Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 1 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

Content

Page 3: The 20 Best Lessons from Social Psychology By Zach Hamed

Page 11: A Linguistic Big Bang by Lawrence Osborne

Page 26: Mathematicians have finally figured out how to tell correlation from causation By Zach Wener-Fligner

Page 29: Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss By Keith E. Stanovich

Page 38: The Future of College? By Graeme Wood

Contributed by Chetan Parikh Prashant Patel Arpit Ranka Manish Gandhi

Compiled & Edited by Prashant Patel

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 2 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

The 20 Best Lessons from Social Psychology

By Zach Hamed

1. Reciprocity has a strong effect on us.

20% of people send Christmas cards back to people they’ve never met, just because they received one from them. For the same reason, tips to waiters go up 3.3% when an after-dinner mint is provided with the receipt. And when the server looked the diner in the eye and gave them a second mint? Tips went up 20%.

2. You attribute a higher value to things you already own— this is known as the endowment effect.

Willingness to sell was twice as high as willingness to pay in one study. In other words, participants were willing to buy a mug for $5, but once they owned it, they wouldn’t sell for less than $10.

3. Heat makes us angry, and sadness physically makes us colder.

When you feel rejected, you report the room as being colder and you prefer warmer foods over colder foods. Crime rates are higher in hotter regions, and crime is more likely on warmer days. Baseball pitchers are more likely to hit batters when it’s hot. This occurs because heat causes arousal, but people misattribute that arousal to situations around them and not to the heat.

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Duchenne smiles (example B) that are exhibited in high school yearbook photos are correlated with better life outcomes 30 years later. Here, Paul Ekman—an expert in facial psychology—exhibits both non-Duchenne (exhibit A) and Duchenne smiles.

4. Smiling is contagious—and can predict your happiness, professional success, and lifespan.

Humans laugh more at movies when other people laugh. Additionally, many people smile at getting a strike in bowling only after they turn around to their friends—you smile for the social approval, not for doing something successfully. In another study, students who exhibited “Duchenne smiles”—a more authentic type of smile that engages the eye and mouth muscles—in their high school yearbook were more likely to get married and were more likely to self-describe as “happy” 30 years later. Students with less intense smiles were more likely to be divorced. And in any given year, people who exhibited Duchenne smiles in their high school yearbook were half as likely to die.

5. How we’re approached and our desire to be consistent affect our decisions.

If I asked you to volunteer for an “Experiment at 7AM,” would you do it? What about a “7AM experiment”? 56% of people asked to volunteer for the first did so, but only 24% volunteered for a “7AM experiment”—fewer people want to wake up early, so the ordering of the words matters. In another experiment, some participants were called and asked if they would hypothetically volunteer for the American Cancer Society. When they were contacted a few days later and asked to volunteer, 31% agreed —versus 4% of people who were cold-called and asked to volunteer for the first time.

6. We act differently when reminded of who we are.

When participants were told that men and women scored differently on a particular test, female participants’ performance dropped dramatically. Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 4 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Male participants’ performance on a task dropped after interacting with an attractive female participant. When children are in a group on Halloween, they take more candy on average—but when children were singled out and asked their names, they took far less candy.

7. Being watched sometimes helps—except when eating.

Having an audience of people watching you complete a task improves performance on simple tasks but hinders performance on more complex tasks or when learning a new skill (they showed this with both humans and cockroaches—don’t ask). The mere presence of someone in the room causes this effect; even a repairman working on something in the corner slowed people down. Yet when it comes to eating, a full chicken will overeat in the presence of another chicken, and animals eat more in pairs than when alone.

8. Comparing people to their friends is the most effective way to make them do something.

When an electric company tried to encourage people to save energy at home, telling them “your neighbors are reducing their energy use” led to a 2% reduction in household usage. Telling people “save energy to save money” or “save energy to save the environment” did not decrease, and in some cases increased, energy usage.

9. Context—where we do something—has a substantive effect on what we do.

56% of actual voters voted for a pro-school budget when voting in a school vs. 53% otherwise. While that effect may not seem huge, it’s statistically significant and was reproduced in a lab environment (64% of people voted for a fake pro-school budget when shown pictures of a school vs. 56% who voted for it otherwise).

10. The more you’re exposed to something, the more you like it—this is called the mere exposure effect, and it works in milliseconds.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 5 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Participants shown a foreign word frequently were more likely to say the word had a positive connotation. The most immediate application of this effect is advertising; the more often you’re exposed to a commercial or ad, the more positively you will rate the company. Flashing images that elicit positive or negative emotions for only a few milliseconds subliminally conditions your attitude.

People liked familiar objects more than abstract patterns, but in both cases participants overwhelmingly preferred curved objects over objects with sharp edges. Objects in category C (featuring both curves and edges) fell in between.

11. Curves > Edges.

Humans overwhelmingly prefer curved visual objects over objects with jagged lines.

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12. Don’t get hurt when there are a lot of people around you.

Bystanders are less likely to intervene in a crime or help in an emergency as the number of observers increases, as each individual feels that someone else will help and responsibility is diffused. When a victim is bloody, people help less often—likely because there is a chance they would be exposed to pathogens. But victims who scream receive more help than those who don’t—clear and unambiguous danger is helped far more often than not.

13. We really want to be happy, but being too happy can negatively affect our work.

In a study of 10,000 participants from 48 different countries, happiness is rated as more important than any other personal outcome—more than finding meaning in life, becoming rich, or getting into heaven. Happy people more often label themselves as “curious,” and depressed people are more likely to notice small changes in facial expressions. Yet extremely happy people (9/10 or 10/10 on a happy scale) got worse grades and had lower salaries than moderately happy people (6/10, 7/10, or 8/10 on a happy scale).

14. We do stupid things because we want to conform.

In one study, a participant was placed in a group and asked to answer a seemingly simple question. The rest of the people in the group were all told to respond with the same incorrect answer to the question, after which the participant was asked to answer in front of the group. 37 of 50 participants gave the same incorrect answer as the rest of the group (even though it was very clearly wrong), either because they wanted to be “liked” by the group or because they thought the rest of the group was more informed than they. This effect was dampened by having just one other person in the group agree with the participant.

15. We have trouble separating out traits in a person.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 7 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Globally positive or negative reactions on a person (“he’s a nice guy”) affect our judgment of a person’s specific traits (“he’s attractive”). This is called the halo effect, and is particularly noticeable in celebrities; their attractiveness or fame also leads us to believe they’re intelligent, happy, or honest.

16. We’re influenced by very particular types of rewards.

Expected rewards reduce motivation on a task. Surprise rewards increase motivation on the same task. Fixed rewards are less powerful than performance-based rewards, even with creative tasks.

17. Authority can fundamentally change our emotions and behavior.

In the Stanford Prison experiment, participants were split into prisoners and guards and placed into a mock prison. In just six days (of a planned two weeks), the experiment had to be shut down because guards were harassing and abusing prisoners, and prisoners began showing signs of emotional breakdown.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 8 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 65% of participants knowingly delivered a lethal dose of electricity to a participant (who they later learned was fake) simply because the instructor in the room told them to.

18. Authority can also make us be obedient and do things to other people we could never imagine.

In the famous Milgram experiment, participants were told to administer a shock of increasing strength when a participant in another room gave incorrect answers to a series of questions. About halfway through, the shocks were labeled “danger: severe shock” and a recording was played begging the experimenter to stop the experiment. Yet in 63% of cases, the participant administered the maximum shock, even when the person they thought they were administering a lethal dose of electric shock to another human being.

A recreation of the original Stanford Marshmallow experiment is predictably adorable. Longitudinal studies have shown that students who can resist eating the marshmallow are better behaved and get better grades later in life.

19. Self-control at an early age might be indicative of success later in life.

In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, a group of children participants were asked to wait in a room with a table full of marshmallows and cookies. If they wanted, they could have one treat now and the experiment would be over. Otherwise, if they could wait for the experimenter to return in a few minutes, they could have two treats. The children who couldn’t delay their urges—either they asked for the treat right away, or tried to sneakily eat a treat when the experimenter left— had more behavior problems, lower SAT scores, more trouble paying attention in school, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. In fact, a child who could wait 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on the SAT than children who could wait only 30 seconds.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 9 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 20. People aspire to round number goals.

I tried to make this list 20 bullet points long instead of 19, and you do the same thing when trying to run 2.0 miles instead of 1.9. In Major League Baseball, players were four times as likely to end the season with a 0.300 batting average than 0.299. And when looking at over 4 million SAT scores, students who scored a 1290 were more likely to retake the test than students who scored a 1300—even though admissions offices did not statistically favor one score over the other.

Source: medium.com

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 10 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 A Linguistic Big Bang

For the first time in history, scholars are witnessing the birth of a language — a complex sign system being created by deaf children in Nicaragua.

By LAWRENCE OSBORNE

At the Escuelita de Bluefields, 9-year-old Yuri Mejia signing the story of Babar: The young elephant is riding on his mother's back (left) when she is shot. He runs away (center) and then dissolves into tears (right).

