2:11:31 "Given everything that's been discussed so far, if you were here right now and you were me asking a question, what would you ask, and what is your answer to that question?" Best question haha!
I skipped college. Instead, I lived in a Buddhist monastery for one year, bicycle toured for six months, moved to California for a year to follow a girlfriend, and then moved to Washington to work as an intern on a historic sailing ship. This unpaid internship ultimately lead me to my career which has been able to provide me with enough of an income to live happily and has proven to be an engaging field of work. We have so many opportunities and possibilities in this life, it’s up to you to seek them out and take the appropriate risks. If school isn’t appealing to you, then don’t waste your time. If school is appealing to you, consider the other opportunities given less attention and consider them sincerely.
I'm currently doing a maths/ AI PhD. In high school, I learned much more maths in maths class by reading recreational maths books I had brought from home, not from the teachers or textbooks.
1:33:32 What an ideal school curriculum would look like for Caplan As someone who hated the majority of compulsory education in Japan (from age 6 to 15), I would've loved if school was run like this
Caplan hits home runs one after the other. Having done graduate level academic work and managed businesses, I cannot agree more with what he says. It is courageous of the host, being a full-time beneficiary of the existing academic structure, to host such a voice. Bravo.
Bryan articulates exactly my thoughts on formal education and what I have been saying to my family for years! I grew up as poor as you can get in America (is not poor at all in absolute terms) went to a kinda crapy public school that sucked, and was absolutely obsessed with the need to go to college. I always loved learning and debate and I went hiking with some of my teachers and would debate them, it was painfully obvious they never actually thought about for themselves or deeply. Never thought of the causal reasons why the avg college grad earns more money, mostly a selection bias for people who are a bit smarter, follow the rules, finish things and often have higher ambitious. If you correct for that college is not only extreamly exspensive, its at equally as huge of an opportunity cost. I went to college for a year and took all the classes I wanted to learn about, and refused to take gen eds again so I never got my degree.i learned the vast vast majority of what I know by reading books, magazines, listing to podcasts and attending events. I remember when I decided to leave college my family and friends thought I was making the biggest mistake ever, I was in a SUNY college that had a program with Cornell 2 years at the SUNY 2 at Cornell, when I saw the cost of Cornell and realized all the gen eds I would need and the fact that they where mostly teaching me stuff I already learned I was very confident I could work may way up on the job and prove I can be as good as any Cornell grad. This saved me 3 years and about $150k debt, and I made $150k from work plus I was 3 years ahead with practice job experience. Best decision ever, I have my own company now but I have had multiple jobs where everyone else was a top school Phd or Masters and I could easily hold my own. It did make it harder to get into the door but thats what networking and writing or some other way you can prove yourself. I have 3 siblings that have a BA or MBA for top 50 colleges and they are in huge debt and make less money than me. I actually coached my older sister in getting her MBA and my younger brother in Economics classes. I have a real passion for ideas, learning and teaching and they really didnt so they just got decent enough grades to get the degree and forgot most of it and dont constantly read about it now. I do really empathize with Bryan when he talks about how normal people talk about and love boring thanings and hate the idea of thinking about ideas, they go why or who cares! Lol So i personally never had anyone in my family or around me that encouraged me to think or appreciate ideas, i was drawn to it myself and with the internet its now easy to talk to like minded people and learn at no cost. If anything I have tried to convince other's of the joy of thinking of ideas. Like I love to hike, people that like to hike tend to be well educated and even with them when I hike I try to discuss Nietzsche or bastiat and all they want to talk about is other people and drama. I am like there is nothing more boring in the world than talking about other people, sports or TV. I mean sure my close family and friends or a girl I am dating but thats it, most people are boring and I dont care what they do or think. 😂
I absolutely agree with Brayan Caplan about the reasons of working at a University. The think I love most about my job is having chats with super interesting, curious people, who want to learn more.
