Based Camp: Our Attempt to Fix Education

<p>Malcolm and Simone discuss the flaws of the current education system and the innovative school they have designed to fix it. They explain how their school uses a skill tree/tech tree model that allows students to progress at their own pace in subjects they are intrinsically motivated in. The school focuses on real-world skills and outcomes rather than standardized tests. It incorporates a "democratized nepotism" system to connect advanced students with mentors in their field of interest. Socialization is taught through community involvement and evaluated by "proctors." The curriculum avoids ideological indoctrination by using AI-generated questions and prediction markets to test abilities. The goal is to create a constantly improving system that cultivates genius and sets students up for self-sufficiency.</p><p></p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Hello. So this is a follow up episode. We had done an episode on the education system, why it's terrible the, the forces at play here how, how little genuine innovation is happening in the space. It is terrifying. I suggest you check that episode out, but you really don't need to watch it before this one.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> This one, we're going to focus on the system that we've designed. For the Collins Institute, you can learn more at collinsinstitute. org, and yeah, it's just one of those spaces where we've decided to put some of our effort to try to fix something because we saw something broken, and that means we gotta clean it up,</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> but the fun premise here is this, is basically we discovered that in the world of education, No one is really trying anything innovative. Also, when people have tried to experiment around different outcomes, it didn't, it wasn't actually trying to experiment for earning potential or changing the world or making an impact or even thriving as a human.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> It was pretty much around self esteem and in the few [00:01:00] isolated instances in which people did say, I'm going to try to create geniuses. They did. So basically we have reason to believe that people who come in intentionally trying to innovate new models have the potential to genuinely change the world because there's nothing more fundamental than the way that you educate the next generation and equip the next generation to take on new challenges.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> So the premise here is, okay, we see this and we're like, all right, we're going to throw our hats in the ring. And this is what we have decided to do.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Few caveats to what you just said. Montessori is pretty good for pre secondary school. So before middle school, Montessori is actually a pretty solid system.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> I think it can be improved a little but it's, it's decent for what's out there. And Acton schools are actually a pretty innovative and interesting model that we respect. Outside of that, pretty much hate everything.</p><p>​</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Okay, now to, to our system. So what we've done is we have taken the entire educational[00:02:00] system, secondary school, so middle school and high school, as well as we're eventually moving to colleges.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> We've talked with this new college that might actually Implement our system is the primary way that learning happens at that college. So hopefully we can go from middle school to the end of college where we have divided it. into individual nodes that work like a skill tree or a tech tree in a video game.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> If you're not familiar with what that looks like I doubt that much of our audience doesn't know what a skill tree or tech tree in a video game is, but it's actually a pretty hard concept to explain to someone who's never seen it. Think of it like a ancestry tree that you progress through.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Like you would have nodes, you complete one node, it unlocks nodes above that. Sometimes you need to unlock two nodes to unlock one node above that, okay? And whenever a student clicks on one of these nodes they get a place where they can book a time to take a test on that subject to complete the note.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Under that is like you would have in Hacker News, although Simone always says I say Reddit as well, but Hacker News is a better direct analog because it's all links. Where [00:03:00] you have links to all of the places a student could learn that information that exists online and students can upload their own YouTube tutorials after doing something or their own notes after doing something.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Then students vote on the sources that were most useful to them. Those votes are modified by how well a student did. Eventually we want to begin to build profiles of students. So that students can be shown resources that were most useful to students who have similar voting patterns to them on these, these tests.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And we also want to build some sort of reward or remuneration system where students can receive some sort of reward for creating content that ended up being useful to a lot of other students. Now, a quick side note on this. One of the things that we really believe in with our educational system is to not have a single metric of measurement.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And by that, what I mean is the existing education system, 80% of students are not in the top 20%. And that's a problem when nobody wants to hire somebody who's not in the top 20% or no one wants to accept someone who's not in the top 20%. [00:04:00] Top 20%. So when you are measuring students on how far they've gotten in the tree, how good their grades are, how many students liked the content that they were creating and we're using that, these are metrics that can have different students succeed within them, which means that no longer are you dealing with a student where 80% of students are not in the top 20%.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Okay.