Friedman: Invent, Invent, Invent | Hacker News Reader

Friedman: Invent, Invent, Invent

nytimes.com

51 pointswyday40 comments

He's nuts and education researcher Roger Schank would agree. You don't need a high school degree and you don't even need math to drive a taxicab.

All this yak about raising the education standard in the USA, when we've got Ph.D.'s in unemployment lines is disheartening. Retraining is the greatest joke. If you're an unemployed IT worker, what is the "next tier up" on the ladder to success? Material physics, which requires 5 years study to get online?

Economics and economists have some credibility in microeconomics, but outside that limited subject they are herd-oriented and usually wrong, wrong, wrong. Ask Nicholas Taleb what he thinks about the economics profession. Hell, look out the window and remember what economists have told you about the economy over the last 20 years. Were their predictions ever better than a crapshoot?

Japan and Germany dominate industries like machine tools in part by beginning skilled craft training in high school. They have self-selected fifteen year olds learning how to use industrial lathes and such. Or in the case of Japan learning the hi-tech business of modern fishing actually out on the high seas.

It seems like there might be a good idea there. But of course Friedman is just talking about making sure everyone suffers through algebra II even if they learn nothing from it.

The German system (What SKorea and Japan took as blueprint to design theirs) goes like this. After High School you do 1 of 2 things (doing none is not accepted from society, well it happens, but is seen as fail): you either do prolonged High, which means you qualify for studying at University (wich is dirt cheap) or you take the route of learning what we call a profession (It's different word usage from US). What this means is, you work 3 years in an industry as apprentice (almost full-time). That's how the talk goes: "What do you do?" "I am making an apprenticeship". In parallel you go to "professional school" to learn some theoretical stuff. That is the basic qualification everyone has over here. You can upgrade by going to college or making a "Master", again different meaning from US usage. Or you can just stay that way. But basically everyone has a basic qualification and a home industry. This has produced a quality workforce (so far).

One of the weirder things I saw in Germany (and I'm not using this to refute your argument, just an aside) was the apprentice carpenters going around asking for handouts.

There's an article here about them:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,416564,00.html

I found it to be just plain weird.

It's basically the historical version of the internship. Craftsman would work together with collegues from other regions of the country, they learn the tricks of the trade of each other.

I think the word in the US is "trade", as in learning a trade.

I don't think pure academic advancement is the answer as a means to invent and thereby dig ourselves out of the recession. More kids graduating high school really doesn't imply that they'll find better jobs or rather even be better off because of it. I would argue it's even the same metaphor for college. Most people go to get better jobs, but in reality, the risk is just as high to not find one, especially in this economy. Honestly I think we're still at the point where people are too prideful to get work just for work. I know plenty of college grads who are "above" working at Starbucks or restaurants of the like. The problem is that there's a definite devaluing of infrastructure type jobs that keep the country running. I think Mike Rowe (my hero) summed it up best: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm... Maybe it's just another crapshoot, but I think it's another way to rethink our education system.

Thanks for the link; that talk was brilliant and excellent food for thought to make us think about the "follow your passions" common wisdom around here.

As a foreigner in the US about to finish a MS degree in IT and travel back home, I find Friedman's words apropos. The limitation on H-1B visas does more harm than good. I've met many young, intelligent knowledge workers about to get their advanced degrees who, unfortunately, find themselves unable to stay in this country because of visa restrictions. Sending those brains back home is a mistake. A new approach is required if the US veritably wants to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

"Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door"

This would help a lot. I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore. For my best students, I have to turn to problems adapted from "key" school textbooks from China.

> I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore.

If it's not asking too much, can you give some examples? Are these contest-style problems, or computational problems?

These Singapore Primary Mathematics series placement tests

http://www.singaporemath.com/Placement_Test_s/86.htm

give some idea of problem types at different grade levels. They are not exhaustive, of course, as the distributor of the books doesn't want to give away all their content for free online.

Thanks, those are great.

"A bell rings every 25 minutes while another bell rings every 40 minutes. Suppose they rang together at 6 a.m., when will they ring together again?"

Very cute. Do you find that students prefer such problems to the normal "plug and chug" type? (Also, when you say "advanced math students", what age are you talking about?)

