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It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in

It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. If advertising networks have effectively personalized propaganda on Facebook and whatnot and games like The Walking Dead are able to change script based on popular choices made by all players, we should be able to apply the same technology to personalized learning at scale.

hanniabu 8y ago
> A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. That'd be extremely useful to have.
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  I concur. While I appreciate that math education at the elementary and high school level is easier to author and has more data points, where I think this approach would really shine is at the college level. The main problem in math is that the higher level you reach, the fewer experts who exist or are willing to sit down 1:1 and tutor students. I think an automated teaching system for analysis, writing proofs, number theory, etc is the next step in democratizing mathematics and science and bringing what is now college-level education down to high school. IMO most college level math isn't difficult, but not missing a step in your understanding along the way to that level and the 'math anxiety' that's introduced along the way is the real hurdle to teaching. It creates a situation where autodidacts are most rewarded, so why don't we use technology to enable more people to become autodidacts?
  - solipsism 8y ago
    IMO most college level math isn't difficult Don't make the mistake of assuming the entire world is like you. Plenty of people struggle with lower level math. What makes you think the concepts are not difficult for them, and to blame only the teaching?
    - galaxyLogic 8y ago
      It's not either or. It's difficult to understand concepts (well) and it is also difficult to EXPLAIN concepts (well). The better the explanation the easier it is to understand for more people. Whereas a bad explanation is something that assumes students understand something most of them don't. It's really not a blame-game but more an impedance mismatch between the teacher and the students. IF you can have your own tutor the tutor can adjust their level of explanation just to you, but that is not economically feasible for most students. Therefore if automated AI-learning text-books can make progress in this direction it is great. It may be that the biggest impact of AI will be not by having something smarter than us, but something that can teach more people to understand difficult concepts. In other words biggest impact of AI may be in education.
      - galaxyLogic 8y ago
        A thought: Most people who learn to play piano do so by having a piano-teacher whom they privately meet with once a week or so. Whereas this is not the convention for learning math. Maybe it could apply equally well for math as it does for learning to play piano.
        jacobolus 8y ago
        Note that hiring a private piano teacher for every child in the country would also be a difficult proposition, politically / economically. Especially if we expected every person to reach the level of competence at music that we expect with numeracy/mathematics. If we wanted to switch from the current classroom model to a private tutorial model, with the amount we currently spend per student on teachers, we could hire 1:1 tutors for only a few hours per week for each student, which would (a) not really be enough time to cover everything students are expected to learn in school, and (b) would then also leave huge amounts of time where the school wasn’t providing childcare service, which is one of its primary purposes. However, just as upper middle class families can currently afford weekly private piano lessons or 1:1 sport coaching, you are right that they could likewise afford private math tutorials, and get better results than classroom instruction.
  - deanalevitt 8y ago
    So true. I recently began taking college math courses online for fun and the ALEKS system was great up to Pre-calc, but once I hit calculus, and only found video lecture-based courses, things became frustrating, half-clear and confusing. Suddenly textbooks and multiple other sources became necessary to combat what you so cleverly called "math anxiety."
  - feanaro 8y ago
    > writing proofs In this vein, there is the Incredible Proof Machine‡, an interactive visual proof assistant designed for introducing beginners to mathematical proofs. ‡ http://incredible.nomeata.de/ http://incredible.nomeata.de/
solipsism 8y ago
It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. Feels to me like we're about as close to that as we are close to regrowing limbs. We've made baby steps. For one thing, the illustrated primer created content from scratch -- content especially suited to the reader. Mathigon and things like it can only present you with content pre-created by humans. Secondly, the illustrated primer had an expert understanding of human development, human psychology, and human biology. It used this understanding, along with incredible sensor technology, dynamically to create complex pedagogical plans and follow them by presenting exactly the content the reader needs at the time. At the moment we have only extremely rudimentary planning capabilities (if any), extremely rudimentary sensor/input capabilities (basically limited to what to user types in), and extremely rudimentary algorithms capable of only low order logic (if the user does x they probably want why) with almost no understanding of human psychology. Not to say we're not making great strides. We're just a really long way off. Edit: thirdly, The illustrated primer had an expert understanding of every topic it taught Nell. I think we're a long way off from any computer system that has an expert understanding of anything. Our computers can do calculus a lot faster than we can, but they don't understand it at a higher order level.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  Absolutely. Writing textbooks is extremely time consuming... Seeing 'Mathematics - May 2019' in the list of tracks for Primer strikes me as un-serious. Likewise the single animation for Hyperbolic geometry in the 'non-euclidean geometry' page on mathigon.
- davidgl 8y ago
  Amazing research on regrowing limbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
GuiA 8y ago
