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Education must go beyond the mere production of words

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Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#91

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"[AI] tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty - it is substitution."

There are lots of HN commenters who dislike formal education. Many of them seem to admire people who dropped out of school but became wealthy without earning a degree, like Zuckerberg, Gates and so on

Greg Brockman of OpenAI is another college dropout

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#92

Post by KiranRao0 »

Retric wrote: post #60
graemep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it. There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject. I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my k…

It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc. The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It…

I agree that memorization is a very useful skill, but I believe it’s over-used in some education systems.

There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.

I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.

Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.

If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#94

Post by lotsofpulp »

graemep wrote: post #89
lotsofpulp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was true. Probably started tilting back the other way after 2008. There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Healthcare is probably the new dependable, decent paying, blue collar work. Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to…

> There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical. We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) b…

>Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work

"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.

Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#95

Post by justonceokay »

hackermailman wrote: post #25
justonceokay wrote: post #3

I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely…

There's a livestream every Tues about house/landscape remodeling I've followed for years to fix my own property https://m.youtube.com/@PerfectGuyLife/streams and they talk about how any good contractor will never run out of work because it's all based on trust and local networking. Eventually these guys go into lumber yard sales because they've built up a huge network of trust that every other builder knows them and…

Yeah. Don’t dream it, be it :)
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