Nintil

> AI tools and tutors never can and never should replace teachers.

This part confused me on several levels.

Let's break it down.

---

1. Tutors (human) can not replace teachers on a mass scale

True, and the article touches on this: human tutors simply don't scale!

2. Tutors (human) should not replace teachers

False. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [0] states that on average, 1-1 tutored students outperform 98% of classroom-educated students. (!!!)

Therefore, if we could replace 1:30 education with 1:1 education, the evidence very strongly says that we should.

In other words, the only reason we have teachers, instead of tutors, is because we don't have enough tutors. If we had enough tutors, we would simply 1-1 tutor everyone -- assuming our goal is educational achievement.

3. AI tutors can never replace human tutors

This is a strange claim. It seems to imply that all technological progress will suddenly cease after today -- not just in AI, but human-computer interfaces, robotics, etc.? (Note: the article doesn't make this specific claim, so perhaps I'm straw-manning here.)

I don't expect convincingly human androids for a while. But are androids really necessary for teaching math? GPT-4o seems to do fine! [1]

---

As far as the tech goes, I think the only thing missing is memory and personalization. Currently GPT doesn't know what I know, and what I don't know. What is the dependency graph of knowledge? (KhanAcademy had one, but they've taken it down...) Where in that…

Thank you for kind words. This is hard won advice, I hope it will be of some use. Looking back it's frightening how fast our life comes and goes, with two decades of learning just to become prepared for two decades of peak adulthood, to have some chance to make sense of it all.

About metformin. I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist, but if life science jobs paid more, I'd heartily studied for a bio degree and worked in this profession. I'm a slightly educated gentleman who has read his Molecular Biology of the Cell and some hundreds of scientific papers of varying quality. It's my hobby.

While it is true that there is a vast universe of "dietary supplements" that do nothing reliably measurable in homo sapiens, and then there are some legit FDA-approved drugs that don't work as intended in most individuals of homo sapiens either, I think there are varying degrees of evidence to support the claim that some approaches to life extension do work, if slightly, for many average human beings. And then there is an interesting question of increasing healthspan, not just lifespan.

There is a spectrum of quality of evidence, with gold standard being high-powered double blind randomized controlled trial, followed by lower-powered RCT studies, followed by not-really-double-blind studies, followed by replicated large observational studies, small observational studies, and then studies in nonhuman primates, mice, worms and yeast cells. Even this evidence is not ideal, given financial…

> There were valid reasons to not be friendly to USSR. Does this justify USSR entering friendship pact with Germany, thus enabling it to start the war?

This is not about "friendship pact", this is about non-aggression pact.

Was Poland not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declaration_of_non-aggression

Was France not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement#Consequences

> Never mind that this protection buffer would not have been needed if Germany did not expand its invasion... which it did thanks to USSR siding with it. Dubious twist of logic.

Good questions/points, but we're judging decisions made at the time with the hindsight of decades after the war. I don't think it was clear to anyone who would've joined the war, which sides would've won, and the likelihood of such events.

Every country, depending on the circumstances, was probably trying to do what's best for them. Either avoiding war, or exploiting the messy situation by expanding their territory by annexing small part of neighboring states.

In fact, after seeing what happened to Poland, I think that every party in such agreements realized that they could provide, at best, temporary respite and delay confrontation (but that's not a weird isolated phenomenon: circumstances changes, and that provides ammunition to arguments that old agreements are not valid…

Some other hypothesis:

- Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. This seems true if you look at citations alone. See https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis

- Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more funding and easier journal publishing, which gets them more exposure, so they end up with their labs and get their name on a lot of papers. https://researchonresearch.org/largest-study-of-its-kind-shows-that-the-matthew-effect-in-science-funding-holds-true/

If I was allowed to speculate I would make a couple of observations. First one is that resources play a huge role in research, so overall progress direction is influenced more by the economics rather than any group. For example every component of a modern smartphone got hyper optimized via massive capital injections. Second one is that this is a real world and thus likely some kind of power law applies. I don't know the exact numbers, but my expectation is that top 1% of researches produce way more output than bottom 25%.

First off, because of Bloom's two sigma effect [0], public schools will never be able to match the experience of a good homeschool. Unless you're talking about class sizes of four, each headed by someone who has mastered the material, the level of achievement possible under homeschooling will, in general, vastly outstrip what a public school offers.

Second, you can't talk about school funding unless you talk about both administrative bloat and teacher's unions. As long as teachers can keep voting themselves raises and escaping even the most basic levels of accountability for their results, money will not solve the public school crises. And administrative employment has grown by 75% over less than a decade -- 10x the growth in teacher employment during the same time. [1]

So sure, you solve the bloat and local control issues, there's plenty of money for instruction and classroom resources.

0: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

1: https://www.educationnext.org/growth-administrative-staff-assistant-principals-far-outpaces-teacher-hiring/

In Ricón's Fund People Not Projects III article [0] he relates:

> Ioannidis et al. (2014) note there are 15M scientists that published anything in the 1996-2011 period, but only 1% that has published every single year in this period. This smaller 150k-strong group accounts for 40% of all papers and 87% of all papers with >1000 citations.

One percent seems like a good size for a major niche; those who do the bulk of the publishing.

This is important, but if that's the only niche you're looking at you're bound to miss 99 percent of what you want to find.

[0] https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis

Edit: Maybe the people that need to be funded most are secretaries for some of the other 99 percent.