Improving model capability with more and more data is what model developers do, over months. Structure and prompting improvements can be done by the end user, today.
> I think college is broken. But my question is whether it’s broken and useful or broken and harmful.
A better question IMO is: Is college more useful than the alternatives?
College is a huge investment: tens of thousands of dollars, plus 4 years of full-time work.
When I went to college in 2007 (not in US, but I digress…) it made sense to go in for a 4-year degree because there were no alternatives. Coursera, Udemy, etc. did not exist. YouTube was just born. And to start with, we didn’t even have broadband in my house or school, that could stream video.
It’s a very different world today. The opportunity cost is too great. Even without being a Thiel fellow, there are many alternatives to what you can do with 4 years of your life that will set you up for success – not only educational opportunities but also starting a business, freelancing, etc.
In fact I think this is a ripe space for opportunities to build new institutions that provide value.
The value of college is not only education, but also community.
We are seeing, and will continue to see, many new online and IRL ventures that provide community and learning to young people, which will serve them much better than colleges.
Exciting! A few years ago, as an academic design researcher, I pondered the same question and wrote a few research papers.
Like the author, my inspiration for doing this work had come from a vintage watch I received from my dad!
Turns out, there’s a rich literature in design and psychology research on the heirloom status of objects. And more generally, on why and how people imbue things with value.
We even went as far as to apply for (and receive) a grant for UX design research, exploring how to create for heirloom value in the digital world. I’ve moved on from academia since then, but AFAIK our PhD is working on it at KTH in Stockholm: https://www.baytas.net/work/digital-preciousness
> “In the exercise, someone picks a number of adjectives from a list, choosing ones they feel describe their own personality. The subject's peers then get the same list, and each picks an equal number of adjectives that describe the subject. These adjectives are then inserted into a two-by-two grid of four cells.”
> “Room one is the part of ourselves that we and others see. Room two contains aspects that others see but we are unaware of. Room three is the private space we know but hide from others. Room four is the unconscious part of us that neither ourselves nor others see.”
I wonder how the fourth room, which neither the subject or their peers see, is populated…
If I understand correctly, with the remaining words from the list. Guess it’s meant as a point of reflection, whether, and in what way, those adjectives might apply.
It's an interesting idea to me, and something I hadn't thought of before. Usually in these kinds of round-robin self-peer rating paradigms the peers are thought of collectively as a kind of oracle, especially as the number of peers increases.
Theoretically I guess there might be some pattern of behavior that goes unnoticed by everyone participating in the exercise. You could imagine, for example, some AI program that analyzes daily recordings of everyone in an organization (admittedly dystopian in its own way but relevant), and identifies some clear pattern in a person that goes unrecognized by everyone in the organization. Whether the AI would "count" in the Johari window exercise is where things get blurry but to the extent the exercise is about human cognition and its consequences I can see how it would apply.
As an experienced web designer I can tell you the design and implementation are straightforward, but very competently done. There are many things like the typography and UX writing that suggest this is the work of a fellow experienced designer. There’s much more here than what can be captured in a “guide” - it’s just an overall high level of design competence.
As a user without any web design experience, the site felt very nice to me... except that the demo ("schedule meetings without the email tennis") hijacked my scrollbar. That felt awful.
I have a theory that when the C-suite decides to slay an entire division they assign an incompetent boss. Give them a few months to mess it up. Then go for the kill. The incompetent new boss magically absorbs all the blame.
fascinating checkout flow