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Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe

207 points · 414 comments · vinni2

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vincent-uden · 1790436359 · focus · HN ↗
This very much echoes the region of critical slowing down present in a dynamical system after its equilibrium states have disappeared due to a change in the system (a bifurcation).
1. andsoitis · 1790436640 · focus · HN ↗
  restate in simple language please?
  1. BobbyTables2 · 1790437295 · focus · HN ↗
    Shit is about to hit the fan.
  2. spockz · 1790437340 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    vincent-uden · 1790437971 · focus · HN ↗
    A bifurcation is a non-continuous change to a system as a result of a continuous parameter changing.
    For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.
    In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.
    I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.
  3. apples_oranges · 1790437394 · focus · HN ↗
    Something changed and adjusting is slow
    samudrijan · 1790437936 · focus · HN ↗
    Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
    andsoitis · 1790439018 · focus · HN ↗
    The good news is the ocean is vast. You don't need to be on a Titanic.
  4. vincent-uden · 1790437449 · focus · HN ↗
    I wanted to relate the result to well known phenomena in Dynamical systems. The value of the comment is in that relationship. But I guess I can try.
    After a saddle-node bifurcation (for example) a system is left with a region of critical slowing down. It can be thought of as the ghost of the fix point that used to exist in that region. Thus observing local phenomena in the system can make it look like the system is still stable while in reality it isn't.
    I guess the most famous example of this is global warning. As our emissions of greenhouse gases increased during the industrial revolution, the environment still seemed stable. But in reality we had already deleted the stable point around with our planets temperature oscillated.
    andsoitis · 1790437909 · focus · HN ↗
    Is your point that earth is not at a "stable point" or "stable range" but it used to be?
    Or are you talking about another system like "society" or "civilization"? Or something else altogether?
    vincent-uden · 1790438109 · focus · HN ↗
    Society, education and white-collar work in this case. Not saying I believe this does mean the collapse of white-collar work of course. Moreso that if that was the case, the point of no return could have already been passed without us knowing.
    dandellion · 1790438952 · focus · HN ↗
    For something as abstract as education, is there such a thing as a "point of no return"? It's not obvious to me that's something that degrades in the same way that climate or a physical system does, even if we can draw some parallels. I do think it's still a useful analogy, for example, it would imply that even though we're only starting to notice the ripples of that instability now, it has the implication that fixing it things would mean having to address much more than just what's apparent, we'd also have to fix everything that lead to this mess over the last few decades.
    vincent-uden · 1790439816 · focus · HN ↗
    I think there is for a snapshot in time of education or work which is how we commonly think of work right? It isn't true of course. But we sort try to group work into periods of stability between revolutions, industrial, digital or whatever.
    We have a chance to adapt, that's for sure. But white-collar work might not exist (or just resemble) as it does today.
    But I agree, the category is almost too malleable to analyze.
    Citizen_Lame · 1790439464 · focus · HN ↗
    Everything is a wave and there are always oscillations.
    Lerc · 1790439177 · focus · HN ↗
    Where is the slowing down? What causes it?
    I can see there a compounding drift from the stable point that is not initially apparent because the compounding values have not yet grown sufficiently to be meaningful. It is still an increase in drift
    Slowing down implies a decrease though, what does that represent then?
    vincent-uden · 1790439851 · focus · HN ↗
    I think we see the slowing down primarily in hiring right?
2. misterchocolat · 1790437324 · focus · HN ↗
  Holy sentence... George Orwell must be turning in his grave right now.
  1. vincent-uden · 1790437765 · focus · HN ↗
    A sentence isn't Orwellian just because you are unfamiliar with its terms. I though dynamical systems theory was quite common knowledge among engineers
    andsoitis · 1790438082 · focus · HN ↗
    The issue is that you're talking in abstraction and it isn't clear what the concrete thing is you're thinking of. Bluntly: you're being obscure rather than illuminating.
    For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?
  2. johnfn · 1790438128 · focus · HN ↗
    > article is about reading scores plummeting
    > guy writes sentence slightly above 6th grade reading level
    > “I can’t read this”
    Uh huh.
  3. lelanthran · 1790438542 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you think Orwellian language means?
    peri-cl · 1790438940 · focus · HN ↗
    I think GP's was a reference to Politics and the English Language (1946)—not "1984". An essay against convoluted writing styles.
    <a href="https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180223/html.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180223/html.php
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
    misterchocolat · 1790439112 · focus · HN ↗
    Orwell's 6 rules for good writing:
    1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
    2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
    3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
    4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
    5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
    6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
    Now you tell me
    lelanthran · 1790498930 · focus · HN ↗
    > Now you tell me
    That's not what is understood when we use the term "Orwellian":
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian
    <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Orwellian" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Orwellian
    <a href="https://www.oed.com/dictionary/orwellian_adj?tl=true" rel="nofollow">https://www.oed.com/dictionary/orwellian_adj?tl=true
    <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/orwellian" rel="nofollow">https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/orwellia...
    If both the wikipedia definitions and all the dictionary definitions differ from your definition, it's probably not the dictionaries and wikipedia getting it wrong.
    misterchocolat · 1790517030 · focus · HN ↗
    Did I ever use the term "Orwellian" in my comment?
3. prescriptivist · 1790437838 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.
4. lbrito · 1790438325 · focus · HN ↗
  Jira, is that you? Have you become sentient?
ThrowawayR2 · 1790437730 · focus · HN ↗
Archive link: <a href="https://archive.ph/n8Akh" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/n8Akh
ProjectArcturis · 1790437748 · focus · HN ↗
So many places to point our fingers:
-Everyone has screens.
-Education system broken.
-Covid disruptions
-Biological effects of Covid infections
1. Lerc · 1790439506 · focus · HN ↗
  I wouldn't know, the articles talking about the loss of learning are paywalled.
  1. ketanmaheshwari · 1790443882 · focus · HN ↗
    The writers of such articles too need to put food on the table.
    Lerc · 1790459652 · focus · HN ↗
    They do indeed, but that does not make the method by which they choose to do so free of consequences.
    Bank robbers, gun runners, and chiropractors also need to put food in the table.
2. notourproblem · 1790456949 · focus · HN ↗
  - Browner
K33P4D · 1790437790 · focus · HN ↗
Doesn't this just shift the average and calibrate a new set of expectations for the coming youth to placate themselves in an age of all or nothing AI?
This surely wouldn't be a problem for the corporations who keep funding politicians
JohnMakin · 1790437895 · focus · HN ↗
Whole word reading has been a disaster.
1. functionmouse · 1790437986 · focus · HN ↗
  something something the purpose of a system is what it does
2. boelboel · 1790439970 · focus · HN ↗
  Not all countries changed to whole world reading at the same time.
  1. analog31 · 1790441857 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed, and some countries have whole word writing.
3. t0mpr1c3 · 1790460698 · focus · HN ↗
  Teaching phonics is one thing the English education system got right.
themgt · 1790437934 · focus · HN ↗
Seems highly plausible AI/robotics will lead a significant decline in public schooling in the near future. Kids honestly might learn better doing a few hours a day one-on-one with 2026 frontier AI than sitting in a classroom of 30 with a teacher. 2027, 2028, 2029?
Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?
1. Espressosaurus · 1790438135 · focus · HN ↗
  No, they think they learn, then when they need to use that knowledge it turns out they learned nothing.
  1. gdulli · 1790438520 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly. Calculators didn't make the typical person great at math. They obviated mastery of math.
    fnordpiglet · 1790439561 · focus · HN ↗
    Math or arithmetic ? Math isn’t arithmetic any more than juggling is theoretical physics.
    Mastery of arithmetic involves memorizing lots of heuristic rules that aren’t particularly insightful about, or are outright conflicting with, the structure of math, and learning the structure of math first slows your ability to do arithmetic.
    I don’t think any school hands first graders calculators and asks them to never learn arithmetic. But I see no need once you’re doing algebra to be focusing your time on long division or multiplication. These are irrelevant distractions from algebra, time spent and points lost on arithmetic details is a waste of cognition and doesn’t help. This becomes increasingly true through calculus, linear algebra, until you get to real math courses where a calculator is pointless because arithmetic doesn’t even show up.
    drivebyhooting · 1790440484 · focus · HN ↗
    Multiplication needs to be automatic for doing algebra: FOIL and factoring polynomials immediately come to mind.
    Long division, at least conceptually, is also present in algebra and partial fractions.
    Espressosaurus · 1790442135 · focus · HN ↗
    Similarly, algebra needs to be automatic to do calculus.
    Everything builds on everything else.
    fnordpiglet · 1790474290 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed. And once you can mechanically do either of these and understand the process, you can defer the mechanics to a machine because continued mastery of a heuristic like FOIL is pretty irrelevant.
2. password54321 · 1790439633 · focus · HN ↗
  There is a 99% probability this will not happen in your lifetime. Half the point of school is so someone has supervision over children for 6 hours and to be part of a small community.
  If anything, if someone is looking for an AI proof job while not wanting to do something braindead, teaching might be one of the good jobs that may get more competitive.
3. ACCount39 · 1790440465 · focus · HN ↗
  AI improves a student's ability to learn. It does nothing to improve a student's motivation to learn.
  Motivating students to learn is not at all a solved task. And arguably a harder one too. Even the ~2010 "Google and grit" self-teaching is enough to outperform public education - but most students don't have the motivation to do that in practice.
4. sneak · 1790441696 · focus · HN ↗
  Modern public education is just state subsidized daycare to keep the population at their 9-5.
5. Zigurd · 1790442628 · focus · HN ↗
  That's a very attractive idea. KhanMigo was supposed to embody that potential. Seems like it hasn't.
  Some kids really enjoy learning. Never mind merely solving an educational assessments problem, personalized learning seems like it has the potential to unlock a lot of intellect across the population. And yet.
niemandhier · 1790438012 · focus · HN ↗
While kids practice the skills of the 21st century, testing got stuck in the 19 hundreds.
I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.
I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.
Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.
1. lelanthran · 1790438421 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a superficial take.
  Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.
  The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.
  Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.
  1. AlienRobot · 1790439066 · focus · HN ↗
    I saw an ad with a guy saying he doesn't write e-mails because he can just speak to the machine, and then the AI does it for him.
    Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...
  2. spongebobstoes · 1790439405 · focus · HN ↗
    how is "worse at reading" evaluated?
    test taking is not a valuable skill. it's mostly pattern matching against the question
    people need new skills in a new age. the education system hasn't even kept pace with the existence of the internet, let alone AI
    mkl95 · 1790440226 · focus · HN ↗
    You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency. This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s.
    spongebobstoes · 1790442063 · focus · HN ↗
    my point is that evaluating reading comprehension is typically done as a test, and test taking is not a valuable skill
    the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
    the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
    pixl97 · 1790443741 · focus · HN ↗
    Individual workers is a rather nebulous statement without citing how the measurement was taken. Like if you have 9 people with zero money and 1 person with a trillion dollars, on average everyone is a multi billionaire.
    The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
    parineum · 1790453694 · focus · HN ↗
    > The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.
    That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
    iamnothere · 1790445329 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    lelanthran · 1790440802 · focus · HN ↗
    > how is "worse at reading" evaluated?
    I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question.
    > people need new skills in a new age.
    If it's a skill that is picked up in minutes, it's not really a skill.
    mehrzad · 1790444172 · focus · HN ↗
    Your comment reads like satire.
2. reedf1 · 1790438434 · focus · HN ↗
  Kids are not training LoRas without a big budget. I fought for $5 from my parents, I could write C for free.
3. trey-jones · 1790438528 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.
  The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
  So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
  1. mschuster91 · 1790439425 · focus · HN ↗
    Education isn't broken, it's gotten too conservative and not able to keep up as a result.
4. anton-107 · 1790438538 · focus · HN ↗
  According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.
  So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
5. andsoitis · 1790438870 · focus · HN ↗
  > I see kids ... discuss post-modern philosophy
  Tell us more?
6. caconym_ · 1790439148 · focus · HN ↗
  None of the things named in your comment, on either side of the line, really matter.
  Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
  Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
  1. Avicebron · 1790439584 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the weirdest things I noticed when people around me started having kids was how immediately they picked up on their parents obsession with their phones, and would instinctively try to interact with them.
    It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
    vladvasiliu · 1790440433 · focus · HN ↗
    Why is that weird? I remember when I was a kid, I tried to imitate what my parents were doing, too. Lucky for me, we didn't have smartphones at the time.
    pixl97 · 1790443859 · focus · HN ↗
    A society is self similar because a huge portion of our social actions are not thought about but copied. Being a parrot saves a massive amount of energy in descending the behavior gradient.
7. avs733 · 1790439404 · focus · HN ↗
  I teach college… you rent wrong on what they output, you are wrong on the inference drawn from it.
  On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
  While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
8. mb7733 · 1790439539 · focus · HN ↗
  > they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago
  Such as?
9. mcphage · 1790439735 · focus · HN ↗
  If they have no emotional connection to texts from the 50s, then how are they discussing post-modern philosophy? Or rather, how shallowly?
10. solatic · 1790439758 · focus · HN ↗
  > 1950s texts
  The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.
  If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.
11. erelong · 1790449955 · focus · HN ↗
  Fair, maybe finding other ways to measure performance - like actual achievements of kids thst you mention - is s better benchmark
cubefox · 1790438091 · focus · HN ↗
There is a very high correlation between national IQ and PISA scores. We know that IQ is declining across the world, and it is declining because fertility and IQ are negatively associated. It's likely that declining IQ is a nontrivial factor for why PISA scores are declining. It is unfortunately still taboo to talk about this. Which is bad, because we can't hope to do anything about it if we don't face the truth.
1. Citizen_Lame · 1790439346 · focus · HN ↗
  IQ is not measure of intelligence, it's more like curriculum test if you go into history of test and how it started.
  1. sfblah · 1790441586 · focus · HN ↗
    No serious person in the field agrees with this.
  2. brabel · 1790441796 · focus · HN ↗
    I think there is ample evidence IQ correlates with lots of things like job success, performance in mental work, income etc to the point the military and many organizations require an IQ test for sensitive tasks. To dismiss it as curriculum memorization, which I think is what you are hinting at, is demonstrably incorrect.
    pixl97 · 1790443479 · focus · HN ↗
    Outside of science it seems to be that people measure intelligence as "what I feel I have" and nothing else.
    Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.
    tptacek · 1790464131 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not clear to me why you believe those two claims are in opposition.
  3. pixl97 · 1790443304 · focus · HN ↗
    How about this, an IQ test developed in the society you have to survive in is a good indicator of outcomes.
    If you want to be a pendant about it then there is no such thing as a comprehensive intelligence test at all as there is no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. But that's not very useful either.
2. AnimalMuppet · 1790439455 · focus · HN ↗
  Mind showing a source for IQ declining across the world?
3. brabel · 1790441466 · focus · HN ↗
  I saw a post where they showed that ethnically native students in Northern Europe are doing just fine, it’s the non natives, which are up to 30% and even higher in som countries, that are doing poorly. Do they actually look at that in these studies or it’s swiped under the rug as something too inconvenient to discuss? If this is fake news, please correct me if you can show the real figures for this.
