Learning a new skill is hard. Part of what’s so hard about it is, by definition, you don’t know the skill and so you also don’t know the best way to go about learning it. So you rely on people who do know that skill to guide you through the process. Maybe you’re a child, relying on your parents to teach you how to ride a bicycle. Or maybe you’re an adult who just Googled “how to learn to code.”

Unfortunately, most people who know things are not good at teaching them. Learning a skill and teaching that skill are two separate abilities. Often we learn things and then forget just how we came to understand them.

Emily Oster recently discussed balance bikes vs training wheels for learning to cycle. A balance bike is a bike without pedals that a child can push around with their feet. The research on learning to cycle in these two different ways is light, but Oster quotes a Portuguese study that says kids who use balance bikes learn to ride around age 4 while kids who use training wheels don’t manage until age 6. (The study didn’t establish causality, but I think it’s probably causal.)

Training wheels and balance bikes are both part of the same essential learning strategy: start with a simplified version of the thing you want to learn so you can learn specific parts of it and ignore the other parts. The difference is that training wheels remove the balancing part of cycling to focus on pedaling, while balance bikes remove the pedaling part of cycling to focus on balancing. I think balance bikes are better because staying balanced on a moving bicycle is more important than being able to pedal. Knowing how to pedal is no good if you fall off the bike. If you can coast on a bicycle without falling off, you have plenty of time to learn to pedal.

Last year I tried learning to code in Solidity, the programming language used to write Ethereum smart contracts. I already know how to program in R and Python, so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to learn another programming language. I found a series of tutorials and slavishly followed them. In the end, I learned…nothing. I couldn’t program in Solidity.

I’m in the second year of my PhD, and I’m working to develop a research program; hopefully one that gets me a finished dissertation as soon as possible.

I’m drawn towards studying education because (1) I have spent my entire life in schools and (2) schools are seriously, and obviously, messed up. The marginal benefit of an additional perspective on education could be very high if that perspective were to shape education reform in some way.

It’s a cliché to make fun of “soft” degrees, so I’m surprised there isn’t a large body of research on why people choose to pursue them anyways. However, there is a body of research on why people fail to treat education as an investment more generally, as detailed in the working paper “Behavioral Economics of Education: Progress and Possibilities” by Lavecchia, Liu, and Oreopoulos. To avoid typing out Lavecchia, Liu, and Oreopoulos many times, and to make it seem like I’m periodically pausing to laugh, I will refer to them as LOL.

LOL use the dichotomy of “system 1” versus “system 2” thinking. System 1 is the unconscious, mostly automatic part of our brains that says “Don’t get out of bed, it’s warm and nice here and getting to work on time isn’t so great anyways.” System 2 is the part that rationally deliberates our long-term choices and says “You need to get up and go to work because working yields the following long-term benefits: (1) wages, (2) the promise of future wages, (3)…” LOL include the obligatory footnote saying that neuroscientists dispute whether this is actually what the brain is doing, but go on using the dichotomy anyways because it’s an extremely useful way to organize our thinking about the brain even if that’s not how it literally works. Continue reading Thoughts on the Behavioural Economics of Education →

When I was young, I played a lot of Age of Empires. For those who are unfamiliar with the series, they are games where the player must direct a tiny civilization’s development. He begins with one building and only a few villagers. By right clicking on a villager, then left clicking on a tree, stone mine, gold mine, or animal, the player can direct the villager to gather wood, stone, gold, or meat. He can also direct villagers to make buildings. And with buildings, he can recruit more villagers or soldiers.

By directing every action of every person in his civilization, the player can eventually turn his tiny village into a sprawling city, clashing militarily with other players’ civilizations.

I think a game economy like that one could be a good teaching tool for young people. In the early stages of the game, centrally managing a few villagers works well. But as the civilization grows, the player’s attention becomes more stretched. It is common, in the game economy, for the player to discover a group of villagers clustered around a (now exhausted) mine or forest. The growing economy becomes ever more difficult to manage, and it becomes more difficult to coordinate the growing numbers of workers and soldiers. Continue reading Teaching Economics: Age of Empires and Central Planning →