31–40 of 447 posts
Why aren't we working on drugs to make people smart?
I wonder what effects do you expect from that on a societal scale in the long term (at least 3,4 decades) ? For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a rhetoric question.
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IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what effects do you expect from that on a societal scale in the long term (at least 3,4 decades) ? For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a rhetoric question.
We didn’t fully ban them. We just prescribe them to anyone a doctor decides has ADHD.
Your apparent disbelief in ADHD doesn’t make it imaginary, by the way. Consider yourself lucky that you do not have it; I am unemployable without medication.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe y…
Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good.
> Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.
I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.
To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry.
Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things.
My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business.
I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd.
Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right?
Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
That was a fun read. What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them. I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects. But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone? I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for th…
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards. It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.
Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.