowness, often with hypocrisy mixed in. It is adequately applied to Hollywood stars in gated mansions with bespoke private security tweeting about defunding the police.
The word "filtering" is *anything but* shallow. What do those employers who have their head screwed on right, really wish to filter for? Don't take it from me, take it from Spolsky and his hiring advice for software companies: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ To spare you a long (and very good) read, it is two things. In Spolsky's words, "a) Smart, and b) Gets things done."
In your own words above, it is *precisely* the combination of a) intelligence, and b) willpower. Spolsky lays out all the reasons why an employer must look for both a) + b). There is an abundance of people who are intelligent but without particular willpower, and also an abundance of people with willpower but without particular intelligence -- and a discerning employer will not wish to hire any of them, as Spolsky elaborates.
Any additional "human capital development" that the schooling might or might not have instilled, is a nice-to-have. Whereas the a)+b) is a must-have. The value of an educational degree had, until relatively recently, indeed been proof of you having passed a solid filter for intelligence and willpower both.
The segments of modern academia that are overrun by wokeness have annihilated both of those long-standing foundations. Its coddling of students all but eliminates the filtering on willpower. Its introduction of dogmatic doctrines (which "challenge preconceptions" without ever allowing *themselves* to be challenged) is simply doing away with filtering for intelligence, replacing it by filtering for blithe conformism. In short, they are making academia and its titles to stop having any practical value to employers.
Interesting article, thanks for the link. Fine, agreed that the meaning of "signalling" in economic context does correspond to the usage made in the OP, even if the meaning of "signalling" in social context does not.
Outside of specialized contexts, the word "signalling" has the mundane connotation of communication, in which a sender has the agency and freedom to pick any kind of signal to send. While applying for a job, I can freely "signal" that I naturally prioritize the robustness of the work over the deadline, or naturally prioritize the deadline over the robustness of the work, or whatever I judge would be the most adequate signal to send in the circumstance, but I am not free to "signal" that I have a Cambridge MSc if I don't have one. Such a degree effectively *is* a filter. A person may have the agency to communicate a signal of their choosing, but not to be passed by a given filter.
Why raise all this; the premise of the article is virtually grounded on the "mundane" meaning of signalling, while purporting to refer to the "economic" meaning. It's like, if we prove that education is "just" signalling, then it has no true value. On the contrary! The "no true value" conclusion is false, and its falsity is easier to grasp if we replace "signalling" with "filtering". To the degree that the filtering is indeed centered around the combination of intelligence and willpower - the "Smart, and gets things done" in Spolsky terms - its true value is huge. Getting into university is primarily a filter on intelligence. Finishing its studies is a filter on intelligence and willpower both.
It's *really costly* for the knowledge-based industries to sift people in the way that academia could and should have sifted them beforehand. Whereas, if academia *stops* being a filter for intelligence-combined-with-willpower, then it indeed becomes harder to refute the "no true value" assessment.
How do you update your priors when someone with a following (peterson/chomsky) says something highly incongruous (various peterson claims/chomskys imprisoning on non-vaxxed people). What I’m trying to express is how I will just completely lose trust in public intellectuals the when they make a strong statement I find deplorable. Similar to correcting for gell-mann amnesia.
It depends. Those sorts of comments don't make me completely lose trust in their academic research - my view on universal grammar is completely unrelated to Chomsky's comments on the unvaccinated or the Khmer Rouge. But I suppose I take his commentary that is unrelated to linguistics slightly less seriously when Chomsky says something that seems plainly wrong to me?
I don't actually know the answer to this question! I guess they're just for me to use as a metric but it could well be that substack uses them in algorithms for which blogs to promote. Honestly, I wish I could turn likes off and leave comments on, but apparently you can either have both on or both off.
Some public intellectuals are pretty vacuous, but others (Caplan) make serious cases via data.
Maybe we just need more serious public intellectuals to figure out exactly where Caplan and these establishment authors are reading the data differently, and illuminate that point of difference so that we can figure out who's correct.