When the Greek historian Herodotus was traveling in Egypt, he heard of a bizarre experiment conducted by a King named Psammetichus. The inquisitive monarch, wrote Herodotus, decided to wall up two baby boys in a secluded compound. Whatever came out of the boys' mouths, reasoned the King, would be the root language of our species — the key to all others. Herodotus tells us that eventually the children came up with the Phrygian word for bread, bekos. In addition to demonstrating the superiority of the Phrygian tongue, the King's inquiry proved that even if left to their own devices, children wouldn't be without language for long. We are born, Herodotus suggested, with the gift of gab.

Ever since, philosophers have dreamed of repeating Psammetichus's test. If children grew up isolated on a desert island, would they develop a bona fide language? And if so, would it resemble existing tongues? Yet only someone with the conscience of a Josef Mengele would carry out such an experiment. Then, in the mid-1980's, linguists were confronted with an unexpected windfall. Psammetichus's experiment was repeated, but this time it came about unintentionally. And not in Egypt but in Nicaragua.

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Lawrence Osborne is the author of "Paris Dreambook," a travelogue, and "The Poisoned Embrace," a collection of essays.

Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government inaugurated the country's first large-scale effort to educate deaf children. Hundreds of students were enrolled in two Managua schools. Not being privy to the more than 200 existing sign languages used by hearing-impaired people around the world, Managua's deaf children started from ground zero. They had no grammar or syntax — only crude gestural signs developed within their own families. These pantomimes, which deaf kids use to communicate basic needs like "eat," "drink" and "ice cream," are called mimicas in Spanish.

Most of the children arrived in Managua with only a limited repertory of mimicas. But once the students were placed together, they began to build on one another's signs. One child's gesture solidified into the community's word. The children's inexperienced teachers — who were having paltry success communicating with their profoundly deaf students — watched in awe as the kids began signing among themselves. A new language had begun to bloom.

A decade later, the children's creation has become a sensation of modern linguistics. Nicaraguan Sign Language (known to experts as I.S.N., for Idioma de Signos Nicaragense) has been patiently decoded by outside scholars, who describe an idiom filled with curiosities yet governed by the same "universal grammar" that the linguist Noam Chomsky claims structures all language. Steven Pinker, author of "The Language Instinct," sees what happened in Managua as proof that language acquisition is hard- wired inside the human brain. "The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history," he maintains. "We've been able to see how it is that children — not adults — generate language, and we have been able to record it happening in great scientific detail. And it's the first and only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of thin air."

Managua's deaf children were stranded in school, not on a desert island. Spanish-speaking teachers were there to guide them. Yet it turns out that Nicaraguan Sign Language doesn't resemble Spanish at all. Indeed, the Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 12 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Managua teachers say they left hardly an imprint on the children's improvised language — largely because their lack of experience led them to adopt poor pedagogy. When the schools first opened, the Sandinista education officials were misguidedly urged by Soviet advisers to adopt "finger spelling," which uses simple signs to limn the alphabets of spoken languages. This approach was a disaster. Because the students had no prior concept of words (let alone letters), it proved fruitless to try to communicate in this fashion. The children remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers.

This failure to adopt a workable teaching strategy, paradoxically, gave the Nicaraguan children an opportunity to erect a linguistic structure of their own. Indeed, the frustrated Managua teachers began to notice that although the children could barely communicate with their instructors, they were beginning to communicate well among themselves, using a sign system that no teacher recognized. But what, exactly, was it?

In June 1986, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education contacted Judy Kegl, an American sign-language expert at Northeastern University. They invited her to visit the deaf schools in Managua and see if she could shed some light on the enigma. Armed with notebooks and a Pentax camera — and a vague tenderness for the revolution — the 33-year-old Kegl set off for Managua.

Her first stop was Villa Libertad, a vocational school for deaf teen-agers. Kegl, now a professor at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, set out to make a rudimentary dictionary of the signs being used by a small group of adolescent girls in a hairdressing workshop. Some signs were obvious enough: objects like "eyebrow tweezers" and "rolling curlers" were signed by more or less imitating the things themselves. But one day, a student playfully tested a more intricate sign on her. She first laid out her left palm flat; then, using her right hand, she traced a line from the middle finger to the base of the palm, turning her right hand over afterward and pointing below her belt. As a result of the girl's giggling, Kegl guessed that the sign meant "sanitary napkin." She had learned her first word in what seemed to be a simple form of communication.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 13 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 After a few days, Kegl figured out the sign for "house" and could combine it with a typical Nicaraguan gesture for "What's up?" — a strong wrinkle of the nose — to ask the deaf students where they lived. The students' responses, however, were baffling. Each student would produce a series of complex but apparently meaningless hand wriggles. Only later would Kegl figure out that these wriggles were in fact precise descriptions of Managua's labyrinthine bus routes. Indeed, the grammar underlying this enigmatic sign system completely eluded her. "I felt like I was failing as a linguist," she recalls. "I couldn't find any consistent regularities. It seemed to be complete chaos."

Three weeks later, however, Kegl moved on to the primary school, known as San Judas, where younger children were being taught. On the first day, she observed a young girl named Mayela Rivas signing in a courtyard. Her gestures were rapid and had an eerie rhythmic consistency. Kegl sensed that Mayela was not just making crude mimicas or the kind of signed pidgin practiced by the older students at Villa Libertad.

"I looked at her, and I thought to myself, Holy cow, that girl is using some kind of rule book," she says. Ann Senghas, a former assistant of Kegl's who is now a professor at Barnard College, shares her wonder. "It was a linguist's dream," she says. "It was like being present at the Big Bang."

To crack the code used by the younger San Judas children, Kegl had them retell stories of Mr. Koumal, a popular Czech cartoon character. To relate the contents of a Koumal picture book, the children would need a variety of syntactic constructions and verb senses. In "Mr. Koumal Flies Like a Bird," for example, the adventurous Czech makes wings for himself by stealing chicken feathers. But after he crashes into a mountainside, Mr. Koumal uses the feathers to make Indian headdresses he can sell to children. By having the children reconstruct these stories in their own tongue, telltale regularities emerged that, bit by bit, provided Kegl with clues to the language's grammar.

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Anselmo Aleman, now 20, didn't come to Bluefields until he was 15, a relatively late start. "I was like Babar in the big city going in the elevator for the first time," he says.

It was noticeable at once that the younger children used signs in a more nuanced way than the older students. For example, the teen-age pidgin signers at Villa Libertad had a basic gesture for "speak" — opening and closing four fingers and a thumb in front of the mouth. The younger children used the same sign, but modulated it, opening their fingers at the position of the speaker and closing them at the position of the addressee. To Kegl, this apparently small difference had enormous implications. "This was verb agreement," she says, "and they were all using it fluently." Similarly, in retelling the Koumal story, the younger kids could express what linguists call "spatial agreement" with their verbs. When they used the verb "to fall" — as in "Mr. Koumal falls down the mountain" — they made a link between Mr. Koumal's falling and what he was falling down. These nuanced signers would first lift one hand in the air to signify "mountaintop" and then begin the sign for "fall" from this height, flipping the hand back and forth while moving it down an imaginary slope.

What explained this difference between the younger and older signers? Kegl's theory, which has been disseminated in various linguistic journals, is that an original group of home signers came up with an elemental pidgin among themselves, known to linguists as Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragense. This was the comparatively crude signing she had observed among the older students. Then, very young children of 5 or 6 had come into the school system. Quickly mastering the pidgin from their elder peers, they had then taken it, quite unconsciously, to a far higher level. This second version was the fast, elegantly orchestrated language that Kegl had seen Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 15 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 flying from the little fingers of Mayela Rivas. This was what would become known as the idioma, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. These three quite distinct levels — home signs, the lenguaje and the idioma — represent phases of evolution, from pantomime to pidgin to language. "Real language in this case," she says, "only emerged with young children first exposed to a signed pidgin."

But how did Nicaraguan Sign Language evolve in the first place? Kegl likens the process to a field of stones waiting to be made into a fence. The "stones" in this case came from the gesture system that speaking Nicaraguans use in daily life. Hence, the first deaf signs for "eat" and "drink" were close to those used by hearing speakers: a flat hand with the fingers bending back and forth before the mouth for "eat"; a thumb gesturing toward the mouth for "drink."

"What happens," Kegl explains, "is that these gestures become gradually richer and more varied. But we can't see the leap between them and the first signs of language because the grammar is inside the child. It manifests itself only as the child is exposed to this ever-richer mix of odds and ends." This ability to organize a heap of stones into a fence lies within the brain itself, and is apparently stimulated by interaction with other children.

"We see these children coming to some kind of unconscious consensus about which signs to use and which ones to drop," she continues. "But we can't explain it fully; we can just witness the outcome. There's an element of mystery in the way in which each child adapts to and then changes the language." The very youngest children, Kegl theorizes, filter the linguistic jumble around them differently and then transmit their inventions, deformations and additions back to the larger group. In this way, new words enter the lexicon. "Yet there's no dominant alpha speaker who leads the way," she adds. "Each child gives birth to a kind of individual dialect, which is then pooled among the others according to a process that we don't fully understand."

'I can remember my childhood,' Aleman signs, 'but I can also remember not having any way to communicate.' His palm wipes his forehead, suggesting someone erasing a blackboard.

