7 ms·

The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigrat

by alecco 7mo ago

The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigration (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries). And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization and catering to the lowest common denominator. Student A is bad at math and good at language, student B is the opposite, both get the worst education for both subjects. I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.

econ 7mo ago
Education is a weird field with perhaps a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas. Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!
- ACCount37 7mo ago
  A big part of the problem education systems are solving is not "how do we get knowledge to children", but "how do we get masses of children to learn without coercion of the ugliest kind". Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone. Thus, peer pressure. That's what putting a whole bunch of students in the same room accomplishes.
  - throwaway384034 7mo ago
    >Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone. I worked as a teacher for a year. Children are innately motivated and curious (this is not just a cliche). If there was any laziness it usually stemmed from fear of not being good enough but they definitely all tried, even students that didn't know their 5 times table by age 10. Some students have greater self-perseverance than others though, some can't handle being wrong and fear being seen as less-then their peers. Others like to challenge themselves without such fear.
    - hirvi74 7mo ago
      > fear of not being good enough I believe that fear is not unwarranted. It's a learned behavior that helps one survive in their environment. I imagine many of those children were likely punished for mistakes or for not being good enough. Don't ask me how I know...
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    > Some children are innately motivated to learn I don't think I've met a single child in my life that isn't excited about learning about new stuff, but it really depends on what it is, it differs a lot! And they're all different as well, someone who's really into math might hate history, or vice-versa. But they all want to learn something, in my experience. The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about, and that kind ruins the other parts they actually find fun and engaging.
    - c0balt 7mo ago
      > The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about A difficult part is that children aren't really in the position to know what they want to learn most of the time. Sure, many prefer sports over math but covering a broad spectrum in pre-teen and teenager education is quite important to get them develop these preferences and themselves as a person. They are given more agency/choice (electives etc.) as they grow up. There are also topics you need to learn that aren't fun/engaging (especially as fun/engaging is quite subjective and depends on the individual). Especially when those topics are prerequisites to other potentially fun topics (you will have to learn the fundamentals before engaging with advanced topics in most subjects)
    - xp84 7mo ago
      Lest you think there’s one simple solution, my kid went to a school for one year that deliberately eliminated all that stuff - no set curriculum, no specific academic goals, and students get the majority of the vote on the rules and anything about the whole setup. They could learn about anything they want to, with no pressure. Most of the kids spent their whole days playing Xbox, Switch, or brainrot games like Roblox on tablets. (No, they weren’t “creatively building new worlds” on Roblox, just screwing around consuming what others had made in order to manipulate them into spending Robux).
      - enoint 7mo ago
        What about the minority?
  - econ 7mo ago
    Ricardo Semler had a hilarious take. When allowed to pick their own topics some kids chose to play only videogames. They dropped far behind. Then They hear other kids learned how to read and write! From scoring no points the gamers went to the top, catched up then continued at the same place. That it was their own idea apparently made all the difference.
- wakamoleguy 7mo ago
  I mean, that LLM idea _sounds_ ridiculous, but similar ideas have worked really well in machine learning for games like Chess and AI.
  - permo-w 7mo ago
    This is assuming that the knowledge space being aimed at is discoverable solely by exploration of 1v1 games. Maths and maybe some of the sciences could be set up like this if you were very clever about it, but not much else.
- amelius 7mo ago
  LLMs have only a very small working memory and they don't have a memory beyond the current session.
- Fricken 7mo ago
  What would you recommend I read if I wanted to learn more about a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas?
- tclancy 7mo ago
  >Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of! Right around puberty your theory starts to break down.
marxisttemp 7mo ago
Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists. Is “stupid people breed too much” really an issue we think is worth propagating?
- dalmo3 7mo ago
  > Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists And all men are Socrates...?
- mchaver 7mo ago
  Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.
- throw310822 7mo ago
  There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.
  - rayiner 7mo ago
    It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801/are-military-members-the-lowest-our-low https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801.... The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military. IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927.
    - dgsii 7mo ago
      Ah, yes, the IQ test; the universal, unbiased gauge of intellect across all cultures.
keepamovin 7mo ago
[flagged]
- beardyw 7mo ago
  Perhaps some folks don't get the reference.
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    They capitalized “Idiocracy” so it seems pretty likely they’re unfortunately, whether they know it or not, endorsing the eugenics-based thesis of the movie.
