Strong upvoted, thank you for the serious contribution.
Children spending 300 hours per year learning math, on their own time and via well-designed engaging video-game-like apps (with eg AI tutors, video lectures, collaborating with parents to dispense rewards for performance instead of punishments for visible non-compliance, and results measured via standardized tests), at the fastest possible rate for them (or even one of 5 different paces where fewer than 10% are mistakenly placed into the wrong category) would probably result in vastly superior results among every demographic than the current paradigm of ~30-person classrooms.
in just the last two years I’ve seen an explosion in students who discreetly wear a wireless earbud in one ear and may or may not be listening to music in addition to (or instead of) whatever is happening in class. This is so difficult and awkward to police with girls who have long hair that I wonder if it has actually started to drive hair fashion in an ear-concealing direction.
This isn’t just a problem with the students; the companies themselves end up in equilibria where visibly controversial practices get RLHF’d into being either removed or invisible (or hard for people to put their finger on). For example, hours a day of instant gratification reducing attention spans, except unlike the early 2010s where it became controversial, reducing attention spans in ways too complicated or ambiguous for students and teachers to put their finger on until a random researcher figures it out and makes the tacit explicit. Or another counterintuitive vector could be the democratic process of public opinion turns against schooling, except in a lasting way. Or the results of multiple vectors like these overlapping.
I don’t see how the classroom-based system, dominated entirely by bureaucracies and tradition, could possibly compete with that without visibly being turned into swiss cheese. It might have been clinging on to continued good results from a dwindling proportion of students who were raised to be morally/ideologically in favor of respecting the teacher more than the other students, but that proportion will also decline as schooling loses legitimacy.
Regulation could plausibly halt the trend from most or all angles, but it would have to be the historically unprecedented kind of regulation that’s managed by regulators with historically unprecedented levels of seriousness and conscientiousness towards complex hard-to-predict/measure outcomes.
Children spending 300 hours per year learning math, on their own time and via well-designed engaging video-game-like apps (with eg AI tutors, video lectures, collaborating with parents to dispense rewards for performance instead of punishments for visible non-compliance, and results measured via standardized tests), at the fastest possible rate for them (or even one of 5 different paces where fewer than 10% are mistakenly placed into the wrong category) would probably result in vastly superior results among every demographic than the current paradigm of ~30-person classrooms.
This sounds great.
Googling “math tutor ai” already gives a bunch of competing suggestions. I wonder how well they work though.
Strong upvoted, thank you for the serious contribution.
Children spending 300 hours per year learning math, on their own time and via well-designed engaging video-game-like apps (with eg AI tutors, video lectures, collaborating with parents to dispense rewards for performance instead of punishments for visible non-compliance, and results measured via standardized tests), at the fastest possible rate for them (or even one of 5 different paces where fewer than 10% are mistakenly placed into the wrong category) would probably result in vastly superior results among every demographic than the current paradigm of ~30-person classrooms.
This isn’t just a problem with the students; the companies themselves end up in equilibria where visibly controversial practices get RLHF’d into being either removed or invisible (or hard for people to put their finger on). For example, hours a day of instant gratification reducing attention spans, except unlike the early 2010s where it became controversial, reducing attention spans in ways too complicated or ambiguous for students and teachers to put their finger on until a random researcher figures it out and makes the tacit explicit. Or another counterintuitive vector could be the democratic process of public opinion turns against schooling, except in a lasting way. Or the results of multiple vectors like these overlapping.
I don’t see how the classroom-based system, dominated entirely by bureaucracies and tradition, could possibly compete with that without visibly being turned into swiss cheese. It might have been clinging on to continued good results from a dwindling proportion of students who were raised to be morally/ideologically in favor of respecting the teacher more than the other students, but that proportion will also decline as schooling loses legitimacy.
Regulation could plausibly halt the trend from most or all angles, but it would have to be the historically unprecedented kind of regulation that’s managed by regulators with historically unprecedented levels of seriousness and conscientiousness towards complex hard-to-predict/measure outcomes.
This sounds great.
Googling “math tutor ai” already gives a bunch of competing suggestions. I wonder how well they work though.