I think the question depends a lot of the social support that you have. I don’t think that an internet forum is enough social support to expect to be really productive while being completely alone.
If I unschooled, I would be engaged in many other activities with social support like internships, classes, and possibly even school extracurricular activities.
Historically, I have had no problem getting things done with no social support.
But the thing is, I will not be alone. I’ll be starting deadlined projects, out taking classes, doing research projects, interning with companies and nonprofits, potentially starting my own business...
Well if your parents won’t tolerate your unschooling, the lack of support network is likely going to make it an ineffective route.
Keep in mind that the value of formal schooling in the case of individuals such as yourself who’re capable of learning valuable skills under their own direction is not necessarily that it provides the best possible instruction in the skills you’d want to learn, but that it signals conscientiousness in a way that most people understand, and may offer practice in valuable skills you might not otherwise take the time to learn, like how to devote yourself to a task which is largely pointless in its own right in order to meet others’ expectations.
Do both. Stay in high school, and use that time to study and perfect the skills you care about. High school doesn’t take all that much attention to do well, you have LOTS of free time both during and after class. If you’re disciplined enough to unschool, you’re disciplined enough to make the effort to learn and improve in spite of school. If you’re not, then that’s an even better reason to not drop out.
Heh. I wake up at 7:00 AM, attend a full 7 periods with all the Advanced Standing classes I can, and leave at 3:15 PM. From there, I go to cross country, taking my time until 6:00 PM at the earliest. Then I eat dinner, shower… Then it’s 8:00 PM already and all my homework is there waiting. Then there are family activities, chores, distractions, and other projects I need to do thrown in. Did I mention I have a serious akrasia problem? Then I sleep at like 12:00 AM… Not that much time if you ask me.
So that suggests a middle ground between your current level of engagement and dropping out entirely. If there are things you think would be more valuable* than one of those activities, and you think you have the mechanisms to motivate yourself to do them, do so.
“Unschooling” won’t help with the lack of available time or motivation. It’s the wrong granularity to make your decisions on—think about how you spend individual hours of time, not how you identify your current lifestyle.
Which of those things (directed studying, sports participation, dinner, shower, family activities, distractions, other projects) do you not think you’re getting value from, and want to do less of? What do you want to do instead? For most sets of answers that pass the sniff test of reasonably long-term valuable, you’ll be better off making those tradeoffs within the traditional school framework than outside of it.
Edited to add: holidays and weekends are excellent natural experiments, and can help shape your beliefs about what you’d actually do with more self-directed time. If you undertook something over the summer that you think provides more long-term value to your life than one of your current activities, you should definitely consider continuing it. I’d recommend posting a more specific question on discussion or an open thread “should I give up cross-country in favor of building a telescope” or whatever the specific choice you’re making is.
leave at 3:15 PM. From there, I go to cross country, taking my time until 6:00 PM at the earliest.
Did I mention I have a serious akrasia problem?
I would look at these two things before considering dropping high school entirely. If you don’t intend on cross country having a positive effect on your college admissions, then you can exercise in a much more time efficient manner than 12.5hr/week long distance running. Your akrasia problem is not likely to disappear with increased free time and decreased structure.
Same here, if another datapoint helps. I’ve been out of school for almost two years now, and don’t feel like this has helped (it may or may not have hurt; I’m not convinced I’m calibrated well enough to say for sure).
In U.S. high schools, “cross country” is a long distance running sport.
It has the same meaning in Australia, schools or otherwise. (Obviously with exceptions based on context. If mountains in winter are involved skiing is likely involved for instance although “cross country skiing” would more often than not be said explicitly unless skiiing was already under discussion.)
I went to an online high school. Without going to an online high school, I would not have graduated at all. Here are some intermediate steps and questions that suggest alternative options that may be more palatable to both you and your parents:
Would your interests best be served by a school, or schooling, that is designed to get you through the minimum requirements with as little and as flexible work as possible, or a school, or schooling, that is designed specifically to challenge your intelligence to the very limit of its ability?
Would your interests be better served by an online high school program? How difficult is it to get in once you apply? Is the school you want to go to accredited? (Read about national and regional accreditation for both high schools and colleges.) If the school requires you to pay tuition, can you and your parents afford it?
What kind of paperwork would you need to complete to convince people who are supposed to keep you in school that you’re still going to be learning? How difficult/tedious is the paperwork to complete? If you withdraw and “homeschool”, will you still need to take the standardized state tests (US)? Will you have to make alternate arrangements for things like AP tests and the SAT tests because you are no longer going to your “neighborhood high school”?
Are you old enough to get a GED and skip straight to community college classes? How about Bard College At Simon’s Rock? Are you exceptional enough that a college’s admissions board would overlook your (presumed not very good) academic record and admit you anyway?
