Yeah - to put it another way, ordered, general criteria like these will rarely be fit for the purpose of selecting the best coder for a given job. They place a huge premium on showing the widest possible diversity of knowledge, whereas what makes many programmers world-class is that they offer highly specialized skills for dealing with highly specialized applications, with which they have huge experience.
1. ...and several other factors, like requiring all students in a class to move at the same pace.
2. We all, including Khan, recognize there is a problem.
3. You gravely mischaracterize Khan's approach. Yes, the video you selected (out of thousands) does promote rote methods, as do many of the exercises. But Khan is also at pains to demonstrate mathematical reasoning from first principles, and to emphasize why we use the methods we do, why they work, and what relevance they have to the real world - in real world terms that make at least as much sense to me as those used by mathalicious. These 'reason' and 'proof' videos are judiciously interspersed with the 'rote' videos and taken together form exactly the kind of compelling mathematical narrative you complain is lacking from typical math curricula.
4. This is great. Students can view and review Khan's videos as their core learning material, help each other, and make use of the teacher's limited time according to metrics which continually and repeatedly assess their personal level of comprehension (which, as they absorb substantial portions of a playlist, will expand far beyond the memorization of rote methods).
5. Hard data will soon show if you are right, but it is my impression that thousands have already benefited.
6. The Khan model, taken in its entirety, only encourages this.
7. If you listen to what Khan actually says in his various talks, he is proposing that his site has a novel and exciting role to play as part of a general restructuring of math education along the lines your propose.
You could have taken the view that the Khan Academy is a useful tool and resource, yet to capitalize on it we must redouble our efforts to improve education funding, classroom teaching methods and better curricula. That sounds reasonable. Instead you wrote an article attacking the Khan Academy as being a direct impediment to this kind of progress. Few respondents here on HN have found your arguments persuasive, and instead of replying to the kind of points I make above, you tellingly characterize us as follows:
It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories: 1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored
The discussion here has been far more nuanced and sophisticated than you allow for - kind of like the way you discredit Khan's videos.
Thanks for the comments. Very helpful. Again, to reiterate, I actually like Khan Academy, and the post wasn't critiquing Khan as much as it was our turning Khan into something that it's not. The post wasn't about Khan. It was about us.
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Schools are experimenting with using it as a core instructional tool. That is not in question. Whether or not Khan himself is advocating this is besides the point (although they are involved in pilot programs). The point is that schools & districts are turning to a style of instruction that we know from research does not work, and that threatens to postpone the more important -- and necessary -- conversation about better teaching and better curriculum.
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That said, I have heard what Khan has said about how he envisions Khan Academy being used. (Awkward sentence; apologies). He wants teachers to be able to offload skills instruction in order to be freed up to pursue projects and other applications. In theory, this is terrific. As a former classroom teacher myself, I know how much time we spend on basic skills. However, my concern -- and let's be clear; I say this as a teacher -- is that if students aren't learning the skills correctly in the first place, then they won't be able to apply them.
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Finally, as someone who has spent considerable time -- and all of his savings -- trying to create a product that will help teachers teach better from the curriculum angle, I can tell you that Khan Academy has made it incredibly difficult to fund new projects in the ed space. Yes, there is more money than ever, but almost all of it is for platforms. Nobody wants to put money into effective content, because the media narrative has convinced them that the math problem has already been "solved." Having watched many, many Khan Academy videos, and having spoken to any number of teachers and school administrators, I have a difficult time believing this to be true.
Again, at its core, the blog post was about how Khan Academy was originally intended as a source for homework help; that we've begun to use it for much more than this; and that this risks perpetuating the underlying problem.
This seems fairly straightforward, uncontroversial, and I must admit that I'm surprised by how energetic (and in some cases, vitriolic) the response has been.
I agree with you gomphus, as an outsider reading this article it did make me feel kind of crappy.
The main feeling I got was:
"Look at the King! Look at the the King! Look at the King, the King, the King!
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether
He's altogether as naked as the day that he was born
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether
It's altogether the very least the King has ever worn"
I am sure there are drawbacks and improvements KA need to make, no doubt at all. But an all out attack from someone at a similar space, to me, seems counter-productive.
