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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for a fraction of the cost of human tuition, potentially bringing about a huge leap in educational attainment. No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.

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>No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.

This is probably the number one thing that excites me about AI. Throughout all of history, when you look back at famous scientists, there's a clearly obvious pattern. Almost without exception they were children of enormous privilege who were given the opportunities to study and be tutored individually throughout their life. Unlocking that for every child on earth is going to accelerate human progress faster than anything else.

You are either being dishonest or you're in for a major disappointment. There's a lot more involved in that "opportunity" than a mechanism for low cost feedback. One's material circumstances predominates their ability to take advantage of such mechanisms, hence why strictly increasing school budgets or teacher quality has never succeeded in significantly improving overall outcomes for children living in poverty. I suppose maybe you have to experience it to grasp the extent to which the havoc and insecurity that living in poverty in brutally individualized Western countries ensures, but it's been shown over and over again that these shortcuts simply don't work. You have to address the poverty itself.

I think ultimately it just comes down to the ability to ask a question. Googling did a lot for this, but LLM agents are on a whole other level. When someone can just endlessly ask questions and have them answered directly and comprehensibly, they can get past that initial stage of confusion in learning much quicker. It used to be you needed a human tutor to do this. But now an AI system can track and manage your knowledge graph and slowly level you up through direct natural language interaction.

That is so incredibly naive. When you and your family is distracted with trauma and turmoil at every turn, there is no precedent for curiosity about anything except how to survive the current state of affairs. This is extremely basic stuff. It's literally just rational prioritization of concerns. If you can't grasp that, you have other problems that aren't being discussed in this discussion.

Children living in poverty will surely use LLMs, but they will continue to lack the capacity for curiosity and intentional learning. They will use LLMs to assist with the same things they invest their energy in without LLMs, which is their immediate life challenges and psychological escapism. And insufferable people like you will blame them when your ignorant plan inevitably fails.

That's one factor. But the way I've learned best, is through stories. My teachers told all sorts of stories, and it made me very engaged in my classes. How can the same be said with AI? How can it make an engaging learning experience?

Even if you want it to, how could it make a very engaging environment when deep down inside you know it's fake?

Why would it be fake? If you can have the LLM reproduce the stories roughly as is:

Student: "Hey LLM, I'm having trouble learning this concept."

LLM: "Here's a real story that a teacher shared with us that will help explain this topic..."

(Later)

LLM: "Remember that story from before? Here's another story from that same teacher to further explain..."

What stories are you guys talking about?

You guys are making it seem like this is a common occurence and I've never heard of anything like this. I've never heard of teachers frequently sharing personalized stories that are also true to help people learn a subject.

In fact, the opposite, most subjects like math or physics have made-up problems to isolate and make simple the concept they're trying to teach. Adding a constraint for realism would just be needlessly complicated.

Also not scalable - if these stories are so effective, why not put them in a book to share with everyone?

The only stories any of my teachers ever shared with me were historical events that were grounded in reality.

Are there just a whole bunch of educational institutions that are teaching things around a campfire and a long-form stories like in ancient times?

Yeah. It's wild isn't it? Surprisingly, there are also subjects outside of math and physics!

> Even if you want it to, how could it make a very engaging environment when deep down inside you know it's fake?

So, like all good fiction from the Iliad and Odyssey to soap operas and Star Trek and wrestling kayfabe?

If anything I expect a problem where AI will become too capable at making things entertaining, such that reality no longer appeals.

Decent? These current LLMs have more knowledge than every teacher on the planet combined. I’m very hopeful to see what finetuned models come out on top of the base gpt4 or lama

But is it just knowledge or is it the human connection that makes a difference?

Students have access to all the information they need on Calculus through Google and other resources, for instance, but actually sitting down with a living, breathing human being and having them help you through your troubles...to me, that cannot be replaced with an AI.

If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter...

> But is it just knowledge or is it the human connection that makes a difference?

