Based Camp - Based Camp： Our Attempt to Fix Education

00:00:00.000 hello gorgeous hello so this is a follow-up episode we had done an episode on the education

00:00:07.340 system why it's terrible the forces at play here how how little genuine innovation is happening in

00:00:13.880 the space it is terrifying i suggest you check that episode out but you really don't need to

00:00:18.780 watch it before this one this one we're going to focus on the system that we've designed

00:00:23.120 for the collins institute you can learn more at collinsinstitute.org and yes just one of those

00:00:28.380 spaces where we've decided to put some of our effort to try to fix something because we saw

00:00:32.240 something broken and that means we got to clean it up the the fun premise here is this is basically

00:00:39.480 we discovered that in the world of education no one is really trying anything innovative also when

00:00:46.060 people have tried to experiment around different outcomes it did it wasn't actually trying to

00:00:50.960 experiment for earning potential or changing the world or making an impact or even thriving as a

00:00:55.720 it was pretty much around self-esteem and in the few isolated instances in which people did say

00:01:02.040 i'm gonna try to create geniuses they did so basically we have reason to believe that people

00:01:08.000 who come in intentionally trying to innovate new models have the potential to genuinely change the

00:01:13.940 world because there's nothing more fundamental than the way that you educate the next generation

00:01:17.760 and equip the next generation to take on new challenges so the premise here is okay we see this and

00:01:23.020 we're like all right we're gonna throw our hats in the ring and this is what we have decided to do

00:01:28.660 few caveats to what you just said montessori is pretty good for pre-secondary school so before

00:01:35.580 middle school montessori is actually a pretty solid system i think it can be improved a little but it's

00:01:40.240 it's decent for what's out there um and acton schools are actually a pretty innovative and

00:01:47.040 interesting model that we respect outside of that pretty much hate everything would you like to know more

00:01:53.020 okay now to to our system so what we've done is we have taken the entire educational system

00:02:00.380 secondary school so middle school and high school as well as we're eventually moving to colleges we've

00:02:05.560 talked with this new college that might actually implement our system as the primary way that

00:02:09.760 learning happens at that college so hopefully we can go from middle school to the end of college

00:02:12.860 where we have divided it into individual nodes that work like a skill tree or a tech tree in a video game

00:02:20.460 if you're not familiar with what that looks like i doubt that much of our audience doesn't know what a

00:02:26.060 skill tree or tech tree in a video game is but it's actually a pretty hard concept to explain to

00:02:29.020 someone who's never seen it think of it like a ancestry tree that you progress through like you

00:02:34.680 would have nodes you complete one node it unlocks nodes above that sometimes you need to unlock two

00:02:38.920 nodes to unlock one node above that okay and whenever a student clicks on one of these nodes

00:02:44.760 they get a place where they can book a time to take a test on that subject to complete the node

00:02:50.720 under that it's like you would have in hacker news although someone always says i i say reddit as well

00:02:55.460 but hacker news is a better direct analog because it's all links where you have links to all of the

00:03:01.780 places a student could learn that information that exists online and students can upload their own

00:03:08.120 youtube tutorials after doing something or their own notes after doing something then students vote on the

00:03:14.340 sources that were most useful to them those votes are modified by how well a student did eventually

00:03:19.560 we want to begin to build profiles of students so that students can be shown resources that were

00:03:25.080 most useful to students who have similar voting patterns to them on these these tests and we also

00:03:31.120 want to build some sort of reward or remuneration system where students can receive some sort of reward

00:03:36.380 for creating content that ended up being useful to a lot of other students now a quick side note on this

00:03:42.520 one of the things that we really believe in with our educational system is to not have a single metric

00:03:47.580 of measurement and by that what i mean is the existing education system 80 of students are not in

00:03:53.120 the top 20 and that's a problem when nobody wants to hire somebody who's not in the top 20 or no one

00:03:58.040 wants to accept someone who's not in the top 20 so when you are measuring students on how far they've

00:04:03.200 gotten in the tree how good their grades are how many students liked the content that they were creating

00:04:09.380 and we're using that these are metrics that can have different students succeed within them

00:04:13.900 which means that no longer are you dealing with a student where 80 of students are not in the top

