hath's Shortform

Teaching 1984

Before we are allowed to start reading, we must listen to a PowerPoint in which the book is explained. The plot, the main character, the context, the terms, the setting; none of these are allowed to be discovered ourselves. The context I'll grant her, but she could have explained the relevant history in five minutes. Instead we must be told what it is that we are supposed to understand from the book, as we cannot be trusted to pick up on the terms by ourselves. I understand that some of it might be confusing for students to read if they aren't familiar with the book already, but 1984's hobby of introducing new terms and settings (worldbuilding) isn't an art highschoolers are incapable of understanding. People here have read The Hunger Games, or Divergent, or whatever other YA fiction is popular these days. They understand it, even when it talks about things that don't exist in our life (District 13, the factions).

We are instructed to take notes as we read. It's implied that these things will be on tests, that we will be asked to define the Newspeak terms and the plot elements. I imagine that that's how they teach Newspeak to children in Oceania, too. Just because we read something in a class doesn't mean that everything has to be memorized; when you ask students to remember what happens in books, and to recite the themes when prompted, you get SparkNotes, which serves as the answer key for this class. The teacher intends for you to understand the underlying themes. You're supposed to understand the application of the concepts, and not just the pages of the textbook it was on. Yet, teachers optimize for what can be easily tested.

She begins to read the first chapter aloud. She pauses, at times, to explain the implications of what we read. "What do you notice about the names of the four Ministries?", she asks. "They're too nice?" a student responds. At least there's student participation. She could have just lectured for the whole class.

But, then again, it could be that much worse. I mock how we start the book, but we're doing a game for the entire grade to try to get us to understand 1984. People will get to roleplay as Thought Police, or Party members, or proles. When I asked the teacher, one-on-one, whether I'd enjoy the game, she said I would. Do I trust that? Somewhat. So, they're trying.

There's a post waiting to be written about the simulations/wargames that we played at my old school as part of history class. I think that those types of wargames are enjoyable, and that they teach more than whatever else the teacher would do. Yet, I fear that if word came down from the School Board, telling teachers that wargames are the new way to teach, more effective than anything else, it wouldn't end well. From where I sit at the bottom of the authority food chain, I've seen dozens of well-intentioned interventions and regulations meant to help students learn, and almost none of them have any of the effect than the regulators expected. Part of this is due to teacher incompetence/apathy; part of this is due to simply miscommunicated intentions.

The saddest thing about this is that these students, these people with the potential to be legitimately creative and do so much more than they're asked to do here, are being taught to see 1984 as their English textbook, in the sense that they must regard 1984 as the source for the questions on the test, and little else. I wouldn't be surprised if we had to write essays on symbolism or themes. We've done this for Lord of the Flies and Macbeth so far this year. It's horrible.

Get us out of here.

Suprising: the fact that Chuck Palahniuk's writing style is visible in lsusr's fiction. More suprising: the fact that Fight Club 2 deals with... memetics, of all things.

I recall there being a Zvi post with a ton of "related to:" prerequisites at the beginning; does anyone remember which that was? It's relevant to a post I'm trying to write.

Upcoming Posts

Now that I'm back from [Atlas Fellowship+SPARC+EAG+Future Forum], I have some post ideas to write up. A brief summary:

Agency and Authority, an actual in-depth, gears-level explanation of agency, parenting, the two kinds of respect, moral conflation with that respect, the fact that those in power are incentivized to make their underlings more legible and predictable to them, arbitrarily high punishments and outcome matrices, absolute control and concessions, incentives for those not in power and how those incentives turn you into less of an agent, and how the best solution is to create a "good person who follows orders" mask that hopefully never breaks or bleeds into the rest of your character, and then use that mask while you plot to get out of the situation.

I've gotten the same questions a couple times from different people, and want to just write up the responses as a post, so I don't have to go back and rewrite them.

• How did you get into rationality/EA/alignment?
• Why did you hate high school so much?
• What was [Atlas/SPARC/EAG/FF] like?
• What's it like being a minor in those communities?
• So, what exactly do you do? Well, okay, what are you planning to do?

There was a lightning talk I gave at SPARC and Future Forum, which I ended up teaching as a full-on class at SPARC, called Memento, Memory, and Note-Taking. I want to develop that as a full post.

I also want to migrate all of my notes from Obsidian to Notion, and have some plans for what I want to include in my Notion; this will probably make it onto LW at some point.

