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Ben Casnocha on placebos and education
Ben sequences it well:
In his new book, which I review here, Tyler Cowen writes:
Placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?
He reluctantly provides the terrifying conclusion: Maybe that's what current methods of education already consist of.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 20, 2009 at 05:58 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
I've been saying similar for years and was looked at like I was crazy. Maybe I'm crazy, but that's beside the point. Now that others are saying it, I'm worried. I don't think people generally snap to the rational conclusion. They overreact.
At the extreme, Ivy league is like taking the healthiest patients and then giving them the snazziest placebo and then sending them back out to give health advice. It's hard to convince me that they have special secrets, or even special techniques. More likely, they just attract slightly better people.
What you realize in graduate school is it takes 5 of these luminaries (who've been at it for collectively 100 years more than you) to come up with questions to stump you. You gain respect for their hard work, but lose the fear of their superiority.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 20, 2009 6:07:53 AM
what could "placebo" possibly mean in this context? placebo has a specific meaning. it does not mean, for instance, "the wrong drug", or "an ineffective drug", but it means "no active ingredient at all."
i worked hard in college and learned many things that i would otherwise not have learned. i bet that if i had not gone to college, i would have worked hard and learned many different things. twenty years later i am not completely convinced that i did the best thing.
however, there was an active ingredient, so it was not a placebo. dictionary definition. end of story.
Posted by: babar at Jul 20, 2009 6:17:47 AM
I think the active ingredient is the potential you already bring with you in your own mind triggered by the act of receiving the treatment. In that sense, this is the perfect analogy to education.
The comments over at Ben's site seem to have regressed quickly into technical versus liberal arts education. I'm one who thinks everyone would benefit greatly from a liberal arts degree (heavy on psych and economics), an engineering degree, and a medical degree. However, I'm one of the few people I talk to who sees education as a cost. Most others view it as a benefit in itself. So, we'll be stuck with this system for a long time.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 20, 2009 6:41:58 AM
@andrew: in that case, what kind of educational or psychosocial intervention would you not consider as a placebo?
(i don't disagree with your points in the second paragraph. i just have a problem with the framing around the word 'placebo'. when i see that it doesn't mean 20 different things to 20 different people, i'll concede.)
Posted by: babar at Jul 20, 2009 7:23:09 AM
Well, I think that's the trick. That's why they test treatments against a placebo, because we can't separate the two effects. We don't know what's not placebo, only what is placebo.
I think the last 4 years of grad school is the pure placebo. No classes, self-education, if you can't get it done yourself at that point you aren't going to. Noone is qualified to teach you anything more.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 20, 2009 7:31:24 AM
What do you mean "maybe"? I sure as hell never learned anything in school.
Posted by: Lennart Regebro at Jul 20, 2009 7:38:57 AM
In psychology, a placebo for Freudian psychoanalysis is going into an office and having a conversation about your life outside of a strict framework.
So the placebo for higher education would depend on what you thought the purpose of education was. Traditionally, education is supposed to result in your being qualified to do things you otherwise would not be, and more effective at doing certain other things. So a placebo for that would be to go and learn useless stuff.
One way that "learning useless stuff" might look approaches a certain type of liberal arts education, the intent of which is really to make you a well rounded person (etc.).
Whatever... I'll have to read the book.
Posted by: alesh at Jul 20, 2009 8:12:53 AM
yes -- the last two to four or so years of graduate school are placebo, and the accreditation/degree is a placebo from the point of view of a prospective / actual employer.
but i would not go much farther than that.
thinking about it, the last two to four years of graduate school are more like a job than education.
there are plenty of treatments that we do not test against placebos, often for good reasons. that leaves us with less proof.
Posted by: babar at Jul 20, 2009 8:14:58 AM
What we badly need are alternative certification systems so we can actually experiment with different approaches to educational 'treatment'. As it stands, it doesn't matter if education is no more effective than a placebo -- since the only way to become certifiable 'cured' of your ignorance is to take the standard course of educational treatment.
Posted by: Slocum at Jul 20, 2009 8:15:23 AM
Public school is a placebo, as are many non-technical university educations. If we shut every public school in America and closed half or two-thirds of the universities, the country would lose nothing and might even increase the overall level of knowledge. Too much of education in America is like the Wizard of Oz handing the Scarecrow a piece of paper. Still no brain.
