Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled • Hacker News Board

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#111

Post by mwcampbell » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

apsec112 wrote: post #61

nimbius wrote: post #35

>I grew up homeschooled in NZ with a hilariously small amount of context for what the real world was like. kind of a blunt take here but yeah, homeschooling will do that because its limited to what your parents know. Public schools work to immerse kids in a diverse environment with many people from many different walks of life. they work to build soft skills like empathy, listening, and conflict resolution. she says…

Isolating kids is bad, but modern schools are a very weird, artificial (and often unpleasant) social environment. Many of the social skills you learn in them are useless or even harmful: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html Also, homeschooling doesn't mean you can only learn from your parents. You can use any other resource that's available to you.

From the pg essay you linked:

> Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries.

So why is this a distinctly American problem? If we understand the answer to that question, might that help us solve the problem?

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#112

Post by causality0 » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

dannykwells wrote: post #108

"Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being an heiress with nearly infinite resources to pursue her dreams". I think the homeschooling is likely second to being rich in terms of her world view and success.

The article also describes her as a scientist and I'm struggling to figure out why. According to Wikipedia she did lab assistant work at ages 12-13 but dropped out of university after accepting a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to become a venture capitalist. If she does any actual longevity research work I haven't been able to find it.

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#113

Post by ksdale » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

DavidVoid wrote: post #104

ksdale wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe if you think that 91% of parents are going to indoctrinate their children in a way that harms society, that society is probably doomed, as that 91% should theoretically have control of the government already...

> I believe if you think that 91% of parents are going to indoctrinate their children in a way that harms society The numbers were just chosen to give a counter-point and are purely hypothetical, but even then I think you are misrepresenting them with your 91% statistic. The 100 good and 1000 bad experiences only represent home-schooled kids in my example, they do not represent all kids (as I presume most kids would…

I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you meant for the numbers to represent.

But I think if you're going to assume that most homeschooled kids are going to have a bad experience, you have to confront the fact that a ridiculously large number of public school students end up functionally illiterate, or innumerate, or mentally ill or traumatized as well.

I think far too often, it's the crappiest homeschool outcomes being compared to ideal public school outcomes, though I'm not accusing you of this.

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#114

Post by klmadfejno » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

comboy wrote: post #83

JoshTriplett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books. > Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being oblitera…

Until we go fully digital this makes no sense. Brains develop in a specific way. We become more wise during our lifetime but we keep getting worse at learning. It's not as easy as "let's fix dying neurons". Society without death would be quite retarded compared to the one we have. Retarded i.e. one that is learning much slower. You and your beloved ones are going to die. Just accept it. This is as big of a fact as gr…

> We become more wise during our lifetime

In my experience this peaks and declines somewhere before 50

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#115

Post by throwawaysea » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

Homeschooling is a very important freedom for parents to retain. Otherwise, parents are increasingly at risk of not being in control of how their children are raised. Schools and colleges are increasingly politicized and are being used by politicians and activists to instill certain values into children early on. Those values are derived from whomever has the most power in a given jurisdiction.

For instance, in Seattle there is a push from activists to introduce progressive politics into schoolrooms, to influence children's culture and values beyond what is appropriate. It started with the NAACP pressuring Seattle Public Schools to introduce ethnic studies into their K-12 curriculum (https://www.king5.com/article/news/education/seattle-school-...). Then the school board proposed converting subjects like math into propaganda channels for social justice politics (https://reason.com/2019/10/22/seattle-math-oppressive-cultur...). Now they're planning to include gender identity material as early as Kindergarten (https://mynorthwest.com/1676789/rantz-mandatory-sex-ed-kinde...). In each instance, I see that the parents' role is being overridden by the state, going far beyond the mandate of core education and clearly into the realm of controversial politics.

