Why The Pentagon run the best schools and the safest nuclear program
governance.fyi
governance.fyi
By contrast at these schools for military kids, behavioral or academic problems can have direct and serious consequences on the parents and end up having the bump into issues with their command. There's going to be an overall greater degree of focus on discipline in the school, as well as the households, and so on. In many ways the most surprising thing is that the overall difference is only about 10%.
EDIT: As mentioned elsewhere, you also know that the parent(s) in these households are going to have minimum of IQ that's higher than the normal minimum since that's a prerequisite for enlistment. So you're getting a rather overt selection bias there.
I guess at best it might be that there’s problems unique to American culture that makes public education not work. But that feels unlikely to hold up. I think the premise is simply wrong.
Basically the US education system is more focused on a sort of one-size-fits-all education with the only real differentiation being a 'normal' or 'accelerated' track (with some places like California even gradually moving against that remaining differentiation). This is in spite of having a far more diverse population in every possible way than other countries which focus on more of having educational systems which work to the strengths of each student.
So this would explain why these disruptions would not appear in my country (or to a far lower degree)but would in the US school system.
If it’s really severe there is special education as a last resort.
More commonly modified lesson plans, or teachers will be instructed to let you out of the classroom for a bit, or give you tasks like “fetch this item from the front desk” in between.
It’s certainly not perfect, but there is quite some guidance and individual measures possible.
A surprising number of the absolute best schools in the world by those same criteria are US public schools due to the population and resources going to those schools. So the issues are not quite so simple as they might first appear. The US education system isn’t efficient, but it’s also not as bad as generally perceived.
"If I remove all the data that hurts my case, the data clearly supports my case!".
Those people that you want to exclude aren't transients - they're either current or future Americans which are called immigrants. So if you want a well-functioning democracy, economy, society, etc you have to educate them effectively too, not just the people that were born here.
If we want to know which system you should copy, you want understand the factors that make that system more challenging. America doesn’t need to deal with severe malnutrition, but we may want to copy elements from countries dealing with such issues.
Unless of course the goal is a hit piece for whatever emotionally agenda you you’re pushing.
I'm pointing out that "an apples to apples" comparison is all of the people in the seats at the schools because all of those people live, work, and (eventually) vote in your country.
I can weigh a bag of groceries, that’s a metric I can collect on everything you’re buying but it doesn’t tell me if you’re making healthy choices at the grocery store.
Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countries school system.
I'll repeat for the third and final time: excluding people that speak English as a second language in a country's school system that has been taking immigrants for all time (and vaguely plans to continue) is not the same thing as excluding people affected by a brutal but eventually ending war.
I can't make it any simpler for you.
The point that the person that you're arguing in bad faith with is making is not that we jettison immigrants and ESL students. It's that you accept that they will have struggles that the students in Japan do not (because there are much fewer immigrant students). So if you compare the students who are _like_ the ones in Japan and you come out ahead, then you go, great, we don't need to adjust for those students.
It does _not_ mean that you don't adjust for the students who have unique challenges and try to bring them up.
But if you compare two different cohorts, you might incorrectly get the signal that you should also change what you're doing for the students who don't have those challenges.
You just excluded people from these comparisons based on some goal.
If anything, the opposite is true. Europe receives less educated individuals who will be a burden on their welfare, while the USA has cheap labor from South America and attract top talent globally.
The public schools run by the military are fairly normal public schools. They aren’t “military schools.” They aren’t more discipline-focused.
They do have the advantage of offering federal salary and benefits to teachers. That means they can be pretty picky about who they accept, resulting in higher quality teachers.
* Almost every parent had college education.
* Classrooms generally were small, with around 20ish kids per class.
* Facilities were very well maintained and funded. Nothing was ever really broken, or stayed broken for long. Nothing looked worn, equipment was generally kept up to date. We had our own bowling alley, swimming pool, theater, lecture halls, music building, indoor basketball courts and two soccer fields, one baseball diamond.
* There weren't really any kids with parents struggling financially. Parents were involved with the school on open days.
* There were some problem kids, but everyone moved so often, it didn't matter.
* If a kid ever did something bad enough the parent would get in trouble. One family I knew had to move back the US after the kid said a racial slur.
* You didn't make any lasting friends, because again, everyone moves frequently.
Basically, short answer, you went to the same school as the officer's kids, so the schools were nice for everyone. Moral of the story, send your kids to schools in affluent neighborhoods.