  1. sfblah · 1790441605 · focus · HN ↗
    It's because it's inconvenient to discuss. What you said is the actual truth.
    brabel · 1790459274 · focus · HN ↗
    The really interesting thing was that when looking further, the results of non-native students reflected closely the scores of their native countries (not the countries where they now live), which is not at all surprising to me (as an immigrant, I don't think I am smarter because I now live in a "smarter" country even if I would love to be) but goes completely against everything people in the education sector appears to believe.
dumberquestions · 1790438138 · focus · HN ↗
The drop from 2018 to 2022 is as big as the one from 2022 to 2026, so it's not obvious whether AI had a role at all, although it's highly plausible.
I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.
1. asutekku · 1790438350 · focus · HN ↗
  Between 2018 and 2022, we saw the widespread adoption of social media and the rapid digitalization of education. Focusing on these key shifts, it seems clear to me that any kind of electronic learning has had a negative impact on education :p
  1. Avicebron · 1790438502 · focus · HN ↗
    You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus.
  2. AlienRobot · 1790438964 · focus · HN ↗
    Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.
    Loquebantur · 1790440940 · focus · HN ↗
    "Modern" education isn't modern at all. It's a leftover from industrialization, aiming at producing easily controllable worker drones.
    "Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
    Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
    Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
    pixl97 · 1790441657 · focus · HN ↗
    Playing games as a biological creature optimized to live on plains is great, your body has a lot of the lessons already encoded in DNA.
    When it comes catching up to the last 10,000 years of human development everything tends to get a bit trickier. Play is a good way at learning, but as you get to higher concepts you have to learn but are hard to game it gets a lot trickier.
    Trying to easily wrap this up as the elites vs you is highly reductive. Before that age you' have spent most of your time and effort making food and clothes, not active research into the world.
    piloto_ciego · 1790445523 · focus · HN ↗
    They're not wrong though, like, it is a creation of the industrial era, and honestly, the "elites vs all of us" isn't exactly crazy. Mcgraw Hill is literally owned by Apollo Global Management, don't just take my word for it, look up the relationship the management there had with Epstein.
    It doesn't have to be a conspiracy even, it could just be that terrible incentives across the board result in terrible outcomes lol
    JumpCrisscross · 1790445616 · focus · HN ↗
    > It doesn't have to be a conspiracy
    “Versus” implies intent. Apollo owning McGraw Hill doesn’t explain falling scores across the entire OECD.
    piloto_ciego · 1790447441 · focus · HN ↗
    You're right, but with the rhetoric I see espoused about "don't go to college" by most really rich people (who all went to the best schools themselves) the more I think "don't fall for it kids!"
    And there may be some social-engineering intent there, or at least something approximating it? Like, I don't think the elites are all smoking cigars after their Bohemian grove owl orgy (or whatever Alex Jones coded nonsense) and saying "muah hahahaha, we can really make these kids dumber!" But I definitely think that "it sure would be nice if the workers didn't want raises" certainly comes up. No child left behind has certainly had an effect too... Then there's the shootings, the bullying (which appears much much better than when I was a kid at least), and the jingoism/patriotic nonsense.
    My wife and I have actually been considering taking the kids out of "traditional school" and doing something more bespoke. Here in Alaska that's a lot more practical than in say, Washington? We have great home school programs here, and with our family members we have the education and qualifications to teach most of the core subjects (lots of retired teachers in our extended family). But, even with my kids in a fantastic school, it is a weird and almost carceral experience for the kids. They're constantly waiting around for stuff, constantly being tested with tests that don't seem to make a huge difference in what's taught, and they aren't really reading literature or doing much in math beyond simple rote work except for one of my sons who is 2 years ahead in math but is still bored.
    I'm not saying it was all roses when I was in school 20-30 years ago, but, it feels qualitatively different? Also... even in the nice school they're in, the environment is just... I don't know, oppressive, crowded, and restrained. I'm sorry, it's messed up to make kids ask to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. I'm sorry, it's weird how authoritarian most of the classes are - I understand why, shrinking budgets mean bigger classes, but at least personally, I feel that there's a lot of merit to the idea that this thing that used to be about learning has become daycare so the parents can stay grinding away while their kids are safely sequestered. We will see if we can do it, but we're thinking pretty hard about just travelling in the winter while they do home school online or take college classes.
    What's better: to have my kids sit in a box for 7 hours a day (but really only work for like 2-3 hours) and respond to bells on command or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties and guide them through projects that really push them all from another country in the winter where they can learn a second language, see a different world, etc? I understand that this is a privileged position for us - like, I work from my laptop and my wife has a commutable job, but each day I pick up the kids from their school it feels a little more like picking up a parolee.
    burnished · 1790449266 · focus · HN ↗
    Worry not, school was pretty much as you described even twenty years ago!
    piloto_ciego · 1790454196 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like that really depended on where you went? But I suppose my life was different, by the time I was a junior in HS, I was mostly taking shop classes and language classes, had my own car that I had bought with a part time job, and had a color printer that convincingly forged hall passes on demand, so I pretty much did whatever I wanted the last couple years? It worked out fine, I graduated near the top of my class? But the strictures and authoritarian sense seemed to be lower?
    I legit had aircraft sheet metal snips and numerous exacto knives in my locker and a leatherman on my person most of the time and it wasn't a huge deal? Hell, I needed the leatherman to open the hood of my shitbox car. In contrast today, one of my kids brought a toy knife to school a few years ago (because he thought it was cool, great learning opportunity for a young kid about "the man" I suppose) and you'd have thought they caught Bin Laden or something?
    Perhaps I was just lucky, but it feels way different now, though there seems to be a lot less bullying.
    trimethylpurine · 1790452289 · focus · HN ↗
    College just doesn't work. They don't know what jobs will be available and they are way too far behind the professional sector to teach about them anyway, with rare exceptions that aren't economically favored for, institutionally.
    The system forces schools to increase enrollment by assigning a tuition price based on attaching a loan to it. It's basically for profit. Then, the loans can't be forgiven in bankruptcy when the outcome of the education platform fails to produce an income that supports repayment.
    To get an education that doesn't completely screw you over, you need to be a minority with a scholarship or actually have rich parents and attend for fun. But in either case, your only benefit financially is the hope of connecting with other students whose parents are richer than yours.
    Exceptions for subjects with artificial barriers of entry (medicine, law, etc., and each of those has its own set of problems, mainly the price of education).
    (Speaking about the United States, but probably a lot of this applies to many places.)
    I disagree with the sentiment that the rich are dissuading college enrollment. I'm not rich. I don't hire college grads. They are broke, entitled, and lack work ethic. After 5 in a row, I started giving opportunities to smart kids, from good families, who exhibit an appreciation for hard work and good moral character. Those people learn in a month what takes a college grad 6. They appreciate opportunity, instead of expecting it.
    As I should have always known, a good person is far, far more valuable than a piece of paper certifying victimhood.
    piloto_ciego · 1790453508 · focus · HN ↗
    I really have found college valuable, but I also self-funded and have no debt. This is pretty much the arrangement I'm trying to set up for my kids too - when I had a blue-ish collar job (bush pilot is a blue collar job no?) I didn't think school had a lot of value, but then again, looking in hindsight, I'd unironically say that the most "valuable" (scare quotes intentional here) course I took was art history. Not because I learned anything that was economically useful, but it gave me a new way to view the world and literally changed some of the decisions I made with my life?
    I agree with the idea of giving opportunities to smart kids from good families who work hard and are ethical. But I also think it's pretty damn hard to get good at certain things outside of a classroom? I don't know, I have mixed emotions.
    Still, despite my misgivings with traditional education, I think there remains some good that comes from going to a place where your only job is to learn.
    trimethylpurine · 1790511007 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    compiler-guy · 1790809915 · focus · HN ↗
    Zhang, L., Liu, X., & Hu, Y. (2024). Degrees of return: Estimating internal rates of return for college majors using quantile regression. American Educational Research Journal. Prepublished March 12, 2024.
    <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/W9MBX7ZGK8FKK86JZ3Z9/full" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/W9MBX7ZGK...
    "We estimate the internal rates of return (IRRs) for individuals with college degrees in 10 broad majors compared to high school graduates. Our analysis shows significant differences in the age-earnings trajectories and IRRs across college majors. Specifically, Computer Science and Engineering majors have the highest IRRs, exceeding 13%, whereas Humanities & Arts and Education majors have the lowest IRRs, around 5% for male and 8–9% for female college graduates. Furthermore, the quantile regression analyses show that IRR is generally higher at the high end of the earnings distribution. Finally, we observed a slight decrease in IRR during the study period, which is consistent with the flattening and even decline in college wage premiums following the 2008 Great Recession."
    trimethylpurine · 1791145433 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    compiler-guy · 1791147452 · focus · HN ↗
    The above study did indeed control for that differences in socioeconomic background and all the rest.
    The data is very extensive on this point. Below I quote another one. Not sure what your sources are. The roi for disadvantaged students is lower than it is for richer students, but still positive across the vast majority of outcomes.
    "Critically, the analysis also accounts for the fact that different schools serve different types of students. This is important because different groups of students have different earnings potential going into college. Given two programs with the exact same earnings after graduation, the program with the lower-income student body will generally have higher estimated ROI, because the analysis recognizes the lower preexisting earnings potential of that program’s students. The ROI figures thus give more “credit” to schools with lower-income student populations."
    <a href="https://freopp.org/oppblog/do-low-income-students-benefit-from-college-what-the-data-say/" rel="nofollow">https://freopp.org/oppblog/do-low-income-students-benefit-fr...
    trimethylpurine · 1791186475 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't need to cite evidence to point out a logical impossibility.
    To make a good experiment you'd need to control for the presence of college in society. The fact that it exists and takes credit for the work of people who would already be doing what it purports to cause makes it impossible to conceive of such a study.
    It's just like a church claiming responsibility for human morality, where everyone starts with a church forced on them. Likewise the church will show studies on criminal behavior and drug addicts, and of course, we will find success in their work. God really does save, right?
    I'm not religious, I'm a scientist.
    Sure enough lots of people are moral even without the church, and lots of people are incredibly successful, even without college.
    And those examples lend themselves to reasoning deductively about the facts, a much higher logical bar when weighing what is or isn't worth believing in.
    That's true as far as the latest arguments on the philosophy of science. So I'm perfectly comfortable waving away illogical arguments, and giving less weight to inductive ones, even if they include lots of marketing and other sound research.
    It's more worth believing in because it's more logically sound. So no, the sauce is not weak when compared to your faith based argument.
    The research you provided shows that we might expect some people to benefit from college. That's the extent of it. But to prescribe it for everyone, is clearly a mistake. It's bad for countless more.
    JumpCrisscross · 1790457680 · focus · HN ↗
    > with the rhetoric I see espoused about "don't go to college" by most really rich people
    The two categories of people I know who say this are elite-college graduates and parents of kids who crashed out of their standardized tests.
    > or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties
    We’ve tried this for decades. What are the data?
    piloto_ciego · 1790466420 · focus · HN ↗
    > The two categories of people I know who say this are elite-college graduates and parents of kids who crashed out of their standardized tests.
    I mostly see business people who are already successful people saying this to be honest.
    > We’ve tried this for decades. What are the data?
    Well, the data is that if you can get a private tutor, that's what you should do, it's way more helpful than just going to school for 7 hours a day. That's why were thinking about making a more alternative education style happen. I'm definitely qualified to teach some stuff, and so is my wife, and mother. We just will need to find a way to fill in the gaps of the places where we're not qual'd. Regardless, I think personalized/individualized education is almost always better by the numbers.
    That said, it really depends on what you're optimizing for.
    graemep · 1790502294 · focus · HN ↗
    > We have great home school programs here, and with our family members we have the education and qualifications to teach most of the core subjects (lots of retired teachers in our extended family).
    These days you can find online courses and tutors. Lots of one to one adult attention helps a lot but kids can teach themselves a lot too. One problem is qualifications. Here in the UK our kids can just do the same exams school kids do. I think its more complicated in the US?
    I think a large part of the problem with schools (and this is why its a problem across many countries) is a greater focus on metrics.
    Schools have never been efficient with kids time.
    koolba · 1790445271 · focus · HN ↗
    > Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
    > Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
    In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.
    And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.
    For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.
    ThousndBeerMike · 1790457026 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean they are doing some things over at the Alpha School to work on gamification of education that is actually useful for the modern human, but they get a ton of hate for what they are doing, despite the test results speaking for themselves
    (they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).
    kyykky · 1790489216 · focus · HN ↗
    My kids are very much into games. However, soon as they got old enough to invite friends over, I have learned they are a minority. Most of their friends don’t give a shit.
    runarberg · 1790451340 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe more and more teachers care less and less about training students to take tests, and care more about actually educating students in the subject matter. So maybe the plunging test scores are are simple as “students are worse at taking tests.”
    what · 1790455262 · focus · HN ↗
    Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test?
    runarberg · 1790456900 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    what · 1790459594 · focus · HN ↗
    Not being able to focus for 4 hours seems like a bigger problem. But it’s also entirely orthogonal to your distinction of “teaching the test” vs “actually educating”. You can’t teach people to focus for 4 hours.
    runarberg · 1790462251 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    what · 1790466686 · focus · HN ↗
    Focusing is mental activity, not physical.
    runarberg · 1790468098 · focus · HN ↗
    Mental activity is a subset of physical activity.
    what · 1790478138 · focus · HN ↗
    This has to be the most retarded thing I’ve read all year. There is nothing physical about writing a test for 4 hours.
    runarberg · 1790483745 · focus · HN ↗
    > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    what · 1790558241 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s something wrong with you.
    runarberg · 1790606369 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    procaryote · 1790507047 · focus · HN ↗
    so your take on declining test scores is that it means people are learning more?
    runarberg · 1790515793 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    procaryote · 1790520090 · focus · HN ↗
    what would be a better repeatable measure of education?
    runarberg · 1790606169 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    procaryote · 1790451695 · focus · HN ↗
    This is highly optional. You can lock phones up at the start of the school day or at the start of class
    falserum · 1790457498 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
    thinkybrewster · 1790459473 · focus · HN ↗
    My sons' school makes it a requirement of continued enrolment.
    nobody9999 · 1790459764 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    FranOntanaya · 1790461450 · focus · HN ↗
    But you may be still trying to teach kids that are going through a form of withdrawal for several hours because it's not managed outside school.
    procaryote · 1790505487 · focus · HN ↗
    If it's every lesson, every weekday, they'll get used to it
  3. voakbasda · 1790440993 · focus · HN ↗
    I worked for an education tech company in the 90s. Seemed to clear to me even then that computers in the classroom were not going to be a positive influence. The way things have gone since then, it is no wonder that kids’ brains have turned into pudding.
    dghlsakjg · 1790442886 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that computers in the classroom can have a tremendous positive influence in specific areas when see with correct guidance. I think where we went wrong is replacing the classroom with ChromeOS and iPads.
    pstuart · 1790450232 · focus · HN ↗
    Those digital devices should be an augmentation of their education, not a replacement for what has already existed.
