Learning Is Slower Than You Think
105 comments
·July 29, 2025overrun11
Erem
What fantastic use of imagery the poetic quality of these LLMs has grown considerably.
I know this is aside to the point you're making but the every dying sunflower line really got me as a reader of poems.
As an argument of course there's barely one at all which was closer to your point.
mcfry
Was thinking the same thing. It's impossible to take this article's criticisms of AI seriously when it's so obviously over-edited with AI itself.
add-sub-mul-div
Maybe the best criticism of it is that it's become synonymous with bad content.
antonvs
> "Because this is how real learning often arrives: sideways, unscheduled, alive."
And this is how AI slop often arrives: so recognizable it hurts.
nartho
Funnily enough, Diderot made this very same argument. Except it was that you should travel by foot instead of by horse. For the very reasons ChatGPT stated.
kccqzy
Creative writing is not the same as an argumentative essay. The former can very well just contrast particularities while getting the author's general sentiment across (or I should say, get the imageries that evoke certain feelings in readers). The latter tries to convince the reader by means of logic and reason. Different writing styles for different purposes. One appeals to your logical faculty. One appeals to your emotions. It's pathos vs logos; and it's known since Aristotle's time.
coldtea
>This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy
Don't know about the "without ever arguing why one is better than the other" part.
The LLM made a very strong case for horse and buggy. It just takes the right sensibility to appreciate it...
djoldman
Indeed; these seem to be more frequent of late. The language seems over-the-top, almost breathlessly pearl-clutching without any sort of evidence:
"Childhood itself, reframed: not as a journey to be nurtured, but a system to be streamlined."
"But what starts as adaptation ends in control."
"And when you name your school Alpha, you signal something deeper: Not growth. Not care. But dominance."
"What’s lost in Alpha’s world isn’t content—it’s interiority: the struggle, the slowness, the human friction."
"And in that shift, the soul becomes overhead."
"Human scaffolding gives way to sleek sterility."
"...we risk raising children who are fluent—but forever waiting for the next prompt."
"It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task..."
timerol
This article seems to be a good argument for a school that's 3/4 project based learning and 1/4 classroom instruction. The author then tries very hard to pretend that Alpha school does not follow that model, and is instead something else - a boogeyman of blitzing through lessons without any opportunity for application or reflection, as opposed to the reality of a mix of classroom instruction and project-based learning to struggle with the concepts learned.
> And some readers may ask: if schools like Alpha accelerate the basics and then give students space to explore—what’s wrong with that?
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
The argument, if I'm following it, is that the Alpha model is going to do well, and therefore the model will change to remove the current 3/4 of the curriculum used for exploration, which will make the model worse. But Alpha won't care, because teaching students worse in the name of efficiency is the natural end point. I am not convinced.
I think the article would have done a much better job starting with Asian cram school culture and how AI tutoring is being "fueled by state incentives and parental anxiety", instead of having that as a throwaway thought in the middle of an article otherwise focused on Alpha school.
NervousRing
There are a lot of things in the article that I find a bit wishy-washy.
> It’s a signpost for a broader trend—one that treats friction as failure, learning as delivery, and formation as a plug-in.
I think building something provides a lot more friction (and learning opportunities) than reading books. We had computer classes for at least 7 years in school and beyond some loops and recursion, I didn't really think I understood computers. One month of trying to build an app and that worked. Similarly, hundreds of hours of YC (and other) video content paled in comparison to trying to salvage a startup that was going bankrupt.
> And what’s the real tragedy of this model? It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task: a perfect system solving for performance, not presence.
I don't know why this line feels like it's written by ChatGPT. Maybe because it has that tone of trying to say something deep in a verbatim manner that is the signature style of ChatGPT.
> Training children to outperform machines may win the game, but it misses the point: Machines don’t need meaning. We do.
And I haven't found more aimless people than those coming out of current highschools. They then go to the universities their peers go to, get the job their peers do and try to fill their weekends with entertainment. No judgement, but I don't think AI will reduce any of that.
diamond559
Everyone should just invent new products, new fields of employment then? So easy to you, what have you invented? What new, innovative job do you do that nobody else does?
briandw
I home schooled my kids during the pandemic. It was amazing how quickly we got through the material for the year. We did all of 5th grade math in 3 months of 40 minutes a day. It not just my experience, 1 on 1 tutoring has been shown to be dramatically more effective than classroom instruction.
