Interview, Fireside Chat, Podcast
Alex Lawsen on his advice for students
- Students likely to benefit most include those studying science or maths who find school difficult or lack guidance; predictions suggest they should prioritize deep learning for approximately two-thirds of the academic year before shifting to exam preparation for the final third.
- Work strategies include aiming to pass subjects being dropped rather than seeking high scores, ensuring homework is done with sufficient neatness to complete tasks without over-optimizing for presentation, and verifying the value of work before skipping it.
- Learning methodologies emphasize practicing without notes or using unseen questions to simulate exam conditions, utilizing spaced repetition tools like Anki for long-term memory, and engaging in mixed practice to improve skill transfer over single-topic drilling.
- Feedback loops require reviewing mistakes, requesting teacher explanations for errors, and distinguishing between fixing technical mistakes versus conceptual weaknesses, with a prediction that those who only review work without identifying gaps will not improve.
- Stress management involves practicing under artificially stressful conditions, explicitly granting permission to rest when unproductive, and switching from "kind of working" to actual relaxation to regain capacity, with success defined by the student feeling better.
- Motivation and planning systems suggest using moments of inspiration to build resources for future use, setting process goals rather than terminal goals, and incorporating flexibility into timetables to prevent total plan failure.
- For high-stakes admissions like Oxford or Cambridge maths/physics, problem-solving skills are predicted to be improvable through preparation and reverse-engineering, though the process involves significant noise, luck, and variance.
- Career exploration advises younger students to prioritize building a broad skill set and understanding their learning styles rather than committing to a specific career path too early, while warning against premature immersion in the adult-dominated effective altruism community.
- Specific predictions note that 16-year-olds interested in effective altruism may gain value from books like Doing Good Better, provided they view school grades as instrumental goals to access future opportunities.
- Risks identified include the "zero-sum" nature of competition, the potential for students to optimize for note neatness over content learning, and the danger of entering competitions or communities before having sufficient experience.