I've also made some progress on what I call "putting myself back together" and this is, in retrospect, what I have spent the past month doing. I might publicly reflect on some of the personal growth and introspection I've done during that time.

I'd like to write "An Intro to Rationalist Culture" at some point, because it's incredible to see the different social norms that rationalists have developed, the most important prerequisite being the ability to see and talk about social norms on the meta-level, and changing said norms as a result.

There's also some other ideas that seem important to me:

• Fleshing out what "hath culture" looks like
• I need to figure out how to live in a world on fire; writing down how I cope with that now might help.

This isn't even a definitive list of all the post ideas I have (the actual list is like 5x the size) but these are the ones I plan on writing soon.

I'll be at Capla-Con this weekend, if anyone else here is going.

I'm writing up my models on why my pet project, Ascension, is a good idea. This is the outline. As I expand the post, I'll add the incremental bits as comments.

Intro:

• Why write this?
• Short version of what this was.
• Why run Ascension (short version)

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.
• High school, as an institution, is absolutely dog shit.
  • Signaling race to the bottom that sucks up all of your time.
• 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 fucking sucked!
• 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.
• Things like coworking are pretty good for long-term productivity.
• There are a bunch of other systems that can be implemented individually and on the scale of groups to make people more productive. Think to-do lists, or morning standup meetings.
• Dealing with minors, in general, fucking sucks.
  • You have to be accountable to parents
  • They don’t have rights under the law to do a bunch of things
  • You’re exposed to a lot more liability in general
  • Also, a lot of people just, like, don’t really want to deal with most teenagers that much?
• As a result of this, the housing situation for minors in the bay is close to nonexistent.
  • Arcadia, the closest thing to Ascension that exists, is pretty good, but not aimed at the exact kind of things I care about here, and also they don’t exactly have a no-minor policy, but they do have strict scrutiny around allowing minors.
• There exist these weird niche communities around really smart, young, promising people, like Atlas/ESPR/SPARC and EV.
  • It’s fucking incredible for people in those communities to spend time with other people in those communities. Yet, because when you’re selecting on the scale of 1/1,000 or 1/10,000, you end up pretty far on average from other people like you.
  • Also, it’s useful for people to have some way of getting into these groups. 
• The Bay community in general is fucking amazing, and being in a house that is part of that larger community is amazing.
  • Having people well into their career who can serve as mentorship-ish figures is also really good.
• Weird rituals and group activities are awesome! People don’t get enough of those by default.
  • Having weird rationalist customs of betting and such, as group norms, is pretty cool.
• Also, having a tight-knit group of people you live with, who you very much respect and know well, is great for social stuff.
• Dath ilani coordination, where people choose Stag as a group.
• Dragon Army was cool and all, but MAN do I not have the leadership knowledge/ability to run something with that much centralization of power. 
  • As it happens, neither did Duncan, according to him.
  • You’ll also note that the Dragon Army Theory post was mostly Duncan explaining different group dynamics problems, and trying to fix it with his group house, whereas this is more me explaining a bunch of societal problems that lead to people misjudging minors for this sort of thing.
• For the demographic of teenagers who are likely to be at Ascension, the risks involved aren’t necessarily what you’d think of. They don’t drink, they don’t take (depressant) drugs. The actual risks that I’d be worried about are people getting depressed and romantic drama.
  • Though, a large part of this is due to me being pretty selective with who I invite.
• Running stuff like “everyone in the house gets together to work on blog posts” results in many more blog posts being written than there would be otherwise.

So, like, what does all of this look like?

Why am I writing this? 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 that I can point to that says what this whole thing is about.

(dialogue reconstructed as well as I can remember it)

For once, I actually cared about what we were doing in English. For our final essay on Macbeth I wrote 1260 words on Duncan's choices through the play, analyzing if he could have made better decisions given the information that he had, and trying to see whether his decisions would have worked out well if not for the supernatural occurrences of the play. This was a couple weeks after my English teacher had talked to me and told me that I wasn't putting enough effort into her class, and that I was doing significantly worse than I could be. At the time, I wasn't completely sure whether this was due to my own laziness or whether it was that the topics we wrote about in that class (essays on symbolism in Lord Of The Flies and other things of roughly equal uselessness) were bullshit, and not relevant to actually learning to write (see everything Paul Graham has ever written) but I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and resolved to try harder on the next essay.

