School trains you to equate difficulty with value
You've identified a critical mismatch between what school trains you to value and what matters in the real world. Spending 15 years in School's closed system—where progression means harder courses and difficulty correlates with grades—c…
School is a closed-world domain: crisply-defined problems, single-dimension grading, low performance ceiling. The only form of progression is harder courses. Spend 15 years in this system and you internalize one heuristic: harder = more valuable. Given the reward function, this isn't irrational — the reward function is just wrong.
Elite recruiting culture reinforces it. "What are you looking for?" "Hard technical problems." Companies say it back in job ads. Interview questions reward the answer. By graduation, difficulty-seeking feels like ambition rather than a trained reflex.
When you enter the real world, you carry this heuristic into a domain where it doesn't apply. The problem isn't ability — it's that the heuristic was trained on the wrong environment.
[!NOTE] School never asked you to find the problem, only to solve it. That's the gap.
Source claim: School's reward structure trains people to optimize for difficulty rather than importance, and that habit survives graduation.
Related notes
- Choosing the harder problem is procrastination disguised as effortself-image · links here
- School and real-world problems are structurally differentpractical wisdom
- Important problems are more interesting than hard onesengagement
- Whether suppression breeds a new form or a dead field depends on what it punishesintellectual freedom
- The thing that carries no content decides what the content becomesleverage