38 KiB
What if Jack Black was a superintelligence? (Or, theoretical limits to conventional education.)
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Author: u/theurbanbandaid *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3y7uwm/what_if_jack_black_was_a_superintelligence_or/
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Score: 50
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Created: 2015-12-25T21:29:28
Post:
I've been watching School of Rock. It's still great (to me at least) after quite a long time.
Say an arbitrarily clever superintelligence (who is outwardly indistinguishable from a slightly overweight 30-year-old) has three weeks in which to perform as a substitute teacher at an expensive preparatory school in a well off part of the United States. How far can they (conventionally/non-invasively) educate a reasonably diverse class of ~20 well adjusted, healthy and fairly intelligent ten-year-olds in that time while keeping them well adjusted, healthy and fairly intelligent? Only counting what they learn in that time period. For all intents and purposes, Jack Black has PtV.
In other words, what are the limits on how much information an adolescent human can meaningfully assimilate through the normal senses (5/9/11/whatever) while retaining long term functionality in a given length of time?
Also does anyone wanna discuss the actual film? It's not particularly rational (or festive), but I like it a lot, and would love to learn of any alternative viewpoints you might have.
EDIT: The kids should retain individuality, continuity of consciousness and their humanity. No giving them superhuman abilities or subliminally implanting an intelligence in their mind that takes over while being outwardly undetectable, or whatever loopholes you can imagine. They should be the same people (and physically human) at the end (and for roughly as long as any other human could expect to be), just knowing a lot more (useful) information than before.
Comments:
u/eaglejarl [+34] (9 hours later)
Took me the longest damn time and a bit of googling to figure out that PtV meant "Path to Victory". It's amazing how much Worm has permeated the noosphere of the Internet circles I move in.
u/lucyfur919 [+10] Chaos Legion (10 hours later)
Thank you for saving me the time to Google that. I'm rereading Worm and I still didn't recognize the acronym
u/eaglejarl [+2] (a day later)
You're welcome.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+3] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (5 days later)
Eaglejar, if you haven't read it please set aside a month and do so, and thank you I almost didn't catch the acronym myself.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (5 days later)
Why would you think I hadn't read it? I have.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (5 days later)
No insult intended just based on googling PTV and amazment on the impact
u/noggin-scratcher [+27] I am a happy tree (10 minutes later)
There's that often-quoted figure about how it takes 10 thousand hours of practice to master any given skill, but one element often left out of the quote is that the practice needs to involve some element of effective feedback, the more of it and the faster the better, so that you can iterate on each building block of the skill in as tight a loop as possible. Otherwise you're just messing about by yourself with limited ability to direct yourself towards getting better.
A teacher with PtV would be able to intervene at exactly the right moment with exactly the right combination of criticism, encouragement and advice, to keep you learning smoothly and keep your motivation up.
I don't know quite what that perfectly smooth rate of skill acquisition looks like, but this is what I'd expect to be the 'value-add' of boosting Jack Black into a superintelligence.
u/theurbanbandaid [+8] (an hour later)
That sounds like a lower bound.
Also I am unfortunately sleepy, any replies of mine to replies to this will have to wait until 7ish hours from now.
u/noggin-scratcher [+9] I am a happy tree (an hour later)
Yeah, would depend on whether more unconventional teaching methods can be applied without leaving the students damaged or altered in a way that strays outside the boundaries set by "while keeping them well adjusted, healthy and fairly intelligent"
For example, maybe a setup inspired by A Clockwork Orange would be an effective way to teach, if you had PtV omnipotence to control the experience perfectly towards stimulating the brain in just the right way, but they would probably also be traumatised by the experience...
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (3 days later)
The other side is just how flexible/useful is a clockwork orange style education going to be? what is the GOAL of education?
if the goal is to cram them with parroting facts then ya I could see that working. If the goal is to have brains that can accomplish tasks as good general intelligences (or as good as humans can get) then the results will look a lot more like what is DESCRIBED in Dune. In particular the first lesson you must teach a child is how to most effectively learn.
u/rineSample [+19] (2 hours later)
This is the most wonderful question I've seen in a long time
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+8] (7 hours later)
Came in here to say just this. I haven't even seen this movie and this is the best thread premise I've seen here maybe ever.
u/theurbanbandaid [+11] (9 hours later)
I've always thought that the point of rational fiction was to use popular culture as a jumping-off point to explore real life applications of rationality. And seeing as complexity theory has been very useful in computer science, why not apply it to a soft science, like pedagogy, and see what happens? You've gotta start somewhere.
u/None [+16] (12 hours later)
Y'all need to stop underestimating, Jack 'best song in the world' Black!
