Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don't Think They're Smart
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
1) There is not a shortage of scientists.
There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science.
2) You don't need to be smart to be a scientist; you need to be stubborn.
This is similar to the argument that ideas don't matter for entrepreneurship. There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.
Everything in life boils down to perspiration at some point.
So compare: in one field, you start earning a median $65k at age 22 with only a bachelor's degree, and in the other, you start earning $65k in your mid to late thirties, after a bachelor's, a PhD, and often at least one post-doc. Everything before that is "low-pay grinding", except that the academic definition of "low-pay" ranges from lower-middle class ($25k-$30k for the better-paid grad-students and worse-paid post-docs) to taking on debt (the humanities).
A median means that half the CS grads made less than 65k. Tenure track also comes with some eventual benefits you won't receive with a bachelor's in CS. Let's be clear about what we're actually comparing.
This is false.
For example, X% could make exactly 65k and only the lower ((100 - X) / 2)% would make less.
...where X \in (0, 100]
However I also doubt that many CS grads at all are making significantly less than $65k. Those that are making appreciably less than that are almost certainly not working in the field, or they are not working in the US. I wager that the salary distribution of CS grads working in the field in the US is pretty damn tight.
Granted, the job market was crap and I make 6 figures now, but there are still plenty of sub 40k programming jobs out there and people happy to take them.
That's not how medians work
Your assuming salaries are not inflated and that the ratio of people reporting salaries is constant at all income ranges and the reported numbers are accurate. I doubt any of those are true. So, IMO to observe a 65k median suggests the actual median is below 65k.
PS: Don't forget grad students count as recent CS grads and there generally not making anywhere close to 65K.
There are loads of professional teachers, professional medics, professional sanitation workers, etc. who just turn up, do the job and go home. Some may and do work long hours for little reward, but a lot don't. There is a culture in academia that you may, sometimes, when you really need to, you may take the weekend off. Or Sunday, at least.
That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I have had a 30+ year career in industry. I have watched margins tighten and good friends get laid off as more and more is offshored. I doubt that this will end well for the next generation. Not everyone will be a "winner." But those who invest in developing their skills will, on average, do much better than those who do not.
I think one cause might be that "the enterprise" has very little to offer in terms of ideals. Those jobs that actually change the world and help a lot of people usually are out of your reach if you choose the wrong education (like computer science). Being "the man that uncovers the truth" (a scientist) seems much more appealing than "earn a lot of money being a cog in a machine that competes with other machines".
I admit, it's just anecdotal. When I see my friends who work at Microsoft, it doesn't seem like the fact that they're working at such a large, influential company excites them. After all, the "up or out" system either drags them out of the company or to some managerial position where there's even more of the "cog in a process" feeling as you spend most of your time presenting your team's results to your superior and the other way around.
No one should go into most sciences (including physics) if they a) intend to stop at the undergrad level and b) expect it to be of non-trivial value in the job market.
Engineering degrees are economically useful at the undergrad level. Science degrees are not, at least not any moreso than English or philosophy degrees. So there is absolutely no need to promote STEM degrees as a career choice. They are a very bad one, outside of engineering (and even there it depends on field and timing).
>There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists.
The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected. More often, they're just busy, so consistently busy doing their own research and supervising their own students that one day some new and improved methodology, instrument, or statistical tool leaves them in the dust. This happens because, frankly, nobody pays them to keep their methodology, instruments, and statistical tools up to date, and it's not like anyone will refuse to publish their papers if they don't keep up-to-date. They get grants because they publish papers, and they publish papers because they keep doing experiments and/or proving theorems -- the fact that they could be learning more and quicker by working some other way isn't built into any incentive structure except their personal hopes and dreams (which are the first thing any young scientist learns to repress).
There is especially no shortage of scientists in the sense that, simply put, there are not enough permanent jobs for the PhDs and post-docs we already train. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif
>Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science.
This is quite true. I find the advising structure in graduate school strange with respect to its stated purposes. The definitional requirement of a PhD is that it be a large piece of original research (stereotypically, about three papers' worth) that charts the course for the young scientist's early career. The best PhD dissertations open up whole new subfields, and those are the young scientists who get the good jobs. But how do we allocate labor to produce these "brilliant new ideas"? Largely by assigning the graduate student to work on their adviser's existing research program, which they can slowly transform into something at least partially their own depending on their level of supervision.
