One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
If ChatGPT is anything to go by, the jobs most at risk are those that involve writing vaguely convincing fluff pieces. Estate agent marketing blurb comes to mind. It's useless for anything that involves actually understanding concepts.
ChatGPT is only one form of AI, potentially AI would make 90% of permanent jobs redundant except the most creative and innovative. Everyone else would spend most of their time on a universal basic income funded by a robot tax doing occasional contract work
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math ...These curricula were quite different from one another, yet shared the idea that children's learning of arithmetic algorithms would last past the exam only if memorization and practice were paired with teaching for understanding...
Topics introduced in the New Math include set theory, modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, bases other than 10, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and abstract algebra...
The benefit of teaching the more interesting stuff at a younger age is that you find out much earlier which kids enjoy and have the capacity for maths.
As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Very good, but when I ask the question how much funding is needed the answers on PB is that funding isn't actually the problem. I have never seen anyone say how much funding (in £s or % of GDP or any other form) would be enough.
It's pretty simple - create an age profile of spending in the NHS, apply an ONS population projection, multiply by labour productivity projection (proxy for wages), multiply by some factor that represents obesity trends and technological advances
= massive increase in % of GDP on health
And when, if ever, do we say that the NHS has enough funding, that its got a budget and simply has to do as well as it can with that - and if that means not saving everyone, then not everyone gets saved?
We spent years locked down to "save the NHS" and the NHS funding has been ringfenced and avoided austerity for decades. Its almost like nothing will ever be enough.
The depressing maths behind the demographic blanket bombing we are facing is true enough though. The country is ageing and living longer while health metrics like obesity are getting worse. So if we ration healthcare to make a difference, then we have to ration it for the old because that's where the demand is.
An alternative would be to encourage mass emigration of retirees to sunny climes elsewhere, based on reciprocal social secutiry arrangements.
Well yes, the demographic problem is only because life expectancy is so high. If people were dying sooner, then the demographic problem goes away.
Yet all the talk of the NHS is how to ensure people live longer, then wonder why we need more money for the NHS. That's a self-fulfilling problem, you can't give the NHS enough money to make the demographic issue go away because as soon as you do, people will live even longer, and the problem is redoubled.
That's not entirely true either. We are having fewer children and have been doing for some time, so with a falling birth rate even with static life expectancy (and it is showing signs of stalling and falling behind other countries) the proportion of the population in inactive age groups continues to rise for some time.
Healthcare may improve LE a little but what a really good health and social care system should be able to do much better is reducing morbidity and increasing quality of life. That should then relieve pressure on healthcare provision for chronic conditions like diabetes, which among the big drains on resources.
But that's all part of the same problem, we have falling birthrates because it's too expensive for families to have more than two kids, it's too expensive to have more than two kids because taxes are so high to pay for all the old people to live forever.
I don’t think anyone has suggested birth rates are lower because of tax rates. In any case it’s a demographic trend in almost every country in the world including those with virtually no taxation. I doubt there’s any correlation - I might see if ChatGPT can do the maths for me.
There certainly is a connection between the cost of childcare (ie in which tax policy is a key part) and fertility.
Britain has some of the most expensive childcare in the world for reasons I don’t fully understand, and of course housing costs in the South East are prohibitive for people considering raising a family.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
The question isn't really, "Should England teach Maths to age 18?"
The real question is, "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?"
Sure, Maths teaching at primary level needs to be fixed *as well*, but this policy looks like an overdue correction of a mistake. If they can find the teachers for it.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
Will it be able to coax, cajole, incentivise, reward, engage, threaten, etc., unwilling children to participate? Ensure they don't bugger off, climb the fence and go on the main road? And chase them when they do? Because until it does that it won't replace my job. Sure. If a student desperately wants to learn it's an invaluable resource. But that is far from the majority.
AI is going to transform education everywhere. But AI teachers will be particularly amazing for keen students in poor countries with few resources. Suddenly they will have access to almost the best education possible
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Agree with that. Also with a maths degree. Couldn't understand why most people couldn't understand what seemed obvious to me and then hit my buffers at University. I focused on logic in my 2nd and 3rd year and very, very basic logic is something I also think would be useful to the general population (HYUFD in particular) yet in my day it wasn't taught until University.
Very good, but when I ask the question how much funding is needed the answers on PB is that funding isn't actually the problem. I have never seen anyone say how much funding (in £s or % of GDP or any other form) would be enough.
It's pretty simple - create an age profile of spending in the NHS, apply an ONS population projection, multiply by labour productivity projection (proxy for wages), multiply by some factor that represents obesity trends and technological advances
= massive increase in % of GDP on health
And when, if ever, do we say that the NHS has enough funding, that its got a budget and simply has to do as well as it can with that - and if that means not saving everyone, then not everyone gets saved?
We spent years locked down to "save the NHS" and the NHS funding has been ringfenced and avoided austerity for decades. Its almost like nothing will ever be enough.
The depressing maths behind the demographic blanket bombing we are facing is true enough though. The country is ageing and living longer while health metrics like obesity are getting worse. So if we ration healthcare to make a difference, then we have to ration it for the old because that's where the demand is.
An alternative would be to encourage mass emigration of retirees to sunny climes elsewhere, based on reciprocal social secutiry arrangements.
Well yes, the demographic problem is only because life expectancy is so high. If people were dying sooner, then the demographic problem goes away.
Yet all the talk of the NHS is how to ensure people live longer, then wonder why we need more money for the NHS. That's a self-fulfilling problem, you can't give the NHS enough money to make the demographic issue go away because as soon as you do, people will live even longer, and the problem is redoubled.
That's not entirely true either. We are having fewer children and have been doing for some time, so with a falling birth rate even with static life expectancy (and it is showing signs of stalling and falling behind other countries) the proportion of the population in inactive age groups continues to rise for some time.
Healthcare may improve LE a little but what a really good health and social care system should be able to do much better is reducing morbidity and increasing quality of life. That should then relieve pressure on healthcare provision for chronic conditions like diabetes, which among the big drains on resources.
In which case the solution is to encourage more children, whether via tax cuts or expenditure depending upon your politics to encourage that end of the demographics.
Fund it by cutting NHS expenditure from the other end of demographics and you can solve the demographic issues with two birds and one stone.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
The question isn't really, "Should England teach Maths to age 18?"
The real question is, "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?"
Sure, Maths teaching at primary level needs to be fixed *as well*, but this policy looks like an overdue correction of a mistake. If they can find the teachers for it.
A far better question would be "how should we be teaching maths ?".
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
If ChatGPT is anything to go by, the jobs most at risk are those that involve writing vaguely convincing fluff pieces. Estate agent marketing blurb comes to mind. It's useless for anything that involves actually understanding concepts.
ChatGPT is only one form of AI, potentially AI would make 90% of permanent jobs redundant except the most creative and innovative. Everyone else would spend most of their time on a universal basic income funded by a robot tax doing occasional contract work
How are we going to pay for our robots, as we don't manufacture them ? Along with the computer chips.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
If ChatGPT is anything to go by, the jobs most at risk are those that involve writing vaguely convincing fluff pieces. Estate agent marketing blurb comes to mind. It's useless for anything that involves actually understanding concepts.