Sense of connection, perhaps.

But AI is getting better at faking that. Even ELIZA gave some people the feeling, though I'm not sure how.

> If access to knowledge was all we needed to acquire and maintain intelligence in a specific area, we would all be a lot smarter...

We kinda are though? XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/903/

That's a little like saying Wikipedia has more knowledge than every teacher on the planet combined. It's being able to bring the relevant knowledge to bear on the student's understandings that matters, and that depends not only on the prompts the student provides the teacher/tutor/LLM, but on the teacher/tutor/LLM's understanding of the domain, the student's point on the learning curve, the student's level of frustration and receptivity, how people learn, and probably a dozen things that aren't coded into how LLMs respond.

The “small classes are better” idea has been disproven. You may be right about one-on-one tutoring though.

'Disproven' is too strong, it's trivially true at the extreme edge cases. But smaller class sizes fail to eliminate all the performance gaps between schools, so the idea of class size (and/or school funding) being the explanation for all school performance gaps has been disproven. Particularly, smaller class sizes can't eliminate a performance gap caused by different conditions at home, whether students bully each other for trying to learn, etc.

But there's really no question that a small class where teachers can know each individual student is better than a large class of hundreds of students or more, where the teachers can't realistically remember who is who.

Source? There are teaching methods possible in a small class that just aren’t doable in a large class.

Scott E Page - The Model thinker. He talks about school size rather than class size, my mistake. He says “Failure to take sample size into account and inferring causality from outliers can lead to incorrect policy actions. For this reason, Howard Wainer refers to the formula for the standard deviation of the mean the “most dangerous equation in the world.” For example, in the 1990s the Gates Foundation and other nonprofits advocated breaking up schools into smaller schools based on evidence that the best schools were small. To see the flawed reasoning, imagine that schools come in two sizes—small schools with 100 students and large schools with 1,600 students—and that student scores at both types of schools are drawn from the same distribution with a mean score of 100 and a standard deviation of 80. At small schools, the standard deviation of the mean equals 8 (the standard deviation of the student scores, 80, divided by 10, the square root of the number of students). At large schools, the standard deviation of the mean equals 2. If we assign the label “high-performing” to schools with means above 110 and the label “exceptional” to schools with means above 120, then only small schools will meet either threshold. For the small schools, an average score of 110 is 1.25 standard deviations above the mean; such events occur about 10% of the time. A mean score of 120 is 2.5 standard deviations above the mean; an event of that size should occur about once in 150 schools. When we do these same calculations for large schools, we find that the “high-performing” threshold lies five standard deviations above the mean and the “exceptional” threshold lies ten standard deviations above the mean. Such events would, in practice, never occur. Thus, the fact that the very best schools are small is not evidence that smaller schools perform better. The very best schools will be small even if size has no effect solely because of the square root rules.”

Jesus, no! Not all of my teachers were great, and most of the knowledge I got, I earned on my own. But they were part of a world that had nothing to do with the world of my parents--my teachers were learned, where my immediate family was not. My teachers were, if nothing else, an example to follow, a light, a guide.

>> No longer will private tutors be restricted to the rich only.

It's not as simple. I've met plenty of poor people who leave well-tutored rich folk to bite the dust, and the other way around too. That's neither here nor there. A kid with all the tutors but with parents or an environment that doesn't favor learning, gets nowhere. That I have seen too, more times than I can count. And, let's face it, we have had the Internet for a few decades now, bursting to the seams with free knowledge. What difference will it make an AI system of dubious trustworthiness?

Just ignore the AI hype herd. People who are pulling predictions out of their ass, have never had to deal day to day with the bugs these systems produce. You will never see a single person who works on production AI(not toy ai or research ai) making predictions cuz they are too busy staring at exploding bug lists.

> Jesus, no! Not all of my teachers were great,

this!

AI isn't as good as a great teacher but its better than a bad teacher and there aren't enough good teachers to go around.

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