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Yes. So, now back to the tech tree. One of the major problems in the educational space is what we call the extrinsic intrinsic reward problem.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> This is a phenomenon where if you pay someone to do something that they love, they start liking it less and less and less. This is why when people take a job doing one of their hobbies, they will sometimes grow to really resent that hobby. And the school system is rife with this problem because that is what grades are.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> They're an extrinsic reward. And so when a student had the genuine passion for something, that passion can be dull by continually applying this extrinsic reward. This is why kids who go through unschooling, this is a schooling system where different from [00:05:00] homeschooling, it just lets kids do whatever they want all day.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> These kids often end up doing just astoundingly at the things that they love but then unfortunately, really bad at the things that they're disinterested in. And this is the core problem of the unschooling movement, and it was a big inspiration for us when we were designing our school system. We said, can we design a school system that instead of trying to fix the problems with public school, instead uses students in a control scenario, students who are just doing whatever they want all day, and see where those students end up.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Struggling and fix those areas and only those areas while allowing students to do basically whatever they want so . They often end up with crippling test anxiety so that is why we incorporate tests throughout our entire system because The truth is is that the real world will test you.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> It will put you in testing situations. If you never go through any of those, that's, that's a problem because that's functionally in the real world. I mean, we're optimizing our system around outcomes, so that makes sense. Second is the extrinsic intrinsic reward problem. So what you need is a [00:06:00] system that can organically Detect when a student doesn't have intrinsic motivation was in a subject and then imply that extrinsic motivation in and only in those scenarios and proportional to their lack of intrinsic motivation in that space now in project based systems, which is what a lot of people move to, but are unsustainable.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> You have teachers that watch the students and. Push them where they need to be pushed, but you can't do that at scale. So it's not really useful for a scalable system unless you're doing it with AI, which we do implement in our system and might be a counter system to ours that we can talk about.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So what we do is the further behind a student is in a part of the tech tree, the higher a multiple is applied to the credits they get for the score they get for completing a test in that subject.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And they need to get a certain number of credits per semester to stay within our school system. And this is the thing where people are like, Ooh, that's really harsh. What, you kick kids out just for not getting a certain number of credits? Even though this is like a public system that's meant for everyone?[00:07:00]</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> In the adult world, I mean, theoretically, this is the way it's supposed to work. When someone can't handle their s**t, what we, what do we do with these people? We send them to prison. That's, that's what we do. It's, it's, it's not the way prison actually ends up working. Prison system also has a lot of flaws.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> I'd love to work on that someday when I get time. And Simone has some really interesting theories around that. I want to do, yeah. CR Charter City is one of you. If we ever get around to publishing that, we recorded it a while ago, but. Anyway what the dynamic that we hope can eventually evolve out of this is that our school system becomes available to any students who want it, but the students who lack the ability to find a way to motivate themselves, they end up having to go to the existing public school system because that's basically prison for kids.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And that's what it already is. It's using the same contractors. It's the same system. It's, it's it's terrible. It's terrible anyway. So, That's the way that aspect of the system works. Now, what do we do when a student gets really far ahead in a subject, three, four years ahead of where they are?</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Well, if somebody really loves playing with Legos, the best reward is more Legos. By that, I mean, it's the best, [00:08:00] yeah, reward for somebody who's intrinsically motivated for something is more of that thing at a more advanced level. But we</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> take it beyond that. And this, this is the, my personally favorite part about this system is that rather than.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Orient people around just pure academic achievement, we're outperforming students in the mainstream industrial schooling world. We're really oriented around instead of outcome being get into good college or get scholarship or get good grades or just graduate from high school, our outcome, our desired outcome is self sufficiency upon graduation.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> So this could mean that you can enter academia basically already with a grant based like postdoc kind of situation or with a scholarship. Or you graduate with enough income from work consulting or a business you create, or even a nonprofit to support yourself fully as an independent living on your own paying rent adult.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> And that means that one of the rewards that we give to people when they start excelling in some domain. Is basically [00:09:00] actual real world work in that domain. And it doesn't matter how old you are to start doing this. I mean, Benjamin Franklin had a full time job and was contributing, under a pen name to a newspaper in the early colonies when he was 12 years old.