ChatGPT is only one form of AI, potentially AI would make 90% of permanent jobs redundant except the most creative and innovative. Everyone else would spend most of their time on a universal basic income funded by a robot tax doing occasional contract work
Arguably it’s the other way round. Yes AI could take 90% of jobs - but it’s the bottom 10% that might survive. The humdrum menial physical tasks - helping old ladies go toilet - which are hard to robotise and probably not worth it financially (at least for a while)
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Everyone should know algebra, surely. It's such a useful tool for solving problems and understanding things.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
If ChatGPT is anything to go by, the jobs most at risk are those that involve writing vaguely convincing fluff pieces. Estate agent marketing blurb comes to mind. It's useless for anything that involves actually understanding concepts.
ChatGPT is only one form of AI, potentially AI would make 90% of permanent jobs redundant except the most creative and innovative. Everyone else would spend most of their time on a universal basic income funded by a robot tax doing occasional contract work
Arguably it’s the other way round. Yes AI could take 90% of jobs - but it’s the bottom 10% that might survive. The humdrum menial physical tasks - helping old ladies go toilet - which are hard to robotise and probably not worth it financially (at least for a while)
In the future we will all do social care
In Japan the robots are doing the social care, if we automate anything it will be the jobs that other people don't want to do such as social care.
Very good, but when I ask the question how much funding is needed the answers on PB is that funding isn't actually the problem. I have never seen anyone say how much funding (in £s or % of GDP or any other form) would be enough.
It's pretty simple - create an age profile of spending in the NHS, apply an ONS population projection, multiply by labour productivity projection (proxy for wages), multiply by some factor that represents obesity trends and technological advances
= massive increase in % of GDP on health
And when, if ever, do we say that the NHS has enough funding, that its got a budget and simply has to do as well as it can with that - and if that means not saving everyone, then not everyone gets saved?
We spent years locked down to "save the NHS" and the NHS funding has been ringfenced and avoided austerity for decades. Its almost like nothing will ever be enough.
The depressing maths behind the demographic blanket bombing we are facing is true enough though. The country is ageing and living longer while health metrics like obesity are getting worse. So if we ration healthcare to make a difference, then we have to ration it for the old because that's where the demand is.
An alternative would be to encourage mass emigration of retirees to sunny climes elsewhere, based on reciprocal social secutiry arrangements.
Well yes, the demographic problem is only because life expectancy is so high. If people were dying sooner, then the demographic problem goes away.
Yet all the talk of the NHS is how to ensure people live longer, then wonder why we need more money for the NHS. That's a self-fulfilling problem, you can't give the NHS enough money to make the demographic issue go away because as soon as you do, people will live even longer, and the problem is redoubled.
That's not entirely true either. We are having fewer children and have been doing for some time, so with a falling birth rate even with static life expectancy (and it is showing signs of stalling and falling behind other countries) the proportion of the population in inactive age groups continues to rise for some time.
Healthcare may improve LE a little but what a really good health and social care system should be able to do much better is reducing morbidity and increasing quality of life. That should then relieve pressure on healthcare provision for chronic conditions like diabetes, which among the big drains on resources.
But that's all part of the same problem, we have falling birthrates because it's too expensive for families to have more than two kids, it's too expensive to have more than two kids because taxes are so high to pay for all the old people to live forever.
Taxes were higher in the 1970s, more women in the workforce, more people going to university and starting work and families later and higher house prices in London and the South
Higher house prices everywhere, unaffordable prices in London and the South East. Tax as a proportion of GDP is higher now than at any point in the 1970s I think. Personal taxation may be lower but indirect taxes are significantly higher which raises the cost of living substantially and taxes on production are higher which means payrises are slower than they would otherwise be.
Yet we still have a higher fertility rate than Switzerland and Singapore which both have much lower taxes than we do. We also have a higher fertility rate than Canada, Spain, Germany, Italy and Japan.
The fact is almost every western nation has a fertility rate below replacement level and mainly because more go to university and more women entertainment the workforce and start families later.
Indeed the closest to replacement level of Western developed nations is France and they are even more statist than we are but perhaps more focused on the traditional family
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Everyone should know algebra, surely. It's such a useful tool for solving problems and understanding things.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
If ChatGPT is anything to go by, the jobs most at risk are those that involve writing vaguely convincing fluff pieces. Estate agent marketing blurb comes to mind. It's useless for anything that involves actually understanding concepts.
ChatGPT is only one form of AI, potentially AI would make 90% of permanent jobs redundant except the most creative and innovative. Everyone else would spend most of their time on a universal basic income funded by a robot tax doing occasional contract work
How are we going to pay for our robots, as we don't manufacture them ? Along with the computer chips.
Plenty of AI produced around Cambridge etc.
Though of course if we don't just rely on AI we have more humans in paid work paying taxes instead anyway
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Everyone should know algebra, surely. It's such a useful tool for solving problems and understanding things.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
Will it be able to coax, cajole, incentivise, reward, engage, threaten, etc., unwilling children to participate? Ensure they don't bugger off, climb the fence and go on the main road? And chase them when they do? Because until it does that it won't replace my job. Sure. If a student desperately wants to learn it's an invaluable resource. But that is far from the majority.
AI is going to transform education everywhere. But AI teachers will be particularly amazing for keen students in poor countries with few resources. Suddenly they will have access to almost the best education possible
Eventually, yes, it might easily take your job
I think I'll be handily retired by some distance by then. I can see massive benefits for the keen. But they tend to learn pretty well already. They pretty much always have. Much of education at the vital stage is about getting students to want to learn, and having the time to do it. The Internet already exists.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
The entire school experience is incredibly frustrating as a one size fits all curriculum, but to tailor learning to each individual child would require a much higher number of teachers with smaller classes.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
The question isn't really, "Should England teach Maths to age 18?"
The real question is, "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?"
Sure, Maths teaching at primary level needs to be fixed *as well*, but this policy looks like an overdue correction of a mistake. If they can find the teachers for it.
I asked CHATGBT "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?
It replied: The educational systems of different countries are often based on their unique histories, cultures, and economic needs, so it is not necessarily the case that one system is better than another. There are many factors that contribute to a country's economic success, and the way in which math is taught in schools is just one of them.
Dear me, Nadine Dorries ain't happy. Her diatribe against this government sounds every inch like that of a firebrand keen to make a name for themselves at Labour Party Conference.
"Three years of a progressive Tory government being washed down the drain. Levelling up, dumped. Social care reform, dumped. Keeping young and vulnerable people safe online, watered down. A bonfire of EU leg, not happening. Sale of C4 giving back £2b reversed. Replaced with what?
A policy at some time in the future to teach maths for longer with teachers we don’t yet even have to do so. Where is the mandate- who voted for this?
Will now be almost impossible to face the electorate at a GE and expect voters to believe or trust our manifesto commitments."
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
My son is the same. I was teaching him A level maths when he was at primary school. He is currently doing his Ph.D at Cambridge. He made the final qualification in 3 subjects for the GB Olympian team and won a Cambridge prize for a paper he wrote on game theory when he was in the lower sixth form. I look at his published papers and have not a clue.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
The entire school experience is incredibly frustrating as a one size fits all curriculum, but to tailor learning to each individual child would require a much higher number of teachers with smaller classes.
