Standardized tests to get IN to college? Standardized tests INSTEAD of college.

More and more universities are waiving standardized test requirements for admission on the grunds that there are racial achievement gaps in such tests (this is like shooting the messenger—it’s far better to help fix the underlying problem that creates the gap). Obviously, this will attenuate the primary function of universities—signaling the ability to get in and complete the requirements of a college. Because of the waste, bloat, inefficiency, and intolerance of campuses, social theorists keep looking for the educational model that is going to “disrupt” higher education and send it to the ash heap of history (where it probably belongs). For Clay Christensen, it was going to be online education; for Peter Thiel, it was going to be private fellowships; for Sal Kahn, it was going to be lecture videos—none of these has worked out. The college degree (particularly elite college degree) remains the standard way to signal ability to employers and society. But what if the disruptive signal has been underneath our noses this whole time? What if it’s the standardized test itself that is a terrific way to signal one’s intellectual abilities to employers and society? Instead of waving around a degree from Yale, why not wave around a 1500 SAT score? If those SAT’s correlate really tightly with success in college (they do), and are a terrific way to signal ability to college admissions committees (they are), and college is mostly about signaling (it is), then why not skip that intermediate step of spending four years to acquire a degree as a signal, and use the standardized test itself? The shift would need to be cultural: somehow, it’s currently seen as unseemly to flaunt one’s standardized test scores, but not one’s college degree, but this is arbitrary. Employers should begin asking for those scores. Employees should begin putting those scores on their résumés. Writers should begin putting their scores in bylines the way they currently do with their college degrees. If society needs a signal of ability, let’s save ourselves four years and thousands of dollars per person, and simply have the standardized tests be the first barrage against the inefficient and largely corrupt higher education system that, as Bryan Caplan has pointed out, is primarily a remarkably expensive signaling system.

Bringing morality into politics?

To a friend who was looking for answers when students asked him about legislating morality and bringing religion into politics:

As far as reading material that addresses these issues, the first that came to mind was a 2011 speech by Elder Oaks called “Truth and Tolerance”:

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks/truth-and-tolerance/

Basically, he identifies one of the two key fallacies that your students are making (and the way you worded your inquiry suggests you already understand all of this, so I’m a little embarrassed to be writing to you “sharing” my thoughts—but, hey, you asked for it :)

1. First, as Elder Oaks points out, it’s a fallacy to assume that we “can’t legislate morality” since all laws (all of them) legislate morality. Every single one. Laws against theft are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not steal.” Laws against murder are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not kill.” Laws providing government assistance are legislating the morality of helping the poor. Laws against slavery are legislating the morality of racial equality (etc. etc.).

So the question isn’t, “Should we legislate morality?”—we already know the answer is “yes”—but “Which morality should we legislate?” For Latter-day Saints, Section 134 gives clear guidelines on this (as do the rest of the scriptures, but just in a less direct, concise way).

2. The second fallacy is the idea that some people get their moral insights (and, by extension, their beliefs about which morality we should legislate) from religion while others do not, and that it’s somehow illegitimate to bring religious values into politics. This is a critical error.

The reality is that everyone gets their morals (and therefore their ideas of which morality we should legislate) from religion, i.e., faith. As Paul pointed out, faith is knowledge of the unseen and since moral truths are completely invisible, then what we know about morality is entirely a matter of faith. Science is the realm of the empirical (the seen) and can give empirical knowledge, but the most important truths, such as truths about morals, are non-empirical. No scientist ever looked into a microscope and said, “Hey, will you look at that? It’s wrong to torture innocent children!” or looked at a test tube and said, “I’ve just found out that we should be compassionate!” We know such moral truths (and much else) by the faith which precedes scientific investigation.

Anyone who says otherwise is deceiving themselves, but boy are they trying hard and getting good at this self-deception. My friend Michael Shermer, for instance, once sent me a long article he wrote arguing that we can get morals from science because we can see that “Humans everywhere seek to survive and flourish and therefore we should do what helps human flourishing and survival.”

