Patrick Collison's Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#191

Post by padolsey » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #136

Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1] As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are? As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these…

> What to do?

Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to society. Just as Khan Academy has revolutionised explanations of complex topics (resolving the ambiguities from school), scaled tutoring in which everyone participates could augment traditional teaching with soft skills, conversation, expansive exploration of worldly topics, and specific technical help.

Imagine a norm where ~everyone, in some way, relays knowledge and experience to youth, freeing youth from the segregation of school. It's always been odd to me that we separate ourselves (especially in western culture) from people of a different age. There's not as much integration between children and adults (outside of formalised schooling) as there could be. This separation seems to limit the transfer of knowledge but also the transfer of culture. And I think it also prevents bridges of commonality and empathy from forming, further entrenching homogeneity and aversion to difference.

It's worth asking ourselves: what would a society look like if we ~all engaged in the education of our young?

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#192

Post by patrickk » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 8:37 AM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #167

paxys wrote: post #97

The infrastructure one really stands out to me, and I'm always astounded by it. Adding yet another example - The Golden Gate Bridge was built in 4 years for $1.6 billion (inflation adjusted), under budget and ahead of schedule. 11 workers died during construction, a safety record matching or surpassing most modern projects. In contrast, a project to install suicide nets around the bridge has been under development fo…

I sometimes wonder about this too. When you walk through European cities and look at the decoration of those old houses, they were all handcrafted. I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details. Same with all those old chairs, where some woodworker sculpted everything by hand. You can't imagine that right now anymore. Is it because we throw away stuff after 5 years? Or beca…

> I think it would be too expensive now to build those same houses with handcrafted details.

On a tangential question - I sometimes wonder why modern buildings are so boring. Postwar buildings in many European cities are drab and devoid of interesting detail and yet with CAD designs, 3D printing and so on it should be possible to create all kinds of intricate detail (perhaps let a computer conjure up a wild pattern to dress up a facade with, like something from a Tool album cover) to create visually interesting features - cheaply. I think it's much more to do with postmodernism rather than cost. There was a great discussion on HN some time ago about it which I cannot find unfortunately.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#193

Post by ALittleLight » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 8:41 AM UTC

josu wrote: post #13

foolinaround wrote: post #2

One common answer for many questions comparing past to present : "More regulations" This is not necessarily a bad thing, but often it is becoming a nightmare of labyrinthine proportions to navigate, which hinders new entrants.

Cars and Cellphone service sectors are heavily regulated. Textbooks are not regulated. There is more to it than just "more regulations". Also regulation doesn't necessarily have to come from the government, for example, the Apple App Store is heavily regulated, and yet they have some of the lowest software prices compared to other platforms. In my opinion, competition through trade may have a stronger effect on price…

I don't agree that textbooks aren't affected by regulations. Regulations permit easily available student loans which leads to the glut of college students who need to buy books. The books aren't exactly a free market as you are told by the school which books and which version to buy. Also, government programs subsidize textbooks.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#194

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:23 AM UTC

ta1234567890 wrote: post #104

akirakurusu wrote: post #18

"Why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?" Figuring out why this is without fully attributing it to culture has been of great fascination to me. It really is mindblowing just how _good_ things are in Japan, perhaps they're just highly optimized for tourism? The cleanliness, the service, the great care people place in doing things and in their work is just amazing. Anyone here have more insights…

> What are the non-cultural factors which contribute to this phenomenon It's simply impossible to detach Japan from their culture. The main thing that stands out to me is their selflessness. One anectdata: Tokyo feels pretty much the opposite of NYC. In NYC it feels like people are obstacles to avoid on the way to where you are going. Nobody waits for anybody. At first it seems rude, then you realize "it's not person…

I worked for a Japanese corporation for decades; regularly traveling to Tokyo.

Japanese culture is really unique; even for East Asia.

They aren’t a “warm and fuzzy” bunch, but every Japanese person is aware that they are a member of Society, with the ensuing obligations and personal boundaries.

Every person in Japan takes their vocation seriously. Quality is absolutely stunning, and is deeply personal to each worker; bordering on obsession. Quality is almost a religious obligation. I feel like a slob, in my own work, compared to them, but most Americans seem to think that I’m way too overbearing about Quality.

That said, it’s no utopia. Management techniques can be difficult to endure, working hours and stress are insane. There aren’t many stress-free jobs, and the nation has a high suicide rate.

I liked to visit, but I don’t think I could live or work there.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#195

Post by dalbasal » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:26 AM UTC

cloogshicer wrote: post #183

dalbasal wrote: post #179

I like the way " Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? " is loaded. Touches on several "questions" in the vein of this article. One load is " why don't we know this with more certainty? " It's a useful thing to know. What is achievable? What's the bar? How good could education be, regardless of resources and other limitations. If true, that can be our 100% marker for instructional eff…

There's an assumption in this line of thinking which I think is unlikely to be true: that this stuff is measurable, at least in principle. I think 'instructional effectiveness' can't ever be clearly and unambiguously defined, much less measured. As with anything that involves people. In my experience, most attempts to do so only cause more harm than good.

