Push Through the Learning Pit

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I loved Scott Alexander’s post “Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman.” The first thing I got out of it was thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “master morality” and “slave morality” in a new way: I’ll call master morality “excellence” and slave morality “righteousness.” Think of excellence as the virtues that the Ancient Greeks and Romans would have emphasized: strength, intelligence, skill, beauty, truth. Think of righteousness as the virtues distinctly emphasized by Judaism, Christianity and (I think) Islam, especially, humility, love and compassion. Unlike at least the usual interpretations of Nietzche, I am a big fan of righteousness. I am also a big fan of excellence. My view is that, at the elite level, our culture become unbalanced, emphasizing righteousness and downplaying excellence. It is time emphasize excellence more to bring things back into balance. Very imperfectly put, it is important both to want to help others and to have the skills to do so effectively.

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One of the great secrets to gaining skill is to be tough enough to push through the “learning pit”: the period of distress or confusion when you have realized how difficult something is, before you finally get good at it. Let’s think about the learning pit in terms of Frank De Phillips, William Berliner and James Cribbin’s Four Stages of Competence:

  1. Unconscious Incompetence (You don’t know what you don’t know.)

  2. Conscious Incompetence (You know what you don’t know. Painful.)

  3. Conscious Competence (You know it, but it still takes effort to use the new knowledge and skill.)

  4. Unconscious Competence (The skill starts to seem relatively effortless.)

Confusion can be a sign of learning. If you make it from (1) unconscious incompetence to (2) conscious incompetence and you don’t retreat in horror and realizing what you don’t know, you can go on to (3) conscious competence, and then at length to (3) unconscious competence. The alternative is to avoid ever doing anything hard, which will limit your life in big ways.

Just below is a short video with that message: Entering the Challenge Zone with Pema Chödrön.

Jenny Anderson writes the blog “How to Be Brave.” Along with Rebecca Winthrop, she has a new book: The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. She wrote a teaser for her book in the Wall Street Journal (February 6, 2025): “Don’t Try to Rescue Your Kid From the ‘Learning Pit’”, source of the picture at the top of this post. Here are some of my favorite quotations (bullets added to distinguish different quoted passages):

  • The high ground, before the ditch, is the excitement and spark of a new idea. Immediately after comes the false belief that you understand it. Then comes the descent into realizing you don’t really understand it: falling into the pit. Over time, very gradually, you figure it out; you climb out of the pit.

  • Letting kids struggle is not the norm in the U.S. In 1999, the Department of Education released a detailed study comparing how teachers teach eighth-grade math in different countries. In Japan, teachers spent 44% of their time giving students material they don’t know and challenging them to figure it out; in the U.S., teachers took this approach 1% of the time. In Japan, a student would sometimes stand at the board for over half an hour trying to figure out how to solve a problem—no one was concerned or embarrassed. American teachers offered help before students tried the problems, to prevent them from struggling.

  • But soon after my unnecessarily panicked email, my daughter’s mood started to improve. Her scores started ticking up. At a regularly scheduled parent-teacher meeting, her teacher said she was clocking 60% on math problems that were a full academic year ahead. She was getting better at dealing with frustration and setbacks. She was gaining confidence—not just in math and English but in asking for help. She was climbing out of the pit.

  • … a kid who struggles—and sometimes fails—will end up better prepared for life’s challenges than one who breezes through their work without breaking a sweat. Independence in learning is critical to success in an era where generative AI will require us not just to know things but to know what we want to do with our knowledge.

In my own intellectual journey, I have made a habit of turning toward what is hard rather than away. That habit has served me well. This is in accordance with a more general principle in life, said well by Ryan Holiday:

“One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way, forgoing difficulty whenever possible. The other way is the Stoic way—to see hardship as an opportunity, as a test not an obstacle, a chance to use all that stands in your path as fuel to make you brighter and better.”

— Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic, "Nothing Can Stop You From This"

Frances Perkins, Loretta Ford and Policy Hope

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For a long time, major federal policies in the US have been relatively fixed, with modest changes that are treated as apocalyptic by politicians. But now everything is coming unglued and we’ll see what major policy change is really like. That could be terrible, or the unsticking that is happening now may make it possible to push things to much better place, say ten or fifteen years from now. I am a congenital optimist, so take that bias into account, but I think there is hope.