Can you take community college classes in place of some of your high school classes and get a dual high school diploma and Associate’s degree, or get an Associate’s degree in less than two years because of the credit you have already accrued in high school?
Would your interests better be served by psychiatric treatment, including but not limited to depression or ADHD medication?
I noticed a correlation between homework-related and personal project-related akrasia starting toward the end of high school and seriously picking up in college. I haven’t really untangled the mechanisms involved, but they do seem to feed off one another (most people screamed about priorities and refused to listen when I tried to point this out). I have not noticed that removing academic obligations has had a significant effect on my productivity (if anything, I feel like my output has slowed down since leaving college, but this may or may not be true; I could be shooting for constant productivity due to the lack of anything to fill my time, and levels could be close to normal but feel underwhelming without school to fill in the gaps.)
The main thing about the education system is not the learning; it’s setting up entry into the workforce. There are useful skills to be gained from attending college, but if you don’t establish connections and/or credentials for a job you have decent odds of getting, the cost might be a bit high. You could very well hone your world-impacting skills at college, but financial stability is the part you need to worry about. Especially the cost of attending college; student loans tend to last a long time if you’re attending an expensive school and don’t have some other means of paying.
A college degree is becoming the new high school diploma, from the sounds of it, so I’d be wary of avoiding college entirely, but cost/benefit analysis is crucial.
College does sounds pretty useful, so I guess the question is whether I should leave high school, unschool for 3 years, then reapply to college. If that does not significantly reduce my college admissions potential it would seem like it is the most strategic thing to do.
Why not apply to college right away? Not seeing the need for the 3-year waiting period. You won’t have formal qualifications anyway, so either you can convince them you know your stuff, or not.
Just as a social and economic matter, it seems to me to be overwhelmingly likely that dropping out of high school will do long term and maybe permanent damage to your ability acquire significant money and free time. Dropping out of high school is very likely to be the worst thing you can do with your life right now. On the other hand, getting straight A’s (which is not an intellectually challenging task) is likely to pay off more than anything else you can invest your time in. I’m not saying that that’s the way it should be, I’m just saying that that’s the way it is.
An hour spent on maximizing your grades in high school is for almost everyone one of the most financially efficient hours you will ever get an opportunity to spend. And you’ll need money if you want the independence necessary to make a difference.
Barring some extreme mitigating circumstances, top colleges will throw your application in the trash the moment they see anything but a high school diploma littered with A’s. They won’t read your writing sample, or your personal statement, and so they won’t know about any of your efforts to educate yourself. They do things this way because they get thousands of applications and they need a way to screen out ~70% of them without doing any real work. And if you’re white, male, and not attending a well-respected high school, it will take more than good grades, but that will at least get your foot in the door.
Unschooling is great, but if it comes at the expense of the kind of schooling where you get a piece of paper at the end with a bunch of A’s on it, then it’s very likely to be an economic and social disaster.
So here’s my advice: Don’t drop out of high school. Get nothing but A’s from now on. And spend the rest of your free time learning about what you find most interesting and valuable or hanging out with friends. Learning how to deal with people, both instrumentally and morally, is not a low priority.
I’m not sure, I just think that it’s overall quite likely. Admissions is probabilistic, in that you never know who you’re admitting given so little information, so you just want to admit those applicants who seem most likely to be successful students. It’s understood that not everyone who lacks a high school diploma with a bunch of A’s on it is going to be unsuccessful, nor is everyone with such credentials going to do well.
But suppose you were getting many more applications than you had time to read thoroughly, and further that reading and evaluating applications is a utterly miserable task. You’d probably come up with a way to weed out all those applications that are very unlikely to be worthwhile without really reading them. If you had to come up with a criteria for weeding people out, given high school GPAs, SAT scores, essays, cover letters, etc. what would you do?
Well, you can’t quickly process essays or letters. What you can do is put all the GPA scores and all the SAT scores on a spreadsheet, weight them however you like, and slash however many off the bottom so that you end up with a manageable number of applications and then read those. Most people with a just a GED or a bad GPA or a low SAT score are going to end up by the wayside. It’s a stupid, prejudicial way to handle any one application, but it makes sense as a way to deal with thousands.
This isn’t how everyone does it. But this is how a lot of places do it. And the more applications a school gets, the more likely it’ll employ such a method. And good schools get a lot of applications.
Each day, finish your homework before you work “on projects that would make [you] more effective.”
The best way for you to have a large impact on the world is probably to do well at school, get a high paying job, find worthy high impact charities, and donate money to these charities.
I think that’s the best guaranteed way to improve the world. There is almost no uncertainty. But I’d rather not subject myself to decades of monotonous work, especially since there are so many other organizations and individuals who could create an impact thousands or even millions of times more than mine.