This article sounds like the usual ideological objections, lots of vague claims that amount to “I don’t like it”.
There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results.
The US education sector is quick to embrace any new fad that sounds good but doesn’t work, building thinking classrooms is the latest. Productive struggle is another.
Yes learning takes time, but it doesn't have to be painfully slow and unproductive.
The education system in US is a disaster and getting worse. The response from schools like the San Francisco school district has been to lower standards and remove higher level material.
I see tremendous potential in Ai tutoring. I use chatgpt to help me learn new material daily. Why should school be any different?
const_cast
Well of course 1-1 teaching is more productive. That's like saying having a personal mechanic is better than taking your car to the local chain on a Saturday. Yeah, duh.
However, what remains to be seen is if 1-1 with an LLM reaches that productivity.
Humans, and especially kids, are weird. They're picky, they're self-sabotaging, and they're short-sighted.
From what I've seen from kids, they will absolutely destroy their own education in the name of fucking around. Presumably, you didn't let that happen. Will an LLM? We're already reaching the breaking point with teachers - a lot of parents just say "I don't care" when confronted with the fact their kid is illiterate.
julianeon
I don't think there's any conflict here.
The article is saying something is lost when the algorithm becomes the teacher, as when the AI is the instructor.
1-on-1 teaching (with the parent as teacher) is not that; whatever problems it has, it's never a problem of a too-powerful algorithm.
beej71
If you use the AI right for tutoring, then sure. A really great tutor will not tell you the answer.
dboreham
One of the purposes of school is to keep students off the streets and out of trouble.
SoftTalker
Well, really the purpose is to inculcate the next generation with the common culture, history, rules and norms, as well as the practical knowledge they will need to become self-supporting functioning adults in society.
Every human civilization and tribal community does this.
It's why we in the USA spend so much time in the early grades not just on arithmetic and ABCs, but on stuff like the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, etc. It's not really anything anyone needs to know for day to day life in 2025, but it's a set of common stories that we all can relate to, draw analogies to, and yes rally around if called to do so. I'm not sure really how much this is true today, I'm reflecting on my experience in the 1970s.
pnathan
Public schools are also a de facto childcare, welfare, and healthcare delivery system. Education is only one facet of the modern public school system in today's society.
peterfirefly
Why should kids like Brian's be forced together with those that need to be kept out of trouble?
BobaFloutist
Because it's important to spend time with people that aren't like you. Otherwise people tend to assume that everyone is like them, or that people that aren't like them are simply not trying hard enough to be like them.
jimbokun
But it doesn’t have to be the only purpose.
rufus_foreman
>> There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results
Well said. Did you just make that up?
briandw
I wasn't explicitly quoting anything, but I'm sure I've read something similar somewhere.
pnathan
OP: You need to stop with the LinkedIn short paragraphs that try to reveal insight. It does you no good as a proponent of a good education to write so poorly.
Anyway -
Education is a very slow and difficult thing, because it is paired with the maturing of the individual along with sharing enough concepts to spark connection _but_ not so much as to overwhelm. Adult humans can make the individual judgment that algorithms can't - WIS not INT.
Regarding dysfunctions.
Children can absorb knowledge _very_ fast in the right environment. I'm uncertain how much that replicates across the whole population, but you can see this in the top-flight homeschoolers.
When we were looking for better environments for our kid than the neighborhood school, we realized that private schools have an advantage in that they can select the parents and effectively curate the environment. Most of the issues in the public elementary school were generated by dysfunctional parents combined with certain political choices on classroom management. The second is materially fixable given work - the first is not something a school board can fix. Much of the discourse on education needs to relate to the total educational delivery across family/student quartiles of capacity, rather than trying to cherry pick a student, or a class, or - . You see, it's very hard to teach when certain students have no self control and disrupt the class continually, and there is no facility to remove them from the class for the good of others. And as we all know- 90% of students are above average, and our kids are _definitely_ gifted. So there's no easy political way to solve the environment problem - which happens to be the key drag on education today.
JamesPark1982
I think micro-learning on a consistent basis helps with retention, maybe one small thing a day consistently
datameta
This is proven by neuroscience. Spaced repetition.
unshavedyak
Is Spaced Repetition related to "learning one new thing every day" though?
