I have a few shorter more focused posts in the works, including my practical short version of On Bounded Distrust. In the meantime, it makes sense to continue to clean out the backlog of roundup style things. Let Your Children Play We have gone insane on this
You wrote about the numbers on sex trafficking/stranger kidnapping being near zero.
Can we take a shot at the numbers for cops taking your kids away / throwing you in jail for letting your kids be free range? I credit the hypothesis that parents who wish they could give their kids more freedom but are afraid of punishment are caught up in a kind of meta-moral panic, and that the risk of punishment isn't that high / they should instead be brave and do what they want.
Anecdotally, I let my kid ride her scooter up to a block away from me down the sidewalk when she was two (once she was able to reliably stop at red lights), and now that she's five I'm working on teaching her to go to the corner store with money and buy something. Since I look like a teenage boy I get verbally harassed by old women and cops, every so often, for not helicoptering more overtly, but it doesn't seem like anyone will do anything bad to us about it.
Having left San Francisco and then Seattle with our children, one of our must-haves in a new town was what we called “feral children.” We are now happily settled in a small town in New Hampshire where children ride bikes, go to the playground, shop at the general store, go to the library and fish in the pond by themselves. The cafe in the next town even offers middle schoolers a discount to encourage them to hang out there! It really is a cultural choice.
It seems obvious to me that for at least a certain subsection of the high school population, removing "need to get into a decent college" from their expectations would immediately remove a ton of stress. Even if their alternative was to go to trade school or apprenticeship, that's a meaningfully different experience and preparation than what's required to get into college. Some large percentage of the population will simply never do well in higher education, while an additional large percentage may be capable but would struggle with interest and/or capability (i.e. would probably choose a different option if it appeared reasonable to do so). I estimate each group at roughly 1/3 of the population. So potentially 2/3 who would either explicitly choose to avoid college or would like a real option to do so.
Since apparently 42% of Americans have a college degree, that implies to me that more Americans are getting degrees than would otherwise choose to do so. Worse, because college dropouts exist, there is also a portion of the population getting very little value for that added stress. Apparently the dropout rate is an unbelievable 40% (and has increased dramatically in recent years), implying that we have far more than reached the saturation point for additional college degrees. This is very likely the reason we are seeing grade inflation - college is a business, and that business goes away if the customers don't feel like they got value for their money. In this case, not just enrollment but passing grades and a diploma.
The national story about college is that everyone needs to go. Even with that as ubiquitous, less than half actually complete a degree. Imagine if people in high school, planning for their future, realized that fact. Most of them would not get a degree - so more likely than not avoiding college would be the better option. So someone with a C+ average and no academic interest could just go on to the workforce and save the years, money, and anxiety.
"Then, the study notes that this correlation has gone down, due to a large group of students who don’t show this pattern - they get the homework right by copying it, then get the exam question wrong anyway."
A few years back, I helped my daughter with her molecular biology collegiate homework. I don't have any background in molecular biology, but I would work through most level 100 homework by finding the answer on the internet, then using the textbook to work backward to why that was the answer. It is *amazing* how easy it is to get the answers for specific questions off the internet - I could answer almost every specific question by Googling it. There's really no reason not to get 100% on most homework, but I imagine it takes some discipline to work through *why* a particular answer is correct instead of just copying and pasting it.
I was born in 1983, I have no kids, I basically never interact with kids. So, real-world vibe check:
1. I grew up in a very small town, and we were fairly free-range. (Which…boy we had a lot of air rifles just sitting around, that *could* have gone poorly…) Are smaller towns still fairly live and let live with having kids play around unsupervised?
2. I live in a *very* big city now, and I can tell that kids here are, to a first-approximation, never let off-leash. Which is I more sympathetic to, because this neighborhood can get a little weird. But, in decades past, were kids more free to roam free in very large dense urban areas? I am not at all paranoid about safety, but even for me, the idea of kids just off by their own where I live makes me a little twitchy.
I think that part of the issue is also a collective action problem. I don't have fear of my kids being kidnapped by sex predators or by the police. But they don't want to just go out because their friends aren't out.
