LESSWRONG
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All of Novalis's Comments + Replies

Unforgivable
Novalis
11

The majority of children, and I say this as having been one of them, are not self-motivated self-directed learners.

Maybe because you've been trained out of it? I'd argue that every person is a self-directed learner: A toddler learns to walk, to speak by imitating his environment - the motivation for this comes from him. So why should it be any different for a 12 year old? 

If I'd been allowed to self-direct in middle and high school, I'd have played video games for 16 hours a day, barely taking breaks to eat and sleep.

The fact that you would have playe... (read more)

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5quanticle
Beware the typical mind fallacy. There are quite a few people who have a hard time knowing their own preferences. If nothing else, school is a good way to get exposure to subjects that you might not have thought that you'd like. I'm a programmer by profession, but on my own time, I read quite a lot of history. That's entirely due to school. If I'd been "self-directed", in the sense of being able to choose my own curriculum at school, I'd have spent all my time learning programming, and I wouldn't have realized that I had other preferences. Because Algebra and Trigonometry are considerably more boring than learning to walk and use the bathroom. I'm sorry, I just don't buy your idea that we can make school as interesting or more interesting than video games. At some point you have to buckle down and do a bunch of drudge work in order to get to the interesting stuff. Video games, by making the reward loop so quick, actively train against that kind of persistence and perseverance. Yes, they may train creativity, but creativity is overrated. Being able to buckle down and grind is underrated, especially in this community.
Unforgivable
Novalis
*20

I want to note for you that the rhetoric in this tripped my internal alarm for manipulation, and irritated me (though I'm self aware enough to know that's not what you meant, and am not irritated with you).


1. Pure appeal to authority / ethos

2. It is an attempt to prove too much; I am asked here to ignore all the smart famous people who feel helped by school

Fair point. The post wasn't necessarily meant for the rationalist community, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to share it here. 

It's my first attempt in a long time to write about things other than th... (read more)

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1Sierraescape
Hi, just curious what the startup is? I'd love to look into it
2Alex Vermillion
All neat points! I mostly commented because this post seemed like it was probably in the class of posts that gets little-to-no attention, and I was trying to bump it while explaining how to outfit it with more content likely to make any further posts get more engagement. It seems like you have already got 2 more eyes on it though, so I was wrong!
4quanticle
Have you considered that you are so far out of the mainstream that any advice you'd give to the mainstream would be actively harmful? The majority of children, and I say this as having been one of them, are not self-motivated self-directed learners. If I'd been allowed to self-direct in middle and high school, I'd have played video games for 16 hours a day, barely taking breaks to eat and sleep. Yes, schools fail geniuses. But they do work for quite a lot of not-geniuses. I'm okay with that trade-off.