Comment by alexashka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexashka | Hacker News Reader

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The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim?

This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess.

Education is not in trouble - the economic model that makes it difficult to go study, learn and get to apply that knowledge and those skills to solving real problems is.

Go ask engineers how many of them get to engineer anything. Go ask how many people in science get to work on interesting problems or can even get a job in the area they studied.

We have the smartest people ever, with access to the most information and the best technology of all time, to make incredible things. It's just hard to get to do those things - when the economy is in this frenzy of quarterly profits.

The decision-makers are 'buy for a dollar, sell for two'. Their worldview is incompatible with education, because you don't need education to make profit, you need someone to exploit to make profit. That's the world we've always lived in by the way, this is not new.

The traders sometimes believe some specific technology, would make them incredible profits, so they become interested in education for a minute, and then get busy with everyday business as usual. This is why science has become toxic via the grant system - 'promise a miracle to get money for research.'

I don't see a world where tradesmen relinquish their powerhold - creative people are always going to either be starving artists, with dignity, or shameless shills. Since the idea of starvation only appeals to a few, we have 'desire to learn is scarce.' It's against human nature to choose starvation you know :)

> The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim?

Personally, I have no idea where the best teachers are, but you don't make any attempt to back up your claim.

> This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess.

First of all, the issue is never whether X will completely solve a problem. It's whether it can help, and how much it can help.

If you think about the last 500 years, there is no question that technology has helped make people, on the whole, less short sighted. The improvements it's helped enable in education, in our knowledge of the world, in the dissemination of knowledge. They have made us more aware of others, of consequences, and so forth.

Regarding teachers - it's up to the person making extraordinary claims to provide extraordinary evidence [0]. Even at a glance however - how many grade 1-5 teachers are on the internet at all, let alone best. It's pure statistics to know the claim is highly unlikely.

Thinking the best educators are on the internet is a lot like Americans who believe their country is the best country - it's an extreme form of short-sightedness. See how that fits so nicely into the rest of my post?

Regarding people becoming less short-sighted - I'd say next to nothing has changed. From the point of view of your life now versus 500 years ago, it's great. From the point of view of this planet and it's people as a whole - how many people did we kill among ourselves again in the last 100 years alone?

Didn't we nearly blow up the planet less than 50 years ago? We're far more monkey-brained than people who are smart and only associate with at least somewhat smart people like to believe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

> Regarding teachers - it's up to the person making extraordinary claims to provide extraordinary evidence

You should be telling yourself this, not me.

The other person claimed all the good teachers were online. Yes, we should ask for evidence for this. But did your original comment do that? It didn't.

Instead it made a claim that the good teachers are not on the internet. This is also making a spefific, very broad claim, which we should also ask for evidence for. Which is what I did.

It seems you're under the mistaken impression that the "neutral" stance, that doesn't require evidence is a claim like the one you made, that (if the original person's claim was X) "not X" is true. But the only stance that doesn't require evidence backing it up is the agnostic one of "I don't know where the best teachers are these days".

- The world' a hexagon

- What? No it isn't

- You haven't provided me evidence that it's not, so you can't...

- Um, ok, you're an idiot

That's the world I live in. I don't know about you.

Sorry if this isn't super constructive, but I read your comment twice and don't have the foggiest idea of what you're trying to say. It feels like you're just being contrarian and ranting against, sort of everything?

It's about solutionism, mostly.

"Let's move away from traditional models (which work well most of the time) and digitalise it all! Change the world for the better, oh and make "some" money on the way."

It's a bit cynical but there's some truth in it. This is the mistake that a lot of startups made in the last edtech 'revolution' - hopefully with YC releasing this edtech list, it means that we've become more educated about the education field, to come up with better tech solutions.

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