The article keeps bring up selection effects
Organisations with bad budget discipline aren't usually short on benefits. What disadvantages are there for them to provide the best conceivable services? Nobody expects them to be able to justify the spend.
Is it? I know they’re a lot more selective than historically, but I was under the impression that a low 30-something asvab score qualifies you for at least infantryman. Is that really above average IQ?
Simply excluding the mentally handicapped or dysfunctional drug addict parents would have an effect
These kinds of results often correlate strongly with parental income levels, which put another way "zip code". Yeah, the military isn't known for great salaries and you'd be right to point at plenty of rich counties, but how many rich counties are there to poor ones? We don't have the distributions and that's what makes this hard to read.
Despite that, we do have some distributional information. Lucky for us, they included the demographics! Taking what we know above, we can actually back investigate to at least provide a "sniff test". Looking at the DoDEA scales, they are pretty low variance in comparison. Unless you think Asians are genetically smarter than whites, blacks, or hispanics then it needs to come down to other factors, which includes culture. The culture will probably be suppressed a bit in the military data, as military naturally creates a more homogeneous setting, but some variance will still exist for this part as well as some likely imbalances in incomes and other things.
An important part of this rich correlation is that it ties very much into stable household. Certainly having active deployment will disrupt the household a bit, but some of that normalizes and well... let's be honest, there is a stable income and stable food situation at home. That's a major factor in a lot of households.
So the real question would be "How do DoDEA schools compare to national schools when you exclude national schools that have a significant number of families that do not have a stable income?" I believe that would be a more fair comparison, though that would really just bring us to "apples and oranges" instead of "oranges and tomatoes". The claim is that the difference is due to some organizational influence, i.e. one that is actionable (like the way teachers teach or students are disciplined, etc), but frankly we just have so little data we can't rule out a million other things.
What I found most striking is that last word: scale. Most people employed to write software cannot write original applications of any size. They certainly cannot thus scale solutions forward if they cannot author solutions in the first place. This is supremely costly for these profit oriented companies. The military on the other hand must scale because while they do not have profits or revenue margins to chase they do have budget constraints. The result is an organization that can do more with less.
As for software, I have never heard the military or government accused of being good at building it, so I don't really see your point there.
Obviously there are still different dynamics between an arbitrary public school and a school on a military base in Kanagawa for many reasons, but I have to imagine that there are similar diversity of goals and lack of "throwing out" the kids in these schools.
Just seems like the flavor of challenges that public schools face and k-12 mil schools face are a bit similar, except for a huge one: the kids in the mil schools are much more likely to have three square meals a day(etc etc).
My experience in corporate software is the opposite where it’s all about hiring/firing for the lowest common denominator. It’s not about being good. It’s about speed and not training.
Based on what sources and using what metrics? And vastly superior to what alternative? If you're saying better than schools, I wouldn't be surprised. But I would be surprised if it's better than the experience you would get as a junior at a major tech company, and shocked if it was better than experience at a small startup.
I would say that the training programs illustrate that the military generally treats its workforce as the result of external factors. Someone else decides who will be in the military, and the military has to figure out what to do with them.
Companies usually see things very differently. They feel free to say that they won't train because they want to hire someone who's already trained. If that approach doesn't work well, they can put even more effort into searching for The Ideal Employee and taking advantage of the fact that, if you ignore the time you spent searching for him, his time-to-become-productive is so low.
How again do we know this isn’t entirely due to selection effects?
That's the point of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test.
Please don't be so eager to reject eugenics that you end up being anti-science. The idea that some percent of intelligence is genetic is entirely reasonable, not something to refuse to consider.
And there's good evidence too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Please explain what "Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense." means because it sure looks like an argument that the genetic component isn't real.
Especially because you posted that in response to someone talking about heritability in very general terms, so your comment can't be interpreted as a nitpick about which evidence goes where. And I can't think of any third interpretation.
> this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military
The idea being presented is that it's easier to run good schools when you have smarter students with smarter parents.
So the inheritability of intelligence over a single generation is critical to the argument.
Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems does not mean that you can determine genetics as a relevant factor when thinking about how to structure education and if one is interested in the relationship between success (on whatever metric) in education and family trees.
I'm neither a geneticist nor is English my first language but I've always understood "heritability" to be a term that very much has to do with genetics and the Wikipedia link you provided implies the same. If we are talking about other factors/mechanisms that impact success in educational systems and that express themselves over generations and in family structures - sure, that's basically what I'm saying.
