bearing blog

Sunk costs and fractional success.

Brief article on the psychology of sunk costs in the Atlantic:

The costs to a person who does not know when to quit can be enormous. In economics it's known as sunk cost fallacy, though the costs are more than financial. While we recognize the fallacy almost immediately in others, it's harder to see in ourselves. Why?

There are several powerful, largely unconscious psychological forces at work... But the most likely culprit is this innate, overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.

Sunk costs are the investments ... that you can't get back out. They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate, or waiting for your commitment-phobic boyfriend to propose. They are the thousands of dollars you spent on redecorating your living room, only to find that you hate living in it. 

Once you've realized that you probably won't succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn't matter how much time and effort you've already put into something. If your job or your boyfriend have taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn't make sense to let them use up the years you've got left. An ugly living room is an ugly living room, no matter how much money you spent making it so.

Recent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui demonstrates an effective way to be sure you are making the best decisions when things go awry: focus on what you have to gain by moving on, rather than what you have to lose. When people think about goals in terms of potential gain, that's a "promotion focus," which makes them more comfortable making mistakes and accepting losses. When people adopt a "prevention focus," they think about goals in terms of what they could lose if they don't succeed, so they become more sensitive to sunk costs. This is the focus people usually adopt, if unconsciously, when deciding whether or not to walk away. It usually tells us not to walk away, even when we should.

Many of the folks in the comments seem to think the takeaway is "you should always walk away and never press on," and are arguing, "But sometimes the right thing to do is press on!"

That's not the lesson here.  The lesson here is that "sunk costs make people irrational when they try to decide whether to quit or press on, and usually nudge them in the press-on direction."

The evidence seems to be that, if people emphasize future benefits as they weigh the outcomes of different possible paths, rather than emphasizing thoughts about what they have that might be lost, they more often choose strategies that include walking away from sunk-cost situations.  

Sometimes walking away will be the better choice and sometimes it won't be.   But once you've identified a source of systematic error, it's good to check for it when you're making a decision.  Hindsight is 20/20, they say; and you can't get that in advance; but what you can cultivate is detachment from the past, and all kinds of detachment help you see with clearer eyes.

"I'm having trouble figuring out whether I should make a change.  Could I be suffering from inordinate attachment to the status quo?"

I think part of the problem is that we think of the effort we've spent in the past as being, somehow, part of what we possess.  We see the wished-for outcome, and know that we've expended effort and resources in pursuit of it, and we think of it as possessing a fraction of the outcome.   

With many, very simple goals, it makes a lot of sense to think this way.  If I have a goal of stocking up six months' supply of canned food and dry goods for emergency preparedeness, then after I've expended effort for a while I may have three months' supply, and a little more and I'll have four months' supply, and so on.  If I have a goal of educating my five-year-old through high school, several years later I'll likely have educated my child through the third grade.   Having extended part of the effort, I have made a real achievement, which happens also to amount to part of my original goal.

But a lot of goals aren't that way.  Partial success is meaningless.  If your goal is to get a certain job that requires a bachelor's degree, but you quit your degree program with half the credits you need -- they're not going to give you your job part-time.  I think we have trouble thinking about these because, unlike "save food to eat later," these all-or-nothing games are often artificial constructs, consequences of complex society.

I've certainly been through big decisions.  The kind where you can see two really great paths ahead of you, and you must choose one or the other, can sometimes be the toughest.  Because you know that you will lose one of those two futures, and somehow you wish you could stay in the now, and cling to them as bright possibilities, equally possessed.  The thing that might be gained seems as if it is also the thing that might be lost.

But of course it is not a thing that might be lost until it is a thing that you actually have.  What you stand to lose by choosing the path to the left is not the path to the right.  What you will lose is only the moment of standing at the crossroads and knowing that you could take one or the other.  

Guess what.  You lose that no matter what you decide.

 

Choosing the right habits.

I just saw a single out-of-context quote that caught my eye today, and I wanted to share.

Lawblogger Ann Althouse was responding to a personal-finance-blogger's post about developing daily "effortless" habits to save money so you could retire early. She wrote,

I think the key is to be selective... Where are the places where you can change the habits and actually improve your life? The $4 latte may be worth it to you if that's how you get yourself out of the house and into a public place where you encounter other people and moderate loneliness into manageable solitude. A month of daily lattes might correspond to one item of clothing that gives you a moment of manic elation but then gets lost in your closet amongst scarcely dissimilar items.

As you know, I am a big proponent of life-change through habit. I thought this quote was good for emphasizing how the "right" habits are not one-size-fits-all, and how "good" choices can have hidden costs.

