The Weaponization of Learning
What even is Education ?
Something about the mass acquisition of knowledge, or particular domain.
But in the old days, perhaps Athens Greece, Ancient China, the dawn of civilization,... etc, Scholars were the weaponization of being able to see the world differently. They collabed closely with commanders of war in order to defeat opponents strategically…. scholars were very useful in history as a weapon.
I much prefer to think about education as:
the ability to see the world from a particular lens—as defined in literature or English class.
The chief business-man, the deep architecture guy, the law psycho, etc, may be able to look at the same problem and come up with their own interpretation and insight.
Unfortunately,
in 1900s or so, they wanted to design education as a pipeline for people to work in factories and become a capitalistic. cog in the machine.
But the truth about education wishes to stand: it should be the effort put forward to see the world from a particular lens.
From F to A.
The F student assumes concepts will jump from the stupid hideous poorly written textbook into their head and knowledge will get goku–summoned automatically from thin-air. The A student is relentlessly thinking–and as soon as they don’t understand something—they jump to the gun to fill the knowledge-gap by asking useful questions. Neurons in the head are some very intricate web of bullshit--- thus knowledge is fundamentally a graph for deep–thinking. If there are any holes in your knowledge, how in the fuck will you ever be capable of connecting the edges in concepts? You are nearly fucking guaranteed to fail at the abstract design or thinking level.
First time taking cs241: building a compiler from first-principles/proofs/determinism/ground-up: 0 class attendance(mistake for this subject), zero knowledge, and didn’t question or realize that the textbook/notes itself could be wrong too(not enough depth)…midterm: Skipped. Final: 45. Tried again, but focused on learning something I didn’t know from what the prof + ta has to say every time we met—>highest midterm I scored in undergrad so far→ almost snuck myself into 90s…
But I truthfully don’t give a shit about what the mark has to say. Who cares. The only thing that should matter is how deep your expertise goes, and for the most part– the grade will roughly reflect on your level of expertise.
Ccomputers and programs are genuinely so fucking painful and complex-layered—-that it almosttt becomes beautiful to reason about(thank you Gregor Richards). it’s unironically a piece of art the bullshit device you are reading these words on….
there’s this english term i think masochist? like the joy you recieve from pain and suffering. yeah somewhere there. the competitive ring of suffering. who can suffer for longer will be happier in the end.
I only found the topic interesting after I started to realize what the fuck we are talking about. The same will go with operating systems→regardless how miserable it will be writing any implementation. I find the first-principles theory of computing very beautiful actually→but that could only follow after talking to my prof who brought light to a grim subject. The Notes are so fucking boring and lame. They don’t appreciate what misery previous programmers accomplished to invent previous iterations that the world currently depends on. They are taken for granted, and not praised enough. Fuck the kim kardasheins and justin believer—what about the ancient figures who conquered land, or giga thinkers who came up with some lunatic propositions and challenged the way society thinks..
Tldr: I desperately needed to focus on having a real intuition for any subject… why do we care? Why are we learning this? Where does it matter? Why does it matter? What goes wrong if this fails? What trade-offs or alternative approaches are we also considering? What defines correctness here? Why does __ justification suffice? What is preventing us from designing it another way? Can we do better than this? Why can’t we improve from this tho? Have we/can we think about the problem this way? Why not?
Who designed this fuck, and why did they design it like this? What problems are we solving for? Whoever built this, what were they smoking? And why?
Really get into the head of the professor…Mind read the scientist fucker who invented it, and the thought process required to come up with it. This is like nearly impossible for math conjectures or theorems, Like what in the fuck was Ramanujan dreaming w/ primes with his conjectures? That’s super hard to think about—and is fundamentally why math is beautiful because holy shit why is that bullshit true?
To be fair, compilers and operating systems are super deep topics—and are very important for markets, trading, quantitative dev and other low latency shenanigans. Will I ever do that? prolly not,.... but if you didn’t know about the depth to begin with—then you wouldn’t have even realized what topic could be weaponized where, and why?–-- why is it used as a weapon to make firms competitive or not? ….why would wallstreet care so much abt firmware and bits? When undefined behaviour shows up in your systems, who's going to know what to do? When shit hits the c++ road at a firm, who do you call? Ghostbusters?
I genuinely hate reading ancient-ahh, minecraft_enchanting_table egyptian 2000BCE syntax. Things that are beautiful: are elegantly simple….not verbose diarrhea. I still recall my english teacher from hs… the white girls w/ hydroflasks and snapchat installed on their ios devices, called him “mean”—but i like him now—bcuz he just says the blunt truth. this argument u claimed: is literal verbal diarrhea and pathetic meaningless. some girls cried during essay review. I think I did too in gr11 go home and cry, but never during class. It felt like he was preventing us from going to uni, but the black-pill must be swallowed.
In wloo, its a diff story-—It’s like they purposefully enchanted courses w/ efficiency 5… unbreaking 3…silk touch hieroglyphics so ur forced to inquire about the ambiguity. it’s like reading the first iteration of traditional chinese—but in brush-stroke-cursive—like bro…just write it in pingying man.
Just understanding what is going on, is most of the uphill thinking battle. You can typically execute fine after you know the context…what is going on…and why it is going on.
Single Source of Truth:
1.The prof or designer of the material is the single source truth. the knower —the course notes for some courses, could’ve been written by the prof while on 50mg of THC for all we know….
don’t go to class to listen; go to class to conduct a polite argument. but don’t be so annoying—so either keep the arguments to yourself, or ask non-trivial questions. write notes on literally the discussions… then go on piazza to continue the argument.
2. Stack Overflow method: ragebait knowledge on piazza by asking thoughtful questions. one too many trivial question—and it’ll feel like ur wasting their time. needs to be thoughtful + ragebait so others think about it and are forced to give a meaningful response instead of “okay, yes”. stack overflow died bcuz ppl want to do this with LLMs—but the thing is, what LLM says can be ambiguous yet dangerously confident…To lower the risk, Take the whole stream of arguments being made in forums, and allow the LLM to continue the framework of the argument. can’t blind trust a confident hallucinator like AI
The way i feel like thinking about it, tuition is paying for the “mere opportunity” to go on dates with your prof and ta—they call it “class” I think. whatever. I don’t know why it’s called class—it should be called dates or chats, bcuz it should be open-ended, socratic, relaxed, and you get to crack up jokes and learn.
Optimizing for learning, will allow students to focus on real activities and free up their time for what they want to do. like shit-posting about their stupid little passion projects, scrolling reels, and watching ASU Frat Leader Mog Clavicular.
Signs of Good professor/instructors :
- knows exponentially more than ur entire bloodline and chatgpt combined— yet
- Hopefully will explain in a non-hyper-pretentious-fashion…and don’t make students feel insecure by simply being proactive and curious.
The narrative that education is useless—in particular becomes proven true —by the person who made it so damn useless in the first place. Qed.