I homeschooled, graduated at 16 and got my bachelor's at 18. Now writing about big idea in education, learning science, and sociology. Founder @GeniusGTX.
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I'm 18.
I’m obsessed with learning how to learn.
So, I spent 200+ hours studying how geniuses, prodigies, and high performers master their disciplines.
Here's what I found on how to master anything faster:
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Toan Truong retweeted
This is Ray Dalio.
He called the 1982 debt crisis, was still wiped anyway, and then turned Bridgewater into the biggest hedge fund in the world.
On The Diary of a CEO, he explained the principles that saved him:
1. In 1980, he saw a debt crisis before anyone
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Toan Truong retweeted
Elon Musk believes we're living through the singularity right now, where technological growth accelerates beyond human control.
On Peter Diamandis's podcast, he shared 8 predictions about what's coming:
1) We're heading for universal high income and social unrest, together
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Toan Truong retweeted
My instinct is that this is true but I'd like to see better evidence on "passenger mode" because we know student self-report on what they think they've learned is often the worst indicator of what they've actually learned.
I know there was a lot of data gathered on this but it's all self-report and the criterion was some kind of affective display from what I remember. (I need to go back and read it, I know..) Many will say, well half are compliant and getting good grades, so whats the problem? But this is really about wellbeing not academic achievement. After all quiet compliance in a well-sequenced lesson and quiet compliance in a crap, joyless one look the same behaviourally.
Also: does "passenger mode" predict anything downstream? What about retention at 12 months, transfer, subject choice at 16 etc, what they can still do at Uni? If the harm is distal, show me the distal data.
The reality is that a lot of kids who claim to be bored are actually learning loads, (even though it doesnt feel like it) and loads of kids who say they are learning stuff like "creativity, curiosity and critical thinking" are actually learning very little other than low level social skills.
Education researcher Rebecca Winthrop says two-thirds of kids are in "Passenger Mode" in school...
"passenger mode is difficult to spot often for parents and sometimes teachers because many kids in passenger mode get really good grades but are just bored to tears"
"They show up to school, they do the homework, they have dropped out of learning"
"I'm in class and the teacher is going going over the math homework from yesterday and I got everyone right and I know the answers and it's 45 minutes of that... I'm going to shop online"
"I got the homework home and I know all I know how to do this stuff so I just put in chat GPT and it did my problem set for me and then I turn it in"
If you're new here, follow @LearningToan for the sharpest lessons from the world's best minds.
— Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute, on Ezra Klein's ( @ezraklein ) The Ezra Klein Show
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Toan Truong retweeted
Overheard a group of high school students on the train discussing how easy their AP Calculus class is and how anything lower than a 5 is failing (to them)
They were also discussing how excited they are to continue taking more advanced math classes as they went through high school
Its always awesome to see students pysched about school, learning, and doing hard things
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Toan Truong retweeted
If you've got some time this weekend, check out this episode of @tferriss's podcast. I hear it's great 😀
We go into all the usual stuff about how people dramatically underestimate what kids are capable of, and the amazing things that can happen when you combine quality curriculum, motivation, and just getting out of kids' way.
But the bulk of the podcast is an unscripted working session where Tim offers advice on some of Mentava's biggest marketing challenges, like "how do we sell a solution to a problem that most parents don't even realize they have?"
Tim has an incredible marketing mind. I've talked to great product thinkers before, and the feeling I always get is that it's like they can see through the Matrix. It's never one silver bullet, it's thousands of little changes that add up to a step function improvement in how people experience your product.
Tim is like that for marketing.
He sees thousands of little details that all add up to a relentless trajectory of constant improvement. The conversation was a real shift in how I'll be thinking about marketing going forward, I hope it does the same for you!
NEW podcast episode is up!
"Why Kids Can Learn 10x Faster Than We Think — @NielsHoven of @MentavaInc (Tim Coaching Session)"
This episode is a bit different. It’s a live, unscripted working session with a founder, and I’ve only done one other earlier this year.
Niels Hoven (@NielsHoven) is the founder and CEO of Mentava, a company building software to support fast learners. Eager kids are dramatically underserved by today’s education system, and Niels created Mentava to allow students to achieve their potential. Prior to Mentava, Niels worked at Cloudflare, ClassDojo, and Pocket Gems, where he ran the highest-grossing mobile game in the world in 2011. He has a graduate degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.
Please enjoy!
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Toan Truong retweeted
Sasha Luccioni has been an AI researcher for over a decade and works at Hugging Face. A stranger emailed to say her work was going to end humanity.
