A central problem in philosophy is to describe what consciousness is and where it comes from. It seems at first like a difficult or even impossible task, because the thoughts and feelings that make up our experience seem to live outside the physical world. Many people think that the feeling of hearing music is not fully described by the interaction of atoms, even if the arrangement of the atoms in our brain somehow generates that feeling. Therefore, the argument goes, consciousness is outside the reach of physical sciences. Here are a couple of quotes from adherents of this view:

“I think that there are certain features of bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain … you won’t have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy.”

— Frank Jackson, Author of The Qualia Problem

“Many of us think we can explain things like trees, rocks, motion, planets, etc, in terms of more fundamental physical things. We can reduce these things to lower level physical things. Once you’ve got all the atoms in the right place, the right forces in motion, you have a rock. There’s nothing else left to say–a particular rock is nothing more than these things appropriately arranged. Consciousness on the other hand, is irreducible–it cannot be reduced to just lower level descriptions of this sort. If you try, inevitably you’ll leave something out.”

— Winsaucerer, Commenter on Hacker News

This viewpoint makes up a comfortable majority on the internet. Unfortunately, it’s wrong. And this isn’t one of those debates where everyone can speculate but no one can really know. Rather, consciousness is in the same category as religion. Just as a person who is reasonably smart and really wants to know the truth about religion will become 100% certain of atheism,¹ so will a similar person become 100% certain about consciousness. The nature of consciousness is one of those rare questions that is both controversial and easy to answer from first principles.

The Answer

The correct answer is that consciousness is a purely physical process. Every aspect of a person’s experience is captured by physical information. An advanced scientist would be able to explain how consciousness arises out of simpler physical patterns, and ultimately out of the basic physical laws.

To see this, the key is to note that our vocal cords, being made up of matter, are governed entirely by the physical laws. So whenever someone says something out loud, we can fully explain why he said it using only those laws.

In particular, suppose a person pinches himself and contemplates the resulting sensation. He says, “Clearly, this awareness of pain can’t be reduced to the movements of material things.” In this case too, we can explain why he said that using only the rules that govern the movement of matter.

Actually this applies every time someone writes or types or speaks a claim that consciousness has non-material aspects. All of these actions are physical movements, so they can be explained completely in terms of physical machinery. And moreover, if we zoom in on that machinery, we can see why these claims have to be made. The physical world, with nothing extra thrown in, necessitates that people will claim certain aspects of their experience to be non-material, and it gives a satisfying, purely physical explanation for why they do.

Now imagine we have fully absorbed this explanation. We can see why these claims about consciousness are an inevitable consequence of the way our brains are wired. We can see why the laws of physics, mechanistically applied, cause people to say that consciousness is not reducible to the laws of physics. We might want to object that there is more to consciousness beyond any such mechanisms, but we even understand the physical mechanism that drives us to make that objection.

At this point, all of our observations about consciousness have been explained from a physical perspective. Thanks to Occam’s Razor, we’re done: There’s no need to bloat the explanation by adding in anything else.

This is completely convincing, and nothing more is required to conclude that consciousness is a purely physical process. But in fact the argument gets even a little stronger than this. When someone says there are non-physical aspects to his experience, not only are such aspects unnecessary to explain why he’s saying that, but in fact they couldn’t be why he’s saying that. If he were really talking about something non-physical, then it couldn’t have influenced his purely physical vocal cords, so he couldn’t have talked about it!

Mary’s Room

When you argue that consciousness is a purely physical process, people often bring up Mary’s Room. In this thought experiment, Mary has spent her life in a room where everything is black and white. However, she’s incredibly smart and has read all about the physical processes that occur when a human brain perceives color. The question is, when she leaves the room and finally sees color for herself, does she learn something new from the experience? And if she does, then doesn’t that mean there is some aspect of experiencing color that can’t be boiled down to physical information?

My feeling on Mary’s Room is that she very likely does learn something new when she sees color for the first time. However, it’s easy to explain this without resorting to anything non-physical.

For example, Mary’s brain may be organized in such a way that it’s able to recall prior sensory inputs, but not simulate completely new ones.² In that case, seeing a color would teach her how to imagine seeing that color, but no amount of reading would teach her how to imagine seeing a color that hasn’t come in through her eyes.

To be concrete about it, suppose Mary is shown the color green. Now if someone asks her to imagine seeing a green leaf, she can more accurately place her brain in a state that would follow that event, because she can draw upon her new memory of green. We would say she has learned what it’s like to see green.

Of course, Mary knew in advance how her brain would react to seeing green. She knew the state her brain would be in afterwards, and she understood how it would store and access its memory of green. But just knowing about a brain state doesn’t give her the power to induce it. Even though Mary knew what types of brain states are capable of imagining seeing green, maybe the only way to reach such a state was to let green light into her eyes. In that case, all her reading would not have helped.³

With that, we have a reasonable explanation for Mary’s Room, and we were not tempted to leave our purely physical context. We probably made some wrong guesses about how Mary’s brain works, but that’s fine. The point is just that it’s possible for a purely physical Mary to learn something new by seeing color, which means Mary’s Room doesn’t undermine physical consciousness.

I now owe a slight apology to Frank Jackson, whom I previously quoted. I actually agree with the second half of his quote:

“Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain … you won’t have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy.”

Like Mary trying to understand color, I doubt he could learn what those states are like by being told. But that’s a technical detail about the architecture of his brain. It doesn’t mean we must embrace magic and say things like this:

“I think there are certain features of bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes.”

Throw Out Consciousness?

Given that so many people allege a non-material aspect to consciousness, and no such thing exists, it’s tempting to throw out the term consciousness entirely. We could say that feeling jealousy and seeing the color red are neural processes, and anyone who tries to claim more by injecting a mystically tinged word like consciousness is confused. I’ve even heard one person say, “I don’t believe in consciousness.”

I disagree with this framing. Our perceptions are fully explained by the laws of physics, but they’re not imaginary. We do experience thoughts and feelings, and that’s a fascinating condition that distinguishes us from most parts of the universe. This phenomenon deserves its own word, and consciousness captures the main idea.

That being said, while I think the word consciousness should stick around, a good 90% of the reverence surrounding it should be thrown out. Once you internalize the consequences of consciousness being purely physical, you realize that a lot of the discussion around it is over-the-top. People treat it as though it holds a more special place in the universe than it actually does.

For example, it should be universally understood that there will never be a natural way to quantify “amount of consciousness in a system,” in contrast with things like heat and entropy. Nor will there be a natural way to define consciousness that perfectly distinguishes between conscious and non-conscious systems. Those beliefs might make sense if consciousness was a distortion in some kind of ethereal field, since in that case you could measure how much the field was being distorted, or if it was being distorted at all. But a purely physical consciousness is a loose concept like friendship. Nobody expects the universe to give us a mathematical criterion for whether two people are friends, and it will not give us one for whether a block of matter is conscious.

There should also be no attempts made to link consciousness to fundamental physics. I once saw a physicist claim that certain particles alter their behavior based on whether they’ve been observed by a conscious entity. Even knowing nothing about physics, I was able to dismiss that claim immediately and with absolute certainty. Consciousness is a high-level process in the brain, and tiny particles do not care about it any more than they care about Alzheimer’s Disease.

Similarly, there is no reason to assume that the brain uses exotic physics to implement consciousness, above and beyond what is used for other bodily functions.

Finally, there should be no speculation that inanimate objects like tables or atoms may be conscious. We can see why humans evolved machinery related to consciousness: We benefit from being able to process sensory information, think about things, and be aware of the world around us. We can also see how the different machines in the brain contribute to consciousness by watching how our consciousness is affected when they’re damaged. But there’s no analogous evolutionary history or computing machinery in tables. To say that a table is conscious is like saying it’s secretly simulating games of Tic-Tac-Toe; there’s no reason it would be doing so and no clear mechanism by which it could. It may be possible to conclude that a table is simulating Tic-Tac-Toe games by viewing it through some pathological lens, but that is not a natural or useful way to interpret the situation.

I could continue this list, but we would be here for a while. Consciousness is a concept that provokes an endless stream of wrong and not-even-wrong ideas. I know that I’m not at all uncommon for having figured out the correct answer on consciousness, and that it has been evident to a lot of people from the time the issue was first discussed. But nevertheless, it’s one of those issues where the rest of the population is not receptive to logic, which means it will always generate controversy. I’m sure there will still be people writing versions of this essay in a hundred years.

The post The Correct Answer on Consciousness appeared first on Nik Noble.

Its purpose is to see how well you can do on a test that you’re completely unprepared for.

