site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

We should probably figure out how to hyper-specialize people by the age of five

It’s known that to be the best chess player or instrumentalist you need to start at a young age, with ~5 being a common age to start for the best in the world. If you’re a chess prodigy or world class cellist, you hyperfocus on these skills throughout your childhood, and it’s accepted that you sacrifice normal schooling and extra-curriculars to pursue your skill. But why do we only allow this for the most worthless skills? There’s nothing unique about chess or cello — to be the best at any skill you need to start at around five. The Olympian Yuto Horigome started skateboarding before he could walk; Mark Zuckerberg started making apps before he was a teenager; Noam Chomsky joined political discussions as a child when accompanying his father to the newspaper stand; Linda Ronstadt learned all the genres of music she would later perform before 10; Von Neumann and Mozart had legendary childhood specializations.

But every skill is like this. If we want the best therapists, they need to be practicing conversation and understanding people by five, hours every day. If we want the best philosophers or practical thinkers, they need to be arguing and testing themselves by five, hours every day. Similar for movie directors, novelists, designers. This even applies to skills that are essential but not economical, like being a good mother, or being a good friend. And to skills that are essential for implementing political change, like writers and representatives and propagandists and moralists. Imagine if your teacher in school were a master at motivating, disciplining, and explaining, and had training in these skills like Mozart with music? Imagine if everyone’s gym teacher or exercise trainer had training to be like Jocko Willick and Tony Robbins? How much more accurate would your doctor’s diagnosis be if he had trained in medicine since five, instead of 21? (By five, a child can learn 5 different languages without accent. By 13, Magnus Carlsen’s skill equaled that of a 40yo Garry Kasparov). We all enjoy Scott’s writings — now imagine a version of Scott that is a better writer, specialized in writing, who outputs even more?

I think we are wasting enormous potential for social improvement by corralling every child into the same mandatory (and inefficient) skill-training, instead of specializing them at an early age. Would Mozart be more valuable for knowing biology? What if Caravaggio knew calculus? What if Einstein took a Spanish class for 2000 precious childhood hours? What if George Washington knew what an atom was? We would have just made them worse, and the world worse by consequence. We are raising up a generation of woefully mid professionals — a whole society of sub-perfect workers across every industry. Everyone a jack of trades, master of none.

And this is more serious than just “they aren’t as good”. It’s also that they can’t perform as many work iterations in a day, their working years are shorter, and they are more stressed (which has multigenerational effects). That little kid you see at the Chinese restaurant ringing up the order for his parents hasn’t just learned to perform that specific skill well, he is also able to perform it for more hours in the day, he can start at a younger age, and he incurs less of a stress cost. That means he is happier, which means you get happier, and it also means his stress is reduced, which means his kid is healthier, and so the cycle goes on. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t apply to a number of industries.

Lastly, I wonder if the “wasteful hobby specialization” among Western youth isn’t due to our denial of their specialization instinct. Boys love becoming experts at something, and today they become experts at video games, or their hair, or some entertainment product, or memes. We have excluded them from any useful specialization, and so they specialize in uselessness, forming a perverse “pair-bond” with a hobby instead of a career. This is a grave evil. How many Asmongolds have we brought into the world, experts at a fantasy world because they have been denied real life’s RPG? This element can’t be ignored. A world where everyone you meet is as passionate in their work as a WoW player would be close to perfection.

In some sense, we do engage in that much specialization, it's just that we're specializing in reading, so it doesn't register. I'm sure I read 10,000 hours in my youth, starting at 4 or so. But, like video games, it isn't completely useful. I was homeschooled, and my mom spent a lot of time reading books, while we kids also read books for 8 hours at a time.

Did societies that placed children in hereditary professions from childhood outperform societies that allowed adults to choose their own path?

That little kid you see at the Chinese restaurant['s]

...parents do not intend for him to work at that Chinese restaurant when he grows up.

But more to the point, we've seen the results of childhood specialization in sports, and while it has lead to improvements in technical quality among youth players, we also have to question the impact on the broader society of all the wasted potential of the failures and burnouts. What do we do with the mathematical equivalent of a Ballerina who gets too fat?

Or consider the crisis of young baseball players getting Tommy John surgery on their elbows.

The need for Tommy John surgery has exploded at the youth level. According to Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, the biggest age group that needs the surgery in the country is from ages 15-19. [...] Another factor according to the experts is overuse. “The more you put a high load on something whether it’s a rope or a ligament in the elbow, it’s going to fatigue over time and if it doesn’t have time to recover and rest, that ligament is ultimately going to fail,” Dr. Shepet said. Doctors recommend avoiding single-sport specialization. “One should take (off) at least 2 months, some people advocate three or four months if you could,” Dr. Zellner said. “That doesn’t mean that a child or youth is sedentary during that time. They're able to do other sports, they’re able to cross-train lift weights and work on their conditioning. There are plenty of things that can be done outside of throwing with that arm.” Berken now owns Impact Sports Academy in De Pere which trains baseball players year round. He tries to help parents understand what can be done to minimize the risk of a pitching injury. “The biggest thing for me I think is, we try to let our coaches know that we gotta take it out of the kids hands,” Berken said. "The kids don’t know any better. Any competitive kid, if you ask them how do you feel, hey do you want to stay in the game, the answer is going to be yes.”

The children may long to identify only with the thing they like and are good at, but that doesn't mean it is good for them, any more than letting a kid eat only a single favorite food is good for them.

Personal anecdote, I dated a girl twelve years ago, her family of three siblings all specialized in different Olympic or non-school sports from middle school, to the point that they did alternative high school classes to avoid attending high school which would have interfered with training and competing. One figure skater, one skier, one cyclist. None made it. All are very fat now. The figure skater at least still looks more or less like herself, the skier and the cyclist are both so fat that one thinks of their health immediately upon seeing them walk across a room. By contrast, I've always been a mediocre dabbler, as a kid I played three sports at a mediocre level, and I kept picking up new ones as the specialists left me behind at each stage; my athletic career topped out competitively in undergrad with our club boat finishing dead-last at the Head of the Charles. At 33, I'm probably in the best shape of my life. Not good enough at anything for anyone to care, but I look good naked and man can I ever help someone move.

You don’t need to make it hereditary, or fully hereditary, as you can test the child’s own aptitude and interest. But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”. In American history, choice and “hereditarian influence” coexisted, as elite children historically pursued a similar field as their parents, with slots always open for talented newcomers. (Consider the Founding Fathers, or our presidents, I suppose). When Britain was dominant in history, there was a hereditarian aspect, as well as when the Ottomans were dominant, or Rome, or France. I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you? Artisans produced artisans, unless the kid was precocious and gifted.

What do we do with the mathematical equivalent of a Ballerina who gets too fat?

If the child who is on the math specialty regimen simply isn’t good, then they should be pushed to something else, and this can occur before the age of 8. We could feasibly design a national index to ensure we don’t raise up too many mathematicians. But if the student trains in math and then randomly begins to hate math, well, that’s a problem that occurs today already. It occurs today because our training environment (school and university) is divorced from the work environment (reality), so we produce doctors who realize they like studying rather than practicing medicine, teachers who realize they hate dealing with children, etc. A rather dumb system. But anyway, if the math-trained realize they hate math, they work somewhere else; we say “that sucks”, and give him a less skilled job somewhere else, perhaps where counting is involved. We want this to occur as early as possible though, and today it occurs quite late.

[elbow injuries in baseball]

Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law thay you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement. There’s nothing to generalize here. Practicing a skill every day is still the rule of thumb for mastery. While that kid is resting his ligaments from the unnatural pitching maneuver, there are still many ways they can be practicing baseball: watching tapes, jogging, improving endurance and diet, or just resting really deeply. But personally, in my ideal world there would be no serious competitive sport, definitely nothing subsidized by schools and the state — sports should be something you do for fun with friends, like a game of Call of Duty, lightly competitive but not neurotic. Sports should be a game about improving your health and having fun, not stats-maxxing.

Olympians

I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive. There’s lots of people who ran track in high school who now love running as a routine. (Two great books I loved about running, “the loneliness of the long distance runner”, and “what I talk about when I talk about running”, depict a more indulgent and purely positive type of running). It’s also possible they they have an addictive personality and substituted competition for food, or that genetics are involved.

But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”.

We absolutely do. No society free from nepotism has ever existed, but societies with proportionately less nepotism have consistently outcompeted societies with proportionately more nepotism.

I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you?

The United States of America. Not only is this literally true comparable to other cultures throughout history, it's our national creed.

Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law that you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement.

