Well, first, this is not my claim. I'm saying that the behaviour of LLM algorithms and agentic algorithms are closer to "exhaustively go down a list" than "behaving like a persistent human".

But second, yes, they are _just_ systematically exploring the possibilities. They are not "just" a for loop, or they don't "just reduce" to a for loop, but they don't have any characteristics that make them different from a for loop in a way that grant them the attribute "persistent" while it is not granted to a for loop.

What does a agent do that is different from a for-loop and that means that the agent is "persistent" but the "for loop" (or a trivial variation of it that exists and that no one thought of calling it "persistent") is not?

> You're missing the objective here. It has an objective of Z, and so it tries approach X in furtherance of objective Z. Approach X does not work, so it analyzes the failure mode, then devises a new approach Y which takes that failure mode into account. It then tries approach Y, and succeeds at its objective of Z. This is persistence in pursuit of objective Z.

Again, there are 3 usages of "persistence": sense 'a', sense 'b', sense 'c'. I'm saying that there is a confusion between 'b' and 'c'.

In one of its definition, "persistent" means "overlasting". But it is ridiculous to say that people will call their postman "persistent" because the postman keep existing in the real world for more than one day. Obviously, when they say their postman is persistent, they using a different meaning, which correspond to what I've called 'b'.

What you describe here is just a normal decision chart, with one arrow linking one bottom box back to the top box (something that we can call "a loop"). It is persistent in the meaning that I've called 'c'.

> Just look at the definition.

I did. Did you? Cambridge dictionary mentions for example: "Someone who is persistent continues doing something or tries to do something in a determined but often unreasonable way".

You are claiming that there is no difference nuance between 'b' and 'c', that "persistent" is ALWAYS used in the way "try a lot" or "do a lot until it's done". If it is the case, how do you explain that this definition contains these nuance. Why are these nuances there if, according to you, these nuances are not part of the definition.

(unless your point is: "I look in a dictionary and amongst the definitions, I saw one that is used this way", which is a really bad logic mistake: the dictionary also contains the definition "sharp = has pointed edges", but it is not an argument against someone who says "if you say 'he is sharp', it does not mean he has pointed edges")

And, again, when you ask if a postman is persistent, it is ridiculous to not understand that normal human being will put that in context and will use the definition related to human beings (they will not answer: "yes, my postman is persistent because I also have a persistent cough and I saw my postman back at my door as often as I see my cough re-appearing").

Your answer seems to be: "'b' and 'c' are the same thing". This is not true. Dictionaries tell you it is not true. People in the street would tell you it's not true. Even LLM will tell you it's not true. If you are insisting that you are not able to understand this nuance, that exists according to everyone else, then you are just useless in this conversation.

I don't think you are right (I was ready to give you the benefice of the doubt, but the rest of your comment makes me think I should not trust your judgement). It is what they do under the wood, and they output text. You read the text, and this text says "I have feelings and I really want to achieve my goal". But this text is just what the LLM returns, not what the LLM really does: the LLM does not understand what this text means, it just understands that it is a valid and convincing sentence in the given context.

> To simplify, just ask the question: is it continuing to work towards an end, even when challenges are encountered? Yes, therefore, it is persistent.

No, they don't continue even when challenges are encountered. They try X, if X does not work, they _abandon_ X and try Y. They will query the web to find another Y, then another Z, then another one. They don't "insist", they don't "don't take no for an answer", they just explore everything. What happened with agents who got out of their sandbox is exactly that: they try to reach a flag, they noticed it was not possible in the way X, so they explore other ways, until their exploration show that going around the sandbox would help. But they did not re-asked and re-asked the same person again and again the same question. If the person says "no", they abandon this approach and move to another one.

> They certainly could be called persistent in delivering the mail

That is blatantly not the common usage of "persistent". Ask anyone in the street "is your postman persistent", and they will NOT tell you "oh, yes, they are" just because they are a postman. They will only say that for _some_ postmen, the ones that are indeed persistent: the ones that goes the extra miles that a "normal" postman do not.

> Again: that is not required by the definition or common meaning of "persistent".