Some would say it’s impossible to do well on an exam without knowing the material, no matter how good you are at taking tests. If that’s true, then everyone will fail the Alien Multiple-Choice Test, since no one knows anything about planet Narbvarg. On the other hand, if someone gets a perfect or near-perfect score, it will show that general test-taking strategies can more than make up for a lack of knowledge.

Let’s see what happens!

The Rules

The test starts beneath this paragraph. You may assume it was written by a college professor for an easy general education class. Once you click the button to begin, you should see a 15-minute timer counting down in a gray circle to the right of the screen. The test will end when the timer runs out or you click Finish. At that point, you’ll see your score and the correct answers. Good luck, or as they (probably) say on planet Narbvarg, tackixin sirtex!

The Questions

The post The Alien Multiple-Choice Test appeared first on Nik Noble.

The Best Language

To be clear, I don’t think all languages are a waste of time. In fact, there’s one that I’m honored to study. The language I’m talking about transcends cultural differences and geography. It plays a pivotal role in science and business worldwide. It’s perhaps the most fundamental and powerful method humans have to communicate.

You might think that I’m talking about math, and it’s true that I would rather learn the language of the universe than the language of Mexico. But no, the language I’m talking about—the language of revolutionary academic papers, bestselling novels, and all the world’s wealthiest companies—is English.

The value of English can’t be overstated. If you don’t speak English and you want to achieve something great, you should devote all your resources to learning it. But I got lucky and was born into it. For a native English speaker like me, spending time on a second language offers little additional benefit, and it even feels like squandering some of my good luck.

I’m not saying that English is better designed than other languages, only that it’s spoken by more people and in more important places. For example, if I wanted to work at Google’s headquarters to build the inventions of the future, English would help me, and Spanish would not. If I wanted to write an article to sway the opinions of the most powerful people in the world, English would give me more reach than Spanish.

People rarely say that English is the best language—they think it sounds insensitive—but the numbers show that they agree. In 2019, English is the most widely spoken language in the world, with about 1.13 billion speakers. However, when you only count native speakers, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish both beat English by a huge margin. This means that the dominance of English is a result of people choosing to learn it. They recognize its high value in comparison to other languages.

English is the best language for anyone to learn, but the calculation is even simpler if you’re planning to spend your entire life in the United States. As an American going into technology, I will probably never need to speak Spanish with anyone in my life. For me, English is the only language with any value. (And even if I do decide to move to a Spanish-speaking country, I would prefer to study the language then, when I know it will be useful to me, rather than preparing now for a 1-in-a-1000 outcome.)

All that said, if we set the practical usefulness of English and Spanish aside and compare them based only on which is better designed, I will admit that the edge goes to Spanish. The beauty of Spanish, as my classes have taught me, is that you can almost always tell how a word is pronounced by reading it and how it is spelled by hearing it. Spanish speakers don’t have debates like car-mul vs. care-a-mel and see-rup vs. sur-up. And the Spanish pronunciation of “quinoa” is much less arguable than the English pronunciation. (The English pronunciation is kwin-oh-uh, and I will say so to any vegan.)

On the other hand, English is miles better designed than Mandarin—an absolute train wreck of a language which has literally set back the Chinese economy. Each Mandarin word is written as a different character, and the characters aren’t built up from an alphabet of letters with set pronunciations. This means that pronouncing an unfamiliar written word is largely guesswork, even for a fluent speaker. It also makes typing difficult; how do you fit the thousands of characters onto a keyboard? Written Mandarin was so unworkable that in the 1950s, the Chinese government developed an alphabet for the language called Pinyin, which resembles English and tries to solve the typing and pronunciation problems.

I guess that I have learned something by being forced to think about languages. But let’s just say that after my first semester of Intermediate Google Translate, when they asked me to share some weak points of the course, a few came to mind.

Quote from my (hopefully anonymous) review:

English is the language of science and the language of commerce. Spanish (like German, French, Chinese, etc.) is a party trick that American travelers use to impress their friends while abroad.

It’s a tragedy that English-speaking engineers and scientists are required to waste time learning a second-rate language that they will rarely use. And that’s assuming a language can actually be learned over a few semesters of college—which of course it can’t. Classes like this set society back by using up time that aspiring professionals could otherwise use to master their craft.

Can I Learn Spanish?

My review brings us to an important point. Before we can discuss whether we should teach Spanish, we first need to ask whether we even can. The answer, obviously, is no. No one has ever learned Spanish by sitting through it in college.

I recently mentioned to my roommate that I’m taking Spanish. It turns out he’s a native speaker, so he hit me with a question at 300 miles per minute. He might as well have told me to go fuck myself (and maybe he did). When I finally stopped blinking and admitted I knew nothing about Spanish, he snorted smugly. He probably gets a kick out of doing that to every innocent STEM major who is pressed into studying the language of his ancestors.

To be fair, even though I can’t understand spoken Spanish, I can occasionally make some sense of the written language. But I doubt I’ll be able to in three years. Even the Spanish department at my university seems to agree that their lessons have an expiration date. Their syllabuses strongly discourage us from taking a semester off in between classes, in case the tiny bit of knowledge we accumulate vanishes over six months without practice.

It’s not my fault that my Spanish abilities are so weak and fleeting. I do most of the homework and get top scores on the tests. And I think I have a better-than-average talent for picking up languages. For example, when I read a piece of writing, I almost always absorb the author’s style, whether I want to or not.

I once read a story called Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. It was twenty-nine pages of this:

I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study. My blind inveteracy returned. Was there any other thing in which I could procure myself to be ignominiously repulsed by this lean, penniless wight?—my hired clerk? What added thing is there, perfectly reasonable, that he will be sure to refuse to do?

Ick.

But when I finished the story, I realized that my inner thoughts were entirely in that voice. I was unable to think a modern-sounding sentence. I was so impressed at how accurately I was matching the tone of the story that I thought, Wow, it’s amazing how good I am at picking up writing styles. But I was still under the influence of Herman Melville, so I didn’t think it exactly like that. Instead, I thought, Every man must permit himself one immodesty.

I actually permit myself several immodesties, if I’m being totally honest, but the point of that anecdote is that language comes naturally to me. So if my Spanish knowledge is nonexistent after a year of classes, I find it hard to imagine that any of my classmates are approaching proficiency.

No doubt you can become good at a language by spending time in a place where it’s spoken. I’ve seen the massive difference that sort of immersion makes for students who have studied abroad. But if you just want to show up to Spanish class and do the assignments, like you would for any other class, I don’t think it’s possible to learn the language. Spanish class on its own does not teach Spanish.

Opening Our Minds with Baseball

One argument people make for mandatory Spanish classes is that knowing the language, even just a bit of it, opens the doors to rewarding experiences you couldn’t have otherwise had. They say you won’t necessarily need Spanish to achieve your goals (the way English is a strict prerequisite for communicating in important venues), but you can still find a lot of personal fulfillment and new ideas by reading Spanish literature or interacting with Spanish speakers in their native language.

This is the argument people make for every required gen-ed class. It boils down to, “I like this subject, so you should have to study it.”

I’m at college to learn math and programming skills that will help me in my chosen pursuits. Occasionally, I may take a class with no obvious use to me just because I’m interested in the topic. But I shouldn’t have to study a subject that is neither practical nor interesting to me just because it’s interesting to someone else.

For example, I could say that an understanding of baseball opens the doors to rewarding experiences you couldn’t have otherwise had, so art majors should have to take a few courses on baseball and its history.

It’s true that baseball has been a big source of fulfillment for many people. Maybe I could say that the friendships I’ve made in my local rec league have been some of the best of my life, and as a naturally non-sporty person, being able to discuss the game with strangers has exposed me to a major part of our culture that would otherwise have been hidden. Baseball broadens your horizons and is just plain fun.

And if one of our art majors objects that baseball isn’t for her, well how would she know? She hasn’t tried studying it yet. She should at least get some exposure, so that path is open to her if she changes her mind.

This is fundamentally the same as the argument that STEM majors should have to take foreign language: “I like baseball, so you should have to study it.” Who knows, if universities were run by former MLB pitchers instead of disgruntled hippies, I might really be complaining about my baseball classes.

Making someone study something they don’t need just because you find it rewarding is hugely arrogant, but it’s also ineffective. If students aren’t interested in a subject, they probably won’t experience its benefits no matter how much time you make them spend. They’ll get through the classes as painlessly as possible, seeking out the easiest professors and doing the bare minimum on assignments, and then they’ll graduate and forget everything they learned. That art major won’t join a rec league or banter about last night’s game with her Uber driver. Most STEM majors won’t move to a Spanish-speaking country, and we won’t try to read Spanish novels. Even if my university moves Heaven and Earth to successfully teach me Spanish, despite my disinterest and the sheer difficulty of learning a language, I won’t use it to explore a new culture, so I won’t get any of the supposedly mind-expanding benefits.

