My composition teacher in college told me that in some pottery schools, the teacher holds up your pot, examines it, comments on it, and then smashes it on the floor. They do this for your first 100 pots.

In that spirit, this post's epistemic status is SMASH THIS POT.

As an older student, facing a long educational track, I'm interested in developing the right attitude toward schoolwork. By attitude, I mean a language to describe my problems and an intuition for what my goals should be and how to prioritize to achieve them. I'd like this to be generally applicable, correct, and user-friendly. I'm going to write these guidelines with confidence, even though they're just my opinions.

Learning and credentials

First, some concept handles.

Practical learning is knowledge and skills for which a) the learner has high confidence that they'll contribute directly to their tangible success, and b) are acquired in a timely and efficient manner to be actually used on the job. Central examples: on-the-job training on equipment you'll be operating, learning to read, moving to France and enrolling in an intensive course in French.

Scaffolding is knowledge and skills for which a) the learner has high confidence they'll make it so much easier to do practical learning that it's more efficient to build the scaffolding first, and b) it's acquired in a timely and efficient manner to do subsequent practical learning. Central examples: learning Python as an introductory language for someone planning on a career as a programmer, learning how to use Anki for someone whose job entails learning a lot of facts, building healthy life habits and time management skills.

Very little of what you learn at the undergraduate level is practical learning by this strict definition. And most course work is not scaffolding either.

Credentialism is knowledge and skills for which the learner has high confidence they'll contribute directly to earning the credentials they need to level up. That typically means being able to advance to college, to graduate work, or to complete a certificate for job training. Even if you do wind up using a small subset of this knowledge as a practical skill, you don't know what will be useful, so it's impossible to prioritize your deliberate practice to maintain and build on it.

Familiarity is a sense of identity with a subject, and experience navigating the reference materials. With scaffolding, you learn in order to progress to practical skills and with the expectation that the scaffolding and practical learning reinforce each other. With familiarity, you learn with the expectation that you'll forget almost everything.

Most undergraduate course work builds credentialism and familiarity. You've worked through the chemistry textbook. A year later, you might not remember the Arrhenius equation, but you do remember that it exists and where to look in order to re-teach yourself the knowledge. Some small subset of the learning does indeed wind up preparing you for practical learning, but because you can't predict which bits will apply, it's not scaffolding in the strict sense.

The frustrating truth

It's important for students to understand that it's not their fault that most of their early education is spent on credentialism and familiarity. We just haven't structured the educational system to better-prioritize scaffolding and practical learning.

In fact, you almost can't do scaffolding or practical learning prior to graduate work. You won't know what you need to concentrate on. Your time will be consumed by credentialism and familiarity-building.

If you can accept this state of affairs, then the logical thing to do is to focus not on learning, but on buying your credentials as cheaply as possible. When you have the rare opportunity to do scaffolding or practical learning, take it. Spend your slack figuring out even better deals on your credentials and making life as sustainable for yourself as possible.

A change in mindset

This is aimed at high scholastic achievers. The A students. The ones who know they want to get higher degrees, and arrive at a demanding and rewarding career doing something they're passionate about or believe is important for the world.

The mindset they're starting with is "I have energy and intellect to spare. So I put it into perfecting my grades, into side projects, and into internships. I don't just want to do well enough to get to the next level.

I am impatient to finish. I don't just want to do good research for an undergraduate; I want my undergraduate thesis to be worthy of peer review and publication. I don't just want to fiddle around with fun software projects while I'm learning to code; I want to build something that's actually useful for people."

The mindset I want to leave them with is "I have energy and intellect to spare, but I likely won't have access to the tools, learning environment, and opportunities I need to achieve tangible success until I'm credentialed. Trying to hasten toward early tangible success will tend to make me prioritize immediate tractability over all other considerations, which is not an optimal long-term strategy.

My present life as a student isn't just a precursor to my long-term career. It's worth my time and energy to live well in the present. The right thing to do is spend my slack getting myself pointed in the right direction, figuring out ways to tick the necessary boxes as easily as possible, and making my life as good as possible right now. Maybe when I'm more powerful and better-resourced, I can improve or even revolutionize this slow and tedious system to speed the next cohort's journey into scaffolding and practical learning."

You are probably an average unusual person

The average scholastic high-achiever really is trapped in a dysfunctional gate-keeping system that's not build to accommodate them. You are probably more or less an average high-achiever. You have potential, not power. You don't have the contacts. You don't have the ideas. You don't have the skills. You don't have the money.

Your best bet isn't to try and bypass the gate. It's to get through it by the normal path as effortlessly as possible.

You bought into the system at an early age. You identified with your A. Then you grew up and you saw that getting an A isn't the same as doing useful work. Now, you don't identify with your A, but you don't have an alternative outlet for your raw energy and creativity. What to do?

The right answer is to identify with your life. Figure out how to make more money on the side so that you can have savings and enjoy nice things (be charitable later, when you're making real money). Get enough sleep. Learn how to do those fun hobbies you always thought you'd cultivate after school. Figure out ways to do the tedious busywork as quickly as possible while still getting an acceptable result (and acceptable might still mean straight As).

Why do I think this?

This is the attitude I've arrived at after a lot of influence from LessWrong. It's the logical student-relevant implication of the idea that school is 80% signaling. It's the result of trying to do a lot of side projects and never feeling quite confident in even the best ideas. It's the result of being deeply skeptical about a lot of other people's projects. It's the result of the assumption that most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, which should lead to a strong bias against the value of ideas that are accessible to even a very bright early student. It's understanding that counterexamples involve a combination of privilege, cherry-picking, and exaggeration.

It's also the result of figuring out in loose terms what I would count as a career-defining achievement, seeing the many years of work and huge amount of resources it would take to get there, and knowing that somebody else is almost guaranteed to beat me to it if I try to start now.

Understanding the circumstances

School is an immoral maze. At least three levels of management (students, teachers, departments, higher-level administration, the administrators of the higher level schools they're tailoring their curriculum for, the PI who manages grad students, the grant-makers, peer reviewers, ethics boards, University administrators, politicians and the voting public). Teachers and administrators have very little skin in the game. Some have soul in the game, but many teachers are either burnt out, or never wanted to be teachers in the first place. To keep away from the appearance of a soft curriculum, there is pressure to over-assign work, and pressure on students to over-commit in order to stand out in the signaling game.

And what does it say about itself? Well, my college's website says "X College offers... academic and professional/technical degrees and certificates to meet... learning needs."

If a college wanted to advertise itself as a place to do scaffold or do practical learning, it would say so. Perhaps "X College offers curriculums tailored to teach up-to-date job skills, delivered by efficient teachers who harness the power of top-notch digital lectures and educational software." Instead it offers degrees and certificates. To meet "learning needs."

Zvi says the right thing to do is "Quit. Seriously. Go do something else. Ideally, do it today."

As a student, you're as far as possible from the top. You're not doing object-level work. And you're paying, not getting paid, so there's no question of charitable giving.

But for most of us, there are only a few alternatives, most of which have a pretty low professional ceiling. If you want access to the colleagues, tools, money, position, and credibility to do groundbreaking innovative work, you're going to have to go through the maze. It is very rare to become a scientist without the credentials, and if you ask the people who did, they'll generally tell you they did it the hard way.

If you can't escape the immoral maze, and you can't change it, and you can't pretend anymore to identify with it, then the next best option is to make it as livable as possible. Don't give it more than it requires. Don't sacrifice what you want to achieve out of distaste for the maze. Don't beat yourself up for not being able to beat the system.