It’s vagueness is intentional and allows you to ignore the blind truth and fill in the gaps yourself. You just have to believe it’s right around the corner.

That doesn’t seem accurate, even if you limit it to mental tasks. For example, do we expect an AGI to be able to meditate, or to mentally introspect itself like a human, or to describe its inner qualia, in order to constitute an AGI?

Another thought: The way human perform tasks is affected by involuntary aspects of the respective individual mind, in a way that the involuntariness is relevant (for example being repulsed by something, or something not crossing one’s mind). If it is involuntary for the AGI as well, then it can’t perform tasks in all the different ways that different humans would. And if it isn’t involuntary for the AGI, can it really reproduce the way (all the ways) individual humans would perform a task? To put it more concretely: For every individual, there is probably a task that they can’t perform (with a specific outcome) that however another individual can perform. If the same is true for an AGI, then by your definition it isn’t an AGI because it can’t perform all tasks. On the other hand, if we assume it can perform all tasks, then it would be unlike any individual human, which raises the question of whether this is (a) possible, and (b) conceptually coherent to begin with.

Moreso, I see an AI that can do any (intelligence) task a human can will be far beyond human capabilities because even individual humans can't do everything.

Do you mind sharing the kinds of descriptive criteria for these behaviors that you are envisioning for which there is overlap with the general assumption of them occurring in a machine? I can foresee a sort of “featherless biped” scenario here without more details about the question.

How would you know if it could? How do you know that other human beings can? You don’t.

...Yes. This is what I think 'most' people consider a real AI to be.

Lots of debate since ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion can be summarised as A: "AI cheated by copying humans, it just mixes the bits up really small like a collage" B: "So like humans learning from books and studying artists?" A: "That doesn't count, it's totally different"

Even though I am quite happy to agree that differences exist, I have yet to see a clear answer as to what about people even mean when asserting that AI learning from books is "cheating" given that it's *mandatory* for humans in most places.

and yet, so confident. so secure. interesting.

We need to crack the code for updating the base model on the fly or daily / weekly. Where is the regular learning by doing?

Not over the course of a year, spending untold billions to do it.

To change this you would either need to let the model retrain itself every time it receives new information, or to have such a great context length that there is no effective difference. I suspect even meat models like our brains is still struggling to do this effectively and need a long rest cycle (i.e. sleep) to handle it. So the problem is inherently more difficult to solve than just "thinking". We may even need an entire new architecture different from the neural network to achieve this.

Isn't that just improving the prompt to the non-learning model?

Words about private internal state don't get feedback about what they actually are on the inside, just about what they look like on the outside* — "thinking" and "understanding" map to what AI give the outward impression of, even if the inside is different in whatever ways you regard as important.

* This is also how people with aphantasia keep reporting their surprise upon realising that scenes in films where a character is imagining something are not merely artistic license.

What you’re going through is hype overdose. You’re numb to it. Like I can get if someone disagrees but it’s a next level lack of understanding human behavior if you don’t get the hype at all.

There exists living human beings who are still children or with brain damage with comparable intelligence to an LLM and we classify those humans as conscious but we don’t with LLMs.

I’m not trying to say LLMs are conscious but just saying that the creation of LLMs marks a significant turning point. We crossed a barrier 2 years ago somewhat equivalent to landing on the moon and i am just dumb founded that someone doesn’t understand why there is hype around this.

In all honesty, there are lots of connections between powered flight and space travel. Two obvious ones are "light and strong metallurgy" and "a solid mathematical theory of thermodynamics". Once you can build lightweight and efficient combustion chambers, a lot becomes possible...

Similarly, with LLMs, it's clear we've hit some kind of phase shift in what's possible - we now have enough compute, enough data, and enough know-how to be able to copy human symbolic thought by sheer brute-force. At the same time, through algorithms as "unconnected" as airplanes and spacecraft, computers can now synthesize plausible images, plausible music, plausible human speech, plausible anything you like really. Our capabilities have massively expanded in a short timespan - we have cracked something. Something big, like lightweight combustion chambers.

The status quo ante is useless to predict what will happen next.

No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon. Ever. Never ever.

If you think it is, you're adding things to make a plane capable of space flight.

Indeed. But there's a reason "aerospace" is a word.

