ASI doesn't doom mankind, the actions of people do. This has been the case since world-destroying weapons were invented close to a century ago. If you're not worried about how you're going to make money in the post-ASI world then I really can't see what you're so worried about.
It doesn't. Thought terminating clichés are rhetorical devices, I pointed out what real world data reflects. You're free to actually address it unless you want to redefine poverty to suit vibes.
I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding. I don't think Khanacademy ever sold itself as a magic learning resource that removes the need to work out problems yourself.
I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. I still remember watching Sal Khan's videos on calculus after struggling to get any grip on it from my frustratingly uninterested teacher who was forced into the position after our actual teacher retired. After I saw them I came back with a fire in me because for the first time he exposed me to the beauty of calculus.
This guy is completely wrong about Khan not inspiring students to care. Sometimes all students need is to see what caring looks like to ignite it in themselves. You can feel how much he cares just by watching him because the video is the product of all that caring, and he does it for millions of people.
But thank you to this blog author for being brave enough to call out Khan's failures, I am sure it'll help education much more than Khan did.
I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum.
They have some significant advantages compared to (just) a classroom: (1) They set a quality floor – sometimes a teacher can be really incomprehensible, or mean, or whatever, but Khan's videos are consistently okay. (2) They are available from anywhere, without need for special social/technical infrastructure, like enrollment in school or access to a university library. (3) They are self paced, which means they can better accommodate the various interest level, motivation, and speed of different students. (A typical classroom also has some advantages: it gives social setting, a consistent schedule/structure, and human feedback.)
I'm also disappointed though, because it seems like, given production resources, there would be potential to make widely available materials that were much better than average lectures. With significant production effort (a team of subject experts and content creators doing a lot of dedicated work on each topic) I think it would be possible to make something truly great, but Khan's videos fall so far short of my imagination. For any particular topic, there are typically other freely available resources which I think are better.
I've also been disappointed because many people have hyped the site as being extraordinarily amazing, but when I have looked at it, what is there doesn't match the hype.
>I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are roughly comparable to an average-quality classroom teacher lecturing about a typical mediocre curriculum.
Its better than average quality classroom teacher in my experience.
And the point is this didn’t exist online at the time. His resources were strictly more. I imagine its still hard to find a single free resource that matches its breadth and quality.
Personally I like books, but there are also many, many lecture videos on YouTube, some of them excellent (though I think they could still be better with bigger production teams and higher budgets). For college-level technical subjects, there are also e.g. many MIT lectures on OCW. If you have a specific topic in mind, I urge you to search around. (Making a long list of my own book/website/video recommendations about various topics here seems a bit off topic and out of scope.)
MIT has renumbered the course, but it's still around: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ . Don't be fooled by the URL; it's now 6.5840.
And a series of lectures is available too: https://www.youtube.com/@6.824/videos . They're from spring 2020. They link to the course website for spring 2020, which is great. But it doesn't link to them, and OCW doesn't know about any of this, as far as I can tell. The 6.824 lecture series is pretty hard to discover, too, because it's uploaded by an account dedicated solely to that one course, which isn't related to any other MIT lecture videos.
From your OCW link, you can see the Spring 2006 version of the course has syllabus, lecture notes, readings, lab assignments, and 2 quizzes available, but no videos. Separately, videos of the 2020 version of the course are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-W...
Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching platforms). However, once you get used to it, it is a wonderful experience.
I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).
He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching assistants. It was the vision that utopian minded technologists craved in the early aughts.
It's not a bad idea in concept, but the core problem is what he delivered was:
"essentially global learning via all the Khan videos, in math, by him, and in other subjects, by his team."
Khan Academy is 2010-era state-of-the-art for rote learning and procedural knowledge. That's a helpful resource, but as one world schoolhouse, there is:
- No room for creativity, or much of anything similar from students (outside of the fantastic JavaScript projects).
- No room for outside innovation.
- A personality cult. Any ideas MUST be attributed to Khan.
Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.
I don't want to tangle myself in a "technically correct" kind of discussion however I'd like to point out that Bloom's taxonomy - a widely used model in pedagogical context - has a level for creative work.
It is the highest level of learning, but still a level of learning.
> There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems.
Only if your goal is to teach people how to solve that particular problem. But it’s not the best way to teach mathematics.
