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Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

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Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#151

Post by michaelmrose »

haukilup wrote: post #147
frubar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart. Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options.

> >This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart. > Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options. For every person you cite as being wildly successful only because of the money they were born into, you could also cite people who came from nothing and became multi-millionaires. Or people who were bor…

There are probably 10,000 who only needed to be rich for every self made multi-milli)onaire who came from nothing.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#152

Post by mmmpop »

fuzzybeard wrote: post #150
fragsworth wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the network is overrated. Everyone I've known has had the same experience - immediately after graduating, everyone gets a job, moves far away from one another, and slowly drifts apart from the friends they met in college. You'll get a similar network working at your first job. And then your second job. The group you met in college is of little consequence in the end.

Not always True. I'm in Boston and the Harvard alumni network is strong. You see connections all the time throughout various events and industries. For example, I'll meet someone in biotech (our state's largest industry) and talk about venture funding for his startup when he'll mention his friends from Harvard that can help get the right introductions.

Not to question the authenticity of your comment but it feels handcrafted to piss off about 75% of HN (not me, necessarily!)

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#153

Post by wott »

taneq wrote: post #108
fragsworth wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the network is overrated. Everyone I've known has had the same experience - immediately after graduating, everyone gets a job, moves far away from one another, and slowly drifts apart from the friends they met in college. You'll get a similar network working at your first job. And then your second job. The group you met in college is of little consequence in the end.

To give an opposing anecdote, I've landed more than half of my full time permanent positions through personal recommendations or references from people I know from university. And these jobs have by far been more interesting and/or better for my career than ones I found through recruiters or vacancy ads.

So, recommendations and references from people who never saw you at work. There's something wrong about that. I am not saying it doesn't happen, it does, but it still makes very little sense.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#154

Post by jstewartmobile »

ajuc wrote: post #146
jstewartmobile wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking here is still in job-credential-land. If the goal is still some kind of 3rd-party pedigree, that is going to be infinitely gameable no matter how you measure it--but that wasn't what I argued! I'm not talking about getting graded USDA Prime so I can fetch the best price in the meat case. I'm talking about personal development. When you go to a personal trainer, you're not going to fudge your delta becau…

But if you want personal development then gaming isn't an issue (why lie to yourself?), and even if you do - changing the metric isn't going to stop you. And grading in absolute values is still more useful to asses your performance than deltas anyway: "you can lift X kg today" is more useful than "you can lift 2 kg more today"?

If we're trying to assess the training instead of the trainee, which is what the article was touching on, I wouldn't be so sure. You've got to take the long game into account.

If we keep with the lifting analogy, I know a lot of guys who could lift some serious weights in high school--but with terrible form. Ten years later they're all messed up with joint and muscle problems due to bad training. They've dropped out of the fitness lifestyle, and aren't about to recommend their HS football coach for anything.

But then you look at guys like Arnold or Scooby who've maintained a high level of fitness throughout their lives without a debilitating injury, people tend to take them more seriously. Of course, then we're talking more about integrals--which would be even harder to fudge than deltas.

I think the worst part of the whole sorry situation is that our modern economy is becoming so detached from reality that the credential has more value than actual performance. I've seen so many nutritionists who are fat and tired and will probably not live that long, but they bought a certification from state U, so now they have a job and people listen to them. Or hairdressers! So many can't even give a decent haircut or keep their tools clean, but they got their state cert, so they can go out and charge for haircuts while mom can't. Or even people with 4.0 GPAs and a masters in CS. I can't tell you how many of those I've had to let go because a high schooler ran circles around them.

Computing is one of the few fields, like music or acting, where you can still just go out there, perform, and get paid for it. I wonder how long that will remain the case...

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#155

Post by Retric »

haukilup wrote: post #147
frubar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart. Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options.

> >This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart. > Like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardasian, etc.? No, rich is still the only requirement. Those other things just give you more options. For every person you cite as being wildly successful only because of the money they were born into, you could also cite people who came from nothing and became multi-millionaires. Or people who were bor…

If you have 10 rich people with a 50% shot of making it : 99,990 people with a 0.005% shot of making it then the number of people with both backgrounds who made it is reasonably balanced. But, in no way is this a meritocracy.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#156

Post by tyrw »

mmmpop wrote: post #152
fuzzybeard wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always True. I'm in Boston and the Harvard alumni network is strong. You see connections all the time throughout various events and industries. For example, I'll meet someone in biotech (our state's largest industry) and talk about venture funding for his startup when he'll mention his friends from Harvard that can help get the right introductions.

