Marius_Manola

Why Teaching Can Prevent Learning A framework for redesigning education in the 21st century

Isn't it rather amusing how uncontroversial and common claiming that "education is wrong and inefficient" has become? Still... isn't it a big concern when people scream from the top of their lungs about a certain problem, yet nothing gets fixed? After all, it's absurd and pessimistic to think that societal problems aren't solvable, it might be just that we don't have the right knowledge to solve them yet... But how can it be the case, when it feels as if countless resources have gone into changing education and yet we still complain about it. Maybe, like in many cases, the crowd is simply wrong... What if education is good enough the way it is? Could it be that children are simply too lazy? Learning is, as they say, supposed to be hard! Or is it? It's hard to tell whether these questions really yield any clear responses. Which question should we follow first? Which one is epistemically more useful? You'd be circling around what the current system does and play within its own framework.

I think, due to how old these institutions are, and how much they have infiltrated our culture simply through existing for centuries (where we now see schooling as a given right, as something that has always existed), the assumptions presented by the educational system about what learning is have become so deeply ingrained in our brains that we take most of them for granted. Answering most of the above questions would therefore entail bringing in assumptions from the very educational system we are trying to examine. I therefore think the best way to understand the state of things is by starting from first principles and, to the extent we can, thinking about what Education Is In Itself! What is the objective of schooling?

Let us assume that the core reason schools exist is to educate pupils [1] (although you can argue that's not their primary function). Education in its broader definition is the deliberate attempt to help the subject develop knowledge.

<Throughout this essay I'll be referring to knowledge in the broader definition that David Deutsch offers as information with causal properties>

To make it even simpler, education is the environment which facilitates the acquisition of knowledge. That encompasses all tools, methods and external agents (what schooling attempts to be if we take its core purpose that of educating).

The process through which the acquisition of knowledge happens at an individual level is called learning. It's not an external process to be controlled, but rather an internal one where the subject's understanding of the world shifts and adapts so that it can better predict the future.

Education is the environment which facilitates the learning process, and although it cannot control how each individual acquires knowledge, it can create the premises that speed up and strengthen that process. It therefore follows that Education (the environment which includes all the tools, methods, agents; teachers, classrooms, curriculum) is downstream of learning, and a way to improve it is by building upon the principles of whatever learning entails.

Learning Is Model Change...

you didn't get into yc? No problem, now you can just talk to pg. made this for fun

There's basically so much educational content out there, that you could argue there's no need for AI to "generate" lessons, when it could just restructure existing ones.

Some make it the case that you need "personalised education" for everything, but it's not at all clear that's the solution. For deeply technical things, you have to explain them from the ground up, and that can't be personalised in n ways...

I thought about making a tool that can search for videos based on context, and jump to the specific moment in the video that you needed. So for the past couple of days I've been working on notclass. We focus mostly on university lectures and long form podcasts, because most of the time valuable information is skipped due to the sheer length of such clips.

Try it and let me know what you think.

P.S. It is 100% free, no registration required, and I intend to keep it that way.

So, should we expect Perplexity to post that "OpenAI killed my startup" kind of article? (just saying)

but for some reason it didn't get that much traction... I know there are just 2 learning paths, I just finished the whole thing in 5 days... Currently the learning pathways are done manually, but the idea would be to embed lots of high quality videos so that they can be re-arranged into courses based on what the user needs.

I wanted to make this a B2C product for those who can't afford to buy an online course, but don't want to scroll through all the content that's on youtube...

As for the B2B idea, it might work, but this would be just another gpt wrapper.

I'm honestly more interested into doing something useful, by embedding a ton of youtube content, then creating 100% free learning paths with free resources.

I intend to keep notclass free forever. No hidden fees.

I'm an 18 years old high school student, and I just finished my first month since I started learning integrals. (Studying based on the European system, calculus is mandatory - which I love. We do mostly derivatives in 11th grade and integrals in 12th)

Seeing this video of Neil deGrasse talking about his experience with calculus pushes me to study it even harder, so I thought that if it motivates me, maybe it might motivate someone else here.

I so much loved watching the pervert's guide to ideology

Was it even a startup, if what I was offering was to generate synthetic data for fine-tuning AI models using various frameworks to understand the patterns out of 3 examples given by the user of input-output pairs, some questioning done by a chatbot and then use some fine-tuned gpt models and some big prompts to generate data at scale.

I feel like I knew openai was going to do this, but I decided to proceed with the project anyway... I am currently like 2/3 of the way to finishing the project, but I'll obviously drop it now... I feel like I was just fooled by the gold rush to creating million dollars gpt wrappers (what an idiot...), but I felt like what I did was a bit more than just a gpt wrapper, maybe I just fooled myself.

The fourth one hit really hard because we live in a world where making mistakes has been normalised to an extreme extent, where we stop being aware that we even made a mistake. And I feel that's the case with me (at least that's what my tennis coach tells me, and I kind of see that in the rest of my life)

Fortunately I don't have a problem with not making mistakes, I made a great deal of them (and many more to come) as I have been trying various online ventures for 7 years now (from youtube and freelancing to startups). And in the end some of those ended up working so well I make more than most of my school teachers do per month.

Finally, I wish I knew how not to care about what others think of me. I'm trying to find a way not to worry about it, but I'm still trying to figure it out. I think this will go away with age, as it is with most bad experiences we have in life; the cure to those experiences is to relive them again and again and realise it's not as bad as we make it up in our own heads.

Thank you for your response. The gift of your keystrokes is much appreciated.

thank you. Will be improving the model in the upcoming days and weeks maybe. can t promise tho.

I did it for fun mostly

but do you have the question?

Also you could achieve that with RAG quite easily. training is good mainly for the tone and style (which still isn't perfect) but better than most things out there that simply use the llm with no fine tuning