kids matter

Adults tend to talk to and work with other adults. We don't spend nearly enough time addressing the problems of younger people: college students, teenagers, and children.

Kids are massively impressionable. They're struggling to make sense of the world, to figure out how to relate to other people, to understand what's important and what to do about it. Although fundamentals are useless for adults, they're front and center in kids' lives.

Kids are starved for intelligent, genuine, empathetic adult interaction. Most of their lives are spent in the school system, where they're given sanitized content filtered through a bureaucracy, in classroom settings that give little opportunity for one-on-one mentorship.

Writing content for adults is competitive and difficult. Adults have busy lives and established worldviews. You have to convince them that reading your stuff will be worth it, and that's genuinely unlikely because most adults are not really open to having their views fundamentally shifted; at best you'll make small changes on the margin.

But smart and curious kids will spend hours reading all kinds of random stuff. They're less likely to have found 'their people' in real life yet, so they seek out like-minded kids and adults online. Observations that are 'obvious' (or disputable) to adults will be fresh and insightful to them. And giving someone the right idea at the right time can create compounding value as it creates more opportunities and helps shape the rest of their worldview.

We systematically undervalue good teaching because credit assignment is hard: working with adults can create value immediately, while the value from working with kids is realized many years later. An academic who solves a research question directly impresses their adult friends and colleagues, whereas the benefits of reducing research debt by producing better explanations of something already known accrue only to people who don't (yet) have power or influence.

Of course, there are good reasons to prefer to work with adults. Selection is easier; you can better focus your energy on people who definitely have the skill and interest to benefit from collaboration. You can create things that are genuinely new and powerful rather than rehashing existing ideas, and you can work in niche areas where low-hanging fruit still exists. And you have a much faster feedback loop; you can see if what you're doing is really working and adjust accordingly.

The selection problem in particular is a genuinely tough tradeoff: every kid deserves mentorship from smart, capable adults, but there just aren't enough of those to go around. I personally can only mentor a few kids, and I'll probably choose the wrong ones; it seems more valuable to focus my efforts on older students and adults with known interests where I have a more unique 'edge'. So in working with kids I'm more optimistic about scalable approaches that can reach many people: good writing, or ultimately something like computational life coaching to provide individualized teaching and mentoring to everyone.