Hacker News Reader

Comment by stanford_labrat | Hacker News Reader

Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP, now we see it also being used to blame for the failures of our modern education system.

Mostly which are that our system only rewards one thing in education: the grade. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your GPA) is the single most important thing for every level from middle school to college where it will unironically determine your entire (academic/academic-adjacent) future.

View on HN

IN RESPONSE TO: Just like AI seems like it's being used as a convenient scapegoat for the layoffs and trimming following the end of ZIRP

there are like 4 factors besides ZIRP i've witnessed as a hiring manager

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of H1b/H4

- Layoff or dont hire locals in favor of Nearshore and Offshore

- Section 174 Tax code on software: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

- More productivity via LLMs, Code Assist

    ... our system only rewards one thing in employment: the metric. Not understanding, knowledge, intelligence, but instead a single number that is more easily gamified than anything. And this single number (your metric value) is the single most important thing for every level from junior to principal where it will unironically determine your entire future.

TFTFY

Our modern education system in the US is broken, but acting as if AI is a scapegoat is comical.

Capitalism is what has destroyed higher education in this country. The concept of going to school to get a job isn’t a failure of education but of economics.

AI is just another capitalist tool made to not only extract wealth out of you but something that they want you to rely on more and more so they can charge you even more down the road.

Before college was a means to get a job, it was status signalling for the upper class by showing they could spend 4 years not working and learning things with no economic value that few could afford. There was never a time when a large portion of society went to school past 18 for any reason other than economic or status gain, and why should they?

>and why should they?

Because modern life is radically more complicated than humans can naturally deal with.

Your average peasant for millenia didn't need to understand Information security to avoid getting phished, didn't need to understand compounding interest for things like loans and saving for retirement (they'd just have kids and pray enough of them survive), didn't need to have some kind of mental model for the hordes of algorithms deployed against us for the express purpose of taking all of our available attention (a resource that people before a couple decades ago had so much excess of that boredom was a serious concern) for the express purpose of selling it to people who want to extract any dollar you may have access to, did not need to understand spreadsheets(!), etc etc etc etc

Like, being productive in modern society is complicated. That's what education is for.

You don't have to understand infosec to not get phished. And education doesn't do a damn thing to help you resist those algorithms.

Philosophy has proven invaluable in identifying the sophistry behind every recent progressive movement.

lol? really? Huh that’s crazy, almost like you’re injecting your batshit crazy political beliefs and saying it’s the fault of “progressives”

Economic OR status gain is putting a lot of work on the or.

We've put into place a context for intellectual achievement at scale. Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field?

> Why shouldn't status be apportioned to someone who is recognized by a panel of peers and teachers to have useful insight into their field

Because many "fields" in colleges are not useful.

Because a college degree isn't an intellectual achievement. It's 4 years of school when you've already done 13. I went to one of those schools where people go "oh, you went to $SCHOOL" when they find out, and I always want to roll my eyes because I didn't do shit to get that degree.

Except in the middle ages when universities started in europe you mean…

Learning stuff is cool?

I think learning stuff and making art just for the hell of it is going to become a lot more accepted as society continues on and more and more peoples' jobs get automated away. Obviously that's a huge simplification of a much more complex situation, but in general I think the best future is one where people are free to pursue interests without regard for those interests ability to pay for their food and housing.

UBI: the dream!

Decoupling working from living: means only intrinsically valuable things get worked on. No more working a 9-5 at a scam call center or figuring out how to make people click on ads. There is ONLY BENEFIT (to everyone) from giving labor such leverage.

Not every job needs to or should even exist: everyone having a job isn't utopia. Utopia is being free to choose what you work on. This directs market value for labor to go up. Work that needs to get done will be aligned with financial incentives (farmers, janitors, repair industries would soar to new heights).

UBI is a necessary and great idea: A bottom floor to capitalism means we all can stand up and lift this sinking ship.

There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job.

The problem with the modern educational system is that it isnt very efficient at this task. Instead, most of the value relies on the screening that took place before the students even entered the institution, not the knowledge obtained while there.

Yep, this is a huge problem. I've long argued that we need value add metrics for colleges, and it probably won't be a single number, but rather a set of values depending on input values, e.g., some schools may deliver a lot of value for kids with 1550 SATs, but other schools may do better for kids with 1200.

Today we simply use college as a proxy for intelligence, so people just like to go to the highest rated college they can to be viewed as intelligent. What happens in the four years at the college is secondary.

> Today we simply use college as a proxy for intelligence, so people just like to go to the highest rated college they can to be viewed as intelligent.

Hmmm… I would say college is a proxy for social currency, of which intelligence is one type. In most cases, intelligence is the least valuable (imho).

> There is nothing wrong with going to school to obtain knowledge and skills to secure a job.

That can't be the only goal. We also need to transmit culture, values, and teach them to become citizens.

Teach them "values" as determined by a central governing authority?

Yes, within a reason. Not in an authoritarian or dismissive manner. But the ideals of our western liberal societies.

What happens if that centeal authority becoms subverted (as many people here would argue is the case right now)?

Doesnt that single point of failure indicate a weakness?

Values are your culture. The Nazis were elected and supported (at least initially) so you are right some what, but the answer is multiple countries.

But a country without a culture and without shared values is a sled being pulled by dogs in different directions and not a real team (as many people would argue has been the case for quite some time).

You need common values to work together to achieve goals. That's what a country is, people working together. When you don't, you just become tenants with passports.

you dont need 4-10 years of post-secondary school at 100k/yr to do that.

nor do our current institutions do a good job of what you describe.

Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting a degree was a route to higher status.

(there have been a few Communist revolutions against the concept of "university", for various political reasons, but China rebuilt theirs after the purges and Cambodia is a sad historical footnote)

IN RESPONSE TO Even the Soviet Union made people go to school, and getting a degree was a route to higher status.

Also people did that to avoid Dedovshchina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/russia1004/2.htm

At least in the Soviet Union, they were free...

In Soviet Union, university education free but came at cost of living in Soviet Union

- Yakov Smirnoff, probably

Reply on news.ycombinator.com