Good to know. I wasn't able to take my temperature, but I felt subjectively "feverish" with mild body aches and bizarre dreams on days 1 and 2 and not after. 10 days after that would put me at 12 days of total isolation. If you have any first or second hand sources you can share I'd love to check them out, but I understand if you can't.
I grew up in California, and many of my friends chose to go to community college part-time instead of high school, and basically got this "modular" design the commenter discusses for later education. I think it worked really well for them. When I was 13 I really wanted an academically "normal" environment, probably irrationally so, maybe a little rebelliously so, which is why I didn't choose to do this. I think expanding California's already very high caliber and affordable community college network to provide a more independent alternative to high school could be a great option for a lot of kids. I have trouble fully understanding how this proposal would be implemented for earlier grades, though it sounds nice. I think decoupling the necessary from the enrichment in school would help a lot. I went to a large urban public high school, and remember seeing a lot of kids who were legally forced to learn a ton of math that had nothing to do with their very real material struggles that could optimistically take a decade to materialize into a tangible career from a teacher who also didn't care about math. I can't help but think these students would have been better served by dropping out of high school, doing a 3 month dev bootcamp, then applying to software engineering jobs, and potentially reentering the school systems once they had more stability in their lives.
I think there's potential for it to go well/poorly at any age, and I'd encourage shifting the focus on the specific way the kid can be unschooled, whether they want to or not, and how well suited to it they are. A lot of parents in my community saw their decision to unschool as protecting the early childhoods of their kids from the stresses of a culture of "academic rigor" that they saw as stress inducing, mind-numbing, and turning kids into cogs of a capitalist machine, and then later allowed or encouraged their kids to go to more traditional or independent high schools. Other parents had kids who did well in traditional elementary school, and were then severely bullied once their peer group hit puberty, to the point their parents looked into radical alternatives.
This is a good point that spelling everything phonetically is probably not a great/sustainable way of writing a language. I'm wondering if there's a word for "spelling system where each letter corresponds to exactly one sound but that sound can change with consistency based on regional dialect/inflection/other context". I think Spanish is a great example of a relatively straightforward spelling system with regional dialects that generally preserves the consistent mapping of letters to sounds. Granted it has some oddities (like "h" having no sound, the redundancy of "s" and "c", the "qu-" prefix, etc). I'm curious what historically caused languages like Spanish, and German to maintain much more logical spelling rules while neighboring languages from similar groups like English, French, and Danish do not.
A friend in college who was very involved in the community kept bring up interesting ideas/events he encountered. When I was commuting a lot, I started listening to the Rationally Speaking and SSC/ACX podcasts, then started following Zvi's covid updates and engaging with 80k hours career coaching. I still don't feel like I'm "part" of the community, and would like to be more involved!
I honestly don't know. I'm inclined to think there's a strong genetic component since almost all of my genetic first cousins have some level of clinical anxiety/depression/adhd traits. Possible the unschooling/family dynamic played a role too, but it's hard to tell.
I didn't know about the IPA itself but I imagined something like it must exist for people who study sounds or something and didn't understand why we couldn't just use that. Or just spell everything phonetically like in Spanish. Hell, even defining a single-valued mapping form letters to sounds would be better than the bullshit we have today that wastes thousands of productive human-hours and makes the defacto universal language less accessible (as you can see I still have strong feelings about this, though I now know how to read and write).
I think there's definitely a middle path, and as much as I loved the flexibility to follow my nose I think I could have benefitted form a little more structure.
As far as the job goes I feel like I'm missing a lot of intuition about how the corporate world operates. Something feels hollow about doing things for profit with minimal academic interest. There are certifications I could get that would give me a significant pay bump, but I keep putting them off because the material feels like corporate propaganda and I can't stand studying for them. Most of my experience before this was in research labs though, so maybe that explains my experience more so than my childhood.
Lack of socialization was one of the main reasons I wanted to go to traditional high school. Do you have any hobbies that you can commit to more seriously? Are there sports teams, arts programs, hacker spaces, internships you could do that would get you regularly out of the house and around other (young?) people? Many of my homeschooler friends started at city college half time at 14 instead of going to high school, did very well, and got to college way ahead of their peers. That might be a good middle ground if it's available to you.
I totally agree that ideally I would test negative before sharing air with anyone, especially those who didn't "opt-in" to the risk. Unfortunately antigen likely won't be available in my area, and PCR seems to not be a great indicator of current viral load, so I'm left estimating based on my symptoms/days of isolation. Continuing to isolate is a significant inconvenience/quality of life downgrade for me, but I am able to do it indefinitely without impacting my basic survival needs.