The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.
That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.
> genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead
that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.
Hubris? No, I don't have any amount of confidence to drive me to offer big, system-wide solutions. Because schooling and its issues are incredibly complicated and bring into play much, much more than just what happens inside the walls of a school building. One trivial example: students in Title I schools (read: poverty) have much higher rates of chronic health conditions. That's not really an issue in our wheelhouse, as a school, and yet we very much have to deal with it continuously. Pretty much everything in a student's environment, including their past, affects school, since school is where they spend most of their day. Yet people think you can just ignore all that and focus on teaching specific content or skills. Like kids are, academically, brains in vats, untouched by environment or circumstance.
Sustained initiative from people like yourself, backed by policy and support from the government can do wonders. And I and most people in this thread are grateful for what you do on the ground level already.
Sometimes abrasiveness is warranted.
Parent didn’t say so explicitly, but there’s really no blog post you can write that is “how to escape from poverty as a teen in high school.” Thus, the problems with this one are not fixable. Off top:
* what’s the opening line of Anna Karenina, again? There are so many disparate challenges that poor kids can face that are more urgent than “get good exercise and send cold emails for jobs” that you couldn’t even fit them in their own book.
* even writing the blog post at all assumes these kids are reading hacker news which is, uh, cavalier. there are zillions of people hawking advice that these kids would need to sift through to even decide to follow this blog. Parents, friends, teachers, influencers, Andrew fucking Tate are all prescribing life strategies, why would they listen to your blog? Moreover, if you’re an impoverished kid who has somehow found HN and for some reason values its advice, you’re already on a better track than your peers, and you likely don’t need the advice!
* in fact, this blog is anti-advice for these people. Probably the single most valuable decision I made in my youth was to always refuse all peer pressure no matter what until I was out of my hometown. Peer pressure is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS for these kids. They’re not Brock Turner, they’re not getting off easy and free because of daddy. one mistake can derail their whole lives. To read this guy say “don’t worry about peer pressure, it’s the spice of life” frankly pisses me off.
The real answer for these kids, again, is to get lucky until we get our shit to get as a country to make life less treacherous and unforgiving for those with less means. Unpopular here on HN, I guess, but the US is not a meritocratic libertarian tech utopia, some situations don’t have a reliable self-directed escape strategy, and not everything can be fixed by the perfect blog post.
edit: also the audacity to be like “here are some advantages of being underprivileged that you can leverage” is its own headache entire… “you won’t have to unlearn as many wrong ideas about the world”? Absolute nonsense
> I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.
doesn't that somewhat justify the anger of the parent comment (who presumably "knows enough")?
If the author doesn't know enough about the topic, why the need to pontify? They could just stfu and have an opinion in topics on which they do have meaningful contributions. Not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything.
The parents are dysfunctional people churning out the next generation of dysfunctional people. It’s an intergenerational cycle that is nearly impossible to break.
You don’t know what’s wrong or where to look for help and in my case I was even proud of my parentification for making me “strong and resilient” while minimizing the bad things as a coping mechanism.