>No plane, relying upon air pressure to fly, can ever use that method to get to the moon

No indeed. But if you want to build a moon rocket, the relevant skillsets are found in people who make airplanes. Who built Apollo? Boeing. Grumman. McDonnell Douglas. Lockheed.

Sure, rocketry to LEO asks more in strength of materials, and aviation doesn’t require liquid fueled propulsion or being able to control attitude in vacuum.

These aren’t unconnected developments. Space travel grew straight out of aviation and military aviation. Indeed, look at the vertical takeoff aircraft from the 40s and 50s, evolving into missile systems with solid propulsion and then liquid propulsion.

LLMs may be a key building block for early AGI. The jury is still out. Will a LLM alone do it? No. You can't build a space vehicle from fins and fairings and control systems alone.

O1 can reach pretty far beyond past LLM capabilities by adding infrastructure for metacognition and goal seeking. Is O1 the pinnacle, or can we go further?

In either case, planes and rocket-planes did a lot to get us to space-- they weren't an unrelated evolutionary dead end.

> Yet powered flight has nothing to do with space travel, no connection at all.

Fully disagree.

But I haven't seen where you make a compelling argument why it's the same thing in AI/AGI.

In your old analogy, we're all still the guys on the ground saying it'll work. You're saying it won't. But nobody has "been to space" yet. You have no idea if LLMs will take us to AGI.

I personally think they'll be the engine on the spaceship.

From another post:

No amount of compute will generate AGI via LLM methods.

LLMs don't think, they don't reason, they don't infer, they aren't creative, they come up with nothing new, it's easiest to just say "they don't".

One key aspect here is that knowledge has nothing to do with intelligence. A cat is more intelligent than any LLM that will ever exist. A mouse. Correlative fact regurgitation is not what intelligence is, any more than a book on a shelf is intelligence, or the results of Yahoo search 10 years ago were.

The most amusing is when people mistake shuffled up data output from an LLM as "signs of thought".

From where I sit, I don't even see LLMs as being some sort of memory store for AGIs even. The knowledge isn't reliable enough. An AGI would need to ingress and then store knowledge in its own mind, not use an LLM as a reference.

Part of what makes intelligence, intelligent, is the ability to see information and learn on the spot. And further to learn via its own senses.

Let's look at bats. A bat is very close to humans, genetically. Yet if somehow we took "bat memories", and were able to implant them in humans, how on earth would that help? How do you use bat memories of using sound for navigation, to "see" work? Of flying? Of social structure?

For example, we literally don't have them brain matter to see spatially the same way bats do. So when access those memories, they would be so foreign, that their usefulness is greatly reduced. They'd be confusing, unhelpful.

Think of it. Ingress of data and information is sensorially derived. Our mental image of the world depends upon this data. Our core being is built upon this foundation. An AGI using an LLM as "memories" would be experiencing something just as foreign.

So even if LLMs were used to allow an AGI to query things, it wouldn't be used as "memory". And the type of memory store that LLMs exhibit, is most certainly not how intelligence as we know it stores memory.

We base our knowledge upon directly observed and verified fact, but further based upon the senses we have. And all information derived from those senses is actually filtered, and processed by specialized parts of our brains, before we even "experience" it.

Our knowledge is so keyed in and tailored directly to our senses, and the processing of that data, that there is no way to separate the two. Our skill, experience, and capabilities are "whole body".

An LLM is none of this.

The only true way to create an AGI via LLMs would be to simulate a brain entirely, and then start scanning human brains during specific learning events. Use that data to LLM your way into an averaged and probabilistic mesh, and then use that output to at least provide full sense memory input to an AGI.

Even so, I suspect that may be best used to create a reliable substrate. Use that method to simulate and validate and modify that substrate so it is capable of using such data, thereby verifying that it stands solid as a model for an AGI's mind.

Then wipe and allow learning to begin entirely separately.

Yet to do even this, we'd need to ensure that sensor input at least to a degree enables the same sort of sense input. I think that Neuralink might be best in play to enable this, for as it works at creating an interface for, say, sight, and other senses... it could then use this same series of mapped inputs for a simulated human brain.

This of course works best with a physical form to also taste the environment around it, and who also is working on an actual android for day to day use?

You might say this focuses too much on creating a human style AGI, but frankly it's the only thing we can try to make and work into creating a true AGI. We have no other real world examples of intelligence to use, and every brain on the planet is part of the same evolutionary tree.

