This woman dropped out of high school and illegally became an underage prostitute because she was struggling with depression. I don't mean to minimize her exper

This woman dropped out of high school and illegally became an underage prostitute because she was struggling with depression. I don't mean to minimize her experience or suggest there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but I don't think you can just project whatever terrible school experiences led her to that and think everyone has that bad of an experience in high school. This reminds me a bit of Scott Alexander's extreme bias against school, due to all of the extreme bullying he faced. It might make more sense to say kids who are having a truly awful experience in high school should skip high school, rather than just "smart kids should skip high school." I think I was a pretty smart person, perfect SAT score even, and I certainly could have learned everything I learned in high school must faster with less wasted time if I studied on my own, but I don't think the experience was worthless. It's the last time I had real, truly close friends. It was the last time I competed hard in real sports leagues. Theoretically, I could have tried to find other ways to do those things, but there's some benefit to just being around the same people all the time and doing things together if you don't hate each other and make each other's lives awful. I don't know what else I would have done. I may have been academically ready for college a lot earlier, but I wasn't socially ready. I wasn't socially ready even at 18 and probably should have waited even longer. You can't just actually go to work even if you're able to because of child labor laws.