In her TED talk, she gave 8 things already going wrong:
1. Nobody knows what happens in twenty years
I wrote about the state of AI, why I’m concerned about the next few years, and the choices we need to make to keep the future in humanity’s hands.
An Alien Mind: openai.com/index/an-alien-mi…
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Toan Truong retweeted
People are now using “Buy Now, Pay Later” for $1000 Coachella tickets, $10 burritos, and even $4 Starbucks drinks.
No interest.
No credit check.
No strings attached.
You've been lied to.
BNPL is actually one of the sneakiest money scams ever built... Let me explain: (THREAD)🧵
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Toan Truong retweeted
Pavel Durov says he was put in an experimental Soviet school that tried to overwhelm a teenage brain on purpose, and the results was mind boggling...
"At the age of 11, I got the opportunity to enter an experimental school in St. Petersburg"
"You would have four foreign languages at least including Latin, English, French, German. In addition, you can get ancient Greek. You would have classes like biochemistry or psychoanalysis or evolutionary psychology."
"Since it was an experimental class, it wasn't possible to become a straight A student to be excellent in all the subject. It was like considered crazy to even try."
"You're just pushing the limits of the human mind, four languages in parallel, math, evolutionary psychology, just overwhelming the mind and see what happens."
If you're new here, follow @LearningToan for the sharpest lessons from the world's best minds.
— Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, on Lex Fridman's ( @lexfridman ) Lex Fridman Podcast
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Toan Truong retweeted
Elon Musk says the smartest engineers make one costly mistake:
They perfect things that should not exist.
To avoid it, he runs the same 5-step algorithm on every problem, always in this order.
1/ Question every requirement
Even from smart people, or you get a perfect answer to the wrong question.
2/ Try to delete the part or step entirely
If you are not forced to add back 10% of what you cut, you did not cut enough.
3/ Only now optimize what is left
4/ Speed it up
5/ Automate it
He learned it the hard way, automating and speeding up things he later had to delete.
Never optimize, speed up, or automate something you should have deleted first.
— Elon Musk (.@elonmusk)
Elon Musk says the AI boom hits a WALL this year when we run out of power to run the chips.
He says the whole industry is about to learn a hard lesson in hardware.
Chip output is exploding, but electricity is nearly flat everywhere outside China.
So the two lines cross this year.
He says by the end of the year, we will be making more AI chips than we can actually turn on.
Millions of them pile up with nowhere to plug in.
In his words, the bottleneck for the next year is not chips, it is raw power.
Whoever can turn on the most chips fastest wins the race.
In the end, the AI race comes down to one thing:
Raw electricity.
— Elon Musk (.@elonmusk) on Dwarkesh Patel's (.@dwarkesh_sp) podcast
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Toan Truong retweeted
Elon Musk says the AI boom hits a WALL this year when we run out of power to run the chips.
He says the whole industry is about to learn a hard lesson in hardware.
Chip output is exploding, but electricity is nearly flat everywhere outside China.
So the two lines cross this year.
He says by the end of the year, we will be making more AI chips than we can actually turn on.
Millions of them pile up with nowhere to plug in.
In his words, the bottleneck for the next year is not chips, it is raw power.
Whoever can turn on the most chips fastest wins the race.
In the end, the AI race comes down to one thing:
Raw electricity.
— Elon Musk (.@elonmusk) on Dwarkesh Patel's (.@dwarkesh_sp) podcast
Peter Diamandis says we'll speedrun every science fiction movie ever written in the next decade.
Moon bases, nuclear plants on the moon, 500,000 data center satellites in orbit:
8 predictions he made:
1) Longevity escape velocity arrives in 2033
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Toan Truong retweeted
Jensen Huang says the first AI supercomputer he ever built had exactly one customer on earth:
Elon Musk.
Back in 2016, he had just created a machine called the DGX1.
It cost $300,000 dollars.
He announced it on stage, and the room went completely silent since nobody understood it, so nobody wanted to buy it.
Since Elon knew him because Nvidia had built the first self-driving computer for the Tesla Model S, Elon bought & tried it.
Elon said he had a small company that could use it.
Jensen boxed one up himself and drove it to San Francisco. He carried it up to a room full of researchers. That tiny company turned out to be OpenAI.
The machine nobody wanted went on to launch the AI revolution.
— Jensen Huang (.@JensenHuang)
Elon Musk says the AI boom hits a WALL this year when we run out of power to run the chips.
He says the whole industry is about to learn a hard lesson in hardware.
Chip output is exploding, but electricity is nearly flat everywhere outside China.
So the two lines cross this year.
He says by the end of the year, we will be making more AI chips than we can actually turn on.