    Teaching kids is incredibly challenging -- if they view school as torture or a prison then we have failed them.
    I have three kids who've gone through K12 public schools and have been lucky enough to do so in well-funded school districts. Adding to that, we did our best to augment that with a parent organized weekly sessions with a host of different teachers hired to give lessons on things that the school curriculum did not cover.
    We also had them participate in Odyssey of the Mind for many years (it's a really cool program worth checking out: <a href="https://odysseyofthemind.com/" rel="nofollow">https://odysseyofthemind.com/)
    Even with all of that, it was clear that while much of their education stuck, other parts were effectively just tolerated.
    I think there are really two core factors that lead to educational success:
    1. A good teacher who can connect with students and inspire them to learn
    2. A curriculum that can be understood by the student as having value and aligns with their life needs.
    Teaching anyone is effectively futile unless they are curious or can find value in the subject material. Good teachers are the foundation of that, and outsourcing that to some sort of "educational platform" is doomed to failure.
    falserum · 1790457350 · focus · HN ↗
    0. children that listen to the teacher (depends on factors outside the classroom, like how parents raise the child)
    pstuart · 1790465802 · focus · HN ↗
    Parenting definitely plays a role, but if you are the parent of more than one child you quickly learn that it is nature, not nurture that defines the child. Nurture is a vital part of guiding acceptable behavior, but what their brain responds too is not under the parent's control.
    And obviously a kid that is a disruption in the classroom degrades the experience for all the other students.
    falserum · 1790497306 · focus · HN ↗
    There are two fronts. If they like the discipline and if they follow rules.
    In both cases I disagree (to some extent)
    Parents are not powerless.
    You can’t force love for geography, but you can choose to ignore or give full attention when child asks some geographical question.
    Same with setting boundaries and teaching to follow the rules. Kids definitely test boundaries, and thats good, they should learn to negotiate and sometimes win, but still kids that know boundaries at home will know boundaries in the classroom.
    pstuart · 1790528919 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you a parent? I am, and your comment indicates you probably aren't.
    Of course engaging with your children is vital, and their curiosity should never be dampened.
    Boundaries are about social discipline and that's akin to training a dog. Sure, every parent should do their best to make sure their children grow up to good members of society (including classroom behavior).
    But when you say that "parents are not powerless" your implication overstates that power. There's no way to force a child to be curious or to care about a subject. Some kids are just "born that way" and are a challenge even for the most caring and engaged parents.
    And once that kid becomes a teenager, that power starts to ebb really quickly as they learn that parents only have so many tools to enforce that discipline.
    falserum · 1790591973 · focus · HN ↗
    I am not a parent, you got me.
    But I do have quite close relationships to several families and their children.
    Some parents actively teach kids to read before going to school (despite certain developmental challenges the kid has), while others see it as a job of teachers to teach meaning of left/right or how to tie a shoe (not joking).
    Btw. Most (All?) management techniques could be compared to dog training (positive and negative reinforcements), it does not make it bad or immoral.
    > But when you say that "parents are not powerless" your implication overstates that power. There's no way to force a child to be curious or to care about a subject.
    By “not powerless” I meant exactly what I said, power is NOT 0%. And yes, as person grows, that power/influence diminishes fast, so I would say early influence is especially crucial.
    Btw. If all kids of a same parents have “bad manners” (kick and scream when others silently read), while all kids of other parent are well behaved (to a reasonable extent), then either manners are a genetical trait or maybe nurture part is quite an important thing.
    9x39 · 1790454397 · focus · HN ↗
    Is that a strategy for the 99th percentile or the 50th?
    The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores.
    dghlsakjg · 1790474764 · focus · HN ↗
    Using the correct tool appropriately - including computers - is for any percentile.
    My point is that we tried to make computers universal and one size fits all, and it doesn’t seem to have helped.
    hadlock · 1790486054 · focus · HN ↗
    I recall having access to an Apple II in first grade to play Oregon Trail, and later the full color Macintosh LC II with a mouse in 2nd grade. I think besides using a word processor once a week in computer lab, and typing class in middle school, there was little to no value in computers in school. I was a heavy user of Encarta in the library during rainy day recess. Giving every kid a laptop or tablet seems like a financial hand out to whatever company is selling them.
    lubujackson · 1790527708 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no intent behind any computer use in classrooms, unless an individual teacher makes Herculean efforts.
    30 years ago, a single computer sat in the corner we could sometimes use it to play "educational" games. Not learn how to use computers or even type, both of which would have been useful life skills. Not how to program or actually educate.
    Now, my son's whole class has laptops (progress!) and what do they use it for? To play Prodigy, a shitty "math" game ("What's 4 + 3? Your attack is successful!") and nothing else. Kids are bored of the shitty game, which pushes kids to pay for microtransactions during class, but they aren't allowed to do anything else on the computer.
    My son wants to work on his Scratch game? Nope. Wants to research for his science report? Web access disabled. This has nothing at all to do with computers in classrooms and everything to do with top down educational policy driven by administrative greed.
  4. danaris · 1790443373 · focus · HN ↗
    What are you talking about?
    Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
    The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
    Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
    JumpCrisscross · 1790445233 · focus · HN ↗
    We haven’t had a pandemic between 2022 and 2026. The 2018 trend continues. That strongly suggests a common effect across both samples.
    EA-3167 · 1790456342 · focus · HN ↗
    It suggests a lot of things, none of which are remotely intelligible with the information we have. The result as always is that people fill those gaps with their pet issues, whatever’s hot today, and tend to ignore anything that doesn’t fit their constructed narrative.
    the__alchemist · 1790450510 · focus · HN ↗
    If I understand you correctly, you are using Covid-19 as a means to justify any position (or broad classes of them) which is convenient to you. I say this because you're using it in a very broad way, and making assumptions to common sense which I do not think are as powerful as you imply.
    danaris · 1790488203 · focus · HN ↗
    Not in the least.
    I am saying that if you want to justify saying that a particular statistical anomaly that occurred during the 2020-2023 timeframe is not wholly or nearly wholly caused by the pandemic and its direct and indirect effects, you better have some damn good data to prove it.
  5. closeparen · 1790448398 · focus · HN ↗
    Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.
    dataflow · 1790448756 · focus · HN ↗
    You say this as if 2010 Facebook was comparable to 2022 Instagram/TikTok.
    ardacinar · 1790450574 · focus · HN ↗
    Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative.
    closeparen · 1790453456 · focus · HN ↗
    The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.
    junofan · 1790457971 · focus · HN ↗
    Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like:
    > An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.
    I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.
    Arainach · 1790464205 · focus · HN ↗
    Like so many conservative scare tactics, this is complete bullshit.
    I hang out with a lot of teacher. Grade inflation is because if you dare give anything less to an A to a student, their parents complain to administration and administration always gives in and never stands up for the teacher. Same if students aren't turning work in - parents complain, administration says to pass them.
    Educators are underwater, overworked, burnt out, and it's getting worse - and none of that is their fault. Every year they're asked to do more with less, which is why many of the best have retired or moved to other work.
    jeltz · 1790464761 · focus · HN ↗
    That just sounds like another hobbyhorse.
    kelseyfrog · 1790473685 · focus · HN ↗
    My take is real. Everything else is people pushing agendas.
    Fricken · 1790457575 · focus · HN ↗
    Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined.
    moron4hire · 1790449051 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    trhway · 1790450100 · focus · HN ↗
    we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event.
    danielheath · 1790456390 · focus · HN ↗
    Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population.
    moron4hire · 1790458165 · focus · HN ↗
    And surely one could never predict the impact of sending kids home for two years and expecting them to manage their own education on their own honor. Surely school aged children are better at paying attention to Zoom meetings than I am as an adult. It's in the computer! Kids are good at computer!
    marcosdumay · 1790460706 · focus · HN ↗
    If you click on the article that has actual data, the trend started in 2013 and has been mostly the same since then.
    williamtell · 1790450704 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know for kids specifically but average user time: 2012 1:30 2016 2:08 2019-now ~2:30
    If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.
    FranOntanaya · 1790461246 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd say the main difference is that you couldn't take a device with good media capabilities, good and cheap-ish networking and lasting battery everywhere. Laptops, netbooks, tablets were a tad too bulky, lasted only a few hours unplugged and mainly wifi, and mobile internet was not all that great.
    closeparen · 1790611157 · focus · HN ↗
    True leading up to 2010. The couple of kids who had the original iPhone or the 3G were unusual. Most of my classmates - including myself - got one between the 4 (2010) and the 5S (2013).
    neuraldeepnet · 1791078580 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    neuraldeepnet · 1791125396 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    bmacho · 1790500639 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  6. api · 1790449260 · focus · HN ↗
    I did tons of electronic learning as far back as the 80s and 90s, and still do.
    It’s algorithmic social media. There’s loads of both direct causal and indirect evidence that algorithmic attention hacking has made everything worse: mental health, learning, socialization, motivation, productivity.
    Short form content makes it even worse. It’s an endless barrage of short pointless tidbits with no connection, no plot, no larger theme, and often little to no content in the actual shorts. It makes trash TV look like high art from a lost golden age.
    m_fayer · 1790457673 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know why this is even a tiny bit controversial. The idea that the media you consume in formative years has a huge effect on mental development seems extremely obvious.
    I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.
    Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.
    What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.
    api · 1790461581 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s controversial because this is a forum with a lot of tobacco growers on it, and they don’t want to hear that smoking causes cancer.
    If you’d told me back then that people would actually watch this crap, I would not have believed you.
    But not only do they watch it, but they largely prefer it to anything with substance.
    Short form video in particular is brain poison, especially when paired with engagement algorithms.
    jacobgorm · 1790465488 · focus · HN ↗
    Even this week following new mediocre PISA results for Danish pupils, I see organizations like the Danish Industry Association and the Danish Chamber of Commerce posting calls for more computers in classrooms, to combat the problems caused by computers in classrooms. They say kids just need to be tought better “technology understanding”.
  7. the__alchemist · 1790449844 · focus · HN ↗
    I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.
    swatcoder · 1790455177 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    dbalatero · 1790455650 · focus · HN ↗
    If they are used, sure.
    stevep98 · 1790509391 · focus · HN ↗
    Is it the case that those that want to learn, will learn at a hugely increased rate, and those that don’t, will not learn anything.
    I used to hate history class in high school. The teacher was crap, the subject matter (basically kings and queens of England in the 1200-1700 era. We didn’t even cover ww2 in high school which was amazing to me.
    Having access to YouTube, and endless access to whatever angle of history I want, I can’t deep dive to whatever I want.
    YouTube, and AI chatbots totally enthrall me and I as an old adult am learning so much more than I was as a child, and its because I want to.
  8. burnerRhodov3 · 1790519783 · focus · HN ↗
    thats when they switch algo's because tik tok. It's more akin to a slot machine now.
    Pre-2016 facebook and insta algos were top posts from your follower net. Tik tok used a gambling algo to feed you the most viral content from around the internet. Randomized shit with no likes mixed in with the good, dopamine driving content. You never knew when you were going to get the good content again, so you just kept scrolling, waiting for the rush of really good content to pop back up.
2. add-sub-mul-div · 1790438398 · focus · HN ↗
  AI, screen time, short form text/video, normalization of recreational drugs, post-truth, there's no one cause but there's lots of things that are not helping
  1. everybodyknows · 1790474183 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  2. confidantlake · 1790560615 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't recreational drug use way down (especially alcohol)? All the others are definitely not helping.
3. chairmansteve · 1790439340 · focus · HN ↗
  I saw extremely rapid computerisation of my kid's education around 2020. Properly thought out and edited text books were replaced with last minute rushed teachers notes on google docs and buggy apps.
  That would have contributed to to the decline.
  1. mcphage · 1790439638 · focus · HN ↗
    When I was a freshman in college taking CS courses, they were just rolling out a new Java curriculum. And Java being fairly new, the textbooks that we were assigned were absolutely terrible. Just garbage books.
    raddan · 1790465322 · focus · HN ↗
    And? Did you turn out OK?
    mcphage · 1790470783 · focus · HN ↗
    The rollout was… uneven. Sophomore year, we had to do our projects in C++. Actually, we were expected to have already learned C++ the previous year, so there was a bit of a rush. Luckily, C++ had been around for longer so the textbooks were a ton better. And after a few years, the Java books improved as well.
4. jimbob45 · 1790440689 · focus · HN ↗
  WolframAlpha was able to do advanced calculus in 2009 fully for free. LLMs shouldn’t have affected math performance at all because the tools were already readily available for a decade at that point.
  1. xdavidliu · 1790440981 · focus · HN ↗
    totally false equivalency. wolfram alpha cannot one shot word problems for one, and there are many many more.
    jimbob45 · 1790445314 · focus · HN ↗
    It got you 90% of the way there once you’d translated the problem. I can’t imagine LLMs ultimately saved more time per problem than WA did.
    bdangubic · 1790449859 · focus · HN ↗
    I would bet that plot of WA users vs AI users, same age groups etc would look pretty funny as comparison
  2. pixl97 · 1790441743 · focus · HN ↗
    Wolfram is a tool, and LLM even without a harness is much closer to an agent.
5. binlog · 1790441270 · focus · HN ↗
  Hmm, did anything happen in 2020 to disrupt the entire education system?
  1. chii · 1790441461 · focus · HN ↗
    the event in 2020 would've only been the last straw in a series of bad policy in education. It might've brought forward this same outcome a few years in advance, but it isn't a root cause.
  2. filoleg · 1790441507 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it.
    I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.
    dghlsakjg · 1790442729 · focus · HN ↗
    Wouldn’t there be recovery? Especially for the cohort that started school after the end of restrictions.
    A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.
    yorwba · 1790445159 · focus · HN ↗
    The cohort that started school after the end of restrictions is not 15 yet, so no recovery can be expected until the 2029 PISA test or so.
    dghlsakjg · 1790463678 · focus · HN ↗
    No, but you would still expect to see some recovery 5 years on from students who were much younger when in-person was implemented.
    yorwba · 1790495473 · focus · HN ↗
    By what mechanism is that recovery supposed to happen? AFAIK students who studied less during the pandemic weren't made to study more later to compensate, so by default they'll permanently have done less studying than other cohorts at the same age.
    dghlsakjg · 1790533765 · focus · HN ↗
    If I missed a year of fifth grade in 2020, I have had 5 years to recover any lost progress and should do better in 10th grade than the kids that just missed a year. Especially when you consider that many of the topics being tested against are not even introduced until after 5th grade. Sure you might miss out on some arithmetic, but your trigonometry scores 5 years later should be better than students that missed out on trigonometry the same year.
    yorwba · 1790594901 · focus · HN ↗
    No, my position is that a recoverable setback will nonetheless remain unrecovered if there is no restorative force driving the recovery.
