The Superstar Effect

In addition to my other comments, I'd like to ask what your overall goal is for grade-school education. (It seems to me that most of your arguments are about grade school and not college. This may be wrong.)

The current (public school) system, inasfar as it has a single consistent goal, tries to optimize the minimal level of education that almost all students attain. Therefore it invests more in students who are doing worse: a lesson advances at the pace of the slowest students. There are sometimes multiple classes for differently performing students, but these are limited to a few subjects in a few years and are still very coarse-grained. (Of course the system also has non-education-related goals, which makes things harder to analyze.)

If I wanted to change the system to optimize average academic achievement instead, I would first of all group students by ability, not by age cohort. And this grouping would be separate for separate subjects. In today's system, if a student fails one class but does well in others, she must either repeat that year for the sake of one class, or advance a year and continue to fail to keep up in that one subject.

But it may be that neither approach is strictly better than the other; it depends on what you are optimizing for. The school system optimizes for socializing kids (even if their models of how to do so are wrong and harmful) and for pleasing their parents. Academic achievement isn't a top priority, and even if it were, there is no objectively "correct" choice between maximizing average achievement, top 10% achievement, or top 90% achievement.

Note: even with these great lessons, I still think that teachers will be useful. The lessons could be pretty good, so I'm not sure if they'd be necessary, but I suspect that they'd still be useful.

It seems you're thinking of a system where teachers help students learn, and the students want to learn and apply some minimal effort towards doing so. And where really good lecture material is prerecorded and teachers don't have to spend the majority of their time reading from standardized lecture notes.

But the biggest problems in modern education seem to lie in mandatory grade school, not in elective college degrees. Many students strongly don't want to study (at least certain subjects); others simply don't care enough to put in a lot of effort. The task of the teacher in practice is often to force students to study (or encourage them, if possible). For those students who do want to study, being forced to sit in the same class as those who don't is often a problem in itself.

Outdoing The Superstar is a large and complex task, and I won't pretend to have all the answers. However, I've had this nagging suspicion in the back of my mind for years. My suspicion is that people drastically overestimate this risk, and that with a good plan and enough resources, you could have an excellent chance at "outdoing The Superstar".

Music appears to be a straightforward counter-example to your claim. Loads and loads of artists and bands struggle in obscurity for their whole lives, without being close to superstar. As someone surrounded by highly trained classical musicians, I know that they are mostly not going to be famous, because I know lots that have spent their lives being exactly that. Daniel Kahneman did some work in hedonism, and I recall him saying that music was an industry you should get in to if you want to be reliably unhappy, and theorising that this was because you never get anywhere. I think that this argument misses out the behavioural economics side, that people not only want the best, but people are going to want to keep with the current superstar, because they are high status too. Also, have you spent time looking for theories about why nobody else is jumping onto this mahoosive gap in the market? Any bias theory?

If you feel that you have a way of beating the market in, say, the education industry, feel free to go out and actually do it. But saying that it appears to be easy, seems an obvious error. What you actually have done is noticed a number of problems and flaws with a current system. They are all valid, and you're not the first to notice them. The education system is hard to change, due to the political situation it is controlled by, and that may be part of the reason that it is not fixed; because the people in charge have no incentive to do so.

the education system today is shit.

Whose education system? Compared to what?

If you want to design a new credential, how do you make people accept/respect it? One way is "convince the relevant government to make it illegal for people to perform a specific task without your credential", but are there others?

As an employer, why should I hire someone who learned to code at App Academy but never went to college instead of the guy with the Comp. Sci degree from NJIT?

The "superstar effect" happened "naturally" with books, music, and so on. If there is this potential gain in education, why hasn't it happened, and what are you going to do about that?

I am not sure how much the Elon Musk quote has to do with education as in schooling. There was undoubtedly a great deal of learning by doing and selecting the best that went into creating the team that created The Dark Knight. A classroom can only go so far in that regard.

I am not really sure I understand what you mean by "pooling resources." Do you mean spending more? Nor do I understand what "division of resources" is or what it has to do with education or the Elon Musk quote or education or schooling.

Is fun, interactive, flashy teaching really better than rote repetition and instruction for the mastery of many skills? E.g.

Of course the testing situation in American public schools is not ideal, but it is the product of the incentives of the people in control of the resources. What can you do about that?

Iteration and change probably requires market competition.

However, the fact remains that investment decisions are all about expected value. Risk vs. reward. Risk isn't inherently bad, it just needs to be balanced by the reward. An in the case of superstar industries, the potential reward is huge.

