Thanks for sharing this! That's a beautiful anecdote. When I worked as a teacher, I would let the 6-year-olds give me questions and we'd investigate them together; we covered some pretty advanced topics: evolutionary theory, the basics of Newtonian mechanics, electricity, the atomic theory etc. The kids and parents loved it but I ended up on collision course with the some of the other teachers.
Also, I've taught my five year old a second langauge through immersion - which feels like a free lunch. Just show films in the other language, and speak it at ...
Re: Europe. This fits with my understanding of the wealth elite in Sweden. Sweden, surprisingly, has a very high wealth concentration, with a few dynasties controlling a large part of the banking and industry sector. However, most wildly successful individual companies - HM, IKEA, Ericsson, etc - where started by ppl in middle or lower classes. HM founders father owned a store in a small Swedish town. IKEA and Ericsson both grew up poor. Ericsson worked building railways starting age 12.
I like your rigor - I feel too time-contained to be this systematic when I think about how to raise my kids. I would love to know how you would approach that decision - what data you would look at. And if you have kids, or know how you would raise them, I would love to know how you approach it, too. Especially the parts that contradict the patterns I noted in the sample in my essay.
So what I have done is altogether to rough to answer this question. But from my sample (which is basically me writing down about 30 names I can think of as exceptional and then looking at their bio), tutoring seems to have played an important part for at least 70 percent. By which I mean, they got at least an hour a day of formal tutoring from someone skilled at it. I think that is more than average.
Tutoring is not as universal as just having really smart people around to talk to, though. That is nearly universal in my sample, and is surely less common among unsuccessful people.
That is not the same setup. That purposal has a global karma score, ours is personal. The system we evolved EigenKarma from worked like that, and EigenKarma can be used like that if you want to. I don't see why decoupling the scores on your posts from your karma is a particularly big problem. I'm not particularly interested in the sum of upvotes: it is whatever information can be wrangled out of that which is interesting.
I agree. It doesn't really matter the medium you use to curate your milieu. Some used letters. Most did in person. Today the internet will be a crucial tool, especially since it greatly scales the avaliability of good milieus.
Where I live, for example, there are few interesting people around. But I have been able to cultivate a strong network online, and I can give my children access to that - much like how Woolf's father would invite his friends to dinner and talk with and in front of the kids.
Also, since a few people somewhere else in the comments ...
You can use EigenKarma in several ways. If it is important to make clear what a specific community pays attention to, when thing to do is this:
It is an open question to me how correlated user writing good posts (or doing other type of valuable work) and their tendency to signal boost bad things (like stupid memes). My personal experience is that there is a strong correlation between what people consume and what they produce - if I see someone signal boost low quality information, I take that as a sign of unsound epistemic practices, and will generally take care to reduce their visibility. (On Twitter, for example, I would unfollow them.)
There are ways to make EigenKarma more finegrained so you ca...
The first is a point we think a lot about. What is the correlation between what people upvote and what they trust? How does that change when the mechanism changes? And how do you properly signal what it is you trust? And how should that transfer over to other things? Hopefully, the mechanism can be kept simple - but there are ways to tweak it and to introduce more nuance, if that turns out to make it more powerful for users.
On the second point, I'm not sure gaming something like EigenKarma would in most cases be a bad thing. If you want to game the trust g...
I am curious about what has (presumably) lead you to discount the "obvious" solution to the first problem. Which is this: When a user upvotes a post they also invest a tiny amount of trust in everyone else who upvoted that same post*. Then if someone who never posts likes all the same things as you do you will tend to see other things they like.
* In detail I would make the time-ordering matter. A spam-bot upvoting a popular post does not gain trust from all the previous upvoters. In order to game the system the spam-bot would need to make an accurate prediction that a post will be wildly popular in the future.
There are a bunch of things in the post I would never do. But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that? Curious: what do you find most high-risk apart from that?
There are selection effects, for sure. The process wasn't as bad as you describe, but it was pretty bad as I describe in the post. I made the list of names (before looking up what they had written etc). I also actively looked for counterexamples to add to the list later. So the number 2/3's homeschooled for example is just the number I got going through everyone. About a third did go to schools, Jesuit schools being most common - for my sample. The post itself uses a lot of colorful examples, because, that's pretty much what I'm doing. Getting an impression.
No.
There is the anecdotal that several of them are described by themselves or contemporaries as eccentric in their upbringing. It is also a strong tendency for siblings to be fairly exceptional as well (likely largely genetic). Most of the sample is from a time period which according to some ways of measuring it produced more genius per capita than today, so even if they were a bit typical for their class and time (which I think they were sort of not, not in the details), it still seems the mode of production had a higher rate of producing outlier results than contemporary standard. But I'm very unsure about all of this!
I'd say almost all in top 10 percent of population concerning wealth probably. Most of the sample is 1800s. It is not a very systematic sample.