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After more than a decade of study, Kegl and Ann Senghas have mapped out an idiom striking in its flexibility. Verbs, for example, can be stretched like a rubber band to include all kinds of nouns and prepositions. In the story "Mr. Koumal Flies Like a Bird," children line up to give the wily Czech an egg each in exchange for one of his Indian headdresses. This action is expressed by a single verb sign in which the hand turns up in an egg shape, bounces twice away from the body and then turns sharply upward. This one sign would be literally translated in English as "each person in a row of individuals gives an egg-shaped object to an adult." Even more oddly, prepositions in Nicaraguan Sign Language function much like verbs. Hence, where an English speaker would say, "The cup is on the table," a Nicaraguan signer will sign something like, "Table cup ons." Verbs and prepositions are therefore protean in a way that resembles only a few spoken languages, like Navajo.

With all of these idiosyncrasies, it is easy to forget that Nicaraguan Sign Language is but the accidental creation of children. Indeed, adult- engineered idioms like Esperanto seem pallid by comparison. As Kegl marvels, "No linguist could create a language with half the complexity or richness that a 4-year-old could give birth to."

Little Yuri Mejia is 9 years old and has been deaf from birth. Under the mango trees of the Parque Reyes in Bluefields, a remote port city on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast, she peers down into an ornamental pool filled with tiny baby alligators. She is neatly dressed in her pressed navy skirt and symmetrical pigtails. With facial expressions and hand gestures working simultaneously, she turns out crisp, twinkling sentences at lightning speed. Her face slips and slides, moving from clownlike frowns to delicate nose wrinkles. Yuri is one of the youngest pupils at the Escuelita de Bluefields, an experimental school that Judy Kegl and her husband, James Shepard-Kegl, have been running since 1995.

Because she was educated so early, Yuri signs with a fluent grace. "When are the alligators going to wake up?" she signs to me through James Shepard-Kegl, who has agreed to act as my translator. "Every time I come to the park they're asleep."

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 17 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 With Shepard-Kegl's help, I ask her if she likes school.

"At home," she signs back quickly, "I'm bored. I live with my grandmother. It's way over there in the barrio. We sit around, and we're bored all the time. We do a lot of laundry. But at school, everyone's deaf, so I can talk to them. And I can read a book about Babar."

Bursting with curiosity, she then asks me where I live. The one Nicaraguan sign I have mastered on my second day in Bluefields is the one for New York. You put your forefinger against your forehead three times to imitate the tiara spikes of Lady Liberty and then raise your arm in a fist.

"Do you live with your grandmother, too?" Yuri asks.

"No."

"Do you know who Babar is?"

"Yes, of course."

"His mommy was killed in the forest, and he came to the town and went up an elevator." She nods wisely. "Babar went up and down in the elevator," she signs.

To make the sign for Babar, Yuri holds up four fingers (the sign for "B"), touches her nose with her thumb and quickly dips the hand down to describe an elephant's trunk. To convey the elevator's movement, she forms a platform with her left hand upon which she plants two fingers of her right hand in an inverted V: a person standing on an elevator floor. She then moves the "elevator" up and down.

Yuri and I head to the school's dormitory on the waterfront. The pink house sits on a winding alley of cracked paving stones from which the moody Bluefields lagoon can be seen. Inside, 15 students between the ages of 10 and 25 relax on homemade bunk beds, entertained by a television set with the sound turned off. There, I meet the Bluefields family one by one. The students range from Daphney, a freckled 15-year-old who recently broke her leg turning cartwheels, to 11-year-old Barney, a Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 18 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 vivacious boy with shells twisted into his hair who began signing the language as a baby.

Immediately curious about the newcomer, they cast about for a name sign for me. Sign-language names are not phonetic but visual. One boy raised his hand to signify height. (I am 6 foot 5, gigantic by Nicaraguan standards.) Another offered a personalized twist on the sign for "journalist": a miming of a microphone passing from mouth to mouth. Finally, however, by dinnertime the matter was settled otherwise. One girl put a finger vertically against her chin, and amid a burst of laughter, I was christened "Dimple."

Many of these whimsical name signs are perceptive. The one for Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's former Sandinista President, for example, is one hand tapping the opposing wrist to signify Ortega's flashy Rolex watch, a loud symbol for a poor deaf child. Fidel Castro is a wagging, sermonizing finger combined with a V-sign near the mouth to suggest smoking a cigar. Signs for many nouns are similarly expressive: a wriggling hand for "fish" or fingers shooting like pistols for "Texas." Verbs, by contrast, can seem elegantly esoteric. To say "to look for," the left hand is first held flat with the palm facing downward; then the pinkie, index finger and thumb of the right hand are extended while the two remaining fingers brush the back of the left hand repeatedly.

The Bluefields schoolhouse is a simple, one-room building with maize- yellow walls. The curriculum varies from elementary word recognition for the tots to mathematics and geography for the older signers. In addition, the students are working to translate Nicaraguan Sign Language onto the written page. (They use a Danish symbolic system for transcribing signs into a written phonemic code: there is a symbol for wrinkling one's nose, for example, and another for clenching one's right fist.) One of the first books to be translated is "The Story of Babar," explaining why the innocent elephant has become a constant reference point for the children. The school's dictionary now totals 1,600 words, and the children have begun preparing a heavily truncated version of "Moby-Dick." One thing that is not taught at Bluefields, however, is a more established sign system like American Sign Language. In order to preserve what Nicaragua's deaf have created, Kegl does not want to encourage the adoption of other Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 19 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 idioms — even if that leaves the students unable to communicate with other deaf communities. "We don't want to kill indigenous language," she says.

Toward the end of my first day in school, the class is interrupted by a troupe of clowns who for some reason have decided to test their act on the deaf children. The students head outside to the garden to watch. The clowns then put on a show of Fellini-esque ineptitude, dropping their bowling pins and failing to turn their somersaults. Finally one of them gets it right, and I decide it is time for applause. I begin clapping furiously. There is utter silence. A little put out, I turn to see the entire class raising their hands above their heads and wiggling their fingers with deadpan expressions.

Impressed by this silent form of applause, I decide that from now on I will do the same, and so I raise my hands, wriggling my fingers. The class laughs and all simultaneously put their fingers to their chins. Dimple is catching on.

The sign languages of deaf children have been of central interest to linguists for a quarter century. Underlying this interest is a quest to find a linguistic "bioprogram": that is, an innate human ability to generate all the fundamental characteristics of language, from word creation to grammar — without the help of auditory or vocal cues.

Like kids everywhere, the ones at Bluefields know how to yuk it up. Here, they give the photographer a round of silent applause by wiggling their fingers.

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In 1978, Heidi Feldman, Susan Goldin-Meadow and Lila Gleitman published a seminal paper on the linguistic propensities of deaf children, based on a group of Philadelphia kids who used simple home signs to communicate with their hearing parents. The researchers found that a deaf child making crude home signs would, in time, begin bending them into languagelike patterns without knowing what he was doing and without being taught. The mothers of these home signers, the scholars revealed, knew far fewer signs than the children themselves. (As trained linguists, they were able to determine the full extent of the children's vocabularies.) And while the parents used the home signs erratically, the deaf children deployed their home signs in a more consistent order.

"Even deaf children grammaticize, regularize — yet they can't have learned it anywhere," Lila Gleitman says. She sees the Nicaraguan case as buttressing her own work. "In Managua, the children formed a continuing community that allowed their nascent language to grow in grammatical and semantic structure. It's a magnificent example of a whole language emerging with incredible richness."

Yet for all its triumphs, the scholarship on Nicaraguan Sign Language makes clear that a precise line between nature and nurture is difficult to establish. Language is the product of a shadowy collusion between biological predisposition and social stimuli. The bioprogram, in other words, is triggered into action by a language community. "It would be hard to find language acquisition in a vacuum," says Gleitman.

Jill Morford, a linguist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, argues that home signers are stuck in a limbo between gesture and language. "Home signing," she says, "is cognitively similar to language, but it doesn't have a grammar as such. It's in between. The beauty of the Nicaraguan children is that they show dramatically how we need both sides of the coin, the social and the innate working together."

To see the limitations of home signing for myself, I take a trip with James Shepard-Kegl by motorboat to the Pearl Lagoon, one hour north of Bluefields. There, a few deaf children still live in almost total isolation deep in the forests. If Bluefields seems remote, then the Pearl Lagoon resembles Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 21 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 another planet. Dreamy estuaries snake through bromeliad-sprinkled rain forest that is almost empty except for a handful of farmers living in tiny settlements connected only by river.

Many of the children's signs are perceptive. The one for Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's former President, is one hand tapping the opposing wrist — to signify Ortega's flashy Rolex watch.

In a hamlet called Haulover, where huts are ringed with paths of oyster shells, I meet a 10-year-old deaf boy named Winston. He has never been to school. A kind of Pearl Lagoon Huck Finn, he's about as isolated a home signer as you could possibly hope to find anywhere. He spends all his days fishing with his homemade lines and has a small if appropriate repertory of fishing signs. Excited to have visitors from the big city of Bluefields, he shows us some pigeons he shot with his sling. As we sit in rocking chairs on the porch, his mother tells us that she and Winston can "talk just fine." Winston goes into long bouts of head-rocking laughter and shows us his limited stock of signs. It is clear that he communicates with his family on some level, but there is no rhythm, no fluidity, to his speech.

"Did you catch fish?" I ask. His mother translates.

"Catch," he signs back.

"How?"

He makes a whacking gesture.