It's pretty fashionable to mock people who have a $4 daily coffeeshop habit, but what Ann says is true -- for some people, the daily $4 may be staving off a much bigger problem! On the other hand, we have a bad habit of misidentifying luxuries as "needs." Maybe the question to ask is, exactly how does this thing I say I need fill a hole?

"I really need my daily latte" might mean, "I am addicted to caffeine and a latte is a tasty way to get my fix." It might mean, "I have established a ritual of stopping at the coffee shop each day, and doing the same thing every day makes me feel peaceful while changing my routine makes me feel upset." It might mean, as Ann suggested, "I need to encounter other people so I don't feel so lonely, and the latte gives me an excuse and a motivation to go do it." It might mean, "I can afford so few luxuries, and the latte is a petty luxury that makes me feel less poor -- for a few minutes out of the day, I can live like a person who doesn't have to pinch pennies."

I thought that the lesson could perhaps be extended to other types of "good" habits besides budgetary ones.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Postsecondary education: Can the signalling game be fixed?

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

+ + +

In my last post about postsecondary education, I enumerated the four things you're buying when you buy education:

1. Signals of quality
2. Required credentials
3. Vocational skills
4. Valued experiences

After I finished the post, I got up from the computer and sat down next to Mark, and explained what I had come up with to him.  He thought maybe I should have lumped "required credentials" in with "signal value" -- and there is some good reason for that, as you'll see -- but otherwise agreed with the list.

"So, if those are the four things you're buying, then how do you game the system?  How do you win the game?" I asked him.

"I guess you do it by paying as little as possible for the signal," he said.

And this seemed pretty reasonable to me at the time.

+ + +

But I wanted to know more about the signaling model, so I started googling around.  I found out two useful things.  

First, I learned that the model was devised in the 1970's by American economist Michael Spence, who developed it -- in part -- around the same scenario that we are discussing here:  that employers use education level as a proxy for valuable abilities.  

Second, that Spence, along with two others, won the "Nobel economics prize" (technically it is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for this work, and his acceptance lecture is online and gives an overview of the work.

I haven't tried to digest the entire thing, but I read enough of it to find something funny about Mark's suggestion.  In the simplest signalling model, Spence explains, there are two kinds of workers:  those with high productivity, and those with low productivity.  There are two salient features that distinguish the  two groups:

1. Employers are willing to pay more to get high-productivity workers.
2. Each "unit of education" costs a low-productivity worker more than it does a high-productivity worker.

This is the whole reason why -- in the simplest, pure signalling model -- education serves as a "signal" of productivity:  because it costs the undesirable workers more to acquire each unit of education, at each successive level of education the pool of employees is more concentrated in the desirable employees.  Employers will pay higher wages for more-highly-educated employees because at those levels a randomly chosen employee has a higher chance of being one of the desirable ones.

But the whole reason this works, in the simple signalling theory, is that low-productivity workers pay more for education.  This is almost like defining a low-productivity worker as "one who pays too much for education."

So when Mark suggested that you could beat the signalling game by "not paying too much for the signal," he was basically suggesting that you could beat the game by being the kind of worker that employers want to hire.

Which rather gets you back to your starting point, doesn't it?

Those who have, get more.  Those who have not, lose what they have.  I think I have heard this before.

+ + +

Anyway, that is about a pure-signal system, where education confers zero added value on a worker -- its whole value is to the employer as a sorting mechanism.  In reality, education can confer value on a student -- though whether it can turn a low-productivity worker into a high-productivity worker is questionable, and it may be that some students gain no valuable skills at all (or that they have difficulty getting connected with the employers who might value what they have gained).  

I'm tempted to go off on a tirade about the inefficiencies in the system.  Spence's theory, if you go on reading it, is that the signalling system is made more efficient if you tax education (which in the theory doesn't confer any value, only signals it).   This raises the cost of education, so people buy less of it with the same out-of-pocket costs, and the tax revenues can be distributed to all the people as refunds; but it preserves the signal.  Of course, we don't tax it, we subsidize it, which is the opposite of taxing it, and maybe that makes the system the opposite of efficient.  

And of course there is the problem of the third party not mentioned in Spence's theory (at least as far as I read), namely, the people who are selling the education; they don't have an incentive either to make the signal more useful or to confer skills on people; you might say that they have an incentive to attract as many low-productivity customers as possible, because those are the ones who spend the most for what they get.  Maybe, if you are selling educational units for their signal value, you only want as many high-productivity people at your educational institution as you need to keep the prestige of your institution high, so you can attract lots of low-productivity people, who are paying your bills.  It costs less to sell them education.

