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What Does It Mean to Learn?
- knighthack 2y ago'Educability' sounds a bit like the ancient Chinese saying, of how only empty cups can be filled: > The "Empty Cup" or "The Empty Vessel" parable: 'A cup that is already full, whether with knowledge, opinions, or experiences, cannot be filled again. It is only the empty cup that can truly learn and absorb new information.'
- agumonkey 2y agoAnd then 'intelligence is compression' is often said.
- skydhash 2y agoNo, it’s mostly realizing that the cup was not full as previously thought. Either by discarding wrong notions or discovering new themes to explore. In the end, we understand that there’s no cup at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kamaal 2y agoModern version of this is 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' i.e Hungry enough to work harder and foolish enough to learn more.
- adolph 2y agoThis is blogspam for a book: Leslie Valiant, an eminent computer scientist who teaches at Harvard, sees this as a strength. He calls our ability to learn over the long term “educability,” and in his new book, “The Importance of Being Educable,” he argues that it’s key to our success.
- Tomte 2y agoThis is commentspam for self-importance.
- wouterjanl 2y agoSo by your measure, would Hacker News be spam for websites and blogs?
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoAdmit it, you just wanted an excuse to say blogspam
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- CyberDildonics 2y agoYou're absolutely right and it's a trollish question to make people think they have a novel definition to something everyone already knows. People really hate someone pointing out that they have been manipulated by clickbait and cheap marketing though.
- sixfiveotwo 2y agoThey just hate being manipulated.
- maxverse 2y agohttps://archive.is/fyhfi https://archive.is/fyhfi
- paulpauper 2y ago“The Importance of Being Educable,” he argues that it’s key to our success. When we think about what makes our minds special, we tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in all its complexity, Valiant writes, then “cleverness is not enough.” Isn't' this IQ? "Educable” seems like the latest iteration of 'multiple intelligences' or the 'street smarts' vs. 'book smarts' distinction.
- wouterjanl 2y agoThe ‘ability to learn’ idea may not be so novel, but I am not sure if I agree with calling it ill defined or it having an agenda for more inclusivity. Generally, in schools, at least from my experience, it will still mostly be abstract thinking and memory capacities that are measured. Curiosity, and the ability to turn that curiosity in new knowledge, also broadens the mind (in addition to abstract thinking and remembering things), which can be an enormous quality that is highly valued on the job market, arguably more than what is mostly measured at schools. I think that’s the point the author tries to make.
- aithrowaway1987 2y ago> But isn't the ability to learn also a major component of IQ? Not sure what you mean by this - it's certainly not something a single-day IQ test could possibly measure! The primary reason IQ is a discredited measure of intelligence is that people are perfectly able to learn how to perform better on IQ tests - any supposed influence of "intelligence" on IQ scores is hopelessly confounded with how much you've practiced similar tests / trivial logic puzzles / etc. This stuff about "attempts to broaden the definition of intelligence to something that is more inclusive" is backwards. The whole problem is that nobody has managed to scientifically define (let alone measure) intelligence in any vertebrate species. IQ is dangerously misleading precisely because it is so narrow: its precision makes claims about IQ seem quantitatively rigorous when they are qualitatively meaningless.
- uncle_charles 2y agoIQ is just the wrong way to approach the subject, to be honest. Metacognition plays the biggest role in learning by far and is trainable. But in order to think properly about your thinking, you need the requisite declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge. Most people, including "intelligent" people, have no clue how learning works. Learning scientists actually study student perceptions of their learning and learners are terrible at selecting appropriate learning techniques. Even when forced to use effective learning techniques, they rate the effective strategies (as determined by their outcomes) as least effective. We need to start teaching people how learning works to begin with.
- canjobear 2y agoLeslie Valiant was on Sean Carroll's podcast to talk about the same topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHW-nBIZc2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHW-nBIZc2g
- dotsam 2y agoThis article doesn't do a good job of getting at the main points of Valiant's book Educability, in my view. You can see some of them in e.g. this talk he gave here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4fIoLGjFtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4fIoLGjFtM He makes various arguments in the book that I disagree with, two of which I've put below. On the whole I think it is directionally correct though, and worth reading. The first quibble I have is about humanity's most characteristic trait. In the book, he writes: "The mark of humanity is that a single individual can acquire the knowledge created by so many other individuals. It is this ability to absorb theories at scale, rather than the ability to contribute to their creation, that I identify as humanity's most characteristic trait". I don't think that ability to acquire knowledge from other people is our most most characteristic trait. Creativity is. Learning is a form of knowledge-creation, and it is a creative process. We don't passively "absorb" theories when we learn from someone else. Instead, we actively look for and attempt to resolve problems between our existing ideas and the new ideas to create something new. Another thing I disagree with is when he touches on AGI. He makes the argument that "we should not be fearful of a technological singularity that would make us powerless against AI systems". This is because it will "asymptote, at least qualitatively, to the human capability of educability and no more". This is reminiscent of David Deutsch's argument that people are universal explainers, and AGI will also be a universal explainer; there is nothing beyond such universality, so they will not fundamentally be different from us (at least, there is nothing that they could do that we couldn't in principle understand ourselves). I think this is true, but it misses something. It doesn't address the point that there is a meaningful difference between a person thinking at 1x speed (biological human speed) and a person thinking at e.g. 100000x speed (AGI running on fast hardware). You can be outsmarted by something that wants to outsmart you, even if you both possess fully universal educability/creativity, if it can generate orders of magnitude more ideas than you can per unit time. Whether we should be fearful or not about this is unclear, but I do think it is an important consideration. His overall message though, is good and worth pondering: "Educability implies that humans, whatever our genetic differences at birth, have a unique capability to transcend these differences through the knowledge, skills, and culture we acquire after birth. We are born equal because any differences we have are subject to enormous subsequent changes through individual life experience, education, and effort. This capacity for change, growth, and improvement is the great equalizer. It is possible for billions of people to continuously diverge in skills, beliefs, and knowledge, all becoming self-evidently different from each other. This characteristic of our humanity, which accounts for our civilization, also makes us equal."
- golergka 2y ago> This sounds chancy and vague, until you reflect on the fact that knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application. You take a class in law school today only to argue a complicated case years later; you learn C.P.R. years before saving a drowning man; you read online about how to deter a charging bear, because you never know. Law students write papers, ER students to CPR on dummies, and when I learn any new concept, framework or language, I build something with it. Don't toy and learning projects count?
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoYes but that’s like a robot learning in a simulation (which is rapidly accelerating now). No matter how accurate the simulation, the real world is the true test. One could easily see a scenario where a robot is trained to handle a rare event and may or may not ever use that training.
- brudgers 2y agoI don't know what to learn means. But I know what it feels like. It feels hard. It feels like sucking at the thing I am learning. It feels like if I stick at it, I might be good in in twenty years. It feels like loving doing things I do badly. YMMV.
- HKH2 2y ago> It feels like loving doing things I do badly. If false confidence gives you the ability to learn, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't so bad after all.
- brudgers 2y agoI do things badly and am self aware enough to know it. Dunning-Kruger would require a lack of that self-awareness and in its place a belief that I had expertise.
- marhee 2y ago“Knowledge is not free; you have to pay attention”(Feynman)
- swayvil 2y agoYou have to give up a piece of sanity too. Because knowledge ain't real. And, for the true philo of sophy, there's a tipping point. (To paraphrase HP Lovecraft.)
- mrinfinitiesx 2y agoTo learn is to teach one's self!
- munchler 2y ago> knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application Anyone who has used StackOverflow (or ChatGPT) to solve a programming problem knows this is completely false. Has the author never heard of “learn by doing”?
- HPsquared 2y agoExperience vs Education.
- YVoyiatzis 2y agoExperience is part of education.
- nyrikki 2y agoMimicry is not mastery. A correct answer is not necessarily imply understanding. Code reviews and incident reports should prove that true.
- ninetyninenine 2y agomimicry is not mastery but mimicry can lead to mastery.
- phs318u 2y agoDisagree. It's when the mimicry fails and the executor is forced to think about why and then draws a new conclusion - that right there is learning and is what eventually leads to mastery.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoHow can mimicry fail if the mimicry wasn't attempted? Mimicry again leads to mastery. Additionally not all learning requires some deeper understanding. Sometimes the attempt to mimic is all that there is.
- authorfly 2y agoHe raises an important point that human learning is continuous and to some extent unavoidable, unlike LLMs (and basically most computing models) which freeze at some point, and as amazing as they can appear, do not update with each interaction (and more or less his point is that even if some system did start updating weights after each interaction, whether that is learning from mistakes or just a model with 1000001 examples instead of 1000000 is debatable. But the argument that we should not learn while young because "It's not useful to us then" is a ridiculous premise to argue with. Perhaps I misunderstand it. Then saying that things benefit us far down the road, long after the original moment of learning... I don't understand this line of thinking at all. Linking this to "educability" as a sort of hidden superpower makes me say "oh, really now?". Like most scientists, he has to focus his ideas on a track with research directions which expand outwards, excite, and provide new directions and conversationality. He may not be aware of doing this. Rare is the day when we see a psychologist studying things like how applying a new learning technique to class A effects all the other classes the student takes. Rare is it we study flow state and motivation of the long term and find meaningful ways at a cohort intra-country level to increase happiness at school or final grades across the board, rather than just one course which the researchers focus on. And when that has been done in Scandinavia, who lead in PISA and happiness as adults and teens, scientists in the US ignore the research by and large. It's sad. This is what I don't like about education research and theories. They can be worthwhile research directions, but diminished to theorizing, rather than application.
- phreeza 2y agoThere is nothing stopping you in principle to keep learning on every interaction in an LLM. Practical benefits are likely small though.
