The College Monopoly Is A Tiger Trap

I hate everything about this article:

How Rich (or Not) Do You Have to Be to Get Into the Ivy League? (NYMag)

Just to pick one example — the “recruit to reject” tactic where elite colleges encourage applicants unlikely to be admitted to apply to pad selectivity numbers. This practice is part of broader slate of strategies that create a more competitive admissions environment.

It just feels like colleges are overplaying their hands in a world where gate-keeping is becoming harder. Their cocktail of deadweight loss and hubris goes down harsh and burps up schadenfreude.

I enjoyed Byrne Hobart’s discussion of education in this podcast interview:

Antitrust, the Future of Competition, and Harvard (The Riff)

2 delightful excerpts:

Say more about what you expect your kids to do. What do you predict for their higher education, “your kids” being a stand-in for high ambition smart, parents of kids.

College might not be an option. However, I would like it to be more of a backup plan for them. If they haven’t found a worthwhile use of their time or developed meaningful talents, despite having nearly two decades to do so, then yes, they can and should consider college. They should aim for a good school, although if you extrapolate, they’ll be borrowing significant amounts of money, it’ll be incredibly expensive, and who knows when the school will all burn down during a protest or something.

Assuming things revert a little bit, going to a good school is still a good way to meet a high concentration of very smart people and those who have dedicated their lives to understanding something that you also find interesting. You can have information-dense conversations with world-leading experts on a topic you find interesting. They can provide insights on ideas that you suggest, tell you who came up with an idea 20 years ago, what the rebuttals were, who tried it, how it worked, how it didn’t, etc. This can be very valuable.

But these people also have email addresses. If you find an academic paper on a topic you like, read it carefully, and provide constructive criticism, you are probably at the 99th percentile for a young person engaging with their work, inclusive of the people who are getting graded in their class. You don’t want to abuse their time, but in many cases, these people are either part of the public sector or their existence is government-subsidized. They are public servants, and their job is to be helpful. And if you can actually engage with their material in a meaningful way, then it’s valuable to them too. This is what they wanted to do with their lives.

You can 80/20 a lot of the benefits of college without paying huge amounts in tuition by reading things by people you like, writing them thoughtful emails about what you read, and sending them the thoughtful thing that you wrote in response to their work. You can get some fraction of the college experience without having to live in a dorm or something similar.

I think it’s a bad idea to over-optimize for some specific hypothetical future plan. I do emphasize to them that schooling is optional, and the better they’re doing in life, the more it is just a purely optional thing. Some of them will likely go to school, hopefully not all of them will finish, and hopefully, it will be because the opportunity cost of getting that degree from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, or whatever, is simply too high compared to their other slightly better options.

I understand the YC analogy [as a substitute for college] as it relates to startups. But what do you think is the equivalent for lawyers and doctors? Another way to put it is, imagine your kids going to college in 10 years. Are they going to go to college? If they are, what’s an alternative look like? How do you think the ecosystem is going to look in a decade? When is it going to materially change? What could that look like?

There’s not going to be a YC for doctors or lawyers. Part of the reason for that is those are both cartel businesses where they want to limit entry into the business and they can. Especially the lawyers, their whole job is parsing rules and writing rules, so they’re really good at coming up with rules that are advantageous to them.

It’s hard to replace those, but there’s room to try to route around them. In general, it’s good life advice to push back on 18-year-olds who have an entire plan for how they will get their dream job and it can’t happen until they’re 25. You have a lot of life ahead of you at that point and a lot of changes you will go through. It’s hard to reverse course. Getting half of an MD or JD is very expensive and not incredibly valuable. [Kris: I’ve had the same thought. Premature optimization is a recipe for waste and sadness for humans. It also discards the timeless, nature-tested decision-making algorithm of evolution —> optionality]

A lot of those jobs are easy to glamorize from the outside, and they’re less fun on the inside. Doctors and lawyers have high divorce rates, high substance abuse rates, and a lot of people try to get out of those professions. They’re great for some people, but it’s easy to see a cultural narrative that is out of date when you saw it. By the time you’re actually doing that thing, it’s even more out of date.

[Kris: notice the market principle embedded in Byrne’s comment — the bullwhip effect. There’s a lag between heightened job demand and the skill to supply it. I don’t want anyone to get bent out of shape, but here’s a generalization (that means exactly that — it may not apply to any specific instance) — tiger parents are risk averse. They project their risk aversion on their kids. Either by command-and-control or Ouija board nudges, they direct their children towards legible paths that are currently in vogue. It’s probably software engineering more so than lawyers these days but you know what I mean. Legible paths get overbid. And competition is a form of hormesis — it’s all about the dose. If you take too large a dose relative to the reward, especially if the reward is only externally motivating, you will find yourself in the latest new-age rehab — slurping health gurus, chasing real estate syndications for passive income or heaven forbid writing a substack. Also these are best outcomes. The dark side is having the narrow path steal whatever’s left of your vitality. You know, that youthful perspective that still couldn't read a line chart.]

In the piece that I wrote on education financing, I have a footnote on this. Sometimes the cultural norms for a profession get established because there was some group that was very idiosyncratic and someone wrote a book about them or made a movie about them. That solidified that particular group’s norms, and they became the norms for anyone with that job.

A lot of people who are law students or aspiring law students watch the movie, The Paper Chase, where it’s all about a guy’s complicated relationship with his brutally demanding contracts professor. The movie is about 50 years old, so a lot of the professors have also seen it. They sort of know what the great law school professor is supposed to be like, and what the great student is supposed to be like. Everyone sort of plays these roles.

This was also revealed by law enforcement wiretaps of mafiosos that they actually started using cliches from The Godfather after the movie came out, and they all loved the movie. So the movie’s stereotypes became more accurate because it got more widely accepted.

But if you’re entering some career because you’ve heard about it in some context where you know exactly what it’s going to be like, and it sounds incredibly glamorous, you just have to know that to the extent that it actually meets your expectations, it’s because everyone is LARPing. They read the same thing you read, or they watched the same thing you watched, and they’re just trying to bring it back.

This is probably a good reason to not work in the White House. Everyone just wants to be pretending it’s a West Wing episode, and it’s just going to feel so weird and dated and retro and 90s. If you see someone in a meeting reading the Financial Times in the West Wing, you’re just obligated to give them a swirly or something, tell them to knock it off. It was just a TV show. The writing was good, but it shouldn’t have changed your life.

From My Actual Life

The bullwhip effect in Byrne’s take is humbling because there is no solution to “safety” if safety requires sacrificing your life for it. Instead of checking a bunch of boxes, flourishing requires a fuzzy mix of imagination, persistence, self-awareness, and perhaps in no small way, savvy. Sheep get shorn eventually.

Once of the glaring examples of this bullwhip thing has been my read on how friends’ feel about their occupations. Doctors and lawyers, what we were told to chase as 80s kids, don’t exactly seem thrilled about their careers. The happiest ones feel like they make a difference. And they do. That matters and it’s awesome. But they don’t think it’s a good deal.

On the other hand, my contemporaries in tech and finance, while having their share of complaints, as a cohort think it’s a pretty damn good deal. Sure it can be dystopian and soul-sucking. But nobody wants to switch spots with a doctor.

I do have a HS friend who was an I-banking analysts for a year and decided the job was full of the worst people. The bosses are miserable, but…rich? The middle-class mind could not comprehend this. He went back to school and became an oncologist.