I brought up TJS, because it's super direct and easy to follow cause/effect. What about the injuries in Basketball? In youth soccer?

Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them. I should be clear: if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five, I support you doing so. But I expect that if we apply such a theory to the mass of people, we'll start to see the same problems crop up.

I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive.

Moreso the aforementioned injuries from intensive training than anything else, combined with going from a highly regimented training regimen built around competition to having to steer oneself. They're an example of what happens to specialists left behind in scalable professions.

And if we're starting from age five, training will always be coercive. Many five year olds require coercion to get dressed and to eat. If you're suggesting that a child who wants to do nothing but mathematics should be encouraged, within reason sure I agree with that. But we'll probably run into the same problems we do with athletics. And we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world.

Hereditary profession is not quite the same thing as nepotism, at least that’s not how I took it. Hereditary profession could mean that a lawyer purposefully raises a lawyer and a composer a composer, and that this is expected; nepotism means that a lawyer hires and promotes his kin who are lawyers, and a doctor his kin. My proposal doesn’t entail anything about nepotism, but it would involve an element of hereditary influence on profession. I think 1 in 5 American physicians are children of physicians, and there are 3.5 physicians per 1000 Americans, so clearly the children of doctors are influenced to be doctors.

Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them

I don’t follow. Many people in history did one task repetitively for hours on end, eg farming or weaving or milling or fishing. We have cases of people focusing on one skill and they improve in that skill. They might nominally be in school, but they attend special schools that are online and not taxing. So we know that Magnus would spends hours a day on chess. We know pianists spend hours a day on piano. We know marathon runners spend hours a day running. Faker, the best strategy gamer, spent 10-15 hours per day practicing. So it’s been abundantly tried, and the results show that the more practice the greater the result. (With the right kind of practice, and with rest, and with diminishing returns).

if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five

How about you just place your kid in fun math contexts for 3 hours a day, and then an hour a day of challenging practice, and then the rest is for enjoying life and maybe some exercise? They will be better at math and they will have more free time. They won’t know about ovaries, orangutans, Ontario or Othello, but they will be better at math than anything else you could do. If they want to read a good book, they ask someone. If they want to know the capitol of California, they look it up. Seems perfect to me, just requires each specialist human to trust the other specialist humans. Adirondacks sound nice though. He can go there on vacation with the time and money he has saved up from not knowing about colonial period.

we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world

Well you haven’t really shown why that is so certain. If my beloved friend is a trucker, I know that specializing in trucking at an early age will be better for his health, reduce accidents, reduce stress, and increase his earnings. I can’t think of a line of work that wouldn’t be aided by specialization.

Would I be right in saying that the belief "with a proper training regimen and careful attention to fit, people will organically want to do what society needs them to do" is both true in your opinion and load-bearing for your proposal? That seems like something concrete that is either provable as mostly true or mostly false.

It is true in the sense that people organically want to make money, and want to master what will make them the most money, and the most visible needs of society are (often) financially rewarded when supplied. I would also say that the right kind of training can make someone enjoy otherwise boring work — there are people who can make excel exciting, for instance. And then I would make a separate point that the education of youth should involve reality: the reality of one’s capabilities, the reality of which jobs will fit them, and the reality of what one is expected to earn according to their performance. Current educational models divorce the youth from reality whereas simply eliminating education altogether (though not my proposal) would immediately make reality salient. A 10-year-old working at the mall instead of studying at school sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet that entire time he is learning the reality of life, that work and money are requirements and that skill and performance matter. When exactly does a kid saliently learn that in school? A 45-min documentary their substitute English teacher plays? That’s not “I am working six hours stocking a shelf” levels of salience and realization and motivation. But that point is an aside and not my proposal, but we should find a way to deeply persuade the youth about reality by the age of 10.

If I can predict your point, it’s that a kid who ought to be trained as a construction worker will opt to attend a school specializing in programming because of the possibility of higher wages. But I think you can persuade the parents + the child that this is not in their interest because reality says it is unlikely, in the same way you can persuade people not to gamble. Note that, if the quality of life for construction workers rises because they get to work earlier in life and are less stressed, then the looming threat of working blue collar is no longer a threat, it’s just a different choice. You will still make money and start a family, etc. I think also just taking money from the super-wealthy and giving it to the employed lower classes is also a great idea which would propel efficiency for a similar reason, that people will opt into specializing in this work because it’s not “the end of the world” being employed there. Classism and over-competition actually winds up reducing efficiency as people opt into chasing the prospect of higher wages when they are better fitted for lower wage professions. But that’s a totally different topic.

The sports teams understand this and invest heavily in sports for children. A talented child will be given all the coaching they need long before they can compete at a high level.

Big tech needs to start the same with math. Specialized coaching in math barely even happens at the undergrad level. The elite in math should be picked up early by the organizations that want elite mathematicians. Even if they don't reach the stars there is plenty of room for people who are fairly good at math but not world elite. While the hundreth best high jumper in the world provides little benefit the millionth best at math can generate value to society.

Specialized coaching in math barely even happens at the undergrad level.

This exists at both the elite and "pretty-good" level. There's the MOP and AoPS respectively. With similar programs to MOP internationally, and AoPS being accessible from anywhere with an internet connection now. Back in the 90's if you were not at the elite level you needed someone in your area with pretty specialized skill to help you through the book version of AoPS, but now they have a huge roster of highly qualified tutors/coaches that work online.

I'm very certain that the 100th best math undergraduate in the US has access to high level Putnam coaching. The problem is not as far out on the distribution. It's the 300 person survey Calc 1 classes at mediocre institutions that churn out incompetent engineers.

The success stories for very early hyperspecialization seem to be very "inside the box" things like playing the violin or being good at golf or chess. You know exactly what you're supposed to do, what is and isn't allowed is tightly circumscribed, and mastery generally just involves knowing as much stuff inside the allowed box and being very well trained at executing it. Things like business or science aren't like this. You are allowed to come up with completely new things for both what you're trying to accomplish and for how you're going to do it. Arguably there's still a box of physical reality and the laws of nature, but those aren't exactly easy to start getting a hang of at age five, unlike "what are the rules of chess" or "how do you hold a violin". If you want to do the sort of cross-cutting paradigm-busting that pushes things ahead, having been hyper-specialized into one of what your parents' generation thought was the set of relevant schemas for succeeding in the world might not be that helpful.

I think chess requires creativity. But if business requires exceptional creative cross-domain understanding, then that “cross-domain understanding” should be included in the specialization training. It’s not every domain which enhances business aptitude, right? It’s unlikely that knowing Shakespeare, the hormonal cycle, and dinosaurs will enhance your business aptitude. Steve Jobs was exceptional because he took design philosophy and applied it to technology, but that’s actually hardly an everyman type of knowledge, it’s the conjunction of two skills which he mastered. He didn’t need to know about early American history, and it would even have been better if he read less eastern spirituality (resulting in his untimely demise through woo woo dieting).

I feel like there's something tricky here. There used to be the thing where people were going "schools should teach critical thinking", that certainly sounds like a cross-domain understanding of sorts. People actually tried to do this, and it turned out that it's either very hard or impossible with the existing toolkit of teaching domain-specific stuff. Maybe it can't really be taught and some people just pick it up by themselves, maybe it needs one-on-one tutoring that doesn't scale.

It's also tricky to apply a fuzzy "might be relevant to business success" / "probably isn't" judgment to rigid curricula and socially recognized pursuits. People will want to legibilize things into clear-lined singular pursuits like "playing tennis" or "being an accountant".

How would you pick the specialization at age 5?

Parents' choice? This might be suboptimal; imagine being born to mathematicians and being pushed into maths from age 5, but realizing at age 25 that despite becoming better at maths than your peers, you enjoy creative writing much more, it comes effortlessly to you. The society has gained a good mathematician, but has lost a great writer.

Child's choice? One of the reasons for the same mandatory (and inefficient) skill-training we corral every child into is exposing them to various activities so they can make this choice for themselves. I can't imagine compressing this into the first five years of their life.

Some kind of aptitude testing? Perhaps, I think it's possible to come up with one that is easy enough for a five-year-old to do, but still has enough predictive power. But possible doesn't mean easy.

I think greater access to specialized schools will help more than trying to specialize every child at age 5. If someone shows aptitude for chemistry at age 5 because her parents are both renowned scientists, let her go to a chemistry-oriented primary school. If someone shows aptitude for chemistry at age 10, let him to go a chemistry-oriented secondary school. Yes, there is a chance that we've lost a Nobel Prize winner by skipping five years of chemistry education, but if the boy's parents were, I don't know, accountants, I think he would still be a better scientist than an accountant.