00:04:18.360 20 okay yes so now back to the tech tree one of the major problems in the educational space is what

00:04:27.460 we call the extrinsic intrinsic reward problem this is a phenomenon where if you pay someone to do

00:04:33.760 something that they love they start liking it less and less and less this is why when people take a job

00:04:39.380 one of their hobbies they will sometimes grow to really resent that hobby and the school system

00:04:44.180 is right with this problem because that is what grades are they're an extrinsic reward and so when

00:04:48.580 a student has a genuine passion for something that passion can be dulled by continually applying this

00:04:53.420 extrinsic reward this is why kids who go through unschooling this is a schooling system where different

00:04:58.940 from homeschooling it just lets kids do whatever they want all day these kids often end up doing just

00:05:05.440 astoundingly at the things that they love but then unfortunately really bad at the things that

00:05:10.560 they're disinterested in and this is the the core problem of the unschooling movement and it was a

00:05:16.040 big inspiration for us when we were designing our school system we said can we design a school system

00:05:20.960 that instead of trying to fix the problems with public school instead uses students in a control

00:05:26.100 scenario students who are just doing whatever they want all day and see where those students end up

00:05:30.820 struggling and fix those areas and only those areas while allowing students to do basically

00:05:37.660 whatever they want so they often end up with crippling test anxiety so that is why we incorporate

00:05:42.520 tests throughout our entire system because the truth is that the real world will test you it will put you

00:05:47.400 in testing situations if you never go through any of those that's that's a problem because that's

00:05:51.440 functionally in the real world i mean we're optimizing our system around outcomes so that makes

00:05:55.560 sense second is the extrinsic intrinsic reward problem so what you need is a system that can

00:06:00.800 organically detect when a student doesn't have intrinsic motivation within a subject and then

00:06:07.080 imply that extrinsic motivation in and only in those scenarios and proportional to their lack of

00:06:14.760 intrinsic motivation in that space now in project-based systems which is what a lot of people move to but

00:06:20.020 are unsustainable you have teachers that watch the students and push them where they need to be pushed but

00:06:24.460 you can't do that at scale so it's not really useful for a scalable system unless you're doing it with

00:06:29.480 ai which we do implement in our system and might be a counter system to ours that we can talk about

00:06:35.180 so what we do is the further behind a student is in a part of the tech tree the higher a multiple is

00:06:42.820 applied to the credits they get for the score they get for completing a test in that subject and they

00:06:48.520 need to get a certain number of credits per semester to stay within our school system and this is the

00:06:53.940 thing where people are like oh that's really harsh what you kick kids out just for not getting a

00:06:57.060 certain number of credits even though this is like a public system that's meant for everyone

00:06:59.820 in the adult world i mean theoretically this is the way it's supposed to work when someone can't 0.96

00:07:04.100 handle their shit what what do we do with these people we send them to prison that's that's what 0.97

00:07:08.700 we do it's it's it's not the way prison actually ends up working prison system also has a lot of 0.99

00:07:13.460 flaws i'd love to work on that someday when i get time and simone has some really interesting

00:07:17.200 theories around that i want to do yeah our charter cities one of you if we ever get around to

00:07:21.260 publishing that we recorded a while ago but anyway what the dynamic that we hope can eventually

00:07:27.220 evolve out of this is that our school system becomes available to any students who want it

00:07:32.800 but the students who lack the ability to find a way to motivate themselves they end up having to go

00:07:37.280 to the existing public school system because that's basically prison for kids and that's what it

00:07:41.440 already is it's using the same contractors it's the same system it's it's it's terrible it's terrible

00:07:47.440 anyway so that's the way that aspect of the system works now what do we do when a student

00:07:51.160 gets really far ahead in a subject three four years ahead of where they are well if somebody

00:07:55.320 really loves playing with legos the best reward is more legos by that i mean it's the best yeah

00:08:00.260 reward for somebody who's intrinsically motivated for something is more of that thing at a more

00:08:04.880 advanced level but we take it beyond that and this this is the my personally favorite part about

00:08:09.980 this system is that rather than orient people around just pure academic achievement or outperforming