Posted by: 8 at Jul 20, 2009 9:04:32 AM
Good points babar - placebo is an odd term to use in this context but you get the general idea.
First consider that "formal education" should really be about learning how to think - developing an effective method for creating meaning from experience. This happens informally but often less effeciently just by living life so the "placebo effect" of formal education makes some sense. A placebo may have no active ingredient but often produces the desired results. So taking the placebo may just trick your mental state to be more open to the idea of self healing (or learning?) - more of a motivational device.
Posted by: CB at Jul 20, 2009 9:13:56 AM
"I think the last 4 years of grad school is the pure placebo. No classes, self-education, if you can't get it done yourself at that point you aren't going to."
Not a placebo -- a test to determine whether you can handle the relatively undirected world of academia. If you prove you can (by finishing), then you get to find a job in the field. From that perspective it's kind of brilliant, although I doubt it evolved for that reason.
Posted by: Eric at Jul 20, 2009 9:13:59 AM
With some exceptions, this is true. There are a few items in a K-12 education that are truly important and you should learn, and a few specific educational scenarios in higher education where it is vital, but other than that, it's just there to make people feel good, but is basically useless.
The problem is that unlike placebo medication, placebo education has some negative effects. If you are convinced that you earned a valuable highschool/college/masters diploma, you may feel as if many employment opportunities are beneath you, and be unwilling to accept them -- even though the very fact that your education was rather placebo-esque probably makes you unqualified for more prestigious positions.
Posted by: Brian Moore at Jul 20, 2009 9:49:18 AM
Placebo is not nothing. It is the inherent ability of your own body that requires a psychological catalyst. That's why this relates to education. That's why it especially relates to grad school because most people who haven't been assume you are getting an education. My advisor has said about me that I am good because I already know what I want to do (and can do it without much if any, and in fact despite, direction). That's odd, but is perfectly natural to him, though he would not consider the education he is 'giving' me to be a placebo.
It is also distinct from but related to the signaling effect of education. If you get a good job, you must have gotten an education, right?
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 20, 2009 9:59:56 AM
Eric: In mathematics, at least, the professorate explicitly mold the PhD program partly as a test of capability. I mean this in the active and current tense.
Posted by: Right Wing-nut at Jul 20, 2009 10:01:11 AM
The terrifying conclusion?
I call Overzealous Signaling.
How can you be afraid of something like the status quo?
Posted by: newerspeak at Jul 20, 2009 10:09:59 AM
Surely the stuff that Alan Sokal parodied with his famous hoax is the placebo. We can compare folks who have received this essentially content-free education to, say, engineering graduates.
And you know what? In the end, those students are not so badly off. They've "learned how to learn". Like medieval theologians in arcane disputations about angels dancing on the head of a pin, or debating club participants arguing a facetious topic just for fun, they've gone through a sort of mental gymnastics that gets the neurons working. If you run a marathon, you get the same exercise whether you actually go from point A to point B or you run around in circles on a track and end up exactly where you started.
Posted by: anonymous at Jul 20, 2009 10:41:41 AM
Tyler's statement:
"Placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo."
and Casnocha's statement:
"If you want your headache to go away, it doesn't matter if you take real Advil or just something that looks and tastes like Advil -- the outcome is the same. The Placebo effect works."
represent grave misunderstandings of the placebo in biomedical research. Forgive me for not taking the word of economics folks that the debate is closed on an actively debated question in the biomedical community. Can we have a list of these "supposedly effective medicines" that are not better than placebo?
"This view was notably challenged when in 2001 a systematic review of clinical trials concluded that there was no evidence of clinically important effects, except perhaps in the treatment of pain and continuous subjective outcomes." (From the Wikipedia entry on the placebo effect Casnocha cites in the statement above)
"Outperforming" also needs to be clarified. In general, placebos do very well in treating the subjective symptoms of a condition (e.g., perceived pain), but due nothing to treat the underlying cause (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis).
Posted by: the rugbyologist at Jul 20, 2009 11:02:11 AM
Considering I've only been a victim of crime while in school, the FDA would deem it neither safe nor effective.