(The worst PhD dissertations are basically just longer MSc dissertations: fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input by the apprentice graduating to become a real scientist.)
>There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.
clap clap clap http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif
Absolutely, completely, entirely, 100% true. The vast majority of professional science is legwork. Theoreticians can spend plenty of time constructing models or proving theorems to feel brilliant, but ultimately, they mostly just do legwork as well. Experimentalists and engineering researchers have to actually do experiments and actually produce artifacts. Mind, many of us find even the drudgery and legwork plenty fascinating to set-up and do, but almost never so much that we'd object to your taking it away somehow.
Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).
I would add only one quality: a professional scientist is defined not only by religious devotion to doing loads and loads of legwork for little compensation, but also by an emotional ability to withstand being constantly graded, measured, and stack-ranked against everyone else in your field, in time periods ranging from each semester to every few years. From the beginning of undergrad through tenure and up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating, you basically never stop having to pass yet another set of exams (each one calibrated to fail some percentage at the bottom, forcing them to find other careers) to continue doing your existing job or to receive a promotion that other skilled professionals would usually get by virtue of experience alone.
While I've heard that many decades ago, funding and positions were plentiful, and so the system was not nearly so burdensome as today, now I am always a little amazed that scientific advancement manages to happen at all, since almost everything a scientist does professionally is connected to keeping his job instead of actually getting and sharing research results.
From one graduate student to another, do we decide to keep sucking toes and complain about it later or do we actually do something about it?
Frankly, I've watched the cheapening happen for the past 15 years, and at first it was schadenfreude. Me, a person with a liberal arts degree, was having a really hard time getting my career going, getting a living wage - and even with a Masters, 10 years of solid work experience, references, technology skills and no piercings, tattoos or felonies. Basically I'm a textbook employee on paper, and it still took me something like 200 applications to "earn" my first career gig.
All the while, people in STEM put me down for having a useless degree. Well, after watching the 2000s tech bubble pop, watching H1-Bs come in and drive down the wage faster than 50 somethings trying to take any job they can just to keep up with their lifestyle (and thereby rob a 20 something of the chance to start gaining the requisite experience), I no longer take solace in how hard it is to be in STEM. It's a family thing now, but fortunately, my experience and my "take no bullshit, this is fucking business" attitude toward employment is very helpful.
I am a creative and intellectual mercenary. I fight for myself. I did not choose this path.
I had
a) physics professors at the previous school (UCSB) willing to write letters, make phone calls b) solid unpublished work that raised some eyebrows c) professors on the admitting end willing to shepherd my application
I got my PhD at an international research lab. I was a research fellow in nuclear physics at a Russell Group (i.e. top-16) university in the UK for 7 years. I was a guest scientist at CERN. I know whereof I speak ;-)
[EDIT: Let's assume that if you are mediocre and not politically-connected, you don't get tenure and you don't stay long. You don't supervise students in an official fashion. This is mostly true, I think.]
I can assure you that when (if!) you come to apply for tenure, it will matter more who your friends are and whose bags you carried than the papers that you produced or the students that you mentored. I agree that most scientists are incredibly busy. Sadly, because they are all incredibly busy, it's the extra stuff (the handshakes, the dinners, etc.) that come to matter. The technical stuff (the tooling, the methods) don't matter precisely because the group heads don't understand them - but they do understand who they had dinner with last week, or who gave a nice talk at that pleasant conference. They do understand that their friend was their prospective employee's supervisor, and they do understand the concept of political favours. They understand prestige and status and how to obtain it, almost by definition. That speaks to your last point too.
> Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).
I disagree slightly, with the benefit of experience. The most brilliant people I knew all left science. They (we, now) went to draw larger salaries in industry, working half the hours and with more pleasant colleagues. The people that were left were those without brilliance but with the tenacity to hold on and without the skills to get a decent job in a mid-career switch. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions, but they're rare (again, only in my experience).
> up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating
Well, at this point you've failed, you see - you've given up doing science :-) But you still get graded - there are departmental quotas and budget forecasts and student surveys and now you're a middle manager. But you get paid less.
For us, an M.S. thesis was supposed to be largely independent, publishable work. Is it that different in different fields?
At least in the geosciences, M.S. research is basically your adviser saying "Here's an idea/interesting problem that I haven't thought much about but looks promising. Have at it."
You do your M.S., publish, switch schools and start a Ph.D. (Or go into industry... An M.S. is a very common working degree in geology.)
