Comment by skulk
8 days ago
> computers do not help human education in the slightest
I had no access to anyone who could teach me calculus as a kid except Khan Academy, so I think this is a gross exaggeration. But I agree in the end, that all my "real" learning did come from pen-and-paper practice, not watching videos.
The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn. We've had MOOCs, gigantic libraries, all full of free information. You can obtain a PhD level understanding in any technical field of your choice today just by consistently going to the library and consistently applying yourself.
It's not unlike going to the gym, and we see how many people do that regularly. Except it's even funnier, because people serious about the gym but what? Tutors. They call them personal trainers. We've known for a millennium or more that 1-on-1 instruction is vastly better than anything else, but most people actually don't want to get into shape, and most people actually don't want to learn.
> The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn. We've had MOOCs, gigantic libraries, all full of free information. You can obtain a PhD level understanding in any technical field of your choice today just by consistently going to the library and consistently applying yourself.
Not true. In every field there is guild knowledge that a person can't acquire from a library. In technical disciplines PhD-level knowledge requires experience in collaboration, research, and frequently lab work, which is impossible to acquire without access to a lab -- or just direct experience with research methods, whatever those may be. Reading papers and absorbing information aren't enough. PhD-level knowledge comes from the process of writing and doing original work.
> The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn.
Also not true. We require kids to go to school partly because exposure to the environment and work inculcates skills regardless of whether kids want to do the work -- and regardless of whether they want to learn.
LLMs are damaging to students partly because they provide an escape hatch from that work and thereby prevent kids from acquiring skills.
Think of it this way: most people who want to be healthy and eat a healthy diet still find easy junk food tempting. What they want does not change the temptation, because the body and brain gravitate towards easy, cheap fulfillment of basic drives.
People facing challenging tasks, similarly, are tempted to take measures that reduce the amount of effort they require. The availability of tools that reduce the required effort also help shape a person's understanding of the value of the challenge and the work: "why should I do this hard task when I have a tool that can do it for me?" You and I know the answer to this question when we're discussing something like writing an essay or solving a problem in a math or programming class. Students frequently don't. They are by definition ignorant. Children, moreover, lack maturity. Their brains are less capable of resisting the easy path than an adult's. That's partly why parenting is important: parents provide boundaries and limits that kids need but won't and can't provide for themselves.
Sometimes people, especially kids, really do need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, through something in order to receive the benefits it offers. Being dragged through it sometimes convinces a person of its value and benefits. In a kid's case, there's a decent chance that the experience will improve executive function, shape expectations in a healthy way, inculcate grit, and become appreciation -- or at least habit.
I would not have written essays on my own as a student in secondary school. My English teachers had to provide that structure for me and impose the demand. But LLMs make it much more difficult to impose the demands, and kids are ill protected against the temptations of the cognitive equivalent of junk food, but an order of magnitude worse and more damaging.
If you've never taught students or mentored PhD students please refrain from diatribes in my comments (and yes I've done both)
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The annoying thing is a PhD level understanding does not get you jobs.
I don't have a PhD, but "you're overqualified" is something I've heard my PhD having friends said to them.
Yeah I agree. I grew up in a very blue-collar town, and anything I wanted to learn (outside of public schooling) either came from emaciated websites or whatever books I could find at the library. Having YouTube and Khan Academy and everything else would have made such a huge difference for me.
Now I’m wondering how a website is emaciated
One simply forgets to hydrate.
Not enough bytes?
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> except Khan Academy
But that's not using "computers" as a computer but as a video player. When evaluating whether computers are "good for learning", I don't think we should include using a computer as a video player, a book, or even flash cards. It should be things a computers uniquely offer which a books, paper, videos and a physical reference library cannot.
Based on the results of deploying hundreds of millions of computer to schools in the 80s and 90s, the evidence was mostly that computers are good for learning computer programming and "how to use a computer" but not notably better than cheaper analog alternatives for learning other things.
Interestingly, a properly trained and scaffolded LLM could be the first thing to meaningfully change that. It could do some things in ways only human teachers could previously since it is theoretically capable of observing learner progress and adapting to it in real-time.
