High School Teacher Burnout

Ellie Herman, a screenwriter and television producer turned high school English teacher, has written an important essay about the difficulties facing primary school teachers in the United States.

A central problem identified by Herman is the fact that teachers in the United States are overburdened in terms of the number of hours they must spend in the classroom:

One thing nobody ever talks about is that teachers in the U.S. have a larger workload than teachers in almost any other country. According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the average secondary school teacher in the U.S. puts in 1,051 instructional hours per year. Instructional hours are the hours spent actually in front of kids—in other words, about half of the job, the other half being time spent planning, grading and collaborating with other teachers. In Finland, the average teacher teaches 553 instructional hours per year. In Korea, 609 hours. In England, 695. In Japan, 510.

Finland in particular is often held up as a model of a successful primary education system; the fact that teachers in the U.S. put in almost twice (190%) the numbers of instructional hours as in Finland is surely significant.

A Fable of Five Philosophers

Or, Who would win in a shootout: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Thales, Protagoras, or Socrates?

Scott Alexander tells a tale that entertains and enlightens, with the following message: Beware isolated demands for rigor, whether of the philosophical, scientific methodological, or statistical kind.

Quantum Mechanics Videos

Grading is done, so it's time to watch some TedEd videos on quantum mechanics (tip of the hat to Marcus Schultz-Bergin).

These videos are excellent, but I've a couple of bones to pick. These videos defend the standard, Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which (if my understanding is correct) 'reify' or treat as fundamental ontological facts the probabilities that are used to measure the position of quantum particles.

Now, on the one hand, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this, since the Copenhagen interpretation is indeed still the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics among physicists. On the other hand, the Copenhagen interpretation has been questioned by some philosophers and physicists for decades, who favored a deterministic interpretation of quantum phenomena (for example, David Bohm, and more recently, James T. Cushing).

Moreover, some recent oil drop experiments have caused more physicists to question the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, since phenomena similar to that observed at the quantum level can also be observed at the macro-level with regards to oil drops guided by pilot waves, and no one is tempted to interpret this as evidence for a probabilistic ontology (or however one wishes to characterize it) for droplets of oil.

However, the videos make the common error of asserting that because the equations of quantum mechanics yield true predictions about the behavior of electrons and other particles, this proves that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. But the critics of Copenhagen do not deny the accuracy of the equations of quantum mechanics. What they deny is the standard philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics: that sub-atomic particles exist in ontologically probabilistic states until they interact with other particles in such a way that their wave function "collapses".

The failure to make this distinction seems related to the most misleading aspect of the second video, which is on "Schoedinger's Cat". The video correctly introduces the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment as an attempt by Schroedinger to disprove the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; Schroedinger thought it was absurd that a cat could be in a superposition between dead and alive before interacting with an observer causes the cat's state to "collapse" like a wave function into either the dead or the alive categories. According to the video, Schroedinger left the field of quantum mechanics altogether, out of his frustration with the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The video then goes on to argue both that Schroedinger's interpretation must be rejected in order to make sense of the way electrons work--which is false--and then to argue that the world as we know it today, with all of its computers and such, would be impossible if it were not for Schroedinger's thought experiment--which is incoherent.

I suppose one cannot expect too much philosophical clarity from TedEd videos, but at least I hope this little imbroglio proves to physicists such as Steven Hawking and science-y types such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson that philosophy may have some value after all, if only in helping to clear up some of the conceptual confusion introduced by well-meaning physicists.

Lest the following point be obscured by the preceding gripefest: the videos are otherwise well-done and are required viewing for the uninformed quantum-ly curious.

The Challenge of Eliminating Bias from Scientific Methodology

Back in April of this year, Scott Alexander wrote a brain-busting meditation on the challenge of eliminating bias from scientific methodology.

I am a humanist by training, statistically illiterate--and, to be frank, practically innumerate--but darn it if this piece doesn't get my philosophy of science juices flowing and coalescing into a roaring stream!

Alexander starts with the observation that a parapsychologist has performed a well-done meta-analysis of parapsychological research, which gives evidence for a small but statistically significant 'psi' factor in his field of research.

Alexander's point is not that we should believe psi is real, but rather something even more disturbing--if a meta-analysis of this high quality can still be wrong-headed, what are we to make of the rest of science? And how do we control for the subtle methodological problems which plague even the best of scientific studies and meta-analyses?

