Comment by Animats

The study picked an artificial and useless proxy.

What did tutored students go on to do? Were they over represented in Nobel Prizes, hedge fund billionaires, heads of state?

Or did they do well on a meaningless test and then forget all about whatever they “learned” just like everyone else?

The entire field is absolutely littered with this problem. Everyone is targeting cholesterol and not all cause mortality.

Hey Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. So far, (nearly) all conversations about education on HN I’ve seen, have had a naturally point at which Bloom’s 2s should be introduced.

Humanity is now preparing students with a 20 year time horizon, while tech changes much faster. If this was agriculture, the industry would be doomed by that horizon mismatch.

We really need more teachers, if we want the median citizen to be better off.

AI lacks both the reasoning and insight needed to teach anybody that isn't already immensely interested in the topic, and even then might leave large knowledge gaps, not to mention how often it hallucinates wrong knowledge. Especially with topics that already have a lot of bad information floating around.

With AIs as teachers, I disagree. But with AIs assisting routine grading, filling in the university's assessment_framework_draft_v3_final_FINAL.docx, and otherwise freeing up time to actually focus on students - maybe? Although I fear that any productivity gains will be swallowed up by further reductions in lecturer headcount...

Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.