My wife started the Math Academy diagnostic on Sunday night. She couldn’t remember that if you raise a number to the 0th power, you get 1.

Her frustration instantly reminded me of being a kid and getting mad at math.

She was annoyed because she couldn’t see the intuition behind “if I multiply something by itself zero times, I get… one?”

I don’t get that either. Rather than look it up, I figured we could “prove” that this must be true based on rules that feel more visible.

Here’s how I tried to make sense of it from basics:

I asked her what 2² * 2³ was — something she could manually see as 4×8=32.

Then I said “Represent 32 using the same base of 2”.

She got 2⁵.

I had her write down what we did so far:

2² * 2³ = 2⁵

So what’s the pattern?

“That you add the exponents when you multiply?”

Right — as long as the base is the same.

But here’s the key part: she basically derived the rule herself from observation. And that matters. Most of us don’t like to accept rules “just because.”

So from there I ask what’s: 2³ * 2⁻³?

Add the exponents… 2⁰

But we know, by definition, that 2⁻³ = 1/2³

So:

2³ * 2⁻³ = 8 * 1/8 = 1

So 2⁰ MUST also be 1.

There’s no intuition here—but it follows inevitably from the basic definitions we already accept.

Back to sympathy for the learner…

She still felt annoyed even though she followed the chain. I remember being frustrated as a kid: you can see how it works, but it’s not intuitively satisfying.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more patient with “I don’t get the intuition, but I see why this rule must be true given the rules I know are inviolable.”

But when you’re young, or new to a topic, it’s easy to get bogged down by “not getting the why.” You don’t yet have the faith that a little time, a few reps, or a fresh look on another day will eventually give you that satisfying resolution in your head.

Without that faith, you feel like you’re following a recipe blindly. Which is, of course, why my wife was annoyed. She doesn’t want to rely on arbitrary memorized rules. When you feel that way, you don’t feel confident — you don’t feel like you could re-derive the rule if you needed to.

It feels like an assault on your independence or intelligence.

Anyway, this is just a thought I had because I totally commiserate with that frustration in numeracy, and this little back-and-forth dominated Sunday night’s family dinner conversation.

By the way, I still haven’t looked up “intuitive explanations for why raising numbers to the zero power equals 1,” but the proof-by-necessity — the “how could it be otherwise?” style — is satisfying enough for me not to care.

I really hope to be helpful today so bear with me as this isn’t the rosiest way to begin.

This tweet halted my scroll:

For whatever reason, AOL (what year is this?) has an unpaywalled copy of the article:

A Recipe For Idiocracy

It’s short, but let me pull an excerpt anyway:

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.

The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique.

The article drones on. None of it uplifting.

“We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up,” Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. “Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability.”

Here’s Jared’s firsthand experience as a teacher while quoting that article:

This should remind you of this quiz from 2 weeks ago…

Victor Haghani referring to the quiz (emphasis mine):

It is well-known (and disturbing) that the financial literacy of this audience is, on average, quite low – as evidenced by a mean score of 56% (yes, that would be an “F” if not graded on a curve) on the below five-question quiz, known as the “Big Five” test by researchers. A survey conducted in 2021 found that less than one third of respondents answered at least four of them correctly, the threshold researchers define as “high financial literacy.” At least as concerning as the low test scores is the fact that the scores themselves have fallen dramatically between 2009 and 2021.

Are you seeing a pattern?

The useless question is “why” all this decline. Is it the phones, social media, microplastics, fluoride, the mentality that “kindergarten is the first step to Harvard” is less about upholding standards and more about suing teachers who give bad grades (just scroll thru the results)?

Probably all of them, I don’t know.

And then you have this response to Jared from our mutual friend:

The public discourse amplified by the rich and powerful is tuned to spread to the lowest common denominator. So the average person notices that rich people sound stupid and mistakes the mask for the face. The spread of information has also made corruption more obvious. That Trump’s favors are openly for sale is celebrated by his defenders as transparency. “They were all doing this, at least now we can see it”.

Fine.

I’ll let you keep that defense, but it’s hard to hear that without also hearing “we should all be allowed to crime”. Populism brings some unintentional equilibria I suppose. [I’m warming up to the idea of paying all politicians a salary of $2mm/year but making them truly public servants. All your financial affairs on full display. The fact that Congress can insider trade tells me we are so far from accountability with teeth.]

Adam’s observation is an instance of the current hypernym: honesty is for suckers.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a permissible instinct as trust in institutions disintegrates. But we risk some baby/bathwater mistakes if we malign all institutional failure as rot from within (university-industrial complex) rather than the natural difficulty of keeping up with accelerating times (securities regulation). Human affairs, the realm of politics and coordination, don’t move as fast the electrons re-shaping power and that impedance mismatch is a source of static. But that’s not nefarious. It’s just social physics.

That was a long digression to land me back where I was headed anyway — “be dumber” is an overfit to a moment we are all struggling to understand. It’s a retreat from responsibility. A cop-out. Hopium that there’s a quick way to get above this fray, shielded from the stray bullet from any of cultural ails lurking below the seemingly healthy SPX price.

I’m sorry but you can’t fake A yourself to flourishing. The flourishing is a by-product of the wax-on, wax-off. Confidence in your competence. Having some real to offer. There’s no “getting through this moment” because life is just one of these moments after another. So tie yourself to the mast of self-efficacy and it will all feel calmer.

If you tell me we’ve gained something from the loss of standards above, I’ll listen. But what hasn’t changed is you need something to offer. Society is not your parents. It doesn’t love you unconditionally. It’s hard to make beneficial choices if basic literacy and numeracy isn’t automatic. “I’ll just ask the LLM”. Well, knowing how to ask good questions itself takes intelligence and learning.

[Personal conviction…I think the quality of someone’s questions is a strong indicator of their thinking skills. This is pretty obvious if you spend too much time on X, but a universal example is to think about the last time a child asked you a question that had you go, “Damn, smart kid”. A know-it-all like the nasal boy in Polar Express comes off as obsessive, maybe smart, definitely annoying (although not a crime). But asking the right question reveals layers. For the finance heads, it’s why Jane Street uses this prompt in interviews — see thread. To just give an answer is to misunderstand the exercise.]

Ok, so the trends in reading and math say we are less and less prepared to engage in sophisticated reasoning. And we acknowledge that reasoning is important because it’s the basis of decisions and decisions are the bridge between our internal selves and our physical experiences and conditions.

How do we reverse the trends?

I don’t have an answer for society but I do have answers for you. And your family. And your friends. (“Hey, doesn’t that scale up to society?” That’s cute, did you just arrive from Mars?)

The answer has 2 facets and since we started in the context of math we will stick with it, but I don’t think it’s limited at all to math.

1) The belief that the process of learning itself makes you smarter

We all have potential. Just like in sports. You can’t be Usain Bolt but you can always get closer to your ceiling. We choose which domains to try to move closer to our ceilings since we can’t work on everything. We prioritize based on goals. Fitness, chess, cooking.