Winston cannot express things like "today" or "later," and he rarely if ever puts three signs together to make something that one could call a sentence. Whereas Bluefields children somersault through complex sentences, Winston lumbers along slowly, one sign at a time.

As he walks Shepard-Kegl and me back to the jetties of Pearl Lagoon, Winston shows me a few signs. "Tree." "River." "House." His hand motions are slow, and there is a curious monotony in his expression that somehow belies his exuberance. Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 22 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

I take his picture, and he shows me his fishing line and his knife. "Big," he adds. "Tasty. Catch. Eat."

"It's sad," says Shepard-Kegl as we walk away. "But Winston's family doesn't want him to come to the school, and so he'll remain at this level all his life. He'll never develop a real language."

On the terrace of the Tia Irene, a waterfront hotel in Bluefields, I sit with 20-year-old Anselmo Aleman playing chess while rain pounds on the thatched roof. The lagoon is shadowed; the rusted fishing boats rock violently in the downpour. We are eating a plate of pale purple star apples. The slender Aleman is a charming chess companion, apart from being impossible to beat. Like Winston, he grew up in the deep rain forest, but unlike him, Aleman came to Bluefields.

Suddenly moving his bishop into check-mate position, he smiles. "It's like war," he signs. "You must concentrate or you lose."

Aleman learned Nicaraguan Sign Language at 15, a relatively late age. Intelligence and hard work, however, have enabled him to master the idiom with almost total fluency. "I couldn't learn the language earlier," he signs, "because I grew up in the forest. It was during the war, too, and since my father was a contra, we were always hiding, being hunted down by Sandinistas. So I remember guns, fear, hiding. When I came to Bluefields I was amazed. I was like" — he pauses for a moment — Babar in the big city going in the elevator for the first time."

Aleman tells me a long, complicated story about his being hit by a firetruck when he was little, sprinkling his account with small scenes and characters. "I can remember my childhood," he signs, "but I can also remember not having any way to communicate. Then, my mind was just a blank." He makes a poignant sign for this emptiness, the palm wiping his forehead to suggest someone erasing a blackboard.

But Aleman will never return to the blank slate. He stands at the center of a young, dynamically evolving language that is now devolving into dialects and variations. Like all living languages, Nicaraguan Sign Language is plastic, Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 23 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 mercenary and gleefully derivative — picking up idioms, slang and even basic nouns wherever it fancies. There is even a "street" dialect that diverges in sometimes salacious ways from the official version sanctioned by the Nicaraguan National Association of the Deaf.

The precise intellectual import of Nicaraguan Sign Language is still being hammered out by linguists. Noam Chomsky, who calls what has happened in Nicaragua "a remarkable natural experiment," has for decades propounded the theory that there is a "biology of grammar" embedded in our brains. (It is no accident, he has argued, that every language from English to Zulu has subjects and verbs.) But he is wary of saying that Kegl's research settles the issue. "These children may have shown us something remarkable, if indeed they came up with this language with little or no input from outside," he says. "If that's the case, it's a very intriguing situation indeed."

But the meditations of world-famous linguists do not mean much to Aleman as we stroll down to the Parque Reyes. As we sit under the coconut palms amid rusting pieces of farm machinery, decorative rubber tires and a dilapidated bust of the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, the park seems to be at the end of the world. Seeing us signing together, a group of Miskito Indian women stare at us in amazement and are soon joined by the local sorbet vendor.

"I can't imagine," Aleman signs, genuinely mystified, "why you came all this way to hear us talk. It's just our language. What's the big deal?"

I tell him that many people are curious to know how a few deaf children invented the world's youngest language.

"I never thought of it that way," he signs.

"It's a pretty language, too," I try to sign back. I hold both palms toward my chest, moving my hands up and down to signify "sign language." Then I join the index finger and thumb of my right hand to make an oval — almost like the American sign for "O.K." — and glide it away from my chest to say "pretty."

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 24 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 "Is it?" Aleman replies. Then he beams with an undisguised pleasure. "Yes," he says, "I suppose it is."

October 24, 1999

Source: nytimes.com

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 25 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

Mathematicians have finally figured out how to tell correlation from causation

By Zach Wener-Fligner, December 23, 2014

Untangling cause and effect can be devilishly difficult.

Imagine a small town on the plains. Every day, the windmills would spin, and the wind would blow, getting dust in everyone’s eyes. Things went on like that for some time: the windmills spun, the wind blew. So the townspeople, being logical folks, finally decided enough was enough and knocked down all the windmills.

It’s easy for us to see where these silly, fictional townspeople went wrong: wind makes the windmills spin, not the other way around.

But there are many more nuanced real-world examples where it is harder to distinguish causation from correlation. One 1999 study concluded that sleeping with a night-light as a child led to near-sightedness. This was later shown to be false: in fact, nearsightedness is genetic, and nearsighted parents more frequently placed night-lights in their children’s rooms.

Another example relates to HDL cholesterol. This “good” cholesterol is associated with lower rates of heart disease. But heart-disease drugs that raise HDL cholesterol are ineffective. Why? It turns out that while HDL cholesterol is a byproduct of a healthy heart, it doesn’t actually cause heart health.

Correlations are a dime a dozen, inconclusive and flimsy. Causal relationships are firm and actionable, and align more convincingly with the natural way we think about things.

Finding correlations is easy—in fact, there’s a project called Spurious Correlations that automatically searches through public data to track them down, no matter how nonsensical they may be.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 26 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

In contrast, determining causal relationships is really hard. But techniques outlined in a new paper promise to do just that. The basic intuition behind the method demonstrated by Prof. Joris Mooij of the University of Amsterdam and his co-authors is surprisingly simple: if one event influences another, then the random noise in the causing event will be reflected in the affected event.

For example, suppose we are trying to determine the relationship between the the amount of highway traffic, and the time it takes John to drive to work. Both John’s commute time and traffic on the highway will fluctuate somewhat randomly: sometimes John will hit the red light just around the corner, and lose five extra minutes; sometimes icy weather will slow down the roads.

But the key insight is that random fluctuation in traffic will affect John’s commute time, whereas random fluctuation in John’s commute time won’t affect the traffic. By detecting the residue of traffic fluctuation in John’s commute time, we could show that traffic causes his commute time to change, and not the other way around.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 27 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Still, this method isn’t a silver bullet. Like any statistical test, it doesn’t work 100% of the time. And it can only handle the most basic cause-and- effect scenarios. In a three-event situation—like the correlation of ice cream consumption with drowning deaths because they both depend on hot weather—this technique falters.

Regardless, it’s an important step forward in the often-baffling field of statistics. And that’s cause—yes, cause—for celebration.

Source: qz.com

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 28 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss

Why smart people sometimes do dumb things

By Keith E. Stanovich

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure every important mental faculty, we behave as if they do. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?

It is useful to get a handle on dysrationalia and its causes because we are beset by problems that require increasingly more accurate, rational responses. In the 21st century, shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments, can cause people to fail to adequately assess risks in their environment, can lead to the misuse of information in legal proceedings, and can make parents resist vaccinating their children. Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry when decision makers are dysrationalic, billions are wasted on quack remedies, unnecessary surgery is performed and costly financial misjudgments are made.

IQ tests do not measure dysrationalia. But as I show in my 2010 book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, there are ways to measure dysrationalia and ways to correct it. Decades of research in cognitive psychology have suggested two causes of dysrationalia. One is a processing problem, the other a content problem. Much is known about both of them.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 29 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 The Case of the Cognitive Miser The processing problem comes about because we tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even when they are less accurate.

Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution:

1. Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes B) No C) Cannot be determined

More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning—reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 30 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like “cannot be determined” available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize– winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick:

2. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Many people give the first response that comes to mind—10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems.

Another characteristic of cognitive misers is the “myside” bias—the tendency to reason from an egocentric perspective. In a 2008 study my colleague Richard West of James Madison University and I presented a group of subjects with the following thought problem:

3. Imagine that the U.S. Department of Transportation has found that a particular German car is eight times more likely than a typical family car to kill occupants of another car in a crash. The federal government is considering resticting sale and use of this German car. Please answer the following two questions: Do you think sales of the German car should be banned in the U.S.? Do you think the German car should be banned from being driven on American streets?

Then we presented a different group of subjects with the thought problem stated a different way—more in line with the true data from the Department of Transportation at the time, which had found an increased risk of fatalities not in a German car but in an American one:

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 31 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Imagine that the Department of Transportation has found that the Ford Explorer is eight times more likely than a typical family car to kill occupants of another car in a crash. The German government is considering restricting sale or use of the Ford Explorer. Please answer the following two questions: Do you think sales of the Ford Explorer should be banned in Germany? Do you think the Ford Explorer should be banned from being driven on German streets?

Among the American subjects we tested, we found considerable support for banning the car when it was a German car being banned for American use: 78.4 percent thought car sales should be banned, and 73.7 percent thought the car should be kept off the streets. But for the subjects for whom the question was stated as whether an American car should be banned in Germany, there was a statistically significant difference: only 51.4 percent thought car sales should be banned, and just 39.2 percent thought the car should be kept off German streets, even though the car in question was presented as having exactly the same poor safety record.

