Utilitarian* atheist, artist, coder, documentarian and polymath (jokes.. but I don’t believe to be a jack of all trades necessitates one being a master of none, rather that the synergy of many fields can lead to novel insights—and I also just want to know everything!).
I write about moral philosophy, artificial intelligence and game theory—in particular non-zero-sum games and their importance in solving the world’s problems. Most of my writing originates on my personal website nonzerosum.games.
I have admitted I am wrong at least 10 times on the internet.
* I don’t really class Utilitarianism as an ethical framework in competition with other ethical frameworks, I see it more as a calculus that most people, when it comes down to it, use to determine or assess more the generalised virtues, principles and laws that they live by (well, at least I do).
I think the idea is really interesting. As someone who spent 5 years creating student video resources, I appreciate the impact they can have, and I have at times tried to convince my father—a life-long maths teacher to collaborate with me on replicating his course… but the fool didn’t take me up on the offer.
I feel like the cost-effectiveness argument is valid but might run into issues. To begin with, as you have in one of your comments pointed out, video resources with a teacher who can respond dynamically, adds much more than a video alone. So, this means there is no cost saving in terms of teachers time—which I think is a good thing (I’ll put a pin in that for later) and then video production on top of that is not at all cheap. One thing that was consistent, in my experience creating educational resources, was the need to constantly update the resources (there was a team of us working full time to just maintain one course).
So, while the cycle of feedback and constant improvement of the resources is a vital part of the process, it makes what seems like a one-off expense into a perpetual expense.
Furthermore teachers are already underpaid, relative to other professions requiring similar skills, so the additional funding for these new resources would need to result from an unprecedented increase in education funding (which could have gone to teachers) or would have to be taken from the budget at the expense of teachers.
Unless of course you leave it to the private sector in which case you have to worry about advertising, special interests and competition leading optimisation for what is appealing to students rather than what is necessarily effective—Hollywood, after all only has the mandate to entertain, they don’t have to also educate.
To get back to that pin: If we did manage to create a resource perhaps incorporating generative AI that can present ideas in an engaging way and provide dynamic feedback, making teachers unnecessary we run into another issue. There’s something to be said for having well-rounded educators in society, learning in a non-specialised way is enriching for people in general. One negative side of chat GPT is this way drastic drop-off in activity on forums like Stack Overflow, because people don’t need other people any more.
There’s something about the person to person trading of ideas that I think contributes to a robust community, in the same way that international trade helps to curb international conflicts—we might find that making human interaction unnecessary to education whether in schools or on forums might lead to a fragmentation of the social fabric. Personally I really like the idea of lots of amateurs sharing ideas—like on LessWrong and other forums, there’s something uniquely human about learning from sharing, with benefits for the teacher also (à la the Feynman Technique).
But, I think you make a good case. Thanks for sharing the idea.