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Comment by kang | Hacker News Reader

> Scale isn’t bad, at least not necessarily. Industrial is perfectly capable of being better than custom. Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor.

This is not true; consider the argument that there is always a loss of quality in scaling. Industrial maybe better than average custom, but is always worse than best customs. Broadcast lecture is almost always worse than a tutor whose discourse is customised to student's current knowledge. (The word guru (literally, one who leads towards light) is wrongly translated to teacher, for which the word in sanskrit is shikshak.)

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I agree the average tutor is better than the average lecturer. But if I watch a YouTube lecture, then I might have access to the best lecturer in the world, or at least a 99%ile lecturer, e.g 3blue1brown. This only works because of the scale -- it wouldn't be possible for millions to get access to tutors this good 1 on 1.

but can you argue with them for an indeterminate period of time in earnest dialogue until the idea goes CLICK inside your head? You cannot, and so the value is much lessened because that critical access isn’t present.

You can’t do that for the average lecturer either… assuming it’s a normal college lecture room with hundreds of students.

Nonetheless the 99th percentile lecturer is still better than the 50th percentile tutor in most cases.

Do you always need that kind of prolonged argument whenever you learn a new concept?

> Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor.

University lectures work like that. First the general lecture, which has 300 students and is not interactive. Then the tutorial, where students who want extra help can consult individually with a TA. Attendance for tutorials was typically much lower in my experience, because a lot of students thought the lecture was plenty and wanted to spend the time on something else.

Except the argument is university lecture (classroom structure) doesn't work. A personal tutor might be able to teach a concept to all their students, whereas not everyone in a classroom passes. Your argument about sufficiency can be made about books and is not relevant here.

> A personal tutor might be able to teach a concept to all their students, whereas not everyone in a classroom passes.

Why are you convinced that personal tutors are so much more effective? I'd expect the average student to be slightly better-served by having a personal tutor, but not by much. After all, personal guidance is available from TAs when necessary—my point is that it typically isn't necessary.

I don’t think that holds for everything. Industrial 3nm chips are probably better than whatever you would get if people tried to DIY this. Lots of things get better with scale: materials, precision machinery, process efficiency, power generation.

But there’s also plenty of things that don’t work this way. Care is one of the most extreme things that does not.

I think the argument is that someone with the knowledge to make 3nm chips could probably know how to make some very cool yet very expensive chips, but since they target a lot of people they probably make choices that would satisfy more people but maybe not as well

for eg, asic custom designed for an application is better than a generalised industrial chip

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