A lot of these models are “this was my lived experience, it seems to generalize a fair bit”. I sent out an interest form to see how much demand there was for something like this, as a way to test whether it did in fact generalize a bunch to other people, and it got a lot of responses.
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. Creating systems that help you get work/studying done every day, without external deadlines and check-ins, is really difficult. Also, I have pretty bad ADHD, which means that my default for extended periods of working alone involves forgetting to eat, take my ADHD medication, or do anything productive whatsoever during the day.
I care a lot about seeing friends, and don’t really have a lot of ways to do that, especially because most of my really good friends are scattered across the US and Europe.
Being stuck at home is corrosive for a bunch of reasons that aren’t always immediately apparent. Some of this is due to the loss of the counterfactual environment, and some of this is due to specific details about people’s home lives.
Agency is a pretty important thing. By default, it gets crushed. Giving people power over their own lives, and encouraging them when they do weird things, helps turn them into the kind-of-person who comes up with weird new things to do that would help their lives, and overall makes the world a better place.
A lot of people who have the potential to do a lot of great things have their creativity and agency crushed by The System and their parents. The K-12 education system isn’t centrally designed to do any one thing, but the result of the system is that your creativity and independence is crushed. The parents of really smart kids can be slightly obtuse and limiting at best and controlling and manipulative at worst. I know people who were forced to do double-digit hours of test prep every week.
Living on your own, and not being forced to adhere to (arbitrary) external goals and standards, does a lot to help people acquire the generalized skills of actually making their own decisions and guiding their own paths and stuff. I have a lot of other thoughts on agency, some of which can be seen here, but “internal vs. external locus of control” is pretty central to the thing here. The key is getting people to see themselves as agents in the world taking actions according to their own desires/ambitions, as opposed to executing strategies that other people/their broader culture has set out for them. Again, I need to write more about this, but this is a good first pass.
Things like coworking are pretty good for long-term productivity.
The key is social accountability. I’d estimate that, for me, having all of my work hours be coworking of some form as opposed to [puttering around and occasionally doing productive things] results in doubling my actual output. Being in a work/living environment where coworking is a readily available default would then be a huge improvement on its own.
Day 1, adding ~500 words of nuance.
A lot of these models are “this was my lived experience, it seems to generalize a fair bit”. I sent out an interest form to see how much demand there was for something like this, as a way to test whether it did in fact generalize a bunch to other people, and it got a lot of responses.
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. Creating systems that help you get work/studying done every day, without external deadlines and check-ins, is really difficult. Also, I have pretty bad ADHD, which means that my default for extended periods of working alone involves forgetting to eat, take my ADHD medication, or do anything productive whatsoever during the day.
I care a lot about seeing friends, and don’t really have a lot of ways to do that, especially because most of my really good friends are scattered across the US and Europe.
Being stuck at home is corrosive for a bunch of reasons that aren’t always immediately apparent. Some of this is due to the loss of the counterfactual environment, and some of this is due to specific details about people’s home lives.
Agency is a pretty important thing. By default, it gets crushed. Giving people power over their own lives, and encouraging them when they do weird things, helps turn them into the kind-of-person who comes up with weird new things to do that would help their lives, and overall makes the world a better place.
A lot of people who have the potential to do a lot of great things have their creativity and agency crushed by The System and their parents. The K-12 education system isn’t centrally designed to do any one thing, but the result of the system is that your creativity and independence is crushed. The parents of really smart kids can be slightly obtuse and limiting at best and controlling and manipulative at worst. I know people who were forced to do double-digit hours of test prep every week.
Living on your own, and not being forced to adhere to (arbitrary) external goals and standards, does a lot to help people acquire the generalized skills of actually making their own decisions and guiding their own paths and stuff. I have a lot of other thoughts on agency, some of which can be seen here, but “internal vs. external locus of control” is pretty central to the thing here. The key is getting people to see themselves as agents in the world taking actions according to their own desires/ambitions, as opposed to executing strategies that other people/their broader culture has set out for them. Again, I need to write more about this, but this is a good first pass.
Things like coworking are pretty good for long-term productivity.
The key is social accountability. I’d estimate that, for me, having all of my work hours be coworking of some form as opposed to [puttering around and occasionally doing productive things] results in doubling my actual output. Being in a work/living environment where coworking is a readily available default would then be a huge improvement on its own.