For my money, the best way is problem based. I heard of one math teacher who had a video playing as the students walked in. The video was a weirdly shaped bucket being slowly filled by a hose. Students came in, saw him sitting up the back, got fidgety then someone asked “how long will this take??”. At that, he shot up and said “good question”! And they spent the rest of the class trying to estimate how long it would take for the bucket to be filled. Complete with diversions into flow rate, volume, and so on. He made the students ask the question. Then got the students to try and answer it themselves, helping them work through their own ideas on the board.
While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).
In my case, it's not so much that I find it childish, it's that I find it incredibly distracting which means I can't focus as easily on the content. Instead of "oh, now I understand how that equation works" I catch myself thinking "why is he repeating the same word over and over - that's so annoying!". Then my brain starts obsessing over "when is he going to do it again?", even though I don't want it to. It's a bit like trying to deliberately ignore something. It becomes all you can think about.
Oh ok, got you. While it entirely differs on how different people receive ideas, for me, I just try to keep the end goal in mind (what are we ultimately moving towards) and just think of those repeated words as just small steps rather than just annoying repeating word.
OTOH creating neural connections takes time. It's a real distance. Small for us, but great for the cells. That's why explaining difficult concepts too fast, while cool for people getting things instantly, is not good for general population.
I very much agree and it saddens me often when I see folks dial it up to 1.5x or 2x "because it is boring otherwise". They might think they just get as much, only in half the time, but I'd hypothesize that they retain less because the mind needs some time to digest.
Similar with the trend to auto-cut pauses that speakers make, just to cram in more text into a youtube video. Destroys not just the pacing but any chance for the mind to take its time.
There’s a great lecture on giving lectures by an MIT prof. He says you can give no more than 3 ideas per hour, and you must repeat yourself at least 3 times for each idea. And while, part of his thesis is because people might miss something due to their attention, and needs of the group vs individual I think his experience is still highly relevant. I know that I don’t learn as much unless there’s room for almost boredom. I find there is a feeling similar to boredom that I have to experience to really internalize something. It’s almost like I can feel the neurons rewiring (though I suspect it might just be an emotion that encourages the energy expenditure necessary for learning). If I skim, or do doubletime, then that feeling usually never comes, and there’s a good chance my future recall will be poor…
When I’m understimulated by a teacher, my mind wanders. I’ll start thinking about something else entirely. When my mind comes back, I’ll have missed a couple minutes of content. I can overcome this with willpower, but doing so is exhausting.
Playing videos at 1.5-2x fixes the problem entirely. My attention is held without any effort.
If a concept is new or difficult enough, I just slow the video back down or pause it whenever I need to think things through.
I don't think you can make blanket statements. Consider:
1. Teacher 1 speaks at 100 words per minute.
2. Teacher 2 speaks at 50 words per minute, for the exact same content as Teacher 1.
You're not really losing anything by playing Teacher 1 at normal speed vs Teacher 2 at 2x speed. For every learner, there will be an optimal teaching speed for a given topic. This may mean listening to some audio at normal speed, some at higher speeds, and some even at slower speeds. I always customise my playback speed to the specific content I'm trying to learn.
Those two teachers will rarely say the same words. Chances are, teacher 2 chooses their words more carefully, and gives you then space to absorb that higher information density. In the end, both may communicate the same amount of information.
It's not about the rate of speaking but rather about what is actually being spoken. I am currently going through the Neetcode DSA course and it's just obnoxious. His video on Union Find, a 15 LoC algorithm, is 20 minutes.
I'd argue (as the article does), that you don't 'really' learn from watching stuff, fast or slow, but from actually working with and doing. This is completely obvious in the physical domain. You could take a ten year course on the basketball free throw and watch a billion hours of video on it, but then when you get on the court and actually do it - you're going to shoot pretty much like somebody who's never shot before.
And I think the same is true in academic domains. If you're trying to think about something consciously, you're going to do a poor job of it. And the only way to get the unconscious competence is through a bunch of 'doing'. Chess is a great example of this because it's purely mental yet again you're never going to gain any degree of significant competence without playing a lot. Interestingly this even applies after mastery. A master who has played e.g. 1. e4 their entire life and then swaps to 1. d4 isn't going to be playing at the same level as he plays 1. e4 even if watches thousands of hours of videos on it beforehand. That connection you make by doing and interacting with things is just critical.