    A student who is bad at arithmetic will tend to struggle to learn trigonometry. A good teacher can realize this and allocate time to arithmetic practice instead. But this time has to come somewhere. As long as the number of teaching hours remains the same, they have to sacrifice something else. So if the students are all caught up in arithmetic, they will be behind in trigonometry by the same amount.
    To fully catch up without sacrifices, students who studied less would need to study correspondingly more to compensate, but there was no concerted effort to make that happen.
    graemep · 1790502495 · focus · HN ↗
    I think its probable that those who were younger were less able to cope and worse affected by it.
  3. ameminator · 1790441771 · focus · HN ↗
    But if the drop between 2018 and 2022 was AS LARGE as the drop between 2022 and 2026, this implies that something happened that was as large as a global pandemic for students' education happened in the last four years. I believe the OP is implying this could have been AI. However, something else could be happening, such as use of phones and other devices or another fundamental problem in the education system.
    throw93038383 · 1790442744 · focus · HN ↗
    The trauma from lockdowns does not disappear overnight! It is compounding damage, that gets worse every year!
    And we can not just change childrens habits, after we forced them to sit at home for 2 years with nothing but youtube! They missed key developmental phase!
    smugma · 1790442889 · focus · HN ↗
    Poe’s Law at work
    piloto_ciego · 1790445013 · focus · HN ↗
    The "trauma" from staying at home? Please. If the parents let them watch youtube for 2 years then the parents were stupid. I have 3 kids in school, all but one of them were in school at the time. Staying at home with Grandma and Papa while they did zoom school didn't break their brains. You know what my kids don't have? My kids don't have a smart phone. You know what my kids don't have? Unlimited access to devices.
    Now, I will say that the Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it. Those people were somebody's neighbors, grandparents, uncles, etc. So maybe the realization that "nobody gives a shit about you except for your productivity" was a lesson they internalized?
    Largely, I think it is the parents though. Like I said, I have kids, and when their grades slump, I get on them to fix it. A lot of people are really unwilling to do that.
    Izkata · 1790447023 · focus · HN ↗
    > I have 3 kids
    So they got at least some of what a lot of kids missed out on: socialization.
    With homeschooling, parents go out of their way to find other kids for theirs to socialize with, but during lockdowns this wasn't allowed (if the parents even had any idea about it, since it was forced on them and not something they chose to do).
    piloto_ciego · 1790447943 · focus · HN ↗
    I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way. We didn't really "lock down" here really. Again, the socialization thing? Not a problem from COVID, now, maybe the skinner box I see kids carrying around in their pockets? Yeah, probably not great? But they didn't lose their socialization here despite whatever right-wing grifters say.
    I think the only thing that was really curtailed was my sons took a few months off of karate? A lot more traumatic was probably mom having to sleep in a hotel for a few nights because she got inadvertently exposed to COVID as nurse (when we really didn't know how dangerous things were), or me having to camp out in my folks' motorhome for a week because I was at the tip of the spear medevac-ing people out of camps in the arctic. I know that was scary for my kids because they told me it was.
    Them not being able to have playdates being some generational trauma is nonsense. What wasn't nonsense was watching aunts and uncles die from a pandemic that we did next to nothing to fix in America until the vax came out. Also, I would not be surprised if there aren't some cognitive effects to COVID. Despite being very careful, we got it too. Everyone had it here. That probably ain't good for kids' development.
    But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too. Read this paper: <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310" rel="nofollow">https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310
    If people like doom scrolling more than they like screwing, it's probably not unlikely that they like doom scrolling better than studying.
    Izkata · 1790448569 · focus · HN ↗
    > I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way.
    Here in Illinois it was over a year, possibly two in some places. The schools didn't return to in-person right away after the government mandates were lifted.
    throw-the-towel · 1790451367 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, because everywhere in the world is Alaska and did exactly what Alaska did. Man, somehow you out-US-exceptionalismed the usual US exceptionalism you see around here.
    piloto_ciego · 1790453634 · focus · HN ↗
    You guys have no idea of just how bad it was here. No idea. A million people died. That did not happen in say, Spain. But the kids missing school for a little bit was not as big of a deal as people are trying to retcon now.
    throw93038383 · 1790461850 · focus · HN ↗
    Obviusly you and your family were not affected by lockdown so badly, congrats. Not everyone was so lucky though.
    > Staying at home with Grandma and Papa
    Lockdown prevented relatives visits.
    > Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it.
    Millions die every year, that is normal for a country with 350 million people!
    > You know what my kids don't have? My kids don't have a smart phone. You know what my kids don't have? Unlimited access to devices.
    My kid did not had device before pandemic, we got tablet for lockdowns. My kid was social and full of energy, it always wanted to play outside and climb trees. Two years of isolation, in tiny apartment were pretty bad!
    Now it does not want to go outside, it does not want to socialize! It adapted and got new hobies.
    > Largely, I think it is the parents though
    Yes, i blame myself. For not ignoring lockdowns and not fighting back! Against sociopaths who enforced this bs!
    zqna · 1790464340 · focus · HN ↗
    You should direct your anger at sociopaths, who can't keep their asses at the first symptoms of illness or who couldn't skip partying for dutation of few months, showing middle finger to all of us and especially to medical services who were actually the main advocates of the lockdown, because well, the hospitals were overcrowded. If you would bother to remember all this of course
    piloto_ciego · 1790467181 · focus · HN ↗
    Seriously. I cannot stand this revisionist history nonsense about how "terrible" the lockdowns were.
    Meanwhile my wife was on the front lines watching people die on vents, and I was literally medevac-ing people out of camp in the arctic with totally inadequate PPE (but we had to do what we had to do, if it got into the camp there was no way to treat people). Seriously one of the most stressful times of my life and I see these people trying to reimagine the history of this. I remember this, I was there...
    throw93038383 · 1790469209 · focus · HN ↗
    Alaska had very limited lockdown for only 2 months. I also imagine you have a fairly large house, with huge garden.
    It is not "revisionist history nonsense". Lockdowns were pretty brutal, lasted almost 18 months total, and several people committed suicide over it.
    > I remember this, I was there
    You were not there! You were at Alaska!
    Like celebrities claiming "we are in this together" from their mansions!
    piloto_ciego · 1790536299 · focus · HN ↗
    Dude I was pulling dying people out of the arctic and my wife was putting patients on ventilators.
    But “oh no… I was bummed because I couldn’t go to the mall!” You have no idea.
    Not to mention, I literally got sick that winter with something else and had a self-imposed lockdown because I was immunocompromised for like a year. It wasn’t great but it was fine.
    This heartburn about this like it was some big task to stay home while there were people out there literally in the thick of it, watching people get sick and die, or dying themselves? Miss me with that. I think my kids did zoom school for something like a year? It wasn’t fine. Grow up.
    cindyllm · 1790471123 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    customguy · 1790469561 · focus · HN ↗
    > Like I said, I have kids, and when their grades slump, I get on them to fix it. A lot of people are really unwilling to do that.
    This is a massive, wide-spread decline, it's not isolated to the US, and all you can think of is to brag about how you're a better parent than the average? As if kids who made the mistake of having being born to parents who are "stupid" unlike you should just be left hanging in the wind? Come on.
    So much about how so many acted during the pandemic, both pro and contra, whatever, was messed up, and a lot of kids got to pay a hefty price for it through no fault of their own. And I think much more interesting than what exactly caused it how much and who should be ranked where on the value totem when it comes to how they handled this or what they proposed, is how to change it, how to help.
    And for that I'd rather listen to affected kids than parents parading their personal achievements, because while that is all very good, and well done, if you don't understand the sheer vastness and range of humans and how they live, it's still like someone who has perfect photographic memory wondering why cameras are so popular, or why people re-read books instead of saving time by remembering anything they read forever. It's precisely because you are so far above the average parent that you offer nothing helpful.
    piloto_ciego · 1790535585 · focus · HN ↗
    If you’re not trying to push your kids to do better and have some agency etc., you’re doing a bad job at parenting. People have a responsibility to their kids and to the future, and part of that responsibility involves trying to teach people that they can always improve that they’re not stuck being at whatever level they’re at etc. the big thing I see is teaching kids that “it’s important to give a shit.”
    I’m not saying it’s the kids’ fault that they’re not doing as well, but the parents definitely have a responsibility to try harder.
    customguy · 1790540095 · focus · HN ↗
    That's all true and still like saying people should drive more carefully in a discussion about seat belt materials or road planning.
    piloto_ciego · 1790570069 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it’s not. That analogy is bonkers.
    People should actually make their kids do stuff that’s intellectually challenging and push them to succeed. The test scores are in part (in my opinion) because people can’t be bothered to give a damn. Get off your collective asses and make your kids read a book, do their homework, and turn the f-ing iPad off.
    customguy · 1790604973 · focus · HN ↗
    > Places that have avoided declines deserve more attention. Britain is one. In 2009 its pupils scraped into the world’s top 30 in maths and reading. Now they sit in the top ten.
    How do you explain this then? The article mentions things like curriculum changes, but you think parents in the UK did and do something they don't do elsewhere. People just "stopped giving a damn", except in the UK and other places, and unlike you. Sure thing.
    piloto_ciego · 1790613933 · focus · HN ↗
    I haven’t dug into the stats, but if they just stayed level while everyone else fell it would look like a rise relative to everyone else, no? This could just be them staying level while everyone else slumps - or maybe British parents just care more and started caring more.
    But at least here in the states I think a lot of people dgaf. And yes, I do gaf.
    What I can’t figure out is why you’re so upset about this - my intuition is that “the lady doth protest too much.” Maybe you know, deep down inside of you, that people aren’t caring as much. Maybe you feel it too - the impulse to not care. Maybe you feel attacked.
    If you’re a parent, then my reply would be “good!” People should be doing a better job pushing their kids to excel to the limits of their capabilities and passions.
    binlog · 1790443637 · focus · HN ↗
    - Students who entered the education system in the COVID years are still taking tests today. They didn’t automatically relearn everything.
    - Schools have not gone back to pre-COVID practices. Online courses, use of digital tools, fewer tests, dropping SAT/ACT requirements, and most of all budget cuts in school districts – all are still happening today.
    readthenotes1 · 1790447719 · focus · HN ↗
    You mentioned budget cuts and yet if I remember the data there is almost no correlation between school budget and results.
    On the other hand, you have the Mississippi miracle, achieved at a budget increase of $35 per student, and a total budget of around $12k per student-- a far cry from the more recent example of education failure in New York City at $26k/student (elementary) and $32k/student (middle school)
    piloto_ciego · 1790456266 · focus · HN ↗
    you are correct, but budget cuts are happening nevertheless and it's being used to justify laying off teachers (while admin staff stay employed... strange?)
    robotresearcher · 1790465197 · focus · HN ↗
    And what if you normalize those numbers for the cost of living in Mississippi vs New York City?
    The chief costs for schools are salaries and premises, both of which are highly location dependent.
    dan-robertson · 1790463727 · focus · HN ↗
    One can try to tease out effects by looking at per-country or per-state breakdowns. It seems to me that:
    - there are lots of different long term trends that vary by country
    - some seem to have started too long ago to be tick tock or similar
    - some countries see a pandemic drop and recovery
    - this implies to me that:
    (I) the pandemic had a strong temporary effect on average educational attainment (though I have strong priors here), and
    (II) other things like long-term trends in teaching approaches, new distractions for students, or availability of AI for ‘cheating’ also have an impact
    See coverage of the recent test results in the FT here: <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/724f8ecb-1e2b-4c7f-bbb6-14239abd50dd" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/724f8ecb-1e2b-4c7f-bbb6-14239abd5...
6. nonethewiser · 1790449689 · focus · HN ↗
  Let’s also not forget efforts to make test scores less important.
  If you actually tied outcomes to test scores all these “causes” would disappear.
  1. chowells · 1790450228 · focus · HN ↗
    Tied test scores to what outcomes? Bush the second tried tying test results to one kind of outcomes (school funding), and the result was schools getting worse.
  2. supertrope · 1790451636 · focus · HN ↗
    Like in South Korea?
7. thrance · 1790521869 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
password54321 · 1790438267 · focus · HN ↗
New York Times: “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”
“What has made the University of California exceptional is its commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence.”
Go woke...
frankbreetz · 1790438923 · focus · HN ↗
I find this article to be more interesting: <a href="https://www.economist.com/international/2026/09/08/are-teenagers-growing-dimmer" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/international/2026/09/08/are-teena...
Especially the part where it states that part of the issue is in 2000 when Finland had higher test scores then everyone it was attributed to play based learning and less testing. Everyone immediately jumped on this, because if you can have more fun and learn more, of course that is the way to go. This opinion still permeates both teachers and parents. I was of this opinion for a long time, as I went to a rigorous school, and would have enjoyed "play based learning".
It turns out this may have been way off and difficult schools such as those in China and Singapore have the best results. In the Finland example they had only recently switched from more rigorous to more play based, so the rigorous schooling was still being shown in testing. I think we were all a bit bamboozled by this. Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings. But the play based learning opinion is still strong and we as a society need to move back to more rigor will make stronger students.
1. sfblah · 1790441541 · focus · HN ↗
  Don't Finland, China and Singapore have the highest IQs of any countries? Why can't that be the answer? To me, what you do exactly in school is likely pretty secondary.
  1. boelboel · 1790443500 · focus · HN ↗
    Flanders vs wallonia at some point had a differential on math part of Pisa of over 50 (553 vs 501). It makes no sense to be because of this as they have basically the same iq/genes but they had a completely different schooling system. Flanders changed its system to be more inclusive afterwards and dropped massively from +-1st place in the world to mediocre.
  2. medler · 1790452222 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think reliable data exists for making these comparisons, but even if it did, how you perform on an IQ test is strongly influenced by your schooling.
    t0mpr1c3 · 1790460595 · focus · HN ↗
    Correct. The likely causality is in the reverse direction.
    sfblah · 1790466881 · focus · HN ↗
    No serious person in the field thinks this. Do some research.
    medler · 1790475735 · focus · HN ↗
    Which field is that? Race science?
  3. dan-robertson · 1790468072 · focus · HN ↗
    For PISA scores, Finland’s have been declining for 25 years and China only produces scores for the top schools in its top-tier cities (and while US averages don’t look so good in comparison, scores for Massachusetts look good, maybe better).
    It feels to me unlikely that PISA should be particularly related to ‘country average IQ’ (except by confounders like malnutrition rates) where my understanding is that it much of the research has been limited or of such poor quality that the topic has become so toxic as to discourage most potential further research.
  4. tptacek · 1790567184 · focus · HN ↗
    There are no such thing as real country-by-country IQ scores.
    ofjcihen · 1790610792 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s too strong. Country IQ estimates are messy, but cross country cognitive differences are measurable.
    For example, PISA consistently finds substantial differences in math, reading, and science performance between countries.
    tptacek · 1790610838 · focus · HN ↗
    They are measurable in theory, one supposes, but since that's never ever happened before, there are in practice no such scores.
    sfblah · 1791092890 · focus · HN ↗
    No matter how researchers measure this, people on the left will always say they didn't do it properly. I'm personally satisfied that the work that has been done is "good enough" to establish reasonable baselines for many, and maybe most, countries.
