7 ms·

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goa

• bluGill 1y ago
  Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe available. those who know the basics and flexible can find something.
  • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > those who know the basics and flexible can find something. I'm not so sure about that: I have a feeling that at least the current trend in quite some jobs is that they are looking for two kinds of people: 1. beginners who know the basics and are cheap 2. deep experts; these are paid well What is in-between gets more and more hollowed out. Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay in the "cheap" pool - I wouldn't consider this to be desirable.
    • Pet_Ant 1y ago
      > Thus the people who follow your advice will mostly stay in the "cheap" pool - I wouldn't consider this to be desirable. Cheap... but employed. Expertise is only valuable if its valued. That means you not only need to be an expert in the thing, but also the market for the thing, and that's a lot to ask.
    • bluGill 1y ago
      You can move between groups. If your expertise turns out not needed get a cheap job while learning something else.
      • panzagl 1y ago
        The only way to develop deep expertise is to do it as your job.
        • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
          There exist in my opinion rather few jobs where you will develop a deep expertise in some area.
        • zaphar 1y ago
          I got my job/career precisely because I developed deep expertise on my own time. So no, that is not the only way to develop that expertise.
          • panzagl 1y ago
            I guess it depends on what you consider deep expertise- I assumed a 10000 hours/PhD level of expertise, which would be hard to achieve in a couple years while working.
          • const_cast 1y ago
            For most people, if your expertise isn't guided by boards of already experienced people then it's probably not really worth it. Most people are shockingly bad at learning on their own. They're gonna go home and watch TV, go to the gym, and spend time with their loved ones. Look, I would not want a doctor to perform my surgery who did not do a residency. I don't care if they carved up 1,000 cadavers in their free time. I want somebody where the board of their specialty has said "yup, this guys good". I'm not gonna spend the time to try to trust the doctor, because that's really really hard. I'm not a doctor, I don't know shit. I have to rely on institutions of trust to do that work for me. And that's really what universities are at their core - institutions of trust. When you get a degree, there's trust you understand the material to an appropriate degree. When you pass a residency, there's trust you understand the material to an appropriate degree. If we lose that trust, such as by letting students cheat by AI, that is a big problem. Could I hire someone who says they're an expert, with no degree, and just give them a leetcode problem? Sure. But if I hire someone with a degree, I have a much greater level of certainty they can actually code. Same goes for work experience.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    This is at odds with professional specialisms which take years to learn. I don't think it's likely that AI will obliterate the job category of "lawyer", but that's what its boosters are claiming, and people need to make a car to house sized investment at age 18 depending on how true that is.
    • bluGill 1y ago
      it always has been. You make what looks like a good bet and if you are wrong adjust-
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        How this works for most people in reality is "if you are wrong, you're screwed" Most people do not have the ability to adjust like that, for one reason or another And even if you do, it still means your life is likely to hit an extremely rough patch while your adjusting catches up to where you were before
    • SoftTalker 1y ago
      I think the profession of "laywer" may come to an end sooner rather than later for many, unless they are able to get legislators to ban AI from practicing law. A lot of lawyering is writing in a particular legal vocabulary and style, and forming arguments based on precident, things that an LLM AI should be able to get very good at. It won't be long before an impoverished criminal defendant will be able to chose between an AI that can spend practically unlimited time on his case and have perfect recall of any precident that might be relevant, or an overworked public defender who has 2 hours a week to spare in his schedule.
      • jjmarr 1y ago
        Go read lawyers complaining on reddit about pro se litigants using AI. They hallucinate precedents like APIs or get confused about what is supported. If you think SWEs that build the same CRUD apps every day are vulnerable but SWEs that do "real work" aren't, apply that logic to lawyers. Except lawyers don't have an automated compiler to check for fabricated precedents as case law databases are monopolized by one company.
• tsunamifury 1y ago
  Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?
  • cafp12 1y ago
    This is a good point and also why are people so certain that superhuman capable robots aren't right around the corner.
