Comment by matrix87

> But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.

And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.

I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion:

Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois.

Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional.

If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.

> you can optimize for that

I think that this is the core problem - you can't.

I was (and remain) a few bad breaks from his situation. I'm not responsible for his state, but we absolutely are peers (i.e., same age, facing the same broad socioeconomic environment).

Your selfishness is not equal to my desire for common prosperity. If anything, lone wolf-ism is what drags us down (no matter how proficient the wolf thinks he is). We live in a society.

the 90th percentile of what?

sport?

english lit?

maths?

music?

socialising?

being the mother hen?

being a jock?

teaching everyone else things in the library?

class clown?

being the wacky one?

skateboarding?

acting?

rebelling?

looking after someone who has just been picked on by all the other kids?

schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.

not saying there aren’t alternatives.

but specialising for only the 90th percentile of one thing seems like a way to isolate someone later in life because they may not have learned how to deal with people who aren’t in the 90th percentile of that one thing.

and i say that as someone who hated my time at school and has struggled with the repercussions in later life.

i still learned a lot near the classroom tho.

As someone who was in the 90th percentile, I can confirm that it wasn't a universal quality about my entire being. I got to be in higher-level courses where I excelled. Those are generally available, even in public school systems.

And just because I was good at math and writing didn't mean that I "deserved" to be in some separate system where I got the "best" of everything (with diminishing returns). When I eventually encountered people who were afforded just such a deal ("elite" private school in a wealthy area), they were far less impressive than the top college-level facilities they enjoyed as grade schoolers; it seemed like a waste of money that could have been put to more efficient use, as far as society writ large might be concerned.

Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.

Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.

I find your statistic mistake rather amusing in light of the point you are making. :D

Distributions aren't all normal, for one. And skill levels are often quantized in a way that majority of people will be above a 50% level on it.

This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.)

People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story.

The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant.

Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.