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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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