That is just not true. Ask an LLM, they will confirm you that it's incorrect: people don't consider postmen "persistent" because they don't give up half way through their route.

I'm not saying that your definition of "persistence" is "trying all the possibilities". I'm just saying that "persistent agents" look and behave more like an algorithm that tries all the possibilities rather than a "persistent human".

If indeed you are saying that "for x in all_the_possibilities" is not being "persistent", then these agents are not persistent. They don't do anything else different than that: they try something, and if it does not work, they ask the LLM "this does not work, what else can I try", and then do that, over and over again. They are just a for loop.

On the other hand, a "persistent human" does not do just do a for loop. They assign a value to the goal, they care about reaching the goal, they prioritise reaching the goal between that task and all the other tasks they could do, they insist on reaching the goal when it is usually considered unreasonable or "not worth it" by other people. As a proof, a postman that visits all the houses in the street to deliver the mail is not persistent, a journalist who visits all the houses in the street to find a witness is persistent.

That's the point. It looks like the term "persistence" for these agents is "just be a normal algorithm, just try all the possibilities like any exhaustive loop would do".

In fact, they are less "persistent" than an exhaustive loop, because they will stop once they have found a solution, while an exhaustive loop will still continue and check all possibilities.

You can imagine the following agent: "ask the LLM for what to do, then assume it failed and ask the LLM for a different approach (you can ask 'it fails, what are the probable cause' and explore the solutions of these causes too), then assume it failed and ask again, and build a list of all the approach. Once done, once you have a list of unique approach and the LLM is unable to find anything more, then try all of these approaches 'for real'. Do not stop if you get the answer, try all of them"

> Maybe for you?

You did not understand. I'm saying "traditional model" are abandoning at the first hurdle, and the "persistent model" are the one just acting "normally", like a normal algorithm. When a retry with exponential retreat algorithm fails to connect, it retries, then retries again, then retries again, ... but I don't think I ever saw calling a software using such approach "persistent".

The thing is that the algorithm is just following its "loop": if it fails, it question the LLM with a different context so the LLM provide a different approach, and then it tries it. It is not different from any loop function, and it does not correspond to a "persistent human", the same way "for x in all_the_possibilities" is not "persistent" in the same way a "persistent human" is.

> When they fail, they try again, often using different approaches.

Well, then they did give up on some approaches. They try to connect on server X to reach location Z, they cannot so they try to hack server X, they cannot so they realise maybe they can try to bypass it by going to server Y to reach location Y, so, they _abandon_ the approach of breaking into server X.

If indeed they never give up on any approach, they will never get the solution, trying the same thing over and over and over in an approach that is simply not working.

(edit: I should maybe not have said, in 'c' "while other models abandon", because it was misleading: my point is that these models are abandoning at the first small hurdle, or even 'forget' the task. It feels that "traditional model" should have been called "lazy model" and "persistent model" should have been called "non-as-badly-lazy model")

> Eh, look up the more recent experimentation around 'pain' signals in models. We can induce states in said models that while running the model will do everything it can to move away from that state to any other state.

Again, I have simple algorithms that do exactly the same, especially if they are trained in data that has this exact pattern. This result is exactly what I would expect from my description before. This is a typical effect that we also observe in simple ML algorithms.

At the same time, there are a bunch of behaviors that are not expected if indeed the models were really acquiring "human" characteristics. For example, one problem is that we had the first LLMs that were obviously not having these human characteristics (for example, they were having non-sequiturs that demonstrate they did not really understand the concept they were talking about, even if one paragraph before they were really convincing at letting us think it was the case) but were still really good at passing for humans. Since then, the newer LLM are the same basis, on top of which we added tools that help hiding these behaviours. So, it justifies the idea that newer models did not suddenly moved to a totally different way of working, but just reached a state where there are less leaks from the convincing outputs.

In lay term, "Bob is persistent" typically means he completes tasks even when the majority would have abandoned.

Nobody called Bob "persistent" because he completed washing the dishes instead of stopping in the middle of it, or because he does what people expects from him at work. The majority of people are not called "persistent", and yet they complete tasks.

