Creating Better Humans, Not Just More Robots

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Long Run! It’s my favorite time of year — winter is leaving, the birds are singing, and March Madness is upon us.

For the record, with UNC’s tragic end to their season last night, I’m now taking UCLA (gotta rep the new hometown team).

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Let’s hop into it.

There’s great irony in the way many of us talk about artificial intelligence:

We worry about AI being able to think like humans, yet our schools continue to teach young people to memorize and regurgitate facts, much like robots.

As much as I enjoyed school, most of what I’ve learned in life has come from outside the classroom. Living on my own, meeting new people, traveling to new places, working internships & jobs, writing online, and exchanging ideas with others. And all of these experiences came at a much cheaper cost.

Education is outdated. While this isn’t a uniquely American issue, America tends to set the precedent for much of the world to follow. How we change the way young people learn over the next decade will have profound effects on the future of not only the US population, but America’s place in the global order.

What’s wrong with our education system today?

Most of you would probably agree that the current education system is broken. It’s:

• Focused on memorization and recitation

• Boring & stale

• Lacking inspiration for joy & curiosity

• Not innovative

• Expensive

The result? Waste.

Students cram the night before tests and then forget everything within a week.

Administrative bloat.

Kids aren’t learning skills valuable to thrive in the modern economy.

We’ve created a zero-sum prestige game where we force kids to learn oftentimes useless skills, get good grades in high school to compete for a limited numbers of seats in good colleges, to then fight for the same limited number of “reputable” jobs as doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, and consultants.

As we’ve focused on the ends (prestigious jobs to please others), rather than the means (learning for the sake of personal fulfillment, growth, and human progress) it’s no wonder there’s a growing loss of hope in the American Dream.

Many kids today grow up stressed about and disinterested in school. Social media is part of the problem, but it’s also due to the outdated nature of what and how schools teach.

Rather than teaching us to enjoy the process of learning, we’ve gotten caught up in outcomes.

The result?

A generation of young people ill-prepared to enter an increasingly complex world.

We’ve lost the script.

The rising cost of higher education

Let’s visualize how the price level of goods & services has varied across sectors of the economy. All of the red lines in the chart above have outpaced inflation (which has increased 74.4% in total since 2000), while all of the blue lines are sectors that have gotten cheaper relative to inflation.

What do we find?

Sectors with the highest inflation are those where technological innovation has stalled (education, healthcare, and housing).

Sectors with the lowest inflation (in fact, where prices have gotten cheaper), are those where technology has reduced prices and increased quality (electronics, software, clothing).

Why?

Heavy regulation and excessive government control (see above: waste).

When you subsidize a product with restricted supply (like colleges in the form of restricting the number of seats for students), prices rise and quality diminishes.

The problem is one of incentives. If you’re a college administrator, you continue to get paid, nothing changes, and you are actually incentivized to not do anything new. You make sure to fund political campaigns for those who protect your system and push your ideology, all in the false prophecy of “education.” You don’t want to change a system that benefits you.

This becomes problematic when extended out across decades.

When the price of anything continues to increase, while the quality of that thing stagnates, two things typically happen:

1) That thing starts to take up a larger percentage of GDP.

2) The pace of innovation in that thing falls behind the broader economy.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, the wealth gap is not only rising in the US broadly, but also within generations. And this “intragenerational wealth gap” is growing larger with younger generations, due in large part to rising education costs, which lead to more student loans, which (coupled with rising housing prices), leads to further inequality.

And that’s just the price side of this equation — on the quality side, these same young people are not learning skills in school that will actually prove valuable in our modern economy. And a lack of marketable skills makes it that much harder to fix the problem.

Blend all of these trends with the fact that AI & automation is dramatically changing the world as we speak, and we have ourselves a conundrum.

What is the actual value of a college experience?

This question gets thrown around all the time. If you ask any recent college grad, they’ll probably tell you that 90% of the value was not in the actual course content, but in being around other smart and ambitious people — the experience outside the classroom.

We need to define the actual purpose of college.

Is it to learn life skills? To get a job? To teach young people how to gain life experience? To create better citizens? To advance our understanding of the world? Is it a stamp on our resume, or the network we build?