I was just reading about a woman who loved novels and wanted to be writer but was pressured into going to an elite school for mathematics. That was Maryam Mirzakhani —

Maryam was not particularly interested in mathematics as a child (although she noticed that she could solve the homework problems of her older siblings quite easily). Her passion was reading novels, and her dream was to become a writer. Things changed when she moved on to middle school […] A specialized Farzanegan middle school for girls gifted in mathematics was opened in Tehran, and Maryam enrolled. She was initially taken aback by the steep jump in difficulty. Her first year was not great. But she persevered and realized that she could make fast progress when she made an effort.

The problem with whim is that it’s whimsical. For every person who ignores their passion and regrets it, there’s one or more who ignored their passion and thanks God for it. For every person who wishes they continued trying to be a famous actress, there’s a person who curses their life that they focused on something they aren’t good at, and there’s someone who loves their life because their parents told them not to be naive about an acting career. For every “society has gained a good mathematician, but has lost a great writer”, there’s “society has gained a mediocre writer, but has lost a universally important mathematician”. In college I knew someone who wanted to be a personal trainer. He studied for four years, and after graduating he suddenly hated it. I met him when he returned to do a new four-year degree as a computer science student.

we corral every child into is exposing them to various activities so they can make this choice for themselves

This does not take the thousands of hours of training we administer. This takes, like, three hours per subject. And I support that. Kids should try lots of things to find what they are good at and what they really like. And then they should attempt to balance the two. IMO it’s better to look what one is good at, find what is bearable, and then see if you can’t find enjoyment from it. If there’s still no enjoyment, then they should make a switch. But there are so many people in the world who enjoy making music but are terrible at it, and then there are excellent performers who actually dislike performing. There are writers who hate writing, then there’s a shitty novella published every hour by someone who should just work at a library. Life is weird.

This is the most wonk I've seen in a while. Please never work at an influential think tank or come near the levers of power in a country where I plan on spending any real length of time. I don't mean this to be offensive, and I mean this in the kindest possible terms - people like you terrify me.

First off the bat, your headline is full of assumptions that immediately set off the calibrations on my suspicion meter. Definitions of "We", "should", and "probably" that I find questionable aside, especially if they're in the same sentence as five-year-olds, the "why" is the first question I zero in on.

Your argument, plainly put, is that to be the best in the world at anything, you need to start young, and that track should be decided by the age of five. Your evidence of this is that most prodigies start young. Even disregarding the massive sweeping implications of A=>B=>C=>D and Therefore E you've made in the above argument...

What do you think that world looks like?

The world already has massively disproportionate rewards for the prodigies (and by comparison, massive amounts of shit for those who can't reasonably compete with the prodigies to eat). I also doubt prodigies are fungible, I could do with one less YoYo Ma and one more Einstein, but stuffing YoYo Ma in a reasonably fantastic virtual reality simulator where he's force-fed the sum of Einstein's life experiences and education will not produce a directly comparable Einstein.

I'll tell you what that world looks like. It's China, a country where the disposable people are fed into relatively metaphorical meat grinders and second place might as well have not tried. It is a country where most parents with the means and ability have shipped their children overseas to avoid the life-defining national state exam, the Gaokao, and cheating on all metrics to try and demonstrate your exceptional nature is rampant. It is a nation of immense human capital, of the tiny fraction of hyper-talented overachievers and a vast, forgotten achievement slum valley of the 99.9999% who have decided lying flat is the best answer to this hellish existence. The stress cost, on both the people in this achievement slum valley and the prodigies alike, is immense.

You finally get at the real meat of your objection, and why you've come up with this argument in the first place. What disgusts you is waste. Wasted potential. You are convinced that the waste of human potential directly equates to a waste of what could be spent on social improvement, and that mandatory skill training (i.e. public schooling or mandatory education or whatever) is highly inefficient. You're not alone in this thinking; I also despise waste. But given how literally everything in our world naturally optimizes for money, I'd rather there be less prodigies be turned to the effort of gaslighting me into buying more knicknacks or signing me up for more subscription services. The fact that they were trained to do it from age five isn't something I personally will care about when they're convincing me to pay for the air I'm breathing.

In fact, I am regularly surprised that mandatory education is not less efficient. Left to their own devices, state-sponsored education initiatives regularly come up with "improvements" to justify their own existence that decrease the efficiency more over time. We know how children learn math and how to read by now, it's well documented and studied, at this point "improvements" are about squeezing more blood from the rock or well-meaning but ideologically blinkered initiatives like No Child Left Behind. It's amazing that a teenager can even put together a complete sentence these days, to say nothing of their ability to navigate the digital panopticon that passes for the internet.

I'll tell you what that world looks like. It's China

TTBOMK China's more "are you good at passing this inflexible multi-subject exam or not", not "are you especially good at this specific thing", which is almost the opposite of his point. @coffee_enjoyer's scheme reminds me far more of the Soviet Union's gifted-ed programs.

Please never work at a think tank

I would never waste my time doing something so ineffectual, so you have nothing to fear. Spending two dozen pages and sixty-nine citations saying something uninteresting, read by fewer people than an average post on the internet, which could be better summarized in a few paragraphs if the evidence is based on compelling common information? I’ll leave that to more grandiose minds. Someone should do a study to see whether think tanks or 4chan have been more influential in shifting political views in the US (was it a think tank that influenced Elon Musk and his influence?) — a perfect study for a think tanker, if you know anyone.

evidence of this is that most prodigies start young

No. The evidence for this is that most elite performers start young across competitive domains. Chess and instrument performance are the most well-known and competitive. Children can learn more efficiently than an adult, so I’m surprised that you disagree with that.

What do you think that world looks like?

I’m glad you asked. We should be focusing on making a world with less stress. If everyone hones their professional skills in childhood, everyone will be less stressed. We should also be focusing on a world with less mandatory working hours. If everyone hyper-specializes, we could get away with reducing working hours due to increased efficiency, entering the workforce at a younger age, and fewer required schooling hours. We also want a world where things work well, which requires experts experting.

The world already has massively disproportionate rewards for the prodigies

Only for comparatively worthless skills, and then also like, 0.1% STEM performers. But my proposal is that whichever career we can reasonably predict you entering, we should train you in those skills at the youngest age. Whether that’s construction, retail, technology, teaching, etc. If you are most likely going to be a waiter your whole life, then we should train you in all possible skills related to that and then send you on your way. Waiting isn’t skill-intensive, but there are still skills (social charm, physical endurance). When trained, why shouldn’t they begin to work at 13? That’s four extra years of work, four years cost reduction in schooling (not counting college), it’s better for the waiter himself, and it increases likelihood of family formation too.

I'll tell you what that world looks like. It's China

If anything, our current system is based off the Chinese imperial examination method of schooling. Every Chinese kid regardless of career destiny is made to study way too much across way too much material. There’s no specialization at all until much later.

gaslighting me into buying more knicknacks or signing me up for more subscription services

I agree but I consider this an ancillary topic. But I’ll give my opinion because you brought it up. I think, if every worker is trained in their specific work, that we will actually have time to instill them with practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is vastly more important than knowing biology, phys ed, history, or even lots of maths you don’t wind up using. And practical wisdom would be all about spotting deception, knowing the dangers of consumerism and the hedonic treadmill, knowing how to spot someone trustworthy, knowing how to find a good deal. If there is one universal skill-set for training every human, it would be this. So something like “hyper-specialization plus universal practice wisdom” would be ideal.

I'm interested to see why you think making more domains more competitive will lead to less stress.

If you’re increasing everyone’s skill across the board then you haven’t made any domain more competitive. It would just be that everyone you come across is more competent. There would be the same amount of competitive within an industry, though it would definitely be harder to break into an industry in adulthood.

There's a place where kids undergo strenuous training from a young age. It's South Korea, and it's universally considered a terrible place to grow up, most of all by South Koreans themselves. Thanks but no thanks, let's let kids actually have a childhood.

We already train kids for 8 hours every weekday plus homework, beginning at a young age. I’m saying that that this training should simply be more specialized, not that it needs to be more strenuous. In fact, if you make it more specialized, we could probably get away with making it less stressful.

Korean education is a complete mess. If I'm reading wikipedia right, their big life-changing exam (for which they rearrange public transport routes and ground flights during the English listening) is almost entirely multiple-choice:

All questions are multiple-choice, except for the 9 questions in the Mathematics section, which are short answer.

Imagine trying to answer a literature question in multiple-choice format. It's ironic, they care so much about education that the inevitable 500K kids demanding remarking means they can't even test literary/rhetorical skills at all in their national exams.

