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.

Wednesday night Yinh came out of the boys’ room and in a hushed tone relayed the 6th grader was feeling down after a bad day. He woke up feeling a bit under the weather (but fine enough to go to school), had a subpar hoops practice, got into a fight with his younger bro (over Halloween masks), his friend was moving to India the next day, and…he was super-stoked about a topic he learned about in Math Academy (interquartile range) but when he told me about it I immediately asked him a question that he didn’t know the answer to deflating whatever good the day had salvaged.

I felt like a total ass. I was 1) out of tune with how the day was treating him and 2) my tone in asking him about the math was out of sync with my message. My intention was curiosity about what he learned but it came out as a challenge or test.

I fumbled. Sometimes you clench the ball too tight.

I have high expectations of effort in 2 categories for the kids:

a) Areas they earnestly want to improve in.

They play soccer for fun but care about getting better at basketball. They create those distinctions. I remind them that getting better doesn’t happen without practice so if you want X and your actions betray you, I’m going to question what you actually want. I try to balance sensibility given their ages without watering down the truth of what being competitive means. Overall, I let their own motivation dictate how hardcore to be about this. I’ll come back to what I mean by this.

b) Things where they are too young to understand the option value of.

I’ll just caveat this with both boys have obvious academic aptitude. If they didn’t, I’d adapt my thinking to what they need as individuals. But since they are capable, I expect them to crush school. You’ll have more choices down the line if you can get yourself onto the equivalent of the honors track. I’m not suggesting this is deterministic — but there’s option value and the easier school work is to a child the cheaper the option premium. Orienting your drive in the direction of your innate strengths is a generally good principle (and possibly underappreciated because the second derivative of that function is opaque but likely convex with respect to success and satisfaction in life).

The flipside of the high expectation is what kids are capable of. I don’t mean this in a purely literal sense. You can search YouTube and find children performing extraordinary feats. Those examples round down to “rare exceptions”. Generally speaking, fulfilling high expectations requires sustained commitment. And sustained commitment relies on motivation. Motivation is a puzzle. What makes some kids (or anyone for the matter) obsessed and others float in the wind? I don’t know those answers but I’ve recently pieced together a partial explanation that bears keeping in mind especially in moments of frustration.

I’ll start with the moments of frustration. Watching my kids waste their time on YouTube Shorts or watching Brawlstars influencers. Nails on chalkboard. Go collect some bugs or build a bike ramp, just turn this crap off. [My nieces and nephews call me Uncle “Nonsense” because I always ask “what nonsense are you watching now?” It’s past the point of meme — my sister’s kids sent me a photo of themselves eating bubble gum flavored ice cream because they know I call it a “nonsense” flavor.]

Sometimes I just wanna yell “go be productive”. But I don’t because that’s not what I really mean — that would be me projecting. That’s my demon, and I don’t want my kids to meet him.

I’ve thought about this a lot. This urge towards productivity. Consider this Paul Graham excerpt I quote in Impedance Mismatch:

What I’ve learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You’ll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.

The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I’m not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can’t be sure I’m getting anywhere when I’m working hard, but I can be sure I’m getting nowhere when I’m not, and it feels awful.

There wasn’t a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn’t achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13. Several people I’ve talked to remember getting serious about work around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said:

“I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.”

Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.

This line resonates “a feeling of disgust when I’m not achieving anything”. But while that disgust is useful gasoline it has fossil fuel level byproducts and externalities. It’s a tradeoff not an unalloyed virtue. So “go be productive” misrepresents what I really want (which stated simply is to be active in mind or body not numbed into zombie mode. A rule that we enforce poorly is “if you are going to watch YouTube you must search for what you want. You are not allowed to let the algo create the menu or serve the next video”).

But the main reason I restrain the “be productive” message is that it’s inappropriate at their age. Even these psychos that Paul Graham refers to didn’t feel the urge to be productive until 13 or 14. He wonders:

Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.

I was listening to Dr. David Yeager on the Huberman podcast (the first time I’ve ever listened to that show believe it or not. Thanks Justin for the heads up, I really enjoyed Yeager’s insights.) and he talks about how puberty coincides with the first time kids really onboard status anxiety. It’s when they become deeply aware of a pecking order or being “popular”. The social dynamics are complex and stressful. It is the first time they start to think of their value in terms of what they can do, or if they are pretty, etc.

