If only students would listen to me!

The older I get, the more I am temped to respond with a "doh!" when I read stuff that I have been saying/writing forever.  But then other than the few losers, er, readers here, who cares about what I have to say, right? ;)

In this essay on the importance of innovation, I read the following sentence:

GPA was associated with innovation, but maybe not in the direction you’d think.

Why the "doh!" you wonder, eh ... let me tell you that first before I report on the innovation essay.

For starters, I have this post from December 2012, with the title "Education does not equal pursuing the GPA" in which I quoted a better known person:

The pursuit of the perfect GPA is a distraction that leads too many students away from the challenges they should be facing in their undergraduate years.

You can already see the connection, right?  In the American system (with which I am most familiar) students can follow a number of strategies in order to pursue the GPA.  They can, for instance, avoid the sciences if they think they are not quite strong in that field--even if they are genuinely interested in science.  They can bypass learning a foreign language if that is not their best suit.  Or, even within these, they can avoid mean old professors like sriram who have may earned a reputation for being intense.  Very rational, if the goal is the GPA.  But, the un-challenged mind is not good at creativity and innovation!

As I wrote in this post from March 2013:

Thus, we end up graduating students with high GPAs, making sure that all students being above-average is not merely the case in a fictional Lake Wobegon!  Commencement ceremonies now routinely have magna- and summa-cum-laudes by the dozens--of course, very, very few of them from math and science, and nobody seems to even acknowledge that!  Once, when I participated in the university's deliberations on choosing the outstanding graduates, I made a mistake of commenting that it would not be fair to compare GPAs of students who were in different majors; I was surprised that there was no discussion on that point. Keep ignoring and eventually people like me will go away, I suppose!  It worked--it has been years since I participated in those discussions.

 Have I established by now that I have always been railing against the GPA?  If only students understand that.  No, correct that.  If only faculty understood that and passed along to students that an easy A or an easy C or easy whatever is not going to help them at all.  It is no longer a world in which every college graduate can immediately transition to that successful middle class life.

Back to the innovation essay then:

From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.
Time spent in these areas might really benefit innovation, but not necessarily GPA.
Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.
We see this work as confirmation of our findings – grades, by their very nature, tend to reflect the abilities of individuals motivated by receiving external validation for the quality of their efforts.
Perhaps, for these reasons, the head of people operations at Google has noted:

GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring.

If only students understood that! :(

And, the essay presents everything that I tell every one of my classes.  Like this:

Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments.

Any student who has been in any of my classes, even if that student slept through, knows well that my courses are structured exactly along those lines.  I emphasize over and over the importance of the ability "to create and answer their own questions."  Of course, I have posted about that too:

Higher education is then about understanding concepts enough to be able to ask questions.  In the format that most of higher education is, students rarely are taught how to ask questions.  And if they never figure this out after four years of university education, then all the access that Google provides will be of zero value.

Despite the "doh!" it does feel good to know that I am not alone in this cosmos ;)

If only students would listen to me though--for their own good!

Do not believe the hype about science education. It is humbug!

Students incorrectly believe that science classes are only about some random science thingys that they do not ever have to worry about once they pass the classes.  But, that is not really the students' fault--the teachers and the system, who convey such  notion, are the ones who are guilty of an enormous crime.

Of course, we learn about various scientific explanations--from grand ideas like evolution and big bang, to curious questions like why the penis is shaped the way it is, to everyday puzzles like what happens to the boiling point of water when you go from sea level to higher elevations.

What is behind all that content is the real McCoy.  Or, as Joe Biden might put it, the big fucking deal.  It is about students learning to doubt and then learning to ask questions in order to figure out the answers.

The most important goal in educating our children should be to encourage them to question everything, to not be satisfied with unsubstantiated claims, and to be skeptical of a priori beliefs, either their own, their parents’, or their teachers’.  Encouraging skeptical thinking in this way, as well as directing a process by which questions may be answered—the process of empirical investigation followed by logical reasoning—helps create lifelong learners and citizens who can responsibly address the demands of a democratic society.
And there is overwhelming evidence that one of the key collateral benefits of a more scientifically literate populace is that the seeds of religious doubt are thereby planted among the next generation.

