Who will lead the charge to a four-day work week?

My personal belief is that this is due to different factors and that it is quite a complex problem that is worsened by oversimplification. Notably that all measurements are quite fuzzy and there's incentives to advocate the metric that suits ones bias rather than account for the fuzziness of the metrics.

I think what's good about the American education system is that we aren't test focused and that we don't have a singular exam that is critical to one's future success. I think this encourages creativity, which is necessary especially in STEM fields and especially as we move into the modern era with AI. I also think test based systems (as you may see in most of Asia like China's Gaokao or Korea's Suneung) put far too much pressure on memorization (lack of generalization) and are especially stressful to children's mental health and takes away from all the soft skills that one learns in schooling (and is especially important). I think it's important we have many opportunities for people to recover from mistakes or environmental situations that these tests do not account for and is likely a bigger problem for western societies and especially American culture.

But the big thing is that there's strong evidence that a child under 10 can learn calculus. I'm not saying we need to do that, but certainly we can put more onto our children who are far smarter than we give credit to. But we may need to radically think our education program to perform such feats at scale. I do think there is a danger to solve "no student left behind" through decreasing standards rather than creating more nuanced educational methods and metrics (we see this even in other countries too). There are certainly larger incentive problems too. Such as in the modern world it is actually a rational decision for these children to desire to be "YouTube Stars" rather than say an engineer and that's not resolved by mocking them but being realistic about the risk reward environment we've created and our social devaluation of these jobs. This is a cultural phenomena that the Asian cultures seem to have solved where performing well in school is considered cool, but there are so many cultural aspects at play that this is hard to disentangle and pinpoint what exactly would be the way to create a similar phenomena in the west. Most certainly we need to disregard all parental sentiment of "well I didn't learn this when I was in school" if we are to operate on the premise that our society gets smarter as the world gets smarter because this should instead be seen as an expected result that is desired. But that may have political ramifications that adds to the complexity.

> though difficult to comprehend the nuances associated with experiments like this until the data is available.

I think, unfortunately, this is one of those many situations where we're never going to have sufficient data until we take a leap of faith. There's far too many issues where if we wait to act on experimental data that we'll wait till the ends of time because performing such experiments are difficult to do and especially in a controlled way. Even more so considering the difficulties in decoupling extraneous variables from the system and finding the key causal ones. In the real world you kinda just have to make that leap at times and be willing to revert if it is a mistake rather than doubling down and also be willing to consider colliding variables being adequate explanations for lack of success rather than the variable that was actively modified. (Fuck, experimentation and evaluation is hard. I really wish this was better recognized. The world is fucking fuzzy and we're fucking dumb)

All of this is of course my opinions and I'm explicitly not adding sources to claims because I'm not trying to sound authoritative here but rather thinking aloud to promote discussion on the topic to form better communal consensus and how we as a community can figure out answers to these complex problems. So these are my views and the data I see. (Let's also try to encourage discussion like this where we aren't asserting authoritative conclusions because certainly none of us are authorities in this regard and certainly there are no hard conclusions from existing authorities)

To be fair, most people think this is how productivity works in any domain. It's certainly true if your job is to turn a hand crank all day producing widgets and under the assumption that you have equal energy throughout the day (but even accounting for that you still get the effect that more time = more widgets). But that most certainly is not true in the modern world and definitely not with any task that requires creativity. I'm actually more shocked at how many developers believe this considering I think we've all been in plenty of situations where more time debugging creates more bugs and the solution is to walk away, go do something else, and come back later. Maybe the problem is simply momentum and the coefficient of status stubbornness.

We use proxies like standardized testing to avoid each school self-assessing as excellent. But tests can be gamed through cheating. States distribute funding on a literal per capita per day formula. It’s much harder to commit time tracking fraud. Incentives that encourage butts in seats of course can be gamed. Snow days are avoided through half days and NYC once had a “school day” that was just a video call long enough to take attendance.

Attendance maximizing limits flexibility and greatness in pedagogy. However it guarantees a bare minimum service level. It also aligns with schools’ secondary function as daycare.