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> So this is about competence, not age. And we really hate how students are infantilized these days. So it's really about starting your career. So instead of let's say you're super into mushrooms. You're like, Oh my gosh, mycology. I love this. And you get really, really advanced. Well, then ultimately what we start rewarding you with is, okay, Hey, we're going to help you pitch a peer reviewed paper, maybe some research in some weird, like jungle with some weird mushroom that only five people know about we're going to have you pitch this to them, pitch a peer reviewed research paper and Hey, maybe they'll say, yes, maybe you can fly to this strange country and research this mushroom and, and end up as a major player in this field.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> And that has me so excited because one, I really think that people at much younger ages can and should be major movers and shakers in different industries, but this also reveals one other part of the school that I think [00:10:00] is really important in that we do think that you can reliably cultivate genius and world leaders.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> But you can't choose what someone's passion is going to be, like a parent can't be like, I'm going to give birth to the best violin player in the world, or</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> I'm going to give birth The last part, Leslie did, but No,</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> No, no, no. Laszlo Polgar didn't plan on creating chess geniuses. His daughters really liked chess and based on his limited funds, that was what was doable for them. And that's how it works when it comes to cultivating genius. Genius is, is a, is a combination of disposition of each individual student or family, and also what connections and resources can be possible for that family.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> You can't choose that. So parents can't shoot shot and call a shot and say, Oh, I'm definitely going to have the world's best golf player. I'm definitely going to have a brilliant doctor. You have to look at what can be possible and bring out. The passions in a child and then make it possible for them, make the connections.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> And that's what this system is about that has me really</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> excited. And I think that this comes to one of our things, which is admitting that [00:11:00] genes play a role in humans and humans do have some pre coded predilections and you can't make an apple tree create pears. You, your, your goal is to give it the most fertile environment possible to be what it's going to be.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> That is our. Philosophy on education, but for this aspect of the system, this reward and intrinsic motivation to play with Legos with more Legos, we call it our democratized nepotism system. So, it's something that we haven't talked. We'll talk about secret society someday on this platform, but, simone used to be the Managing Director of Dialogue, which was the secret society that was originally founded by Peter Thiel and Arne Hoffman. And then Schmidt Futures hired us to build out their secret society thing that they were building. And then like we did matchmaking for one that the EA community did called Future Forum.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And so we've been able to interact with a large number of people who are very classically successful by society's terms. And able to interview them and look to find out what is a commonality among them. Man. Nepotism is something that you see throughout this, but not [00:12:00] nepotism in the way that people think.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> It is not that they had people, they did have people advocating for them, yes, but it's not necessarily that these people were family connections or something like that. It's that they made the effort early in their career to reach out to people who were high level people in something they had a passion for and engage directly in those fields.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And so we are trying to build systems where one, using our Rolodex is we built this amazing mentor network and then. Through that mentor network, we can connect students directly with these really high profile individuals to work with them. But even when students can't we don't have somebody for a student and to make this system genuinely scalable, one of the things we teach students is how do you do cold outreach?</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> How do you get people who are already in a field who you respect to engage with you and to include you in their projects in a way that can get your name out there? Because when we're not optimizing. Around the students graduation, [00:13:00] like just generic score, but optimizing on their ability to compete in this real world environment.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> The thing that matters most is why our school will have an in house. We've already worked on this in house PR firm. We've actually already built a partnership with the 1517 fund. Which is a fund that specializes a B. C. Fund that specializes in companies started by high schoolers. So, we can have our students when they have ideas, they know how to raise capital.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> That's one of the things we're going to teach them. How all of these systems work that are often obscured. By the existing educational system that is essentially geared around creating slaves. It's around creating slaves for the bureaucracy. And so we can get into how all that works. So now we want to talk about how we handle socialization.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So one of the things that people often ask with this is they're like, okay, so the first iteration of this is going to be predominantly online. Everyone knows homeschoolers have socialization problems. How are you going to handle that? And hold on, and then it's that's a bad toupee problem you're talking about right there.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Meaning that you only notice a bad toupee, so there's a perception that bad toupees [00:14:00] create. You know, Look bad. There's actually been a lot of research on this. You can look at the research on this. And while, like all research, it's all over the place, the majority seems to lean towards homeschoolers are actually slightly more better socially adjusted than non homeschoolers.