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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.
Did societies that placed children in hereditary professions from childhood outperform societies that allowed adults to choose their own path?
...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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The United States of America. Not only is this literally true comparable to other cultures throughout history, it's our national creed.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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