A Ph.D. is "Come up with three different, relevant, original ideas that work* and see them through". (*Obviously, most don't work, so it's largely an exercise it trying different things until something does.)
I know we have a different academic culture than CS (and a wildly different industry culture), but is it really that different at the M.S. level?
I don't want to sound like an "internet tough guy" but rising up above that level is laid on the student to pursue.
Sorry, I had to edit this again. I have a PhD in physics. My dire warning to graduate students is: You might be given a degree even if you didn't do PhD level work. I hope that's sobering, but at the same time motivating.
On the other hand, my experiences have been weird, in that I had near-total independence for my BSc thesis (which, as a result, simply was not very good even though it was accepted with honors) (because my undergrad thesis advisors were involved in administration and I was doing a topic politically disfavored in that department), and an uneven degree of supervision for my MSc research (I've had a lot of guidance on what experiment to do and what statistics to run, but my advisor has never told me how to find the previous literature on our subject, even when I ask).
I share your two hypotheses to the point I consider them ansatzes. Most of my peers have Ph.D.'s in hard sciences or engineering as I do. Most of them wasted their time on their thesis research; it's just a certificate meaning "certifiably smart, persistent, and able to do self guided study." I don't particularly regret getting my underwear drawer liner autograph from the governator. It was a poor financial decision, but I had fun playing with big toys, and it provided enough meaning to my life I avoided ending up a glue sniffer or drunkard.
Attempting to convince more people to do this is a fool's errand: we can't even employ the ones we have. I've been lucky in that I have mostly worked on interesting things and been reasonably well paid for it, but doubling or tripling the number of science people in the world is foolish unless you give them something useful to do. My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity. You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or machine learning to do that. Yet a lot of Ph.D. types are doing this sort of plumbing for a living, because there are not enough jobs doing actual science.
Now, as some one poorly paid and pursuing science you would be particularly vulnerable to this risk. The bad thing is you have worked yourself into a corner, and there is nothing that you can immediately do, to improve your situation, should you fall into bad times. If you are working for a contractor for a big IT company, you can work long hours for increased pay. You, as a scientist, will not find a similar outlet.
Personally, I think the whole thing sucks. It is not that we need more people in science, rather, we need more investment in science; People/Institutions with big money taking big risks. Like Elon Musk.
In any case my impression is that the article was about different strategies for improving achievement. I'm not a psychologist, but I've seen some pretty convincing articles that show that praise for how smart a kid is versus praise for how hard they work affects how they handle failure. Increasing perseverance would be a good way to be more successful in academia, I would imagine.
What would you rather be doing with your higher education credentials? What is the hiring process for doing that?
If you want to back up this claim, back it up. The entire rest of your comment is totally orthogonal.
The claim being made by the self-esteem expert is not "psychobabble." It's simple enough for you to think about directly. It's not a langauge you can't understand, written in abstract terms you can't understand.
Having experienced firsthand what happens when people treat intelligence as an "innate talent," I actually know that what he is saying is correct, from personal experience.
Nowhere in the article does it say anything about PhDs. A Bachelor's degree is more than sufficient to do the sort of "plumbing" you mention. And it is exactly that sort of thing where the employers are chronically complaining that they can't find any qualified candidates without getting more H1B visas.
Someone may not need a PhD to do this sort of thing, but they DO need more than the remedial Algebra II class that qualified as a math prerequisite for their Communications degree, which they went into because they were told in 2nd grade that they're "not a math person".
You don't even need a high school diploma to do data plumbing. You don't need H1Bs to do it either: you simply need to train and pay people adequately.
I used this as an example of what working scientists (you know, the article is about encouraging people to study STEM) are confronted with on the job market thanks to nincompoops who believe we are short of STEM degreed individuals. I'd rather drive a bus. Fortunately, I don't have to.
When these "scientists" spend most of their time massaging data to get that golden 0.049 p-value, I think a bit of derision might be deserved.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7143630 [2]
[2] Before you go all "grr, journanists, grr", I first heard about that one on both the Science and Nature podcasts.
What is your position then? That nothing can be learned about human behavior by applying the scientific method? That there's no inherent patterns or cause and effect behind how humans act? Or just that not one single psychologist in the history of the field has yet successfully performed an experiment that has demonstrated such, or even made an attempt in good faith to do so?
Certainly, it's much harder to remove all confounding variables from psychological experiments. That doesn't mean that there's nothing to be learned about human behavior by applying the scientific method.
