7 ms·

This article raises some interesting science fiction-y ideas. Quite a long and in depth read, but worth it because gwern's mind is one of our real treasures. Tw

by hooande 13y ago

This article raises some interesting science fiction-y ideas. Quite a long and in depth read, but worth it because gwern's mind is one of our real treasures. Two things I found interesting: 1. If everyone in the world had the exact same Khan Academy style learning experience it would control all of the random factor associated with education. This means that the only differentiating factor would be raw intelligence, which is scary for those of us who were born as geniuses. 2. Conscientiousness (aka discipline or work ethic) is more important in online classes. So future Einsteins might be too bored by mundane assignments to take their work seriously. Improvements to IQ and personality testing might mitigate both of these problems in the future. If we can accurately measure a student's IQ we can give him or her harder or easier questions, essentially baking a curve into every assignment. Personality testing might yield the ability to identify students who are lacking Conscientiousness in order to target them with more interesting problems at a challenging pace. As usual, I think that machine learning and data science could lead to great benefits for everyone. This was an incredibly well researched piece that provided some interesting hypotheticals regarding online education. As Gwern points, out drastic technological changes rarely benefit everyone equally. Education tech is going to create some big winners and losers over the coming decades.

VLM 13y ago
"the only differentiating factor would be" And language / cultural stuff. I can't imagine trying to do trig or calculus with Roman numerals or Mayan numerals. And that's sticking to obvious math examples. There have been theories that (insert language) has always been superior for (insert hard science) because of inherent linguistic advantages. You haven't lived until you've heard William Shakespeares plays in their original Klingon and all that. I have a decent sorta-classical education and I find it much easier to read modern translations of ancient greeks than to try to puzzle thru Olde English. I do wonder about some subjects like somewhat advanced physics, is the "charm" factor of a subatomic particle "charm" when Chinese talk about it, or does it get localized? WRT making every assignment challenging, I was near the top of my class in most subjects in K12 and that would have driven me completely bonkers with the unfairness of it all. Teens are all, and always have been, a bundle of angst but I would go nuts if little Bobby Tables only had to power on the computer without hurting himself or the machine, but I had to write a malloc() function for the same assignment or similar. There's more than a little prison time mentality in contemporary K12 (intentionally?) and arbitrarily giving people hard time or easy time is going to make social issues. I would probably have gone on strike until grade 12 by coasting.
- sanskritabelt 13y ago
  "There have been theories that (insert language) has always been superior for (insert hard science) because of inherent linguistic advantages." I've never heard any of those theories coming from anybody who wasn't some know-nothing engineer whose idea of high literature was old Larry Niven stories.
  - nicolethenerd 13y ago
    See Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Last I checked, he wasn't a know-nothing engineer.
    - sanskritabelt 13y ago
      Last I checked Malcolm Gladwell was a 'journalist' and barely a couple notches above Thomas Friedman on the intellectual rigor scale.
  - VLM 13y ago
    One example is previous century German physicists, chemists, and engineers had a very high opinion of themselves. Go back two centuries and add philosophers. I will agree its curious how those observations tend to appear from people describing their own accomplishments.
  - gwern 13y ago
    I've been told that a lot of Chinese and Japanese prefer to discuss technical or philosophical topics in English or using English vocab, supposedly because those languages tend to the concrete rather than the abstractions necessary.
    - ekm2 13y ago
      I've been told that a lot of Chinese and Japanese prefer to discuss technical or philosophical topics in English or using English vocab, supposedly because those languages tend to the concrete rather than the abstractions necessary. It is probably because it holds more opportunities for jobs in the US.
