51–60 of 169 posts
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I was shocked to (re)discover that high school algebra is a multiyear course. And trigonometry is a year long. What?
I learned algebra in middle school, in one year. What is this insanity of which you speak?
Here's the HS math sequence options from my local school district in VA. Can't speak to many other places but this is what my above comment is based on.
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I was shocked to (re)discover that high school algebra is a multiyear course. And trigonometry is a year long. What?
We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. Trigonometry didn’t make sense to me as a kid because I was learning from someone who didn’t understand it. They could memorize a lot of rules, but they didn’t understand it. In the face of this, what makes the most sense is fostering curiosity. Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and…
I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be fixed by paying teachers more. Why would a smart person become a teacher if a professional industry job will pay $300-500k and a teaching job will pay $100k? Is paying teachers so much even palatable to the general public?
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We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. Trigonometry didn’t make sense to me as a kid because I was learning from someone who didn’t understand it. They could memorize a lot of rules, but they didn’t understand it. In the face of this, what makes the most sense is fostering curiosity. Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and…
> We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be fixed by paying teachers more. Why would a smart person become a teacher if a professional industry job will pay $300-500k and a teaching job will pay $100k? Is paying teachers so much even palatable to the general public?
I wanted to go into teaching but stopped after I realized what that would mean for my long term earnings. Even with time taken off as a stay at home parent and time spent working in the developing world, I’m getting close to the lifetime earnings for teachers who progress in their careers. In less than a decade of working.
My general advice remains the same: raise good children.
> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me. > Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. I'm readi…
I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.
That is maybe the single most dubious statistic I've seen thrown out so offhandedly in my entire time on HN.
We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures of life and society forced people long ago to prioritize their work in such a way that the bulk of it was done in a very short, timely manner.
Or perhaps much like an athlete, it's probably ideal to spend your prime doing your best work. Or even still, maybe like me, these people worked on waves of mania and maybe occasionally that manic episode lasted an entire year and they were extremely productive.
All of that said, literally what are we talking about? Don't spend your time on a PhD program, you might be the next Einstein! Einstein wasn't writing blog posts, he was grinding! Please go join the latest YC backed venture and we can disrupt the food delivery industry!
We're all obligated to go outside after participating in either one of these articles.
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I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.
That seems worthless if they find their own way to knowledge outside of the schools. I think the K12 system destroying potential geniuses is a seriously overblown concern, especially in the internet age.
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The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Richard White
When I saw your initial comment I figured this was the tome. It's outstanding. I got onto it after hearing an interview with Richard White. He's opinionated and some of the opinions are very insightful. In the interview he said that there's no such thing as cycles in history ( pace Spengler). Instead there are unresolved issues that keep bubbling up over generations. That completely describes America's problems with…