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Comment by jumploops | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but I think AI has the potential to supercharge learning for the students of the future.

Similar to Montessori, LLMs can help students who wander off in various directions.

I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.

Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious…

My hope is that, with new teaching methods/styles, we can unlock (or just maintain!) the curiosity inherent in every pupil.

(If anyone knows of a tool like this, where an LLM stays on a high-level trajectory of e.g. teaching trigonometry, but allows off-shoots/adventures into other topical nodes, I’d love to know about it!)

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>>> Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious

I think you hit on a major issue: Homework-heavy. What I think would benefit the truly curious is spare time. These things are at odds with one another. Present-day busy work could easily be replaced by occupying kids' attention with continual lessons that require a large quantity of low-quality engagement with the LLM. Or an addictive dopamine reward system that also rewards shallow engagement -- like social media.

I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.

And there's something else I think might be missing, which is effort. For me, music and electronics were not easy. There was no exam, but I could measure my own progress -- either the circuit worked or it didn't. Without some kind of "external reference" I'm not sure that in-depth research through LLMs will result in any true understanding. I'm a physicist, and I've known a lot of people who believe that they understand physics because they read a bunch of popular books about it. "I finally understand quantum mechanics."

> I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.

I see both sides of this. When I was a teenager, I went to a pretty bad middle school where there were fights everyday, and I wasn’t learning anything from the easy homework. On the upside, I had tons of free time to teach myself how to make websites and get into all kinds of trouble botting my favorite online games.

My learning always hit a wall though because I wasn’t able to learn programming on my own. I eventually asked my parents to send me to a school that had a lot more structure (and a lot more homework), and then I properly learned math and logic and programming from first principles. The upside: I could code. The downside: there was no free time to apply this knowledge to anything fun

>I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.

Yeah I feel like teachers are going to try and use LLMs as an excuse to push more of the burden of schooling to their pupils homelife somehow. Like, increasing homework burdens to compensate.

Spare time, haha, most people nowadays have a hard time having some dead time. The habitual checking of socials or feeds has killed the mind wandering time. People feel uncomfortable or consiser life boring with the device induced dopamine fix. Corporations got us by the balls.

The last thing I need when researching a hard problem is an interlocutor who might lie to me, make up convincing citations to nowhere, and tell me more or less what I want to hear.

Still better than the typical classroom experience. And you can always ask again, there's no need to avoid offending the person who has a lot of power over you.

Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years.

Edutech is pretty new and virtually all of it has been a disaster. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes on paper is tried, tested, and research backed. It works. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people.

> Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years

"Typical classroom experience" hasn't even meant the same thing for thousands of years.

"lecture" used to be centered around reading the source book so that students could copy it verbatim. The printing press was an important piece of "Edutech". Technology has been continuous, and much of it has been applied to impacted the experience of education, not just in the last few years, but over a long window of history. Yeah, what we currently think of as "edutech" is what has been around for only a short time, and hasn't yet been established as part of the consensus baseline -- but that's a moving target.

And it still varies a lot. There are large lectures, small lectures, labs, seminars, largely project courses, etc. Varies by subject matter of course. You probably won't have labs in an English class but you may well have a big project of some sort.

Talk is cheap; if you want to see what people really believe, ignore what they claim and look at what they actually do. And when you do that, you see that people generally don't find typical college classes to be worth it outside of the credentials they give. Almost no one with a CS degree goes back to college to take a college algorithm course when they want to get better at algorithms; they study on their own. You can look at plenty of the HN discussions about "how do I learn X" or "how do I get better at X"; almost none of the suggestions are "go to your local university and audit some classes."

The issues with Edutech are mostly because they're bolting it on to the same broken system that people don't find value in. But the original comment wasn't about Edutech. When people want to learn new things, they largely do it without either typical college classrooms or Edutech, because the alternatives are so much better than anything coming out of the broken academic morass.

Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own.

And not due to a lack of information. The draw of education hasn't been access, not since the internet anyway. Structure, pacing, curriculum, schedule, and measurement cannot be recreated.

I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost all of them fail.

At the end of the day, we go home and we don't crack open a textbook. We sit and watch TV. Maybe we go for a walk or go to the gym. The vast majority of people do not have the mindset required to be self-educated.

We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most people couldn't read or write. Humans are unintuitive. You can't just give them access to things and expect results. They require accountability, they require structure. We're not machines, we're faulty fleshy creatures. Our reward feedback loops were never built for self-determination at this high of a level.

> We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most people couldn't read or write.

Do you regard that as intrinsically problematic? The people themselves weren't unhappy about their state, and society, too, could function well without mass literacy. There was a certain period where we thought training wage workers for their duties required them to be literate, but that might turn out to be unnecessary, if supplying an LLM is cheaper overall than mandatory school education.

Yes, because it's hostile to democracy and freedom as whole. Even if we could let everyone not read and write and use LLMs, this is just asking for trouble. Reading and writing is precursor for other skills, in fact, just about every skill.

This includes analysis, critical thinking, skepticism, morality, you name it. Without literacy, people are easy to manipulate. It won't happen immediately, but it won't be long until we revert to a world state where organizations like the Catholic Church control everything and order around millions of people to kill each other.

> Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own.

That's not true though? Many people are trying to increase their CS skills through self-study. This topic even comes up a lot here, with people recommending the self-studying they've been doing in CS.