00:08:15.820 students in the mainstream industrial schooling world we're really oriented around instead of

00:08:20.800 outcome being get into good college or get scholarship or get good grades or just graduate from high

00:08:26.180 school our outcome our desired outcome is self-sufficiency upon graduation so this could mean that you can

00:08:32.560 enter academia basically already with a grant-based like postdoc kind of situation or with a scholarship

00:08:38.500 or you graduate with enough income from work consulting or business you create or even a non-profit

00:08:45.700 to support yourself fully as an independent living on your own paying rent adult and that means that

00:08:52.640 one of the rewards that we give to people when they start excelling in some domain is basically actual

00:09:00.100 real world work in that domain and it doesn't matter how old you are to start doing this i mean

00:09:05.280 benjamin franklin had a full-time job and was contributing under a pen name to a newspaper

00:09:09.820 in the early colonies when he was 12 years old so this is about competence not age and we really hate

00:09:15.940 how students are infantilized these days so it's really about starting your career so instead of

00:09:20.660 let's say you're super into mushrooms you're like oh my gosh mycology i love this and you get really

00:09:24.960 really advanced well then ultimately what we start rewarding you with is okay hey we're gonna help you

00:09:29.420 pitch a peer-reviewed paper maybe some research in some weird like jungle with some weird mushroom that

00:09:34.600 only five people know about we're gonna have you pitch this to them pitch a peer-reviewed research

00:09:39.440 paper and hey maybe they'll say yes maybe you can fly to this strange country and research this

00:09:44.400 mushroom and and end up as a major player in this field and that has me so excited because one i really

00:09:50.700 think that people at much younger ages can and should be major movers and shakers in different

00:09:56.980 industries but this also reveals one other part of this goal that i think is really important

00:10:00.740 in that we do think that you can reliably cultivate genius and world leaders but you can't choose what

00:10:08.560 someone's passion is going to be like a parent can't be like i'm going to give birth to the best

00:10:12.980 violin player in the world or i'm going to be laszlo did but no no no laszlo polgar didn't plan on

00:10:19.340 creating chess geniuses his daughters really liked chess and based on his limited funds that was what was

00:10:23.920 doable for them and that's how it works when it comes to cultivating genius genius is is a is a

00:10:29.740 combination of disposition of each individual student or family and also what connections and

00:10:34.900 resources can be possible for that family you can't choose that so parents can't call a shot and say oh

00:10:41.860 i'm definitely going to have the world's best golf player i'm definitely going to have a brilliant

00:10:45.800 doctor you have to look at what can be possible and bring out the passions in a child and then make

00:10:52.260 it possible for them make the connections and that's what this system is about that has me really excited

00:10:56.620 and i think that this comes to one of our things which is admitting that genes play a role in humans

00:11:01.200 and humans do have some pre-coded predilections and you can't make an apple tree create pairs you

00:11:07.480 your goal is to give it the most fertile environment possible to be what it's going to be that is our

00:11:14.460 philosophy on education but this aspect of the system this reward and intrinsic motivation to play

00:11:20.160 with legos with more legos we call it our democratized nepotism system it's something that we

00:11:24.840 haven't talked we'll talk about secret society someday on on this platform but simone used to be 1.00

00:11:28.580 the managing director of dialogue which was the secret society that was originally funded by peter

00:11:32.260 tiel and arn hoffen and then schmidt futures hired us to build out their secret society thing that they

00:11:38.520 were building and then like we did matchmaking for one that the ea community did called future

00:11:42.020 forum and so we've been able to interact with a large number of people who are very classically

00:11:48.240 successful by society's terms and able to interview them and look to find out what is a

00:11:53.980 commonality among them and uh nepotism is is something that you see throughout this but not

00:11:59.580 nepotism in the way that people think it is not that they had people at they did have people advocating

00:12:05.960 for them yes yes but it's not necessarily that these people were family connections or something

00:12:10.260 like that it's that they made the effort early in their career to reach out to people who were high

00:12:17.020 level people in something they had a passion for and engage directly in those fields and so we are

00:12:23.460 trying to build systems where one using our rolodexes we built this amazing mentor network

