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 / ethos2. 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 the start-up I'm currently building in the crypto space, so I... (read 538 more words →)
There are few things that strike me as being completely unforgivable. One of those things is how individuals and society as a whole treats children and adolescents.
Be it deliberately stripping them of agency on all matters in their everyday life, not out of benevolence towards them, but out of convenience.
Having them, under threat of consequences, devour continuously to the pursuit of what the adults in their life find is important for them. Knowing that they'll loathe the sight of these things, whether actually important or not, for the rest of their life.
Or requiring them to put up with the tight-fitting encasement of school, which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman,... (read 1396 more words →)
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?
The fact that you would have played video games all day seems to me to be a kind of cry... (read more)