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Notes -
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.
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.
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