I was thinking more along the lines of actually working at a nonprofit, starting businesses to raise money, something at least a little higher impact then earn several hundred thousand and donate it.
With those updated plans, which of my three options (or neither of them) are the best?
Eliezer is a profoundly unusual person who has had vastly more success than most people with his level of education.
decades of monotonous work
many people are able to find interesting high paying jobs in the for-profit sector.
especially since there are so many other organizations and individuals who could create an impact thousands or even millions of times more than mine.
This is also an argument for taking the donating money path to helping. Remember, money is a unit of caring.
With those updated plans, which of my three options (or neither of them) are the best?
It depends on your skill set, but I would guess (1) in part because of what your parents think. If you are a computer programming genius (i.e. someone is currently willing to pay you >$100/hour) then perhaps 3.
Having akrasia problems is an argument for staying in a highly structured environment.
My problem is that the akrasia seems to be partially caused by staying in a highly structured environment. I don’t have much trouble doing things I believe are beneficial towards my goals.
I currently believe if I pursued option 2 I could get into a top college just like I would have done if I stayed in high school but more useful things would get done.
If this belief is false, then my akrasia would be slightly reduced.
My solution to a similar problem: deliberately put off your school assignments until their deadlines are fairly close, then work on them then. Deadlines are great at increasing your motivation and helping you work in a more efficient way. If something increases your effectiveness so much, why not deliberately take advantage of it?
Do it carefully though… taken to an extreme, this idea can be hard on your mental health & cause burnout. I’d suggest staying very aware of all the stuff you need to do and scheduling a reasonably decent amount of time in your calendar to do it—just right before it’s due.
This seems an extremely risky strategy if one has not already become master at averting the planning fallacy. When akrasia is a serious issue, as it seems to be in this case, I’d expect this technique to be particularly high risk.
Carefully putting off assignments sounds like a potential solution, but usually assignments are assigned one day and due the very next. I have around 4 hours to get an average of 2 hours of homework done on school nights. But I fail to shift into homework mode which caused me to write this article at 10:00 PM last night, get 5 hours of sleep, then wake up early to finish studying because it seems easier in the morning.
If you work better in the mornings, is it possible to arrange things so you get to sleep and wake up a little earlier? Not ridiculously so, but if moving work time from night to morning lets you use it more efficiently...
(I did exactly this entirely by accident. The trouble was the part where it made it easier for me to forget assignments that needed doing, so while I got things done with less mental strain and without so much time wasted internally, there were more assignments that just got missed. A simple written agenda would probably avert this risk.)
Unfortunately, Akrasia still strikes in the morning and I don’t always have the motivation or energy to finish everything. But that’s only with minimal sleep due to procrastination the night before.
It seems like you’d do well to at least spend some time brainstorming and experimenting with solutions to this problem (ex: do your homework in a different part of the house, or at least take a short walk to get in to “homework mode”, smoke electronic cigarrettes or spray your face with water to stimulate yourself, set up website blockers to block your distracting websites past a certain time) before ditching school… it’s an option that’s always there.
Or just do your homework in the mornings, if that’s what works for you.
I’ve actially spend years trying to fix this problem, with little success. I’ve tried multiple books, read about every productivity system ever invented, tried thousands of articles over hundreds of websites… No luck.
Recently, I’ve been looking into Akrasia on Less Wrong because I thought the suggestions might finally have an impact. I memorized The Motivation Hacker (along with all the techniques shared in the Procrastination Equation). I’ve also tried PJ Eby’s materials. I found that unfortunately it had no impact on my akrasia at all :(
Do you have any recommendations? Am I doing something wrong? It certainly feels like it!
Thanks for your suggestions, I’ll give them a try and see how it goes.
I’ve tried multiple books, read about every productivity system ever invented, tried thousands of articles over hundreds of websites...
“Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,” he said, “and the tale is yet to run:
By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer—what ha’ ye done?”
Perhaps you just phrased yourself poorly, but the form of your answer does not suggest to me that you have, you know, actually made an effort, extraordinary or otherwise.
I believe the pomodoro technique had me accomplishing many tasks for one day, then it failed. It failed because I failed to start using the pomodoro method itself, I just procrastinated on starting it. I also got distracted while working. I either stopped working and never got on track again, or I forgot about the rules about distraction (record it, apply the 3 steps) and wasted a lot of time. Over time I just forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me, I’ll give it another go because it was so close to working and I can try different motivational techniques to get started.
I believe an “energy pill” (Elebra) also helped me get things done for several days before I succumbed to procrastination. I should try that again as well...