Math and literacy touch everything, whether you want them to or not. We are all touched by deals, contracts, transactions, even if we just want to paint. Youth is the rare stage of life where there is time carved out specifically for upskilling your general-purpose machinery of abstract thought, the manipulation of symbols, and the ability to maintain a chain of ideas inside one brain. I’m not sure if the appeal of doing so is universal, but the fact that games and puzzles are not compulsory and in fact pulled, not pushed, suggests that there is something intrinsic about cognitive self-improvement. Fostering this urge requires no justification beyond “it’s fun” but it happens to have salutory effects across your mental wetware and let’s face it, your job prospects, if you insist on being purely practical.

So this gift of time that children are afforded is when the skill of skill acquisition should be taught. I emphasize this because school is treated not as a place where we acquire skills but a place to trot them out for approval. The difference is insidious. As you traverse the years, it’s not what did you master, it’s what grade did you get? There’s really no emphasis on mastery. It’s just “did you go through the motions” for most, and then for the top students, who may or may not have achieved any type of mastery (and if they did it wasn’t to the school’s credit), the school is just a sorting hat. And with grade inflation a bad one at that, making students (and their parents) feel like college admissions is plinko.

My HS diploma-only mother emphasized school because education was the path to a better life. But she specifically stressed math because she thought it literally made you smarter. Her opinion is backed by nothing but intuition and self-flattery (she was a strong math student). But Ced, whose practice and writing is maniacally obsessed with the art and science of getting good at things and separating b.s. that sounds like it works from what actually works in complex domains, sent me a link to mathematician David Bessis’ interview with Russ Roberts:

🎙️A mind-blowing way of looking at math (Econtalker)

Bessis echoes what my little immigrant mom said. In describing what we need to do differently in teaching math, he argues we must not mince words to motivate:

I think teachers should be bold. They should say, ‘It makes you smarter.’”

More:

People hate math because they view it as an IQ test that they’re failing. And, it’s not a test. It’s a technique to get smarter.

If you’re failing, it’s normal because you start. When you start any new sport, you suck at it. There’s no way you’re going to be good on Day One. Just because a two-year-old is babbling, you don’t say: Well, I guess he’ll never learn to speak, but we just won’t bother teaching him language because he’s not good at it. And yet, we do that with math. We say, ‘Well, he’s not a math person. He’s not good at math.’

You cannot teach mathematics to kids who are convinced that your mathematical ability is something that is static… A combination of confusion about the nature of mathematics, and confusion about how the brain operates, and confusion about the origin of the shocking gap of abilities that are visible on a given day in a given high school makes us believe that this thing is entrenched and you’re not going to be able to change it. But it’s not true.

The failure of teaching mathematics—and it’s something that has been going on for not just centuries, but actually millennia—is the failure to admit that we do things in our head. We play with our intuition, we play with images, and these things have traditionally not even been discussed as being part of mathematics.

At school, you enter the room with your intuition, and the teacher is telling you that your intuition is wrong; and you reach your conclusion that intuition is bad and that you’re stupid. But, the thing is, it’s wrong, but it’s not going to be wrong forever. You will gradually evolve your intuition if you confront it with this very special apparatus that is logical formalism.

Mathematics is a technique that, if you learn how to master the technique itself, you will develop your intelligence; you will utilize your brain in a way that you would not be able to otherwise.

But this is really cutting to the heart of my mother’s hunch, which she couldn’t articulate:

I knew when I was a mathematician that what was really interesting to me was not the mathematics: it’s that kind of meta-cognition that you have to learn to become a mathematician. And this is the topic of the book. What do you do inside your head when you become better at mathematics?

It’s worth mentioning that much of the interview is spent on intuition and what Bessis, playing on Kahneman, calls System 3 thinking:

Whenever you catch your intuition red-handed being wrong at something, don’t throw that away. Don’t reject the intuition… Explore it. Try to unpack it… do back and forth until they agree. It may take you five minutes, one hour, a day, a week, a year, 10 years, 50 years.

Bessis argues that this process of confronting incorrect intuition is a uniquely valuable habit because it creates a highly memorable learning stimulus. This rings so true personally. When something goes wrong, when you are snapped out of autopilot, or surprised, the lesson you learn sticks with you.

His last inversion, namely, that math is not a test of smartness but it makes you smarter is a hokey story of being intimidated when Bessis noticed legendary mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre in the audience. After the Bessis talk, Serre said he’d need to repeat the talk because he “didn’t understand a word of it”. Serre was being sincere. Bessis noticed that most people would not admit to incomprehension so easily. And while it’s much easier to do so if you are Serre, whose capabilities are beyond reproach, Bessis wondered:

“Maybe with that attitude, you can become Jean-Pierre Serre.”

Ok, so the first step to improving our abilities in math (or literacy) is believing it’s possible and worthwhile.

The next step is to know how to actually acquire the skills.

2) Skill development is not the same as education

School is time-based education. You do X in 4th grade, Y in 5th and so forth. There’s some acceleration but it doesn’t stretch as far as individual variation because the range would be too wide to contain in a single classroom. The compression hurts not only the top performers but the bottom performers who are hanging on for dear life only to be waved through to the next grade, where the deficiencies compound.

Skill development is rooted in learning science. You are far more likely to have encountered its prescriptions in sports or music than school. I encapsulate a lot of that information in The Principles of Learning Fast. But today I want to zoom in specifically on our foundations because it’s an actionable target if you are insecure about your knowledge and how to go about learning to mastery since you may have never realized that was an option. How could you have realized that…there’s a test tomorrow you need to study for even though you don’t understand the material from last week’s test, right? It’s not your fault but hopefully what you’re about to learn can serve you and your loved ones going forward.

I’m going to let Alpha School’s Joe Leimandt be the messenger. The following flow comes from an interview he did with Patrick O’Shaughnessy.

🎙️Building Alpha School, and The Future of Education (Colossus)

1) Knowledge is hierarchical

Most of knowledge is hierarchical where it’s based on foundation. Algebra is basically advanced fraction manipulation. Fractions is multiplication and division. And you can just keep going down the tree where you have to actually learn bottom-up and have mastery.

2) Well, what is mastery?

Think of a sports analogy like in basketball. If you’re the point guard and you lose the ball 30% of the time going down the court, the coach is not going to be like, hey, let’s work on the alley-oop. They’re going to be like, okay, let’s get back to the basics and master the basics so you can get down the court.

Have you mastered the basics? How good are you? We always talk about in standard school, there’s a whole set of things that 70%—you’re passing, you don’t know 30% of the material, and then they move you on to more advanced things.

This is pretty obvious stuff. You know how this feels:

3)The Swiss Cheese Problem

The problem’s not the algebra, it’s the prior knowledge… if you’re pushing people up and they’ve only learned 70 or 80% of the curriculum, you should think it’s like Swiss cheese. It’s like you’re building a foundation with all these holes. And then eventually as you get high enough, it just gets too much and it collapses and you can’t learn anymore.

4) Going Back to 3rd Grade

If you’re doing fractions and you haven’t mastered division, you’re going to sit there and say, God, this fraction problem is really hard. But the real issue is, well, just go back and learn your division and then the fraction’s going to be easier.

We have one student who was, this is sort of a unique, an extreme example and I hesitate to say it but we had a student who was 740 on the math SAT and in looking they were making careless errors. Some of the problems they were overloading working memory and for whatever reason the student didn’t have fluency of multiplication and division tables. So we literally sent her back to third grade math.