Are there any good ways to teach stubbornness to very-non-stubborn kids in a student-teacher relationship?
Too often stubbornness is attributed to some quirk in the child's history/family life that leads them down a self-reinforcing path of self-motivated stubbornness. That's not useful for the vast majority of kids who are surrounded by constant, quick distractions and have parents who lack the knowledge/motivation to instill stubbornness into them.
There are no universal rules when it comes to people. But, what I've observed and what I've had reported to me by those who have studied the issue has pretty consistently shown people who pursue their goals more stubbornly achieving those goals more reliably. And conversely, people who are more easily distracted/dissuaded struggling more and having a more difficult time.
If I cared about a kid that seemed easily distracted/dissuaded, I would do what I could to set that kid up to achieve his/her goals more reliably with less struggle and difficulty. (please don't take this into a discussion the value of achievement vs struggle and difficulty)
Many students I've met in high school or college don't even realize that there are cool things to understand in math. They think math is just a collection of rules. Once the rules are mastered/test is over, done. What's there to understand? And hence why be stubborn? What is there to be stubborn about?
A healthy disregard for authority is also important in stubbornness, and hard to teach in school (as it's against the self-interest of the harried teacher who needs a "well-controlled" classroom).
I've long believed doing a PhD is very similar to being an entrepreneur. Discipline and maintaining motivation are by far the hardest things. Little pay and no guarantee of reward. You have an idea and you have to do your best to see it through, but it's tough, utterly exhausting and very isolating. It's a wonder anyone manages it at all really.
It is very difficult for people to appreciate how grueling an academic career can be, from grad school on. I put together this list to make the point: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 (needs to be read to the end to see what I mean.)
My experience is that professors in "pure maths" are very bright and showed exceptional reasoning skills from an early age.
> It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.
That's quite a generalisation! obviously, not all professional scientists are geniuses and it takes perseverance to get a decent permanent position. But to get a position in a decent institution isn't only a matter of political connections and stubbornness. Look up some coursera classes for instance. The people teaching those classes aren't just there because they're the only ones willing to do some "extraordinarily boring" legwork.
That's the definition of a jackpot.
Good point. The opportunity cost of getting a PhD can generally be pretty soul crushing if measured in terms of dollars, years, and rungs on the career ladder (although a lot of things can be soul crushing if measured by those metrics).
All that effort to do some research that, at the end of the day, probably won't matter to anyone. I don't take that as a huge personal failure, because most research doesn't really change the world. That's the nature of research. It's like the world of startups, where most of the time you fail to make an impact, and occasionally you succeed.
But unlike in the start-up world, success isn't measured in $XM IPOs or buyouts. It means getting your foot in the door as a non-tenured professor, so you can work fiendishly at a below-market salary for the next few years trying to secure tenure. Or taking a job at an industrial research lab, and possibly discovering you don't actually enjoy working at industrial research labs.
Ah, now I'm too old to work as a programmer at your social media company? Sweet.
> "Actually, praise may not be the optimal way, but we are so praise oriented. We can ask the child questions about the process: “How did you do that? Tell me about it.” As they talk about the process and the strategies they tried, we can appreciate it. We can be interested in it. We can encourage it. It doesn’t have to be outright praise."
Most kids crave attention from the adults they look up to. Merely paying attention to something and expressing an interest can be hugely rewarding without needing to praise.
The flip side of this is why parents who have busy schedules for one reason or another often have kids with behavioral issues; the only reliable way for the kid to get attention is to piss off their parents.
And this is also why so many gifted children become mediocre adults.
I haven't been able to put my finger on what exactly it is that causes these people to "get lost" on their way, but it is common enough that I think we need to be doing something differently with regards to gifted & talented education in the USA.
One problem is that gifted programs (at least in public schools) are contrary to reality. If the gifted programs in your state are like the one I was enrolled in, then members had to have a 130+ IQ to be admitted. There is the rub. Upon exiting school you suddenly and jarringly discover that not everyone else in the world has a 130+ IQ like the people you spent the past 8-10 years with, and things get very slow. Even at places like Google and Facebook not everyone has a 130+ IQ. The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Some people, like me, have severe difficulties adjusting to this deceleration. I was in gifted programs from first until tenth grade. However, after college (tech Ivy), I spent almost a decade in low-paying and unchallenging jobs while wracked with depression. Only a few years ago was I able to pull myself out of that hole.
