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Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.

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This is why it's useful to look up stats when we have them.

For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...

Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.

This is some fascinating insight. Do you think that the things being compared are [homeschooling] and [fighting grizzlies]?

I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.

Given the subject of the thread and the comment I replied to: yes?

I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.

Isn't that true of public school kids who do/don't take the ACT as well?

My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?

We didn't have that at my school. Unless it's super widespread, it's probably not what's behind the different test results.

An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.

What a horrible story to share.

I didn't see it as horrible. I saw it as a story of human triumph. And good fortune.

I think the implication of the question is that one doesn't have a firearm

"fun" story and all, but the statistic in question is about people believing they could beat a bear in a fight with their bare hands, not with firearms.

That’s not a great example though, is it?

I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.

I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.

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