This is an extremely interesting talk. Mr. Caplan presented many solutions that i disagreed with, though of course the problems raised are valid. It is an interesting question to me of, can (should) you - people who have been blessed with great intellectual curiosity, in a sense judge these people, who now have the internet, but in any case don't flock to listen to Mozart for hours. What you seem to fail to really tackle, what the one guy asking was trying to ask is (i think) - do there exist values that people should hold, that no matter the present data, no matter people's personal interest, no matter the opportunity cost - you should invest in, for example public school music lessons etc. And, well my intuition is, if you don't have any external reason for it, then the logical solution is to scrap it, if it is ultimately an economic decision. But that seems wrong. Whereas the other solution of saying, we the curious people like music(insert noble pursuit of your choosing) and we want to inspire you to like it too, seems to me intrinsically arrogant. These are just some of my thoughts, still have a lot to process. Thank you, Agnes, for posting these talks on the internet, greetings from Latvia, I have been a fan of yours for a while :)
As a homeschool mom who has unschooled the sons for more than a decade, I agree with this. Knowing how foolish it is to ask rambunctious boys to sit in a desk and fill in worksheets every day, we sampled widely a large variety of activities and topics. They are very much Renaissance men. And yes, they appreciate Shakespeare and rhetorical devices too! 😉 We do "school" together in the morning, all three the same, and then after lunch they have their time to pursue their own interests.
Heard someone, maybe Deming that jobs should not have conflicting purposes, like a teacher needs to teach the students and help the student to as well as possible, but the other part of their jobs is to grade students. Those goals are somewhat in conflict.
Educators serve two masters, they have two jobs, and it's essential, not incidental. Job one is to increase the knowledge and skill every student has, to make the best of the material. Everyone talks about that. The other job is to sort and label people with grades, like meat, so that employers and next level educators know who to accept. People have inborn characteristics like IQ, honesty, conscientiousness, and curiosity, which make them useful. Education discovers who's who as well as improving everyone. Both jobs are important, they conflict, and I suspect that's why education is hard and you don't see new colleges become the next MIT too often. A few decades ago, K-12 educators convinced themselves that the second job was racist or too hard or something, and started graduating everyone even if they couldn't read. Employers still needed the labels, so they made high school graduates pay for them by incurring debt to go to college. The ones who got good labels did ok, the ones who didn't, because they just weren't born with the right configuration, got screwed and live under the debt for decades. There was a good reason to socialize the risk of education failure, C students didn't used to get buried in debt in their 20's.
not being funny but does anyone know the kind of table Bryan and Agens were sitting at. I have looked for at least two years for such a table and would find it incredibly useful.
39.57 Dr. Caplan appears to have a lot of "fun" writing books, teaching at one of those terribly wasteful universities he criticizes, and sitting around talking about ideas. What a rich and wonderful life! Of course, the rest of the masses, the philistines as he calls them, with their high school diplomas, will just have to be content with their boring jobs, following orders, and having lots of kids. My concern is that his libertarian program will be a dreamland for the privileged elites such as himself, and a nightmare for the less fortunate. I am more than a little disappointed that Prof. Callard didn't ask more pointed questions. In the end, I must confess that I found Dr. Caplan's vision of society to be both depressing and dystopian.
Kids love to help out and "work" and are naturally curious. This idea that working is bad is bizarre to me. I am a farmer and i have been helping on the farm or working since i was 4 and evey otger farmer has their kids work for them as well. Its great experience and teaches responsibility and work etic very young. I think this idea that people achouldnt work untill they are 22 and graduate with a bachelor's degree is idiotic and in most cases very bad for the kid's. There is a reason why when ever i had another job after college and i mentioned i grew up on a farm they always always hired me since we have such a reputation for having a great work ethic.
To be honest Bryan Caplan resonates with me I would show up to his lectures but sorry Agnes I really don’t give a damn about the Iliad i already know too much about it. Basically because I count myself as educated knowing that homer wrote it
1:14:20, Coming from someone who did benefit from public school pushing classical music and fully appreciating that; I do not think its fair to project that on the majority of the population who doesn't appreciate it. Its not as though the roles have been reversed and I had to suffer through hundreds of hours of gangster rap to satisfy the popular preference. Ironically I developed my appreciation of jazz from watching Hey Arnold as a child and romantic comedies in my teenage years, by college I was seeking out Jazz on my own. So its unclear to what extent I would appreciate the higher forms of music or absent elementary music class. The retort might be its important to instill high culture, but not low culture and children's preferences. First I would ask why? Second I doubt the efficacy of such things, I think human consuming preferences are much more biologically grounded than what that young man probably realizes: See Gad Saad The Consuming Instinct.
