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Education: Vocational retraining effectiveness for work for 45+ people. I am not one of them, but there seems to be more and more left behind with no strategy/k

Education: Vocational retraining effectiveness for work for 45+ people. I am not one of them, but there seems to be more and more left behind with no strategy/known good answer. I personally can't figure out how to teach and elevate people to do good work so it tends to be they end up being a long term on social security/unemployment/draining savings. So the question would be: - What are the most effective ways to retrain people of that age? I don't know of any techniques to motivate people that are not lifelong learners to acquire skills. Is it a demographic thing? This can be warped into 'what's the best way to make expert users of that category' that leads to gamifaction and other things. Market study: - What is the barrier to entry to start businesses as a platform? I feel there isn't enough innovation in pooling the resources to make starting a business. Yes money can solve a lot of problems, but how do you make it so there is a shared stack of resources of logistics, space, pension/benefits to let businesses of <$1MM gross revenue (basically cottage industries). How do we mitigate the risk of the individual to try? What is the best settings for a particular region to accelerate the progress? What can we remove from the equation to increase the growth of wealth of individuals? Interoperability: This is something that I was partially pursuing as a research topic- how can we make the transfer of technical information (CAD drawings, models) easier to convert between. A UNIX system works wonderfully because of how piping works, but for highly complex program there is not a wonderful model to build such pipelining without serious grunge work. A lot of value gets lost plugging these things together, and sometimes this work is done by very nontechnical people. There is a lot of work for this in message processing but less in the context of file processing, but really it's a knowledge representation and transfer problem.

salgernon 11y ago
What needs to be taught is that it is POSSIBLE to automate a problem. Many people (not sure why you're picking on over 45s here; it seems like this is true at all age groups) don't fundamentally understand that computers can be used to perform tedious or error prone tasks. Ask a non techie how much they spent at Amazon last year, and you'll get some mumbling about mint or their bank offering a search option, ask a UNIX neckbeard and get an answer via awk and col, and ask an overworked, underpaid administrative assistant and you'll get an excel spreadsheet that crudely but effectively provides the answer.
ilaksh 11y ago
I'm going to be 45 in a few years. Your ageism is a big problem. The thing is, as artificial general intelligence advances, everyone is going to be left behind. Give it 4-6 decades. Anyone essentially Human 1.0 at that point will be irrelevant. But a few decades out, you can count on your OWN skills to become outdated, and regardless of whether you are a motivated learner or faster learner, it will quickly become very difficult for anyone to keep up. Even the young.
- xemdetia 11y ago
  I am not making an ageism argument, it's a request based on my direct experience in my life. Retraining people in that age bracket I find extremely difficult and I cannot find good resources about teaching and helping them in the most effective ways. The fact that it is difficult to keep up is the problem I want people to look at.

salgernon 11y ago

What needs to be taught is that it is POSSIBLE to automate a problem. Many people (not sure why you're picking on over 45s here; it seems like this is true at all age groups) don't fundamentally understand that computers can be used to perform tedious or error prone tasks. Ask a non techie how much they spent at Amazon last year, and you'll get some mumbling about mint or their bank offering a search option, ask a UNIX neckbeard and get an answer via awk and col, and ask an overworked, underpaid administrative assistant and you'll get an excel spreadsheet that crudely but effectively provides the answer.

ilaksh 11y ago

I'm going to be 45 in a few years. Your ageism is a big problem. The thing is, as artificial general intelligence advances, everyone is going to be left behind. Give it 4-6 decades. Anyone essentially Human 1.0 at that point will be irrelevant. But a few decades out, you can count on your OWN skills to become outdated, and regardless of whether you are a motivated learner or faster learner, it will quickly become very difficult for anyone to keep up. Even the young.

xemdetia 11y ago
I am not making an ageism argument, it's a request based on my direct experience in my life. Retraining people in that age bracket I find extremely difficult and I cannot find good resources about teaching and helping them in the most effective ways. The fact that it is difficult to keep up is the problem I want people to look at.