It’s the age when kids start bands. We know why they do that. And it’s not to “be productive.” But achievement is a byproduct. Ambition is a natural solution to status anxiety.

Meanwhile elementary school kids are beautifully unaware. Some kids wanna score a hattrick and some are picking daisies. But there’s room for everyone. Their lives are pre-achievement. Open exploration. No judgement. It’s a small window.

How dare I shorten it?

For their whole lives, others are gonna size them up. These boys’ thoughts will whisper “what are you bringing to the table?”. They don’t need extra pressure from me. They don’t need another form of love that comes with strings attached. The world’s love comes with enough conditions.

They’ll need guidance. They’ll be things they can’t forsee because they are unforseeable. But there will also be things they can’t foresee because they’re inexperienced. We can help with that. There will be useful resources and opportunities they didn’t even know were possibilities. We can help with that. There will be questions of reality. Like what it takes to learn. What it means to have integrity. How to model decision-making. We can help with all that.

But we are not here to create pressure. Or fear. I want them to face fear. I don’t want to generate it. The world will do that for free.

If I killed the enthusiasm for what Zak learned in math, I’m doing something wrong. I’m grateful Yinh told me, because like him, I’m learning and we will get better. Puberty is gonna be a trip.

The day after the bad one was uplifting.

I was traveling. Yinh texted me that the younger one was struggling with Math Academy and extra frustrated because the older one who he idolizes crushed his quiz.

But…the older one coached and brought him around and excited again.

Like any set of brothers they can be 2 cats in a bag (they were the night before), but it makes it that much sweeter when they get each other’s backs. This particular instance made me especially proud because I’m relentlessly on their ass about being patient (go slow to go fast) in learning and with each other so any indication that they hear me is a win.

Yinh was blown away at how Zak was so calm and methodical breaking down Max’s difficulty into manageable steps. I’ve had his friends say the same thing about how he helps them. Being patient and helpful because everyone learns at a different pace is an explicit and modeled value at home. But a lot of what you want to instill doesn’t transmit so it’s worth celebrating the small win.

Yinh captured the moment when cooler heads prevailed:

If you know about education and want to write about it, I’m just letting you know you should go for it. There’s an audience. That Principles of Learning jam I put out Wednesday got me a lot of inbound. Which I never would have predicted. It was an exercise in organizing my thoughts on a topic I find inexhaustibly interesting — learning faster and more efficiently. If I wasn’t loving building moontower.ai, I’d be pulling on that thread harder.

[If you are operating at the intersection of machine learning and human learning and want to connect hit me up. I have a close friend at the tip of that spear who I’d be asking for a job if I wasn’t being feral.]

Anyway, parents wanna know about this stuff based on my email inbound. Just sayin.

In that vein, I’m going to share a response I sent to someone who recently enrolled their 7th grader in Math Academy. The parent is concerned that by going faster (even in a selective private school that the child is already in) that boredom could become an issue.

I’ll be honest. I hadn’t considered that angle. But it’s a totally legitimate one considering that MA’s Justin Skycak addresses it directly in:

The Greatest Educational Life Hack: Learning Math Ahead of Time (5 min read)

Justin frames it in terms of risk and reward. That’s a valid approach. But for some kids, it’s still too conservative. Pre-learning is the ultimate option on having doors open that simply won’t any other way because you are compressing time.

In one of Paul Graham’s best essays, How To Make Wealth, he talks about the decision to join a startup in such terms. In Startup = Growth it’s spelled out — “raising money lets you choose your growth rate”. If the kid enjoys going faster, let ‘er rip, they aren’t aware of the option your giving them but they might thank you later.

[I wish I could make copies of myself to do all the stuff I want to do but at the same time, I consciously don’t want to burn the candle at both ends right now. There are doors that are closed because I didn’t go faster when the cost of going faster from a family POV was lower. But I wasn’t inspired to go faster then. Anyway, I’m not writing for therapy here, but if I’m projecting my own illusions you should at least have the disclaimer. ]

I suspect the downside is not especially sensitive to pre-learning anyway. Even if a motivated or math-inclined kid didn’t pre-learn they’re gonna be bored. The teacher will introduce a topic, the kid will get it immediately and still need to wait for others to catch up.