00:12:29.100 and then through that mentor network we can connect students directly with these really high profile

00:12:34.720 individuals to work with them but even when students can't we don't have somebody for a student

00:12:38.740 and and to make this system genuinely scalable one of the things we teach students is how do you do

00:12:44.160 cold outreach how do you get people who are already in a field who you respect to engage with you

00:12:50.380 and to include you in their projects in a way that can get your name out there because when we're not

00:12:56.180 optimizing around the students graduation like just generic score but optimizing around their ability

00:13:03.060 to compete in this real world environment the thing that matters most is why our school will have an

00:13:07.700 in-house we've already worked on this in-house PR firm we've actually already built a partnership with

00:13:12.080 the 1517 fund which is a fund that specializes a VC fund that specializes in companies started by high

00:13:18.020 schoolers so we can have our students when they have ideas they know how to raise capital that's

00:13:22.820 one of the things we're going to teach them how all of these systems work that are often obscured

00:13:27.900 by the existing educational system that is essentially geared around creating slaves it's around creating

00:13:33.380 slaves for the bureaucracy and and so we can get into how all that works so now we want to talk about

00:13:39.480 how we handle socialization so one of the things that people often ask was this is they're like okay so the

00:13:45.460 first iteration of this is going to be predominantly online everyone knows homeschoolers have

00:13:49.740 socialization problems how are you going to handle that and hold on and then it's that's the bad toupee

00:13:54.540 problem you're talking about right there meaning that you only notice the bad toupee so there's a

00:13:58.480 perception that bad toupees create that you know look bad and there's actually been a lot of research

00:14:03.540 on this you can look at the research on this and while like all research it's all over the place

00:14:08.400 the majority seems to lean towards homeschoolers are actually slightly more better socially

00:14:13.260 adjusted than non-homeschoolers yep and it should be obvious why this is the case are kids who have

00:14:18.880 learned their social skills by modeling adults going to have better social skills than kids who

00:14:23.160 have learned in this weird lord of the flies setup we call public school what what you probably are

00:14:28.660 learning a bit more in public school is resiliency but i mean and social resiliency and resiliency to

00:14:33.860 bullying and okay that's all good but i mean can we maybe do something can we can we find

00:14:40.400 better than that but but outside of that i actually think that the existing school system is

00:14:44.040 terrible at teaching social skills well and actually i think most of the research says as

00:14:48.320 as parents at least with really really young children like toddlers when they're thinking

00:14:52.300 do i keep my home my kids home with me or with a nanny if i need one or do i send my kids to daycare

00:14:57.960 sort of the the trade-off is okay if you send them to daycare their language will develop more quickly

00:15:04.320 but they're also going to pick up a ton of bad habits so i think it's also understood already in some

00:15:08.980 peer-reviewed research that school is a source of bad habits more than it is a source of maturity

00:15:15.060 and ability to socialize plus of course the problem is school socialization teaches you to what

00:15:21.200 befriend those who are stuck in a room with you to befriend your inmates essentially and so this is

00:15:27.160 how you end up with people who only know how to make friends with their classmates with their workmates

00:15:32.640 with the people who they like live with in a dorm so in in the future they're limited to

00:15:37.280 what we would call i mean what what was called convenience friends we call them convenience

00:15:42.800 friends and parks and rec they're called workplace proximity associates but but the point being here

00:15:49.520 is is i've heard this before from people i know yeah is they they moved to the new city for the first time

00:15:56.420 and they realize no one ever once taught them how to go out and make random friends yeah and that's bad

00:16:02.460 that's really bad and so the the actual useful skills for going out and meeting totally new people

00:16:07.900 that young kids are learning they're not learning them in school right now they're learning them

00:16:11.760 in these online environments that they're often being scolded for interacting with so we we do have a a

00:16:18.820 course of the skill tree that is dedicated to this but it is really focused on making your own

00:16:26.360 friends going out there joining a sports team like a local sports team running in local elections

00:16:31.580 building local groups and your grades are based on how you actually perform at that how you do in the

00:16:39.760 election how you do with like how many people do you get to regularly go to these meetings that you

00:16:44.440 put together like well but here's the big thing too and it's it's such a notable thing that in school