    - DangitBobby 7mo ago
      We don't have to support Eugenics to understand there's probably a real effect.
      - Forgeties79 7mo ago
        You can’t disentangle “smart people have few kids, dumb people have lots of kids, ergo we are gradually getting dumber” from eugenics (or class for that matter). It’s inherent in the argument. It’s also not how genes work. It’s a very classist, flawed argument. In some way it’s emblematic of what the right calls “East Coast elitism” yet I find people from across the political spectrum have no issue embracing the argument (because they all assume they’re part of the “smart” group). “Wow look at all these dumb hicks having kids while the smart, responsible, educated people aren’t.“ You really don’t see the issue with that? There’s even an XKCD for it: https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/
        eudamoniac 7mo ago
        You can call it a flawed argument, but then you need to point out the flaw. Intelligence is heritable. Flynn effect has reversed. High IQ people have less kids. What's the flaw?
ffsm8 7mo ago
Memorization is pretty much the single largest undervalued thing in the west which has a gigantic impact on the mental capabilities of people. I mean I get that rote memorization of eg. The multiplication table (7x7=49 etc pp) feels pointless, but it is training your brain. And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, only put in minimal effort because everyone around them talks like intelligence is mostly genetics. I mean genetics definitely plays a role given the same circumstances - but your effort - including memorization - is massively more impactful.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, I dunno, I guess it depends on what we mean by "smart" but I've definitively met (and been friends) with people who weren't able to live on their own by their 20s, although they were very "smart" in school and highly intelligent in general. I've also seen the reverse, dumb people being "better at life in general". I don't think it's as black and white as you're trying to make it out to be.
raincole 7mo ago
> by top skilled immigration who are mostly from countries where education is > leaning more to memorization
- thundergolfer 7mo ago
  There’s a potential irony here that a commenter lamenting the decline of education in the West is leaning on the “critical thinking over memorization” trope in contemporary Western education, when that trope has contributed to a decline in educational effectiveness. The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking. But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.
  - raincole 7mo ago
    Believe or not, if you look at Zhihu[0] you'll see a lot of people glazing Western education system. Grass is always greener on the other side of Pacific. [0]: China's Quora equivalent, but much better than Quora
    - xp84 7mo ago
      I think both viewpoints can be right. Chinese people come here, study engineering, chemistry, pharma, computer science, etc. and then graduate and then they invent and make insanely cool things. Meanwhile at the same schools, so many Americans major in things like the various identity “____ studies,” fake sciences like psychology, etc. They graduate from college with potentially less useful skills or knowledge than could have been gained by watching a few (non-AI) YouTube videos a day. We’ve turned half or more of our educational system into babysitting and self-esteem therapy for a generation we’ve raised to be incredibly anxious and fragile.
  - alecco 7mo ago
    Memorizing is not understanding. You can see this clearly with LLMs trying to predict outside their training data. Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).
skybrian 7mo ago
Possibly things are worse, but here’s an argument that we’ve gotten unrealistically ambitious about universal education through college: What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-our-schools https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-o...
- echelon 7mo ago
  College and school are super suboptimal at dispensing education. We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level. We don't let kids excel at their interest area. Math and science, obviously, but we lack programs for entrepreneurship and leadership that might be better for kids that aren't STEM-focused. Something like a scouts-type program that teaches them business, accounting, management, leadership. Sports and the arts are pretty well covered, though. If you're born poor and/or without interested parents, the system doesn't help mobility much. Kids gravitate to the environments they live in, and school doesn't shelter them from this. College itself is a bubble for many degree programs. It's fantastic for hands-on sciences, but useless for career development in liberal arts. It will put you into debt if you're not already wealthy. We need to subsidize STEM and reintroduce college loan dischargeability so risk to lenders is back in the equation. Programs are too expensive. Universities sell themselves as "experiences". Amenities, facilities, day spas. Admins are too big. Kids are taking degrees they shouldn't. Grad programs are also inefficient. Academic publishing, the research and grant treadmill, not letting smart students immigrate, ... The whole thing needs to be gutted and rewritten. From early childhood to post-grad.
  - dboreham 7mo ago
    You get a free education in entrepreneurship and leadership when you're born into the upper socioeconomic groups.
    - echelon 7mo ago
      Nothing can be done about that. We need to focus on ways to boost class mobility at a young age.
pyrale 7mo ago
> (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries) Ah yes, the undevelopped and oppressive countries able to provide them good enough education and not make them debt-ridden for it. I don’t blame people for moving for better wages, but the level of rationalization used here to make brain drain feel virtuous is off the charts.
masswerk 7mo ago
