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Comment by trukterious | Hacker News Reader

>As with children, we don’t debug these networks; we educate them

Mostly we aren't educating young children. Rather, they are the recipients of memes (e.g. words, waving). These are ways of behaving in context. The transmission is mostly unintentional and unavoidable.

It has been speculated that if we tried to educate children how to walk and how to talk then they wouldn't succeed at either! Yet they succeed and improve these skills indefinitely. By contrast, arithmetic is intentionally and exhaustively taught, yet most adults cannot perform it.

>But you cannot reset a human being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMKcO-T5Y4o

Sure you can. See Tom Scott's face around 3:30. It's a slightly unpleasant facial sequence that I'd only ever witnessed in babies previously; a sort of soft reset.

Another form of reset is evident when addicts are administered with ibogaine.

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> Mostly we aren't educating young children. Rather, they are the recipients of memes

Guided repetition is a common educational tool.

I guess you can call that a "meme" if you want, but that doesn't make it "not education".

> By contrast, arithmetic is intentionally and exhaustively taught, yet most adults cannot perform it.

In countries where arithmetic is taught, adults are certainly capable of performing basic arithmetic.

I have yet to meet a literate adult who couldn't compute some arbitrary sum or solve a multiplication problem. In fact, the only counter-examples I've discovered are that a lot of people have problems remembering order of operations. But that's more about language/notation than arithmetic -- if you put the parens in, they'll give you the correct answer.

> It has been speculated that if we tried to educate children how to walk and how to talk then they wouldn't succeed at either!

I was taught to talk. Some of the other children in my class were deaf, and even they eventually learned how to talk (albeit not as well as you or me). I assure you, they weren't "meme'ing". There was a lot of rather complex guiding that looks a lot like what I imagine you call "education".

>> But you cannot reset a human being.

> See Tom Scott's face around 3:30

That's... pretty weak evidence. And also a weird definition of "reset". Presumably, he still knows his name is Tom, his mother's phone number, and can write an essay or add numbers together...

When I turn my computer off and on again, I don't lose all my files.

>I guess you can call that a "meme" if you want, but that doesn't make it "not education".

The kind of memes I'm referring to transmit spontaneously, though no doubt intentional cultivation is beneficial in some cases. There's a technical term due to Daniel Dennett: synanthropic memes. These are extremely sticky behaviours/ideas that thrive autonomously in the presence of humans, just as some biological species do, e.g. pigeons, rats, barn swallows. Some are bad. For example, swearing, bullying and perhaps even certain motor tics are memetic and these are considered bad by many.

Our ideas about education are pretty messed up and thus we ultimately have some disturbing realities to face, quite apart from the mounting student debt :-/ Hopefully there will be a clearing up if and when we develop AGI and thus gain a better understanding of how the mind works.

> By contrast, arithmetic is intentionally and exhaustively taught, yet most adults cannot perform it.

The adults that can perform it practice it regularly. Would those same children that can talk continue to know how to do it if they were exposed to it briefly and then never given the opportunity to do it again? The social aspect of talking (understanding context, etc) requires a lot of practice, and regular exercising of it (just like arithmetic..)

We do teach children how to walk and talk. These disciplines are known as PT, OT and speech therapy.

Oh come on, a speech therapist isn't needed to get the vast majority of children talking. You know what they meant.

We still teach kids to talk... By talking at them all the time.

This includes mute and deaf people who will talk at kids using signs. These kids which are not mute or deaf will learn to speak much later since most others will still talk at them.

The hardwired part is the sign, grammar, logic and meaning. These essentially happen over development with no intervention. We do not teach kids logic - they already have it and we teach them formal reasoning and that was not invented but discovered.

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