Most important point is that this is only "commended" status, which no one cares about. Commentary:
> This whole story is just utter, unmitigated bullshit–so much so that I’ve spent considerable time trying to see if I’ve missed something. Surely someone who gets paid to report would have looked up some of this? But not.
> I understand why the activist parents are ginning up the story. They want to create political or even legal sympathy for their efforts to restor TJ’s admissions policies.
> I don’t understand why the media–not just the reporters, but the many pundits and policy analysts on Twitter–doesn’t take the time to do even minimal research to understand how asinine this story is. Sure, these are people on both the left and right who despise public schools and consider them incompetent. But they aren’t supposed to be activist hacks.
> Did things get more dangerous since 1980, when we were mostly sane about this? No. They got vastly less dangerous
There's clearly a causal connection going from modern America's insane levels of protectiveness, to the lack of actual incidents. How *strong* that connection is, and what the counterfactual incident rate would be were our kids free range, are things that can be argued. But the effect simply won't be zero.
If we stick with utilitarianism, at some point we'll probably need to make a utilitarian argument that sounds suspiciously like "The ones who walk away from Omelas", so maybe we should get started on developing rigorous virtue ethics so we can dodge that bullet.
I grew up in the 90s, so highschool in the mid-2010s...it was a small town, not cloyingly so, but "doesn't even have a movie theatre or clothing store, can count the stoplights" small. Some parts of wandering unsupervised weren't feasible - we lived in the unincorporated district, and walking/biking directly alongside a major state highway is, uh, a bit of a risk reach even for the leashless. But there was a big backyard full of adventures, nearby schoolgrounds to play and bike around in (no, we weren't students there, no, no one considered this weird, why would they?), wonderful beaches and coastal trails right over that highway.
The elementary school was plonked right next to an alpaca farm and nestled up against the local mountains, with a giant field in the back...there were regular playgrounds as well, but we spent many happy days wrestling on real grass, eating blackberries off the wild bushes, wandering off into the foliage. Nominally it was fenced, but >kids so of course it was trivially easy to get under/between the gaps. No one even noticed or cared, you could just...wander off. Be back when recess ends, that's all that mattered. And the playgrounds had all the Good Old Fixtures! Monkey bars, balance beams, ziplines, jungle gyms, angel rings, climbing domes (got a 2nd-degree burn from picking up a freshly-welded screw after they installed that, this was considered Character-Building and not Grounds For Lawsuit). Some of these got sanded down after *egregious* injuries - one kid got their head stuck between some bars, that involved Jaws of Lifing...another broke their arm climbing. But still remarkable levels of freedom.
Middle and highschool kids outgrow playgrounds, of course, but the grounds were still large (if now actually-fenced, due to being right smack downtown/abutting McMansions respectively). The highschool was notable for being open campus - kids could leave during breaks, including driving if they had their license. Many frequented the local mall and coffeeshops. It was also still possible to bypass the fences, and...well, hike right up the nearby mountain. There was a particular path I discovered that terminated in a tailor-made glade...nice place to sit or lie, perfect view of the school and sky. Many a quiet lunch spent there, technically-illegally but who's checking.
There were plenty who walked to and from school...not necessarily all the way home, because >car sprawl, but shitty public transit has a way of making non-drivers increase mobility. I'd frequently depart highschool lugging my (compared-to-teen-size) bulky musical instrument, wander several blocks downtown, and just sorta...hang around the local mall or office complex until parents got off work and picked me up. Sometimes this included shepherding my younger sibling, too. This was all completely aboveboard and we were never once hassled about it. Dad's office buddies came to know us by sight, and we were graciously permitted to wander the employee areas and use their facilities.
It's sad to look back at all this now, 32 and living in child-hating SF (definitely one of those "we don't *do* children here" places...you could almost call it...the poster child). How this was eminently normal and good and right, and a major ingredient in a wonderful childhood...and also completely fucking insane to contemplate for modern kids.
My first mental-completion when I see a stroller or baby sling in public: it contains a <s>dog</s> "service animal", not a human. Because that really is a reasonable-odds assumption in SF. That same "crying out for kids" impulse hasn't been extinguished, but if it's legally and financially and socially much easier to address it with a furbaby...then, well, the market will provide. (An old businesspartner used to refer to these types of dogs as "little kickers". Feels apt. They lose out on this arrangement, too.) And people wonder why I'm a natalist...