00:16:49.680 no one like gives you credit for building a social network building a network when those things like

00:16:54.920 when it comes to getting promotions when it comes to finding a spouse when it comes to having good mental

00:16:59.740 health like those things like being able to socialize to build a friend network to get people

00:17:04.460 together i don't like even within thriving with your in your own job like building coalitions to

00:17:09.920 get a project done or managing sales or hiring people like you need to have these skills and schools don't

00:17:16.760 teach it another big thing that is a big part of our school is rather than have any teachers or anything

00:17:22.640 beyond ad hoc tutors when you need them and request them what we the only sort of personal touch point you have

00:17:28.480 the only sort of regular personal meetings you have are with what we call a proctor who's essentially

00:17:33.760 someone to check in with and just make sure that you are meeting your social goals that you're doing

00:17:39.260 well that you're not getting stuck somewhere like there's basically like a kind of like a life coach

00:17:43.640 without all the woo if you know what i mean yeah so and this is something we've really worked uh on

00:17:48.340 honing because if you've watched our video on how psychology became a cult it is very dangerous

00:17:54.000 whenever you put one person in charge of another person's mental well-being it is very easy for that

00:17:59.180 person to build dependency and the person who they're in charge of and use that to their advantage

00:18:03.940 and we already have a huge problem in the public school system i mean if you're watching like

00:18:08.060 democratic elite controlled media you don't know that like rape and molestation is a big problem in

00:18:12.060 the public school system but it's enormous it's enormous it's actually there was this study done

00:18:16.880 some people have debated whether this is accurate but it was done during a democratic administration

00:18:20.560 it's under in the clinton administration they showed that the rates of molestation in the public

00:18:24.180 school system are higher than they were at the height of the catholic church scandal but the unions

00:18:31.320 have a have a reason to cover this up so they're gonna cover it up and it doesn't fit the the generic

00:18:37.240 narrative so cover it up yeah but anyway so it's a big problem so we really don't want to put people

00:18:43.160 in a position where they can victimize students and we want to and we we spent a lot of time doing this

00:18:49.360 actually our system is a modified version of cognitive behavioral therapy that is less easy

00:18:54.100 to screw up less easy to mess up so we want to have a lot of safeguards on this system we want to 0.82

00:18:58.940 have it on rails so even a fairly stupid person can perform it without messing someone up actually

00:19:03.580 took a lot of inspiration speaking of catholics from the catholic confession system which i think 0.99

00:19:08.460 is a much superior system than modern psychology in that it's really hard for even a dumb person to

00:19:14.360 screw up it's got this anonymity which let's say unskilled team unskilled person to screw up you've 0.82

00:19:20.480 got this layer of anonymity which makes it a bit harder to get this person to build dependency

00:19:24.780 specifically on them and instead of telling you like oh there's this trauma in your past that you

00:19:29.180 got to work on or something like that they're like yeah what you did is wrong here's how you can

00:19:33.040 feel better about it don't do it again it was genuinely wrong and then you go out you do the thing to feel

00:19:37.740 better about it and you go okay i feel better about it now i did the thing obviously our system is more

00:19:42.200 complicated than that but what i'm saying is it's not impossible to create a system like this

00:19:46.240 that isn't based around uh a system that could be easily abused or messed up in a way that is

00:19:53.240 dangerous to students so we've worked a lot on that system very excited about that and that but the

00:19:58.300 reason why it's important and i think we just want to emphasize this is that right now in public school

00:20:03.300 we are seeing a mental health crisis we are seeing all these really huge issues with with teens and

00:20:08.760 i mean especially teens not being able to thrive in terms of anxiety in terms of depression i think

00:20:13.740 the bigger problem here and this is something that we want to emphasize is that the current

00:20:16.960 industrial school system is oriented around this really limited and increasingly obsolete outcome

00:20:22.000 we want your grades to be good we want you to go to a college we want you to go through this system

00:20:26.600 and that's not what predicts success anymore that's not going to predict good mental health that's not

00:20:30.840 going to predict that you thrive that you are mentally well or that you are physically well or that

00:20:35.720 you're getting a good job so it just it's bizarre that we're throwing our kids into this this shredder

