You could, but you haven’t argued that this is not a very bad idea. Almost everything you identified leads to high variance, but it doesn’t necessarily usually have positive impact. I’m not sure I’d want my kids to be ten times as likely to be exceptional at the cost of them being one hundred times as likely to be miserable—and many of the things that get recommended here are also common among dilettantes and losers, who are far more common.
Edit to add: I’m not saying it is a bad idea, but I am saying that the presentation of the idea, and the motive to promote these ideas, is fundamental to the motive and method. I think this flaw should lead us to mostly discard the filtered evidence presented.
There are a bunch of things in the post I would never do. But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that? Curious: what do you find most high-risk apart from that?
But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that?
Mind the potentially strong selection bias specifically here, though. Even if in our sample of ‘extra-successful’ people there were few (or zero) who were too adversely affected, this does not specifically invalidate a possible suspicion that the base rate of creating bad outcomes from the treatment is very high—if the latter have a small chance of ever getting to fame.
(This does not mean I disagree with your conclusions in general in any way; nice post!)
I’m positing that there is a set of people for who the various preconditions you’ve identified for being an exceptional person, and you’ve then post-hoc selected the ones who were exceptional. I wondered if it might be the case that a majority of that set, but only a minority of the chosen subset, are miserable. And the reason I think that is that some people do poorly with only self-direction.
What specifically do you think is really high variance as opposed to the main downside being that it is expensive? If it is the ‘not going to school thing’ at least when I was growing up as a religiously homeschooled kid in the 90s, the strong impression that I got was that homeschooled kids systematically did better than other kids in terms of college success and other legible metrics—of course this has a gargantuan selection bias going on. But that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids.
The other stuff I recall from the article (ie being from a high resource background, having an intellectual mentor, being surrounded by intellectual conversations, getting one on one tutoring, good intrinsic capability) all seem to be things that either you can’t pick whether a child has or not, or where it would be weird if they left the child worse off.
One on one tutoring, for example, just doesn’t seem like a high variance thing, it seems like a positive expected value thing that might not actually be that causally important or have that big of impact, but where it will only make things worse in exceptional cases.
Isolating kids from peers is damaging to social skills in many cases. That would not show up in academic success, but it matters for happiness
Giving kids control over what they learn, and having them self-guide, is very prone to failing to pick up key skills—and some of the time, the skills are critical enough to handicap them later.
Also, “that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids”—It really doesn’t. If 25% of homeschooled kids do much better than average, and 75% do significantly worse, looking at those who went to college means you’ve completely eliminated the part of the sample that was harmed.
So this is based on my memory of homeschooling propaganda articles that I saw as a kid. But I’m pretty sure the data they had there showed most kids went to college. In my family three of us got University of California degrees, and the one who only got a nursing degree in his thirties authentically enjoyed manual labor jobs until he decided he also wanted more money.
Perhaps these numbers do stop at college, and so we don’t see in them children who get a good college education, but then fail in some important way later on in life, but I’ve never gotten an impression from anywhere that homeschooled children have generally worse life outcomes—anyways, this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.
I did have substantial social problems, even as an adult, and they have led me to be less successful in career terms than I probably would have been with stronger social skills. But this might be driven by a selection effect: The reason my parents actually started homeschooling me was because I was being bullied and having severe social problems in third grade.
“this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.”
Never mind. There aren’t particularly good studies. But what exists seems to say that homeschooled students do much better than average for all students, but maybe somewhat worse than the average for students with their parent’s SES backgrounds.
But the data mostly comes from non-random samples, so it is hard to generate firm conclusions.
It’s also mostly “conditional on acceptance, homeschooled students do better”—and given the selection bias in the conditional sample, that would reflect a bias against them in admissions, rather than being a fact about homeschooling.
You could, but you haven’t argued that this is not a very bad idea. Almost everything you identified leads to high variance, but it doesn’t necessarily usually have positive impact. I’m not sure I’d want my kids to be ten times as likely to be exceptional at the cost of them being one hundred times as likely to be miserable—and many of the things that get recommended here are also common among dilettantes and losers, who are far more common.