This study illustrates our tendency to evaluate a situation from our own perspective. We weigh evidence and make moral judgments with a myside bias that often leads to dysrationalia that is independent of measured intelligence. The same is true for other tendencies of the cognitive miser that have been much studied, such as attribute substitution and conjunction errors; they are at best only slightly related to intelligence and are poorly captured by conventional intelligence tests.

The Mindware Gap

The second source of dysrationalia is a content problem. We need to acquire specific knowledge to think and act rationally. Harvard cognitive scientist David Perkins coined the term “mindware” to refer to the rules, data, procedures, strategies and other cognitive tools (knowledge of probability, logic and scientific inference) that must be retrieved from memory to think rationally. The absence of this knowledge creates a mindware gap—again, something that is not tested on typical intelligence tests.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 32 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 One aspect of mindware is probabilistic thinking, which can be measured. Try to answer the following problem before you read on:

4. Imagine that XYZ viral syndrome is a serious condition that affects one person in 1,000. Imagine also that the test to diagnose the disease always indicates correctly that a person who has the XYZ virus actually has it. Finally, suppose that this test occasionally misidentifies a healthy individual as having XYZ. The test has a false-positive rate of 5 percent, meaning that the test wrongly indicates that the XYZ virus is present in 5 percent of the cases where the person does not have the virus.

Next we choose a person at random and administer the test, and the person tests positive for XYZ syndrome. Assuming we know nothing else about that individual's medical history, what is the probability (expressed as a percentage ranging from zero to 100) that the individual really has XYZ?

The most common answer is 95 percent. But that is wrong. People tend to ignore the first part of the setup, which states that only one person in 1,000 will actually have XYZ syndrome. If the other 999 (who do not have the disease) are tested, the 5 percent false-positive rate means that approximately 50 of them (0.05 times 999) will be told they have XYZ. Thus, for every 51 patients who test positive for XYZ, only one will actually have it. Because of the relatively low base rate of the disease and the relatively high false-positive rate, most people who test positive for XYZ syndrome will not have it. The answer to the question, then, is that the probability a person who tests positive for XYZ syndrome actually has it is one in 51, or approximately 2 percent.

A second aspect of mindware, the ability to think scientifically, is also missing from standard IQ tests, but it, too, can be readily measured:

5. An experiment is conducted to test the efficacy of a new medical treatment. Picture a 2 x 2 matrix that summarizes the results as follows:

Improvement No Improvement Treatment Given 200 75 No Treatment Given 50 15 Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 33 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

As you can see, 200 patients were given the experimental treatment and improved; 75 were given the treatment and did not improve; 50 were not given the treatment and improved; and 15 were not given the treatment and did not improve. Before reading ahead, answer this question with a yes or no: Was the treatment effective?

Most people will say yes. They focus on the large number of patients (200) in whom treatment led to improvement and on the fact that of those who received treatment, more patients improved (200) than failed to improve (75). Because the probability of improvement (200 out of 275 treated, or 200/275 = 0.727) seems high, people tend to believe the treatment works. But this reflects an error in scientific thinking: an inability to consider the control group, something that (disturbingly) even physicians are often guilty of. In the control group, improvement occurred even when the treatment was not given. The probability of improvement with no treatment (50 out of 65 not treated, or 50/65 = 0.769) is even higher than the probability of improvement with treatment, meaning that the treatment being tested can be judged to be completely ineffective.

Another mindware problem relates to hypothesis testing. This, too, is rarely tested on IQ tests, even though it can be reliably measured, as Peter C. Wason of University College London showed. Try to solve the following puzzle, called the four-card selection task, before reading ahead:

6. As seen in the diagram, four cards are sitting on a table. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Two cards are letter-side up, and two of the cards are number-side up. The rule to be tested is this: for these four cards, if a card has a vowel on its letter side, it has an even number on its number side. Your task is to decide which card or cards

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 34 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 must be turned over to find out whether the rule is true or false. Indicate which cards must be turned over.

Most people get the answer wrong, and it has been devilishly hard to figure out why. About half of them say you should pick A and 8: a vowel to see if there is an even number on its reverse side and an even number to see if there is a vowel on its reverse. Another 20 percent choose to turn over the A card only, and another 20 percent turn over other incorrect combinations. That means that 90 percent of people get it wrong.

Let's see where people tend to run into trouble. They are okay with the letter cards: most people correctly choose A. The difficulty is in the number cards: most people mistakenly choose 8. Why is it wrong to choose 8? Read the rule again: it says that a vowel must have an even number on the back, but it says nothing about whether an even number must have a vowel on the back or what kind of number a consonant must have. (It is because the rule says nothing about consonants, by the way, that there is no need to see what is on the back of the K.) So finding a consonant on the back of the 8 would say nothing about whether the rule is true or false. In contrast, the 5 card, which most people do not choose, is essential. The 5 card might have a vowel on the back. And if it does, the rule would be shown to be false because that would mean that not all vowels have even numbers on the back. In short, to show that the rule is not false, the 5 card must be turned over.

When asked to prove something true or false, people tend to focus on confirming the rule rather than falsifying it. This is why they turn over the 8 card, to confirm the rule by observing a vowel on the other side, and the A card, to find the confirming even number. But if they thought scientifically, they would look for a way to falsify the rule—a thought pattern that would immediately suggest the relevance of the 5 card (which might contain a disconfirming vowel on the back). Seeking falsifying evidence is a crucial component of scientific thinking. But for most people, this bit of mindware must be taught until it becomes second nature.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 35 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Dysrationalia and Intelligence

The modern period of intelligence research was inaugurated by Charles Spearman in a famous paper published in 1904 in the American Journal of Psychology. Spearman found that performance on one cognitive task tends to correlate with peformance on other cognitive tasks. He termed this correlation the positive manifold, the belief that all cognitive skills will show substantial correlations with one another. This belief has dominated the field ever since.

Yet as research in my lab and elsewhere has shown, rational thinking can be surprisingly dissociated from intelligence. Individuals with high IQs are no less likely to be cognitive misers than those with lower IQs. In a Levesque problem, for instance (the “Jack is looking at Anne, who is looking at George” problem discussed earlier), high IQ is no guarantee against the tendency to take the easy way out. No matter what their IQ, most people need to be told that fully disjunctive reasoning will be necessary to solve the puzzle, or else they won't bother to use it. Maggie Toplak of York University in Toronto, West and I have shown that high-IQ people are only slightly more likely to spontaneously adopt disjunctive reasoning in situations that do not explicitly demand it.

For the second source of dysrationalia, mindware deficits, we would expect to see some correlation with intelligence because gaps in mindware often arise from lack of education, and education tends to be reflected in IQ scores. But the knowledge and thinking styles relevant to dysrationalia are often not picked up until rather late in life. It is quite possible for intelligent people to go through school and never be taught probabilistic thinking, scientific reasoning, and other strategies measured by the XYZ virus puzzle and the four-card selection task described earlier.

When rational thinking is correlated with intelligence, the correlation is usually quite modest. Avoidance of cognitive miserliness has a correlation with IQ in the range of 0.20 to 0.30 (on the scale of correlation coefficients that runs from 0 to 1.0). Sufficient mindware has a similar modest correlation, in the range of 0.25 to 0.35. These correlations allow for substantial discrepancies between intelligence and rationality.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 36 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Intelligence is thus no inoculation against any of the sources of dysrationalia I have discussed.

Cutting Intelligence Down to Size

The idea that IQ tests do not measure all the key human faculties is not new; critics of intelligence tests have been making that point for years. Robert J. Sternberg of Cornell University and Howard Gardner of Harvard talk about practical intelligence, creative intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and the like. Yet appending the word “intelligence” to all these other mental, physical and social entities promotes the very assumption the critics want to attack. If you inflate the concept of intelligence, you will inflate its close associates as well. And after 100 years of testing, it is a simple historical fact that the closest associate of the term “intelligence” is “the IQ test part of intelligence.” This is why my strategy for cutting intelligence down to size is different from that of most other IQ-test critics. We are missing something by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities.

My goal in proposing the term “dysrationalia” is to separate intelligence from rationality, a trait that IQ tests do not measure. The concept of dysrationalia, and the empirical evidence indicating that the condition is not rare, should help create a conceptual space in which we value abilities at least as important as those currently measured on IQ tests—abilities to form rational beliefs and to take rational action.

KEITH E. STANOVICH is emeritus professor of applied psychology and human development at the University of Toronto. He is author of seven books about cognition, including What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought (Yale University Press, 2009), which received the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in Education. Stanovich is the winner of the 2012 E. L. Thorndike Career Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association.

Source: scientificamerican.com

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 37 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

The Future of College?

A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by stripping it down to its essence, eliminating lectures and tenure along with football games, ivy-covered buildings, and research libraries. What if he's right?

By Graeme Wood

SEPTEMBER 2014

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily populated with winos and vagrants, and whose buildings host hip new businesses, many of them tech start-ups. In a small room, I was flanked by a publicist and a tech manager from an educational venture called the Minerva Project, whose founder and CEO, the 39-year-old entrepreneur Ben Nelson, aims to replace (or, when he is feeling less aggressive, “reform”) the modern liberal-arts college.

Minerva is an accredited university with administrative offices and a dorm in San Francisco, and it plans to open locations in at least six other major world cities. But the key to Minerva, what sets it apart most jarringly from traditional universities, is a proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.

