[HN Gopher] How Might We Learn?
___________________________________________________________________
How Might We Learn?
Author : ColinWright
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-05-21 05:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andymatuschak.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (andymatuschak.org)
| k__ wrote:
| Learning well requires two circumstances for me.
|
| 1. I need a goal.
|
| 2. The time I need to practice to reach that goal needs to be
| reasonable.
|
| This makes endeavours like learning to speak a language, to play
| an instrument, or getting buff unsustainable for me.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| What do you consider a "reasonable" amount of time?
|
| (I probably come from the opposite viewpoint: I consider the
| few axes along which I've devoted over a decade to learning as
| being the particular high-dimensional corners making me me,
| rather than any of my 8 billion other conspecifics)
| yawpitch wrote:
| > what were the most rewarding high-growth periods of your life?
|
| Every single one was an extremely life-threatening moment in
| which I very likely would (and should) have died, but for my
| _very rapid_ learning. The growth came in not being a corpse.
|
| I realize I am not the target audience of this article.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "Target audience" or not, there's a ton of truth in what you
| say.
|
| Necessity and lack of control in a novel and frightening
| situation transforms our minds. It isn't sustainable, but it's
| not meant to be, because the goal is to get through it and get
| out, by becoming a different, better person.
|
| To pick some slightly less dramatic examples than combat or
| wilderness survival; A person who learned a new
| language in 14 days because they fell in love with
| someone who spoke almost no English, but simply had to be
| with them and make things work. Someone who became
| an expert bricklayer when stuck in a remote village where
| that was the only skill they could contribute.
|
| A fella named John Taylor Gatto [0,1] became the New York State
| Teacher of the Year (winning it more than once IIRC) before
| being fired for reckless unconventionality. He once drove a bus
| of school kids upstate into the wild, gave each $10 and a
| bottle of water, told them their assignment was to "find your
| way home", and drove off. Of course all the kids made it and
| recounted the "best ever learning experience of their lives".
| Today they'd sue for trauma... if they survived.
|
| The article I just read sadly describes more scaffolding, more
| mollycoddling, more "learning on rails", but "Now with added
| AI!"
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
|
| [1] https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/186/a-few-lessons-they-
| won...
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I really enjoyed Gatto's "The Underground History of American
| Education," it's a refreshing and entertaining rebuke of the
| authoritarian/scientific management consensus on schooling,
| which has not changed much over the past century and is not
| equipped to educate children for the modern era.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > This AI system isn't trapped in its own chatbox, or in the
| sidebar of one application. It can see what's going on across
| multiple applications, and it can propose actions across multiple
| applications. Sam can click that button to view a changeset with
| the potential implementation. Then they can continue the
| conversation, smoothly switching into the context of the code
| editor.
|
| That would be an incredibly valuable tool beyond learning, a
| killer feature for an operating system.
| runiq wrote:
| The intro veers dangerously close to this, which I've read with
| abject horror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425306
| criddell wrote:
| For me, school was mostly frustrating.
|
| I loved kindergarten and first and second grades which mostly
| seemed to be play. I think it was effective for me as far as
| creativity and socialization goes.
|
| From third grade through high school I was bored with most of the
| material. A lot of it was not interesting and sometimes the pace
| was too slow.
|
| At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken
| six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot
| better off. Too often I didn't have the time to really dig into
| the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I
| settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My
| GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material.
|
| Like Andy, I think an AI-powered course of learning could be
| great. The strength, I think, would be its adaptability. If while
| learning topic A I stumble across an interesting idea, it would
| have no problem with changing course and running down topic B.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I really enjoy reading Andy's ideas on education--alongside Peter
| Gray (a psychologist who emphasizes the importance of play for
| education, https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-
| Self-R...) and Piotr Wozniak (invented SuperMemo,
| https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Main_Page), he has really shaped my
| perspective on learning. I actually built a last-minute YOLO
| application to YC on an extremely similar idea--I figure that
| modern LLMs are capable enough to offload most of the
| metacognitive aspects of learning onto. Learn drive (a Wozniak
| term: your natural curiosity) can take you pretty far in a
| subject, but it's often frustrating to find the right order to
| learn concepts based on your current understanding and the
| subject matter. I've previously scoured syllabi on the internet
| for this, but often what I want to learn isn't really codified in
| a single course.
|
| I started building a prototype of this idea that I've been very
| slowly working on in my free time that indexes and uses my notes
| in emacs for RAG against a locally running LLM. I do think these
| kinds of learning LLMs have to be run locally, though I've
| recently gotten a little frustrated because I cannot run a
| capable open model without my machine's fans turning on.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-21 12:00 UTC)