Or, you know, AI teachers personalised to each pupil
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Everyone should know algebra, surely. It's such a useful tool for solving problems and understanding things.
Most should. Some can't.
Some don't want to x plain.
They don't see y they have to.
Just don't add a third variable that would bore them to sleep.
So, from not having heard of revolut I have acquired and funded a credit card and added it to Google pay on my phone, all without yet getting out of bed.
Very good, but when I ask the question how much funding is needed the answers on PB is that funding isn't actually the problem. I have never seen anyone say how much funding (in £s or % of GDP or any other form) would be enough.
It's pretty simple - create an age profile of spending in the NHS, apply an ONS population projection, multiply by labour productivity projection (proxy for wages), multiply by some factor that represents obesity trends and technological advances
= massive increase in % of GDP on health
And when, if ever, do we say that the NHS has enough funding, that its got a budget and simply has to do as well as it can with that - and if that means not saving everyone, then not everyone gets saved?
We spent years locked down to "save the NHS" and the NHS funding has been ringfenced and avoided austerity for decades. Its almost like nothing will ever be enough.
The depressing maths behind the demographic blanket bombing we are facing is true enough though. The country is ageing and living longer while health metrics like obesity are getting worse. So if we ration healthcare to make a difference, then we have to ration it for the old because that's where the demand is.
An alternative would be to encourage mass emigration of retirees to sunny climes elsewhere, based on reciprocal social secutiry arrangements.
Well yes, the demographic problem is only because life expectancy is so high. If people were dying sooner, then the demographic problem goes away.
Yet all the talk of the NHS is how to ensure people live longer, then wonder why we need more money for the NHS. That's a self-fulfilling problem, you can't give the NHS enough money to make the demographic issue go away because as soon as you do, people will live even longer, and the problem is redoubled.
That's not entirely true either. We are having fewer children and have been doing for some time, so with a falling birth rate even with static life expectancy (and it is showing signs of stalling and falling behind other countries) the proportion of the population in inactive age groups continues to rise for some time.
Healthcare may improve LE a little but what a really good health and social care system should be able to do much better is reducing morbidity and increasing quality of life. That should then relieve pressure on healthcare provision for chronic conditions like diabetes, which among the big drains on resources.
But that's all part of the same problem, we have falling birthrates because it's too expensive for families to have more than two kids, it's too expensive to have more than two kids because taxes are so high to pay for all the old people to live forever.
I don’t think anyone has suggested birth rates are lower because of tax rates. In any case it’s a demographic trend in almost every country in the world including those with virtually no taxation. I doubt there’s any correlation - I might see if ChatGPT can do the maths for me.
There certainly is a connection between the cost of childcare (ie in which tax policy is a key part) and fertility.
Britain has some of the most expensive childcare in the world for reasons I don’t fully understand, and of course housing costs in the South East are prohibitive for people considering raising a family.
Sadly ChatGPT refuses to do the maths for me, but the cost of childcare is definitely a problem for female participation in the workforce and one of the biggest no brainer to boost our productivity. Whether it actually affects the birth rate I think is hard to measure.
I doubt we’ll ever get back to organic population growth, and it’s questionable whether we want that anyway given peoples concerns about Britain being full up. In any case it might relieve health service costs in 18 years time but significantly increase stress on education provision in the meantime.
The arithmetically obvious but politically problematic solution is to increase the state pension age to 70 and encourage older people to continue working for longer.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Everyone should know algebra, surely. It's such a useful tool for solving problems and understanding things.
Most should. Some can't.
Some don't want to x plain.
They don't see y they have to.
Just don't add a third variable that would bore them to sleep.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Not sure why this basic list needs to be taught to age 16. It sounds like you could stop maths proper at age 9, then do a module on money management. But this also raises the question why any GCSEs should be compulsory: if 100% of kids don't need calculus, they certainly don't need to read a handful of works of fiction.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
Indeed. If a kid is struggling with simple addition and subtraction it needs to be reinforced at an early age until it is embedded. Without moving on. Even if that isn't until 18.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
Agree with that. Also with a maths degree. Couldn't understand why most people couldn't understand what seemed obvious to me and then hit my buffers at University. I focused on logic in my 2nd and 3rd year and very, very basic logic is something I also think would be useful to the general population (HYUFD in particular) yet in my day it wasn't taught until University.
Yes, this was my conclusion, or at least that there comes a point where the maths is no longer 'obvious' and straightforward-seeming, and where that point is varies a lot between people. For me, I hit it in the Cambridge maths quantum mechanics lectures in the second year and realised I just wasn't having fun any more. I was spending all my spare time messing about with computers, so I switched to compsci for my third year. In retrospect that ranks pretty high in my list of "correct decisions I have made"...
But that's inconsistent with what it said in the earlier answer, that it was cancelling out the division and returning the original number.
Much as I hate to admit it, but mathematically the response is absolutely correct even though it looks to appear inconsistent.
Why do you “hate to admit it”?! This is genuinely exciting stuff
Just a joke Leon. Can't be seen to be agreeing with you or admitting you are making a good point, even though I think you do a lot of the time, but there is a point of principle that I must disagree, mainly because you are very good at taking it and responding in kind.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
Miss AI Perfect might want to work on her pronouns :-)
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
The question isn't really, "Should England teach Maths to age 18?"
The real question is, "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?"
Sure, Maths teaching at primary level needs to be fixed *as well*, but this policy looks like an overdue correction of a mistake. If they can find the teachers for it.
I asked CHATGBT "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?
It replied: The educational systems of different countries are often based on their unique histories, cultures, and economic needs, so it is not necessarily the case that one system is better than another. There are many factors that contribute to a country's economic success, and the way in which math is taught in schools is just one of them.
I would disagree with two main points.
Firstly, yes, it is necessarily the case that education systems in some countries are better than others. Otherwise your argument is that it's impossible to distinguish between failing and successful education systems. This is demonstrably false.
What is true is that you can't simply copy wholesale the education system of one country and transplant it into another. But I struggle to see what is unique about British culture that indicates against teaching Maths to age 18 like most of the rest of the OECD.
Secondly the use of the word "just" in the final sentence to minimise the importance of Maths education in relative economic performance is unwarranted. Teaching Maths well, as well as good Education in general, is a factor that determines a country's economic success.
If, as a country, you want to succeed economically then you have to pay attention to all such factors, particularly those such as education quality that are more directly under your control, unlike, say, geography or geology. Dismissing them as "just one factor" is the route to failure.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
It’s basically already here: sparxmaths.com
Though it makes teachers more efficient and creative, rather than pointless. I can teach far better lessons now I know kids will get personalised practice via AI.
Maybe Sunak has a cunning plan. Compulsory lifelong learning in mathematics will lead to a decrease in life expectancy (I can't cope with this), and large-scale emigration (I'm off if I have to do maths), thus reducing very significantly the pressures on the NHS. Problem solved.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
It won't if there isn't any manufacturing base there already. The countries with manufacturing domination will hold on to it.
The other thing Leon needs to think about is the possible combination of AI, and corporate personhood - particularly in the US, where the legal rights of corporations compared with their limited legal responsibilities would be quite alarming.
