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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#521

Post by killerstorm »

dkyc wrote: post #89
mattbee wrote: post #38

This spends too many words justifying the stale "real hacker" tradition of dunking on education, and kindof ignores the problem of how to measure something so subjective as learning. So people who are good at tests get ahead. We get that you're not interested in grades. We all know people who play the game and win, not sincerely engage with their job or education or whatever. But I'd like to hear from pg / other peop…

"Growth" in the YC definition ("revenue growth with positive unit economics", or the closest proxy to that) seems a pretty objective test to me.

It can take a lot of resources to get to that point, no?

So there's still a question what companies should do until they reach this growth possibility.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#522

Post by impendia »

DSingularity wrote: post #246
jtanderson wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree wholeheartedly. That's exactly the approach I take, but the problem of course is that 1) it's difficult to do successfully, and 2) students "freak out" because the exams become unpredictable and they end up getting more stressed out that they need to about succeeding at the exam. Of course, my regular high-performing students do well regardless, but I haven't found a way to convince them that they have the skil…

The problem in my eyes is while you are fighting the fight your department is fighting another one entirely within a university of departments competing in yet another fight. Who is fighting at the organizational level for the students? The problem is systemic. All of the solutions I see, here and elsewhere, describe a small piece of the problem. At best — a few courses in a curriculum.

> Who is fighting at the organizational level for the students?

Plenty of people. Sometimes at cross purposes, rarely with little effect.

Unlike Tolstoy's happy families, good teachers are not all alike. For the most part, I can't envision what a productive organizational-level fight would even look like.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#523

Post by threatripper »

taeric wrote: post #291
knzhou wrote: post #264

As somebody who has designed some of the tests Paul Graham is complaining about, it really is hard from the other side! For example, it's long been known in the physics education research community that students come away from introductory courses with very little physical understanding, even if they can do the plug and chug problems on typical tests just fine. Students can all recite Newton's third law, but immediat…

It is amusing how many of my peers still hold to the notion that heavier things fall faster. Not a higher terminal velocity, but the intuition that they accelerate faster. Hilariously tough for folks to shake.

Heavier things really do fall faster in the sense that they also pull the earth towards them which increases the relative acceleration and thereby decreases the time until they hit each other.

F = G * m1 * m2 / r²

This tells you that the acceleration of mass 1 is independent of the mass 1 and only depends on mass 2 and the acceleration of mass 2 is independent of mass 2 and only depends on mass 1. But the relative velocities will increase when either m1 or m2 is increased.

E.g. a black hole with the mass of the earth will hit the ground of a (perfectly rigid) earth in almost half the time as a feather would.

(I won't go into relativistic effects here.)

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#524

Post by BlueTemplar »

ZeljkoS wrote: post #87

Yes, most tests are bad, but there is a quick advice that improves them immensely: never ask questions that are not at least Level 3 in Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge: https://blog.testdome.com/blooms-taxonomy/ I cofounded a technical screening startup, and despite our efforts to educate our customers that enter their questions on our platform, 95% of their custom questions are bad questions. They tend to ask trivia q…

"Why is Pluto no longer classified as a planet?" You've passed the "categorization" level, but might have actually failed the real "understanding" level, for which "We have discovered many large((r)) objects beyond it." might actually be a more correct answer!

After the discovery of dozens of new trans-neptunian "planets", categorizing Pluto as a "real planet", while it probably had more in common with them became problematic.

The best definition that we had to come up with to cleanly separate "real" planets from the others was therefore quite unlikely to include Pluto!

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#525

Post by BlueTemplar »

Too wrote: post #517
ZeljkoS wrote: post #87

Yes, most tests are bad, but there is a quick advice that improves them immensely: never ask questions that are not at least Level 3 in Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge: https://blog.testdome.com/blooms-taxonomy/ I cofounded a technical screening startup, and despite our efforts to educate our customers that enter their questions on our platform, 95% of their custom questions are bad questions. They tend to ask trivia q…

Thanks for the article. The advise against level 5 questions is interesting. I found them to be very useful for answering if a candidate has really applied in the field before, especially comparing two big fields against each other. For example asking if they prefer sql or nosql. Anyone who doesn't answer some variant of "it depends" has probably not had enough hand on with either of them. But regardless if the candi…

