Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

gatesnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 418 posts

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#171

Post by radicaldreamer »

croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

People who find the tool to do the work for them will be fine. I remember “learning” to use Mathematica so I could easily complete copious calculus assignments and homework in high school.

It didn’t keep me from learning the material - a lot of those assignments and problem sets were simply busy work — but did improve ho much free time I had to read and surf the net and learn new tech things.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#172

Post by gwern »

Note that when Bill Gates praises GPT-4o, he is at least partially "talking his book": he retains large amounts of equity in Microsoft, and has been intimately involved in MS's big bet on OA - in 2019, when Kevin Scott was lobbying a big investment in OA (https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/openai/2019-sco...), Bill Gates was CCed, Gates invested in Inflection (recently rolled up into MS), and Sam Altman & Greg Brockman personally demoed GPT-4 to Gates at his mansion (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk...) to show that GPT-4 could solve the AP Biology test that Gates had said would convince him LLMs were real. And I'm sure his involvement now goes well beyond just those few instances I've happened to note.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#173

Post by ThinkingGuy »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #120
Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

Maybe no school board buys and puts it into every class. Parents will still buy it and it can supplement learning gaps when doing homework. $20/month is a rounding error compared to pre-school, clothes, extra-curricular activies, private school, private tutors, etc.

Most likely scenario: school boards buy it, then use it to justify cutting the number of teachers.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#174

Post by MR4D »

Pulcinella wrote: post #70

Background: I taught high school science for half a decade and now I am in tech. This will never take off. One, there is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. There is no money in Ed.Tech. What little money there is goes to the obvious stuff like student records databases. Anything that requires an ongoing subscription fee is dead in the water. The only reason those stupid smartboards took off is because…

A couple thoughts...

First, clearly you had a crappy experience. And that sucks. There are probably many others with bad stories as well. I'm deeply involved with my kids education and can only imagine how much that sucked.

Second, we can't solve everything at once. Hungry kids, bad parenting, all that will take time, and may never be resolved. I wish it could be, but honestly, it will take time - probably a long, long time.

Third, he's building for the future. Richer schools (both private and public) will get this first, typical schools will get it next, and poor schools (both administratively poor and monetarily poor) will get it eventually. This is where that great quote applies - "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" - and boy will it apply to education. So much so that some parents will feel like they are left in the stone age by comparison.

Fourth, an anecdote. I do volunteer work for an education-related non profit. I learned during covid that HISD (Houston school district) couldn't easily move to online learning because 30% of their students did not have internet access at home. Thirty percent!!! I was blown away. Still am. But it's gotten much better, and we've evolved. Does it still suck? Yes, undoubtedly (HISD was taken over by the state, if that tells you how big their problems are). So I know this will not be evenly distributed because of this experience.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#175

Post by balls187 »

megaman821 wrote: post #134
diddypiddy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify t…

The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential ove…

That might be true outside the US; I believe that the standard of living has gone down in the US, due in large part to the pandemic, followed by rampant inflation.

The shift away from manufacturing jobs to service jobs also played a role, along with the population boom in major cities.

The cities/countries with the highest standards of living all seemingly exist in Europe.

EDIT To Add: look at the revolting against McDonald's to see my point. Taking your family to mcdonalds used to be something you didn't really need to think about. Not anymore.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#176

Post by delfinom »

megaman821 wrote: post #134
diddypiddy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a world where wealth is increasingly being concentrated at the top, social mobility for the average person is trending downwards, suicide rates in the US are at all-time highs, drug abuse rising, general deaths of despair rising, mental illness rising, climate and ecological catastrophes mounting by unchecked greed and all of this AI crap is mostly in the hands of the powerful who will use it to solidify t…

The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential ove…

> Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression.

Nah we already exceeded WW2.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-...

> but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.

>U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest level since 1941.

I guess we still haven't exceeded the Great Depression rates but it's really not that hard of a target

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#177

Post by meetingthrower »

7thpower wrote: post #19

I am a high school dropout and who learned math using Khan Academy after never having completed more than pre-algebra in middle school. Sal Khan’s work changed my life and allowed me to build a foundation in not only math, but also finance and economics, that allowed me to feel confident enough to go to college. I did not have a support system or people in my life who could teach me these things, but I had the intern…

Love to see this - a miracle! We used it to partially homeschool a kid in math, then he graduated to SAT prep for himself, etc. Totally free. What a gift to the world.

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#178

Post by [deleted] »

croes wrote: post #5

>Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you. I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.

[deleted]

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#179

Post by lolinder »

delfinom wrote: post #176
megaman821 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person has a higher standard of living and more wealth than ever before. Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Drug abuse is down too, but newer drugs are more potent. Mental illness is a hard stat to compare over time since it is very sensitive to the collection mechanisms. The growth of carbon-free technologies has been exponential ove…

> Suicide rates are not at all-time highs, they were much higher during the World Wars and Great Depression. Nah we already exceeded WW2. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/cdc-data-finds-... > but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II. >U.S. suicides steadily rose from the early 2000s until 2018, when the national rate hit its highest l…

Suicide rates during WW1 were hovering around 20 per 100k. During the Great Depression it peaked at 22 per 100k [0]. That's around 50% higher than the 2022 number you cite (14.3 per 100k), which is hard to describe as "really not that far off".

EDIT: The comment I replied to has been edited in multiple ways since I replied, so the text in quotes above is no longer present. The comment previously indicated that we had already exceeded "the world wars" (not just WW2) and that we were "really not that far off" from the rates of the Great Depression.

Slight meta tangent: OP, in general it's considered good form to reply to people who reply to you rather than just modifying your comment. Calling out edits explicitly (like I've done here) after you've received replies is also considered good form.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...

Re: Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

#180

Post by tombert »

RandomLensman wrote: post #145
tombert wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is! In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.

Not sure self-selecting on exercises is really sufficient (at least for me I doubt it).

You're not wrong, but such is the way with nearly anything autodidactic. Learning how to find exercises that are challenging enough to actually learn something is a skill that I'm not going to pretend that I've mastered, but I would like to think I've gotten reasonably good with.

I was a college dropout for quite awhile but was still working as a software engineer, and while that's definitely not something I would recommend to anyone (it makes stuff way harder), it did have the advantage of making me pretty decent at teaching myself stuff, simply because my career depended on me being able to play with the "big boys" on an intellectual level.

For software it's comparatively easier though, because you can just have a project to do X, and if it's complicated enough you'll likely touch on a lot of CS concepts, even some you didn't directly self-select. Math (particularly more abstract math) is harder simply because it's much harder to practice; there aren't a ton of tangible "math projects" that you can hack on.

The closest way I've been able to practice it is by using Isabelle. I didn't use ChatGPT to learn that initially, since I learned how to use it before ChatGPT was released; I read through the "Concrete Semantics" free book and did those examples, so I guess that of proves your point more than mine.

Post reply on HN