Entrepreneurship is an important part of a thriving economy, and entrepreneurship education is intended to make sure that those who have the potential to succeed in this way have the resources and knowledge to do so. But the opportunity for innovation, being one's own boss, and making money are not the only reasons that people become entrepreneurs. Some do so to fulfil a kind of fantasy, or simply to look good. And there is an entire educational sub-industry offering to help them to indulge this fantasy, for a price. In Towards an "Un"trepreneurial Economy: the Entrepreneurship Industry and the Veblenian Entrepreneur, authors Hartmann, Spicer, and Krabbe try to explain a strange trend in recent years: while entrepreneurial activity has gone up, success rates for entrepreneurial ventures have gone down. After considering several possible explanations, they ultimately conclude that a major reason for "excess entry" into what one might call "high-class" entrepreneurship (e.g. founding a tech start-up) is due to a sub-class of entrepreneurs who are not driven to pursue real opportunities in the market, but are simply trying to adopt the identity of an entrepreneur because of its high social status. Dubbed "Veblenian entrepreneurs" (or sometimes "wantrepreneurs") after Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist who coined the term conspicuous consumption at the end of the 19th century, these are individuals who are drawn in by a huge industry designed to sell people a dream and a lifestyle which can take them away from everyday mundanity and make them seem successful to their peers. Consumers of the entrepreneurship industry's products (such as courses, conferences, publications, and consultancy) have been shown to engage in more entrepreneurial activity, while actually having lower success rates. This idea is somewhat analogous to the notion of human capital vs. signalling in education economics - in other words, what is the value of education? Does it make you a better and more productive person, or does it just make you look good to employers? (What is the value of entrepreneurship? Does it contribute to the economy, or does it just make you look good on social media?) It also has implications for entrepreneurship educators. Should we really be encouraging entrepreneurship for everybody who is interested, or should we be discouraging those who are least likely to succeed, so that they can make better choices? Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES 115. Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber 103. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee 23. So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport

I picked up The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences hoping for a longer term project of enrichment from a volume published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world. However, it only took reading the introduction by editor R. Keith Sawyer to see that this book is suffused with ideological stances commonly supported and even dogmatically preached in educational circles, whose major tenets have been shown wanting time and again by empirical evidence from cognitive science - not to mention the practical experience of teachers. The whole thing is made all the more facepalm-worthy for the extent to which the author emphasises that his ideas apparently are based on "cognitive science" ideas of "deep learning". In practice he has paid attention to some important facets of the cognitive science of learning (mainly the value of the novice vs. expert axis of comparison), but draws from this ludicrous conclusions which are not, in fact, supported by the science at all. Ultimately, I decided that this book is a good opportunity to discuss widely circulated claims which are invalid or misleading. Among these are the denigrating of "instructionism" (read: common sense teaching) by use of a combination of straw men and false dichotomies; the suggestion that learning should be "authentic" (i.e. inefficient); motte-and-bailey arguments concerning the (un)importance of factual knowledge; and the fallacy of gaining expertise by direct mimicking of experts' day-to-day activities (even though that isn't the way those experts themselves became experts). Enjoy the episode.

How the Brain Learns is one of the first books I bought about education, all the way back in summer of 2014. It sat on my shelf for seven years before I finally got round to reading it. Now, with the benefit of knowledge gained from so many years of investigation, it is much less impressive to me than it would have been when I started. After introducing some basics of brain anatomy, the author starts to describe learning, covering a lot of ground that we've already seen in this podcast in a generally acceptably accurate way. As usual for books about learning with "brain" in the title, it feels as though this word is maintained largely for the purposes of hype, as references to brains in this book, as in others, do little to help us understand the nature of learning. The book does have several important flaws, most striking of which is the author's apparent lack of understanding of the concept of working memory, perhaps the most important learning concept to grasp. The author seems to think that cramming for a test only keeps information in working memory and doesn't allow for transfer to long-term memory, which suggests that crammers have miraculous working memories that can hold far in excess of the pruported limit 2-7 items of information, and that they hold this information in there for days (presumably there is nothing they can divert their attention to in the meantime). How the Brain Learns does contain a few interesting nuggets, and there are a number of ideas that it explains more or less correctly. This puts it way above its apparent cousin Brain-based Learning, put still far behind Why Don't Students Like School? and other books on this podcast for helping us understand how learning works. I do not recommend it, but I've seen worse. Enjoy the episode. ### RELATED EPISODES 53. Brain-based Learning by Eric Jensen - a similar, though considerably worse, book about learning and brains. 79. What learning is - about the modal model of memory (cognitive architecture: working memory and long-term memory), the most important thing I've learned in six and a half years of researching this stuff. 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Dan Willingham - the classic cognitive science book for teachers. 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters - a model very similar to the modal model of memory.