2. analog31 · 1790441828 · focus · HN ↗
  When my daughter was in kindergarten, it was common to walk your kids to school, then let them play in the playground while chatting with the other parents, until the bell rang.
  One mom told me: "I like the American school. It's like Singapore, but with fewer beatings."
3. Zigurd · 1790441900 · focus · HN ↗
  Reductiveness is under the surface of many of these numbers. Finland has high teacher salaries, which is a contributing factor but entirely outside of the way teaching methodologies are evaluated.
  Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.
  My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.
4. SubmarineClub · 1790442803 · focus · HN ↗
  > Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings.
  I mean, I always was. My rule has always been - if something seems too good to be true, it is.
  This is my biggest issue with ‘progressive’ types. They always seem to get drawn in by hype and flash, and neglect to consider 2nd order effects. I’ve had an endless number of conversations with friends of this persuasion where I point out very very obvious problems with some hot new idea they are so enamored with, which they inevitably poo-poo as me being a mean old cynical conservative. And a few years later we end up with articles like above.
5. Ekaros · 1790445813 · focus · HN ↗
  In somewhere that period of Finland education system I remember there being testing. Just not large scale standardised testing. But everything did have tests. Still teachers did have quite large freedom even if criteria was state level. Also it was very much traditional lessons with only occasional small scale group work.
  One impact for later time was increased immigration and challenges of integrating increasing amount non-native speakers in same system that used to have nearly exclusively native speakers.
6. overgard · 1790450560 · focus · HN ↗
  Intuitively though at 40ish, most of the things I "learned" in school but never used have all fallen out of my head. The knowledge I have is things that I was actually excited to learn: computers, enough math to make computers do what I wanted, writing so I could socialize with other nerds better, history because I like history. Basically, you couldn't stop me from learning those things, but the things I was forced to learn ended up being somewhat of a waste of time for both me and the instructor, I think. I mean, you want to challenge kids a bit because they might resist something at first and then eventually realize they like it quite a bit (math for instance), but there's also a point where the tests mostly just become kayfabe. We say these people are doing "better" because they get a higher test score, but then they get into the real world where there is no test score, and that entire academic framework is kind of useless and maybe even harmful.
  1. zozbot234 · 1790450885 · focus · HN ↗
    "Play based learning" is a huge misnomer, which is unfortunately common in unscientific academic fields like education. Any successful, intrinsically-motived learning is biologically categorized as "play" behavior; and knowledge-based, teacher-centered, direct instruction approaches (i.e. traditional schooling) are the most effective and most likely to be perceived as enjoyable "play" by a school pupil. So-called "play-based" or "student centered" approaches (i.e. expect the student to know what they're supposed to learn by themselves, while the teacher just slacks off) are merely a source of confusion and frustration for shoolkids.
diego_moita · 1790439045 · focus · HN ↗
A very long time ago, in the 90s, we really thought that computers would make people smarter. We thought computers would sharpen people's analytical skills with logic and math, would provide them better tools to write and design things, would provide them information to help them get better answers.
Back then, there was a famous snake-oil salesman that coined the expression "computers are bicycles for the mind". He proposed an analogy: when you compare the effort humans put into personal locomotion on foot with other animals you'll notice that they spend a lot of effort to yield very little movement. But then you put them in a bicycle and things change: humans can move a lot with very little effort. Computers would do the same: increase the mind's "productivity".
Fast forward for today and we live in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets. Ironically this change was pioneered by that very same snake-oil seller.
And when I see the consequences of it, I say to myself: "boy, we were soooo wrong!"
1. cameldrv · 1790440111 · focus · HN ↗
  It’s still possible. There’s this sort of guerilla education movement in software with apps like Mathacademy and Mentava to really focus on actual learning, in a scientific way. I can say for my part that my son has been using Mathacademy and the results have been incredible.
  The reason most educational software is not like this, as far as I can tell, is that the incentive structures aren’t there. Maximizing learning just isn’t a priority for most schools.
  For this new breed of software though, they’re selling to parents, at fairly high prices. Some parents really care about their kids actually learning, and so the incentives are much more direct and aligned.
  1. drivebyhooting · 1790440944 · focus · HN ↗
    Does math academy still start at 4th grade? How do you compare it to beast academy or AoPS? What incredible results have you observed?
    I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.
2. pu_pe · 1790441300 · focus · HN ↗
  It is a bicycle for the mind, but the mind still sets the direction. Sometimes it's going faster towards a dumpster.
3. I_dream_of_Geni · 1790442912 · focus · HN ↗
  Here, let me revise that expression: "computers are ELECTRIC bicycles of the mind". You know this feeling, and we know it's how humans operate: when given a choice, we will ALL take the easy path. School is hard, learning is hard, and it all takes years and years of effort. Give a child a computer, or a smartphone, or AI, and all of a sudden, we don't have to expend any effort, like that electric bike. I shut my brain off and trust the ride, because it is effortless. Forget the part about having UNDERSTANDING of why things are true or false, why things work, how they work, how physics and mechanics and chemistry ALL are needed to create things. As an engineer (retired), I see youth having great KNOWLEDGE at their disposal, but feeble to no UNDERSTANDING of how things work, why they work, underlying mechanics, underlying theories, etc.
  Ask any youth today about the smartphone in their pocket. Do they have any inkling of the decades of research and development for that device and it's capabilities to coalesce into what it is today? I mused once on some public forum about the inverse square law and how it applied to the fantastical ability of a smartphone to connect with a cell tower 5 miles away. The power received by the tower is approximately 3 times 10^-13 Watts or -95.15 dBm. This, to me is almost magical. Yet the forum members did not even know what the inverse square law was. They just ridiculed my comments and literally downvoted my musings to zero. I can't comprehend the ignorance of today's society.
4. armchairhacker · 1790451566 · focus · HN ↗
  Computers make some people more knowledgeable and productive: those who use them to learn and create.
mkl95 · 1790439427 · focus · HN ↗
It seems there is no working around learning to write and read properly. We've drifted away from this idea, which might lead to a "soft" dark age.
1. pfortuny · 1790440197 · focus · HN ↗
  And memorizing. Rote learning makes the brain.
  1. yoyohello13 · 1790440927 · focus · HN ↗
    You were downvoted but also right. Memorization is an extremely useful skill to develop.
    watwut · 1790442837 · focus · HN ↗
    Rote memorization is very ineffective way to memorize things. That is why it was downvoted.
    Balooga · 1790462939 · focus · HN ↗
    How about instead of just saying what's wrong, say what's better?
    [deleted] · 1790465831 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. absoluteunit1 · 1790441101 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure why this was downvoted. Memory is one of the most important skills imo
    Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.
    gambiting · 1790441674 · focus · HN ↗
    There's memorising and there's memorising.
    My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.
    But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.
    ArnoVW · 1790443816 · focus · HN ↗
    Even for maths, knowing why is king. Once you understand maths there is a whole bunch that makes sense and you can just derive.
    khazhoux · 1790465604 · focus · HN ↗
    > Once you understand maths there is a whole bunch that makes sense and you can just derive
    (trigger warning: I'm going to use the word "privilege" and hate myself for it...)
    The comment above is your math-brain privilege speaking. Not every kid has the required mathematical aptitude for that. You can reach a level of basic competency with repeated drilling and practice, but not everybody's brain is wired to be able to retain the conceptual foundations and then just derive the rest.
    This is where math education has gone off the rails, at least in California. It's great to introduce and emphasize the "why", but the curriculum has completely abandoned repetitive drilling. Kids aren't building up any muscle memory.
    steveBK123 · 1790442336 · focus · HN ↗
    More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.
    There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
    One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
  3. mkl95 · 1790441306 · focus · HN ↗
    Memorization might make a comeback in the next decade if society understands the power of automaticity. Look at what Math Academy are doing, to name an example.
2. sneak · 1790441469 · focus · HN ↗
  I think most people don’t bother to use the reading and writing skills they did learn, so I doubt this is as big a deal as people think.
  More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old, and this has been true for decades. Being able to read isn’t enough, people have to actually do the reading.
  1. pixl97 · 1790441812 · focus · HN ↗
    What percentage of people drag us forward kicking and screaming into the future?
  2. JumpCrisscross · 1790446183 · focus · HN ↗
    > More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old
    Source?
    I thought it was around that magic 20% [1] figure for which you can find support in America for almost any idiocy.
    [1] <a href="https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-about-human-evolution-year-darwin" rel="nofollow">https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...
    thrance · 1790522325 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    JumpCrisscross · 1790543142 · focus · HN ↗
    Huh. Double what I thought. Thanks. I’d still say only the 37% counts for being crazy.
  3. zahlman · 1790498680 · focus · HN ↗
    Aside from the facts that a) the polls don't actually show that and b) people professing religious beliefs aren't necessarily as serious about them as you'd think (and can accept quite a bit of contradiction in them depending on the context), learning consists of something more than "doing the reading" and then choosing correctly what to believe from among what was read. When your outgroup doesn't agree with you on something, generally it isn't because they haven't heard from your authorities; it's because they don't trust your authorities. (And why would they, given their perspective?)
cs702 · 1790440778 · focus · HN ↗
Isn't education the best antidote we have against misinformation, against ignorance, against hateful ideologies, against our least civilized impulses?
Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?
Sigh.
1. maomao5 · 1790440898 · focus · HN ↗
  > Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?
  Yes, but the population has to be tightly controlled. It's why the olgicarchich elite is so enthused to build out the surveillance states at the same time.
2. frogperson · 1790442155 · focus · HN ↗
  Many, many times through out history knowledge and education have been destroyed to prop up some group that want to rule.
3. boelboel · 1790445819 · focus · HN ↗
  Better chance it's the reverse, civilized societies end up educating people.
  1. cs702 · 1790511014 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's both, in a virtuous cycle:
    Educated people make societies more civilized, and they in turn invest to educate more people.
    Unless there's a catastrophe. In that case all bets are off.
    boelboel · 1790513412 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah it's a bit of both but there's quite some societies which were educated and turned uncivilized or where you have an educated elite that's not really civilized/interested in civilising. Meanwhile pretty much all civilized populations end up educating people,I don't think I've seen a counter example.
    It's a lot easier to educate a decent portion of society than create a society that's civilized as a whole. And I think the latter is more important for keeping things running long term which is grim.
4. cvwright · 1790449626 · focus · HN ↗
  The counterpoint to this is that early 20th century Germany was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world.
  In fact the genocide only stopped when a bunch of unsophisticated American (and Russian) farmboys rolled in.
  1. cs702 · 1790459082 · focus · HN ↗
    > was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world
    It was also an economic disaster. Surely that contributed.
    t0mpr1c3 · 1790461148 · focus · HN ↗
    WWI was the cataclysm that destroyed the global economy.
    (Its aftermath was a necessary transition, that happened to be disastrously mismanaged.)
    The current proponents of new "realism" who claim that regional empires will co-exist in peace would do well to study the causes of WWI.
5. juanani · 1790535888 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
BobbyTables2 · 1790441660 · focus · HN ↗
Gee, schools got rid of text books and ask only multiple choice questions on Math tests… They now also use AI to grade short essays.
I’d have been more surprised if there wasn’t any impact on learning.
zkmon · 1790441734 · focus · HN ↗
It's a cycle. Affluence of food, goods and tech removes natural survival instincts due to lack of struggle and need. That would cause the affluence to go away, rekindling the survival instincts through struggle. The cycle repeats. Different geographies have different phase delays in this cycle. Sometimes the cycle is affected by artificial forces such as dominance of a nation and it's control over the global matters. But the cycle just pushes forward.
bentt · 1790441911 · focus · HN ↗
Where I live in the US there is a movement to A) Prohibit phones from being used in schools B) use textbooks again instead of digital texts C) use handwriting and notebooks instead of Chromebooks for in-class note taking.
While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.
1. throw93038383 · 1790442244 · focus · HN ↗
  Perhaps teachers are just useless. It is heavily unionized job, with skills that do not change at all (maybe once a decade history books gets updated).
  And there is a strong move towards useless subjects like black history and oppression studies!
  1. watwut · 1790442768 · focus · HN ↗
    Black history and gender theory are super useful today.
    Understanding them makes you understand Hegseth, Trump and Iran war a lot better.
    throw93038383 · 1790443026 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, right! Black lesbian invented electricity, and cis white man stole it from her.
    Most people today do not even know history of Vietnam war, far more relevant!
    JumpCrisscross · 1790445413 · focus · HN ↗
    I’d honestly argue it’s more important for Americans to understand black history today than the Vietnam war. The idiots who keep propelling Presidents into the Oval who repeat Vietnam in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran have been voted in by folks with a terrible understanding of our racial history and way too much surface knowledge about big guns.
    ndriscoll · 1790464999 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's probably pretty important to teach that the government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Saddam's WMDs, and that the history of the last half century has been the federal government constantly starting wars for no benefit to the American people, often under false pretenses.
    While we're at it we can teach how the government conducted a biological attack on San Francisco to see what would happen if there were a biological attack on San Francisco, sold weapons to terrorists, let people's syphilis go untreated intentionally so they could see what happens (to be fair that falls under black history), conducted torture experiments (possibly accidentally creating the unabomber), was caught spying on all of us, and developed plans that they brought to the president to conduct false flag attacks on Americans to start another war. But they definitely wouldn't still do any of that.
    AlexandrB · 1790443713 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree that understanding gender theory helps understand Iran a lot better. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Iran" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Iran
  2. Henchman21 · 1790444379 · focus · HN ↗
    Wow, in just one comment you have demonized:
    - teachers - unions - history - as books - about specific people - about specific topics
    You seem to be an incarnation of an actor acting in bad faith with a highly ideological agenda. Perhaps give it a rest?
    throw93038383 · 1790445008 · focus · HN ↗
    I was pointing out teachers are very unlikely (not motivated) to learn modern teaching methods. They have more important topics to push!
    Perhaps teaching defense against modern totalitarian state is far more important?
    We will have a color flip after next election, all will be the same, but sudenly goverment and authorities will be the best think since sliced bread.
    Henchman21 · 1790452176 · focus · HN ↗
    As the child of two public school teachers, you don’t have the first clue what you’re talking about.
    But then, I feel I was right in my initial assessment: you’re an ideological shit-stirrer. Stop stirring up shit.
    wbxp99 · 1790452447 · focus · HN ↗
    FOH “both sides”. Trump is a cretin
  3. JumpCrisscross · 1790445284 · focus · HN ↗
    > Perhaps teachers are just useless
    Teachers collectively became useless a decade ago? As a cohort?
    dan-robertson · 1790465626 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree with the grandparent comment, but you could imagine a few teacher related causes:
    - Maybe the better teachers retired or quit due to burnout/better opportunities (the pando surely increased both of these and I think one could imagine reasons for better teachers to disproportionately stop teaching). One thing we observe is the best decile being a lot less affected than the average or worst, which vaguely lines up with the hypothesis. I didn’t try to look into attrition or retirement rates.