The National Merit Scholarship thing I never really understood...I got one of those, and there was certainly some implied Gravitas about the whole affair. (Especially at a not-really-interested-in-academics highschool. "Wait, we have actual smart kids here? There must be some mistake..." It literally made the front page of the local paper, I was gobsmacked.) But the actual total amount of money was...peanuts? Less even than a Pell Grant. I guess that might make the difference on the margin for some applicants. Yet if the effect is particularly beneficial for early application, it would seem to imply the main value is in credible signalling, not actual money.
Agree that __not loudly advertising obvious marker of nerditude that could ruin one's social standing__ is probably a better default. Having Asian parents myself, I think it's sometimes hard for them to understand that even without explicit anti-intellectualism going on, it's...actually not considered especially cool to be Good At School, by many? That's a rarefied world, luxury beliefs of aspirational-strivers. To the extent it's valued at all, it's part and parcel of the whole memeplex that school -> degree -> good job -> good life. Consequentialist good doesn't make something status-cool. (Especially if one doesn't actually acquire the intended goods at the end. Then it's just an embarrassing and painful reminder of failure.)
If you'll forgive the slight meta tangent: As a non American I often see Americans in rationalist adjacent spaces online report very negative experiences with schooling, which are far more severe than I've heard anywhere else. I'm never sure whether to update in the direction of American public schools being genuinely uniquely bad among western developed countries, or that this is a reporting artefact.
Posts like this have me leaning towards the former, but that leaves the question of why that is the case. There's lots of vaguely plausible sounding, but unfalsifiable cultural arguments. Structurally the biggest difference seems to be the hyper localization of decision making about schools in the American system, particularly the weird thing of schools being funded by local property taxes. Though I'm not sure how that translates to actual funding per pupil, which you'd think would be the main determinant
Swedish child credit works exactly like this - universal both for efficiency and to create a middle-class support that would be a lot less certain if it only went to the poor. Sometimes someone floats the idea of means-testing it, and then everyone else points out how stupid that would be.
As someone who's been doing on-campus recruiting at Ivy schools for over a decade now, I'm actually not so sure I'd rule out the Harvard-students-are-smarter (or at least "smarter" as defined by ability to do coursework and other credentialing activity) as at least a contributing factor here.
The median resume at those schools is definitely far more impressive than when I attended them. My sense is that a big driver here isn't that kids magically got smarter, but rather that the very-highest-end schools have done a better job of attracting the very best applicants. (For example, the average resume of a student applying for a summer-after-freshman or -sophomore year program is _definitely_ more impressive than it would have been when I was an undergrad.) This seems to be driven by much more strenuous efforts to get high school seniors to lift their ambitions as high as possible and to apply to even long-shot schools (e.g., through offering application fee waivers) compared to even a decade ago.
Note that this doesn't mean that you have to think that the students are more impressive (though I do, incidentally) -- it can be driven entirely by better matching students to their highest ambitions.
We let our then seven year old daughter walk two blocks to the local park. This was in a placid suburb, all streets crossed were 20 mph limit. Someone called the cops. No arrest, but my wife had to pick her up. When she asked the cop what age our daughter could play by herself, cop didn't have an answer.
I have to wonder when cops stopped saying "Stop being a worrywart" to people making frivolous calls.
On the college front, I'm an MIT grad but I'm supporting both kids getting 2-yr degrees in hands-on fields. Even aside from all the BS, college has become expensive enough to not justify the return except in certain specialties.
"The word "proud", or rather its translation, just has a different, considerably more negative connotation in Finnish. Like, if hearing this question in English, the idea of "pride" I'd get would just be a beaming parent going "So proud of you, son!" while imagining the same phrased in Finnish, using the word "ylpeä" (direct translation), has much more of a connotation of an arrogant, conceited parent going around their friends going "Oh, you didn't know my son/daughter is a doctor?" "
(but read the full comment for more possibilities)
You wrote about the numbers on sex trafficking/stranger kidnapping being near zero.