maxerickson 13y ago
If you focus on measuring present achievement, you can skip faffing around trying to correlate question difficulty to intelligence (that is, just ask a question targeted at that level of achievement). And you don't even need better IQ tests to do it. Of course, this requires abandoning the idea that students should be competing with each other.
- gwern 13y ago
  A minor technical objection: you actually can improve slightly if you include a measure of IQ, because if you estimate from just the person's performance on a few questions, there's going to be a lot of inaccuracy in your estimate and a measure of IQ will reduce it (as would, say, a measure of previous grades, or data about previous questions, even in an unrelated area).
netcan 13y ago
regarding "discipline/conscientiousness/work ethic": It will probably always be a big factor (it always has been). Probably bigger than usual for the next few years as we figure out this online self learning stuff. We just have to remember that these things are very very new. Imagine taking a bunch of smart people and turning them into middle school teachers. None of them has ever taught before. They have access to nothing. No textbooks or curriculum. No experienced teachers to help. They probably won't do a great job, not at first. It'll take time to learn what works. We have time to figure this stuff out. I like that we are in a rush as individual players. Khan Academy can't let coursera blow them away. That's great. But as a culture, we have time. Maybe generations to figure out how to teach people using these new tools. I believe solutions will eventually be better for almost everyone. We'll probably need to tailor the tools for people with a naturally low self discipline, but I think that is possible.
- VLM 13y ago
  "Imagine taking a bunch of smart people and turning them into middle school teachers." An interesting analogy might be .mil drill instructors and other .mil instructors. They have a very high opinion of the value of self discipline, even for future REMFs like I was. I did a lot of OJT when I was in .mil many years ago, on both sides, and decades later all I can really analyze it to at this moment is "its complicated" not just easy or difficult. What little I can get out of it, is the average motivated dude can pretty successfully teach the average motivated dude pretty well. There is also the business model issue where you profitably churn out three times as many kindergarten teachers as the market can adsorb. Very optimistically you'd end up with a perfect top third being hired, and the rest being my baby sitter or waitress (true story). This survivorship bias naturally leads to peculiar ideas like only the top fraction of people have what it takes to be able to teach; not so, it means the market and culture produce waaaay too many teachers...
- gwern 13y ago
  > But as a culture, we have time. Maybe generations to figure out how to teach people using these new tools. I'm concerned that we don't have as much time as one might think. The employment changes seem to be happening already. Maybe as a culture we have time, but in the long run, you and I are dead.
grandalf 13y ago
I'd argue that an optimized curriculum would start to resemble a video game that people would play for fun. To beat a video game takes grit but not conscientiousness in the same way that it's normally framed for learning (where it usually means slogging through boring material and lots of rote memorization or unpleasant repetition). In v1 of such a curriculum, IQ would reign supreme, but as the sophistication advanced things like creativity, ability to innovate, and mental control/focus would become increasingly important. Things like letting your mind wander just the right amount, knowing which instincts to trust and which to temporarily ignore, etc. There are very few natural impediments to the progress of thought, so training intended to prepare students for the real world would necessarily deal a lot with optimizing around constraints. The deeper one goes into this line of reasoning, the more education starts to mean what it intuitively means, life skills preparation. Few jobs today require the level of pure "knowledge work" that an optimized curriculum would prepare a person for, which is why the current system is generally adequate and being skilled at slogging, memorization, and obedience are still so highly valued.