This is bad reasoning because he’s engaging in the futile task of trying to derive an IS from an OUGHT. Philosopher David Hume showed this was impossible over two centuries ago, but it’s also just basic common sense. Every rational person knows that it’s absurd to say, “It IS the case that men abuse their wives therefore men OUGHT to abuse their wives” or “it IS the case that humans are greedy therefore we OUGHT to be greedy.”

If we used Shermer’s logic, then we would need to conclude that we OUGHT to commit every evil act because it IS the case that humans do commit every evil act (genocide, rape, murder, cruelty, etc.). Sorry, but Hume was right: IS has nothing to do with OUGHT.

So Shermer saying “It IS the case that humans survive and flourish therefore we OUGHT to promote human survival and flourishing” is no more empirically valid than saying, “It IS the case that COVID-19 viruses survive and flourish and therefore we OUGHT to promote COVID-19 survival and flourishing” (actually, we OUGHT to do the opposite, which is why Shermer got vaccinated). IS has nothing to do with OUGHT and therefore science (the realm of IS) can’t even begin to shed light on morality (the realm of OUGHT).

And it’s not just Shermer. Pretty much every atheist begins their appeals to a scientific basis for morality with, “If we can just agree that…” but this “just agree” is where the leap of faith comes in. What are we agreeing on, and how do we know it? They’ll say something like, “If we can just agree that we should maximize human well-being…” or “If we can just agree that we should respect human rights…” or “If we can just agree that compassion is better than cruelty…” but these are all appeals to non-empirical assumptions for the “agreement.” They are all taking a leap of faith before the scientific investigation even begins.

Atheist Steven Pinker’s claim that, “I don't want other people to hurt me so I shouldn’t hurt others” is no more scientifically valid than saying, “I don’t want other people to hurt me so I should kill and control others to prevent them from hurting me.” And, in fact, the latter statement is far more justified and common from a Darwinian point of view: those most successful in reproducing their genes throughout history (e.g., Ghengis Kahn) were those who were the most ruthless in killing and controlling other people. The most successful reproducers throughout history have made the Kahn survival calculation, not the Pinker one, and it has paid off big time. So why should we heed Pinker instead of Kahn? There’s no good reason except that we know through faith (i.e., intuitions) that the Kahn survival strategy is morally wrong and the Pinker survival strategy is morally right-. You simply can’t get that knowledge by conducting experiments in a laboratory, observing nature, or reading a biology textbook. All other “science gives morals” arguments are based on the same faulty reasoning. Nietzsche understood this, but current-day atheists do not (or, more likely, pretend not to).

Which brings us back to the two fallacies: since morals can’t be known empirically, then they can only be known through revelation, i.e., “moral intuition,” and since this is non-empirical knowledge, then we are knowing moral truths through faith, i.e., “religion.” Everyone gets their morals from religion, no matter how “secular” they believe themselves to be, ergo, the idea that we “shouldn’t bring religion into politics” is absurd because it would mean excluding all morality from politics and yet all law, as Elder Oaks pointed out, is an implementation of someone’s idea of morality

Just this past week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor fell into this error, when she claimed that it was somehow illegitimate to oppose abortion because believing the fetus is a life is a "religious issue." It’s true that believing that an unborn child is a person is a religious belief, but so is the belief that slaves were people—does she believe, then, that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have overturned the Dred Scott or Plessy rulings? Would she have excluded all of the 19th century anti-slavery arguments from public discourse since virtually every abolitionist organization in America was explicitly Christian? The essence of personhood is not something we find out through scientific investigation, nor is the idea that persons have rights. These are non-empirical truths known only by religious means—faith—and nobody is seriously considering excluding morality from laws, and therefore, by definition, they can’t be in favor of excluding religion from consideration in the making of laws.