Then again, some people say that learning a place’s language is, on its own, enough to give you insight into the culture—as though pronunciation and sentence structure are windows into the soul. Well, if it’s true that someone’s pronunciation can be used to judge his inner character, then I have bad news for the people who call quinoa keen-wa. Dress light for the afterlife.

Like a Rocket Ship for Your IQ

If foreign languages are relatively useless compared to English, and if they can’t be effectively taught, then it’s hard to see why people in unrelated fields should be required to study them. But some proponents of mandatory foreign language classes don’t care about practical use. They claim that the mere act of studying a foreign language makes you smarter—whether or not you reach proficiency or end up using the language—and that’s reason enough to require it. Apparently, they would consider Elvish from Lord of the Rings a valid language choice.

To be fair, a class that meaningfully boosts your intelligence would be a vital help to anyone pursuing a STEM career, so it would make sense for it to be a required part of a STEM degree. I just don’t think that learning a foreign language makes you significantly smarter. In fact, as far as I can tell, it could even be harmful.

If I could snap my fingers and immediately be fluent in Spanish, I don’t even know that I would. What if I start primarily associating pencils with the word lápiz, so it takes me an extra millisecond to recall their English name? What if I find myself wanting to use a Spanish expression with no English equivalent, so I stumble in a conversation? Since English is the only language I use to communicate, anything that slows down my English by even a sliver effectively reduces my verbal intelligence.

On the other hand, there may be some small benefit to knowing multiple expressions for the same idea. Maybe now I think of this thing as a pencil, but if I also knew it as a lápiz and a bleistift, then I would stop associating it strongly with any word, and I would just think of it as a long, yellow thing that writes. Maybe the underlying concept would be a little clearer if it wasn’t so tightly attached to English. (There’s a similar idea in machine learning. Often, a single machine learning model has a lot of random quirks, but when you take the average of a bunch of models, their quirks cancel out and you get a more accurate picture of reality.)

But advantages like that, even if they’re real, aren’t substantial enough to justify requiring foreign language classes. We could describe comparable supposed advantages for pretty much any non-required activity. Meditating focuses your thoughts. Chatting with people boosts your emotional intelligence and teaches you to see things from different perspectives. Even playing videogames improves your spatial awareness and communication.

My point is that most mental tasks can be argued to make you smarter in some way, and the arguments for studying foreign language don’t seem exceptionally strong. If my Spanish class were made optional, whatever the students choose to do in its place would probably be of similar benefit, and they would give it more effort because they actually want to do it.

For example, I know exactly what I would do if I didn’t have to go to Spanish class. I would attend a math club that meets at the same time.

Actually, the club starts a little earlier, so I can usually stop by for a few minutes before Spanish, and I can see what topics I’ll be missing out on while I’m conjugating verbs in my $150 workbook. After a few of those brief visits to the math club, I realized something funny. I could now make a list of useful things I don’t know because of Spanish, and it would be longer than the list of useful things I do know because of Spanish.

Maybe one day I’ll really make those lists, set them side-by-side, and contemplate the value of a college education.

The post Spanish Is a Waste of Time appeared first on Nik Noble.

Philosophy professors ask this question: If you could have a job where you were ill-paid but saw your work contributing value to the world, or a job where you were paid well but all your work was burned at the end of each day, which would you choose? The students discuss the different kinds of reward, apply the ideas to their own lives, and gain a greater understanding of why others might choose differently.

High school is the worst of both worlds. The “work” is completely unpaid and completely useless to the world. Those “rebellious” teens are a pretty compliant bunch, by and large, and so most of them will do as they’re told … but some of them itch.

Humans, including young humans, aren’t happy when useless. The kids sink what energy they have left into finding ways to do things, make things, to contribute something real. They form bands, bake pies, and create game extensions. They develop skills in their free time. Since humans also aren’t happy when broke, some of them hope to use those skills to earn.

They’re not allowed. Until they’ve reached a certain age ― 16 in most of the US ― they’re considered “child labor,” unable even to ask for a job without a special youth worker permit. Even then, there are special restrictions for those younger than 18 which still put them at a disadvantage.

I interviewed three young job-seekers. I asked them why they wanted jobs, when they didn’t yet have living expenses.

“Abby” told me that she wanted to save up money against college expenses. Why rack up debt, when she could save in advance? She’s not exactly challenged and exhausted by her high school load, so would like to use some of her energy to work towards her future.

“Ben” laughed. He said relying on his parents might be okay if they were willing to give him infinite money for the rest of his life, and pointed out that when he needs a job, he’ll be in a better position if he already has work experience. The money would be nice, but what he really wants are those first resume entries.

TheRealbek (identified by his Reddit handle, as requested) would like to start a business. He has a doable and marketable idea, but his parents declined to front the startup costs. He understands that this is their right, and so decided to earn the startup money himself.

One of the interesting points here is that every one of them is focusing on the future. None of them mentioned video games, clothes, or other frivolities on which many assume the young would fritter away their money.

I asked my three interviewees about the idea that young people could best prepare for their futures by focusing on school. Abby reminded me that she already focused on school as far as the material allowed. Ben was amused by the idea that academic study would somehow prepare him for working better than actually working would. TheRealbek told me that young people should focus on school, but not to the exclusion of directly useful skills, and also mentioned that allowing young people to earn money could let them pay for more education ― a point Abby had mentioned earlier ― as well as letting them learn how to handle money.

Again, I’m struck by the future time orientation. None of them want to drop out because they’re too cool for school. Two explicitly mentioned that they valued education, and the third had nothing against it. They don’t want to quit school to work ― they want to finish school and work. Why do we make it so hard?

The idea of “child labor” conjures up the dreadful specter of small children chained to looms, but that’s not what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing young adults aged 12-15 who would like part-time jobs slinging fries ― a task most twelve-year-olds could perform safely and adequately. So why don’t we let them?

The real reason isn’t to push them into school. By the time the US heavily regulated child labor in 1938, industrial child labor was already largely gone and most kids already went to school. The real impetus was that the country was struggling with the Great Depression and its stratospheric unemployment rate. Previous attempts to outlaw children’s jobs were struck down by courts, but when adults wanted those jobs, we all suddenly changed our minds. When they couldn’t push all the children out through market forces alone, they simply banned the practice. Kids can’t vote.

This has proven to be a bad thing for the kids. You see, our culture had already changed over to the idea that kids shouldn’t work. Once that happened, the only kids still working were those who genuinely wanted jobs and a few who genuinely needed them.

Taking away the jobs didn’t take away the would-be workers. There are still young people who want or need income, but since their efforts to seek it have been banned, they must now turn to unreliable cash-under-the-table jobs or the black market.

We should relax child labor laws. My three interview subjects are not in dire straits, but they all have valid reasons to desire paid employment. We banned both the youngest and the oldest workers when jobs were terrifyingly scarce, but we let the oldsters opt back in when times had eased. The youngsters have been locked out for almost a century. Is it right to prevent them from starting their futures?

There are other young people who need the right to work for their own immediate well-being and safety. There are kids in bad families who are capable of taking care of themselves if the rest of us would let them. By what right do we demand that they focus on their studies and not worry about money? How do we rationalize this as protecting them?

The right to work, to exchange our labor for goods, is a basic human right. As such, it should be accorded to anyone capable of making use of it. To do otherwise is irrational, unfair, and sometimes permanently harmful for the targets of our so-called protection.

This is a guest post written by the owner of Exit Rights.

Exit Rights is a blog on the most vital youth right: the right to leave bad homes and schools.

http://exitrights.net

The post Kids Should Have the Right to Work appeared first on Nik Noble.

A crowd of people on a grassy slope was listening to a concert down below. Most of them were sprawled out on the ground or on picnic blankets, but one shirtless man was dancing intensely to the music. He paid no attention to the people around him.

All over the hill, concertgoers recorded the dancing guy on their phones and giggled about him. Every now and then, someone would walk up beside him and join in as a joke. But the stares were obviously uncomfortable for the newcomers. They kept glancing back at their friends to make sure it was still funny, and they quickly left.

Finally, someone more persistent joined in. He swayed and waved his arms with the dancing guy for what felt like minutes, mimicking his moves and drawing even more eyes to the area. Then another dancer appeared. People turned and laughed and watched the three of them. It was another twenty seconds before two more arrived.

