We must stop trying to teach meta-learning and start architecting environments that force it to emerge.

Research Roundup

Free-Range Humans

We often treat early childhood education like a race to the bottom of a worksheet or a competition to pack a 5-year-old’s resume. But a new, rigorous lottery-based study on public Montessori schools suggests we should be playing a very different, much longer game.

Early in preschool, Montessori children showed no obvious academic differences to their traditional school peers, but by the end of kindergarten, they had meaningfully “higher reading, short-term memory, theory of mind, and executive function scores.”

Crucially, this causal effect appeared later—a "sleeper effect" suggesting that the Montessori environment wasn't just filling a bucket with facts, but building a better bucket.

I have no particular allegiance to Montessori, specifically. It is the environment—self-directed choice and mixed-age peers—that causally lifts meta-learning, the architecture of learning itself. It turns out that if you treat children like autonomous agents rather than empty vessels, they build the cognitive scaffolding necessary to fill themselves up.

Too bad child-centered, self-directed learning is more expensive…oh wait, it isn’t: “a cost analysis suggested three years of public Montessori preschool costs less per child than traditional programs, largely due to Montessori having higher child:teacher ratios in PK3 and PK4.”

Genes vs Schools

There is a creeping biological fatalism in education and throughout society—the idea that DNA is destiny. A groundbreaking study prunes back these lazy myths to reveal that high-quality schools can substitute for genetic luck.

By combining genetic data (polygenic indices) “on mother-father-child trios” with causal estimates of school quality, researchers found that better schools significantly dampened the impact of genetic predisposition on reading scores.

Specifically, a “1 SD increase of school quality decreases the impact” of genetic disadvantages “by 6%.” This is important because reading comprehension tracks strongly with meta-learning development and human capital accumulation.

Our institutions must never be cynical sorting mechanisms for biological talent; they are engines that can override biological lottery tickets and lift all of society. Disassembling the infrastructure of high-quality universal education is the dissolution of our very capacity.

Save Yourself From Yourself

We like to think we have the willpower to ignore the supercomputer in our pocket. We don’t. And neither do students. The implications of that are…messy.

A massive randomized controlled trial involving 17,000 students found that a strict ban—physically collecting phones during class—raised grades by nearly 10% of a standard deviation. The gains were highest for “lower-performing, first-year, and non-STEM students”, possibly interacting with factors like working memory or executive control.

The most fascinating finding? The“students exposed to the ban were substantially more supportive of phone-use restrictions”. This casts doubt on studies using 'willingness-to-pay' to value social media, revealing that our 'willingness' is not a fixed number, but a fluid state that shifts based on our recent experiences.

Initially resistant, students became supportive of the policy once they experienced the benefits of a distraction-free environment. This is a lesson in "paternalistic libertarianism" or perhaps just good design: sometimes you have to remove a dominant choice to expose people to the benefits of other choices.

We aren't just addicted to the device; we are addicted to the distraction. We can engineer environments that save us from our own dopamine loops.

P.S. I also just found the original "meta-learning" white paper we wrote way back when!

Media Mentions

This Professional Mad Scientist is heading to the Alps. 🏔️🧪

I have been invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos many times over the years, but for one reason or another, the stars never quite aligned for me to take the stage in person. That changes in 2026.

I am thrilled to share that I will be speaking in Davos on January 20th. Why this year? Because the conversation has finally caught up to the science.

We are past the hype cycle of "AI replacing humans". The real challenge now—and the focus of my talk—is Hybrid Human-Machine Collective Intelligence. It is about how we move beyond lazy automation to effortful augmentation. We’ll talk about the messy, chaotic, beautiful work of maximizing human potential, whether in a corporate environment or across society.

I’ll be previewing concepts from my new organization, Possibility Sciences, and sharing core themes from my upcoming book, Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People (coming March 14!).

If you are going to be in Davos this January, let me know. I’d love to connect, share some ideas, and perhaps find a good cup of tea in the snow.

More details to come soon.

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

If you've never come across Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville, this is the foundational text of the "New Weird"—a sprawling, steampunk, bio-punk nightmare set in New Crobuzon, a city populated by cactus people, sentient insect-women, and criminals surgically "remade" into grotesqueries.

The plot follows a renegade mad scientist (my favorite kind) commissioned to help a de-winged bird-man fly again. Naturally, his scientific hubris accidentally unleashes a flock of interdimensional dream-eating moths. The prose is dense, baroque, and feels constantly on the verge of collapsing under its own sheer creative weight. It is a masterpiece of unrestrained imagination.

Stage & Screen

• December 8, NYC: Ripple of Hope Awards–take a look at that list of attendees, including Stephen Colbert and Magic Johnson! Buy a damn ticket!
• January 20, Davos: After all these years, they are finally allowing me to speak in Davos at the World Economic Forum.
• February 2, NYC: My latest research on neurotechnologies for cognitive health and more.
• February 10, Nashville: Shockingly, I haven't visited Nashville since I was a little kid. On this trip I'll be looking at why Tennessee and North Carolina appear to have more entrepreneurship than all over their neighboring states combined.
• March 8, LA: I'll be at UCLA talking about AI and teen mental health at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
• March 14, Online: The book launch! Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People is will finally be inflicted on the world.
• Boston, NYC, DC, & Everywhere Along the Acela line: We're putting together a book tour for you! Stay tuned...
• Late March/Early April, UK & EU: Book Tour!
  • March 30, Amsterdam: What else: AI and human I--together is better!
  • plus London, Zurich, Basel, Copenhagen, and many other cities in development.
• April, Napa: The Neuroscience of Storytelling
• June, Stockholm: The Smartest Thing on the Planet: Hybrid Collective Intelligence
• October, Toronto: The Future of Work...in the Future

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming