> And the teacher grew very quiet.

I'm sorry, but this is a yarn. The story is either about a very inexperienced teacher (of which there are many), so not representative of the profession as a whole; or it's invented by the author to make a rhetorical point, but not a real thing that happened.

What you say the speaker pointed out to the teacher is basic teaching praxis. The idea that this teacher was somehow stunned to silence by the hypotheticals says more about her personal abilities as a teacher than the teaching profession (you framed this as how "most" education is delivered).

The number one thing we do when designing classes is first we talk about outcomes: what do we want the student to know after the class? Then we talk about prereqs: what should they know coming in? From there, we design assessments to actually measure whether the outcomes were achieved. During the class we implement the assessments, and then after the class we analyze the results to determine if we were successful in attaining outcomes. Then we reassess the course and iterate. But at all stages, student outcomes are driving the design, so I must disagree with the idea most education is uninterested in whether the students learn anything.

Yeah. It has a very strong "and then everyone clapped" vibe to it.

But even if the teacher "grew very quiet" in actual fact there can be many reason behind that. The story as told tries to imply that they realised that they were wrong somehow for doing these presentations. It is also possible that they went quiet because they realised that there is no point in asking whatever they wanted to ask under such a hostile interrogation.

It is also lovely to note that the supposed interaction happened with "someone who gave a presentation at an education conference". I guess that someone must have been born with the skills to present, because they (according to the story) think very lowly about the idea of practicing it.

To be fair, a lot of science doesn't follow the scientific method. I've yet to see an applied mathematician (to speak only of what I know) come up with a hypothesis, it's usually rather: here's how people solve this problem currently, this has this and that drawback, and our paper introduces a new method that solves bigger problems faster/new classes of problems.

The same could be said of theoretical work: here, we tightened up an inequality.

This is also research, not all of it is experimental!

Yeah I get it when giving projects to kids it's easier to be like "Here are the 5 sections you have to do" and then grade them on how well they did the 5 sections... but that's really limiting the spirit of the thing if the idea was to let the kids off the leash and see where they can take their minds.

We did ISEF in highschool. I always wanted to build something but just couldn't figure out a way to justify it. My teacher usually just said do an experiment please. I usually just did some lame science project that didn't really produce anything interesting.

Freshman year: effect of light wavelength on basil plant growth. I shined a black light, a regular light bulb, and a very bright IR light at some basil plants. I probably could have made it better by doing colored lights with controlled lux levels. Didn't win anything and the judges were unimpressed.

Sophomore year: effect of water pH on electrolysis gas production. Varied the pH on some water and put it in an electrolysis apparatus. I actually got 3rd place in the highschool chemistry group surprisingly. It wasn't a very rigorous project but I guess no one else did anything terribly interesting. Not enough to go onto regional or state level (not sure what came next). Even my parents were surprised.

It's also really damned hard to come up with an interesting, novel question, that is testable, with resources available to the average school child, in a reasonable amount of time.

Allowing engineering opens up the workable space by quite a bit.

Questions don't need to be new to be science.

My brother and I, for example, did an experiment where we tested pH of various water bodies around us. The hypothesis was based off of local drainage patterns.

Not a new question... Still scientific.

That's not science then. Just because engineering is equally enigmatic to most people as science doesn't mean they're the same.

Science means applying the scientific method.

"I hypothesize that method X is the best way to construct a robot that does Y and I've tested methods A, B, and C to validate that claim"

That's science.

Just building something can actually be a pursuit of non science..this is why many engineers have not invented here syndrome. They think they're thinking scientifically, but they don't. Thus, instead of checking their assumptions, they run with them.

There's definitely a degree of that. When I was in the fairs, the winning kids were often the ones with the giant posters 3 stories tall working in a lab no on else had access to. I had to beg my school for a $100 robot controller to do my project, and my truck driver dad and SAHM didn't have access to a fancy lab where I could do experiments.

Still, although it's hard to compete with the upper echelons, you can still get results that land you in schools you wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. 100% the reason I got into CMU was my science fair work. I personally never got 1st place at science fair, but I won awards (there's tons of special category awards) and was competitive, and others who didn't have access to a big research lab did get first place. So, yes, it's not exactly fair but at the same time it doesn't mean you're out of the competition if you don't have access to those privileges.

> In 2007 (my senior year), I went to two major national science fairs.

I did the science fair circuit growing up from 7th through 12th grade, then coached HS students on projects when I was in college. Today I'm a judge for ISEF, which is happening shortly.