Idea for pomodoro technique: try making a 30 minute audio clip that consists of 25 minutes of “pomodoro timer noise” (some noise you condition yourself to concentrate on, e.g. find some waterfall clip or something), then 5 minutes of silence. Then play it on loop. Makes it easier to not get distracted when the timer is running and also ensures that the timer is always restarted. Make rules related to when you can turn off the looping, e.g. if you’re done with your homework for the day, or you spend at least 30 seconds writing down reasons to keep it on and decide that you should still turn it off even given those because you’re too tired to work effectively or whatever (see also). Maybe also make it give you a warning 30-60 seconds before your 5-minute break is going to end.
Given that you’ve failed at this so many times before, I’d recommend being extremely strict with yourself this time… really figure out in advance what the rules you’ll follow will be, brainstorm cases where you’d want to break them, and either add exceptions and decide to continue following them for every case that you brainstorm, and then be extremely anal about following the rules once you start actually using them. Additionally, probably make the rules pretty reasonable and easy to follow to increase your success odds even more (but still be an extreme stickler about following the rules you do set out; err on the side of following them too well). Also, if you’ve been failing at doing your homework a lot recently, I’d say give up on trying to do it ahead of time and just deliberately do it at the last minute for a few weeks, so you stop practicing the action of attempting to improve your study habits and failing (it sounds like you’ve practiced this a lot, and you don’t want to just keep practicing it. It’s not “practice makes perfect”, it’s “practice makes permanent”.) Have a day planned in advance when you will switch to the new pomodoro productivity scheme you’ve been working on… September 30, say (that’s a Monday, right?)
Since you asked me about the most effective technique I’ve used since this point, I started using the pomodoro technique with Beeminder. I have experienced a very dramatic increase in productivity. Thank you very much!
Unless you’re fairly unusual, you’ll probably need the papers that employers care about. Since you spend a lot of time at the school, that’s the time you need to learn to use more effectively. Here’s how I survive through mandatory lectures at university level:
wake up early
do all the fun and/or useful learning in the morning with a fresh brain before school, make anki cards
do all the useless assignments I’d hate anyways after and during school just before the deadline
study all the school topics beforehand, so I don’t have to fully concentrate during the lectures (listening stuff you can read is a gigantic waste of time)
review anki cards on my smartphone/laptop during the lectures, roughly listen to the lecturer so you don’t miss anything important
Obviously this might not be something that you can specifically do, but you get the idea. They still think I go there for their useless lectures. Can you utilize your commutes or some other time you think is part of your school day?
I’d vote for #1, with a side of, ”...learn as much useful stuff as you can on the side”.
Given the way our current society functions, a person who lacks a college graduation certificate is at a severe economical disadvantage; and a person who lacks the high school graduation certificate is practically economically crippled. Yes, world-saving skills are great, but they don’t pay the bills.
In addition, some colleges do indeed teach you important and useful skills, and thus getting into them and staying for 4-6 years is not a waste of time. Merely living in an academic environment can expand your horizons, exposing you to areas of study that it wouldn’t even occur to you to consider otherwise. On top of that, if your college major does match your interests, high-quality structured instruction will improve your skill level faster than you can accomplish on your own.
That said, typical high school workloads are usually fairly light, so I’d use the spare time to rack up some extracurricular activities (to improve your chances of getting into a good college), as well as to brush up on whatever it is you are actually interested in learning (because high school won’t teach you much of anything useful).
I vote unschool, because lots of the time you spend at school is apt to be wasted on marginally low-impact social interactions, bureaucratic rules required to govern large bodies of people but useless to the individual, and so forth.
A high school diploma is essentially equivalent to a GED. So my advice is to get some GED prep books, take some practice tests, and see if you can get a good score with your current knowledge. If so, you can basically test out of high school early. If not, you can use the prep books to figure out where you are coming up short and fill in the gaps.
Curiosity-driven learning tends to be fastest and least boring. Look for reasons to be curious, e.g. about math and science stuff slightly above your current level. Try to write compelling essays. Less Wrong is a great place for both of these things. So are various online forums like Stack Exchange.
You can also get cheap college credit by AP, CLEP, and other standardized tests. Most people pay quite a bit more for college credit, and spend a lot more time in class than they really need to.
If you have boring homework to do that can’t compete against video games and such for your attention (e.g. brushing up on some topic that you notice you are not testing well on), you will need to either become more interested or put yourself in an environment without distractions. You can get away with resisting distractions directly for a while, but eventually that tends to cause willpower depletion, so think of that as something that has to be budgeted carefully. Simple trivial inconveniences like putting games on the top shelf or protecting them with a long password that’s a pain to type can reduce the willpower required to resist.
I think the question depends a lot of the social support that you have. I don’t think that an internet forum is enough social support to expect to be really productive while being completely alone.
If I unschooled, I would be engaged in many other activities with social support like internships, classes, and possibly even school extracurricular activities.
Historically, I have had no problem getting things done with no social support.
Don’t underrate the effects of having a fixed structure that comes from the outside.