If Shakespeare was just Shakespeare, almost no one would care. I mean they were a pretty good author in their time. But most of their cultural references are severely outdated, the english is archaic. So many smart people have studied Shakespeare's work that they must have found improvements and learned pretty much every trick of good writing by now. Shakespeare has such relevance because it is studied in education for the sake of signalling. Consider the difference in how society considers someone who spent years studying Shakespeare, vs someone who spent years studying spiderman. That is the main attraction Shakespeare holds. Not to say no one would ever study Shakespeare if this effect vanished. Judged on its own merits as a work of fiction, as read by a modern audience, it is reasonably good but not exceptional.
@SephirothLives I agree that there is a signalling quality to Shakespeare but that isn’t the main reason the stories are so popular. The stories are timeless for many reasons, not just because of writing “tricks” like the OP suggests. It’s too cynical
Everything Caplan says strikes me as being right on. What he appears unconcerned about aside from ridiculous curriculum however is the behavioral sink which K-12 schooling has become in which the snowflake kids are being permitted to run amok with no consequences. But he’s a college professor so obviously he doesn’t need to worry about getting fired for rescuing weaklings from the bullies who are preying up them, because college kids don’t typically tear up their classrooms throwing furniture at each other, power slamming weaklings, or inflicting grotesque levels of verbal abuse on staff members. We are setting ourselves up for a massive right wing repression in which although there may not be any meaningful K-12 vocational programs there could instead be an eventual inflation of the juvenile justice system including shipping gang members off to work camps where they are basically enslaved for the purpose of grooming the national forests, for instance, as members of quasi chain gangs.
I am 40 minutes into this and they still haven't mentioned the real problems with education. The real problem with education is our stubborn refusal to acknowledge that eye cue (I know) is very real and not equally distributed. The reason 75% of people dropped out of school in the 40s is because each person went as far as they could and then dropped out. Today, we are graduating kids from high school with a functional 6th grade education. Nearly everyone get a HS diploma and so the smart people actually have to go to college.
Making people wear masks for 2.5 hours while not wearing them yourself sounds like double standards, and citing being on a video as an excuse is accepting they are useless in the first place assuming making a video is not more important than saving lives. I would've expected Professor Caplan to start by debunking that discourse, but I guess he just has too much class
His blog has a great entry talking about masks just like this. His argument hinges on his often revisited thread that people heavily value convenience.
It doesn't seem to be something that has a lot of positive knock-on effects. In the average case, it doesn't seem to produce any health benefits, or social competence, or skills transferable to other realms of life. But then, it also depends a lot on what you think the alternative is. If people played video games less, what would they do instead? Exercise more? Go out and meet people? Read books and watch lectures? Or maybe just sit home and watch TV?
I think unemployment continuing forever is a good idea. There are some people who for whatever reasons can't really hold down a job. Them being on unemployment and playing video games is funging against them begging on the streets or stealing and going to jail.
based caplan
based indeed
Caplan's observations of the world, and to a lesser degree his mannerisms, remind me of Larry David. This is a compliment.
Love this comment. Caplan seems light hearted in a similar sense to Larry David.
His comedy sketch was, by all accounts, excellent too
This is such a fantastic event! I came for Caplan and stayed for the really fun atmosphere.
2:11:31 "Given everything that's been discussed so far, if you were here right now and you were me asking a question, what would you ask, and what is your answer to that question?"
Best question haha!
I skipped college. Instead, I lived in a Buddhist monastery for one year, bicycle toured for six months, moved to California for a year to follow a girlfriend, and then moved to Washington to work as an intern on a historic sailing ship. This unpaid internship ultimately lead me to my career which has been able to provide me with enough of an income to live happily and has proven to be an engaging field of work. We have so many opportunities and possibilities in this life, it’s up to you to seek them out and take the appropriate risks. If school isn’t appealing to you, then don’t waste your time. If school is appealing to you, consider the other opportunities given less attention and consider them sincerely.
I'm currently doing a maths/ AI PhD.
In high school, I learned much more maths in maths class by reading recreational maths books I had brought from home, not from the teachers or textbooks.
I learned and have retained absolutely nothing in school that I wouldn't have on my own. School is nothing more than state indoctrination camp.
Definetly had a terrific time.
we're all gon make it.