The solution is to disband gifted programs. The culture shock experienced by the members once the scaffolding is removed can be pretty severe. It's probably better to make the gifted kids understand that the other 96% of non-gifted people on earth with them are going to be around them all the time. They should learn to deal with it. If there's any gifted education, it should be outside of normal schooling.
I was also in a G+T program in the 80s and I'd say a major problem in young adult years is no one cares how smart you are, after 16 or so years of being told there's nothing more important than being smart. Much like your GPA, your IQ is pretty much irrelevant once you graduate. Workplace progress suddenly switches entirely over to who you know, who is your dad, who you impress, who you kiss up to, your golf game, etc.
Artificially concentrating smart kids in a group and then scattering them into the world is pretty counterproductive. I mean, it makes the school district look good ("We have 120 high-IQ students in the county! Stellar exam scores! We're fantastic!"), and at the end of the day, that's all the matters. The school system doesn't care much what happens after the students have left it.
For academic achievement, the majority of research backs up your thesis, and it isn't even a tradeoff, where you get better academics at the expense of worse socialization. Gifted programs don't work. It is far better to accelerate a student to a higher grade, even if it means putting students in classes with much older students (accelerating a gifted student is the most effective positive intervention that can be taken in K-12 education according to Hattie's recent review of meta-analyses, Visible Learning, and nothing else is close). It pushes them academically, and more often than not, helps them socialize, because they learn how older kids interact before internalizing too many abnormal frames and social habits.
So maybe we have to work with what we've got - 14yo that can learn fast - so teach them fast. Can't do it in the regular classroom, so gifted class. Socialization is apparently an issue there (why? same age group as other kids have, same teacher - what's really different?) so work on that.
There are plenty of students who, when bored or unchallenged, underperform to the point where they are initially mistaken for having an intellectual disability. For these students to have no support throughout school seems like a recipe for these students to "get lost" earlier in their life rather than after high school (where it seems to happen in my anecdotal experience).
On that note, I'm particularly interested in what, if anything, helped you to pull yourself out of the hole: were there any identifiable experiences that helped you find a "sense of direction", for lack of a better term?
As for me, I was correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder after many years of misdiagnoses. Now with proper treatment I don't have mood swings, take rash actions, or go into months-long dark, suicidally depressive states. But I also can't output 2 weeks of project work in 3 days with 8 hours of sleep anymore. I'll take the good with the bad though. Overall, the death of my father was probably the main catalyst for improving myself.
I wasn't in the gifted programs when I was in school (to the contrary: the K-12 system stuck me in Special Ed for behavioral problems), but... this bit comes as a surprise. I thought Google and Facebook only hired the very gifted in the first place. I do have a 130 IQ (almost exactly, and it would be higher if not for my miserable visual-processing abilities and my "merely gifted" calculation abilities), and I'd be really surprised to find that the top tech companies (or... even... academia...) are filled with people less intelligent than me.
Congratulations: you just made me feel very, very alone.
> The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Yes. Yes, it is. Worse: when you're really really clever, and anywhere near a decent human being, you spend a lot of time failing to understand why the rest of the world seems to be so damn cruel, because after all, from your point of view, anyone with some decent common sense can see, plain as day, how to make things nicer for everyone.
Damn. Damn damn damn.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/...
Gifted kids always hear "you're good / you're the best" so they learn to build their self-image based on this external praise. Essentially, since external feedback is always positive, a strong coupling forms between external inputs and one's feeling of self worth.
Later on in life when the world starts to send them not-so-positive feedback about their work, gifted kids take it really badly because the negative feedback hits their core.... whereas a not-so-gifted kids have learned not to take external feedback so seriously long ago.
It's definitely something to watch out for. Remember---you are not your work. Your worth is not connected to what you've achieved or what you own---your worth stems from your human nature, and your unlimited ability to adapt, learn, and do stuff in the future.
Growing up 'smart' made me stupid.
I had tests and things, I was marked for inclusion in the TAG program. I got poor grades not because I wasn't smart enough to do the work, but because the work bored the hell out of me and I refused to do homework and thus allow it to intrude upon fun time away from that tedium (I suspect I also dealt with some undiagnosed ADHD; it runs in the family).
The problem though is that when everything comes easy, and you're never given much opportunity and encouragement to challenge yourself, then you also become prone to getting frustrated and confused whenever something isn't coming easily. You're not accustomed to that kind of failure, to not just knowing off the bat or at least being able to pick it up on the fly.