After that, the hill seemed to melt as people ran down it from all directions. Almost immediately, the dance party was huge. It swallowed some of the people still sitting, who just moments before had been joking with each other about how ridiculous the dancing guy looked. Some of them seemed like they wanted to stay sitting, but they must have felt awkward and out of place among so many people standing, so they reluctantly got to their feet.

If you haven’t seen a video of this, you’ve got to go watch one. Here’s a link to the best angle.

The YouTube comments on that video are fascinating in themselves. Most of them said they had just witnessed a beautiful moment and their faith in humanity had soared. But several said they were disgusted. It’s as if some of the commenters watched a different video.

I can see why most of them thought the video was inspiring. We all felt a flash of triumph as the dancers went from the minority to the majority, and the shirtless guy went from crazy to genius.

But ultimately, I side with the viewers who left that video shaken and disturbed. I was unsettled at the number of people who mocked the lone dancer but rushed to join ten, whose opinions changed in an instant to align with those of the crowd.

And those aspects of human nature extend far beyond dance parties and music festivals.

The Gay Marriage Reversal

If you took a chart of Americans’ support for legalizing gay marriage over time and covered up the labels, it would look like a plot of the percent of people dancing in that 2009 video. It would start off flat at a low percentage and then skyrocket to well over fifty.

To the people who lived through the massive shift in opinion on gay marriage, it seemed to happen overnight.

There were anti-sodomy laws on the books in fourteen U.S. states as recently as 2003. In 2008, fewer than ten of the one hundred U.S. senators publicly supported legalizing same-sex marriage. And in 2012, surveys show that still less than half the country would admit to favoring legalization.

Now, same-sex marriage is recognized in all fifty states. It’s celebrated in movies and TV shows. It has become socially risky to suggest that the change was for the worse. And even the religious, some of the staunchest enemies of the policy just a decade ago, are going soft on the issue. You can’t sit through a Catholic mass anymore without the priest subtly implying that same-sex unions are a minor or irrelevant sin, in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Vatican and the words of the Bible.

What caused this tidal wave of change? No new facts came to light. God didn’t descend and edit the scriptures. None of the reasons for opposing same-sex marriage were invalidated or weakened. All we can say is that Americans were morally appalled by homosexuality one decade, and they embraced it the next. They discarded their convictions as quickly and carelessly as one throws out a piece of trash, as soon as it was fashionable to do so.

To be clear, I support gay marriage. I think it’s a positive move towards the separation of church and state. But it annoys me that people instantly gave up their opinions when they became unpopular. I can’t respect the millions of Americans who came to my side all at once. Like the wave of late-arriving dancers at that concert, they changed their minds only in response to the crowd around them.

On the other hand, I have total respect for the people who opposed gay marriage when they were commended for it and continue to now that they’re called bigots. They are like the concert attendees who forced themselves to stay sitting as the dance party materialized around them because they had too much dignity to follow the guy they had just laughed at.

But the people who stayed sitting when everyone else got up were few and far between—as uncommon as the people who danced when everyone else was sitting. Instead, most of the concertgoers followed a simple formula. They sat when the majority were sitting, danced when the majority were dancing, and looked strangely at anyone who bucked the trend.

While that approach to dancing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it was downright jarring to watch politicians, celebrities, and our own grandparents apply the same technique to their personal values.

Would You Really Have Hated Slavery?

Not only can the pressure of majority opinion break deeply held convictions about gay marriage; it can even convince reasonable people to support truly brutal ideas.

Today, a lot of people say they would have fought slavery if they had lived in the American South while it was still legal. When I hear that, I usually shake my head.

Really? You would have been a radical abolitionist? You would have faced mockery and insults from your neighbors? You would have been the one person in your peer group who was always on about a stupid, slightly dangerous theory? If you’re so unconcerned with looking crazy, then why don’t you stand on that table for a couple minutes and tap dance?

Then there are those who say they wouldn’t actively oppose slavery, but they would be internally horrified by it.

Again, really? You’re the type of person who disagrees with almost everyone you know about major pillars of society? Please, share with us some of the views you hold that less than a tenth of your city would agree with.

I don’t buy that many of the people alive today would dislike slavery if they were born into a society where it was normal. In fact, we saw how many people spoke up against it when they were born into that society: vanishingly few.

And I’ll go even further. Drop the average 2018 American into 1820 Alabama with all their memories intact, and they’ll lose their antislavery attitudes within a year.

Here’s how they’ll justify it:

“The slave owners I’ve met aren’t cruel like I thought they’d be. They’re just farmers trying to make a living. They genuinely care about their slaves. I’ve heard about some isolated acts of abuse, and those should be stopped of course, but the slaves who are treated well seem content…”

Dance Revolution

Most people only dance when others do, only support gay marriage when others do, and only reject slavery when others do. They like to think they’re arriving at opinions on their own, but really, their opinions are reflections of the sentiments around them. They don’t realize it, but when you ask them what they believe, they just measure the group consensus and report it.

I’ve thought about what I would have done if I were at that festival, and honestly, I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t have been the first or second person to join the dancing guy, but I might have been the third. Or I might have rushed in when there were already twenty and hated myself for it later. I might really have stayed sitting, plastered to my picnic blanket as the party ballooned around me, looking down at my phone to fight the awkwardness. Or, realizing I had missed my chance to support the dancing guy when he needed it, I might have just walked away.

I don’t know which person I would have been at that concert in 2009, but I know who we all should aspire to be. We should aspire to be like the hero of that YouTube video—focused on the music, oblivious to the stares, optionally shirtless, and dancing where no one else will.

The post What We Can Learn from a Shirtless Guy Dancing at a Concert appeared first on Nik Noble.

As you can imagine, I rarely find anyone who agrees with me, but it wasn’t always that way. When I was a teenager and aired that idea among my classmates, I got genuine support.

Once, in a high-school class, a friend told me that his parents had banned him from using his phone. I declared provocatively that I thought minors were the most oppressed group in our society. To my surprise, he answered, “Of course,” without a hint of sarcasm.

Another time, on a bus ride home from a high-school chess tournament, the conversation turned to politics. Looking for a debate, I voiced my theory about minors again. Thinking I had said minorities, the guy across from me started to argue.

“No,” I said. “Minors. Kids.”

Then I got a familiar reply. “Oh, of course.”

Occasionally, when a classroom discussion touched on voting rights or compulsory education, I would make my case in front of everyone and fend off the inevitable rebuttals from the teacher. People rarely came to my aid in those debates—partly because it was uncool to get animated about in-class activities—but sometimes, at the end of the period, a student would get my attention privately and say thanks. They would explain how they had always agreed with me but had never heard anyone make those points out loud.

The people who expressed their support were all similar. Top performers academically. Mature. Quiet. Students who were articulate, but whom I barely recognized because they never spoke in class. Kids who participated in just enough clubs to make universities think they were “involved.” Bored, intelligent people who were biding their time until they could go to good colleges and learn real skills and start their own lives.

By the time I had graduated from high school, I had met so many people like that that I wondered if our country was hiding a massive, invisible coalition of youth rights supporters. I thought that if I just put those ideas out there, then maybe it would spark an outpouring of agreement.

On my second night at college, I put my hypothesis to the test. I told some other freshmen in my dorm building that I had hated K-12 and that I thought kids deserved more freedom. This part of the building was for recipients of a top national scholarship, so I figured that some of them were my people, the ones who sat in the back in high school and always felt like adults, who bristled at living under special restrictions reserved for a quarter of the population.

But I soon found myself in a one-versus-ten debate.

“I was an idiot at fifteen,” one of my opponents argued. “If I had been able to vote then, it would have damaged the country.”

I enjoyed the argument, but it quickly became apparent that no one in college felt kids needed more freedom. The dormant support for youth rights that I had sensed in high school had evaporated without a trace.

In hindsight, it makes sense. I was able to find high schoolers who agreed with me because the policies I was criticizing, like the voting age and compulsory schooling age, affected them personally. People are frustrated when a law treats their group as uniquely incompetent. But as new adults, those laws had no power over us, and they didn’t seem so horrible for treating other people as incompetent.

As night fell outside the dorm building and our discussion grew more lively, I finally found a youth rights issue my opponents could agree with me on. They all acknowledged that the drinking age was too high at twenty-one. They called the law ridiculous and outdated. Interestingly, it was the only restriction we were discussing that still applied to us.

It’s now been a couple of years since we had that dialogue, and the people involved are turning twenty-one. I wouldn’t be surprised if those students who had railed against the drinking age are beginning to see the wisdom of it. If so, their justifications for the policy might sound strangely familiar.

“I was an idiot at eighteen…”

The post When People Stop Caring About Youth Rights appeared first on Nik Noble.

What is it about teaching K-12 that makes our educators so irritable? Their holidays extend for weeks or months. Their job security is maximal. It sounds like an employee’s dream.

If you ask one of them directly, she’ll set aside her Starbucks latte, widen her eyes sarcastically like she’s amazed you even have to ask, and subject you to a rehearsed tirade about how bad she has it. If you’re listening carefully, you may catch a few keywords in the otherwise incoherent deluge of self-pity: standardized tests, paperwork, and administrators.

In this article, we will examine why teachers find those aspects of their job so egregious. We will also conduct a more sober analysis of their working conditions and responsibilities, ultimately confirming what most people already suspect—that teachers are underworked and overpaid.

Teachers Versus Tutors

To understand the difference between teaching and other jobs, it’s helpful to compare teachers to private tutors, the latter being respected professionals who rightly command a premium.

Although tutors are in essentially the same business as teachers, they differ greatly in that they’re held accountable by their students. If their performance is underwhelming in the eyes of the student, their services are terminated. It follows that every employed tutor is performing at least satisfactorily.

On the other hand, K-12 students don’t have the option to leave a teacher. If a teacher is unclear, rude, or uninformed, the students may grumble about it, but she’ll still have a class to teach, and she’ll still collect a paycheck. Even when student evaluations of teachers are elicited, they are almost never considered in calculating raises and firings.

Some teachers like to imagine that they earn their students’ respect, even though they don’t have to. But even the best teachers rely heavily on the fact that their employment is not contingent on student satisfaction. They know that if it were decided tonight students could stop attending their class, then they would arrive tomorrow to an empty classroom.

Allergic to Accountability

Seeing as teachers are not accountable to the direct recipients of their service, where does accountability come from? What tools exist to assess their productivity? Put simply, standardized tests, paperwork, and administrators. Sound familiar? These are the parts of teaching our fictional latte-drinker—like the vast majority of her real-world counterparts—railed most loudly against.

We’re beginning to solve the mystery of the most common teacher whining points. Teachers hate anything that attempts to apply an objective standard to their work. They don’t want their performance to be measured—not by testing their classes, not by having them document their progress on paper, not by sending an administrator to their classroom to observe, and certainly not by querying the dozens of students who receive their teaching for hours each day.

This also explains their near-universal opposition to merit pay. Paying better employees more is such a reasonable concept that in most professions, it isn’t even debated. But if, as teachers claim, we shouldn’t try to distinguish good teachers from bad ones, then we also shouldn’t be making judgements about who deserves higher pay.

This all triggers an obvious objection, which is perhaps best captured in the comedic title of a Dilbert book: Your Accomplishments Are Suspiciously Hard to Verify. If teachers are doing such good work—and they’ll go on for hours about how they are—then why don’t they want it quantified? Why do they push back so hard against any effort to gauge the positive effects of their teaching?

There is a simple explanation for this apparent allergy to accountability. Teachers believe education is a difficult craft, and they are its rare experts. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense for an administrator to evaluate a teacher’s performance, either through paperwork or direct observation, since a non-teacher would struggle to recognize the subtle signs of healthy student learning. And even when it is possible to measure changes in student knowledge—most agree that standardized tests achieve this, to some extent—using such measurements forces teachers to teach what is being measured, overriding their own expert opinions about what kids should learn.

Teachers’ mentality of expertise—a rarity in a nontechnical field—makes them suspicious of anyone else who tries to have an impact in the classroom. It’s difficult to overstate the passive-aggressive bitterness they feel towards the administrators who run their school districts. In a survey conducted at my own former high school, only 16% of teachers reported feeling respected by administrators. (For context, over 80% of students said they felt respected by teachers and staff.) Likewise, teachers have no patience for parents who take issue with the content or style of their classes. They reminisce about the good old days when parents trusted teachers absolutely. Now, they lament, parents feel emboldened to call in with complaints when their children are dissatisfied. Parents should stick to parenting and leave education to the experts.

In short, any effort to impose accountability on teachers can only get in the way of their nuanced and highly skilled work.

Given that teachers are so talented, one wonders why they don’t pursue a more lucrative career in science or medicine. Maybe we should add selflessness to their long list of talents and virtues. Or maybe we should interrogate their claimed expertise a little further.

Experts in a Basic Human Function

As a university student, I often walk past the College of Education on my way to the College of Engineering. I try not to stare at the math-illiterate twentysomethings texting on the benches. As STEM majors, we joke that a Bachelor’s in Education is at best practice in a basic human function and at worst license to party for four years.

When teachers hear their prized credential being slandered, they recoil like they’re losing a month of summer vacation. But there’s more than a grain of truth to the jabs thrown by STEM majors.

What skills does a K-12 educator actually need, assuming she really wants to excel in the profession? She must be able to explain concepts to an audience that doesn’t understand. She must show patience if they take a while to sink in. She also needs some amount of self-confidence to convince a rowdy class to shape up and focus on work.

But none of these soft skills are off-limits to a person who lacks formal training. My sisters used to “play school” when they were younger, and it seemed that the one who played the teacher had all those qualities even then. Of course, the average businessman possesses them in spades. Teachers see themselves as specialists, but the skills they flaunt are standard human abilities that most people develop without college.

Here, teachers might object that they also need knowledge in the subject they’re teaching. For example, a history teacher should know about the Civil War. But much of what is taught in a K-12 class is common knowledge among adults. The rest is trivial to pick up, otherwise we wouldn’t expect disinterested children to absorb it along with the content of four other classes.

Consider that pretty much anyone can fill in as a substitute teacher. At my high school, it was sufficient to possess any college degree. Equipped with a Bachelor’s in Marketing, you were prepared to teach social studies. With such lax requirements, it was not uncommon to see neighborhood moms working the whiteboard for a few extra bucks. Why don’t substitute teachers require more qualification? Because any adult who can hold a conversation can teach. There aren’t many professions where so little skill and technical knowledge is needed that a random person can replace you at a day’s notice.

The more honest teachers will concede that what they do isn’t intellectually strenuous like mechanical engineering. They’ll grant that it doesn’t require long hours like medicine. They’ll admit they don’t need the broad knowledge of an actuary. But it’s stressful, they say. Dealing with kids is a nightmare. And I’m not the kind of person who hands out worksheets and browses Pinterest. I go above and beyond. I take it upon myself to make sure everyone participates and understands the concepts, whatever hurdles the administration puts in my way.

To hear teachers tell it, their burden gives Atlas a run for his money, and they get none of the glory. Well, waiting tables is stressful, thankless, and low-paying, and there are plenty of waiters who go above and beyond, who put on a smile for obnoxious, ungrateful diners, even when they’re exhausted and just want to go home. I respect people who thrive under stress. But earning employee of the month at Buffalo Wild Wings is a few notches below practicing law.

Speaking of skilled jobs, I once heard a professional chemist say he could never do the work of a high school teacher. It was a safe conversation filler. There was something witty and self-deprecating about it. But taken literally, it was ridiculous. If you can analyze complex proteins, you can ask surface-level questions about Hamlet.

The Pay Debate

I once had a friend who told me he only supported two political causes. I was saddened to learn that the first was higher pay for teachers, but it didn’t surprise me that the second was pot legalization. You would have to be high to give teachers a raise.

We’ve established that teaching is essentially unskilled labor. At the same time, teachers make well above the minimum wage (even if you pretend they’re working during the eighty weekdays a year they have off). It follows that they are due for a pay cut.

And while all teachers should be grateful for their generous salaries, their often-successful fight against accountability has made the job downright cushy for the unmotivated and the incompetent.

As an example, we’ve said that teachers don’t like having their classes observed by administrators. But they especially hate it when the observation day is unexpected. In many districts, teachers’ unions have managed to eliminate unannounced observations, meaning teachers are informed of the event days in advance. You can see why victories like this are a godsend for slackers.

(Needless to say, the day with the observer is always highly unusual. The lesson plan is tight as a drum. The students leave wondering if Mrs. Smith ate a good breakfast.)

There Are Still 85 Words Left in This Article. You Click Away When I Dismiss You.

In summary, teachers work an easy job for a substantial paycheck, view themselves as experts who are above accountability, hold few or no hard skills, and complain to anyone who will listen about how bad they have it.

Some might call it ironic that a group so resistant to ordinary adult responsibilities would be tasked with preparing our youth for the trials of life. Modern schoolchildren get criticized for being lazy and entitled, but how can we blame them when they’re learning from the best?

The post Teachers Are Underworked and Overpaid appeared first on Nik Noble.

That made three ready adventurers. They departed in the afternoon, under a warm August sun and a scenic sky. Victor wore a backpack full of water bottles and snacks. The others carried only their confidence, which could be heard in their footsteps as their shoes tapped the sidewalk and in their voices as they discussed their destination.