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Yep. And it should be obvious why this is the case. Are kids who have learned their social skills by modeling adults? going to have better social skills than kids who have learned in this weird Lord of the Flies setup we call public school.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> What, what you probably are learning a bit more in public school is resiliency. But, I mean, and social resiliency and resiliency to bullying and, okay, that's all good. But, I mean, can we maybe do something? Can we, can we find something better than that? But, but outside of that, I actually think that the existing school system is...</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> It's terrible at teaching social skills. Well, and</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> actually, I think most of the research says, as, as parents, at least with really, really young children, like toddlers, when they're thinking, 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, sort of the, the trade off [00:15:00] is okay.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> If you send them to daycare, their language will develop more quickly, but they're also going to pick up a ton of bad habits. So I think it's also understood already in some peer reviewed research that school is a source of bad habits more than it is a source of maturity and ability to socialize. Plus, of course, the problem is school socialization teaches you to what?</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Befriend those who are stuck in a room with you. It's to befriend your inmates essentially. And so this is how you end up with people who only know how to make friends with. They're classmates with their workmates, with the people who they like live with in a dorm. So in, in the future, they're limited to what we would call I mean what what was called convenience friends.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Convenience friends. We call them convenience friend. Friends in Parks and Rec, they're called Workplace Proximity Associates. .</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> But, but, but to the point being here. I've heard this before from people I know, is they, they move to the new city for the first time and they realize no one ever once taught them how to [00:16:00] go out and make random friends.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And that's bad. That's really bad. And so the, the actual useful skills for going out and meeting totally new people that young kids are learning, they're not learning them in school right now. They're learning them. in these online environments that they're often being scolded for interacting with. So we, we do have a, a course of the skill tree that is dedicated to this, but it is really focused on making your own friends going out there.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Joining a sports team, like a local sports team, running in local elections, building local groups, and your grades are based on how you actually perform at that, how you do in the election, how you do with, how, like, how many people do you get to regularly go to these meetings that you put together? Well, but here's</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> the big thing too.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> And it's, it's such a notable thing that in school. No one gives you credit for building a social network, building a network when those things like when it comes to getting promotions, when it comes to finding a spouse, when it comes to having good mental [00:17:00] health, like those things, like being able to socialize, to build a friend network, to get people together, I don't like even within thriving within your own job, like building coalitions to, get a project done or managing sales or hiring people like you need to have these skills and schools don't teach it.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Another big thing that is a big part of our school. It's rather than have any teachers or anything beyond ad hoc tutors when you need them and request them. What we, the only sort of personal touch point you have, the only sort of regular personal meetings you have are with what we call a proctor who is essentially someone to check in with and just make sure that you are meeting your social goals, that you're doing well, that you're not getting stuck somewhere like they're basically like a, kind of like a life coach without all the woo. If you know what I mean?</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Yeah. So, and this is something we've really worked on honing, because if you've watched our video on how psychology became a cult it is very dangerous. Whenever you put one person in charge of another person's mental wellbeing, it is very easy for that person to [00:18:00] build dependency and the person who they're in charge of and use that to their advantage.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And we already have a huge problem in the public school system. I mean, if you're watching like democratic elite controlled media, you don't know that like rape and molestation is a big problem in the public school system, but it's enormous. It's enormous. It's actually, there was this study done. Some people have debated whether this is accurate, but it was done during a Democratic administration, it was done during the Clinton administration, that showed that the rates of molestation in the public school system are higher than they were at the height of the Catholic Church scandal.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> But the unions have a, have a reason to cover this up, so... They're gonna cover it up. And it doesn't fit the generic narrative so, cover it up. But anyway, so it's a big problem. So we really don't want to put people in a position where they can victimize students. And we want to, and we, we spend a lot of time doing this.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Actually, our system is a modified version of cognitive behavioral therapy that is less Less easy to mess up. So we want to have a lot of safeguards on this system. We want to have it on rails, [00:19:00] so even a fairly stupid person can perform it without messing someone up. Actually took a lot of inspiration, speaking of Catholics, from the Catholic Confession system, which I think is a much superior system than modern psychology.