To see what one talented and powerful individual can do at the right moment in history, consider Frances Perkins. As Charlotte Gray’s review of Rebecca Brenner Graham’s book Dear Miss Perkins in the February 4, 2025 Wall Street Journal notes:

[Frances Perkins’s] legacies include the 40-hour work week, unemployment insurance, Social Security and the end of child labor.

She did a lot as secretary of labor! Without her, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have had less of an effect on our daily life today.

Dear Miss Perkins is primarily about how Frances Perkins tried to overcome the antisemitism of many others to let more European Jews come to the United States. The strong efforts that she made make it clear the heavy guilt that others bore for the deaths of a huge number of European Jews who could have been saved if they had been allowed to come to the United States. (Of course, we today are in great danger of bearing guilt for keeping others out of the United States who will fair much, much worse in the places they are in now.)

As another example of an individual who made a difference, consider Loretta Ford, the pioneer of the role of nurse practitioner who died January 22 this year. Loretta did a lot to reduce the baleful effects of monopolization of medicine by doctors restricting supply. Quoting from James Hagerty’s obituary in the February 6, 2025 Wall Street Journal (bullets added to mark off distinct quotations):

  • The problem was that physicians regarded themselves as the “lords of health,” as she put it. They were, and remain, determined to defend their turf.

  • Rather than seeking approval from boards of medicine, she said, “We went to tell them what we were doing.”

  • About 385,000 nurse practitioners are working in the U.S., more than triple the total two decades ago.

  • In the early days, Ford met resistance not just from physicians but from nursing professors wary of what seemed like radical change. Some colleagues stopped talking to her. “I’ve been kissed and kicked and reviled and revered and crucified and credited,” Ford often quipped.

  • Ford saw no need for physicians to fret. “There’s enough work to go around for everybody,” she told Modern Healthcare in 1995. “The patient needs team care.”

I think we are again in a time of great policy possibility—both for bad and for good. Even just limiting ourselves to the areas Frances Perkins and Lorretta Ford worked on, we could

  1. Further loosen “scope of practice”, as more and more of medicine becomes routinized, reserving to MD’s the most difficult diagnostic questions and the most difficult types of surgery. On this, I am inspired by Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang’s book The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care. (If you put “Hwang” in the search box above, you’ll find many posts I have written about insights from this book.)

  2. Work toward a four-day workweek. On this, I was inspired by a seminar here at the University of Colorado Boulder by the economist Pedro Gomes, author of Friday is the New Saturday, who is working hard to make the four-day workweek a reality, starting in Europe.

The way to make political hay in the world today, I maintain, is to propose things that will make people’s lives better that have not even been part of the political discussion.

Disparate Outcomes and Systemic Racism

Disparate outcomes for different races and sexes can result from several causes:

  • “Animus”: This is a fancy word for “hatred.” It can also include looking down on a group. Unfortunately dividing the world into “us” and “them” is built deep into the human psyche, and can especially easily target racial and sex differences. See my sermon “Us and Them,” and if you are willing to read a long, but excellent book, Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. I see animus (or possibly statistical discrimination stereotypes) behind many policies that are stated in race-neutral terms but have a disparate impact, such as the long-time harsher treatment of crack cocaine abuse (associated in the minds of policy makers with Blacks) and powder cocaine abuse (associated in the minds of policy makers with Whites).

  • Statistical Discrimination: This is people using race or sex as a cognitive shortcut rather than learning more about each individual. A crucial fact of the social sciences is that differences within any demographic group are much, much larger than differences in the average between groups. So even when there are differences in the averages (say, because of history), it is a fool’s game to judge by group averages when one has had any chance at all to learn more about an individual.

  • The Long Shadow of the Past: Intergenerational transmission of wealth matters. Intergenerational transmission of health can also be crucial. If your grandmother was malnourished, that affects the womb your mother gestated in, and therefore the womb your mother developed, which you were gestated in. And there is intergenerational transmission of education: parents who have had more education are likely to better impress on their kids the value of education. Occasionally, a parent might emphasize the importance of education precisely because the parent wasn’t able to get much, but more often, if they have less education they will, for example, read less to their kids, which communicates less importance of books. Where there is intergenerational persistence, ancestors starting in an enslaved situation is a tough starting position.

