About MankNotes

I read a lot, and I write a lot. Some of it might be useful to people. I think gatekeeping education is one of the worst crimes a society can participate in. It tells those who don’t have access to education that they were never meant to succeed, and it tells those who do that they’re part of a natural elite with the right to take more than others. Both are destructive to knowledge. I aim to keep this as accessible as possible. I will never have a paywall or ask for a subscription to anything here. No promises about ads though. I still need to pay rent.

About Mank

When I was in high school (in the pre-ChatGPT days), one of my teachers caught a handful of students with links containing every past AP test from which questions on the final would be drawn for the entire school. Faced with the dilemma of knowing a handful of students were guaranteed to cheat in every AP class while everyone else was working hard, this teacher decided to give everyone the link to level the playing field.

I was one of two students in my year who took Multivariable Calculus as a high school junior. It was not a weighted class, which meant that even if I aced every assignment and test, it would be mathematically guaranteed to bring down my weighted GPA. The year after, our school made a new version of the class that did seem to be weighted, after which many more students began to take it.

I actually enjoyed learning, but I could not honestly blame any student in that class for using the link or waiting until the class became weighted. They tried to maximize their chances of success using methods proven to work by those older than them who got into competitive colleges. The value of knowledge is speculative when you can’t apply any of it for a dozen years and the wealthiest members of society use almost nothing from their K-college education to generate wealth; many of them have bragged about the virtues of dropping out. The value of a good grade is instantly reflected in comparable GPAs, class rankings, college admission chances, peer judgment, and the reactions of adults whose approval you seek.

Students are being very rational in recognizing that most students who cheat are never caught while the competition for scarce seats in top colleges continues to get more vicious. We tell them this will define the trajectory of their entire lives. We punish curiosity, ethics, and enthusiasm because they’re not readily measurable, and then we’re upset when people turn surface metrics into goals when that’s the incentive we give them. We can’t have it both ways. At no point in our society have we shown kids the correlation between pursuing knowledge or truth and living a more comfortable life. The opposite, in fact. You can be sued, fined, imprisoned, institutionalized, or exiled for speech aimed at the truth. You can make a lot of money lying, or letting liars get away with it while taking your cut and calling it honest.

I’m not better than anyone. I just can’t do things I don’t believe in. I never had the stomach to swallow the hypocrisy and contribute to that system when I knew it was never sustainable. I wanted to prepare for the day after it collapses. I won’t outright encourage or endorse cheating, but I’ll do my part to make knowledge as accessible as possible here. If I feel an accessible explanation for something doesn’t exist in the world, I consider it worth writing about, however imperfectly or egregiously. I’ve found that the best way to get a correct answer isn’t by asking questions, it’s by proposing a wrong answer which triggers people into correcting you. May a thousand flowers bloom.

Keep that in mind, because as I said above, these are just notes and rants from a nobody with no professional credentials. If you disagree completely and think I’m full of crap, that’s great. You know who you are, what you think, and what works in your life. You do not need my approval or agreement, and everything I say is only a perspective you can freely disregard. You will find no claims to absolute truths here.