It is a spectrum. If you give your mind some space, it will start churning through the key ideas, fill in gaps, turn things upside down, ask questions. That starts during the explanations and their pauses. And ideally you have some empty time right after to think about it, maybe do an exercise, maybe try to explain it to somebody. Work it, like a good dough.
2x listening suffocates this process. Like too little sugar or too low temperature or too little rest for your yeast dough. It might "feel" good but you are missing out so much...
I remember reading a study a while back about learning from videos at 1.5x to 2x speed. The key observation that actually made the learning more efficacious was to watch the video at 2x speed two times back to back. Apparently, this method was also better than watching the video one time at normal speed. I suppose it's because one get twice the exposure for the same amount of time.
I haven't looked for the study, but I can if you are truly curious.
I think there was a study omparing watching an educational video in 1x speed and watching it two times back to back in 2x speed equating the time spent on the material, which found the second group faired better.
Though it's not the question I asked. Would the second group fair somewhere close to the first if it only had listened once?
(I don't buy the argument that this would not be fair since they would use the extea time to watch more stuff ... because that's rarely what people do with their extra time. Especially not watching the same thing again.)
Ironically, spaced repetition is the key to successful learning.
Obviously one can overdo it. And there is variance in what people require. But not giving things time, instead giving in to the dopamine-craving, that's killing your learning abilities.
Repeating a sentence twice in a row during an explanation, is not spaced repetition at all. Spaced repetition means testing recall at increasing intervals, usually starting 1 day apart.
"Paris is the capital of France. Paris is the capital of France" -> not spaced repetition.
"Paris is the capital of France. [one day later]. What is the capital of France? [three days later] What is the capital of France?" -> spaced repetition.
And in fact, it's this plus practice where the real value lies in learning and memorising. The only purpose of an explanation from a teacher is to help you understand the concept. Generally once you understand it once, you don't need to understand it again - unless you forget, and that's where the practice / spaced repetition comes in. That's why I prefer the teaching part to be as efficient as possible, so I can focus my limited time on the parts that will make me internalise it.
I originally learned linear algebra from Gilbert Strang's OCW videos, and I was only able to stick with them by 2x'ing the playback rate; at this point, hearing Strang at his normal speaking rate sounds to me like hearing him after a Robitussin bender.
I wish YouTube let you increase the speed of videos past 2x. I play almost everything at 2x now, and I have no problem comprehending videos at that speed. I’d like to try 2.5x or 3x but the ui doesn’t have that option.
There's a bunch of different chrome extensions that do this, and you can do it yourself from the Chrome console with `$0.playbackRate = 3` or whatever.
It might be annoying if you already know the content. Frame it for the least common denominator (pun intended) - the person who has the time and needs the repetition to pick up a concept.
I've not tried it myself, but I consistently hear good things about Math Academy. It uses a knowledge graph so that it knows whether you've satisfied prerequisites for a topic, and it adapts itself to your level. I've never taken the plunge because it's very expensive at $49 a month, but it seems to be the one that serious maths learners use.
I did the trial of Brilliant the other day. You can get 7 days free, then another 7 days added if you cancel the first trial before the end. After that you can continue to get 2 free lessons per day with ads. I think it's about $20 a month for unlimited lessons. The maths problems are more visual (which makes them quite intuitive) and it has a nicer, more polished UI than Khan Academy. It's easier to stay in the mood for doing more lessons. The main downsides compared to Khan are that the explanations are quite minimal (short descriptions, no videos), and it doesn't reach as advanced a level as Khan. I'm looking at it as more a way to do a refresher on the maths I already learned at school rather than a serious learning tool. If it were $5 a month I'd probably consider subbing for a couple of months and trying to blitz through all the material before switching back to Khan to fill in the gaps.
Not sure that I'm adding anything to this, or that what I'm saying is even relevant, but Sal does (or did) have a deviated septum, and as someone who suffers from the same / similar root cause of breathing issues, I'm pretty sure speaking is (or was) taxing for him, probably contributing at least mildly to such a style.
The article is indeed uncharitable. Nowhere does the article mention the fact that there are exercises AND that you can explore the website and the different resources in the way you like. You don't even need to watch videos if you don't want to.
You also do not need to linearly follow the topics/videos. You can take a few quizzes from some topic, notice you don't understand something completely yet and instead pick up more trigonometry instead.