1:33:32 What an ideal school curriculum would look like for Caplan
As someone who hated the majority of compulsory education in Japan (from age 6 to 15), I would've loved if school was run like this
Caplan hits home runs one after the other. Having done graduate level academic work and managed businesses, I cannot agree more with what he says. It is courageous of the host, being a full-time beneficiary of the existing academic structure, to host such a voice. Bravo.
Bryan articulates exactly my thoughts on formal education and what I have been saying to my family for years! I grew up as poor as you can get in America (is not poor at all in absolute terms) went to a kinda crapy public school that sucked, and was absolutely obsessed with the need to go to college. I always loved learning and debate and I went hiking with some of my teachers and would debate them, it was painfully obvious they never actually thought about for themselves or deeply. Never thought of the causal reasons why the avg college grad earns more money, mostly a selection bias for people who are a bit smarter, follow the rules, finish things and often have higher ambitious. If you correct for that college is not only extreamly exspensive, its at equally as huge of an opportunity cost.
I went to college for a year and took all the classes I wanted to learn about, and refused to take gen eds again so I never got my degree.i learned the vast vast majority of what I know by reading books, magazines, listing to podcasts and attending events.
I remember when I decided to leave college my family and friends thought I was making the biggest mistake ever, I was in a SUNY college that had a program with Cornell 2 years at the SUNY 2 at Cornell, when I saw the cost of Cornell and realized all the gen eds I would need and the fact that they where mostly teaching me stuff I already learned I was very confident I could work may way up on the job and prove I can be as good as any Cornell grad.
This saved me 3 years and about $150k debt, and I made $150k from work plus I was 3 years ahead with practice job experience. Best decision ever, I have my own company now but I have had multiple jobs where everyone else was a top school Phd or Masters and I could easily hold my own. It did make it harder to get into the door but thats what networking and writing or some other way you can prove yourself.
I have 3 siblings that have a BA or MBA for top 50 colleges and they are in huge debt and make less money than me. I actually coached my older sister in getting her MBA and my younger brother in Economics classes.
I have a real passion for ideas, learning and teaching and they really didnt so they just got decent enough grades to get the degree and forgot most of it and dont constantly read about it now.
I do really empathize with Bryan when he talks about how normal people talk about and love boring thanings and hate the idea of thinking about ideas, they go why or who cares! Lol So i personally never had anyone in my family or around me that encouraged me to think or appreciate ideas, i was drawn to it myself and with the internet its now easy to talk to like minded people and learn at no cost. If anything I have tried to convince other's of the joy of thinking of ideas. Like I love to hike, people that like to hike tend to be well educated and even with them when I hike I try to discuss Nietzsche or bastiat and all they want to talk about is other people and drama. I am like there is nothing more boring in the world than talking about other people, sports or TV. I mean sure my close family and friends or a girl I am dating but thats it, most people are boring and I dont care what they do or think. 😂
Loved this
Amazing talk 🙌
I absolutely agree with Brayan Caplan about the reasons of working at a University. The think I love most about my job is having chats with super interesting, curious people, who want to learn more.
The questions are ridiculous. Bless 🤣
😂😂😂 to the lady that says everyone is curious in intellectual That is hilarious. Maybe kids are but not adult's.
Based Caplan.
Ordered the book after watching this.
This is an extremely interesting talk. Mr. Caplan presented many solutions that i disagreed with, though of course the problems raised are valid. It is an interesting question to me of, can (should) you - people who have been blessed with great intellectual curiosity, in a sense judge these people, who now have the internet, but in any case don't flock to listen to Mozart for hours. What you seem to fail to really tackle, what the one guy asking was trying to ask is (i think) - do there exist values that people should hold, that no matter the present data, no matter people's personal interest, no matter the opportunity cost - you should invest in, for example public school music lessons etc. And, well my intuition is, if you don't have any external reason for it, then the logical solution is to scrap it, if it is ultimately an economic decision. But that seems wrong. Whereas the other solution of saying, we the curious people like music(insert noble pursuit of your choosing) and we want to inspire you to like it too, seems to me intrinsically arrogant. These are just some of my thoughts, still have a lot to process. Thank you, Agnes, for posting these talks on the internet, greetings from Latvia, I have been a fan of yours for a while :)
No aesthetic or philosophical value is so high that we can completely disregard opportunity cost. You can't eat classical music.