MBA programs, for example, are not valuable because they teach case studies and how businesses work. That can all be found online for free. They’re valuable in the network they provide and the career opportunities they create.

When you really think about it, society is, by definition, social. While more technical skills and concepts can be taught digitally, and we have more access to information through the internet than ever before (and for much cheaper), the purpose of college must be reimagined.

Technology enables us to more easily learn hard skills. But it can’t teach us:

• Values

• Empathy

• What it means to be a good person

• What things are worth learning

• What problems are worth pursuing

We must learn those things through experience and sharing ideas with others.

If we define the purpose of college, we can work backwards to build an environment that fulfills that purpose.

Schools as third places — the crucial fabric to our society

We can’t lose sight of the fact that schools are a massive component in shaping the values of children and the people they become.

In the modern tech-dominated world, we have fewer third places, and fewer young people are seeing their friends every day.

But there’s real value in in-person interaction.

We talked previously about how our physical surroundings impact us far more than we realize.

As an example, let’s take a quick detour and look back at historically valuable hubs of knowledge — coffeehouses in Europe.

European coffeehouses in the 18th century were the first vital gathering places not centered around work, home, church, or alcohol consumption. They were places where ideas were born, and they spurred the Age of Enlightenment.

By the late 19th century coffeehouses got a reputation as hubs for writers & artists. For example, Picasso, Hemingway, and Gauguin were all frequent visitors at Le Dôme Café in Paris.

Everyone from radical political groups to regular folks visited these coffeehouses before or after work to socialize and share ideas. Although they weren’t “schools,” these were centers of learning. They were in-person hubs of creativity innovation.

Unlike school today, these coffeehouses were not someone telling you what to think, but they were a two-way discussion where we debated merits of ideas and learned for the sake of advancing human knowledge and progress, not memorizing & reciting facts (things AI already does well).

One is authoritarian, while the other is scientific.

So if we were to redesign education today, what might it look like?

Redesigning education from the ground up

For starters, we’d want to actually teach skills that enable young people to thrive in today’s world — to actually build & create things that add value to society.

Automation will remove a lot of waste from the economic world (purely due to capitalist motives), and this is a good thing. However, education must get ahead before that happens; otherwise, all of the value created will accrue to an increasingly small group of people.

Rather than creating better employees (which are good at obeying), the schools of the future will create better entrepreneurs (which are good at creating things and solving problems).

How might this reformed education system look? I’m no expert, and I’d love to hear others’ opinions on this, but here are some ideas:

• Fostering a love for reading — whatever it is the person finds interesting

• Greater emphasis on storytelling & persuasion

• More opportunities for doing (and learning to fail) rather than theorizing

• Inspiring joy & curiosity

• Less memorization, more analytical & creative thinking

• Less sitting, more physical movement

• Building community

• Financial literacy

• Physical & mental fitness

• Instilling Discipline

In the case of college campus settings, we should probably emphasize gaining valuable life experience rather that purely course content that can be learned online.

We can build machines that solve complex equations, but we can’t manufacture excitement and passion. We should direct kids into things that hold their attention, leaning into those passions.

As AI begins to dominate technical domains, the areas that will be most important for humans are the ones where AI struggles:

Things like curation & good taste. Empathy, morals, good values, and philosophy. The ability to form an opinion and communicate those ideas effectively with others. Asking the right questions. Storytelling.

Ultimately, life is a game. Rather than schools telling kids how to win the game, we should teach kids how to decide for themselves which games are worth playing.

Creating better humans, not just more robots.

-Owen

How would you change education (both at the elementary and collegiate levels)? Reply directly to this email with any ideas. Would love to hear what you think!

Fresh Finds

Michael Mauboussin — How Great Investors Make Decisions (Tim Ferriss)

Podcast | 123 minutes

If you haven’t heard of Mauboussin before, he’s a fountain of knowledge. Combine his wide range of interests and investing expertise with Tim’s ability to draw out interesting stories from people, and this made for a super insightful convo. I enjoyed their discussion around how there’s both wisdom and madness in crowds, as well as this idea of “complex adaptive systems” in everyday life, and how seemingly unrelated domains apply to others (such as how biology applies to finance & economics).

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