There’s always a couple older dogs in med school so these stories happen.

In contrast, the list of doctors and dentists I am at least one degree separated from who pulled the chute and went into RE, business, or franchises is long. Nobody leaves trading to buy a McDonalds. It’s hard to think of a crappier job to buy which makes me think the bar of “what’s a satisfactory way to spend my day” must get real low in some branches of medicine.

Then the debt, extra years of schooling…I don’t need to explain, you have friends and family too. You see it.

I don’t understand the underlying forces that led to this but I can see where we are now. How much of it is bullwhip? Growing up, nobody said become a plumber or electrician. Today, you called in a favor to get one to swing by the house for less than $150/hr.

Prestige has a benefit. And a cost. The market is looking for a clearing price every time someone fills out an application for trade school or a school school.

One day in the future, a chip cluster will re-write this essay and “software developer” will replace “doctor” and maybe “doctor” will replace “plumber”. Maybe deciding what we do should have less to do with how far in the future these replacements will happen but on something else. A few months ago I gave a talk at Cal to the quant trading club. It had some broader relevance on the topic of careers. (See Make Yourself Future Proof)

Parents push smart but innocently naive teens towards highly competitive fields because they think the path is safer.

Safer for the parents’ egos maybe.

Further learning:

Marc Andreesen ranted on education almost 5 years ago. I published my notes on it back then.

Notes from Marc Andreessen on Education (Moontower)

It remains highly relevant. Here’s a few excerpts:

The value proposition of university for people in “show your work” fields is changing.

One of the most basic revelations the internet has surfaced is the different nature of professions.

Internet has made the largest difference in “show your work” professions: occupations where it is valid and easy to demonstrate your value online. For example, coding, design, music, art, game dev, animation. Open source projects and writing, democratized, pure examples of “show your work” fields.

From an employer’s point of view conscientiousness is a proxy for being a good employee. But this can be circumvented by just showing your work online. This erases the value of a degree that derives from employer demand.

GitHub has like an internal ranking and rating system for software code, and for programmers. So you can actually build an actual professional reputation as a software developer on GitHub without ever actually being face to face with another human being. People all over the world today who were basically taken advantage of this to be able to basically build these incredible track records as a software developer and make themselves more employable. Employers like my venture firm. We recommend that our employers spend as much time on GitHub looking for good programmers as they do on LinkedIn, or going to college fairs.

YouTube, blogs, Figma for design all play a similar role as GitHub does for software developers. He tells the story of South Park as an early example of a viral video that was able to spread organically through a distributed technology. The show born from Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s irreverent holiday card which made its rounds as a downloadable Quicktime vid!

“If you can go to college, go to college”

Even jobs that probably shouldn’t require degrees require them.

I think it’s actually quite dangerous to give somebody, somebody as an individual the advice, don’t go to college, like in the current system that we have that’s basically saying don’t prove that you’re smart don’t prove that you’re industrious, and conscientious and then basically be prepared to settle for fundamentally lower income for the rest of your life.

Understand the proposition

Gates and Zuckerberg notwithstanding, if you go to college finish college. Get the piece of paper.

The 2×2 matrix of what to study and where to study.

The spread of outcomes for technical degrees is not that wide. If you have a technical degree your choice of school matters less. This is exactly the opposite of what you find with liberal arts degrees. Since the output of a liberal arts degree are more subjective or uneven the school issuing the diploma carries more weight.

Possible explanation: in absence of concrete skills, the network from a top school is valuable.

Tips for those in college or considering college

Execute on the opportunity — take the hardest course load you can. Get the skills (obviously get good grades but focus more on getting the skills).

If you are at a sub-tier college taking liberal arts, de-risk by acquiring marketable technical skills.

For those considering alt paths

At this point Marc, still recommends college and acquiring technical skills but if you choose an alt path be aware of the trade-offs. For example, if you choose to do open source work recognize it’s better to make major contributions to one project (as opposed to minor contributions to multiple projects) because that really demonstrates what employers are looking for. Put yourself in the mind those who will be evaluating you years down the road.

Consistent work demonstrates conscientiousness and the nature of the work is an embedded intelligence test.

What should a software developer do? Unquestionably the answer is create an open source project or go become a member of an existing open source project and make successful high quality sustained contributions to that project over time. At this point I think that’s clearly a better credential than getting a computer science degree. I’d hire people like that myself and the great thing now is you can do that from all over the world.

So what matters to Andreesen when they hire or fund someone?

The good news:

They do not care about a degree or GPA or test scores and in fact question if too much conscientiousness means you are too much of a rule-follower.

The tough news:

They measure you by what you have actually done. Building companies requires being able to do things so that is the capacity they are looking for. List of things a founder will need to be able to do:

Building an actual product that somebody will actually pay for.
Figuring out a way to actually sell it to them
Actually collect the money
Actually service the customer so they actually have a good experience
Actually tell their story so that anybody will even know that they exist
Run a finance function so that they don’t lose all the money
Run a legal function so they don’t get sued all the time
Actually get others to work with them.

There are many talented people so the way to stand out is to actually demonstrate the ability to build or create.

Steve Martin best career advice ever: Be so good they can’t ignore you.

Personal Perspective On Teaching Kids

A friend in one of the chats I’m in revived the practice of sharing wordle scores. I joined in because I’m playing the NYT games again thanks to my kids. The 7-year-old comes into my bed every morning to do the cycle: wordle, mini, connections, letterboxed and tiles. In that order. Kids + routine are like pb & j.

Anyway, one of the younger members in the chat goes “sometimes i feel like it would be nice to have a kid just so i can teach them everything i know.”

Very cute. But then a dad injected reality:

nah, they don’t want to learn anything from their parents

Ding, ding ding.

Here’s my impression. Kids learn from you by osmosis. Modeling, not direct instruction.

I think it has something to do with your lessons being a “you” thing. They don’t feel like the knowledge is theirs. Like they can smell your desperation in wanting them to learn no matter how chill you are about it.

It seems like a brand of what David McRaney calls reactance.

This is a concept that has been studied extensively in the context of clinical therapy.

They would come to the therapist and the therapist would say, ‘Well, you know what’s your real problem is. You should be doing this.’ Or, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you don’t do this very much. You should do this.’..All that feels pretty good. They now call that in psychology the “writing reflex”. And, we’ve all felt that whereas someone is saying something and you’re like, ‘Oh, I have the advice for them. I know what to tell that person.’

But, you also have also experienced this other thing that happens, and this seems to be something that’s universal to human beings across all cultures. It’s just something that the brain that we’re issued at birth, it’s something that’s a feature of human thinking, rationality, psychology. Human brains do this. It’s called reactance. In the psychological parlance, they’ll say something along the lines of, you feel motivationally aroused to remove the influence of the attitude object, which just means: ‘You made me feel a feeling I don’t like and I want it to go away. So, I’m going to push you away,’ or ‘I’m going to disengage.’

What is the feeling that’s causing the motivational arousal? It’s the sense that your agency is under threat–your autonomy is under threat. It’s the ‘Unhand me, you fools,’ feeling. You’ve all felt this. If you’ve ever been a teenager or you’ve ever spoken to a teenager, you know what I’m talking about…”You shouldn’t do this. You should study more.”‘ This is good advice that the person when they’re 35 will go, ‘Man, my parents were right about that.’