She gave me a C-. Had her criticism been that the essay was poorly-written or rambling, I would have been okay with that; instead, her issue with it was that it was off-prompt^[1]. I had written about something I actually cared about for only the second time in the six months of that class, and she had rejected it for not specifically answering the prompt. In her feedback, she helpfully explained what she wanted me to write instead:

This is not about blame. This is a cause/effect essay.

1. Duncan decides X.
2. X, therefore Y.
3. This illustrates the theme of Z.

I'm grateful to her for spelling out exactly what she wanted, because otherwise I may have been under the impression that she wanted me to actually do something interesting. I talked to her about it in person. "hath, your issue is that every time you're given an assignment, you want to talk about the philosophy of it. You need to learn to follow directions. If you have a job, and someone gives you the assignment to write a report, and you instead say 'I'm not sure if writing this report is the best thing to do', you're going to end up jobless." I disagreed with everything she had said (I wouldn't call "trying to make better decisions" philosophy, I have had an internship in which the person said specifically "If you come up with better ideas for assignments than what I give you, do those instead", and I don't plan to work in the type of job where conformity is useful), but instead said this: "I grant that there is some value to conformism and respect to authority in certain environments." "I'm not teaching conformism." At this point, I honestly didn't see any point in continuing this discussion (we had had talks like this for the past few months with zero change), and left. Not sure if I should have left, but I don't necessarily regret it. I've been trying since the start of the year to do independent work on writing I actually enjoy, but every time she shoots me down and tells me not to tell her how to teach.

Yes, there is a reason to actually follow directions in this setting, but I would say that forcing students to write specifically one type of formulaic paper that doesn't have any other relevance is actively counterproductive to learning the skill of writing well. Furthermore, every other English teacher I've had would have gladly accepted the essay I wrote, and not rejected it solely based on it being adjacent to the prompt instead of exactly following the prompt. Throughout high school, I've had to optimize for getting a good grade over actually learning, and don't look forward to doing it more. At this point, the point of getting good grades is to signal to my parents that I'm capable of doing non-school things, because they have made it abundantly clear that putting effort into my schoolwork is the only way that they can be persuaded into allowing me to do independent study of any type, or anything resembling a nontraditional path. (or even to apply to fellowships).

This was the prompt:

Macbeth examines the difficulty of ruling: who gets to make important decisions, what should be the course of action to take, and what will be the impact? In a well-written essay, identify two such decisions in Macbeth made by a ruler (Duncan, Macbeth, etc), and through the lens of one of the themes of the play, evaluate how those decisions contribute to the profound personal and societal consequences that follow. Make sure you illustrate causality (cause/effect) in this essay.

1. ↩︎

I might start a newsletter on the economics of individual small businesses. Does anyone know anyone who owns or manages e.g. a restaurant, or a cafe, or a law firm, or a bookstore, or literally any kind of small business? Would love intros to such people so that I can ask them a bunch of questions about e.g. their main sources of revenue and costs or how they make pricing decisions.

Prom tickets at my high school are $85. Luckily, you can buy them now, before they go up in price to $100. If you donate $150 to St. Judes, you get a ticket for free; as far as I know, buying a normal ticket does not involve donating to charity. Normally, I'd be in favor of just supply-and-demanding it, by raising prices until you have peak attendance, but something tells me that the purpose of a high school is not to extract profits from their students. Maybe this is just preparing us for college.

I think that having some form of daily to-do list will go a long way towards increasing my productivity and happiness, as it'll help me keep track of sleep/exercise habits, stay on top of schoolwork, and help me spend my free time on things I actually want to work on. Here's the one I came up with:

• Plan out free time for the day
• Review all due Anki cards
• Go on a run, or use elliptical for 30 minutes
• Update calendar
• Work on schoolwork for at least an hour
• Take a walk outside.
• Work on learning math for at least 30 minutes
• Write for at least 30 minutes
• Take a melatonin at 8pm
• Turn off phone by 9pm, be in bed with book when you finish working
• Floss, brush teeth, wash face, use moisturizer, put in retainer
• Set alarm for tomorrow morning
• Meditate for 15 minutes

I made a printable version with checkli.

I hereby pledge to completing this to-do list every day for the next week. If it goes well, I'll try longer-term.

Some quotes from Planecrash that I might collect into a full post: