But now imagine someone enters the class whose compensation is dependent on how much she can get the students to pay attention to her rather than whatever else they’re supposed to be paying attention to. She makes funny noises, starts showing a movie in the corner on her phone, sets up a video game system. And now imagine there are multiple people in the room who have this incentive and they’re competing. Very obviously the teacher would have no chance, and no learning would get done. It sounds like a ludicrous thought experiment, I know, but it also happens to be a decent approximation of how
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