But, in that moment it’s just the fact that you’re saying, ‘I have a thing in my head that should be in your head and I want it to be in your head.’

And, oddly enough, it’s the want that creates the reactance. The person’s feeling that you have approached them in some way and said, ‘I want you to think, feel, or believe, or act in a certain way that you’re not doing right now,’ and it feels coercive. It feels like they’d come at you and they’re threatening you. They’ve got a knife in their hand, and they’re saying, ‘Walk this way.’ That’s what it feels like.

We just, at a visceral level, will react by saying ‘no thanks’ to that, and we’ll push against it.

Back to the wise dad in the chat. He goes on to say:

you’re better off teaching someone else’s kid

Despite the reactance thing, this also seems true. My kids’ friends are around a lot or I’m shuttling them somewhere so there’s always an interesting spot to drop a fun riddle or word problem into a dull moment especially if the kid is, I don’t know, a “solver” for lack of a better term. (Some kids have the “ugh, I have to use my brain” reflex. Tread lightly…most kids are solvers at some level but you might need to hide the pill in the peanut butter.)

[My 10-year-old likes to needle me by announcing to his friends “Imagine having to live with this all the time” but I’m getting better at dialing in the dose. I think.]

Meanwhile, some kids are just thirsting for enrichment. I have one friend who asked me to point them to resources for their precocious son (the kid is an alien — genius, super athlete, and socially adept…I wish I could share some of the stories). I figured I could teach them about something I know about or just point them to things that might align with their interests. That might be a more productive frame. Just shepherd them towards sources of intellectual nourishment.

I sent this particular kid Ed Thorp’s bio not just because the action arc will provoke but because Ed’s own childhood will be relatable to a boy who sees through his or her surroundings like an x-ray. The Founders’ podcast is also an effective way to introduce a powerful mind to its greatest lever — the belief that the rules are all just made up. The world is malleable. See The Podcast I Listen To With My 9-Year-Old.

While today’s musing is mostly an off-the-cuff reaction to the wordle chat, I also had a related exchange this week with a college student who DM’d me on Twitter. I got permission to share it here. The first part conveniently flatters Moontower so you’ll have to sit through that for a scrubby second. (I added the hyperlinks for this reprint).

Original DM: Hey Kris, Hope you’re well. I’m a junior at [Ivy] and will be interning at SIG (Bala Cynwyd) this summer. I’ve been reading your posts for over a year now, and they really helped me gain intuition around options (and also other math concepts – like thinking in log space and Jensen’s inequality). I recently joined this mentoring program called Big Brothers Big Sisters, and I got matched with a Little from a middle school in [city]. He really enjoys sports and board games. Today, we played some games from the book Math Games with Bad Drawings (which I found from your blog) – it was really fun! I was wondering if you had any recommendations for fun 2-person activities, which could also teach useful concepts like decision-making and strategic thinking

My response: First glad the site has been useful for you. Cool that you are doing that program. My general recommendation is to just find interesting scenarios to analyze in whatever the kid is interested in. Tree (ie binomial) thinking can be applied anywhere in decision land. For example, whether to punt or go for it if it’s a football fan.

I recently taught some kids about the idea of volatility but in a light way. We were talking about daylight savings time and I told them it actually causes accidents. And I just socratically asked them why that might be true…(people rushing to work, sleeping in, not sleeping enough, etc). But I asked them how they would know that DST was the culprit? And where I’m leading them to is “What does it mean for there to be a number of accidents that exceeds the norm by an amount that isn’t noise”…ie statistical significance.

But I don’t burden them with these words. I just have them propose a guess for the number of typical accidents in a day in say their county or state. Then I make up a fake data set and have them compute the mean and the mean absolute deviation. This is basically what our minds do automatically when deciding if something is abnormal but here we just lay the thinking out step by step. And then maybe on our fake data, they compute some MAD of like 50 accidents a day and then we see that there’s 150 on DST day. That’s how you know DST is the culprit.

Generally, I look for learning moments in everyday stuff or their interests. Better to be socratic not pedantic so they can discover the lessons themselves. Then they “own” them.

And then I attached some resources.

This is one I just published and I will add to over time:

A Collection of Math Riddles/Puzzles (Moontower)

which can be found in this wider portal:

🧠Moontower Brain Plug-In

And here’s a nice thing about helping kids that aren’t your own. They appreciate it. Got this in the mail:

Just a reminder. Do stuff. If you can make it cool that’s a bonus. But even corny with enough persistence eventually endears because it’s authentic. It’s all better than apathy.

Try. The world vibrates back.

Kiyosaki Without The Brainworms

On Wednesday, a friend and I hosted 30 kids ranging from age 7 to 13 for Financial Literacy session I. Parents had drinks and pizza in the adjacent room. We kept it fun and highly interactive. No grown ups standing in front of a room. The feedback was overwhelming — the kids not only learned but had a blast.

You can do this for your kids’ friend groups too.

I’d describe it as “Kiyosaki without the brainworms”:

🐖Financial Literacy #1: Savings & Compounding (lesson plan)

A summary of the flow:

Start

why we need money —>
why we need savings —>
how do you get money —>
The floor and ceiling on savings (your savings don’t start until you cover your costs while savings from wages are capped by the number of hours in a day) —>
how to increase your savings rate (earn more per hour — even when your sleeping via investing or business ownership) —>
how compounding grows your savings

End

If you seriously decide to do this in your community, I’m happy to offer tips.

A few canned ones:

One tricky thing was the wide 7-13 age range. Littles run out of gas by 7:30pm and fractions are hard or inaccessible to most…but the 9+ group loved the compounding riddles. When I asked who wanted paper to do a math problem I didn’t expect to get mobbed. Something I learn over and over — give kids credit. They want to be stimulated.
We had prizes for right answers and some kids were so on point we had to adlib some timed questions to cull the herd because we didn’t have enough prizes.
No standing in front of the room. Get on their level. Silly is good but be quick to shut down “bottle flipping” distractions or any intra-group condescension. You are trying your best to meet every kid where they are. Also, not all kids are comfortable speaking up, it’s on you to make the environment inclusive the best to your ability as opposed to getting carried away with the energy of the dominants (much of that energy is insecure competitiveness that kids are understandably still navigating — but then again, you’ve certainly met adults wearing the same masks. They’ve just hardened into a “personality”).
We opened the discussion of compounding with this1. You deposit $100 at 10% interest. You pocket the interest at the end of each year. Repeat for 3 years
2. You don’t remove any money until 3 years elapses.

How much do you end up with in each case?
For the more mathy questions we’d let them work out the questions on paper and work in groups if they wanted.
It took 75 minutes to do the whole lesson.

Numeracy Injection

Some fun math stuff today all inspired by discussions I’ve seen online in the past week.

Another Monty Hall Explanation

I saw a discussion online recently about the Monty Hall Problem. It was a debate about the best way to explain the solution. If you need a refresher on the problem and the solutions I wrote this a while back: The Monty Hall Problem Is More Than A Game.

Many people are familiar with 99 or 1,000,000 doors explanation. I think this explanation is easier to grok after you’ve been given a more probability based explanation. The value of the 99 doors version is it highlights the beating heart of the problem — the host knows where the goats are!

Anyway, the discussion prompted me to draw out a solution I haven’t seen laid out this way before. It uses tree thinking (big surprise right?).

