California needs real math education, not gimmicks

> I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats.

I had a similar experience. I wasn't particularly good at math and struggled a bit with algebra until I started programming.

I had something I wanted to solve, and I found out I needed to convert between one ratio to another ratio, and I couldn't figure out how. Then I realized I could just compute a percentage and use that. After all a ratio is a measure of something relative to a whole and percentage would tell you, well, the percentage of the whole, and I had memorized the formulas from going to and from percent.

So I wrote the code for this, but staring at the code it suddenly was so obvious that the division by 100 on the first line would cancel with the multiplication by 100 on the second line.

That was my eureka moment. Algebra suddenly made sense, and math in general became a whole lot easier.

Have you thought out the perverse incentives your pay scheme would create?

I don't believe that "education resources" are lacking at all, if a student has access to the internet they have instant access to anything they would learn k-16. In terms of exercise, everybody has their own personal/public gym, with all the most advanced equipment (possibly interspersed with suboptimal equipment but an advanced personal gym nonetheless) that they do not use, because they either aren't athletes or don't care about exercise for health/spiritual fulfillment. Any work on making the gym better is wasted it isn't being used.

How can we solve this problem? Advertisement.

Perhaps instead of giving talks at conferences to people who couldn't care less about what you are saying and even if they did care they are "too busy" to engage with the ideas; you give talks to elementary schoolers instead. Elementary school, classrooms or auditoriums, or a monthly lecture series over the course of a year.

There aren't many other effective ways to show students that real people actually care about STEM, this one has the bonus of making use of the education of people who went from say EE to IT support, teachers cannot reasonably be expected to explain to children how electricity works better than that guy who lives a block down from you who has a stack of breadboards up to the ceiling, and just showing a video lacks the spontaneity needed to keep children engaged as you change focus.

What exactly is stopping you from repeating that talk you gave at strangeloop, rustconf, usenix, fosdem or gophercon to that school within walking distance? At the very least can you walk into the principal's office, look them dead in the eye; give them a firm handshake and tell them that you want to get involved with the kids' education.

How many STEM degrees holders are in California? A hundred thousand? How many elementary schools? If you are a Californian, tell me how many STEM related talks, given by a community speaker, did you attend during your k-12 schooling? Now tell me how many times your teacher put on some random movie.

For me the answers are 0 and 100+

That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but:

The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.

It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it.

> Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence).

> A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2

> And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation.

> Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.