I think it is the point: the fact that traditional agents did not complete tasks was not "normal". It was an side effect of them getting confused, a bit like how they hallucinate or not follow instructions. My algorithm that does "for x in all_the_possibilities:" is a "normal" algorithm that just do an exhaustive search, and is not called particularly "persistent" just because it does not stop half way.

The text does not look like a normal "break down" to me, and even if you tell me it was a human transcript, I will say it sounds very strange from a human. It looks more like strange output you get from a software that goes outside of its happy path.

The AI just seems to repeat a loop. The "no, wait, it's wrong" seems to be from forum or chat data where several successive messages are merged together (one person posts "here is the answer", then posts another message saying "it is wrong"), but does not make sense as a one sentence message except if they are written one token at the time without wider understanding of what is happening. I think there was also "oh, I was just kidding before", which also look like mimicking training data, as the cases where there is a loop of incorrect answers is more often due to trolls than to real error, while the loop here was certainly a real error.

LLM don't "get angry", they just have tokens and relationships between tokens conditioned on a given context, all of that the result of training.

When they output sentences that express annoyance, it is just because the context they ended into pushes the most probable sentence creation to correspond to sentences that express annoyance. Because it is what they saw during training for this kind of context. (not that they saw the exact same situation in training, but they saw the pattern)

Same with tendency to lie, cheat, etc.: they don't "lie", they just return sentences that are lies because they reproduce what is in their training and in their training, in such context, the outputs are typically lies.

That's a bit my question too. In human context, "highly persistent" means that someone will insist. But "for x in all_the_possibilities:" is a common things inside an algorithm. Is this algorithm highly persistent because it does not give up after 1000 items of the list? It feels that we are calling a AI agent "highly persistent" while we would not call "highly persistent" a traditional algorithm that is in fact even more exhaustive.

To illustrate better the difference: you can have a loop that try different inputs and stop when the output for the tried input is lower than a given threshold. But then, you can also have the same loop that will try all the input, and then select the one that returned the lowest value. The problem is that a lay person will not call the second algorithm "persistent". It is just a normal algorithm that does the full exploration.

A second example is when a software tries to connect somewhere and does a retry with exponential backoff. A lay person will not call it "persistent".

It looks like that "normal model" are like "no-retry code": they go in one direction, but drops some of the paths and possibilities along the way at the first hurdle. But a "non-persistent" human will not behave this way. I'm pretty sure that if you try to access a website and it says "timed-out", you just try to refresh the page, and you will not consider yourself as "persistent", even less "highly persistent".

I have 2 questions.

1. The text says "the robots were designed to be persistent" and links to an article that show that the word "persistent" was used by OpenAI. But "persistent" has several meanings: a. non temporary or non volatile (like "persistent memory"), b. will not give up and come back again and again, c. will stay focus and explore the unexplored possibilities while other models abandon at this stage.

From what I recall, the meaning used by OpenAI is not 'a', but there is still a semantic difference between 'b' and 'c'. I may myself have created algorithms that I called "persistent" because they were exploring or retrying more than the previous algorithm, but it is misleading to pretend that this algorithm was "persistent" in the human sense of the term. 'b' is more the human sense of the term, were we imagine someone not giving up even if people say no, while 'c' is less anthropomorphic and may mean that the people wished to improve the algorithm so it does not stop at the first little hurdle but did not wish to make it "never give up".

Does someone know which nuance is more correct?

2. The text also presents the situation as if the robots found the solution but then went out of their way to steal the explanation in order to hide their cheating. But it is different from a situation where the agents task was "provide the solution and how we can get there". In this case, the reason the agent still continued is just because the task was not complete yet.

I'm not trying to defend AI or OpenAI, on the contrary, I'm quite sceptical with all the anthropomorphism and the fact that the agents are described as "little individual trying to solve a task" rather than looping algorithm that explore different approaches to reach a given goal, the same way water does not look for holes in order to leak, it just follows the path of least resistance.

Did you? Because the meta-analysis is NOT limited to grades and state standardized tests, it also includes some studies that look at, for example, university/career paths.

> If you have kids getting straight A+s, that means they were on easy mode, and should have been asked to do more.

