Untapped Potential at 13-18

Imagine that you are a student, around 14 years old. You fall into the top 5%, not the extremely motivated startup founder or math prodigy that you hear about on the news, but comfortably more intelligent and curious than the others. The system sucks some of your free time with busywork, but you build up a knowledge base, and start working on small projects related to your area of interest. Now what?

The problem is, as a business owner, how do I tell this person apart from the average 14 year old?

Competent teens fall into apathy because the work is too easy, application of anything more difficult is inaccessible, and there’s only so much knowledge-gathering they can do before they want to do something.

Typical-mind fallacy warning. Just because you were like that as a teenager doesn't mean that this is common. If it seems like a large fraction of people around are like this, that says more about your environment than it does about the overall population.

I agree that there is a certain amount of "wasted" talent among bright 14-year-olds. But it is not at all clear to me that the amount of talent wasted is sufficient to warrant companies throwing out the conventional wisdom on using years of education as a filter for hiring.

The big problem with giving kids jobs is that most kids are not strong enough self defenders to defend against potentially-subtle attacks and manipulation by people employing them. identifying kids who are strong enough self defenders and or adults who are not inclined to take advantage of vulnerabilities arising from lack of knowledge is a very hard problem. as with any inter agent safety problem, large capability differences are hard to simply normalize away.

also, agreed, I got a lot of benefit from being home schooled and getting software work early. lots of potential is lost because of society's bad approach to protecting kids; it protects many kids successfully, fails to protect many kids, and yet almost all kids lose out on advantages that would become available if a better approach for coprotection of kids was specified clearly enough to the senses that everyone can understand why it's a better idea with few presentations.

If school is busywork, how would you call daily "agile" meetings, more meetings, JIRA tickets, SNOW tickets...?

If you say that internship is possible but underused, and school system drowns students in busywork, it seems to me that a relatively straightforward solution would be an alternative high school that would require only minimum busywork (the minimum required by law, and even there simplify things for students if possible), but in turn would require from each student either individual projects or internship (otherwise you might get the laziest students in the neighborhood, not the most talented ones).

In Germany students who completed 9 years of schooling are allowed to work. That means you do get on-the-job apprenticeships that start at 15/16 years of age. For people under 18, there's a maximum of working 40 hours per week and no work on weekends (there are a few expectations for weekend work).

You need 12/13 years of schooling to be accepted into a German university and getting to that point is a sign of status on the job market.

To get more teenagers into productive work you would need to reduce the status that academic credentials bring with them. 

A billionaire who wants that to happen could shift the hiring practices of his corporation to be strictly guided by what predicts new employees achieving high KPI scores. 

On the political side, you can attack requirements for college degrees as structural racism if you are on the left or as inhibiting the free market if you are on the right. While it would be hard to argue for woke people that the requirement is not structural racism it's obviously an unpopular argument among woke college students.

You could pass a law that says that any employer who requires a college degree has to write into his job applications explicitly why a college degree is required and open up lawsuits for those cases where people get discriminated against for not having a college degree. 

Data point: I started working professionally at the age of 15 (part-time, in parallel with education) and it was one of the best things that have ever happened to me. Definitely found it way more enjoyable, rewarding and beneficial than traditional school.

It was software engineering, which is probably the best case scenario - the field is desperate for people and there's a lot of room for growth.

My first patent (for a hybrid analog/digital method of detecting pulse centroids for noisy signals) was awarded when I was 14... but, then, my father was a Chief Scientist in a large electronics design department and I had all kinds of electronic parts as toys since I was a toddler, and at some point he started taking me to his office so I started interacting with real engineers building real computers.  (When I've read Robert W. Wood's memoirs I discovered that he had a similar experience in his teenage years; in Surely You're Joking Richard Feynman writes about playing with real-world tech - fixing radios - when he was 12 years old).

