Comment by havercosine
1 day ago
Thanks for taking time to write this. HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) ! Folks here are wildly overestimating (or ignoring!) how many adults are qualified to be good teachers and how many of them further have enough incentives (money, time, resources) to do it well. Its a _very_ small number.
In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.
Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.
I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!
> HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) !
I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.
Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.
I hear you, and I know every project being dissed here is not going to be Dropbox. Perhaps some projects deserve the reality check they get. Though I still believe that HN crowd telling that just pay teachers more or kids need to be taught by good human teachers are underestimating the scale of the problem.
Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.
Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.
This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.
The Galileo gambit is the idea that because experts reject an idea, it must be true. HN is the furthest thing from experts when it comes to early childhood education.
Or Clarke's first law
-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
I love my parents but I don't think either of them have read a book in 50+ years now.
My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.
You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.
I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".
A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.
What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.
No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.
My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.
Pay your teachers better.
That is the ideal solution. I'll tell you an incident that seems from a black humour novel. A state government in one of the highest populous state in India decided to make biometric attendance for government school teachers, to ensure they are in school. Large number of so called "teachers" started protesting against state, egged on by opportunistic opposition. Because many of them were drawing salaries from government and _not even showing up in school_. That's the ground reality of government funded education.
I'm open to the idea that market forces or reality _might_ tilt the favour in more investment in AI in education and tutoring. Think about developing economies or under developed economies of the world. The state / government has to think how should they allocate budget: on agriculture subsidies or pay teachers better or spend it on energy security in increasingly hostile multipolar world or invest it in infrastructure. There are no good answers.
> That's the ground reality of government funded education.
In India perhaps.
In Commonwealth countries such as the UK, AU, CA, NZ, etc. teachers being paid but not attending doesn't go unnoticed and would be part of an award (sick leave, paid vacation time, etc).
What I'm hearing from your anecdote is that in India the government is unable to track it's own employees.
How? Taxing you higher?
Paying teachers higher is a harder sell than isolating children from humans so they can talk to an LLM?
What fucking society are we trying to cultivate?
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It's a matter of distribution, not scarcity.
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