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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 untra

• 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.