{a number of lobsters, elevated to sentience, have entered the chat}
I don't think sentience is required; just the required set of programmed directions. It ought to be possible for at least a subset of businesses for the entire thing to be run without human directors.
That opens up some worrying problems about legal responsibility.
It’s a reference to a SciFi book where the protagonists eventually come across a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain which is entirely dedicated to running uploaded corporations. It is not a nice place.
But that's inconsistent with what it said in the earlier answer, that it was cancelling out the division and returning the original number.
Much as I hate to admit it, but mathematically the response is absolutely correct even though it looks to appear inconsistent.
Why do you “hate to admit it”?! This is genuinely exciting stuff
Just a joke Leon. Can't be seen to be agreeing with you or admitting you are making a good point, even though I think you do a lot of the time, but there is a point of principle that I must disagree, mainly because you are very good at taking it and responding in kind.
Nah, the original answer was mathematically poor. The operations don’t cancel each other out, one reverses the other. I know it’s a subtle difference in language but the implication of the latter is that you have to be able to perform both operations for the problem to be a valid one.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
The entire school experience is incredibly frustrating as a one size fits all curriculum, but to tailor learning to each individual child would require a much higher number of teachers with smaller classes.
Or, you know, AI teachers personalised to each pupil
Head::Desk
Yes. Essentially the plot of the Neal Stephenson book The Diamond Age.
I expect you'd enjoy it. Would probably save you a lot of time to read that, rather than to spend your next couple of days reading people on twitter come haltingly to the same conclusions as the author.
But I was disagreeing with a different poster who thought that Maths uniquely benefits from being tailored to individual children. The same is true of education more generally and a genuine AI would make a huge difference in this regard.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
Jonny Fuckoff is going to be a problem, for sure
How do you motivate kids to learn a load of stuff which will probably be useless in their future and likely won’t lead to paid work?
That is the more pessimistic take on AI and education (I was trying to be optimistic in my scenario). Demotivation is already an issue for some kids and it’s going to get orders of magnitude worse
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
Sounds worrying to me. Who will be checking that the sentences this algorithm is generating and pumping out to the children contains factually correct information? And if future generations are reared on it, eventually no one will have a clue as to whether it's spouting bollox or not.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
Agree with that. Also with a maths degree. Couldn't understand why most people couldn't understand what seemed obvious to me and then hit my buffers at University. I focused on logic in my 2nd and 3rd year and very, very basic logic is something I also think would be useful to the general population (HYUFD in particular) yet in my day it wasn't taught until University.
Yes, this was my conclusion, or at least that there comes a point where the maths is no longer 'obvious' and straightforward-seeming, and where that point is varies a lot between people. For me, I hit it in the Cambridge maths quantum mechanics lectures in the second year and realised I just wasn't having fun any more. I was spending all my spare time messing about with computers, so I switched to compsci for my third year. In retrospect that ranks pretty high in my list of "correct decisions I have made"...
Disagree. I think it is more that people take differing amounts of time to move from concrete to abstract in maths (moving, say, from number to generalised number ie algebra). People appear to hit a hard wall when the teaching moves into the abstract too quickly for them, or builds upon what for them as an individual is shaky foundations.
I can teach anyone algebra as long as I have enough time to do it, to go at their pace.
One issue, alluded to above, is that when people talk about "Maths," they tend to mean several things at once. Especially politicians.
Many people seem to think it's all arithmetic. But basic arithmetic should be ingrained following primary school. That many adults are functionally innumerate is a product of the overcrammed maths curriculum. More and more is pushed into it, and there are only so many hours that can be taught (which seems to be an arithmetic and logic failure from decades of Governments meddling with the curriculum).
At GCSE, children should be able to solve simultaneous equations, identify and work with sequences of triangular, square, and cube numbers (Personally, I'd need to google what a triangular number is and why it might be important), calculate the nth term of linear sequences, manipulate polygons under reflection and rotation, explain the properties of special types of quadrilaterals, identify and apply circle definitions and properties, including: centre, radius, chord, diameter, circumference, estimate powers and roots of any given positive number, calculate with roots, and with integer and fractional indices, calculate exactly with fractions, surds and multiples of π; simplify surd expressions involving squares (e.g. 12 = 4× 3 = 4 × 3 = 2 3 ) and rationalise denominators, factorise quadratic expressions of the form x^2 + bx + c, including the difference of two squares; and factorising quadratic expressions of the form ax^2 + bx + c, and many other things.
I did maths throughout - GCSE, A-level, in my first degree, and in my second degree. I enjoy and admire maths. But I'm not convinced that further increasing the maths load-out onto all children, no matter what, is a key factor (and if we're teaching to age 18, we're going beyond the above, or, at the very least, banging that above into heads again and again).
I'd prefer to see a simplified elementary curriculum, including probability and statistics (because if you can't do them, they will do you), and ensuring the basics are complete, with a set of modular optional add-ons beyond that.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
In the Diamond Age, the equivalent of Fortnite was a game that hid the fact that it was educating the subject.
In a rather horrifying twist, a version was created that educated. And turned the pupils into devoted followers of a literal Queen.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
Health spending has not kept up with population growth + ageing/obesity + health inflation.
This is especially true with respect to capital investment, or in simplest terms, “beds”.
On top of those limitations, we can’t release people quickly enough from hospital into social care because (a) we don’t fund that properly either, and (b) we’ve lost a lot of staff from that sector.
Covid’s overhang continues to mean acute pressures; people are just sicker than they were before.
Apparently Rishi is fully focused on this (alongside his maths idea) so let’s see what he has to say.
The first point is the most important and the problem that Bart is pointing out is that in this environment of ageing/obesity the NHS is still attempting to extend life expectancy. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to accept we live in a resource limited environment and stop extending life expectancy.
That could have been a cogent argument if it was made decades ago, but it wasn't.
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
shock collars.
{Bud has entered the chat - despite suffering a head count reduction}
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
And again, as mentioned above, our entire education system is optimized for previous generations. And it keeps going out of inertia, because it’s how the decision-makers of today were taught, because it’s how their parents’ generation were taught, because it’s how their parents’ generation were taught. So it’s “real” school and “real” education.
So much of what we actually need and use isn’t taught because it’s not "real work" as per fifty years ago.
- Project Management - Meetings and Minutes - Presentation skills (creating and delivering) - IT: spreadsheet familiarity and creation [to be updated as the needs change for the next generation] - Business: Finance and Business Cases - Basic Accountancy - Management (and managerial skills) - Some of these get done at a token level in, say, English (we did a single presentation class). Those who have managed to pick up skills in the above as they go have a huge advantage.
I exaggerate, and yes, it would involve deprioritising knowledge that we would all see as very valuable (and yes, I'm a philistine) - but the key to school is to teach the basic building blocks and provide a taster of the deeper knowledge to see who grabs hold and/or is interested in that area. Looking at the Maths syllabus, for example because so much is crammed in, they need to skate over the basics way too fast.
All changes to every syllabus (including the full suite of what's taught and what's compulsory) have been done (apparently) by adding more in, never reducing what’s in there, and overwhelming the teachers and children.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
Your last para is correct. I infer that an alternative to A levels might be a better approach for the wider population - akin to Scottish Highers, Ireland's Leaving Cert, the Int Bacc or Bart's Aussie experiences.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
It won't if there isn't any manufacturing base there already. The countries with manufacturing domination will hold on to it.
