On the destruction of America’s best high school

post by Chris_Leong · 2024-09-12T15:30:20.001Z · LW · GW · 7 comments

This is a link post for https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979

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7 comments

This is a rare case when I think it's actually worth sharing an article that directly comments on the culture wars on Less Wrong:

I’d like you to feel about the impending destruction of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the same way you might’ve felt when the Taliban threatened to blow up the Bamyan Buddhas, and then days later actually did blow them up. Or the way you felt when human negligence caused wildfires that incinerated half the koalas in Australia, or turned the San Francisco skyline into an orange hellscape. For that matter, the same way most of us felt the day Trump was elected. I’d like you to feel in the bottom of your stomach the avoidability, and yet the finality, of the loss.

7 comments

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comment by Carl Feynman (carl-feynman) · 2024-09-15T23:45:04.369Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don’t think articles like this belong on Less Wrong, so I downvoted it.  Presumably the author agrees, to some extent, or he wouldn’t have felt the need to pre-apologize.   If people disagree with me, they are of course free to upvote it.

Also, the article in question was posted in October of 2020.  Why bring it up now?  It’s not like we can do anything about it.

Replies from: Chris_Leong
↑ comment by Chris_Leong · 2024-09-16T03:57:10.038Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't think these articles should make up a high proportion of the content on Less Wrong, but I think it's good if things like this are occasionally discussed.

Replies from: Viliam
↑ comment by Viliam · 2024-09-16T15:39:11.327Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree that things like this should be discussed, but the question is how. Mere link might be okay for something that is urgent... where the trade-off is between posting the bare link and procrastinating to write something more.

But if it is 4 years old, then we don't need to hurry, and if you want to have a debate, perhaps you could start by writing your opinion on what happened, and maybe add some more context.

(Also, I think it would be nice to make the fact that it is 4 years old more visible.)

So basically in my opinion the topic is okay, but this way you introduced it is not.

comment by nim · 2024-09-12T16:58:30.743Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It feels like a loss, yes, but a small loss, like a single building of architecture eroding into the sea.

It does not feel like a loss of the hope for more similar schools, to me, because it existed for how long and yet spawned how few spinoffs?

If it was going to change the world at scale by existing, it sounds like it had plenty of time to do that. Why didn't it? Why wasn't individual love and appreciation for it enough to coordinate efforts to create more such schools?

Certainly, for the few who would have been very very lucky and gotten in if it hadn't ended the program, it's a potential tragedy. But if the program wasn't successfully lowering the luck threshhold required to benefit from its ideas... I don't feel like that's the same loss as if we were losing a program which demonstrated an ability to scale and spread.

Replies from: Viliam
↑ comment by Viliam · 2024-09-14T13:32:44.732Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This sounds a bit like: "it improved lives of some people, but not of everyone, so no big deal if it gets burned down". That's an insane standard for how good things need to be, before we prevent people from destroying them for stupid reasons. I don't think that following such standard actually makes the world a better place.

This objection would make sense in a situation where would have to choose between an option A that is good but doesn't create spinoffs, and an option B that is good and creates spinoffs. There it would make sense to sacrifice A so that B could survive. But what exactly survives here as a result of sacrificing a good school?

Replies from: nim
↑ comment by nim · 2024-09-16T15:06:42.475Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I wouldn't call it "no big deal" to lose it... but losing something that's on track to scale and grow its impact seems like a different order of magnitude of loss from losing something that performed beautifully in a microcosm without escaping it.

In parallel, I wouldn't call it any less of a loss to lose a local artist than a globally recognized one, but it's a very different magnitude of impact.

I made my initial comment in the hope that someone could either explain how actually it had a wider impact than I understood from the post, or retrospect on why it never spread, so that I could learn something about what forces prevented the thing that was good for some people from being good for more.

There's also a layer of seeking a counterexample to my resentment that urban east-coast people have and hoard this utopian high school experience -- it sounds like it would have changed my life if it had been available to me, yet the happenstance of being born to rural west coast parents seems to imply that someone in my situation would never have been allowed to even try for it in the past or in the future if it had not been lost. This smells wrong, but the easiest way to disprove it would be to learn why it might have been on track to become more widely available, or to learn how I could update on lessons learned from it to increase the likelihood that similar programs would ever become available to people like me.

Replies from: Viliam
↑ comment by Viliam · 2024-09-16T15:45:33.514Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Fair points.

I am not sure how to bring elite schools to areas where the density of talent per square mile is low. I mean, mathematically, if you need 500 students per school, and you want to make a school for one-in-hundred talent, you can at most have one such school per 50 000 kids of school age -- and that's optimistically assuming that all potential candidates will want to join your school; otherwise you need to add another factor of 10 or 100.

Perhaps one day this objection will become moot if we somehow switch to fully online education or AI tutors.

An alternative is that instead of building an online school you only make an online club, for example a mathematical club for children gifted in math. A boring school (or homeschooling) in the morning, remote elite education in the afternoon.