X² and its neighbors

What’s bigger:

20 x 20 or 19 x 21?

And is your answer generally true.

This is the same as asking, what’s bigger:

X² or (x-1)(x+1)?

Somewhere in your mental library, there’s a dusty text probably wedged between the book called “Polynomial” and the volume named “Completing the Square” that will remind you that (x-1)(x+1) = X² – 1

Which means your answer generalizes:

400 > 399

X² > X² – 1

So just knowing what 20² is means you immediately know what 18 x 22 is 396, X²-4.

The sandwiches around “20” continue down the squares:

17x 23 = 400 – 9

16 x 24 = 400 – 16

15 x 25 = 400 – 25

Et cetera

Clever Polling

This is neat:

I posted that I remembered reading about a sampling technique a long time ago for how to poll for things that people wouldn’t answer truthfully (ie “Have you cheated on a test/spouse/taxes?”).

@LoneSands recognized what I was referring to:

The version I saw had you flip a coin twice before answering an agree/disagree question. If first flip was heads then answer honestly; on tails use the 2nd coin flip to decide.

Ah yes, that was it. So how do you use this tree math to infer the “true” response rate assuming people follow the rules?

This is how I solved it….I just used some real numbers.

Suppose n = 1000 and I had 550 agree.

I expect that 250 are “agree” and 250 are “disagree” because of the second coin flip.

That means 300 people actually agreed.

The true agree rate then is 300/(200 disagrees + 300 agrees) = 60%

LoneSands gave the general formula:

True agree rate = 2*(observed agree rate) – .5

That’s friggin’ tight. I like that.

I wanted to bridge the general solution to mine for validation. This is a great opportunity to demonstrate how to use GPT for self-tutoring.

I gave GPT the general formula and then prompted:

I needed to push a bit more because the bridge wasn’t complete. Luckily, GPT never gets tired of my tediousness.

I’ll tell you a secret.

I’m taking Algebra 2 on Khan Academy right now. These notes remind me what has been refreshed or reinforced (I’m about 2/3 finished with the course):

My plan is to re-do all my HS math through Calc BC and then assess what math I want to learn for the first time after that. It’s really different to take math as an adult because:

a) There’s no deadlines so the stress is gone

b) I actually care beyond a test score

c) Re-learning math after you’ve spent 20 years doing math at work (usually through heuristics and shortcuts passed down), you naturally try to draw connections between the math class examples and the problems in your field. For example, deriving the geometric series in Algebra 2 is synergistic with thinking about compounding problems. But the first time I took Algebra 2 I surely could care less about how much total distance a monkey swinging from a branch with a starting arc length of 50 ft who loses 15% per swing covers after 5 swings.

Math scratches the same itch as NY Times puzzle games for me, which is to say I don’t need an instrumental reason to do it. But it’s also a convenient discovery to hear one of the the late Charlie Munger’s big pieces of advice (amongst many amazing bits of advice) to be “pay attention in HS math”.

☮️

Stay Groovy

On Hidden Potential

One of the Substacks I never fail to read is Range Widely by David Epstein, author of Range (my notes on his interview about the book) and The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.

David is a journalist by trade. His writing is well-researched. Social science research, especially the kind of pop-sci stuff that climbs the heap to find itself in airport bookstores, should require a “grain of salt” rating (G: “germane”, PG: “possibly garbage”, R: “rumored at best“). David’s process and intellectual demeanor indicate care — he resists the temptation to oversell conclusions.

Personally, I rarely read social science books — I’ll just listen to a podcast with the author if I care. The insights in such books feel like they have an asymmetrical yield — if they confirm what you already thought then the opportunity cost of reading that book is high (I’ll be lucky if I read 500 more books before I’m dead) and if the book has a ground-breaking insight it’ll almost certainly be out of fashion within a decade (“the game theory of getting published in social science” is a comically fractal idea. If you google that phrase, you’ll see why).

Anyway, David’s history of intellectual care makes him an ideal candidate to interview other social science authors about their books — critical enough to ask good questions but friendly enough that he can get the interviews in the first place.

Enough preamble…some excerpts I enjoyed from David’s Q&A with psychologist Adam Grant on his new book Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Thing (emphasis mine):

Many people believe that if you’re not precocious, it’s a sign that you lack potential. But potential is not about where you start — it’s a matter of how far you’ll travel. And the latest science reveals that we shouldn’t mistake speed for aptitude. Our rate of learning is driven by motivation and opportunity, not just ability. Think of all the late bloomers who weren’t lucky enough to stumble on a passion, or to have a parent, teacher, or coach early on who recognized and developed their hidden potential.
This doesn’t mean we should ignore “gifted” students. We need to think differently about how we nurture their potential too. Empirically, the rate of child prodigies becoming adult geniuses is surprisingly low. I suspect one of the reasons is that they learn to excel at other people’s crafts but not to develop their own. Mastering Mozart’s melodies doesn’t prepare you to write your own original symphonies. [Kris: this is exactly the point Trent Reznor made to Rick Rubin as he wrestled with his own potential]. Memorizing thousands of digits of pi does little to train your mind to come up with your own Pythagorean theorem. And the easier a new skill comes to you, the less experience you have with facing failure. This is a lesson that chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley drove home for me: the people who struggle early often build the character skills to excel later. We need to start investing in character skills sooner.
Because Glennie is deaf, she had to find nontraditional ways to learn, like using different parts of her body to feel vibrations that correspond to different pitches. She and her teacher were constantly trying different ways to do that, and different ways to do everything, really. As you write: “Continually varying the task and raising the bar made learning a joy.” I’ve long been fascinated by this issue of variable practice. Mixing things up constantly might seem counterintuitive, but it turns out to be better for learning.
You note that concert pianists who reach international acclaim by age 40 typically were not obsessed early on, and that they usually had a slow but steady increase in their commitment to music. It just made me think of the first page of Battle Hymn — in which the author promises the secrets to raising stereotypically successful children, and recounts assigning her daughter violin and soon she’s supervising five hours of deliberate practice a day. That part was excerpted in the Wall St. Journal, and it was the Journal’s most commented upon article ever! It really seeped into the public consciousness, I think. What didn’t make as much of an impression was the part later in the book where the author (to her credit) recounts her daughter turning to her and saying: “You picked it, not me,” and more or less quits. [Kris: I’m very careful riding our kids in areas that they are naturally drawn to because of such “reactance”. I don’t want to turn “their thing” into “my thing”. You have an extra gear to give for those things that you discover independently.]
The issue of “learning styles.” This is the very popular idea that some people learn best by listening, others by reading, others by looking, etc. Maybe someone prefers podcasts to books because they style themself an “auditory learner.” Trouble is, a mountain of research has failed to back this idea up [Kris: Veritasium calls this “the biggest myth in education”. Although I suspect the testing design for experiments that dismiss the idea might be strawmanning the contention or interpreting it too narrowly].People may indeed have a style of learning that feels most comfortable, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually learning more that way. In fact, to use a line from Range, in many cases, difficulty is not a sign that you aren’t learning, but ease is [Kris: I’ve found that many teachers I respect agree with this so it’s not as bold a statement as it might appear even if this is the first time you’ve heard that. I remind my kids — if it’s easy it’s just review, not learning. Non-superficial learning hurts. I might even go as far to say that learning and pain are nearly synonyms. To be clear, such a statement is more useful as a reminder than a universal truth. Experiential learning is an easy counterexample]. As you write: “Sometimes you even learn better in the mode that makes you the most uncomfortable, because you have to work harder at it.” I was just reading a study (“Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning”) which showed that Harvard physics students preferred lectures from highly-rated instructors to active learning exercises. But they learned more from the latter. The main difference in the active group was that students had to try to solve problems in groups before they really knew what they were doing, and so they would discuss, generate questions, and hit dead-ends, all before seeing correct solutions. We know that forcing learners to try to generate solutions before seeing them enhances learning (the so-called “generation effect”), but it doesn’t feel great, so we may avoid it.
Back in December, you helped me get in touch with RA Dickey, and he was every bit as stellar of an interview as you promised. His story helps to illuminate why so many people fail to try new methods when we get stuck. It’s not so much that we’re stubborn or resistant to change. We hate the thought of giving up the gains we’ve already made. We forget that sometimes, the best way to move forward is to go back to the drawing board. [Kris: Feeling seen] If your fastball is slowing down and your career is stalling, you have nothing to lose by tinkering with the knuckleball. We shouldn’t be so afraid of failing that we fail to try.