I definitely wasn't claiming that Caplan didn't have anything valuable to say, I think his book is really good and does make a serious case for the signalling model!
I think that there is a bit of a danger that someone can convincingly write a book that is incorrect and in contrast with not just the majority opinion but reality as well. I take the side that Caplan is actually correct. I think we can't really put any fault on him for writing well and in a fun manner.
Now, maybe it would be a concern if he was fun, but totally unrigorous. Is he insufficiently rigorous or is there evidence that he has not done a deep dive of the literature? I'm skeptical because he has explained his research process and been critical of others for not fully reviewing the literature such as in this debate linked below.[1][2]
Caplan: "There is the ideal thing, which is you go to google scholar yourself and try reading it. And of course, don't just do google scholar to find the paper that says what you want it to say but rather do a large search. By the way, one of the main when I search is I deliberately search for things that are going to say the opposite of what I want to believe and then take a look at that and read that as well as I can. "
The article that you linked to is critical of the signaling method and references Caplan and his arguments explicitly. Is Caplan less rigorous than those authors? Should we trust them because they are less fun or entertaining? Probably not. And you admit to not being certain of who is correct, which is fine but to note, my copy of Caplan's book has about 43 pages of references with roughly 19 per page, for a total of ~817 citations.
A very intelligent and interesting writer Philip E. Tetlock, who's career was largely based off critical analysis of expert opinion and how to accurately predict the future, says this of Caplan: "Bryan Caplan is as dedicated to discovering the truth as any scholar I've met in my 40 years in academia—plus a really nice guy." I am not sure what further arguments to make about the correctness of Caplan's argument without diving into the specific arguments, which I found convincing.
Imagine an opposite world in which ~99% of people believe that education is purely for the purpose of signaling and few people attends high school or college. In fact, the government spends 1 trillion dollars on discouraging people from attending high school and college. Within the contrasting 1%, there is an author who writes a book citing 817 sources making an argument that education is actually probably 80% human capital and only 20% signaling. But the book is chided as dangerous. Should we be against this public intellectual?
My take on this is that the burden of proof is far on the side of those advocating for the trillion+ dollar subsidies that are given to education. If Caplan is correct, this is a colossal waste of not just money, but time as well. This is literally millions of years of productive adults time spent engaged in a behavior that could potentially be mostly a waste of time. This level of waste is so incredibly large it boggles my mind if Caplan is correct.
I'd like to make a quick point. Imagine you started an Anki deck 4 years ago and haven't reviewed it longer than 1 month. Then someone hires you on the basis of your ability to retain those Anki cards. I think that would be pretty preposterous. It doesn't make sense, because you know--since you're familiar with Anki-- that you quickly forget what you do not recall. The memory decay function is exponential. Knowledge quickly approaches 0. It seems difficult to imagine the information learned being particularly worthwhile if it is not recalled. This is discussed more in chapter 2 of his book of course.
"Sometimes I write about political science and reference a couple of papers I’ve read without really knowing what I’m talking about. The last thing I would ever want is for someone to think that because I had said something, it was probably true." You write interesting things. I expect the individual facts to mostly be true but to not always agree with the interpretation or weigh the evidence in the same way. If I thought what you said wasn't at least probably true, then I wouldn't read you. If I thought it was nonsense, then literally nobody should read you. Your blog would just be pollution and noise. But obviously, you put thought behind things and you fairly interpret sources but make some mistakes or I disagree with interpretation, it happens. Don't see yourself _that_ short! ha
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOa53H96K0s?t=57m
[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOa53H96K0s?t=61m
I might do a long explainer on why I'm actually sceptical of Caplan's view at some point, this post wasn't really intended to be a critique of his book. To clarify one thing - I wouldn't use the word 'dangerous' to describe Caplan, and I'm certainly not calling for him to be silenced or anything like that (I liked the book!), I just think it's a shame that people I know buy into the signalling model without really having engaged with any of the literature, and I think popular and interesting academics can distort people's views of what is and isn't a mainstream idea in academia.
i think there is a better equilibrium than “public intellectuals are bad” which is “other intellectuals should present their work more interestingly”
Another not-totally-fleshed-out-idea: The counterfactual world is not one where people are critically reviewing the literature themselves. Nor are they even doing the work to determine expert consensus. Absence someone grabbing their attention, their opinion will be shaped by some combination of intuition and local authorities (parents, grade school teachers, religious leaders). Those are all great ways to come up to speed on local, concrete knowledge, but are not clearly better Vs. “public intellectuals“ when both are venturing far outside of their domains.