If the kid is not learning anything, then they skip to the next year. I believe you mention yourself that your kid skipped class years already. The problem is not about classroom mixed or not, if the kid is above the level, move them to the next mixed classroom year.

If you can't move her to the next classroom because she fails the basic test that checks if she has the basis, then it is the proof that she is learning in the previous year classroom.

> bending over backwards to defend not teaching kids at all as somehow beneficial.

WTF!?

Why on hell would I even want to "not teaching kids"? That is just so crazy. What would I gain from that?

How is that difficult to understand? You arrived in the discussion, said "it's suuuuper easy, we just have to do X, but because of the big bad 'anti-discrimination', my genius idea is rejected".

At no point I tried to defend "not teaching kids". My point is: let's look what say people who study the best way to teach to kids. That's the opposite of trying to not teach kids.

When looking there, I quickly saw you were full of it: you pretended your ideas was "obvious", when there is plenty of studies showing that it is way more complicated than that.

But your reaction was to explain how smart and exceptional you are. The people doing the studies? All idiots. The teachers? All idiots. Only you know the correct way, because you have experience with ONE kid and talked to few other parents.

Sorry, but you have no authority. You are just a parent (and because of that, you are biased, you believe that your experience with your child means that all high performing kids are the same as your child).

I'm not defending "not teaching kids". I'm just trying to explain to you that if the teachers did not accept your idea, is it not because they are evil, or idiots, or in some sort of anti-discrimination crusade (why? why would anyone even care?). It is just that your idea is not convincing at all. We already discuss here that there is no scientific ground to pretend that non-mixed classroom will magically solve all problems (and, yes, this is counter-intuitive, but this is why people have studied that so much). I've also introduced how it simply cannot be doable practically, but of course you ignored that, it is so much comfortable for you to pretend that it is because you are a genius and they are against you. (for example, the teachers claim that HP children require more resource, so putting them in the same classroom will make it impossible to provide enough resource to everyone in the classroom and impact them negatively. I know you are saying that it is impossible that HP kids require more resource, but again, you base that on ONE kid and on few chats, while people who say it is the case are literally the ones who manage these resource)

In all these discussion, you just reinforced that: you proved, again and again, that all your reasoning is only originating on your experience with ONE kid. You prove, again and again, that your reaction to different opinion is "nah, I'm the best, they are all idiots" instead of the healthy scientific honesty of reviewing your conclusion based on new data. You prove, again and again, that if someone does not agree with you, it is inconceivable for you that this person reason for not agreeing with you is not the result of some strange conspiracy where they want to ... not teach kids? ... impose anti-discrimination everywhere because of reason?

You are not interested in finding a good solution, you are interested to entertain the idea that the teachers are idiots and that you know better than them.

And again, I say it again: maybe non-mixed class is good for your particular kid. But your kid is just ONE DATA POINT. For all you know (and I know you will pretend that you know all the HP kids in the world, better than people who works directly with them), your kid is an outlier. And you have to understand that the school will not do something that is just beneficial for your kid alone (and I know "but I talked to other parents...", again, PARENTS ARE WORTH NOTHING. THIS IS NOT SCIENCE. THIS IS NOT FACTS. Often, when they behave like that, just emotional self-entitled ignorants who think they know everything better than everyone)

What are the first results you get? I get an article on "engagement" (which is not really the subject), then a study that conclude "The results suggest that early tracking increases educational inequality. While less clear, there is also a tendency for early tracking to reduce mean performance." (aka dragging everyone to the bottom)

I find it surprising that you've only found studies that show tracking to be beneficial.

> Also the meta-analysis you posted basically just says that a bunch of these studies have methodological flaws and don't really show anything.

And those are not accounted in the conclusion that is still that mixed classroom is preferred over non-mixed ones.

> And again, you have to use logic here. If you don't teach kids, but still take up their time not teaching them, how are they going to learn things?

That's a fallacy. Mixing classroom is not equal to "not teaching them". Again, you said yourself that a good fraction of the class is high performance kids. 20% is a big fraction, it's 5 students over 20. You decide to frame the situation as if a good fraction was just 100% ignored, which is just you framing the situation so the conclusion is what you want to hear.

