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

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

#71

Post by ryandelk » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

giacaglia wrote: post #2

This is super interesting! I wonder what other homeschooled people think of their experiences!

I was homeschooled K-8th, went to a traditional school for high school, and then a big public college (University of Florida) and dropped out Junior Year to move to SF and join a startup.

My parents' goal for our (me and my siblings') educations was basically just to teach us how to think. They cared a lot more about what we were like at 25 than what we'd be like at 15. I found this to be super freeing, and something I valued a lot.

We didn't have much money growing up, and my dad worked 3 jobs so that my mom could stay home and homeschool us. My mom was actually a public school teacher, and wrote a paper in college on why homeschooling should be illegal. I have always loved her willingness to change her mind on that once she realized that public school wasn't the best fit for us.

My parents both sort of split the "education" responsibilities, and they really tried to empower us to view learning as a journey we could join them on vs. something that was compulsively forced upon us. So, whenever possible we would learn things from the "real world" vs. a textbook or classroom setting. I remember when we were learning about the pulmonary system, my mom convinced a local butcher to give her some cow lungs so that she could show us how inflating / deflating lungs worked. When we learned about the founding of America, she put us in a van and drove from Florida to all 13 colonies and visited all the historical sites.

I found the transition to traditional school and then a big public university with 50k students to be quite easy. I also played a lot of sports growing up, and I find that sports / music / other forms of community tend to give kids plenty of socialization, and the "homeschoolers are socially awkward" meme is a bit of a myth in most cases.

Anyways, it was hugely positive for me. It's not for everyone, and requires a specific type of parent with a specific type of motivations, but I think it can be incredible for many families.

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

#72

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #42

apsec112 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad.” If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow thi…

> if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible That is far from clear. It is even far from clear that this is true all else being equal , and all else is definitely not equal. Extending longevity exacerbates the strain on global resources caused by overpopulation -- most notably at the moment, the capacity of the planet to absorb carbon emissions,…

> Extending longevity exacerbates the strain on global resources

Suppose we didn't die. Would you start killing people (yourself or others) in order to "reduce the strain on global resources"?

It helps to not take the status quo as a given, or as immutable.

> So even if we could tweak our bodies to live longer, it is not a foregone conclusion that this would be healthy for our minds

We're going to need to solve that problem too. I'm currently supporting people working on Alzheimer's research, for instance.

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

#73

Post by GuiA » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

jonstewart wrote: post #56

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…

Exactly—one anecdote about homeschooling doesn’t apply generally. In the US, the average homeschooled kid is likely to be raised in a very religious family with little to no science education.

Even then, it's an uneven distribution. Homeschooled in Montana? Probably. Homeschooled in the Bay Area? Probably not.

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

#74

Post by ksdale » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

jonstewart wrote: post #56

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…

Exactly—one anecdote about homeschooling doesn’t apply generally. In the US, the average homeschooled kid is likely to be raised in a very religious family with little to no science education.

The fact that homeschoolers in the US are likely to be religious also tells you nothing about homeschooling if done by someone who's not particularly religious and cares about science.

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

#75

Post by DavidVoid » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

speeder wrote: post #38

leotaku wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you possibly share what you mean by "bullshit"? I am genuinely interested in what that entails.

1. Typical stuff that they try to simplify science and thus teach stuff wrong, like the classical each area of tongue has a specific taste receptor thing. 2. Government heavily interfere with what is taught in classrooms regarding some subjects, most notoriously the government is quite heavy handed in anti-monarchy rethoric, I was actually shocked when I was in my 25s and started to find out a lot of stuff I learned…

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.

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

#76

Post by divbzero » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

apsec112 wrote: post #22

boxcardavin wrote: post #13

I also grew up in NZ idolizing Faraday. I feel sad to see obviously smart and passionate folks like this with deep technical interests end up in venture so young.

I'd rather have smart, passionate people with deep technical interests judge whether to fund my company than a dumb, lazy person who doesn't know math or science :)

Exactly, with her background and informed outlook [1] she’s probably picking up on ideas that other investors would miss. In addition, being in venture now doesn’t preclude direct involvement in research or startups in the future.

[1]: https://www.ldeming.com/longevityfaq

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

#77

Post by mc32 » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:57 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".

It depends for sure. However most households have a diversity of friends and the kids do have to go in group outings. Besides, depending on school district your claim might not be accurate (ie you may attend a school full of rich brats, you may attend a school full of ne’er do wells, or a school where everyone is on the lunch program) neither broadens horizons).

Religion might be a problem with strictly religious parents, but I don’t see the damage being worse than that done by school systems. I experienced way too many friends who didn’t fit in and dropped out and other kids who believed in the system and believed things their teachers told them.

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

#78

Post by pnw_hazor » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

jonstewart wrote: post #56

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…

Exactly—one anecdote about homeschooling doesn’t apply generally. In the US, the average homeschooled kid is likely to be raised in a very religious family with little to no science education.

Absent the religiosity, the same can be said for the average public schooled kid.

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

#79

Post by ballenf » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:57 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…

I worry about what immortality would do to our legal system, moral judgments and overall progress. If a life is immortal then life preservation actually becomes priceless in a non-hyperbolic way. And that means it really does outweigh everything else -- including wellbeing and the cost-benefit of taking risks gets very lopsided. People could still do risky things individually, but any business that had inherent risks would be very difficult to do on any scale. And that includes way more businesses than just the unpopular ones. Think human drug trials, eg.

Or at least that line of thinking becomes very difficult to resist. I still want to promote the research, but like AI progress I hope we think about the second-order effects sufficiently along the way.

One of the cliches around progress in certain fields is that it requires the death of those unwilling to change. Would immortality slow down progress in those fields? Would we have to place more "term limits" on those in authority (whether political or in organizations).

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

#80

Post by ativzzz » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

talentedcoin wrote: post #65

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…

I find this kind of outlook very confusing. Don't you think that assuming life to be an engineering problem is a very strong assumption? Seems a bit above my pay grade to me ...

Everything in life is an engineering problem until someone makes a breakthrough/discovery at which point it becomes an ethical, moral, political and financial problem.