> And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization The idea that (correct) answers are something that can and may be known is all over the place, lately also in technology (LLMs, curve fitting, etc). Notably, answers must be able to validate themselves, every time. (Western) education used to be about this, before it reoriented towards instruction.
djmips 7mo ago
Dumb people - smart computers. What's the consequence of that I wonder.
piloto_ciego 7mo ago
I'd actually say we could use more targeted memorization for things you have to know. I'd love if my kid's school taught them much about spaced repetition. At risk of being that guy, Anki has changed my life for the better and I'm trying to foster an understanding of the utility of SRS in my kids. I think it's kind of a good thing to learn how to not have to look literally everything up because that's a time suck. I speak 3 languages "decently." My native language, one I learned as an exchange student (it's rusty, but it's still in there and if I start speaking it regularly the words come back almost unbidden), and Spanish from several long-distance backpacking trips in Spain for months and months. I dabble in others as necessary. If I'm learning a new language for travel or something I find that memory alone is invaluable. A few months of using SRS and memorizing 1000 words and you are suddenly able to communicate with a millions of people. Sure you might speak caveman Italian or whatever, but read a little bit of grammar you're off to the races. You're no Dante, but you are able to get by - that's so useful, and I can't see why people eschew the practical advantages of learning how to memorize! I'm taking some classes (perpetually, I don't know why I must hate myself) and I find I consistently do better learning new things if I just know some facts about a topic before I even learn all the connections between ideas. Let's say you are learning, I don't know, DC circuits? I'm taking that class for fun this semester because I'm mostly self-taught in hardware and wanted to fill in some of the gaps. If you need to know how to calculate the step response, sure you can do it from first principles if you've taken ODE. But imagine if you're taking this as your first "real" engineering class on the EE track as a 19 or 20 year old kid. At the university I went for undergrad and this university now, you wouldn't get exposed to ODE for another semester or 2. But if you can just memorize the formula now, you can absorb the material - the "why" can come later. I mean, I can never remember some math things, so I just derive the math when I need it, sure, I assume everybody does this where they have to, but if I could remember the damn derivation I wouldn't have to. Same with some code. There are some things in this world like matplotlib - I have used it 1000s of times and somehow I've literally barely learned it beyond the basics and constantly end up looking up how do things. As soon as I get the chart I want, it falls out of my brain until I am forced to learn it again to make a chart for a slide a couple months later. But there's insane utility to just... knowing things. When I was a pilot for a living, there were certain emergency procedures and limitations that I was just... expected to know - down cold. I haven't turned a prop for money in almost 6 years now, and there's some emergency procedures and limitations that I still can recite from memory. What's a great way to learn those things? Well... memorizing them. Then there's the practical nature of things. You're not going to derive maneuvering speed from first principles when you encounter mountain wave, you just need to know what you've gotta slow down to. That doesn't mean throw out your analytical brain, but having access to facts that you can use in furtherance of your cognition is super useful. And I don't really think that is the major "problem" with education in this day and age? I have 3 kids in school. They're great kids and all doing more or less well. From the outside looking in today, I'd say the biggest issues I'm aware of are: 1) A downright authoritarian environment in schools. No seriously, even the school my kids go to which is by the numbers a pretty good school seems a bit like incarceration. 2) The teaching to the lowest common denominator (which you mentioned and I think is a very good point). 3) The money is going to the wrong stuff and so quality is going down but costs are still rising. 4) Schools are basically viewed as babysitting places so that the parents can go and work and contribute to the economy, not hallowed halls of learning or some-such. It's viewed as "jobs training" from the bottom to the top. Even at the university level. 5) The incentives, both social and financial, that exist to become an educator suck and needing licenses and specialized university training to teach in some states means that an engineer with 20 years of experience isn't going to go to school for 2 years just be treated like garbage at some middle school or high school. We're not getting "the best of the best" in education. 6) The phones. I don't think a constant entertainment drip is really that good for young people. 7) Educational software is usually pretty bad? And the kids are forced into using a lot of these garbage tools day in and day out. This isn't really as big of a problem as the rest of the things, but it irritates me when I'm forced to interact with iReady or the absolute garbage (and insanely expensive) platforms the school uses to track grades. Also, I mentioned this in another thread and got downvoted, but I honestly think that the reversal of the Flynn effect might have some environmental basis too? We go outside a lot less, indoor CO2 counts are higher, issues start occurring above 1000ppm - that's not uncommon, we eat terrible, are more likely to be obese, had COVID, and are filled with plastic, we spend a lot less time bored and are mostly overstimulated. I'm not a biologist, so I wouldn't say that any one of these sorts of things is the "gotcha" like lead or whatever, but yeah, I suspect that there are other environmental effects that are making us collectively make bad decisions more often. I don't know.