Not to question the authenticity of your comment but it feels handcrafted to piss off about 75% of HN (not me, necessarily!)

What is offensive about this? The fact that someone on HN went to Harvard?

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#157

Post by gmarx »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #26
gmarx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The racial achievement gap closed? That would be a huge story and I would be surprised if I missed it...unless you mean the gap closed within the school (i.e. not relative to society at large) because the remaining whites achievements were lower than the average before they fled, i.e. selection bias :)

Integrated schools help to reduce racial achievement gaps. In fact, the racial achievement gap in K–12 education closed more rapidly during the peak years of school desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s than it has overall in the decades that followed—when many desegregation policies were dismantled. More recently, black and Latino students had smaller achievement gaps with white students on the 2007 and 2009 NAEP whe…

Sorry for the late response. I haven't gone to the links yet but the quotes in italics give me pause. They seem to be at pains to state things in a way which looks like it means one thing but may mean another. The second sentence is a nice start to an investigation but is not evidence really, just a temporal association. The third sentence is about poverty, not integration.

The fact that the gap is larger in segregated districts is difficult to interpret without knowing if the comparison is to the population as a whole (i.e. blacks in the district to whites as a whole) or within the district (i.e. blacks in the district to whites in the district). I'd also want to know if how those districts compared to other districts. Were these high achieving schools? Low achieving? Somewhere in the middle?

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#158

Post by jamescostian »

oldandtired wrote: post #102
jamescostian wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a student, I agree with many of the words you said but for different reasons. I've had a middle school teacher who told us about her own sex life during class. I've had a high school teacher who droned on and on about her divorce (to the point that everyone learned so little, almost no one passed the AP exams she was supposed to prepare us for) and put down religions - again, during class. College isn't a whole lo…

Having been a student with good and bad teachers, I can see your point. However, many of the things that you are being taught (at least I hope this is still the case) that don't appear to be needed for the "job" are actually important because they are needed for the understanding of the background for why and how the "job". The failure of teachers that we faced as students was that the reasons for learning something…

I definitely agree that learning things that seem irrelevant to your job pipeline can be good, just like your K-maps example. But I also think there are plenty of seemingly irrelevant things that end up not helping you at all, ever.

That's why I don't think teachers ought to be in charge of teaching those extra things like K-maps, but rather, students should be asked to study things on their own (both inside and outside their comfort zone), in hopes that students will "learn to learn" and be able to teach themselves.

You're right, this method would not have given you K-maps in school, but it also would have wasted less of your time in school, and empowered you to learn about things on your own (such as don't cares in K-maps, or even just the general idea that you can assign whatever value you like to outputs you never expect to see).

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#159

Post by jamescostian »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #99
jamescostian wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a student, I agree with many of the words you said but for different reasons. I've had a middle school teacher who told us about her own sex life during class. I've had a high school teacher who droned on and on about her divorce (to the point that everyone learned so little, almost no one passed the AP exams she was supposed to prepare us for) and put down religions - again, during class. College isn't a whole lo…

Like you said, most people know who's done them a service and who hasn't. If only that was what they were selling! Just pretend to care while they're rattling on about their kids and their sex lives, meticulously regurgitate their opinions--verbatim--on the test, and watch the circle of life remain unbroken as one generation of over-credentialed under-performers passes the torch to the next. I mean, hell, it's only f…

AMEN

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#160

Post by mmmpop »

tyrw wrote: post #156
mmmpop wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to question the authenticity of your comment but it feels handcrafted to piss off about 75% of HN (not me, necessarily!)

What is offensive about this? The fact that someone on HN went to Harvard?

Envy I'd guess? There are probably a lot of reasons that some people resent Ivy League grads, probably the whole "legacy" model. I get that, but I know plenty that were just talented and worked very hard to be there. Haters gonna hate!
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