Something I tell my kids, and I don’t express it any type of subversive tone but just as a matter of fact…you can’t let the pace of school dictate what you think is a normal pace. School is built for everyone, but if you are good at sports you wouldn’t expect to move at the pace of the average kid in your class. You’d have a coach and play “up” or on a club team.

The subconscious message we pick up everywhere, especially in school, is that there’s a correct pace. But the error bars around that pace are massive. We know our children so deferring to what’s best for the average when we have specific info (whether they need more help or more stimulation) is wasting info. As always, it’s sound decision-making hygiene to consider the outside view but adjust it for your circumstances.

One last caveat — if I found out my bored kid was working on his fantasy football model underneath this textbook at school because he was bored my reflex would be “Sweet, show me what you got so far. But also you better get an A+.”

Friends,

In September I wrote about signing my 6th grader and myself up for courses on mathacademy.com. It’s been a month and we’re addicted and competing with each other to level up in our respective leagues by gaining XP. A unit of XP approximates “one minute of focused effort by a serious but imperfect student”.

[I’ve turned a bunch of readers onto this site just as I was turned on to it by another reader and now I got peeps texting me questions about it or telling me about their kids progress. You love to see it. Random side note — I have a good friend who just moved from my neighborhood to Austin because he’s deep in the education/AI intersection and the weird city is the scenius for education experimentation. I mentioned it to him and let’s just say he knew all about it from different angles. What he told me only got me even more stoked about what mathacademy is doing fwiw.]

In that post, I pasted links to 30 articles that I planned to read by the site’s chief quant Justin Skycak after already doing a fair bit of reading on the blog. I’ve plowed thru the 30 articles and then some, which is still just a fraction of what’s on there.

I’m personally highly interested in the entire topic of using AI to develop talent and learn at rates that were previously unthinkable. I have a large unfinished document with years of insights that I’ve pulled together from various sources that probably won’t see the light of day. For education I’m a big fan of writers like Scott H. Young, Cedric Chin, Matt Bateman, and Freddie deBoer. You can search the substack for all the times I’ve referenced their work and I have plenty more in backlog. I’ve also harped on the degree to which SIG’s education was extremely well-mapped out from a pedagogical point of view. It wasn’t until I heard Todd Simkin explain the educational influences that informed how they taught did I appreciate the extent to which education theory underpinned their methods.

See:

🔗Educational Ideas Inspired By Seymour Papert’s Constructionism (Moontower)
🔗Notes From Todd Simkin On The Knowledge Project (Moontower)
🔗General & Childhood Education Articles (Moontower)

I’m adding Justin to my list of must-reads. After spending most of Sunday with the blog, I’ve synthesized a much more condensed version of Principles of Learning except it’s fully based on Justin’s insights.

I reached out to him when I first discovered the site and made my interest in what he’s doing as plain as possible. I told him:

I think being born on 3rd is to get exposure to someone when you are young who shows just how self imposed our speed limits are.

He hadn’t heard it put that way before.

The wealth you give a youth is self-efficacy. A chance to match their abilities to the needs of communities they find themselves in as they get older. Autonomy and confidence through competence.

When I say “speed limit” I’m not referring to speed only, or even necessarily. It’s more about limits in general. In athletics, you can’t be Lebron no matter what you do. But whatever your limit is, it’s further than you think. It goes without saying that finding your limit requires brutal effort and commitment…but however far that gets you, personalized instruction will get you even further.

If a great teacher/mentor/coach will get you further than the frontier that caps out at a given level of effort, then that role has insane leverage. The very act of pushing through a previously-conceived frontier will increase your motivation and effort as you see what’s possible.

There was a Washington Post article several years ago referring to “America’s most advanced math program” in Pasadena. The kids were crushing the AP Calc BC exam in 8th grade.

Who were the teachers?

The founders of mathacademy.com

The Math Academy began as a tutoring program run by husband-and-wife duo Jason and Sandy Roberts before being formally adopted into the PUSD curriculum in 2017.

Seen narrowly, mathacademy is an AI program that helps you learn math faster.

I think this is to miss what’s coming.

The instruction portion of the personalized coach is being automated.

I’m fairly convinced that we aren’t too far from knowledge not just being democratized (I mean Wikipedia already exists) but structured for delivery on incredibly effective, personalized rails.

