CGP Grey
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2013–2024
5:44 · 2.5M views · Nov 5, 2012
CGP Grey argues that a classroom works well only for the one student pitched at the average level, and sketches a future of personalized instruction. It introduces the idea of a Digital Aristotle, a tutor for every learner.
Brought up in nearly every discussion of AI tutors and the future of schooling as the original Digital Aristotle idea.
7 comments from Hacker News
I'd like to revisit a classic CGP Gray video for talking points on this subject: this video What roles does (Public) Education fulfill in society and to parents? * A free society and elected government function best when the people who make decisions about the future of that society are properly educated and capable of high level decision making. Public Schools and Education are generally critical (decades to forever) health factors in such societies. * Better educated laborers are able to further the knowledge of intelligent life, and make better things possible. The video talks about how education has traditionally generally worked, how educational videos can be the basis for learning a subject, and how an AI can feed that to students as a personal "Digital Aristotle for Everyone". '... I doubt that schools will go away. After all, they aren't just about learning but also freeing parents to work in the economy, while their feral children are are turned into civilized adults. Schools will be radically different, and there will be far fewer teachers working in them doing far less. While that's not great news for teachers, it is awesome news for students and society.' -- paraphrased a little, CGP Gray in the linked video. * Free parents to work in the economy. I'll extend this with anecdotal evidence from relatives during the pandemic. It generally gives parents and kids a break from each other so they don't go mutually insane and so that both can progress forward with things the
The solution isn't to provide multiple approaches in the same classroom, it's to remove the classroom altogether. I keep coming back to CGP Grey's take[0] on the issue, and since he's an ex-teacher it makes him somewhat qualified on the topic. Conceptually the problem is solved, it's one-on-one tutoring that was widely practiced in the ancient world for the aristocracy. The question is how to effectively implement that for the masses. Khan academy has attempted to use GPT 4 as a teacher bot in much this manner (to some success?), but the current gen of language models isn't smart enough nor designed to tackle this problem in a holistic manner. In a decade or two though? Easily. Obviously there are numerous problems when it comes to deploying this sort of thing to the public school system. I mean, can you really trust a private company do handle it? Eventually though, something will have to be implemented when the ever dwindling number of underpaid teachers forces our hand. [0] this video
Related thoughts on education... from CGP Grey: this video Also watch Greys favorites vol 4 (playlist on CGP Grey channel). These thoughts from Salman Khan are most relevant here: [LINK]
If you want to learn how to write, you mainly need to read more, and fixing grammar and punctuation is an automated thing nowadays. If you feel like you're getting expert writing feedback from a high school teacher then you won't be writing any novels any time soon anyway. > we should conduct a moonshot project to build a homeschooling technonanny that uses enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard so we can educate our kids without human interaction Actually, unironically yes since you only have to do pretraining once. A model that can then run inference locally on smartphones and is used for many years would amortize its creation cost though the utility it provides in a few years. It wouldn't even have to be AGI tier, just good enough to work with. A single teacher educating 30 people vastly underperforms 1-1 tutoring. It's a "good enough" system and it doesn't work very well for most people, it's just the only thing we have. Hell most of it is just following a fixed script that repeats every year, answering a few questions and grading based on ground truth. A personalized teaching system that knows your interests and skills would be able to motivate and explain far more effectively by adapting the script to you in pace and difficulty. Being available to you 24/7 for questions and having a personality you like would certainly help too. There's this 11 year old video [0] from the ex-teacher CGP Grey that turned out to be pretty prescient and elaborates a bit more on t
CGP Grey talked about it. "Digital Aristotle" If you were extremely rich and lucky in the time of Aristotle, you would have Aristotle as a tutor. Why can't everyone have their own personal digital 24/7 tutor? this video