There's a fundamental reason why doing, and learning from doing, is necessary to learn (to do), and can't be replaced with book learning.

Maybe stated like this it sounds obvious, but it runs counter to people expecting LLMs to learn to do things for themselves by "book learning" (pre-training), unless regurgitating artifacts from the training set is all you need.

The issue is that intelligence and action are prediction (with motor cortex output predictions driving muscles and becoming action - a useful insight/framing from Jeff Hawkins)... In order to act well, you need to learn to predict/react well, but these predictions need to be based on your OWN state per the sensory inputs you are receiving. Learning to predict what someone else would do (being book smart) doesn't help when you're the actor, where the predictions need to be based on your own internal state.

It's not that school causes success. It's that school is a decent way to learn. It's not the best, by any means, but it beats not learning at all.

If you drop out of school, do it because you've found a better way to learn.

If you stop learning, whether in our out of school, that is the path to failure.

"For a simple example, a better home craft than lemonade might be a pastry, taken seriously. Not sugar cookies or muffins, but the kind of thing that is plain for a 13-year-old to understand, harder for him to make, and very difficult to master. If a child committed to a batch a day, documenting progress, perhaps in time he would have something worth selling."

1. is lemonade a home craft? 2. who is forcing their children to bake sourdough croissants? 3. is craft baker really the career path of the future?

School is not enough, learning by doing is not enough... The sweet spot lies as always in the middle. Certain things can only be learnt by doing, some things are learnt x100 faster if you learn the theory first.

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.

I think the title doesn't go far enough, as it removes the "sufficient" part but leaves alone the "necessary" part.

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.

An earlier version of this article was discussed at the time:

The most precious resource is agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695181 - July 2021 (325 comments)

Does this mean I shouldn't worry about my 11 year old son and his fixation on video games right now? It looks like you either figure out when you are 12 or 13 or you don't. That's the moment parents should be watching carefully.

Free to learn, a book by Peter Gray about unschooling, really opened my eyes and finally help with decision about homeschooling.

It shood be basic literature for all institutional teachers.

I have just discovered Simon’s blog a week ago, and it’s one of my favourite reads of the year. He seems like a really interesting person.

Agency is also possibly an innate ability not necessarily cultivated at school or by focusing on some useful early pursuit.