Can we take a shot at the numbers for cops taking your kids away / throwing you in jail for letting your kids be free range? I credit the hypothesis that parents who wish they could give their kids more freedom but are afraid of punishment are caught up in a kind of meta-moral panic, and that the risk of punishment isn't that high / they should instead be brave and do what they want.
Anecdotally, I let my kid ride her scooter up to a block away from me down the sidewalk when she was two (once she was able to reliably stop at red lights), and now that she's five I'm working on teaching her to go to the corner store with money and buy something. Since I look like a teenage boy I get verbally harassed by old women and cops, every so often, for not helicoptering more overtly, but it doesn't seem like anyone will do anything bad to us about it.
Having left San Francisco and then Seattle with our children, one of our must-haves in a new town was what we called “feral children.” We are now happily settled in a small town in New Hampshire where children ride bikes, go to the playground, shop at the general store, go to the library and fish in the pond by themselves. The cafe in the next town even offers middle schoolers a discount to encourage them to hang out there! It really is a cultural choice.
It seems obvious to me that for at least a certain subsection of the high school population, removing "need to get into a decent college" from their expectations would immediately remove a ton of stress. Even if their alternative was to go to trade school or apprenticeship, that's a meaningfully different experience and preparation than what's required to get into college. Some large percentage of the population will simply never do well in higher education, while an additional large percentage may be capable but would struggle with interest and/or capability (i.e. would probably choose a different option if it appeared reasonable to do so). I estimate each group at roughly 1/3 of the population. So potentially 2/3 who would either explicitly choose to avoid college or would like a real option to do so.
Since apparently 42% of Americans have a college degree, that implies to me that more Americans are getting degrees than would otherwise choose to do so. Worse, because college dropouts exist, there is also a portion of the population getting very little value for that added stress. Apparently the dropout rate is an unbelievable 40% (and has increased dramatically in recent years), implying that we have far more than reached the saturation point for additional college degrees. This is very likely the reason we are seeing grade inflation - college is a business, and that business goes away if the customers don't feel like they got value for their money. In this case, not just enrollment but passing grades and a diploma.
The national story about college is that everyone needs to go. Even with that as ubiquitous, less than half actually complete a degree. Imagine if people in high school, planning for their future, realized that fact. Most of them would not get a degree - so more likely than not avoiding college would be the better option. So someone with a C+ average and no academic interest could just go on to the workforce and save the years, money, and anxiety.
"Then, the study notes that this correlation has gone down, due to a large group of students who don’t show this pattern - they get the homework right by copying it, then get the exam question wrong anyway."
A few years back, I helped my daughter with her molecular biology collegiate homework. I don't have any background in molecular biology, but I would work through most level 100 homework by finding the answer on the internet, then using the textbook to work backward to why that was the answer. It is *amazing* how easy it is to get the answers for specific questions off the internet - I could answer almost every specific question by Googling it. There's really no reason not to get 100% on most homework, but I imagine it takes some discipline to work through *why* a particular answer is correct instead of just copying and pasting it.
I was born in 1983, I have no kids, I basically never interact with kids. So, real-world vibe check:
1. I grew up in a very small town, and we were fairly free-range. (Which…boy we had a lot of air rifles just sitting around, that *could* have gone poorly…) Are smaller towns still fairly live and let live with having kids play around unsupervised?
2. I live in a *very* big city now, and I can tell that kids here are, to a first-approximation, never let off-leash. Which is I more sympathetic to, because this neighborhood can get a little weird. But, in decades past, were kids more free to roam free in very large dense urban areas? I am not at all paranoid about safety, but even for me, the idea of kids just off by their own where I live makes me a little twitchy.
I think that part of the issue is also a collective action problem. I don't have fear of my kids being kidnapped by sex predators or by the police. But they don't want to just go out because their friends aren't out.
Counterpoint on the Thomas Jefferson / National Merit story: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2023/01/01/how-were-tjhsst-commended-students-harmed/
Most important point is that this is only "commended" status, which no one cares about. Commentary:
> This whole story is just utter, unmitigated bullshit–so much so that I’ve spent considerable time trying to see if I’ve missed something. Surely someone who gets paid to report would have looked up some of this? But not.