The other thing Leon needs to think about is the possible combination of AI, and corporate personhood - particularly in the US, where the legal rights of corporations compared with their limited legal responsibilities would be quite alarming.
{a number of lobsters, elevated to sentience, have entered the chat}
I don't think sentience is required; just the required set of programmed directions. It ought to be possible for at least a subset of businesses for the entire thing to be run without human directors.
That opens up some worrying problems about legal responsibility.
It’s a reference to a SciFi book where the protagonists eventually come across a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain which is entirely dedicated to running uploaded corporations. It is not a nice place.
Indeed. But the nearer term stuff is what we need to be worrying about now.
And given the rate of improvement, AIs will be around 1000x faster in five years time. Quite what that will mean in terms of capabilities is an open question.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
Health spending has not kept up with population growth + ageing/obesity + health inflation.
This is especially true with respect to capital investment, or in simplest terms, “beds”.
On top of those limitations, we can’t release people quickly enough from hospital into social care because (a) we don’t fund that properly either, and (b) we’ve lost a lot of staff from that sector.
Covid’s overhang continues to mean acute pressures; people are just sicker than they were before.
Apparently Rishi is fully focused on this (alongside his maths idea) so let’s see what he has to say.
The first point is the most important and the problem that Bart is pointing out is that in this environment of ageing/obesity the NHS is still attempting to extend life expectancy. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to accept we live in a resource limited environment and stop extending life expectancy.
That could have been a cogent argument if it was made decades ago, but it wasn't.
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
I thought you were a fan of market forces? These gold plated pensions (and I cannot stress enough that I don't have one) were what the labour market dictated at the time you needed to pay these people to do the job they did. Your proposal to rewrite those contracts is pure communism: to each according to his needs, not what a contracting party agreed to pay him. Whereas where you are not personally disadvantaged we get caricature capitalism; the good people of Wick should pay the market price for having their parcels delivered even if that is £1000 a go.
Lots of people saying kids should have to study less maths but more statistics and probability within that time, but it is a betting board after all. Thing is that to the average person, statistics and probability are baffling, not just the technical parts but even the intuition behind different states of the world that don't exist. Some event will either happen or not happen, but you're telling me it has a single probability between zero and one?!
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
People already on it and being deployed for training in the real world for corporate clients....
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
Jonny Fuckoff is going to be a problem, for sure
How do you motivate kids to learn a load of stuff which will probably be useless in their future and likely won’t lead to paid work?
That is the more pessimistic take on AI and education (I was trying to be optimistic in my scenario). Demotivation is already an issue for some kids and it’s going to get orders of magnitude worse
I guess the issue will be compulsory curricula leading to examination. Everyone is interested in something. I have an 8 year old only interested in rollercoasters. Frankly, we have exhausted the entire Internet of stuff to engage him already. We simply don't have the knowledge to teach him. So I can see the possibilities. English? Read about rollercoasters. Write about your favourite ones. Least favourite. Which one would you most like to ride? Done that to death. Science. He knows about G forces, he knows about their applications to aviation and space travel and wants to know more. We don't know. Engineering, finance, history, chemistry, geography. Superb. I can fully appreciate how AI would be game changing for him. The problem will come when an exam question from a government minister's decree asks any kind of question about anything at all outwith the remit of rollercoasters.
Health spending has not kept up with population growth + ageing/obesity + health inflation.
This is especially true with respect to capital investment, or in simplest terms, “beds”.
On top of those limitations, we can’t release people quickly enough from hospital into social care because (a) we don’t fund that properly either, and (b) we’ve lost a lot of staff from that sector.
Covid’s overhang continues to mean acute pressures; people are just sicker than they were before.
Apparently Rishi is fully focused on this (alongside his maths idea) so let’s see what he has to say.
The first point is the most important and the problem that Bart is pointing out is that in this environment of ageing/obesity the NHS is still attempting to extend life expectancy. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to accept we live in a resource limited environment and stop extending life expectancy.
That could have been a cogent argument if it was made decades ago, but it wasn't.
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
I thought you were a fan of market forces? These gold plated pensions (and I cannot stress enough that I don't have one) were what the labour market dictated at the time you needed to pay these people to do the job they did. Your proposal to rewrite those contracts is pure communism: to each according to his needs, not what a contracting party agreed to pay him. Whereas where you are not personally disadvantaged we get caricature capitalism; the good people of Wick should pay the market price for having their parcels delivered even if that is £1000 a go.
If the contracting party has the funds available to pay the contract, then they can pay it.
If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be subsidised or paid for by taxpayers. If you are in a contract and the other party goes bust, then you lose whatever you contracted.
The good people of Wick I'm sure would rather go collect their own parcels than pay 1000 a go so the market would find equilibrium without interference.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
Indeed. I got bad reports in maths for quite a while in secondary school ... until they actually set a proper exam and found that I had actually been listening, at least for the time it took to understand it.
I think it is the abstract nature of it that confuses a lot of people, particularly when the basis of the whole subject is never really explained until University (and not even then if you do a mathematically based subject that isn't maths).
I think the idea that it should be split in to 'everyday practical' maths, which might include some light trigonometry, statistics/probability and finance/economics, and 'abstract' maths is a good one. I don't know when this split should occur though - you would be ruled out of a lot of science degrees by not doing the 'abstract' stuff as it often turns out to be essential.
In an ideal world, you would start by not having 30 to a class, though...
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
One thing Leon does not appear to have considered in his foray into futurology is the potential impact on the UK economy of hyper-competent AI. If the potential of its replacing well paid service jobs (accountancy, law, finance, etc) is fulfilled, then the possession of an advanced manufacturing base of significant scale will be essential to future prosperity. Which is not good news for us.
There's perhaps a decade available to rectify that.
AI if it can do most professional jobs will surely do almost all advanced manufacturing anyway
It won't if there isn't any manufacturing base there already. The countries with manufacturing domination will hold on to it.
The other thing Leon needs to think about is the possible combination of AI, and corporate personhood - particularly in the US, where the legal rights of corporations compared with their limited legal responsibilities would be quite alarming.
{a number of lobsters, elevated to sentience, have entered the chat}
I don't think sentience is required; just the required set of programmed directions. It ought to be possible for at least a subset of businesses for the entire thing to be run without human directors.
That opens up some worrying problems about legal responsibility.
It’s a reference to a SciFi book where the protagonists eventually come across a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain which is entirely dedicated to running uploaded corporations. It is not a nice place.
For a slightly more contemporary take on that, this guy is quite an entertaining read (but already somewhat dated as the books are a decade old). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
Indeed. I got bad reports in maths for quite a while in secondary school ... until they actually set a proper exam and found that I had actually been listening, at least for the time it took to understand it.
I think it is the abstract nature of it that confuses a lot of people, particularly when the basis of the whole subject is never really explained until University (and not even then if you do a mathematically based subject that isn't maths).
I think the idea that it should be split in to 'everyday practical' maths, which might include some light trigonometry, statistics/probability and finance/economics, and 'abstract' maths is a good one. I don't know when this split should occur though - you would be ruled out of a lot of science degrees by not doing the 'abstract' stuff as it often turns out to be essential.