    - There could be a new teaching method that is popular with teachers, teachers’ unions, administrators, or governments but which is actually quite ineffective. My weak understanding is that the quality of education research is very poor and that evidence-based decision making for how to teach is extremely rare, so this also feels plausible. I think many HN readers would have seen stories about math teaching in SF public schools, and there’s also the positive case of Mississippi seeing great successes from some teaching methods that are supported by good evidence. In some sense this isn’t really a case of teachers being bad.
    upboundspiral · 1790473605 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a concerted attack on the teaching profession, that's why education is terrible.
    Teachers at the middle / high school level are not allowed to fail kids anymore. Parents are extremely litigious in America, suing schools over every little thing. Admins don't want to deal with that + their school's funding is tied to attendance / outcomes, so together they pressure the teachers to lower their standards.
    Add into this the tech ologopoly trying to get kids hooked on their products young, pushing for chromebooks and google classroom when there have been numerous studies showing handwriting is important for retaining information.
    The quality of student (on average) has also decreased thanks to tech. On average, kids are watching brainrot while their parents are trying to make ends meet, instead of reading or educating themselves.
    Teaching is a thankless job. You have lots of unpaid hours (teachers need to prep lessons outside of school time, need to grade papers outside of school time, etc). I think a lot of people also severely underestimate the effort needed to keep 30 rambunctious kids on track. It truly drains you.
    Given all this, there is no surprise at the outcomes.
  4. Ekaros · 1790445309 · focus · HN ↗
    What changed with teachers? As if they were doing same thing as previously you would expect pretty much same result. But clearly something changed somewhere and it might not be the teachers. It might be for example be the tools they have...
2. toilet · 1790447788 · focus · HN ↗
  Do some schools really use chromebooks for note taking outside of IT class? I can see the advantages for some types of exercises but using laptops as the default choice seems crazy to me. What is even the problem with textbooks and paper we're trying to solve?
  1. cvwright · 1790449180 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.
3. ffsm8 · 1790450463 · focus · HN ↗
  > has rewired our kids
  The kids? I mean sure, they too - but seriously... It's not just the kids that have been affected.
  Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
  Ever more extreme positions are being agreed as the norm, and what had previously been the norm is being decried as evil itself.
  I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
  Evil has lost its meaning, and people started randomly selecting other behaviors as "evil", and excusing actual evil deeds like rape, murder etc because "reasons".
  This has opened up social media to become a echo chamber of ever increasing insanity.
  I'm not seeing things get better through initiatives like that. I suspect things are gonna keep spiralling more and more out of control until we end up in a dystopia in which the populus looses a lot of their rights. And not in the too far future either, I'm almost certain I'll witness it before I grow old.
  1. bentt · 1790450824 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not that doomer about what you are referring to. I think a lot of kids are wising up to the echo chamber.
    Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.
  2. tick_tock_tick · 1790456122 · focus · HN ↗
    > I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
    Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.
  3. dan-robertson · 1790464575 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m not sure it’s social media so much as the smartphones. It’s been surprising to me watching my parents become slightly senile in a way that seems related to phones – much less ability to cope when the phones aren’t quite working and a lack of the habits I see in my own generation (eg one should obviously try to avoid having a phone out at the dinner table).
    I don’t think I agree with your take around religion or ‘evil’. (Imo two big advantages of religion we are currently or will soon be wanting for society are firstly the social/community component and secondly the idea that one can lead a worthy and fulfilling life through acting virtuously and faithfully, rather than through the worth implied by educational or career achievements, which are often a rough proxy for certain kinds of intelligence, that are neither evenly distributed across the population nor easily changed, and which may become unimportant as machines outcompete us there)
    ffsm8 · 1790503504 · focus · HN ↗
    > I’m not sure it’s social media so much as the smartphones.
    It's probably the combination of both. The smartphone itself is innocuous, but increases the availability of the thing social media.
    However if social media wasn't as ubiquitous it'd likely be less of an issue then it is today.
    However, if social media wasn't a thing people just wouldn't constantly pull out their phones, hence id blame it instead of the form factor.
    dan-robertson · 1790504420 · focus · HN ↗
    I think if social media required logging into a desktop computer or laptop then it would be a lot less impactful. So I think I still disagree. I think smartphones can be bad even if they are limited to largely non-social media like YouTube or TikTok.
    ffsm8 · 1790506177 · focus · HN ↗
    Fyi, both TikTok and YouTube are classified as Social Media.
  4. heresie-dabord · 1790516589 · focus · HN ↗
    > Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
    Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
    > I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
    The lense that has replaced religion is callous for-profit exploitation.
    > the populus looses a lot of their rights
    People will certainly lose the rights that they do not exercise.
    ffsm8 · 1790582107 · focus · HN ↗
    > Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
    We've recently gone through a very public trial about a women murdering kids and countless people showing support for the confirmed murderer.
    The whole influencer industry is - from the perspective of religion - as sinful as you can get and gets more insane with every year. Remember: narcism, vanity, showing off, envy, gloating -> that's 90% or the viral content and it's all based on behavior Christianity considered Sin until the modernity happened.
    The other day a gangster publicly murdered another person and hundreds of thousands were raised in response for support
    The fact that for almost 10 years variations of onlyfans, patreon before that have been some of the most profitable enterprises. And the way the "models" foster the para social behavior for money extraction
    That there are people unironically thinking January 6th riots in the US were patriotic and not hooligans living out their power fantasies.
    I could go on forever, but let's end with a gigantic and obvious point: greed is one of the primal Sins. If our societies were still deeply religious, we wouldn't even have any fallout from the unrestricted market exploitation we have today.
    I could go on, but I think my point is clear and more would not convey this in any better way.
4. juanani · 1790514819 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
proee · 1790441915 · focus · HN ↗
My electromagnetics professor started our class with a massive ambition that we would truly understand maxwells equations at a fundamental level by end of semester. Well our class started failing all ghe exams leading up to this pinnacle and he told us we were all a bunch of morons, basically the dumbest class he ever taught. I raised my hand and asked if we were still going to get to maxwells equations by end of semester and he started back with eyes of pure distain. This was the year 2000.
VCFundedGenYer · 1790442155 · focus · HN ↗
Been saying this for a while. AI is melting away people's mental and cognitive abilities.
Nobody wants to admit it though due to capitalism and VC drunkenness.
This will reach critical mass in a few years.
VLM · 1790442489 · focus · HN ↗
There's a whopper in the middle of the article declaring an outcome "high test scores" is a cause, not a result, of a lack of a wide variety of social ills. The cause and effect ratio is obviously reversed. Its like claiming that playing the violin leads to wealth via some magical process, whereas the reality is only wealthy parents can afford to hire a classical violin tutor for their kid, so sure, the wealthiest neighborhoods have the kids who are the best violin players but it would be pretty clueless to describe violin playing as a vocational skill. Its a luxury skill for people who've already made it, like math is for about 99.9% of the population.
Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.
Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.
"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.
The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.
srj · 1790442692 · focus · HN ↗
The period after leaded gasoline was eliminated and before modern tech may go down as the peak of human intellect.
More specifically I wonder if the birth of social media in the form of short videos is the real culprit. Most other single causes don't line up even if I can believe they are a factor.
It seems like we should be able to adapt, but the dopamine hit of short videos may prove as difficult to manage as healthy eating and exercise in terms of self-discipline.
1. Henchman21 · 1790444522 · focus · HN ↗
  Just forget being able to adapt if you’re male, the videos have attractive women in various stages of undress, that auto-play one after another. You may find yourself in a daze drooling out of one corner of your mouth.
  1. TFNA · 1790458575 · focus · HN ↗
    Taking an intercity bus ride in Europe may disabuse you of the idea that short-form video is a threat to males specifically: you're likely to see several young women consuming short-form videos (often from beauty influencers) for the entire journey.
2. ProjectArcturis · 1790464514 · focus · HN ↗
  I think roughly 1900-1930, before leaded gasoline and also before radio and TV, was the peak. At least for educated elites -- the general population didn't get nearly as much schooling.
  But look at physics: Basically all modern theory was developed by 1930. Math too, with the exception of information theory.
limagnolia · 1790443040 · focus · HN ↗
Are the PISA exams really the ultimate end all, the best goal we have for education?
I like the idea of a standard to measure against, but in my experience, standardized tests are terrible measures of education.
1. notourproblem · 1790456936 · focus · HN ↗
  Are you brown?
2. dan-robertson · 1790467506 · focus · HN ↗
  I think the point is that they are good for comparing different cohorts and different countries, though the article makes some claims about how the scores tend to correlate with other desirable outcomes. Naturally one should try to avoid Goodhart’s law here.
tancop · 1790443099 · focus · HN ↗
The whole system is built on the idea that kids will learn because we force them to for their own good. But I don't think you can get real understanding from that, you need internal motivation that comes from a true desire to know more.
I'm not saying lower test scores are good but they might be a sign that we need to move from "push based" forced complete education in childhood to a more "pull based" system. That would mean the only mandatory part is basic skills as opposed to knowledge, things like reading and arithmetic but also critical thinking, social skills, task organization and manual/mechanical work.
Everything else should be optional, fully up to the student (and their parents until they're 18) and available for their whole lifetime. That's the most important part.
If you go to an accounting school and decide to become a plumber after you graduate, then switch to programming at 30 and electrician at 45, you should be able to do that. Low cost, free if you're poor and always without social stigma, the exact same quality and credentials as if you did it in high school.
Sometimes you need to wait and experience life a bit before you understand how important your education is. We should support that instead of making it so you only have one real shot.
1. procaryote · 1790506663 · focus · HN ↗
  This is satire, right?
romaaeterna · 1790443776 · focus · HN ↗
If you take the 1998 NAEP 8th grade reading scores by race, re-weight them by the new 2024 demographic makeup of American 8th graders, you will find a predicted point decline of 4.6, rather close to the actual 4 point fall over the period.
Over the same period, reading scores actually improved somewhat for each of the 1998 poorly scoring groups (and quite a bit for Asians), but the poorly scoring groups simply make up so much more of the population now that it drags everything else down.
| Group | 1998 NAEP | 2024 NAEP | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *268* | *266* | −2 |
| Black | *242* | *243* | +1 |
| Hispanic | *241* | *245* | +4 |
| Asian/Pacific Islander | *261* | *280* | +19 |
| All public-school students | *261* | *257* | −4 |
| Race/ethnicity | 1999 Grade 8 | 2023 Grade 8 | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *64.5%* | *44.0%* | −20.5 pp |
| Black | 16.1% | 14.9% | −1.2 pp |
| Hispanic | *14.3%* | *29.4%* | +15.1 pp |
| Asian/Pacific Islander* | 3.9% | 5.9% | +2.0 pp |
| American Indian/Alaska Native | 1.2% | 0.9% | −0.3 pp |
| Two or more races | not separately reported | 4.8% | — |
1. tdb7893 · 1790449886 · focus · HN ↗
  Does this actually track over time or is it coincidence? I'm a bit confused why 1998 was chosen out of all years
  1. romaaeterna · 1790452602 · focus · HN ↗
    Coincidence? Of course not.
    1998? I wanted a quarter century of Grade 8 and that gives me 1998 to 2024 with NAEP. 2000 reading assessment was Grade 4 only. You can do it with any pair of years.
    kalkin · 1790457982 · focus · HN ↗
    The article says that scores began drifting down around 2012. Gemini is telling me that NAEP peaked in 2013. Elsewhere in this thread there's a claim of an inflection point around 2018 in PISA, which eyeballing Gemini's numbers lines up with NAEP.
    Does this correlate with the racial proportion data?
    romaaeterna · 1790460885 · focus · HN ↗
    If you graph actual NAEP since 1998 versus a 1998 group-fixed score, you'll see increases (1998-2002, 2005-2013, 2015-2017) and multiple declines twice taking the line back down to the 1998 linear trend prediction (2002-2005, 2017-2024).
    It is wrong to get overly exact here though. We are talking about a overall score variance of just 10pts in the face of an achievement gap of nearly 30pts, with an absolutely massive 20% decline in white population share over the 26 year period.
    tdb7893 · 1790467267 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're seeing trends in your residuals that's a sign of a violation of the independence assumption of linear models.
    I'm in a different field but an arbitrary 27 years (1998-2024) of data and the autocorrelation both would get flagged in a review for me. Not to give statistics homework but you should test and correct the autocorrelation issue you're describing in the model and if the data goes farther back I would go farther back, too (with how you're describing the errors going off pattern then back on it sounds like the inference here would be at least somewhat unstable depending on year chosen).
    tdb7893 · 1790514911 · focus · HN ↗
    I was checking if there was a response and upon reading your comments again, looks like your method is less a model and more just some ad hoc procedure. Based on what your conclusion is it sounds like a linear model based on demographic data would work and linear models are easy to train. Though by your summary there are probably going to be issues with the model, though you have the same issues with your procedure, you just can't tell because it hasn't been rigorously specified.
    There's a channel on YouTube called Statquest that teaches statistics in a pretty accessible way if you're interested in analyzing this sort of data.
    romaaeterna · 1790532081 · focus · HN ↗
    I learned my statistics in university, not Youtube. You are confusing yourself about residuals.
    To make my point in the original post, I held the group scores fixed and extrapolated combined scores based on changing population sizes. This is straightforward. Simple even.
    $\widehat S=\sum_g p_gS_g,$
    Why did I call this "linear"? (Not a "linear model", your term, because it is not). The model function actually tracks the population function. Over the 25-year period, however, this trend is in fact linear because the White-to-Hispanic population trend is linear on that timescale. Over a longer timescale it would not be.
    tdb7893 · 1790617897 · focus · HN ↗
    What you're describing is a linear model, it just has an ad hoc construction instead of something like a least squares training (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_model" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_model). Also linear models are about linear associations and work even with non-linear predictors. Your assumption in the model is explicitly a linear association so how the predictors vary shouldn't affect it.
    I don't mean to disparage amateur statistics since often there are interesting things that experts miss that amateurs have insight into but this sort of data with few data points (the data you have doesn't sound independent) and a lot of confounding factors is not trivial to accurately model. Not that everyone needs to learn statistics but this sort of data (and also this topic) probably deserves a bit more of a rigorous approach.
    romaaeterna · 1790640751 · focus · HN ↗
    You remain confused.
2. shagie · 1790450036 · focus · HN ↗
  With pre-formatted table:
  Group 1998 NAEP 2024 NAEP Change ----------------------------- ---------- --------- ------ White 268 266 −2 Black 242 243 +1 Hispanic 241 245 +4 Asian/Pacific Islander 261 280 +19 All public-school students 261 257 −4 Race/ethnicity 1999 Grade 8 2023 Grade 8 Change --------------------------------- ------------ ------------ -------- White 64.5% 44.0% −20.5 pp Black 16.1% 14.9% −1.2 pp Hispanic 14.3% 29.4% +15.1 pp Asian/Pacific Islander 3.9% 5.9% +2.0 pp American Indian/Alaska Native 1.2% 0.9% −0.3 pp Two or more races not separately reported 4.8% -
  1. tusimi · 1790609325 · focus · HN ↗
    why leave out intermediate years that show the rise before the fall?