But the thing is, I will not be alone. I’ll be starting deadlined projects, out taking classes, doing research projects, interning with companies and nonprofits, potentially starting my own business...
Well if your parents won’t tolerate your unschooling, the lack of support network is likely going to make it an ineffective route.
Keep in mind that the value of formal schooling in the case of individuals such as yourself who’re capable of learning valuable skills under their own direction is not necessarily that it provides the best possible instruction in the skills you’d want to learn, but that it signals conscientiousness in a way that most people understand, and may offer practice in valuable skills you might not otherwise take the time to learn, like how to devote yourself to a task which is largely pointless in its own right in order to meet others’ expectations.
Edit: That’s a good point, thank you.
Do both. Stay in high school, and use that time to study and perfect the skills you care about. High school doesn’t take all that much attention to do well, you have LOTS of free time both during and after class. If you’re disciplined enough to unschool, you’re disciplined enough to make the effort to learn and improve in spite of school. If you’re not, then that’s an even better reason to not drop out.
Heh. I wake up at 7:00 AM, attend a full 7 periods with all the Advanced Standing classes I can, and leave at 3:15 PM. From there, I go to cross country, taking my time until 6:00 PM at the earliest. Then I eat dinner, shower… Then it’s 8:00 PM already and all my homework is there waiting. Then there are family activities, chores, distractions, and other projects I need to do thrown in. Did I mention I have a serious akrasia problem? Then I sleep at like 12:00 AM… Not that much time if you ask me.
So that suggests a middle ground between your current level of engagement and dropping out entirely. If there are things you think would be more valuable* than one of those activities, and you think you have the mechanisms to motivate yourself to do them, do so.
“Unschooling” won’t help with the lack of available time or motivation. It’s the wrong granularity to make your decisions on—think about how you spend individual hours of time, not how you identify your current lifestyle.
Which of those things (directed studying, sports participation, dinner, shower, family activities, distractions, other projects) do you not think you’re getting value from, and want to do less of? What do you want to do instead? For most sets of answers that pass the sniff test of reasonably long-term valuable, you’ll be better off making those tradeoffs within the traditional school framework than outside of it.
Edited to add: holidays and weekends are excellent natural experiments, and can help shape your beliefs about what you’d actually do with more self-directed time. If you undertook something over the summer that you think provides more long-term value to your life than one of your current activities, you should definitely consider continuing it. I’d recommend posting a more specific question on discussion or an open thread “should I give up cross-country in favor of building a telescope” or whatever the specific choice you’re making is.
I would look at these two things before considering dropping high school entirely. If you don’t intend on cross country having a positive effect on your college admissions, then you can exercise in a much more time efficient manner than 12.5hr/week long distance running. Your akrasia problem is not likely to disappear with increased free time and decreased structure.
This. Sometimes I do less when I have more free time, perhaps because the duties I have at least wake me up and set me in the motion.
Me too (though the effect is no longer as strong as it was when I didn’t use Beeminder and LeechBlock).
Same here, if another datapoint helps. I’ve been out of school for almost two years now, and don’t feel like this has helped (it may or may not have hurt; I’m not convinced I’m calibrated well enough to say for sure).
Why?
That seems to be time that you could use otherwise.
I would also add that “cross country” doesn’t seem to be a term with a fixed meaning and I can find many things under that label via google.
In U.S. high schools, “cross country” is a long distance running sport.
It has the same meaning in Australia, schools or otherwise. (Obviously with exceptions based on context. If mountains in winter are involved skiing is likely involved for instance although “cross country skiing” would more often than not be said explicitly unless skiiing was already under discussion.)
It’s true, my parents kind of forced me into it...
You are right, I should try to free up more time while taking the conventional and safer route.
But don’t you attend school only around 180 days/year (if in the U.S.)?
Yes, but with all those activities I listed above I have minimal free time during the school year. I do have much more time during the summer though.
I went to an online high school. Without going to an online high school, I would not have graduated at all. Here are some intermediate steps and questions that suggest alternative options that may be more palatable to both you and your parents:
Would your interests best be served by a school, or schooling, that is designed to get you through the minimum requirements with as little and as flexible work as possible, or a school, or schooling, that is designed specifically to challenge your intelligence to the very limit of its ability?
Would your interests be better served by an online high school program? How difficult is it to get in once you apply? Is the school you want to go to accredited? (Read about national and regional accreditation for both high schools and colleges.) If the school requires you to pay tuition, can you and your parents afford it?
What kind of paperwork would you need to complete to convince people who are supposed to keep you in school that you’re still going to be learning? How difficult/tedious is the paperwork to complete? If you withdraw and “homeschool”, will you still need to take the standardized state tests (US)? Will you have to make alternate arrangements for things like AP tests and the SAT tests because you are no longer going to your “neighborhood high school”?