+ + + 

But the question before us is not whether we should change the current system; it's what kind of education the individual should buy, given the system that we have.

It seems like it might be useful to know yourself.  Are you low-productivity or high-productivity by nature?  Are you already the kind of person that employers want?   Will you be paying too much for a signal that  says "I'm high-quality goods?"  Will you be found out in the end anyway as the impostor you are?  Or are you the real deal, and will stand out from the crowd?

It seems like it might be useful to know whether you have what it takes to get the required credential.    What are the chances that you'll sink a lot of money and time into education, only to drop out before acquiring the degree/certificate/license that the gatekeepers require?

It seems like it might be useful to consider how education might build your measurable skill-set.  And watch out for promises that education will build a set of skills that are "intangible" or "unmeasurable" but that are nevertheless, supposedly, valuable... the emperor may not have any clothes.

Finally, what about those valued experiences?  It seems like it might be useful to consider how much you are willing to pay for each year of a multi-year vacation.  Because, you know, you could spend your money getting valuable experiences a lot of other ways, too.

Postsecondary education options: The four things you're buying.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.  Are you getting tired of this yet?  I noticed that the comments dry up over the weekends.  Well, I have a lot more of this coming, because it is clarifying my thinking marvelously, and I really needed my thinking clarified before I start kids in ninth grade.)}

+ + +

I think we can break down the value of a college degree -- or any form of postsecondary education, really, including trade-school studies, apprenticeships, intern experience, military training, studies for licensure exams, and the like -- into these sources.

1. Signals of quality
2. Required credentials
3. Vocational skills
4. Valued experiences

Let's talk about these one by one briefly, and then I'll look more closely at the ones that warrant separate posts.

+ + +

Signals of quality.  We discussed the "signalling" value of education in the comments on the post where I linked to Megan McArdle's Newsweek piece.   Megan sums up the "signalling model" like this:

 It’s hard to prove to employers that you’re intelligent, conscientious and persistent, and so you use a diploma to demonstrate it.

Or you could look at it this way (this is me talking, not Megan):

It's hard to figure out which potential employees are intelligent, conscientious, and persistent, and so employers use a diploma as a proxy.

Megan says in her related blog post that there is signal value even in having had "some college." Different degrees (e.g. an engineering degree versus a communications degree) have different signal value to potential employers. The prestige or perceived difficulty of the university also provides perceived signal value.

Whether we like it or not, possession of signal value is an economic good.   It is also, in principle, measurable.

Required credentials.  At first glance it may seem that a credential is just another kind of signal, but they are distinct.  Credentials are different from signalling because they are codified by the gatekeepers of a profession.    

Whether a "required degree" is a credential or a signal depends on how much discretion the employer has.   An employer may write "B.S. required" on the job description for a lot of reasons; but if the employer is allowed to hire an impressive, skilled candidate who didn't finish his degree, the degree is not a credential.  You can imagine this happening in fields like technical sales or journalism:   a sufficiently interesting candidate who can get himself noticed might be able to land a job despite lacking the "required" degree.

But whether they want to or not:   hospitals aren't allowed to hire nurses who aren't certified as R.N.s or  L.P.N.s.   Engineering firms aren't allowed to assign certain tasks to engineers without their P.E.   Trucking firms can't hire drivers who don't hold a commercial license.  Rite Aid can't hire a pharmacist who doesn't have a Pharm.D.   These are credentials.  No amount of experience, demonstrable skill, or character can substitute for them.

Vocational skills.  These are the abilities and knowledge, acquired through education and training, that are really called upon in daily work.  

It includes things learned in specific coursework that apply to a job or to managing a household or other economically valuable activity.

It also includes generally useful learned abilities such as quickly digesting technical information, or communicating clearly, or discreetly handling a delicate situation, or staying up all night to meet a deadline -- as long as those are skills that are really used and needed.  

I would expand it, broadly, to include skills that underlie latent competencies:  the learned ability to acquire more competencies as needed.  For instance, I took a minor in French; I rarely get to speak French; but in learning French I acquired skills that enabled me to teach myself other Romance languages, which I am now teaching children in the homeschool.   Speaking French didn't turn out to be a vocational skill, but "the ability to self-teach a language" did.

Valued experiences.   All the other good things you hope to get out of a postsecondary education.  This category by its nature is subjective, broad, and difficult to measure even in principle.  It includes things like learning to get along with roommates, immersing oneself in a subject for pure love of the subject, staying up late arguing with friends over beer and pizza, building character through hard work, exposing yourself to culture, opening your mind through difficult thinking, and acquiring skills that are valued without necessarily being evidently valuable  to others.  