Really? I wasn't that impressed with them: they were mostly arithmetic - not actual math.

Most of the questions I saw were just annoyances dealing with fractional/decimal arithmetic. There were some interesting word/figure problems, but the difficulty in those usually lay in doing the arithmetic by hand.

I wasn't that impressed with them: they were mostly arithmetic - not actual math.

Same request as the friendly request above to which I responded: what resources would you suggest for examples of "actual math" appropriate for elementary-age students.

I use a great variety of problem sources, published in both English and Chinese, to teach various learners of elementary math supplementary lessons, which is my current occupation. But one can never have too many sources of problems, so what sources do you suggest? There's no "ceiling" of difficulty level, because I have early-elementary-age students who are already well along in secondary-level math, so I have to keep looking for more challenging material all the time for my most advanced students.

Hmm, that's a fair question. I tutored high school kids (14-17) for a while, and I would generally tailor things to their interest.

Basically, I tried to relate the math to solving a real problem they might be interested. Limits to money problems (e.g., could you retire on a Million dollars? Now take into account inflation, interest, etc)., differentials to sports/computer-games (plot the trajectory of the ball), random riddles, etc.

I'm not really sure how well that would translate to younger kids though ... My elementary school aged nephews/nieces tend to enjoy geometry problems (find the pattern ...), 'shortcuts' (FOIL, etc), and morphisms, but I fear my experience with kids that young is too limited to draw any general conclusions.

See the following for general pointers. They may not be the exact material you want though.

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem-Solving/dp/047113571...

I wish I had access to people who were really good at problem solving when I was in my pre-university days. The intention is not to really become an ace problem solver, but to give the brain a real good workout.

I concur with the recommendation of the Art of Problem Solving website for all ages of problem-solvers. That's where I first took up the screen name I also use here on HN.

Here is an example from the typical French high-school graduation question: http://xmaths.free.fr/TSTI/exos/exercice.php?nomexo=TSTIpbac...

If you wanted to graduate this year, this is the problem you had to solve: http://www.maths-express.com/bacs/2009/FranceSjuin2009.pdf (in PDF, easy to read).

(even if you don't speak the language, it's math, so you can probably figure out what the questions are, the formulas themselves are universal)

For completeness, have you gone the other way?

I still wouldn't expect the Americans to come out on top but the distinction might be less than you think. I remember in school that word problems tended to be written very stereotypically for any given book or curriculum, and students who just barely managed to learn how to do that stereotypical set might have a lot of trouble doing problems from a different "word problem tradition" (if I may coin the phrase). You might find more Singapore students have trouble doing the American problems than you expect, even though as I said I'd still expect the Singapore students to come out on top in general.

I don't have current access to students from Singapore, but later this summer I'll have a visit from a student from Taiwan, and I could try American problem types on him.

My two older children have lived in both Taiwan and the United States, as my wife and I have at various stages of life.

Then I have to ask: what do you mean by "advanced math students"?

I have students of second-grade age who have been learning to solve systems of two linear equations in two unknowns (with arbitrary coefficients in each equation). I hear from some schoolteachers that it is "impossible" to teach algebra to students before eighth-grade age, but I have definitely proved that wrong multiple times in my own experience.

Other suggestions:

- All SBA loans should come with free lifetime supplies of Provigil

- We should send our kids to Singapore to learn math and physics

- Earlier specialization

I just graduated from a high school in Singapore and I'm heading to Stanford this fall. And I think the Singapore education system is extremely overrated. I felt like I learned nothing in high school. Of course, the math problems might be tough and Singaporean kids might do well in international competitions. But really, do you know a single great company that was founded in Singapore? There's a complete lack of creativity and critical thought here.

Sometimes it seems that Singapore is a single great company that was founded in Singapore. To address your point though - I'm surprised that you lump creativity and critical thought into the same bag?

Also, judging from the admissions behavior of top PhD programs in quantitative subjects (and assuming they know what they're doing), high performance in math competitions is a good indicator of both critical thought and creativity.

(Also, I hope it was clear that my list was being a bit ironic...)

