Contra Cowen, competency-based & on-line school seem to me to offer worse signals of future job performance, and so would not beat existing school plans in an open fair competition. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/02/signal-inertia.html …https://twitter.com/MargRev/status/966727303693615104 …
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Replying to @robinhanson
That is not what I claim, though, only that such forms will dominate *if* Caplanian signaling is the dominant motive...
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Replying to @tylercowen
But I don't see
@bryan_caplan as saying school is mainly about signaling learning. He says school signals smarts, care, & conformity. Competency-based & online learning don't obviously show those features better.1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes -
Replying to @robinhanson @bryan_caplan
BC wants to have it both ways. The more complex the signaling story gets, the harder it is to do it another way, and we are back to a kind of semi-efficiency.
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Bryan's primary thesis is "School is not forming human capital and groups with more school won't do collectively better." You can't refute that by saying "School is socially efficient signaling, there's no simple way for a society to allow stronger signals at lower cost."
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @tylercowen and
That is: Even if signaling future job performance is a social good (which it would be at zero cost), it's not the same social good as human capital formation (which is supposed to be a very large social good allowing your country to create a higher grade of stuff and services).
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky @tylercowen and
It's also possible for signaling to burn most of the gains from trade in a negative-sum way. If the trade surplus from employment is $100,000 and the use to the employer of a strong signal is $10,000, then the future employee is still motivated to burn $90k to send this signal.
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That is certainly not how the standard model works. It's about escaping pooling rather than full rent exhaustion.
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Our models of school, college, and health care all seem like they would benefit from a model of rent exhaustion if one were available. Absent the human-capital story, what's the story for **$1T** of student loans where the trade surplus from employment is *not* being chewed up?
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