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My Students Can't Read

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Re: My Students Can't Read

#191

Post by cjbgkagh »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #166
cjbgkagh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is easier to make that call when you’re not at risk of being sued.

If the choice is between eroding the recognition of excellence and risk being sued, then the foundation upon which the society has been built is the problem. The solution to which is, as @JumpCrisscross says, correcting legislation in such a way as to direct the society towards better outcomes.

Disparate impact laws are a spin off from civil rights act 1964 so you’d have to repeal at least a part of that act. Much of modern society is shaped by these laws so you’d be completely changing the structure of society. Many people benefit from the status quo and those people, who have substantial means, will fight any attempts to repeal these laws.

I want these laws changed, it is the whole reason I brought up the issue, but I also understand how monumentally difficult it would be to do that. I suspect the US would have to degrade far further to even consider this.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#192

Post by mos_basik »

cmxch wrote: post #187
abaymado wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually dese…

So basically you want to tier bin people’s lives and careers because of one or two numbers? Fuck No.

Friend, you've misunderstood. @abaymado's point was that tier binning people's lives and careers on one or two numbers is an awful approach, and doing it probably produces more poorly educated people.

(Much irony, given the topic of TFA.)

Re: My Students Can't Read

#193

Post by godelski »

bmn__ wrote: post #176
godelski wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills. Meaning it can be learned. Trained. I'm not defending the metric. People use it like it is some innate thing that doesn't change over one's lifetime. In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ. It's also important to note that IQ is normalized. An IQ of 100 today is different than an IQ of 100 20 years ago.…

> > IQ is about aptitude > Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ. You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.

  > or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
If that were the case a person's IQ wouldn't increase during that time.

It's also pretty well known and well studied that you can train people to score higher on IQ tests. I'm not talking about years of training either

Re: My Students Can't Read

#194

Post by cjbgkagh »

mos_basik wrote: post #192
cmxch wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically you want to tier bin people’s lives and careers because of one or two numbers? Fuck No.

Friend, you've misunderstood. @abaymado's point was that tier binning people's lives and careers on one or two numbers is an awful approach, and doing it probably produces more poorly educated people. (Much irony, given the topic of TFA.)

The problem is that as the education system degrades the products of that system gain power over it and accelerate the decline.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#195

Post by AnimalMuppet »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #175
godelski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…

Is meritocracy a dream for a society? The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it. What I want ultimately is that we strive…

Well, meritocracy isn't just who gets the jobs. It's who gets the jobs that run society. And that's important for everyone, because it matters to everyone that society be competently run, rather than run by incompetents who have important parents.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#196

Post by godelski »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #175
godelski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…

Is meritocracy a dream for a society? The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it. What I want ultimately is that we strive…

  > I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser
We already do this and we've done it throughout history too. There's always some excuse people will make to feel better than others. Wealth, religion, race, intelligence, education, all sorts of things.

But we do want high social mobility. If you work hard it is easy to climb the ladders. If you squander your wealth it is easy to slip. I'm not saying there should be no friction, the correct balance is always hard to find.

But whatever that merit is is something we need to decide as a society. It can be anything we want. It can be your work that contributes to monetary growth. It could be work that contributes to scientific growth. It could be how great of an artist you are. How popular you are. Our anything. We decide and we decide how much one means more than the other. Or we could even decide that there are no "lessers" and we could decide that the person traveling the world on their parent's dime has the same value to our society as a scientist, businessman, or artist. Mind you, I'm not talking about their value as a human, that's different

Re: My Students Can't Read

#197

Post by eudamoniac »

joquarky wrote: post #169
godelski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…

How can we claim to have a meritocracy if we allow inheritance?

By not conflating wealth with merit

Re: My Students Can't Read

#198

Post by tasuki »

jmspring wrote: post #50
pclowes wrote: post #28

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest…

My step daughter graduated this last week (high school). Watching the curriculum over the last 4 years, they had 5-8 validictorian (all a's) and 6-8 salutarians (sp?) (all a's one b). They would have been at the 3.x level in my high school 25 years ago. The rigor in high school is no longer there, community college is adopting to the lesser expectation as well.

This has been going on for thousands of years...

Re: My Students Can't Read

#199

Post by tasuki »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #123
ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which…

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days. I'm not sure it matters anyway. I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points. I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points. I know many people who don'…

> If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me".

And the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points.

One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?

Re: My Students Can't Read

#200

Post by godelski »

ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which…

  > which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it
Literacy isn't just the ability to read words, it's the ability to interpret them.

You can read while still being illiterate

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