There are pitfalls to expected value. Volatility is a killer. A lot of risk management is devoted to reducing the impact of volatility on your position. Even Kelly bets, which maximize long-term expected return, are subject to wide swings. It's okay to take on a few long shots with a high reward, but the longer the shot the smaller the fraction of your bankroll you want to bet (note that by the Kelly criterion, this holds true even if the potential returns are huge).

People seem to view large ventures like starting startups as a roll of the dice. They say things like, "9 out of 10 startups fail". I don't see things that way. I don't see it as "a roll of the dice". I see it as a deterministic puzzle that can be solved.

Any solution you can implement, a competitor can potentially implement as well. You can't deterministically beat such a competitor.

Also, the testing effect. There seems to be some sort of consensus among scientists who research in the relevant area that many, low-stakes quizzes is better than few high-stakes tests, because it reduces student anxiety, encourages a more spread out practice distribution, and leverages the testing effect more. (There exists proper empirical support which I'm too lazy to dig up, but will if asked to.)

Thank you for your article, I really liked the optimism I felt conveyed from the paragraph about beating the superstar.

(I have my own caveat here, it does not pertain to the level of the easiness of the necessary plans or their implementation - in my experience it's much more the coordination problems that throw a wrench into these schemes: You are going to invariably need more people on the set; and you're going to end up spending factorially more time on explaining what exactly on earth you want to do) I notice though that most superstars didn't optimise their abilities, when treated separately, their ideas are barely trivial, and the stuff that is heard a decade, hundred years later probably was not made by a superstar of that time. (Know Giacinto Scelsi? He invented the stuff that people today use in music that the superstars of tomorrow will make. ~10% confident about that, considering x-risk and everything)

On another note, do I read you well enough to say that you wish to optimise on the teaching side? What if you could get more mileage out of optimising on the learning side, for instance propagating the urge of really wanting to learn stuff?

I'd also be interested how you'd set your plan in motion. Given infinite resources, what particular thing you know about would you change first. (Describe it to my system 1, pretty please)

the education system today is shit.

Whose education system? Compared to what?

you shouldn't have students learn things that they don't have the proper foundation for.

I think that in education the problem usually isn't students learning things they don't have the proper foundation for, but rather people disagreeing on the goal of the learning. You don't elaborate your point and so I'm unsure what you mean precisely, so what follows may be a tangent.

Almost all academic subjects - in math, computing, natural sciences, history, literature, economics - have 'foundations' one could learn. In math, these are axiomatic formulations and proofs (as opposed to results), and often complex underlying theories. In computing, these are enginnering artifacts - software and hardware designs, implementations, and algorithms. In the sciences, these are the more fundamental laws of nature (which may be described by a slightly different science), as well as a great deal of organized facts, especially in biology. In history and literature, these are even more history and literature which provide the necessary background context.

One can always point towards a lesson (which isn't at a graduate level) and claim students are missing some fundamental background. So does that mean we shouldn't teach calculus without the underlying proofs, or programming 101 before operating system design, or classical physics before modern theories? That depends on what you want to accomplish.

When I studied undergrad CS, most courses had several versions you could choose from. All freshmen in the sciences & engineering faculties had to take a course on real number calculus, but there were as many as 5 variations, billed as calculus for math, physics, CS, engineering, and biology/chemistry majors, respectively. The math majors spent most of their time (and were tested mostly on) proving theorems. The engineering students studied solving really hard instances of the equations. And the biology students did the minimum and skipped some of the hard proofs entirely.

Did the biology students not "learn the proper foundation" for calculus? That depends entirely on the use they expect to make of it. The tradeoffs of the harder courses are clear: more time and effort spent studying, and more students failing the course and not graduating. (Also, things one learns but never uses are usually forgotten after a few years.)

In many cases it's harder to match up the optimal lesson for the goal. In grade school we studied history. Which historical subjects should be taught? How should the available time be spread across them - studying a few eras in depth, or many on a shallow level? How useful is it, and against what goal should it be judged, to learn about any one historical setting without understanding its causes and effects - what came before and after, what was happening elsewhere at the same time, why people behaved as they did? But any mandatory education system must make centralized decisions about the accepted minimum that everyone should know.

I will now proceed to miss the point. ;)

Consider The Dark Knight. It's awesome! It has all the best actors, directors, special effects etc. Now imagine if you took the same script and asked the local middle school to reproduce it. It'd suck. That's education.

Oddly enough, sometimes you get the opposite effect. "Arsenic and Old Lace" is hilarious when performed by random high school students, but under no circumstances should professional actors ever be allowed to perform it. If the performances are too "good", the atmosphere goes from ridiculous and starts veering toward creepy (but not quite creepy enough to be genuine horror).

The Large Puzzle that I understand best is Education

Unless you are studying education, you don't know that much about education.