.Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 on how to give your kid an unfair advantage

The problem is that smarter kids are severely disadvantaged in the traditional school system. The current school system is tuned to drag the slowest kids along. This imposes incredible boredom on the faster kids and drains them leaving their potential unrefined until much later. This is wasting effectively a decade of their lives if that period is not augmented by parents which often don’t have time. Everyone always talks about helping the weak students but what about the students with great potential? Ultimately it’s the latter, not the former, that creates prosperity for all.

@pmarca Did you just describe homeschooling ?

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The distinction between teaching **compliance** vs. **agency** is the whole game here. Most of the standard path is designed to make kids good at following instructions and waiting for permission. The "unfair advantage" is realizing early that the world is malleable. Letting them sit at the dinner table and absorb how adults actually solve real-world problems—rather than shielding them from it—is such a simple, high-leverage cheat code.

@pmarca Love the energy but hard disagree. You cannot take the human tutor/guide/personal trainer out of it and expect the same level of performance.

Marc is the best example of how I wish I could have video playback on X at 4x speed This is Marc at 2x speed (essentially 4x speed for many) and you can now press play on this vid to get what would be 8x for normies and what I wish for as 4x playback @nikitabier @elonmusk xoxo (2x 4x 8x a lady)

@pmarca More and more people are realizing the acceleration that is about to happen. Ignore it at your peril. I recommend this book for a imaginative glimpse at the future.

@pmarca @AlphaSchoolATX is building physical schools that do this

@pmarca He is 99% correct and 1% very wrong! A great private tutor it doesn’t only answer your questions. It models your thinking. It challenges you It knows you personally And something that AI will NEVER EVER be able to do (hence, never reach AGI), a great tutor will CARE about you!

@pmarca "if you have a kid thats interested in something..." the hard part will be creating a loop that incentivizes learning with a human in the loop, there are inherent social contracts that make the learning part incentivized. this doesnt 1-to-1 map in an AI driven experience

@pmarca 💯 it’s why we’re building — to enable liberal arts education (the OG aristocratic education) at scale.

@pmarca I spoke about this when I keynoted an AWS panel of AI for Education at a conference. The phenomenon is called the Two-Sigma problem coined by Benjamin Bloom in 1984.

@pmarca kids dont learn like this, no kid says "dumb this down" and "quiz me" those are SV qualities.

@pmarca Human tutors are the motivational piece that AI still doesn't provide. The smile. The enthusiasm. The challenge. The tough love. Can AI or a robot do that yet? Will it be able to do that?

@pmarca Ironically, my 13 year old refuses to use the AI tutor I built him.

@pmarca He's talking about @oboelabs !

@pmarca Also breed with someone with a normal shaped head.

@pmarca because nothing ever goes right, and everything is doomed to fail. just another pipe dream in a world of broken promises.

@pmarca The part they don’t tell - It diminishes the learning capability and makes you dependent because of short cuts that feel real. There’s no nuance based on age, capability and learning ability - In short you get answers that seem smart but lack depth.

@pmarca Yes! When guided and used correctly, this is 100% the outcome. Just one quick caveat that may have been discussed beyond this snippet. It’s important to use domain-specific tools tailored to their interests for augmentation to be highly effective.

@pmarca We have already built this :)

@pmarca @rshanreddy 👀

@pmarca I must know his peptide stack 💉

@pmarca This melon head forgets to think about the consequences of letting a child build such relationships with AI. It can't end well.

@pmarca I'm not disagreeing with Marc's point, but haven't we as a society figured out that we can get senior citizens to also fill that gap? There are a lot of successful peeps out there who've been laid off because of age who want to send the ladder down. It wouldn't cost much.

@pmarca great convo @lennysan, love to see it

I do think it’s a possibility we are however far away from it, like yes few use cases like learning the regular lists of stuffs needed to do well in an exam yes of course llm is doing it perfectly. But when you want to go deeper in a certain area, like which interests you, may be business math and you want to connect it with bartering, trading , and then slowly introduce money, there are curriculum where history geography and mathematics are related and a kid gets super interested in going deeper horizontally in each of these. A.i is still very far from this. Like recommendations on certain books and then letting them know may be you go in this direction or check this out. Can you do this too? Like out of box thinking I guess. I think this is a very interesting problem and solving it would be something worthwhile

@pmarca Likely to side step this as a parent, though I can see why the parallel is drawn

@pmarca Two listens in and feeling indeterministically optimistic. @pmarca on guiding his son with the new “philosopher’s stone” is pure gold. I vibe code games with my son, and that “anything is possible” mindset spills right into his education.

@pmarca Hey @pmarca … like @TeachUai ?

Startrek TNG "The Offspring" (Season 3, Episode 16). Wesley Crusher (the prodigy character) suggests traditional schooling for Lal (Data's android "daughter," who is extraordinarily advanced and learns at an accelerated rate): Wesley Crusher: Have you considered sending her to school? Data: She already has access to the sum of human knowledge from me. Wesley Crusher: Data, she could learn a lot by being with children her own age. Data: She is only two weeks old. Later, when Data does try placing Lal in the ship's school (a more group-based setting), it fails quickly: the other children are intimidated/afraid of her because she appears older/more capable, and she's too advanced for the classes. The teacher reports she's "too smart for most classes," and the social dynamic doesn't work. Data pulls her out, reverting to personalized guidance from himself (and later Guinan in Ten Forward for social aspects).

@pmarca parabolic.

@pmarca

@pmarca Silly.

@pmarca Had me until "traditional education system"