I'm wondering if you might think about pilots or creating models. In particular, I'm thinking about how design thinking can create more opportunities for communities to experience deliberative democracy. That's the work that I do, and I'm about to start a project in NYC that focuses on creating an admissions policy that will result in more diverse middle schools. It involves research, but it also puts forth, or we hope it will, a model that other districts can tweak and try out. Here's an example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIRkVZDILzM
Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
481–490 of 545 posts
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe education will find a natural middle-ground. In many instances the benefit of having an in-person instructor has much to do with the social interaction/interpersonal support that they can give to a struggling/minimally motivated student. That said, motivated learners don't always need that kind of personal interaction and would benefit from self-guided learning opportunities. This is obvious, but is hard to…
^ That sounds viable. I want to point out though, that I hope this doesn't mean states will stop trying to get more schools closer to people, or more teachers trained. As good as one-to-one, "personalised" instruction can be, students gain a lot from learning and working together with other students in a classroom. Tech should be a tool, and not a replacement for teachers IMHO.
Absolutely - and I make these suggestions as a high school teacher. I also have downriver concerns about mass, compulsory data collection on the cognitive development of our youth (though that is not a concern exclusive to education).
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model. Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that costs a cou…
It's teachers that are not remotely viable in the developing world. I read recently that the teacher failure rate in Maharashtra is about 15% - i.e., on a given day, 15% of Maharashtrian teachers just don't show up to work, and there is a famous case of an MP teacher who's been absent for 23 years. [1] Further, even if the teacher shows up, the student may not be able to. Consider the "town" in this pic: https://imgu…
Education is about much more than just a transmission of knowledge, however. IMHO efforts are better spent training better teachers, than making and buying more devices.
A good teacher will inspire kids, will get them to work together, will be a person to go to. I do believe in the motivation of students, but sometimes you need someone to spark that motivation in the first place.
There will always be bad teachers, and outrageous stories about them making way around the internet. You hear about good teachers much less often, but their impact in a community can be much, much greater. Teachers are viable; they worked for the developed world, back when they still weren't "the developed world".
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Academic publishing is obsolete To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we…
Can we add some nuance here? It is not like in the last few decades there has been no new knowledge generated. Just in my own field of biology, the amount of progress we have made in understanding how cells regulate themselves (20 year ago we were still teaching DNA->RNA->PROTEINS that do stuff), how immune systems function and can be used (stem cell therapy, cancer treatments, HIV drugs) and the flow of genetic info…
I agree -- we're making great progress. Science IS working. My point is really just that since the advent of the internet, we've had the potential of making progress much faster.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#485YC Research should fund research on synthetic consciousness based on human models of consciousness. Consciousness research is still un-mainstream enough that there's a common perception that no one has any idea how consciousness works or even what it is, even though we actually know quite a bit: In particular, the dynamic thalamic core theory of conscious experience (Google it, the author-posted paper requests you do…
Since I was old enough to understand neural networs idea, I imagined and I was sure that one day we will build an artificial brain, at first with less sub-components (brain areas) and then with more if not all that we know about with their functions. At that time the only thing I thought stops us from doing it is the computing power. In the meantime we grew enormously our computing power AND we invented the deep lear…
It depends on how you model the neurons/networks in the brain. For example, if you do it this way: http://www.nature.com/news/fragment-of-rat-brain-simulated-i... then you'll need a lot more computing power, as they do. But they are aiming to eventually build an artificial brain as you describe.
If you just want to create an artificial thalamus (probably connected to deep learning-like layers, since those are loosely based on the layers of the cerebral cortex), you can start much smaller: https://books.google.com/books?id=VTduCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1159&lpg...
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no reason to care about "potential trillions of descendants" who don't exist, nor is there any reason to maximize the amount of humans in the universe, etc. The "existential risk" talk tends to assume , to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist, unless existential risks "destroy" it "in embryo" in our near-term fut…
The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist... Can you cite such a person? I've read quite a few folks concerned with existential risk, and never saw this assumption before.
I was under the impression it came from Nick Bostrom. And other than some assumption or some Bostromian thought-experiment, where in the world did the phrase "trillions of descendants" even come from?
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Academic publishing is obsolete To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we…
I agree completely about the system being broken and that innovation would be fantastic (I wrote a few paragraphs below, but in a very different direction). I'll take a close look at Thinklab, and it'd be great to see a dialogue forming here.
Great! I read your comments and have to admit I'm unfamiliar with what a "collaborative atlas" is or would be? But I certainly agree it's a big problem that scientists are only rewarded for publishing papers. There needs to be a way to reward scientists for sharing in smaller chunks -- even just an idea that might help out a peer.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Academic publishing is obsolete To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we…
>The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. Okay, can you elaborate on why?
Yes. I mean broken in the sense that the incentives of individual scientists are not aligned with what's in the best interests of science a as a whole. It's the reason scientists hoard knowledge and work in silos instead of sharing their work openly while collaborating over the internet. I've written more here: http://thinklab.com/blog/10-consequences-of-a-broken-scienti...
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
My startup, Thinklab, is trying fix the incentives. The concept is to partner with science funders and help them distribute their money in a way that rewards scientists for openly sharing their work in real-time while collaborating with each other over the Internet. The first simple step is requiring researchers to openly post their proposals in order to get funding. A portion of funding is then set aside to reward v…
I think that's cool and could lead to more collaboration/others also being able to easily reproduce experiments too (assuming the tool for them collaborating over the internet is really good and they want to use it). The tricky part is that the current system may act as a filter where the best people will still try to hide their methods and get into the existing Journals because it's best for their career - so you'll…
> The tricky part is that the current system may act as a filter where the best people will still try to hide their methods and get into the existing Journals because it's best for their career - so you'll get lower quality requests for funding.
Yes you could be right about that. It's possible that in the short term an individual funder could see a drop in the quality of applicants -- but I think this will be offset by massive increase in overall impact. I think science funders underestimate how much power they have to compel change.
Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?
#490A research on how to unwind grudges after long term conflicts. Specially for large scale conflicts (as opposed to personal conflicts). A notorious example would be the Arab, Iraeli conflict. That is a conflict that affects me personally, and i ve always been worried about how, even if official peace treaties are signed, will the people get over the hate, fear of the other, the feeling of not having been vidicated. And the effect of such feeling on the peace.
A case that has always fascinated me is the german european relations post ww2, same for nippon-us relations, how did these pull it off?
Finding out the hows, and whys, can greatly help in improving global well being.