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Comment by wendyshu | Hacker News Reader

> Education ... should be egalitarian

Why?

We shouldn't have to explain that it's plainly obvious that society massively benefits from an educated populace, especially one that claims to be a democracy. There are incredibly broad benefits from a reduction in crime to the expansion of the skilled labor pool.

I've noticed that many people in tech seem to disregard or disrespect educational institutions. So I'll turn it back on you. What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an equal opportunity for a high quality education? Do you hate living in an educated society that much? Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?

Very uneducated so I can’t comment on this but I’m living in a Malthusian nightmare and definitely wouldn’t recommend it :)

>Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?

Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared. Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental because that other person might see what you're doing and take credit for or steal your work; some say helping another with your skills/time and not charging money is peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool ever invented and we should measure everything with it, including a person's worth.

That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity could use at least 10 of you).

I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN comments enough.

Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment, yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.

What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an equal opportunity for a high quality education?

Opportunity, sure. But an opportunity to get a good education is not the same as actually getting good education. Because every child is different and we want to spend a lot more efforts to educate a child who shows genius level potential than on a child who has zero interest in anything. This is assuming limited educational resources - an assumption challenged by AI education initiatives.

If I have two sons, and one is bright and curious and hard working, while another is dim and lazy, the first one will get 95% of my attention.

The biggest predictor of whether or not a child is "gifted" is the amount of attention they receive as children from their parents and from the education system. Actual genetically driven genius is rare. The kids that gifted child programs benefit are largely the children of affluent parents and not the so called geniuses of our generation. They mostly serve to create a two tier education system within public schools. I'm not saying we tolerate disruptive kids or that we shouldn't reward merit, but this kind of rich kids get the resources and attention system is counterproductive to the outcome you seem to want.

Furthermore, there is zero proof that AI will give us the kind of system that will allow us to shore up the limited education system. The actual solutions to many of these problems are things like paying teachers more to retain the best people, giving kids free lunch, funding after school programs and one on one tutoring etc etc etc.

But doing those things is hard, so tech bros who believe in the myth of the gifted child, who don't have any background in education at all, come in with these systems that they think are silver bullets, then are shocked when they don't work, blaming the unruly children of the proletariat on their failure to fix anything.

And what will you do with the lazy one? Kill him? Let him die when in problems? Maintain it throughout his live? Ignore him and let him live a miserable life?

The lazy one gets exactly the same *opportunity* to have a good education as the bright one. Do you see the difference?

They often don't have the same opportunity but I'm glad we as grown adults are sitting here and judging a child on their dedication to academic rigor.

> I'm glad we as grown adults are sitting here and judging a child on their dedication to academic rigor.

In a conversation about academic performance, what were you expecting?

I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know: in a conversation about resources being poured into academic outcomes, why is a child's athletic ability, or artistic ability, etc relevant?

We are comparing outcomes of investment into academic performance - do you expect this conversation about ROI to be completely without judgements?

We're talking about changing the entire trajectory of someone's life when they're a child because they find school boring when they're 8 years old. Talking about ROI and hard numbers about this makes your look like a ghoul. I think aggregate measures over years are required to accurately measure the impact educational investment, but we should pay teachers more and hire more of them to reduce class size because we have a moral obligation to do so, not just because we'd get an ROI.

> We're talking about changing the entire trajectory of someone's life when they're a child because they find school boring when they're 8 years old.

Maybe you are. We are not. No one is suggesting decreasing the resources made available to a cohort of children. We're suggesting increasing the resources for gifted children within that cohort.

> Talking about ROI and hard numbers about this makes your look like a ghoul.

How else are you going to discuss what is obviously a very important investment into humanity? Personal attacks, maybe?

Is it better to be egalitarian in education or is it better to focus on raising the floor, or raise the median, or providing equal opportunity? They aren't the same thing, and it's very possible that the education system that focuses on one will miss out on parts of the others. You can make moral arguments in favoring each of those options (or even focusing on raising the average).

You can optimize for economic benefit, innovation, fairness, or passions. Their is plenty of non-draconian reasons for preferring each.

It's better to be egalitarian. The clientele of hackernews is predominantly people working in high paying industries, who were lucky enough to get the resources and opportunities to get there, in addition to a considerable amount of hard work. I pushed hard to get where I am today and personally benefitted from gifted child programs. What terrifies me is the idea that being born to slightly different parents or in a slightly different area could have had drastic effects on my outcome. I believe we should make policy decisions assuming any one of us could have been born to the poorest and most negligent parents imaginable. Making any other assumption is being dishonest about the benefits afforded to you by your upbringing.

Wouldn't it be better to raise the floor? If given the choice of a higher floor but a higher ceiling of education quality vs equal but lower quality for everyone, I would prefer the former.

Would this raise the floor? Or would this be "we can hire 5% as many teachers and make the students interact with robots to save money."

Evolution.

The human species has only existed as such for ~100,000 years. Almost all human societies have failed.

We should spread knowledge far and wide for the same reason adaptive mutations spread through a population: shit happens.

Rocks fall out of the sky.

The Earth is jelly with a thin "crust" of congealed goo on top. So-called "solid ground" is thinner relatively than the paint on a globe. It shakes.

(As a kid I lived through Loma Prieta[1], I've seen the earth roll like Santa's belly. We are small!)

We should go through life like "an old man crossing a river in winter", and things both precious and free, like knowledge, should be the treasure of every person, no matter how poor or weak, for tomorrow they may be all that's left.

That's why Wendy, that's why.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake

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