> I understand why the activist parents are ginning up the story. They want to create political or even legal sympathy for their efforts to restor TJ’s admissions policies.
> I don’t understand why the media–not just the reporters, but the many pundits and policy analysts on Twitter–doesn’t take the time to do even minimal research to understand how asinine this story is. Sure, these are people on both the left and right who despise public schools and consider them incompetent. But they aren’t supposed to be activist hacks.
So, I'm on your side here, but Devil's Advocate:
> Did things get more dangerous since 1980, when we were mostly sane about this? No. They got vastly less dangerous
There's clearly a causal connection going from modern America's insane levels of protectiveness, to the lack of actual incidents. How *strong* that connection is, and what the counterfactual incident rate would be were our kids free range, are things that can be argued. But the effect simply won't be zero.
If we stick with utilitarianism, at some point we'll probably need to make a utilitarian argument that sounds suspiciously like "The ones who walk away from Omelas", so maybe we should get started on developing rigorous virtue ethics so we can dodge that bullet.
This post made me nostalgic, so I'll ramble.
I grew up in the 90s, so highschool in the mid-2010s...it was a small town, not cloyingly so, but "doesn't even have a movie theatre or clothing store, can count the stoplights" small. Some parts of wandering unsupervised weren't feasible - we lived in the unincorporated district, and walking/biking directly alongside a major state highway is, uh, a bit of a risk reach even for the leashless. But there was a big backyard full of adventures, nearby schoolgrounds to play and bike around in (no, we weren't students there, no, no one considered this weird, why would they?), wonderful beaches and coastal trails right over that highway.
The elementary school was plonked right next to an alpaca farm and nestled up against the local mountains, with a giant field in the back...there were regular playgrounds as well, but we spent many happy days wrestling on real grass, eating blackberries off the wild bushes, wandering off into the foliage. Nominally it was fenced, but >kids so of course it was trivially easy to get under/between the gaps. No one even noticed or cared, you could just...wander off. Be back when recess ends, that's all that mattered. And the playgrounds had all the Good Old Fixtures! Monkey bars, balance beams, ziplines, jungle gyms, angel rings, climbing domes (got a 2nd-degree burn from picking up a freshly-welded screw after they installed that, this was considered Character-Building and not Grounds For Lawsuit). Some of these got sanded down after *egregious* injuries - one kid got their head stuck between some bars, that involved Jaws of Lifing...another broke their arm climbing. But still remarkable levels of freedom.
Middle and highschool kids outgrow playgrounds, of course, but the grounds were still large (if now actually-fenced, due to being right smack downtown/abutting McMansions respectively). The highschool was notable for being open campus - kids could leave during breaks, including driving if they had their license. Many frequented the local mall and coffeeshops. It was also still possible to bypass the fences, and...well, hike right up the nearby mountain. There was a particular path I discovered that terminated in a tailor-made glade...nice place to sit or lie, perfect view of the school and sky. Many a quiet lunch spent there, technically-illegally but who's checking.
There were plenty who walked to and from school...not necessarily all the way home, because >car sprawl, but shitty public transit has a way of making non-drivers increase mobility. I'd frequently depart highschool lugging my (compared-to-teen-size) bulky musical instrument, wander several blocks downtown, and just sorta...hang around the local mall or office complex until parents got off work and picked me up. Sometimes this included shepherding my younger sibling, too. This was all completely aboveboard and we were never once hassled about it. Dad's office buddies came to know us by sight, and we were graciously permitted to wander the employee areas and use their facilities.
It's sad to look back at all this now, 32 and living in child-hating SF (definitely one of those "we don't *do* children here" places...you could almost call it...the poster child). How this was eminently normal and good and right, and a major ingredient in a wonderful childhood...and also completely fucking insane to contemplate for modern kids.
My first mental-completion when I see a stroller or baby sling in public: it contains a <s>dog</s> "service animal", not a human. Because that really is a reasonable-odds assumption in SF. That same "crying out for kids" impulse hasn't been extinguished, but if it's legally and financially and socially much easier to address it with a furbaby...then, well, the market will provide. (An old businesspartner used to refer to these types of dogs as "little kickers". Feels apt. They lose out on this arrangement, too.) And people wonder why I'm a natalist...
