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> Aligning digital teachers with our broken education system that thinks “answers” are the important part of education is a terrible terrible idea.

Your position is inherently incorrect and a conflation of what you think is being done.

Being provided the answer might be a decent method to learning X concept. But the answer is ALWAYS downwind of the techniques, which you are actually being taught every step of the way, in every single teaching system. If you learned+mastered the technique or concept, getting to the answer is just proving it with those things, and mostly mechanical while you write down the steps.

How would you solve a problem that no one has ever touched before, and that no one knows the answer to? Where are you going to be provided the answer?

But if you are provided the answer, you can work backwards to figure out the technique. There is a large contingent here on HN that learned electronics by taking things apart, not by reading linearly through textbooks.

I'd say test your theory, breaking electronics apart need only be a test to reverse the order in which you took them apart. That is only about as good as a memory test.

Test your theory on something that requires quite a few years of intuition building and understanding.

From my days as an MLE: Why does stochastic gradient descent, work?

From that question, you know the answer - it works! Great, now why should I believe you? I.e, prove it.

The knowledge to answer that question only really requires some understanding of stochastic processes, randomness, and vector calculus. But you would be pressed to get an answer like I did out of numerous people who did ML research and put things into all the types of conferences, and these people were not dumb at all, yet all of them used SGD in some form without really getting into why it works, effectively they do not get the tools they're using.

Reverse-engineering the technique from the answer is a different skill from creating the answer though. The latter requires more creativity, the former is deduction.

> How would you solve a problem that no one has ever touched before, and that no one knows the answer to? Where are you going to be provided the answer?

This is very near and dear to my heart.

We are talking about “teaching” and I doubt anyone who supports the current education status quo is advocating to teach using unsolved problems.

That said, I do feel, personally, and have long advocated for, teaching using unsolved problems as a better technique, because you learn strategies for approaching a problem much better than: here’s theorem 13.4 heres an exercise problem that uses the theorem, what’s the answer?

It reads like you see my opinions are black and white and yours as spectra.

Using your own reading on your own comment the logical conclusion is “a system that teaches to an answer will be unable to answer unanswered questions because the students were only taught to answer questions that already have answers.”

A great example of the answer being the most useless part of one’s own personal knowledge is Timothy Gowers YouTube content:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=byjhpzEoXFs

But who’s cares what some YouTuber is up to? He’s just out here promoting an inherently incorrect education method wrought from a dysfunctional mind.

> It reads like you see my opinions are black and white and yours as spectra.

No, we're talking past each other.

Your claim is the current system is "broken" because you think teachers believe the "answer" is the ultimate goal. I refute that. The teacher does not believe the "answer" is the ultimate goal, they are teaching you techniques on how to solve problems, and the answer is the standard upon which you are being measured in correctness.

This is why "show your work" exists, your steps to get to the end (the answer) is employing the techniques, they measure how effective you are at getting there. The best teachers even mark you down if you make a mistake somewhere, but still get the right answer without proving it fully.

Hilarious, given how many real world problems start with the "answer" and the actual question is "how do we get there?".

I hope you are not an education professional with a view that narrow-minded.

Find me an "education professional" that disagrees with me, and we'll work on getting their teaching credentials revoked ASAP.

I feel for you, but I would humbly suggest trying to get to the root of this. In all sincerity, therapy is good for this sort of thing. I have similar desires, but I have come to understand them as quite dysfunctional, and not something that should be catered to by the system around me.

Because the real/natural world doesn't work that way. it's very ill-adapted to real life learning. Only in a constructed and false environment can anyone give us the answer to help us learn. The point of learning is not just the acquisition of information, but also to learn how to acquire future information. Leaning into your current tactics (and advocating ppl be supported to learn this way) will leave the learner very ill-equipped to learn in the real world and real jobs, where no one has the answer to give. Learning to thrive (or at least cope) in that situation, that's important

> I would try to get to the root of this.

I guess you could amend the old adage to “on the internet everyone thinks you’re a dog”.

I am decades removed from advanced university degrees.

I am saying how I, as in me, learn best, and acknowledging that it’s different.

My point was why restrict a “generalist engine” to only teach one specific way.

All the old restrictions that pander to: this is how the text book is written, there is only one teacher and 30 students; are baggage and should be discarded in their absence.

I made my educational intentions clear:

> That quote should have read ~“the agent has been designed to work tirelessly to do anything to ensure the student understands the material well enough to wield it”

But I do like and agree with one point you made:

> but also to learn how to acquire future information.

What’s the student learning in regard to acquire future information? To hope some megacorp will steal all of humanity’s creative output to build an llm to teach it to them?

Hm. Y'know what... I regret my comment. It felt ungenerous and obnoxious to write, and I tried to change the tone in edits, but it still feels gross.

Maybe just consider my comment self-talk. I guess your comment hit a nerve with familiarity, and I ended up talking to myself more than speaking to you. I apologize for that. And thanks for the original sincere comment. I'm sure others have seen it and at least some of them felt a little less alone in the weird world of our own brains <3

>> Because the real/natural world doesn't work that way. it's very ill-adapted to real life learning.

Actually, the real/natural world is perfectly adapted to real life learning.

Which is why science was formed shortly after people become intelligent...

> but I understand them as quite dysfunctional, and not something that should be catered to

I'd be happier to accept this if you'd explain why it's dysfunctional.

Maybe my rationale was just unconvincing to you (and I respect that), but I said it in the next paragraph. If you felt inclined to offer what's unconvincing about that, I'm open-minded about changing my perspective, or maybe I can better articulate beyond those words

EDIT: I realize maybe I prematurely submitted and it was just the first paragraph for a minute. It was all one thought, so apologies if that's what happened

Thank you, but I did see the whole answer (the second paragraph) when I responded. I sort of know what you're saying about not spoon feeding people, but learning happens best for a person according to that person, and working backwards from an answer can be as illuminating for me as it was for the other guy (and it can be illuminating for the wrong reason – revealing that it was a poor question in the first place).

I don't think you can be prescriptive about how people should learn. In the end we'll have to be able to operate without someone giving us the answers, but in the beginning however we get the learning process we need, that's all that counts.

This is a nonsensical statement produced by a chat bot. There are no invalid ways of learning.

There are 100% at least some ways of learning that ill prepare us for the world we're eventually going to be thrown into

I mean, we're talking "learning". Even negative reinforcement and beatings are a way that was a "learning style" at one point, that ppl defended as "worked for me". "Every way of learning is fine" is not a sensible way to enter the conversation about education

umm, "Even negative reinforcement and beatings are a way that was a "learning style" at one point" is a teaching style, not a learning style.

Getting the answer and working backwards teaches you to use what others have created within very narrow guide rails. Figuring out the answer for yourself (with some minimal guidance) teaches you to create new things. We should strive for the latter.

Getting the answer and working backwards teaches you to use what others have created in novel ways to find new solutions to old problems. Figuring out the answer for yourself (with some minimal guidance) teaches you toy problems with answers have answers. We should strive for the former.

Cute, but wrong.

I think some textbooks are really just written that badly.