- cowl 2y agoyes there is. how LLMs "learn" is by training and every new "fact" moves the weights of older learnings. you can not be sure that this movement has not caused past learnings to be forgotten or brought to absurd limits without a full cross training. that is why everyone does training in stages and doesn't just let the models learn gradually daily. for LLMs all "knowledge" is in one big container to be updated all or nothing. Humans on the other hand, learn in different containers. you have your core beliefs that are not touched everytime you read or hear something new, it requires a pretty good shake to make anyone "update" their core beliefs. from there there are several corpuses of knowledge more or less isolated from one-another that may take various amount of "influence" to change but that more or less don't impact each other. for example learning a new foreign vocabulary does not really impact your math knowledge etc. notice that LLMs "context" chat is not learning, it's a temporary effect that gets lost as soon as the chat closes.
- dmvdoug 2y agoRead Gadamer’s Warheit und Methode (unless you have a pathological aversion to continental philosophy in any form). All understanding is hermeneutic and thus infinitely wheeling us around the hermeneutic circle. It’s the entry-point (without an exit) to answering Plato’s questions about questions. It’s how we learn and deepen language understanding. It’s how we interpret texts. It’s how science works, except that science enshrines its Methode as a sine qua non. It’s how we come to understand other people and why we can be continually surprised (or not!) by them. The real shame is that academic fashion jerked violently in the direction of Derrida and company in the mid-to-late-60s before anyone had time to really dwell with and appreciate the power of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. His masterpiece was only published in 1960, when he himself was 60! It’s a mature and deep reflection on themes he had been studying for 40 years. Ricoeur grasped its power, of course, but the whole Habermasian-Derridan-Foucauldian critical project flavored Ricoeur’s approach. Richard Rorty gestured in similar directions, with less depth (and certainly far less phenomenological power). But invest the time to read Gadamer. It’s worth it.
- ggm 2y agoAt one level, this is word-games. I wouldn't personally construct a sentence with "educability" in it very often, but I have read them, and the sense of the word is not a million miles from many of the others cropping up in this thread which go to the capacity to learn, distinct from the amount of knowledge acquired. Personally, I think there's a set of outcomes here. To acquire knowledge usefully demands both retention and some ability to apply abstraction/synthesis to the knowledge acquired. Simply being a repositary of knowledge is not in itself usually useful, unless you want to win a competition for the most digits of pi, or ability to recite the Koran from memory, but latent within that ability are other skills which we often decry as "not intelligent" or "simply parroting facts" -the amount of facts you can recall aren't useful in the same way that synthesis over those facts is.
- xwolfi 2y agoOr hey, the courage to even act upon the most basic of conclusion. Being useful is very different from being aware or intelligent. It's sometimes more useful to be ignorant and brave, than scholarly and asleep high in an ivory tower. Knowledge, or its synthesis into derivative knowledge, have nothing to do with utility I think ? It's sometimes pointless to acquire knowledge, and useful to act upon the world. So I don't really understand what you meant by "useful" yourself there. What is the goal to reach ?
- ggm 2y agoThere's interior applicability to knowledge: it feeds thought and the inductive reasoning process. If you have never been exposed to TV, being exposed to TV changes how you think. There's exterior applicability to knowledge: feed a man a fish vs teach a man to fish. I see both as "utility" although I suppose achieving nirvana is seen as utility in other people's domains. It's subjective.
- pixl97 2y agoBy analogy is one of the most powerful tools that humanity has. Using a rod to get a lure where you want it might cross over later in to getting a rope across a ravine.
- edulix 2y agoshameless plug: AIs don't learn, they get indoctrinated https://x.com/edulix/status/1827493741441249588 https://x.com/edulix/status/1827493741441249588
- ninetyninenine 2y agoWe live in an age where learning has become an applied mathematics problem. The rigor involved in mathematics makes it closer than ever to a formal definition about what learning actually is. We do know modelling learning will involve fitting a multidimensional curve among a set of data points. There are multitudes of ways to do curve fitting. Our biggest issue, however, is to imitate the way the human brain does it. For this we still don't know how to do learn like a human. But we do know in it's most basic form that learning can be simply fitting a 2 dimensional straight line among a set of two dimensional data points.
- nateglims 2y agoWhat are those dimensions?
- ninetyninenine 2y agoIn it's most fundamental form those dimensions represent two quantities. Those quantities can be modelled as numbers in mathematics or given arbitrary symbolic categorical names. At a minimum we need two dimensions. At least one for input and at least another one for output.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoThere are many formal definitions of (machine) learning. For example, see: A Theory of the Learnable L. G. Valiant 1984 https://web.mit.edu/6.435/www/Valiant84.pdf https://web.mit.edu/6.435/www/Valiant84.pdf Also: Statistical Learning Theory Vladminir N. Vapnik, 1998 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Statistical+Learning+Theory-p-9780471030034 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Statistical+Learning+Theory-p-97... And: Language identification in the limit E. Mark Gold, 1964 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019995867911655 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001999586...
- jeisc 2y agolanguage blocks learning because it reduces thought into words
- blueyes 2y agoWhile this article may be making a good point, in its construction it's quite weak. It reminds of something an old reporter once told me: "Any article whose headline is a question, fails to answer that question." Corollary: If the article had a point, it would have stated the point in the headline. But the writer didn't do the work, so it has no point to make. Sidenote: it doesn't seem to me that the writer understands AI, its moving frontier, and its likely near-term abilities.