I've worked through Khan academy in a way similar to what the author describes as a good flow, but then all within the Khan Academy platform. The platform even allows for discussions and questions.
To me the problem is much more that motivation or a destination is not something that Khan Academy will give you. Then again, so won't most teachers. I much preferred Khan Academy over most of my math teachers, but occasionally I've had teachers who helped me love a subject I barely knew beforehand.
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.
I have benefited a good deal from Khan Academy, and was quite disappointing to go back and see that they seem even more focused on showing videos than they did 10 years ago.
But ... Rayfish creates a layer 3 network too. It assigns IP addresses to each node. I don't really see why it matters from this point of view whether it uses Iroh or something else to provide its backhaul. That's like saying Wireguard works at layer 4 because it uses UDP. The whole point of VPNs is to offer some kind of tunneling over higher level protocols.
Computers are pretty fast these days. It depends on exactly what kind of general purpose use you're talking about. Trying to push 10 Gbps through a slow old machine? You're doomed. Trying to run SSH, browse the web, or even watch Netflix over a tunnel? Probably fine to send the packet up and down the stack an extra time or two.
> congress during some fluke period when the filabuster can be overcome.
If the clouds part and Jesus himself descended from the heavens, you'd ask him to ... discourage anchor babies? Surely there are better and more pressing uses of his power.
If you're asking me personally, on this topic? Wide open borders, not even a wall, zero employment eligibility checks, but no welfare. Only way to win is to also benefit others in voluntary trade or seek voluntary charity. I have no problem with "illegal" immigrants, only those who purposefully target and drain the coffers of Americans by popping in for a citizen-baby and then run every public benefit available with their anchor baby.
Part of the reason why immigrants were so successful and beneficial in the 1870-1920 era boom was that labor was so badly needed in the burgeoning age of industry. But really, the other half is there was no other option -- you did something productive or you were completely fucked.
I'm asking you, is this really such a big problem that it requires getting rid of welfare? Is the US financially in trouble because it pays out welfare to undeserving layabouts? I seriously doubt it.
Yes im absolutely certain the broken redistribution system is one of the most pressing problems in US, but of course its not the only one. Not because recipients dont "deserve" a living but rather it poisons the productive and it provides the wrong incentives to recipients while conditioning them to depend on a bloated government that now has total leverage on their life (and of course, virtually assured votes to whoever are bribing recipients with OPM redistributed away from the big bad other voter), all while speed running towards a ruinous national debt even if they deserved the moon and stars and were paid it.
Well, I do agree that the redistribution system is absolutely broken. Most welfare recipients do in fact work (and benefit others) but our capitalist redistribution system has decided that they don't deserve to live with dignity, leaving the centrally planned redistribution system to pick up the slack.
The fallacy here is you're trying to frame things in terms of "deserving." An African child deserves life and wealth as much as an American one. A guy slaving 16 hours a day ripping shingles off of roofs "deserves" a mansion and high-dollar escorts as much as the playboy heir of some mega-corp. Some starving African child probably deserves to rip the computer/tablet/phone you're writing this with out of your hand and sell it for a bucket of rice to feed his family. Play this fallacy out to its extension and the whole thing collapses in any system that's attempted to roll out the "deserve" system beyond a pretty constrained fraction of its GDP, and then both the deserving and undeserving end up worse off.
You're fixating on the word deserve in my post, but that's got nothing to do with my point. I'm saying that the market has decided that it doesn't have to pay a living wage since the government picks up the bill to keep things going. I think that's perverse.
I'm confused whether you want more welfare, or you're trying to ban jobs below a certain "living" wage floor (which are probably mostly occupied by the poorer).
There is a somewhat intermediate of this, proposed by Milton Friedman, called the negative income tax. I can't say I'm sold on the idea but it does solve some of the problems of the local maximums encountered that keep people trapped in the welfare system and from trying to get more lucrative income.
Probably some mixture of better statutory labor protections and more class solidarity (collective bargaining), but generally I don't know. It just boils my blood that Walmart can publish a document explaining to its employees how to apply for government food assistance (to buy food from Walmart itself) and this is business-as-usual in the USA.
Not even this. The USA has a labor shortage that is filled by workers who used to migrate seasonally until it was no longer allowed, thus creating a perverse system that encouraged business owners to look the other way and immigrants to stay instead of leave.
