I've been enrolled in an online CS program provided by a respectable university for a while. I get a lot of joy from continuous learning and being in a university program helps me stay focused, plus I'll get credentials to prove it eventually.
Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.
You could have said the same thing 20 years ago about wikipedia and the internet in general. A kid in a poor school on the other side of the world has access to the same wealth of knowledge than a student in a Ivy League university. But that hasn't made universities useless, and very few of those kids in poor schools (that wouldn't have gone to a elite university) picked up the opportunity.
If anything, AI in education I think will lead to a divergence. Mediocre students will be even more mediocre as they will use it as a substitute for learning, with AI doing their homework. Good students will leverage it to learn and understand things even faster.
> Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade.
Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like to be able to so arrogantly make predictions about the future as if one had already lived in it. How can you be so confident about something you don't know for sure?
You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
my point is that evaluating reading comprehension is typically done as a test, and test taking is not a valuable skill
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
Individual workers is a rather nebulous statement without citing how the measurement was taken. Like if you have 9 people with zero money and 1 person with a trillion dollars, on average everyone is a multi billionaire.
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
> The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
Not sure why this was downvoted. Memory is one of the most important skills imo
Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.
More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.
There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.
But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.
> Once you understand maths there is a whole bunch that makes sense and you can just derive
(trigger warning: I'm going to use the word "privilege" and hate myself for it...)
The comment above is your math-brain privilege speaking. Not every kid has the required mathematical aptitude for that. You can reach a level of basic competency with repeated drilling and practice, but not everybody's brain is wired to be able to retain the conceptual foundations and then just derive the rest.
This is where math education has gone off the rails, at least in California. It's great to introduce and emphasize the "why", but the curriculum has completely abandoned repetitive drilling. Kids aren't building up any muscle memory.
I think most people don’t bother to use the reading and writing skills they did learn, so I doubt this is as big a deal as people think.
More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old, and this has been true for decades. Being able to read isn’t enough, people have to actually do the reading.
This gives: 37% of Americans believing "God created humans in their present form", 34% believing that "God guided evolution", and only 24% believing "Humans developed without God".
> Creationist Belief Linked to More Religious, Less Educated, More Conservative Americans
Aside from the facts that a) the polls don't actually show that and b) people professing religious beliefs aren't necessarily as serious about them as you'd think (and can accept quite a bit of contradiction in them depending on the context), learning consists of something more than "doing the reading" and then choosing correctly what to believe from among what was read. When your outgroup doesn't agree with you on something, generally it isn't because they haven't heard from your authorities; it's because they don't trust your authorities. (And why would they, given their perspective?)
EU states do an excellent job at tolerating each other, with the odd hiccup. They are also gerontocracies fronted by middle aged leaders focused on pleasing older wealthy people, who last cared about entrepreneurship in the 70s. When you combine it with extremely low birth rates, you get a rotting economy.
All of these are mandatory in EU universities' CS programmes and are taught with relative rigor, particularly linear algebra. Calculus is called "Analysis" and usually covers all of Calc I plus a bit of Calc II.
> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
Right, but both of those examples are terrible ideas on their face.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
Not that I disagree, but it should be asked: Retribution for what? The answers are, generally:
>COVID restrictions
>The state of the economy
>The state of culture, broadly-speaking
>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)
I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)
There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
Why would "EU perspective" make it look more or less complicated? People are people everywhere, regardless of country.
> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded
It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.
I've worked with SOC2-certified companies where employees would email each other plaintext credentials, publish them in Notion pages, etc. You cannot cure stupidity by "complying".
It's very unique to LinkedIn. OP's prose is difficult to process even if you've abused your brain for years with LinkedIn content, though. In a more merciful timeline, only people like James Ellroy or Cormac McCarthy would ever attempt to write like that.
Having said that, higher education as we know it is facing extinction in less than a decade. The materials I'm provided are a rambling stream of consciousness that are difficult to make sense of. Only truly elite universities that educate students efficiently deserve to survive.
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