The Midpoint From 1 to 9 is…3?

For the past 3 years, the Berkeley Chess School has done a weekly lesson in our backyard. About 15 kids attend. They are mostly 2nd and 5th graders because we know the families through our kids.

I walk home from school with all the kids on chess day. I usually throw out a math question or riddle and by now the kids just ask for them on our strolls. Lately, the questions deal with rates, percentages/fractions, exponents/roots, or some basic number play stuff (“How do you know if a number is divisible by 9?”)

Some examples:

Start with $100. If you earn 10% then lose 10%, how much money do you have?
What’s larger 3⁴ or 4³ and similar questions?
If you travel 5 miles in 12 minutes, how fast are you going?[I haven’t dropped this one on them: “If I drive around a one-mile track and average 30 mph for the first lap, how fast do I have to drive the second lap to average 60 mph for both laps combined?” (Solution)]
If you have 5 kids on your team and only 4 kids start how many possible starting lineups are there?
If you lose 25%, how much do you have to make to get back to even?[I like that one because it’s a useful elasticity idea. If X is the loss percentage, you need to earn back X/(1-X).
If you are selling lemonade and you cut your price by 20%, you need to sell 25% more cups to be revenue-neutral.]

I started giving these questions because, well it’s just play. Riddles are inherently satisfying. But I’m also conscious of imparting some durable concepts. It’s not quite as deliberate as hiding the dog’s pill in the peanut butter but there’s some overlap. Honestly, the main motivation is keeping the kids who aren’t into sports engaged. There’s about 40 minutes between the kids getting to my house and the start of chess. The 2nd graders usually play soccer and the 5th graders hoop it up. A few kids aren’t into either but they gravitate to the riddles (my boys just wanna play sports and my 5th grader, Zak, with sass tells his friends “This is the stuff I deal with all the time”).

Lately, I’ve been doing more exponent stuff because I know they aren’t doing that yet in 5th grade but it’s reachable for them. Zak is taking the online Pre-Algebra I course on Art of Problem Solving which is comprised of 7 chapters. He just wrapped chapter 2 which is all about exponents so that’s been top-of-mind for coming up with the questions.

The challenge question to end the chapter was to solve for the 2 possible values of X (see below). But keep in mind, they haven’t learned how to compute square roots or any other kind of roots. You can do this without any involved computations and without roots. You can find the solution at the end of the post.

Find the 2 possible values of x:

Anyway, I didn’t give the kids that question but by this past week, they understood the basics of computing a simple exponent or taking a square root. So I took a stab at base 10 logarithms. I just explained it as the power you need to raise 10 to get to the target number.

“So if our target is 100, what do you have to raise 10 to? How about a target of 1,000?”

They had no trouble with this. So I explained how both the Richter and decibel scales were log scales that compressed a wide range into a smaller ruler. A 6 on the Richter is not twice the energy of a 3 but 1000x more energy. Every integer increase in the scale is just a higher order of magnitude.

The most pleasant thing happened. The kids that gravitated to this stuff were stoked. As it it settled in their brains they were all Keanu Reeves “Whoa, that’s so cool”.

I texted one of the parents:

Putting aside the pure joy of watching a kid unlock, exponents and logs are fundamentally important operations like adding and subtracting. Our first formal introduction to them outside a math class is usually science (exponential growth/decay) but more prosaic to this audience is the topic of investing, specifically the idea of compound growth. It’s an idea you’d love to see people internalize as young as possible.

Typically when someone (and I’ve done this too) writes about compounding they reference Einstein’s 8th Wonder of the World quote or talk about how our minds think linearly and find exponential growth unintuitive. [This was a common conversation at the start of the COVID pandemic with VCs patting themselves on the back for lateral thinking about how coefficients of virality applied to…the domain where exponential growth is usually people’s first contact with the topic. Like twisting a eulogy into a chance to talk about yourself. I’m not even mad, it’s the whole wheel of cheese].

With that in mind, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Grant Sanderson, the mathematician behind the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel. This is from his appearance on

Dwarkesh Patel

excellent Lunar Society Podcast:

Have you come across those studies where anthropologists interview tribes of people that are removed enough from normal society that they don’t have the level of numeracy that you or I do? But there’s some notion of counting. You have one coconut or nine coconuts like you have a sense of that. But if you ask what number is halfway between one and nine, those groups will answer three whereas you or I or people in our world would probably answer five and because we think on this very linear scale.

It’s interesting that evidently the natural way to think about things is logarithmically, which kind of makes sense. The social dynamics of as you go from solitude to a group of 10 people to a group of 100 people have roughly equal steps in increasing complexity more so than if you go from 1 to 51 to 102 and I wonder if it’s it’s the case that by adding numeracy in some senses we’ve also like lost some numeracy or lost some intuition in others, where now if you ask middle school teachers what’s a difficult topic to teacher for students to understand they’re like logarithms. But that should be deep in our bones right so somehow it got unlearned

What a cheeky observation. Gives a second entendre to the expression “natural log”.

2 ways I came up with to solve the AoPS question

Method 1:

x could also be -243 since it’s being raised to an even power.

Method 2:

Excerpts From Grant Sanderson on The Lunar Society Podcast

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Grant Sanderson (who runs the excellent 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel) about:

Whether advanced math requires AGI
What careers should mathematically talented students pursue
Why Grant plans on doing a stint as a high school teacher
Tips for self teaching
Does Godel’s incompleteness theorem actually matter
Why are good explanations so hard to find?

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any other podcast platform. Full transcript here.

Kris: I snipped several excerpts for future reference. Emphasis mine. I cut up the excerpts as I want to remember them which means there are missing sections so I encourage you to listen to the whole episode or read the sections of transcript I’m pulling from if you want a closer look.

On the future of education

[key ideas: reducing distance to students, educator’s role is not just explanation but more importantly “bring out knowledge” not put it in, the non-linear influence of a teacher on a student’s future, and the chaotic concept of “sensitivity to initial conditions”]

Dwarkesh Patel 0:44:44

Should the top 0.1% of educators exclusively be on the internet because it seems like a waste if you were just a college professor or a high school professor and you were teaching 50 kids a year or something. Given the greater scale available should more of them be trying to see if they can reach more people?

