Incoming links: Money
"automatic programming has always been a euphemism for programming in a higher-level language than was then available to the programmer" sums it up.
The ultimate high level is of course to program with: "computer, make money", which is the goal of artificial general intelligence.
Exams as a prerequisite for a degree are useless. Exams as part of a degree must be abolished. And degrees must be abolished. Ultimately the only metrics that really matter are money and fame. See also: motivation.
The only thing exams should matter for is as a screening tool to select people with specific abilities that you care about as an employer or principal investigator. If:then exams are useless for your purposes. then might as well just go by interviews (basically what all employers do already, though not PIs). Degrees are too course grained to mean anything to anybody. Employers and PIs likely only care about very few specific subjects.
- you have no idea about what the content of specific exams are (and you don't because they are all ad-hoc university secrets)
- or don't have a way to machine learn what grades correlate with your desired performance (you don't because where's the data?)
Once the question of an exam has been formulated, the usefulness of the problem is already been completely destroyed, because formulating the problem that matters is the most important part of things. And any problem with an answer, is useless to put effort into: give answers.
Furthermore, preventing people from searching for answers while answering an exam, AKA preventing "cheating", also makes absolutely no sense. In the real world, we want people to find answers as quickly as possible! We should be teaching people how to "cheat"! What we should teach them instead is what a fucking license is, and what you have to do to comply with it.
And if you must absolutely have exams, they must be open to anyone who wants to applies. Then people have to pay to take the exam, with subsidies for "official course takers", who are spending 100x more anyways due to not living with their parents.
And if you pass the exam, you pass the course, without any further time requirements.
And those exams must be applied by professional test application companies to ensure no cheating and to factor out the anti-cheat work, while still making the tests available to people anywhere.
A quote from Richard Feynman present in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.
The only metric that matters is "to feel that you've satisfied youre curiosity". When one studies for that, it can take a lot more time to actually learn everything, because it is sometimes not as clear when you should stop. But it is the only way to go deeper.
A person's understanding is the most illiquid asset that exists, to judge that based only on standardized exams, is a certain way to fail to identify top talent.
- Suck at your job:
- Have bad memory so you have to take notes: Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory
- Be a compulsive knowledge hoarder: Ciro Santilli's knowledge hoarding
- Seek glory over money: Ciro Santilli's selfish desires
- Try to make a carrier out of it: OurBigBook.com
- Be born compassionate: Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality
- He doesn't actually write that much, but when he does he focuses on higher impact stuff, see remarks about "He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation" on Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions"
- Contribute in a place where it is super easy for people to give you upvotes if they like your stuff. This way, you will see the uploads, and that will motivate you to re-read your content and make it more perfect with additions and corrections.
People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!
If computers are bicycles for the mind, Ciro wants this website to be the Ferrari of the mind.
Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.
The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.
As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!
School, instead of helping him, was just wasting his time with superficial knowledge.
First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.
Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.
You remind me of a friend of mine. He always wanted to understand the deeper reason for things. He now works at NASA.
Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.
Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.
Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.
University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:
The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.
This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.
Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?
And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.
But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.
The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.
Ciro believes however, that exams are useless, and that there are only two meaningful metrics:
- how much money you make
- fame for doing for doing useful work for society without earning money, which notably includes creating new or better free knowledge such as in academic papers, either novel or review
Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.
If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.
And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.
Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.
To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:
He who teaches one thousand, saves one million.
He who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.
So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.
We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.
And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)
So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.
Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:
- Jimmy Wales
- Brewster Kahle
- Tim Berners Lee
- Tim O'Reilly, who once brilliantly described O'Reilly Media as "a lifestyle business that got out of control" [ref]
- Aaron Swartz. Minus suicide hopefully.
"Brewster Kahle: A digital library, free to the world." 2007 TED Talk
. Source. Talks about the Internet Archive which he created.- HyperCard: we are kind of a "multiuser" version of HyperCard, trying to tie up cards made by different users. It is worth noting that HyperCard was one of the inspirations for WikiWikiWeb, which then inspired Wikipedia
- Semantic Web
- NLab
- physicstravelguide.com/ Nice manifesto: physicstravelguide.com/about by Jakob Schwichtenberg.
- OpenStax
- www.ft.com/content/5515ec3e-0040-4d90-85a9-df19d6e3ebd2 (archive) Twilio’s Jeff Lawson: an evangelist for software developersYou can never be first. But you can have the correct business model. That company's website must have gone into IP Purgatory, and could never be released as an open source website.As a student at the University of Michigan, he started a company that made lecture notes available free online, drawing a large audience of Midwestern college students and, soon enough, advertisers. At the height of the dotcom bubble, he dropped out of college, raised $10m from the venture firm Venrock and moved the company to Silicon Valley.His start-up drew interest from an acquirer that was planning to go public early in 2000. They closed the acquisition but missed their IPO window as the market plunged, and by August the company had filed for bankruptcy. Stock that Lawson and investors in his start-up received from the sale became worthless.The website was called stubhub.com/, as of 2021 the domain had been sold to an unrelated website.He might actually be interested in donating to OurBigBook.com if it move forward now that he's a billionaire.
- Knol: basically the exact same thing by Google but 14 years earlier and declared a failure. Quite ominous:
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
- leanpub: similar goals, markdown-based, but the usual "you own your book copyright and you are trying to sell your book" approach
- nature Scitable
OK, just going random now:
Something is useful if it either:
- makes money
- creates novel knowledge, or present knowledge in a novel way, that others may find beautiful