R as a language is highly multi-paradigmatic, while remaining essentially a specialized tool for statistical analysis whose users, often scientists, are not first and foremost programmers. Also, the usefulness of R depends on a huge range of contributed packages, leading to duplication of effort and disparate approaches to the same problems.
Because the language is friendly and intuitive enough on the level of manipulating datasets, and template code is available for all of the popular tests and plot types, you can go very far in R without actually learning to program deeply. Considering all this, it is not surprising that a lot of user code is inelegant, inefficient, etc. Perhaps we should be more tolerant of this, compared to other languages, in light of R's status as a rough 'n ready tool for quick analysis, simulation and prototyping.
Of course, reference and contributed R code should show exemplary style. And R code that is aware of the intricacies of the language - the consequences of lexical scoping with lazy argument evaluation, S3, S4 + Reference classes, environment implementation, the possibilities of 'computing on the language' - can be a thing of beauty. I think it's a wonderful language, and I would like to see many of its features implemented in more general purpose languages for application development.
Often it's just the little things. As a very basic example, I am someone who has always disliked that the assignment operator in so many languages is the mathematical symbol for equality. I'm not entirely happy with prefix syntax for assignments either. While R supports "=" and assign() for assignment, it pleases me no end to use "<-" or "->" (and the corresponding nonlocal "<<-", "->>"), with their implicit directionality and action of a target "getting" a value.
> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them?
In science, we call this a thesis or research project. I don't see the need for all exams to take the same format (although some do so successfully), as closed-book exams test something quite different - the depth and breadth of your internal, longer-term comprehension.
> An “education,” whether for its own value or to help you get a job, is–at least to me–about developing the skills to find the information you need, assess its value, integrate it into the context at hand, and make a better decision than you otherwise could have.
An education -at least to me- is about building up an inner edifice of knowledge, so you can work fast, and formulate original and hopefully brilliant ideas and insights, with the skills the author mentions being accessory to this (and something that should really be in place by high school). The author writes as if knowledge is something to be retained as fleetingly as possible, to make room for whatever the next task is. But information you have committed to long-term memory can cross-pollinate, become a greater structure, open up new horizons. Information that you merely load and discard cannot - at least not in the same way.
> In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared.
In my world, being (professionally) prepared means that you have authoritative mastery of a subject. Of course you often refer to notes, and have the skill to quickly and perhaps temporarily assess and assimilate new concepts. It does not follow that holding the detail of our degree subjects at arm's length is a virtue, and that having to rely on our own memories in examinations is somehow "bad education". Yes, the open book exam format has its place, but so does the traditional one.
If you want a better education, try regarding your knowledge as something to be made more enduring, not more ephemeral.
van Gogh chose paints for their immediacy of color, sometimes without understanding the problems of hue shifting and degradation displayed by certain pigments. This causes a huge headache for curators and in many cases the changes are irreversible. For example his chrome yellows contain sulphides which have significantly darkened and browned through exposure to UV. He also used various red lakes that are prone to fading and discoloration.
van Gogh famously wrote in a letter to his brother Theo: "Paintings fade like flowers... All the colors that impressionism has brought into fashion are unstable, so there is all the more reason to simply use them too brightly - time will tone them down only too much".
Any theory of color vision deficiency that attempts to reconstruct the color balances that van Gogh actually saw should take into account the hue/value/chroma of his paints such as they possessed when originally applied, and also consider that van Gogh intentionally adjusted his aesthetic to render color schemes in expectation of future pigment degradation, and that these adjustments cannot have been an exact science.
Two standout scenes for me. First, gazing out from the London Eye over a skyline filled with incredible feats of engineering, the chief is bemused - because our money houses are so much bigger than our spirit houses.
Second, entering the main spirit house itself (St. Paul's cathedral) - after establishing that their women won't be struck dead for entering such a holy place - the tribespeople encounter, seemingly for the first time, the glories of neoclassical Western sculpture, art, architecture. They caress the faces carved from marble and stone, dance with pure delight between the soaring Corinthian columns. They explain how such impossibly beautiful things could only have been created by God, and have obviously been part of the world from the very beginning.
