Remix.run Logo
mncharity 4 days ago

I've lately been struck by people having a life difficulty due to "missing a clue" absent some experience. The person poorly conceptualizing and executing physical therapy, for lack of athletic experiences. The person poorly handling cognitive decline, for lack of a grasp of work processes. The person variously failing from having physical discomfort as an abort criteria, for lack of experiences normalizing its deferral.

"I have this clue at hand" can have broad impacts. Software development's emphasis on clarity, naming, and communication protocols, helped me a lot with infant conversation. Math done well, can be a rich source of clues, especially around thinking clearly.

There's an idea that education should provide more life skills (like personal finance). And another, that education should have a punch list (as in construction), of "everyone at least leaves with these". Now AIish personalized instruction will perhaps permit delivering a massive implicit curriculum, far larger than we usually think of as a reasonable set of learning objectives. Just as a story can teach far more than the obstensible moral/punchline of the story, so too might each description, example, question and problem, dynamically tuned in concert. So perhaps it's time to start exploring how to use that? In the past, we worked by indirection - "do literary criticism, and probabilisticly obtain various skills". And here, from math. Perhaps there's a near-term opportunity to be more explicit, and thorough, about the cluefulnesses we'd like to provide?