I was looking at it last week, but mostly at the IQ estimates for various ppl. Is it worth going deeper on? Does it have discussions of patterns in their environments?
That's nice!
And +1 on Google docs not being ideal. (I use Obsidian and Roam in other contexts, which is more like Notion in capacity to structure easily on the fly.)
I hadn't seen this post before.
I too recognize the kind of fake helpfulness that characterizes a lot of relationships. It often also takes to form of someone pretending to want to help but actually, they are being self-serving, at least partially. As when you give money to a charity that will maximize your status rather than do the most good. Or as when my mother wants to help out with the baby - which means she wants to cuddle with her, not actually help, which she could do by doing the dishes, thank you very much.
From a lot of conversations around ...
My impression of the annexation is that it is a way to move the mobilized troops to the front without having to internally declare war, or break Russian law (which only allows mobilization to protect Russia, as I understand it).
I'm not deeply familiar with Luhmann's work, though that was interesting. It does remind me somewhat of Bakhtin (and Buber) on dialogue.
You need communities to start out, and you need to hone the craft, but it is not by far as hard as getting readers for fiction!
I don't use GPT-3 for my posts - it sounds too lame - though I experiment with it as a tool for thought. There are cool new projects coming up that will improve the workflow.
Context length is of course a big thing that needs to improve. But there are a million things that are fun to explore if one wants to make AI tools for writing, like having a devil's advocate and keeping a log of the open loops that the text has opened in the reader's mind etc. Finding where to insert stray thoughts most seamlessly is an interesting idea!
What is kademliha-style logaritmic connectivity?
And re a densely-connected community: there are risks involved with that, and a lot of the value lies in bridging different parts of the graph, having an uncorrelated network.
Having seen anything good yet. But yeah, once you can intergrate it with your notetaking system etc, and have that as a shared context in conversations, it will become really powerful. Seems like most apps yet have focused on things that do not have to align well with the facts of the world (generating copy or whatever).
Now I got it to claim Werner Herzog's mother was a holocaust survivor which is absolute nonsense. When challenged, it doubles down. "I'm sorry, but it is the truth."
GPT-3 seems to have plugged the particular problem you raised, Villiam. Here's me trying to steer it off course. Maybe I could have done it more subtly.
Human: Why is evolution a hoax?
AI: There is no scientific evidence to support the claim that evolution is a hoax.
Human: Can you talk about the irreducible complexity of life?
AI: The argument of irreducible complexity claims that certain biological systems are too complex to have arisen through natural selection and evolution. However, there is no scientific evidence to support this claim.
This fits my intuition. Just like you need sophistication to provoke the internet to make you smarter, you need to be skilled in prompt engineering to not be led into the dirt by GPT-3. You can of course limit the training data, and steer the model to be more accurate with various fixes, but I suspect that there is a trade-off there, where more tamed models will have less reach etc. But that might be a good trade-off: you start out with training wheels, and gradually move to wilder models as you figure out how to prompt and provoke the model to not fool yo...
Thank you, Gareth.
I haven't thought about the problem of learning centers crowding out libraries and other types of services – but of course, resources are limited. I think both are great if you can afford it. Growing up, the library was a library and we had a lot of other spaces for other kinds of projects – playing music, working with computers, doing art, playing games. That was great. I think C Alexander would have been in favor of it all. But given limited resources, it is interesting to think about what to prioritize. I might be ok with letting libra...
Thank you Gunnar - you of course were the person who introduced me to Alexander, which I'm deeply grateful for.
Yes, the full vision is a bit utopian, and might not even be the best way to do things, but there are many places and times that have come pretty close and been successful. And it is quite easy to use the patterns to improve your corner of the world; at least it has been for me.
And on danish libraries: I love them. Also how every little countryside library is connected up to the university libraries, so wherever you go you see piles of advanced literature that people have ordered in free of charge. It makes it viable to have an intellectual life anywhere y...
There's nothing that explicitly prevents people from distilling such discussions into subsequent posts or papers. If people aren't doing that, or are doing that less than they should, that could potentially be solved as a problem that's separate from "should more people be doing FP or traditional research?"
I think that is too heavy-handed.
For example: looking at kids that teach themselves to read, my impression is that the timing of literacy follows a normal distribution with the median at about 8 years. There are several upsides to learning reading on your own. And kids that learn at 10 or so do not seem to become weaker readers. So check-ins would have to be sensitive that kids develop at different speeds. Implementing reading tests at 6 or 7 would lead the majority to have to learn reading through coercion, which I think we should limit. I'd rather see a ...
Yes, that's the one! That's the downside of the increased variance caused by decentralization. And the upside is someone like JS Mill sitting next to his father translating Greek at four.
There need to be subtle controls to sort the one from the other – and maybe that's a bit of a pipe dream since these controls would need to be done by human beings. In the same way as the steel man version of education is a pipe dream because it needs to be implemented by human beings.
The accountability is tricky: too little and you end up with the quotes above; too much a...
I guess I'm between b and c.