+ + +

When I was telling Mark about this yesterday, I listed the first three categories -- signals of quality, required credentials, vocational skills -- and then said, "And then there's a fourth category.  It includes everything else that you can't put your finger on quite as easily.  Learning to analyze great literature -- of course, for English teachers that will turn out to be vocational -- or having good class discussions -- or sitting in coffeeshops really diving into a difficult math problem, if you like that sort of thing -- or --"

He laughed and told me, "It's the error term."  He took a pull of his beer, apologized for laughing at me, and said, "I can't help it.  The differential equations book is open on my desk right now."

I hung my head and admitted, "Yes.  Now that I think about it, it's the error term.  I guess I can't break anything down into a list without including one."  

I suppose that remembering to include a "...plus everything else you can't measure or forgot to include" term at the end of a list is, after all, a vocational skill for me.

+ + +

The benefits of an education = S + R + V + E, where

• S = signal value,
• R = required credentials,
• V = vocational skills,
• E = experiences valued for their own sake (or E can be for error, if you ask Mark).

These four things are what you hope to buy with your money when you set out to purchase a postsecondary education.  

If you are lucky, you may get components of each term that you did not expect but that turned out to be a bonus and that did not cost you anything extra.

Your money will also buy you things that you didn't necessarily want -- things you never wanted in the first place, purported vocational skills that turned out not to be useful, experiences that you thought you would enjoy having but that ended up disappointing you.  

How do you win this game?  How do you maximize the return on your money and your time?  And how do you judge the relative importance of the four terms in the equation -- because different educational choices will give you a different mix?

More on that later...

Postsecondary education: Darwin weighs in, and I explain the pitfalls I'm trying to avoid.

_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

+ + +

Check out Darwin's take at DarwinCatholic.  I'll probably have comments later in an update, but I have to go read a bedtime story.

.....LATER.....

Every once in a while, a critic will say of some hawkish Senator, "Well, is he going to send his kids off to war?"

This rhetorical device annoys me, because in this country, no one sends his own kids off to war.  Adults (and sometimes older teens) decide for themselves whether or not to enlist in the U. S. armed forces and to accept the possibility of combat.     "Sending someone off to war" is the purview of the DOD, not of parents.

When we imagine helicopter parents, we are generally not thinking of Black Hawks.

A better question would be, "Well, is he going to teach his own kids to value the contributions of the U. S. military and to consider it as a potential calling or career?  Is he going to communicate to his kids that the choice to serve in one of the branches of the U. S. military is an honorable one, that to take on the risks of combat is brave and selfless, and that he would be proud to call a sailor, soldier, or officer Son or Daughter?"

But somehow the critics never phrase it that way.

+ + +

As Mark and I have been writing our pieces on postsecondary education questions, I find myself imagining an imaginary reader challenging us,

"Well, if college is such a bad deal for America, and if there are as they say too many college students, are Mark and Bearing going to keep their kids out of college?  Are they going to send them to trade schools instead, or send them off to one of the other alternatives Bearing mentioned?"

And of course we can't keep our kids out of college, even if we wanted to, because eventually they'll be adults.  We can't send them to trade schools either. (Although we could offer to pay for one and not the other).

But a better set of questions might be:

Are we going to encourage our children to take a broad view of "post-secondary education" that includes alternatives to college?

Are we going to encourage our children to view all kinds of productive human labor as honorable and their practitioners worthy of respect? 

Are we going to give them a chance to work with their hands during childhood as well as with their minds?

Are we going to encourage our children to consider the costs as well as the benefits of the different educational paths open to them?

Are we going to encourage our children to delay spending money on education until they have a plan for how to establish themselves, and eventually a family, in favorable financial conditions?

Are we going to encourage them to have a backup plan, or an escape hatch, in case their first plan unexpectedly becomes untenable?

Are we going to try to communicate to them that our approval and love is not contingent upon the "status" of their chosen profession?

Are we going to try to raise them to strive for excellence, and not limit "excellence" to mean only academic achievement or prestige?

+ + +

As Darwin points out, it's pretty likely that each of our children will have the inclination and the necessary preparation to attend a four-year college right out of high school.  Mark and I both graduated from college, and I hold an advanced degree; we directly supervise their education and are inclined ourselves to make that education a college-preparatory one; we have some funds to support post-secondary education, including college; in short, we come from a "college culture."  

But we want to avoid the pitfall of assuming that four-year college will be the default choice, or even the best choice, for each of our children.  