I think videos are a unique thing computers offer. Books I understand. You have them digital or not. But a video ? Without a computer, there is no video. You were present for the initial lecture or you weren't and that's it.
There were videos* before computers.
*Not really, but you could film stuff and display it.
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> Without a computer, there is no video.
There's nothing about video that uniquely requires computers. Maybe you meant "streaming video"?
I realize you're probably under 30 and don't remember "ye olden times" but nearly 90% of U.S. homes and every school had an analog VCR long before they had a computer. Widespread consumer video formats included VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, Laserdisc, etc. I still buy some movies I care about on UHD discs and watch them in a dedicated Blu-ray/UHD player. Even the 'smart' TVs and streaming sticks most people watch streaming channels like Netflix on aren't functionally computers (no meaningful user accessible local storage, input like keyboard/mouse, CLI or windowing GUI).
Personally, I learned an enormous amount from video before I ever touched a computer. In elementary school we learned from 16mm films almost weekly and watched space launches and Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on TV (it was rebroadcast in the mornings specifically for schools). My junior high had a television in every classroom and some classes were planned around shows on PBS, NASA channel, C-SPAN and BBC. In the late 80s there was thousands of hours of educational video programming sent via direct broadcast satellite to 18-inch dishes at schools. In the 90s every grade and subject had hundreds of interactive video DVDs in large notebooks (four discs to a page in plastic sleeves) and multiple DVD players per classroom.
The peak installed base of VCRs in the U.S. was in 1999. Streaming video wasn't common in consumer households until well into the 2000s, YouTube didn't even exist until 2005 and most people had never heard of it until 2007. In 2010 Netflix mailed DVDs in envelopes to 25M homes every week. They didn't even offer a streaming plan until 2011.
As someone who's spent most of my adult life thinking about video technology, with patents ranging from analog days to the streaming tech you use today, computers have been extremely disappointing in terms of enabling any unique "learning from video" features that are computer-specific. In the 90s we realized that computers could make digitized video random access letting us sequence it non-linearly to make it interactive in response to user input. We knew that computer-enabled interactivity, responsiveness and real-time adaptation to learner progress would be incredible for improving video education. Yet the vast majority video content available online today is still linear in form. Even video that's specifically educational is no more interactive or user responsive than a 90s DVD disc.
Sadly, only two things have really changed about consumer video in the last 30 years: quantity and distribution. There's much more video content and it's remotely accessible on-demand instead of being limited by broadcast channels and storage media. But that's far more about communication technologies like broadband than computer technologies. For a few years YouTube even had authoring features like interactive menus and conditional branching but removed them because it didn't increase ad revenue. There are a few dedicated video authoring platforms for education which can apply uniquely 'computer things' to video like dynamic scripting, conditional branching, viewer annotation and timecode-linked threaded Q&A. Unfortunately, such content is rarely found outside high-end corporate training and some university courses. But there are so many other ways we could combine the strengths of advanced wikis with interactive video. Today, the most the public sees is just an HTML link from a wiki to a video clip. Almost none of the learning features computing could uniquely bring to video are widely available to learners. Since ~90% of everyone already had access to linear video playback before they had access to a computer and most online video today is still primarily linear, in my opinion, there's still virtually no uniquely 'computer-enabled video' involved in learning. Computers haven't enabled much that's new in video - just much more, much cheaper and more convenient forms of what we could already do without a computer.
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Khan did not throw at you a 100-slide Powerpoint deck in 45'.
He really took the time to replicate the manual teaching process of writing on whiteboard. He improved upon it by using colors. But basically had the same pace as a teacher writing on a whiteboard.
When professors are given a projector, they just throw together some slides and add their narration.
This is not very efficient. To learn you need to suffer. Or you need to watch the suffering.
That's not really a computer helping you though, that's just a computer allowing a human that's far away to help you right?
I think what the author meant is that it does help not more than the same knowledge provided the old way.
Every child reads a book about solving problems, assumes they can now solve problems, and is disappointed when that is not true.