tags : Notetaking
note: I am no longer updating this page, keeping this as part of the migration.
2020
Sleepwalking through life
This tweet summarizes the idea of energy management to have a better understanding of self. The variables of energy management are known; sleep, hydration, diet, exercise, relationships, stimuli. What happens when these variables are configured sub-optimally? Fixing physical things is easy, eg. keeping your phone in DnD during sleep time but the difficulty is when you try to conceptually understand why this change is important like understanding that these changes shape who you are.
Empty your cup
Talks about the lesson to unlearn things, you might find the realization of unlearning by talking to people and having conversations just to realize that so much of the things in this world are sub-optimal and there’s a reason for it, people are too tired to bring in their A-game. Eg. Active listening is so important because the words they say are like ~20% of what’s being comm. We should at least be open to the idea of trying active listening, we have to allow us to be surprised in good and bad ways by the world. Most of unlearning is about refusing to be in denial and making room for surprises.
Education is broken
The thread is basically some predictions about what the future of education will look like. Teaching will become a very lucrative career option taught by experts as it will not only be about someone who provides the right answers, teachers will coach students on how to structure their learning and there will be deep trust among the provider and consumer of education.
Education will become cheaper because of the Internet and even more unpacking of education will happen. For example, a new accreditation seems like interactions with peers. This will lead to new ways of evaluating students rather than solely evaluating some test scores. Escaping the classroom and learning on the internet by design promotes community and peer learning, more students will be helping each other and in some cases, the students can become the producers.
Subjects will be mixed and matched which will generate a new breed of polymaths, some education courses might have Hollywood level budgets for the impacts it can create. Students will be more accountable for their results and they will realize that learning is a process of personal growth which in turn will promote inverted learning, i.e start with curiosity and then expands towards basics, in current school the opposite happens.
Testimony to the Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol (IP) has taken the internet from nothing to ~15B connected devices and has survived for 40 years now. The internet created the economic flywheel; more bandwidth, more devs, more users, more bandwidth. It’s mostly unopinionated about whatever exists below and above it, which enabled it to be a universal connector of networks. It does not care about applications, it does not care about physical technologies, it forms a narrow waist for the Internet. During the 70’s IP also had various competing standards(ATM, XNS, X.25) they had more features than IP but they lost against IPs minimalism.
The narrow waist of the Internet can be compared to the narrow waist of blockchain computing, which is non-existent currently because most blockchain tech today are opinated, they make every assumption about how every other layer will work. This limits the kind of applications that can be built. Some projects are taking up the opportunity to build a consensus mechanism that is minimal like IP. This suggests that there will be a winner-take-all project at hand among projects building blockchain computers. As with IP, the project that places radical minimalism and modularity above all else will confer its parent blockchain computer with the strongest network effects and the greatest addressable market.
Rant on bullshit that people write about online education
Basically, ShriramKrishnamurthi beats the sh*t out of an op-ed published on the NYT, he starts with stating that the article is written from a perspective of video conferencing tools, filled with platitudes about MOOCs and the superstar educator(making lesser lecturers obsolete). There are things that contradict the superstar educator idea like the same MOOC will not be equally valuable for everyone, adding diversity to learning helps, issues of connection etc. The line between offline and online is also not clearly drawn, there’s this superstar on video and some intimate college system experience, that’s all it states; It’s much more than that. We learned from MOOCs that people don’t learn well online and it’s a rich get richer world.
What campuses really provide are not tutors, mentors, role models etc. but mainly structure, peer pressure, focus. You can have 200 tabs open on your browser when learning on Coursera, campuses cuts through all that. Everyone knows that what we’re doing is not “online teaching”, but rather emergency delivery through an ill-suited medium for the original instructional design. When we talk of “high-quality lectures” it’s often taken for granted that any lecture series from a reputed university will be “high-quality”, that’s certainly not the case in reality.
On bundling of online education
I have a lot of things against this tweet but, let’s keep it for when I am capable of raising a word against Tiago.
Courses that solve just one problem like “how to make a Maggi”, are competing with the amazing free quality content on Youtube and elsewhere. The only way to beat this is by making it better or cheaper. There comes bundling of courses, for someone interested in productivity, they probably will also be interested in time management, notetaking, etc. So instead of having these courses independently he suggests creating one high-priced bundle having all those stuff on top of that providing Q/A, feedbacks, etc.
Predicts that the next generation of online courses will be self-improving bundles where the creator can constantly add new features, justifying the increase in price. Having a good business around selling online courses also allows the creator to offer scholarships to students who can’t afford it.
It’s important to know that a bundle probably won’t probably have a PM fit, rather the individual courses that are being taught have to have their own demand. Putting multiple losers doesn’t make a winner.
A platform that gives leverage to creators without getting between them and their customers, designing such a platform should separate creators, staff, facilities, etc. to the payment system, marketing, etc.