It's OK, AI will surely fix this.

At some point, AI tutors will so massively surpass human teachers that the whole educational edifice will collapse in a heap. There will be nothing they can do, it will simply be too shameful to pretend they're serving any purpose.

It'll be interesting to see how things go in East Asia, where they're super into respecting teachers and tutors. There's a prestige they have there that won't be easily broken, no matter how pointless their work is.

That's nuts. Even the dreaded Eight Leg Essay of the Ming dynasty required some creativity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay

The following is loosely based on true events:

Imagine you are a trauma surgeon.

You work in a small trauma center; you show up to your shift. There’s more shouting than normal in the ED, so you head to the trauma bay first.

24 hours to go.

The first thing you see is a headless body in one of the bays. “What the fuck is that Jim” you say to your colleague, who is currently administering chest compressions to a clearly very temporarily alive patient, and only such because someone is basically rhythmically punching her in the heart.

“Oh yeah, EMS didn’t want to call it so they left that there. Paperwork, you know? No idea where the head is.” He pauses. “Car accident, we think, didn’t get a great report before they ran off.” He then grunts and someone else takes over chest compressions, he walks over to lab print outs and stares at some numbers, willing them to change. They don’t. The patient gurgles for a second, everyone’s breath pauses as they hope, but then nothing else happens. You look back at the patient being coded, her chest looks like it has the consistency of spaghetti and meatballs.

You take in the scene and then ask the dreaded question “how long?” “we don’t know, she was down in the field and we’ve been doing compressions for…30 minutes?” One of the nurses’ interrupts “43.” You stare. He stares back. He then points to the pediatric trauma bay. The curtain is closed. “I didn’t want all three, you know?” You nod, then walk over to the headless body. “Time of death, whenever the fuck now is. I’ll chart later.” Someone reads off the time, someone else writes it on a post it note and puts the name of the patient on it, and then slaps it to the computer you usually use.

You briefly consider how aggravated this would make the hospital legal team when a nurse walks in from the main ED, exposing the headless body to a bunch of civilians waiting for treatment of their mild respiratory infections. She says “umm doctor, the one patient wanted to talk to you about their pain medicine. Thanks!” She then runs away before you can ask follow up questions, and you hear her saying to another nurse “OMG it’s just sitting their headless.” A patient looks ill hearing this.

“Fucking nurses” you say. “Fucking nurses” the nurses in the trauma bay reply back.

Anesthesia sighs.

The phone rings, you pick it up. It’s the OR. “Dr. Fuckmylife, how can I help you?” “We’ve got a hot gallbladder down here, and then you have emergency cases for the next 12 hours. Jim’s got the bay, can you come scrub?

You sigh.

23 hours and 45 minutes to go.

Early training is not going to help with the above shitshow.

That was amazing, and I encourage you to write up more of these and put them as a separate post!

Here's one ~ someone else wrote when we were still on Reddit a few years ago.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/u110mx/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_11_2022/i4yly8v/

To do this, we’d need some sorting algorithm beyond “rich parents.” I propose Triessentialism, my own philosophy, as a guide for creating a sorting mechanism.

Humans are born (I theorize) with an inherent drive to understand systems, which in most neurotypicals is geared either toward understanding and manipulating the physical world or the emotional inner worlds of their fellow people.

If an autistic human develops without either of those, they instead find a system with as much internal logic and interface consistency: the train routes and engines of trainspotters, the elemental type advantages and weaknesses memorized by Pokémon fans, the logics of Aristotle or Boole, a computer language or operating system, etc.

If people with emotional, logical, and physical intuitions were catered to in their early education, and their natural deficits accounted for by society, they could find their “Michael Jordan” field much more efficiently in one of the seven Venn categoricals: Physical, Logical, Emotional, Scientific, Philosophical, Psychological, or Moral.

Of course, any such development is more likely to be a split based on a test administered by Pearson, the neurocrats underlying the psychostate, resulting in a dystopia like in the Divergent series.

There's probably no need to enact sweeping cultural changes to solve a problem that will soon be fixed or moot with technology. Hyperspecialize your kid if you want to, but we're already looking into pluripotent adult-derived stem cells and how to induce neuroplasticity with antidepressants. We'll be able to learn implicit skills like children at any age, while using ai and the internet as a source of arbitrary amounts of high-level insight. (Most of that insight will be bullshit, but massive redundant parallelism covereth many sins.)

Could you expand a little on inducing neuroplasticity via antidepressants? A quick google shows a lot of academic articles speculating that the latest generation of SSRI’s effects are mediated via neurogenesis; are you aware of any protocols, bio hacking journals, or otherwise ‘here and now’ looks at this?

I'm uninformed, sorry. It's just something I've been noticing in news articles especially regarding LSD-- that some drugs increase various measures of neuroplasticity. [ex.] (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01389-z). I don't know if I'd finger neurogenesis specifically, but I'm fairly confident something is going on.

It’s known that to be the best chess player or instrumentalist you need to start at a young age, with ~5 being a common age to start for the best in the world. If you’re a chess prodigy or world class cellist, you hyperfocus on these skills throughout your childhood, and it’s accepted that you sacrifice normal schooling and extra-curriculars to pursue your skill. But why do we only allow this for the most worthless skills? There’s nothing unique about chess or cello — to be the best at any skill you need to start at around five. The Olympian Yuto Horigome started skateboarding before he could walk; Mark Zuckerberg started making apps before he was a teenager; Noam Chomsky joined political discussions as a child when accompanying his father to the newspaper stand; Linda Ronstadt learned all the genres of music she would later perform before 10; Von Neumann and Mozart had legendary childhood specializations.

nah, it's not the tutoring or hyper-specialization, but rather the IQ. Some of the most gifted mathematicians alive were not necessarily precocious at math, but by being so smart, were able to make rapid progress despite showing inclination at math later in life, such as in their teens or twenties. Ed Witten is an an example of this. Von Neumann was hardly the only Hungarian Jew who had an early start, but by being so smart, far outpaced his other 'Martian' peers. We need to find a way to raise IQ . Sure, Magnus Carlsen got an early start, but his IQ is also legit higher than probably most or all his competitors too.

By 13, Magnus Carlsen’s skill equaled that of a 40yo Garry Kasparov)

his IQ is way higher too. IQ vs ability is not linear, so an extra 40 points is not being 40% better than someone with an IQ of 100 but many magnitudes smarter.

IQ vs ability is not linear, so an extra 40 points is not being 40% better than someone with an IQ of 100 but many magnitudes smarter.

Again, i don't think our understanding of consciousness and cognition is nearly as good as we like to pretend it is and and this sort of fetishization of Goodheart's Law sticks out to me as an obvious pitfall.

Is an extra 10 - 20 points over the median result in a significant advantage over said median? Sure. But i would also caution against reading too much into it. My alma mater may not be as prestigious as Oxford or Cambridge but it is reasonably prestigious (im confident that you'll have heard of it) and having pursued a degree and subsequently made my career in mathematics I've had a lot of dealings with both precocious kids and MENSA-types and can tell you that IQ does not neccesarily translate into intelligent behavior or cognitive function. The Sheldon Cooper archetype exists and they tend to be far less fun or functional in IRL than they are portrayed as on TV. I have nothing to base this on aside from my own observation but my impression is that there is an inflection point where (to the degree that IQ is real) the upsides of "number go up" become overshadowed by the downsides of nuerousises, mental illness, addiction, Et Al. I think that the thing set a lot of the "great geniuses" a part is not thier raw intelligence as much as it is thier ability to be botb highly intelligent and highly functional at the same time.

more like 50+ points above the mean , and IQ is necessary but not sufficient

If its not sufficient, how do you prove that it's neccesary?

I'm not the commenter you were replying to, but trivially, if all people with trait C (prodigies, 10x engineers, etc) exhibit both trait A and trait B, while people with only A or B do not exhibit trait C, you could say that trait B is necessary but not sufficient.

In this example, you could say that trait C (prodigy) requires traits A (IQ, intelligence, whatever) and trait B (conscientiousness, focus) or whatever trait D (open-mindedness to explore new research avenues, low neuroticism to avoid some of the pitfalls of high IQ, etc).