In his post, Darwin has identified some bad outcomes of this assumption.  

(1)  Many people start college who are not actually able to finish, and these people "end up with debt and lost time, but don't have appreciably higher income and lower unemployment than those with only high school [diplomas]."  

I add to that:   it's not just "lost time" -- lost time in the workforce represents lost wages, lost savings, lost interest on those savings, lost experience that could have been leveraged into higher income now.  It's not just that they failed to gain economic benefits.  They really lost an economic good.

(2) Those who graduate but who were in the bottom quintile of academic ability also end up with debt and lost time (and lost wages, lost savings, lost interest, lost experience....) but are unemployed at rates similar to those with only high school diplomas.   These people also really lost an economic good.  You might well argue that as a group they would have been economically better off if they had dropped out (like the group in point one), also known as "knowing when to quit," because they would have sunk less of their time and money into an endeavor which wasn't paying off.

(3) "Borrowing tens of thousands of dollars is a bad way to avoid making decisions." Darwin is referring to graduate school, not undergrad, but I think the point stands for undergraduate education as well, because many people go to college after high school only because they have to do something while they figure out what they want to do with their lives, and college is the default option.  How many people start their college career with their major "undecided?"  How smart can that be?  Wouldn't it be better to do something that made money instead of  cost money while you are trying to decide what to do when you finally grow up?

+ + +

And here are some more pitfalls:

(4) If you assume that four-year college is the best choice, then you won't devote much time to learning about other kinds of careers and training paths.  If you are ignorant of these, you may miss something that would have been a perfect fit for your personality and talents.

(5) Assuming that four-year college is the default choice, especially insisting that it is the only acceptable choice as many families do, communicates that people who choose different paths are less worthy.  Darwin implicitly identifies this when he points out that people make "unspoken assumptions" about those who don't have college degrees.  It's true that we have to teach our children to navigate a world that makes value judgments about people based on their occupations and education level, but we don't have to contribute to it.

(6) Assuming that four-year-college immediately follows high school -- the so-called "traditional student model"  -- is to reject a number of viable paths in which alternative education precedes  or leads into a bachelor's degree from a traditional institution.

For instance, Darwin writes that "urging [kids] to skip the college degree they want and get a certification in some skill like plumbing or welding instead is probably not a good idea."  Well -- who says it has to be "instead?"  A welding certificate could be the means to earn a high hourly wage with which to "work your way through school."  It could be the backup plan so you know you'll always have a skill to fall back on if that English degree doesn't work out. (Most students don't graduate on time anyway -- why not spend one year getting a certificate and four years getting a degree, instead of five years getting a degree?) Or it could be the first half of an associates degree in welding, which itself could lead to a bachelor's degree in welding engineering from a traditional four-year university.

 

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENTS:  " I just wish I had felt like there were other options for a nice upper middle class girl."

 

Postsecondary education questions: A summary sort of post, before moving on.

(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)

+ + +

In this post I came to a conclusion about parents' responsibilities toward helping adult children finish their education:

 Parents have a certain minimum education and preparation that they owe their kids; if they don't manage to do it by the time the kids are adults, the kids have a right to ask for more help; but adults who are continuing to receive help from their parents to continue their education, rightly continue to be subject to their parents as they were when they were minors.

A lot of what the Church documents go into has to do with religious development and character development, but economics is part of it too.  I think these (both from Familiaris Consortio) are the key economic features of a minimum education for a child who may marry :

• it will enable them to "establish their family in favorable...economic conditions." (53)  
• it  "will... acquaint [them] with correct methods for the education of children, and will assist them in gaining the basic requisites for well-ordered family life, such as stable work, sufficient financial resources, sensible administration, notions of housekeeping" (66)

(I propose to stick, for now, with the case of a child who likely will plan to support a family.   We'll get to other vocations eventually.)

I also wrote that (morally rather than legally speaking) a child is emancipated 

• when he is accessing what he needs to know
• and is doing what he needs to do
• to fulfill the duties of his vocation,
• and has embarked on independent life.

We can combine these definitions of "necessary education" and "emancipation" to arrive at something like this (economically speaking) for a child who may marry:  

Parents must teach the child, or delegate that teaching to another, so that he knows what he needs to know and can do what he needs to do to establish his family in favorable economic conditions.  That education must assist him in gaining stable work and sufficient financial resources for supporting a family.  It must also assist him in learning to run a household and acquaint him with correct methods of educating children.

