Tag: learn by doing

Ethan Mollick on Leaping (And/Or Waiting)

I learnt about wait calculations today. Or rather, I learnt that’s what they’re called. I have been doing them my entire life, but we’ll come back to that later.

What is a wait calculation?

This paper describes an incentive trap of growth that shows that civilisations may delay interstellar exploration as long as voyagers have the reasonable expectation that whenever they set out growth will continue to progress and find quicker means of travel, overtaking them to reach and colonise the destination before they do. This paper analyses the voyagers’ wait
calculation, using the example of a trip to Barnard’s Star, and finds a surprising minimum to time to destination at a given rate of growth that affects the expansion of all civilisations. Using simple equations of growth, it can be shown that there is a time where the negative incentive to travel turns positive and where departures will beat departures made at all other times. Waiting for fear future technology will make a journey redundant is irrational since it can be shown that if growth rates alter then leaving earlier may be a better option. It considers that while growth is resilient and may follow surprising avenues, a future discovery producing a quantum leap in travel technology that justifies waiting is unlikely

https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/2006-kennedy.pdf

If you wanted to travel to the star nearest to us, should you leave today or not? You might think the correct answer is obviously yes, you should leave today. But ask yourself this (ridiculous but illuminating) question: should you have decided to start swim to the United States from India the month before we invented ships capable of such crossings?

Makes rather more sense to just wait for a month and jump onto the ship, no?

Ethan Mollick asks if we should write a book / design a presentation / discover a new element / <insert task that can be done by AI here>, or wait until AI becomes good enough to do this task for us instead.

Which brings us to AI. AI has all the characteristics of a technology that requires a Wait Calculation. It is growing in capabilities at a better-than-exponential pace (though the pace of AI remains hard to measure), and it is capable of doing, or helping with, a wide variety of tasks. If you are planning on writing a novel, or building an AI software solution at your business, or writing an academic paper, or launching a startup should you just… wait?

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-lazy-tyranny-of-the-wait-calculation

He gives two examples from his own professional life where he thinks he should have waited, because what took a lot of blood sweat and tears (or significant effort, at any rate) took AI not all that much time, not really.

And that, of course, is true for a lot of us, across a lot of tasks that we do in our daily life (present activities included for both you and I, by the way). AI can, and does, do the task of reading and writing blog posts, so why should I bother writing this, and why should you bother reading it? We could have waited! Or rather, we could have asked AI to do these tasks for us.

So which tasks should we do, and which tasks should we wait upon, or delegate? Ethan Mollick says that the answer to this question in turn depends upon two other questions: “how good?”, and “how fast?”. How good is (or will be) the AI, and how long will it take for the AI to become that good?

The troublesome bit is that we just don’t know the answers to these questions, because of how rapidly AI is developing. Ethan Mollick develops a better, richer framework in his post, and as always, you should read the whole thing.

But of all of his excellent questions in his framework, my favorite one was this one:

Does it create a learning trap?

That is, choosing to let AI do something for you robs you of the opportunity to learn how to do it yourself. And in the world of learning (which is the corner of the internet where this blog locates itself), why would you want to give up on the opportunity to learn?

So if it is your 5000th presentation, or your 20th book, or your 400th academic paper, well ok, you may want to let AI write it for you. But if it is your among your first efforts in the field, maybe give it a shot yourself?

As with everything else in life, there’s lots of asterisks and conditions and what have you’s. But in my limited experience of having tried to get AI to do things, having tried it yourself first is the best way to write better prompts. Skin something something game and all that.

So yes, absolutely, waiting probably makes sense in some cases. And as the lifetime president of the Procrastination Society, I don’t have much moral standing to say what I’m about to – but the best way to learn is to try and do it yourself first!

Lists and To-Do’s

Aadisht messaged me with a list of things he wished was taught in schools and colleges (mostly school), and asked me to come up with a list of my own. Which I will, shortly, but I also wanted to talk in today’s post about a larger point about education in our country. Higher education especially, of course, because that is where I work right now.

OK, short rant coming up:

We spend far too much time in teaching, learning, submitting assignments and writing examinations in college, without actually doing anything. That dulls the mind, captures all of us in a mindless routine that is exhausting, and we end up wasting the most precious years of a student’s life. It’s actually worse than that, because it’s not a mindless routine, it’s a mindless race. You don’t just have to do a whole series of mindless things, you must be seen as being better at it then everybody else.

For example, you having attended classes ain’t enough. You must be seen as having attended more classes than everybody else. Ditto for marks. Ditto for participation in college fests. And on and on and on. But I’ll build on this rant on another day.

First the explanation about listening vs doing, then a potential cure, and then the list.

Explanation:

Consider the program that I am in charge of at the Gokhale Institute. We have about 6-7 courses on offer every semester, and the way the programme is structured, all are currently compulsory. If you assume that each course runs for 40 hours – which it does in non-covid years – we’re looking at around 250 hours of classroom teaching every year. A typical semester lasts for about four months, out of which you need to discount about three-four weeks for holidays, college fests, internal examinations and so on. So about three months (12 weeks) of classroom teaching, into which must be shoehorned 250 hours of teaching.