In my episode on Stuart Ritchie's Intelligence: All that Matters I spoke about IQ and intelligence, after a long silence on this issue. In Hive Mind, we get a look at how IQ affects the fate of entire nations, rather than just the individuals living in them. Jones' argument rests on data showing that IQ correlates positively with patience, win-win thinking, productivity in teams, supporting "good" policies (i.e. those endorsed by experts), and saving more money. There is also data to indicate that richer countries tend to have higher average IQ, and some indications that causality goes from IQ to national wealth. The Flynn effect - a constant increase by the equivalent of 3 IQ points per year around the world throughout the 20th century - shows that IQ can be increased, but a more important question is whether that increase can be encouraged somehow. Jones also covers this ground, although it seems that we don't really know good answers to this. Nevertheless, that doesn't stop authors like David Didau in Making Kids Cleverer proposing that the purpose of school is to increase IQ so that children can benefit from the associated health, wealth, and other benefits. Overall, by combining economics and intelligence research, Hive Mind brings new perspectives to each of these domains. Enjoy the episode. ### RELATED EPISODES 111. Intelligence: All that Matters by Stuart Ritchie

This is the second part of the episode on the book Multiple Faces of Attachment - Cultural Variations on a Fundamental Human Need. In this section, we will look at three societies - the Beng (Ivory Coast), Nso (Cameroon), and Makassar (Sulawesi) - to see how children are brought up there, and the extent to which Attachment Theory as it is currently formulated makes sense within these example societies. We will see the themes of the child not "belonging" to parents, alloparenting or additive parenting, the need for the mother to get back to work after birth, the lack of an ideology of mother love, and child autonomy and choice concerning its caregivers as factors that undermine the basic thinking of Attachment Theory, and expose it as ultimately ethnocentric. Finally, we will see an example of where application of Attachment Theory's suggestions seems to actually lead to harm, as a final demonstration of the shortcomings of this psychological theory. Enjoy the episode.

Exploring Attachment Theory as a cultural ideology, the podcast challenges its Euro-American bias and Western moralisms. It delves into the evolution of child valuation, societal perceptions, and influences on childcare practices. Critiquing the scientific basis and cultural biases of Attachment Theory, the episode emphasizes cross-cultural research challenges and the importance of contextual factors in understanding human behavior.

Which country was the first ever to have universal, free, compulsory education? Zero points if you said "Prussia". The correct answer is the Aztec empire, almost four centuries before the oft-cited German state. I happened to find out this bizarre fact from an aside in a YouTube video, and decided to look into it. If this isn't an independent societal data point on the development of education, then I don't know what is! In this episode, I discuss the article Developing Face and Heart in the Time of the Fifth Sun: An Examination of Aztec Education by Timothy Reagan. You will hear about Aztec society and values, and how the education system fit within the society in order to achieve its educational aims. You will also hear a lot of bloody stories of human sacrifice. Enjoy the episode.

I realised I missed something, and I kicked myself. For a while I've been toying with the idea that learning occurs in two stages, which can be mapped between cognitive science and neuroscience: Exposure to new material -> neuronal connections Practice and repetition -> myelination ...with elaboration (e.g. relating one piece of information to another) being a practice that involves both stages. This model appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it is simple, which is a relief in the complex world of teaching and learning. Secondly, it is grounded in the idea that learning is all about addition to long-term memory, which is now a deeply ingrained idea with me. Thirdly, it is in line with the way that most teachers would teach, which makes sense - you would think that teachers tend to do something more or less right after so many years of experience. However, there is one anomaly that I couldn't place in this model: pre-testing. It turns out that when you are given a test on something before you start learning, even if you're completely ignorant of the topic, it boosts your learning compared to just starting off with study straight away. How could this make sense with the above? For a while I just brushed it aside, but now I realised how it would fit in, as "stage zero": humility, or realisation of ignorance. As I understand it, this is a stage where you can overcome your cognitive biases which make you not want to expend effort to learn anything, by assuming that you already know this, or that there is nothing to learn. Immediate exposure to a test shatters this illusion, and makes you more able - even subconsciously - to pay attention to the lesson. One of the great things about this way of thinking is that it makes room for some "progressive" ideas within the starkly "traditional" view of stages 1 and 2. While I still feel that progressive education is largely a bad idea and a failure, I don't want to become dogmatically married to another way of thinking, especially not one which is to some extent defined by its opposition to progressivism. The chance for at least some reconciliation through synthesis is something that I warmly welcome. In the recording, I also discuss how this relates to ideas of mental warm-ups, desirable difficulty, and the differences between learning and performance. Enjoy the episode.