Grant Sanderson 0:45:01

I think it’s not a bad thing for more educators who are good at what they’re doing to put their stuff online for sure. I highly encourage that even if it’s as simple as getting someone to put a camera in the back of the classroom. I don’t think it would be a good idea to get those people out of the classroom.

If anything I think one of the best things that I could do for my career would be to put myself into more classrooms…

One of the most valuable things that you can have if you’re trying to explain stuff online is a sense of empathy for what possible viewers that are out there. The more distance that you put between yourself and them in terms of life circumstances. I’m not a college student so I don’t have the same empathy with college students. Certainly not a high school student, so I’ve lost that empathy. That distance just makes it more and more of an uphill battle to make the content good for them and I think keeping people in regular touch with just what people in the classroom actively need is necessary for them to remain as good and as sharp as they are…

The other thing I might disagree with is the idea that the reach is lower. Yes, it’s a smaller number of people but you’re with them for much, much more time and you actually have the chance of influencing their trajectory through a social connection in a way that you just don’t over Youtube.

You’re using the word education in a way that I would maybe sub out for the word explanation. You want explanations to be online but the word education derives from the same root as the word educe, to bring out, and I really like that as a bit of etymology because it reminds you that the job of an educator is not to take their knowledge and shove it into the heads of someone else the job is to bring it out. That’s very, very hard to do in a video and in fact, even if you can kind of get at it by asking intriguing questions for the most part the video is there to answer something once someone has a question.

The teacher’s job, or the educator’s job, should be to provide the environment such that you’re bringing out from your students as much as you can through inspiration through projects, through little bits of mentorship and encouragement along the way. That requires eye contact and being there in person and being the true figure in their life rather than just an abstract voice behind a screen.

Anytime I chat with mathematicians and try to get a sense for how they got into it and what got them started, so often they start by saying there was this one teacher and that teacher did something very small — like they pulled them aside and just said, “Hey. You’re really good at this. Have you considered studying more?” or they give them an interesting problem.

And the thing that takes at most 30 minutes of the teacher’s time, maybe even 30 seconds, has these completely monumental rippling effects for the life of the student they were talking to that then sets them on this whole different trajectory.

Two examples of this come to mind. One is this woman who was saying she had this moment when she got pulled aside by the teacher and he just said, “Hey, I think you’re really good at math. You should consider being a math major.” which had been completely outside of her purview at that time. That changed the way she thought about it. And then later she said she learned that he did that for a large number of people. He just pulled them and was like, “Hey, you’re really good at math.” So that’s a level of impact that you can have as a figure in their lives in a way that you can’t over screen.

Another one which was very funny. I was asking this guy why he went into the specific field that he did. It was a seemingly arbitrary thing in my mind but I guess all pure math seems to be. He said that in his first year of grad school he was sitting in this seminar and at the end of the seminar the professor, who was this old professor who he had never met him before, they didn’t have any kind of connection. He seeks this guy out and comes up and he says, “You. I have a problem for you. A good research problem that I think I think might be a good place for you to start in the next couple months” and this guy was like “Oh, okay” and he gets this research problem and he spends some months thinking about it and he comes back and then it later came to light that the professor mistook him for someone else that was someone he was supposed to be mentoring. He was just the stereotypical image of like a doddering old math professor who’s not very in tune with the people in his life that was the actual situation but nevertheless that moment of accidentally giving someone a problem completely shifted the research path for him, which if nothing else, shows you the sensitivity to initial conditions that takes place when you are a student and how the educator is is right on that nexus of sensitivity who can completely swing the fences one way or another for what you do.

For every one of those stories there’s going to be an unfortunate counterbalancing story about people who are demotivated from math. I think this was seventh grade. There was this math class that I was in and I was one of the people who was good at math and enjoyed it and would often help the people in the class understand it. I had enough ego built up to have a strong shell around things. For context, I also really liked music and there was this concert that had happened where I had a certain solo or something earlier in that week.

There was a substitute teacher one day who didn’t have any of the context and she gave some lesson and had us spend the second half of the class going over the homework for it. All of the other students in the class were very confused and I think I remember like they would come to me and I would try to offer to help them and the substitute was going around the class in these circles and basically marking off a little star for how far down the homework people were just to get a sense are they progressing. That was kind of her way of measuring how far they were. When she got to me I had done none of them because I was spending my whole time trying to help all of the others and after having written a little star next to the same problem like three different times she said to me like, “Sometimes music people just aren’t math people.” and then keeps walking on.

I was in the best possible circumstance to not let that hit hard because one, I had the moral high ground of “Hey, I’ve just been helping all these people. I understand it and I’ve been doing your job for you.” This was my little egotistical seventh grade brain. I knew that I knew the stuff. Even with all of the armor that was put up, I remember it was just this shock to my system, she says this thing and it just made me strangely teary-eyed or something.

I can only imagine if you’re in a position where you’re not confident in math and the thing that you know deep in your heart is actually you are kind of struggling with it, just a little throwaway comment like that could completely derail the whole system in terms of your relationship with the subject.

So it’s another example to illustrate the sensitivity to initial conditions. I was in a robust position and wasn’t as sensitive. I was gonna love math no matter what but you envision someone who’s a little bit more on that teetering edge and the comment, one way or another, either saying you’re good at this you should consider majoring in it or saying, “Sometimes music people aren’t math people” which isn’t even true. That was the other thing about it that niggled at my brain when she said it.

All of that is just so important for people’s development that when people talk about online education as being valuable or revolutionary or anything like that, there’s a part of me that sort of rolls my eyes because it just doesn’t get at the truth that online explanations have nothing to do with all of that important stuff that’s actually happening and at best it should be like in the service of helping that side of things where the rubber meets the road.

On explanations

[key ideas: not everyone responds to the same explanations so explanations that scale well are difficult to conjure. There’s room for multiple approaches and ways to communicate]

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:22

Why are good explanations so hard to find, despite how useful they are? Obviously, other than you, there’s many other cases of good explanations. But generally, it just seems like there aren’t as many as there should be. Is it just a story of economics where it’s nobody’s incentive to spend a lot of time making good explanations? Is it just a really hard skill that isn’t correlated with being able to come up with a discovery itself? Why are good explanations scarce?

Grant Sanderson 1:02:47

I think there’s maybe two explanations.

The first less important one is going to be that there’s a difference between knowing something and then remembering what it’s like not to know it. And the characteristic of a good explanation is that you’re walking someone on a path from the feeling of not understanding up to the feeling of understanding.

Earlier, you were asking about societies that lack numeracy. That’s such a hard brain state to put yourself in, like what’s it like to not even know numbers? How would you start to explain what numbers are? Maybe you should go from a bunch of concrete examples. But like the way that you think about numbers and adding things, it’s just you have to really unpack a lot before you even start there.

And I think at higher levels of abstraction, that becomes even harder because it shapes the way that you think so much that remembering what it’s like not to understand it. You’re teaching some kid algebra and the premise of like a variable. They’re like, “What is X?” It’s not necessarily anything but it’s what we’re solving for. Like, yeah, but what is it? Trying to answer “What is X?” is a weirdly hard thing because it is the premise that you’re even starting from.

The more important explanation probably is that the best explanation depends heavily on the individual who’s learning. And the perfect explanation for you often might be very different from the perfect explanation for someone else. So there’s a lot of very good domain specific explanations. Pull up in any textbook and like chapter 12 of it is probably explaining the content in there quite well, assuming that you’ve read chapters one through 11, but if you’re coming in from a cold start, it’s a little bit hard.