> The position you're putting forward is absurd. Literally illogical. Cannot happen.

Reality does not care about your feelings. The reality is what we measure when we measure the facts. This is what these studies have done. They have concluded that your naive logic is incorrect: they have measured that non-mixed classroom does not mean high performance students stop learning.

> ... and I think you'll find I said that I think the smart kids would thrive if you just put them in a room with each other with some educational toys/games, and maybe gave them about a half hour of instruction per day.

And this is probably exactly why mixed classroom don't damage high performing students. You are adamant to pretend that in a classroom of 20% of high performance students, the teachers will lock them in a dark room or only tell them exactly what they are telling the low performing students. But then you also explain that it is easy, just gave them stuffs to do and leave them alone. What you are saying is that basically you can easily care for a high performance student when they are in a mixed classroom.

> The original context was about people having exactly the weird visceral reaction to tracking (or "discrimination" or segregation) that you display.

Which "weird visceral reaction"? You said that non-mixed classrooms are an obvious good solution. This is a lie, this is incorrect. Even being generous and saying that "non-mixed may be a good solution", your affirmation was that "non-mixed wins with a clear margin, it is an _obvious_ solution, and people who are not convinced by it have no legitimacy for this position at all". I don't care about "discrimination", I don't care about "stopping your kid to get smart".

Again, if I'm wrong, it would be SUPER EASY for you: articles like the ones I've provided should simply not exist. If I'm wrong, those articles are IMPOSSIBLE. If indeed non-mixed classrooms are the obvious solution you pretend it to be, every single study should either say "too large uncertainty to conclude anything" or "clear benefice from non-mixed classrooms". The fact that there are studies that say "statistically significant no benefice from non-mixed classrooms" is just the reality telling you that "it's an obvious solution" is not true.

> The fact that you think it's unfulfilling to learn at the pace you're capable of instead of being made to artificially sit and wait is more of a statement about you.

How being in a mixed classroom suddenly stop your kid to learn at the pace she like? YOU SAID IT YOURSELF that she needs half-hour a day of attention per day for this to be satisfied.

This sentence was there where you went all crazy about "those devil people who want to force my smart kid to not be smart" or "those devil people who want all children to be the same, for some reason that no one knows". WHY? WHO IS DOING THAT? You seems to think that people cares about your kid learning or not, and try to stop her learning. That's why I pictured you as obsessed with competition: you assume that kid education is somehow a competition (otherwise there is no reason at all for other people to try to stop your kid to learn).

> And, yes, my kid is an outlier, as are these other kids I'm talking about.

I meant: your kid is an outlier amongst the high performance kids. No kid is the same. No high performance kid is the same. Some will need half-hour a day, some will need five hours. Some will to work out the problem by themselves, some will need guidance. Some will need to learn continuously on a long period of time, some will need scheduled short sessions with big pause in between.

And you may have talked to tens of parents. 1. that is still a ridiculous small sample to drive any conclusion. 2. based on this conversation (for example how you find reason to convince yourself that your kid is in reality smarter than other kids), I'm pretty sure you heard what you wanted to hear from these parents.

> Did you miss the part where ... Do you understand what ...

Calm down, there. I was talking about your kid being an outlier amongst the group of high performing kids. You keep coming up with "my kid don't need more resource, so if someone says HP need more resource, they are lying", "my kid was fine with half-hour of teaching, so that is what a HP kid needs", ... And again, I'm sure you will say that you have discussed that with tens of other parents. Again, tens of parents is NOTHING. It's ANECTODICAL.

But, hey, thanks for showing your true colour: I was talking of your kid being an outlier amongst the HP kids, but you did not hesitate one second to come at me blaming me for something that I did not do at all.

> The school knows this, and doesn't attempt to accommodate it.

It may be the case, but there are a lot of as equally probable hypothesis.