So best to work with something we know, something we're getting more and more apt at understanding, and with brain implants of the calibre and quality that neurolink is devising, something we can at least understand in far more depth than ever before.

You eventually said winged flight much later-- trying to make your point a little more defensible. That's why I started explaining to you the very big connections between powered flight and space travel ;)

I pretty much completely disagree with your wall of text, and it's not a very well reasoned defense of your prior handwaving. I'm going to move on now.

Winged flight == "low/high pressure" flight, it's how an airplane wing works and provides lift.

On the other hand, powered flight and the things we started building for powered flight got us to the moon. "Powered flight" got us to turbojets, and turbomachinery is the number one key space launch technology.

Anyways, bye.

Or maybe you didn't read closely? You claimed I didn't mention winged flight, yet I mentioned that and the method of winged flight. Typically, that means you say "Oh, sorry, I missed that" instead of blaming others.

I have refuted technology paths in prior posts. Refute those comments if you wish, but just restating your position without refuting mine doesn't seem like it will go anywhere.

And if you don't want a reply? Just stop talking. Don't play the "Oh, I'm going to say things, then say 'bye' to induce no response" game.

Just debate fairly.

> Just debate fairly.

The thing I felt like responding to, you were like "noooo, i didn't mean that at all.

> > > > > Yet powered flight has nothing to do with space travel, no connection at all.

Pretty absolute statement.

> > > > > Gliding in the air via low/high pressure doesn't mean you'll get near space, ever, with that tech.

Then, I guess you're saying this sentence is trying to restrict it to "airfoils aren't enough to go to space", and not talk about how powered flight lead directly to space travel... Through direct evolution of propulsion (turbo-machinery), control, construction techniques, analysis methods, and yes, airfoils.

I guess we can stay here debating the semantics of what you originally said if you really want to keep talking. But since you're walking away from what I saw as your original point, I'm not sure what you see as productive to say.

https://bigthink.com/the-past/wright-brothers-ignored/

People are well aware of the limits of LLMs.

As slow as the progress is, we now have metrics and measurable progress towards agi even when there are clear signs of limitations on LLMs. We never had this before and everyone is aware of this. No one is delusional about it.

The delusion is more around people who think other people are making claims of going to the moon in a year or something. I can see it in 10 to 30 years.

I didn't say there was endless hype, I gave an example of how one technology would never result in another... even if to a layperson it seems connected.

(The sky, and the moon, are "up")

People are well aware of the limits of LLMs.

Surely you mean "Some people". Because the point in this thread is that there is a lot of hype, and FOMO, and "OMG AGI!" chatter running around LLMs. Which will never ever make AGI.

Then you made an analogy and I said your analogy is irrelevant because nobody thinks LLMs are agi nor do they think agi is coming out of LLMs this coming year.

And hype doesn't mean "this year" regardless.

Anyhow, I don't think we'll close this gap between our assessment.

The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.

Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.

As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.

One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.

All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle

I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern.

Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state.

I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.

True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores".

Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!

(The word is “Culture”)

African-American communities could be a lot better off if they had been able to take advantage of the same veterans benefits programs that white veterans were able to take advantage of, if they had been able to get home loans on the same terms that white counterparts were able to, if Black professionals had been able find work outside of Black operated businesses, and so on.

But yeah, Black people are real lazy if you just ignore hundreds of years of history. Black people ain't lazy, they just don't have the same opportunities as everyone else because when they walk into an interview with a white manager, there's a real good chance that manager is thinking something like, "In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture".

> I remember reading about certain African-American immigrants being focused on education and doing fairly well

From the Harvard Business Review: "In the United States, where 13.7% of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2% of the self-employed workforce and 25% of startup founders". So, this pattern shows up for immigrant communities in general, it is not evidence that Africans off the boat from Africa have a different culture that makes them more likely to succeed than their American counterparts that have lived in America for generations.

The idea that a historically disenfranchised group is unsuccessful due to certain "cultural values" does not hold water. It's just a way to ignore history, and in turn ignore and excuse existing biases.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecityma...

How did the Chinese immigrants become so prosperous so quickly if not for their cultural values around hard work and education? It's not as if there was affirmative action for them at the time because they were disenfranchised or something.

Education matters. Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well. There may be some subconscious biases in hiring, but it's not significant.

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/a-grow...

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/01/20/househ...

