my husband is setting up a homeschooling center in Berkeley...Elon Musk founded a school to educate his kids. It’s kind of a convergent thing to do
These examples seem to me provide great support for the claim that the Bay Area is a terribly difficult place to raise children. If I heard that you and Elon Musk were growing your own herbs to counteract the toxic levels of pesticides found in storebought spices, I would conclude that the food supply is seriously effed up, not that everything is fine.
Yes, you’re demonstrating that it’s ameliorable, but the fact that high-performing people need to put in individual effort to get a decent solution to a common need is not exactly encouraging. And depending on a community to invent novel solutions at half market price is generally not a winning stra
If you have any leads on where I can obtain an Optimal Autodidacting education for my (likely highly gifted, likely autistic or broad autism phenotype) child for $10,000 a year without doing it myself, please let me know.
(Note that I do not value granite countertops and thus the increased cost of a house in a “good neighborhood” should be considered to be tuition.)
I’m not sure of the details, and it may take a few years to get up and running, but it seems plausible to me that if you could get together five children in a mixed aged class, you’ve got $50,000 to spend. That amount of money can rent (or mortgage) a 2⁄3 bedroom house and pay a super-competent teacher/supervisor, given the going rate of mid-career schoolteachers is ~$40,000 and instead of dealing with bureaucracy, mandatory curriculum and resentful state school kids they have a self-directed passion job of teaching only highly gifted and unconventional children.
The difference here is that it isn’t a bit of space in a grouphouse while the adults are at work in the daytime, but a dedicated house, as well as the fact that a meaningful job role offering $40k can get you a LOT higher quality applicants at that price here in Manchester than it could in The Bay.
Offering $40k for such a role here could get you a non-ingroup candidate with no job-relevant mental issues, good people skills and a masters degree or higher level of general knowledge communicated in pitch-perfect British English.
I’d prefer to hire a person I know, because I would be able to more easily screen them for a lot of things I care about that are hard to screen for in an interview. (For example, a pro-neurodiversity attitude, respect for children’s autonomy, ability to control their temper.) There’s a reason lots of hires happen within social networks, even outside the rationalist community.
It is also odd to me that I listed off “my child is likely to have a mental health condition” as a constraint and then you assumed that badbrains would be an obvious negative. It seems to me that a teacher with a well-managed mental health condition would be an excellent role model for a twice exceptional student and have a particular understanding of and empathy for their difficulties.
Also, that plan is called “starting a school” which is the thing Patri was criticizing.
This is very close to our plan, including the cost. A $40,000 salary for a teacher seems roughly market rate. We have ingroup candidates with teaching experience, good people skills, and masters degrees, but of course there’s no law that says we can’t hire someone we don’t know, it’s just a lot easier to get trust and goodwill when you use existing social ties.
(I frankly don’t want to live in a community that discriminates as radically as you’re suggesting against the mentally ill. In the US, this is technically illegal. It also seems unreasonable to me. You can do what you like in Manchester, but it’s not something I intend to do.)
> A $40,000 salary for a teacher seems roughly market rate.
Salary.com says: “The median annual Teacher Elementary School salary in Berkeley, CA is $66,364, as of October 30, 2017, with a range usually between $54,362-$78,713 not including bonus and benefits.”
It’s probably beside your main point, but people being way off base on middle class salaries is a pet peeve of mine.
Employment discrimination against the mentally ill is also illegal in the UK. In particular, it is illegal to ask whether someone has a mental illness during an interview. I imagine a small school could easily get away with discriminating against teachers with mental illnesses, but regardless it is probably ill-advised to express your intent to break the law on a public forum.
First of all, the thing I was trying to communicate was what kind of candidate you could get in the UK, the general gist being “someone who doesn’t have some limiting-reagent crippling their employment oppertunities to the point that $40k/year in Berkeley is the best offer that highly gifted candidate has”. (I have corrected it as such)
I didn’t say masters degree, I said masters degree level of general knowledge, big difference.
If you can’t tell someone is greatly held back from the details of their work history without asking questions about their mental health, then any mental illness is well-managed enough that it ceases to matter.
It should also go without saying that if you can get someone to do it in Berkeley for $40k, you can get the equivilent here for $15k. If the going rate is $65k+bonus+health insurance, I’d say don’t take for granted that someone’s promise that “yeah I’ll homeschool five kids for $50k minus premesis rent and employment-side costs” will actually happen, and if it does, they won’t stay in that role for anywhere near the time you’d want them to.
If your $50k-premisis rent system relies on ingroup friends being given a stipend for a fulltime job, that’s fine, but it is not comparable to what we would be able to do i.e. pay someone market rates without it being any kind of favour. If you want me to make estimates using the same degree of optimistic projections then we’re looking at around $10k all in if the teacher lived in the homeschool, had two roommates who worked fulltime, didn’t have to pay health insurance and just got all their living expenses paid plus a £200/month stipend. It could be done in theory, but it would require every optimistic assumption to be true.
We could shuffle the numbers about a bit, quadruple the class size and offer them $100k. But as a rule, if you wan’t to not get blindsided by cost overruns, you need to be quite pessimistic when making financial assumptions.