In an ideal world, you would start by not having 30 to a class, though...
It's weird how other countries manage to have smaller classes and we don't.
Health spending has not kept up with population growth + ageing/obesity + health inflation.
This is especially true with respect to capital investment, or in simplest terms, “beds”.
On top of those limitations, we can’t release people quickly enough from hospital into social care because (a) we don’t fund that properly either, and (b) we’ve lost a lot of staff from that sector.
Covid’s overhang continues to mean acute pressures; people are just sicker than they were before.
Apparently Rishi is fully focused on this (alongside his maths idea) so let’s see what he has to say.
The first point is the most important and the problem that Bart is pointing out is that in this environment of ageing/obesity the NHS is still attempting to extend life expectancy. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to accept we live in a resource limited environment and stop extending life expectancy.
That could have been a cogent argument if it was made decades ago, but it wasn't.
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
I thought you were a fan of market forces? These gold plated pensions (and I cannot stress enough that I don't have one) were what the labour market dictated at the time you needed to pay these people to do the job they did. Your proposal to rewrite those contracts is pure communism: to each according to his needs, not what a contracting party agreed to pay him. Whereas where you are not personally disadvantaged we get caricature capitalism; the good people of Wick should pay the market price for having their parcels delivered even if that is £1000 a go.
If the contracting party has the funds available to pay the contract, then they can pay it.
If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be subsidised or paid for by taxpayers. If you are in a contract and the other party goes bust, then you lose whatever you contracted.
The good people of Wick I'm sure would rather go collect their own parcels than pay 1000 a go so the market would find equilibrium without interference.
The contracting party was the UK Government. When that goes bust we can talk.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
Indeed. I got bad reports in maths for quite a while in secondary school ... until they actually set a proper exam and found that I had actually been listening, at least for the time it took to understand it.
I think it is the abstract nature of it that confuses a lot of people, particularly when the basis of the whole subject is never really explained until University (and not even then if you do a mathematically based subject that isn't maths).
I think the idea that it should be split in to 'everyday practical' maths, which might include some light trigonometry, statistics/probability and finance/economics, and 'abstract' maths is a good one. I don't know when this split should occur though - you would be ruled out of a lot of science degrees by not doing the 'abstract' stuff as it often turns out to be essential.
In an ideal world, you would start by not having 30 to a class, though...
You could practicably run both as completely separate subjects in a large enough school - eg 6th form college. But ideally it would be good to do earlier.
Health spending has not kept up with population growth + ageing/obesity + health inflation.
This is especially true with respect to capital investment, or in simplest terms, “beds”.
On top of those limitations, we can’t release people quickly enough from hospital into social care because (a) we don’t fund that properly either, and (b) we’ve lost a lot of staff from that sector.
Covid’s overhang continues to mean acute pressures; people are just sicker than they were before.
Apparently Rishi is fully focused on this (alongside his maths idea) so let’s see what he has to say.
The first point is the most important and the problem that Bart is pointing out is that in this environment of ageing/obesity the NHS is still attempting to extend life expectancy. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to accept we live in a resource limited environment and stop extending life expectancy.
That could have been a cogent argument if it was made decades ago, but it wasn't.
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
I thought you were a fan of market forces? These gold plated pensions (and I cannot stress enough that I don't have one) were what the labour market dictated at the time you needed to pay these people to do the job they did. Your proposal to rewrite those contracts is pure communism: to each according to his needs, not what a contracting party agreed to pay him. Whereas where you are not personally disadvantaged we get caricature capitalism; the good people of Wick should pay the market price for having their parcels delivered even if that is £1000 a go.
If the contracting party has the funds available to pay the contract, then they can pay it.
If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be subsidised or paid for by taxpayers. If you are in a contract and the other party goes bust, then you lose whatever you contracted.
The good people of Wick I'm sure would rather go collect their own parcels than pay 1000 a go so the market would find equilibrium without interference.
The contracting party was the UK Government. When that goes bust we can talk.
It is. The last time it ran a surplus was in 2002, hence austerity. So let's talk.
Any funds that were put to one side should be used. Anything else, is just politics.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
How much practical experience of the current state system do you have ?
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
I don't think Woke is much interested in pre 19th century European and American history beyond slavery and sexuality.
So counter Reformation history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should be relatively Woke free
Health spending has not kept up with population growth + ageing/obesity + health inflation.
This is especially true with respect to capital investment, or in simplest terms, “beds”.
On top of those limitations, we can’t release people quickly enough from hospital into social care because (a) we don’t fund that properly either, and (b) we’ve lost a lot of staff from that sector.
Covid’s overhang continues to mean acute pressures; people are just sicker than they were before.
Apparently Rishi is fully focused on this (alongside his maths idea) so let’s see what he has to say.
The first point is the most important and the problem that Bart is pointing out is that in this environment of ageing/obesity the NHS is still attempting to extend life expectancy. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to accept we live in a resource limited environment and stop extending life expectancy.
That could have been a cogent argument if it was made decades ago, but it wasn't.
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
I thought you were a fan of market forces? These gold plated pensions (and I cannot stress enough that I don't have one) were what the labour market dictated at the time you needed to pay these people to do the job they did. Your proposal to rewrite those contracts is pure communism: to each according to his needs, not what a contracting party agreed to pay him. Whereas where you are not personally disadvantaged we get caricature capitalism; the good people of Wick should pay the market price for having their parcels delivered even if that is £1000 a go.
If the contracting party has the funds available to pay the contract, then they can pay it.
If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be subsidised or paid for by taxpayers. If you are in a contract and the other party goes bust, then you lose whatever you contracted.
The good people of Wick I'm sure would rather go collect their own parcels than pay 1000 a go so the market would find equilibrium without interference.
The contracting party was the UK Government. When that goes bust we can talk.
It is. The last time it ran a surplus was in 2002, hence austerity. So let's talk.
Any funds that were put to one side should be used. Anything else, is just politics.
No it isn't. Governments pay their debts is the first rule of a first world, rule of law country.
I don't think what you propose is possible anyway. The government's obligation to pay these pensions is no different from its obligation to pay coupons and redemptions on gilts. I would think our debt would be rerated as junk if it tried to default.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
I believe that everyone has a hard conceptual limit in mathematics beyond which it becomes incredibly difficult to understand and apply.
Most people can do arithmetic. Some struggle with algebra, the introduction of variables. Then comes calculus with derivatives and integrals. Beyond that is tensors, lagrangians and hamiltonians, set theory, quantum mechanics and so on.
I read mathematics at Cambridge. Some of my friends, who had come up with maths scholarships, switched from maths after the first year to read law or economics because they couldn't cope with the additional abstraction.
My limit came with topology (knots and stretchable surfaces) but there was sufficient other stuff for me to get a decent degree.
My conclusion is that the idea of everyone doing maths to the age of 18 (A Level) is completely crackers. A level maths will be beyond a lot of people.
What is needed for the general population is sufficient knowledge of arithmetic, orders of magnitude, managing finances, basic statistics etc. Practical stuff. To age16. Algebra of calculus isn't required. Not everyone is going to be a rocket scientist.