I think everyone agrees that parents owe their minor children an adequate education.  If all the adequate choices cost money, and the parents can reasonably afford it, then they might reasonably conclude they have a duty to pony up for elementary-school or high-school tuition.   

Given that, parents might reasonably conclude that they also have a duty to contribute materially to a child's postsecondary education -- if that postsecondary education will complete the "minimum" education that a child needs.  That is, if it will teach him adequate knowledge and skills to establish his family in favorable conditions, to gain stable work, to gain sufficient financial resources, to run a household, and to educate his children.

Here's what's coming up:

  - On the theoretical side, I have a post in the works on what it means to have "adequate" skills and knowledge.  Not a list of necessary skills and knowledge, but the meaning of "adequate."

  - On the cost-benefit side, Mark is working on a guest post (okay, right now it is in the form of several spreadsheets) about the lifetime economic differences between hypothetical sibling pairs, one of whom gets a 4-year college degree, one of whom does not.  I got a preview of the data last night.  I think you'll find it very, er, educational.  

The point of working these things out, both on the theoretical and the practical side, is not that it is foolish or wrong to choose (or to fund) a less-lucrative path if it will make you happier; the point is to make your choices (a) within the bounds of duty to your family and (b) with your eyes open to the range of consequences. 

Exercise can make you fat. So what?

This Daily Mail article has been getting around -- it's a popular-press take on the theme "exercise can make you fat."

I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying "Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?"

And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra "rules" to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

• Choosing "fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling," over weight training
• Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
• Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume "a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout" and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking "squash" as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
• Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

 

• You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
  
• You don't need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
• Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

 

Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

 

• Don't start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
• I recommend starting with exercise. If you're starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day -- whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. "Gradually" means "slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule."
• Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
• The first metric of performance is "Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?" Once you have "showing up" pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is "Did I finish my session?" After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
• Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don't worry about it -- except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like "Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda."
• A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don't anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point -- when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week -- that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
• If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

It isn't terribly scientific, but I can't see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

Non-evidence-based style.

My friend M. has been deep in the books, trying to design and redesign a good homeschooling environment for her eight-year-old son who is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and who really needs quite intense attention.  She is looking at various styles of teaching and how they are shown to work with real children.

She came to me a few days ago saying (I'm paraphrasing):  "You know what's really amazing about the so-called 'classical model of homeschooling?'  So many homeschoolers put so much stock in it -- in this idea that the medieval trivium corresponds to three stages of child development -- but there isn't really any evidence for it at all!  If you go tracing back the claims that people make about classical homeschooling, they all go back to just one source --"

"'The Lost Tools of Learning,'" I said.  "The essay by Dorothy Sayers."

"...And, well, she just made it up!  She doesn't claim to know anything about how children develop.  It's just her idea.  But this entire industry has sprung up to support classical homeschooling, as if there was any evidence that designing a school the way she imagines it is something that really produces good outcomes.  There isn't any evidence.  And of course the medieval trivium wasn't at all like the homeschooling trivium that people talk about.  There's no evidence that children ever were taught the way she describes."

I thought for a moment how to respond.  "I think that the essay provides a useful organizing principle," I ventured.  "No more than that."  I did have to defend myself a little bit!

And I do think that the organizing principle behind "The Lost Tools of Learning" is so useful that I maintain it's part of the "homeschooler's canon" of educational philosophy.  

+ + +

But M.'s reminder is useful, too -- that Sayers' essay is just that:  an opinion piece.  After all, I do go around telling other homeschoolers, when I need to, that I am "oh, sort of a classical homeschooler, with a little Charlotte Mason thrown in."  Really, this is just a piece of code, shorthand for what I am not:  I am not an unschooler, I am not a school-in-a-box-er, I am not entirely disorganized (I have some kind of plan), and, well, I'm not entirely "evidence-based."  

(Even the Charlotte Mason reference is really cheating.  I've never actually read any serious books by or about Charlotte Mason.  That reference is code for "I like making my kids tell back what they've learned, and I tried keeping a nature journal for a while.")

One careful reading of Sayers' essay will show you that she never intended her imaginary school to be set up as a real place.  She breezily assumes ideal and impossible conditions:

Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls whom we may experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our building and staff large enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products we turn out. Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus--a modern Trivium "with modifications" and we will see where we get to.

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher.

Did you catch that bit -- that at the start of her "school" the children have already been taught to read, write, and do arithmetic?  We're on our own for that part, homeschoolers.

Sayers' imaginary school is not, actually, a plan (and she takes pain to point this out).  Nor is it a reconstruction of the medieval trivium in any way -- significantly, she stresses, "It does not matter, for the moment, whether it [the trivium] was devised for small children or for older students, or how long people were supposed to take over it."

