Hacker News Reader

> what you describe is the behavior of your classmates, not the purpose of the system

While the GP used the word "purpose", thus prompting your is-ought comment, knowing Caplan, I suspect it was inaccurate. Economics is largely about an emergent phenomenon, thus falling squarely on the "is" side of things.

Emergence is a relatively recent concept in the linguistic timeline. For most of human history, everything seemed to be either of human action and human intention (turning on a light), or neither of human action nor of human intention (the weather). As such, languages did not emerge (ha!) that easily expressed emergent behaviors, things that were of human action but not of human intention (traffic jams).

Similarly, one can see this with the subject of biological evolution (another emergent phenomenon). It's been nearly two centuries since Darwin got that ball rolling, and still almost any discussion about evolution is rife with inaccurately implied intention.

One other consequence of this linguistic difficulty is that it leads people to propose solutions to perceived problems as if they were just about human action/human intention...

That's fair, and perhaps I could have described it in a different way, which is that purpose aside, the education system is eminently hackable. One such hack is to let your friends take bird courses while you take meaty courses. Another is to find a way to learn from the bird courses while your classmates sleep through them.

In the same terms, one could say that higher education has emerged to produce empty signaling as a widespread outcome, while allowing itself to be hackable enough to produce other desired outcomes as well. Empty signaling is the prevailing hack, but not the only hack.

Indeed, individually your preferences can lead you to make choices that are different from the aggregate, and in so doing your choices marginally contribute to what emerges. Sort of like considering a market price too high, thus not buying.

To be clear, that's distinct from actively attempting to broadly change what emerges, e.g., trying to "fix" the education system to no longer be structured for "signaling". To do that requires affecting the trillions of choices made by billions of people, and one way or another, that often requires violence or threats thereof.

University is founded on the idea that the professor are your future peers. That is a laughable thought in the age of mass tertiary education. I always tell my children to learn what they have to for school but if they feel they only need to know what school demands they have already failed at becoming educated.

> My view is that higher education comes with the flexibility to apply it towards your own use

The problem is that your grades (the signal) depend on your success at the stretch-goal courses, not the signaling courses, meaning that the best strategy is to not take anything hard. If only the base classes counted to your grades you'd be free to stretch your mind without risking your expensive credential.

> and in any event, employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.

Some interviewers do, but I feel companies hire more blindly based on your GPA than that HR people actually dive in and weight your courses against other candidates.

> being taught higher math and physics for the same price as what my friends were paying for sociology and religion courses seemed like the ultimate cheat

Good attitude.

Are there any schools that use a 5.0 A (instead of 4.0) for harder classes? That might help encourage students to try harder classes.

I can't begin to imagine the politics that would erupt if a school had to classify easy and hard classes. I suppose it can be done at the K-12 level because there are already pre defined definitions such as "advanced placement."

”employers know the difference between the bird courses and the ones with real meat on the bones.”

I’ve never been asked my GPA or what courses I took. Most of my interviews have been focused on my professional experience (internships, full time work, programming projects, etc.)

GPA (and major of course) can matter right out of school. It's hard for me to imagine in most circumstances though someone scouring a transcript, if they even ask for one, to see if someone took some easier classes as electives.

no one is going to bother looking at a transcript, but fresh graduates should definitely list any challenging/relevant electives they took on their resume (and be prepared to answer some basic questions). if you don't list anything challenging that wasn't a core requirement, it kinda implies you took the softball approach.

Yeah, GPA might matter for your first job, but it won't for the second.

Indeed it's pretty rare. I've only seen GPA's when someone offers them or brings their transcript to an interview.

I've heard that Epic Systems has a hard GPA threshold for their programming jobs.

> This has always been a paradox in education: It thrives on freedom, yet freedom comes with the freedom to abuse it.

I find "freedom" to be a very wrong term to describe our education system, the only thing I seem free to do is spend money and accrue debt, everything else is pure marketing speak and information assymetry.