The evidence on chess and IQ is mixed, with several studies finding no correlation between IQ and Elo within players. However, this meta analysis found huge correlations (~0.25). Still, lots of room for other factors. Many top GM's are adamant that chess players aren't particularly smart. Perhaps they're all being humble but it makes a lot of sense. Chess ability is comparatively narrow compared to IQ testing. Magnus has the best brain for chess, but much of that might not generalize to IQ. (iirc Magnus has given interviews where he tries to dispel the notion that he is a genius, stating that he was never at the top of the class academically).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616301593

agree, Among top chess plyers in general, a super-high IQ is not that important , but to be among the absolutely best in such a crowded, competitive field, then IQ matters a lot, i would assume. CHess is not as g-loaded as math, but still g loaded to some extent given you need to memorize moves and think fast enough or ahead .

IQ is an absolute requirement, but no amount of IQ will lead you to being a chess great if you started the skill at 16. Ed Witten seems like a bizarre anomaly as far as STEM goes, and I wonder how much his father taught him physics as a child — it may be that he had some childhood expertise but momentarily decided to pursue journalism.

he is an outlier and his dad probably helped in some way. But other examples are Peter Scholze and June Huh. The former only became interested in math at 14, and then, boom, best in the world by 2010.

Are you sure about Scholze? I couldn’t find anything but this

Scholze started teaching himself college-level mathematics at the age of 14, while attending Heinrich Hertz Gymnasium, a Berlin high school specializing in mathematics and science. At Heinrich Hertz, Scholze said, “you were not being an outsider if you were interested in mathematics.”

And his parents were in STEM, likely teaching him at an earlier age than his specialized high school.

it's not like he started at 10 or earlier like Erdos or Tao. age 14 is late compared to those child prodigies. another example is Maryam Mirzakhani, who took up math in her mid teens, and then also went from 0 to 100 seemingly instantly, winning contests and such.

We don’t know if his interest in math began at 14, only that by 14 he started teaching himself college-level math. In Maryam’s case, she enrolled in a specialized math middle school, so she started focusing mostly on math at 11-12. Anyway, when I read that these prodigies started at ~11-14, I think that it’s sad that they didn’t start at 5. Surely if they started at 5 they would be even better.

Magnus Carlsen at age 13 was substantially weaker than Kasparov; I suspect the notion they were equals comes from the fact they drew a rapid game, but such upsets like that aren't unheard of (and Kasparov beat him in their next encounter, knocking him out of the tournament).

his IQ is way higher too.

I'm extremely dubious of this. What's your source?

Sure, Magnus Carlsen got an early start, but his IQ is also legit higher than probably most or all his competitors too.

Starting young (below 10 at a max, ideally below 8) is essential to eventually playing chess at the highest levels. There probably isn't a single player in top 100 who didn't start learning the game before this cut-of (and I suspect 90% of them achieved the GM title before they were 20). The chance to rapidly absorb thousands of patterns while your brain is still plastic is an opportunity you only get as a child. Anyone who's spent much time playing chess will know that children improve dramatically quicker than adults, primarily because they've still got the mental wiring to make great leaps in their understanding of the game in a very short time.

Magnus Carlsen was a prodigy in almost every regard, not just a chess prodigy. His spatial recognition and fluid memory abilities were very advanced at a young age, suggesting a very high full-scale-IQ, not just being specialized at chess.

From wiki:

Carlsen showed an aptitude for intellectual challenges at a young age. At two years, he could solve 500-piece jigsaw puzzles; at four, he enjoyed assembling Lego sets with instructions intended for children aged 10–14.[12]

Kasparov's IQ is widely cited as 135, which is good, but not that impressive. I would bet it's a lot lower than that of Magnus Carlsen.

Magnus Carlsen at age 13 was substantially weaker than Kasparov;

They faced different competitors. Given how optimized chess has become, Magnus Carlsen faced harder opponents and a much deeper talent pool. In 2004, when he lost to Kasparov, Magnus was just 13. It would be another decade until he would become the world chess campion and hit the peak of his abilities. A more apt comparison would be adult Magnus vs Kasparov.

They faced different competitors. Given how optimized chess has become, Magnus Carlsen faced harder opponents and a much deeper talent pool.

Carlsen has also benefited from the advances in theory and training methods that have occurred over the last few decades. If Kasparov were playing today and were able to take advantage of these resources he'd most likely be even better than he was at his peak.

A more apt comparison would be adult Magnus vs Kasparov.

That's pretty open debate among chess players with plenty of people taking either side. Neither is generally accepted by a majority of players to be more talented than the other.

I was thinking about this with respect to social skills recently. I don't have good social skills and neither do my parents. I'm sure it's partly genetic, but my grandmother had incredible social skills. She remembered everybody and she remembered details about them. She was an excellent conversationalist who never ran out of things to talk about. Even into her late nineties she maintained an active social life, going out and making new friends. She never passed on an opportunity to meet a new person and she'd remember them. Her brother was also similarly talented, in particular being really good at telling hilarious stories, which he had an endless supply of.

I used to think this was entirely innate, but I learned that the house she grew up in had a constant stream of visitors. My mother told me that every time she visited her grandparents, there were always visitors and they'd come for half and hour and then leave. Then someone else would come, all day every day for years as far as she knew. My grandmother and her brother would have spent their childhoods entertaining and talking to adults. I also know that , as children, they did a lot of visiting themselves. For Christmas, they would go to each house, stop for a while and talk to the family there, and then move on to the next one.

This is completely different than how I grew up, where adults would only visit occasionally and as children, we wouldn't talk to them much. I think the way my grandmother was raised played a big role in the development of her social skills.

Social media maybe to blame, or TV. Technology gives more ways for people to socialize at a distance or to disengage.

I think the idea you’re looking for is apprenticeship. And I think they did start teaching kids to do useful things early. But it seems at least from my reading that the activity started at 7 and didn’t get serious until later.

Without licensing, how can an average homeowner tell the difference between a plumber whose work will catastrophically fail in 6 months and one whose work is unlikely to do that?

A plumber whose work catastrophically fails in six months will be sued and will go out of business.

For the sake of argument: that’s after six months of doing shoddy work at dozens of job sites, plus however long the court cases take.

Ehh, depends on the kind of electrician and plumber, and what those electricians and plumbers are actually doing. There are a lot of plumbers and a smaller number of electricians(and an even smaller number of HVAC techs, although I’m calling anything with Freon outside of the realm of what a homeowner can do even if good with tools) who do solely easy residential service calls. But most have a body of knowledge out of reach for the average homeowner which they have to call on at least occasionally.

You cannot put vehicle automotive Freon gages on a home air conditioner, they won’t fit.

although I’m calling anything with Freon outside of the realm of what a homeowner can do even if good with tools

Before they made you get a license, and for a lot of people long after, homeowners did do their own work with Freon. It's not rocket science, it's just reading gauges.

Metering devices were different in 1990. TXV’s genuinely make measuring Freon more complicated.

I agree it isn’t rocket science- I could teach you to do it in an afternoon and trust you to do it right after a couple days supervision- but at that point you are no longer an ‘average homeowner’.

And understanding the proper use of vacuum pumps and fittings; there's a few decent gimmicks and tricks to doing it right rather than right-enough and to minimize lossages. Similarly, there's some relatively subtle mistakes you can make with home wiring, especially older installs.

But they are learnable, especially these days where there's pretty good video tutorials everywhere online.

I agree in a way. Fundamentally, the biggest problem with meritocracy is that it’s extremely inefficient. Biology is a meritocracy of its own. Meritocracy as an institution is superfluous. But there’s no need to sort people even aged five. Just allow people to be naturally sorted, make no special effort, in fact require a very special effort to transcend one’s destiny at birth.

Taking other replies into consideration, I would suggest instead getting kids very good at developing intrinsic motivation, something along the lines of operationalizing and scaling the writeup here, instead of applying top-down selection without access to the contents of the student's head. I think this means refactoring your instrumental goal into "detect native talent applicable to a specialty, if any, and supply every resource towards maximizing development towards it if it's desired." This reflects my bias towards individualism and market-based solutions rather than top-down assignments, especially given the massive uncertainties we have around intellectual development timelines.

I'm interested in this topic. One thing I've found for myself again and again is that having a generalized concept of knowledge, with a wide variety of subjects at my disposal, has improved my general ability to both pick up new skills and excel at them. Maybe that's not enough to offset the skill that comes from early specialization in an individual, not sure. But maybe there's value to the field as a whole from having creative thinkers who can take concepts from one area and apply them to another. I don't think you have to look too far to find example stories where people who are newcomers to a field or to a company are able to point out key problems with it, and change things for the better. Or even to find example stories about automaton-like humans who were trained from birth to perform music who have nothing to write about.