“I think there’s a pot of gold,” said Jet. “Maybe guarded by a leprechaun or something.”

“That would be wonderful!” said Ava, and she eyed the shimmering semicircle with a new fascination.

“Why would there be a pot of gold?” said Victor.

Jet thought for a moment. “Well, in the movies there’s always a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Sometimes there’s a leprechaun too.”

“So?” said Victor. “They can put whatever they want in movies. Movies are full of things that don’t exist.”

“Yeah,” said Jet, “but I still think there’s a pot of gold.”

The three came to a busy road and waited to cross. Ava was upset by something. Both the boys discerned this easily, for when Ava was troubled she scrunched up her face and stared hard ahead.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jet.

Ava’s complaint tumbled out at once. “My brother said the closer we get to the rainbow, the further it’ll seem, and eventually it’ll just disappear! He said there were angles and droplets…and prisms!”

“What are you talking about?” said Jet. “Those words even sound hokey. Your brother can tell some serious tales.”

But the mention of distance had clearly activated something in Jet, for now he was narrowing his eyes and focusing more intently on the left base of the arch. It touched down somewhere very far, beyond even the furthest buildings and streetlights. He wondered how long they had been waiting at the road.

“There’s nothing hokey about angles and prisms,” said Victor. “But they’ve got nothing to do with rainbows. We’ll reach it. We’ll see it up close and run around it. You’ll touch it, if you want. I don’t know exactly what we’ll find there, but it will be beautiful, and it can be reached.”

“You’re sure?” said Ava.

Victor looked firmly at the vivid streak against the azure. “Fifty dollars if I’m wrong,” he said. The statement was quite impactful because he had revealed to her only yesterday that fifty dollars was all he owned, and with the breeze stirring his hair dramatically, it was more than enough assurance for both his friends. The last car rolled by and he led them through the vacant street.

They continued on as their shadows grew longer in front of them and the houses changed around them. Once Victor stopped to announce that they were officially further than anyone had expected them to go. He said this with faint appreciation, and it invigorated the group terrifically.

Eventually their path came to the foot of a high hill. The slant obstructed the horizon so that the distance of the rainbow was difficult to gauge.

“Look there!” said Jet. He pointed, and the trio halted. “I think it’s falling on that guy!”

There was a man at the peak of the incline, standing slightly hunched and holding a large cardboard sign. From the angle of the children, he seemed directly within the rainbow.

“And look: he has a big black bowl,” said Ava. “It’s the pot of gold! We made it to the bottom! We really found the bottom of the rainbow!” She clenched her hands together and jumped up and down.

Victor spoke quickly. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Looks like the bottom to me,” said Jet.

“It’s behind him,” said Victor. “C’mon. You’ll see.”

Jet and Ava followed him up the hill at a brisk pace. Near the top, it became clear that Victor was right. They saw the arc landing far in the distance. Jet made a sound of exasperation. Victor said nothing and kept walking.

Ava sighed. “Not the bottom of the rainbow,” she said.

As they went over the hill, the man with the sign watched them curiously. He was old and missing teeth. Victor and Jet passed him with averted eyes, but Ava stole a glance into his bowl. It contained a five-dollar bill and a few grimy quarters. The coins dazzled in the late afternoon light, but no one would mistake them for gold.

“Definitely not the bottom of the rainbow,” Ava said when they were out of earshot.

Then three things changed. First, the sky was ablaze with the fire of sunset. From pink to orange to fading blue, it was a rainbow in itself. Second, the town was replaced with another, unlike any the children had seen. Here the houses were large and few, and they threw wide shadows over empty yards. Third, Jet began looking backward as often as forward, and he asked repeatedly about the time.

Finally, on one such inquiry, Victor had enough. “Why do you care what time it is?” he demanded.

“We’ve been gone for hours,” Jet said. “My Mom’s gonna kill me, and besides, the rainbow’s fading.” He pointed glumly. “Look, I’m sure Ava won’t make you pay the fifty dollars. Let’s head back before we’re in even bigger trouble.”

Something shifted in Victor’s eyes. “The rainbow’s only fading because it blends in with the sky, and you’re right that I won’t pay the fifty dollars—because we’re going to make it. Don’t you see? We have to!”

Victor’s posture made it apparent that he would not turn around. Jet glanced miserably behind. The world was a labyrinth of ash trees, stop signs, and newly illuminated streetlamps. He did not know north from south, so he pushed aside visions of his mother’s wrath and forced more steps from his tired legs.

The world darkened and cooled. The sidewalk and neighborhood ended. After brief hesitation, the group abandoned the security of concrete for the rustle of grass.

As the houses shrank behind them, Ava made a game of counting firefly flashes. But her voice was sleepy, and soon, with a sigh, she stopped. Jet pointed out that the rainbow had vanished as the sun had gone down, but Victor countered that it was hidden behind the clouds. No one else spoke until they halted before a thick forest.

“I don’t like it,” Ava said. She peered down the narrow trail in front of them. In the darkness, the trees seemed to open around the path like the mouth of a cave.

“From the way the rainbow was falling, I guarantee you we’ll find it in this forest,” Victor declared.

“Really?” Ava asked excitedly, and the concern disappeared from her face.

But Jet was standing further back from the trees, watching them warily. “Victor,” he said, “we have no idea what’s in there.”

“I just told you what’s in there,” Victor said. “Let’s go.” He led Ava onto the path before Jet could say anything else.

Slowly, they wound their way into the woods. Jet helped Ava over fallen logs. In some places, they had to push aside the underbrush. Their clothes kept getting snagged on thorns.

Jet looked around uneasily, but as they got deeper in, he had to admit there was something magical about the forest. All around them, nocturnal insects hummed a strange and constant chorus, and moonlight pierced the canopy in geometric shafts.

“Well,” he said, “If we are gonna reach the bottom of the rainbow, I guess it makes sense for it to be in a place like this.”

“Exactly,” said Victor.

They pushed on.

Once, the branches above them opened, exposing the star-studded sky.

“I’ve never seen a rainbow at night before,” said Ava. But she had now, for it was clearer than ever—strikingly radiant and nearly opaque—before the navy backdrop of the sky.

“It’s because you have an early bedtime,” said Victor. “You’re usually asleep.”

Even Jet stared up at the rainbow admiringly. For a moment, it wasn’t obvious that he was tired and afraid.

Finally, the trio pushed through a wall of leaves into a grassy clearing, and just like that, their journey ended. Six shoes halted. Three jaws went slack. Six wide eyes reflected an otherworldly iridescence.

The rainbow was a tube rather than a ribbon. It was wider in diameter than Jet, Victor, and Ava standing side-by-side. Its nearest base rested on a slight hill, shedding a pool of soft white light that filled the clearing. The rest arced away into the distance.

Ava was the first to touch it. She ran without reluctance to the shining pillar of color and thrust her hand into it. Her expression was joy when she felt it. “It’s more amazing than anything!” she declared in a voice that was lilting and new. Jet and Victor exchanged giddy glances.

Victor threw off his backpack, and the boys ran up the hill to try it themselves. Their reactions when they touched it were just like Ava’s. Then each took turns running through the gleaming column, and what they felt and saw was inexpressible.

When they stood directly under the bend of the rainbow, they could hear exquisite music. It started off allegro and energizing, with a variety of instruments, but as the night progressed it slowed, and it featured more and more prominently a mournful violin. At first the children avoided entering the zone of the violin, for it was impossibly sad, but soon they sat together to listen, for it was also impossibly beautiful.

Only Victor stepped away for a moment, to stare into the heedless ocean of the sky, inhale the aroma of the dying summer, and shout a message to no one and everyone.

“I told you! I told you all!”

Before then, in all the time they had known him, neither Jet nor Ava had ever heard his voice crack.

When dawn finally broke and lent their tear-stained faces a fluorescent aspect, Ava whispered to the others, “It’s gone.” They emerged from their fantasies to find that she was right. The rainbow and its unearthly music had faded so gradually that neither of them had noticed.

For a while they stayed sitting, watching without speaking as the sky turned pink and the sunrise sparkled in the dewy grass. There were patches of bright white flowers growing where the rainbow had met the ground, which they didn’t remember seeing the night before.

Finally, Victor stood and stretched and took a deep breath. “Should we sleep before we head back?” he asked. “Or have some snacks?”

“It’s weird. I’m not tired or hungry at all,” said Jet. He and Ava got to their feet.

“Me neither, I guess,” said Victor. “Ava?”

“Nope,” she said.

For a lingering moment, they stood still and surveyed the clearing.