We’re the only school in the world who will take a 740 math SAT student go back to third grade, send back and she got a 790, a 790. And it’s that kind of thing where when you talk about the science of learning and just I say it this way, the parent and the student in this case were not excited that their 740 math student is being given third grade problems. That can’t be the issue, but it is. It is, because you’re overloading the working memory and she’s just making careless mistakes.

My eldest is 12. I keep telling him that the form on his basketball shot is off. He finally asked me to show him a video of him shooting. After seeing it, HE decided he wanted to correct it. He understands it’s a step back to go forward. I gave him tremendous praise for the decision because it’s not easy to make choices like that. It’s an investment in the bigger picture

[He’d like be able to make the HS team and it’s gonna be competitive. His current shot won’t cut it, especially since I don’t expect he’ll be very tall.]

My wife is going to start Math Academy because she sees the kids’ work and, well, there’s lots of swiss cheese in her knowledge. She decided that didn’t sit well with her. The kids asked her what level of math she’s gonna rebuild from and while the diagnosttic will place her, she has no shame about however far it suggests. The 12-year-old would bet he’s ahead and she’s not taking the other side of that.

Everyone is anxious about time. Finish so you can get to the next thing and the next thing. I’m very sympathetic. Things just feel like a race. Business is often a race. It’s hard to backfill expertise or keep up with all the cool new stuff when you’re putting out fires. So I don’t know to what extent we as adults can choose mastery for ourselves. I don’t pretend to know your constraints. But when it comes to the kids, I urge you to think about this stuff. You know what it’s like to have swiss-cheese in your foundation. Holes are not totally avoidable. But rushing to check off “done” is training for a life of cramming. Of seeing a stimulus to grow as an obstacle to relaxation rather than an opportunity to expand your capacity to offer something to others.

That’s a real goal. Not a fake one. Getting there takes as long as it takes for you. But once you’re there you can’t be shaken because the foundation is rock solid. The title of today’s letter is hook to remind you:

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast

There’s no shortcut to smooth.

Last Monday night, I taught a group of kids (and parents) from the neighborhood and social club a trading game as well as exercises to demonstrate how confirmation bias is always lurking even when a topic isn’t emotional. I also gave them some quizzes which never fail to demonstrate how overconfident we are.

Here’s the presentation flow:

Open with Confidence Interval Tests

• Kid version
• Adult version

My notes on what to talk about (I didn’t cover all of it because you take the temperature of the room to see what’ll be boring)

Everyone thinks they are a better driver than the average driver. We are structurally overconfident. I say structurally because it’s a conspiracy of how our minds are wired. We don’t look at evidence then form beliefs. We form beliefs easily and then filter our observations through these beliefs — facts that reinforce our beliefs are preserved and evidence against our priors are ignored or discounted.

[Beliefs are like the first sperm to get to the egg — it forms a shield shutting off new assailants. Regardless of the merit of the first idea you heard, dethroning it is difficult which is why a lot of learning as an adult feels like unlearning. You come to realize that many of the things you believe are legacies of childhood, from parents who often times were just muddling thru themselves as many of do today]

That leads to a discussion of…confirmation bias

Anyway, you’ve probably heard of this phenomenon— it’s called confirmation bias. You’ve probably heard of many so-called cognitive biases, thanks to the late Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman.

There’s a whole zoo of these biases but many of them can really be collapsed into confirmation bias. Notwithstanding Wu Tang’s objections, CREAM is “confirmation bias rules everything around me.”

Just think of survivorship bias — we look at some super successful person and suddenly everyone wants to know their morning routine or what they read. That 1000 other people who did what they did and didn’t get that outcome is easily ignored. We want to know the pattern, right? We are trying to confirm a belief that cause and effect are related by a string. The impulse is forgivable because that’s how the world works in common, tangible contexts — if I spill this drink, I will feel wet.

But complex contexts, like achieving outlier results, are governed by chaotic processes or what is more academically referred to as “complexity”. Jurassic Park is a great lesson in complexity science — it’s not an accident that Michael Crichton was a collaborator with the Santa Fe Institute (Cormac McCarthy was another), a research org devoted to the science of complexity and making sense of chaos. Great success, a complex outcome, is the result of long chains of serendipity, largely out of our control, resting on a foundation of sufficient conditions of which we have some control.

Give this Confirmation Bias Riddle

In making decisions, it’s not necessarily about being right or wrong — it’s about calibration

[In investing, it’s not about predicting the future which nobody can do it’s about getting odds that have positive expectancy compared to your confidence — but you need to be effective at understanding your confidence. Which takes practice! I did not discuss this with the kids and in fact there’s a whole part 2 of this presentation that would make sense for an older group.]

But it’s important to learn about what calibration is because the next level of understandinf confirmation bias is to know that it is insidious because it often comes dressed as rigor.

I’ll give you an example.

CIA’s Psychology of Intelligent Analysis cites an unpublished 1973 study by researcher Paul Slovic demonstrating how horse handicappers confidence grew faster than their accuracy as they get more information. [Tell the story]

Practice with quizzes and games

Give them the link to try to test their calibration at home:

http://confidence.success-equation.com/

I shared my results. If anything they show caution — which tracks…my biggest risk as a trader was not that I was gonna blow up, but I wouldn’t maximize because I was always paranoid about what I didn’t know. That’s no excuse of course, it’s just diagnosis.

Evergreen:

Targeting adults…

Why do I bring this up?

This is a hazard in a world that tempts you to lever yourself on confidence as asset returns from stocks to housing to gold to crypto all sit near all-time highs at the same time trading & gambling, including the recent developments in prediction markets (Robinhood/Kalshi CFTC going around states rights to regulate gambling) is shoved down our throats.

One of the most helpful things I can do is offer some perspective on the nature of markets. My goal, as you’ll see, will actually be to have you viscerally feel their nature through a game we will play.

Game description

Bonus Section inspired by the confirmation bias riddle…

I’ve long thought that a good barometer of intelligence was asking good questions. I think this will be more obvious in the age of AI where people who are skilled at prompting, ie asking questions to LLMs, will get a lot more mileage out of the technology as opposed to using it as a glorified dictionary.

So I posed the famous fork in the road riddle:

You reach a fork in the road. A sign explains that in one direction is Heaven and the other is Hell. Each path is blocked by a Guard. The sign goes on to say that one of the guards will always lie and the other will always tell the truth, it does not say which guard is which. We assume that the guards do know which path leads to where.

You may ask one question of only one guard in order that you can determine, with certainty, the way to Heaven. What is that question?

You can see the solution here. I always think of it as an electric circuit question because it’s positive (truth-teller) x negative (liar) or vice versa which always means the response is a “Not”.

An IRL friend who happens to be one of the best long/short pod shop folks in the world (no exaggeration — one of the people that gets offered those 9-figure guarantees you hear about) once described his craft as asking the right questions. Getting someone to tell you something you care about with a question that seems to have nothing to do with what it seems you asked about. Layered on top of the whole quant alpha-isolation architecture that these firms sit on, it’s always stuck with me as sounding so interesting. But it also makes me think of this riddle.