This is a good point, although I think in many cases people just won't have a strong opinion on something. E.g. if I had asked one of the Caplan readers whether they thought education actually gave people useful skills before they had read Caplan, I assume they would have said something along the lines of 'I would assume education does give people useful skills, but it isn't something I really know a lot about', whereas now the response is basically 'It seems very likely that the evidence that the human capital gains from education are hugely overstated'.
Oh that’s interesting; looks like we have hugely different priors on the effect of content-volume in opinion-strength. I’d be 50/50 in the question among the *very* small group of people who consider epistemic humility a virtue. And maybe that’s the implied context of this blog.
Outside of that, as long as there is a keyword like “education” in the question, I strongly suspect people will have a confident opinion regardless of time spent consuming/considering relevant content.
I guess it depends on how you framed the question, I think if I hinted at the fact that some academics took the signalling model seriously, people I know would not dismiss it out of hand (nor would they instantly back it), whereas if I casually asked whether they reckon it's possible that education doesn't actually do much for people, they might push back on that strongly if I didn't allude to some broader academic debate. But it's true that the people I know might have much more of a tendency towards epistemic humility than most people, I'm not sure.
I’d have to nail down some logistics, but I could imagine sending out a poll to a few general communities I am part of. Definitely open to ideas about how to frame the question, they almost certainly will not have heard of Caplan‘s book
Sure, sounds fun!
It's hard to trust the boring stuff too. Someone who makes a better case without too many appeals to academic studies is more convincing.
On education: the paper you linked was not convincing at all. Their only source that the certification value of US university degrees are small is Kane and Rouse (1995), a 28 year old study which looked at both 2 and 4 year degrees. That's the best academia can do to defend itself?
There’s a trend of publishers and academics amolifying messages delivered by other academics, not because they have solid grounding on evidence but because they resonate with certain audiences. Grit and growth mindset, for instance, are interesting constructs that intuitively make sense, but evidence for both is relatively weak. Now, Haidt’s new book on cellphone use by kids sounds reasonable, but it also makes claims that go beyond what evidence supports, and BTW he’s not an expert in the topic. I intuitively agree with all of the above (not with Caplan, though), but still acknoeledge that the evidence is not as strong as the claims.
These are the most compelling points about the model to me from a bird’s eye view:
1. We pump an enormous amount of money into the educational system, incentivizing fraud and waste.
2. The vast majority of curriculum has no relevance to what we do at our jobs.
3. Most people forget what they learn unless they use it (this dovetails with 2) meaning that they will forget most of it since they won’t use it.
4. Most college students spend approximately no time studying, so it’s not even clear that they learn literally anything - signaling aside.
5. Various methods of testing applicants for intelligence are banned by law.
6. Education is a socially desirable concept to defend. In a debate the person defending ever increasing education spending is viewed positively regardless of the facts.
Can’t believe I left out this one, but
7. Subjectively, it appeared to me as if the entire point from the beginning was signaling. Most students performed poorly, no one except those majoring in difficult fields spent much time at all in the library. College students never came across as well-read to me. It seemed like the point was to skate by and graduate, signaling that you had actually achieved something. This seemed like something of a consensus among those at my school.
In other words, the aggregate behavior was that of a signaling model.
>It might signal you have some skills, because you were able to get into a good university and had the willpower and intelligence required to pass all the courses
Yes, immensely so. But the word for that is not "signalling" (even less so within a false dichotomy with "human capital building") -- the word for it is "filtering". "Filtering" in a world where not all people were created equal, and where the employers are looking for a subset-of-all-people that was *filtered* in a very particular fashion.