Are you old enough to get a GED and skip straight to community college classes? How about Bard College At Simon’s Rock? Are you exceptional enough that a college’s admissions board would overlook your (presumed not very good) academic record and admit you anyway?
Can you take community college classes in place of some of your high school classes and get a dual high school diploma and Associate’s degree, or get an Associate’s degree in less than two years because of the credit you have already accrued in high school?
Would your interests better be served by psychiatric treatment, including but not limited to depression or ADHD medication?
Good luck, whatever you end up doing.
I noticed a correlation between homework-related and personal project-related akrasia starting toward the end of high school and seriously picking up in college. I haven’t really untangled the mechanisms involved, but they do seem to feed off one another (most people screamed about priorities and refused to listen when I tried to point this out). I have not noticed that removing academic obligations has had a significant effect on my productivity (if anything, I feel like my output has slowed down since leaving college, but this may or may not be true; I could be shooting for constant productivity due to the lack of anything to fill my time, and levels could be close to normal but feel underwhelming without school to fill in the gaps.)
The main thing about the education system is not the learning; it’s setting up entry into the workforce. There are useful skills to be gained from attending college, but if you don’t establish connections and/or credentials for a job you have decent odds of getting, the cost might be a bit high. You could very well hone your world-impacting skills at college, but financial stability is the part you need to worry about. Especially the cost of attending college; student loans tend to last a long time if you’re attending an expensive school and don’t have some other means of paying.
A college degree is becoming the new high school diploma, from the sounds of it, so I’d be wary of avoiding college entirely, but cost/benefit analysis is crucial.
College does sounds pretty useful, so I guess the question is whether I should leave high school, unschool for 3 years, then reapply to college. If that does not significantly reduce my college admissions potential it would seem like it is the most strategic thing to do.
Why not apply to college right away? Not seeing the need for the 3-year waiting period. You won’t have formal qualifications anyway, so either you can convince them you know your stuff, or not.
I don’t think I’ve accomplished enough at this point in my life to go to college immediately.
Just as a social and economic matter, it seems to me to be overwhelmingly likely that dropping out of high school will do long term and maybe permanent damage to your ability acquire significant money and free time. Dropping out of high school is very likely to be the worst thing you can do with your life right now. On the other hand, getting straight A’s (which is not an intellectually challenging task) is likely to pay off more than anything else you can invest your time in. I’m not saying that that’s the way it should be, I’m just saying that that’s the way it is.
An hour spent on maximizing your grades in high school is for almost everyone one of the most financially efficient hours you will ever get an opportunity to spend. And you’ll need money if you want the independence necessary to make a difference.
Barring some extreme mitigating circumstances, top colleges will throw your application in the trash the moment they see anything but a high school diploma littered with A’s. They won’t read your writing sample, or your personal statement, and so they won’t know about any of your efforts to educate yourself. They do things this way because they get thousands of applications and they need a way to screen out ~70% of them without doing any real work. And if you’re white, male, and not attending a well-respected high school, it will take more than good grades, but that will at least get your foot in the door.
Unschooling is great, but if it comes at the expense of the kind of schooling where you get a piece of paper at the end with a bunch of A’s on it, then it’s very likely to be an economic and social disaster.
So here’s my advice: Don’t drop out of high school. Get nothing but A’s from now on. And spend the rest of your free time learning about what you find most interesting and valuable or hanging out with friends. Learning how to deal with people, both instrumentally and morally, is not a low priority.
Thank you very much. How sure are you that top colleges will trash unschooling applications?
I’m not sure, I just think that it’s overall quite likely. Admissions is probabilistic, in that you never know who you’re admitting given so little information, so you just want to admit those applicants who seem most likely to be successful students. It’s understood that not everyone who lacks a high school diploma with a bunch of A’s on it is going to be unsuccessful, nor is everyone with such credentials going to do well.
But suppose you were getting many more applications than you had time to read thoroughly, and further that reading and evaluating applications is a utterly miserable task. You’d probably come up with a way to weed out all those applications that are very unlikely to be worthwhile without really reading them. If you had to come up with a criteria for weeding people out, given high school GPAs, SAT scores, essays, cover letters, etc. what would you do?
Well, you can’t quickly process essays or letters. What you can do is put all the GPA scores and all the SAT scores on a spreadsheet, weight them however you like, and slash however many off the bottom so that you end up with a manageable number of applications and then read those. Most people with a just a GED or a bad GPA or a low SAT score are going to end up by the wayside. It’s a stupid, prejudicial way to handle any one application, but it makes sense as a way to deal with thousands.
This isn’t how everyone does it. But this is how a lot of places do it. And the more applications a school gets, the more likely it’ll employ such a method. And good schools get a lot of applications.
Each day, finish your homework before you work “on projects that would make [you] more effective.”