As a nerdy programmer and human computer interaction researcher, the fact that we are getting incredibly close to having all of the bits required (multitouch, extremely high pixel density screens, batteries/processors that merely add millimeters of thickness to it, recent advances in neural networks, fast enough wireless connectivity to stream high resolution interactive content, etc.) to build this technology is extremely exciting. As someone who has been doing their best over the past ~10 years to understand how technology has interfaced with societies, cultures, political & business interests, etc. over human history - and all the ways that it has gone wrong - the first thing that I can think of is: who will make this "Young Lady's Primer", and what are their incentives for making it? A Young Lady's Primer built by the Chinese Communist Party, or Facebook, or American evangelical Christians would be an extremely scary thing. How can we nerd out on building the former while actively working against the latter?
- selestify 8y ago
  > As someone who has been doing their best over the past ~10 years to understand how technology has interfaced with societies, cultures, political & business interests, etc. over human history - and all the ways that it has gone wrong What a fascinating subject to look into! Any books you would recommend?
otabdeveloper2 8y ago
> something that learns your interests It's not rocket science, a mole rat could figure out that kids want to play video games and eat candy all day long.
- derefr 8y ago
  Textbooks aren’t just for children. (Adult education is woefully underoptimized.)
  - otabdeveloper2 8y ago
    Adult interests are a no-brainer in the same way. "Figuring out your interests" isn't the hard or useful part. The hard part is changing your default (usually harmful) interests into something useful and productive. That involves lots of psychology and (yes) manipulation and coercion.
    - XaoDaoCaoCao 8y ago
      "useful and productive" The cognitive nihilist in me shudders at the thought of a technocrat deciding what my own best interests are. "Your best interests are the games I like to play, not the games you like to play." Which is a fine position and all that. The objectionable part of it is the pretense of objectivity.
- danharaj 8y ago
  One of the most popular video games amongst kids is about tinkering, exploration and building cool stuff.
  - otabdeveloper2 8y ago
    No child learned anything useful in Minecraft. It's better than Candy Crush (no overt addicting psychological tricks) but ultimately the same kind of waste of time. No child ever grew up and said "gee, how great it is that I spent 10000 hours in Minecraft instead of doing sports or learning a useful skill". I grew up on video games myself; trust me, it sucks.
ai_ia 8y ago
I am building Primer. :) https://www.primerlabs.io https://www.primerlabs.io You can checkout the documentation part for images/gifs to learn how it works. Bit late on schedule, but working hard to release soon. Made a video about the same explaining the interface. https://youtu.be/acTdwGV0s9I https://youtu.be/acTdwGV0s9I P.S. The landing page is a horrible experience on mobile. My bad.
- RSchaeffer 8y ago
  Are you hiring? This looks interesting
  - ai_ia 8y ago
    Thank you. TBH, I have been full-time working on it alone since last year Jan. Left job and moved back to parents place. Cannot afford hiring anyone as I am basically broke. Planning to bootstrap. Thank you once again.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      You might consider exploring obtaining a grant or funding from the Gates Foundation. Education improvement is one of their foundation's core targets.
      - ai_ia 8y ago
        Not sure if they give out grants to for-profit organisations. Will check it out. Thanks.
        perfmode 8y ago
        You’d be surprised!
- gridspy 8y ago
  Looks exciting. Make sure you post it back here when there are a couple of tracks to follow. Good choices for your first tracks.
chongli 8y ago
something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes I have grave misgivings about that sort of thing. This approach is what leads to the Google and Facebook "filter bubbles" [1]. What I need is something that exposes me to different viewpoints, opposing viewpoints, presented in convincing ways to challenge me and help me to grow as a person. What I want is to learn about new ideas that would never have occurred to me before. Traditional schools, much maligned, try to expose kids to books and other media they never would've bothered with otherwise. Yeah, kids for the most part reject this stuff and slog through until graduation, but some don't! Some kids find a new passion for Mozart or Shakespeare or calculus for that matter. Maybe we can predict interest in those subjects before exposing people to them, but I'm not confident about it. There are outliers everywhere and it's not fair to leave them out in the cold. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  My point is that society strictly benefits if we made a ‘filter bubble’ that teaches calculus instead of antivaxx theories or Shakespeare instead of polical radicalization. We’ve seen many, many examples of people picking up new concepts from their filter bubble, stuff like pizza-gate, that they wouldn’t have thought up on their own. The same click-reward feedback algorithm can be applied when teaching more virtuous knowledge. The algorithms that create filter bubbles are disturbingly good at teaching, as in really disturbing and really proficient. (And besides, let’s not pretend western and Confucian education aren’t indoctrination processes to some extent in their own right. Western education is predicated on building ‘virtuous’ citizens according to what I remember from the Socratic/Platonic dialogs. Also I feel like a dickhead for saying “according to the classics”.)
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    > The algorithms that create filter bubbles are disturbingly good at teaching Are they really though? I have found that when I start probing people’s weird conspiracy theories picked up from blogs/facebook (or even more mainstream partisan disinformation picked up from newspaper op-eds or think tank whitepapers), they are quite shallow and unsophisticated, typically papering over gaping holes in basic knowledge. “Teaching” a bunch of made up bullshit has much lower standards and requires a lot less effort (for both teacher and pupil) than teaching about complex real-world structures even to a level of basic competence, let alone serious expertise.
walterstucco 8y ago
> As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching As cool as it sounds, this is exactly what learning is not. Learning is getting out of the comfort zone, usually going against what you like and discover new things, especially that you thought you liked those things before, but you actually were just liking what was popular back then. I was deeply into car repairing and scale models when I was a kid and a young teenager. But one of my uncles was a sci-fi fan and kept giving me books as gifts, he introduced me to computers (he had a Sinclair Spectrum 48k) and gave me my first PC (a 286, I owned the C=64 before, but I wasn't really programming it). If it wasn't for him, I would have never become a programmer. I was the first one to ignore what I really liked.