  • mtillman 1y ago
    I’m convinced plumbing would pay better than programming in certain neighborhoods right now now.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      Plumbers never realized that they should be selling service plans and leasing toilets to people. Software's golden goose is not letting people own things.
      • toyg 1y ago
        I'm pretty sure plumbers do sell service plans to businesses. It's just that households don't really need regular work.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        The people who lease toilets to people are landlords, as part of leasing the rest of the building or unit.
      • bongodongobob 1y ago
        Service for what? I'm in my 40s and now that I think about it, I've never had to call a plumber in my entire life. The only time I can think of is my parents calling one when they got a new dishwasher 25 years ago.
        • kenjackson 1y ago
• aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. I am very sure that those jobs that have been existing for a long time will continue existing for a long time (and no: even if some disruption occurs, these jobs won't suddenly disappear, but will rather phased out slowly; you thus have sufficient time to make a decent plan for you). In other words: in my opinion one can predict rather well many jobs that will be available in 5 to 10 years. The "inconvenient" truth rather is that many high-paying jobs in the new economy sector don't satisfy this criterion of "existing for a long time". So by this criterion you might miss out some hard to predict high-earning opportunities. Thus, if you are the kind of person who tends to easily become envious if your friends suddenly experience a windfall, such a job perhaps won't make you happy.
• stanford_labrat 1y ago
  Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system. Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your GPA) is the single most important thing for every level from middle school to college where it will unironically determine your entire (academic/academic-adjacent) future.
  • throwawaybob420 1y ago
    Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting as if AI is a scapegoat is comical. Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn’t a failure of education but of economics. AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on more and more so they can charge you even more down the road.
    • pjc50 1y ago
      Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting a degree was a route to higher status. (there have been a few Communist revolutions against the concept of "university", for various political reasons, but China rebuilt theirs after the purges and Cambodia is a sad historical footnote)
      • NoOn3 1y ago
        At least in the Soviet Union, they were free...
        • thatoneguy 1y ago
          In Soviet Union, university education free but came at cost of living in Soviet Union - Yakov Smirnoff, probably
• bigbacaloa 1y ago
  Most students see education as a video game - the goal is to score as many points as possible in a framework controlled by some apparently arbitrary rules. That educators fail to distinguish school from video games is mostly the fault of educators. And video games are more fun.
• eyesofgod 1y ago
  > I don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for the educational and career system we've created I dont know man, you do it every time.
• thomastjeffery 1y ago
  This is rooted in the idea that a person should need permission to work. The reason we do this is because our capitalist society is structured around competition instead of collaboration. Because all work must be framed as a competition, the only way collaboration is allowed is by explicitly joining a team. This rule is made explicit with copyright: derivative work is, by default, illegal. The only way that derivative work is allowed to be made is after making a contract with the rightsholder. This system can only be enforced with incompatibility. You can't actually stop someone from making derivative work unless your help is actually required. The most familiar instance of this requirement is software: it's simply not pragmatic for someone to extend your code, when they only have access to a compiled binary. Software work can only be extended from a shared context: what you write must be compatible with what is written. That's generally unfeasible when what is written is a compile-time optimized binary executable. Incompatibility is not a perfect barrier. It's possible to decompile software. It's possible to edit text, images, video, audio, etc. Copyright depends on incompatibility, and LLMs are simply the newest, most compelling way to call that bluff.
• realitybit3z 1y ago
  IN RESPONSE TO: There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. This one is really bad. I have waves of local grads begging for unpaid internships or work now. They all were AP students, good GPAs, good schools, "learned to code", took on 200k of college debt -- only to find the promised job is just not frigging there at the end of the line. Meanwhile, they are told there is a "massive shortage of coders" and see overseas workers hired into those same jobs. How do younger people trust the system anymore? Further, in light of this, why would any steel-worker (metaphorically speaking) want to retrain and learn to code if even the geeks learning to code face dismal outcomes?