It's quite possible to teach set theory well before university. And it actually makes a lot of sense to teach some of the 'abstractions' to younger more receptive minds. Going through school learning only the conventional curriculum possibly militates against later learning.
My 12 year old grandson has an amazing grasp of mathematical abstractions that I didn't encounter until A level. But it's not for everyone. It's demotivating and unproductive for many. Teach basic practical mathematical skills to everyone and encourage and stimulate the lucky ones who can operate at a higher level of abstraction.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Well I agree entirely with your last sentence.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph: As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
Indeed. I got bad reports in maths for quite a while in secondary school ... until they actually set a proper exam and found that I had actually been listening, at least for the time it took to understand it.
I think it is the abstract nature of it that confuses a lot of people, particularly when the basis of the whole subject is never really explained until University (and not even then if you do a mathematically based subject that isn't maths).
I think the idea that it should be split in to 'everyday practical' maths, which might include some light trigonometry, statistics/probability and finance/economics, and 'abstract' maths is a good one. I don't know when this split should occur though - you would be ruled out of a lot of science degrees by not doing the 'abstract' stuff as it often turns out to be essential.
In an ideal world, you would start by not having 30 to a class, though...
It's weird how other countries manage to have smaller classes and we don't.
Yes. I remember an interview at the height of lockdown about how Denmark was keeping its schools open. The Danish teacher explained all the mitigations they were using. Interviewer: Wow. That's amazing. And how many children do you have in your class? DT: Fifteen. Interviewer: Oh. That helps explain how you manage to do it. And how many did you have before COVID? DT: (clearly confused) ...15.
But that's inconsistent with what it said in the earlier answer, that it was cancelling out the division and returning the original number.
Much as I hate to admit it, but mathematically the response is absolutely correct even though it looks to appear inconsistent.
I'd argue that the first response is wrong. If it was a cancellation of operations that returned the original number, (1/0)*0 would equal 1.
Rob, I'm happy that both are correct. When carrying out an operation the order does not matter where operations are at the same priority level (eg multiply and divide) and you will always cancel out first. Dividing by Zero is a special case (as @LostPassword said). It is deliberately not introduced at early levels of maths so as not to confuse. But it is a classic issue that arises when working with complex equations that you sometimes unintentionally divide zero by zero (because you are using variables so don't see it) and produce gibberish. Often when introducing a division in an equation you will add a note saying 'Assumes xyCosz is not equal to 0' for instance.
Here is one for fun that I posted here a few years ago:
a = b therefore a.a = a.b therefore a.a - b.b = a.b - b.b therefore (a - b)(a + b) = b(a - b) therefore a + b = b therefore 2 = 1 Dah dah.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
Same at our local school. The bloody Tudors, the Victorian era, WW1 and 2, then at secondary school it's 1066, and yet more world war stuff. They learn about slavery and African kingdoms and a tiny bit about the empire.
What you get none of - and we had almost none of in my time either - is wider European history. Has the typical year 11 student any concept of who Charlemagne was, or the 30 years war, or the Moorish conquests or Mongol invasions, do they know Germany and Italy used to be clusters of tiny kingdoms and principalities or that there used to be these two massive empires within Ryanair distance of us run by the Habsburgs and the Ottomans? No, they know about Henry the 8th, Hitler and the Nazis and William the Conqueror. If they're lucky they might heave heard a passing reference to the French and Russian revolutions and learned about the Battle of Trafalgar.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
Comments
...These curricula were quite different from one another, yet shared the idea that children's learning of arithmetic algorithms would last past the exam only if memorization and practice were paired with teaching for understanding...
Topics introduced in the New Math include set theory, modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, bases other than 10, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and abstract algebra...
The benefit of teaching the more interesting stuff at a younger age is that you find out much earlier which kids enjoy and have the capacity for maths.
As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Britain has some of the most expensive childcare in the world for reasons I don’t fully understand, and of course housing costs in the South East are prohibitive for people considering raising a family.
The real question is, "Why doesn't England already teach Maths to age 18 like most of the countries that are economically outcompeting it?"
Sure, Maths teaching at primary level needs to be fixed *as well*, but this policy looks like an overdue correction of a mistake. If they can find the teachers for it.
Eventually, yes, it might easily take your job
It would have been a stupid idea and achieved nothing. If something works, why change it? This was pure ideology above common sense.
Now, let's apply the same thinking to the railways and bring them into a proper StateCo.
Fund it by cutting NHS expenditure from the other end of demographics and you can solve the demographic issues with two birds and one stone.
This "policy" of maths until 18 won't survive a week's closer inspection.
Along with the computer chips.
In the future we will all do social care
Edit: I did it for you. The answer:
The fact is almost every western nation has a fertility rate below replacement level and mainly because more go to university and more women entertainment the workforce and start families later.
Indeed the closest to replacement level of Western developed nations is France and they are even more statist than we are but perhaps more focused on the traditional family
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
Though of course if we don't just rely on AI we have more humans in paid work paying taxes instead anyway
I can see massive benefits for the keen. But they tend to learn pretty well already. They pretty much always have.
Much of education at the vital stage is about getting students to want to learn, and having the time to do it. The Internet already exists.
And I anticipated your previous paragraph:
As Barnsian suggests, maths isn't a single subject, and making everyone jump through the same hoops leaves the less capable kids behind, and bores the brightest ones rigid.
Maths ought to be taught differentially from a fairly early age, as the one size fits all curriculum is incredibly frustrating for both ends of the ability range.
It replied:
The educational systems of different countries are often based on their unique histories, cultures, and economic needs, so it is not necessarily the case that one system is better than another. There are many factors that contribute to a country's economic success, and the way in which math is taught in schools is just one of them.
Her diatribe against this government sounds every inch like that of a firebrand keen to make a name for themselves at Labour Party Conference.
"Three years of a progressive Tory government being washed down the drain. Levelling up, dumped. Social care reform, dumped. Keeping young and vulnerable people safe online, watered down. A bonfire of EU leg, not happening. Sale of C4 giving back £2b reversed. Replaced with what?
A policy at some time in the future to teach maths for longer with teachers we don’t yet even have to do so.
Where is the mandate- who voted for this?
Will now be almost impossible to face the electorate at a GE and expect voters to believe or trust our manifesto commitments."
Head::Desk
I doubt we’ll ever get back to organic population growth, and it’s questionable whether we want that anyway given peoples concerns about Britain being full up. In any case it might relieve health service costs in 18 years time but significantly increase stress on education provision in the meantime.
The arithmetically obvious but politically problematic solution is to increase the state pension age to 70 and encourage older people to continue working for longer.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
Firstly, yes, it is necessarily the case that education systems in some countries are better than others. Otherwise your argument is that it's impossible to distinguish between failing and successful education systems. This is demonstrably false.
What is true is that you can't simply copy wholesale the education system of one country and transplant it into another. But I struggle to see what is unique about British culture that indicates against teaching Maths to age 18 like most of the rest of the OECD.
Secondly the use of the word "just" in the final sentence to minimise the importance of Maths education in relative economic performance is unwarranted. Teaching Maths well, as well as good Education in general, is a factor that determines a country's economic success.
If, as a country, you want to succeed economically then you have to pay attention to all such factors, particularly those such as education quality that are more directly under your control, unlike, say, geography or geology. Dismissing them as "just one factor" is the route to failure.