Nelson and Kosslyn had invited me to sit in on a test run of the platform, and at first it reminded me of the opening credits of The Brady Bunch: a grid of images of the professor and eight “students” (the others were all Minerva employees) appeared on the screen before me, and we introduced ourselves. For a college seminar, it felt impersonal, and though we were all sitting on the same floor of Minerva’s offices, my fellow students seemed oddly distant, as if piped in from the International Space

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 38 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Station. I half expected a packet of astronaut ice cream to float by someone’s face.

Within a few minutes, though, the experience got more intense. The subject of the class—one in a series during which the instructor, a French physicist named Eric Bonabeau, was trying out his course material—was inductive reasoning. Bonabeau began by polling us on our understanding of the reading, a Nature article about the sudden depletion of North Atlantic cod in the early 1990s. He asked us which of four possible interpretations of the article was the most accurate. In an ordinary undergraduate seminar, this might have been an occasion for timid silence, until the class’s biggest loudmouth or most caffeinated student ventured a guess. But the Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.

Bonabeau led the class like a benevolent dictator, subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange. He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked. After a representative from each group gave a brief presentation, Bonabeau ended by showing a short video about the evils of overfishing. (“Propaganda,” he snorted, adding that we’d talk about logical fallacies in the next session.) The computer screen blinked off after 45 minutes of class.

The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the video lagged— but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 39 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic.

Minerva’s headquarters are in San Francisco, and the first class of students will live in a dorm there this year, but the university plans to open locations in at least six other cities, including Berlin and Buenos Aires. (Ike Edeani)

Minerva, which operates for profit, started teaching its inaugural class of 33 students this month. To seed this first class with talent, Minerva gave every admitted student a full-tuition scholarship of $10,000 a year for four years, plus free housing in San Francisco for the first year. Next year’s class is expected to have 200 to 300 students, and Minerva hopes future classes will double in size roughly every year for a few years after that.

Those future students will pay about $28,000 a year, including room and board, a $30,000 savings over the sticker price of many of the schools— Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 40 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 the Ivies, plus other hyperselective colleges like Pomona and Williams— with which Minerva hopes to compete. (Most American students at these colleges do not pay full price, of course; Minerva will offer financial aid and target middle-class students whose bills at the other schools would still be tens of thousands of dollars more per year.) If Minerva grows to 2,500 students a class, that would mean an annual revenue of up to $280 million. A partnership with the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California, allowed Minerva to fast-track its accreditation, and its advisory board has included Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and Harvard president, and Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska, who also served as the president of the New School, in New York City.

Nelson’s long-term goal for Minerva is to radically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.

The paradox of undergraduate education in the United States is that it is the envy of the world, but also tremendously beleaguered. In that way it resembles the U.S. health-care sector. Both carry price tags that shock the conscience of citizens of other developed countries. They’re both tied up inextricably with government, through student loans and federal research funding or through Medicare. But if you can afford the Mayo Clinic, the United States is the best place in the world to get sick. And if you get a scholarship to Stanford, you should take it, and turn down offers from even the best universities in Europe, Australia, or Japan. (Most likely, though, you won’t get that scholarship. The average U.S. college graduate in 2014 carried $33,000 of debt.)

Financial dysfunction is only the most obvious way in which higher education is troubled. In the past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budged. The easiest way to picture what a university looked like 500 years ago is to go to any large university today, walk into a lecture hall, and imagine the professor speaking Latin and wearing a monk’s cowl. The most common class format is still a professor standing in front of a group of students and talking. And even though we’ve subjected students to lectures for hundreds of years, we have no evidence Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 41 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 that they are a good way to teach. (One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)

In recent years, other innovations in higher education have preceded Minerva, most famously massive open online courses, known by the unfortunate acronym MOOCs. Among the most prominent MOOC purveyors are Khan Academy, the brainchild of the entrepreneur Salman Khan, and Coursera, headed by the Stanford computer scientists Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Khan Academy began as a way to tutor children in math, but it has grown to include a dazzling array of tutorials, some very effective, many on technical subjects. Coursera offers college-level classes for free (you can pay for premium services, like actual college credit). There can be hundreds of thousands of students in a single course, and millions are enrolled altogether. At their most basic, these courses consist of standard university lectures, caught on video.

But Minerva is not a MOOC provider. Its courses are not massive (they’re capped at 19 students), open (Minerva is overtly elitist and selective), or online, at least not in the same way Coursera’s are. Lectures are banned. All Minerva classes take the form of seminars conducted on the platform I tested. The first students will by now have moved into Minerva’s dorm on the fifth floor of a building in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood and begun attending class on Apple laptops they were required to supply themselves.

Each year, according to Minerva’s plan, they’ll attend university in a different place, so that after four years they’ll have the kind of international experience that other universities advertise but can rarely deliver. By 2016, Berlin and Buenos Aires campuses will have opened. Likely future cities include Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. Students will live in dorms with two-person rooms and a communal kitchen. They’ll also take part in field trips organized by Minerva, such as a tour of Alcatraz with a prison psychologist. Minerva will maintain almost no facilities other than the dorm itself—no library, no dining hall, no gym —and students will use city parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their extracurricular activities.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 42 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 The professors can live anywhere, as long as they have an Internet connection. Given that many academics are coastal-elite types who refuse to live in places like Evansville, Indiana, geographic freedom is a vital part of Minerva’s faculty recruitment.

The student body could become truly global, in part because Minerva’s policy is to admit students without regard to national origin, thus catering to the unmet demand of, say, prosperous Chinese and Indians and Brazilians for American-style liberal-arts education.

The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone. What’s left will be leaner and cheaper. (Minerva has already attracted $25 million in capital from investors who think it can undercut the incumbents.) And Minerva officials claim that their methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices, unlike the methods used at other universities and assumed to be sound just because the schools themselves are old and expensive. Yet because classes have only just begun, we have little clue as to whether the process of stripping down the university removes something essential to what has made America’s best colleges the greatest in the world.

Minerva will, after all, look very little like a university—and not merely because it won’t be accessorized in useless and expensive ways. The teaching methods may well be optimized, but universities, as currently constituted, are only partly about classroom time. Can a school that has no faculty offices, research labs, community spaces for students, or professors paid to do scholarly work still be called a university?

If Minerva fails, it will lay off its staff and sell its office furniture and never be heard from again. If it succeeds, it could inspire a legion of entrepreneurs, and a whole category of legacy institutions might have to liquidate. One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 43 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

The Minerva offices—where all employees work at open-plan stations—recall a typical tech start-up far more than they do an academic building. (Ike Edeani)

The decor in the lobby of the Minerva office building nods to the classical roots of education: enormous Roman statues dominate. (Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom.) But where Minerva’s employees work, on the ninth floor, the atmosphere is pure business, in a California-casual sort of way. Everyone, including the top officers of the university, works at open- plan stations. I associate scholars’ offices with chalk dust, strewn papers, and books stacked haphazardly in contravention of fire codes. But here, I found tidiness.

One of the Minerva employees least scholarly in demeanor is its founder, chief executive, and principal evangelist. Ben Nelson attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as an undergraduate in the late 1990s and then had no further contact with academia before he began incubating Minerva, in 2010. His résumé’s main entry is his 10-year stint as an executive at Snapfish, an online photo service that allows users to print pictures on postcards and in books.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 44 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Nelson is curly-haired and bespectacled, and when I met him he wore a casual button-down shirt with no tie or jacket. His ambition to reform academia was born of his own undergraduate experience. At Wharton, he was dissatisfied with what he perceived as a random barrage of business instruction, with no coordination to ensure that he learned bedrock skills like critical thinking. “My entire critique of higher education started with curricular reform at Penn,” he says. “General education is nonexistent. It’s effectively a buffet, and when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated. You get a random collection of information. Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”

Students begin their Minerva education by taking the same four “Cornerstone Courses,” which introduce core concepts and ways of thinking that cut across the sciences and humanities. These are not 101 classes, meant to impart freshman-level knowledge of subjects. (“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.

Nelson compares this level of direction favorably with what he found at Penn (curricular disorder), and with what one finds at Brown (very few requirements) or Columbia (a “great books” core curriculum). As Minerva students advance, they choose one of five majors: arts and humanities, social sciences, computational sciences, natural sciences, or business.

Snapfish sold for $300 million to Hewlett-Packard in 2005, and Nelson made enough to fund two years of planning for his dream project. He is prone to bombastic pronouncements about Minerva, making broad claims about the state of higher education that are at times insightful and at times speculative at best. He speaks at many conferences, unsettling Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 45 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 academic administrators less radical than he is by blithely dismissing long- standing practices. “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”

In academic circles, where overt competition between institutions is a serious breach of etiquette, Nelson is a bracing presence. (Imagine the president of Columbia telling the assembled presidents of other Ivy League schools, as Nelson sometimes tells his competitors, “Our goal is not to put you out of business; it is to lead you. It is to show you that there is a better way to do what you are doing, and for you to follow us.”)

The other taboo Nelson ignores is acknowledgment of profit motive. “For-profit in higher education equates to evil,” Nelson told me, noting that most for-profit colleges are indeed the sort of disreputable degree mills that wallpaper the Web with banner ads. “As if nonprofits aren’t money-driven!” he howled. “They’re just corporations that dodge their taxes.” (See “The Law-School Scam.”)