Paragraph separations are your friend.
As a homeschool mom who has unschooled the sons for more than a decade, I agree with this. Knowing how foolish it is to ask rambunctious boys to sit in a desk and fill in worksheets every day, we sampled widely a large variety of activities and topics. They are very much Renaissance men. And yes, they appreciate Shakespeare and rhetorical devices too! 😉
We do "school" together in the morning, all three the same, and then after lunch they have their time to pursue their own interests.
01:04:30 I think the real question here is "should school be compulrsory". Mr Caplan talks about kids having jobs alongside school.
Heard someone, maybe Deming that jobs should not have conflicting purposes, like a teacher needs to teach the students and help the student to as well as possible, but the other part of their jobs is to grade students. Those goals are somewhat in conflict.
Educators serve two masters, they have two jobs, and it's essential, not incidental. Job one is to increase the knowledge and skill every student has, to make the best of the material. Everyone talks about that. The other job is to sort and label people with grades, like meat, so that employers and next level educators know who to accept. People have inborn characteristics like IQ, honesty, conscientiousness, and curiosity, which make them useful. Education discovers who's who as well as improving everyone. Both jobs are important, they conflict, and I suspect that's why education is hard and you don't see new colleges become the next MIT too often.
A few decades ago, K-12 educators convinced themselves that the second job was racist or too hard or something, and started graduating everyone even if they couldn't read. Employers still needed the labels, so they made high school graduates pay for them by incurring debt to go to college. The ones who got good labels did ok, the ones who didn't, because they just weren't born with the right configuration, got screwed and live under the debt for decades. There was a good reason to socialize the risk of education failure, C students didn't used to get buried in debt in their 20's.
1:33:36 what could you do if you have create education
43:20 this should be what education is
Covid panic at this talk.
Based crowd
Bryan Caplan rockstar?
Is this the same guy who wrote the "article" called "The Origin of the Word "Relationship"?
If it was he has misinformation in the article.
not being funny but does anyone know the kind of table Bryan and Agens were sitting at. I have looked for at least two years for such a table and would find it incredibly useful.
Armside table (?)
Seating still doesnt make a tradesman
39.57 Dr. Caplan appears to have a lot of "fun" writing books, teaching at one of those terribly wasteful universities he criticizes, and sitting around talking about ideas. What a rich and wonderful life! Of course, the rest of the masses, the philistines as he calls them, with their high school diplomas, will just have to be content with their boring jobs, following orders, and having lots of kids. My concern is that his libertarian program will be a dreamland for the privileged elites such as himself, and a nightmare for the less fortunate. I am more than a little disappointed that Prof. Callard didn't ask more pointed questions. In the end, I must confess that I found Dr. Caplan's vision of society to be both depressing and dystopian.
22 for 22 lol
Kids love to help out and "work" and are naturally curious. This idea that working is bad is bizarre to me. I am a farmer and i have been helping on the farm or working since i was 4 and evey otger farmer has their kids work for them as well. Its great experience and teaches responsibility and work etic very young. I think this idea that people achouldnt work untill they are 22 and graduate with a bachelor's degree is idiotic and in most cases very bad for the kid's. There is a reason why when ever i had another job after college and i mentioned i grew up on a farm they always always hired me since we have such a reputation for having a great work ethic.
1:36:46 home school
1:21:20 curious society
53:03 cost benefit ratio
To be honest Bryan Caplan resonates with me I would show up to his lectures but sorry Agnes I really don’t give a damn about the Iliad i already know too much about it. Basically because I count myself as educated knowing that homer wrote it
1:14:20, Coming from someone who did benefit from public school pushing classical music and fully appreciating that; I do not think its fair to project that on the majority of the population who doesn't appreciate it. Its not as though the roles have been reversed and I had to suffer through hundreds of hours of gangster rap to satisfy the popular preference. Ironically I developed my appreciation of jazz from watching Hey Arnold as a child and romantic comedies in my teenage years, by college I was seeking out Jazz on my own. So its unclear to what extent I would appreciate the higher forms of music or absent elementary music class. The retort might be its important to instill high culture, but not low culture and children's preferences. First I would ask why? Second I doubt the efficacy of such things, I think human consuming preferences are much more biologically grounded than what that young man probably realizes: See Gad Saad The Consuming Instinct.
