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

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

#191

Post by sergeykish » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 10:36 AM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #106

legitster wrote: post #51

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 -…

My family become dysfunctional, dreams up to death shattered, all the sacrifice for nothing. Several last years was living in horror.

Each day I strive not to become a zombie. It is easy to live in fantasies, dreams, movies, there is no exit there.

My way out is to resolve inner conflict by singing. Start from some truth - we cry when hurt, sometime can stop it, sometimes not. But there is a need. So find some really private place - forest, bathroom - and try to allow that voice. One note would be enough. It will sound awful. Do not be hard on yourself. It is mismatch between reality and expectations that hurts. No need to push it harder. Thoughts stream through mind, all the lies and unjustice, I try to not interfere. Finally there is a match between thoughts and reality - pain and support. Hours later it sounds like lullaby and I can finally see beautiful forest around.

It is hard to describe, previous attempt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269320

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

#192

Post by lisper » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #187

lisper wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on balance, a human life has positive value Yes, I would agree. But that value derives from the process of living. The value of a human life is analogous to the value of a movie. That value only manifests itself while the movie is playing, not when it is sitting on the shelf. And dying is an essential part of that process, just like a movie coming to an end is an essential part of that process. > a human death is h…

> But that value derives from the process of living. Ultimately how someone spends their boundless time is up to them, but in general I'd agree that the point of life is to live , not just to exist , yes. But in general, people working on longevity do it so that people can live more. And the purpose of going on existing forever is to be able to go on living forever. That value doesn't become less over time. > That va…

> humans are a source of boundless novelty and creativity

No, they aren't. It only seems that way to you because you haven't lived very long yet, and what life you've lived has been lived at one of the most propitious times in the history of the universe. You've known nothing but peace and prosperity and discovery of new things, and so it's easy to imagine that this can go on forever. And maybe it can. But it won't.

Just as a purely practical matter, humans are not going to survive beyond the heat death of the universe. They are extremely unlikely to survive when the sun becomes a red giant. So even with arbitrarily advanced technology, the time available is finite. A few billion years may be better than a few dozen, but no matter what it's going to be finite. And a good thing too, because you really don't want to live forever. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, forever is a long time. A really really long time. You just won't believe what a vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly long time it is. I mean, you may think a few billion years is a long time, but that's just peanuts compared to forever. In an unbounded amount of time you can read every book that has ever been written and every book that could ever be written an arbitrary number of times. You can watch every movie, play every game, write every program, learn every fact that can be expressed in a text shorter than the current size of Wikipedia and you still won't have made a perceptible dent in an unbounded life. Long before you get to the non-existent end you will be bored out of your skull and you will yearn for oblivion.

But all of this is academic because, again, as a practical matter human civilization is unlikely to last this millennium, maybe not even this century. The human species will likely go on, but civilization is probably toast. Unless something really radical changes really soon, we're looking at a climate tipping point happening before the end of this century. Whether that actually ends up destroying civilization before the end of the century is open to debate, but once the permafrost releases its methane there's no coming back from that. We're looking at 5-10 degrees C of warming after that, and no way is this round of civilization going to survive that. If you really want to make a dent in the world, that is the problem you need to be looking at because it is going to dominate everything else in your lifetime, no matter how much you manage to extend it.

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

#193

Post by yodsanklai » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 11:45 AM UTC

nathanbarry wrote: post #6

Such a great interview. It's fascinating to see how different education styles can have such a big impact. While homeschooling isn't the right fit for everyone, I was homeschooled and it had a huge impact on me. My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that…

> My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that my parents put into crafting a unique education for me.

Who knows were these habits come from. There are many people who went to regular schools and share these exact same habits.

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

#194

Post by Viliam1234 » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

hevelvarik wrote: post #163

potta_coffee wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess the reason is that some kids are so bright that schools would compete for them, most kids are average and the schools would compete for the vouchers, but... there are some kids everyone wants to avoid. For example, that kind that will stab their classmate the moment they get their hands on something sharp (and will find a creative solution even if all objects at school are perfectly soft and spherical). Maybe one percent of population are psychopaths, and they are all kids before they become adults.

In other words, I would love to see a school system based on free association, but what about the kids no one wants to associate with? If you make the system such that one type of school can freely accept or reject students, but the other type must accept everyone, you just increased the density of the problematic kids in the second type of school, which creates a positive feedback loop because now more parents want to take their kids away from there.

Yet another problem is that the density of population is different in different places. In a big city, you can have dozen schools in a walking distance, so it is easy to choose. Then you have places where choosing another school would require an hour of travel, so people would be quite angry if their child is rejected. Should we have different rules for different places?

There are many great ideas, but it is difficult to set up the entire system so that none of its parts explodes. And sometimes removing pressure from one place means adding it to another.

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

#195

Post by schwartzworld » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #26

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? 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…

They aren't going to cure death in your lifetime. you will almost certainly die of something. if you think it's healthier not to come to terms with that... well, you're entitled, but I think you'll be disappointed

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

#196

Post by morelisp » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

nmfisher wrote: post #174

earthscienceman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wonder she's obsessed with longevity. If everything I ever wanted or was interested in was handed to me on a silver platter, I'd want to live forever too. How can people like Peter Thiel et al not feel disgusting spending a fortune on personal longevity when there is still starvation and hunger killing children every day? I would love to see the wealthy/privileged hackernews crowd try to justify this. I have less…

> How can people like Peter Thiel et al not feel disgusting spending a fortune on personal longevity when there is still starvation and hunger killing children every day? Probably because starvation is almost never an economic problem solvable with money.

Child malnutrition in Thiel's home countries (Germany, US, or New Zealand) is 100% solvable with money, maybe even entirely with his personal money.

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

#197

Post by abjKT26nO8 » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 3:24 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.

> 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.

Science advances one funeral at a time. ~ Max Planck

I'd add to that that it's not only science that advances in this way.

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

#198

Post by swiley » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

hevelvarik wrote: post #163

potta_coffee wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vouchers just created another form of regulatory capture. Better would be to decouple schools from zip codes and allow parents to send their kids to whatever schools they wanted.

This would crash a lot of overinflated realistate markets though. God forbid we actually take care of children and have a rational housing market.

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

#199

Post by TomMarius » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:25 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #193

nathanbarry wrote: post #6

Such a great interview. It's fascinating to see how different education styles can have such a big impact. While homeschooling isn't the right fit for everyone, I was homeschooled and it had a huge impact on me. My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that…

> My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that my parents put into crafting a unique education for me. Who knows were these habits come from. There are many people who went to regular schools and share these exact same habits.

There also are many people who have severe problems with these habits due to regular schools.

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

#200

Post by TomMarius » Fri, Jun 26, 2020, 8:27 PM UTC

morelisp wrote: post #196

nmfisher wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can people like Peter Thiel et al not feel disgusting spending a fortune on personal longevity when there is still starvation and hunger killing children every day? Probably because starvation is almost never an economic problem solvable with money.

Child malnutrition in Thiel's home countries (Germany, US, or New Zealand) is 100% solvable with money, maybe even entirely with his personal money.

Why is he responsible? I thought we pay taxes to the government for that.