I’m gonna re-do the event for another group in town on the recommendation of one of the attendees. If that group skews more towards adults, I’ll bridge it into a discussion of markets and what it means for investing, which is what the unused notes were about. Like a comedian testing nerd shit instead of jokes I guess. Whatever lands can find its way back here. You notice a lot of blindspots in your understanding when you try to explain something to laypeople, making the the effort conveniently self-rewarding.

Friends,

I’ve been saving this one for the start of the school year. For those who start after Labor Day like it should be (my kids have been in school for nearly a month already).

I took my boys to Alpha School in Austin during Spring Break this year. School during Spring Break, dad?! Yea, I suck. Tough.

I also have a few friends with multiple kids each in the school. Friends who were quite opinionated about school in ways that resonate with me before they sent their kids to Alpha. They are quite happy with their kids’ experience and pushed me to come see it myself. I never got around to writing about my tour or Max’s shadow day but I was impressed.

I’m not going to write a review because it’s already dominated by today’s Munchies. Scott Alexander’s annual essay contest includes a finalist that is the first-hand account of a reader who moved to Austin just to send his kid to Alpha.

The essay is thorough. Read it:

Review: Alpha School

[author identity withheld as it’s Astral Codex essay finalist]

The message today isn’t one that Alpha owns but its methods flow directly from it.

A tiny bit of background first

The Core Claims: Alpha claims students “Learn 2.6X faster” with “Only two hours of academics per day” that’s “Powered by AI (not teachers)” but the reality is more nuanced than the marketing suggests.

What Alpha Actually Does:

• Uses a personalized learning platform with third-party tools (iXL, Khan Academy-style content) rather than generative AI
• Maintains a 5:1 teacher-to-student ratio with highly paid “guides” ($60k-$150k salaries)
• The “2-hour learning” actually takes about 3.5 hours (8:30am-noon) with breaks
• Emphasis on becoming “pointy” in at least one area
• Heavy use of incentive systems

Many of the stories in the essay (ie the Poland trip or the dirtbike story in the comments) I heard about first-hand from my visit. The range of reactions to what Alpha is doing spans relief and exuberance to jaded skepticism to outright disgust or grievance. But if you scan the landscape of private schools, top public schools, magnet schools you will form some opinions about what is better or worse but it’s all a bit incremental between your finalists. Plus your finalists are still incremental over the worst school you’d realistically send your kid to.

Alpha does not look incremental. It might not be better for your kid, I don’t know, but it’s definitely very different.

For what it’s worth, both my kids would want to go (especially my younger one, who LOVED his day there) if we had one near us.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Learning

76% of Americans oppose paying kids to learn, Alpha has built its entire system around what the research shows to works. Drawing on Roland Fryer’s studies and Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice, Alpha uses “GT bucks” (worth 10 cents each) to reward academic progress. Kids earn money for completing lessons with 80%+ accuracy, creating a gamified learning environment that turns the same iXL content that was “a fight every time” at home into something children beg to do more of at school. The author’s middle daughter completed two full grade levels in 20 weeks – powered not by innate love of learning, but by transparent incentives that most educators would recoil from.

Let me pause here for a moment to remind you that my guide The Principles Of Learning Fast distilled from The Math Academy Way is not a controversial reading of the learning literature, or to be more accurate, the literature on “skill development”. The same principles that we use for athletics work in academics. But all of this knowledge is heavily ignored for (waves hand) “reasons”.

If an educator is accustomed to norms that aren’t heavily rooted in skill development literature, that literature can be jarring. It doesn’t love you the way your teachers do. It loves outcomes.

If you’re building muscle, the stimulus to grow starts with discomfort. There are many techniques to get through discomfort. But none that serve your goals include avoiding it.

To think otherwise is to believe in lies.

When it comes to sports, nobody believes otherwise. No pain, no gain is the boring truth. My guess here is that we can be upfront about this because athletes are motivated by winning and “gains” are steps to winning.

Similarly, students are motivated by…by…err….well. Hmm. This is kinda tricky. I mean some kids are motivated by As because they equate that with “winning”. Maybe some see As as a stepping stone to a good college, which is a stepping stone to…umm, well, err again.

The motivation for As slams pretty hard into our tendency to hyperbolically discount and that Marshmallow test thing didn’t replicate, right?

Even then, we are setting the goal as an “A”. What’s an “A” a surrogate for? If it’s money, then it’s about as loose as the Dave & Buster ticket/prize exchange rate. Is it popularity or style or honor or hotness? Have you even been to high school? I suspect the “A” works on the “academic athlete”. A competitive person who can’t resist a gold star who can memorize stuff without too much effort. That’s who As work on.

Now actually learning, that’s all too often, another matter altogether.

• being creative
• having an ill-defined definition of what’s excellent but knowing it when you see it and not stopping until you are proud of what you did but also not needing it to be perfect. (I mean really — what percentage of A work actually looks like excellence. I remember shredding my 6th grader’s A+ essay last year because the work was trash and he knew it. He didn’t push back. Bruh, you’re better than this, don’t confuse their standards with good standards.)
• drilling a concept that hurts your head until you’ve knocked the intimidation out of it with exposure and practice and pattern recognition. The wax-on, wax-off antecedents to authentic understanding

But if your not an “playing the sport of As”, how can anyone motivate you to do these hard things. We can’t say “no pain, no gain” because you don’t see the point of the pain.

When you are 12-years-old, nobody gives you a satisfying answer for why the pain is worth it.

Pause for a moment on that. It’s a big deal. Without a good reason to endure pain, the reality that pain is a prerequisite for growth is a highly inconvenient truth. Why bring it up? You have given a kid no justification for the pain, so you are forced into a sin of omission — to act as if it’s not true. You don’t need to say it’s not true, you just never really say that it is.

And just as water takes the path of least resistance lower, so does one’s perception of “what it takes” to succeed. They expect comfort or at least the absence of discomfort.

This is the result of not being able to justify the cost of growing. A failure to motivate via inspiration.

Why do we fail at this?

Because.

Because motivation and actually giving a hoot is scarce and mysterious. We’ve been wrestling with this since, heck when wrestling was invented. The Greeks spoke of “thymos”. Maybe you need to be touched by a god to care, I don’t know.

So I’m giving a giant hall pass to “education” and really society at large — this motivation thing, it’s ok if you don’t know where it comes from or how to inspire it.

But if you don’t have intrinsic motivation as a tool to teach people that growth requires discomfort, that doesn’t mean you let them believe you can grow without struggle. This lesson alone — that you shouldn’t expect to be good at anything without pushing — is more important than any fact you’ve ever learned in school.

So you need to motivate somehow if only to get someone to internalize this reality. To get them to actually push.

I’ve given you a glimpse into my beliefs because it explains why I agree with Alpha on the use of incentives. I turn now to the essay:

Self-actualization is where we want all our kids to reach (or at least “become a strong enough reader that they enjoy reading books and will do it for pleasure”). The question is how to get there. Ericsson has mapped out that path:

• Start with adult-generated incentives
• Surround the children with peers who will raise their status for being “learners”
• Hope at some point they self-actualize

Clearly not every kid will get to stage three (and no one will get to stage three in every endeavor), but Ericsson’s point is that EVERYONE who gets to stage three starts at stage one. And we know how to motivate kids in stage one – or at least Roland Fryer does.

Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation:

Incentives → Motivation

Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice

Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery

Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn’t “follow the data” on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension.

I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids).

Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect. Tell a kid to read a book or show up on time and they know what they need to do to get the money. Tell them to get higher scores on tests and, while they have a rough idea how to do that (pay more attention in class, study longer and more efficiently), the actual things they need to do are not entirely clear and the inputs they put in (studying) are not directly tied to the outputs (test scores) – and the incentives have no impact.

I’m back again.

When I was a kid, I wanted As because of the competitive gold star thing plus parental sticks (there were carrots of praise sure, but the stick loomed larger). I played the school game all the way through college. What’s the most efficient route to As? If I learn something in the process, fine, but that’s not the goal.

I regret my approach.

But this is a convoluted proof of Ericsson and Fryer!

Why?

Because regretting my approach reveals what I’ve become — someone who cares about learning, not gold stars. If you’re an adult reading this right now, how many times have you thought to yourself ‘College is wasted on the young’? You understand exactly what I mean. Regardless of how long it took you to get here, you’re here now.

I needed some external motivation. I needed some type of payoff to not feel scarcity breathing down my neck, discouraging the indulgence of knowledge for its own sake. As its own reward. As a means to discovery about the world and myself. As a pattern that connects beauty to chaos or design to function. Or the gift of receiving new 10 questions for each old one answered.

Would it have been better to have curiosity and motivation paired when I was 12? Of course. But if bootstrapping motivation via external rewards can work over the course of 25 years, AND if rewards can be tightly coupled to milestones such that we move faster at a young age (and provably so), then this is a good trade.

Especially since the status quo is not being motivated, building competence too slowly, finding no point in discomfort. And all of this while staying obliviously vain, celebrated for being yet unaccountable and even less aware. Playing video games in the waiting room until the nurse announces, “Dr. Disappointment will see you now.”

Screw that. Get uncomfortable, get some candy. Welcome to life. Self-actualize later.

[If there is a more enlightened path, we’d do that, but since there isn’t, take one that leads to actual results and hope the results become addicting on their own merit. Nobody is going to suffer for growth in the name of pure scholarship. Acting like they should is preaching abstinence in a dark room when slow jams are playing. Good luck.]

Back to the essay:

The future elite soloists of the music world all hated practicing.

And so did everyone else.

All of the musicians at the school did not like the process of practicing. They enjoyed playing. They enjoyed being good musicians. They just hated the process of practicing to get good.

So why did they do it?

Because they wanted to be great musicians and they knew that they needed to practice to become great musicians.

According to Ericsson, the key to being great is deliberate practice. The key to deliberate practice is motivation.

Ericsson dug further to figure out where the motivation came from and he found it grew over three stages:

1. Parental and authority approval: Initially kids practice because they are given praise and attention from their parents when they do so, and are reprimanded when they don’t. He gives examples of mom saying “if you don’t practice an hour per day on piano I am going to stop paying for your music instructor”.
2. Peer approval: At some point the young musicians begin to care less about what their parents think, and more about their relative status among their peers. Part of this is that they can perform music for their classmates, which is very impressive, but a bigger motivation is that their skills are recognized by other young musicians – their true peers.
3. Self Actualization: Eventually the best musicians stop caring about their peers and start internalizing the desire to be great. They see themselves as musicians, and they do the hard, uncomfortable work of practicing because “that is what a great musician does”.

You get the point. A toddler learns to walk because the point of walking is natural and intrinsically attractive. Most tasks in the painful “zone of proximal development” are not as motivating as walking. Grease the rails.

---

Related:

🎙️Alpha School Founder, software billionaire and school principal, Joe Leimandt tells the Alpha story on Invest Like The Best just last week (Spotify)

✍🏽Zvi Mowshowitz’ post Childhood and Education #11: The Art of Learning

It opens:

In honor of the latest (always deeply, deeply unpopular) attempts to destroy tracking and gifted and talented programs, and other attempts to get children to actually learn things, I thought it a good time to compile a number of related items.

• Finally, if you’d like to learn more about Alpha directly they hold weekly info sessions online (link)

The common theme in today’s links is gonna be pretty obvious.

math team and other horrible things you to do get into Stanford (6 min read)
Benedict

This essay is about what it feels like to jump through hoops for an overbid goal. It’s not about the worthiness of the goal itself which is what a lot of debate around competitive schools tends to focus. In fact, the author despite a dreary, soul-sucking description of achiever life readily admits:

Was it worth it? It’s hard to say it wasn’t. My best friends are still the ones I met in high school and college. I met my wife in my first year at Stanford. The Stanford name gets me in front of venture capitalists and hiring managers, just like Oatnook’s name got me in front of the admissions committee before that. I’m now 15 years into a tech career that I’d never even known was possible as a kid, a career that has been comfortable and lucrative in equal parts.

The essay is worth reading for several reasons.

1) It transports you into the mind of a person whose experience you may recognize in your own lives or the adolescents in your lives.

2) The distinction between a “mathlete” and a mathematician is a metaphor for the perversion we see everywhere — substituting a fake measure as a proxy for the thing we actually want to find.

3) Because the essay is the appetizer to today’s meal…but like a fancy waiter allow me some words first:

Some sleight of hand. When I say “substituting a fake measure as a proxy for what we really want to find” I’m getting you to accept an assumption. My assumption is we care about people matching to a life of thriving. But I’m not sure this assumption figures into society’s definition. Like the comfortable and lucrative in equal parts yuppie success story means thriving.

Ehh. There’s more to this.

“Success” may be a prerequisite for thriving but it’s not evidence of it. If success is sprouting from a soil of pyrrhic compromises, the plant’s not thriving. The fake hoop-jumping is an artificial light ensuring the seeds take to the environment but zap the natural tilts towards the sun.

The mathlete vs mathematician distinction says more about the ability to take pain to gain the approval of a gatekeeper who is not fundamentally interested in you but in the self-perpetuation of a system. Not because the gatekeeper loves the system, they’re probably most cynical of all by now if they have any self-awareness, but because inertia is a physical law. It takes energy to change course. Expending energy is risky.

It’s a 2 sided market. Both the judge and the applicant embrace conformity to reduce risk. When the rules of getting ahead are written down, and you get ahead, what have you demonstrated? Certainly grit. Tip o’ the hat, no shade. But picking a crowded selection from a menu is a “nobody got fired buying IBM” choice. When you eventually get fired, this could be literal but I mean it figuratively as the moment when you face a crisis of self, will you realize you traded your courage for certainty? Will you be able to get it back?

Another way?

Is there a way to replicate the desired outcome without chasing? Sure. You can lead. It’s not easy. The replication will be more expensive in terms of effort — but lower in terms of perceived effort because you’re alive.

It’s hard to trek where there are no tracks or where they are hard to see. It requires creativity, the knowledge that nobody cares or even notices when you have a bad hair day, and the meta-awareness that previously rewarding paths that are now overbid have a far worse risk/reward.

I’ve talked about this so many times. When I went into options trading it was a relative backwater. I was lucky it was on the cusp of becoming a booming business. The path was not overbid 25 years ago. It was highly competitive, sure, but nothing like it is now. Today, firms know to hire more than they need and then run them off against each other. Between this and the internships, they are smart. They know job interviews don’t tell you enough. They want a longer look at you.