So you give up on things a lot. When you get out into the real world, you wind up with a complex. That stuff that made you 'smart' isn't actually that useful outside of certain areas, so on a 'regular job' you're still functionally useless.
As a kid in the 90s, at the beginning of the great tech boom, the .com crash still on the horizon, you were inundated with messages that said that because you were smart and knew computers you were somehow just on a free ride to be the next Bill Gates. When the reality is that most of the kids who did go that route wound up broke in '99, and the rest just never got that far in the first place.
I genuinely worry that the current startup culture and the push for 'start an app!' programs in schools are headed the same way. Selling tech and 'being smart' as an automatic win at life, which isn't true at all, and 90% of those kids finishing 'accelerated learning' courses in programming will be lucky to grow up writing backend code for a medical insurance billing provider.
I agree and also have faced this problem as I was in the gifted programs all through school, then into university. However, in my third year of University I failed the entire year, owing mostly to the assurance in my ability to just wing it.
This had profound effects on my psyche and over the last two years, I have been trying to reprogram and discover strategies to not fall into this trap. In areas of life where many struggle, I am sharp, but in other areas I really struggle and learning to appreciate the talents of others in this area has been an eye-opener.
One of the major things for me was writing; I just don't find it easy. Possibly the largest change for me was actually facing up to that fact and starting to read and write again, which I hadn't done since high-school.
Now I am enrolled in a MSc program and actively engaged in learning and struggling in the areas I am weak; I believe this change is starting to pay off. The hardest thing was to accept that I wasn't good at everything, and to start working hard like everyone else.
I have a very clear memory of an after-school workshop I attended in early high school to prepare students for the ACT, a college entrance exam that was common in that time and place. This exam tested students on math, English, reading, and science reasoning. When it came time for the teachers to provide advice on science reasoning, they basically told the students to not bother, and just guess as best they can. I was completely floored at this extraordinarily defeatist attitude. Sure, this school had science classes, but they mostly taught science memorization (what does ATP stand for?) and not science reasoning.
Her theory hinges on the concept of a 'declarative knowledge system' as a component of cognition, which could be described (in an over-simple manner) as "beliefs are significant determinants of behavior." This structure is also at the heart of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is the dominant paradigm for treating anxiety, depression, ocd, and others. It also works by correcting problematic beliefs in patients.
The belief in question in Dweck's work, which has so much impact on people's learning efficacy, is whether intelligence is changeable or not. If someone thinks it's changeable, they work hard to change it, and value effort. If they think it's something fixed that they're born with, they hold out hope that they might be brilliant for as long as possible, trying to make sure they and others think that's the case. You can imagine how this impacts people responses to failures in intellectual domains: if you think intelligence is changeable, you are glad to be given information on a weakness that you can now improve; if you think it's fixed, you become scared and discouraged.
I think this article focuses on the praise aspect, because it's easy to communicate the idea to lots of people; but the reason the type of praise matters is because one type or the other leads (on average) to the formation of one belief or another on the question of intelligence mutability. If you're not a parent, but someone interested in being able to learn more effectively, the praise aspect is probably less relevant to you—but the books are good.
The thing to keep in mind though, is that the only way to reap the benefits of what she's talking about is to understand that intelligence is changeable (to deeply believe it—that's where it's going to impact your behavior). Reading her books can help instill the idea—I'm still looking for other ways to prove it to myself and have had some success.
I think that's a big problem, and one that makes the self esteem issue worse (if you don't fit the formula, you'll feel inferior).
I always wanted to be a scientist, but then gravitated towards entrepreneurship because it's less rigid and defined.
If you're a hacker, you owe it to a beginner to let them know it's difficult but if they persist they can overcome the learning curve (for some people it's steeper or wider, but it's still not easy no matter how you look at it). We're very honest about how difficult starting a startup is, so we should be equally honest when it comes to learning to code. Hope this helps anyone out there interested in learning.
"They often praise the ability, the talent, or the intelligence too much. The opposite of this is the good process praise"
I've been hearing variations for this for years, often in the context of comparing educational traditions of Asia to Europe-US. It seems each has their advantage. I haven't heard any smashingly convincing evidence that there is some insight which can be applied across the board. It mostly sounds like people picking a preference and arguing for it. I don't see whay science is special here.
