Rational Optimist Society

New Podcast: The AI school that’s fixing education

Find out why Alpha School students are scoring in the top 1% to 2% nationally in every subject:

On Joe Liemandt’s first day as Alpha School principal, he asked kids what would make them love school. The most common answer? “Less school.” Most principals would’ve ignored them. Joe rebuilt the entire school around their answer: a whole day’s lessons packed into a two-hour sprint, then the rest of the day spent building actual life skills.

50 Things I Learned, inspired by Tom Whitwell, Kent Hendricks and others.

1. Roughly half the protein in your body is built from synthetic nitrogen — the Haber-Bosch process, just over a century old, now feeds the ~2.7 billion people who'd otherwise have starved.
2. Producing a kilogram of wheat took 10 minutes of human labour in 1800. By 2021: 2 seconds — a 99.7% collapse.
3. Before agriculture, a square mile of land fed about a quarter of a person. Today the same square mile feeds nearly 1,300.