I was taking Max to the ortho last Thursday and I saw what turned out to be a HS sophomore in a Jane Street t-shirt. I stopped him to chat. Asian kid. Math team. Seemed super mature, curious, and eager. We’ll stay in touch. You can’t see a kid like that and not want them to thrive. I want the mill to be kind to him. Not to be soft on him. But to genuinely energize him. Inspiration is the world being kind to you. Creating space to let it in is how you encourage and honor her kindness.

It’s tragic if the game theory of the system demands all your space.

If the cost of reducing risk is directing all your lifeforce and motivation to satisfy an endurance test, what are we even doing here? For whom is this endurance needed exactly? If I need it for me, and I do, then how much effort should I expend proving it meets someone else’s criteria. Or am I proving my endurance to someone else because I’ve substituted someone else’s pursuit for my own?

Like I said, all the above is appetizer.

Today’s main course is an assault by Zvi Mowshowitz (ironically he spent some time at Jane Street).

Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat (23 min read)

It’s a long post that reads briskly. I’ll excerpt just the opening and then the ending only because otherwise I’m going to excerpt all of it. It starts with a discussion about rampant cheating. It’s not an indictment. In fact, to read it on the level of morality is to miss why this essay is so important.

Because this essay is about everything.

You’ll understand why I opened with the math team post.

When you get to the “Whispering Earring”, a thought you’ve probably all considered, you’ll appreciate why this is about everything.

A lot of the stories we tell ourselves about motivation and meaning are going to look quite brittle in the coming years. There’s a silent river running underneath everyone’s house but the floorboards are starting to warp and it smells like mold.

The whole topic of cheating is just a canary.

Opening

Cheaters. Kids these days, everyone says, are all a bunch of blatant cheaters via AI.

Then again, look at the game we are forcing them to play, and how we grade it.

If you earn your degree largely via AI, that changes two distinct things.

1. You might learn different things.
2. You might signal different things.

Both learning and signaling are under threat if there is too much blatant cheating.

There is too much cheating going on, too blatantly.

Why is that happening? Because the students are choosing to do it.

Ultimately, this is a preview of what will happen everywhere else as well. It is not a coincidence that AI starts its replacement of work in the places where the work is the most repetitive, useless and fake, but its ubiquitousness will not stay confined there. These are problems and also opportunities we will face everywhere.

From the Closing

…our future may depend on the answer, what is your better plan?

The actual problem we face is far trickier than that. Both in education, and in general.

Extra

😂Matt Levine’s section on Student Finance Clubs is perfectly timed.

Last Wednesday, I talked about the cognitive bias where our minds substitute an easy question for a hard one. It’s in the category of “attribution” error which encompasses many biases you’ve heard of such as overconfidence, availability, peak-end, and more.

I remember Tetlock saying in his book that superforecasters suppressed this natural urge to switcheroo the question. Instead, they read the question like a lawyer. With precision.

A recent story at home made me think of this again.

My 6th grader told me that he’s been dominating the trivia competitions in history class. It’s jeopardy-style trivia where you lose points for being wrong.

Last night he told me his 18-game winning streak, in a class of 25 kids, was just broken. (He argues it was on a technicality and nobody actually beat him, so I think he’s well on his way to a JD. I am in seclusion in the north wing mourning).

While he’s good at school crap I was still surprised by this streak. Zak, how are you doing this? Turns out he basically lays in the weeds, answers fast when he’s confident, and otherwise lets the other kids “cook themselves”. They answer too many questions.

I have a couple thoughts about this.

First the superficially obvious one…Zak’s strategy is precise. The goal isn’t to know the most about the subject. It’s to get the most points. He understood the objective quite literally. No substituting. I appreciate that he recognizes this.

But it brings me to my next thought — about school’s limitations.

This game is a microcosm of school training.

Don’t take risk.

There’s a right answer.

Failure is heavily penalized.

Some of this dosed correctly is good and necessary. We need our bridges to stand.

But you can overlearn these lessons. I did. I never saw school as a place to learn but as a game. I even took that mentality to college. What major is the easiest to satisfy requirements while being tolerable? (Answer: econ)

The rules of life from what I was told:

getting an A = a pleasant future

I took this quite literally and missed the forest through the trees.

(I have a post about misapplying my trader mindset which shows how this particular folly of overlearning lessons was not limited to my academic years).

I’m not gonna go on some crusade about playing Jeopardy in school because it injects insidious game-thinking into one’s entire educational journey. It’s just a story that reminds me that formal schooling is incomplete. Risk-taking is a form of learning. School’s not really built to encourage that type of learning.

You can just try to round out the lessons at home. We definitely do the cliche stuff. At dinner, we might talk about a risk we took or something we failed at today. It’s not all the time because, heck, sometimes mom and I aren’t taking enough chances. But being annoyingly repetitive about it does seem to have an impact. The kids will just parrot me “why would you expect to be good at something the first time you try it”. I like when they mock me. It means they’re listening.

With the older kid now getting report cards, the kids are figuring out that mom is the letter grade enforcer. And you don’t even need to wait until report card day. She is addicted to Canvas notifications. I’m not the most detail-oriented about “did you do your homework” which is a flippancy towards school I am trying to suppress so they don’t pick up on it. That said, I’m pretty matter-of-fact about an A just being table stakes. School’s designed for everyone, the least you can do is get an A (look, I wouldn’t say this universally but parents know their kids — whether it’s school or sports you figure out the curve to grade them on).

More critically, an A is NOT an endpoint. The 6th grader gets As easily but I’ll spot check his work. I looked at an essay of his last week and threw up in my mouth. I went through it line by line with him. Not to make him feel bad (I do so in a joking way so he’s usually laughing when I make fun what I deem lazy work), but to teach him basic writing hygiene. The truth is he’s gonna get an A for what I consider trash. I don’t expect him to write like a lit major but the first step in closing the gap between what he’s capable of and where he is is pointing it out. That gap is unmeasured by the stupid grade. The grade is not on a curve to who he is. It’s my job to calibrate.

I think a lot about that interview I summarized with Kathleen Mercury. She teaches boardgame design to gifted kids in middle school. She says the lesson most of those kids need is that an A is not a ceiling.

Teaching game design is teaching to orient towards an internal scorecard not an external one:

That quantitative checkmark feeds into a lot of the programming that we’ve already done with kids as far as you know letter grades and standardized tests and success is 100% and success is, you know, an A plus is, you know, and I think for a lot of my students especially having to sort of break that mentality. A lot of what I do in teaching game design is here is this problem that cannot be solved, or notions like that. Here is this problem that you will have to you have to define the problem. You have to figure out how you’re going to solve this problem, you’re going to design your tests with these resources in terms of you know how close are you to solving this problem and you’re gonna do this again and again and again, you’re going to make a prototype you’re going to put it in front of other people, they’re going to play it, you’re going to get their feedback, and then you’re going to take those ideas, and that, you know, good, bad, the ugly. Incorporate that into your next design so that when that hits the table hopefully it’s better. Thinking of it as an unfinished unending hopefully upwardly ascending sort of cascade. See that process as a real process reflective of what life will be, I think is really important, because for a lot of my kids, you know they’ve learned what successes is and it’s an A+. I’m trying to show them that if you want to do anything cool, there will never be A+. You will never be finished. You will always just have to try to do your best to put out your best possible effort, listen to other people, and hopefully make that idea better and so that’s why I teach game design.