by hooande 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

"the only differentiating factor would be" And language / cultural stuff. I can't imagine trying to do trig or calculus with Roman numerals or Mayan numerals. And that's sticking to obvious math examples. There have been theories that (insert language) has always been superior for (insert hard science) because of inherent linguistic advantages. You haven't lived until you've heard William Shakespeares plays in their original Klingon and all that. I have a decent sorta-classical education and I find it much easier to read modern translations of ancient greeks than to try to puzzle thru Olde English. I do wonder about some subjects like somewhat advanced physics, is the "charm" factor of a subatomic particle "charm" when Chinese talk about it, or does it get localized? WRT making every assignment challenging, I was near the top of my class in most subjects in K12 and that would have driven me completely bonkers with the unfairness of it all. Teens are all, and always have been, a bundle of angst but I would go nuts if little Bobby Tables only had to power on the computer without hurting himself or the machine, but I had to write a malloc() function for the same assignment or similar. There's more than a little prison time mentality in contemporary K12 (intentionally?) and arbitrarily giving people hard time or easy time is going to make social issues. I would probably have gone on strike until grade 12 by coasting.

sanskritabelt 13y ago
"There have been theories that (insert language) has always been superior for (insert hard science) because of inherent linguistic advantages." I've never heard any of those theories coming from anybody who wasn't some know-nothing engineer whose idea of high literature was old Larry Niven stories.
- nicolethenerd 13y ago
  See Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Last I checked, he wasn't a know-nothing engineer.
  - sanskritabelt 13y ago
    Last I checked Malcolm Gladwell was a 'journalist' and barely a couple notches above Thomas Friedman on the intellectual rigor scale.
- VLM 13y ago
  One example is previous century German physicists, chemists, and engineers had a very high opinion of themselves. Go back two centuries and add philosophers. I will agree its curious how those observations tend to appear from people describing their own accomplishments.
- gwern 13y ago
  I've been told that a lot of Chinese and Japanese prefer to discuss technical or philosophical topics in English or using English vocab, supposedly because those languages tend to the concrete rather than the abstractions necessary.
  - ekm2 13y ago
    I've been told that a lot of Chinese and Japanese prefer to discuss technical or philosophical topics in English or using English vocab, supposedly because those languages tend to the concrete rather than the abstractions necessary. It is probably because it holds more opportunities for jobs in the US.

maxerickson 13y ago

If you focus on measuring present achievement, you can skip faffing around trying to correlate question difficulty to intelligence (that is, just ask a question targeted at that level of achievement). And you don't even need better IQ tests to do it. Of course, this requires abandoning the idea that students should be competing with each other.

gwern 13y ago
A minor technical objection: you actually can improve slightly if you include a measure of IQ, because if you estimate from just the person's performance on a few questions, there's going to be a lot of inaccuracy in your estimate and a measure of IQ will reduce it (as would, say, a measure of previous grades, or data about previous questions, even in an unrelated area).

netcan 13y ago

regarding "discipline/conscientiousness/work ethic": It will probably always be a big factor (it always has been). Probably bigger than usual for the next few years as we figure out this online self learning stuff. We just have to remember that these things are very very new. Imagine taking a bunch of smart people and turning them into middle school teachers. None of them has ever taught before. They have access to nothing. No textbooks or curriculum. No experienced teachers to help. They probably won't do a great job, not at first. It'll take time to learn what works. We have time to figure this stuff out. I like that we are in a rush as individual players. Khan Academy can't let coursera blow them away. That's great. But as a culture, we have time. Maybe generations to figure out how to teach people using these new tools. I believe solutions will eventually be better for almost everyone. We'll probably need to tailor the tools for people with a naturally low self discipline, but I think that is possible.

VLM 13y ago
"Imagine taking a bunch of smart people and turning them into middle school teachers." An interesting analogy might be .mil drill instructors and other .mil instructors. They have a very high opinion of the value of self discipline, even for future REMFs like I was. I did a lot of OJT when I was in .mil many years ago, on both sides, and decades later all I can really analyze it to at this moment is "its complicated" not just easy or difficult. What little I can get out of it, is the average motivated dude can pretty successfully teach the average motivated dude pretty well. There is also the business model issue where you profitably churn out three times as many kindergarten teachers as the market can adsorb. Very optimistically you'd end up with a perfect top third being hired, and the rest being my baby sitter or waitress (true story). This survivorship bias naturally leads to peculiar ideas like only the top fraction of people have what it takes to be able to teach; not so, it means the market and culture produce waaaay too many teachers...
gwern 13y ago
> But as a culture, we have time. Maybe generations to figure out how to teach people using these new tools. I'm concerned that we don't have as much time as one might think. The employment changes seem to be happening already. Maybe as a culture we have time, but in the long run, you and I are dead.

grandalf 13y ago

I'd argue that an optimized curriculum would start to resemble a video game that people would play for fun. To beat a video game takes grit but not conscientiousness in the same way that it's normally framed for learning (where it usually means slogging through boring material and lots of rote memorization or unpleasant repetition). In v1 of such a curriculum, IQ would reign supreme, but as the sophistication advanced things like creativity, ability to innovate, and mental control/focus would become increasingly important. Things like letting your mind wander just the right amount, knowing which instincts to trust and which to temporarily ignore, etc. There are very few natural impediments to the progress of thought, so training intended to prepare students for the real world would necessarily deal a lot with optimizing around constraints. The deeper one goes into this line of reasoning, the more education starts to mean what it intuitively means, life skills preparation. Few jobs today require the level of pure "knowledge work" that an optimized curriculum would prepare a person for, which is why the current system is generally adequate and being skilled at slogging, memorization, and obedience are still so highly valued.