An Educational Contrarian

We are all of us cousins. Every human being on the planet. It may not be through a long-lost aunt or a great grandfather, but it’s probably not much more than a great great great grandparent. That’s remarkable. If you believe in science, we all come from a common ancestor from 200,000 years ago and our ancestors’ paths have probably crossed multiple times since. If you believe the world came into being six or seven thousand years ago—I don’t but I’ll grant it for the moment—then our common ancestor is even more recent, and we’re more cousins than ever. We need to acknowledge this, that we’re all related, all one family. Millions of our cousins around the world are sick. Millions more are impoverished and living in slums. Millions are governed by cousin tyrants who don’t seem to care about their extended family, or forgot they are part of one. And many millions more continue to wonder why bombs and militaries are more important to some than food, healthcare, education, and children. A f...

Being accountable to any test result is being accountable to the wrong thing. Right now, the most important test in the world is for the Coronavirus. The information it provides is immensely useful, and yet to treat that information as more than information about the presence or absence of the virus is a mistake. Neither outcome tells us anything about a person’s overall health. Neither outcome signals anything about what has happened or what will happen. And both outcomes come with a caveat—there is a small possibility of the result being wrong, of suggesting you have it when you don’t, or that you don’t when you do. To treat either outcome as more than it is absent contexts, details, and a whole lot of additional information renders any next step invalid, likely to be unhelpful, or even harmful. All tests suffer from this limitation. It is a consequence of trying to squeeze as much precision as possible out of a single result, and the necessary price we pay for needing and trying to ...