Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own.
And not due to a lack of information. The draw of education hasn't been access, not since the internet anyway. Structure, pacing, curriculum, schedule, and measurement cannot be recreated.
I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost all of them fail.
At the end of the day, we go home and we don't crack open a textbook. We sit and watch TV. Maybe we go for a walk or go to the gym. The vast majority of people do not have the mindset required to be self-educated.
We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most people couldn't read or write. Humans are unintuitive. You can't just give them access to things and expect results. They require accountability, they require structure. We're not machines, we're faulty fleshy creatures. Our reward feedback loops were never built for self-determination at this high of a level.
> Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own.
That's not true though? Many people are trying to increase their CS skills through self-study. This topic even comes up a lot here, with people recommending the self-studying they've been doing in CS.
> I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost all of them fail.
Yet there are still a large number of self-taught programmers.
Of course, more people will have an incentive to learn through the university system than through self-education, but that's because the current system says that you only get the highest level credentials if you go through a university education. Naturally, a system that explicitly biases a certain form of education to a large degree is going to cause more people to do that. But that's for the credential, not the education. When the credentials are taken out, we see people do better with other forms of education.
Mooc completion rates hovered at single degree percents.
The vast majority of people do not complete.
The people who do complete are outliers. I suppose we can build for outliers, but then most people are just going to be ignored in this system, and if they have way to respond (vote), they won’t be happy about it.
Most academic education is already built for outliers. Courses are designed around building up to the next generation of professors. Most knowledge that's taught in university is unused, basically wasted education for 99% of the "person-facts" that are picked up by the class.
This isn't true, education as a whole is built for the majority of people. If we look at K-12 it's explicitly built to work best for the neuro-typical child with a normal household. Outliers struggle, and they need other systems to catch them, like special education.
> basically wasted education
People say this but they don't understand how learning things works. Learning is inherently cummulative, everything builds off of everything else. We can't skip steps because then there will be holes. It's a big Jenga tower, and you're essentially advocating taking pieces out willy nilly because you don't think they're important.
Even coding, if you look at it, relies on English. English language arts and computer science are, in a lot of people's minds, completely opposite each other in the sphere of education. But they're actually not - because coding is a subset of the English language. Even naming variables, the people best at it are also the people who are good at conveying meaning in an essay. Because it's the same problem: conveying to an audience your intention as concisely, yet clearly, as possible.
Some relationships are obvious, like you can't learn calculus without algebra without arithmetic. But most are non-obvious.
> We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most people couldn't read or write.
Do you regard that as intrinsically problematic? The people themselves weren't unhappy about their state, and society, too, could function well without mass literacy. There was a certain period where we thought training wage workers for their duties required them to be literate, but that might turn out to be unnecessary, if supplying an LLM is cheaper overall than mandatory school education.
Yes, because it's hostile to democracy and freedom as whole. Even if we could let everyone not read and write and use LLMs, this is just asking for trouble. Reading and writing is precursor for other skills, in fact, just about every skill.
This includes analysis, critical thinking, skepticism, morality, you name it. Without literacy, people are easy to manipulate. It won't happen immediately, but it won't be long until we revert to a world state where organizations like the Catholic Church control everything and order around millions of people to kill each other.