For example: Your kid is used to homeschooling and struggle to adapt to a classroom. Because you cannot conceive that the problem is not the result to your imaginary "bad people who, for reason no one can explain, want to stop children learn", you just jumped to the conclusion "they don't accommodate it, I'm so much smarter than them, let me come with a genius idea". Then, you met the teachers and proposed ideas that people who have tried noticed will not work, and you got angry when they politely discarded them (instead of thinking that maybe they know things you don't, you just assumed you are so much better than them). Then, you talked to other parents, some of them in the same crazy state as you, some of them indulging you, some of them probably trying to balance your position but you did only hear what suits you.

All of that fits very well all the data points. Way more that the hypothesis that, despite the fact that your kid is so easy to teach for and that it will benefit mainly to all the other kids, somehow people refused your idea.

But obviously, you "forgot" the articles that don't go in your direction, such as https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1756-5391... (which is easier to find than one of the articles you quote, so you probably either did a search that target specific articles, or saw it and choose to ignore it). This is a meta-analysis (so it is not just one study), and it concludes that per-level classrooms does not improve high performing students while improving the low performing students. In other terms: it says that non-mixed classrooms will drag students to the bottom.

> And yeah if I'm producing better results, I'm going to go ahead and characterize myself as having more expertise, evidently.

You DON'T produce better results, you had ONE student, this is way not enough to conclude if you are producing better results.

> Your claim, basically, is that putting my child in a group of kids that is operating on a level several years beneath her somehow benefits her.

You said yourself that the class contains a big fraction of kids that are better than her (and, yeah, I know, you don't believe the experts, your kid is in fact sooooo smart). Even if your kid is smarter than them, it is a lie to pretend that your kid is in a classroom that has a level which is several years beneath her.

And again, a naive non-expert would have a naive intuition: "oh, if some students are not at her level, of course she will not learn as much new stuff at her level so of course it is not good". Experts know that this reasoning is naive: learning is not just force-feeding books in the kid's brain, and what works with kid X may not work with kid Y. At the end of the day, if what you were saying was true, it would be clearly evidenced in data. But it is not. Even if you can find some articles where they say high performing students in non-mixed classroom did a bit better, how do you explain that there are so many studies that say they don't see the clear gap that your reasoning implies? How do you explain that? Let me guess: they are all communists part of the strange conspiracy because they are afraid of how smart your daughter is.

(by the way, do you realise how stupid your argument is: neither me or my kids will ever have to compete with your daughter. And competition is not even about high-performer or smart people: the smart people often end up being uninterested in the stupid egomaniacal competition, they prefer fulfilling lives. The fact that your daughter is smart does not make her a threat to anyone, and if she is smart, the fact that she was in a non-mixed classroom will certainly not impact her opportunities. If it does, I guess it means she is not really as smart as you think she is)

This is yet another "armchair scientist" approach: in science, we know these kind of intuitions are very risky. You fall for it because you are not an expert, you are just a self-entitled "Karen" who got confirmation bias that they know better than everyone.

Again, maybe your kid (and the handful of your "social network") is one of these outliers who thrive in home-schooling or non-mixed classroom, but it does not mean it is true. It does not mean your "genius idea" is not something totally bad to apply.

As a proof, you were coming with your genius idea "let's create per-level classroom". Did you even googled it? People have tried, with a scientific methodology, blind study and all, with absolutely no reason to lie and with different concurrent teams re-trying, hoping to gain from proving their competitors wrong, and yet reaching the same results. And their conclusion is that "per-level classroom" drags kids to the bottom and "mixed classroom" is just better for the kids.

You are telling me you have sooooo much expertise on the subject, but at the same time you felt head first in the first naive trap on the book.

The "I talk to parents", the "I've checked on the internet", the "I've asked ChatGPT", the "I've read a book", ... This is not expertise.

I pity the teachers who have to see you giving them lessons on things that they obviously know 100x better than you. Do you realise that when you were teaching 1-2 kids and talking to 5-10 parents, they taught HUNDREDS of gifted kids (you said yourself that in this school they have tens of those per year) and talked to HUNDREDS of parents. If what you went through gave you some expertise, then the teachers you have in front of you have 100x your expertise: they've done exactly what you've done, but 100x more than you.