hanniabu 8y ago

> A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. That'd be extremely useful to have.

CoolGuySteve 8y ago
I concur. While I appreciate that math education at the elementary and high school level is easier to author and has more data points, where I think this approach would really shine is at the college level. The main problem in math is that the higher level you reach, the fewer experts who exist or are willing to sit down 1:1 and tutor students. I think an automated teaching system for analysis, writing proofs, number theory, etc is the next step in democratizing mathematics and science and bringing what is now college-level education down to high school. IMO most college level math isn't difficult, but not missing a step in your understanding along the way to that level and the 'math anxiety' that's introduced along the way is the real hurdle to teaching. It creates a situation where autodidacts are most rewarded, so why don't we use technology to enable more people to become autodidacts?
- solipsism 8y ago
  IMO most college level math isn't difficult Don't make the mistake of assuming the entire world is like you. Plenty of people struggle with lower level math. What makes you think the concepts are not difficult for them, and to blame only the teaching?
  - galaxyLogic 8y ago
    It's not either or. It's difficult to understand concepts (well) and it is also difficult to EXPLAIN concepts (well). The better the explanation the easier it is to understand for more people. Whereas a bad explanation is something that assumes students understand something most of them don't. It's really not a blame-game but more an impedance mismatch between the teacher and the students. IF you can have your own tutor the tutor can adjust their level of explanation just to you, but that is not economically feasible for most students. Therefore if automated AI-learning text-books can make progress in this direction it is great. It may be that the biggest impact of AI will be not by having something smarter than us, but something that can teach more people to understand difficult concepts. In other words biggest impact of AI may be in education.
    - galaxyLogic 8y ago
      A thought: Most people who learn to play piano do so by having a piano-teacher whom they privately meet with once a week or so. Whereas this is not the convention for learning math. Maybe it could apply equally well for math as it does for learning to play piano.
      - jacobolus 8y ago
        Note that hiring a private piano teacher for every child in the country would also be a difficult proposition, politically / economically. Especially if we expected every person to reach the level of competence at music that we expect with numeracy/mathematics. If we wanted to switch from the current classroom model to a private tutorial model, with the amount we currently spend per student on teachers, we could hire 1:1 tutors for only a few hours per week for each student, which would (a) not really be enough time to cover everything students are expected to learn in school, and (b) would then also leave huge amounts of time where the school wasn’t providing childcare service, which is one of its primary purposes. However, just as upper middle class families can currently afford weekly private piano lessons or 1:1 sport coaching, you are right that they could likewise afford private math tutorials, and get better results than classroom instruction.
- deanalevitt 8y ago
  So true. I recently began taking college math courses online for fun and the ALEKS system was great up to Pre-calc, but once I hit calculus, and only found video lecture-based courses, things became frustrating, half-clear and confusing. Suddenly textbooks and multiple other sources became necessary to combat what you so cleverly called "math anxiety."
- feanaro 8y ago
  > writing proofs In this vein, there is the Incredible Proof Machine‡, an interactive visual proof assistant designed for introducing beginners to mathematical proofs. ‡ http://incredible.nomeata.de/ http://incredible.nomeata.de/