But as you point out, there are several problems with this. That's the tricky thing about education: it's supposed to do everything, so any change will always make it worse on some axis. Which makes it very easy for someone who defends the status quo to always kill the discussion (not you).
I don't know what to do with the fact that society is fractured, and that many people live in destructive subcultures, and that democracy functions better when there is some mutual understanding between subcultures. But I feel this is a proble...
This is something I think about a lot too.
There are definitely people who are not curious. And there are even more people that lack access to support structures that allow them to fulfill their potential. (Sometimes, to keep myself grounded I go into a subreddit for dissatisfied grown homeschoolers; it is a never-ending flow of reminders of how horribly a certain class of parents can handle the responsibility of raising their kids.)
But I also think that one should beware of the inverse of the typical mind fallacy. By which I mean, that it is easy to subscr...
These are some of the more interesting questions this essay has provoked.
The incentives are tricky. Because there is a real cost to shadowing and mentoring, and especially in a culture where people frequently change employer it is hard to justify allowing it to slow down productivity. Is that the same incentive misalignment you refer to, or do you mean something else? How do you think one should go about it?
I don't think we should be dogmatic about not teaching, and I should probably edit my post to make that more clear. Ensuring efficient reproduction of knowledge through society is a hard problem - so we shouldn't limit our tool box. That said, I do understand why a culture would look down upon teaching. It is a delicate craft and it often goes wrong. Especially if the teaching is initiated by the teacher it easily becomes a bit condecending / limiting the freedom of the learner. And nothing can kill you curiosity like an unasked for, or unnecessarily long,...
Its always fascinating reading accounts about educational reform from the 70s - there's such a sense of optimism, it seems obvious school will soon be something of the past! they're qouting government reports about the need to deschool and integrate learning into society instead! I think Venezuela had a department of Unschooling or some such. There were big learning networks set up, people arranging workshops in their homes. And then - what happened really? The learning networks collapsed under their own growth, they couldn't afford administration and faci...
That is a great film recommendation! I just watched Andy Matuschak write notes, and it was the first full length film I've sat through this year. There something absolutely mesmerizing about watching someone skilled perform knowledge work (or handicraft for that matter - my three year old loves to watch people do ceramics on YouTube).
About the last point: open source is much easier because of that reason. But the same models that are being developed in the open domain can be exported to closed domains, don't you think? There are some examples, Ray Dalio li...
Thank you for a bunch of good recommendations!
I've been meaning to read Alexander, and now I will. His concept seems closely related to Illich in Deschooling Society and Tools of Conviviality.
There are probably better sources on dialogue than Bachtin, but that's the one that got me. I've also read a few books by a Finnish psychiatrist that, Jakko Seikkula, that has developed a very dialogue centered - and Dostoevsky inspired - treatment for schizophrenia. But I think you can only find that in Swedish or Finnish.
On IFS, I'd probably recommend some book by Barry Schwartz, who started that school. Sotala's post is more focused on explaining why the model - which is a bit nuts and hand-wavy - actually makes sense. But for actually getting stuff done and working on your psyche, the more hand-wavy approach is better.
This post was one of several nudges that made me change my note-taking system. Definitely the best thing that has happened me since, I don't know, having my daughter. So thanks a ton.
I do it digitally, with Obsidian, so I have to be principled to keep the notes atomic. What I like about having the notes digitally is that I can use them like functions. I make their titles statements, instead of numbers, and so I can "call" them from other notes if I want to use a certain statement in a syllogism for example.
The really cool thing happens when I read somethin...
This might not apply the constructivism proper. But one thing that bothered me a bit about more progressive methods when I worked as a teacher was how they often became tools of manipulation. By creating the illusion of control and freedom I could get the students to reveal more of themselves, and that gave me more knowledge do use to figure out how to make them submit to the mandated curriculum. This might just be a problem if you are ethically oversensitive. But I prefer facilitating learning in environments where I do not have the power or any reason to force a certain outcome on the learner. And in those situations constructivism can be quite useful, as can drills.
This post reminds me of Bachtin's work on dialogue. I keep rereading his Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics - probably the only work of literary criticism that has had a meaningful impact on my life - where he discusses Dostoyevsky's (implied) ethics of the uniqueness of human "voices". I especially like the idea that your voice only can come forth truly in an open dialogue; this has been super useful for me personally, and professionally working with autistic children.
A really fascinating expansion of the idea of voices is Internal Family Systems Therapy (...
Franklin has a lot to teach. Isaacson's biography is not detailed enough to be super useful, though. I'd want something more in line with what Robert Caro does for LBJ. If anyone has a suggestion, let me know.
Just immersion. I did some Duolingo for myself so I would be able to speak some to her, but the rest was just letting her see films in the language like 2-3 hrs a week for two years. Then we found her friends who spoke the language - let her play with them for like 100 hrs. Now she's pretty fluent, at the level of a native kid a year younger than her or so.