[lokimedes]

The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.

[graemep]

Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it.

There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.

I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.

I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.

[Retric]

It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc.

The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong.

[KiranRao0]

I agree that memorization is a very useful skill, but I believe it’s over-used in some education systems.

There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.

I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.

Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.

If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.

[WalterBright]

> Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it.

I was able to do the math to solve quantum mechanics problems. But I didn't understand QM.

[roysting]

The vast majority of people currently do not “ask the right questions and to make sense of the results” now because they are conditioned from early life on to only ask the approved “right questions”, which will always frame the sense they can make of any results; why would that change with AI that has clearly already been manipulated with the very same kind of dogmatic guardrails deliberately there to prevent “asking the right questions and make sense of the results”?

And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.

In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.

We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.

It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?

So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.

There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.