If you want to appeal to a broad audience I’d say tone down the “debating complex intellectual questions” stuff. most teenagers aren’t terribly intellectual but this kind of advice is important to them and you want them to be imagining themselves in your shoes.
Personally I was very lucky, my parents didn’t pressure me into a particular profession though I have ended up in a somewhat similar area to my dad.
I did initially consider studying physics or math in college and missed getting into physics by just a few points but it was very much for the best as I realized later that the things that had appealed to me were much more in line with CS, I thrived in CS where I would have merely done OK in physics or math.
Of course, if anything I do it too much, I spent about half my life perpetually living for 5 years in the future. Sometimes it’s important to stop planning and enjoy the current time.
On the note of career choices, I quite like this old quote of EY’s:
“Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy? ”
To the contrary, they want to appear and feel super smart, at little effort! This is why most teenagers love Dawkins et al. as it sounds like being smarter than your parents, or this is why Ayn Rand and Nietzsche are typical teenager heroes. The trick is to not make them think hard—they will call that boring stuff—but help them feel smug about their intellectualism and then they will listen.
Caveat: my current self absolutely hates my smug-ass teenage self that I used to be so I may be a bit pessimistic about other teenagers :)
A large portion of the population don’t attach a great deal of status to smartness. In the slightly geekier subgroups sure but scoring goals, scoring with attractive members of the opposite sex, being invited to lots of social events, knowing the gossip. All these things are far more important to a huge portion of the population than smartness and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that.
personally I’d much prefer to one day hold a nobel than to hold the FIFA world cup and I’m willing to bet so would you but we’re almost certainly in the minority on that score in the general population.
Reminds me of this essay by Scott/Yvain where he mentions a reddit thread of over 10,000 comments specifically looking for people who opposed gay marriage, but with practically nobody who opposed gay marriage participating.
Caveat: my current self absolutely hates my smug-ass teenage self that I used to be so I may be a bit pessimistic about other teenagers :)
I think you are. I agree that some teenagers love to feel smarter than other people (not necessarily their parents), but I hypothesize that this is more because no-one is offering teenagers the actual tools to be genuinely smart/intelligent. I think that there’s a number of teenagers who, if they knew it was an option, would want to actually think hard and be smart without being smug about this. I’m not a huge fan of labeling all behavior as “signaling,” but I think that the smugness and the wanting to appear smart is a substitute for the unknown option of actually being smart in a meaningful way.
Fair enough about the “intellectual questions”—I will change that to “arguing with each other about life questions”
Thanks for sharing about your own experience, glad it worked out (mostly) well for you.
Good point about EY’s quote (looking forward to re-reading the sequences myself now that the book came out). That’s one reason I suggest in the 3 steps for people to re-evaluate their goals every 3 months, and avoid being attached to previous goals.
If you want to appeal to a broad audience I’d say tone down the “debating complex intellectual questions” stuff. most teenagers aren’t terribly intellectual but this kind of advice is important to them and you want them to be imagining themselves in your shoes.
Personally I was very lucky, my parents didn’t pressure me into a particular profession though I have ended up in a somewhat similar area to my dad.
I did initially consider studying physics or math in college and missed getting into physics by just a few points but it was very much for the best as I realized later that the things that had appealed to me were much more in line with CS, I thrived in CS where I would have merely done OK in physics or math.
Of course, if anything I do it too much, I spent about half my life perpetually living for 5 years in the future. Sometimes it’s important to stop planning and enjoy the current time.
On the note of career choices, I quite like this old quote of EY’s:
To the contrary, they want to appear and feel super smart, at little effort! This is why most teenagers love Dawkins et al. as it sounds like being smarter than your parents, or this is why Ayn Rand and Nietzsche are typical teenager heroes. The trick is to not make them think hard—they will call that boring stuff—but help them feel smug about their intellectualism and then they will listen.
Caveat: my current self absolutely hates my smug-ass teenage self that I used to be so I may be a bit pessimistic about other teenagers :)
You may have a slight sampling bias.
A large portion of the population don’t attach a great deal of status to smartness. In the slightly geekier subgroups sure but scoring goals, scoring with attractive members of the opposite sex, being invited to lots of social events, knowing the gossip. All these things are far more important to a huge portion of the population than smartness and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that.
personally I’d much prefer to one day hold a nobel than to hold the FIFA world cup and I’m willing to bet so would you but we’re almost certainly in the minority on that score in the general population.
I do very little offline communication with young people anymore and tend to think Reddit is representative. I mean, it is big, right?
Reminds me of this essay by Scott/Yvain where he mentions a reddit thread of over 10,000 comments specifically looking for people who opposed gay marriage, but with practically nobody who opposed gay marriage participating.
A great reminder that while increasing sample size decreases random bias, it does nothing to reduce systemic bias.
True. Hmm...
I think you are. I agree that some teenagers love to feel smarter than other people (not necessarily their parents), but I hypothesize that this is more because no-one is offering teenagers the actual tools to be genuinely smart/intelligent. I think that there’s a number of teenagers who, if they knew it was an option, would want to actually think hard and be smart without being smug about this. I’m not a huge fan of labeling all behavior as “signaling,” but I think that the smugness and the wanting to appear smart is a substitute for the unknown option of actually being smart in a meaningful way.
Fair enough about the “intellectual questions”—I will change that to “arguing with each other about life questions”
Thanks for sharing about your own experience, glad it worked out (mostly) well for you.
Good point about EY’s quote (looking forward to re-reading the sequences myself now that the book came out). That’s one reason I suggest in the 3 steps for people to re-evaluate their goals every 3 months, and avoid being attached to previous goals.