All the best --

Enchantment and Morality

Atheism advocates a disenchanted world, but morality itself is a kind of enchantment. For instance, atheistic materialism disenchants humanity itself, saying that humas are just matter, like rocks or bacteria—there is no spirit, God, or divinity setting us apart from anything else (living or non-living) in the universe. But does the atheist say that rocks or bacteria should “work together for the good of all other rocks or bacteria” as a matter of morality? If not, then why should humans, whom the atheist insists, are mere matter themselves, do so? If the atheist says that humans are different than rocks or bacteria because they have free will, then he’s just re-enchanted the world and violated his own materialism, since free will is decidedly non-material (and not detectable scientifically). They dismiss spirit, God, miracles, and other products of religion as “superstition” and claim to be hard-nosed realists willing to confront the harsh reality of a disenchanted world, until the moment they realize that this would lead them straight where Nietzsche went—to a transvaluation of all values—at which point they pull back and re-enchant the world with talk of “moral duties” “human rights” and “the golden rule,” all of which goes against their entire materialist/disenchantment project. This, as I see it, is the ultimate problem of trying to ground morality in atheism.

Disrupting Higher Education with Assessment

As someone who believes there is quite a bit of corruption, sclerosis, and waste in higher education, I welcome the announcement of the creation of Austin University—a new institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth—but I also think it’s not going to be the disruptive force that higher education needs. The main reason colleges and universities (particularly the Ivies and their equivalents) have had such staying power, despite their well-documented dogmatism and decline in quality, is their signaling function. Currently, we have nothing comparable to a college degree that adequately communicates intelligence, conscientiousness, the ability to work with others, and flexibility across a wide range of dimensions (academic fields and modes of activity). So the disruption will come from an alternative signaling system that communicates what university degrees currently do. The ideal institution, then, would not be just another university with a mission statement that most of the others already have (Harvard’s motto is “veritas”), but one that assesses, measures, and communicates what a bachelor’s degree currently communicates, but at much lower cost in both time and money. I can foresee, for instance, a six month (rather than four year) “boot camp” for young people in which they are constantly evaluated on a range of exams and activities that, for six months, test what it currently takes colleges four years to test. Young people might brag someday about “tier 1 at boot camp” the same way they currently brag about a bachelor’s from Yale. I’d say the place to start, then, is to take standardized testing, use that as a core, and build from there.

The Virgin Birth, the Male Birth

Yet more evidence that the New Woke Orthodoxy is a religion that replaced the old Christian orthodoxy: they both require belief in immaculate conception miracles. Christianity had as one of its founding doctrines the idea that a virgin miraculously gave birth; the New Orthodoxy has as one of its central doctrines the idea that a man can miraculously give birth. Five centuries ago, if you had asked an independent observer who had never encountered Christianity which would be more miraculous, a virgin giving birth or a man giving birth, she likely would say the latter. The “rational optimists” who encourage us to abandon the old orthodoxy and embrace “rationality” are not themselves being rational. Those who took the Pinker/Dawkins/Ridley advice and “progressed beyond” Christianity only embraced a new irrationality that requires just as much faith to accept, but employs medieval methods of enforcement. A thousand years ago you could lose your job for refusing to believe in a virgin birth, now you can lose your job for failing to believe in a man birth. Is there any doubt that this is a regress to barbarism?

Hard writing means easy reading

The easier something is to read the harder it was to write. This is counterintuitive. We assume easy reading means easy writing, but the opposite is the case. Authors need to get in this mindset of doing the work of cutting the clutter, making clear, and rendering intelligible their sentences so that their readers don’t have to. From a utilitarian point of view, this is ethically preferable since sentences are generally read more times than they are written.

Smoking and Socialism

The arguments for socialism are like arguments for smoking—they depend on anecdotes. There’s the person who just started smoking who is nonetheless healthy, leading many to proclaim the virtues of smoking until the moment the person falls deathly ill (like Venezuelan socialism). There’s the person who smoked heavily, got really sick, and so cut back to a pack a month and now is seen as the model of a healthy smoker (like Swedish socialism). And then, of course, there are all the people who just smoked and died (like Soviet socialism), to which we can always say, “They just weren’t smoking the right way.” As with socialism, the best way to know the effect of smoking is to run a regression analysis. When we do, we find that—controlling for other variables—the more smoking the less healthy the body, and the more socialism the less healthy the economy. Until we can find a correlation between socialism and positive economic outcomes, I’ll be considering smoking and socialism in the same light.