Comment by naet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naet | Hacker News Reader

I've written about this before but I think this is mainly a symptom of the modern education system being based around a perverted incentive system.

College students don't take classes to learn; they take classes as part of a transaction to earn grades, a form of capital that is eventually exchanged for a degree. In many cases actual passion about learning might hurt your grade if you spend effort outside the transactional scaffold and study extra topics or make personal projects. The assignments themselves are reduced to formulaic checklists that can be graded by an unskilled intern or TA, where essays with a topic sentence, three body paragraphs, and minimal grammatic errors are given full marks even if they're just academic drivel (or more or less bullshit).

So of course students end up cheating or checking out and not learning much, just fulfilling requirements until they finish. A student using GPT to do assignments is naturally robbing themselves of any learning opportunities offered by the assignment, but it doesn't matter in this context of grade transaction being valued over actual education.

Maybe if we moved away from traditional grading structures we could better our system around real learning and development.

For a while I had hoped that bootcamp style education might be able to get around some of those issues, but those have largely been warped around job placement statistics and so now teach the bare minimum to fool a recruiter into giving you an interview and maybe an offer.

Yes, and my god would it be nice to finally stop this charade of "school is for learning" meanwhile unanimously everyone goes through the process explicitly to land a job, all the while the curriculum gets centered around application in jobs.

We need separate systems, one for actually learning without financial pressure, and one for joining the workforce - before anyone brings up College/Uni as the solution, they can be if transformed but as of right now there are too many in Uni doing so to get a job.

When you have a system organized around the morality of work and not working ostracizes you from society, health care, shelter, food security, etc, what do you expect?

My wish is the next 20 years brings a post scarcity society where wage slaving for a corporation so your family doesn’t die if they get cancer isn’t so much a moral imperative.

Post-scarcity will never happen, we live on a finite planet, and that's why mass industry is as much of a problem as Capitalism. We need to divorce from the idea that more production is inherently better than less production.

Post scarcity has more to do with divorcing labor from production than producing unlimited amounts of widgets. A basic living, often proposed as basic income, is therefore available to all without everyone fully employed. Our work morality that equates labor with godliness will make this morally hard to accept, but I dream someday art can be a labor of its own merit, or even building realms in Minecraft. I don’t frankly see what’s intrinsically superior to laboring at McDonalds or as an accountant for some globo corporation over playing video games all day. But most people believe breaking your soul in a cubicle is somehow morally superior.

> Post scarcity has more to do with divorcing labor from production

For almost everything, we’re there. Especially when it comes to food production. There’s still some employment to be had, but precious little when compared with the number of people who can be fed by that limited labor.

For most of our basic needs, this holds true. Yet, the economy demands our labor, arguably hallucinating jobs into existence to meet those demands.

I agree. Realistically housing, medical care, and a few other basic necessities aren’t there. And farming the way we do is blasting the earth. We still have a way to go. But the nobility of exploitation and a life of pointless toil will likely persist without some serious dislocations in society. It’s possible AI will bring those about. But as a society we don’t let go of our prisons easily.

We are expanding beyond Earth though. the universe is more than plenty, at least for the next few thousand years.

> College students don't take classes to learn; they take classes as part of a transaction to earn grades

I am really grateful that I was in a position where I was able to go to college to learn. My parents allowed me to live at home rent free for 3 1/2 years while I worked a full time job on 3rd shift. I took 2 classes a semester and I didn't go into any of the schools degree programs. I paid mostly out of pocket and took whatever classes I thought would be useful. I took almost every CS class, a UX class, a few graphic design classes, some business law, project management, and an accounting class. My advisor was always seemed really concerned I wasn't working towards any particular degree. I never looked at my grades and never stressed about passing any exams because they didn't matter to me. All I wanted was to pull as much knowledge as I could out of a class.

Goodhart's Law back at it again. Though there might be something just adjacent that I'm not familiar with. Sure seems like we're asking "how do we measure the success of this process?" and we keep going "money".

All this does is underscore for me is how many careers that require a college degree are going to soon be made obsolete by technology. As my grandchildren grow older into secondary school ages, this grandfather is going to be extolling the virtues of vocational trade schools.

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