``` Group 1998 NAEP 2013 NAEP 2024 NAEP Change 98–13 Change 98–24 Change 13–24 ----------------------------- --------- --------- --------- ------------ ------------ ------------ White 268 275 266 +6 −2 −9 Black 242 250 243 +8 +1 −7 Hispanic 241 255 245 +13 +3 −10 Asian/Pacific Islander 261 279 280 +18 +18 +1 All public-school students 261 266 257 +5 −4 −9 ```
shagie · 1790707998 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
3. zug_zug · 1790450043 · focus · HN ↗
  The challenge here is that you're assuming performance by race should be constant over time. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.
  Also if you want to entertain the theory that it is racial/genetic, it'd be important to do that analysis on a continuum since a lot of people who are "minority X" may be more than 50% white or there may be trends in that over time.
  1. romaaeterna · 1790453082 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't assume that. See the first table, even better in shagie's nicely reformatted version.
    You are the person in this discussion invoking race genetics. Why does your mind go there?
    yesitcan · 1790455309 · focus · HN ↗
    Because you grouped intelligence by race and showed that whites outperformed blacks and Mexicans.
    tick_tock_tick · 1790456340 · focus · HN ↗
    He just picked the strongest predictive characteristic we have data on. You're the one trying to turn the statement into something it isn't.
    > I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.
    We have all that data it's just significantly less predictive of outcome then race.
    kalkin · 1790457470 · focus · HN ↗
    "roma aeterna" is also the sort of alias that's associated with a particular set of political views. (Not conclusive! But a rational thing for someone to notice.)
    romaaeterna · 1790459181 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a particular set of political views associated with people who read classical languages? I fail to see what you are calling "rational" here.
    jimaway123 · 1790472533 · focus · HN ↗
    He's trying to imply that you're a crypto-fascist because you presented some hate-facts.
    It's sad that there can be no straightforward discussion of issues like this. It doesn't help anyone except people who are paid from ineffectual educational and social programs.
    romaaeterna · 1790459072 · focus · HN ↗
    Where did you come up with "Mexicans" or "intelligence"?
    Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?
    amluto · 1790532264 · focus · HN ↗
    > Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?
    Hispanic != non-native English speaker
    There is pretty clearly something going on that causes the results upthread, but there is nowhere near enough data in this thread to figure out what it is.
    romaaeterna · 1790537712 · focus · HN ↗
    Pew Research Center says that over this period, 2000 to 2024, 78% (2000) to 68% (2024) of Hispanics spoke Spanish at home. To me, that sounds more than sufficient to explain a 20pt NAEP 8th-grade reading gap.
    amluto · 1790538459 · focus · HN ↗
    Pew Research Center also says that 63% of Asian Americans speak a language other than English at home:
    <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/01/key-facts-about-asians-in-the-us/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/01/key-facts...
    More data is needed here.
    FWIW, until 2024, the US treated the state of being Hispanic differently from race, which seems like it could be a confounding factor. (Not that I believe that it explains any of the educational outcome data, but it’s still bizarre and IMO messy.) Here’s the updated guidance:
    <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06469/revisions-to-ombs-statistical-policy-directive-no-15-standards-for-maintaining-collecting-and" rel="nofollow">https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06...
    romaaeterna · 1790594849 · focus · HN ↗
    That's real. Asians show a massive (compared to anything else that moved) NAEP score increase over the 25-year period, which is presumably tied to changing English-language competency as a group. It matters less as their population share isn't enough to affect the overall NAEP average.
    If you want more data on something or other, you should state the hypothesis that you are trying to test. Mine is pretty simple and was easy to test like I did in the first post: in a world of mostly static in-group NAEP 8th-grade reading scores (like the one we live in) large shifts in population shares (like we see) dominate the overall average.
    pessimizer · 1790459234 · focus · HN ↗
    They grouped performance, not intelligence.
    If you don't think that what happened and is happening to black people affects our average performance on tests, you haven't eliminated racist assumptions, you've eliminated the entire black experience in America and any reason for a grudge or complaint.
    Grouping a list of test performances by race shouldn't lead to an assumption of natural stupidity any more than grouping a list of incomes or wealth by race should lead to an assumption of natural laziness.
    And the fact that you jump to that conclusion, and it makes you nervous, so you think it's bad to talk about the facts that remind you of that conclusion, does not help black people.
    You could say the same thing about Hispanic economic migrants. You don't think that economic migrants from countries with good universities and healthy middle classes are going to score lower on tests? The ones that fly in are a different story, they're often elites, but the ones that walk in? They're bottom caste where they come from, and looking for a chance to change things.
    syspec · 1790486148 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe there are more Hispanic ethnicities than Mexicans.
JumpCrisscross · 1790445947 · focus · HN ↗
Is there a good science fiction story where humanity discovers it’s unalterably getting dumber? As in within a fixed number of generations tool use will cease?
1. Footprint0521 · 1790446958 · focus · HN ↗
  WALL·E
  1. vinni2 · 1790452025 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t know in WALL.E they are not so dumb as they are lazy l, infact they are smart enough to do space travel at scale.
2. mindcrime · 1790450731 · focus · HN ↗
  Idiocracy?
3. progval · 1790456022 · focus · HN ↗
  It's a major plot point in one of the books in the Bobiverse series, though it's a civilisation humanity meets instead of humanity itself (not saying anything more to avoid spoilers).
4. pretzellogician · 1790458158 · focus · HN ↗
  The classic version is Kornbluth's 1951 story "The Marching Morons", itself pretty clearly the basis for Idiocracy.
  (You could argue that "The Time Machine" was the original example.)
5. m_fayer · 1790461046 · focus · HN ↗
  In Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time", there's a generation ship wandering space that's a marvel of human engineering, whose inhabitants are getting dumber every generation and losing the capacity to maintain or even respect the incredible environment into which they were born. Certainly rings a bell.
6. kris_golden · 1790527025 · focus · HN ↗
  Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. A multigenerational ship's population is losing its ability to maintain the complex mechanisms needed to keep everything functioning.
znpy · 1790449758 · focus · HN ↗
Meh, the writing has been on the wall for a decade at least.
All that stupid ideas on giving passing grades to everybody in the name of equality (lol) removing admission tests to fight racism (double-lol), attention-stealing practices by social media (not lol) are now compounding with AI as a cheap service to offload thinking to.
The writing has been on the wall for years, a lot of people called that out and have been silenced.
Unironically, I would not be surprised if the kids with the best scores turned out to be the homeschooled ones.
My wild (and uneducate, don't get me wrong) guess is that in some years we'll see two groups of people succeeding: homeschooled kids (their parents kept them away from the BS) and the rich people's kids (their parent could afford a no-BS schooling).
erelong · 1790450000 · focus · HN ↗
It's just basic political math: regulations protect grift and lead to lower scores
Deregulation enables competition to naturally drive up scores
Everything's over-regulated, leading to falling scores
Simple as, all else equal
overgard · 1790450057 · focus · HN ↗
One thing that tends to get lost when we talk about the education system we have is how it was invented and what it was designed for. I mention this, because if you want to educate kids better, it's useful to consider what they system was designed for so we can design a better one. Unfortunately, the history here is somewhat more cynical and bleak than you might expect. There's an excellent book called "The Underground History Of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling"
Anyway, modern schooling was essentially designed to create excellent workers -- it was never about creating excellent individuals. At the time, the robber barons who helped invent this system along with a series of pseudo religious ideologues essentially wanted: standardized, predictable, obedient individuals without a lot of creativity. Credentials became important. Basically they wanted good consumers who don't question their station in life. (It shouldn't shock anyone that this is essentially what our current robber barons also want, although to a more extreme degree. It also shouldn't shock anyone that this is largely what we get out of the system.)
The current system was still helpful, despite it's design, I would argue mostly because of the excellent teachers that really do have kids best interests in heart. However, I really think technology has just completely broken this. I'm not sure it's a system that can be repaired, I think it's going to end up being a new system. My guess (I think it's basically already happening) is the rich will send their children to more experimental schools because they have the money, and the poor... well who cares about the poor anyway? (Sarcasm, but, I think that more or less describes the unspoken attitudes of the elites)
hyperlinerapp · 1790450201 · focus · HN ↗
Remember that in some liberal schools some of these people will graduate to be your doctors or policy makers, especially if DEI or with a degree studying some perceived social grievance.
1. max__dev · 1790450486 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes no child left behind is famously liberal dei. /s This issue is non partisan and not limited to the USA.
  1. hyperlinerapp · 1790452189 · focus · HN ↗
    Nowhere in No Child Left Behind it says DEI nor it says to promote children who can’t read or pass standardized tests just so certain politicians can be appeased.
zug_zug · 1790450244 · focus · HN ↗
I agree it's worth looking into, potentially very emphatically. But that means doing some hard science.
That means don't just look at test scores by county, it means looking at DELTAs in test scores across time by numerous dimensions (income, poverty, did the kids get breakfast, school, etc) and an open mind to every possibility. Perhaps comparing against the parents' test scores might help elucidate.
Given the rise of so many unexplained mental health phenomena, I personally suspect there are environmental factors, but again, we need hard science and a lot of it.
Animats · 1790450510 · focus · HN ↗
Plunging physical fitness test scores are even worse.[1] "Fat people don't make good soldiers … they get themselves or others hurt or killed." The US military says 31% of US youth are too fat to serve. 77% are not qualified for one or more reasons.[2]
Only 12% of American male youth who are qualified for the military are not in college.
Think about that. About 2/3 of American male youth are not good enough for either college or the military. That's a high reject rate.
[1] <a href="https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/10/10/one-third-youths-too-obese-military-service-study-finds.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/10/10/one-third-you...
[2] <a href="https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-study-shows-77-of-young-americans-are-ineligible-military-service.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
1. armchairhacker · 1790451202 · focus · HN ↗
  Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.
  1. dpkirchner · 1790451784 · focus · HN ↗
    Hell, let's just reduce the Medicare eligibility age (alllll the way down) so everyone can afford the care they need or would benefit from.
    parineum · 1790453029 · focus · HN ↗
    Medicare is currently something like 14% of the budget and covers 20% of the population.
    supertrope · 1790453273 · focus · HN ↗
    The least healthiest 20% of the population. Old people use much more medical care.
    parineum · 1790471977 · focus · HN ↗
    Personal healthcare spending is estimated to have been 4.5T in 2024. [1] Total revenue was 4.9T that year. [2]
    [1] <a href="https://nchsdata.cdc.gov/dqs?topic=personal-healthcare-spending&topic_id=111160&subtopic=all-personal-health-care&group=&subgroup=&range=2023-to-2024&estimate=number-of-dollars-in-billions&subtopic_id=610090" rel="nofollow">https://nchsdata.cdc.gov/dqs?topic=personal-healthcare-spend...
    [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_budget" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_bud...
    oklahomasports · 1790458835 · focus · HN ↗
    to be fair if everyone was paying 10-20k less in private healthcare thorough their employer you could tax that amount
  2. kelseyfrog · 1790451993 · focus · HN ↗
    Because the political will doesn't exist. Because being fat is portrayed as a moral failing. Because the Protestant work ethic's[1] virtue of self-discipline extended to health and eating. I guess it's kinda strange to carry the mantle of the protestants without being protestant one's self, yet it happens.
    1. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moralizing_of_obesity_A_new_name_for_an_old_sin" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moral...
    LadyCailin · 1790452250 · focus · HN ↗
    Kind of hard to feel sorry for the richest country in the world when they refuse to spend enough money to take care of their people enough to even meet basic national security standards.
    9x39 · 1790454304 · focus · HN ↗
    Taking care of them was historically about calorie and nutrientmaxxing. Subsidized calories have worked too well, worldwide, and there's no response to it within the current Overton window.
    what · 1790458580 · focus · HN ↗
    Being fat is a moral failing though?
    kelseyfrog · 1790469104 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you think that was in response to?
    what · 1790481149 · focus · HN ↗
    Half the country being fat and not wanting to take responsibility?
    runarberg · 1790484178 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    kelseyfrog · 1790485092 · focus · HN ↗
    Right. Fat acceptance was created in response to the sentiment that you're expressing.
    ThePowerOfFuet · 1790512527 · focus · HN ↗
    Taking responsibility for the tremendous surge in highly-calorific, ultra-processed food over the last forty years or so?
    eudamoniac · 1790524338 · focus · HN ↗
    And these calories are in the water supply? No, the fat people choose to buy and eat that food. I'm on a 700C deficit right now, it's not very fun, but it works because I have the discipline to not order a pizza.
    armchairhacker · 1790492588 · focus · HN ↗
    It can be, but so can existing as an ordinary citizen and not devoting your life to activism, abstaining from everything but the most sustainable resources. Some people lose or maintain weight with zero effort, while some have significantly lower TDEEs and experience actual Minnesota-starvation effects, so I disagree.
    But regardless, morality is irrelevant here. The rest of society would be better off if these people lost weight, and I doubt forcing them would go well, but voluntary GLPs would.
  3. V__ · 1790452148 · focus · HN ↗
    There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.
    neutronicus · 1790452400 · focus · HN ↗
    This may be true, but I think the electorate would go fucking bananas for free GLP-1s.
  4. supertrope · 1790452286 · focus · HN ↗
    It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
    We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!
    armchairhacker · 1790453912 · focus · HN ↗
    Why not both? Because we’ve been “addressing on the front end” for a while without results. Making places walkable and getting (especially already obese) kids onto healthy food are things we should be doing, but harder and take longer than a drug.
    And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.
    overfeed · 1790454363 · focus · HN ↗
    > We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.
    The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.
    tick_tock_tick · 1790455804 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
    Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.
    Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.
    seanmcdirmid · 1790467512 · focus · HN ↗
    GLPs require some good dietician advice to be given and followed to be effective, otherwise you are just trading off obesity for an eating disorder. You really have to do both, provide the high protein + high fiber food alternatives and the GLP to make cheating less likely.
    ericbarrett · 1790469606 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you taken them? Because I see this “you still need virtue^Wdiscipline” refrain a lot, but it doesn’t match my experience or that of many others I know who use GLP-1s.
    For me, I lost 50 lbs not exercising and not actively managing my diet. I felt better and all my biomarkers got better (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Later, I exercise and cleaned up my diet because I wanted to. Healthy food just tastes better now, and moving my body is satisfying rather than tiring. They are the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced.
    seanmcdirmid · 1790474968 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm talking from direct experience here. Although I'm over 50 so that definitely can make my experience different from yours.