00:20:42.040 of their best years in many cases when they could honestly be building their careers right away they

00:20:47.540 could be living great lives yeah so we built this as a certification system and the reason we built it

00:20:53.220 as a certification system is our rollout has a few plans we want to start with the children of the

00:20:58.320 elite i'm sorry like that's people are like why are you starting it was like elite gifted kids or

00:21:03.000 whatever and it's because that will make the system easier to get state approval for if we start in

00:21:08.620 really low income communities and then we try to move to middle class communities people are going

00:21:12.420 to be like yeah i don't want that system that's the one that the like the super ghetto system i don't 0.88

00:21:16.360 want that yeah but if we're like oh we're bringing like the the one that previously only the elites

00:21:20.720 could get and now like a gmail rollout is basically what we're aiming for but our goal is i want this to

00:21:25.920 be in every state and free and we're trying to build it so that it can eventually be free so with the

00:21:31.220 initial one we're looking at doing like a minerva like system well so first we'll just do a completely

00:21:35.180 online system then we'll do a minerva like system where we'll have some campuses in developing

00:21:39.720 countries where people can do what we call dynamic boarding school which means you can send your kids

00:21:44.540 to go 11 months a year six months a year however much you want and they're not going to slow down

00:21:48.360 because they're all learning through the same platform but if you also want somebody else to handle

00:21:52.180 raising your kids which a lot of people do especially wealthy people well that's a area of price

00:21:56.160 discrimination for us there and then for the general rollout one of the problems you have so

00:22:01.360 you look at a place like texas the truth is why doesn't texas have a good voucher or charter system

00:22:05.880 it's because the public education system has become a jobs program especially in rural communities

00:22:11.140 and the rural voting block is very important to the republican party which is typically the party

00:22:14.880 that's trying to innovate within the educational space you don't have a good voucher system in texas

00:22:19.080 and so how can we keep the money in the community instead of having it go out to these large

00:22:23.160 private equity companies that don't care because that's often what happens when you get these

00:22:26.360 charter schools coming in and the answer we came to was well what if we can utilize counter cyclical

00:22:34.160 community assets by that we mean community assets that aren't being used at the time when students

00:22:38.900 are in school and with the understanding the schools are often food programs for kids they're often

00:22:44.280 daycare for kids they're often a place where kids can be watched so can we certify the people at

00:22:50.580 your local public library or your local museum or your local religious center to be able to take

00:22:58.460 care of kids during the day and use those spaces during the day which will further distribute the

00:23:03.720 money throughout the community than just going to the local public school so because we operate so

00:23:08.400 inexpensively we can take a cut of that and then the rest can go back to these community institutions

00:23:12.940 community centers whatever hopefully make them better places for the entire community and support local

00:23:17.840 jobs and i yeah i mean i think it's really insensitive for anyone to be like oh i have this

00:23:21.440 great academic solution and then to forget about the food services about the safe place for students

00:23:26.680 to be about the fact that parents can't necessarily be at home watching their kids all day so we we

00:23:32.040 acknowledge that and we plan for it and then the final part of the system we haven't talked about

00:23:35.600 which really comes to our larger thing which is one of the things we hate about the school system is

00:23:39.600 the way that it imposes its morality on people and the way that it has become a center for

00:23:45.000 ideological indoctrination that terrifies i think a lot of parents and it's a big problem with if

00:23:51.640 you're even just talking about this as a business opportunity people are like why are the pro natalists

00:23:55.900 also working on school systems and it's look there is it yes school systems are becoming increasingly

00:24:03.480 irrelevant boarding schools all over going bankrupt all sorts of private schools are going bankrupt but

00:24:08.100 these are often super super lefty institutions school systems for people who don't want their kids

00:24:12.820 brainwashed into this urban monoculture that's actually an exploding market right now because

00:24:17.840 the people who are having kids are often from these more conservative cultures that don't want their 0.99

00:24:21.840 kids homogenized into this monoculture right so how can we create a school system that never imposes

00:24:28.260 our ideology onto students and that is modularizable so families can ensure that it stays within their value

00:24:35.540 system and the way that we have done this is our school system has two types of tests one which is a

