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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.
This is the most wonk I've seen in a while. Please never work at an influential think tank or come near the levers of power in a country where I plan on spending any real length of time. I don't mean this to be offensive, and I mean this in the kindest possible terms - people like you terrify me.
First off the bat, your headline is full of assumptions that immediately set off the calibrations on my suspicion meter. Definitions of "We", "should", and "probably" that I find questionable aside, especially if they're in the same sentence as five-year-olds, the "why" is the first question I zero in on.
Your argument, plainly put, is that to be the best in the world at anything, you need to start young, and that track should be decided by the age of five. Your evidence of this is that most prodigies start young. Even disregarding the massive sweeping implications of A=>B=>C=>D and Therefore E you've made in the above argument...
What do you think that world looks like?
The world already has massively disproportionate rewards for the prodigies (and by comparison, massive amounts of shit for those who can't reasonably compete with the prodigies to eat). I also doubt prodigies are fungible, I could do with one less YoYo Ma and one more Einstein, but stuffing YoYo Ma in a reasonably fantastic virtual reality simulator where he's force-fed the sum of Einstein's life experiences and education will not produce a directly comparable Einstein.
I'll tell you what that world looks like. It's China, a country where the disposable people are fed into relatively metaphorical meat grinders and second place might as well have not tried. It is a country where most parents with the means and ability have shipped their children overseas to avoid the life-defining national state exam, the Gaokao, and cheating on all metrics to try and demonstrate your exceptional nature is rampant. It is a nation of immense human capital, of the tiny fraction of hyper-talented overachievers and a vast, forgotten achievement slum valley of the 99.9999% who have decided lying flat is the best answer to this hellish existence. The stress cost, on both the people in this achievement slum valley and the prodigies alike, is immense.
You finally get at the real meat of your objection, and why you've come up with this argument in the first place. What disgusts you is waste. Wasted potential. You are convinced that the waste of human potential directly equates to a waste of what could be spent on social improvement, and that mandatory skill training (i.e. public schooling or mandatory education or whatever) is highly inefficient. You're not alone in this thinking; I also despise waste. But given how literally everything in our world naturally optimizes for money, I'd rather there be less prodigies be turned to the effort of gaslighting me into buying more knicknacks or signing me up for more subscription services. The fact that they were trained to do it from age five isn't something I personally will care about when they're convincing me to pay for the air I'm breathing.
In fact, I am regularly surprised that mandatory education is not less efficient. Left to their own devices, state-sponsored education initiatives regularly come up with "improvements" to justify their own existence that decrease the efficiency more over time. We know how children learn math and how to read by now, it's well documented and studied, at this point "improvements" are about squeezing more blood from the rock or well-meaning but ideologically blinkered initiatives like No Child Left Behind. It's amazing that a teenager can even put together a complete sentence these days, to say nothing of their ability to navigate the digital panopticon that passes for the internet.
TTBOMK China's more "are you good at passing this inflexible multi-subject exam or not", not "are you especially good at this specific thing", which is almost the opposite of his point. @coffee_enjoyer's scheme reminds me far more of the Soviet Union's gifted-ed programs.
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