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> In that it's really hard for even a dumb person to screw up. It's got this anonymity, which let's say</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> unskilled</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> team, unskilled person to screw up. You've got this layer of anonymity, which makes it a bit harder to get this person to build dependency specifically on them. , and instead of telling you like, Oh, there's this trauma in your past that you got to work on or something like that, they're like, yeah, what you did is wrong.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Here's how you can feel better about it. Don't do it again. It was genuinely wrong. And then you go out, you do the thing to feel better about it and you go, okay, I feel better about it now. I did the thing. Obviously our system is more complicated than that. But what I'm saying is it's not impossible to create a system like this that isn't based around a system that could be easily abused or messed up in a way that is Dangerous to students.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So, we've worked a lot on that system. Very excited about that and that. But</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> the reason why it's important and I think we just want [00:20:00] to emphasize this is that right now in public school, we are seeing a mental health crisis. We are seeing all of these really huge issues with with teens. And I mean, especially teens not being able to thrive.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> In terms of anxiety, in terms of depression. I think the bigger problem here, and this is something that we want to emphasize is that the current industrial school system is oriented around this really limited and increasingly obsolete outcome.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> We want your grades to be good. We want you to go to a college. We want you to go through this system. And that's not what predicts success anymore. That's not going to predict good mental health. That's not going to. that you thrive, that you are mentally well, or that you are physically well, or that you're getting a job.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> So it just, it's bizarre that we're throwing our kids into this, this shredder of their best years in many cases, when they could honestly be building their careers right away. They could be living great</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> lives. Yeah, so we built this as a certification system, and the reason we built it as a certification system is our rollout has a few plans.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> We want to start with the children of the elite. I'm sorry, like that's, [00:21:00] people are like, why are you starting it with like elite gifted kids or whatever. And it's because that will make the system easier to get state approval for. If we start in really low income communities</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> and then we try to move to middle class communities. People are going to be like, Yeah, I don't want that system. That's the one that the, Like the super</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> ghetto system. I don't want</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> that. Yeah. But if we're like, Oh, we're bringing like the, the one that previously only the elites could get. And now like a Gmail rollout is basically what we're aiming for.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> But our goal is I want this to be in every state and free. And we're trying to build it so that it can eventually be free. So it was the initial one. We're looking at doing like a Minerva like system. Well, so first we'll just do a completely online system, then we'll do a Minerva like system where we'll have some campuses in developing countries where people can do what we call dynamic boarding school, which means you can send your kids to go 11 months a year, 6 months a year, however much you want, and they're not going to slow down because they're all learning through the same platform.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> But if you also want somebody else to handle raising your kids, which a lot of people do, especially wealthy people, well, that's an area of price discrimination for us there. And then For the general [00:22:00] rollout, one of the problems you have, so you look at a place like Texas, the truth is, why doesn't Texas have a good voucher or charter system?</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> It's because the public education system has become a jobs program, especially in rural communities. And the rural voting bloc is very important to the Republican Party, which is typically the party that's trying to innovate within the educational space. So you don't have a good voucher system in Texas.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And so how can we keep the money in the community instead of having it go out to these large private equity companies that don't care? Because that's often what happens when you get these charter schools coming in. And the answer we came to was, well, what if we can. Utilize counter cyclical community assets.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> By that, we mean community assets that aren't being used at the time when students are in school. And with the understanding, the schools are often food programs for kids. They're often daycare for kids. They're often a place where kids can be watched. So can we certify? The people at your local public library or your local museum or your local religious center to be able to take care of kids during the day [00:23:00] and use those spaces during the day which will further distribute the money throughout the community than just going to the local public school.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So, because we operate so inexpensively, we can take a cut of that and then the rest can go back to these community institutions. Community centers, whatever, hopefully make them better places for the entire community</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> and support local jobs. And I, yeah, I mean, I think it's really insensitive for anyone to be like, oh, I have this great academic solution and then to forget about the food services about the safe place for students to be about the fact that parents can't necessarily be at home watching their kids all day.