The best way for you to have a large impact on the world is probably to do well at school, get a high paying job, find worthy high impact charities, and donate money to these charities.
Huh. Ask Eliezer about that :)
I think that’s the best guaranteed way to improve the world. There is almost no uncertainty. But I’d rather not subject myself to decades of monotonous work, especially since there are so many other organizations and individuals who could create an impact thousands or even millions of times more than mine.
I was thinking more along the lines of actually working at a nonprofit, starting businesses to raise money, something at least a little higher impact then earn several hundred thousand and donate it.
With those updated plans, which of my three options (or neither of them) are the best?
Eliezer is a profoundly unusual person who has had vastly more success than most people with his level of education.
many people are able to find interesting high paying jobs in the for-profit sector.
This is also an argument for taking the donating money path to helping. Remember, money is a unit of caring.
It depends on your skill set, but I would guess (1) in part because of what your parents think. If you are a computer programming genius (i.e. someone is currently willing to pay you >$100/hour) then perhaps 3.
Having akrasia problems is an argument for staying in a highly structured environment.
My problem is that the akrasia seems to be partially caused by staying in a highly structured environment. I don’t have much trouble doing things I believe are beneficial towards my goals.
I currently believe if I pursued option 2 I could get into a top college just like I would have done if I stayed in high school but more useful things would get done.
If this belief is false, then my akrasia would be slightly reduced.
My solution to a similar problem: deliberately put off your school assignments until their deadlines are fairly close, then work on them then. Deadlines are great at increasing your motivation and helping you work in a more efficient way. If something increases your effectiveness so much, why not deliberately take advantage of it?
Do it carefully though… taken to an extreme, this idea can be hard on your mental health & cause burnout. I’d suggest staying very aware of all the stuff you need to do and scheduling a reasonably decent amount of time in your calendar to do it—just right before it’s due.
This seems an extremely risky strategy if one has not already become master at averting the planning fallacy. When akrasia is a serious issue, as it seems to be in this case, I’d expect this technique to be particularly high risk.
Carefully putting off assignments sounds like a potential solution, but usually assignments are assigned one day and due the very next. I have around 4 hours to get an average of 2 hours of homework done on school nights. But I fail to shift into homework mode which caused me to write this article at 10:00 PM last night, get 5 hours of sleep, then wake up early to finish studying because it seems easier in the morning.
If you work better in the mornings, is it possible to arrange things so you get to sleep and wake up a little earlier? Not ridiculously so, but if moving work time from night to morning lets you use it more efficiently...
(I did exactly this entirely by accident. The trouble was the part where it made it easier for me to forget assignments that needed doing, so while I got things done with less mental strain and without so much time wasted internally, there were more assignments that just got missed. A simple written agenda would probably avert this risk.)
Unfortunately, Akrasia still strikes in the morning and I don’t always have the motivation or energy to finish everything. But that’s only with minimal sleep due to procrastination the night before.
I have to see if I can get my parents to agree...
It seems like you’d do well to at least spend some time brainstorming and experimenting with solutions to this problem (ex: do your homework in a different part of the house, or at least take a short walk to get in to “homework mode”, smoke electronic cigarrettes or spray your face with water to stimulate yourself, set up website blockers to block your distracting websites past a certain time) before ditching school… it’s an option that’s always there.
Or just do your homework in the mornings, if that’s what works for you.
Thanks for your helpful replies!
I’ve actially spend years trying to fix this problem, with little success. I’ve tried multiple books, read about every productivity system ever invented, tried thousands of articles over hundreds of websites… No luck.
Recently, I’ve been looking into Akrasia on Less Wrong because I thought the suggestions might finally have an impact. I memorized The Motivation Hacker (along with all the techniques shared in the Procrastination Equation). I’ve also tried PJ Eby’s materials. I found that unfortunately it had no impact on my akrasia at all :(
Do you have any recommendations? Am I doing something wrong? It certainly feels like it!
Thanks for your suggestions, I’ll give them a try and see how it goes.
“Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,” he said, “and the tale is yet to run: By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer—what ha’ ye done?”
Perhaps you just phrased yourself poorly, but the form of your answer does not suggest to me that you have, you know, actually made an effort, extraordinary or otherwise.
What’s the technique that came closest to succeeding and how specifically did it fail?
I believe the pomodoro technique had me accomplishing many tasks for one day, then it failed. It failed because I failed to start using the pomodoro method itself, I just procrastinated on starting it. I also got distracted while working. I either stopped working and never got on track again, or I forgot about the rules about distraction (record it, apply the 3 steps) and wasted a lot of time. Over time I just forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me, I’ll give it another go because it was so close to working and I can try different motivational techniques to get started.
I believe an “energy pill” (Elebra) also helped me get things done for several days before I succumbed to procrastination. I should try that again as well...
