The sin of Pride is exacerbated by the catastrophe of incompetence.

A couple of days ago, I posted about the central sin of Pride; The Essential Vice is alive and well and thriving on government programs in Thingfinder.   One of the points is that government routinely undertakes to change exceedingly complex and obscure social processes in a fashion intended to do good but almost always ends up producing outcomes worse than the status quo ante intervention.

I argued that the government is committing the sin of Pride by continually intervening in things to make them better.  But it is worse than the sin of Pride.  They commit the sin based on confident actions performed on complex systems that are poorly understood and then are shocked because the outcomes are worse than before.  The sin of Pride is exacerbated by the catastrophe of incompetence.  

Very closely related is Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias by Freddie deBoer.

There’s a bias that runs throughout our educational discourse, coming from our media, academia, and the think tanks and foundations that have such sway in education policy. It’s a bias that exists both because of a natural human desire to see every child succeed and because the structural incentives in the field make rejecting that bias professionally risky. The bias I’m talking about is optimism bias, the insistence that all problems in education are solvable and that we can fix them if only we want to badly enough. At least a half-century of research, spending, policy experimentation, and dogged effort has utterly failed to close the gaps that so vex our political class. But still we hear the same old song about how we could close those gaps tomorrow if we really wanted to, an attitude that has distorted education policy and analysis for decades.

[snip]

The essential argument of the book is that overwhelming empirical evidence shows that students sort themselves into academic ability bands in the performance spectrum early in life, with remarkable consistency; that the most natural and simplest explanation for this tendency is that there is such a thing as individual academic potential; and that the most likely source of this individual academic potential is [edit] likely influenced by genes. When we look at academic performance, what we see again and again is that students perform at a given level relative to peers early in schooling and maintain that level throughout formal education. (I make that case at considerable length here.) A vast number of interventions thought to influence relative performance have been revealed to make no difference in rigorous research, including truly dramatic changes to schooling and environment. Meta-analyses and literature reviews that assess the strength of many different educational interventions find effect sizes in the range of .01 to .3 standard deviations, small by any standards and subject to all sorts of questions about research quality and randomization. Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.