by alecco 7mo ago

econ 7mo ago

Education is a weird field with perhaps a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas. Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!

ACCount37 7mo ago
A big part of the problem education systems are solving is not "how do we get knowledge to children", but "how do we get masses of children to learn without coercion of the ugliest kind". Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone. Thus, peer pressure. That's what putting a whole bunch of students in the same room accomplishes.
- throwaway384034 7mo ago
  >Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone. I worked as a teacher for a year. Children are innately motivated and curious (this is not just a cliche). If there was any laziness it usually stemmed from fear of not being good enough but they definitely all tried, even students that didn't know their 5 times table by age 10. Some students have greater self-perseverance than others though, some can't handle being wrong and fear being seen as less-then their peers. Others like to challenge themselves without such fear.
  - hirvi74 7mo ago
    > fear of not being good enough I believe that fear is not unwarranted. It's a learned behavior that helps one survive in their environment. I imagine many of those children were likely punished for mistakes or for not being good enough. Don't ask me how I know...
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > Some children are innately motivated to learn I don't think I've met a single child in my life that isn't excited about learning about new stuff, but it really depends on what it is, it differs a lot! And they're all different as well, someone who's really into math might hate history, or vice-versa. But they all want to learn something, in my experience. The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about, and that kind ruins the other parts they actually find fun and engaging.
  - c0balt 7mo ago
    > The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about A difficult part is that children aren't really in the position to know what they want to learn most of the time. Sure, many prefer sports over math but covering a broad spectrum in pre-teen and teenager education is quite important to get them develop these preferences and themselves as a person. They are given more agency/choice (electives etc.) as they grow up. There are also topics you need to learn that aren't fun/engaging (especially as fun/engaging is quite subjective and depends on the individual). Especially when those topics are prerequisites to other potentially fun topics (you will have to learn the fundamentals before engaging with advanced topics in most subjects)
  - xp84 7mo ago
    Lest you think there’s one simple solution, my kid went to a school for one year that deliberately eliminated all that stuff - no set curriculum, no specific academic goals, and students get the majority of the vote on the rules and anything about the whole setup. They could learn about anything they want to, with no pressure. Most of the kids spent their whole days playing Xbox, Switch, or brainrot games like Roblox on tablets. (No, they weren’t “creatively building new worlds” on Roblox, just screwing around consuming what others had made in order to manipulate them into spending Robux).
    - enoint 7mo ago
      What about the minority?
- econ 7mo ago
  Ricardo Semler had a hilarious take. When allowed to pick their own topics some kids chose to play only videogames. They dropped far behind. Then They hear other kids learned how to read and write! From scoring no points the gamers went to the top, catched up then continued at the same place. That it was their own idea apparently made all the difference.
wakamoleguy 7mo ago
I mean, that LLM idea _sounds_ ridiculous, but similar ideas have worked really well in machine learning for games like Chess and AI.
- permo-w 7mo ago
  This is assuming that the knowledge space being aimed at is discoverable solely by exploration of 1v1 games. Maths and maybe some of the sciences could be set up like this if you were very clever about it, but not much else.
amelius 7mo ago
LLMs have only a very small working memory and they don't have a memory beyond the current session.
Fricken 7mo ago
What would you recommend I read if I wanted to learn more about a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas?
tclancy 7mo ago
>Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of! Right around puberty your theory starts to break down.