I am not trying to just single out Seattle or progressive politics, mind you. It's just what I'm most familiar with. In Arkansas some schools teach that the age of Earth is a controversial topic (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...). And outside the US as well, governments use education as a means to undermine parents and steal away their children's minds, turning them into willing adopters of the government's values/culture/politics (https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/03/04/chinas-bilingual-educa...).

Homeschooling and school choice more broadly (like charter schools) are the antidote to having children propagandized. Homeschooling is generally very successful, to the point that it is viewed by some as a threat to public education (https://reason.com/2019/01/22/homeschooling-produces-better-...) and now there are activist researchers claiming that homeschooling is vector for child abuse despite evidence to the contrary (https://www.educationnext.org/harvard-law-professors-attack-...). I hope people take note and fight to retain their rights as parents.

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#116

Post by klmadfejno » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #87

scandox wrote: post #9

> But with longevity and other deeply existential problems, the horror of what’s happening has been tragically normalized. I will never understand this attitude. Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? How can we possibly reframe this as a "horror". The horror is this idea that personal identity can go on indefinitely. Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. None of this is being "tragically norm…

> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? Death is the greatest weakness of humanity, and to think otherwise is fatalist. We don't have to live eighty years at best and die. We can do better. If everyone on this planet had solving death as their single-minded focus, we'd accomplish it within our lifetimes.

> If everyone on this planet had solving death as their single-minded focus, we'd accomplish it within our lifetimes.

This is a particularly advanced form of wishful thinking.

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#117

Post by gowld » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #111

apsec112 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolating kids is bad, but modern schools are a very weird, artificial (and often unpleasant) social environment. Many of the social skills you learn in them are useless or even harmful: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html Also, homeschooling doesn't mean you can only learn from your parents. You can use any other resource that's available to you.

From the pg essay you linked: > Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. So why is this a distinctly American problem? If we understand the answer to that question, might that help us solve the problem?

It's not. Don't trust someone with no relevant knowledge about the world telling you that the only place he has experience with is exceptional compared to the rest of the world.

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#118

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

klagermkii wrote: post #85

JoshTriplett wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books. > Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being oblitera…

From an individual perspective I don't think there should be any doubt that solving death is a fantastic goal. It's the threat that is poses to the system, threats to which we have no better tool than death. Old age and death is still the number one tool for solving: - empires and tyrants - outdated societal opinions and prejudices (racism/sexism/etc) - locked in privilege and wealth - ossification of social roles -…

I agree: social progress, political progress, economic justice all also happen one funeral at a time. Look at Congress, CEOs and corporate boards, academic and other major institutional leaders. They're all elderly, and we have no (in practice) ability to change them out except by waiting for them to die! If they all of a sudden couldn't die, they'd be there for eternity. Imagine 600 years of Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy!

EDIT: I guess "geezers" is no longer PC. Apologies

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#119

Post by gowld » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

DavidVoid wrote: post #68

mc32 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest advantages as well as disadvantage of homeschooling I think would be limiting the amount of school induced brainwashing. I don’t mean they make kids into automatons, but there is a tendency to _tell_ kids this is right and that is wrong along ideological lines without allowing kids to discover those things for themselves. I’m talking about things like tax policy, education, religion, government, et…

I feel like this would be a strong argument against homeschooling (and private religious schools for that matter). Because if they're home-schooled then they'll get exposed to fewer people from different social backgrounds than themselves, and that would reasonably reduce the amount of "brainwashing".

People who can afford to homeschool tend to live in areas where the the local public school does not have diverse social backgrounds.

Re: Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

#120

Post by philipkglass » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #66

A lot of people talk about repairing decrepitude of the body, but what about decrepitude of ideas and world views? What if advancement depends on the death of people with outdated ideas?

About 0.7% of the American public dies each year:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm

An idea that sees its support changing substantially faster than 0.7% per year is not primarily driven by older members of the public dying.

The original Civil Rights movement, the fight for gay marriage, cannabis legalization -- all of these saw public acceptance shift much faster than population turnover can account for. Do you have examples in mind of trends that actually required the die-off of older people?