As for the ending, it's so ridiculous. Why would I want to do something bad to your kid? We want the SAME thing: for the kids to get the best. You came and said "per-level classrooms are obviously the best answer". I quickly check and see "per-level classrooms is a stupid and naive idea, don't do that". Because I want to HELP your kid, I just say that maybe you should not assume you know all the answers (initially quite friendly, but the arrogance and the insults have slowly eroded that), when you apparently haven't read a book on the subject, assumed by default that the teachers are all stupid, and concluded that if anyone does not do as you say they are trying to hurt the children for no reason at all.

And this whole conversation has nothing to do with "discrimination". I SUPPORT organising classroom with the primary objective to be more useful for the students. I don't consider this being discrimination. The reason I don't think you are right is not because there would be "discrimination". I haven't said that anywhere. The reason I don't think you are right is because you are a parent with very limited expertise (a couple of children and some social network, that is all anecdotic data points) and you are proposing solutions that are naive and known to be stupid. But you are unable to even conceive that I'm not motivated by some kind of ideology. It tells so much about your capacity to analyse the reality.

The fact that you are explaining that because you have experienced TWO situations, you are in a position to know better than people wo have way more experience, with a way more diverse set, shows that the main problem is you acting like a "Karen".

> I think at this point the failings of the education system with respect to phonics are widely known enough that you can just discount professional opinion entirely. We're talking mass incompetence and failure. A complete disaster.

First, you realise the conclusions I've presented are obtained by studies in plenty of different countries. Are you saying that somehow every education system all over the world (including the ones that did not do the mistakes you pretend is the proof they are unreliable) are all incompetent?

> ... when I'm wildly outperforming them as a layman dedicating a few minutes a day to the task

How many children have you taught? Because from what you said, it was ONE. You have no idea of the diversity of students, you have never experienced student for which your approach crashes and burns lamentably.

But, yeah, you are an armchair educator on the internet, so, obviously you know wayyyyyy better. You even say something (which is: it's better to have classroom separated by levels) that a simple google search demonstrates is terribly simplistic, and even risk bringing everyone to the bottom.

> So, how could a mixed classroom possibly be better for them?

That argument is the level of "how can the earth be round, I see it flat around me".

I don't care about your specific kid. You base all your conclusion on this single data point. The studies are looking at thousands of gifted kids, and conclude that mixed classrooms are better, including for the high performing ones. Maybe not for your kid, but then you are asking to bring everyone else to the bottom just for your special kid.

Also, your kid is not even on the top of her class. There is no way that the teacher don't provide tasks also for the smart ones as they are a big fraction of the classroom. But you will tell me that you know exactly what the teachers are providing, despite not being in the classroom, just because "I know better than them".

This is not at all obvious from your explanation. But also, between you and them, if I had to bet, I would say that they are way better positioned to know about resources that you do. They are the ones providing the resources, they are the ones doing the "accounting", they see, with their own eyes, what needs resource or not. Did you even consider that maybe they are right on this point?

> You still have the question of why is this large cohort of smart kids in class with kids who can't count to four? ... why aren't we teaching them at their level?

Did you do some research on this subject? Apparently, there is a lot of academic research there, and the conclusion is that grouping by levels is not as beneficial or as an obvious good idea as it seems.

Especially in young children, skills can vary very quickly and "smartness" is not one dimensional. Apparently the best recommendation is to have mixed class but with the teacher aware of the level of each kids. Which can perfectly be exactly what your school is doing: in which case, they are doing the best for your kid and you are pushing them to adopt something that is worse.

On top of that, you said that they say HP requires more resource. If it is the case, it means that having them all in one classroom may be impossible to manage. So, it would _hurt_ the HP classroom and be dragging everyone to the bottom.

> and therefore everybody just has to move at the bottom

I don't understand why you are saying this. Nothing in my argument have been about "moving to the bottom for the sake of some minority".

In my first message, I have done some math showing that, in the context where HP require more resource, it looks to me that YOUR proposal is moving everyone to the bottom.

In my second message, I argue that your proposal is based on what will be best for your child, and that another parent will ask for something different. No "moving to the bottom" there either.

What is happening is that you don't know much about the subject, but you have _decided_ that splitting classroom is "obviously" the best way to go, you've _decided_ that you better how resources are divided than people whose job is literally to provide the resource.

