Good piece. Funnily enough I wrote a post just a few weeks ago critiquing Case Against Education, not because it isn’t a good book, but because people in the blogosphere seem to think it’s a total knockdown argument that proves education is all signaling when what he actually claims in the book is that someone who shares his extreme priors should want to cut 80% and those who don’t should cut 20%.
But as time passes, the caveats all fade, and people forget there were ever any limitations or meaningful debates to be had at all.
This is a superb article - thank you for clearly articulating an intuition thar constantly nags me.
Rhetoric must be one of the worst inventions humans have ever come up with. I have an off-the-scale stubborn friend who will respond to observations & speculations with a beautifully constructed quotation from some historic intellectual or artist, as if that settles the matter. I have no idea how to navigate this move and so discussion simply ends at that point.
(Also, just a word of encouragement - you're shaping up to be a very 'good' writer and one of the qualities of 'good' - in this sense - is the honesty and awareness you're demonstrating here. Keep going.)
This was an interesting read, but what have I really learned from it? You just discussed a few articles you found persuasive but which you claimed didn't have many arguments for them. There's no data about how persuasive articles are on average, or how that varies by whether or not they have arguments in them. When arguing with someone who thinks that individual testimony and rhetoric can't be separated from other forms of evidence, what am I supposed to say? That I read Bentham's Bulldog say the opposite, and it really resonated with me?
Well, I think that describing some phenomenon can be convincing even if one doesn't provide empirical data. I think most readers will, when reflecting, recognize that this accurately describes their experience.
Good piece. Funnily enough I wrote a post just a few weeks ago critiquing Case Against Education, not because it isn’t a good book, but because people in the blogosphere seem to think it’s a total knockdown argument that proves education is all signaling when what he actually claims in the book is that someone who shares his extreme priors should want to cut 80% and those who don’t should cut 20%.
But as time passes, the caveats all fade, and people forget there were ever any limitations or meaningful debates to be had at all.
https://infovores.substack.com/p/attention-caplanites-school-is-less
This is a superb article - thank you for clearly articulating an intuition thar constantly nags me.
Rhetoric must be one of the worst inventions humans have ever come up with. I have an off-the-scale stubborn friend who will respond to observations & speculations with a beautifully constructed quotation from some historic intellectual or artist, as if that settles the matter. I have no idea how to navigate this move and so discussion simply ends at that point.
(Also, just a word of encouragement - you're shaping up to be a very 'good' writer and one of the qualities of 'good' - in this sense - is the honesty and awareness you're demonstrating here. Keep going.)
Thank you so much for this very nice comment Mike. Your stuff is always interesting and worth reading!
This was an interesting read, but what have I really learned from it? You just discussed a few articles you found persuasive but which you claimed didn't have many arguments for them. There's no data about how persuasive articles are on average, or how that varies by whether or not they have arguments in them. When arguing with someone who thinks that individual testimony and rhetoric can't be separated from other forms of evidence, what am I supposed to say? That I read Bentham's Bulldog say the opposite, and it really resonated with me?
Well, I think that describing some phenomenon can be convincing even if one doesn't provide empirical data. I think most readers will, when reflecting, recognize that this accurately describes their experience.
One of your better articles imo, loved it