The Lesson to Unlearn (2019)

> Hackable is the default for any test imposed by an authority. The reason the tests you're given are so consistently bad — so consistently far from measuring what they're supposed to measure — is simply that the people creating them haven't made much effort to prevent them from being hacked.

In proof-based math classes in college, there really was no hacking them. You had to build up an intuitive understanding of the concepts and think on the fly to come up with a proof for a test.

Sure, you could try to seek out "all relevant questions" and memorize the proofs but there's such a large universe of possible problems to ask you'd never have enough time to study this way.

The focus on grades seems to me to be a symptom/side-effect of deeper structure. The structure of time that emerges from educational organization.

Imagine a job where there were six or seven unrelated cognitive tasks and one of them was running round physically and each of these tasks was allotted about an hour of each work day and management wasn't coordinating the work load among them.

And every few months the cognitive content of the tasks changed as did the nature of the running around.

Grades are the only common thread in the first sixteen or so years of education.

What people have to unlearn is distraction. Or rather what they have to learn is how to concentrate on one thing over a period of years...is it surprising the degree this sounds like grad-school? Or studio art? Or internship? Or the sort of interests that kids pursue outside of school?

The thing that has to be learned is flow. That is what ordinary forms of school remove. No time blocks of reading a book all day.

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." (Goodhart 1975)

Or:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Strathern 1997)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Graham invents the notion of "authoritarian" tests, like school exams, and non-authoritarian tests, like football matches. But this is a poor distinction. Originally, sports were a genuine test of physical prowess. Eventually, the institution took over by enforcing rules. This is the same situation in education, except mental prowess is considered.

He's correct that focusing on grades is bad. But one key point is very wrong:

> In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what you've learned in the class.

This is backward. In theory, most tests should be testing that the teacher is effectively teaching the material. If a student does badly on a test it should be interpreted as that student needing more help.

This is why things like 2-year vocational schools are so great! They tend to focus on competency-based outcomes, where "tests" usually involve demonstrating a skill in a simulated environment. Though I will definitely admit that this is not the best option for all areas of knowledge.

> No, no, no, experienced students are saying to themselves. If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class. And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question. You're looking for sharply-defined chunks of information. If one of the assigned readings has an interesting digression on some subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it's not the sort of thing that could be turned into a test question. But if the professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the Schism of 1378, or three main consequences of the Black Death, you'd better know them. And whether they were in fact the causes or consequences is beside the point. For the purposes of this class they are.

This is something I had to "teach" (hah) my classmates in a history class in college. I did benefit from a way above average memory at the time (diminished as I've aged, but still better than many of my age-wise peers) which helped me out a lot, but even without that advantage it wasn't hard to become an A student in that class. My method was to:

Take notes (no slides or handouts from the professor) in, more or less, an outline form. If there had been handouts, these would have mimicked them. They were not detailed, but mostly a way to pay attention to the lecture. If you didn't have a memory like mine you'd want more detail or to actually study these notes later.

"Read" the relevant chapters. "Read" because I didn't really read the whole thing. I read the intro/outro of the chapter and each section within the chapter. Then I read the first sentence of every paragraph. If any paragraph had a fact (dates, names, places) I'd make a note of it (highlight, underline, marginalia, or a note in a notebook, all can work), this was usually obvious by the first sentence of the paragraph without needing to read more. Again, if your memory wasn't like mine you'd need to actually study these notes (and today I'd have to).

That was all there was to getting an A in that class, and nearly every other fact-heavy class was the same. I learned a lot more about those subjects from my extra-curricular reading and experiences.

The problem is, grades are everything in school. I just finished a high stakes algorithms class where 75% of our grade was exams with only a few questions. A decent chunk of the class has to retake the class each semester, so it's important to do as well on the exams as possible. At a certain point, it's not only about learning the material but practicing exam-type questions over and over.

Does this extend to salary, wealth, or other more adult signals of status and achievement, or are those actually the goal?

There are just a few logical steps off the path of social expectation that will lead you to either solipsistic narcissism or the opposite direction to Zen Buddhism. The middle path is there not because we agree with it, but because we can’t decide what we do agree with.

I never had to unlearn this lesson. There's a second, related, lesson to unlearn though: The idea that the teacher is an antagonist.

The way it works is the teachers set up obstacles to you getting good grades, and any way over, around, or through the obstacles is fair game. Any good teacher is there to help you learn the material. They are your learning ally.

Is fake news what happens when the authority of journalism (editors) is replaced with the intrinsic measure of the internet? Naively, without corporate bias or gate keeping, the internet should set truth free. Paul writes “Writers no longer have to submit to publishers and editors to reach readers; now they can go direct” It sets the writers free, not necessarily the truth. So the authentic internet is not the place to be looking for true news. At least not indiscriminately, and isn’t that a call for authority?

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