So the real golden egg is like, how do you construct explanations which are as generally useful as possible and generally appealing as possible? And that because you can’t assume shared context, it becomes this challenge. And I think there’s like tips and tricks along the way, but because the people that are often making explanations have a specific enough audience, it is this classroom of 30 people. Or it’s this discipline of majors who are in their third year. All the explanations from the people who are professional explainers in some sense are so targeted that maybe it’s the economic thing you’re talking about. There’s not, or at least until recently in history, there hasn’t been the need to or the incentive to come up with something that would be motivating and approachable and clear to an extremely wide variety of different backgrounds.

Putting in work with calculations

Dwarkesh Patel 1:20:44

If you’re self teaching yourself a field that involves mathematics, let’s say it’s Physics or some other thing like that, there’s problems where you have to understand how do I put this in terms of a derivative or an integral and from there, can I solve this integral? What would you recommend to somebody who is teaching themselves quantum mechanics and they figured out how to put how to get the right mathematical equation here. Is it important for their understanding to be able to go from there to getting it to the end result or can they just say well, I can just abstract that out. I understand the broader way to set up the problem in terms of the physics itself.

Grant Sanderson 1:22:00

I think where a lot of self-learners shoot themselves in the foot is by skipping calculations by thinking that that’s incidental to the core understanding. But actually, I do think you build a lot of intuition just by putting in the reps of certain calculations. Some of them maybe turn out not to be all that important and in that case, so be it, but sometimes that’s what maybe shapes your sense of where the substance of a result really came from.

I don’t know it might be something you realize like “Oh, it’s because of the square root that you get this decay.” And if you didn’t really go through the exercise, you would just come away thinking like instead of coming away thinking like such and such decays but with other circumstances, it doesn’t decay and not really understanding what was the core part of this high level result that is the thing you actually want to come out remembering.

Putting in the work with the calculations is where you solidify all of those underlying intuitions. And without the forcing function of homework, People just don’t do it. So I think that’s one thing that I learned as a big difference post college versus during college.

Post college, it’s very easy to just accidentally skip that while learning stuff and then it doesn’t sink in as well. So I think when you’re reading something, having a notebook and pencil next to you should be considered part of the actual reading process.

And if you are relying too much on reading and looking up and thinking in your head, maybe that’s going to get you something but it’s not going to be as highly leveraged as it could be.

The “failure to disrupt”

[key ideas: learning is not bottlenecked by good explanations but by social incentives. Deeply resonant. Reading between the lines — we are aspirational and good at copying others or trying to impress them, so if we know that we should provide good models for learners to emulate]

Dwarkesh Patel 1:23:39

What would be the impact of more self teaching in terms of what kinds of personalities benefit most? There’s obviously a difference in the kind of person who benefits most. In a situation where it’s a college course and everybody has to do the homework, but maybe some people are better tuned for the kind of work that’s placed there versus all this stuff is available for you on youtube and then textbooks for exercises and so on but you have to have the conscientiousness to actually go ahead and pursue it.

How do you see the distribution of who will benefit from the more modern way in which you can get whatever you want but you have to push yourself to get it.

Grant Sanderson 1:24:17

There’s a really good book that’s actually kind of relevant to some of your early questions called Failure to Disrupt that goes over the history of educational technology. It tries to answer the question of why you have these repeated cycles of people saying such and such technology that almost always is getting more explanations to more people, promises that it’ll disrupt the existing university system or disrupt the existing school system and just kind of never does.

One of the things that it highlights is how stratifying these technologies will be in that they actually are very very good for those who are already motivated or kind of already on the top in some way and they end up struggling the most just for those who are performing more poorly.

And maybe it’s because of confounding causation where the same thing that causes someone to not do poorly in the traditional system also means that they’re not going to engage as well with the plethora of tools available.

I don’t know if this answers your question, but I would reemphasize that what’s probably most important to getting people to actually learn something is not the explanation…but instead, it’s going to be the social factors. Are the five best friends you have also interested in this stuff and do they tend to push you up or they tend to pull you down when it comes to learning more things? Or do you have a reason to? There’s a job that you want to get or a domain that you want to enter where you just have to understand something or is there a personal project that you’re doing?

The existence of compelling personal projects and encouraging friend groups probably does way way more than the average quality of explanation online ever could because once you get someone motivated, they’re just they’re going to learn it and it maybe makes it a more fluid process if there’s good explanations versus bad ones and it keeps you from having some people drop out of that process,which is important.

But if you’re not motivating them into it in the first place, it doesn’t matter if you have the most world-class explanations on every possible topic out there. It’s screaming into a void effectively.

And I don’t know the best way to get more people into things. I have had a thought and this is the kind of thing that could never be done in practice but instead it’s something you would like write some kind of novel about, where if you want the perfect school, something where you can insert some students and then you want them to get the best education that you can, what you need to do is — Let’s say it’s a high school. You insert a lot of really attractive high schooler plants as actors that you get the students to develop crushes on. And then anything that you want to learn, the plant has to express a certain interest in it. They’re like, “Oh, they’re really interested in Charles Dickens.” And they express this interest and then they suggest that they would become more interested in whoever your target student is if they also read the dickens with them.

If you socially engineer the setting in that way, the effectiveness that would have to get students to actually learn stuff is probably so many miles above anything else that we could do. Nothing like that in practice could ever actually literally work but at least viewing that as this end point of “Okay, this mode of interaction would be hyper effective at education. Is there anything that kind of gets at that?”

And the kind of things that get at that would be — being cognizant of your child’s peer group or something which is something that parents very naturally do or okay, it doesn’t have to be a romantic crush, but it could be that there’s respect for the teacher. It’s someone that they genuinely respect and look up to such that when they say there’s an edification to come from reading Dickens, that actually lands in a way.

The natural extension of this:

Encourage people to mentor or teach on the side!

Grant Sanderson

I think there are two things I would want to get out of teaching in a school setting. One of them, as I was emphasizing, I think you just lose touch with what it’s like not to know stuff or what it’s like to be a student and so maintaining that kind of connection so that I don’t become duller and duller over time feels important.

The other, I would like to live in a world where more people who are savvy with STEM spend some of their time teaching. I just think that’s one of the highest leverage ways that you can think of to actually get more people to engage with math

And so I would like to encourage people to do that and call for action. Some notion of spending, maybe not your whole career, a little bit of time. In teaching, there’s not as fluid a system for doing that as going through a tour of service in certain countries where everyone spends two years in the military

Shy of having a system like that for education, there’s all these kind of ad hoc things where charter schools might have an emergency credential system to get a science teacher in. Teach for America is something out there.

There’s enough ways that someone could spend a little bit of time that’s probably not fully saturated at this point that the world would be better if more people did that

Being Stuck

This past Thursday at Back To School Night, I’m sitting in my 5th grader’s classroom chair scribbling a note on his dry-erase desk for him to see in morning. His mother is filling out a parent survey that helps the teacher get up to speed on your kid. It looks like she’s finished when she slides it over to me to answer a question she left blank — “What would you like your child to focus on this year?”

An article I read this summer immediately popped into my mind — The State of Being Stuck by math educator Ben Orlin.