These examples seem to me provide great support for the claim that the Bay Area is a terribly difficult place to raise children. If I heard that you and Elon Musk were growing your own herbs to counteract the toxic levels of pesticides found in storebought spices, I would conclude that the food supply is seriously effed up, not that everything is fine.
Yes, you’re demonstrating that it’s ameliorable, but the fact that high-performing people need to put in individual effort to get a decent solution to a common need is not exactly encouraging. And depending on a community to invent novel solutions at half market price is generally not a winning stra
Note that Musk lives in LA, not the Bay Area. Problems with educational quality are America-wide.
If you have any leads on where I can obtain an Optimal Autodidacting education for my (likely highly gifted, likely autistic or broad autism phenotype) child for $10,000 a year without doing it myself, please let me know.
(Note that I do not value granite countertops and thus the increased cost of a house in a “good neighborhood” should be considered to be tuition.)
I’m not sure of the details, and it may take a few years to get up and running, but it seems plausible to me that if you could get together five children in a mixed aged class, you’ve got $50,000 to spend. That amount of money can rent (or mortgage) a 2⁄3 bedroom house and pay a super-competent teacher/supervisor, given the going rate of mid-career schoolteachers is ~$40,000 and instead of dealing with bureaucracy, mandatory curriculum and resentful state school kids they have a self-directed passion job of teaching only highly gifted and unconventional children.
The difference here is that it isn’t a bit of space in a grouphouse while the adults are at work in the daytime, but a dedicated house, as well as the fact that a meaningful job role offering $40k can get you a LOT higher quality applicants at that price here in Manchester than it could in The Bay.
Offering $40k for such a role here could get you a non-ingroup candidate with no job-relevant mental issues, good people skills and a masters degree or higher level of general knowledge communicated in pitch-perfect British English.
What can it get you in Berkeley?
I’d prefer to hire a person I know, because I would be able to more easily screen them for a lot of things I care about that are hard to screen for in an interview. (For example, a pro-neurodiversity attitude, respect for children’s autonomy, ability to control their temper.) There’s a reason lots of hires happen within social networks, even outside the rationalist community.
It is also odd to me that I listed off “my child is likely to have a mental health condition” as a constraint and then you assumed that badbrains would be an obvious negative. It seems to me that a teacher with a well-managed mental health condition would be an excellent role model for a twice exceptional student and have a particular understanding of and empathy for their difficulties.
Also, that plan is called “starting a school” which is the thing Patri was criticizing.
This is very close to our plan, including the cost. A $40,000 salary for a teacher seems roughly market rate. We have ingroup candidates with teaching experience, good people skills, and masters degrees, but of course there’s no law that says we can’t hire someone we don’t know, it’s just a lot easier to get trust and goodwill when you use existing social ties.
(I frankly don’t want to live in a community that discriminates as radically as you’re suggesting against the mentally ill. In the US, this is technically illegal. It also seems unreasonable to me. You can do what you like in Manchester, but it’s not something I intend to do.)
> A $40,000 salary for a teacher seems roughly market rate.
Salary.com says: “The median annual Teacher Elementary School salary in Berkeley, CA is $66,364, as of October 30, 2017, with a range usually between $54,362-$78,713 not including bonus and benefits.”
It’s probably beside your main point, but people being way off base on middle class salaries is a pet peeve of mine.
You also need to account for taxes; for them to get $66k after tax you probably need to pay $100k pre tax.
Employment discrimination against the mentally ill is also illegal in the UK. In particular, it is illegal to ask whether someone has a mental illness during an interview. I imagine a small school could easily get away with discriminating against teachers with mental illnesses, but regardless it is probably ill-advised to express your intent to break the law on a public forum.
First of all, the thing I was trying to communicate was what kind of candidate you could get in the UK, the general gist being “someone who doesn’t have some limiting-reagent crippling their employment oppertunities to the point that $40k/year in Berkeley is the best offer that highly gifted candidate has”. (I have corrected it as such)
I didn’t say masters degree, I said masters degree level of general knowledge, big difference.
If you can’t tell someone is greatly held back from the details of their work history without asking questions about their mental health, then any mental illness is well-managed enough that it ceases to matter.
It should also go without saying that if you can get someone to do it in Berkeley for $40k, you can get the equivilent here for $15k. If the going rate is $65k+bonus+health insurance, I’d say don’t take for granted that someone’s promise that “yeah I’ll homeschool five kids for $50k minus premesis rent and employment-side costs” will actually happen, and if it does, they won’t stay in that role for anywhere near the time you’d want them to.
If your $50k-premisis rent system relies on ingroup friends being given a stipend for a fulltime job, that’s fine, but it is not comparable to what we would be able to do i.e. pay someone market rates without it being any kind of favour. If you want me to make estimates using the same degree of optimistic projections then we’re looking at around $10k all in if the teacher lived in the homeschool, had two roommates who worked fulltime, didn’t have to pay health insurance and just got all their living expenses paid plus a £200/month stipend. It could be done in theory, but it would require every optimistic assumption to be true.
We could shuffle the numbers about a bit, quadruple the class size and offer them $100k. But as a rule, if you wan’t to not get blindsided by cost overruns, you need to be quite pessimistic when making financial assumptions.