The economies of scale will still allow specialized classes for those qualified in the public system. A special program to tell people they are special is probably not the investment needed at this time.

Tell people they are special? Are you joking or just uninformed?

These programs provide challenging material to kids who are more capable while leaving room for teachers to create more appropriate coursework for everyone. Do you think those kids should just nap all day?

Your preferred system seems to be to lower the standards instead of raising everyone up. Interesting, I wonder why.

You are factually wrong. According to actual studies which follow these things, high IQ students do not increase their scores when in gifted programs compared to being in general education. It's a wash. The ones who benefit most are disadvantaged kids. I know, you hate the idea of equity. But universal screening showed that Hispanic kids participation rate in gifted programs increased by over 100% when all kids were screened for access to gifted programs instead of relying on teacher + parent recommendation. For black children, they increased by around 75%. *Those* children were the only ones to actually see improved scores from gifted programs.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w20453

I have no issues w public schools offering advanced engineering, calculus, Latin, and other uncommon languages the many thousand students in the school system will give them an opportunity to have these classes for highly advanced students. I do not think blowing smoke up kids asses by telling them they are so special is the best way to go. In many areas, these kids may not be so special but their inflated ego may not pick up on it. My anecdotal observations of my youth was too many of my mentally gifted minor friends became potheads and sadly wasted the great opportunity they had.

I really like reading him. I do wish is posts were a lot shorter. I get tired of all the 60/40 percent forecasts that have enough wiggle room the forecaster never thinks he is wrong. I certainly dont get that from Ed!

For the most part never used these products so I avoided the network effect of being dragged into them. Nice writeup.

I keep running into people that don’t want to hear this message. It does remind me of the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis when nobody wanted to listen to me.

There is the old joke that 87 percent of all statistics is made up on the spot. I’ve told it many times but a fair amount of people seemed to believe it hook, line, and sinker.

In the 1980s I had purchased a book of integrals. The very first integral that I looked up in a work related professional manner was in error. My co-worker, mathematician, convinced me to throw out the book.

Really cool! It gets a little frustrating when it’s obvious someone is using an engine to cheat.

Yes, I’m running out of websites that I value enough to spend my time. I have a large list for weekly and monthly reviews. I walk thru them periodically but the lists are rapidly diminishing in size

I have RSS feeds I use to pull out my long-reads to consider knowledge, when I'm not doing wiki walks, that helps give me the 'novel world expanding hit' from the web.

I've started to go to tiny forums like forums.bladerunner.net and hobby-specific forums like rpgpub and vogons to hang out at the water cooler around others.

Awhile back, I dropped into Libera.chat's lobste.rs room and asked about this topic, which got no traction, but we ended up chatting for a bit, I was given the classic noob treatment. One user complained I was a bot at first, then asked me absurdist non-sequitors to haze the newbie, another user complained that they should close membership off from randos like me (and another user argued with him that they need new members eventually), and a third user told me not to post more than a few sentences without using a pastebin because their terminal IRC client looks ugly.

So I had a very nostalgic web 1.0 world: 1)the angry troll trying to kick me out 2) the tired mod trying not to tap the sign 3)the grumpy greybeard who never left emacs and 4) nobody really addressed the topic I was hoping to talk about.

If that's not congealed 199x internet exchanges, I don't know what is! It was very nostaglic and comforting in a way, the only thing it was missing was some erectile dysfunction pop-up windows and a gaudy internet radio widget.

The web as we know it is out there, I saw it on the lobste.rs libera chat just a few weeks ago! So maybe you have to go as far as islands like fediverse and simplex which are so isolated, most of the users there only want to talk about the tech itself, but , fellow web rando, have some hope, because I didn't go out there and I found some true internet recently, it can happen to you too!

Ask your search engine or LLM to help you find small-medium sized forums ased on hobbies you like, and start lurking, just like we used to 20(!?) years ago.

In class quizzes and in class exams are probably the way to go. Quizzes can be less than ten Minutes. Take homes are tough. I was an outlier student, one class a quarter due to my work. Witnessing all the answer swapping between the full time students was a bit challenging but it was their way of learning.