“I guess that’s it,” said Victor.

“Yeah,” said Jet after a pause. Then, with a look that said he had just remembered, “Geez, my Mom really is gonna kill me.”

The adventurers left the clearing in silence and started for home. As they made their way through the forest, they thought about how much walking they had ahead of them. The route seemed longer going back.

They were nearing the edge of the forest when Victor suddenly stopped. “Wait,” he said. He had his hand up to block the sun. He was squinting at something in the distance.

“Look.”

Jet and Ava followed his gaze through the trees, out of the forest and past the radio towers, to a faint band of light brushing the horizon. They traded gleeful smiles. Then Victor was running, and his friends were behind him.

The post A Lesson In Disappointment appeared first on Nik Noble.

It certainly seemed like it at first. We took turns with the Wii remotes, battling each other Wii Sports. It felt so satisfying to swing your arm and feel the vibration in the controller, as on the TV screen your racket struck a tennis ball, or your boxing glove stuck Grandpa’s face. When my turn with the remote was up, I grudgingly handed it off and immediately began looking for another opportunity to rotate in. The grandparents remarked intermittently at how far technology had come since they played basketball in the street with a trash can as a hoop. Everyone was having a good time.

But before an hour was up, you could sense a change in the atmosphere of the room. My relatives became more willing to cede the controller after a game and less insistent on getting it back. Side conversations spread as attention shifted from the screen. People left for the kitchen to get snacks and didn’t return. The wind was slowly leaving the sails of the celebration.

At the end of the day, the Wii was sealed in its cabinet. It was never again the main object of interest at a family meetup. Even when my cousin and I got together to play video games, we favored the Xbox and the PlayStation. They were just better consoles.

The novelty of the Wii wore off fast, and maybe that was part of the reason I became such a pessimist about trends in technology. The noise about blockchain, the internet of things, and data analytics never really registered with me. They were all just gimmicks, I figured, exciting for a while but ultimately lacking in impact.

So you can imagine my skepticism in the summer of 2017, when a team lead at the company where I was interning invited me to try virtual reality at his house. I agreed because you have to agree to such things, but I harbored no hope that I would actually enjoy playing video games with a VR mask—an experience I assumed you could simulate by playing Wii Sports with your face a couple inches from the TV screen.

But boy, was I in for a surprise. 

Waiting Game

It seemed like the team lead had invited everyone in the department to his VR night. When I got there, I found myself at the back of a long line for a shark attack simulator. When a person got to the front of the line, he would put on the VR mask and enter the scenario, while a huge TV screen showed everyone else what he was seeing.

I tried to pass the time with small talk, but when that got boring I resigned myself to watching the shark attack over and over again. It always happened the same way.

The player, who was technically a diver tasked with exploring an oceanic trench, would be lowered through the water in a metal cage. First he would pass by a variety of marine life. Then he would sink through a rocky tunnel that opened near the ocean floor. Next, a shark would circle him, drawing close and retreating, but becoming increasingly aggressive in its approaches. Finally, the team on the surface would pull the cage up to escape the shark, and the player would make it back to the tunnel just in time.

Two things struck me as I watched the scenario on loop.

First, the story could have been shortened considerably. Why did the player have to pass three kinds of fish on the way down, and why did the shark have to circle the cage a million times? It felt like the experience was taking twenty minutes per person, and the line was at a total standstill.

Second, the reactions from my coworkers as the shark got close seemed disproportionate. Even burly men squealed and jumped backwards, knocking into onlookers waiting their turn. I decided to be the first person who would stand as still as a statue throughout the ordeal.

When my turn finally came, they handed me the headset and a PlayStation controller. I pulled the mask over my eyes.

And right away, it was disorienting.

A Journey of Zero Miles

I was in a dim underwater chamber, surrounded by ornate pillars and bronze statues. I could see my controller hovering in front of me, right where I was holding it. It gave off a ghostly blue glow. When I moved the physical controller or turned its joysticks, the ghost controller reacted identically. I reached it forward to poke an air bubble in front of me, and the bubble rippled like it was real.

“Whoa,” I said.

But I barely heard myself, because there were headphones sealed over my ears. The noise of the party had been replaced with the soft churning you hear underwater. The man behind me sounded far away as he told me what button to push to start the experience. This was just the loading screen.

I pushed the button, and what I saw next made it obvious that I had been wrong about VR. There was no gradual realization, no lingering doubt, just an immediate, frank admission to myself that I had been way off-base.

Because I was literally in the ocean. I bought the illusion instantly. From the coral to the fish to the surface shimmering up above, it looked exactly like the real thing. And you could sense the vastness of it. The water went on for miles, beyond the diving cage, beyond the little reef around me, and way beyond the confines of any spare room made VR studio.

Somehow, there was a level of visual realism that far exceeded computer screens and televisions. Later I would decide that what sets VR apart is not high-resolution graphics or even the way the pixels span your entire field of view. Instead, it’s the way it shows each of your eyes slightly different angles of the same scene, making the environment feel three-dimensional.

The effect was so striking that even the metal bars of my cage fascinated me. I spent the first several moments pawing the space where they should have been, marveling that my hand was passing through. Conversely, there was a part of my cage that should have been empty, where the physical world hid the angular corner of a couch. I must have bumped into that couch a dozen times, and every time it surprised me.

Of course, my plan to be cool in the face of the shark was soon forgotten. I won’t say my heart sped up and I looked around frantically when I lost sight of it, and I certainly won’t say I screamed louder than even my most squeamish female coworker, but I will admit that I took a short, manly breather to compose myself afterwards.

But really, for all its intensity, the shark was the least memorable part of the sequence. What sticks with me most was the awe I felt during the descent. I stared in wonder as vivid tropical fish kept their distance from the cage, and a school of gigantic manta rays came to investigate it. The majesty of the rays was complemented by a series of grand orchestral tones, but the music faded to silence as I entered the dark mouth of the tunnel. Then, after an indiscernible amount of time, I spotted a single luminescent jellyfish in the gloom. Before I knew it, they were all around me, and the music had resumed, only this time softer and with a note of longing. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen in months.

When I took the mask off, it felt like returning from a long journey. It was hard to believe that nothing had really happened. There was a bored-looking guy sitting on the couch, checking his phone. I handed the headset to the next person in line. And the event that had lasted so many minutes for the other players was over in a heartbeat.

So I Was Sitting at This Desk…

I was now a fresh convert to the church of VR, but the team lead whose house we were at was more of a fanatical archbishop. He had three VR gaming systems—the PlayStation VR and two Oculus Rifts. Over the course of the evening, I used all of them, and literally everything I tried impressed me. I was beginning to understand his devotion to this technology.

After several hours, the party had cleared of all but the host, me, and a few of my fellow interns. We gathered around an Oculus Rift for one last game.

The game was called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It had a unique premise. One player wore the VR mask and manipulated a bomb that only he could see. He described the bomb to the players back in the real world, who used paper manuals to determine how to safely defuse it. Descriptions and instructions would fly back and forth. With the bomb’s timer ticking down, it made for an exciting challenge.

But my most unforgettable experience that night didn’t happen during the rush to defuse a bomb. It happened in between rounds, when everyone else went to get drinks and I was left alone with the headset.

I was in the game’s lobby, a virtual bureaucrat’s office where you could flip through a binder to select levels. I was sitting in a chair in both the simulated and the physical world, which made the illusion especially seamless. It was so convincing that I kept trying to rest my elbows on my virtual desk.

I was admiring the realism of the environment—hours had done nothing to lessen the novelty—when I had the idea to toss the binder across the room. It was the best idea I had had all night. The trajectory and rotation of the binder as it flew were jaw-droppingly natural. It even fanned open in exactly the way you would expect. For a moment I was depressed that I had thrown it out of my reach, but then I noticed a button that you could push to reset the room. I spent the next three minutes flinging the binder against the wall and pressing the button, giggling like an idiot.

When my friends came back and tapped me on the shoulder, the first thing I did was try to set the controllers down on the desk, but they fell right through. Thankfully I was wearing the wrist straps, so they didn’t drop all the way to the floor.

I threw the mask off and tried to explain how perfect the physics in the room were, but I wasn’t at my most articulate in my giddy state. Our archbishop host just smiled and nodded knowingly, as if to say, “Yes, my child, you are beginning to see the light.”

For the rest of the summer, whenever I would evangelize VR (which was pretty much daily), my coworkers would make fun of me.

“You did so many amazing things that night. You fought off a shark and climbed a mountain, but your stories always begin with, ‘so I was sitting at this desk…’”

The Night I Became an Optimist

When I got home from the party, I knew my life had been altered. VR had caught me completely off guard. Technology was fifty years ahead of where I had thought it was. We could literally put someone in any environment, simulating its sounds, appearance, and movement perfectly. All that was left was to incorporate haptic feedback—the sense of touch—and then the virtual world would be indistinguishable from reality.

