Comment by Herring
5 days ago
I think the point is we’re getting there. These models are growing up real fast. Remember 54% of US adults read at or below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
5 days ago
I think the point is we’re getting there. These models are growing up real fast. Remember 54% of US adults read at or below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
> Remember 54% of US adults read at or below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
The sane conclusion would be to invest in education, not to dump hundreds of billions of llms, but ok
Education is not just a funding issues. Policy choices, like making it impossible for students to fail which means they have no incentive to learn anything, can be more impactful.
But holy shit is it also a funding issue when teachers make nothing.
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It's not just investing in education, it's using tools proven to work. WA spends a ton of money on education, and on reading Mississipi, the worst state for almost every metric, has beaten them. The difference? Mississipi went hard on supporting students and using phonics which are proven to work. WA still uses the hippie theory of guessing words from pictures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language) for learning how to read.
Investing in education is a trap because no matter how much money is pumped into the current model, it’s not making a difference.
We need different models and then to invest in the successes, over and over again…forever.
Because education alone in a vacuum won't fix the issues.
Even if the current model was working, just continuing to invest money in it while ignoring other issues like early childhood nutrition, a good and healthy home environment, environmental impacts, etc. will just continue to fail people.
Schooling alone isn't going to help the kid with a crappy home life, with poor parents who can't afford proper nutrition, and without the proper tools to develop the mindset needed to learn (because these tools were never taught by the parents, and/or they are too focused on simply surviving).
We, as a society, need to stop allowing people to be in a situation where they can't focus on education because they are too focused on working and surviving.
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It's so hilarious to look at 10k years of education history and be like "Nah, funding doesn't make a difference."
Incredible.
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Education funding is highest in places that have the worst results. Try again.
Yes for example is its very well known that Angola has a top tier education system while Swedish people can barely read or count
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New Mexico (where I live) is dead last in education out of all 50 states. They are currently advertising for elementary school teachers between 65-85K per year. Summers off. Nice pension. In this low cost of living state that is a very good salary, particularly the upper bands.
I don't think it's a money issue at this point.
Because they use whole language theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language) instead of phonics for teaching how to read.
Just flatly not true.
In theory yeah, but in practice 54% will also vote against funding education. Catch-22.
In WA they always pass levies for education funding at local and state level however results are not there.
Mississipi is doing better on reading, the biggest difference being that they use phonics approach to teaching how to read, which is proven to work, whereas WA uses whole language theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language), which is a terrible idea I don't know how it got traction.
So the gist of it, yes, spend on education, but ensure that you are using the right tools, otherwise it's a waste of money.
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Not true, most people are not upper-middle class anti-tax wackos. They benefit from those people being taxed.
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You don't need an educated workforce if you have machines that can do it reliably. The more important question is: who will buy your crap if your population is too poor due to lack of well paying jobs? A look towards England or Germany has the answer.
The top 10% of households already account for more than half of consumer spending in the US
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Unfortunately, people are born with a certain intellectual capacity and can't be improved beyond that with any amount of training or education. We're largely hitting peoples' capacities already.
We can't educate someone with 80 IQ to be you; we can't educate you (or I) into being Einstein. The same way we can't just train anyone to be an amazing basketball player.
From what I've read, IQ is one of the more heritable traits, but only about 50% of one's intelligence is attributable to one's genes.
That means there are absolutely still massive benefits to be had in trying to ensure that kids grow up in safe, loving homes, with proper amounts of stimulation and enrichment, and are taught with a growth, not a fixed potential mindset.
Sad to say, but your own fixed mindset probably held you back from what you could truly achieve. You don't have to be Einstein to operate on the cutting edge of a field, I think most nobel prize winners have an iq of ~ 120
This is extremely not settled science. Education in fact does improve IQ and we don't know how fixed intelligence is and how it responds to different environmental cues.
Other countries have better outcomes. I doubt it's just because of the genetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Modern society benefits a lot from specialization. It's like the dumbest kid in France is still better at French than you.
A question for the not-too-distant future:
What use is an LLM in an illiterate society?
Automatic speech recognition and speech to text models are also growing up real fast.
But will an illiterate person be able to articulate themselves well enough to get the LLM to do what they want, even with a speech interface?
Will they possess the skills (or even the vocabulary) to understand the output?
We won't know for another 20 years, perhaps.
Thinking that speech recognise is a solution to the illiterate is like thinking that low code tools can replace traditional programming tools. The bottleneck is and has always been the cognitive capacity limits of your average human. No interface can solve the issue of humans being illiterate
> What use is an LLM in an illiterate society?
The ability to feign literacy such that critical thought and ability to express same is not a prerequisite.
Absurd question. The correct one is "what use is an illiterate in an LLM society".