That is not too bad in terms of time per week, especially considering the fact that we have lectures on Saturday as well. There’s a separate argument to be made about whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it does mean that the number of lectures per day averages out to be around 4.

More than the quantity though, it is the sameness of the day that worries me. All classes are the same. The professor talks, the students listen, and there’s some questions. Learning isn’t by doing, in other words, it is by listening.

There isn’t anything to do. Yes, there is the odd in class assignment, activity and what not – but honestly, most courses will involve at least 80% of the prof talking and students listening. And passive listening – my opinion – can only take you so far. In fact, back when I was a student, I didn’t do so well with passive listening. I still don’t do well with passive listening, which is why this last year has been so horrible for me. Attending a call with nothing to see or do except stare at circles that symbolize names is my ultimate nightmare – and I can’t for the life of imagine how students have been doing it day in and day out. (They haven’t, of course. Attendance rates have been plummeting in all courses across all colleges this past year, one way or the other. And that’s not such a bad thing, for a variety of reasons.)

But that’s the explanation part of this post: we focus far too much in our colleges in this country on listlessly listening, and there’s nothing to do.

Now for the (potential) cure.

These past few weeks, two of my BSc students worked with me on a paper that I and a colleague are writing on health in India. Forget the two students, my colleague and I have learnt more about microeconomics than we did in years of teaching the stuff. By extension, I cannot begin to imagine how much the students learnt about research, theory, its application, the nuances of theory and the benefit of working in groups.

Two other students worked with me on writing articles about the budget. Let me be clear, I did not foist this work upon them. Writing articles about the budget is a cottage industry that nobody ought to be a part of more than a couple of times – but if you’re doing it for the first two or three times, it can be a lot of fun. Again, in their case, I’m sure they learnt a lot more from doing the research to write these articles than they would have in class. The point I am making is that doing work when you have skin in the game teaches you far more than passive listening ever will.

There are other BSc students involved in building out workshops, launching podcasts, helping out with background research for tie-ups with other universities and a lot else besides. But the point behind all of them remains the same: my experiment this year is in trying to see if we can turn college inside out.

Throw students in at the deep end of the pool and ask them to do stuff. When they find out that in order to do stuff they need to know “x”, they now have an immediate, urgent desire to know “x”. And then there’s a point to attending classes that teach “x”!

So, in a not at all hypothetical example, a student is helping me write out a process document for the BSc programme. She has realized that building Gantt charts in Excel actually isn’t simple at all. What if she now attends an Excel session that teaches her about filters, tables and building out charts in Excel? As opposed to a semester in which she learns about Excel in the manner in which it would usually take place in a college. In which case is she going to be hungrier to learn?

We will teach you this, and this will turn out to be useful in life later, just you wait and see. (A)

Or.

Here’s what you have to do. Can’t do it because you don’t have the requisite skill? Cool, here’s the class on acquiring that skill. (B)

Colleges are all about approach A, and they need to be about approach B.

That’s the potential cure, and I’m trying to work on this approach in this semester.

It doesn’t scale, that’s the problem. At any rate, it hasn’t scaled so far. But I’ll keep you posted, and as always, suggestions welcome.

And with all of that said, my list:

  1. Disassemble and reassemble the following:
    1. The door to a classroom
    2. A switchboard in your classroom
    3. The clutchplate assembly on a bike
    4. Note that each of these are to be done with proper, capable supervision, and each being perhaps a three person job. While these are being done, conversations about typical pay, spare parts costs, typical expenses, commute, educational requirements, on the job training recommended. This point is applicable to everything else that follows on this list.
    5. Then have classes about division of labor, inequality, growth, specialization, pricing, sociology, calculus and statistics.
  2. Tend to the following:
    1. A kitchen garden plot in college.
    2. A butterfly garden plot in college
    3. A herb garden at home
    4. Develop and tend to (and that means everything, down to selling it yourself) a vermicomposting pit in college
    5. Then have classes about agriculture, resource management, pricing, government intervention, public economics, sociology, environment, urbanization and the history of the Indian economy.
  3. Learn double-entry bookkeeping and apply it for your own finances. Preferably in Excel/Google Sheets.
    1. Then have classes about statistics, finance and accounting.
  4. Build and deploy an expense tracker, with a dashboard. Preferably in Excel/Google Sheets
    1. You get the idea by now, surely.
  5. Publish in the public domain. Could be a video, a blogpost, a podcast, a photo-essay. But you don’t get to hide behind submissions to faculty only. All your submissions are mandatorily on public domain, viewable to everybody. Non-negotiable rule. Of course, by extension, this rule applies to faculty. All of our question papers and assignments to be put up for public scrutiny too!
  6. Write. Write every single day. You don’t get better at writing without writing every single day. Trust me.
  7. Ditto for reading.
  8. But also learn to take the odd day off every week, and do nothing. Including unlocking your phone. I’m a hypocrite, because I haven’t been able to do this even once in the last five years. I’m talking about not unlocking the phone, to be clear. I’ve taken plenty of days off.

What’s your list?