Alexander offers a glorious trip through the inner workings, the nooks and crannies of scientific methodology, with himself as thoughtful guide. Alexander concludes in part that there is a hidden "experimenter" bias which shows up in scientific research of all kinds. The most striking example occurs in a parapsychological study conducted by two researchers, who jointly agreed on a common methodology and who supervised each others' collection and interpretation of data--but who still achieved contrary results, which corresponded with their prior beliefs. This is probably only part of the explanation for why many scientific research findings are biased or unreliable, however.

Research on Student Evaluations

Lillian MacNell and two co-authors from North Carolina University have discovered evidence of gender bias in student evaluations of professors. 

The study tested the effect of perceived gender on student evaluations by having the same professor self-identify as different genders for different sections of the same course taught online.

In a separate study, Michele Pellizzari, of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, found that professors who are better teachers actually receive lower student evaluations (presumably because they challenge their students in ways that students find difficult or unpleasant). The exception is that highly skilled students evaluate better teachers more highly (presumably because they appreciate being challenged in a way that promotes their learning).

Are Economists' Research Findings Biased by Political Ideology?

A new paper examines whether the political ideology of economists influences their findings. 

The authors of the paper have summarized their findings in a popular article on the website Five Thirty Eight entitled "Economists Aren't as Nonpartisan as We Think".

However, I concur with economist Noah Smith, who disagrees that the data show that economists are partisan. Smith argues that the effect size of ideological bias on research findings that was discovered by the researchers is surprisingly small, even though the result is statistically significant.

Now, it is common to confuse the issue of effect size with that of statistical significance, but presumably the authors of the study understand very well the difference between these two concepts. The most likely explanation for the way they are framing their findings is that this is what the journals and Five Thirty Eight want to hear. But who knows?

Tony Blair Critiques Democracy as We Know It

Tony Blair criticizes the performance of democratic governments: "The simple right to vote is not enough: Systems need to deliver results for the people."

Blair is not very systematic in his descriptions of the problems facing democracies, and he's vague about solutions, but I agree with him that our democratic governments are performing poorly in a variety of areas. For example, he mentions the difficulties several European countries have had in reforming their finances, and the difficulties many countries have in creating the legal conditions for an effective and innovative health care system.

Here is a list containing restatements of the problems with democracies that Blair identifies in his piece:

1. The drawing of electoral districts often favors candidates who appeal to more partisan and ideological party activists, rather than to the political center (presumably leading to worse policies).
2. The polarization of news outlets has further polarized voters (again, presumably leading to worse policies).
3. Government bureaucracies fight proposed changes which would affect their operation, even if such changes would benefit the nation.
4. Special interests such as teachers' unions and those involved in health care fight reforms which would benefit the nation.
5. The pace of democratic reform is unable to keep up with the pace of technological and social change.
6. Few politicians have real-world experience or expertise outside of politics.
7. The salaries of elected officials are not high enough to attract the best talent.
8. Social media has enhanced the voting public's susceptibility to scandal and passionate, irrational agitation, giving more power to the loudest voices, rather than the most reasonable.

Not all of these criticisms are equally plausible, but Blair is surely correct that democracy does not work as well we often think, say, and hope.

Do Humans Have a "Language Instinct"?

Vyvyan Evans has written a critique of Noam Chomsky's and Steven Pinker's "language instinct" theory of language acquisition. 

The main problem with this essay is that it does not give a sufficiently clear initial definition of the language instinct thesis; it is therefore difficult to assess what the testable implications of the language instinct thesis are, and how those differ from what Evans presents as the agreed upon consensus of linguists:

Our brains really are ‘language-ready’ in the following limited sense: they have the right sort of working memory to process sentence-level syntax, and an unusually large prefrontal cortex that gives us the associative learning capacity to use symbols in the first place. 

Presumably a linguist already knows how this standard view differs from the specific implications of the language instinct view, but it wasn't clearly explained in the essay.

Also, Evans criticizes Chomsky's view about how the capacity for language evolved in humans, without making it clear that this is a separate issue from whether the language instinct theory is correct. Chomsky could be wrong about how the capacity for language evolved, even if he is correct about how this capacity operates.

Nevertheless, the essay is well worth a read by anyone interested in human language acquisition. I wonder whether and how Chomsky or Pinker will respond.