Millions of them pile up with nowhere to plug in.
In his words, the bottleneck for the next year is not chips, it is raw power.
Whoever can turn on the most chips fastest wins the race.
In the end, the AI race comes down to one thing:
Raw electricity.
— Elon Musk (.@elonmusk) on Dwarkesh Patel's (.@dwarkesh_sp) podcast
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Toan Truong retweeted
Bill Ackman says almost all the money Warren Buffett ever made came from one business nobody copied.
Ackman runs a $25 billion fund and is copying it right now.
Here's the reason it's still open to you:
1) A burger chain owned a coffee chain worth more than itself
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Toan Truong retweeted
Elon Musk says one heat shield problem could kill Starship's reusability for years.
Starship is the most complicated machine humans have ever built.
The hardest part isn't the engines.
It isn't the steel.
It isn't even the explosion margin on liftoff.
Musk named the one remaining bottleneck.
"It's having the heat shield be reusable. No one's ever made a reusable orbital heat shield."
The shield does two impossible jobs.
"It's gotta make it through the ascent phase without shucking a bunch of tiles, and then it's gotta come back in and also not lose a bunch of tiles or overheat the main airframe."
40,000 tiles per ship.
Musk reframed the consumable problem through brake pads:
"Your brake pads in your car are also consumable, but they last a very long time."
The shield must consume slowly.
It must not require inspection between launches.
Musk on the current state:
"We have brought the ship back and had it do a soft landing in the ocean. But it lost a lot of tiles."
A soft landing is not reusability.
The bar is daily launches. One ship. Many flights.
Musk, on the gap that's left:
"You can't do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing."
The first reusable heat shield in history is the last gate to Mars.
— Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast
Elon Musk says the AI boom hits a WALL this year when we run out of power to run the chips.
He says the whole industry is about to learn a hard lesson in hardware.
Chip output is exploding, but electricity is nearly flat everywhere outside China.
So the two lines cross this year.
He says by the end of the year, we will be making more AI chips than we can actually turn on.
Millions of them pile up with nowhere to plug in.
In his words, the bottleneck for the next year is not chips, it is raw power.
Whoever can turn on the most chips fastest wins the race.
In the end, the AI race comes down to one thing:
Raw electricity.
— Elon Musk (.@elonmusk) on Dwarkesh Patel's (.@dwarkesh_sp) podcast
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Toan Truong retweeted
Tutoring began TODAY
It was so fun seeing the kids giddy while doing Math.
One principal teared up seeing them so happy and engaged
We have a very tall hill to climb, but today we took our first steps.
I'm excited to announce the most ambitious recreation of Bloom's 2Sigma study of the last 40 years. It's funded by @reedhastings and staffed by a team of 20 of the best educators in this country.
Our education team's goal is to show the largest academic gains in one year ever recorded, and we'll publish our results even if we fail.
Recently, @jwdanner introduced me to @reedhastings. Most people know Reed co-founded Netflix. Fewer know he has been one of the driving forces behind improving education for the last twenty years.
When Reed pitched me on recreating Bloom's famous 2-sigma problem, I felt an overwhelming sense of hope for education. Over the last few months we have moved at breakneck speed to assemble an exceptional team. Someone recently described it to me as the "Avengers of education."
We are testing one question with the rigor it deserves: can elite one-on-one tutoring reproduce the largest learning gains ever measured in a controlled study? We will work with researchers from Stanford, Brown, Cornell, and other leading institutions, and we intend to be the most transparent research group in the field. That means publishing our methods, our benchmarks, and our results, whatever they show.
We will invest up to $100,000 per year per student to give them the best education on the planet. If it works, the data and methods can help educators and technologists recreate these outcomes for every child.
We are actively hiring tutors, engineers, and operations people to help us climb this mountain.
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Toan Truong retweeted
This mathematician built the AI company that started the image-generation boom, Stability AI.
On André Duqum's podcast, he shared 8 bold predictions on how AI changes humanity:
1) Desk jobs will be replaced by it in 1,000 days
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Toan Truong retweeted
In 2021, while I was still at university and building Howitzer (a reddit outreach tool), I raised money from investors.
It was the biggest investment that ever happened in Macedonia - $500k.
I took money from one VC fund (DayOneCapital), and 2 angels who believed in my idea. I was a 22 year old college student. I blew their money a year after, as Howitzer didn’t work.
Now, nearly 5 years after that, I returned their money.
@heyreach_io became a huge, seriously profitable company, and it was a time to pay back what I owned.
If these guys didn’t believe in me back in the days, I wouldn’t be here.
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