161–170 of 216 posts
It was impressive how he spotted a bug in his rendering engine and found a workaround for it in realtime! https://youtu.be/rbu7Zu5X1zI?feature=shared&t=693
In larger companies this is how arsonist-firefighter engineers look impressive... fixing a bug they are responsible for while in a highly visible position
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The traditional lecture does have a lot of value, however, we are also quite certain that the instructional experience can be improved through the addition of visualizations and simulations. This is especially true for interactive visualizations where the learner can ask, "What if ...", experiment, and see the results of their interactions. The lecture format is very old and would not have persisted if it didn't prov…
The vast majority of students never ask, “what if…” The vast majority just want to know the mechanics of doing the problems well enough to pass the test. At the time a student is taking Calculus 1 they don’t ask questions about why it works. They just want to know, for instance, the rules of differentiation. Later in life, when they have intellectually matured, videos like 3Blue1Brown are interesting and fascinating.…
To hell with the majority which will forget it next week and go management or delivery. They are unimportant for the key idea of education.
I assume that a considerable percentage of CS students or recent graduates (myself included, back in the day) dream about creating some sort of visualization tool, let alone an awesome one like this.
Sometimes knowing how to do something isn't nearly as important as badly wanting to do something
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind elaborating on what that reason is? Otherwise this comment just comes off as a drive-by dismissal…
Pretty much everyone has ideas and opinions on teaching and what would work. It is easy to tell when such opinions are made by people with no experience teaching. In the same way a professional carpenter can tell when some wood work was done in an amateurish way. Why do teachers do things the way they do? Is it because they are mostly stupid, incompetent people who haven’t thought as much about their job as amateurs…
I can only think of: because nothing works at scale in education and it’s generally slow as hell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean he was 100% right about all of that; history will not look fondly upon societys hysterical reaction to Covid, so… I think he took a lot of shit for “coming out of the closet” in that regard and he’s never been the same. There was (and apparently still are) a lot of incredibly sanctimonious busy body’s out there who absolutely loved the power trip Covid gave them and they were more than happy to harass, threate…
Disagreement is healthy. What was unhealthy is that it was dangerous to disagree. People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice. A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and comp…
One person is clever, two can talk, a group is clueless and a crowd is an idiot. It is only expected that any non-standard regulation will meet all sorts of resistances and division across axes most of which will make no sense even.
Personally I believe that the best way to handle it is not an open information, but total social manipulation into FUD with proper control points. But that’s incompatible with democracy and all. It’s not because I’m an inherently bad anti-humanist, I just don’t see how that could work cause it’s absolutely naive. A crowd is a separate being from a human that stands in it, and it requires non-human interaction. Treating it as just a set of humans to whom you speak directly is an error.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, that must be why math literacy is ubiquitous.
Here’s a thought for you. What percentage of the population wants to be mathematically literate given the amount of effort needed to gain that literacy? In my 30 years of teaching math at the college level the anecdotal evidence I have is that this number is quite low. Why do you think the number of mathematically literate people should be significantly higher than what it is? What methods of teaching will work for t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Efficacy, maximal effectiveness over a large population, and because it works better at scale than other solutions.
I was under the impression that our education system is more about keeping children off the streets while both parents go to the office/factory than really educating them. This was especially visible during covid. In that sense I agree with you: videos won't do the job. On the other hand there is this one guy making videos that, I believe, reached way more people than any single teacher would. How does that count for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What scares me so much about the Covid debacle is that despite all the information that's been coming out about how most of the restrictions placed on people -- like hindering people from gathering _outside in the sun_ -- and effectiveness of both pharmaceuticals and PPE's -- of which I won't name any because then I'll be booted out of here quite quickly I imagine -- despite all of this data, government hearings arou…
Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds? If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as pos…
There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:
1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)
2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.
3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home
4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)
---
They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.
Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here’s a thought for you. What percentage of the population wants to be mathematically literate given the amount of effort needed to gain that literacy? In my 30 years of teaching math at the college level the anecdotal evidence I have is that this number is quite low. Why do you think the number of mathematically literate people should be significantly higher than what it is? What methods of teaching will work for t…
You are doing a terrible job at teaching math. but hey, you got your cushy guv-job so who cares about the next generation?