No, this school she describes is a rhetorical device.  The point of the description is to create vivid pictures in the readers' minds, of children arguing, or finding Cassiopeia in the night sky, or examining portraits of the Kings of England, or carefully studying maps.  This is just an illustration to motivate readers to hear and accept her philosophy of education, which she emphasizes by making it the very last sentence of the essay:

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

This is a philosophy that appeals to me, and it is why I go around telling people that I am a "classical homeschooler."  Not because I think my homeschool should be split up into Grammar and Rhetoric and Dialectic (although I sometimes use those terms to describe the level of mental process that is engaged by a particular book or curriculum).  I tell people I am a "classical homeschooler" because I believe my job is to teach my kids how to teach themselves.

+ + +

Which brings me to the problem of evidence-based teaching.  Evidence is overrated.

If I say "Evidence is overrated," you should know I am speaking tongue in cheek.  I am trained as an engineer and as a scientist, and even though I abandoned that life in its early stages, its inner life has not abandoned me:  I can never lose the engineer's problem-attacking method, nor the scientist's reflexes to observe, test, and revise.  

No, what I really mean is that the marshalled evidence often overemphasizes one kind of data to the exclusion of another kind of data that, depending on the application, may be more important.  The distinction between the two kinds of data:  that drawn from large groups and that drawn from individuals.

Data drawn from large groups can be usefully applied to help individuals, it's true.  Let's imagine an experiemental school -- would that schools would actually do this -- in which two methods for teaching arithmetic are to be evaluated.  Children are randomly assigned to two classrooms, one in which the arithmetic skills are taught via method A, and one in which the teacher uses method B  to teach the same skills.  After a suitable time, the children are evaluated, and method A comes out ahead:  perhaps more students in classroom A have achieved a certain minimum competency, or perhaps the average score of students in that classroom is significantly higher than the average in classroom B.   Perhaps A outperforms B by both metrics.  If the test is repeated over different schools and different populations, and if A consistently outperforms B, that would certainly be a strong argument for teaching with method A instead of method B.  I would gladly support this kind of approach to curriculum selection in my local public schools, who are, after all, in the business of educating large groups.

However, just because A is the better method overall does not mean it is the better method for every child in the class.  Imagine there is one particular child -- let's call him Jacob -- who responds better, in a critical way, to method B.  It's not that Jacob was one of the top kids in classroom B -- no, let's be honest, most of the "top kids" in classroom B would also have been "top" in classroom A, because every classroom contains at least a few kids who are going to absorb material no matter how you throw it at them.  No, this boy was on the margins:  Jacob was one of those who achieved competency in classroom B, did well enough.  But when the classrooms all switched to the A method -- the method that was proved superior by the average-score metric and by the number-achieving-minimum-competency metric -- Jacob did not succeed, did not achieve competency.  More of his classmates will succeed in the A environment, and that is good for them, and good for the school, and good for the teachers, probably.  It does not help him.

I am not, mind you, saying that the evidence drawn from large groups is unhelpful for the large groups.  I do think schools should use data to shape their curriculum, because that is the job of the schools.  I just want to point out that the schools have one job -- to teach the large groups -- and Jacob's parents have another -- to teach Jacob.  

This is, to me, the distinction that gives meaning to the notion that education of children is primarily the responsibility of their parents.  It is reflected in Minnesota law, at least:   Our state's constitution stipulates that the legislature shall establish a "general and uniform" system of public schools; "uniform" is supposed to provide for equal and fair access to schooling, and that is commendable and appropriate for government schools.  The statutes specify this:  "The parent of a child is primarily responsible for assuring that the child acquires knowledge and skills that are essential for effective citizenship."

My point:  You use large-group evidence to design approaches that are aimed at large groups.  If your job is to teach Classroom B, you use what you've learned from metrics that measure Classroom B.  But if your job is to teach Jacob -- and that, mind you, is not legally our state's job, nor a single classroom teacher's job, nor can it be -- it is Jacob's parents' job -- then you have to give primary weight to evidence drawn from Jacob and not to that drawn from his classmates.

+ + +

I derive a lot of inspiration from Dorothy Sayers' opinion piece, even though it is not evidence-based.  Sayers never thought that people would try to copy the imaginary school she described, and I don't either.  I follow her example -- not by trying to create in my home the school that she imagined -- but by trying to create in my home the school that I  imagine.  

I consider the problem that life has posed me -- and I frame it and sketch it out as How will I teach my children to teach themselves?  I make assumptions, I list my constraints, I weigh costs against likely benefits, I approximate when necessary, and in the end I do what I can with what I have.

