The Pursuit of Real Life Superhero Training
I just want to build a thermodynamic machine that makes people insanely skilled as efficiently as possible.
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I like math, coding, analytics, cognitive science, science of learning, talent development…
but these are all means to an end: real life superhero training.
I just want to build a thermodynamic machine that makes people insanely skilled as efficiently as possible.
Right now the situation in education that if you want to level yourself up, you push yourself to take STEM honors classes and take them seriously, you do everything that’s expected of you and do it well…
and you quickly hit a ceiling where any extra effort has extremely poor ROI.
You put in quite a bit more effort for only marginally better results: instead of learning math up through precalc on the standard track, you learn up through calculus on the honors track.
You put in quite a bit more effort into climbing the math ladder but only end up one rung higher, still knowing nothing above basic calculus and little to no coding.
This ROI is so low that it’s an embarrassment to humanity. It’s just unacceptable.
Of course, you can climb higher if you go off on your own outside of the school system – but currently this is such a high-friction move that, of the students who would do it if it were frictionless, few students actually do it.
So what I’m focused on is this: Let $A$ be the total student population, $B$ be those who want superhero training, and $C$ be those who actually do it despite all the needless friction.
We have $A \gg B \gg C$ and the issue I’m fixated on is $B \gg C.$ I know that $A \gg B$ comes down to internal desire, but the $B \gg C$ part comes down to friction, and I want to remove that friction and turn it into $B \gtrsim C.$
(And as we bring $C$ closer to $B,$ I’m sure that $B$ will also move closer to $A.$ The question is just “how much closer,” which is going to be exciting to find out.)
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