If I was to pick my own bias and go with it, it's that education at some point (I don't know if it's at 5 or 25) needs to get students to really internalize the actual process of learning and practice. Spend a quality hour a day on piano and you will get good at piano. Same goes for maths, painting, fiction writing, foreign languages and lucha libre.
They needs to realize that they can get good at stuff. They need to realize how much work it is and they need to internalize that they (specifically) can do it.
I have another pet peeve here. These discussions start with a problem and the immediate assumption is that the educational establishment needs to fix it. Well, the educational establishment is a huge lumbering giant and it's not necessarily the right man for the job. What about the ballet instructor, mother or godfather.
We're talking more about child psychology than science education here. Raising kids better is certainly an admirable goal, but is this best addressed at a humanity-as-a-whole level? Do you have a daughter, nephew or godson? Can you make a difference as an adult in their life? Why not start there. At least it's something most of us can do something about.
Each time I begin to learn something new, as a new programming language, the beginnings are very hard and you feel dumb, this is the most difficult part. Once you have practice a lot, then all goes smoothly.
Add to this that everyone seems to forget quickly how hard was to give the first steps. When you are learning something new people take for granted that you should be ready, but may times you are in that stage in which progress is hard and slow. So we should emphasize this point when we start learning.
If there was some kind of crisis (say cold war) and we needed new inventions to survive, things might be really different. But right now, we are just comfortable with the world as it is with not much demand for radical transformation.
I never thought I'd be a developer, though.
I was beginning to learn programming around 8th-9th grade, but I was only creating webpages, simple CRUD apps, and other things that weren't very "serious".[1]
At this time, I knew I didn't want to be a programmer because I knew the job equated to sitting around doing math problems all day. It's not that I didn't think I was smart enough—I was a very good math student. I just couldn't think of anything less appealing than doing math problems all day, every day for the rest of my life. I didn't know what the job actually entailed, but I thought I did.
[1] I thought of "programmers" as people who built 3D engines, used complex math to render interfaces (shapes, colors, animations, etc). By that standard, I'm still not a programmer. :)
Science is hard, soul-crushing and not that well-paying. Better to quit before they go into grad school than to waste years to be me. Only the truly dedicated and brilliant will survive.
I'm a huge critic of the flaws in the educational system, but I wouldn't give up my experience studying science in school for anything. It's molded who I am, it's made me a better person and a better developer, and I wish that more people would share that experience.
There are many people who defend studying "the humanities" as something universally valuable and universally desirable, and I think there's truth in that. I think there's just as much truth that studying science is universally valuable and universally desirable, regardless of ones eventual career aspirations.
I was perplexed by this, until I realized what is going on. Many people are convinced of the implication:
person is smart --> person is good at math
In the light of this, the first few chapters of my book[1] serve to help readers get over their math fears. Honestly, I feel I need to learn about psychology to help people with their math phobia... Once you get rid of fear, math can become an amazing source of knowledge buzz.
shoots your comment into the all-consuming hellfire of the sun
someone smarter than me said: teaching is not filling a cup. teaching is lighting a fire.
i still remember how some teachers sucked at knowledge, and/or knowledge transmission to students. math is actually pretty easy if it is explained to you in a words you understand. i think feynman said it.
some of best teaching i've seen is walter lewins mit 801 and 802. it's available on mit ocw. it's not just about teaching but also lighting a fire of students' willingness to start to learn for themselves . and always teach via example (sokrat, i think).
I have worked 15 years and coded low-level, applications and ops. I've always kept an interest in this and keep a few side projects.
But I am not smart. Anyone could do this, given the right training.
If what you want in life is a science PhD, go get it. Anyone can do it. You may have to work more for it, but that's it.
Fortunately getting a doctorate doesn't have a hard deadline, or at least that's my impression (of course it may vary).
Very often, being really "smart" in a subject is dependent on having a sustained high level of interest in that subject. Not at the grade school or high school level, but at the graduate or professional level. It's possible to fake it, relying on raw intelligence and forcing yourself to perform well in a mentally-demanding field that you're not genuinely interested in, but it's way, way more work.
I remember being told, at a seminar on exactly this sort of thing, that more than half of students entering high school here (Australia) still did not understand fractions.
The high school curriculum then steamrollers on to try and teach these kids about algebra, calculus, trigonometry. Not once do we stop to check that the students grasp the prerequisites necessary to understand the material, rather than just faking enough to get 50% on a test.