solipsism 8y ago

It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. Feels to me like we're about as close to that as we are close to regrowing limbs. We've made baby steps. For one thing, the illustrated primer created content from scratch -- content especially suited to the reader. Mathigon and things like it can only present you with content pre-created by humans. Secondly, the illustrated primer had an expert understanding of human development, human psychology, and human biology. It used this understanding, along with incredible sensor technology, dynamically to create complex pedagogical plans and follow them by presenting exactly the content the reader needs at the time. At the moment we have only extremely rudimentary planning capabilities (if any), extremely rudimentary sensor/input capabilities (basically limited to what to user types in), and extremely rudimentary algorithms capable of only low order logic (if the user does x they probably want why) with almost no understanding of human psychology. Not to say we're not making great strides. We're just a really long way off. Edit: thirdly, The illustrated primer had an expert understanding of every topic it taught Nell. I think we're a long way off from any computer system that has an expert understanding of anything. Our computers can do calculus a lot faster than we can, but they don't understand it at a higher order level.

sdenton4 8y ago
Absolutely. Writing textbooks is extremely time consuming... Seeing 'Mathematics - May 2019' in the list of tracks for Primer strikes me as un-serious. Likewise the single animation for Hyperbolic geometry in the 'non-euclidean geometry' page on mathigon.
davidgl 8y ago
Amazing research on regrowing limbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

GuiA 8y ago

As a nerdy programmer and human computer interaction researcher, the fact that we are getting incredibly close to having all of the bits required (multitouch, extremely high pixel density screens, batteries/processors that merely add millimeters of thickness to it, recent advances in neural networks, fast enough wireless connectivity to stream high resolution interactive content, etc.) to build this technology is extremely exciting. As someone who has been doing their best over the past ~10 years to understand how technology has interfaced with societies, cultures, political & business interests, etc. over human history - and all the ways that it has gone wrong - the first thing that I can think of is: who will make this "Young Lady's Primer", and what are their incentives for making it? A Young Lady's Primer built by the Chinese Communist Party, or Facebook, or American evangelical Christians would be an extremely scary thing. How can we nerd out on building the former while actively working against the latter?

selestify 8y ago
> As someone who has been doing their best over the past ~10 years to understand how technology has interfaced with societies, cultures, political & business interests, etc. over human history - and all the ways that it has gone wrong What a fascinating subject to look into! Any books you would recommend?

otabdeveloper2 8y ago

> something that learns your interests It's not rocket science, a mole rat could figure out that kids want to play video games and eat candy all day long.

derefr 8y ago
Textbooks aren’t just for children. (Adult education is woefully underoptimized.)
- otabdeveloper2 8y ago
  Adult interests are a no-brainer in the same way. "Figuring out your interests" isn't the hard or useful part. The hard part is changing your default (usually harmful) interests into something useful and productive. That involves lots of psychology and (yes) manipulation and coercion.
  - XaoDaoCaoCao 8y ago
    "useful and productive" The cognitive nihilist in me shudders at the thought of a technocrat deciding what my own best interests are. "Your best interests are the games I like to play, not the games you like to play." Which is a fine position and all that. The objectionable part of it is the pretense of objectivity.
danharaj 8y ago
One of the most popular video games amongst kids is about tinkering, exploration and building cool stuff.
- otabdeveloper2 8y ago
  No child learned anything useful in Minecraft. It's better than Candy Crush (no overt addicting psychological tricks) but ultimately the same kind of waste of time. No child ever grew up and said "gee, how great it is that I spent 10000 hours in Minecraft instead of doing sports or learning a useful skill". I grew up on video games myself; trust me, it sucks.

