Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Perhaps the only positive thing we can say about Fisher's role in the debate is that it is very unlikely that tobacco money corrupted him in any way. His own obstinacy was sufficient." - perhaps we can be equally generous to Conservative phiolosophers?

"If children are more often left to entertain themselves, we would expect they will not only learn to do so, they will learn that sometimes one is bored for a while before there's a payoff." - I stopped playing video games because I found them boring.

"This pattern of data led to the functional equivalence hypothesis" - by far the most interesting idea in this book gets...almost two pages. Obvious to me than for some kinds of learning..anything technical, reference, digital multimedia is far superior to mere reading.

"Other research has shown that students rarely critically evaluate information they find on the web, if they do try to evaluate the credibility of a website, they are likely to focus on the look of the site than source characteristics" - isn't the same true for academics assessing academic journals, cf Sokal affair, etc.

"...comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling..." - I wonder if the opposite was true for our ancestors raised on scrolls.

"Parents and teachers can try to exploit situations where reading is useful to thr child" - my son prefers to use YouTube, which raises the question of whether, with ubiquitous digital video, we are entering a post-literate world.

"Perhaps then, reading comprehension tests are really knowledge tests...disadvantaged kids have not had the same opportunities to acquire the vocabulary and background knowledge needed to succeed on these tests" - he's on the money here.

"[Writers] judge what their readers already know and what must must be made explicit in the text..." - As well as not being up to speed with the interdependence of lexis and grammar, he doesn't seem to be aware of conversational implicature either. This wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't making his limited knowledge of language to inform his model of reading.

"...readers need to know 98% of the [type or token?] words for comfortable comprehension" - what is the relationship between comfort and learning? Does comfort reinforce learning or inhibit it?

"From the overly methodological world of Fisher, thr Hill guidelines take us to the opposite realm, to a methodology-free world where causality is decided on the basis of qualitative patterns of statistical trends. The Causal Revolution builds a bridge between these do extremes, empowering our intuitive sense of causality with mathematical rigour" - This is what he thinks he has acheived?

"These brilliant pieces of detective work had in common a fortunate one-to-one relation between cause and effect. The cholera bacillus is the only cause of cholera; or as we would say today, it is both necessary and sufficient. If you aren't exposed to it, you won't get the disease." - I wish he had said at the start of his discussion of causality.

"When readers can read by spelling as well as by sound, decoding requires less attention, which leaves more attention for...comprehension" - I think he means when readers recognise whole words rather than individual letters...and working memory rather than attention.

"Indeed, some data show that's it's the development of prosody, and not reading rate per se, that leads to boosts in reading comprehension associated with fluency, but this conclusion is controversial" - not for me it isn't. I see this everyday in class, when a student realises how a sentence is to be read aloud, and simultaneously what it means. A discussion of speech development is sorely missing in this book.

"In fact, this kind of writing was commonly used by teens in the 1990s when texting" - He's wrong here txting(!) exploited the sound of letters and digits not their shape, i.e. C U B4 5. Don't B L8! Once again spoken language is prior.

"Humans are not born with the ability to hear individual speech sounds" - I think he means phonemes here. It's true acquiring the phonemes of a particular language is learnt and difficult (No, L1 is not effortless) but their still seems to be something more 'natural' in acquiring a spoken language than a written one.

"Cognitive psychologists often begin their study of a mental process by trying to understand the 'why' before they tackle the 'how'" - not a distinction seems Pearl seems to be making in his 'The Book of Why'

I appreciate that causal diagrams can improve the process of deconfounding relationships between variables. But the process is still only as good as the causal model it is based on. The lurking variable may be the one we are looking for, but it remains outside our model.

"Lacking this information, the researcher is left to intuit whether the treatment and control groups are exchangeable or not" - every time he introduces the notion of 'intuition' I get nervous. Is he going to priviledge 'intuition' and show how AI can replicate it; or is he going to admit this reliance is a limit on science and show how AI can supercede it?

"However, randomization does have one great advantage: it severs every incoming link to the randomised variable, including the ones we don't know about or cannot measure" - tempting, but I would like a robust argument before excepting that.

"If we believe that Abbot's team identified all the important confounders, we must believe that intentional walking tends to prolong life" - but is causality a tendency? And can we be sure we controlled for all the important confounders - "there are more things in heaven and Earth..." Yes, our confidence in our beliefs is greater greater, but there is no certainty here.

"I wanted Baysian networks to operate like the neurons of a human brain...it's worth noting one feature it does not (yet) incorporate: human intuition" - does he think intuition can be reduced to neurons or not?

"[Notation for Bayesian Networks] Tea->Scones, Disease->Test, or more generally Hypothesis->Evidence" - The equivalent probabilty notation is P(scones|tea), P(test|disease).The order of the terms have been inverted. If that isn't confusing enough, P(test|disease) is the probability that they test positive given that they have the disease, this goes against the common sense order of terms: the test shows the disease.

"All young people should have access to playing fields, common rooms and gymnasia..." - and auditoria, and the stage, and studios and workshops, and professionally equipped kitchens, and to debates and discussion.

"We must develop a way of giving continuously new chances and second chances to all children and young people..." - long life expectancy and rapid technological change imply that education is not just a feature of childhood and youth, but should continue through the whole of life.

He is so wide of the mark that it's difficult to comment. Teachers have not professionalised and taken control of education, as doctors did in the NHS. In fact, in both Education and Health a new class replaced the bureaucrats to manage the internal markets created by consecutive Conservative governments.

'In an age of complex technology the power of the expert is great. A profession gives responsibility to that power, and the gowth of other professions emphasizes the situation of mutual dependence in which we all live." - Surprisingly, Scruton makes a similar argument in 'The Meaning of Conservatism'. Populism has been a rebellion against professionalised expertise: is it now coming to an end in America's courtrooms?

"There is a real problem in teaching people about children and schools when their instincts are to teach as they were themselves taught" - also most teachers were themselves successful at school. This makes it difficult to understand those who are not.

"Thus a change in a social status of teaching is dependent upon, and implies, a change in the social status of women." - I've always looked at it the other way round, that teaching offers mother-friendly hours and so many women choose to teach. Chicken and egg?

"We are in direct competition with institutions overseas, especially in the United States" - this seems surprisingly clearsighted in 1970.

"This would attempt to raise the prestige of vocational studies in this country without in any way distorting them by academicizing them" - the vast majority of university courses are vocational in intent, always have been. Even scholarship is a vocation.