I'm not ignoring history. I recognize that African-Americans have been heavily disenfranchised and discriminated against. I'm trying to find a way forward from here. If African-Americans achieve similar educational attainment, I think it's fair to say that we'll be on the path to achieving equality. As they become more successful, fewer people will have undue stereotypes about them. Now the problem becomes initiating the process of betterment. The government should pitch in, but that will do little good without a change in culture. Plants can't grow without light, even if there's plenty of water and nutrients.

> Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well.

You keep attributing immigrant success rates to "cultural values" when they should be attributed to the self-selection process of emigration.

If it is as you say, that a sample of immigrants is representative of their native population and their "cultural values", then you should see comparable poverty rates and earning rates in immigrants' native populations, adjusted for local economies. You do not see that. Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking, otherwise they would not undergo the immense challenge of immigration in the first place. This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".

> Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking

Yeah. So have the African-American populace at large match that.

> This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".

I don't know what the financial situation of those expats are and how hard it is to live in Berlin or Paris, but if it is difficult then hard work is necessary, no? Whether that would be American cultural values is trickier to answer because of the diversity here.

Listen, if you honestly thought that saying half the stuff you said was right, then I don't know where to start. Imagine landing an interview for a job that will significantly effect where you can afford to live, what you can provide for your kids, and your ability to retire. Now imagine that your hiring manager is making value judgements about you personally, that are based on unfounded opinions he has about how your "culture", and you're passed over for a candidate that comes from a "culture" that he holds in higher regard. This is a real life scenario for millions of Americans, every single day.

Here:

Result I'm looking for: Decent baseline of financial stability among African-Americans

Objective: Get educational attainment and good employment up

Major factors I think are necessary (for relatively quick results, anyways):

- culture shifts towards focusing on education

- government funds public schools in terms of materials, transportation, teachers, etc.

- reduce college tuition somehow

- race-blind hiring/whatever policies

I'm just trying to justify why I think the culture is important. There is evidence that culture is important. Furthermore, I'm saying that there's currently a lack of that education-focused culture and that's why e.g. Baltimore isn't doing too great even with all the funding.

So you should at most have an issue with

- culture shift necessary (which embodies "current culture not working")

I don't see where your evidence that culture isn't an important factor here is. Also, I'm not here to talk about historic grievances and bias and all that. I'm trying to discuss a way out, not bemoan the current circumstances or hope the world magically changes overnight.

That is abundantly clear. Here it is in a nutshell: *if* you accept that "culture is important," *then* you cannot have "race-blind hiring/whatever policies," *because* you have already accepted that one culture values hard work more than another culture.

When you reject that "culture is important," then you can hire individuals based on their merits, instead of the opinions you have about their culture. Making decisions about individuals based on opinions you have about their culture is the definition of racism.

It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try harder, meanwhile the outside world has been pouring concrete around the outside for decades.

If there was some magical way to change the culture of many African-American communities instantly, and if the government bolstered schools, healthcare, and whatnot, that would really be something. I don't think all that money will be very effective if the culture isn't changed, though. And affirmative action is too late, too little in the education journey.

I recognize this is like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill right now, but that's the only feasible way out that I see.

Thanks for specifying which c word you meant, as the only one in the post you replied to was Chinese.

Money talks.

A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen.

Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway.

I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc.

Pay the damn kids, I say.

We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.

The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.

(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)

One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end.

https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...

For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.”

That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children.

The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do.

Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.

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.

To be clear, originally you said "extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation". "Incentives can hurt" is a totally different statement; but I assume you still mean the original.

A short digression. As a scientist I think we should teach critical reading skills when it comes to science. This study has a bunch of things going against it:

1. It is published in an economics venue. This means the reviewers were economists, not psychologists. They had no clue about rewards, children, etc. They are experts in evaluating the model, not in what you want to know about, which is the part about humans.

2. You are relying on something in the paper that isn't the key contribution. You're relying on a short survey in the intro. No reviewer carefully read this and proposed updates. And even if they did, they were not the deciding factor in acceptance. Even if the intro was one-sided and mostly junk, if the model was amazing, the paper would be published. Papers are not evaluated based on their intros.

3. The paper is almost 25 years old, surveying material that is more than 25 years old. Science changes. A lot. The conclusions here could be totally different from the conclusions in a paper today because we have so much more evidence, higher quality studies, and better conceptual frameworks.

