Grant Sanderson: evaluation

Transcript context

…What would be the impact of more self teaching in terms of what kinds of personalities benefit most? There's obviously a difference in the kind of person who benefits most. In a situation where it's a college course and everybody has to do the homework, but maybe some people are better tuned for the kind of work that's placed there versus all this stuff is available for you on youtube and then textbooks for exercises and so on but you have to have the conscientiousness to actually go ahead and pursue it. How do you see the distribution of who will benefit from the more modern way in which you can get whatever you want but you have to push yourself to get it. There's a really good book that's actually kind of relevant to some of your early questions called Failure to Disrupt that goes over the history of educational technology. It tries to answer the question of why you have these repeated cycles of people saying such and such technology that almost always is getting more explanations to more people, promises that it'll disrupt the existing university system or disrupt the existing school system and just kind of never does. One of the things that it highlights is how stratifying these technologies will be in that they actually are very very good for those who are already motivated or kind of already on the top in some way and they end up struggling the most just for those who are performing more poorly. And maybe it's because of confounding causation where the same thing that causes someone to not do poorly in the traditional system also means that they're not going to engage as well with the plethora of tools available. I don't know if this answers your question, but I would reemphasize that what's probably most important to getting people to actually learn something is not the explanation or the quality of explanations available because since the printing press that has not been true. Not literally true because maybe access to libraries it’s not as universal as you would want. But people had access to the explanation once they were motivated. But instead, it's going to be the social factors. Are the five best friends you have also interested in this stuff and do they tend to push you up or they tend to pull you down when it comes to learning more things? Or do you have a reason to? There's a job that you want to get or a domain that you want to enter where you just have to understand something or is there a personal project that you're doing? The existence of compelling personal projects and encouraging friend groups probably does way way more than the average quality of explanation online ever could because once you get someone motivated, they're just they're going to learn it and it maybe makes it a more fluid process if there's good explanations versus bad ones and it keeps you from having some people drop out of that process,which is important. But if you're not motivating them into it in the first place, it doesn't matter if you have the most world-class explanations on every possible topic out there. It's screaming into a void effectively. And I don't know the best way to get more people into things. I have had a thought and this is the kind of thing that could never be done in practice but instead it's something you would like write some kind of novel about, where if you want the perfect school, something where you can insert some students and then you want them to get the best education that you can, what you need to do is — Let's say it's a high school. You insert a lot of really attractive high schooler plants as actors that you get the students to develop crushes on. est education that you can, what you need to do is — Let's say it's a high school. You insert a lot of really attractive high schooler plants as actors that you get the students to develop crushes on. And then anything that you want to learn, the plant has to express a certain interest in it. They're like, “Oh, they're really interested in Charles Dickens.” And they express this interest and then they suggest that they would become more interested in whoever your target student is if they also read the dickens with them. If you socially engineer the setting in that way, the effectiveness that would have to get students to actually learn stuff is probably so many miles above anything else that we could do. Nothing like that in practice could ever actually literally work but at least viewing that as this end point of “Okay, this mode of interaction would be hyper effective at education. Is there anything that kind of gets at that?” And the kind of things that get at that would be — being cognizant of your child's peer group or something which is something that parents very naturally do or okay, it doesn't have to be a romantic crush, but it could be that there's respect for the teacher. It's someone that they genuinely respect and look up to such that when they say there's an edification to come from reading Dickens, that actually lands in a way. Taking that as a paragon and then letting everything else approximate that has, I would emphasize, nothing to do with the quality of online explanations that there are out there that at best just makes it such that you know, you can lubricate the process once someone is sufficiently interested.…

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