I don't know as much about other domains, but I know a bit about music. Like a lot of people I started in the school band, took lessons as a kid, was in some ensembles in college, but never thought about actually making a living from it. I have played enough to have met some very skilled players over the years, and am acquainted with even more. All the real maestros I've known in my life yes, started young, but they also had at least one parent who was a professional musician at some level, even if its just a highschool choir director. Many of the musicians mentioned above also are the children of musicians. Just growing up surrounded by that world is a huge advantage, IF it ignites something in the child. This is a big IF. No amount of 'pushing' the child into music can really substitute for that internal experience that only some kids get when they're young and exposed to music through a skilled parent, usually around 4 or so. The best guitarist I know is the son of a professional guitarist father and a singer mother. He became fixated on the guitar at 5 years old and was playing 5-10 hours a day by the time he was 10, absolutely obsessed, and has been playing professionally since he was 15. He has 2 brothers and a sister who were somewhat musical as kids, had the same support system in place, but it just didn't take. They went on to be an engineer, doctor, and career naval officer.

Just having a training or educational program to force young kids into isn't enough. Something has to resonate within the child as well to get the exceptional results as an adult you see in the above examples. I've met a lot of people who were, in their opinion, forced into piano, violin, or other prestige instruments as kids, sometimes for over a decade of constant practice. As soon as they got to college and started on a career track in some other high status domain they abandoned music as fast as they could. They never liked it, it was an affectation of their parents own status seeking. In my estimation it takes three components: first, the formal educational/support system mentioned above. Actual correct instruction. Second, internal motivation that can often be described as obsession, like they become addicted to the pursuit as a child, and finally raw biological/genetic talent/potential. This last one is tougher to capture, can't really be instilled, and people just have it or they don't. In music some people just have an amazing ear, as it were, and a memory for music and ability to create/recreate that exceeds what can realistically be taught. A good example of a professional like this is Tori Amos. She had pianist mother, 6 years of conservatory (5-11, she seems to have lacked the raw discipline to go further as she was expelled at 11 for misbehavior), but her innate talent is insane. I'm not really a fan of her music, but I recognize a truly exceptional born-maestro when I meet one. She could perfectly recreate piano pieces from recordings at 5 years old, before she started conservatory, and can easily demonstrate this ability now in her 60s. I've known many very good pianists with decades of experience who can't even begin to recreate by ear like this. Jacob Collier is another example. (as an aside most of the people I've known like this tended to be personally irritating people, not unlike the portrayal of Mozart in that movie from the 80s. Maybe I'm just envious though)

I feel like professional sports are similar to this, but know less about it. My own innate musical talent is ok, probably above average, but no where close to some of the people I've played with who started as kids, took to it like a fish to water, and had the early support and instruction. They're like a different species.

All the real maestros I've known in my life yes, started young, but they also had at least one parent who was a professional musician at some level, even if its just a highschool choir director. Many of the musicians mentioned above also are the children of musicians.

I think it's genes . Same for athletes. it's not a coincidence that the children of professional sports players also tend to get into sports or have above average ability. however, the apple can still fall far from the tree or roll and there is a lot of regression. Brony James for example is only 6′ 2″ compared to his much bigger and better dad. Freeman Dyson's son , a science writer, is quite a step-down from revolutionizing theoretical physics as his dad had done.

Beware of making generalizations based on data with massive survivor bias. Yes, the individuals extremely successful in their field may have started young, but you also need to consider all the kids that were pushed into a field just as early. If at five you try to ascertain a kid's interest (ballerina!) and then push them into it with rigorous training (hours of ballet classes!), sure, you will get reasonable competency, but not Anna Pavlova quality. Meanwhile, there is this massive influx of ballerina-wannabees where already there is a glut.

I agree with your idea that it would help to introduce a child to various useful pursuits and to support it in those pursuits in which it shows interest and aptitude. (So something like the Montessori method.)

I think this depends on what you mean by pushing. There are ways to incentivize and promote childhood expertise that don’t revolve around “I will punish you if you don’t train for hours every day”. You can put a child in formative social contexts where their identity becomes tied to the skill, and where they want to master the skill in order to enhance their reputation in the social context. A bad thing to do would be to threaten your child to be a pianist. A good thing to do would be to show him how amazingly well good pianists are treated socially, how they get to go on adventures around the world, how the skill is valuable, how beautiful the music they make is, present them in front of a kind pianist who they now want to please… once their identity has been changed, then you can gently criticize their worst habits of laziness. I recall reading a study on this (child prodigies) and the author noted that the first months of skill development must purely involve play, interest, and fun. The hard training comes later in the same way it does for soccer players — but surely no one would think a top soccer player ought not be forced to train.

If you take the Chomsky example, you can imagine he was eager to please his father and father’s friends. The Magnus example, he was eager to accrue as many wins and titles as he could. There’s an element of, like, gentle propaganda here.

Yeah, for sure. Kids being pushed/prodded into extracurriculars or enrichment is par for the course in high-SES areas; few become any good.

But in music performance and sports, we do find that the younger they start the better they are.

This is why universal-pre-k did not live up to the hype .Early gains, if any, fade by teens.

It would seem there are some things that benefit from a focus on hyperspecialization at an early age, and some things that don't.

Chess and gymnastics? Absolutely. Medicine or personal training? Not so much.

Totally agree. The practice of Medicine just isn't that deep. It's some pattern recognition (sick / not sick), extracting the right features from the patient (patient says "man my chest feels weird" and figuring out if they mean chest pain, shortness of breath, etc.), heuristics (this cluster of signs and symptoms matches this), and then a short decision tree (D-dimer --> CTA).

It turns out that at the end of that relatively shallow decision tree, if you can't figure it out, 99% of the time it's not because there's a Dr. House moment waiting on the other side, it's because nobody knows. Sometimes that's -- well we've discovered that you have stage IV pancreatic cancer. Here's a clinical trial but otherwise that's the end of human knowledge. Sometimes it's "well, I don't know why your chest feels weird, but we've ruled out the bad stuff so let us know if it gets worse!".

And obviously there's bad doctors who can't go through that without fucking something up along the way. Maybe there's even a lot of them? But outside of a small handful of surgical subspecialties (like you do open heart surgery on babies), I would guess that there's not much difference between an 90th percentile doctor and a 99th percentile doctor -- and almost certainly not between 99th percentile and 99.9th percentile.

I hope you're not a doctor.

As is usual when this kinda thing comes up, time for me to jump in and defend the field.

Doing medicine isn't what people expect.

For most specialties the hard part isn't knowing what to do for any specific patient (outside of fields with technical skills like surgery, or fuzzier guidelines with broader knowledge bases like Psychiatry), it's balancing all of the tensions of medicine. Some things are complicated. Radiology needs to know everyone else's shit. Neurology involves tough, at times technically challenging physical exams that are actually meaningful for diagnosis.

However most patients really only interact with primary care or basic bitch outpatient medicine, and then they go "I can toss this shit into google and get myself the diagnosis and the management." Yeah you can, we get paid for knowing the situations where the first hit on google is wrong, but that doesn't seem to excite people so let's talk about the other shit.

The hard parts of medicine include the long training period, brutal hours even as an attending physician, working nights, weekends, holidays, and 24+ hours in a row. Managing multiple types of intensely dysfunctional bureaucracy (the government, insurance, the hospital system, medical records), dealing with constant death and bad outcomes, writing notes that need to be clear for whoever is coming on to replace you and will protect you from getting sued if you fuck up, or if you don't, and doing all of this an environment where people are screaming, constantly trying to get your attention, and with a chair and keyboard that a homeless shelter would reject for being too gross.

It's the summation of requirements, including empathy and related fatigue and burnout, and also the necessary customer service/patient interaction skills, and the need to be doing stuff other than your work constantly like basic research and the need to continue to study continuously every year for the rest of your career...

Most doctors are teachers, researchers, and all kinds of other shit in addition to the doctor.

Balancing all this stuff without becoming an alcoholic or killing is absolutely a challenge and well, we see high rates of both of those things in the MD population.

I can't really think of many jobs that combine reasonably high intelligence, massively high work ethic, significant administrative burden, massive hours, catastrophically poor resources and equally disruptive customer service needs.

Takes a lot to balance.

To put some context in, most jobs involve things like lunch breaks and misc. downtime during the day where you can shoot the shit, unwind, and refocus. It's extremely common for a physician to work 16+ hours with barely enough downtime to piss and shove a flaccid banana down your throat like a two dollar hooker.

That's absolutely foreign to most sectors of the economy (including nursing).

I'll note once again that the way to fix "My job is hard mostly because there are so few of us that we have to work long shifts with many patients and it is exhausting" is to lower standards and introduce more workers into the job, making it easier and reducing the standard of quality needed to perform the job, which would allow those lower standard workers to perform at the necessary level.

