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That ChatGPT can pass exams, do your homework, and write your essays is a great thing. Education has been fundamentally broken pretty much my entire life. The

• asynchronous 3y ago
  The pessimist in me doesn’t expect those in power to change education for the better or react accordingly, but the optimist in me really hopes you’re right
  • r3trohack3r 3y ago
    There is no one in power other than you when it comes to your education. Credentials, yes, but education no. Go on Wikipedia, Khan Academy, MDN, etc and open ChatGPT right now.
    • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      There are so many exceptions to this I'll just say that I disagree.
    • asynchronous 3y ago
      I’m talking those who make decisions about what to do with my tax dollars, and no, we do not have much control over those people
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    It's always a generational problem for progress in anything isn't it? When people are entrenched in certain ways it's nigh impossible to change anything, especially when there's no gain for them personally. Real changes happen only when the current incumbents gradually die off. This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. It's become glaringly apparent in the last century with progress vastly outpacing generational swaps. Old geezers in charge, trying to control a world they don't fundamentally understand anymore.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > This is probably one of the main reasons mortality was evolutionarily selected for: easier adaptation to changing environments. I don't think mortality was selected for - but rather, that it's longevity that never was. The default state of any organism - or any temporarily self-sustaining / self-perpetuating chemical reaction or temporarily-stable dynamical system - is that something will eventually kick it out of the stable region, and the reaction breaks down, the system muffles itself or shakes itself apart, the organism decays and dies. The way the evolutionary process works, natural selection will strongly promote organisms that survive to the point of reproduction. Past that point, the influence weakens significantly. It's more work that affects reproduction weakly, if at all. Humans are one of those few special cases, where it's strongly beneficial to keep the older individuals around, due to the positive impact of accumulated experience and thinking on survival rates of the group. I think in our case natural selection would actually favor longevity, or at least extending the part of the lifespan where we are capable of thinking clearly. Alas, from evolution's point of view, the entire history of humanity - from first tales and invention of writing, all the way to spaceflight and the Internet and GPT-4 - happened faster than in a blink of an eye. We're iterating and improving couple orders of magnitude faster than natural selection - we've decoupled ourselves from natural evolution, and we're stuck with the shitty hardware we have, that's optimized for barely above reproductive age. IMO, the right answer isn't to throw up our hands and say "oh, science/politics advances one funeral at a time" or "evolution clearly thought longevity sucks" - but rather recognizing that we're on our own with this, evolution doesn't matter to us, and maybe we should come up with a better solution.
• hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  I keep hearing that education is broken, but I never see specifics. Could you present some?
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    For thousands of generations we effectively learned through individual, tailored mentorship and trial-and-error. A hundred or two generations ago mass instruction was adopted for scions of certain of the powerful, or for everyone in organizations such as militaries. It's only in the last couple of hundred years that this mass instruction generalized to almost the entire populace of countries. Mass instruction effectively treats students as the average of their cohort, without really getting to know each particular student. This is the fundamental break. It treats students more as blank states to be filled, than as collaborators in their own development. As a specific anecdote, when I was in 4th/5th grade I didn't work ahead in math much because the assignments were to do every even problem on a page (one page, the potato page, as it had pictures of potatoes on it, had over 100 problems, I still remember it), which was tedious as heck. Because I didn't work ahead I was mainstreamed in math in 6th grade, and felt absolute horror at repeating yet again what I had already tediously repeated so many times.
    • hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
      What an ordeal!
      • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        Assuming you're being sarcastic about my anecdote, I was in gifted classes in elementary and middle school (there were no gifted classes in high school for anyone in my district). 1330 SATs as a 14 year old (edit to add: 14 years, 10 months, to be precise). I ended up in poor fit colleges and didn't finish an A.S. until almost 30, and a B.S. until 35. My abilities were wasted in jobs such as newspaper delivery until the A.S., and even wasted in the A.S.-level job as I had very little power to be anything other than someone else's hands in that job. Miraca Gross, in her literature on the exceptionally gifted, has a person with a 4 S.D. IQ who dropped out of high school and ended up in a store management track.
• thatcat 3y ago
  Do ai tutors exist? Any recommendations?
  • r3trohack3r 3y ago
    Khan Academy is working on one that looks promising - it’s in a private beta.
    • d0mine 3y ago
      You might mean this: How AI could save (not destroy) education Sal Khan • TED2023 https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education/ https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_des...