00:24:41.880 multiple choice test which are constantly generated by ai then filtered by a human and then they go into

00:24:46.640 the school so less bias there and we use ai with prompts that decrease its progressive bias because

00:24:52.160 right now ai has created a lot of progressive bias then we measure those questions against authentic

00:24:58.220 assessments which are the mastery courses within our educational paradigm and by that what i mean is

00:25:04.200 occasionally students need to do something to show i understand all of the concepts being taught here to a

00:25:07.840 high level so what is an authentic assessment this is something in educational pedagogy which means

00:25:12.200 something that tests students ability to compete in a real world environment for example in english you

00:25:16.740 could test them through how many five-star reviews that they got on a fan fiction they wrote and posted

00:25:22.500 online or how many upvotes their scary story that they posted on a reddit got which is fantastic because

00:25:28.060 you're testing their real world writing ability and one of my favorite things is we mentioned this and we

00:25:31.580 there were there was this teacher who we were talking to and she goes oh well i'm sorry i am a

00:25:36.920 author the failed author obviously and english teacher and let me tell you what didn't you know

00:25:42.480 that 50 shades of gray used to be a fan fiction and it is terribly written and if she was in my class

00:25:50.020 i would have given her a c and i go is there anything more indicative of the problems with the current 0.76

00:25:54.960 education system and this failed author masturbating to herself about this idea of punishing one of the 1.00

00:26:02.240 most successful books in the last century in all of human history actually because it doesn't fit

00:26:09.480 what she considers good writing which obviously isn't performing well in a real world environment

00:26:15.060 and this is the problem here we because we haven't been forced to measure people and how they perform

00:26:20.140 in real world environments we have unfortunately conflated a few different things in some

00:26:25.760 measurements so what we're really measuring in english scores is a student's ability to show class

00:26:29.740 status through how they write and a student's ability to write for a reader as soon as you

00:26:33.280 disintermediate these into two tests like to test how a student writes to show class status you can have

00:26:38.020 other students rank students writing samples by the class status they think the student has based on

00:26:43.380 that writing sample and then use that to grade the students so then what you do is you take the way

00:26:47.660 students perform in these and then you test the individual multiple choice tests that were created

00:26:54.280 the individual questions i can see within every individual question how much they correlated with

00:26:59.320 the student's ability to compete in a real world environment and measure our own questions and then

00:27:03.360 constantly create new questions so i have a system that's constantly self-healing and improving but

00:27:08.460 here's where it gets really interesting so we've got a partnership with metaculous which is the major

00:27:11.560 prediction market player where people go and they make predictions about future events and you can win

00:27:16.000 tokens and stuff like that really cool suggest you check it out but anyway we have a partnership

00:27:20.760 with them to do student-based questions around more political outcomes because remember if you had

00:27:26.900 written a political theory paper leading up to the trump hillary election that said trump has a chance

00:27:31.960 of winning and we saw this was like pundits who said trump has a chance of winning they would get told 1.00

00:27:36.360 that basically they were crazy people they were idiots what they were doing was malpractice 0.99

00:27:40.060 because the industry itself was wrong the industry had become so ideologically indoctrinated they 1.00

00:27:45.540 weren't able to see truth anymore we saw this with the ukraine war as well was the ukraine war everyone

00:27:50.180 saying oh russia's going to steamroll ukraine and then that doesn't end up happening right

00:27:53.580 dogma in the field had hidden people who might actually have a better understanding of the field

00:28:00.380 than the status quo so by having students compete in these metaculous like environments for their 0.78

00:28:06.360 authentic assessments we can see which students actually understand political ecosystems better

00:28:10.000 actually understand economic systems better and then correlate how those students do within those

00:28:15.700 tests to how they answered individual multiple choice questions to understand which of those

00:28:19.460 questions are actually testing a student's real world ability instead of their ability to parrot back

00:28:24.120 ideological indoctrination and here is where this gets really interesting with some of the more

00:28:28.640 controversial stuff so you talk about something like evolution right i can't test a student's ability

00:28:32.880 to actually understand evolution but i can't test a student's ability to convince somebody who has a

00:28:38.300 high level of quote-unquote understanding of evolution that they understand evolution we believe in evolution