Minerva is built to make money, but Nelson insists that its motives will align with student interests. As evidence, Nelson points to the fact that the school will eschew all federal funding, to which he attributes much of the runaway cost of universities. The compliance cost of taking federal financial aid is about $1,000 per student—a tenth of Minerva’s tuition— and the aid wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of Minerva’s students, who will likely come from overseas.

Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs. These effects pervade higher education, he says, but they have nothing to do with teaching students. He believes Minerva would end up hungering after federal money, too, if it ever allowed itself to be tempted. Instead, like Ulysses, it will tie itself to the mast and work with private- sector funding only. “If you put a drug”—federal funds—“into a system, the system changes itself to fit the drug. If [Minerva] took money from the government, in 20 years we’d be majority American, with substantially higher tuition. And as much as you try to create barriers, if you don’t structure it to be mission-oriented, that’s the way it will evolve.”

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 46 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014

Minerva CEO Ben Nelson’s first major hire was Stephen M. Kosslyn (right), a cognitive neuroscientist and former Harvard dean. (Ike Edeani)

When talking about Minerva’s future, Nelson says he thinks in terms of the life spans of universities—hundreds of years as opposed to the decades of typical corporate time horizons. Minerva’s very founding is a rare event. “We are now building an institution that has not been attempted in over 100 years, since the founding of Rice”—the last four- year liberal-arts-based research institution founded in this country. It opened in 1912 and now charges $53,966 a year.

So far, Minerva has hired its deans, who will teach all the courses for this inaugural class. It will hire rank-and-file faculty later in the year. One of Minerva’s main strategies is to lure a few prominent scholars from existing institutions. Other “new” universities, especially fantastically wealthy ones like King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in Saudi Arabia, have attempted a similar strategy—at times with an almost cargocult-like

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 47 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 confidence that filling their labs and offices with big-shot professors will turn the institutions themselves into important players.

Among the bigger shots hired by Minerva is Eric Bonabeau, the dean of computational sciences, who taught the seminar I participated in. Bonabeau, a physicist who has worked in academia and in business, studies the mathematics of swarming behavior (of bees, fish, robots), and his research helped inspire Michael Crichton’s terrible thriller Prey. Diane Halpern, a prominent psychologist, signed on this year as the dean of social sciences.

Minerva’s first major hire, Stephen M. Kosslyn, is a man I met in the fall of 1999, when I went to have my head examined. Kosslyn taught cognitive psychology and neuroscience for 32 years at Harvard, and during my undergraduate years I visited his lab and earned a few dollars here and there as one of his guinea pigs. The studies usually involved sticking my head in an fMRI machine so he and his researchers could record activity in my brain and observe which parts fired when.

Around that time, Kosslyn’s lab made news because it began to show how “mental imagery”—the experience of seeing things in your mind’s eye— really works. (One study involved putting volunteers into fMRI machines and asking them to hold an image of a cat in their head for as long as possible. You can try this exercise now. If you’re especially good at concentrating, the cat might vanish in a matter of a few seconds, as soon as your brain—distractible as a puppy—comes up with another object of attention.) Kosslyn served as Harvard’s dean of social sciences from 2008 to 2010, then spent two years at Stanford as the director of its Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In 2013, after a few months of contract work for Minerva, he resigned from Stanford and joined Minerva as its founding dean.

Kosslyn speaks softly and slowly, with little emotional affect. Bald and bearded, he has an owlish stare, and at times during my recent conversations with him, he seemed to be scanning my brain with his eyes. For purposes of illustration (and perhaps also amusement), he will ask you to perform some cognitive task, then wait patiently while you do it— Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 48 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 explain a concept, say, or come up with an argument—before telling you matter-of-factly what your mind just did. When talking with him, you often feel as though your brain is a machine, and his job is to know how it works better than it knows itself.

He spent much of his first year at Minerva surveying the literature on education and the psychology of learning. “We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.

For example, he points to a 1972 study by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in The Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, which shows that memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks. In an educational context, such tasks would include working with material, applying it, arguing about it (rote memorization is insufficient). The finding is hardly revolutionary, but applying it systematically in the classroom is. Similarly, research shows that having a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned. Likewise, if you ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.

Kosslyn had powers literally no one at Harvard—even the president— had. He could tell people what to do, and they had to do it. Kosslyn has begun publishing his research on the science of learning. His most recent co-authored article, in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, argues (against conventional wisdom) that the traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.

The pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 49 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.

This approach does have its efficiencies. In a normal class, a pop quiz might involve taking out paper and pencils, not to mention eye-rolls from students. On the Minerva platform, quizzes—often a single multiple-choice question—are over and done in a matter of seconds, with students’ answers immediately logged and analyzed. Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—perhaps pairing poets with business majors, to expose students who are weak in a particular class to the thought processes of their stronger peers. Some claim that education is an art and a science. Nelson has disputed this: “It’s a science and a science.”

Nelson likes to compare this approach to traditional seminars. He says he spoke to a prominent university president—he wouldn’t say which one— early in the planning of Minerva, and he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based. “He said the reason elite university education was so great was because you take an expert in the subject, plus a bunch of smart kids, you put them in a room and apply pressure—and magic happens,” Nelson told me, leaning portentously on that word. “That was his analysis. They’re trying to sell magic! Something that happens by accident! It sure didn’t happen when I was an undergrad.”

To Kosslyn, building effective teaching techniques directly into the platform gives Minerva a huge advantage. “Typically, the way a professor learns to teach is completely haphazard,” he says. “One day the person is a graduate student, and the next day, a professor standing up giving a lecture, with almost no training.” Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound, although for universities looking to trim budgets they are at least cost-effective, with one employee for dozens or hundreds of tuition- paying students. “A great way to teach,” Kosslyn says drily, “but a terrible way to learn.”

I asked him whether, at Harvard and Stanford, he attempted to apply any of the lessons of psychology in the classroom. He told me he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,” he says. Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 50 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 The very thought that he might be able to impose his own order on it was laughable. Professors, especially tenured ones at places like Harvard, answer to nobody.

It occurred to me that Kosslyn was living the dream of every university administrator who has watched professors mulishly defy even the most reasonable directives. Kosslyn had powers literally no one at Harvard— even the president—had. He could tell people what to do, and they had to do it.

There were moments, during my various conversations with Kosslyn and Nelson, when I found I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower. The American college system is a frustrating thing—and I say this as someone who was a satisfied customer of two undergraduate institutions, Deep Springs College (an obscure but selective college in the high desert of California) and Harvard. At Deep Springs, my classes rarely exceeded five students. At Harvard, I went to many excellent lectures and took only one class with fewer than 10 students. I didn’t sleepwalk or drink my way through either school, and the education I received was well worth the $16,000 a year my parents paid, after scholarships.

But the Minerva seminar did bring back memories of many a pointless, formless discussion or lecture, and it began to seem obvious that if Harvard had approached teaching with a little more care, it could have improved the seminars and replaced the worst lectures with something else.

When Eric Bonabeau assigned the reading for his class on induction, he barely bothered to tell us what induction was, or how it related to North Atlantic cod. When I asked him afterward about his decision not to spend a session introducing the concept, he said the Web had plenty of tutorials about induction, and any Minerva student ought to be able to learn the basics on her own time, in her own way. Seminars are for advanced discussion. And, of course, he was right.

“The reason we can get away with the model we have is because MOOCs exist. The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.” Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 51 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do. A student who wants an introductory economics course can turn to Coursera or Khan Academy. “We are a university, and a MOOC is a version of publishing,” Nelson explains. “The reason we can get away with the pedagogical model we have is because MOOCs exist. The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”

Indeed, the more I looked into Minerva and its operations, the more I started to think that certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous. Just as learning to read in Latin was essential before books became widely available in other languages, gathering students in places where they could attend lectures in person was once a necessary part of higher education. But by now books are abundant, and so are serviceable online lectures by knowledgeable experts.

On the other hand, no one yet knows whether reducing a university to a smooth-running pedagogical machine will continue to allow scholarship to thrive—or whether it will simply put universities out of business, replace scholar-teachers with just teachers, and retard a whole generation of research. At any great university, there are faculty who are terrible at teaching but whose work drives their field forward with greater momentum than the research of their classroom-competent colleagues. Will there be a place for such people at Minerva—or anywhere, if Minerva succeeds?

Last spring, when universities began mailing out acceptance letters and parents all over the country shuddered as the reality of tuition bills became more concrete, Minerva sent 69 offers. Thirty-three students decided to enroll, a typical percentage for a liberal-arts school. Nelson told me Minerva would admit students without regard for diversity or balance of gender.

Applicants to Minerva take a battery of online quizzes, including spatial- reasoning tests of the sort one might find on an IQ test. SATs are not considered, because affluent students can boost their scores by hiring tutors. (“They’re a good way of determining how rich a student is,” Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 52 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Nelson says.) If students perform well enough, Minerva interviews them over Skype and makes them write a short essay during the interview, to ensure that they aren’t paying a ghost writer. “The top 30 applicants get in,” he told me back in February, slicing his hand through the air to mark the cutoff point. For more than three years, he had been proselytizing worldwide, speaking to highschool students in California and Qatar and Brazil. In May, he and the Minerva deans made the final chop.