The word "signalling" implies superficiality and shallowness, often with hypocrisy mixed in. It is adequately applied to Hollywood stars in gated mansions with bespoke private security tweeting about defunding the police.
The word "filtering" is *anything but* shallow. What do those employers who have their head screwed on right, really wish to filter for? Don't take it from me, take it from Spolsky and his hiring advice for software companies: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/ To spare you a long (and very good) read, it is two things. In Spolsky's words, "a) Smart, and b) Gets things done."
In your own words above, it is *precisely* the combination of a) intelligence, and b) willpower. Spolsky lays out all the reasons why an employer must look for both a) + b). There is an abundance of people who are intelligent but without particular willpower, and also an abundance of people with willpower but without particular intelligence -- and a discerning employer will not wish to hire any of them, as Spolsky elaborates.
Any additional "human capital development" that the schooling might or might not have instilled, is a nice-to-have. Whereas the a)+b) is a must-have. The value of an educational degree had, until relatively recently, indeed been proof of you having passed a solid filter for intelligence and willpower both.
The segments of modern academia that are overrun by wokeness have annihilated both of those long-standing foundations. Its coddling of students all but eliminates the filtering on willpower. Its introduction of dogmatic doctrines (which "challenge preconceptions" without ever allowing *themselves* to be challenged) is simply doing away with filtering for intelligence, replacing it by filtering for blithe conformism. In short, they are making academia and its titles to stop having any practical value to employers.
I'm not convinced that the word 'signalling' does imply superficiality or hypocrisy or anything like that - it's just a term from contract theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
Interesting article, thanks for the link. Fine, agreed that the meaning of "signalling" in economic context does correspond to the usage made in the OP, even if the meaning of "signalling" in social context does not.
Outside of specialized contexts, the word "signalling" has the mundane connotation of communication, in which a sender has the agency and freedom to pick any kind of signal to send. While applying for a job, I can freely "signal" that I naturally prioritize the robustness of the work over the deadline, or naturally prioritize the deadline over the robustness of the work, or whatever I judge would be the most adequate signal to send in the circumstance, but I am not free to "signal" that I have a Cambridge MSc if I don't have one. Such a degree effectively *is* a filter. A person may have the agency to communicate a signal of their choosing, but not to be passed by a given filter.
Why raise all this; the premise of the article is virtually grounded on the "mundane" meaning of signalling, while purporting to refer to the "economic" meaning. It's like, if we prove that education is "just" signalling, then it has no true value. On the contrary! The "no true value" conclusion is false, and its falsity is easier to grasp if we replace "signalling" with "filtering". To the degree that the filtering is indeed centered around the combination of intelligence and willpower - the "Smart, and gets things done" in Spolsky terms - its true value is huge. Getting into university is primarily a filter on intelligence. Finishing its studies is a filter on intelligence and willpower both.
It's *really costly* for the knowledge-based industries to sift people in the way that academia could and should have sifted them beforehand. Whereas, if academia *stops* being a filter for intelligence-combined-with-willpower, then it indeed becomes harder to refute the "no true value" assessment.
How do you update your priors when someone with a following (peterson/chomsky) says something highly incongruous (various peterson claims/chomskys imprisoning on non-vaxxed people). What I’m trying to express is how I will just completely lose trust in public intellectuals the when they make a strong statement I find deplorable. Similar to correcting for gell-mann amnesia.
It depends. Those sorts of comments don't make me completely lose trust in their academic research - my view on universal grammar is completely unrelated to Chomsky's comments on the unvaccinated or the Khmer Rouge. But I suppose I take his commentary that is unrelated to linguistics slightly less seriously when Chomsky says something that seems plainly wrong to me?
Thanks for the counterpoint.
Are the "likes" of the post just for your personally or is substack evaluating the number of likes?
I don't actually know the answer to this question! I guess they're just for me to use as a metric but it could well be that substack uses them in algorithms for which blogs to promote. Honestly, I wish I could turn likes off and leave comments on, but apparently you can either have both on or both off.