Idea for pomodoro technique: try making a 30 minute audio clip that consists of 25 minutes of “pomodoro timer noise” (some noise you condition yourself to concentrate on, e.g. find some waterfall clip or something), then 5 minutes of silence. Then play it on loop. Makes it easier to not get distracted when the timer is running and also ensures that the timer is always restarted. Make rules related to when you can turn off the looping, e.g. if you’re done with your homework for the day, or you spend at least 30 seconds writing down reasons to keep it on and decide that you should still turn it off even given those because you’re too tired to work effectively or whatever (see also). Maybe also make it give you a warning 30-60 seconds before your 5-minute break is going to end.
Given that you’ve failed at this so many times before, I’d recommend being extremely strict with yourself this time… really figure out in advance what the rules you’ll follow will be, brainstorm cases where you’d want to break them, and either add exceptions and decide to continue following them for every case that you brainstorm, and then be extremely anal about following the rules once you start actually using them. Additionally, probably make the rules pretty reasonable and easy to follow to increase your success odds even more (but still be an extreme stickler about following the rules you do set out; err on the side of following them too well). Also, if you’ve been failing at doing your homework a lot recently, I’d say give up on trying to do it ahead of time and just deliberately do it at the last minute for a few weeks, so you stop practicing the action of attempting to improve your study habits and failing (it sounds like you’ve practiced this a lot, and you don’t want to just keep practicing it. It’s not “practice makes perfect”, it’s “practice makes permanent”.) Have a day planned in advance when you will switch to the new pomodoro productivity scheme you’ve been working on… September 30, say (that’s a Monday, right?)
Since you asked me about the most effective technique I’ve used since this point, I started using the pomodoro technique with Beeminder. I have experienced a very dramatic increase in productivity. Thank you very much!
Wow, great to hear!
Unless you’re fairly unusual, you’ll probably need the papers that employers care about. Since you spend a lot of time at the school, that’s the time you need to learn to use more effectively. Here’s how I survive through mandatory lectures at university level:
wake up early
do all the fun and/or useful learning in the morning with a fresh brain before school, make anki cards
do all the useless assignments I’d hate anyways after and during school just before the deadline
study all the school topics beforehand, so I don’t have to fully concentrate during the lectures (listening stuff you can read is a gigantic waste of time)
review anki cards on my smartphone/laptop during the lectures, roughly listen to the lecturer so you don’t miss anything important
Obviously this might not be something that you can specifically do, but you get the idea. They still think I go there for their useless lectures. Can you utilize your commutes or some other time you think is part of your school day?
Leaving school may be detrimental to your social life.
I’d vote for #1, with a side of, ”...learn as much useful stuff as you can on the side”.
Given the way our current society functions, a person who lacks a college graduation certificate is at a severe economical disadvantage; and a person who lacks the high school graduation certificate is practically economically crippled. Yes, world-saving skills are great, but they don’t pay the bills.
In addition, some colleges do indeed teach you important and useful skills, and thus getting into them and staying for 4-6 years is not a waste of time. Merely living in an academic environment can expand your horizons, exposing you to areas of study that it wouldn’t even occur to you to consider otherwise. On top of that, if your college major does match your interests, high-quality structured instruction will improve your skill level faster than you can accomplish on your own.
That said, typical high school workloads are usually fairly light, so I’d use the spare time to rack up some extracurricular activities (to improve your chances of getting into a good college), as well as to brush up on whatever it is you are actually interested in learning (because high school won’t teach you much of anything useful).
I vote unschool, because lots of the time you spend at school is apt to be wasted on marginally low-impact social interactions, bureaucratic rules required to govern large bodies of people but useless to the individual, and so forth.
A high school diploma is essentially equivalent to a GED. So my advice is to get some GED prep books, take some practice tests, and see if you can get a good score with your current knowledge. If so, you can basically test out of high school early. If not, you can use the prep books to figure out where you are coming up short and fill in the gaps.
Curiosity-driven learning tends to be fastest and least boring. Look for reasons to be curious, e.g. about math and science stuff slightly above your current level. Try to write compelling essays. Less Wrong is a great place for both of these things. So are various online forums like Stack Exchange.
You can also get cheap college credit by AP, CLEP, and other standardized tests. Most people pay quite a bit more for college credit, and spend a lot more time in class than they really need to.
If you have boring homework to do that can’t compete against video games and such for your attention (e.g. brushing up on some topic that you notice you are not testing well on), you will need to either become more interested or put yourself in an environment without distractions. You can get away with resisting distractions directly for a while, but eventually that tends to cause willpower depletion, so think of that as something that has to be budgeted carefully. Simple trivial inconveniences like putting games on the top shelf or protecting them with a long password that’s a pain to type can reduce the willpower required to resist.
So I leave high school… and then what comes next on the path to world optimization? :)