The National Merit Scholarship thing I never really understood...I got one of those, and there was certainly some implied Gravitas about the whole affair. (Especially at a not-really-interested-in-academics highschool. "Wait, we have actual smart kids here? There must be some mistake..." It literally made the front page of the local paper, I was gobsmacked.) But the actual total amount of money was...peanuts? Less even than a Pell Grant. I guess that might make the difference on the margin for some applicants. Yet if the effect is particularly beneficial for early application, it would seem to imply the main value is in credible signalling, not actual money.
Agree that __not loudly advertising obvious marker of nerditude that could ruin one's social standing__ is probably a better default. Having Asian parents myself, I think it's sometimes hard for them to understand that even without explicit anti-intellectualism going on, it's...actually not considered especially cool to be Good At School, by many? That's a rarefied world, luxury beliefs of aspirational-strivers. To the extent it's valued at all, it's part and parcel of the whole memeplex that school -> degree -> good job -> good life. Consequentialist good doesn't make something status-cool. (Especially if one doesn't actually acquire the intended goods at the end. Then it's just an embarrassing and painful reminder of failure.)
If you'll forgive the slight meta tangent: As a non American I often see Americans in rationalist adjacent spaces online report very negative experiences with schooling, which are far more severe than I've heard anywhere else. I'm never sure whether to update in the direction of American public schools being genuinely uniquely bad among western developed countries, or that this is a reporting artefact.
Posts like this have me leaning towards the former, but that leaves the question of why that is the case. There's lots of vaguely plausible sounding, but unfalsifiable cultural arguments. Structurally the biggest difference seems to be the hyper localization of decision making about schools in the American system, particularly the weird thing of schools being funded by local property taxes. Though I'm not sure how that translates to actual funding per pupil, which you'd think would be the main determinant
Swedish child credit works exactly like this - universal both for efficiency and to create a middle-class support that would be a lot less certain if it only went to the poor. Sometimes someone floats the idea of means-testing it, and then everyone else points out how stupid that would be.
As someone who's been doing on-campus recruiting at Ivy schools for over a decade now, I'm actually not so sure I'd rule out the Harvard-students-are-smarter (or at least "smarter" as defined by ability to do coursework and other credentialing activity) as at least a contributing factor here.
The median resume at those schools is definitely far more impressive than when I attended them. My sense is that a big driver here isn't that kids magically got smarter, but rather that the very-highest-end schools have done a better job of attracting the very best applicants. (For example, the average resume of a student applying for a summer-after-freshman or -sophomore year program is _definitely_ more impressive than it would have been when I was an undergrad.) This seems to be driven by much more strenuous efforts to get high school seniors to lift their ambitions as high as possible and to apply to even long-shot schools (e.g., through offering application fee waivers) compared to even a decade ago.
Note that this doesn't mean that you have to think that the students are more impressive (though I do, incidentally) -- it can be driven entirely by better matching students to their highest ambitions.
"I am terrified that someone will call the cops"
We let our then seven year old daughter walk two blocks to the local park. This was in a placid suburb, all streets crossed were 20 mph limit. Someone called the cops. No arrest, but my wife had to pick her up. When she asked the cop what age our daughter could play by herself, cop didn't have an answer.
I have to wonder when cops stopped saying "Stop being a worrywart" to people making frivolous calls.
On the college front, I'm an MIT grad but I'm supporting both kids getting 2-yr degrees in hands-on fields. Even aside from all the BS, college has become expensive enough to not justify the return except in certain specialties.
Regarding Finland, Stefferi, a Finn wrote a list of "some explanations I've seen" (his/her words) at https://www.themotte.org/post/240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week. The first explanation is, in my view, enough to turn the whole survey into no useful data:
"The word "proud", or rather its translation, just has a different, considerably more negative connotation in Finnish. Like, if hearing this question in English, the idea of "pride" I'd get would just be a beaming parent going "So proud of you, son!" while imagining the same phrased in Finnish, using the word "ylpeä" (direct translation), has much more of a connotation of an arrogant, conceited parent going around their friends going "Oh, you didn't know my son/daughter is a doctor?" "
(but read the full comment for more possibilities)