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(Long) edit after a cup of tea and a sandwich spent over the Wikipedia-Link you provided:
I must say, I think that's pretty readable even for me as a non-geneticist. In the context of this thread, there is a lot of interesting info about "Heritability and caveats", "Influences" and "Environmental effects". I've highlighted these quotes for myself while reading:
"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis."
"Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes."
"Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes."
The whole section on "Implications":
"Some researchers, especially those that work in fields like developmental systems theory, have criticized the concept of heritability as misleading or meaningless. Douglas Wahlsten and Gilbert Gottlieb argue that the prevailing models of behavioral genetics are too simplistic by not accounting for gene-environment interactions. Stephen Ceci also highlights the issues with this assumption, noting that they were raised by Jane Loevinger in 1943. They assert that the idea of partitioning variance makes no sense when environments and genes interact and argue that such interaction is ubiquitous in human development. They highlight their belief that heritability analysis requires a hidden assumption they call the "separation of causes", which isn't borne out by biological reality or experimental research. Such researchers argue that the notion of heritability gives the false impression that "genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits", rather than another developmental resource that a complex system uses over the course of ontogeny."
Since this is a US-centered forum, this also seems relevant:
"In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans. Yet, although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that between-group differences in average IQ have a genetic basis. In fact, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap."
This is just about race & IQ and already cedes the genetic argument that you were refusing to believe - because the evidence is so overwhelming.
> Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence.
Not necessarily is load-bearing here in an extremely misleading way. Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median.
You’re basically just cherrypicking arguments that support your incorrect supposition when compared to a mountain of evidence on the other side.
Nobody here brought up race but you/wikipedia.
edit: Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?
I'll say the same thing as you: context matters. Someone trying to say that smarter parents lead to a smarter student body doesn't need to model any genes and they don't need to care about the difference between things that are transferred genetically and things that are transferred socially.
> because of genetics as the main determining factor?
Does that matter? While the word "heritability" was used, and that term "very much has to do with genetics" as you say, that person didn't directly mention genes and didn't attribute any particular percent to genes. The original argument is the same whether genes are 80% or 20%.
> Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense. If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.
the obvious reading is that you do not believe in a genetic component to intelligence - and in fact say that a belief in “this” is arguing for eugenics.
> Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?
Even if you remove all environmental factors, two smart parents are more likely to have a smart kid than the counterfactual.
I'd also be - again, genuinely - interested in how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design and how - practically - useful this piece of data in and of itself would be when most of us are not Kaspar Hauser or any other conceptual model of a human being that exists without external interdependences.
Well because you basically accused most people of being eugenicists simply for believing something that is most likely true and clearly implied a strong position that you are now retreating from. It's clearly an incendiary one-liner where previously the conversation was not so.
> The researchers who look at those things seem to be the ones telling us that the relationship between intelligence and genetics is complicated and many, many non-genetic factors are in play, no
There are massive biases in academia that encourage researchers to hedge results like this. When you ask anonymously, the answers & beliefs are clear.
> Snyderman & Rothman (1987/1988) — mailed survey to ~1,020 academics; 661 replies. Experts overwhelmingly agreed that IQ has substantial within-group heritability, and among those willing to give a number, the average estimate was ~60% for U.S. populations. Also https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4804158/ which is going to be a lower bound because it focuses on international differences.
Adoption studies pretty clearly upper bound the amount that these complicated non-genetic/non-prenatal factors can be causing differences in tested adult intelligence among Americans.
> I'd politely ask you to refrain from insulting my good faith.
Again, you started your entry into this conversation by leveling accusations of eugenics. The responses you get are going to be tinged by that.
> how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design
Adoption studies can provide an upper bound (excluding pre-natal environment). Also GWASs paired with mendelian randomization can provide a lower bound.
The study you linked is interesting but its results are far from "clear" (see its discussion section but that's probably also just bias and hedging or whatever) and it does have fuck all to do with your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child. Even less so with your confident prediction of how a Kasper-Hauser-like child would turn out. I think you probably know this yourself but these kinds of predictions are something scientists would very, very rarely do - because they know the limitations of their work.
I'm kind of weirded out by this exchange, people here rather confidently express quite a bit of stuff that goes against years and decades of training I received when I became a scientist and I think I'll stop replying now. That was the recommendation of a colleague - who actually is a geneticist - I showed this thread to over coffee as well.