Though it makes teachers more efficient and creative, rather than pointless. I can teach far better lessons now I know kids will get personalised practice via AI.
Which is something you hyped to infinity and beyond as well.
And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds.
What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
The standard deviation wasn’t enough for him.
I expect you'd enjoy it. Would probably save you a lot of time to read that, rather than to spend your next couple of days reading people on twitter come haltingly to the same conclusions as the author.
But I was disagreeing with a different poster who thought that Maths uniquely benefits from being tailored to individual children. The same is true of education more generally and a genuine AI would make a huge difference in this regard.
How do you motivate kids to learn a load of stuff which will probably be useless in their future and likely won’t lead to paid work?
That is the more pessimistic take on AI and education (I was trying to be optimistic in my scenario). Demotivation is already an issue for some kids and it’s going to get orders of magnitude worse
I can teach anyone algebra as long as I have enough time to do it, to go at their pace.
Especially politicians.
Many people seem to think it's all arithmetic. But basic arithmetic should be ingrained following primary school. That many adults are functionally innumerate is a product of the overcrammed maths curriculum. More and more is pushed into it, and there are only so many hours that can be taught (which seems to be an arithmetic and logic failure from decades of Governments meddling with the curriculum).
At GCSE, children should be able to solve simultaneous equations, identify and work with sequences of triangular, square, and cube numbers (Personally, I'd need to google what a triangular number is and why it might be important), calculate the nth term of linear sequences, manipulate polygons under reflection and rotation, explain the properties of special types of quadrilaterals, identify and apply circle definitions and properties, including: centre, radius, chord, diameter, circumference, estimate powers and roots of any given positive number, calculate with roots, and with integer and fractional indices, calculate exactly with fractions, surds and multiples of π; simplify surd expressions involving squares (e.g. 12 = 4× 3 = 4 × 3 = 2 3 ) and rationalise denominators, factorise quadratic expressions of the form x^2 + bx + c, including the difference of two squares; and factorising quadratic expressions of the form ax^2 + bx + c, and many other things.
I did maths throughout - GCSE, A-level, in my first degree, and in my second degree. I enjoy and admire maths. But I'm not convinced that further increasing the maths load-out onto all children, no matter what, is a key factor (and if we're teaching to age 18, we're going beyond the above, or, at the very least, banging that above into heads again and again).
I'd prefer to see a simplified elementary curriculum, including probability and statistics (because if you can't do them, they will do you), and ensuring the basics are complete, with a set of modular optional add-ons beyond that.
In a rather horrifying twist, a version was created that educated. And turned the pupils into devoted followers of a literal Queen.
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-10-24/college-humanities-decline
We have a particular and long forewarned problem of one specific generation that seriously outnumber both those that came before it, and those that came after it. But what sacrifice is that generation making?
Future generations won't be retiring at 65 on gold plated pensions. The problem there has already been somewhat addressed but for those who have retired at 65 on a gold plated pension, what's the solution?
Any proposals to extend working is in the future, not for that generation. In the future the problem will have gone anyway, but our generation could be working into the seventies and beyond before retirement but without a demographic boom in that generation. How does extending that further address the problem of those who are already retired and have 3 to 4 or more decades of retirement?
So much of what we actually need and use isn’t taught because it’s not "real work" as per fifty years ago.
- Project Management
- Meetings and Minutes
- Presentation skills (creating and delivering)
- IT: spreadsheet familiarity and creation [to be updated as the needs change for the next generation]
- Business: Finance and Business Cases
- Basic Accountancy
- Management (and managerial skills)
-
Some of these get done at a token level in, say, English (we did a single presentation class). Those who have managed to pick up skills in the above as they go have a huge advantage.
I exaggerate, and yes, it would involve deprioritising knowledge that we would all see as very valuable (and yes, I'm a philistine) - but the key to school is to teach the basic building blocks and provide a taster of the deeper knowledge to see who grabs hold and/or is interested in that area. Looking at the Maths syllabus, for example because so much is crammed in, they need to skate over the basics way too fast.
All changes to every syllabus (including the full suite of what's taught and what's compulsory) have been done (apparently) by adding more in, never reducing what’s in there, and overwhelming the teachers and children.
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
But the nearer term stuff is what we need to be worrying about now.
And given the rate of improvement, AIs will be around 1000x faster in five years time. Quite what that will mean in terms of capabilities is an open question.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/06/how-britain-abandoned-classical-education/
https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/decline-humanities-levels-disadvantages-uk
https://www.synthesia.io/
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
Everyone is interested in something. I have an 8 year old only interested in rollercoasters. Frankly, we have exhausted the entire Internet of stuff to engage him already. We simply don't have the knowledge to teach him. So I can see the possibilities.
English? Read about rollercoasters. Write about your favourite ones. Least favourite. Which one would you most like to ride? Done that to death. Science. He knows about G forces, he knows about their applications to aviation and space travel and wants to know more. We don't know.
Engineering, finance, history, chemistry, geography. Superb. I can fully appreciate how AI would be game changing for him.
The problem will come when an exam question from a government minister's decree asks any kind of question about anything at all outwith the remit of rollercoasters.
If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be subsidised or paid for by taxpayers. If you are in a contract and the other party goes bust, then you lose whatever you contracted.
The good people of Wick I'm sure would rather go collect their own parcels than pay 1000 a go so the market would find equilibrium without interference.
I think it is the abstract nature of it that confuses a lot of people, particularly when the basis of the whole subject is never really explained until University (and not even then if you do a mathematically based subject that isn't maths).
I think the idea that it should be split in to 'everyday practical' maths, which might include some light trigonometry, statistics/probability and finance/economics, and 'abstract' maths is a good one. I don't know when this split should occur though - you would be ruled out of a lot of science degrees by not doing the 'abstract' stuff as it often turns out to be essential.
In an ideal world, you would start by not having 30 to a class, though...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
But ideally it would be good to do earlier.
Any funds that were put to one side should be used. Anything else, is just politics.
So counter Reformation history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should be relatively Woke free
I don't think what you propose is possible anyway. The government's obligation to pay these pensions is no different from its obligation to pay coupons and redemptions on gilts. I would think our debt would be rerated as junk if it tried to default.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
Interviewer: Wow. That's amazing. And how many children do you have in your class?
DT: Fifteen.
Interviewer: Oh. That helps explain how you manage to do it. And how many did you have before COVID?
DT: (clearly confused) ...15.
Here is one for fun that I posted here a few years ago:
a = b
therefore a.a = a.b
therefore a.a - b.b = a.b - b.b
therefore (a - b)(a + b) = b(a - b)
therefore a + b = b
therefore 2 = 1 Dah dah.
What you get none of - and we had almost none of in my time either - is wider European history. Has the typical year 11 student any concept of who Charlemagne was, or the 30 years war, or the Moorish conquests or Mongol invasions, do they know Germany and Italy used to be clusters of tiny kingdoms and principalities or that there used to be these two massive empires within Ryanair distance of us run by the Habsburgs and the Ottomans? No, they know about Henry the 8th, Hitler and the Nazis and William the Conqueror. If they're lucky they might heave heard a passing reference to the French and Russian revolutions and learned about the Battle of Trafalgar.
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.