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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In a corner of SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company's usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs.
Those at Ad Astra still find time for a quick game of dodgeball at lunch, however, because the average age within this group is just 10 years old.
Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk's sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles' most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his sons' teachers, the CEO founded Ad Astra to "exceed traditional school metrics on all relevant subject matter through unique project-based learning experiences," according to a previously unreported document filed with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
"I just didn't see that the regular schools were doing the things that I thought should be done," he told a Chinese TV station in 2015. "So I thought, well let's see what we can do. Maybe creating a school will be better."
In an atmosphere closer to a venture capital incubator than a traditional school, today's Ad Astra students undertake challenging technical projects, trade using their own currency, and can opt out of subjects they don't enjoy. Children from 7 to 14 years old work together in teams, with few formal assessments and no grades handed out.
Ad Astra's principal hopes that the school will revolutionize education in the same way Tesla has disrupted transportation, and SpaceX the rocket industry. But as Musk's sons near graduation age, the future of Ad Astra is unclear. Will Musk maintain interest in the school once his children move on? And even if he does, can a school of fewer than 40 students ever be anything more than a high-tech crèche for already-privileged children?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 29 2018, @03:54PM (3 children)
Huh?
Dunbar's number has to do with a supposed limit on simultaneous stable social relationships a person can maintain. It has nothing to do with how many people you only "know" as an acquaintance or whatever, let alone people (like celebrities) you have no relationship with whatsoever, only a one-sided interest. (Those latter numbers, as noted in your link, have only to do with limits on long-term mempry, this usually being a much larger number.)
Once more, a bunch of links purporting to say one thing but actually not supporting your argument at all... But hey, it looks impressive.
Really mastering the art of fake news.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 29 2018, @04:07PM (2 children)
Oh, I will note that last link about the Monkeysphere gets closer to on point, but it has basically nothing to do with Dunbar's number, which some Cracked.com editor appears to misunderstand as well. David Wong does have a valid point about how we dehumanize people more than farther they are from our communities... It's just a point about something different (which if he read any sociology from the past 50 years, he's probably have better sources for).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 29 2018, @05:18PM (1 child)
Every bit of what I've linked to has a central theme: the upright apes aren't all that very smart, and there are limits to the number of people they can keep track of. The greater community of upright apes has very limited capacity to keep track of serious tech minded people. They would rather spend that capacity on mindless endeavors such as photoshopped asses and such.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 29 2018, @06:26PM
What you just said may all be true. But the basis of "keeping track" of people you are in relationships with is very different (and cognitively much more intensive) from keeping track of random facts about something (celebrities, lists of plant phyla, types of subatomic particles, what you need to buy at the grocery store, etc.).
Or at least that distinction was the entire basis of Dunbar's number. If you want to smear all of those things together and claim they're all basically a similar cognitive process, you shouldn't cite Dunbar, since you just undermined most of the premise of his research that came up with that number. (Personally, I would agree that Dunbar's assumptions may be overblown, but that's the whole basis for the claim of limited number of people to "keep track of." )