In "Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs", Ruth Alexander tells the story of how graduate student Thomas Herndon detected an error with possibly substantial economic and social implications in a research paper popular with proponents of austerity economics policies by two Harvard University economics professors, who have now acknowledged their error (2013). Although motivated by initial scepticism of the academics results, Herndon, who was supported by his own professors at MIT, was nonetheless surprised when, after much painstaking investigation, he discovered "a basic error in the spreadsheet" calculations.
For a BBC News article, "Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs" is comparatively long, and although following their usual annoying practise of making almost every sentence a paragraph, some of those sentences are fairly complex, and even a bit long, so it was a little more challenging than usual to get a clear enough understanding of the whole report to be able to pick out the important ideas to include in my two sentence summary above.
Herndon actually started the process that led to the surprising result of proving a couple of respected Harvard academics wrong as a homework assignment, and it was a homework assignment that I like: checking what someone else has done to see if it's right. This is what academics do all the time: someone has a bright idea, whether a physicist, a philosopher, a historian or a an anthropologist, and they write up their bright idea with the supporting evidence and reasons. Other academics then judge the value of that piece of work, and one of the important criteria is whether it's right or wrong. A lot of bright ideas are wrong. For example, a popular solution to problems in society is that more education is needed. Smoking related problems: education is needed on the harmful health effects. Road deaths at Songkran: educate people about driving and drinking alcohol; and so on. Many people's immediate response to any problem, personal or social, seems to be to throw some education at it.
But is there any evidence that all this education is of any use? The road death reports during the recent Songkran remind me of a more specific example. Looking through the doubtless well-intentioned editorials in the local press, calling for better driver education along with demands for bans on this and that (likely equally useless), I couldn't help but feel that the writers were perhaps nice people but somewhat foolish. However, it does sound plausible that more education will both make people more aware of the dangers and, in the case of driving, give them the skills to better avoid danger. It certainly sounds plausible to me, so that introducing lessons on driving and road safety into schools for all teenagers before they get a licence to drive sounds both reasonable and sensible. The only problem is, it's wrong. When the relevant statistics are checked, the facts are that providing driving lessons in high school correlates with, and seems to cause, higher accident rates amongst new drivers (Williams & Ferguson, 2004). The bright idea is not just wrong, but is a very dangerous idea.
I wasn't planning to cite a second source, but I was worried that unless I did refer you to some solid evidence that the belief with which I might once have agreed is wrong, you would, quite reasonably, not believe me.
Finally, I think it's also worth noting that just because an idea is wrong doesn't make it worthless: we know that Newton's theories about the universe are wrong, but they are still brilliant explanations, vastly better than any explanation of the world to be found in any religious text, which is why Newtonian physics is still taught in high schools, with the fact that it's wrong being clearly stated. Newton's mathematical efforts, on the other hand, are proof against being wrong, but they're a different sort of knowledge, arguably not of this world.
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References
Williams, A. F., & Ferguson, S. A. (2004). Driver education renaissance? Injury Prevention, 10, 4 - 7. Retrieved April 21, 2013 from http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/10/1/4.full
There is also a fun follow up article published the day after. "The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel", the author wistfully relates his own experiences with the spreadsheet program that I and many others cut our teeth on. And which I still use to record all of the grade and other information for my AEP classes, although I've now started keeping regular AUA class records on Google Docs spreadsheets.
ReplyDeleteI've been trying to put some suggestions for sources and ideas in the discussions here to help you as you work on the body paragraphs defining a term. I thought that the post here might be useful for Wut, who has chosen the very difficult question about the importance of free speech.
ReplyDeleteAnd since I also directly state that education might be of doubtful value, it might also have some relevance to the critical thinking questions I asked in the post that is a response to the ideas that a few people wrote about in their paragraphs on the eradication of poverty, where education spending was seen as a form of investing in people.