Is it surprising that people develop learned helplessness about mathematics?
If children are stubborn enough, they can overcome this kind of negative reinforcement at home of the societal norms they see expressed at school and throughout much of whatever culture they belong to. However, as is the case with other people I grew up with who had similar backgrounds, without stubbornness and the willingness to recognize where one would be most happy and useful it is possible to drift for a long time without understanding why everything about one's identity is orthogonal to how it feels it should be, or even to just end up in a mediocre paper shuffling job forever.
Imo it isn't about encouragement or positive reinforcement, but rather (as a parent) helping your children to figure out what they want to do and what they are interested in without projecting your own hopes and aspirations on them. Regardless of if your kid wants to live in a garage in Monterey and make sculptures of feet (or, hell, move to India and build water treatment plants, or study blue whales, or whatever), even if you think they'd make an amazing neurosurgeon/NFL player/xyz, don't push them to be something they're not. They get enough backlash from their peers and the rest of the world as it is.
Too many kids don't just quit STEM (or never start) because they're pushed out of it or excluded for one reason or another, too many kids go into what seems socially acceptable because they aren't allowed space to grow into whatever the hell they are.
- If I have to be scientist, I have to demonstrate certain level of competence in science and maths.
- I can achieve that in 2 ways. 1. I am so brilliant that I reach that level without breaking a sweat. 2. I will have to put in more efforts to reach that level.
- Kids are not interested in putting those efforts, neither do their parents put in necessary efforts to convince them.
- Kids are getting lazy, running away from personal responsibility and ambitions. This is bad because eventually they will end up living on welfare money taxed from the hardworking students.
I think that is a valid point for some students, but for others I think it is more: "I don't want to put in all that effort only to fail because I'm not smart enough"
It's one thing to ask, "How smart do you have to be to do useful science?", and it's quite another to ask, "Do you think you can make it in the field of competition?"
Many of us here have social circles that consists only of the highly educated; in these bubbles it's easy to forget that many people simply are not capable of higher level mathematics, and are not capable of becoming even mediocre scientists. It's likely that the average child - and the vast majority of all children - would be happier and more productive in other professions.
It's harsh, but try to judge your child's talents objectively, then encourage them to do what best for them.
Maybe they are all little socrates'es
I've been on this hobby horse for a while here on HN, and I'm worried people are getting tired of me. But seriously, think about it. I don't have attrition rate numbers for typical undergraduate STEM degrees, but I do know that undergrads don't drop out of Economics or Poly Sci or Literature to major in CS, Engineering, Physics, and so forth. Where I do have data, look at attrition rates for graduate schools, especially at the elite level. A typical attrition rate for an elite Law or Medical school is below 1%. A typical attrition rate for an elite Engineering or Science PhD program is 35-50%! MS programs aren't s studied, but nation wide, attrition rates are about 33% (I'd have to dig though my HN comments to find the cite for that one, and it was behind a paywall).
So, considering how difficult all this is, outcomes must be much better for those STEM grads, right? Well, no, not really. CS is a good major at the undergrad level, and grads do pretty well. But again, at the elite level, top software developers, even from elite CS schools with grad degrees, just don't pull it in like dermatologists or radiologists. I read a pretty heartbreaking story about a woman who was denied the right to use sick leave for maternity leave from her grad program. My cousin, a radiologist, worked part time (20 hour weeks) for a while when she had a kid, and she still pulled down more than my salary as a developer. I know another woman who is an emergency medicine physician who did the same thing. They are so, so, so much better off not going into science. A RAND study found that the American aversion to STEM graduate degrees in favor of professional degrees is economically rational and shouldn't be a head scratcher. The head scratcher is why people still act like the only thing we need to do to get more people into science is "make it cool", or "improve middle school math", and so forth.
We have got to stop acting like there's something surprising here. Science gets kids who are very smart and utterly devoted but perhaps lacking in wisdom, and who just can't believe that they might be in the bottom half of a cohort with high grades in STEM coursework and test scores above 95%ile. Or, alternatively, they are students who don't have these other options (US med and law schools are not nearly as accessible to international students as engineering and science PhD programs are). So if the "professions" are cut off to you because you aren't a US citizen, your decision to go into a graduate STEM program (especially if it fast tracks you to US residency) may be rational in a way that wouldn't hold for someone who already possesses US citizenship (who typically shun science PhD programs).