I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents who buy books in learning to parent are typically better parents not because they read the books but because they care enough to buy the books. If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school, the parent is invested in the child's success and I think that's way more important.
I spent months doing research for a blog post about One Laptop Per Child last year, and came to a related, but more broad conclusion: it's extremely easy to reach misleading conclusions when studying novel educational methods. No strong conclusion comes without qualifiers related to culture and economics. Moreover, a shocking amount of harm has been done by people trying to apply an educational method outside of the socioeconomic context where its efficacy was proven.
There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
In OLPC's case, the remedy was a retroactive, panicked attempt at teaching teachers how to use the laptops, an effort that largely failed.
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
> i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here.
Oh yeah, they had their heads miles up their own asses. That's absolutely a major part of the story. Idealism led to hubris.
The hand crank is a big part of the story, though its role is more complicated than you might expect. It wasn't a silver bullet. Some developing nations, like Paraguay, had decent electrical infrastructure, but their OLPC deployments still went poorly due to lack of training and lack of maintenance/repair programs.
Also, it takes very basic physics to prove that the hand crank could never have been the silver bullet in the first place. My math in the essay agrees that no child-operated hand crank was ever going to be sensible.
I did high school at a prestigious technical school at my hometown, hard to get in, very competitive. The education itself wasn't that much better than my previous school but they had the name recognition and as getting in was very hard, likely the best students around town.
Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
In my hometown there is something like that. There are two schools, one of them had a year with particularly good approval rates. Competitive parents started preferring that school, finding ways to send their kids there. That school has been sustaining better approval rates since then.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
In middle school, I had good grades but was considered a bit of a teacher's pet and was not well liked (especially since I sucked at sports). So I stopped doing homework, I showed that I didn't make effort to try and be better accepted. I still did any graded homework (less than 20% of the homework given) but didn't bother with anything else. Luckily school was easy for me so I still got good grades but I got very habits from that that I have needed to unlearn after.
I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.
It's even worse than that: in some circles, kids are expected to be ignorant, or expected to be emotionless, or mean to each others, or asocial etc. We became mostly what was expected from us, with little variations. Once you've set the wrong expectations, education is an uphill battle.
It makes perfect sense if we approach it from the stance that parents and peers matter more than the teachers. Anecdotally, kids who have parents who give a crap and peers who share similar goals (seek good grades, entrance to college, not doing drugs, etc) tend to do better in school.
> Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
Theres also a lot of college prep going on with private schools. We had far higher college adviser to student ratios than any public school. They started working with you earlier than any public school. No grade inflation and college admissions knew that and knew the reputation of the highschool. Academically the schedule, courseload, workload, things like freedom to pick different electives, were all designed to mirror college.
It also had an obvious and unhelpful result. Of course kids who spend all day learning will know that stuff better than kids who don't. What really matters is long term life outcomes.
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
I'm not exactly sure, but measuring performance on education tests as a child is just a proxy for the whole point of education and raising children and it could even be backwards.
> If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school
Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
> if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school
This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.
It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships.
My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children.
Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.
My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
Isn’t Montessori considered kind of weird by many people, though? Like you have to be into child education and actually critically assess the available options to realize it’s probably better than the standard one. Or has Montessori achieved Eternal September?
You don't to execute code to have it backtrack. The LLM can inherently backtrack itself if trained to. It knows all the context provided to it and the output it has written already.
If it knows it needs to backtrack then could it gain much by outputting something that tells the code to backtrack for it? For example, outputting something like "I've disproven the previous hypothesis, remove the details". Almost like asking to forget.
This could reduce the number of tokens it needs at inference time, saving compute. But with how attention works, it may not make any difference to the performance of the LLM.
Similarly, could there be gains by the LLM asking to work in parallel? For example "there's 3 possible approaches to this, clone the conversation so far and resolve to the one that results in the highest confidence".
This feels like it would be fairly trivial to implement.
I see a lot of people talking about rental properties and I don't think there's enough talk in favor of rental properties so here's my shot at it.
My philosophy of being a landlord is not to bank on appreciation, but rather find houses where the mortgage is well below what tenants are paying for. How do you find those kinds of houses? You buy dilapidated houses, renovate them and then rent them out. If you don't want to go through that work, there are middlemen called "turnkey providers" that renovate houses and then sell them to investors for a profit.
From there, you can decide whether to manage the property yourself (less passive) or hire a property manager (more passive). If you hire a property manager, they do all of the busy work associated with owning a house like finding tenants, collecting rent, evicting tenants. They do not get paid unless there is a tenant on the property so it's in their best interest to find you a good tenant.
The thing I like most about rental properties is four fold:
1) Positive cash flow (rent minus all operating costs)
2) Depreciation (in the US, you can depreciate the cost of the house--not land--over 27.5 years which usually makes the cash flow stated above tax free)
3) Principal payments (part of the mortgage the tenant pays goes into the principal of the property--usually around 30% of the first payment goes to principal if you put down 20% and it only goes up from there)
4) Appreciation (the house & land usually appreciates at pace with inflation)
Also remember, the longer you hold the property, the higher the rent will be while your 30 year loan will stay flat. This makes holding property much more appealing later on but with higher repair bills as well as things start to break.
There's a lot of advantages with owning homes IF you do the math correctly. Here's a video of Brandon Turner, the owner of Bigger Pockets, discussing how to analyze rental properties for the math to make sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uogn4qtZ8U
Also, if there's a downturn in the market, usually people that own homes move to rental properties.
If you're interested in rental properties, I'd suggest the bigger pockets forums where you can read about everyone doing this type of stuff:
https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums
I think you missed mentioning the greatest thing about rental properties: You're buying the property using someone else's money (via a mortgage). There is literally no other investment besides real estate that allows you to do this.
Principal payments (part of the mortgage the tenant pays goes into the principal of the property--usually around 30% of the first payment goes to principal if you put down 20% and it only goes up from there
You would be correct if you were managing this property yourself. This would be incorrect if you have a property manager managing this property. You can work with your property manager to auto approve any house related work that is under a certain threshold. Otherwise, they will send you an invoice for you to pay at your convenience.
With that said, depending on the property manager, they will do some of the following: find tenants, place tenants, evict tenants, collect rent, find contractors/repairperson to fix issues, etc.
The property manager makes it mostly passive but probably an hour a month of work if that.
Sure, but then the property manager charges so much that it's probably not a profitable investment, or at least a much less profitable one. They typically charge a % of the rent, plus another fee for whatever activity they do- x number of dollars to visit the site, x dollars to show the property, x dollars to go to court, manage the contractors, and so on.
Now it's 'passive', sure, but no longer an 'investment'
Not only that, but her answers were "in memory of ...[of her husband], a gentle spirit, and in memory of my father, mother, aunts, uncles, friends, and many others who have lost the cancer battle."
Here's the problem. The person was being paid to pay attention to the road. According to the below news article, the person was watching the voice on their mobile phone while the car was driving. Perfectly acceptable if the vehicle has already been rated to be fully autonomous but, in this case, they are still testing the automation and the car detected the bicyclists 5.6 seconds prior to the accident.
Uber should be partially at fault since they deactivated the automatic emergency braking.
Yes, I agree when vehicles become fully autonomous, people will be less attuned to the environment, but in this case, the person was hired specifically to pay attention at all times.
"Herzberg was crossing Mill Avenue (North) from west to east, approximately 360 feet (110 m) south of the intersection with Curry Road, outside the designated pedestrian crosswalk"