00:28:41.840 but i i do recognize that this is a true thing right so this means when students are taking the multiple

00:28:47.900 choice tests on evolution it is made clear to them that what they are being tested on and what they're

00:28:53.440 going to later be tested on is their ability to convince someone that under understands what we call

00:28:58.940 evolution that they too understand evolution not understand an objective reality because we can

00:29:05.220 never claim to be testing a student on more than what we can measure the student on which is really

00:29:11.240 exciting to me i i really like that this system is self-constructing because students can begin to

00:29:16.980 create their own learning materials they vote on these materials and it's self-healing to an extent with

00:29:22.420 the students but here's where it can get really interesting which is some of the weirder stuff we've done

00:29:27.880 around education one is we have a partnership with praxis which is this organization that's trying to

00:29:33.660 create a new country and one of the things that we've theorized about doing is this partnership

00:29:37.040 is having a member of their government who is an ai amalgam of all of the student writing so the

00:29:45.840 students contribute to decisions that are being made in the government by how much they contribute to

00:29:53.680 their academic work which i think is just a really cool way to give students a vote but also encourage

00:30:00.040 students to get out there and create more content the other another really interesting idea we had here

00:30:07.020 was can we build prediction markets like get all students to constantly be predict engaging in these

00:30:13.620 prediction markets and because prediction markets are so successful get companies to actually pay into the

00:30:19.980 school to get access to this prediction market data so a company could because this has been shown in

00:30:24.900 companies prediction markets are actually fairly good at like determining outcomes within companies

00:30:29.900 so like if a biotech company is going to do some big uh experiment right or or try to produce some drug

00:30:36.660 prediction markets can determine with a high degree of accuracy whether or not that test will be worth

00:30:41.080 the money they put into it they can then basically pay for access to once we're running in all the u.s states

00:30:46.340 to access to the cumulative brain power of all of our best biology students for example and then this

00:30:53.140 can be a source of funding which then can go to things like scholarships and stuff like that so the

00:30:58.460 school itself is acting as a source of cumulative brain power which i love we also want to build a system

00:31:06.480 that can track students after they graduate how those students are doing in terms of mental health and

00:31:12.540 career outcomes so in the long term not just we want to measure students off of authentic assessments

00:31:17.100 but we want to measure off of how they do in real world environments and throughout their entire lives

00:31:23.840 and how they're doing in terms of mental health throughout their entire lives when we are a b testing

00:31:28.020 different parts of our system because i do want our system constantly a b testing having students go

00:31:32.000 through different types of trees different ways of doing things to see which ones have better outcomes

00:31:37.160 and then choose those models for ones that we can then distribute throughout the entire system so we

00:31:43.780 can have this system that's constantly experimenting but that isn't just looking at how students do in

00:31:48.200 terms of graduation but how they do in terms of real world outcomes anyway love you saban sorry for

00:31:54.100 panting suffice it to say you're excited about this and you have every reason to be but now we have to

00:31:59.840 actually finish building it and make it work in time for us to at least have our kids run through this

00:32:04.480 because yeah we had a lot of our funding pulled for this at one point and then we got a bunch of

00:32:09.760 funding for the pronatalist stuff so the work on this slowed down a lot i mean it's still going in

00:32:14.860 the background we've got a team in africa working on it right now but man i wish hey if any of you are

00:32:19.440 big donors we might be able to pull something together here listen we're gonna get it done regardless

00:32:24.820 i don't care i mean honestly i'm i'm stoked about us owning all of it and running all of it with no

00:32:30.440 adverse incentives so whatever we're just gonna make it happen but i'm curious if anyone else is

00:32:35.680 building their own secret system for cultivating genius and building the world's future leaders

00:32:41.280 we want to hear what your plans are because again we feel like this area is rife for disruption or ripe

00:32:46.240 for disruption and the more players here the better honestly it's we're really sad about how little is

00:32:54.340 being done here so join us tell us what you're doing really want to hear about it and check in

00:32:59.480 with us in seven years see how it's going

00:33:01.780 you

Based Camp - July 19, 2023

Based Camp： Our Attempt to Fix Education

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