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

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

#161
post #141
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…

Kids get vastly more indoctrination through homeschooling than at any state school.

If Rodger Waters thinks the schools are a bit heavy , there’s gotta be a problem.

Children are very impressionable and unless their parents are attentive and let on that there’s more to things in life than school's take on things (which is potentially six hours or more of institutional indoctrination), the kids have little chance.

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

#162
post #15

Is homeschooling actually better once you control for the types of people who are capable of doing it? I would imagine a good chunk of people who homeschool their children are incredibly active in their children's education, by definition. These children I would argue, would be fine with or without homeschooling. Homeschooling also just seems unsustainable. Modern society generally requires two parents to be working.…

Yeah, it seems like an anti-pattern. Also, it's supposedly better for children to be educated by a great educator and most parents, like most people, are not. The fact of the matter is that the implicit assumption of many pro-homeschoolers is that most professional educators - either for individual or systemic reasons - are also not good educators, and would rather take their chances. I can't entirely blame them.

> Also, it's supposedly better for children to be educated by a great educator and most parents, like most people, are not.

Most teachers aren’t great educators either, speaking as someone who did it for five years. Homeschooling parents have fewer students and care much, much more about them.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now. But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts? FWIW, I was bullied in middle school, and pretty much had to fight my way through. As in fist fighting. As an adult, I don't tolerate any bullshit -…

Kids were knifed and shot at my high school, which wasn't even in a city that's considered unsafe / high crime. There was a race war there too, in which dozens of kids brought baseball bats and put each other in the hospital. A kid was put stabbed with screwdriver and another kid was hit so hard in the head he had a seizure. These kinds of experiences led me to homeschool my own kids.

I don’t know why school vouchers isn’t a wildly popular idea, with support crossing political lines. Allowing schools and schooling models to compete for students, and turning parents bodies into the customer is about as no-brainer a public policy as a public policy can get.

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

#164
post #11

I want to homeschool my future kids but it is still illegal in my country (illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage) Thing is: public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit and are dangerous. Private schools are crazy expensive, and although they are more useful they still teach a lot of bullshit. Also the educational style of all schools here is o…

How difficult is it to credential a private school ? Start your own...

Exactly. School vouchers. Let’s do it.

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

#165

I know a lot of homeschoolers. Some had great experiences. Some had truly terrible experiences. But regardless, they turned into functional, developed adults at about the same rate as publicly schooled kids. I think it's important for parents to realize that a lot of these choices are mostly about enjoyment and convenience, and they don't need to beat themselves up if they feel like they are failing because they can'…

Honestly timetable isn't bad if your school stops abusing you. Stop punishing kids. Stop grading them like factory workers or defective products. Stop putting them all in one classroom. Change their course work to be more interactive and make an environment where people can naturally be social... I follow this Japanese light novel where they simulate real world in a school setting. The school campus has everything -…

It sounds like you are going through some tough things.

> I have a different outlook on life now that people find very controversial or against their moral compass. But I can justify it. The disconnection keeps growing even if you quit.

> Life gets better motto stings and disconnect me from others because I can't remember a single nice memory that isn't reading something obscure on the internet or communicating with other internet dwellers.

I am not sure if this is the right thing to say or not, but it seems like you may be stuck in a negative feedback loop. You are getting validation from people on the internet, and it is creating resentment for people in real life.

It sounds like the novel is about the nostalgia of a time in our lives when we were forced to spend time with others. I think that is a pretty familiar sentiment for a lot of people.

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

#166
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you really think allowing homeschooling would improve any of this on a societal scale? Sure, some people will do an excellent job at educating their kids, but many will indoctrinate them even more than the public school system ever would.

Even then... If a lot of parents indoctrinate the kids to be conservative religious. Another group indoctrinate their kids to be far-left. Another group is anti-science. Another pro-science... When all these people vote, you still end up with politicians that actually represent the society. Now if everyone is mandatorily indoctrinated in schools that teach whatever the government wants, would that be a true democracy…

That's why education has to try to be as objective and apolitical as possible, and when the two are at odds, choose objectivity. And accept that it's never going to be perfect. Nobody is ever going to agree on where that sweet spot is and there will always be segments of the population who vociferously disagree with how some things are taught, but as long as there's a critical mass of educators making good faith efforts to achieve those ideals, the result will be imperfect but better than kids being taught random things (whatever their parents want to indoctrinate them with) by random people who aren't professional educators (the parents doing the teaching). I'm not arguing against homeschooling here, just arguing against the nihilism expressed by the parent post. I'm fine with homeschooling as long as there are educational standards and it's not just parents who want to brainwash their kids.