This book touched my heart, and it changed my mind about neuroscience. I wasn't going to read this book. While I was at my friend's house, I picked this book up and read the preface, written by Will Self. He wrote that Oliver Sacks is extraordinary in the way in which he fuses such humanity with his scientific probing of the brains of his patients. At that point, I got interested, and my friend told me I could borrow it. I gobbled the book up in two days. Having read the book, I can see what Will Self was saying. I used to feel that neurologists were dehumanising of people, seeing them as a pile of neurons, and seeing themselves arrogantly as masters of the most important discipline. Oliver Sacks couldn't be more different. He has a real care for the humanity, for the soul of his patients, even as he describes the areas of brain damage. He marries up scientific description and human concern in a way that is life-affirming and touching. I used to think that neuroscience is too low-level to be relevant to education, and that higher-level cognitive science is enough. To  a large extent, I still believe this. Neuroscience in education seems to me like trying to understand why your browser plugin isn't working properly by inspecting your computer's microchips - yes, the fundamental problem is there somehow, but it's just not the best way of solving the issue. Eric Jensen's useless book Brain-based Learning also vividly showed how neuroscience seems incapable of making a tractable theory or set of coherent principles for teachers and others in education to work from (I covered this book in detail in episode 53). However, I now see a different relevance to neuroscience. Just as psychologists have been sampling too narrowly by focusing almost exclusively on Western university undergraduates, so have they been sampling too narrowly by only looking at people without brain damage. I see neurology now as a new ground in which to sample widely, in order to get a proper sense of how the mind works by considering really different minds, or minds that don't seem to work properly. Enjoy the episode.

This episode feels almost nostalgic, as it is a return to the theme of the roles and interactions of the conscious and subconscious mind, something which I focused on early in the podcast and came out strongly in my main series on expertise (around episode 20). It also shares some relation to books on the topic of cognitive biases on the one hand, and the complexity of the world on the other. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has two main points to make: firstly, that ignorance and cognitive biases often outperform knowledge and "clear thinking"; and secondly, he proposes a way in which gut feelings work. On the first point, Gigerenzer points us to some experiments which are convincing of their point but difficult to know how to make use of. It turns out that, in tasks like guessing which of two cities has the larger population, if you've heard of one but not the other, the one you've heard of is probably more populous. This requires that you are "somewhat ignorant" - you know one city but not the other - as if you are completely ignorant (not heard of either) or somewhat knowledgeable (heard of both) then you can't use this trick. It seems very impractical to try to reach a perfect state of mild ignorance in everything in order to use this trick, and you would have to give up the benefits of knowledge in order to do so... Nevertheless, the theoretical point is well made. On the second point, Gigerenzer proposes that gut feelings are simple rules that cut out most of the information, and they often make use of an algorithm called "take the best". The algorithm works like this: you compare whether the available options in the most important feature, then the next important feature, and so on, until in one of the comparisons one of the options is clearly better, at which point you choose that one. So, for example, if you're choosing a restaurant, maybe you first think about the food, but two places both have good food; then you compare atmosphere, but both atmospheres are good; then you compare price, and find one is considerably cheaper, so you go there. Overall Gigerenzer's work makes a welcome contribution to thinking about the nature of intuition. Probably the most insightful idea is that gut feelings use simple rules, because that way they can cut out the noise and make decisions easier. Richard Dawkins apparently once claimed that when we catch a ball we must be implicitly solving partial differential equations; Gigerenzer shows that this is probably not what happens. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Phenomenology of learning / relation between conscious and subconscious mind: 7. The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner; 9. The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey; 10. Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi; 17. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; 49. The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin; 64. What Bruce Lee taught me about learning Mental architecture: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters Expertise: 18. Bounce by Matthew Syed; 20. Genius Explained by Michael Howe; 22. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; 24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Expertise in "wicked" domains: 98. Range by David Epstein; 108. Expert Political Judgement by Phillip Tetlock The world is complicated: 113. The Hidden Half by Michael Blastland Cognitive biases: 11. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; 12. "Picture yourself as a stereotypical male" by Michelle Goffreda