Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I would say no concrete plans. I would want to do it in a period where I also have young children and therefore it would make sense to. Maybe a lot of people will say this kind of thing but there's friends of mine who think when their child is in high school, that's when they would want to be a high school teacher. I think there are two things I would want to get out of it. One of them, as I was emphasizing, I think you just lose touch with what it's like not to know stuff or what it's like to be a student and so maintaining that kind of connection so that I don't become duller and duller over time feels important. The other, I would like to live in a world where more people who are savvy with STEM spend some of their time teaching. I just think that's one of the highest leverage ways that you can think of to actually get more people to engage with math And so I would like to encourage people to do that and call for action. Some notion of spending, maybe not your whole career, a little bit of time. In teaching, there's not as fluid a system for doing that as a going through a tour of service in certain certain countries where everyone spends two years in the military Shy of having a system like that for education, there's all these kind of ad hoc things where charter schools might have an emergency credential system to get a science teacher in. Teach for America is something out there. There's enough ways that someone could spend a little bit of time that's probably not fully saturated at this point that the world would be better if more people did that and it would be hypocritical for me to suggest that and then not to actually put my feet where my words are. I think that's a great note to leave it on Grant. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast and genuinely, you're one of the people I really, really admire but what you've done for the landscape of Math education is really remarkable. So this is a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for saying that. I had a lot of fun.…

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