ChaitanyaSai

I don't understand any of the math here, but I had two thoughts. Soon we'll have explainer agents that translate these according to my level so I can, with effort and interest, follow along and stretch my understanding boundary bit by bit.

Two, at some point AIs will be able to use other context like the fact that this is Terrence Tao and not your average Joe and change how it answers, either in tone or structure.

Congratulations on the launch!

How do you solve for "meaning?" Is there some implicit expectation that kids arrive with motivation to discover meaning, or some extrinsic rewards?

As AI essentially commoditizes the mechanical aspects of learning, this is the question we find ourselves asking.

I would like to share our journey running a microschool (where our kids go, along with 40 others now) and how we use AI and what we think about its role.

Some useful context, because this really has informed our approach. I am an engineer turned neuroscientist and the co-author of a popular nonfiction book on the mind (and I share this here because the hard effortful self-driven work of crafting this book taught me more about the mind than anything else in my PhD or later). This work, done during the pandemic when learning was coming online, was what pushed us into setting up the school and gave us the courage to work on it from first principles and not rely on any off-the-shelf alternative pedagogy (montessori, waldorf etc). We looked at (and continue to work on) the full-stack of philosophy, pedagogy, process, practice. So the "what should they learn" is also met with "why should they learn this" and also "how should they be learning this"

The *single biggest* learning for us, which we are now able to articulate clearly, is that schools are set up to fail because there is a well-intentioned but misguided focus on measurement (what are they learning). This gravitational pull results in a focus on mechanics (the most easily measurable thing; long division, periodic tables). This results in a narrow focus on concepts (what David Perkins terms elementitis). Most importantly, what gets left out is meaning. Why should I care about this? With a well-intentioned curriculum and an administration pipette we basically leach out agency and meaning.

So we try to solve for meaning. Our biggest worry with AI is that it focuses entirely on mechanics, with very little meaning. Adults and kids are learning to discount AI-content as automated and inauthentic. We derive meaning from connection. AI can help with the mechanics, but only when meaning has been established. Without this clear-eyed understanding and buy-in we basically have chromebooks all over again, which flattened learning to 2D screens and accomplished nothing (if you look at literacy numeracy scores)

Chatbots are great if you start with meaning and motivation. I already care about the why, so I will socratically find my way to the how and what. But if we do not care about it, which really is the biggest malaise (why should a child who has not yet explored the world or literature they like care about foreshadowing or plot mountains?) Sure, the AI could make it easier, but the kids still need to care?

Wrote about our meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement revelation and the usual unfortunate inversion here https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

We need many more people approaching education with ideas and experiments, so thank you and good luck!

The thing I do not understand here because it seems obvious: AI will be a commodity market and you simply cannot have a large PE multiple. So the valuations imagine a global commodity monopoly or duopoly coupled with the increased intelligence still disallowing other suppliers from becoming competitive? Without any network effects to help?

One man's filler is another's phatic communication (if done well and not to pad)

Thanks for sharing this. So lovely to hear and hope they find their joy and meaning in whatever they do!

Thanks, I have. And it resonated a whole lot! He was working within a very entrenched system. Systems have a way of achieving equilibria and then all the parts trying their best to maintain it (unions, lobbies etc) School is a practical necessity and there's a lot of good that's possible. It's easier to start outside of the system, but also consequently much harder to scale unless we build tools to help systems to stabilize.

Thanks!

Schooling has been trying for ever to institutionalize and standardize learning without really understanding what learning is. In that absence, we've focused on learning proxies, which are tests. And tests resulted in a focus on mechanics. Meaning was and is an intangible so it got leached out. Everything school does starts at the wrong end of meaning > motiviation > mechanics > measurement.

It is possible to fix school. It needs understanding learning, and also being willing to revisit learning design at every level. How to bring meaning in?

Without meaning you could have all your fancy chromebooks and chatbots but you won't move the needle (as we are seeing)

We are actually trying to change schooling (but with a tiny experiment, knowing that scaling does not happen without changes and cultural context)

https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

Thanks! How early did you take them out of school? How old are they now.

