Super rough expansion of the first couple bullet points, Day 0:
Intro:
Why write this?
I’m writing this post because I have a bunch of models about group houses, minors, and the combination of the two that I think other people might be interested in. I also want to have some publicly available thing I can point to that says what this whole thing is about.
Short version of what this was.
Ascension Beta was a month-long experimental group house I ran in October 2022, with participants aged 16-22. It was intended primarily as a test of the below models (to see if a larger, longer-running version was worthwhile) and a chance to practice running a group house of this type, working out the major kinks before running a longer version.
The major goals of Ascension were to give residents social accountability, agency over their environment, and community.
Why run Ascension (short version)
Because I wanted it to exist (so I could live there), other people wanted it to exist for the same reason, and nobody else was going to step up and make it happen. I had a lot of models about agency, environment, and productivity, and in particular a specific kind of environment I wanted to live in. However, it didn’t exist, especially not for minors. I also hypothesized that the people I had met who were similar to me would also want this to exist, and that was borne out by the evidence. There are a bunch of reasons for why Ascension provides value to these people, and that’s what most of this post is about.
Models:
Most important model here: it worked. Everything below is mostly informed by that, and the beta was a really good way to develop those models.
Before I ran the beta, I was pretty uncertain about some of these models. My models on high school and agency were fairly strong, but everything about how something like Ascension would actually function in practice was fairly blurry. However, the beta, while janky, proved that something like Ascension could work, and that it was likely for some longer/larger version to be more effective.
High school, as an institution, is really bad.
It’s a waste of time that destroys your agency and love for learning. I could go in-depth on the specific reasons why it’s so bad, but for now, just keep in mind that the default societal path here is four years in hell that takes up as much of your Slack as possible. This means that really smart/ambitious people, the kind that you meet at programs like Atlas or SPARC, often have to find their own ways out of high school to actually do the things they care about. There mostly does not exist infrastructure to support alternate pathways for these people. There are small bits of it, notably Emergent Ventures for funding your endeavors during this time, but the majority of the things that you would have on the default pathway of high school + college (housing, peers, “learning”) have to be found for yourself; most of the time, the hand-rolled solutions that you find will fail you.
Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, maybe on a grant, while you self-teach or work on a project”. I did this! It sucked!
Solo productivity is hard.
Going insane due to loneliness.
Being stuck at home is really really bad for a bunch of reasons that aren’t always immediately apparent.
Super rough expansion of the first couple bullet points, Day 0:
Intro:
Why write this?
I’m writing this post because I have a bunch of models about group houses, minors, and the combination of the two that I think other people might be interested in. I also want to have some publicly available thing I can point to that says what this whole thing is about.
Short version of what this was.
Ascension Beta was a month-long experimental group house I ran in October 2022, with participants aged 16-22. It was intended primarily as a test of the below models (to see if a larger, longer-running version was worthwhile) and a chance to practice running a group house of this type, working out the major kinks before running a longer version.
The major goals of Ascension were to give residents social accountability, agency over their environment, and community.
Why run Ascension (short version)
Because I wanted it to exist (so I could live there), other people wanted it to exist for the same reason, and nobody else was going to step up and make it happen. I had a lot of models about agency, environment, and productivity, and in particular a specific kind of environment I wanted to live in. However, it didn’t exist, especially not for minors. I also hypothesized that the people I had met who were similar to me would also want this to exist, and that was borne out by the evidence. There are a bunch of reasons for why Ascension provides value to these people, and that’s what most of this post is about.
Models:
Most important model here: it worked. Everything below is mostly informed by that, and the beta was a really good way to develop those models.
Before I ran the beta, I was pretty uncertain about some of these models. My models on high school and agency were fairly strong, but everything about how something like Ascension would actually function in practice was fairly blurry. However, the beta, while janky, proved that something like Ascension could work, and that it was likely for some longer/larger version to be more effective.
High school, as an institution, is really bad.
It’s a waste of time that destroys your agency and love for learning. I could go in-depth on the specific reasons why it’s so bad, but for now, just keep in mind that the default societal path here is four years in hell that takes up as much of your Slack as possible. This means that really smart/ambitious people, the kind that you meet at programs like Atlas or SPARC, often have to find their own ways out of high school to actually do the things they care about. There mostly does not exist infrastructure to support alternate pathways for these people. There are small bits of it, notably Emergent Ventures for funding your endeavors during this time, but the majority of the things that you would have on the default pathway of high school + college (housing, peers, “learning”) have to be found for yourself; most of the time, the hand-rolled solutions that you find will fail you.
Default BATNA to high school is “live by yourself, maybe on a grant, while you self-teach or work on a project”. I did this! It sucked!
Solo productivity is hard.
Going insane due to loneliness.
Being stuck at home is really really bad for a bunch of reasons that aren’t always immediately apparent.