The reason why I teach game design is a teaches them this process of thinking design, thinking hands-on, trying to create solutions and learning how to see successes incremental progress, not as I finished I’m done.

We do talk about how it can be finished and not perfect and that’s really important for a lot of them. That you can have something that is unfinished. And you can see it as successful because you did try to make it better, even if you don’t think it’s better. And that’s really really hard for them to accept because it goes against everything they’ve always done

Real work has a tension in that you must ship even though it can always be better, especially in creative work. Balancing the quest for excellence without making perfection the enemy of the good will be a struggle for kids that are used to not struggling.

The struggle for school achievers can be a reluctance to try things they won’t be good at right away. Chipping away at the reluctance is part of the education that’s rarely captured in grades. It’s often actively selected against (like picking a major based on the easiest route to As).

The whole interview with Kathleen is great. Here’s a few more bullets:

On kids having different abilities

✔️Everyone deserves to learn at their level every single day that’s just one of those tenets that I just hold. If you’re doing something where their disabilities or inabilities become apparent to others. I think you have to be really careful about how you handle that. As far as you know what you’re willing to do to, you know, protect them to take care of them because if they’re stressed out and embarrassed.

✔️Approach to gifted kids:

1. If you don’t give gifted kids problems to solve, they will create their own.
2. They need to learn how to struggle and work through it.

✔️Heterogeneous groupings can protect kids by partnering up but homogenous groupings have advantages too.

For my gifted kids, a lot of times when that happens, they’re always like the ones that are like spread out amongst the other groups, and then they put all the spread out all the middle kids and then they spread out all this sort of low kids and pardon me for speaking in broad brushstrokes but I am. And so a lot of times they never get chances to work with each other. And one thing that research shows is that when you let kids have similar abilities work with each other. Everyone gains, because the kids on the middle step it up, and the kids on the lower end also step it up, even if it’s like one notch higher, you know, that’s okay for them, you know they’re using their abilities and what they know and trying to push themselves up to be more competitive as well

✔️Why the emphasis on points in winning is redundant.

Points are used to ultimately communicate your position in the game to other people. And if we’re playing a game that is just to be, you know, a review or something like that I don’t care about the points at all. And so, what I will often do is even if they get points, or if one team starts to get a blow out. I will, you know, do something like say “this is a 20 point question”, and then somehow I manage to make it so that kids on the other team get those points, or I start awarding ridiculous points my cool you just got a puppy. So drop puppy up there on the scoreboard.

✔️An antidote to results-based thinking

I honestly try to minimize any type of objective points in any kind of game situation as much as possible, because no one should ever be blamed for losing for their team, and I honestly don’t want anybody to be, you know, the fourth batter to just hit the Grand Slam home run and they get all the credit, not the people who also got on first, second and third.

✔️Be thoughtful about when points matter

It does make sense to have kids have scoring that matters, but I think you have to really ask yourself, is this that time?

✔️Not having grades at all doesn’t really work either

And if I had my choice I wouldn’t do grades at all, but this is the world we live in and I have to actually try tried one year to not give out grades and our gifted class. There’s some unintended consequences there but there you go. We tried it once. As much as we wanted it to work it didn’t really work.

More personal exhaust

Monday was my 3rd grader’s chance to have dad be a hard-ass:

Just as an fyi on the tweet context…there’s a test called the OLSAT that all 3rd graders get in CA. It’s basically an IQ test that measures verbal and non-verbal reasoning. It determines whether your kid gets into “gifted and talented”. The mean score on the test in our town is re-centered to 1 standard deviation higher than the CA mean. You need to be 2 standard devs above the town mean to make the program.

If you are one of these tiger parents who says “kindergarten is the first step towards college” you should definitely not live in a town with good public schools. This would be substituting the easy question for the hard one. You are playing the game wrong. I’m pretty sure there’s niche little industry for getting your address to be somewhere in the Dakotas if this is the type of game you gets you off.

That reminds me I need to have my friend Brent guest-post again. Retired options trader turned college consultant. Dude’s forgotten more about trading the VIX complex than I know plus knows exactly how to understand the admissions game for what it is — a horrible game. It’s an area where the conventional wisdom reeks of substituting the easy question for the hard one. Which is understandable since looking at the game for what it is, is certainly not pleasant.

Every article like this and company’s reactions (see what Google did) is going to pile up to real change one day as the system has overplayed its hand. Industry, like Billy Beane did 25 years ago, will add liquidity to an inefficient market. The spirit of “show your work in public” will become increasingly common amongst ambitious high schoolers and I expect more routes around the ossified college-industrial complex.

It’s funny — when I was in Vegas last week with my good friend we were talking about NILs. His son is an elite HS athlete (if you know me IRL there’s a good chance you know which kid I’m talking about). They are meeting famous sports agents. The scouts are circling. If the boy stays healthy and stays on the curve he’s been on since he was 2-years-old (Yinh and I flew to Anaheim when he was 4 to watch him throw out the first pitch at an Angels game), he’ll make more money in college than most people make in their fancy jobs. I’m so proud and hopeful for him. But I’m also reminded that colleges are branded hedge funds with multi-billion dollar logos. Education is part of the bundle but I suspect it’s a large part for only a tiny number of students whose futures depend on the things they actually learn in school.

Nothing would make me happier than seeing them lose their grip on our youth’s singular dreams. I’m going to root for anything that encourages more paths to thriving without paying some artificial-scarcity tax.

As I’m getting older and watching friends with high school-age kids it seems like everyone agrees that the situation is gross but they feel hostage to it. I don’t know how much of it is cartel economics versus paradox of skill. If people internalize that college is so valuable it becomes more competitive — and if a game is competitive enough, the outcomes look random. Which tracks. What word do parents use in describing admissions?

Crapshoot.

Our local social club recently held its annual all-hands where we address housekeeping matters, re-affirm goals, and discuss event programming.

This is boilerplate info from the weekly letter I send to the club.

This is where I hosted the Financial Literacy sessions for kids last year. Feel free to copy and host your own:

• Financial Literacy #1: Savings & Compounding
• Financial Literacy #2: Entrepreneurship

Last night, we did our first salon of the year where members who were fluid with what’s happening in AI gave a presentation to the rest of us eager learners.

The topic of AI can leave people feeling anxious about the future. “What am I supposed to learn?” or maybe even more important to the members “what are my kids supposed to learn?”

This made me think of a recent interview I listened to with sci-fi author Devon Eriksen.

I’ll cut straight to the excerpts that relate (emphasis mine).

Interviewer Dan Koe: I want to start with that very first post of yours that I came across, and it was you responding to Yuval Noah Harari, like a clip of him saying that nobody knows what to learn because nobody knows what will be relevant 20 years from now. And then you started it with, “That’s because this dude doesn’t know what education is.”