ai_ia 8y ago

I am building Primer. :) https://www.primerlabs.io https://www.primerlabs.io You can checkout the documentation part for images/gifs to learn how it works. Bit late on schedule, but working hard to release soon. Made a video about the same explaining the interface. https://youtu.be/acTdwGV0s9I https://youtu.be/acTdwGV0s9I P.S. The landing page is a horrible experience on mobile. My bad.

RSchaeffer 8y ago
Are you hiring? This looks interesting
- ai_ia 8y ago
  Thank you. TBH, I have been full-time working on it alone since last year Jan. Left job and moved back to parents place. Cannot afford hiring anyone as I am basically broke. Planning to bootstrap. Thank you once again.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    You might consider exploring obtaining a grant or funding from the Gates Foundation. Education improvement is one of their foundation's core targets.
    - ai_ia 8y ago
      Not sure if they give out grants to for-profit organisations. Will check it out. Thanks.
      - perfmode 8y ago
        You’d be surprised!
gridspy 8y ago
Looks exciting. Make sure you post it back here when there are a couple of tracks to follow. Good choices for your first tracks.

chongli 8y ago

something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes I have grave misgivings about that sort of thing. This approach is what leads to the Google and Facebook "filter bubbles" [1]. What I need is something that exposes me to different viewpoints, opposing viewpoints, presented in convincing ways to challenge me and help me to grow as a person. What I want is to learn about new ideas that would never have occurred to me before. Traditional schools, much maligned, try to expose kids to books and other media they never would've bothered with otherwise. Yeah, kids for the most part reject this stuff and slog through until graduation, but some don't! Some kids find a new passion for Mozart or Shakespeare or calculus for that matter. Maybe we can predict interest in those subjects before exposing people to them, but I'm not confident about it. There are outliers everywhere and it's not fair to leave them out in the cold. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

CoolGuySteve 8y ago
My point is that society strictly benefits if we made a ‘filter bubble’ that teaches calculus instead of antivaxx theories or Shakespeare instead of polical radicalization. We’ve seen many, many examples of people picking up new concepts from their filter bubble, stuff like pizza-gate, that they wouldn’t have thought up on their own. The same click-reward feedback algorithm can be applied when teaching more virtuous knowledge. The algorithms that create filter bubbles are disturbingly good at teaching, as in really disturbing and really proficient. (And besides, let’s not pretend western and Confucian education aren’t indoctrination processes to some extent in their own right. Western education is predicated on building ‘virtuous’ citizens according to what I remember from the Socratic/Platonic dialogs. Also I feel like a dickhead for saying “according to the classics”.)
- jacobolus 8y ago
  > The algorithms that create filter bubbles are disturbingly good at teaching Are they really though? I have found that when I start probing people’s weird conspiracy theories picked up from blogs/facebook (or even more mainstream partisan disinformation picked up from newspaper op-eds or think tank whitepapers), they are quite shallow and unsophisticated, typically papering over gaping holes in basic knowledge. “Teaching” a bunch of made up bullshit has much lower standards and requires a lot less effort (for both teacher and pupil) than teaching about complex real-world structures even to a level of basic competence, let alone serious expertise.

walterstucco 8y ago

> As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching As cool as it sounds, this is exactly what learning is not. Learning is getting out of the comfort zone, usually going against what you like and discover new things, especially that you thought you liked those things before, but you actually were just liking what was popular back then. I was deeply into car repairing and scale models when I was a kid and a young teenager. But one of my uncles was a sci-fi fan and kept giving me books as gifts, he introduced me to computers (he had a Sinclair Spectrum 48k) and gave me my first PC (a 286, I owned the C=64 before, but I wasn't really programming it). If it wasn't for him, I would have never become a programmer. I was the first one to ignore what I really liked.