Toan Truong

I'm 18. I’m obsessed with learning how to learn. So, I spent 200+ hours studying how geniuses, prodigies, and high performers master their disciplines. Here's what I found on how to master anything faster:

A counseling grad student says elite universities have normalized suicide attempts during finals week "I do see smaller universities that are and it may be biased as a counseling university that there are accommodations that there are talks of disability that there are talks about systemic oppression" "seeing the more prestigious spaces where I have been, the amount of just the normalization of suicide attempts during finals week is atrocious" "I've had even colleagues that went to these institutions and they're like, I had to drop out because it's I needed a month off. This is just too much. Then to mention any vulnerability is is considered a weakness" "And to not get a good grade or you're missing an assignment is considered a weakness" Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Speaker on Jubilee's Middle Ground, counseling graduate student, on Jubilee's Middle Ground.

Jordan Peterson says a famous US program proved you cannot give kids a lasting IQ boost, even with early enrichment "there was a huge program in the United States started in the 1960s which was supported by conservatives and liberals alike called Head Start" "the kids who went to Head Start did do better than their age matched and socioeconomic matched peers who didn't go to Head Start, but the differences disappeared by grade five or grade six" "so there was no improvement in cognitive function" "that was really saddening... because it was a good hypothesis. Like the idea that you could get a leap ahead early seems so obvious that you'd think it was incontrovertible. It just happens not to be true" If you're new here, follow @LearningToan for the sharpest lessons from the world's best minds. — Jordan B Peterson ( @jordanbpeterson ), clinical psychologist, on Jordan B Peterson's ( @jordanbpeterson ) Answer the Call

Jordan Peterson says separated identical twins raised in totally different worlds end up with nearly identical IQs by age 60 "If you take twins, identical twins separated at birth and you test them repeatedly for IQ as they age" "What happens is that as they age, their IQs get more similar until regardless of how they were raised" "By the time they're 60, if you test one twin and the other, they're so similar that it's like you test the same person twice" Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Jordan B Peterson, clinical psychologist and professor, on his own Answer the Call podcast.

I was fortunate to experience this without the aid of external chemicals. The material universe is comprised solely of vibrating light-waves which compress to simulate solids and expand to simulate waves. The material universe is the effect. REALITY is Cause, and cause must be eternal for it to be REAL. Cause must therefore be dimensionless, vibrationless and conditionless. In other words, Cause is 'comprised' of immeasurable 'qualities' which are simulated in our electrical light wave universe by moving vibrating quantities of matter. Philosophers call these qualities Principles and Scientists call them Laws. REALITY is the dimensionless, invisible, motionless, sexless, undivided and unconditioned White Light of Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent Mind which we call God. Our universe of motion SIMULATES REALITY. Analogy: Cause is the still fulcrum. The material universe of motion is the lever. A lever cannot move without its fulcrum. The universe could no more move without its still fulcrum than your body could without its fulcrums (joints.)

Carl Jung wrote something that I think about often: "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."

A dopamine deficit is the real reason nothing feels good. It brings anxiety, insomnia, irritability, and a flatness Dr Anna Lembke calls akin to depression. If I wanted to reset it without medication, here are 8 things I'd do for 30 days: 1. Expect to feel worse first

A high school senior graduating at the 50th percentile knows the same math as a third grader "Well, I mean here's here's the state of affairs. Uh a third of students can do math or reading at grade level, right?" "a high school senior who graduates in the 50th percentile, you know, your average high school senior, they know the same amount of math as a third grader who's in the 99th percentile" "half of our students in in you know the country that we graduate don't know as much math as a 99th percentile third grader. It's absolutely crazy" "for kids that are just average kids, you could really look at four years of high school as basically a waste of time for them. They barely improve at all" Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. MacKenzie Price, founder of Alpha School, on Chris Williamson's ( @ChrisWillx ) Modern Wisdom.

OpenAI's head of education admits schools handled AI completely backwards from day one "I mentioned this before like I was frustrated because like the AI detectors were terrible" "there were these AI detector like one I could show somebody how to write text that would be flagged as AI and also how to prompt a thing to avoid it" "you take one or two students who didn't cheat and told they're cheaters" "we got off onto the wrong foot with AI in the classroom. Instead of trying to be explicit and establish clear policies on when students should use the tech and when they shouldn't, teachers sort of hid from it" "we started with policing its use rather than actually sitting there and figuring out how do we actually want to redesign the way we assess students" Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Leah Belsky, head of education at OpenAI, on the OpenAI Podcast.