I make a guess -- this particular sort of curriculum will interest my eleven-year-old, or arranging the school desks in that particular way will keep my eight- and five-year-olds from fighting; I try it out; I check to see if my eleven-year-old is engaged in his work, I listen to see if the squabbles have diminished; I revise my hypothesis, I try again.

+ + +

There is another thing to weigh, too -- and it is sort of outside the evidence of what sort of methods produce academic excellence.  Because academic achievement is not, actually, central to what I am trying to do here (although it's very easy to forget that, because academic achievement is so much more easily measured, and because the culture values it, and I am swayed by culture).  

What I am supposed to be doing is forming human beings who are honest, fair, kind, and wise, who have a firm understanding of their own value and of the value of other human persons, who recognize their direct responsibilities and carry them out.   And no amount of evidence of academic achievement should entice me to apply a method that undermines any of these.

Meanwhile, I am supposed to be forming myself in honesty, fairness, kindness, and wisdom -- and if I somehow form my children in ways that deteriorate my own character, I'm equally wrong.   

 To put it bluntly, if by daily beatings or regular bribes I could ensure my child a perfect SAT score, that wouldn't mean I should do it.

+ + +

Large-group evidence based on large-group metrics will only take you so far.  It isn't useless:  it's just that it is useful for purposes different from mine.  (I can, of course, use it for my own purposes:  what's good for the group may be the best thing to try first, before tweaking to suit the individual.)    This is true about education, but lots of other things too:  taking care of your health, disciplining children, deciding what sort of community to live in, deciding whom to spend time with.  Sometimes "what works" is what matters; other times it's far more important to find something you can live with, whether it "works" or not; most often it is a matter of balancing both.

"It's better naked."

Marc Barnes, the freakishly young writer of Bad Catholic, has launched his new project aimed at spreading the word about NFP (mainly Creighton) to young people -- teens and college kids.

The site, 1flesh.org, is part "what you didn't know about contraception and condoms" and part "there is a better way."

Check it out here

Marc's blog post introducing the project is here:

Birth control has done nothing to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies, the Pill increases breast cancer risk, lowers female sex drive, and screws up the environment. We’re talking about how artificial contraception is one of the most falsely advertised products out there. We’re talking about how condoms ruin sex, how they’ve been remarkably ineffective in the fight against HIV, how they’ve done nothing to stop our modern explosion of STDs. We’re talking about the Pill and heart disease, about how the health benefits of oral contraceptives aren’t health benefits at all. We’re talking about the Pill’s potential to be an abortifacent, the bad philosophy behind artificial contraception, how contraception has increased the abortion rate, is linked to an increase in divorce, and how — in general — it’s been making relationships difficult for some time now.

And of course, we’re spotlighting the fact that there’s a much better way, all while having an absurdly good time.

I think there is still some cleaning-up to do, and I haven't had time to evaluate the evidence marshalled against birth control and condoms on the various arguments pages, but it looks like a really good start towards raising awareness among young people that, no, you don't have to take hormones or encase yourself in latex, and the benefits you are supposed to get might not even be, you know, real, let alone worth the cost and trouble.

Check it out. What do you think?

Improvements.

Seeing as I've been sufferig from blogger's block lately, I thought maybe I'd do a week or so of reposts of old favorites.  While I was looking for some, clicking through my old posts, I found this one from about six years ago:

Here's an interesting mortality calculator.  Not only does it tell you how long you're slated to live, it tells you how much you could increase that by changing certain habits.

I'm supposed to last until mid-2063, when I'm nearly 89 years old.  This is a bit less than the median (the median survival age of the general population, or of those taking the test?)  I blame my parents.

Apparently I could live about eight months longer if I stopped driving, avoided all major stress (at least in the last year of my life), became a conditioning exerciser instead of just an "occasional" exerciser, and stopped having sex.   Six of those months come from exercising.  Apparently avoiding driving is only good for about ten days, and stress for three weeks.   Sex is costing me two whole weeks of my life!

For some odd reason, the model also cheerfully informs me that if I don't mind cutting my life short by 0.34 years, I can increase my alcohol consumption to 2-3 drinks per day.  Is that good news?

I wouldn't call the post a favorite, but of course I couldn't help but check, and it turned out that the mortality calculator is still there.  I took the quiz again today.  With my new lifestyle, and (I suppose) a few extra years in which to demonstrate my survivability, this time I get to live to ... 2068.

In six years, I gained five years of my life!

And I didn't even have to stop having sex.