Based Camp: Our Attempt to Fix Education

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.

Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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,

Simone: 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.

Simone: 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.

Simone: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

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Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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%.

Malcolm: Okay.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: 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.

Malcolm: It will put you in testing situations. If you nev