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> So we acknowledge that and we</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> plan for it. And then the final part of the system we haven't talked about Which really comes to our larger thing, which is one of the things we hate about the school system is the way that it imposes its morality on people and the way that it has become a center for ideological indoctrination.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> That terrifies, I think a lot of parents and it's a big problem with, if you're even just talking about this as a business opportunity, people are like, why are the pronatalists also working on school systems? And it's look, there is, yes. [00:24:00] School systems are becoming increasingly relevant.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Boarding schools all over are going bankrupt. All sorts of private schools are going bankrupt. But these are often super, super lefty institutions. School systems for people who don't want their kids brainwashed into this urban monoculture, that's actually an exploding market right now because the people who are having kids are often from these more conservative cultures that don't want their kids homogenized into this monoculture, right?</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So how can we create a school system that never imposes... Our ideology on to students and that is modularizable. So families can ensure that it stays within their value system. And the way that we have done this is our school system has 2 types of tests. 1, which is a multiple choice test, which are constantly generated by AI, then filtered by a human, and then they go into the school.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So. Less bias there, and we use AI with prompts that decrease it's, progressive bias, because right now AI creates a lot of progressive bias. Then, we measure those questions against authentic assessments, which are the [00:25:00] mastery courses within our educational paradigm. And by that what I mean is occasionally students need to do something to show I understand all of the concepts being taught here to a high level.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So, what is an authentic assessment? This is something in educational pedagogy, which means something that tests a student's ability to compete in a real world environment. For example, in English, you could test them through how many five star reviews that they got on a fanfiction they wrote and posted online, or how many upvotes their scary story that they posted on Reddit got.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Which is fantastic because you're testing their real world writing ability. And one of my favorite things is we mentioned this and we were, there was this teacher who we were talking to and she goes, oh, well, I'm sorry, I am a author. The failed author, obviously, and English teacher, and let me tell you what, didn't you know that Fifty Shades of Grey used to be a fanfiction, and it is terribly written, and if she was in my class, I would have given her a C, and I go, is there anything more indicative of the problems with the current education system than this failed author, masturbating to herself about [00:26:00] this idea of punishing one of the Thank you.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Most successful books in the last century, in all of human history, actually. Because it doesn't fit what she considers good writing, which obviously isn't performing well in a real world environment. And this is the problem here. We... Because we haven't been forced to measure people and how they perform in real world environments, we have unfortunately conflated a few different things in some measurements.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So what we're really measuring in English scores is a student's ability to show class status through how they write, and a student's ability to write for a</p><p>reader. .</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> As soon as you disintermediate these into two tests, like to test how a student writes to show class status. You could have other students rank students writing samples by the class status they think the student has based on that writing sample and then use that to grade the students.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So then what you do is you take the way students perform in these and then you test the individual multiple choice tests that were created, the individual questions I can see within every individual question, how much they correlated with the student's ability [00:27:00] to compete in a real world environment.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> and measure our own questions and then constantly create new questions. We have a system that's constantly self healing and improving. But here's where it gets really interesting. So we've got a partnership with Metaculous, which is a major prediction market player where people go and they make predictions about future events and you can win tokens and stuff like that.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Really cool. Suggest you check it out. But anyway, we have a partnership with them to do. Student based questions around more political outcomes. Because remember if you had written a political theory paper leading up to the Trump Hillary election that said Trump has a chance of winning and we saw this was like pundits who said Trump has a chance of winning.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> They would get told that basically they were crazy people. They were idiots. What they were doing was malpractice because the industry itself was wrong. The industry had become so ideologically indoctrinated. They weren't able to see truth anymore. We saw the Ukraine war as well was the Ukraine war.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Everyone's saying, Oh, Russia's going to steamroll Ukraine. And then that doesn't end up happening. Right. Dogma in the field had hidden. People who might actually have a better [00:28:00] understanding of the field than the status quo. So by having students compete in these metaculous like environments for their authentic assessments, we can see which students actually understand political ecosystems better, actually understand economic systems better, and then correlate how those students do within those tests to how they answered individual questions.