It's actually kind of funny if you think what is education? You’re basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain, and it's amazingly bad in conventional education. I think just in general conventional education should be massively overhauled, because it shouldn't be like this huge chore. Everyone normally goes through English, math, science and so forth from fifth grade, the six grade, seventh grade and so forth, like it's an assembly line. It shouldn't be that you got like these grades where we have people walking in lockstep. People are not objects on an assembly line, that's a ridiculous notion. People learn and are interested in different things at different paces. You really want to disconnect the whole grade level from the subjects, and allow people to progress at the fastest pace they can or are interested in, in each subject. It seems like a really obvious thing.
A lot of kids are probably just in school puzzled as to why they're there. They don't know why they're there, like why are we learning this stuff? We don't even know why. You’re asked to memorize formulas, but you don't not know why this is the case. You have this cognitive dissonance of it seems irrelevant, but I've been told to remember it, I'll be punished if I don’t remember it.
I think a lot of the things that people learn, probably there's no point in learning them, because they never use them in the future. People I think don’t stand back and say, well, why are we teaching people these things? and we should tell them, probably why we're teaching these things. I think if you can explain the why of things, then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation. Then they understand purpose. I think that's pretty important.
The more you can game-ify the process of learning, the better. Generally you want your education to be as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game. Just make it entertaining.You don't need to tell your kid to play video games. For my kids, I do not have to encourage them to play video games. I have to like pry them from their hands like crack, it’s like “drop that crack needle!” they will play video games on autopilot all day. To the degree that you can make somehow learning like a game, make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do. I think that's how it should be.
It's also very important to teach to the problems and not to the tools. You can imagine like if you say, we want to understand how an internal combustion engine works. The best way to do that is to say let's take apart the engine and put it back together again. Now what tools do we need for this? We need a screwdriver, we need a wrench, maybe a winch, and as you take the engine apart you understand the reason for these tools. If on the other hand you have a course on screwdrivers and a course on wrenches, that would be a terrible way to do it, it’s difficult to remember. The way that our mind has evolved is to remember things that are relevant, and to discard information that it thinks has irrelevance, so we must establish relevancy. Tying it to a problem is very powerful for establishing relevance, and getting kids excited about what they're working on, and having the knowledge stick. In the course of solving a problem, taking the engine apart and putting it back together, you learn about the relevance. It's very painful and difficult to remember things if they seem abstract and unimportant. You have to establish the relevancy and importance, and establish the why of things in order for the knowledge to naturally stay in your brain.
It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves and details, or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
Frankly, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying. I think generally peoples thinking processes are too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. They'll say we will do that because it was always done that way, or they will not do it because nobody has ever done that before, so it must not be good. That is just a ridiculous way to think. Analogies are very seductive they can sound very compelling, but analogy is just a story. The way we get through daily life is mostly by analogy, or sort of copying things with minor variations. The amount of thinking you need for it is not much, because it is a computational shortcut, which is fine for every day life.
If you want to do something that is fundamentally new or is particularly counterintuitive, then analogies don't work very well. You won't know what's really true, or what's really possible, if you reason by analogy. You have to do a first principles analysis, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine, and then you reason up from there. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up. This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense, or if it’s just what everybody else is doing. It’s hard to think that way, you can’t think that way about everything. It takes a lot of effort, it requires a lot of thinking. It's rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis.
First principles is a phrase that is used in physics. Physics has this problem where they are trying to figure out things that are counter intuitive, like quantum mechanics. They had to get a framework for getting there. My main training and mindset is that of a physicist, so I tend to think in a very sort of physics brainwork. I think it is the best brainwork for thinking, and for evaluating technologies at a fundamental level. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn't work. It means that you go to the very basic laws of physics, the things which we believe to be extremely well demonstrated. In other words the reason they call it a law is that no one has ever demonstrated an exception to that ever. That's how it qualifies as being a law, but even then laws can be broken, where you find that one case in the very unusual circumstance that will break it. That is the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics are actually extremely predictive of reality, except when you approach the speed of light. Since back in the day, with their primitive instruments, they couldn't detect these tiny little differences, Newtonian mechanics seemed to predict everything perfectly. You take these very fundamental laws and say now let's use those as the ingredients from which we will construct a theory, a conclusion, because we know that base is sound. If we therefore are able to combine those elements in a way that's cogent, that conclusion will be sound, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past. That's what I mean with reasoning from first principles, and I think that general approach can be taken in many fields.
I think that physics is usually not taught the right way. The way physics is usually taught is with a series of raw formulas. The wonder and awe of physics is not conveyed in classrooms, the fundamental meaning is not conveyed. Like what do these formulas represent in reality? It's incredible that a formula can actually describe reality, that's amazing.
The very framework of how to think about physics is by far the most helpful. To sort of understand how the first scientists learned anything, how they changed the way they learned things. How they build the framework of analysis overtime, as they learned that one mode was better than another. This is extremely helpful to learn. If people really pay attention to physics 101 that is the most valuable. Physics is true everything else is debatable, and even physics is questionable. Quantum mechanics is really interesting too. It's amazing that quantum mechanics is true, it's still hard to believe.
I do think more people should study engineering and science. Software engineering is probably the single biggest area that people should learn, and I'm always sort of a fan of general economics and critical thinking. We should really teach critical thinking a lot more. That may seem like a simple thing. You just need to tell people this is how you know whether you should believe something or not. Just teaching people these are general types of fallacies, and this is how people generally trick you, and how to avoid being tricked, that would be really great.
A university education is often unnecessary, That's not to say that it is unnecessary for all people. It really depends on what somebody’s goal is. I think you learn the fast majority in the first two years, and most of it is from your classmates. You can always buy the text books and read them.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of teaching today is a lot like vaudeville, and as a result of that not that compelling.You've got someone standing up there kind of lecturing at people. They've done the same lecture 20 years in a row, so they're not necessarily all that engaged doing it, and they're not very excited about it. That lack of enthusiasm is conveyed to the students, so they're not very excited about it. Compare that to let's say “Batman: The Dark Knight” the Chris Nolan movie, it's pretty freaking awesome. You got like incredible special effects, amazing actors, great script, multiple cuts, and great sound. That's amazing, and it's very engaging. Now, imagine if instead you had the same script, so at least it's the same script, and you said instead of having movies, we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. In every small town in America, if movies didn't exist, they'd have to recreate “The Dark Knight” with like home-sewn costumes, and like jumping across the stage, and not really getting their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie, and no special effects. That would not be compelling, I mean that would suck, it would be terrible. That's education.