4. The authors have a particular goal: they want to show that there's a conflict between internal and external goals. This taints everything. They don't want to present an even-handed review, they literally want to make their case to a reader. I'm not saying this in some "conspiracy" sense. When I write a paper I want to argue my view, and put my view's worldview at the center, because I want to win people over.

All of this means that you should not be reading this paper in this way. It's the wrong paper, from the wrong time, with the wrong thesis, and you're looking in the wrong section.

We can do better!

Here is a review from 2020. https://msofc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2020-Intrinsic-...

Let's compare with the points above.

1. It is published in Contemporary Educational Psychology. You can bet the reviewers here know the material, know the latest studies on child learning, etc.

2. The key contribution of the paper is a survey. This is what they are being evaluated for. You missed a paper? Nope, your survey is bad we don't accept you. You didn't fairly represent what that paper said, we don't accept you. etc. The paper is being evaluated by what you are looking for.

3. The survey is fairly current, 4-5 years is ok. You would expect a survey every that many years, or at least once per decade or so.

4. The authors might have biases, but not in this paper. This paper's goal is to present the state of the art. And reviewers aren't looking at the paper based on how well did their argue their point, they're looking at it based on how well they represented the state of the art.

All of this means that this paper should be read to find what you want to know. It's the right kind of paper, from the right time, with the idea of looking at the field and answering these kinds of questions, and we're looking in the main body of the paper.

Now, let's turn to the paper itself.

What it says is that extrinsic motivation is no longer seen as so alien from intrinsic motivation. That in the past 20 years there's a new framework that talks about internalizing extrinsic motivation.

https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jeltal/article/downl...

The story is the same if you look at the paper above on language learning. The two types of motivation are not seen as opposites anymore.

You can keep reading by looking for "survey intrinsic extrinsic motivation teaching" and you'll find many more post 2020 papers. They all say the same thing. The field has changed. The two aren't opposites. Both are useful.

The summary on Wikipedia suggests that there was some arguments about whether this effect was real or not but the consensus is currently that it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory#Deb...

> Through the debate, consensus seems to have emerged that crowding out reliably occurs if the following conditions are met:[33][dubious – discuss]

> * Rewards are offered in the context of pre-existing intrinsic motivation (e.g. in a pro-social setting or for interesting tasks).[34]

> * Rewards are known in advance and expected.[35]

> * Rewards are tangible.[36]

There are worse problems to have!

If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.

https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.

How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

Strong capital markets makes the US probably the easiest place to start a company and seek funding.

The US remains a place where smart, talented individuals can succeed and make far more money than peers, attracting a pool of very talented immigrants.

Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money.

Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago?

Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative?

Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?

Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing

That's because it's not the people educated by the U.S. systems that are producing so much. I worked at a FANG company and within my team of 50 engineers, I was one of two people who were born in the U.S. It's not just tech either — my father is a chemical engineer and most of the engineers he works with are from other countries.

The U.S. is currently still one of the top places that the world's best talent wants to move to; whether that continues to hold true remains to be seen.

One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail.

Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment.

So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.

Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.

Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.

Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.

> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling

Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.

Sales is a great example.

In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!

Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.

But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.

Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.

Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.

Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.

This problem can't be.

Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.

People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)

In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.

But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?

Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.

I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.

Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.

teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.

teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.

like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?

how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?

> in the vague opinion of your management tree

I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.

It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.

Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.

In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.

Most of human history has seen the bulk of humans living in rural areas within all manner of labor exchange schemes.

"Modern Capitalism" was founded with "work from home" as a significant factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work

    Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.

Huh? No, it's not. The first step may be learning what "capitalism" means. It's a specific economic system that developed in early modernity. It's not some "natural state of man" any more than feudalism was before it.

At best they are niche and contraversial (admittedly it's the phrase "revolutionary and controversial" that most commonly appears on his book reviews).

I spoke of modern capitalism which is a well understood term, as acknowledged by bandrami.

If you wish to speculate on undocumented pre history then it's reasonable to assume that work from home predates first documentation and goes back as far in time as large works with small parts existed.

There are plenty of things companies do, pretty pervasively, that have been proven both scientifically and empirically to be detrimental.

Management methods are full of cargo cult "science".

That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).

> or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers

Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.