That is from the talk that the physicist/public-intellectual Lawrence Krauss gave after picking up the 2015 Humanist of the Year award.  In fact, Krauss opened the talk with a Richard Feynman quote:

Permit us to question—to doubt, that’s all—and not to be sure…. It is our responsibility…to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

To doubt. To question.  Two actions that always trouble the establishment, whether it is science or politics or religion.  Especially religion, in which one believes without doubting and questioning.  A good Christian never doubts Jesus rising three days after he died.  In his Hindu faith, my father believes in the gods and godmen whose "miracles" he has even witnessed in person.

Science, on the other hand, makes us think about these very differently.  We begin to doubt the claims.  We question.  We ask for evidence.

The purpose of education may not be to destroy religious belief, but surely, as Richard Feynman alluded to in the quote I opened with, its purpose is to encourage doubt. In that arena we are sorely falling short.

We are falling way short.

[An] AP-GfK poll revealed that less than a third of Americans are willing to express confidence in the reality of human-induced climate change, evolution, the age of the earth, and the existence of the Big Bang. Among those surveyed, there was a direct correlation between religious conviction and an unwillingness to accept the results of empirical scientific investigation. Religious beliefs vary widely, of course—not all faiths, or all faithful people, are the same. But it seems fair to say that, on average, religious faith appears to be an obstacle to understanding the world.

Krauss offers examples from here in the US.  The old country is no different.  Well, it is way worse there.

I am so glad that Krauss added this:

Of course, science class isn’t the only place where students can learn to be skeptical. A provocative novel that presents a completely foreign worldview, or a history lesson exploring the vastly different mores of the past, can push you to skeptically reassess your inherited view of the universe.

As I have noted in many posts, in my dealings with students, I push them to question their views of the world.  "The academy has a far more important and subversive way" of dealing with such issues--the doubt and the questioning are all related to curiosity, and "curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."  There is no doubt about that.

Size isn’t everything. Especially when you are thinking with it

Because of my electrical engineering background, most graduate school faculty expected me to get into working with numbers and computers.  My first year assignment was to be a research assistant to a professor who wanted to develop a GIS-based approach in her project, back when GIS at the personal computer level was quite a joke by today's standards.  It was soon clear to her that I was not planning to be a data geek in the social sciences.

I was not after numbers by any means.  I was in graduate school to learn about ideas.  I was blown away that so much had already been said and written down.  Yet, I had not known even the tiniest bits of those ideas when I was led down a narrow alley called electrical engineering.  It is not that I did not value the empirical approach--after all, the background in science and math and engineering had provided me with enough and more evidence on the importance of empirical data.  But, theories and ideas mattered more to me than what the numbers could reveal.

Over the years, I have watched with fascination the rapidly growing collection of data at all levels.  The Big Data, as it has come to be called.  And how mining the Big Data will be the digital world equivalent of the oracle at Delphi--the data will tell us everything we would want to know.

Thus, with interest I read two lengthy opinion pieces on the flaws with Big Data.   The conclusion in one is:

Big data is here to stay, as it should be. But let’s be realistic: It’s an important resource for anyone analyzing data, not a silver bullet.

And the conclusion in the other is:

“Big data” has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever.

Both the essays methodically lay out their arguments, and I urge you to read them.  I especially liked the following:

we almost forgot one last problem: the hype. Champions of big data promote it as a revolutionary advance. But even the examples that people give of the successes of big data, like Google Flu Trends, though useful, are small potatoes in the larger scheme of things. They are far less important than the great innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries, like antibiotics, automobiles and the airplane.

Yes, the hype of it all!

Big Data's cheerleaders claim:

that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”.

So, what about those claims?

Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be “complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.”

Bollocks. Nonsense. I love such clear and succinct opinions!

All these remind me of a short reading that I assign students to read.  Well, it is an actually an interview with George Dyson--yes, he is Freeman Dyson's son.  George Dyson offers a profound observation that "information is cheap, meaning is expensive":

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.

Go figure!  With or without Big Data, that is ;)

A Measuring Worm
By Richard Wilbur

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.