  • andai 3y ago
    ChatGPT
• juujian 3y ago
  Curious to hear why you feel that education has been broken throughout your life. I totally believe you, it's your own experience after all! Just feel that I was very lucky and had a good education at several great institutions with good mentors, so curious to hear what could have gone wrong.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I'm not the GP, but treating students as tabula rasa is a big part of the problem. Another is treating students as the average of their cohort. > with good mentors Most people don't get mentors until the latter part of undergraduate, at best. They don't even get people asking pertinent questions as to what they (the students) want to do, or are interested in, and what problems or issues they are having. Asking these questions is not an easy process, as the asker doesn't know about the student in order to ask pertinent questions, and the student often lacks the life knowledge to give the most pertinent answers. But even a bad processes would be preferable to nothing. I know now what guidance I should have sought. But other students aren't me. It's a sad fact that it's pretty much only those who successfully navigated the system who are in a position to give informed advice and mentorship to students today. Our teachers are the successes. Those who failed are, at best, object lessons who we never hear from. Some pedagogues try to research successes versus failures to generate lessons on how to instruct and credential better. And I wish them well.
  • alpaca128 3y ago
    I personally had a miserable experience too. I can focus for about 10-20 minutes in a typical class setting before my brain drifts off, which made most of education feel like a waste of time. That kind of daydreaming also pisses off certain teachers to a point they make it their goal to make one's life hell. Part of the reason I finished school at all is that making a student fail causes more paperwork than most teachers care to do, which makes it quite easy to get barely passing grades. Of course this backfires in various ways like constantly declining standards for grades. Teachers in their last years before retirement are either so unmotivated they might as well stay at home (one of my teachers literally arrived 30 minutes late every time, another one simply didn't teach, ever, and was just present), others are just miserable people and decide none of their students ever deserves a better grade than a C. Very motivating. Of course it's not a great system for teachers either and a lot of them work really hard.
• ryan93 3y ago
  Humans made unimaginable progress in the last 150ish years. Many of those who contribute were raised on farms or taught in third world countries. What magic system are you envisioning that could do better than what got us to the moon?
  • ghaff 3y ago
    Solutions that involve tossing everyone into the deep end of the pool and letting them sink or swim on their own would probably work for some people assuming it exists as part of a system where there are no educational credentials (though presumably companies would then come up with their own credentialing systems). But I expect a lot of people would drop out of the system in the absence of structure.
    • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > But I expect a lot of people would drop out of the system in the absence of structure. Especially once they've been socialized through years of instruction to not be self-motivated learners. I've read about child development that most children actively want to be engaged with adult work (such as chores), but harried adults can become impatient with the best efforts of the children. This can lead to the children no longer being interested in helping, and when the tasks eventually become chores assigned to the kids they dislike doing them, and don't have the willpower to stick with doing them. I think this process would generalize to general education.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        I doubt anyone seriously disputes that individual (or small group) tutors combined with whatever form of socialization is probably optimal. But that's pretty impractical economically for the population as a whole. I had some of that in grad school and it was pretty great but I'm pretty sure not really scalable.
        • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
          This seems like a response to another of my comments, not this one. Things can be done with individualized or mentored instruction within the current system without using too many additional resources.
• probably_wrong 3y ago
  I'd like to speak in favor of the gulag. Sure, you get access to the library of Alexandria, but every book you need is wedged between copies of "The Big Book of distractions" and the "Encyclopedia of young girls with barely any clothes on". Some of those books play loud music, too, not to mention the books written by hacks and disguised as the book you actually want. You'd have to have the tenacity of a monk to get anything done. It is possible for a person to be self-disciplined and learn by themselves. It is also possible, and even likely, to get lost in an ocean of distractions and/or depressed due to the lack of human interaction. As a physical person living in a physical space I wouldn't discount the positive influence of bringing your body somewhere with a purpose.
  • ModernMech 3y ago
    This is the big thing all the introverted self-learners miss about college. They reduce it to a number of CS classes they’d like to take, see the material on YouTube, then conclude that the college experience can be reduced to viewing some YouTube videos. Lost in all of this is the notion that learning is a coop game, not single player; it’s more fun with friends! That’s the whole point!
    • faitswulff 3y ago
      Not only is it more fun, those friends will be able to refer you to jobs later on.
    • r3trohack3r 3y ago
      As an introverted self-learner, I can say I do not miss this. From LinkedIn, to IRC, to GitHub, to the hallway track at conferences the people part of our craft is more important than writing software. At the risk of over-asserting your stance, I’d say you’re accusing introverted self-learners of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, when you are mistaking the bathwater for the baby. The social aspect of the craft doesn’t require taking on 5-6 figures of debt (or being lucky enough to have a social structure from the previous generation that can foot that bill upfront). Most venues for education don’t even provide that great of a social network compared to the internet (elite universities withstanding). Not to mention most of this only applies to collegiate level study and not pre-k through 12th grade, which IMO is more broken then collegiate education. As an introverted self-learner, I’d rather meet my social network while practicing my craft and take out a 5 figure loan to live on my own for 4 years and “figure it out” before moving into a big kid job. That doesn’t require our current education system.