marxisttemp 7mo ago

Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists. Is “stupid people breed too much” really an issue we think is worth propagating?

dalmo3 7mo ago
> Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists And all men are Socrates...?
mchaver 7mo ago
Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.
throw310822 7mo ago
There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.
- rayiner 7mo ago
  It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801/are-military-members-the-lowest-our-low https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801.... The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military. IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927.
  - dgsii 7mo ago
    Ah, yes, the IQ test; the universal, unbiased gauge of intellect across all cultures.

keepamovin 7mo ago

[flagged]

beardyw 7mo ago
Perhaps some folks don't get the reference.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  They capitalized “Idiocracy” so it seems pretty likely they’re unfortunately, whether they know it or not, endorsing the eugenics-based thesis of the movie.
  - DangitBobby 7mo ago
    We don't have to support Eugenics to understand there's probably a real effect.
    - Forgeties79 7mo ago
      You can’t disentangle “smart people have few kids, dumb people have lots of kids, ergo we are gradually getting dumber” from eugenics (or class for that matter). It’s inherent in the argument. It’s also not how genes work. It’s a very classist, flawed argument. In some way it’s emblematic of what the right calls “East Coast elitism” yet I find people from across the political spectrum have no issue embracing the argument (because they all assume they’re part of the “smart” group). “Wow look at all these dumb hicks having kids while the smart, responsible, educated people aren’t.“ You really don’t see the issue with that? There’s even an XKCD for it: https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/
      - eudamoniac 7mo ago
        You can call it a flawed argument, but then you need to point out the flaw. Intelligence is heritable. Flynn effect has reversed. High IQ people have less kids. What's the flaw?

ffsm8 7mo ago

Memorization is pretty much the single largest undervalued thing in the west which has a gigantic impact on the mental capabilities of people. I mean I get that rote memorization of eg. The multiplication table (7x7=49 etc pp) feels pointless, but it is training your brain. And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, only put in minimal effort because everyone around them talks like intelligence is mostly genetics. I mean genetics definitely plays a role given the same circumstances - but your effort - including memorization - is massively more impactful.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
> And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, I dunno, I guess it depends on what we mean by "smart" but I've definitively met (and been friends) with people who weren't able to live on their own by their 20s, although they were very "smart" in school and highly intelligent in general. I've also seen the reverse, dumb people being "better at life in general". I don't think it's as black and white as you're trying to make it out to be.