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 20, 2009 11:04:57 AM
@andrew, @right wing nut
my phd is in mathematics. the last three or four years of it were largely spent chasing theoretical results with little help from my advisor. he suggested papers for me to read; he made some key introductions. i my experience was by and large as intended. the system was set up to see if i could cut it (both psychologically and intellectually). academic mathematics departments are not known for behing humane.
was it a placebo? in the @andrew sense it was, because i was completely under my own direction and the only thing the institution provided was a purposely vague context and a small stipend. and in the @andrew sense it was very valuable to me, because i learned a lot from the experience. i was working on problems that required more brain work than real world problems tend to. it helped me harness my unruly brain. i learned some math too.
i think though that there is a sense that "placebo" means something different to the rest of the world. if it's just a placebo, why do it at all? well, i answered the question above. if it is a placebo, do it because the psychological catalyst (@andrew's words) works.
but then the question to ask is "how can we use the placebo effect in education to make people more (fill in objective of education)."
fwiw, by my own choice, i didn't go on to academic employment. another story.
Posted by: babar at Jul 20, 2009 11:10:38 AM
'The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo.'
Never heard of the unschooling movement? You need to get around more. But at the extreme I think this can fail (especially if combined with an abecedarian culture that activeley despises learning). I am pretty driven to teach myself stuff but even so I learned my multiplication tables in grade school like just about everyone else.
Posted by: bbartlog at Jul 20, 2009 11:11:04 AM
"Not a placebo -- a test to determine whether you can handle the relatively undirected world of academia."
This sounds like post hoc rationalization to me. Also, the diversity of training belies this. Are there guidelines on how little direction to give students? No, of course not. And some of my classmates quit for too much hectoring. In reality, students are the guinea pigs for professor trial-and-error and tenure evaluation for new professors and indentured servitude for tenured professors. Either way, neither of these are what people generally think of when entering educational training (that you will get neither an education or training that you don't give yourself, whether it is described as for your own edification, or whether it is on your back the system progresses.)
The real question is why Tyler provides the conclusion, if he does, reluctantly.
I also didn't realize he was a behavioral economist. Are we all behavioral economists now?
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 20, 2009 12:19:11 PM
"If you want your headache to go away, it doesn't matter if you take real Advil or just something that looks and tastes like Advil"
The nature of this claim alone is enough to put me off anything else said. As a biomedical researcher with a silly number of post-graduate hours and who works closely with a number of universities, this entire conversation has the whiff of intellectual arrogance. (And of being too cute with semantics.)
Posted by: MPO at Jul 20, 2009 12:20:14 PM
Does this remind anyone else of the Wizard of Oz?
Posted by: Floccina at Jul 20, 2009 12:37:11 PM
For some people, I think education is an anti-placebo in the sense that they graduate with a degree and think they are educated, and therefore stop really thinking and learning. I've known a number of people like this. They get their liberal arts degree, get a job, and spend the rest of their lives watching TV and playing sports and socializing and in general doing very little actual learning. But they've sure got strong opinions about the world, and think they are far more educated than they really are.
And the truth of the matter is that if all you know is what you learned in the curriculum of a 4-year degree, you are ignorant.
When I think about the most educated people I know, a number of them either didn't go to college, or didn't graduate from college. Those people knew they had to learn on their own, and learning became a lifelong activity. My grandmother was very smart, but her economic circumstance prevented her from going to college. So instead, she spent the rest of her life reading, taking classes when she could, and in general improving her knowledge of the world.
As for K-12 education. It's mostly babysitting and socialization. My daughter could read and write fluently by the time she went into grade one. She's been far ahead of the curriculum at all times. When she brings her studies home, I spend about as much time correcting the godawful material the school gives her and writing letters to her teacher to correct the teacher's incorrect material than I do on helping my daughter understand the concepts she's learning in school.
Stats for achievement in school show that one of the biggest predictive factors for child achievement is the level of engagement of the parents. To me, that's evidence that the schools themselves aren't doing the job. Obviously, good parents are always going to be better than bad ones, but if the schools really were educating the children, the level of parent involvement shouldn't be quite as important as it appears to be.
Posted by: Dan H. at Jul 20, 2009 3:37:13 PM