  • Policies That Keep the Poor Down that Often Had Racist Roots but Many of Which are Now Usually Thought of as Innocent. Such policies make the long shadow of the past much longer. It is these policies the best candidates for systemic racism, which I will define as structures that have a racist effect even when there is no animus or statistical discrimination. (If a society were in every way an opportunity society—and one that especially does right by the children of the poor, I would not classify what remained of the long shadow of the past as systemic racism.)

Talking about systemic racism is only helpful if one points to what systemic racism is made of. Focusing on policies that all too many people think of as innocent, here are four key components of systemic racism:

  1. Anti-construction rules and attitudes that make it difficult for poor people to live near rich people. (See “Why Is Housing So Expensive?”). Residential segregation makes it harder for talented poor kids to get good mentoring about professional careers, to mention one of a host of problems with it. Residential segregation makes life much harder for the poor in other ways, too. For example, residential segregation is encourages police to concentrate their policing efforts on fighting crime in the rich areas that have more political clout. If the poor and the rich lived side by side, the rich would care about crime fighting helpful to the poor next door, because that would also be protecting their own necks.

  2. Opposition to charter schools and to longer school days and school years. (See “Evidence on Charter Schools: 'Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City' by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer” and “Magic Ingredient 1: More K-12 School”. What I find remarkable about the evidence for charter schools is that for the large fraction of charter schools that are oversubscribed and choose students by lottery, one has school by school randomized controlled trial evidence for the value of each charter school relative to the schools that those who lose the lottery for that school go to. There may be some bad charter schools, and some that, while good, are no better than excellent local public schools, but we know which ones they are! And we know that the rest are valuable to students.

  3. Government connivance in allowing the deadly idea that sugar is OK to continue. (I highly recommend the hard-hitting book Good Energy, by Casey Means and Calley Means.) This affects almost everyone in our society, but hits the poor much worse than the rich, who can more easily get more accurate health information.

  4. Occupational Licensing. The rest of this post is about occupational licensing. Also see “When the Government Says ‘You May Not Have a Job’”.

Alex Tabarrok is one of my favorite bloggers. He wrote a February 7, 2025 review in the Wall Street Journal for Rebecca Allensworth’s new book, The Licensing Racket. The picture at the top alludes to the fact that in many states, hair-braiding requires a government license. Let me quote some of his key points:

  • Nearly a quarter of American workers now require a government license to work, compared with about 5% in the 1950s. Much of this increase is due to a “ratchet effect,” as professional groups organize and lobby legislatures to exclude competitors.

  • Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.

  • Enforcement efforts tend to protect turf more than consumers. Consumers care about bad service, not about who is licensed, so take a guess who complains about unlicensed practitioners? Licensed practitioners. According to Ms. Allensworth, it was these competitor-initiated cases, “not consumer complaints alleging fraud, predatory sales tactics, and graft,” where boards gave the stiffest penalties.

  • the AMA and the boards limit the number of physicians with occupational licensing, artificially scarce residency slots and barriers preventing foreign physicians from practicing in the U.S. Yet when a physician is brought before a board for egregious misconduct, the AMA cites physician shortage as a reason for leniency. When it comes to disciplining bad actors, the mantra seems to be that “any physician is better than no physician,” but when it comes to allowing foreign-trained doctors to practice in the U.S., the claim suddenly becomes something like “patient safety requires American training.”

  • Voluntary certification can effectively replace many occupational licenses. Consider computer security, one of the most critical fields for consumer safety. Instead of requiring occupational licenses, professionals in this field rely on certifications such as the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) to demonstrate expertise and competence.

Turn Toward What is Hard, Not Away From It—Ryan Holiday

“One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way, forgoing difficulty whenever possible. The other way is the Stoic way—to see hardship as an opportunity, as a test not an obstacle, a chance to use all that stands in your path as fuel to make you brighter and better.”
— Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic, "Nothing Can Stop You From This"