That caught my attention immediately. And you went on to say this:

“In my opinion, the seven liberal arts of the modern world are:

1. Logic: How to derive truth from known facts.
2. Statistics: How to understand the implications of data.
3. Rhetoric: How to persuade and spar persuasion tactics.
4. Research: How to gather information on an unknown subject (practical psychology).
5. Practical Psychology: How to discern and understand the true motives of others.
6. Investment: How to manage and grow existing assets.
7. Agency: How to make decisions about what course to pursue and proactively take action to pursue it.”

This will set us up for the entire podcast. So I want to start with this question: What do you find wrong with the current education system, and why are we not teaching what you call these liberating arts?

Devon: Well, the root cause of what is wrong with the education system is that a third party is paying for it. You know, we could go on all day sort of nitpicking the symptoms. But that is the disease. And when something is being paid for, the person who pays for it is the customer, and it is the customer who gets served.

So when you don’t pay for your education, when the government pays for your education through money that it has taken from other people, then the government decides on some level what you are going to learn. And you do not have so much as a veto power. Because if you pack your bags and go somewhere else to some other college, you’re getting the same thing because the government is paying for that, either through these kinds of education grants or through the Stafford Loan program. You’re not writing the checks, so you don’t decide the curriculum. And when somebody else decides the curriculum that you are going to be educated from, then they are going to give you the education that is going to make you useful to them—not specifically the education that is going to make you useful to you.

This is something that Cicero talked about when he talked about education. And I would highly recommend giving those bits of his writings a read. Because we don’t really have an organized version of what Cicero would have considered education.

What we call education today is mostly actually training, and that is the kind of education that in Rome would have been given to slaves. A slave is essentially a human machine. Where he’s property. He’s going to spend his whole life doing one task. So you give him job training. Job training is not education. It is preparation to do a specific task.

In that era of history, if someone was a free man, a Roman citizen with the full rights thereof, who could carry weapons and do all the things that Roman citizens could do, it was expected that he would probably need to be able to do many different things in his life because he would be acting in his own interest. He was not a slave. He did not exist to serve someone else. He existed to benefit his society, but also to serve himself. Hopefully, the two would align.

That meant that you couldn’t teach him everything he might need to know because you had no idea what he might need to know. He had no idea what he might need to know. So you taught him how to train himself. You taught him how to learn. Education is not about how to do a task. It’s about how to learn a task.

We do not have systematic education in this society, in the modern West, about how to learn and educate yourself, because the people who are determining what goes into education are really more focused on, “Okay, what’s going to make this person a useful worker for the moneyed interests that I actually serve?”

[Kris: Maybe that was a lot of words to say “specialization is for insects”. Then again, my money is on the roaches to outlast us all. Even better, cyborg roaches.]

 

Dan Koe: With that, it seems like agency is a massive part of that equation. The last art, so to say, could be the glue between it all. So in your eyes, what is agency, and what is the importance of it?

Devon: Well, agency is really the one most rare factor that determines highly successful people in life. You know, if we look at someone like Elon Musk, we can say, “Oh, he’s very smart.” And clearly, he is. IQ probably 150 plus. But there are lots of people banging around with 150-plus IQ—thousands upon thousands of them in the United States alone. And a lot of them are cloistered in academia. They come up with these sort of post-modern-esque papers. Or maybe they’re doing something slightly more useful, like physics. But they don’t get this magical effect where everything they touch turns to gold.

That’s because the bottleneck is not intelligence. Intelligence is only one of the things that is needed for success. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. And intelligence is a very narrow thing. So what agency is, is the tendency to initiate action to achieve your goals.

And we don’t solve the world with intelligence. We don’t look at the world and think very smart thoughts and say, “Oh, I understand everything now.” That’s not how it works. Because when we look at the world and we think very hard, we get a few things right and we generally get most of it wrong. Then what we do is we try something, we have our guess, we test it. Some of it fails; maybe it succeeds, but usually, it fails. We refine that guess and try again.

So what applying raw intelligence to the universe is missing is that feedback loop. And what agency does—what this tendency to initiate action, this belief that you will eventually be successful, which is what agency is—what it does is it makes us willing to take risks. And it makes us resilient to failure. Because if you’re trying something that really is an achievement worth having, that somebody hasn’t done before, the first time you try it, you’re going to fail. No matter how smart you are. You’re going to get a lot of things wrong. So you have to keep trying again until you eliminate all of the errors from your model or from your plan.

You can’t do that with pure intelligence because intelligence is just the ability to analyze. It doesn’t give you data. It doesn’t tell you what the universe is like. So you have to go over and over again.

Ok, so I want to just emphasize the “feedback loop”. At our weekly family dinner with my in-laws we discussed New Year’s Resolutions.

I admit I was being quite tedious, but I kept pointing out how the way the resolutions were written, there was no feedback loop.

• “Make the middle school basketball team”
• “Shoot in the low 80s in golf”
• “Write a 100 page story”

Here’s how you fix all of them:

• “Alternating days: 20 minutes of dribbling drills/400 shots from various stations. Record percentages.”
• “Driving range X days/week and putting drills Y days a week. Play 18 holes every week.”
• “Write for 15 minutes every day”

None of these were my resolutions so I have no idea what the specific prescriptions should be, but I’m certain that the second set of prescriptions will have a higher likelihood of getting you to the goal. Because they embed a feedback loop.

If this reminds you of timeboxing, then you’ve been paying attention. It’s the manuka honey of productivity hacks. Score yourself not on the output of an hour but on whether you actually worked on what you said you would.

It’s so stupid simple and yet if you scored yourself this way do you think you’d actually be batting 1.000? If not, then you probably have a lot to gain from this shift in what you label a successful hour vs an unproductive one.

Ok, I’ll close the sandwich with another education bit. This is from my takeaways from Seth Godin:

What we have done in the last 50 years is leveraged everything. So, whereas in the old days of business might be able to go four or five days with no revenue because they didn’t own the bank, anything because they didn’t know the mortgage, anything. Now, if you want to compete, you need to have raised the money, to have run the ads, to have lower the price, et cetera, et cetera. So one business after another, big and small are leverage to their eyeballs. And we’ve done the same thing with education. That if other people are leaning into it, levering up, competing for scarce slots, it’s really easy for a parent to believe that balance will be punished. There’s no way to win that game against someone who’s unwilling to compromise. So what you have to do instead is play a different game. And you had to figure out what other agendas are available for my kids and my family…

If you talk to freshmen at Harvard, not one of them says they came to Harvard so they could get a job in finance. And if you talk to graduating seniors, they’ve somehow persuaded themselves that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. So what happened? Well, they’re not vocational schools in the sense that they teach you how to be an investment banker. But they are definitely labeling and finishing schools in the sense that they make it easy for investment bankers to know where to go, to get more investment bankers. The thing is that colleges that chose not to play this game got less famous. The ones that said you’re here to read great books, you’re here to explore what it means to be on the planet, you’re here to think deeply about meaning and philosophy and connection didn’t attract the same people to their placement office.

Which meant a signal went out to parents. And the signal was if you’re about to invest $200,000 or go into debt for something choose wisely and your peers will judge you for it. And so we created this capitalist driven ratchet that says money and success are the same thing. And that success means you’re a good parent. And success means you have a good kid and we’re defining that success in terms of money, but there are plenty of ways to make a living where you can be happy and make a contribution where the goal isn’t to make the most money.