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Multiple choice questions to understand which of those questions are actually testing a student's real world ability instead of their ability to parrot back ideological indoctrination. And here is where this gets really interesting with some of the more controversial stuff. So you talk about something like evolution, right?</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> I can't test a student's ability to actually understand evolution, but I can test a student's ability to convince somebody. Who has a high level of quote unquote understanding of evolution that they understand evolution. We believe in evolution, but I do recognize that this is a true thing, right? So this mean what students are taking, the multiple choice tests on evolution.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> It is made clear to them that what they are being tested on. And what they're going to later be tested on is their ability to convince someone that understands what we call evolution that [00:29:00] they too understand evolution, not understand an objective reality, because we can never claim to be testing a student on more than what we can measure the student on.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Which is really exciting to me. I, I really like that this system is self constructing, because students can begin to create their own learning materials, they vote on these materials, and it's self healing to an extent with the students. But here's where it can get really interesting, which is some of the weirder stuff we've done around education.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> . One is we have a partnership with Praxis, which is this organization that's trying to create a new country. And one of the things that we've theorized about doing is this partnership is having a member of their government who is an AI amalgam of all of the student writing.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So the students contribute to decisions that are being made in the government. By how much they contribute to their academic work, which I think is just a really cool way to give students a vote, but also [00:30:00] encourage students to get out there and create more content. The other another really interesting idea we had here.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> Was can we build prediction markets like get all students to constantly be pretty engaging in these prediction markets and because prediction markets are so successful, , get companies to actually pay into the school to get access to this prediction market data. So, a company could, because this has been shown in companies, prediction markets are actually fairly good at determining outcomes within companies.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> So, like if a biotech company is going to do, some big experiment, right? Or, or try to produce some drug prediction markets can determine with a high degree of accuracy, whether or not that test will be worth the money they put into it. They can then basically pay for access to once we're running in all the U.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> S. States to access to the cumulative brainpower of all of our best biology students, for example. And then this can be a source of funding, which then could go to things like scholarships and stuff like that. So the school itself [00:31:00] is acting as this source of cumulative brain power, which I love.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> We also want to build a system that can track students after they graduate, how those students are doing in terms of mental health and career outcomes. So in the long term, not just do we want to measure students off of authentic assessments, but we want to measure off of how they do in real world environments.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And throughout their entire lives and how they're doing in terms of mental health throughout their entire lives when we are a B testing different parts of our system because I do want our system constantly a B testing, having students go through different types of trees, different ways of doing things to see which ones have better outcomes and then choose those models.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> For ones that we can then distribute throughout the entire system. So we can have this system that's constantly experimenting, but that isn't just looking at how students do in terms of graduation, but how they do in terms of real world outcomes. Anyway, love you, Simone. Sorry for ranting.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Suffice it to say you're excited about this and you have every reason to be, but now we have to [00:32:00] actually finish building it and make it work in time for for us to at least have our kids run through this because</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> yeah, we had a lot of our funding pulled for this at one point.</p><p><strong>Malcolm:</strong> And then we got a bunch of funding for the pronatalist stuff. So the work on this slowed down a lot. I mean, it's still going in the background. We've got a team in Africa working on it right now, but man, I wish Hey, have any of you are big donors? We might be able to pull something together here.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Listen, we're going to get it done regardless. 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, adverse incentives. So whatever, we're just going to make it happen. But I'm curious if anyone else is building their own secret system for cultivating genius and building the world's future leaders.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> We want to hear what your plans are, because again, we feel like this area is rife for disruption or ripe for disruption. And The more players here, the better, honestly. It's, it's, we're really sad about how little is being done here. So join us, tell us what you're doing. Really want to hear about it and, check in with us [00:33:00] in seven years, see how it's going.</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>