Ever since watching this series, I've tried to look at my city with the same combination of cynicism and amazement.
There's also a bittersweet segment where the chief of the tribe is dumbfounded that he's not allowed to drop in on the "big chief" - Queen Elizabeth II.
I would like to toss the author of this paean to passivity into the ocean.
Yes, sure, clinging on to certain kinds of unrealistic expectations, in certain contexts (particularly personal relationships), can be fatal.
But this is a truism that any idiot could tell you - and in this case the post is generalized to the point of meaninglessness.
Suppose you encounter someone who is openly racist, dishonest or technically incompetent at their job, and no one is challenging him about it. Because it's bad to have expectations about public & professional behaviour, and even worse to actually impose them on others!
Here's the core message: when the world isn't how you think it should be, don't have the courage to try and change it, or to speak out about how you feel. Suppress your feelings, accept everything just the way it is, and - just as long as you yourself behave well - all the bad energy will go away!
Sounds to me like someone trying to justify being a total wimp. Like someone who's so afraid of experiencing any degree of anger or disappointment that they philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness. And I'm afraid that's my overall impression of people who embrace "zen" as a lifestyle paradigm, (rather than just a mindset for, say, a discrete programming project, for which it can work wonderfully). Zen has its place, but taken too far it becomes morally corrosive, and turns personalities to mud.
Most of that is your expectation of what the author intended. I didn't read any of that. Just this: try to improve the world, try to help others perform better. Emotionally respond to the result, sure. Then ... let it go. Live and learn. Try something different next time.
I've met folks who live this way. They are not wimps. They are strong, and resilient.
What is a wimp? More like, someone who is afraid, who lashes out at things before they understand them, staying in their disfunctional rut rather than risk any emotion other than anger.
Absolutely agree. To make an assumption about the world, test it and find out you were wrong is way better than to not make any assumptions and just being passive. And what upsets me more is that such 'zen' philosophy become more and more popular. Like relax, lower your standards, don't have expectations, don't care for work too much, go play soccer. This is how western civilization fades away becoming more lazy and less competitive.
Why is it bad to constantly challenge yourself and the world around you. Humans are great because they can change the circumstances and not to surrender to them. Although often times it comes through terrible mistakes, but the process is moving forward.
I had a lot of trouble with this aspect too and your logic is perfectly valid but your assumptions are missing a key piece. Part of accepting things the way they are is understanding that you are an integral part of the world. This implies that not only do you have the power to influence it but that doing so is both inescapable and your duty.
Telling someone that they are ignorant or incompetent is far more effective when you're not hinged on whether or not they will listen to you. If you are attached to the result, you will become a dictator. If you are not, you will become the most effective type of leader. It is far more effective to give someone the message and trust them to figure it out then to force them to change when they either don't want to or are not yet capable. If one person hits a bottleneck, there are millions of others who are capable of taking their next step with a little guidance from you.
I completely agree that a lot of people fall into the trap you described.
You have broadened my thinking on this issue, but I'm not convinced that being "attached" to the result of an intervention is necessarily harmful (let alone something that makes me a dictator!). There are many ways to positively accommodate our natural emotional responses to things being other then we would passionately want them to be, into our continued efforts to make those things so. I agree with your comments on leadership (although I can think of some contrary examples), but leadership is just one area informed by expectation.
I think I am guilty of further polarizing what was presented as a false dichotomy in the first place. It is not the case that either we live a life full of expectations that poison us when they are not met; or that we must be devoid of expectation and experience all outcomes with equanimity. Shades of grey predominate.
That was really my beef with the article: its absolutism. Life requires a repertoire of attitudes and responses. It is futile and naive to say we must always adopt a principle of throwing all our expectations away. It is not so different from saying that the culture and technology we treasure could have been more painlessly attained in a world of wandering sadhus.
Really, it depends on what your goal is. The point of enlightenment is to stop suffering, so if you're trying to do that then our emotional responses must be transcended. If you're not, then what you say makes more sense. I think that the target audience of this website is people who have the goal of transcendence.
