Today, I estimate a 30–50% chance of significantly reshaping education for nearly 700,000 students and 50,000 staff.

I get really worried when people seize this much power this easily. Especially in education. Education is rife with people reshaping education for hundreds of thousands or millions of students, in ways they believe will be positive, but end up being massively detrimental.

The very fact you can have this much of an impact after only a few years and no track record or proof of concept points to the system being seriously unmeritocratic. And people who gain power in unmeritocratic systems are unlikely to do a good job with that power.

Does this mean you, in particular, should drop your work? Well, I don't know you. I have no reason to trust you, but I also have no reason to trust the person who would replace you. What I would recommend is to find ways to make your system more meritocratic. Perhaps you can get your schools to participate in the AI Olympiad, and have the coaches for the best teams in the state give talks on what went well, and what didn't. Perhaps you can ask professors at UToronto's AI department to give a PD session on teaching AI. But, looking at the lineup from the 2024 NOAI conference, it looks like there's no correlation between what gets platformed and what actually works.

So—was it worth backing a candidate?

Yes. That path ultimately led me to a place of greater agency and purpose.

Do you know how the others were effected? Have you kept in contact?

Sounds like some of them were hurt? You say you forced them to take action, and that afterwards they "shifted to 'self-care.' "

Today, I estimate a 30–50% chance of significantly reshaping education for nearly 700,000 students and 50,000 staff.

I'd be interested to hear how that pans out a year from now.^[1]

The lesson: 

Don’t spend energy forcing people into actions they’re not already motivated to take.

I guess that's a valid moral to this story? I think most LWers would see this as further evidence for "political stuff gets you a lot more impact per unit effort if you're making significant use of your comparative advantages and/or taking stances orthogonal to existing party lines ('pulling ropes sideways')".

Regardless, strong-upvoted for doing interesting things in the real world and then writing about them.

1. ^{^}

   . . . how do we not already have a custom emoji for this sentiment?