Wrong diagnosis leads to wrong corrective actions

The mind moves in circles and eddies.

An abscess was found in Mom's mouth via imaging. Cross references to dental information indicated that the "lucidity" was recent.

The dots connect. The most probable origin of Mom's first issue has been found.

It moves the time-tables for other actions back. Leg surgery is rescheduled to allow drainage of abscess and swelling to shrink.

George Washington

The mind moves in circles and eddies.

The proximal cause of George Washington's death is often given as an oral infection.

He was thoroughly wetted on December 12, 1799. He had a fever the next morning and died December 14. Cause-of-death was given as "Quinsy".

Forensic pathologists strongly suspect that the prevailing method of treating fevers, blood-letting, may have hastened his demise.

At that point in history, medical science (such as it existed) focused on counteracting symptoms rather than causes. If a patient was hot and flushed the "obvious" solution was to remove their excess blood.

Biden and 17 years of education

The jaded and cynical point to Biden's plan to add four years to the current mandatory K-12 (13 years) as a blatant pay-back to the Education Exploitation Industry for their unquestioning support of leftist-goals.

This proposal, and the criticisms, merits examination from multiple perspectives.

Going from 13 years of mandatory "education" to 17 years is an increase of 23.5%.

Early childhood instructors don't get paid very much. Folding them into the EEI complex would raise their wages from $20k/2000 hour work-year to an average of $45k/1400 hour (nominal) work-year or approximately 3X previous wage.

BUT that comes at a cost of mandatory participation in Unions and the commitment to pay dues that then support Progressive candidates. A 25% increase in political contributions is not chicken feed

Most community colleges use part-time instructors. The increase in income is likely to be the same order-of-magnitude.

Using a wider-angle lens

Many people would argue that "Made in Japan" is a prime indicator of quality regardless of the product.

Much of that is attributable to Professor Genichi Taguchi.

Like many people who were pivotal in history, Professor Taguchi had a great "Ah-ha" moment.

Picture Japan shortly after WWII. Shorn of over-seas suppliers and bled-white by the skimming off of prime-laborers to support the war-effort, many of whom lay in the bottom of the Coral Sea feeding the sharks, Japan struggled to feed herself.

Desperately seeking technologies to leverage food-producing capabilities, they latched onto plastic-film covered greenhouses. It was a brilliant decision. Plastic covered greenhouses had the ability to increase per-area (and per-worker-per-year) production by up to 300%.

Taguchi's "Ah-ha" moment came after a hail-storm shredded those greenhouses and devastated the crops within.

Investigating, he discovered that the specification for the plastic film was 1.0mm while every greenhouse that was destroyed was covered with 0.8mm plastic.

Digging deeper, he discovered that the 0.8mm plastic was "in-spec" based on standards that were formulated and accepted when the plastic industry was in its infancy. The acceptance specification for (nominally) 1.0mm plastic film was anything between 0.80mm and 1.20mm.

As manufacturers became more proficient at producing uniform thicknesses, it was to their economic advantage to ship the thinnest film that would pass the acceptance criteria. Consequently, most greenhouses were covered with 0.80mm-to 0.85mm film even though the specification was 1.0mm. 

Then the hailstorm came.

That triggered a stream of thoughts in Taguchi's head. 

Taguchi postulated that most "tolerance bands" are bounded by two different failure modes. In an oil-lubricated, journal bearing "too tight" might mean that the machine will not turn over and "too loose" might mean the oil-pump cannot supply enough oil or dimensional integrity is lost.

The designer ought to specify the upper-and-lower bounds in a way that reflects zero-value (or loss) to society. A machine that will not run is an black-hole for value-to-society. A machine that has too-loose of a journal bearing will return for rebuild (and incur lost-productivity and rebuild costs) too soon.

He then postulated that if the extremes of the tolerance band were of neutral-value-added-to-society, then the only way to provide net-positive-value was to run within a band that was significantly tighter than the design tolerances.

Consider a grinding operation that makes journal bearings. The traditional thinking was to install a grinding wheel that produced the minimum sized "round". As the grinding wheel wore, the "round" would increase in size. Then the wheel would be replaced or adjusted when the first "round" was measured that exceeded the specification.

Taguchi made a radical suggestion: Don't start with the wheel that produces the maximum sized "rounds". Start slightly larger than the mid-range. Equally radical was his suggestion to not wait until it was producing "scrap" before remediating. He suggested changing the grinding wheel while the wheel was still producing "rounds" that were well within the tolerance.

In fact, he then suggested that when enough institutional knowledge was acquired, measurement was almost an after-thought. If experience showed that a grinding wheel was only good for 10,000 parts (using his significantly narrowed tolerance bands) then change the wheel every 8000 or 10,000 parts unless quality monitoring indicated something catastrophic had occurred.

Back to Biden's 17 years of education

What if our issues with education were a case of misdiagnoses? What if Biden's plan was analogous to George Washington's doctor bleeding him to cure an infection rather than addressing the actual problem?

I think we have all seen sixth-grade graduation examinations from the early 1900s. How many college graduates could get the correct answer to this question:

"You have a wagon that is 10' long, 5' wide and has 5' high sides. It is filled with wheat and the top is leveled. How many bushels does it hold and what is the net weight?"

The problem with education in the US is not the time or resources dedicated to the task. It is the lack of a linkage between "Performance in school equates to a better life later" in the students' heads and a metastasizing job-creep.

Graduation rates are a joke. NCLB incentivizes graduation rates and embalmed bodies "walk down the aisle and graduate". The entire language of "No child left behind" warps the thinking. It changes performance from the individual's responsibility to "failure of one is a failure of the system".

America used to have an EXTREMELY robust system for education after the 12th grade. It was called "WORK". Or, in some cases, military service.

I didn't learn to weld in high school or college. I learned at work.

I didn't learn how to deal with difficult people in high school or college. I learned at work.

Young people do not need four more years of formalized (guaranteed to fail) public education. They need earlier exposure to the rough-and-tumble, value-added experience of work in the private sector.

Combining Taguchi with Biden

From a Value-to-society standpoint: What benefit is there to imprisoning a young person for an additional two years?

Is society better served to have those young people working and learning state-of-the-art methods and technologies or is society better off having them sequestered from society in an in-bred hot-house and learning technologies that were state-of-the-art twenty years ago?

From the standpoint of the individual: Are they better served entering the workplace two years later and losing two years of time-value-of-money? Keeping them in school two additional years does not automatically add two years to their lives. It means that they lose two years of their retirement, should they be blessed to live so long.

Answer to the wagon question: A bushel is 1.25 cubic feet by definition. A cube, five feet on a square is 125 cubic feet or one-hundred bushels. A wagon 10'-by-5'-by-5' is 250 cubic feet or 200 bushels.

A bushel of wheat weighs 60 pounds, by definition. 200 times 60 is 12,000 pounds or six tons.

The dimensions were selected to make the calculations simple enough to do you the test-taker's head.

I wonder how many college students could get the right answer even when given access to the internet and ten minutes of time. My guess is in the 1%-to-10% range.

And this is the kind of question that was considered 6th grade (12 years old) material in 1912.