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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Human nature, and the rate of learning.

I agree without change - but going to postulate a question:

Let's say I believe it is my destiny to make sure all humanity evolves to become enlightened and reach the next rung?

Let's also say a constraint is I disbelieve in humanity as an entire collective body can reach enlightenment by itself - and therefore must be pulled, due to human base desires.

Knowing this, how can I accomplish it? I have theories, but I don't want to pre-form the suggested solutions.

Get LSD legalized and form a religion around ritualized use of it.

That is definitely something I hadn't considered ;)

Spend a few evenings learning about what Timothy Leary and Friends were trying to do.

When I listened to Sasha Shulgin (Discovered many of the known psychedelic substances) speak, he believed that psychedelic substances should be used within the realm of something like a religion or a similar societal traditions.

I wonder about the latter. It's known that high quality, one-on-one teaching can greatly improve learning speed. Could near future generation AI learn to be a teacher on par with the best human ones?

no but current LLM can already almost give 1:1 support and differentiated assistance based on how the student comes.

I'm in edtech building this.

it's like having 1 teacher with 25 assistants.

I imagine that the problem with getting LLMs to do it is 1)hallucination and 2)a lack of training examples of teaching through text. We rarely teach purely through text messages, I think this might explain why LLMs almost never ask clarifying questions or use the Socratic method. But it might be possible to RLHF it into doing that. Can you say something about what your approach is?

Even better abstractions have already radically improved the rate of learning. Try learning math by medieval books written before modern notation: the most basic, middle school things like trigonometry will look like arcane mysteries.

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