Most teachers can predict each of their student's year-end educational performance by the end of the first parent-teacher meeting week. Students whose parents who are not involved or where there is no culture valuing education at home are pretty much screwed, no matter how much effort is spent on them, and students whose parents are dialed in and taking an active role in their educations are going to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is even there.

Basing a teacher's bonus on student performance will have one effect: Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.

There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes". Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".

Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course.

BTW, every school knows who the good teachers are and who the useless ones are. They get paid exactly the same. Do you think that's a good system?

> There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes".

Of course they are.

> Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".

Company revenue is the sum of all the contributions of its workers. A student outcome is not the sum of the other student's outcomes, and is measurable independently.

> Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.

Sure. And there are only so many of those positions available.

Replacing teachers by canned video courses does not a priori sound like a bad idea.

The central reason why this is not done is that school also serves as daycare, so you need some employees to supervise the children, i.e. removing the teachers will hardly decrease the employee count. All together, if we consider the additinal cost of creating the video courses, this measure would hardly decrease the cost of schooling. So politicians think "never change a running system" and "avoid the trouble with the teacher's unions" and leave everything as it is.

I’m not saying it couldn’t be done but you would need a pretty sophisticated model to try to figure out who is or isn’t effective. Then once you turned on the model you would need to constantly tweek it to handle metrics based tampering.

The classic example is poor Asian immigrants that produce successful professionals within one or two generations. Strict behavioral expectations in the home, coupled with an attitude of parental sacrifice for their child's educational opportunities causes significantly better results decade over decade. But this is an attitude that often doesn't translate to many American households.

Vouchers might be one way to help, but it still requires parental involvement in creating the incentive for the child.

I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time.

They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time?

They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it.

I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you?

Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching!

Money talks, BS walks.

The examples you give are straightforward. You already have a bunch of people who know how to do a job, so you pay them to do it quickly. Basically you are giving them money to go and tell their families they are going to be working late for a while and they have to postpone their holidays. These are both examples of a simple task with a definable, specific goal. Everyone can tell when the junction is built.

With this teaching math thing, there is no finish line. The people who decide if the kids pass are... teachers. Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes. You want to adjust for how easy the task is because you don't want easy classes to get paid and difficult classes to be excluded from getting the bonus. But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.

Finally there's the problem of feedback. Incentives work when the person who is incentivized knows how things are going and knows how to change the outcome. It is not clear at all that teachers know that if they just show Billy Bob the times tables as a rhyme then he will pass his test. It is not clear at all that teachers even know whether Billy Bob understands the times tables, or is just repeating what is being said.

This is the problem with all incentive engineering schemes. I'm an engineer too and I wish it were simple. But the history of it is rife with all sorts of catastrophes.

Here's what I wrote:

> But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.

So how do you intend to grade the teacher's work, except by other teachers, who are in the same position?

This is just like having board members appointing CEOs out of the same pool.

In fact, it's a pretty hard problem to deal with in general, and it appears many places in society, so it's fair to ask how this would be dealt with.

If we're going to build an incentive system, we don't want it to be gamed.

You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers.

The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out.

This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay.

We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558...

So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US.

Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind.

This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.

1. Because tests are a crappy way of assessing knowledge.

There are students who are amazing test takers, but don't really understand the material. There are students who are terrible test takers, like they have test anxiety, but have an incredible understanding of the material if you talk to them and they work through a problem in front of you.

2. Because it's a terrible teaching methodology.

No one wants to learn about something because it's on the test. That's horrible motivation. They want to learn about something because it explains something cool they could never understand, because it provides a new perspective, because they get to do an exciting thing, because it's a fun competition with others, etc.

When you have to teach to a test, people teach to a test. There's pressure from administration to do it because the merit-based pay isn't just for you personally, it's also for the school as a whole. When test scores don't go up your school gets punished too. So now you drill the specific problems on the test over and over again. Do test scores go up? Sure, by that 0.1 standard deviations we talked about. Does joy go up? Does understanding go up? No.

3. Because tests can only test so much.

Practically, only so many topics can be on the test. There are big topics that are important to know in every class. There's tension here: if you design a test that's in a sense fair for a machine, you pick a random page, a random paragraph and ask a specific question about that paragraph, well, ok, you have a test that tests everything. Sort of, at least at the level of memorization. But, immediately people would say this is a terrible test for a human: why does it matter that my child remember the minutia in page 32, paragraph 3, when there are 7 big topics in this course, the topics that are important to build on for next year, and my child mastered them all? And that's fair criticism.