I run a microschool and also teach maths there. I love this essay, and book, but by focusing on maths as art, it focuses on only one aspect of meaning. The larger issue with the way maths is taught, and especially maths, is that it is all mechanics. Now for a certain set of students, those mechanics are incredibly beautiful. Prime numbers have a seduction to them! A few more can be introduced to this beauty and aesthetics, but many are still not into it, and that's entirely okay. What's needed for kids to see and start accepting it is meaning. And meaning comes from connection to the real world. This is why kids who are unschooled but work in shops become great at arithmetic. It's part of their daily web of life. No amount of sanitized exposure to abstract aspects, however aesthetically dressed up will help most. The mind needs to answer "why do i need to care about this" to be open to learning. And this is not something that can come with instruction. It is lived experience, culture. To fix maths education,and any education, you need to bring in meaning before mechanics. Unfortunately the curriculum, assesment, and therefore teaching inevitably end up with focus on the mechanics, which is the wrong end. It is meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement

School inverts this. And that's a tragedy.

Wrote about it here. https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

Agree, and it's hard to think about fixing education in isolation. But we've got to start somewhere to fix the meaning void. Easiest first step is to not take play away.

nice :) I cheated though by pasting it in because I couldn't bear the thought of having to wait for a day. Didn't even wait till the 4th try.

Lovely site! Did you start this pre-AI? One issue with AI answers that will likely persist is data staleness. Having a site like this would help users find the "source" and ask actual users perhaps?

How?

Consciousness is an engineering problem not a philosophical one. How do you get a tiny fraction of the many billion experiences that cohere to create your self to listen to, and decide what sensory data to turn into your next experience?

The engineering problem is that this decentralised moment to moment consensus has to span the galactic distance of your mind (from the perspective of a neuron) and do it fast and cheap (on a tiny metabolic budget)

You might like our book Journey of the Mind if you'd rather skip the onerous philosophical jargon and get a systems neuroscience perspective

https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

It's been more than a year for us in India. We've resorted to using openrouter. How is Mythos or whatever their latest is not realizing that this is a priority - customers WANT to pay you and cannot!

Here's my armchair two cents: Whoever it is, has to be British. The language is unmistakeably British or Commonwealth. It's likely him. I'd wager if there was a polymarket bet. But I also feel for him. Does this make him a target for both half-wit criminials and rogue nation states?

I am sorry but perhaps some use of AI or grammar-check would help? A lawn that's not overly manicured has its charm, but if it has one too many barren patches of clumps of overgrown grass, it doesn't appeal as much? This essay feels a bit like that.

Huh wow just noticing it. That was definitely my own writing. Kinda sad I failed the captcha

I thought you were joking about the date! They actually picked that one :)

AI has made it easier for me not to worry about how pretty or polished my comments are. What used to be a sign you cared has now been devalued nearly completely by AI. This is freeing and allows me to think about the substance. I still do read it, but don't care too much about the typos. It's now a a proud badge for artisanal thinking!

Ah, that makes a lot of sense!

(Do not use imessage, a Whatsapp user, and we can access that through the browser, which means you can plug it into an extension)

Question: Why do people want to do this with their mac mini? Can you not do all of this with a hosted VM instance? A mic mini makes it easier for people to set up? Everything still has to talk to data on the cloud right?

Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )

The whole next word thing is interesting isn't it. I like to see it with Dennett's "Competence and comprehension" lens. You can predict the next word competently with shallow understanding. But you could also do it well with understanding or comprehension of the full picture. A mental model that allows you to predict better. Are the AIs stumbling into these mental models? Seems like it. However, because these are such black boxes, we do not know how they are stringing these mental models together. Is it a random pick from 10 models built up inside the weights? Is there any system-wide cohesive understanding, whatever that means? Exploring what a model can articualate using self-reflection would be interesting. Can it point to internal cognitive dissonance because it has been fed both evolution and intelligent design, for example? Or these exist as separate models to invoke depending on the prompt context, because all that matters is being rewarded by the current user?

Fascinating read! And very interesting in the light of recent advances in AI to think about what makes this ability possible. How far can we go with increasing long-term memory and working memory? Does increasing comprehension follow with competence?

Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly? Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them?

Ramunujam seems to have had this.

OK I hope someone from anthropic reads this. Your API billing makes it really hard to work with it in India. We've had to switch to openrouter because anthropic keeps rejecting all the cards we have tried. And these are major Indian banks. This has been going on for MONTHS

I miss the thrill of running through the semi-parched grasslands and the heady mix of terror triumph and trepidation as we close in on our meal for the week.

Interesting! Documenting this anywhere?

Yup, it's the short sentence cadence.

"And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window."

The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out.

Have written about other markers here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...

One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."