High performance in math competitions is simply a result of a lot of training. There are only so many different kinds of problems and only so many different techniques that can be employed to solve such problems (the kind that come out in olympiads, etc). I'm not saying there's no creativity in math (absolutely, there is) but coming up with a new theorem is very different from simply knowing which theorem to apply where.

I didn't really say critical thought and creativity are the same thing but yeah, I shouldn't have lumped them together. From my experience, critical thought is much more common here than creativity but even that is not applied to anything outside quantitative subjects, such as politics or philosophy.

P.S. There are many creative, smart people here but they are creative because they are creative not because of the school system. What happens to these people later in life? Why don't they found companies? I suspect the answer here is because of the Singaporean mentality where entrepreneurship isn't valued as much as a stable job. But even more that, it's because these people are often given scholarships to study overseas. These scholarships have bonds where you have to work for the company (in most cases, the government) for 5/6 years. By the time they get out of their bond, there are already ~30 or older, have a family and can't bothered to switch/start companies.

Inventing something is the easy part. If you don't do it, someone else will. Making it into a business is what's hard and that alone is what makes your invention special.

I agree, "Adopt, Adopt, Adtop" is much more important. Michael Schrage has made this point many times: "innovation is not what inventors develop, it's what customers adopt." It would be more useful for Friedman to encourage experimentation by business, especially to look at practices in adjacent industries that could be incorporated into their own business.

SarbOx has something to do with starting up small businesses? I'm glad to see someone's (Craig Barrett, in this case) parochial interests being so poorly disguised as a prescription for American economic woes.

ISTR pg has an essay on this somewhere, but anything you do to make the top-end payout for a business starter worse has a disproportionate effect on their willingness to incur the risks of starting a business. If SarbOx makes it harder to take a company public, which is one way to get a payout, it can have that effect. Economics isn't just about first-order effects.

In fact, it is sufficient for it to be perceived that it limits your top-end gain, even if it doesn't, and I think that I confidently say that such a perception exists in many people's minds, even though I could not say a word about SarbOx's true effects.

"Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent"

Hmm, make something people want. I heard that somewhere else too.

He talks about Russia and China, but not Europe. Why?

He had me until

3) lower the corporate tax rate

Does anyone out there actually believe getting a high school diploma does anything to increase an individual's productivity? I thought it pretty clear by now that people advance through the educational system to their abilities. You can fiddle with methodologies and testing all you want, but the raw material is what it is.

Government funding of scientific research is the problem. About two thirds of scientists make their living off the government, directly or indirectly. We need less of that, not more. Scientists need to stop making ultimately useless death machines for the DOD and other government agencies and they need to start working on technologies for the free market. Eliminating DARPA and throwing all the scientists who depend on it out of work would be a good start. They'd be forced to come up with business ideas.

The problem with health care in America isn't that too many aren't "covered," it's that too many can't afford medicines and procedures because they're too expensive. Costs and prices need to be driven down. That would happen right away if you eliminated the tax deductibility of health care benefits. (Maybe give an offsetting tax credit to make it political palatable.) Millions of people would opt out of their employer provided plans and go comparison shopping for much cheaper high deductible plans so they could pocket the savings. This consumer driven pressure would force insurance prices down dramatically. The high deductibles of these cheap plans would have people comparison shopping for the cheapest medical services, which they basically don't do now. This would drive down prices dramatically.

Eliminate DARPA? The majority of what they fund is really cool, useful technology that just happens to be a little too risky or costly for businesses to fund (especially with capital harder to come by today). Look over their list of projects; you'll find a shortage of "ultimately useless death machines" and an abundance of worthwhile science and engineering. I doubt you could have made a convincing business case for building the ARPANet -- too expensive, and how are you going to earn money from it? -- but it turned out to have been worth doing anyway. Likewise for most of the DARPA projects I've been seeing.

Without darpa, how would the internet get it's start?

"how America should get out of its current economic crisis."

Put the bankers in check, put the media conglomerates in check, put the politicians in jail and put everybody else to work.

This is another problem with Open Source. Americans need to create something of value to the rest of the world that the rest of the world is willing to pay for. If we continue building open source software, then the rest of the world never has to pay us for our innovation. They just compile it themselves and leave us in the dust.

So you mean to say only Americans build FOSS?

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