Parents called this school stunned their kids were doing extra math homework at home for a strange reason "We had a group of students that came to us and they were behind academically. They weren't real motivated by what we traditionally were doing at Alpha... They loved video games. They were super into gaming, right?" "You guys can do your 2 hours of learning in the morning. And if you hit your goals, you unlock video game time at school with each other to do" "My kid is going home at night and getting extra work done because they would rather get extra work done at home to unlock more time... playing with their friends at school" "We had kids go up multiple grade levels in 4 months just by offering up some time to get to play Fortnite at school" Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. McKinsey Price, co-founder of Alpha School, on Jonathan Bi's YouTube channel

An education researcher says the anti-cheating tools schools bought to stop AI are already broken "Kids will find a way no matter what. Kids will find a way. We cannot out maneuver them with technology." "So, so the first response when Gen AI came in was ban it, block it, get anti-ag plagiarism checkers in, which are which are bad by the way." "Like I talked to one kid who showed me he had this essay um and the plagiarism checker flagged 40% of it and he changed two words and then it went away. It was all he's all good." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute, on Ezra Klein's The Ezra Klein Show.

A researcher found the average teacher spends this many seconds one-on-one with each student per day "I read a research study that showed the average amount of time that a teacher is spending with a student in the traditional school environment, 22 seconds per day" "22 seconds. One-on-one." "The majority of time is them talking to a group, right? Talking to a group versus one-on-one." "So, the thing about an AI tutor, it doesn't care if you're white or black or brown. It doesn't care if you're rich or poor. It doesn't care if you're in the 15th percentile or the 85th percentile. It's infinitely patient." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. McKinsey Price, co-founder of Alpha School, on Jonathan Bi's YouTube channel

A casino general manager stopped a dealer mid-hand and banned Mohnish Pabrai for life, and he wasn't even counting cards "Mr. Purbrai, I like you. I read your book. I watched your videos. And you have a system that we cannot beat" "I told him I said you know I'm not counting cards. He said that's what threw us off. He said we know you're not counting cards. And we know you'll beat us" "So you can come to this casino anytime you want. But you cannot sit down at a blackjack table" "I always tell them listen just say that I have a lifetime ban in Vegas" P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab a free copy here: besuperhuman.gumroad.com/l/mentalmodels If you're new here, follow @GeniusGTX for content on the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. — Mohnish Pabrai, fund manager, on Sean Kelly's My First Million

Everyone talks about the same geniuses like: Einstein, Tesla, or Hawking. But for me, there's one woman who stands head and shoulder above all. Sadly, her legacy was a heartbreaking tragedy. Here's her story... (thread) 🧵

In 2012, a cryptic image was posted on 4chan with a strange message: "Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test..." Today, this is the world's greatest and most mysterious puzzle on the internet. Here's the story: 🧵

A teacher explains why this generational (Gen Alpha) is unlike any other in 200 years of schooling "Gen Alpha is being taught by millennials and younger Gen Xers, people who didn't grow up with smartphones, social media, or instant access to AI powered information." "We didn't just shift culture. We shifted the entire architecture of childhood." "What took a century to evolve before now has flipped upside down completely in less than a decade." "These kids are now spending 7 hours a day, every weekday in an incompatible, outdated system with them that we have been teaching kids to learn for the past two centuries." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Cole Hastings, creator of Cole Hastings on YouTube

An economist's data shows why kids stopped caring about grades or college entirely "If what they're being taught isn't actually preparing them for the workforce and will barely help them get a job, what reason do they have to discipline themselves?" "Punishments don't work because they don't care about them. They don't care about grades. They don't care about college." "It's like you are interacting with them briefly in between hits of the internet." "The average cost of public higher education adjusted for inflation has soared while the job market has simultaneously gotten harder and harder for new grads." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Cole Hastings, creator of Cole Hastings on YouTube

A student says universities only care about students as tuition payments, not people "I do not think that they do they do not care for students mental health. I'll say it like point blank period. They do not" "We are paying to be there. We are just a payroll to them" "the amount of just the normalization of suicide attempts during finals week is atrocious" "to mention any vulnerability is is considered a weakness" If you're new here, follow @LearningToan for the sharpest lessons from the world's best minds. — Jubilee panelist, college student, on Jubilee's Middle Ground

Pavel Durov says one school subject rewires your brain more than any other "I still think math is essential." "It's something that shapes your brain." "It teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work." "This is exactly the same skill you need in programming, in project management, in starting when you start your own company." If you're new here, follow @LearningToan for the sharpest lessons from the world's best minds. — Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, on Lex Fridman's Lex Fridman Podcast

In 1989, Japan ruled the world • GDP per capita beat America's • 8 of the 10 biggest companies were Japanese • Tokyo real estate was worth more than all of California Today? • Growth is flat • Wages are stuck • Population shrinking The signs were obvious & everywhere🧵

In 2009, Stephen Hawking threw a party for time travelers. The physicist provided exact GPS coordinates and time... Then waited with his champagne... This is what happened next and the world's smartest man honest confession about time travelling: 🧵