I think the current idea of academia as a carefully isolated age-segregated bubble of theoretical learning is seriously misguided, and that guilds running apprenticeships was a much more useful form of education, at least during teenage years.  You need to develop problem-solving skills in the real world before going for theory - then you get the benefit of intuition and understanding of how the theories relate to the reality, and how to effortlessly cross the artificial boundaries between disciplines when you need to something in the real world (which has no such boundaries).

By the time I finished the university I already got one of the top civilian awards from the government for contributions to the computer industry.  Starting playing with things in the adult world as a teenager has benefits!

As for deference to authority, I never learned it.  Lack of it served me well by quickly getting me out of places where I was wasting my time (not that being fired feels good), but it all worked out OK as nobody can fire me now:)

Several not-that-thought through things on this interesting idea. I agree that an above-average 14 year old could demonstrate a lot of hard skills as well or better than a below average adult worker. If you need a spreadsheet populated, some averages taken and a graph made then their are a surprising number of working adults who could not even start. In any typical school class there will be many students who can finish. My suspicion is the things called "soft skills" might be a lot weaker in 14 year olds though. ("My mum forgot to pack my lunch. What should I do?" they ask their line manager.)

-Many parents will be wary of their 14 year old children travelling to an unfamiliar place on their own. (So will either drive them to the work place, make sure really hard they have memorised the right bus/train changes, or forbid them from going at all).

- In social ways 14 year olds are importantly different from adults. They will over-estimate the knowledge and understanding of the "adults" even more than the adults will under-estimate the understanding of the teenagers. They will (I suspect) be very keen on everyone-agreeing-about-everything and being happy, and so will be loathe to bring up anything they know that suggests that actually something might be wrong.

These adolescents are also likely ahead of the curve on what new stuff (tech and social) means and how to apply it in practice. At least, that's what I gather from my son.

One idea that I have been toying around with is scaling angel investment to this group. The approach pioneered by Y Combinator to reach earlier startups was to let go of some of the requirements of formal funding (inventing the SAFE) and to batch them together. What other constraints can we drop to reach teens? Clearly we can't require a percentage of their later startup when they might not even have a fully formed commercializable idea. Maybe they just want to throw a new type of party. What weaker request can we make? Request to be invited or kept uptodate on their project. The funding amount could also be much smaller, the Y Combinator funding was a few percent of VC funding and I think a group of teens could get started a lot with 1000$. I less clear whether or how to scale the batching. Should you run big school fairs? This seems too close to existing school invention competitions.

One possibility: I suggest that with decent schooling, the kids who could start working professionally at 14 can instead be doubling their productivity every year, so there is a benefit to working on building talent directly before trying to extract outputs- exploration vs exploitation.

My public school was beyond good to me, and so I was learning math as fast as I could from the age of 11 to 21, commuting to the local university for my last two years of high school for multivariable calc, diff eq, linear algebra, and discrete math at the university, then taking a mix of undergraduate and graduate math during college. During highschool I also spent some time working at a lab at the university. The time I spent working in the lab was valuable 99% as a learning experience to 1% actually pushing science- the crux of my actual contribution was a single pull request to matplotlib that took months and months to craft, which would take me around a day today. My work in medical imaging that takes years now would take infinity time without 10 years of math classes behind me.

The question then is, is working on real adult goals a better proxy task for learning than the typical gifted highschooler fare of unproductive projects, contests and tests. I'd guess that as proxy goals, contests > self chosen projects >> real productive work >> school assigned projects > tests.

Relevant part of a documentary made by a homeschooler (who you could talk to on discord if you're interested.) I'm also homeschooled.

I was typing up a comment to this, and I realized I don't understand what's forcing the current equillibrium. Companies are said to want university graduates because that signals their ability to follow boring orders for years successfully. But, like, why isn't high school and some impressive projects enough for that? Surely completing high school serves as a following orders well signal, and impressive projects serve as an intelligence signal. In which case, universities should be irrelevant. Unless you're also signalling that you obey social pressures, which included a pressure to go to university because that was correlated with earning a lot of money and prestige, and lots of the people hiring you went to university and think less of people who didn't go to university because it was prestigious when they went. Does that sound plausible to anyone?