I guess that "putting opinions aside and only asking about fields which you yourself deeply understand" is actually very very hard to consistently apply in practice ?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#526

Post by BlueTemplar »

wrinklytidbits wrote: post #239
hooande wrote: post #106

I know that learning how to hack systems is valuable because that's how I got into YCombinator. I set out specifically to hack the application process and succeeded. It wasn't even that difficult to do. If pg believes what he's saying in this essay, I have two questions: 1. why did he design a testing system that was easily hacked? 2. why does YCombinator itself focus so much on hacking the venture capital system, as…

I think what he's saying is that the approach is wrong. The highly industrialized school system is the way it is because of scale. His perspective is the initial point (paraphrasing: tests should be the same as taking a blood test). To add to that point, take a urine test: people have been hacking it for years. The purpose of the urine test is to see what residual byproducts from certain drugs are in my system. I can…

If the emphasis is on teaching, rather than conformity or daycare, then I suspect teachers being tutors for everyone would actually be more cost-effective !

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#527

Post by jstanley »

taeric wrote: post #498
isidor3 wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually is though! The force due to air resistance is the primary thing slowing down the bike and rider, and the force, which doesn't change with mass, slows down a heavier bike less, and so a heavy bike will be rolling faster than a lighter one at the bottom of a hill, all other things being equal.

Right, you can hit a higher velocity. You will not get extra acceleration. That is my entire point. That is to say, the force from the air does not actively slow you down. It prevents you from speeding up, after a point. (Aerodynamics are, of course, more complicated. But this general model is pretty solid.) Such that if I want to accelerate faster down the hill, I have to pedal to cause that to happen. Or add a moto…

The heavier bike will reach the terminal velocity of the lighter bike sooner than the lighter bike will. If that's not extra acceleration then I don't think you're looking at the problem from a practical perspective.

Yes, acceleration due to gravity is the same, but air resistance has less effect, at all speeds, on the heavier bike. The rate at which the heavier bike gains speed is higher. It accelerates faster.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#528

Post by matheusmoreira »

GCA10 wrote: post #300
taeric wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amusing how many of my peers still hold to the notion that heavier things fall faster. Not a higher terminal velocity, but the intuition that they accelerate faster. Hilariously tough for folks to shake.

Add air resistance into the mix, and denser materials do fall faster. Coins vs. napkins. Plums vs. crumpled balls of paper I'd actually take the lesson the other way. It's hilariously tough for model-makers to acknowledge real-world noise that prevents their theoretically precise models from delivering reliable results.

I've done so many physics questions that explicitly instruct me to disregard air resistance... Reminds me of Feynman's speech:

https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

> There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on.

> The numbers have ‘errors’ in them – that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors – very fine.

> The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball.

> Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#529

Post by choppaface »

pmichaud wrote: post #413
choppaface wrote: post #366

“But you can't blame teachers if their tests are hackable. Their job is to teach, not to create unhackable tests. The real problem is grades, or more precisely, that grades have been overloaded.” Two important things here: * Grade inflation makes for happier students and counterbalances the value of test hacking. Today there are very few schools that don’t do grade inflation. Without considering grade inflation, much…

The suggested alternative I got from the essay was "try to cause a real, specific outcome in the world. If the action you took caused the outcome, you passed the test."

Did Sam Altman pass the test with Loopt?

Just because you made waves somehow or filled your pockets with money doesn’t mean your time was ‘better spent’ than trying to make A’s in organized education. School can very well teach you how to make better outcomes.

But, yes, school steers youthful energy away from making change... err making money for VCs.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#530

Post by BlueTemplar »

buboard wrote: post #13
esotericn wrote: post #8

Not sure I agree with this. The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests. It might be producing a specific CV or preparing for an interview whiteboard session to land a job. It might be socializing and networking in a specific way in order to land funding. The real world does not commonly reward just being really good at arbitrary things. It's almost always focused on meeting a need that someone…

There is truth to this. It reflects the shift of mentality in tech entrepreneurs since the 2000s (experimentally entrepreneurial, introverted hackers, libertarian) to the 2010s (work for FANG or make a feature that FANG wants to buy, well-curated github and social media, social justice). I could dare say that this mentality flowed from academia to the greater economy. Academic funding has been generally formalistic a…

How many decades? I've heard that things were very different in the 60's/70's...
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