    Also, constipation and muscle loss are real issues. Protein and exercise will help with muscle loss (well, I haven't really started weight training yet, just aerobic), but you need to up your water and fiber intake or you could be in for a very hard time. I'm glad that this didn't happen to you, and that you didn't have to take an emergency trip to the drug store to figure out what an enema was (and how to use it, ouch).
    ericbarrett · 1790480270 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm in the same age range. Never had those issues (with GLP-1s, anyway) and I'm sorry to hear you did. Fiber is good :)
    seanmcdirmid · 1790480808 · focus · HN ↗
    On each ramp I had constipation issues, but they seem to have mellowed as I got used to the dose. The dietician has been really useful, I recommend that anyone who wants to get started with this look into a video consult (no need to attend in person), insurances generally cover the dietician faster than they will your GLP dosage, and they are good at providing solutions to balance out your diet long term if you can't figure it out on your own.
    tick_tock_tick · 1790728500 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not even vaguely true a lose dose is effective enough at reducing hungry enough to get slow and steady weight loss and require zero planning or effort on the users part.
    The only time you need a dietician is if you want a high enough dose you barely want to eat at all.
    _heimdall · 1790508749 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't imagine the military wants a fighting force dependent on a consistent supply of GLP-1s to the front lines.
  5. raz32dust · 1790452736 · focus · HN ↗
    Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care
    armchairhacker · 1790453960 · focus · HN ↗
    True, but GLPs in particular are obvious.
  6. _heimdall · 1790508640 · focus · HN ↗
    Ironically that GLP-1 blocker prescription would potentially make you ineligible. You have to take that pill for the rest of your life, and the military generally doesn't want to deploy combat troops dependent on a consistent supply of non-life saving medications.
2. pgryko · 1790451637 · focus · HN ↗
  The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions.
  Human soldiers are legacy technology that do not fare well against drones, for evidence (obligatory NSFW tag): Check reddit /r/CombatFootage/
  Human soldiers are still used extensively on the battlefield - but are in the process of being replaced by machines.
  1. torginus · 1790452107 · focus · HN ↗
    We have heard this so many times. The future was mechanized warfare, or missiles, or aircraft, or stealth jets. It seems that now in Russia/Ukraine, pretty much all forms of mechanized warfare have been rendered irrelevant and you can't achieve military objectives no matter how many bombing runs you conduct with your planes. And those planes are not safe either. Same goes for Iran. You still need the guys to go in.
    boredatoms · 1790453101 · focus · HN ↗
    Another way to view those conflicts is that (horrible as it is to say) neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.
    As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo.
    overfeed · 1790454072 · focus · HN ↗
    > ...neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.
    Try the US/Iran war for size then.
    I'm not sure what you mean by "completely disable their opponents" - there may not be a country on earth with enough munitions to do this against a competent and resilient adversary - the Vietnam war comes to mind where the US still lost after dropping triple the bombs (by tonnage) of what the entire allied forces dropped during WWII across all theaters
    torginus · 1790454106 · focus · HN ↗
    My understanding is that Russia despite falling far from its USSR days, still had multiple times more capacity to make Iskander-s, than the US can make ATACMS (and Iskanders are way better too). The PrSM, the US based successor is just about to enter volume production, and will be years till they can be made by the hundreds.
    At least that was the case before Ukraine started blowing up Russian factories. And for the rest of Europe, their capacities are somehow even worse.
    And in any case, Russian missiles were a drop in the bucket compared to drones.
    So building high performance missiles in a volume needed for sustained conflict is not something any military has managed to do so far.
    hunterpayne · 1790460022 · focus · HN ↗
    "As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo."
    Imagine if they had air superiority. For some reason people ignore this when analyzing the war in Ukraine. Drones are great for denial (defense). So far they are shit at assaults (offense). Also, drones don't do well in environments with military aircraft. We just don't see that in Ukraine because they are very few aircraft in the skies. The Russians haven't flown into Ukrainian airspace in over 3 years now. They launch their missiles and glide bombs from their side of the border.
    onlypassingthru · 1790453362 · focus · HN ↗
    Russian autocrats agree. 1.5M Russian casualties in the last 5 years(!) with an unprecedented fatality ratio, but sure, you still need the guys to go in.
    nyczomg · 1790453407 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rkg3wZq0cdo&ra=m" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rkg3wZq0cdo&ra=m
    GuB-42 · 1790461878 · focus · HN ↗
    All these fancy weapons are called "force multipliers". And multiplying zero is still zero.
    You still need people to occupy the place, take control of objectives, interact with the population, etc... Otherwise, you are just making craters.
    An advanced army with appropriate support can make a soldier 10x more effective, but you still need a soldier to begin with.
  2. bliteben · 1790453426 · focus · HN ↗
    The meat robot still has a long way to go
  3. overfeed · 1790453441 · focus · HN ↗
    > The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions
    The robots are made to kill people on the other side until you hopefully win, otherwise political disagreements could be settled via best of 3 CoD games - or chess if you're more traditional. Recruitment of humans is still required for fodder.
3. torginus · 1790451823 · focus · HN ↗
  Even before that, I feel like the abolition of conscription has changed the stock of American soldiers (who used to be prime-age males from all walks of life), to a much younger cohort where misfits and lower classes were overrepresented.
  I think perception of American military strength rests somewhat on the image of the square-jawed, rugged soldier, which was very much a staple of combat propaganda, but used to be more like an embellishment of the truth, rather than outright fiction.
  Video games of the 2000s-2010s, like the CoD series, have usually cast this WW2-Vietnam era image onto the GWOT era, with the heroic characters fighting in the middle-east this time. It was kind of surreal to see actual authentic footage of awkward gangly teens wearing the same uniforms.
  1. le-mark · 1790454474 · focus · HN ↗
    The “poverty draft” narrative is old and tired and not true. The stats are 60% are from middle class, about 20% poor and 20% wealthy.
4. puzzledobserver · 1790452054 · focus · HN ↗
  Did you mean: > Only 12% of American male youth who are __not__ qualified for the military __are__ in college?
  Without reading your citations, your argument threw me for a loop.
  1. pessimizer · 1790458233 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think so. I think what was meant was what was literally said: that 88% of youth qualified for the military are in college.
    66% of youth are not qualified for the military or college, leaving a remainder of 34% that are qualified for the military, college, or both.
    X% of youth qualified for college but not the military (qualified for college here meaning attending college, I think.), leaving (34-X)%.
    Of those, 88% attend college .88(34-X)%,
    leaving .12(34-X)% eligible for recruitment. Which ends up a successful recruiting number like 63.5K, which is from one of the references.
    I could be wrong, but it could make sense.
    But also, 2/3rds of 34% also leaves a remainder of about 12% (which is a bit coincidental), so maybe what was meant to be said was that only 12% of (all American youth) are (qualified) and not (in college), rather than only 12% of (the qualified) are not (in college.)
5. leodler · 1790452791 · focus · HN ↗
  Not to downplay the reality of the situation here, but being not qualified in this case just means not being able to walk into a recruiting office and sign a contract without a waiver. The military processes tens of thousands of waivers every year for past legal infractions, tattoo policy exemptions, medical history stuff, etc. Anyone currently taking something like ADHD medication who isn't willing to stop receiving treatment for the condition is ineligible for instance.
  It's kind of asinine that one can be demonstrably stable over a long term and do all sorts of things operationally in the intelligence community, but could not even become a 92G (culinary specialist) in the Army.
  1. raddan · 1790465833 · focus · HN ↗
    In high school (in the 90s) I was badgered by military recruiter phone calls. I’m not sure why they were fixated on me, but I had several military in my family (including my mother) and I was a good athlete so maybe that was a part of it. I don’t know. Finally, out of frustration I told one of the recruiters that I was gay (which is not true) and he quickly responded “the modern military takes all kinds” and then I followed up with “and I have asthma.” Click. They never called back after that.
    My freshman year cross country course record still stands, 34 years later. I’ve always thought how strange it was that the merest whiff of asthma was disqualifying.
6. _heimdall · 1790508364 · focus · HN ↗
  I really have no idea how we (the US) would stand up a meaningful sized army today if a larger war were to break out. Between obesity and the widespread use of psychological medications a huge swath of the population is ineligible to serve.
  1. neutronicus · 1790543720 · focus · HN ↗
    Ramp up Adderall production and drug em into soldiers
    _heimdall · 1790815379 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, then we just need to ensure that any forward fighting force has reliable access to Adderall. Seems reasonable for modern warfare, after all it seems like the Nazis may have been delivering heroine to their front lines.
7. juanani · 1790514400 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
ck2 · 1790450588 · focus · HN ↗
America's future is delivery drivers
one out of every three people is going to be doing last mile delivery of some kind
they don't even need to be able to read english because they all ignore delivery notes, if GPS takes them off a cliff or to the wrong town they will happily follow it because they never learned to read a map
all b&m stores will go "dark warehouse"
how anyone is going to afford delivery I am not sure
but since you won't be able to afford health care or owning a home or even a car at some point, "spare cash" until you die young?
chairmansteve · 1790450983 · focus · HN ↗
Apparently test scores are rising in England....
1. dan-robertson · 1790468566 · focus · HN ↗
  Depends on the subject, but much more ‘similar to pre-pandemic levels’ than the ‘continued decline’ observed in most places.
tonymet · 1790452288 · focus · HN ↗
do we really need to blame AI ? 14+ years of reducing standards in schools, reducing discipline, allowing underperforming students to proceed and graduate, plus 30 years of changing demographics. AI isn't the primary driver here.
1. anon291 · 1790486058 · focus · HN ↗
  My mom was an inner city public school teacher. Coming from a poor background herself and being an immigrant, she was excited to help underprivileged kids after spending years in corporate America.
  Six years, several rape threats, several attempted assaults, and one vehicle destructure later, she gave up on the whole thing. Now a few decades later, she's an AI proponent.
  No one wants to face the cold hard truth of what the average American school is like. The people in charge send their kids to fancy schools in nice areas or shove wax in their ears and put blinders on to not see the reality of their child's education (see the recent article in the New York Times).
  A sad situation all around.
  1. tonymet · 1790609848 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m sorry for your mom, and it’s a real tragedy. We need more teachers like her. But That’s not what the average American school is like. Part of the problem is not identifying the problem.
khazhoux · 1790452384 · focus · HN ↗
My kid's math curriculum has been a disaster the last couple of years. Teachers started using lesson plans from Desmos (the tech company, which I haven't figured out how exactly they're pumping out curriculum material).
Back in my day, in basic math, you'd learn a couple of concepts a day and then did 20+ problems of homework, with variations of the main themes. But the new homework style is you do 1 or 2 problems for each new concept, and then you "expand your thinking" → trick questions, gotchas, problems that combine (non-obviously) today's lesson with one from last week, things you can't answer without peeking ahead to next lesson, and so on. This style is --I imagine-- good for kids who are already very good at math. I may have enjoyed it myself. But it's shit for most students, if you never spend hardly any time ensuring that the fundamental learning sinks in before moving on.
1. anon291 · 1790486162 · focus · HN ↗
  This is the basic reason we homeschool. People probably assume it's because we're crazy religious nuts, because we do attend church regularly, but that alone is not enough... there are plenty of religious schools. The real issue is that American education has been taken over by this bizarre desire to not memorize things.
4g · 1790455376 · focus · HN ↗
I M M I G R A T I O N A N D G E N E T I C S
t0mpr1c3 · 1790458155 · focus · HN ↗
Naturally, The Economist chooses the political stance of "blame lefty teachers and hooray for Baron Gove".
The regional coverage remains excellent, but this kind of editorializing is the precise reason I stopped subscribing.
1. gruez · 1790458452 · focus · HN ↗
  >but this kind of editorializing is the precise reason I stopped subscribing.
  It's filed under "leaders". It's by definition supposed to be "editorializing", because it's an editorial.
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial
2. gjskngnf · 1790463573 · focus · HN ↗
  Regardless of political lean, this is a very low effort article.
3. dan-robertson · 1790467112 · focus · HN ↗
  I thought the article was pretty good. I think it does a reasonable job of explaining why the issue matters, dismissing some alternative explanations (covid, funding), and describes some evidence supporting their ‘pedagogy’ argument (different results in England vs Scotland/Wales which didn’t make the same reforms. I think Mississippi another positive example).
  I’m not sure it is even blaming lefty teachers. The blamed people are in university education departments, where I don’t think it’s controversial to say that their faculty tend to be very left leaning (there are surveys on this sort of thing). Their research often being more focused on social justice than finding evidence for better ways of teaching particular things lines up with my (weak) understanding of education research.
  I think more senior members of teachers unions are going to be more left-leaning on average and more likely to prefer approaches more on the ‘social justice’ end than the ‘phonics’ end of the education research spectrum. I would generally expect teachers to be more politically left than the general population, as is the case for many professionals, and a little more leftist than other professionals. I also expect many to be a bit naive about how things work in organisations outside the public sector (especially high-functioning organisations). But mostly I think they care a lot about helping kids learn and not very much about the latest education research (expecting some other school leaders will direct them towards the right way to do things). I think it’s therefore reasonable to care about the relatively low quality of education research(ers) without blaming teachers here.
GuB-42 · 1790463256 · focus · HN ↗
Every time I see a "kids aee getting stupid" article, I wonder what we are missing.
I don't believe that kids are really getting stupid. I see no physiological reasons. Nutrition, pollution, substance abuse,... Not perfect but generally fine. Intellectual stimulation is high, maybe too high. Availability of information is an all time high. If anything the new generation should be smarter than we are.
And yet, it is always "kids these days are stupid". To me, it can't be right. Maybe they are indeed not as good at some tasks. But what are they good at instead? Maybe we should focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. We are judging the next generation with criteria of our own, but the world they are going to live in is not the same as ours. Maybe tests should take it into account.
1. procaryote · 1790508203 · focus · HN ↗
  Education isn't a zero sum game. It's highly possible for people to do worse on basic skills without that being compensated by new unknown skills.
  Hoping they're smarter than the tests show is a bad strategy for fixing the issue
Glyptodon · 1790465613 · focus · HN ↗
People want this to be a "just one thing explains it all" situation. But it's like the unholy intersection of multiple things.
Parents are getting worse at being parents, or don't have the time for it. Technology and social media don't help. People have less stable lives. Schools have more complicated trust and financial situations. And more.
khazhoux · 1790465909 · focus · HN ↗
If athletics were taught like today's math, it would look like this:
"Hey coach, should I spend the next 30 minutes practicing my free throw?"
"No don't worry about that, you already did 2 free throws today. You got the core idea."
"But my dad says he would spend hours every day just shooting hoops by himself."
"That's the old way. Ineffective. More important to learn what makes a good free throw than to mindlessly just repeat it. Then you can apply it to all kinds of situations."
shushpanchik · 1790477394 · focus · HN ↗
PISA is not the only OECD study/assessment that evaluates students abilities. There are others - PIRLS, and, more importantly, ICILS (The International Computer and Information Literacy Study). It's unfair to look at PISA results alone.
nobodywillobsrv · 1790492199 · focus · HN ↗
A lot missing from this analysis.
Usually due to discomfort of the analysis.
It would be interesting to pull the data and control for demographics and then some kind of educational factor and social media factor
agent_954 · 1790517396 · focus · HN ↗
When you import the third world, lower standards to accommodate the worst of society...who's actually surprised by this?

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