There's an inplicit assumption, both in the post and in many of the comments, that the 'value' of school for teenagers lies in knowledge acquisition. And therefore, if school is busywork a.k.a. does not lead to acquisition of useful knowledge, homeschooling or 'alternative' schooling must be better. I think this is wrong.

For society, the principal lasting value of schooling teenagers relates to the acquisition of skills like:

• dynamic balancing of self-assertiveness vs. deference to authority (both on an interpersonal level, and also on a societal level)
• productively handling highly heterogeneous interpersonal environments e.g. where people have a broad mix of skill levels, temperaments, abilities, interests, etc.
• learning to handle common but undesirable traits in others e.g. aggressiveness/bullying, jealousy, etc.
• balancing behavioural risk/reward factors (e.g. via 'playing up' and assessing the reactions of others)

These things are all important in the real world to ensure effective function of society. They emerge as a result of contact time, and whatever other things also happen during that time (e.g. learning synthesis paths for ammonia, busywork etc.) don't really matter that much. 'Alternative' schools where there's more homogeneity (everyone is super bright, 'finds school boring' etc.) deprive teenagers of time spent in 'normal' (heterogenous) society - at a time when such exposure has the most impact - and thus compromises acquisition of the skills that help thrive in the real world.

Knowledge acquisition, on the other hand, can be done via Wikipedia etc. and does not need to occupy school time. People who want to acquire knowledge can do this easily in their bedroom at night. Soft skills cannot be learned this way. 

There's a lot of comments here from people saying things like "I dropped out of school / did not attend regular school, became a software engineer and that was a great decision". Great for who? I've worked with many software engineers and I can say that "software engineer" as a profession is at least somewhat correlated with a lack of the soft skills that others do gain from teenage schooling. So it isn't surprising, then, that "software engineer" is also correlated with "didn't get much out of school". But the direction of the arrow of causality isn't clear. And having more teenagers spending more time on software engineering (and hence less time on acquiring soft society skills via extended time in heterogenous interpersonal environments i.e. 'normal schools') may be great for the teenagers if they're not interested in society, or for GDP, but I don't see any indication it's a net positive for the world as a whole.

The true problem is liability. Since teenagers can't assume it for themselves until the age of majority, nor sign any binding contracts.

A teenager that messes up in some catastrophic way and turns themselves into a quadriplegic, will need several tens of millions dollars in healthcare over their lifespan, and will likely be awarded it by most courts, especially if they get enough media attention. Even if it happened solely because of their own negligence, unlike how it works with adults.

No teenager can contribute enough valuable work for any organization doing anything remotely risky physically to take on that risk. 

This includes even basic things such as woodworking, or milking a cow. Which is why any 'employment' of that kind is done on an informal family and friends basis in the U.S.

Even fast food franchisees are getting wary of hiring teenagers because the chances of a huge lawsuit are becoming significant.

In other countries with much lower expectations of liability or healthcare, there is far less 'stretched adolescence'.

1517 fund (Medici fund) is supportive of these people. It has a discord and is generally very "anti-school". Danielle Strachman and Nick Arnett are very understanding (and approachable) of these people.

Hack Club is also a source of them. I know some - like https://medium.com/@kevalin.create - who are trying to craft an alternative path.

I helped fund one (https://mobile.twitter.com/calithameridi ) to SF at age 16, upon which he immediately dropped out of his University of Washington early entrance program to join a new Thiel Fellow at his new startup. UW EEP gives you an immense degree of freedom (you can choose your own classes or skip classes) + some resources, though even EEPers often self-limit themselves to WA and the smartest WA students don't do EEP just to gamble for elite universities (one of my EEPer friends considered most of them "normies" and unfriended them all after moving to SF)

If you know of any disillusioned teenagers, contact me and I can try to set something up (I've liberated more than one). I have some track record of turning people into Thiel Fellows. :)

Another rising star in this demographic is https://twitter.com/raidingAI/ .