Frankly, the whole scene is a bit done by 12th grade, so I'm not really sure this person has enough experience doing fairs to say what's broken about them and how to fix them. It's really a middle school to early high school thing; if you're starting in senior year most of the best students are already set with results they will use to apply to colleges, so they stop doing fairs in senior year. 8,9,10 is the real heat.

It's also not the common case that a student is placed in a research lab and works on in-progress research, you see all kinds of students doing varied projects. I judge the CS field and yeah you get projects which are essentially "Me and my dad built a PC" (although I've never seen a volcano project). Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel. Some of them have a giant board with binders upon binders upon binders and it's clear the kid was coached and worked at his mom's lab. The "consumer science" category of the fair grows every year.

But really no matter what, I find this to be true of all students at the fair:

> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer.

All the kids exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. Some of them are only capable of doing experiments that come in a box, but they're still curious. So I don't really know what the author is trying to say with this article. Is there actually a problem, and if so how bad is it? I'm all for changing up the science fair and evolving it and doing a new format, but I don't think they're especially lacking in innovative spirit as the author implies.

I am happy to hear that things as not as bad as I thought, but my experience being judge/mentor for a couple of years for the high school science fair near a top university was very discouraging and closer to what the author of the article describes.

Maybe the mass of the kids at the first round were what you describe, but very quickly the focus turned to the top 20% who were very much "reputation laundering" and "CV padding" internships at labs, not actual curiosity driven independent exploration

> Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel.

It might be novel to the student. What I mean is that IMO, science fairs should be more about the students exploring and learning/using the scientific method, even if a similar experiment has been done thousands of times before.

An issue with that, especially now that they might go to LLMs for bibliography / exploratory work rather than google or a library, is that they may be exposed to the solution before even really tackling the problem.

Maybe that's fine, but it seems to me like it spoils the fun.

Pretty sure the article agrees with you. They made soap and ink more as makers rather than fake a deeper expertise

It's worse than a meme economy, it's a gambling economy. The entire VC business model is gambling (fund 10 hope 1 pays for the losers). Crypto is all gambling. The stock market is gambling. TV ads are all gambling ads. Even dating is gambling.

Now programming and art are both gambling.

For me I would ask it to do a simple thing and it would give me the tutorial code you could find anywhere on the Internet. Then you ask it to modify it in a way that you can't find in any example online, it will tell you it's fixed everything, but actually nothing has changed at all or it's completely broken.

I think if someone's goal was just the tutorial code, it would have been very impressive to them the AI can summon it.

this is what I've been using freebie gemini chat for mostly, example code, like reminding me of c stdlib stuff, javascript, a bit of web server stuff here and there. I think it would be fun to give googles agent or cli stuff a spin but when I read up here and there about antigravity, I'm reading that people are getting their accounts shutdown for stuff I would have thought was ok, even if they paid for it (well actually as usual the actual reasons for accounts getting zapped remain unknown as is today's trend for cloud accounts).

I'm too poor for local llms, I think there might be a 2 or 4gb graphics card in one of my junk pcs but thats about it lol

> ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”.

Odd typo + em dash = "Make mistakes in your output so that people think it wasn't AI generated"

Author here! I didn’t use AI to write this. Jekyll’s markdown to HTML converter helpfully transforms a series of three normal dashes into an em dash.

I did use AI to proofread the article, and implemented its primary suggestion (turning down a dark joke at my own expense that was pretty out of place), but the first draft of this was 100% hand-written.

Why would we accept that instead of changing it?

My interpretation of ModernMech's comment is that acceptance is a pre-requisite of changing it.

ie. if you didn't accept it, then you wouldn't feel the need to change it.

I agree that is the most favorable interpretation.

That's how I meant it but now actually I don't agree with the usage of "accept", because acceptance implies consent. So I would change the word to "acknowledge".

I think the exact opposite is true: LLMs revealed that when you average everything together, it's really bland and uninteresting no matter how technically good. It's the small choices that bring life into a thing and transform it from slop into something interesting and worthy of attention.

I think we agree but my prediction is that the slop will win

> there's also a place for a hot mess that barely passes its own non-existing tests

For a long time that place has been "the commercial software marketplace". Let's all stop pretending that the code coming out of shops until now has been something you'd find at a guild craft expo. It's always been a ball of spit and duct tape, which is why AI code is often spit and duct tape.