Until that day, I had always called myself a pessimist, but I decided optimist was now more appropriate. The next morning, I invested in the stock market for the first time in my life. I figured that any bet on the continued success of the human race was a good one.

I began to think about technology trends beyond VR, how almost every interesting human achievement has occurred in the last hundred and fifty years. Air conditioners, microwaves, antibiotics, airplanes, televisions, satellites, and cell phones were all twentieth century inventions. My parents grew up without the internet.

And now we’re talking about computers that translate languages, recognize images, and generate photorealistic pictures of people who don’t exist. We’re starting to whisper about self-driving cars, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces. The revolution in genetics is a miracle by itself. And all these things build upon each other, making it easier to learn and easier to create. Behind it all, no one seems to realize that virtual reality is about to render the physical world secondary, that we are a couple simple, concrete steps away from living in digital universes of our own design.

VR is not the Wii, and this exponential progress is not a gimmick. Next time I feel bored at a family get together, finally tired of whatever newfangled gadget my uncle is showing off, maybe I’ll glance outside at the giant metal birds leaving silver trails across the sky. Maybe I’ll pull up Uber on my phone and watch the cars trace the roads around the house, ready to take me anywhere at the push of a button. Or maybe I’ll just spend a moment in silence, amazed that I’ve seen more magic in my twenty years than all the monarchs in the history books. Because we’re living in a sci-fi world, and no one can imagine what happens next.

The post Virtual Reality Is Not the Wii appeared first on Nik Noble.

That’s just one of the horror stories my high school teachers told me about college.

Or at least, it could have been. I wouldn’t know. I was sitting somewhere in the back of the classroom with one earbud in, only half paying attention.

By that point, I had been desensitized to those scare tactics. I had heard middle school teachers give the same spiel about high school and elementary school teachers give the same spiel about middle school. I had listened to my first-grade teacher grimly warn us that “they don’t put up with that behavior in second grade.”

It’s a nice narrative that life gets progressively harder, and progressively more is expected of you. But the reality is more like this: K-12 schooling is a full-time job, professional work is similar (but with more freedom and less supervision), and college is the four-year vacation in between.

I’m majoring in math and computer science at a prestigious university. I’m more than halfway done, and I currently have a 4.0 GPA. It has been an absolute breeze. Even with clubs, job applications, and social activities, I have more free time than I know what to do with.

For example, I’m writing this at just past noon on a Wednesday. My only class today ended at 9:30 this morning. I could have skipped it without consequence, and many students did, but the professor was covering a cool topic that I wanted to hear about. My schedule for the rest of the day is totally free, except for a club meeting at 7:30 tonight, which I will only attend because I’m friends with the club’s president and there’s pizza.

Meanwhile, my sister in high school is presumably filling out a worksheet about the events leading up to the Civil War. If she stops writing, her teacher will soon ask her to continue. If she checks Instagram on her phone, she’ll be scolded within seconds. And God help her if she whips out a laptop and starts laying down a blog post.

At the same time, my father is in an office somewhere responding to urgent problems. There are teams of people who rely on him to do his job well. He might be fired if he stands up and walks out, but he’d never consider it—there’s too much to do.

And I’m sitting here wondering why I have a blank Word document open. Is this for another blog post? Oh, never mind. It’s just my to-do list.

A Bachelor’s Degree Doesn’t Show Proficiency

I could be convinced that graduate work is more intense than this undergraduate stuff. To earn a PhD in a real subject, I imagine you need to know something about it, and that takes time and effort. But a Bachelor’s degree doesn’t show proficiency. It barely shows interest.

Read an introductory book on any subject, and you will know more about it than the average college graduate who just earned a Bachelor’s in that field. Furthermore, you will be better read than that graduate.

Indeed, almost no one reads a full book worth of information about their major over the course of their college career. Most undergraduates avoid reading about their major at all. Seasoned professors know this and have stopped assigning reading entirely, but some of the greener ones still pretend that “Read pages 100 through 105” is a request students take seriously.  Of course, any student will tell you that’s a complicated way of saying “No homework.”

I actually have one professor who unironically assigns reading and quizzes us on it in class. I just guess on the quizzes; you can usually infer the answers from the wording of the questions. As I recently declared to some of my classmates, I will not be bullied into reading the book. They laughed, but they agreed.

The Two-Hour Rule

Sometimes a young kid will innocently ask a college student, “Is it true that you only spend fifteen hours a week in class?”

This figure is rightly shocking to the typical K-12 schoolboy, whose life has always been forty-hour workweeks plus homework.

If the college student wants to save face, he responds, “Yeah, but the rule of thumb is that you spend three hours studying outside of class for every hour you spend in class.”

This brings the total hours worked to sixty a week, a believable number for a Supreme Court justice. Sometimes the rule is instead reported as two hours studying per hour in class, making for forty-five hours a week. That’s still ridiculous, and I know very few people who believe it.

Students who do spout the two-hour rule often describe the library as a sort of second home. They insist that they sometimes spend many hours a day studying among the books. But do they really?

Just today, I was walking past a line of desks in my own university’s library. There were three students in a row with their laptops open. The first was browsing Facebook, the second was playing Fortnite, and the third was playing League of Legends. (Admittedly, that was an uncommon sight. More often, the library dwellers have homework open on their laptops while they use their phones in their laps, so it at least looks like they’re being productive from a distance.)

I guarantee you these are the same people who complain about forty-five hours of work a week. If they actually worked for a fraction of the eight hours a day required of K-12 students, and didn’t mix in marathon social media sessions, they would be in and out of the library before lunch.

Those who describe college as more difficult than high school should turn their attention from their classes to their mirrors. For them, it’s easier to do eight hours of forced work than two hours of work when no one is looking over their shoulder.

But laziness isn’t the only bad habit afflicting the small subset of students who say college is hard.

Notetaking Is Worse Than Drinking

If you’re deciding between notetaking and trying alcohol, I would recommend Coors Light. Taking notes in class is possibly the most academically detrimental habit there is. And while alcohol and notetaking both slow your thoughts, at least drinking can be fun.

The problem with students who take notes is that they usually see it as a substitute for trying to understand lectures. These students stop thinking the moment their notebooks hit their desks, preferring to robotically transcribe everything the professor writes on the board.

When the professor surprises them with a question, they flip furiously through the pages of their notebook, trying to match keywords from the question with a bullet point in their notes, which they then regurgitate exactly. I could write a Java program that replicates the behavior of these future janitors. And my program would get better grades!

If a notetaker misses a class where an important concept is discussed, he doesn’t sweat it. He just sends out a request for “the notes” and stashes them away to review before the exam. At first I thought this was a funny request—shouldn’t he have to specify whose notes he wants?—but I’ve realized it’s completely unambiguous. Everyone who takes notes takes them identically, as word-for-word copies of what the professor says and writes, free of any personal revelations about the material. Unfortunately for our absentee, this makes learning from the notes impossible. The person who wrote them didn’t understand them, so he has no chance.

It’s no wonder notetakers call college hard. Maybe I should amend the title of this article. College is way easier than high school for people who think.

There’s a philosophy that it’s okay to take a few notes, as long as you understand what you’re writing down and you don’t let it replace internal consideration of the class’ core ideas. I used to be sympathetic to that view, but I’ve come to believe that storing information for later is always a distraction that diminishes comprehension in the present. Having a notebook on your desk during a lecture is disrespectful to the lecturer, period.

Even some good students part ways with me on that. I admit it’s not a wildly popular position. Telling people you don’t take notes is like telling people you don’t drink. They may look at you funny, but you still feel a tinge of pride because you know your abstinence makes you better than them.

Let Us Give Thanks for the Easy Life

I have a message for K-12 students who are worried about college. The stories you’ve heard are exaggerated. You will be able to start assignments the night before they’re due. You won’t have to stay up late reading. You won’t work anywhere close to the forty hours a week expected of you now. The originators of frightening myths about the college workload are a vocal minority of notetakers, Fortnite players, and other morons, who are cruising towards dead-end jobs at Starbucks.

Put simply, college is easy. I often stop and give thanks that I no longer have to work full time. I give thanks that my role as a student doesn’t interfere with the activities I enjoy.

I know the professional world awaits me, and when I get there I’ll have to put my nose to the grindstone again. But I’m ready for it. Excited, even. God knows I’ll be fresh and well-rested.

The post College Is Way Easier Than High School appeared first on Nik Noble.