The people who steal ethic books certainly need them the most
1:01:00 child labor
If Shakespeare was just Shakespeare, almost no one would care. I mean they were a pretty good author in their time. But most of their cultural references are severely outdated, the english is archaic. So many smart people have studied Shakespeare's work that they must have found improvements and learned pretty much every trick of good writing by now.
Shakespeare has such relevance because it is studied in education for the sake of signalling. Consider the difference in how society considers someone who spent years studying Shakespeare, vs someone who spent years studying spiderman. That is the main attraction Shakespeare holds. Not to say no one would ever study Shakespeare if this effect vanished. Judged on its own merits as a work of fiction, as read by a modern audience, it is reasonably good but not exceptional.
Tell me you don’t understand Shakespeare without telling me
@SephirothLives I agree that there is a signalling quality to Shakespeare but that isn’t the main reason the stories are so popular. The stories are timeless for many reasons, not just because of writing “tricks” like the OP suggests. It’s too cynical
Everything Caplan says strikes me as being right on. What he appears unconcerned about aside from ridiculous curriculum however is the behavioral sink which K-12 schooling has become in which the snowflake kids are being permitted to run amok with no consequences. But he’s a college professor so obviously he doesn’t need to worry about getting fired for rescuing weaklings from the bullies who are preying up them, because college kids don’t typically tear up their classrooms throwing furniture at each other, power slamming weaklings, or inflicting grotesque levels of verbal abuse on staff members. We are setting ourselves up for a massive right wing repression in which although there may not be any meaningful K-12 vocational programs there could instead be an eventual inflation of the juvenile justice system including shipping gang members off to work camps where they are basically enslaved for the purpose of grooming the national forests, for instance, as members of quasi chain gangs.
7 8:45
I am 40 minutes into this and they still haven't mentioned the real problems with education. The real problem with education is our stubborn refusal to acknowledge that eye cue (I know) is very real and not equally distributed. The reason 75% of people dropped out of school in the 40s is because each person went as far as they could and then dropped out. Today, we are graduating kids from high school with a functional 6th grade education. Nearly everyone get a HS diploma and so the smart people actually have to go to college.
28:41 community termination
Making people wear masks for 2.5 hours while not wearing them yourself sounds like double standards, and citing being on a video as an excuse is accepting they are useless in the first place assuming making a video is not more important than saving lives.
I would've expected Professor Caplan to start by debunking that discourse, but I guess he just has too much class
His blog has a great entry talking about masks just like this. His argument hinges on his often revisited thread that people heavily value convenience.
He calls the policy insane towards the end of Q&A: czcams.com/video/2iklHm0o-iM/video.htmlsi=1z3zZiNJTH9kWSVW&t=8990
Timestamp
Why all the video game bashing here? Can't appreciating video games be an important component of a good life?
It doesn't seem to be something that has a lot of positive knock-on effects. In the average case, it doesn't seem to produce any health benefits, or social competence, or skills transferable to other realms of life.
But then, it also depends a lot on what you think the alternative is. If people played video games less, what would they do instead? Exercise more? Go out and meet people? Read books and watch lectures? Or maybe just sit home and watch TV?
I think unemployment continuing forever is a good idea. There are some people who for whatever reasons can't really hold down a job. Them being on unemployment and playing video games is funging against them begging on the streets or stealing and going to jail.
Oh man I would be on easy street. That policy would be sick.
The Mathematicians are at it again!
Sheepskin effect 6:14
1:30:41 alternative to higher education
The young woman at 1:58:00 rules(!) and asks the right questions.
"Covid vaccines are bad for morticians." 😆😅🤣😂😆😅🤣😂😆😅🤣😂 #diedsuddenly
Did she say academic hiring tends to be conservative and merit based?? 😂😂😂 she's a comedian 🤣
She didn't mean politically conservative.
59:57 why school be better than work
I love how "The Market:tm:" is the only metric for anything ever with this guy. Why aren't his kids working in a paper mill?
TYT subscription, opinion immediately discarded
@@soulfuzz368 🤣
Children labour. You laboured. Don't you remember? You just didn't get paid.
It'd be a great market value if this guy hid in a cave for the rest of his life