I'd have thought repetition was more about retention than the described "learn one new thing every day".
I'm also curious what new means here. Is attempting to research and retain (eg SR) some small fact the goal? Or would it be learning novel modals, such as new skills or new ways of thinking - which i imagine would be quite difficult in a day of course, just thinking out loud.
wahnfrieden
They've confused learning new material with reviewing learned material
scarier
Here’s another take: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
At the very least it’s an interesting experiment—still unclear if or how well this sort of thing will succeed.
rahimnathwani
My thoughts about Alpha School and '2 hour learning':
https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1933354196792979590?t=bMl...
My main problem is that they claim:
- it can work with any cohort
- that the gains come primarily from the 2 hour learning platform
But actually:
- the gains come from the high quality and large quantity of adults
- only 10% of the benefit comes from the platform (according to Matt Bateman, an education thinker who now works there)
- there are definitely large selection effects, too
I like the idea of it. But AFAICT there's nothing special about the execution. It's just that public schools (both government-run, and charters):
(i) can't choose their students, and
(ii) aren't trying to maximize learning, and
(iii) have parents who want something 'normal'.
So it's easy to do something better, if you can get a few folks to pay you a lot of money, and you have investors willing to burn additional money.
(BTW at their new school in San Francisco, opening this fall, they're planning to charge $75k/year, so probably no need for VC subsidy)
They might iterate to something that can scale. But right now they're making claims that I don't think would stand up to scrutiny.
Regarding their charter school application in Pennsylvania: the fact that they're trying to get taxpayers to pay so much for their software (which Matt acknowledges only accounts for 10% of the gains) seems like a trick to extract money from a taxpayer-funded 'not for profit'.
Separately: if I were paying $75k/year for a school for my child, I'd be disappointed if they were using IXL and ALEKS for math, instead of Math Academy.
zehaeva
Excluding room and board that's more expensive than Harvard[0]. I feel like if you're spending that much money on a child then it should be freaking amazing. You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.
0: $59,320 for the 25-26 year according to their website.
rahimnathwani
You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.
But actually I don't think you could hire a full time tutor for that amount in San Francisco. Many public school teachers in SF cost double that https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-...
You could hire one full time tutor per two children, though...
more expensive than Harvard
jorl17
This is only very vaguely related but this title made me think of a very touching book on the subject of learning: Flower for Algernon.
I definitely recommend it for those who enjoy thinking about what life is like for people of different perceived "intelligence" levels.
ozgrakkurt
I don’t believe in god, but this kind of thinking feels like playing god.
It is really hard to guess what is the right way, everyone has a different idea.
Effort and resources seems like the biggest missing piece in practice.
In almost everything more effort and resources seem to be able to overcome a lot of bad decisions and mistakes but there is not much hope if there isn’t enough effort.
Alifatisk
I am a very slow learner, I have colleagues who learn things very quickly. Two things that have helped be speed things up is these two:
- Spaced repetitions
- Active recall
greenavocado
The elephant in the room that makes or breaks learning GENERALLY is encoding ability. Spaced repetition is far less effective if you don't build meaningful encodings for knowledge you are learning.
Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering. Grinding trivia is not learning.
Combine elaborative encoding + self-explanation + dual coding as your core encoding triad. Use mnemonics selectively for hard-to-remember facts. Embed spaced and interleaved practice into your review schedule via tools like Anki or RemNote.
rahimnathwani
"Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering."
This is true for many things, but there are exceptions.
For example, my son studied the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) using Anki, without any prior exposure. Now, when he uses a dictionary (paper or online), he can verify the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.
Another example: foreign language vocabulary. These are rote facts. There's no meaningful distinction between 'learning' a foreign word and 'remembering' that word. You cannot say you've 'learned' a word if you cannot already 'remember' it.
pessimizer
> Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering. Grinding trivia is not learning.
You haven't learned anything you can't remember, you've just heard it once.
Also, this is horseshit on its face. Sometimes I just need to to remember what dots and dashes in what order mean "J," or how -ar verbs are conjugated in the progressive past. Learning things and remembering them is the same thing. Once you have the facts remembered you can abstract groups of them into parameterized functions, and abstract those parameterized functions, and test how they work in strange contexts, etc.
