The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
College Degrees Are Almost Zero Predictor of Engineering Competence
“Whether or not someone has a college degree is almost a zero predictor for how good they are as an engineer and how good they are as a designer.”
Latta: Education's core problem is that institutions never build for students
“I think the biggest problem in education is very simple. It's that when you look at all the different players that make up education for young people, when you look at Pearson, when you look at schools, when you look at school administrators, when you look at …”
Latta proposes splitting schooling into a four-hour core and student-directed pursuits
“I think my proposal is two systems. I propose one system that's like normal public school that where you have a high floor, low ceiling, everybody learns to read and write, but it's hard to go off the beaten path, but that only takes like four hours a day or s…”
Traditional Education Outcomes Reflect Average Compromises Across Conflicting Stakeholders
“The thing that's so hard about education is that it has a million stakeholders. Literally everyone from parents to communities to literally real estate agents have a huge stake in education. And what that means is we end up with a system that's almost like the…”
Latta: 100% of world population will have internet access within 10 years
“In the next 10 years, that's going to be a hundred percent.”
Latta: Coding teaches youth that both digital and physical systems are malleable
“When you learn to code, you begin to realize that all these digital systems are malleable. And if you realize that the digital systems around us are malleable, you realize that the physical systems are too.”
Modern Education's Challenge Has Shifted From Information Access to Motivation
“So much of what we think of as public education today is built to solve an access problem. How do we simply get access to all this different knowledge in front of as many people as possible? Where I think the new challenge of education is one of motivation.”
Latta: Coders earn double or triple a public school teacher's salary
“If you know how to code, you have the choice between being a public school teacher or making double or sometimes triple your salary.”
Hack Club Bypasses School Administrators to Work Exclusively With Teenagers
“In Hack Club, we don't work with schools. We don't work with teachers. We don't work with school administrators. We only work with teenagers. And even though we're on an in-person program inside of schools, we only interface with teenagers.”
Latta: Educational programs must feel editable so students act like owners
“We try and make Hack Club as an organization and as a set of programs feel very editable. If you're a teenager in Hack Club and you're thinking, I don't like this thing Hack Club is doing, or I don't like this experience I'm going through. It should feel like …”
Latta: Student school satisfaction plummets from 75% in elementary to 25% in secondary
“When you look at what students say every year, there's a big survey that's done. It's over a million students are surveyed. And one of the questions asked is, do you like school from K through about six? The answer is usually overwhelmingly yes. It's like 75% …”
Programming Is the Closest Modern Equivalent to a Human Superpower
“I think computers and programming as a whole is probably the closest thing we have today to a superpower, and it's an, it's like the ultimate tool for self-expression.”
Elon Musk Told Latta the World Needs More Builders
“When we talked with Elon, what he said is he believes that there needs to be more builders in the world.”
Latta: Vitalik Buterin First Learned Linux in a High School Computer Club
“We talked with Vitalik, he talked about when he was in high school, he and one of his friends started what he called a mini Hack Club at his high school. And that was the first place he learned about Linux, which completely changed his life.”
A High Schooler's App Reached 12% of District Users in Two Weeks
“They launched it four weeks ago. Within two weeks, one in eight people in their school district had downloaded it and was using it on their phone.”
Latta: India implemented over 10,000 public school makerspaces in five years
“India has this incredible initiative right now to get a makerspace in every single public school in the country. And they've already implemented more than 10,000 of them in the past five years.”
Latta: Hack Club serves 10,000–20,000 teens with a 10-person staff
“At this point, hack club serves between 10 and 20,000 teenagers. That's, you know, larger than many undergraduate programs at universities. And our staff is 10 and our budget smaller than second grade at an average size elementary school.”
Teenagers Collaborated Online to Build a Custom Shader Programming Language
“One cool project was a Hack Clubber from California and a Hack Clubber from a pretty rural part of the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia worked together to make a fragment shader programming language. And if you've ever played a game before where you see movin…”
Zach Latta Acquired His First 10,000 Software Users at Age 12
“When I was 12, I got my first 10,000 users.”
Latta: 'Football Heroes' reached number one on App Store with 1M+ downloads
“So when I was 15, when I was 16, I worked on two apps. One was a game called Football Heroes. I was part of a small team. I was the youngest and it became the number one game on the App Store. We got over a million downloads.”