3 ms·

> The difference is that, fortunately, fine-tuning them is extremely easy. If this was true, educating people fast for most jobs would be a really easy and sol

> The difference is that, fortunately, fine-tuning them is extremely easy. If this was true, educating people fast for most jobs would be a really easy and solved problem. On the other hand in March 2018, Y Combinator put exactly this into its list of Requests for Startups, which gives strong evidence that this is a rather hard, unsolved problem: > https://web.archive.org/web/20200220224549/https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#education https://web.archive.org/web/20200220224549/https://www.ycomb...

armchairhacker 9mo ago
Easier than to an LLM, compared to inference. “‘r’s in strawberry” and other LLM tricks remind me of brain teasers like “finished files” (https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain-teaser/ https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain...). Show an average human this brain teaser and they’ll probably fall for it the first time. But never a second; the human learned from one instance, effectively forever, without even trying. ChatGPT had to be retrained and to not fall for the “r”’s trick, which cost much more than one prompt, and (unless OpenAI are hiding a breakthrough, or I really don’t understand modern LLMs) required much more than one iteration. That seems to be the one thing that prevents LLMs from mimicking humans, more noticeable and harder to work around than anything else. An LLM can beat a Turing test where it only must generate a few sentences. No LLM can imitate human conversation over a few years (probably not even a few days), because it would start forgetting much more.
graemep 9mo ago
The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched. At the school level: teachers are trained, buildings are built, parents rely on kids being at school so they can go out to work.... At higher levels and in training it might be easier to change things, but IMO it is school level education that is the most important for most people and the one that can be improved the most (and the request for startups reflects that). I can think of lots of ways things can be done better. I have done quite a lot of them as a home educating parent. As far as I can see my government (in the UK) is determined to do the exact opposite of the direction I think we should go in.
- sdenton4 9mo ago
  The one true result of education research is that one on one education is vastly more effective than classroom education. While I have no doubt you had good results home schooling, you will almost certainly run into difficulty scaling your results.
  - graemep 9mo ago
    Not as much as you might think for two reasons. 1. Kids need far fewer hours of one on one than classroom teaching 2. There is much greater proportion of self teaching, especially as kids get older. I estimate adult time required per child is similar to schools with small class sizes, and it requires somewhat less skilled adults.
- Nevermark 9mo ago
  > The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched. Which is still a problem of educating humans. Just moved up the chain one step. Educators are often very hard to educate. Even mathematics isn't immune to this. Calculus is pervasively taught with prematurely truncated algebra of differentials. Which means for second order derivatives and beyond, the "fraction" notation does not actually describe ratios, when this does not need to be the case. But when will textbooks remove this unnecessary and complicating disconnect between algebra and calculus? There is no significant movement to do so. Educators and textbook writers are as difficult to educate as anyone else.

armchairhacker 9mo ago

Easier than to an LLM, compared to inference. “‘r’s in strawberry” and other LLM tricks remind me of brain teasers like “finished files” (https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain-teaser/ https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain...). Show an average human this brain teaser and they’ll probably fall for it the first time. But never a second; the human learned from one instance, effectively forever, without even trying. ChatGPT had to be retrained and to not fall for the “r”’s trick, which cost much more than one prompt, and (unless OpenAI are hiding a breakthrough, or I really don’t understand modern LLMs) required much more than one iteration. That seems to be the one thing that prevents LLMs from mimicking humans, more noticeable and harder to work around than anything else. An LLM can beat a Turing test where it only must generate a few sentences. No LLM can imitate human conversation over a few years (probably not even a few days), because it would start forgetting much more.

graemep 9mo ago

The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched. At the school level: teachers are trained, buildings are built, parents rely on kids being at school so they can go out to work.... At higher levels and in training it might be easier to change things, but IMO it is school level education that is the most important for most people and the one that can be improved the most (and the request for startups reflects that). I can think of lots of ways things can be done better. I have done quite a lot of them as a home educating parent. As far as I can see my government (in the UK) is determined to do the exact opposite of the direction I think we should go in.

sdenton4 9mo ago
The one true result of education research is that one on one education is vastly more effective than classroom education. While I have no doubt you had good results home schooling, you will almost certainly run into difficulty scaling your results.
- graemep 9mo ago
  Not as much as you might think for two reasons. 1. Kids need far fewer hours of one on one than classroom teaching 2. There is much greater proportion of self teaching, especially as kids get older. I estimate adult time required per child is similar to schools with small class sizes, and it requires somewhat less skilled adults.
Nevermark 9mo ago
> The problem with education is that existing ways of doing things are very strongly entrenched. Which is still a problem of educating humans. Just moved up the chain one step. Educators are often very hard to educate. Even mathematics isn't immune to this. Calculus is pervasively taught with prematurely truncated algebra of differentials. Which means for second order derivatives and beyond, the "fraction" notation does not actually describe ratios, when this does not need to be the case. But when will textbooks remove this unnecessary and complicating disconnect between algebra and calculus? There is no significant movement to do so. Educators and textbook writers are as difficult to educate as anyone else.