Before someone’s reactance reflex gets all buzzy, I don’t mean “education” will be solved by a robot. Instruction is simply one component of education. Motivation, support, guidance, as well the type of story-telling and conversation that relates classroom learning to the world and others is as human-based an activity as a warm hug. But if the price for personalized instruction craters, the secondary effects are going to be large and visible.

At scale, we are going to find out just how many kids are capable of finishing Calc BC by grade 8 or publishing a novel in middle school. We hear those stories now and we dismiss them as “genius” or “privileged”.

But what if a low price for personalized instruction tells us we’re wrong about this? There will always be examples of genius or privilege. But if stories of insane achievement start multiplying amongst broken-English immigrants or other groups who are not advantaged in any way EXCEPT in motivation than you’ll know that the things Justin is writing about turned out to be true.

The price of personalized instruction falling is not a panacea. The cost is only a bottleneck after basic needs like stability and safety are met. But the cost is an active bottleneck for all but the rich once those needs are met. Even expensive schools are only incrementally better on truly personalized instruction (their primary advantage might be the compression of the classroom range to a higher functioning average but that’s not the same as personalized instruction so much as a release from tolerating a small number of disproportionally disruptive students).

I’m fascinated by mathacademy because of what it telegraphs — a future of cheap personalized instruction. I’m not picturing slicker edtech apps here. This is a glimpse of something different.

Libraries were free. The internet is free, convenient, and wider reaching. Sal Khan is a prophet who built on its rails. Well, the tracks are being upgraded.

The trains are going to go faster.

The full document can be found as a moontower guide:

🎓Principles of Learning Fast

It’s a living document that I’ll add to over time.

This condensed version hits most of the highlights based on what I’ve read so far. I pontificate like a blowhard at the end a bit more.

Maximizing the Learning Rate: A Neuroscience-Informed Approach to Education

The objective function of educational strategy outlined below is to maximize the learning rate—helping students acquire and retain knowledge more effectively. There are certainly great programs for independent learning out there but the objective in this discussion is to leverage technology and cog sci to progress through levels of mastery faster.

What Neuroscience Has Taught Us About the Brain

These are some of the most durable findings in cognitive science.

• Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to rewire itself through new experiences is one of the most significant findings in neuroscience. Neuroplasticity means that the brain continually adjusts its neural connections in response to new learning. This allows learners to develop new skills and adapt to challenges. Methods like deliberate practice particularly the “effortful repetition” and “successive refinement” aspects repeatedly strengthen neural pathways until tasks become second nature (Talent Development vs Traditional Schooling).
• Dopamine and Motivation: Neuroscience has shown that dopamine, a neurotransmitter, plays a critical role in motivation and reward-based learning. When learners experience success, dopamine is released, reinforcing the behavior and encouraging continued effort. This makes motivation a crucial component of the learning process, as it directly influences how willing a learner is to persevere through challenges.
• Working Memory and Its Limitations: The brain’s working memory, or the ability to hold and manipulate information temporarily, is limited. Overloading this system can impede learning, as the brain can only focus on a few pieces of information at once. Techniques like chunking—breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable units—can help mitigate this overload (When Should You Do Math in Your Head vs Writing It Out on Paper?).
• The Science of Forgetting: One of the most critical insights from cognitive psychology is the concept of forgetting curves. The theory, which dates back to Hermann Ebbinghaus’s pioneering research, shows that learners forget newly acquired information rapidly unless there is some form of reinforcement. The brain’s natural tendency to forget is often visualized in a forgetting curve, which steeply declines in the hours or days after learning.

  
  Forgetting Curves and Memory Decay: Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve demonstrates that without review or rehearsal, retention of new knowledge drops quickly over time. However, the rate of forgetting slows down when learners engage in retrieval practice and spaced repetition—both of which can flatten the curve, leading to more durable retention.

  Spaced Repetition Leads to Automaticity: Over time, repeated retrieval practice pushes learners toward automaticity—the ability to recall information effortlessly. Once information is retrieved enough times across spaced intervals, it becomes deeply embedded in long-term memory. Efficiency is achieved through repeated activation and myelination – a process where neural pathways are coated with a substance called myelin, increasing the speed and efficiency of signal transmission.

  This is the key loop:

  Retrieval practice > Automaticity > Reduced demand on working memory >

  The learner frees up cognitive resources for more complex tasks, facilitating better problem-solving and higher-order thinking.