FWIW I was partially educated in American public schools and got no shortage of what many would consider to be anti-government messaging, at least in the sense of being encouraged to think critically on my own and taught about all sorts of occasions where people's moral convictions went against government policies so they protested or went into government or whatever to change it for the better. I also got no shortage of focus on all of the ways in which America did terrible things in the past: Native American genocide, slavery, Japanese internment camps during WW2, Jim Crow laws, etc. The focus was always on why those things were bad, how they got changed, and how understanding those things helps us perceive normalized shittiness in the present day so we can fix it and make things better. Nothing's ever completely fixed, history is just an endless process of things (usually) getting marginally better over time in the aggregate.

I'm sure there are lots of shitty schools with shitty teachers that teach blind obedience and tribalism, but those are shitty schools with shitty teachers and they need funding and improvement, rather than throw our hands up in the air and say there are no standards and no truth and everyone just believe whatever. If nothing else, education at least needs to expose people to a range of things they wouldn't be exposed to if left to their own devices, and help students learn critical thinking so they can make their own rational choices about things.

Also it's not like parents give up all rights to educate their kids when they don't homeschool them. They can teach their kids all they want about whatever they want, including things that contradict what's taught in class, for better or worse.

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

#167

Hi guys! This is Laura :) - everyone here is really cool and I can't believe this made the front page of HN so just wanted to drop my email here in case anyone wants to catch up on longevity stuff or other cool science discussion - ldeming.www@gmail.com. Sorry, I just really love geeking out and this seemed like a good place to find more thought buddies. Anyway, I love talking about most interesting things (physics /…

There seems to be research exploring links between blood sugar regulation (diabetes) and aging. I guess that shows up in metformin aging correlations/links.

Do you have pointers to research linking liver function to diabetes and perhaps to aging research.

It’s known that non alcoholic fatty liver is common in people who will develop type 2 diabetes. But the link is not well understood. (There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how the two are linked?).

Any solid references would be helpful, I’ve only found older nature reviews from 2006 and 2010. Maybe that’s the state of understanding but curious to get any additional pointers.

Asking for a friend :)

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

#168
Homeschooled, myself. Academically, I have a MS CS. My sibling has a PhD. It worked, academically.

I don't particularly recommend it for anyone without substantial need. I would put genius-level children at that level. We weren't geniuses.

I can imagine an... alternative... schooling coop which would work well. But there are whole volumes of good behavior that I had to intake as a teen & young adult that homeschooling had no ability to teach me.

Parents of homeschooled kids don't notice, I think. Because this is about peer behavior and interaction. Not child-parent interaction.

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

#169

Hi guys! This is Laura :) - everyone here is really cool and I can't believe this made the front page of HN so just wanted to drop my email here in case anyone wants to catch up on longevity stuff or other cool science discussion - ldeming.www@gmail.com. Sorry, I just really love geeking out and this seemed like a good place to find more thought buddies. Anyway, I love talking about most interesting things (physics /…

Thanks! Do you have a list of which simple interventions have the most data behind (ex: metformin, resveratrol?), and which long shots have the most potentials (ex: rejuvenating stem cells by expressing Yamanaka factors, then reinjecting them, as bone marrow transplants have shown the new cells find their way in about every tissue)

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

#170
post #167

Hi guys! This is Laura :) - everyone here is really cool and I can't believe this made the front page of HN so just wanted to drop my email here in case anyone wants to catch up on longevity stuff or other cool science discussion - ldeming.www@gmail.com. Sorry, I just really love geeking out and this seemed like a good place to find more thought buddies. Anyway, I love talking about most interesting things (physics /…

There seems to be research exploring links between blood sugar regulation (diabetes) and aging. I guess that shows up in metformin aging correlations/links. Do you have pointers to research linking liver function to diabetes and perhaps to aging research. It’s known that non alcoholic fatty liver is common in people who will develop type 2 diabetes. But the link is not well understood. (There doesn’t seem to be a con…

Peter Attia talks about metformin (https://peterattiamd.com/) also in the context of exercise and I've heard Dave Asprey (https://daveasprey.com/)talking about it.
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