[johnfn]

Tell me if I am oversimplifying, but I never understood the noise about the two sigma problem. Like, of course if you have a private tutor to immediately answer any question that pops into your head at the immediate moment you get confused, you are going to learn vastly more efficiently than in a large classroom where once you get confused you are likely to stay confused. To say nothing of how the pace will likely either drag way behind what you'd like, or accelerate too fast ahead of it.

The environment is just obviously two sigma better. This just... seems obvious to me? In the same way that I will get stronger much faster if I have a physical trainer to tell me exactly what I am doing wrong when I do it? And it seems obviously unsolvable other than by getting everyone a private tutor (or AI..?).

Asking from a place of curiosity.

[klustregrif]

The noice isn’t about the effect, it’s about trying to scale the outcome. We essentially have proof of a method that is significantly better than what is used with the broad population, but we cannot scale it to the broad population. That’s the “problem” in the two sigma problem.

And in general ongoing from “it’s obvious to me” to a quantized effect is always an effort. For instance I don’t believe you are correct in assuming that one would see a two sigma effect in physical exercise when comparing someone who attends a regular exercise course va someone who spends the same time with a personal trainer. Two sigma is a lot, and you won’t be lifting significantly heavier weights from hav a PT vs doing starting strength training. In my opinion you would most definitely see a two sigma effect from doing steroids though. But this is all pure speculation which underlines that part of the “noice” is about the documented aspect of the two sigma problem, where we have a body of data to work against not just personal assumptions. That said if anyone has studies on personal trainers va course work in fitness I’d love to see my world image challenged by data.

[SgtBastard]

The “problem” is exactly as you’ve framed it: individual 1-1 tutoring unambiguously improves education outcomes by a significant (2 StDev’s in Blooms study) vs any other understood method but delivering this universally is (was?) infeasible.

Bloom looked at other methods used in concert to achieve similar improvements to “solve” the problem that could be delivered at scale.

LLMs may provide a new path to the 2-Sigma improvements without the same delivery problems.