A little while back there was some hubbub about Canada’s English-language proficiency test, possibly due to some very inaccurate reporting. While reading “Generations of Exclusion” I got to thinking about language assimilation & immigration. Answering some stock questions could lead to cheating, and personal evaluation could be subjective. It occurred to me that language should help to impart information, and I recalled the trouble some people have had when calling outsourced call-centers. I propose that prospective immigrants be sent technical manuals (written in English). Federal employees will be required to phone them for tech support. If a prospective immigrant can’t set the men & women who serve Uncle Sam right, there are probably plenty of others who can. Before anyone interjects, this test will be necessary rather than sufficient for entry.
September 29, 2010
Technical support as test of language proficiency
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[8] Comments
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September 30, 2010 at 3:41 am
You’ve veered in an ugly direction in my absence. The title sounded pretty cool and I’m interested in technical cannons as fluency asymptotes similar to languages and their OED type compilations. But then you slap it on to some policy porn.
I think paternalism should be going in the direction of encouraging polinguistic competence in America (and elsewhere), but I don’t know if in America in particular it makes sense to screen narrowly for people who can effectively apply the content of technical manuals in English. I’d love a world and citenzry that smart, but USA doesn’t strike me as an organization set up for that particular comparative advantage (for that I think someplace like Singapore or Switzerland).
September 30, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Did you mean to write poly-linguistic? Post-linguistic?
I hadn’t thought of it as falling under the “paternalism” framework.
I didn’t think that it would be such a narrow screen, but I’ve never worked tech support.
October 5, 2010 at 3:48 pm
polylinguistic
September 30, 2010 at 3:15 pm
I have a feeling that if the US did this, it would set up the call center in North Korea, or maybe Syria, and ask what to do with leaking warheads.
I’m getting a bit worried…
September 30, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Fucking brilliant!
October 11, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Couple of posts I attempted to make recently to delong (technical difficulties and rethinking the proper forum is the reason I didn’t post them).
I think as a public expert you go far in being on the side of angels with this post and in general. I take issue only with this line at the end: “help us manage the world to attain the greatest good for the greatest number.” like that’s a smart way to frame the end goal: I think it just rewards population growth competition, a perverse incentive structure.
I like that you’re standing up to what I think is (like a lot of narcissistically/competively deformed public epistemological framings) a kind of hedonic rentier spending of our commons -in this case bashing experts out of the basest of human instincts the desire for “people more like me” to manage resources, because it raises my trait population’s status, rather than for the most effective resource managers to manage those resources.
I think we should start calling out that form of hedonic spending and rent-seeking for what it is.
At the same time I think we should work to neutralize it by burnishing populist credentials (trait-based, not dumb ideological based) within the cohort of most effective resource managers.
Great economics can be done at flagship large population state schools. Experts on public administraton and policy can develop fluencies in mass culture and subcultures without having to lie about serious intellectual and empirical consensus on topics ranging from christianity to counterintuitive insights from empirical macroeconomic research.
We need more top caliber public experts who struggle to remain on the said of the angels AND who struggle to engage mass culture, the way Professor Krugman and (in my opinion) Professor Mankiw do.
The craven, irresponsible, and ultimately destructive narcissitic public epistemology hedonism of folks like Will Wilkinson needs a publicly engaged alternative. Before the rise of the expert academic blogs, I felt trapped in a Orwellian world of relative intellectual mediocrity on all sides.
It’s refreshing to get the unfiltered thoughts of people much smarter than me, even if the ideologically undeformed empirically fluent expert remains asymptotic, particulalry in the social sciences.
+++
Ultimately aren’t all of us Great Plains Apes subuseful in (seems to be less meaninglessly populist than subnormal) the forecastible future? Seems like it’s check mate, and just a matter of # of moves and illusion of humane habitat in the interim.
A personality and ape-like theatre of consciousness seems to me to be dead weight for a von neumann replictator.
October 11, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Your comments are a bit out of place here. I have created a post to host them. ATTENTION READERS: RESPOND OVER THERE, I WILL MOVE ANY RESPONSES TO H.A’S DELONG COMMENTS.
October 11, 2010 at 9:29 pm
I think the media engaged academics like you and Prof. Krugman are doing a good job, but I see real coordination failure by media and popular political elites.
Even on CNN and MSNBC I see shtick by personalities railing against the federal government spending too much.
The inability of major networks and mass constituency politicians too coordinate to resist fiscal restraint pandering for popularity is a wicked problem, and I recommend you shift focus a bit to highlight experts at solving these type of wicked problems.