What you're describing is the inefficiency of a medieval guild system engaging in rent seeking.

No no, it's not simple like that. For one, patient handoffs are so dangerous that one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.

For another, we've been part of a multi-decade long project to remove the "guild" and reduce training requirements to bring in replacements. When I first started complaining about this the jury was still out, it's back - and it doesn't work. NPs and PAs have much less exhaustive training requirements and have been in place and growing for years. They suck. They don't save any money because increased testing costs money (it's just a transfer from the doctor to the hospital) and the increased testing and consults create burdens any everyone else. NPs and PAs just consult everything, overloading the sub-specialists even more. Radiology is near breaking from unnecessary testing.

Train more doctors you say. Sure, fine. Except that that takes a long time, requires professors and other resources (we don't have enough cadavers for anatomy lab already) and things like surgery specialties don't have enough procedures to adequately train in a timely fashion. You need to see a variety of cases and patients and advancements in medical care have made this harder (which is mostly good but not for this specific issue).

Import foreign doctors you say. Okay better. Yes most foreign doctors are very much not as good. They are also mostly good enough, especially after retraining. But then you are stealing doctors from other countries, which you know, need them. You are also stealing jobs and wealth from Americans, which is sometimes justified but most of the people making this complaint don't like it when it happens to them or people they like.

In the longer term you'd kill Americans going into medicine, and Americans going into medicine and our absurd wealth is responsible for a huge amount of medical advancement.

Even if you fix the hours worked issue (which for most specialties is a problem during training more than anything), you won't remove the other major causes of burnout which include administrative burden, malpractice, American patients, fucking dealing with dying people, and so on.

patient handoffs are so dangerous that one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.

Man, the goalposts are moving around so much that I can't even remember if this is a home or away game anymore. But let's chalk that up to exhaustion and address what you're saying point by point.

Our learned friend in argument @was started this discussion with the statement:

The practice of Medicine just isn't that deep. It's some pattern recognition (sick / not sick), extracting the right features from the patient (patient says "man my chest feels weird" and figuring out if they mean chest pain, shortness of breath, etc.), heuristics (this cluster of signs and symptoms matches this), and then a short decision tree (D-dimer --> CTA). It turns out that at the end of that relatively shallow decision tree, if you can't figure it out, 99% of the time it's not because there's a Dr. House moment waiting on the other side, it's because nobody knows. Sometimes that's -- well we've discovered that you have stage IV pancreatic cancer. Here's a clinical trial but otherwise that's the end of human knowledge. Sometimes it's "well, I don't know why your chest feels weird, but we've ruled out the bad stuff so let us know if it gets worse!".

So sure, fine, we need a few hero-genius doctors willing to work insane hours for complicated patients. That doesn't really address the majority of patient needs, the majority of interactions that a typical individual has with a doctor and with the medical system, which typically are simple checkups and checkins and outpatient procedures and don't require constant observation. Why are we incapable of discriminating between those tasks and assigning appropriately?

{Nurse Pratitioners aren't good enough.}

That's fine, no one brought them up. The whole argument I'm making is that improving access to doctors will be a positive, even if the doctors that one has access to are not hero-geniuses.

Train more doctors you say. Sure, fine. Except that that takes a long time, requires professors and other resources (we don't have enough cadavers for anatomy lab already) and things like surgery specialties don't have enough procedures to adequately train in a timely fashion. You need to see a variety of cases and patients and advancements in medical care have made this harder (which is mostly good but not for this specific issue).

All the more reason to start today. Not doing something because it takes a long time is setting us up for the same problem ten years from now. Pipeline problems require time to address, but you have to start. And what we're seeing today is downstream of what we did 40 years ago:

While today’s physician shortage is accepted as fact, it may come as a surprise to learn that just forty years ago the exact opposite problem was being predicted: a physician surplus. Back in 1980, reports warned that too many physicians were being trained, and organizations like the Pew Charitable Trust and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) urged a moratorium on new medical schools and a reduction of first-year residency positions to restrict the entry of foreign medical graduates. In fact, there was such urgency in the 1990s to slow the production of physicians that the government began paying hospitals not to train doctors. In 1997, a consortium of medical organizations agreed that further steps should be taken to limit the number of physicians, recommending a decrease in funding for postgraduate medical education. That same year, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act capped residency training funds, which would remain frozen for the next twenty-five years.

The physician shortage of today is the result of policies then. Do you think that the percentage of Americans who meet those rigorous hero-doctor requirements declined as a result of those changes in slot-availability, or do you think that fewer Americans who were capable of doing the job were being trained? So now we're downstream of those policies facing a shortage, we should give up? It will take institutional knowledge and years of training-the-trainers to come to fruition, so we should never start?

Also, RE: cadavers. Pay for them. Or make it opt-out rather than opt-in. We've got the dead bodies. Not having enough cadavers is a question of will, not some immutable law of the universe.

Import foreign doctors you say...They are also mostly good enough, especially after retraining...You are also stealing jobs and wealth from Americans, which is sometimes justified but most of the people making this complaint don't like it when it happens to them or people they like.

So, at this point, we get the whole story lined up directly: adding a large number of inferior doctors will be good enough to keep the system moving, but it would reduce the wealth of existing stakeholders. This is called rent-seeking. Look, if you want to work brutal hours in a hellscape because it will make you good money, that's mostly* your right. But then don't complain about it and attack the solutions to the brutal hours and the hellscape. Either this is a good deal you want to preserve, or it isn't.

In the longer term you'd kill Americans going into medicine, and Americans going into medicine and our absurd wealth is responsible for a huge amount of medical advancement.

Why would making more residency slots available for Americans kill Americans going into medicine? You know what increasing med-school spots and residency requirements would kill? Affirmative action. If every qualified applicant gets a spot, who cares who gets priority. And why would improving on a system which you say sucks kill applications? You say:

To put some context in, most jobs involve things like lunch breaks and misc. downtime during the day where you can shoot the shit, unwind, and refocus. It's extremely common for a physician to work 16+ hours with barely enough downtime to piss...

Ok, let's get you a piss break, and maybe even lunch and an afternoon smoke break. People aren't going to want that job?

*There is some point at which I'm uncomfortable with a job being done at all if it requires inhumane working conditions or incredibly low wages. But we're talking about different universes than medicine, like when I saw the illegal immigrant tree planting crews that a landscaper near us hired for an industrial job planting three inch caliper birch trees without any power equipment. Three Americans could have done the whole job in a day with a mini excavator you can rent at home depot, instead these guys were breaking their backs for days to put them in, paid piecework so ultimately a significantly sub-minimum wage. At minimum wage it wouldn't be profitable to have them do it, and you'd have to have somebody with a backhoe doing the work.

  1. The average patient's average interaction with a doctor is not complicated. What patient's don't generally realize is that is a small fraction of the overall work done by doctors. This is true both because more complicated patient's and problems take up more time but also because they have more interactions, and more kinds of interactions. Family Medicine is bread and butter outpatient appointments, but nobody else is. Every single interaction Emergency Medicine starts complicated or can go from simple to complicated at the drop of a hat, and needs to be treated as complicated for that reason and for others like defensive medicine. Entire specialties like Radiology and Pathology never see a single patient or outpatient appointment, and complex surgical specialties will see someone for five minutes in the clinic but only after all the work is done. Even when the thinking part is simple other parts of the workflow or not. An anxious 20 year old comes in with chest pain. It's MSK or anxiety, not a heart attack. But if you have to rule out the heart attack just in case. Remembering to do that is not hard. Triaging when to do it when you are balancing everything else, knowing what level of intervention (EKG? Sure. Echo? Absolutely no. Trop? Maybe, but if we do serial trop the patient might leave) is hard, and communicating this to a stressed patient again while balancing all the other tensions in your job is hard. Non medical people, and even medical people underestimate the level of intellectual challenge in medicine, and yes it doesn't require as much horsepower as being NYC PE person, but it's not a small amount....but it's only one slice of the job.

  2. NPs/PAs are important because society decided that you are right, and they came up with this plan. And it sucked. It was decided to be the best plan, and it made everything worse. Other solutions will have similar problems, otherwise we'd have done them.

  3. All the billionaires get together and decide to donate a 100 billion dollars to improving U.S. medical education to increase supply of doctors. Some things can be fixed. Some things can't, even with infinite financial support. One of the biggest problems is that doctors want to go where the people and society are because they have to give up years of their lives in training and don't want to live in upstate NY or Arkansas. Fine. 100 billion. Offer them 3 million a year and they'll go to the places that need doctors. You can fix that problem with infinite money but we don't have infinite money and its extremely unpopular to raise doctor salaries so even if you increase the supply all you'll be doing is improving supply in a few geographic areas and depressing salaries in them. Not helpful.

