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ChristianKl comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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Not quite -- mainly because finishing high school even if you didn't want to/really give it much thought is more likely to be an overall benefit, whereas getting married even if you didn't want to/give it much thought is unlikely to turn out happily.
Without more information, I'm not sure that "do your math homework" is going to be as useful as "learn to cook and clean".
I think the VERY best outcome would be to train children as early as possible to make independent and well-informed decisions, and then a better phrasing would be "If your plans [still] involve graduating high school, it would help you to do your math homework", or possibly "it would help you to drop this class, since you are obviously not inclined to do your math homework". But I'm not sure how long before ~graduating-age that's even developmentally possible.
Given how much people use the skills they learned during math homework later in life I think it would be fair to argue that cooking and cleaning skills are more valuable for the majority of people.
The only skills I ever learned during math homework were:
"How do I rephrase this question so that the answer becomes retrospectively obvious?"
"I don't know where to even start; let's try something that's been useful before to see if I can break down the problem and identify a path towards the solution."
I might not quite be an unbiased, population-representative sample, but given how much I use these skills versus how much I use my cooking skills (about half an hour per month, on average), and the respective impacts they have on my life, I think it would be fair to argue that what I learned while doing math homework would be far more valuable for the majority of people.
The key turning point being that not all people learn the above from math homework - not all people learn the above at all.
I don't think I've ever thought explicitly like that before encountering Less Wrong.
What pretty much everybody (including me) complained about http://xkcd.com/1050/.