> I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost all of them fail.

Yet there are still a large number of self-taught programmers.

Of course, more people will have an incentive to learn through the university system than through self-education, but that's because the current system says that you only get the highest level credentials if you go through a university education. Naturally, a system that explicitly biases a certain form of education to a large degree is going to cause more people to do that. But that's for the credential, not the education. When the credentials are taken out, we see people do better with other forms of education.

Mooc completion rates hovered at single degree percents.

The vast majority of people do not complete.

The people who do complete are outliers. I suppose we can build for outliers, but then most people are just going to be ignored in this system, and if they have way to respond (vote), they won’t be happy about it.

Most academic education is already built for outliers. Courses are designed around building up to the next generation of professors. Most knowledge that's taught in university is unused, basically wasted education for 99% of the "person-facts" that are picked up by the class.

This isn't true, education as a whole is built for the majority of people. If we look at K-12 it's explicitly built to work best for the neuro-typical child with a normal household. Outliers struggle, and they need other systems to catch them, like special education.

> basically wasted education

People say this but they don't understand how learning things works. Learning is inherently cummulative, everything builds off of everything else. We can't skip steps because then there will be holes. It's a big Jenga tower, and you're essentially advocating taking pieces out willy nilly because you don't think they're important.

Even coding, if you look at it, relies on English. English language arts and computer science are, in a lot of people's minds, completely opposite each other in the sphere of education. But they're actually not - because coding is a subset of the English language. Even naming variables, the people best at it are also the people who are good at conveying meaning in an essay. Because it's the same problem: conveying to an audience your intention as concisely, yet clearly, as possible.

Some relationships are obvious, like you can't learn calculus without algebra without arithmetic. But most are non-obvious.

Sure, but regardless of what the better way to learn is, a large part of the purpose of a degree is to demonstrate to potential employers that you have a certain proficiency in a field. Universities stake their reputation and accreditation on being able to measure that proficiency. We've spent thousands of years figuring out how to do that in various ways. Maybe some day it will be easy to do that for course loads that heavily utilize LLMs, but I don't think we're quite at that point yet. Certainly they have value in assisting with learning, but it's important to defend the old methods until we get there.

Actually, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Amos_Comenius in 17th century much of education was route memorization.

Then it was corporal punishment if you did not learn quickly enough.

Comenius idea was of pansophia - knowledge for all. Also his Latin textbook - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janua_Linguarum_Reserata was quite revolutionary - in using relations to real world knowledge to learn a new language.

Even more ground breaking was his picture book for children - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbis_Pictus . We take hybrid approach to learning for granted these days.

Even then Comenius was mostly forgotten in the enlightenment of 18th century - probably ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau took over - with insufficient backing.

Education is bound to culture and life in general. We just can't imagine nowadays how fatalistic and submissive to god and authority people's world view was before protestants in medieval Europe. An education bound to memorization and pretty violent culture helped to mould the people society needed at the time. But it wasn't always like that. There were quite different views to learning in ancient Greek, during golden age of islam etc.

The longer I go without seeing cases of ai supercharging learning, the more suspicious I get that it just won’t. And no, self reports that it makes internet denizens feel super educated, don’t count.

Wasn't this the promise of MOOCs in the 2010s?

The problem is that many students come to university unequipped with the discipline it takes to actually study. Teaching students how to effectively learn is a side-effect of university education.

Yes, I think curiosity dies well before university for most students.

The specific examples I recall most vividly were from 4th grade and 7th grade.

> I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth.

This resonates with me a lot. I used to dismiss AI as useless hogwash, but have recently done a near total 180 as I realised it's quite useful for exploratory learning.

Not sure about others but a lot of my learning comes from comparison of a concept with other related concepts. Reading definitions off a page usually doesn't do it for me. I really need to dig to the heart of my understanding and challenge my assumptions, which is easiest done talking to someone. (You can't usually google "why does X do Y and not Z when ABC" and then spin off from that onto the next train of reasoning).

Hence ChatGPT is surprisingly useful. Even if it's wrong some of the time. With a combination of my baseline knowledge, logic, cross referencing, and experimentation, it becomes useful enough to advance my understanding. I'm not asking ChatGPT to solve my problem, more like I'm getting it to bounce off my thoughts until I discover a direction where I can solve my problem.

Indeed. I never really used AI until recently but now I use it sometimes as a smarter search engine that can give me abstracts.

Eg. it's easy to ask copilot: can you give me a list of free, open source mqtt brokers and give me some statistics in the form of a table

And copilot (or any other ai) does this quite nicely. This is not something that you can ask a traditional search engine.

Offcourse you do need to know enough of the underlying material and double check what output you get for when the AI is hallucinating.

I am building such an AI tutoring experience, focusing on a Socratic style with product support for forking conversations onto tangents. Happy to add you to the waitlist, will probably publish an MVP in a few weeks.

Do you have capacity for more developers? I’ve been wanting to help make this for a long time

I haven’t personally tried it, but the high-level demos of “khanmigo” created by khan academy seem really promising. I’ll always have a special place in my heart (and brain) for the work of Sal Khan and the folks at khan academy.

yeah this is a good point, just adjust coursework from multiple choice tests and fill in the blank homework to larger scale projects.

Putting together a project using the AI help will be a very close mimicry of what real work will be like and if the teacher is good they will learn way more than being able to spout information from memory.

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