Some things just can't be trained. Surgeons require a certain number of procedures to be proficient. If we don't do them often enough because we don't need to then you can't train them. Plenty of programs cannot handle more residents because not enough stuff is happening to adequately train more than we have. You can increase the numbers mildly in most specialties but somethings it just won't work. With 100 billion you could bribe people to get extra, unnecessary surgeries or to use outdated modalities that you only do in emergencies, but that would be grossly unethical.

  1. Year after year going into medicine becomes less popular. People quite and burn out and it's not because of the hours its because of other stuff like lawsuits, lack of respect, administrative burden. None of what you are talking about addresses any of those. Cut salaries by further increasing supply and you'll get less Americans in it.

  2. Foreign doctors aren't free and without issues. Patients complain about accented doctors all the time. Training is inferior in most countries. This is a real problem. Stealing them from other countries is an honest to god additional ethical issue you can't ignore. Often (like with other forms of importing) they become trapped and subjected to poor working conditions.

  3. What's your job? If you are posting here, probably tech? How do you feel about outsourcing? Americans are losing job, the product is terrible quality, most workers hate it and most employers hate it because it sucks, but go with it because cheaper is king. I don't want your job to go away, and you don't either. That applies here also.

  4. The typical model of rent seeking is something like NYC taxi cab medallions. You can more or less costly increase the supply with maybe some mild increase in traffic and a significant decrease in salaries. Again that is not the case here. Importing foreign doctors is vaguely possible if you are okay with decreasing the value of American healthcare (which is a massive segment of the economy) and reducing quality of care (which you don't believe is important) and reducing salaries (which you don't care about at all) but you can't do a lot to increase the total number of American medical grads because their isn't enough work to properly educate them.

Importing foreign doctors is vaguely possible if you are okay with decreasing the value of American healthcare (which is a massive segment of the economy) and reducing quality of care (which you don't believe is important)

You're putting a lot of words in my mouth, which I'll attribute to your repeatedly mentioned intellectual exhaustion.

Quality of care for the average patient will improve with increased access to doctors. Which can most easily be achieved by increasing the number of doctors.

I'm admittedly not in medicine, but growing up basically all my high school best friends wanted to go into medicine. Only one out of seven still wanted to go into medicine by junior year of college. These were all guys with SAT scores within a shout of mine in the mid 2200-2400 range. Why? Because they looked at the available slots and realized that if you have the misfortune to be white or Asian and interested in medicine, you face a series of gatekeeping processes that heavily limit your odds of making it. Return to the article I linked:

On March 17, 2023, nearly 43,000 medical school graduates will anxiously await the chance to continue their journey to become licensed physicians. But with just 40,375 available residency positions available, what will happen to the remaining 2,500 applicants that fail to match into a slot? While a lucky few may be able to ‘scramble’ into an open position, most will have no choice but to wait an entire year to reapply for the privilege of practicing medicine.

And that's after you get into med school.

The overall allopathic medical school acceptance rate for the 2022-2023 year was 43%. There were 55,188 applicants and 23,810 applicants were accepted. 22,713 students who were accepted actually matriculated.

I argue that much of the lack of interest from top students in going to med school is that 57% chance of not getting into med school at all, followed by extra gatekeeping and artificial systems that might still leave you without options and certainly leave you without prestige. Much of it tied up in racist affirmative action policies and destructive undergrad competition. Why not opt out and go into consulting or finance or tech, as many of them did, where you've got a comparatively high chance of making it into the industry and little gatekeeping to prevent your rise after you are employed?

Make it seem easier to become a doctor and more people will become doctors. Make being a doctor seem less horrendously awful, as you repeatedly claim it is, and more people will want to become doctors. Create more doctors and more of them will choose to move to Arkansas. These things are really economics 101 stuff.

Alternatively, I'm sure we're only a few days from Trump proposing that doctors shouldn't pay taxes.

As for foreign doctors, my general belief is that we should not restrict immigration of high human capital candidates. Every (legitimate) Masters degree should come with a green card stapled to it. If we need to do outside testing to insure quality, let's do it. But that's a technical issue not a strategic one. Regardless, that's not a solution I'm proposing.

More comments

one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.

How do you handle this when you do eventually have to switch off? I'm imaging trying to hand off a tricky piece of software to a new team every 24 hours - I guess a short interview plus some notes? How complicated is a complicated patient?

As is usual for us there's a whole bunch of different ways this happens. I'm going to simplify some of this for ease of reading.

Surgical rounding team (ex: post-op patients). A team of 4 residents manages 80 post-op patients they know nothing about. Some of them are very complicated, but they are complicated in a relatively small number of ways that can be picked up and put down as needed. Someone prints out a hand out from the computer that tells the residents everything they should need to know, which is generated automatically. Some particularly weird situations get handed off verbally. Nobody remembers what was said. Every X amount of hours the team changes over or new people come on and off. Shift times are generally vague, they exist on paper but emergencies are constantly happening and surgeries run long. One intern (first year resident) who doesn't really know anything about anything is hypothetically in charge of making sure floor patients don't die, while everyone else hides in the OR as much as possible. Handoff risk: low-to medium.

Radiology. You finish your worklist and everything is done. No handover. Ish. Handoff risk: low.

Medical floors. During the day 12 residents manage 120 patients. 2 them stay overnight or two fresh people going on to work 16 hour nights for a week straight. If something happens overnight you hope it's someone you know, otherwise you look at the chart, the notes are good because it's medicine, ideally if something complicated is expected to happen the day team told you about it. Sometimes they don't or it's a new problem. Fuck. Also the nurse will call you at 10pm asking for an update on the discharge plan because the family asked. You don't know because you've never met this patient before and never will. Handoff risk: normally low-to medium, but sometimes high.

Surgery. You don't hand off, you can't. Handoff risk: incredibly high, but because the docs stay until they are done, low. If the surgery has NPs/PAs involved (most typically Anesthesia). Can be hugely problematic since they don't have responsibility and try to stick with shift times.

Surgical/Medical ICU. Patients have failures of multiple organ systems. Documentation is good and on paper tells you what is up. In real life you lose track of how often fluid or blood products went in. Complicated stuff happens constantly. You takeover a patient and have to tell their kids and their mom is going to die. You've never meet the mom. Actually that was the other patient. This person is a dad and is fine. Fuck. Okay now someone else is dying. How many units did the first person get again? You've worked 90 hours a week for the last two weeks. Handoff risk: fuck my life.

Obviously I'm making this sound more ridiculous than it is for the most part, but in real life we do endeavor to write good documentation that supposedly allows an oncoming doctor to pick up the patient, we have handoff reports with automatically summarized information, and a verbal signout (or written via computer for like a weekend daytime doc on a psych unit) happens. But the reality and complexity of the situation often gets in the way.

Lots of research has been done to get this as safe as possible, and it works to some extent, but you can't substitute for actually knowing the patient and being the one who did the surgery or admitted them last week.

Thank you very much for the explanation.

This is exactly what I think every time I see the

24+ hours in a row

argument. It seems pretty likely it's easier to select three people who can competently work 8 hour shifts than one person who can competently work after being awake for 24 hours.

Totally agree. The practice of Medicine just isn't that deep. It's some pattern recognition (sick / not sick), extracting the right features from the patient (patient says "man my chest feels weird" and figuring out if they mean chest pain, shortness of breath, etc.), heuristics (this cluster of signs and symptoms matches this), and then a short decision tree (D-dimer --> CTA).

This is being a nurse, not a doctor. Doctors can triage, but also have to understand the intricacies of the body well enough to publish research or prescribe drugs.

What percentage of doctors publish research?

To be clear- childhood hyperspecialization is inherently a gamble, and you’re SOL if it doesn’t work out. In other developed countries it’s very common for most people to start specializing in their teens, but not 5. I suspect the efficiency loss from childhood hyperspecialization not working out more than offsets any hypothetical Doogie Howser MD, at least for hoi polloi.

The USA can’t do this because of the predictable variance in who would go to hauptschkulen.

SOL? Hardly. The child or young adult will just find something else he or she enjoys. A hyperspecialization program will weed out those who show little promise anyway or who are disinclined.

Was going to say, if you start specializing your kids in something that early you better hope that something does not become obsolete or is economically unrewarding when it comes time to cash in on that skill 15-20 years later.

Seems like you could instead teach a range of possible complementary skills and teach them to find their own particular niche based on these skills and their interests and preferences.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats