Can We Scale Cultures That Support Learning?

Exceptional people grow up in exceptional milieus

This seems to be true for >95 percent of the people I looked at.

These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exception... See more

If the culture in a school is at odds with its pedagogical goals, energy will be wasted trying to deal with the friction between these value systems: You get disruptive students and motivation issues. An educator might have an easier time if they found a way to align the peer culture with the pedagogy. But crafting aligned cultures is not how mains... See more

Until now, skills have been a major differentiator for humanity. However, in the age of AI, taste will become more important than skills as much of skill-based work and productivity is offloaded to compute. Taste seems more scarce these days, and increasingly differentiating in the age of AI. This assertion makes me think about the development of t... See more

Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app will enable yo

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Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), ... See more