Edit to add: I’m not saying it is a bad idea, but I am saying that the presentation of the idea, and the motive to promote these ideas, is fundamental to the motive and method. I think this flaw should lead us to mostly discard the filtered evidence presented.
There are a bunch of things in the post I would never do. But I doubt highly that most of the things are of a sort that is likely to lead many to be miserable. The two who are the most miserable in the sample are Russell and Woolf who were very constrained by their guardians; Mill also seems to have taken some toll by being pushed too hard. But apart from that? Curious: what do you find most high-risk apart from that?
Mind the potentially strong selection bias specifically here, though. Even if in our sample of ‘extra-successful’ people there were few (or zero) who were too adversely affected, this does not specifically invalidate a possible suspicion that the base rate of creating bad outcomes from the treatment is very high—if the latter have a small chance of ever getting to fame.
(This does not mean I disagree with your conclusions in general in any way; nice post!)
I’m positing that there is a set of people for who the various preconditions you’ve identified for being an exceptional person, and you’ve then post-hoc selected the ones who were exceptional. I wondered if it might be the case that a majority of that set, but only a minority of the chosen subset, are miserable. And the reason I think that is that some people do poorly with only self-direction.
Yes, I encourage everyone to avoid the nitpick trap. There’s plenty of good things to take from this essay. You don’t need to hire abusive tutors.
That completely misunderstands the objection—see my other response.
What specifically do you think is really high variance as opposed to the main downside being that it is expensive? If it is the ‘not going to school thing’ at least when I was growing up as a religiously homeschooled kid in the 90s, the strong impression that I got was that homeschooled kids systematically did better than other kids in terms of college success and other legible metrics—of course this has a gargantuan selection bias going on. But that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids.
The other stuff I recall from the article (ie being from a high resource background, having an intellectual mentor, being surrounded by intellectual conversations, getting one on one tutoring, good intrinsic capability) all seem to be things that either you can’t pick whether a child has or not, or where it would be weird if they left the child worse off.
One on one tutoring, for example, just doesn’t seem like a high variance thing, it seems like a positive expected value thing that might not actually be that causally important or have that big of impact, but where it will only make things worse in exceptional cases.
Isolating kids from peers is damaging to social skills in many cases. That would not show up in academic success, but it matters for happiness
Giving kids control over what they learn, and having them self-guide, is very prone to failing to pick up key skills—and some of the time, the skills are critical enough to handicap them later.
Also, “that does give a strong lower bound for how bad that specifically can be for kids”—It really doesn’t. If 25% of homeschooled kids do much better than average, and 75% do significantly worse, looking at those who went to college means you’ve completely eliminated the part of the sample that was harmed.
So this is based on my memory of homeschooling propaganda articles that I saw as a kid. But I’m pretty sure the data they had there showed most kids went to college. In my family three of us got University of California degrees, and the one who only got a nursing degree in his thirties authentically enjoyed manual labor jobs until he decided he also wanted more money.
Perhaps these numbers do stop at college, and so we don’t see in them children who get a good college education, but then fail in some important way later on in life, but I’ve never gotten an impression from anywhere that homeschooled children have generally worse life outcomes—anyways, this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.
I did have substantial social problems, even as an adult, and they have led me to be less successful in career terms than I probably would have been with stronger social skills. But this might be driven by a selection effect: The reason my parents actually started homeschooling me was because I was being bullied and having severe social problems in third grade.
“this is something that the data has to actually exist for since several percent of US children have been homeschooled for the last several decades.”
Never mind. There aren’t particularly good studies. But what exists seems to say that homeschooled students do much better than average for all students, but maybe somewhat worse than the average for students with their parent’s SES backgrounds.
But the data mostly comes from non-random samples, so it is hard to generate firm conclusions.
It’s also mostly “conditional on acceptance, homeschooled students do better”—and given the selection bias in the conditional sample, that would reflect a bias against them in admissions, rather than being a fact about homeschooling.