raincole 7mo ago

> by top skilled immigration who are mostly from countries where education is > leaning more to memorization

thundergolfer 7mo ago
There’s a potential irony here that a commenter lamenting the decline of education in the West is leaning on the “critical thinking over memorization” trope in contemporary Western education, when that trope has contributed to a decline in educational effectiveness. The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking. But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.
- raincole 7mo ago
  Believe or not, if you look at Zhihu[0] you'll see a lot of people glazing Western education system. Grass is always greener on the other side of Pacific. [0]: China's Quora equivalent, but much better than Quora
  - xp84 7mo ago
    I think both viewpoints can be right. Chinese people come here, study engineering, chemistry, pharma, computer science, etc. and then graduate and then they invent and make insanely cool things. Meanwhile at the same schools, so many Americans major in things like the various identity “____ studies,” fake sciences like psychology, etc. They graduate from college with potentially less useful skills or knowledge than could have been gained by watching a few (non-AI) YouTube videos a day. We’ve turned half or more of our educational system into babysitting and self-esteem therapy for a generation we’ve raised to be incredibly anxious and fragile.
- alecco 7mo ago
  Memorizing is not understanding. You can see this clearly with LLMs trying to predict outside their training data. Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).

skybrian 7mo ago

Possibly things are worse, but here’s an argument that we’ve gotten unrealistically ambitious about universal education through college: What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-our-schools https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-o...

echelon 7mo ago
College and school are super suboptimal at dispensing education. We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level. We don't let kids excel at their interest area. Math and science, obviously, but we lack programs for entrepreneurship and leadership that might be better for kids that aren't STEM-focused. Something like a scouts-type program that teaches them business, accounting, management, leadership. Sports and the arts are pretty well covered, though. If you're born poor and/or without interested parents, the system doesn't help mobility much. Kids gravitate to the environments they live in, and school doesn't shelter them from this. College itself is a bubble for many degree programs. It's fantastic for hands-on sciences, but useless for career development in liberal arts. It will put you into debt if you're not already wealthy. We need to subsidize STEM and reintroduce college loan dischargeability so risk to lenders is back in the equation. Programs are too expensive. Universities sell themselves as "experiences". Amenities, facilities, day spas. Admins are too big. Kids are taking degrees they shouldn't. Grad programs are also inefficient. Academic publishing, the research and grant treadmill, not letting smart students immigrate, ... The whole thing needs to be gutted and rewritten. From early childhood to post-grad.
- dboreham 7mo ago
  You get a free education in entrepreneurship and leadership when you're born into the upper socioeconomic groups.
  - echelon 7mo ago
    Nothing can be done about that. We need to focus on ways to boost class mobility at a young age.

pyrale 7mo ago

> (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries) Ah yes, the undevelopped and oppressive countries able to provide them good enough education and not make them debt-ridden for it. I don’t blame people for moving for better wages, but the level of rationalization used here to make brain drain feel virtuous is off the charts.

masswerk 7mo ago

> And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization The idea that (correct) answers are something that can and may be known is all over the place, lately also in technology (LLMs, curve fitting, etc). Notably, answers must be able to validate themselves, every time. (Western) education used to be about this, before it reoriented towards instruction.

djmips 7mo ago

Dumb people - smart computers. What's the consequence of that I wonder.