Oh my god this is the most malicious possible reading of "remove all environmental factors".
They're talking about making the environments match, for fuck's sake.
The bulk of your comments are arguing that heritability is very complex, which is completely compatible with the words "highly heritable". And you still haven't explained why the term "eugenics" was relevant to anything anyone else said. If it's something about race, a superficial similarity across millions of people in shifting groups has very little to do with the correlations between child and parent that share 50% of their genes, but even if those were the same the comment still didn't say anything that got anywhere near eugenics!!
> the post I was replying to somehow "clearly" was about the generalized notion of kids being like their parents instead of being very specifically about genetics
I didn't use the word "clearly". You're misquoting now too?
And I still believe they meant the entire complex mess you're talking about, yeah. I think you have zero justification to barge in and say it's a complex issue, and the person making a single sentence comment must have meant the most simple possible version, there's no way they were referring to the entire complex issue already without your help, in a context where the distinction doesn't even matter.
Even if you're done replying I hope you see this: If you were actually talking in good faith you're doing a very bad job at giving anyone the benefit of the doubt for how they word things.
Personally I would include other methods. And for the argument about schools method doesn't really matter.
Edit: And I don't know if genetics are the biggest factor in single generation inheritance, especially at a younger age, but I do think they're a reasonably significant factor after looking at various estimates.
"statistically" meaning any individual child could have any IQ, and genes are only one factor out of many, but when you measure the entire group the graph of IQs is going to look different.
A comparison would be like, filtering IVF in 50 couples based on X/Y chromosomes and measuring height. That filter doesn't decide how tall a child will be, but it does shift the average. The filter would cause a height change, on a statistical basis.
I don't think there's a Wikipedia cite that's going to get you over that speed bump in your argument.
And to the extent that research successfully isolates the genetic factors, we know it's not some outside factor causing a correlation, and we know it's not IQ causing genes. Anything isolated there is genes causing IQ.
When researchers do studies specifically designed to isolate different factors, it's different. Please stop ignoring this part of my argument!!
Assume the most extreme case of assortative mating possible. Every child inherits two genes that list the exact IQ of its parents.
Do those genes correlate with the IQ of the child? If they do, there's only a few ways for that to happen. The causal factor could be how they're parented, or the environment, or the genes themselves. If you correct for the first two across a statistically large sample, and still see an effect, then it must be the last one.
> not a measure of any single person
I know. I'm saying each data point inside the statistic is arrived at in a specific way. Cause and effect only go via certain paths. It's easy to make mistakes about cause and effect by forgetting about paths, but you can categorize them and only some paths are possible. Any statistically resilient correlation has a cause somewhere.
I'm not trying to stake out a position about whether IQ is in any sense genetically causal or fixed. I'm saying that it's much more complicated than the Wikipedia page on "Heritability of IQ" would suggest. That's the only reason I dipped into this thread. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but this is an actively (indeed, furiously) studied open question, and the answer is definitely not "twin studies from 20 years ago set a heritability number that resolves the question".
If you're not trying to stake out a position then you did a very good job of convincing me otherwise.
I don't know where I implied it wasn't complicated?
Also my original statement was just that it's "entirely reasonable".
You said "the sort we have numbers from peer-reviewed articles on" is "not genetically causal". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624902
That's not true. There is peer-reviewed evidence for genetic causation.
I think we are way too deep in the weeds for this to be productive, and we're the only two people reading this. If it wasn't clear, I was trying 1-2 exchanges ago to find an off-ramp for this. I'm not telling you what to believe, I'm just saying that twin study heritability statistics don't settle the question. We should be able to agree comfortably there.
Have a good weekend!
There is still a section on spatial reasoning, which is trying to get at a general mental ability.
Specifically, the Word Knowledge, Paragraph Comprehension, Arithmetic Reasoning, and Mathematics Knowledge subtests.
Sample questions:
(identify the best synonym for the underlined word)
His record provides no reason for _apprehension_.
[ ] anxiety
[ ] change
[ ] enjoyment
[ ] endorsement
According to the passage, some artists work with titanium because it
[ ] is transparent.
[ ] does not corrode.
[ ] generates its own heat.
[ ] can assume a variety of colors.
One in every 9 people in a town votes for party A. All others vote
for party B. How many people vote for party B in a town of 810?
