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Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

reuters.com

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Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#571

Post by somenameforme »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #557
somenameforme wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just ignoring the flimsy SAT metric, there's something most aren't considering in these sort of data. Cell phones enable and are fairly widely used for all sorts of cheating. Banning them gets rid of that, and so if there was no positive effect from a phone ban you'd actually probably expect a slight decrease on scores because of this effect. So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing m…

A "million times better," or 0.9 percentiles better? You have no idea. Of course I don't want kids to be distracted in school. I just think that if things were as easy as a ban, or some other kind of coercion, education would be easy.

You don't need to quantify things like socialization and real life interaction to know it's vastly better than not, and that's not even touching on the academic side of things where you are seeing clear quantifiable differences. Ultimately, education is easy. A century+ ago this [1] was a college admittance exam, which students were expected to be able to pass, and the overwhelming majority did.

It's not like we're making incremental progress over time. Education has become a dumpster fire, and it's getting worse. The solution is simple - stop changing stuff, and just go back to classical education methods that did work, phenomenally. Tech is clearly having detrimental effects on education, so get rid of it in the classroom. Starting with phones there is a mind bogglingly obvious low bar.

[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#572

Post by QuesnayJr »

theptip wrote: post #563
mike_hock wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask a question. > Ask two follow-up questions. > Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question. > Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction." Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."

I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit: _used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than…

FWIW, I liked the way you expressed it through a dichotomy.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#573

Post by bebe83939 »

bborud wrote: post #540
bebe83939 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or English I never said english, just Norwegian. Many people are fine with english only education, but goverment will still demand Norwegian lessons. > we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn No, you need AI so kids who do not speak Norwegian, can learn to read and write. It is more important than forcing them into Norwegian first. AI also comes to spotlight with homeschooling. > else chil…

You offer no concrete explanation of how AI will magically remove the language barrier. Have you ever taught a class? How, in practice would you make language go away? In concrete terms. Exactly how do you envision interaction between teacher and student and between students happening? Again, in plain practical terms that can be implemented easily? Teaching isn’t just about delivering a monologue. Even at university…

> Exactly how do you envision interaction between teacher and student

Some sort of teacher avatar. Works great for teaching english in china. And we had this during covid. I can write one in a weekend, easy.

> between students happening?

How about playing football or other physical activities?

> Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people

It is demanding only because single teacher has to manage 20 kids. With individual tutor, kids can teach much faster, and have more for socializing.

> how AI will magically remove the language barrier

I dated a girl via google translate, worked pretty well.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#574

Post by somenameforme »

dpkirchner wrote: post #552
somenameforme wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently de…

In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet. Without an enforcement mechanism that…

Sites don't require phone numbers because of any sort of law or regulation. They started requiring them on their own, likely in an effort to amplify their tracking efforts by being able to a high confidence unique identifier to an account which can be paired and cross-referenced with data from other sources to create ever more detailed and invasive profiles of people. Privacy with anything involving companies like Facebook or Google is just nonexistent. And people are fine with this, until there's actually a motivation that isn't outright dystopic.

The companies that would be punished in this case would be Google/Facebook/etc if found to be willingly complicit in enabling fraudulent underage access. And the poetic thing about this is that this is where their endless datamining comes back to bite them square in the ass. That'll be day 1 discovery in the lawsuits, because Google/Facebook/etc already know full well who's e.g. under 14, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#575

Post by solid_fuel »

ndriscoll wrote: post #252
solid_fuel wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sycophancy is just one aspect of the problems I mentioned, though. Another huge one is hallucination, and one that is actually far worse than I thought: > It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer. DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params, 49B active, 44 AA Intelligence Index score) has a ludicrous 94% hallucination score on the A…

Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and it will often create experiments on the fly unprompted (well, prompted, but generically in AGENTS.MD) to check itself. My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers. The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.

> Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and … My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers.

Yes I am certain that it feels that way. However empirical testing holds a lot more weight than anecdotes.

> The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.

The entire danger here is that it hallucinates when you don’t know the ground facts. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#577

Post by logicchains »

somenameforme wrote: post #420
dpkirchner wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also? It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.) T…

In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently de…

>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.

By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#578

Post by [deleted] »

tgv wrote: post #504
0xpgm wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without increasing educator workload substantially Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools? Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.

That used to be the case, but it no longer is. Not only are budgets limited, only a few choose for a career in education, leaving schools already understaffed. Expansion is not feasible in the short run.

[deleted]

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#579

Post by logicchains »

intended wrote: post #499
joe_mamba wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles. In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.

> Even if the Finns don't need it, research suggests it makes a positive difference. Prof Susan Hallam from the Institute of Education says there is "hard evidence" that homework really does improve how well pupils achieve. "There is no question about that," she says. A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve fi…

>A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework

It didn't control for why they were doing the homework. I'd bet if you did a study comparing two cohorts of students with identical social-economic status and IQ, you wouldn't see a significant difference.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#580

Post by simonw »

kubb wrote: post #566
simonw wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good catch. It looks like that 28% figure is specifically Level 1 or below in English literacy , which makes that number a whole lot less interesting for evaluating education levels. I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.

Do you care about trends? Like an increase from 19% to 28% between 2017 and 2023?

Sure, but if that trend turns out to be an increase in non-English speakers it tells us less about the state of literacy, which is the thing I'm interested in here.
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