There are different kinds of measurable, and the purpose of the measure is important. Measuring for the purpose of management (eg creating incentives for teachers and schools), measuring for the purpose of most academic publishing, etc. Each have their own pitfalls, and I agree with you on these.

That said... there is clearly such a thing as better and worse instruction.

Where the 2-sigma claim gets interesting is scale. We're not concerned with marginal differences (management measures) and we're not concerned with legibly identifiable causal relationships (academic publishing). We're just concerned with establishing a high watermark.

The simple measures (eg testing) we have, work fine for that... in the context of math, reading/writing, foreign language, etc. Stuff that's easy to test for, and assuming we're only interested in big differences.

Two sigma implies that within 1 year of instruction, the two sigma group will have progressed by several years. 12th grade math level by grade 10. This doesn't have to be achievable by every teacher, it just has to be achievable at the high end.. assuming a random sample of students.

Agreed though.. we have a history of insisting that the unmeasurable be measured... and its a very common, long term failure mode. more harm than good. I'm not suggesting implementing anything, let alone implementing anything using measures. Just setting that watermark, so we know what awesome looks like.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#196

Post by 082349872349872 » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

bschne wrote: post #176

paxys wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much bett…

> helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through questions and targeted hi…

I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address misunderstandings and gaps.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#197

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:30 AM UTC

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #124

ncmncm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or that hundreds of Tokyo buildings will collapse in the next big earthquake? Or have they been fixed, since we learned about it? If so, how?

Could ask the same about SF, LA, maybe Portland OR, Seattle, Vancouver and really anything in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone I'd trust the Japanese more in anything related to earthquake proof building, in spite of their little fuck-up with Fukushima. At the end of the day, no matter where and when you are, it's your mandatory share of risk in the lottery of life. Deal with it.

The recent claim (maybe 10 ya) was that Yakuza influence forced inspectors to sign off on foundations that were not sound. So they do not have the required pilings. I don't know how that could be fixed, but I don't assert it couldn't be. I assume if it is, it would have been done by now.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#198

Post by esc_colon_q » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:33 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #135

sudhirj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like the Khan Academy apps do something like this. You progress through a tree of knowledge and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on, demonstrated by solving problems. It also gives you all the help you need to achieve that mastery.

> and can’t move to any next node until you master the one you’re on Oh that's the absolute worse way of teaching people (or, ok, that's my pet peeve in education) "but how do you expect to learn stuff without knowing the basics blah blah blah" well, because maybe actually knowing how it is used in the end helps with learning. Instead education seems to focus on wasting a lot of time with "basics" disconnected from r…

Calculus was the worst for this: in my first class we spent literally two months dissecting the minutiae of limits and Lipschitz conditions and infinitesimals and blah blah etc, only to get the the punchline, "and you find the slope of a function by doing the obvious thing, which works in the obvious way every time you'll actually be using it in practice". I get it in a college level analysis class or something, but as an intro in high school that's just a great way to make students hate what is at its core a very simple and useful subject.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#199

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #166

zachware wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs. I've built several large-scale buildings and developments at urban scale in California and Nevada, both heavy heavy union states. I can't point to the systemic problem leading to the delays but I can tell you that any job even tangentially related to construction requires high wage labor. This is universally true for civic proje…

It's entirely possible that you are right except for construction and civil project jobs. It's all very well to pay someone well and expect good results for the money, but that person is still a member of society and will be affected by the things around them. I'd argue that someone who hears constant negativity in the media about how everyone is underpaid and living in poverty, and sees the person serving their coff…

The Golden Gate Bridge was built during the Great Depression.

Poverty may have been prevalent.

Re: Patrick Collison's Questions

#200

Post by dalbasal » Mon, Aug 24, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

bohemian99 wrote: post #65

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer linked to in Collison's question, https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/what-gets-expensive-and-why-... , is really insightful and interesting in my opinion and goes to a deep level of analysis.

Exactly- people don't/can't really comparison shop when it comes to medical procedures. They don't know how good their doctors are at it, this is all unpublished information. Similarly college textbooks- if your professors assigns work from their book, then you need that book. You can't competitively shop on that. As the response points out, all of these groups and then backed by accreditation systems to limit new en…

Starting from Patrick's question, and working through the list...

It suggests that some of our market-thinking has been off mark. Free-market economic policies have tended to define things in terms of market "freeness." How much intervention, etc. This is commonly how we think politically, because it relates directly to policies.

The way these affect reality is through the market structures themselves. We can regulate or deregulate barber shops and restaurants... but within wide margins they are likely to remain pretty good market structure. Lots of choice, competition, churn, etc. Hospital services or college tuition are structurally different. If we are "laissez faire" with hospitals, and have heavy handed regulation for restaurants... Restaurants would still behave like a more free market, just because of innate structure.

It would take a truly byzantine accreditation system to make restaurants look like textbooks or pharmaceutical drugs. Someone would literally have to assign you a dinner reservation.