[ ] 90
[ ] 720
[ ] 801
[ ] 819
The ratio 36 : 12 is the same as
[ ] 2 : 1
[ ] 3 : 1
[ ] 4 : 1
[ ] 5 : 1
(Source of all questions, and the definition of the AFQT: www.officialasvab.com )
People have apparently done research on adding more IQ test sections in: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22113...
No, it isn't different. Do you know what an IQ test looks like?
We moved to a good school district in the U.S, so the quality of the education remained the same. The most startling difference in a U.S public school was in how we were viewed by admin.
Compared to DoD schools, administrators in U.S public school system weren't too different from middle management at $corp. We were numbers on a spreadsheet.
A good analogy - U.S school admin acted like the kind of "manager" who judges you by the lines of code you produce and the number of commits you make. DOD school admin were the kind of people who judge you by the impact you made.
DoD schools respected our autonomy - we were treated like humans. Non-DoD schools treated us like cattle.
Hope author goes further into analyzing the diff between army and navy engineering culture, because it is clear that naval engineers built the foundations here :)
Post is titled Pentagon but how does the cross-service learning work exactly in the Schools
I also wonder if culturally DODEA is cut from a similar cloth and had a similarly strong founding impetus / strategy. The pentagon / DoD contains multitudes, and the culture of each branch, agency, etc are all different in different ways. Some for the better… some worse.
In general I would disagree with the posts that say they are not more discipline focused. It was a normal school, however if you were consistently a problem in class the squadron commander would be notified of a subordinates unruly child, and that would immediately solve the issues in class. I remember getting into a fight with a bully, and my military parent drilling into my head that this had career consequences if it kept happening. I believe the bully also had a similar talk because the next day at school we were no longer speaking or in contact in any way, which is a perfectly acceptable outcome in my opinion.
One difficult part that many people do not seem to understand is that as a kid you become very good at forming surface level friendships, but not many deeper friendships. This is a result of your class changing every month as parents are sent to different bases during a permanent change of station (PCS). One moment you might be best friends with someone who sits next to you in class, the next week their seat is empty, and the week after that it could be filled with someone from around the world who grew up in completely different circumstances than yourself.
One aspect that was completely different was that the DOD school was more egalitarian. No one cared who your parents were, as everyone's family was from the military. In the public schools and private schools I attended in the United States, other students focused a lot on what their parents did or what (economic) class they belonged to.
When I returned to the United States and was enrolled into the local public school, it was a nightmare. I was years ahead of the other students in all subjects. As a young child, I didn't understand why everyone was so undisciplined, and when there were problems in class the teacher seemed more than happy to do literally nothing. Students could be bullying classmates during a lecture, and the teacher would just continue the lecture as if nothing is going on. Where bullying was completely stomped out in the DOD school by the faculty, it was actively aided and grown by the public school faculty. Students who were more of the "political activist" type also actively harassed me for my parent's chosen career, and more than one public school faculty member made distasteful comments about my intelligence due to my families military background.
The faculty of the school also didn't like me (I think?), I was held back from joining the gifted program because my Spanish language grades were terrible. There was no consideration that I had never had Spanish as a class before moving back to the states, and was joining a class in the 7th grade that had studied Spanish for years at that point. Because my reading scores were so much higher than the rest of the class, I was blocked from checking out specific books I wanted to read in the library. The teachers deemed them "below my reading level" and so I was limited to a selection of about a dozen books I found extremely boring, with no option to read what interested me. I simply didn't read at school, luckily my parents took me to the county library instead. Being ahead of the other students was also disastrous to my study habits, I unfortunately turned into one of those students who could get A's without any studying, so the change to a much more difficult high school curriculum required a lot of adjustment.
As an aside, the field trips were also significantly better. In the DOD school once a year we got to go somewhere very interesting, like a real medieval castle, the white cliffs of dover to see old WW2 equipment, and even Normandy beach. In the US I had a single field trip the whole time I was in the US, and we just walked around the state capitol for an hour.
In general I found that any learning that happened at a public school to simply be a happy accident. While at the DOD schools it seemed to be the focus every day. In my opinion, public school faculty are actively the worst elements of the school system, with the student body being a close second. I don't think you can solve this issue with more funding, smaller classes, or any of the other often repeated "one simple solutions" you see posted around online. It seems to me that Americans actively despise education, and place no value on it, and that the people we let teach at public schools are the complete opposite of who you would want teaching in the first place.
Genuinely curious.