  “Automaticity frees up cognitive resources that would otherwise be consumed by basic recall tasks, allowing for higher-order cognitive tasks to take place in the working memory.”

Implications for Implementation

The implications of neuroscience and research on forgetting curves for learning are vast. Here’s how these insights translate into effective learning strategies:

• Retrieval Practice and Minimizing Forgetting: The act of retrieving information from memory, rather than passively reviewing material, significantly boosts retention. Each successful retrieval attempt strengthens neural pathways and makes the knowledge more durable. As learners engage in retrieval, they disrupt the forgetting curve and prolong the retention of knowledge (Which Cognitive Psychology Findings Are Solid, That Can Be Used to Help Students Learn Better?).
• Spaced Repetition for Long-Term Retention: By structuring review sessions at increasingly spaced intervals, learners allow time for memory consolidation. This reduces the steep decline of the forgetting curve, especially in the early stages of learning. Over time, the intervals between repetitions can be extended without significant loss in retention, enabling efficient long-term learning. The use of spaced repetition systems (SRS) has demonstrated significant improvements in student performance (Optimized, Individualized Spaced Repetition in Hierarchical Knowledge Structures).

Common Misconceptions in Learning

It’s easy to fall into widely accepted beliefs about how people learn, but research has debunked many of these ideas. Here are a few myths that might surprise you:

• Learning Styles: Contrary to popular belief, the idea that individuals have specific “learning styles” (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and that teaching should be tailored to these styles is unsupported by research. While students may have preferences, these preferences do not significantly improve learning outcomes. Instead, using varied teaching methods that engage multiple senses enhances learning for all students (Why is the EdTech Industry So Damn Soft?). Veritasium has also called this the “biggest myth in education”.
• The Myth of Productive Struggle: While allowing learners to struggle through difficult problems might seem beneficial, research has shown that this is often counterproductive, particularly for novices. Without proper guidance, prolonged struggle leads to frustration and disengagement. Scaffolding and explicit instruction provide the necessary support to avoid cognitive overload and enable meaningful progress (What’s the Best Way to Teach Math: Explicit Instruction or Less Guided Learning?).
• Discovery Learning vs. Direct Instruction: The idea that students should learn concepts through self-discovery has been largely debunked, especially for beginners. Direct instruction, which provides clear guidance and support, has proven far more effective in most learning scenarios. Discovery learning works well for experts but can leave novices overwhelmed and unproductive, a paradoxical finding known as the “expertise reversal effect”. (The Pedagogically Optimal Way to Learn Math).
• The Illusion of Comprehension: Learners often mistake familiarity with material for true understanding—a phenomenon known as the illusion of comprehension. Just because something feels familiar doesn’t mean the learner can apply it effectively. Combatting this requires practices like retrieval practice and interleaving, which force deeper engagement with the material (Which Cognitive Psychology Findings Are Solid, That Can Be Used to Help Students Learn Better?).

What Pedagogy Research Has Taught Us

Pedagogy research provides practical strategies that align with neuroscience insights, helping us understand how to optimize learning environments:

• Deliberate Practice: One of the most well-established findings in educational research is the importance of deliberate practice. Unlike passive or rote learning, deliberate practice focuses on honing specific skills through effortful repetition and immediate feedback. This approach helps students achieve automaticity, where foundational skills become second nature and free up cognitive resources for more complex problem-solving. This is why “deliberate practice” is regarded as the most effective training technique across talent domains (The Pedagogically Optimal Way to Learn Math).
• Worked Examples to Reduce Cognitive Load: Especially in subjects like mathematics, worked examples are invaluable for novice learners. By showing step-by-step problem-solving processes, worked examples reduce cognitive load, allowing learners to focus on understanding the process rather than inventing solutions. This strategy is effective in reducing overwhelm, a key barrier to learning (Which Cognitive Psychology Findings Are Solid, That Can Be Used to Help Students Learn Better?).
• Active Learning for Deeper Understanding: Research consistently shows that active learning—engaging students in activities like problem-solving, discussion, and teaching others—leads to better retention and understanding than passive learning methods like lectures. However, this active engagement must be paired with direct instruction, especially for novices, to prevent cognitive overload (Why is the EdTech Industry So Damn Soft?).
• Interleaving Practice: Interleaving, or mixing different topics or skills within a study session, forces the brain to continually retrieve and apply information, strengthening neural connections. While it may feel harder for learners, this desirable difficulty improves long-term retention and the ability to transfer knowledge to new contexts (Which Cognitive Psychology Findings Are Solid, That Can Be Used to Help Students Learn Better?).