A long time ago, the southwestern part of the USA was Mexico, but a certain destiny manifested itself and changed that. It seems like this didn't affect day-to-day life due to a generous treaty for a while until some Americans decided they deserved the land there more than the people who were there.
Obviously, the people who were kicked out were performing some useful economic function, so the USA decided to have it both ways: The Bracero program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program
This program of importing cheap labor had an expiration date, and it was allowed to expire in the 60s. Guess what happened then?
> Despite the forced removal of Mexicans during the 1930s, as soon as the United States entered the Second World War, authorities approached Mexico to negotiate a binational treaty that arranged for the annual entry of legal workers for seasonal labor in U.S. agriculture (Galarza 1964; Calavita 1992). The resulting Bracero Program lasted from 1942 through 1964, and its effect on the likelihood of migration is readily apparent in Figure 3. Between 1940 and 1945 the probability of U.S. migration rose nearly seven times, going from 0.003 to 0.020 before leveling off briefly and then rising to new plateau of 0.029 from 1956 to 1959. In 1960 Congress began to phase out the Bracero Program, finally letting it expire at the end of 1964, bringing the probability of migration down to 0.017.
Why did they let it expire? presumably to increase demand for American labor. A laudable goal to be sure, but is that really what happened? Surely people stopped crossing the border to do labor here and Americans started getting hired more.
This whole thing is beyond messed up and the fact that this history is essentially erased (I wasn't taught this in school) absolutely boils my blood.
Immigration in the US is a completely different problem with its own crazy complex history of cause and effect. Using one as a lens to study the other seems foolish at best.
tractor manufacturers or fertilizer companies didn't suck down the work of generations of predecessors in a questionably-legal fashion only to turn around and sell a heavily discounted version of that back to them. I'm not sure where "parasite" becomes appropriate, but your analogy is poor.
Maybe in the eyes of seething artists/programmers seeing their jobs getting automated, but courts have so far ruled that AI training falls under fair use.
Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers. They're often produced at some harm to society, as well as their use. They're also in some sense, a "heavily discounted" versions of that they replaced, bird guano or whatever.
> Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers.
It's completely different. If LLM companies pulled this out of thin air it would be also different, but no; they've effectively plundered the commons and locked up all the profit for themselves. If intellectual labor goes the way of agricultural labor, I think humanity will have lost something valuable.
And don't come back with the "farmers would have said the same thing about the industrial revolution!" thing again if you're just going to terminate your thought there. Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life. I'd challenge you take this one step further and explain why automating intellectual labor will provide similar fruits and is therefore something to cheer for.
If we actually do meaningfully automate intellectual labor, we create a world where we have real technical solutions for our toughest problems. Maybe we can get carbon capture and fusion energy working. There’s a theoretical world of abundance for us to explore.
That’s the steel man argument.
FWIW I mostly don’t believe that LLMs are the answer, I don’t think they’re going to reach a high enough level of capability to do this, and I think the current AI companies are problematic in a lot of ways.
I also think LLM use is bad for us and probably harms our thinking abilities. And using it takes away a lot of what it means to be human.
Personally I like both physical and mental difficulty. I like gardening even if I could just buy mass produced flowers. I like riding a bike even though cars are “easier”. I like playing ukulele with my family even though I can barely make a chord, much better than listening to some other real musician, or Suno ai generated songs. I like eating my wife’s sourdough bagels even if they take several hours more than just buying some.
And I think having those regular challenges and achievements make life worth living! And I worry that the AI future that some envision will make much of what we get value from feel meaningless in the same way that writing code by hand is starting to.
Maybe we’ll still be fine in the same way I find meaning in all of those things that I listed above. But damn what a gamble
A better analogy would perhaps be to consider the land the farm uses as the commons (it was before becoming private property)
We can debate the just access to land (commons) and point to Henry George, John Locke, Thomas Payne and others, but still agree that the value produced by the farm comes from the labour put in to refine the common resource into something more useful.
There can be rent seeking and value
produced at the same time.
Edit: One can provably extend the rent seeking parts of the analogy in terms of John Deere and Monsanto
"Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life"
In point of fact a loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 40 years ago. What has changed significantly is the total number of participants in the industry is greatly reduced, and the bulk of profits from agriculture accrue to AG services companies. There is no evidence that AI will buck this trend.
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