piloto_ciego 7mo ago

I'd actually say we could use more targeted memorization for things you have to know. I'd love if my kid's school taught them much about spaced repetition. At risk of being that guy, Anki has changed my life for the better and I'm trying to foster an understanding of the utility of SRS in my kids. I think it's kind of a good thing to learn how to not have to look literally everything up because that's a time suck. I speak 3 languages "decently." My native language, one I learned as an exchange student (it's rusty, but it's still in there and if I start speaking it regularly the words come back almost unbidden), and Spanish from several long-distance backpacking trips in Spain for months and months. I dabble in others as necessary. If I'm learning a new language for travel or something I find that memory alone is invaluable. A few months of using SRS and memorizing 1000 words and you are suddenly able to communicate with a millions of people. Sure you might speak caveman Italian or whatever, but read a little bit of grammar you're off to the races. You're no Dante, but you are able to get by - that's so useful, and I can't see why people eschew the practical advantages of learning how to memorize! I'm taking some classes (perpetually, I don't know why I must hate myself) and I find I consistently do better learning new things if I just know some facts about a topic before I even learn all the connections between ideas. Let's say you are learning, I don't know, DC circuits? I'm taking that class for fun this semester because I'm mostly self-taught in hardware and wanted to fill in some of the gaps. If you need to know how to calculate the step response, sure you can do it from first principles if you've taken ODE. But imagine if you're taking this as your first "real" engineering class on the EE track as a 19 or 20 year old kid. At the university I went for undergrad and this university now, you wouldn't get exposed to ODE for another semester or 2. But if you can just memorize the formula now, you can absorb the material - the "why" can come later. I mean, I can never remember some math things, so I just derive the math when I need it, sure, I assume everybody does this where they have to, but if I could remember the damn derivation I wouldn't have to. Same with some code. There are some things in this world like matplotlib - I have used it 1000s of times and somehow I've literally barely learned it beyond the basics and constantly end up looking up how do things. As soon as I get the chart I want, it falls out of my brain until I am forced to learn it again to make a chart for a slide a couple months later. But there's insane utility to just... knowing things. When I was a pilot for a living, there were certain emergency procedures and limitations that I was just... expected to know - down cold. I haven't turned a prop for money in almost 6 years now, and there's some emergency procedures and limitations that I still can recite from memory. What's a great way to learn those things? Well... memorizing them. Then there's the practical nature of things. You're not going to derive maneuvering speed from first principles when you encounter mountain wave, you just need to know what you've gotta slow down to. That doesn't mean throw out your analytical brain, but having access to facts that you can use in furtherance of your cognition is super useful. And I don't really think that is the major "problem" with education in this day and age? I have 3 kids in school. They're great kids and all doing more or less well. From the outside looking in today, I'd say the biggest issues I'm aware of are: 1) A downright authoritarian environment in schools. No seriously, even the school my kids go to which is by the numbers a pretty good school seems a bit like incarceration. 2) The teaching to the lowest common denominator (which you mentioned and I think is a very good point). 3) The money is going to the wrong stuff and so quality is going down but costs are still rising. 4) Schools are basically viewed as babysitting places so that the parents can go and work and contribute to the economy, not hallowed halls of learning or some-such. It's viewed as "jobs training" from the bottom to the top. Even at the university level. 5) The incentives, both social and financial, that exist to become an educator suck and needing licenses and specialized university training to teach in some states means that an engineer with 20 years of experience isn't going to go to school for 2 years just be treated like garbage at some middle school or high school. We're not getting "the best of the best" in education. 6) The phones. I don't think a constant entertainment drip is really that good for young people. 7) Educational software is usually pretty bad? And the kids are forced into using a lot of these garbage tools day in and day out. This isn't really as big of a problem as the rest of the things, but it irritates me when I'm forced to interact with iReady or the absolute garbage (and insanely expensive) platforms the school uses to track grades. Also, I mentioned this in another thread and got downvoted, but I honestly think that the reversal of the Flynn effect might have some environmental basis too? We go outside a lot less, indoor CO2 counts are higher, issues start occurring above 1000ppm - that's not uncommon, we eat terrible, are more likely to be obese, had COVID, and are filled with plastic, we spend a lot less time bored and are mostly overstimulated. I'm not a biologist, so I wouldn't say that any one of these sorts of things is the "gotcha" like lead or whatever, but yeah, I suspect that there are other environmental effects that are making us collectively make bad decisions more often. I don't know.