But these are all rewards you get for remembering things. On the other hand, I see no benefit in thing that I "learned" yesterday that I don't remember today.
edit: I agree 100% with the prescription, though. But creating lots of spurious associations around pieces of data you want to remember is a temporary measure until you can make more real and useful associations. The process of creating real and useful associations between new information and old knowledge is what I'm referring to when I say "learning." It happens whether you want it to or not. It's a product of the sheer amount of repetition times the salience of the new fact to old knowledge. [edit: although number of sleeps seems to have an effect.]
taeric
Something that I keep meaning to dive more on here, is an exploration of why spaced repetition and active recall work. I saw a study once that indicated it was largely the "guess and check" aspect of combining these that worked.
That is, some people will approach spaced repetition as a means to re-consume the information. But, sadly, that doesn't really work. Instead, those that use it as a means to attempt active recall, effectively "guessing" the answer and then immediately checking that result do see massive gains.
To that end, I'm curious if this describes your approach when it works?
Alifatisk
I think it works because if you see your memories in the brain as a road, it will make sense. Any memory or association you create between two things builds a tiny little road. Your brain scales that road based on how much you use it. Any time you recall that memory by repetition, the road gets stronger, the stronger it is, the more persistent it stays as memory. If you don't use it at all, then at the end, it will get demolished to free the space (you forget).
That is the mental model I have of it, I don't know how accurate it is though.
taeric
My point was that just seeing the road is not enough to remember it, it seems. You have to predict what is at the end of the road, as well.
This is why "flash cards" have the question on one side and the answer on the other. If you just looked at all on one side, then you lose retention.
I think the idea is that you want to get your mind trained to create the answer based on the prompt. You don't, necessarily, remember the answer and the prompt, together. Instead, you want you mind to be able to make the answer.
chizhik-pyzhik
Unfortunately and ironically this has all the marks of AI writing.
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
use of "not this — that", em dash, staccato sentences to make a point, unnecessary metaphor, etc
I stopped reading at this point.
DHPersonal
LLMs use em dashes because they were trained on content made by actual writers. Actual writers still exist and they still use em dashes.
kccqzy
Either actual writers who care about typography, or actual writers who have had their writings edited by a real editor. Or even anyone just curious enough about writing that they picked up a manual of style.
parpfish
i'm a frequent em-dash user. it's great for little appositive clauses because it can make the sentence feel less cluttered than commas.
but i have no idea how to type an em-dash. you just put in a double-dash/hyphen (i.e. "--") and any modern word processors will know to convert it to an em-dash for you.
I suspect that lots of writers who use this trick are getting unfairly slammed with "omg, youre an AI! no human knows how to type that character!"
kirubakaran
You're conveniently replying to the weakest point of the parent comment. They listed a several more reasons, and when taken together, the article reeks of LLM generated content.
snapcaster
You don't have a lot of experience with LLMs if this isn't immediately identifiable as ChatGPT generated
null
sctb
Of course, they certainly do. But this article is really something else! I don't care if it's written by AI or not, but it has a rhetorical style that relies much more on rhythm than on connecting the conceptual dots. Like a TED talk or a revivalist preacher.
jihadjihad
Cmd-F for em dash `—`:
> 72 results
It doesn't prove anything but it's a highly suggestive signature. I would hazard a guess that it would be rare for most writers to use an em dash every other sentence.
PeeMcGee
It happens as soon as the fourth sentence (maybe even the third):
> There was a silence at the table—not confusion, but recognition.
Then keeps happening again and again and again to the point where it would be obnoxious even if a human wrote it.
It's unbelievable to me that there's a kind of person who would publish an article about learning that is so obviously AI generated, and from a professor nonetheless. Maybe this is some sort of experiment or an ironic joke that went over my head.
null
djeastm
I also felt my AI spidey-sense tingle and just threw the article into an LLM to summarize for me.
Oh, what a world we live in.
somebodythere
LLM argumentative essays tend to have this "gish-gallop" energy; say a bunch of tenuously related and vaguely supported things, leave the reader wondering if it was the author who failed to connect the dots, or them
zahlman
Yes, so do human ones (just not the ones that filter through to you). The output is like this because the training data is like this.
esseph
You just described my personal writing style :(
intended
Yeah, this reads as AI Generated. The opening para, and several subsequent paras, have this specific flow that I associate with an LLM asked to write an essay.
iFire
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age was one of my favorite depictions of learning technologies
null
This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour. We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all. Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."