Posted by Gooblebrai 3 hours ago
I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing" things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing" at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best.
Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the railroads just as they were taking off.
The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments.
There are just so many things that require such and such degree, or such and such experience, not because they're actually necessary, but because various legalistic bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away from it, probably because it undermines its thesis.
In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the past, both close to me institutionally and more distally. People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then getting a career because they came there to do the work, were respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward. None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks involved.
Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the premise that doing things is important. But I think schools teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way, but something about today's society makes the examples provided in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.
Some of those young people cultivate skill by getting practice during youth. Doing that while young builds a compounding machine of personal interest + confidence + progress.
I have never seen broad data to support this, so discussions revolve around anecdotes[1]. That's fine by me though because we have countless examples of the legends of their craft who fit that mold: bill gates, zuck, warren buffett, taylor swift, mozart, da vinci... the list is long.
No single system will work for every single student. But that isn't the point. The point is that the best of the best deserve to feed their interests at a young age, which the current US upbringing limits. How many more bill gates and zuck-level creators could the world have if more talented youths could cultivate their talents very early in life?
[1] Although not broad data, the thinking behind these works build on a similar point: Thiel Fellowship [https://thielfellowship.org/]; PG's essay How to Do Great Work [https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html]
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
Either way, at 60, on a daily basis in my life, almost all the skills I use were thing I learned after I turned 25 (and most of them after 30). That includes cooking, woodworking, programming, swimming and host of others.
My stepfather used to say (he probably still would if given the chance) that the point of school (by which he meant what in the US is called K-12) is learning how to learn. I agree with 100% (surprise!) - the reason I have been able to learn things in later life is because I got an excellent opportunity to learn how to learn when I was younger.
> The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now.
I don't even know what this means. The best education consists of a situation (sometimes created by a teacher) that provides a given individual with the opportunity and motivation to acquire some knowledge about something. I do not see what AI can possibly have to do with creating such situations.
Isn’t the more apt comparison between “pointless” schoolwork today and the “pointless” menial labor that would characterize more typical adolescences in early industrial times?
For that matter, between interest groups and national contests and wholesome YouTube role models aand makerspaces and even open-source, where kids can ease their way into meaningful contributions—all against a backdrop of world-historical material security—isn’t it an even larger handful of exceptional kids today with the means to break out and “do” than in the past?
Why should we look to the experiences of the exceptional few to understand what works best for kids on average?
Later I invite the counterfactual:
"Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
and,
"A 13-year-old Steve Jobs once called Bill Hewlett—whose number was simply listed in the phone book–and received a summer job at Hewlett Packard. This would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is culturally verboten today."
A telephone was only accessible to businesses and the wealthy during Carnegie’s time, so no surprised there.
A better analogy would be a postal letter.
Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they would have made the exact same connections.
It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation from the path they took would have been bad for them. But then you're no longer arguing about the value of education, you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people. And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same choices.
That doesn't make learning by doing a bad idea, or even necessarily a poor first choice, but if it's the only way for you to learn that's a problem.
School typically only caters to one type of learning, and it actually wouldn't matter which type since only focusing on one always leaves out the other.
Lastly, if you can only learn one way, and it is a defect, what do you expect them to do? Genetically modify themselves? Chemically correct themselves? They're kids, they need to be catered for, they can't do it for themselves.
No, your claim is even stronger - that anyone who doesn't learn that way has a learning disability?
I think either version is far too strong a statement.
Regardless I think it's trivially true that one learns by doing primarily or possibly exclusively. When I think of all the practice problems or "think through implications" that I have to do before being competent enough to claim i know something... Let alone my first attempt at applying the knowledge. That's all "doing".
Another point is that you can’t really learn a skill unless there are stakes - a real goal you need to accomplish, real customers, real coworkers. Grades aren’t real stakes; at least I didn’t regard them as such.
I’ve seen this over and over through the years as new college grads arrive who know a lot about things but have no idea how to do those things. Unless they went to a school with a good co-op program.
School is neither necessary nor sufficient for achievement. Certainly education, in some form, must be required. E.g. learning to read and perform basic math, but "school" as it's known today is not the only way, nor likely even a good way, to learn those skills.
- All of us are more naturally talented at some things.
- When you end up working with your natural talents, you have it easier than everyone else.
- Working in your talents often translates to passion, and that’s how you get the so called “agency.”
- To find your talents, you have to try everything once (e.g. wakeboarding, tennis, programming, accounting).
- More well off parents can offer their kids more opportunities to find their talents.
- Schooling and “doing” are orthogonal to finding your talents. Neither learning or doing will tell you your talents, passion, or give you agency, but you should do them both anyway.
I’m just speaking from my experience. I put a lot of practice into things that I am also talented at and life is good. shrug
I put practice into other things like cooking and music too but I’m not going to become a chef or play music for anything but fun.
The most valuable thing is learning when to apply each type of learning, and the best way to learn that is with different kind of mentors. I guess the well known people that he lists as examples had a lot of those. For me that is the differentiator.