The interesting thing is that detachment does not remove the shades of grey, it's not about removing anything and more about accepting it. It's the difference between having a favorite colour and having every colour as your favorite. In the latter case, you don't care what the weather is, you're still smiling.
In a world of wandering sadhus there wouldn't any development of culture and technology since they would all be dedicated to reaching enlightenment, which means that none of them would have attained it. It would be a world of people with the same goal which nobody has actually achieved.
I think that after enlightenment has been attained, people do the same things as we do now, just with infinitely less friction. The saying goes - "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Some minds are inclined towards science or cultural development or computer programming and the same would apply to them.
I've often felt that the Buddhist "no desires" and "no mind" concepts are akin to the trivial solution in polynomials or vector math: set everything to 0!
That it's one solution does not mean there are not other, non-zero solutions.
You've fallen into the classic trap: Buddhism does not espouse nihilism (the negation of all things),
Buddhism simply asserts that what you think is your reality, isn't. That's not to say that NOTHING is real or that you don't experience something, it's to say what you put stock in is very much not worth doing so.
No. My statement was short, but that's not what I said at all. And while I'm not an expert, I've read extensively on the subject (20 books?), am actually quite familiar with and fond of eastern ways of thought, and am well aware of common misconceptions.
My main point, though, is in striving to be desire-free. (To the adept, this is an upaya, a clever means of potentially pointing out the truth, not the truth itself. However, it's an oft used one.) In the case of this article, being desire-free is translated into being expectation-free. They're the same idea to the author.
I'm not discussing what reality is here, or what it is not, but am looking at the idea that desire causes suffering. I've imagined this phrased as a set of coefficients indicating quantity for all desires in the world, i.e. x1 is how much you have desire d1:
x1 * d1 + x2 * d2 + ... = Suffering
In the classic Buddhist disciplines, one eliminates desire (whether as an end goal or upaya is up to you to decide, or more appropriately, ignore). To phrase it again as math, it's the trivial solution to the equation above:
0 * d1 + 0 * d2 + ... = No Suffering
My hypothesis is that the coefficients need not be 0 to find a non-suffering answer.
(And, in fact, I do believe that's what Buddhism teaches, or shows, eventually. But all of the above holds.)
Since you pointed out that you've read lots of books, I assume that means you haven't actually practiced under a teacher's guidance. Reading about riding a bike is a far cry for actually doing so.
As a practicing Buddhist for a decade, having attending multiple retreats including a 30-day one, this statement right here indicates the flaw in your argument:
In the classic Buddhist disciplines, one eliminates desire
Actually, Buddhism is about being OK with the desire, but the idea isn't to become some robotic zombie walking around. That's a classic mistake. Buddhism DOES talk about the ability to first limit and later eliminate your REACTIONS to desires, but never the desires themselves. They will always arise, no matter whether you're enlightened or not. It's a question of whether you respond to those arisings.
I don't think "no mind" is a trivial solution by any means; and Vajrayana Buddhism (as well as some other branches) do allow for desire.
Agreed that there can be other solutions as well. However I do think Buddhism has some very valid critiques of unity and duality that it's well worth paying attention to.
Many of the comments here debate materialism vs. minimalism, in terms of which provides a truer path to happiness. But the author of the post wasn't trying to be happy - his goal is to become "uncomfortable", in order to work more productively.
The main issue is not how much stuff the author has or doesn't have, but rather his spiritual and cultural impoverishment.
He insists that progress in life is driven by unhappiness, and that comfortableness begets complacency. This simplistic argument says a lot about his personal failings and very little about the human psyche in general. Yes, some great things are born of discontent. But this dude is a computer programmer, not Ghandi. It apparently has not occurred to him to nurture a sense of sustained excitement over the creative process, to channel the joy and endless amusement of a life spent problem-solving and pushing intellectual boundaries, or to get happily enthused about developing his own original ideas.
If drooling over video games and giggling at Reddit memes is your default 'comfortable' behaviour, then yes, by all means, take drastic measures to suppress your immaturity. (I'd personally keep very quiet about it.)