Connecting It All: The Flywheel of Competence, Confidence, and Motivation

When neuroscience and pedagogy principles are applied in tandem, they create a reinforcing cycle that propels students toward continuous growth and mastery:

• Competence: Effective learning techniques, such as deliberate practice and retrieval practice, build competence. As learners master fundamental skills, they achieve automaticity, allowing them to perform basic tasks effortlessly, freeing up mental resources for tackling more advanced problems (Automaticity for Cognitive Efficiency).
• Confidence: With growing competence comes confidence. When learners see themselves succeeding—whether it’s mastering a math concept or improving in a skill—they are more likely to tackle new challenges with a positive mindset. This confidence feeds into their willingness to engage with difficult tasks (Recreational Mathematics: Why Focus on Projects Over Puzzles).
• Motivation: Confidence breeds motivation. As students become more confident in their abilities, they are more driven to continue learning. This motivation reinforces their engagement in deliberate practice, completing the flywheel and leading to greater competence over time. Accountability, whether through structured learning programs or paid educational platforms, also plays a role in keeping learners committed to their goals.

 

Key points and clarifications from select posts

 

• Recreational Mathematics: Why Focus on Projects Over Puzzles (2 min read)

  There’s only so much fun you can have trying to follow another person’s footsteps to arrive at a known solution. There’s only so much confidence you can build from fighting against a problem that someone else has intentionally set up to be well-posed and elegantly solvable if you think about it the right way.
  

• The Situation with AI in STEM Education (11 min read)

  The major limitation of LLMs in education is their reliance on student-initiated questions. Effective teachers don’t simply answer questions; they guide students through a structured learning process, scaffolding information and addressing knowledge gaps. LLMs, like ChatGPT, primarily respond to prompts, lacking the pedagogical ability to anticipate a student’s needs or direct their learning path.
  

  The promise of AI in education overemphasizes the role of “explanation”. Scaffolding and learning management are equally important. He cautions against prioritizing AI’s ability to engage in conversational dialogue over its capacity to deliver well-structured, personalized learning experiences.

• Optimized, Individualized Spaced Repetition in Hierarchical Knowledge Structures (22 min read)

  Theoretical Maximum Learning Efficiency In physics, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It is the theoretical maximum speed that any physical object can attain. A universal constant. In the context of spaced repetition, there is an analogous concept: theoretical maximum learning efficiency which posits that in a perfectly encompassed body of knowledge, it’s theoretically possible to achieve mastery through continuously learning new, progressively advanced topics without ever explicitly reviewing old material. This idea, while theoretical, underscores the power of leveraging knowledge interconnectedness.

  Importance of Encompassing Graphs (as opposed to prerequisite graphs) : Unlike prerequisite graphs which show learning dependencies, encompassing graphs map how practicing advanced topics reinforces prior knowledge. Constructing these graphs is a laborious, manual process requiring significant domain expertise, highlighting the importance of expert-designed learning pathways.

• Talent Development vs Traditional Schooling (12 min read)

  
  Orthogonality of Talent Development and Schooling: Traditional schooling, with its age-based grouping and standardized curricula, often fails to effectively nurture talent. This stark contrast emphasizes the need for specialized approaches outside the traditional classroom setting. Talent development is not only different from schooling, but in many cases completely orthogonal to schooling: “For one portion of our sample, talent development and schooling were almost two separate spheres of their life. … Usually the student made the adjustments, resolving the conflict by doing all that was a part of schooling and then finding the additional time, energy, and resources for talent development. … Mathematicians found and worked through special books and engaged in special projects and programs outside of school. Sometimes the schools or particular teachers made minor adjustments to dissipate the conflict. Mathematicians were sometimes excused from a class they were too advanced for and allowed to work on their own in the library. Sometimes they were accelerated one grade as a concession to their outside learning. … Whether the individual or the school made these adjustments, it was clear that these adjustments minimized conflict but did little to assist in talent development. The individual was able to work at both schooling and talent development, although with minimum interaction. … Talent development and schooling were isolated from one another. Schooling did not assist in talent development, but in these instances it did not interfere with talent development.”

