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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30072 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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I'm very sympathetic to that position, but:

Things like basic literacy, numeracy, being able to do addition, basic algebra, understanding the very basics of our economy and political system, are all very valuable for the economic productivity of 85, 90, 100 iq people. Higher-level math and humanities skills are very valuable for the economic productivity of 110 iq people. If you nuke schools - not just 'abolish public school and everyone attends private' but 'everyone stops attending school entirely' - I think a lot of people who aren't in the top 20% will be much less skilled, be less productive, make less money, and that'll also cause them social problems.

My understanding is that truancy problems usually start after all those things are taught in elementary school. I disagree that basic algebra is valuable when, in a few years, someone with an 85 IQ will be able to ask the Large Language Model on their phone to solve the problem for them, and it will get it right. You say teaching numeracy is important, I think by any reasonable measure we have tried and failed to do that. It would be easier to change societies expectations to be "people aren't expected to understand things with numbers", than it would be to rely on an assumption that call center employees can understand what it means when they push buttons on a calculator.

You're right that we shouldn't abolish school entirely, and I apologize for being unclear in my comment. I propose we keep schools but make them optional, at the parent's discretion. We are forcing too much education on people who are too stupid to benefit from it, and in the process we're torturing children who would actually benefit from more schooling.

I disagree that basic algebra is valuable when, in a few years, someone with an 85 IQ will be able to ask the Large Language Model on their phone to solve the problem for them, and it will get it right.

You need to understand the shape of algebra to even know what kind of question to ask the LLM though.

I think by any reasonable measure we have tried and failed to do that.

I think we've succeeded massively? If with school 50% fail that test, and without 80% do, that's great.

verizon doesn't know dollars from cents

I think this was a uniquely bad customer service experience, as opposed to the norm.

We are forcing too much education on people who are too stupid to benefit from it,

I think a lot of 100-90 iq people who currently benefit from schools would stop going, which would be unfortunate for them. Also, I think a lot of 110-130 iq people would spend all day playing video games or doing some shitty 'online learning'* where they make very slow progress.

*online learning isn't necessarily bad, but online significantly reduces the friction required to sell someone something bad

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