So now, tests become about the big things. Which makes sense, that's what you need for the future. But that interacts with 1 and 2. So now you drill the big topics over and over again. It becomes a game about memorizations.

4. Because we start teaching test taking skills instead of material

Many people are not good test takers. And that's fine! The goal of tests is not to test if you're a good test taker. It's to test if you know the material. We specifically design tests to avoid testing how good you are at taking tests.

Well, when the stakes are so high at Mr/Ms's Smith's retirement fund is on the line, and St. Margaret's operating funds for next year are on the line, people teach test taking. This is miserable for students. You basically teach it by taking a lot of tests over and over. And then of course teaching test taking strategies.

5. Because it makes losers and winners.

If a teacher and school knows that Jimmy isn't going to make it to grade level, will they work with Jimmy so he can do his best. Maybe catch up a little this year? Maybe find an alternative teaching style. Maybe there's a 10% chance that it will work out for Jimmy and he'll go on to university and do amazing things. No. Teaching to the test and merit based pay means that teachers will dump Jimmy. Even if they don't want to do that, the administration makes them. Jimmy is a liability, sure, but it's worse. All the time spent on Jimmy becomes a liability too. Better to just discard him to the scrap heap, he's unlikely to pass the test anyway. We'll double down on our efforts to help Bob instead. He's middling, he has a 70% chance to pass the test. If we double down maybe we increase that to 90%. That's much better for us. This is terrible for students and it feels really bad as a teacher too.

There's much more that is wrong, this is just a short summary.

It doesn't teach people to become educated, curious, smart, interesting, kind, well-rounded. To ask interesting questions. To want to learn. It forces teachers to turn people into widgets and to discard them like widgets.

Incentives are whack across the board in education.

At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.

We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.

As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.

The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.

If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.

But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts.

Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.

Citation needed.

Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.

If you have a system with a dedicated school for violent and behaviorally challenged kids, there would be a much larger number of angry parents reacting to the idea of integrating those students with their children.

That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.

If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.

This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.

Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.

Nope. Do the homework here.

> the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools

Another claim remarkably free of any data

> the disparities between different racial groups.

African American kids today score better than white kids 30 years ago did.

Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3])

The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it).

In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future.

[1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214.

[2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall)

[4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)

Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.

Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.

* Provide instruction to the median student. * Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities. * Empower gifted students to learn to their potential. * Serve as an amateur sports league. * Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program * Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings) * Screen children for abuse and neglect * Be a place children can be left while parents are at work

Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.

Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.

For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).

Government bureaucracy absolutely produces less than optimal incentives and priorities, but the responsibility voters have in creating those incentives seems underappreciated, especially when it comes to public schools.

After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system.

Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform.

Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society.

These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?

Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city.

And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either.

I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy.

The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially.

In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.

Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them.

The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else.

So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.

This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones.

There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.

Irrelevant to the question at hand. There are small schools with small classes, small schools with large classes, large schools with small classes, large schools with large classes.

> "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case

No, it's intended to be a technical/neutral term to describe the person(s) making the economic (as in the science of economics) choice of which school to choose.

> parents tend to optimize for...

And other parents optimize for other priorities, see e.g. Montessori schools, St. Anne's in NYC where there are no grades. Having options allows parents to make that choice. When parents are forced to send their children to the large monopolistic public option because there are no other affordable options, they don't have a choice.

In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice.

The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection.

This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.

I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.

most state schools will have bare bones programs, except few select, while private schools will be many levels ahead and become "elite".

do we want "ivy league" situation with K-12 education system?

Segregating misbehaving students is a feature. Rejecting them is a bug.

I don't see why the cost of an educator should be that much different at school A than B either. It might be even cheaper.

California spends 23k per K-12 student now. You should be able to pay someone 100k to guard 5 jail cells with self study students.

Because the school of last resort will have to be further away in order to consist only of misbehaving kids. You don't have to take my word for it. You can see for yourself that there are far fewer schools for troubled kids.

> I don't see why the cost of an educator should be that much different at school A than B either.

Because these educators will be dealing solely with misbehaving kids. You don't have to take my word for it. There are private schools that take these kids, and they charge more.

Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.

Large organizations just further exacerbate this

-- attributed to Oscar Wilde

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apocalyptic_groups