The article begins:

Last year, I got the high school math teacher’s version of a wish on a magic lamp: a chance to ask a question of the world’s most famous mathematician.

Andrew Wiles gained his fame by solving a nearly 400-year-old problem: Fermat’s Last Theorem. The same puzzle had captivated Wiles as a child and inspired him to pursue mathematics. His solution touched off a mathematical craze in a culture where “mathematical craze” is an oxymoron. Wiles found himself the subject of books, radio programs, TV documentaries—the biggest mathematical celebrity of the last half-century.

Ben, like me staring at that survey question, didn’t want to waste the opportunity. He wondered…

…before settling on this question:

Here’s what Ben got back:

The essence of Wiles’ answer can be boiled down to just six words: “Accepting the state of being stuck.”

For Wiles, this is more than just a vague moral, an offhand suggestion. It’s the essence of his work. It’s an experience at once excruciating, joyful, and utterly unavoidable. And it’s something desperately misunderstood by the public.

“Accepting the state of being stuck”: that’s the keystone in the archway of mathematics. Without it, we’re left with nothing but a pile of fallen bricks.

Wiles began his answer, like any good mathematician, with a premise everyone can accept: “Many people have been put off mathematics,” he said. “They’ve had some adverse experience.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

“But what you find with children,” he continued, “is that they really enjoy it.”

In my experience, it’s true. Kids love games, puzzles, learning to count, playing with shapes, discovering patterns—in short, they love math.

So how does Wiles account for our alienation from mathematics, our loss of innocence?

“What you have to handle when you start doing mathematics as an older child or as an adult is accepting the state of being stuck,” Wiles said. “People don’t get used to that. They find it very stressful.”

He used another word, too: “afraid.” “Even people who are very good at mathematics sometimes find this hard to get used to. They feel they’re failing.”

But being stuck, Wiles said, isn’t failure. “It’s part of the process. It’s not something to be frightened of.”

Catch me and my teacher colleagues any afternoon, and—if you can get past the “sine” puns and fraction jokes—you’ll likely find us griping about precisely this phenomenon. Our students lack persistence. Give them a recipe, and they settle into monotonous productivity; give them an open-ended puzzle, and they panic.

Students want the Method, the panacea, the answer key. Accustomed to automaticity, they can’t accept being stuck.

…

“What I fight against most,” said Wiles, naming an unlikely enemy, “is the kind of message put out by—for example—the film Good Will Hunting.”

When it comes to math, Wiles said, people tend to believe “that there is something you’re born with, and either you have it or you don’t. But that’s not really the experience of mathematicians. We all find it difficult. It’s not that we’re any different from someone who struggles with maths problems in third grade…. We’re just prepared to handle that struggle on a much larger scale. We’ve built up resistance to those setbacks.”

If you have walked past a rack of popular non-fiction books in the past decade, you are thinking “not another lecture on grit or growth mindset please”. Ben doesn’t go there. In fact, he’s quick to affirm how we often overplay the “grit “ hand:

Recently, the currency of “grit” has fallen among teachers. It’s not that the idea lacks psychological validity. It’s more the weight of its educational connotations. Grit has become an excuse to romanticize poverty as “character-building.” It has devolved into a vague catch-all at best, and at its paradoxical worst, a reason to write kids off as lost causes.

Orlin proposes a 3rd idea:

Wiles is no educational theorist, of course, but I find that he offers a resonant and compelling third path. For him, perseverance is neither about personality (as with grit) nor belief (as with mindset).

Rather, it’s about emotion.

Fears and anxieties come to us all. You can be a nimble mathematician, a model of grit, and a fervent believer in the human potential for growth—but still, getting stuck on a math problem may leave you deflated and disheartened.

Wiles knows that the mathematician’s battle is emotional as much as intellectual. You need to quiet your fear, harness your joy, and cope effectively with the doubt we all feel when stuck on a problem.

Giles offers some counterintuitive ideas as well:

On the value of forgetfulness

“I think it’s bad to have too good a memory if you want to be a mathematician,” Wiles said. “You need to forget the way you approached [the problem] the previous time.”

It goes like this. You try one strategy on a problem. It fails. You retreat, dispirited. Later, having forgotten your bitter defeat, you try the same strategy again. Perhaps the process repeats. But eventually—again, thanks to your forgetfulness—you commit a slight error, a tiny deviation from the path you’ve tried several times. And suddenly, you succeed.

Wiles has a nifty analogy for this: it’s like a chance mutation in a strand of DNA that yields surprising evolutionary success.

“If you remember all the false, failed attempts before,” said Wiles, “you wouldn’t try. But because I have a slightly bad memory, I’ll try essentially the same thing again, and then I’ll realize I was just missing this one little thing.”

Wiles’ forgetfulness is a shield against discouragement. It neutralizes the emotions that would push him away from productive work.

Coming back to the parent survey…how did I reply?

I want Zak to build the muscle of persisting through drawn-out problems.

This skill is more valuable in a holistic, psychological sense than just being a technique. It’s hard to feel truly empowered unless you become familiar with the pattern of feeling stuck and the emotional reward of chipping your way out of it. If you find success too quickly, you’ll fear that you can’t repeat it. You’ll feel like an imposter. You’ll be imbalanced — with a bias towards protection, not growth. Coddling your ego or hating on others when you should be prepping for your next climb from a new valley.

Learning To Appreciate Learning

In the past few weeks about 5-10 people have reached out to ask me for advice in the vein of “my kid is 6 and likes math and what should I put in front of them to foster this”. They are usually looking for specific answers.

I offer a few things my kids have enjoyed (everything can be found on the blog, ie here and here) but I want to be clear — I’m no expert. I’m just like the rest of the parents who have the same goal of watching their kids’ curiosity flourish.

To kill many birds with one stone here’s the gist of my email responses:

I don’t create pressure. Let learning be a source of joy. Insight is its own reward and to train someone to appreciate that when they are young is a life-long gift because they can find stimulation in the pleasures of the mind and the mundane.

Sure, math proficiency has plenty of instrumental value in life, but appreciation and beauty is the bigger gift here (I also suspect this is an antidote to the doping that broader media does to people — if you find beauty in the evergreen you don’t need to constantly be taking drags from the current times and you’re perspective and emotional state will be better off for it. No science behind that — just my hunch).

You are already doing the single largest muscle movement –> literally giving a shit about your kids’ curiosity flourishing. Like seriously that’s 90%. The specific instances of expression — coding, writing, drawing, cooking, composing — or any other forms of creation are secondary. Creating not just consuming is the key because by being able to manipulate the world (I don’t mean manipulate in some evil sense) around you, you reinforce your agency.

When I see fear and extreme tribalism I see people retreating away from agency and frankly accepting some learned helplessness. Your role as a guardian is to shepherd a healthy sense of agency (unhealthy would be to program an overconfident narcissist).

Code and writing are symbol-manipulative domains — some will gravitate to that more than say carpentry or being a physical maker. I’d be open-minded about the specific expression and focus on nurturing the upstream creation and play impulses.

And if you got this far you exemplify an ironic phenomenon — the people who reach out looking for help/guidance/opinion/validation on their approaches are the people who don’t need to (this is not a back-handed way of saying don’t reach out btw, it’s just an observation!)

This young portal in the Moontower codex is an attempt to consolidate some specific learning stuff if interested:

🧠Moontower Brain Plug-In