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Cultivating And Destroying Agency

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Something that really surprised me about high school is how little agency the majority of the students there had. This was even more pronounced among the students at the local magnet school, Academies of Loudoun; they were selected for on intelligence and work ethic, but generally had a “the world affects me” mindset as opposed to “I affect the world”. It took me a while to understand what led to this, and over time my way of describing this went from “NPCs/sheeple (somewhat joking)” to “NPCs/sheeple (almost completely serious)” to my current way of describing it, which is “kids who had the agency burned out of them“. In this post, I’ll go through the fully general way of increasing agency, some actual examples of that, and what it was that burned the agency out of my peers. The academic term for agency, or the “I affect the world” vs. “The world affects me” continuum is internal vs. external locus of control, and I’ll be using that interchangeably with agency. Charles Duhigg’s Smarter

Cultivating And Destroying Agency May 24, 2023 Originally published on LessWrong June 29th, 2022. Something that really surprised me about high school is how little agency the majority of the students there had. This was even more pronounced among the students at the local magnet school, Academies of Loudoun; they were selected for on intelligence and work ethic, but generally had a “the world affects me” mindset as opposed to “I affect the world”. It took me a while to understand what led to this, and over time my way of describing this went from “NPCs/sheeple (somewhat joking)” to “NPCs/shee

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