The White Man's Burden

Japanese Craft Biru

I'd seen the beer with the cute Owl on it at Total Wine.

How Culturally Isolated are you?

Via DarwinCatholic, How Thick is Your Bubble?

How Thick Is Your Bubble? Guest Score » 10 out of 20  (50% )  Result   On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 9 and 12. In other words, even if you're part of the new upper class, you've had a lot of exposure to the rest of America. Quiz School Take this quiz & get your score

How Thick Is Your Bubble? » Free Online Quizzes

Modern Education

Via Walter Russell Mead, here is an editorial in the NY Times by Larry Summers on the future of education.

Summers lists 6 things about American education he thinks are changing. The article is pretty interesting, and while I largely agree with Summers' argument, I feel there is still some value in the traditional model of a university education. Despite hating college, I still think the 4-year residential institution has some unique advantages.

1. Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it. .... But in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important.

I completely understand where Summers is coming from. I rarely have any need of memorization to perform my job well. That being said, I think the real value of learning some things by heart is that it enables you to think faster. Much like the way good habits make it easier to use your willpower, mastering the fundamentals of a field enables you to spend precious brainpower on the challenge fo the moment. This matches up well with Summers' point 4.

2. An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration. As just one example, the fraction of economics papers that are co-authored has more than doubled in the 30 years that I have been an economist. More significant, collaboration is a much greater part of what workers do, what businesses do and what governments do. Yet the great preponderance of work a student does is done alone at every level in the educational system. Indeed, excessive collaboration with others goes by the name of cheating.

For most people, school is the last time they will be evaluated on individual effort.

Where I work, copying your report from the last person who did the same thing is a standard practice. 

3. New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed. Electronic readers allow textbooks to be constantly revised, and to incorporate audio and visual effects.... There was a time when professors had to prepare materials for their students. Then it became clear that it would be a better system if textbooks were written by just a few of the most able: faculty members would be freed up and materials would be improved, as competition drove up textbook quality.

As Steve Sailer recently noted, tablet technology could drive innovation in education, except no one, even Apple, has really made this happen yet. As for lecture and lab preparation, this makes sense in certain contexts. The Magistra taught a class for an online college, and all of the course materials were simply provided for her. This is super efficient, but it fundamentally changes the relation of an instructor to the subject. I've never learned as much about a subject as when I needed to teach it. Standardized instruction probably makes the most sense for the large number of people who need post-secondary education, but aren't college material. 

4. As articulated by the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we understand the processes of human thought much better than we once did. We are not rational calculating machines but collections of modules, each programmed to be adroit at a particular set of tasks. Not everyone learns most effectively in the same way. And yet in the face of all evidence, we rely almost entirely on passive learning. Students listen to lectures or they read and then are evaluated on the basis of their ability to demonstrate content mastery. They aren’t asked to actively use the knowledge they are acquiring.

“Active learning classrooms” — which cluster students at tables, with furniture that can be rearranged and integrated technology — help professors interact with their students through the use of media and collaborative experiences. Still, with the capacity of modern information technology, there is much more that can be done to promote dynamic learning.

I'm pretty suspicious the real utility of learning styles, but there is probably some room for improvement here. If you need to learn to be a PhD physicist, a lecture is a must. If you are learning to be an engineer, a hands-on lab would probably be way more useful. I think the problem here is probably that we try to teach everyone as if they were going to be future professors, a problem in every discipline.

5. The world is much more open, and events abroad affect the lives of Americans more than ever before. This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world. It seems logical, too, that more in the way of language study be expected of students. I am not so sure.

English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile. While there is no gainsaying the insights that come from mastering a language, it will over time become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.

I remember scandalizing an acquaintance in college when I expressed how convenient it is that everyone in the world speaks English. I really like languages, but I suck at learning them.

6. Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data. Gen. George Marshall famously told a Princeton commencement audience that it was impossible to think seriously about the future of postwar Europe without giving close attention to Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War. Of course, we’ll always learn from history. But the capacity for analysis beyond simple reflection has greatly increased (consider Gen. David Petraeus’s reliance on social science in preparing the army’s counterinsurgency manual).

Nuff said.

CrossFit 2011-01-25

Hotel workout

2 rounds

• 10 burpees
• 20 air squats

CrossFit 2012-01-23

Fran

21-15-9

• Squat thrusters [30 kg]
• Kipping pullups

Time 9:01

Last time 11:10

Dessert 2 minutes situps, 2 minutes rest, 2 minutes situps

Score: 57 and 44

The New American Divide

Charles Murray is taking a tour of the opinion pages, stumping for his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I've been looking forward to this book for some time now. Murray is arguing that Americans of all classes used to share a common civic culture, but this has greatly changed over the past fifty years. There is a new prole class, with distinctive tastes and life patterns, and a winner class [my terms not Murray's] that earns double or triple what the working class would and shares the tastes of SWPLs. As always, Murray uses databases like the General Social Survey to make his case, often turning up surprising results. For example, the GSS demonstrates that the new upper class is actually far more religious than the new lower class. I'll be sure to pick up a copy of this book when it comes out.

When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

...

As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

In-sourcing

The big business news of the moment, other than cheap oil and gas from fracking, is the continuing growth in US manufacturing. What this hasn't meant is a ton of new jobs. The reason for this is pretty simple, US workers are about three times more efficient than Chinese workers doing the same job. That means you need a third of the staff to get the same output.

The other thing this means is you need to be more efficient to get these jobs. Assembly lines no longer represent rote tasks you can train anyone to do. You have to be capable of learning to operate a complex machine, and meet all the complicated social rules of the modern workplace too. This leaves a lot of people at the bottom of the ability distribution without a means of making a decent living.

The massive productivity of American workers means that we can actually afford to have a significant fraction of the population not doing useful work, but this is ultimately dehumanizing to those stuck at the bottom. I have no idea what to do about this, but it is only going to get worse as the economy improves.

h/t Steve Hsu

An exception

An exception to the rule of thumb that most social statistics get better as you get closer to the Canadian border.

Percentage of adults who admit binge drinking

CrossFit 2012-01-18

3 rounds

• 70m lunge lap
• 25 kb swings [20kg]
• 25 Italian tosses double count [15#]

Finish with 1/2 mile run

Time 20:38