  Individualized Instruction in Talent Development: Unlike the group-focused approach of schools, talent development thrives on personalized instruction, tailoring learning tasks to individual needs and ensuring mastery before moving on. This distinction underscores the importance of personalized learning pathways in maximizing potential.

 

A useful reminder from You Will Never Achieve Your Goals Unless You Transform Yourself Into a Person Who is Capable of Achieving Them:

You want to do something that sets you apart? You’re going to have to work harder than most.

Actually, let’s re-print the entire post:

The #1 confusion that I hear when people ask me about math, ML/AI, startups, etc., is they think there’s a way to achieve outsized success without putting in an outsized amount of work.

You want to do something that sets you apart? You’re going to have to work harder than most. There is no way around it.

You think you can get good at math by watching YouTube videos?

Develop cutting-edge ML/AI by asking ChatGPT to code it up for you?

Put a dent in the universe working 40 hours per week?

If you think any of those things, then you will never achieve your goals because you will never transform yourself into a person who is capable of achieving them.

And guess what? It’s not enough to simply work hard.

To achieve outsized success, it’s critical to not only put in enough time/effort, but also to work productively.

You have to work hard AND work smart.

And furthermore, work in a direction where you have some competitive advantage (or, at least, you’re not at a disadvantage).

Part of this work involves engaging in activities that maximize the likelihood of you getting some lucky breaks.

You have to work to maximize your luck surface area.

I have friend from my college days that always used to say ridiculous catch-phrases with his personal mix of cheekiness and seriousness. Like if you didn’t for the 5th set of squats he’d just dismiss you with “I guess I’ll just take you off my list of successful people for today”.

It was a phrase a bunch of us still parrot to this day in a joking way. Oh you didn’t moisturize after your shower? Off the list. Didn’t drink your coffee black? Just go to bed now and try again tomorrow.

The grindset earns its parody. But we don’t mock mediocrity because it’s suffered enough. We apologize for it readily but rarely our own. But we might bend over backward to apologize for others’ mediocrity. The reasons can range from genuine concern to signaling to grift. I don’t want to paint the motivation with a broad brush. Regardless of the motivation, excessive sympathizing without actually getting your hands dirty is just patronizing. If you care, then help.

A lot of education problems are not education problems so much as just family or stability problems. That can range from abuse to just having parents that are consistently crap decision-makers. Public school, as maligned as it often is, can be a refuge. A chance to get inspired by a great teacher or an authority figure whose influence counteracts the brainworms that might come from home life.

If you come from stability, this is hard to see and might even sound offensive. But kids are not possessions. It’s why we have laws to protect them but you’re free to stick your silverware in the microwave if you want. Where the lines of interference lie are legal matters (and by extension political — it comes with living in a representative government…shrug).

My belief is that education experimentation is good because making progress on instruction is a high-leverage activity. The fact that it is not evenly distributed because the spread is rate-limited by non-educational obstacles is not a reasonable objection to innovation. Of course, you can be skeptical or bearish. Hell, the education world is mass of twisted hot metal. But resignation to extending an uninspiring status quo or accepting low standards is anything but progressive.

[There’s probably some smart-sounding argument that goes “you can’t fix education because you can’t fix society” to which you can only wonder, then what are we even doing here?]

When it comes to teaching and coaching there’s a delicate balance of toughness and love. It’s like parenting to be honest. It’s hard because it often hurts plus its mired in bureaucracy.

On the supply side, great teachers might be scarce because the right mix of tough but fair + smart is just scarce in the population and now we have to choose a subset of those people. If you want great teachers you’re asking for a legion of special individuals. Attracting special individuals requires a special effort to recruit, train, support, and enable. We get what we are willing to pay for. I don’t have a full understanding of the frictions that make our spend inefficient, but addressing them is independent of trying to make inroads with technologies that improve instructional efficiency.

🍰Justin has plenty of criticism on technology by the way: Why is the EdTech Industry So Damn Soft? (11 min read)

If you don’t see technology as being more than incrementally useful (at least on a longer-time scale) then you’ve given up.

Because we aren’t going to get much better without it.

(Collectively at least. The resourceful are going to have robot tutors if they can’t afford human ones. When you get down to it, it’s your move either way.)