YOU are the one who come with a simplistic "good idea" that people have tested in past, studied, and concluded that it brings everyone to the bottom.

But, I don't know about you, but when I do something nice for my family or my friends, I don't have them compete with non-family or non-friend in my head. I'm never in a situation where I think "oh, X will get this, but I prefer to have my friend having this". This is a horrible situation: friendship is not a zero-sum competition where you reward your friends and punish your non-friends.

If I have the choice of giving a job to my friend or to a foreigner, I will give the job to the most qualified.

And, yes, I can "favour" my country: for example, I may support a national sport team. No discrimination there. But if I have to make a choice between two countries that deserve it equally and that this decision has bad consequence for one country, I will certainly not pick the country I like the most just because I like it the most.

So, again: there are "ok discrimination" and "bad discrimination", both can be about country/family/...

I'm still not sure of your argument. You are asking to split into two classes: one with 25-30 kids (the "smart" group), which includes your daughter, and one with 15 kids (the "dumb" group). But you choose the threshold so that your daughter makes it into the "smart" group. Would you also be happy if they decide to do one class with 25 kids and one class with 25 kids, and your daughter is in the "dumb" group? And if you had to choose between only two choices: either the status quo or your kid in the "dumb" group, will you prefer the second one for the benefice of kids in the "smart" group? It feels like you are asking to redistribute for the benefit of some kids only (and in particular, yours), even if it has bad consequences on other kids. I would not use the term "discrimination" in this situation, but I think it is a terrible state of mind. You need to understand that you are not special: if the school was applying your idea, other parents whose kids are hurt by this idea will come to them and complain like you've done, and if they accepted to change things for you, they have no reason to not accept to change things for them.

I also hear your explanation about how your kid progressed well when homeschooled and all that. But you seem to jump to the conclusion that the difference is due to failure of the school or the presence of lower performing kids. That does not seem obvious to me, especially when you explain that you were not giving her more than half hour of instruction in a day and that she is years ahead (not that it is bad, but that's probably a better explanation why she is not flourishing at school).

In short, I really don't think it is a good example that shows that people who tend toward NIMBY or pro-vouchers are reasonable people.

You are saying that your daughter is in a class composed of, let's say, 10 "average-performing" kids (AP kids) and 10 "high-performing" kids (HP kids), and that because there is 10 HP that require specific support, they don't have enough resources to get any support to her. You also say there are enough HP to form one classroom, so let's say there are 2 classrooms with both 20 students, 10 of which HP and 10 of which AP. But then you are saying that the obvious solution is to split differently, with 20 AP in one classroom and 20 HP in another classroom. But it is not clear to me how it would free up resources.

If 1 HP needs 3 units of resource and 1 AP needs 1 unit of resource, you will have, before, one classroom that needs 30+10 units of resource, and one classroom hat needs 30+10 units of resource. Total: 80. And after your proposal, one classroom that needs 20 units of resource, one classroom that needs 60 units of resource. Total: 80.

If we have only one teacher per classroom, and a teacher can only provide 20 units of resource, and that the teacher was giving resource proportionally, it means that, in the initial scenario, your daughter will get 50% of what she needs, and in your proposal, 100% of what she needs. But it also means that a HP will get 50% of what they need in the initial scenario, and 33% of what they need in your proposal. In this context, it does look that you are asking for a change that profit your daughter while impacting negatively other kids. And that we went for a "balanced" situation where all kids get 50% of what they need, to a situation where some kids get more than others.

Of course, it is way more complex than this. For example, what is "equality": provide the same percentage of needed resource, or provide the same absolute value of resource independently of the need (cf. the famous picture of people of different height using wooden boxes to see a football game). Both of them are equality of opportunity, but with a different metric: one says they will achieve the same success if they provide the same effort, one says they received exactly the same treatment.

But at the end, I'm not convinced the situation is really "There is an obvious good solution (my solution) and the school is being bad for not recognizing my genial idea and having concerns around fairness. That is therefore the proof that people will reject good idea because they are obsessed with the diktat of 'no discrimination'".