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?
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.
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.
themgt · · focus · HN ↗
Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?
Espressosaurus · · focus · HN ↗
gdulli · · focus · HN ↗
fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
Long division, at least conceptually, is also present in algebra and partial fractions.
fnordpiglet · · focus · HN ↗