Of the students who enrolled, slightly less than 20 percent are American* —a percentage much higher than anticipated. (Nelson ultimately expects as many as 90 percent of the students to come from overseas.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the students come disproportionately from unconventional backgrounds— nearly one-tenth are from United World Colleges, the chain of cosmopolitan hippie high schools that brings together students from around the globe in places like Wales, Singapore, and New Mexico.

In an oddly controlling move for a university, Minerva asked admitted students to run requests for media interviews by its public-relations department. But the university gave me the names of three students willing to speak.

“That’s what Minerva is offering: an experience that lets you live multiple lives and learn not just your concentration but how to think.” When I got through to Ian Van Buskirk of Marietta, Georgia, he was eager to tell me about a dugout canoe that he had recently carved out of a two- ton oak log, using only an ax, an adze, and a chisel, and that he planned to take on a maiden voyage in the hour after our conversation. He told me he would have attended Duke University if Minerva hadn’t come calling, but he said it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision, even though Minerva lacks the prestige and 176-year history of Duke. “There’s no reputation out there,” he told me. “But that means we get to make the reputation ourselves. I’m creating it now, while I’m talking to you.”

Minerva had let him try out the same online platform I did, and Van Buskirk singled out the “level of interaction and intensity” as a reason for attending. “It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 53 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.” He said the focus required was similar to the mind-set he’d needed when he made his first hacks into his oak log, which could have cracked, rendering it useless.

Another student, Shane Dabor, of the small city of Brantford, Ontario, had planned to attend Canada’s University of Waterloo or the University of Toronto. But his experiences with online learning and a series of internships had led him to conclude that traditional universities were not for him. “I already had lots of friends at university who weren’t learning anything,” he says. “Both options seemed like a wager, and I chose this one.”

A young Palestinian woman, Rana Abu Diab, of Silwan, in East Jerusalem, described how she had learned English through movies and books (a translation of the Norwegian philosophical novel Sophie’s World was a particular favorite). “If I had relied on my school, I would not be able to have a two-minute conversation,” she told me in fluent English. During a year studying media at Birzeit University, in Ramallah, she heard about Minerva and decided to scrap her other academic plans and focus on applying there. For her, the ability to study overseas on multiple continents, and get an American-style liberalarts education in the process, was irresistible. “I want to explore everything and learn everything,” she says. “And that’s what Minerva is offering: an experience that lets you live multiple lives and learn not just your concentration but how to think.” Minerva admitted her, and, like a third of her classmates in the founding class, she received a supplemental scholarship, which she could use to pay for her computer and health insurance.

Two students told me that they had felt a little trepidation, and a need to convince themselves or their parents that Minerva wasn’t just a moneymaking scheme. Minerva had an open house weekend for admitted students, and (perhaps ironically) the in-person interactions with Minerva faculty and staff helped assure them that the university was legit. The students all now say they’re confident in Minerva—although of course they can leave whenever they like, with little lost but time.

Some people consider universities sacred places, and they might even see professors’ freedom to be the fallible sovereigns of their own classrooms Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 54 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 as a necessary part of what makes a university special. To these romantics, universities are havens from a world dominated by orthodoxy, money, and quotidian concerns. Professors get to think independently, and students come away molded by the total experience—classes, social life, extracurriculars—that the university provides. We spend the rest of our lives chasing mates, money, and jobs, but at university we enjoy the liberty to indulge aimless curiosity in subjects we know nothing about, for purposes unrelated to efficiency or practicality.

Minerva is too young to have attracted zealous naysayers, but it’s safe to assume that the people with this disposition toward the university experience are least likely to be enthusiastic about Minerva and other attempts to revolutionize education through technical innovation. MOOCs are beloved by those too poor for a traditional university, as well as those who like to dabble, and those who like to learn in their pajamas. And MOOCs are not to be knocked: for a precocious Malawian peasant girl who learns math through free lessons from Khan Academy, the new Web resources can change her life. But the dropout rate for online classes is about 95 percent, and they skew strongly toward quantitative disciplines, particularly computer science, and toward privileged male students. As Nelson is fond of pointing out, however, MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.

“Plutarch said the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. Part of my worry about these Internet start-ups is that it’s not clear they’ll be any good at the fire-lighting part.” The question remains as to whether Minerva can provide what traditional universities offer now. Kosslyn’s project of efficiently cramming learning into students’ brains is preferable to failing to cram in anything at all. And it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens. But defenders of the traditional university see efficiency as a false idol.

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 55 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 “Like other things that are going on now in higher ed, Minerva brings us back to first principles,” says Harry R. Lewis, a computer-science professor who was the dean of Harvard’s undergraduate college from 1995 to 2003. What, he asks, does it mean to be educated? Perhaps the process of education is a profound one, involving all sorts of leaps in maturity that do not show up on a Kosslyn-style test of pedagogical efficiency. “I’m sure there’s a market for people who want to be more efficiently educated,” Lewis says. “But how do you improve the efficiency of growing up?”

He warns that online-education innovations tend to be oversold. “They seem to want to re-create the School of Athens in every little hamlet on the prairie—and maybe they’ll do that,” he told me. “But part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”

He calls the “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student— an “old fallacy.” As Lewis explains, “Plutarch said the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. Part of my worry about these Internet start- ups is that it’s not clear they’ll be any good at the fire-lighting part.”

In February, at a university-administrator conference at a Hyatt in downtown San Francisco, Ben Nelson spoke to a plenary session of business-school deans from around the world. Daphne Koller of Coursera sat opposite him onstage, and they calmly but assuredly described what sounded to me like the destruction of the very schools where their audience members worked. Nelson wore a bored smirk while an introductory video played, advertising the next year’s version of the same conference. To a pair of educational entrepreneurs boasting the low price of their new projects, the slickly produced video must have looked like just another expensive barnacle on the hull of higher education.

“Content is about to become free and ubiquitous,” Koller said, an especially worrying comment for deans who still thought the job of their universities was to teach “content.” The institutions “that are going to survive are the ones that reimagine themselves in this new world.”

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 56 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Even if Minerva turns out not to be the venture that upends American higher education, other innovators will crop up in its wake. Nelson ticked off the advantages he had over legacy institutions: the spryness of a well-funded start-up, a student body from all over the world, and deals for faculty (they get to keep their own intellectual property, rather than having to hand over lucrative patents to, say, Stanford) that are likely to make Minerva attractive.

Yet in some ways, the worst possible outcome would be for U.S. higher education to accept Minerva as its model and dismantle the old universities before anyone can really be sure that it offers a satisfactory replacement. During my conversations with the three Minerva students, I wanted to ask whether they were confident Minerva would give them all the wonderful intangibles and productive diversions that Harry Lewis found so important. But then I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education. These three young students were more resourceful than I was, and probably more deliberate in their choice of college. But they were newcomers to higher education, and asking them whether their fledgling alma mater could provide these things seemed akin to asking the passengers on the Mayflower how they liked America as soon as their feet touched Plymouth Rock.

Lewis is certainly right when he says that Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles. But of course the conclusions one reaches might not be flattering to traditional colleges. One possibility is that Minerva will fail because a college degree, for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club. Minerva has no alumni club, and if it fails for this reason, it will look naive and idealistic, a bet on the inherent value of education in a world where cynicism gets better odds.

In another sense, it’s difficult to imagine Minerva failing altogether: it will offer something that resembles a liberal education to large segments of Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 57 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 the Earth’s population who currently have to choose between the long- shot possibility of getting into a traditional U.S. school, and the more narrowly career-oriented education available in their home country. That population might give Minerva a steady flow of tuition-paying warm bodies even if U.S. higher education ignores it completely. It could plausibly become the Amherst of the world beyond the borders of the United States.

These are not, however, the terms by which Ben Nelson defines success. To him, the brass ring is for Minerva to force itself on the consciousness of the Yales and Swarthmores and “lead” American universities into a new era. More modestly, we can expect Minerva to force some universities to justify what previously could be waved off with mentions of “magic” and a puff of smoke. Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.

It seems only remotely possible that in 20 years Minerva could have more students enrolled than Ohio State will. But it is almost a certainty that the classrooms of elite universities will in that time have come to look more and more like Minerva classrooms, with professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship. Even if Minerva turns out not to be the venture that upends American higher education, other innovators will crop up in its wake to address the exact weaknesses Nelson now attacks. The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.

At the university-administrator conference where Nelson spoke in February, I sat at a table with an affable bunch of deans from Australia and the United States. They listened attentively, first with interest and then with growing alarm. Toward the end of the conversation, the sponsoring organization’s president asked the panelists what they expected to be said at a similar event in 2017, on the same topic of innovative online education. (“Assuming we’re still in business,” a dean near me whispered to no one in particular.)

Forum for Multidisciplinary Thinking 58 Read Volume 57 : 28th December 2014 Daphne Koller said she expected Coursera to have grown in offerings into a university the size of a large state school—after having started from scratch in 2012. Even before Nelson gave his answer, I noticed some audience members uncomfortably shifting their weight. The stench of fear made him bold.

“I predict that in three years, four or five or seven or eight of you will be onstage here, presenting your preliminary findings of your first year of a radical new conception of your undergraduate [or] graduate program ... And the rest of you will look at two or three of those versions and say, ‘Uh-oh.’ ” This was meant as a joke, but hardly anyone laughed.

Source: theatlantic.com

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