It sounds like your homeworld is populated by aspiring rationalists of the type you might find on LW. Or to put it another way, I think you are proposing a system based on typical-minding. You’d learn useful things in school without acting disruptively, you’d take bomb-making courses without using them to bomb the Jew who lives down the block, you’d find autodidactic computer programming very useful. You probably don’t like American football all that much, or at least, you haven’t played it. So your homeworld is an entire society like that.
It’s also vulnerable to the “beware fictional evidence” problem. Do you have a reason to believe that any substantial number of kids would make online friends through foreign language instruction, that are good enough for business partnerships? In the fictional evidence category, I’d also ask how foreign countries in your homeworld differ from ours. Becoming a business partner online with someone living in an authoritarian government may just export the authoritarian government’s influence on businesses. And what about countries full of scam artists who may not reciprocate and try to scam the “business partner”?
I played American football for two years. It was a lot of fun.
I had a online friend I made through foreign language learning provide a source of KN95 masks at the height of the COVID-19 shortage. He lives under an authoritarian government. Long-term relationships are one way how you avoid scams over there.
“I did this and it was great” is pretty much a subset of typical minding. Your own experiences are always going to include a combination of things that actually work in general, things that occasionally work if you get lucky, and things that work for people like you but don’t generalize.
It sounds like your homeworld is populated by aspiring rationalists of the type you might find on LW. Or to put it another way, I think you are proposing a system based on typical-minding. You’d learn useful things in school without acting disruptively, you’d take bomb-making courses without using them to bomb the Jew who lives down the block, you’d find autodidactic computer programming very useful. You probably don’t like American football all that much, or at least, you haven’t played it. So your homeworld is an entire society like that.
It’s also vulnerable to the “beware fictional evidence” problem. Do you have a reason to believe that any substantial number of kids would make online friends through foreign language instruction, that are good enough for business partnerships? In the fictional evidence category, I’d also ask how foreign countries in your homeworld differ from ours. Becoming a business partner online with someone living in an authoritarian government may just export the authoritarian government’s influence on businesses. And what about countries full of scam artists who may not reciprocate and try to scam the “business partner”?
I played American football for two years. It was a lot of fun.
I had a online friend I made through foreign language learning provide a source of KN95 masks at the height of the COVID-19 shortage. He lives under an authoritarian government. Long-term relationships are one way how you avoid scams over there.
“I did this and it was great” is pretty much a subset of typical minding. Your own experiences are always going to include a combination of things that actually work in general, things that occasionally work if you get lucky, and things that work for people like you but don’t generalize.
Okay, then change it to “you like American football less than the people who that statement was addressing like it”.