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His analogy of teaching resonated too much with me. I have been feeling exactly that for a couple of years, and it feels scarily like when I abandoned the belie

His analogy of teaching resonated too much with me. I have been feeling exactly that for a couple of years, and it feels scarily like when I abandoned the belief in god many years ago. There is that nagging feeling I can’t shake that, no matter how I look at it, I can’t negate the null hypothesis that organized education is basically useless. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think educational institutions shouldn’t exist; surely smart people need a place to go and do things and get together and work. The point to me is that, whatever it is that smart people are doing, they’d mostly do that anyway no matter what kind of education they’re getting. Whenever I bring it up with colleagues, I usually get into heated arguments where I become the 1 in an invariably N-to-1 aggressive debate. Plus, my wife is a primary school teacher with a Master degree in Education who loves teaching, so obviously that is a very delicate subject to bring up at home. I have noticed that people like her, who love teaching, usually have a very emotional attachment to it from their own personal experiences and how they see education as transformative, and that makes any kind of objective research on teaching become very hard to do. It’s almost like teaching is such a holy subject that any teaching has to be good, and criticizing it is like defending imperialism or capitalism or rich people or something like that (it doesn’t help that my wife came from a very poor background and got out of that through education practice, and has teached most of her career in poor neighborhoods; that makes a delicate subject even more touchy). My personal opinion is that I am only human and seeing myself as some kind of ”savior through teaching” is unfair, to me and to others (yes, I do some teaching too). Most of the time I focus on trying to give smart students a platform to grow, and while I also try to motivate the other students as much as I can (I do believe you can ”fish” some of them out of the pool), I don’t usually pull my hair or lose sleep over them. One, because I don’t feel like I have the right to keep patronizing people as if I know what’s objectively better for them; lots of people out there are doing much better than me without formal education. Second, because I do not have the illusion that I (or most other teachers) know a really good teaching method that can make a significant difference. It would be like losing sleep because a glass of holy water that I blessed did not save a cancer patient.

smogcutter 4y ago
This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to a pretty banal HN greatest hit: “intelligent” people don’t really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.
- atleastoptimal 4y ago
  Yeah, he seems to be making it a matter of "well the smart people, the ones who really matter, don't need education, so all the sub 99th percentile students don't really matter because the smart ones aren't benefitting" So teaching kids to read, understand logical inference, showing them different parts of the world and how to look at it, doesn't matter because the wonderful gifted kids would have happened upon those insights anyway? It seems pretty reductive to assume the point of education is just to foster a small cadre of geniuses. Does every other non-gifted kid not deserve to be helped by education because they couldn't have educated themselves?
  - low_tech_love 4y ago
    Thanks for both points, I’ll think about them. However, you basically just confirmed what I argued: it’s impossible to criticize educational methods. Just because education ”can” be useful, that doesn’t mean it ”is” useful. I wish every person in the world could have access to transformative education, but the truth of the matter is that almost no teacher out there can actually do that; most are just very well-intended witch doctors. And since the subject is impossible to criticize (and the ”research” area is mired with politics and virtual signalling), it’s probably going to stay that way. So, calling me elitist is all good, but I’m pretty sure I’m doing more than most other people by being as rational as I can and not promising to cure an ailment for which I have no remedy.
    - atleastoptimal 4y ago
      Your comment only seemed to be about the current uselessness of education as a value-add for smart kids. You never mentioned the benefit it offered to average or less intelligent kids. Do you believe that their needs aren't being addressed either? > you basically just confirmed what I argued: it’s impossible to criticize educational methods. Not sure how my comment confirmed that. All I pointed out is the fact that your gripe with education seemed mostly focused on the failure to help smart kids, ignoring whether or not if helping other kids could be evidence for or against the effectiveness of the education system in the western world. With regards to that I have a question for you. Is the percentage of kids in any age cohort you consider "smart" a product of their educational environment, or is the proportion of smart kids to normal kids the same no matter what methods, within the realm of methods readily available to educators nowadays, we use?
deleted 4y ago
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lambdatronics 4y ago
I wouldn't say it is useless. But, there's an extent to which "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it to you." There's an interesting school of thought saying that in order to understand an idea, it requires creative act similar to that of the individual who originated an idea. (B/c verbal communication is very limited.) For instance, in order to comprehend the idea of Newton's Laws, one needs to have in some sense the capability to have come up with them, because teaching is really just prompting the pupil to reinvent the concept in their own mind. IMO, this is why "natural language processing" with LLMs will not amount to "natural language understanding." Natural language explanations are targeted at intelligences capable of forming concepts based on IRL experience (naive physics, etc). The goal of teaching is to induce the formation of the concepts, not to directly transmit the concepts.

smogcutter 4y ago

This is a lot of patronizing hair tearing over what amounts to a pretty banal HN greatest hit: “intelligent” people don’t really need school, and everyone else can get fucked.

atleastoptimal 4y ago
Yeah, he seems to be making it a matter of "well the smart people, the ones who really matter, don't need education, so all the sub 99th percentile students don't really matter because the smart ones aren't benefitting" So teaching kids to read, understand logical inference, showing them different parts of the world and how to look at it, doesn't matter because the wonderful gifted kids would have happened upon those insights anyway? It seems pretty reductive to assume the point of education is just to foster a small cadre of geniuses. Does every other non-gifted kid not deserve to be helped by education because they couldn't have educated themselves?
- low_tech_love 4y ago
  Thanks for both points, I’ll think about them. However, you basically just confirmed what I argued: it’s impossible to criticize educational methods. Just because education ”can” be useful, that doesn’t mean it ”is” useful. I wish every person in the world could have access to transformative education, but the truth of the matter is that almost no teacher out there can actually do that; most are just very well-intended witch doctors. And since the subject is impossible to criticize (and the ”research” area is mired with politics and virtual signalling), it’s probably going to stay that way. So, calling me elitist is all good, but I’m pretty sure I’m doing more than most other people by being as rational as I can and not promising to cure an ailment for which I have no remedy.
  - atleastoptimal 4y ago
    Your comment only seemed to be about the current uselessness of education as a value-add for smart kids. You never mentioned the benefit it offered to average or less intelligent kids. Do you believe that their needs aren't being addressed either? > you basically just confirmed what I argued: it’s impossible to criticize educational methods. Not sure how my comment confirmed that. All I pointed out is the fact that your gripe with education seemed mostly focused on the failure to help smart kids, ignoring whether or not if helping other kids could be evidence for or against the effectiveness of the education system in the western world. With regards to that I have a question for you. Is the percentage of kids in any age cohort you consider "smart" a product of their educational environment, or is the proportion of smart kids to normal kids the same no matter what methods, within the realm of methods readily available to educators nowadays, we use?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lambdatronics 4y ago

I wouldn't say it is useless. But, there's an extent to which "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it to you." There's an interesting school of thought saying that in order to understand an idea, it requires creative act similar to that of the individual who originated an idea. (B/c verbal communication is very limited.) For instance, in order to comprehend the idea of Newton's Laws, one needs to have in some sense the capability to have come up with them, because teaching is really just prompting the pupil to reinvent the concept in their own mind. IMO, this is why "natural language processing" with LLMs will not amount to "natural language understanding." Natural language explanations are targeted at intelligences capable of forming concepts based on IRL experience (naive physics, etc). The goal of teaching is to induce the formation of the concepts, not to directly transmit the concepts.