He's got the function mapping goals to their most actionable paths, and the best you think he can come up with, is to provide feedback... FEEDBACK!!!
I don't think so!
Maybe some other pansy-ass PtV user *cough* Contessa *cough* would be so banal, but this is Jack 'patron saint of rock' Black, and he has deemed these children worthy of his blessing.
Jack 'Kung Fu Panda' Black will not be limited by something as menial, as a child's learning rate. He's going to sing a song, which exploits the zero-days in their heads, and results in them being perfect acolytes of rock.
And not only that.
This song will be the greatest song in the world, not just a tribute.
u/PL_TOC [+1] (10 days later)
Like the anti-cthaeh of awesomeness
u/MineDogger [+7] (2 hours later)
Or perhaps in his previous occupation as astronaut, his ship flew too close to the sun, making his brain expand like cookie dough... Then he had to find a new identity to escape special agent Ron Silver...
u/None [+6] (16 hours later)
One of the biggest problems in teaching, especially of younger children, is maintaining attention and concentration. Children below a certain age are pretty much physically incapable of long stretches of concentration and of redirecting their focus.
So give them lots of drugs. Superjackblack should give each kid the highest doses of ritalin/adderall/modafinil possible without causing permanent damage, so they get as much as possible from the lessons and minimise the time needed to repeat and go over things. The limiting factor would be whether the parent/other teachers would notice.
on the film in general Having worked in education I can't help thinking about how much of a child protection and liability clusterfuck would result. What the hell was the school doing that Jack Black could impersonate another teacher? Everyone would be fired.
u/derefr [+5] (2 days later)
What the hell was the school doing that Jack Black could impersonate another teacher? Everyone would be fired.
Having coincidentally watched the movie last week, my impression was Robin Hanson-esque (is there a name for that yet?): the school was very prestigious, and so they hired very prestigious teachers, and so it would be disrespectful to those teachers' prestige to ask them to bring their teaching certificates to the interview or any such thing.
I think this generalizes to the real world: the minimum-wage jobs I applied for fresh out of school cared far more about seeing proof of any credentials I claimed than the skilled professional jobs I applied for later on. There comes a point when you're working for "classy"-enough employers/clients when you get hired entirely through dinner and a handshake.
This keeps the door open for cronyism and confidence men, but at the same time, it mostly works: clients/employers are effectively pre-screening potential contractors/employees using the "pickiness" of the social networks that referred them. The harder it is to even get heard about by someone (think, for example, Venture Capitalists who only take "warm intros" sponsored by other VCs), the less they have to worry that you've faked your way into their view. This also works out to mean that the more you pay, the fewer people there are who've built up a reputation working at that high a level, and so the easier it is to trust any of them sight-unseen.
And let me make the opposite cases explicit: the less picky your "funnel", and the less you pay, the more scrutiny you have to give candidates. (My impression is that a large part of the problem Millenials are having getting jobs is that they are stuck in the highest-scrutiny part of the funnel.)
Also, trades jobs are an exception to this rule, probably because the incentives are in closer to the right places: the employer is forced by the trade union to get proof that you're a union member; and the trade union acts a lot like a guild, worrying about the skill-training and certification of its members, so that it can use its members uniform high qualifications as leverage in negotiations with companies. When "union = qualified; scab = unqualified" is a meme, trade unions win, but oddly enough, customers also win.
u/Vebeltast [+3] You should have expected the bayesian inquisition! (22 hours later)
- Medevac helicopter ride to university electron microscope lab: twenty minutes.
- Cannibalise keyboard to get transistors to manufacture ad-hoc brain-computer interface: fifteen minutes.
- Expose JTAG header on electron microscope's beam guidance microcontroller: ten minutes.
- Jam BCI into spinal column at base of neck, fix resulting medical problems: sixty seconds.
- Blast new firmware for electron microscope out through new BCI: half an hour?
- Insert raw materials into electron microscope, get it running, calibrate it: half an hour
- Manufacture seed nanofactory: ten minutes.
- Iterate: twenty hours.
- Upload students: couple more hours. Mission accomplished.
Though I guess the title says "conventional education". Would it count if I would really like conventional education to include an upload? Alternatively, replace the upload step with something like "cover students' eyes with nanobots, Clockwork Orange mathematics into their brains".
u/Kuratius [+2] (a day later)
Ow. The nanobots idea could have issues that include permanent brain damage, or it'll end up with weird-looking nerve structures depending on the method used to create structures optimized for processing of data, which is what you want to do when teaching.
It's got a few kinks that may need to be ironed out. Also, you vastly underestimate the time needed for creating that many without exploiting self-replication. The real cheat would be for the nanobots to act as a brain machine interface, with the rock patterns already programmed into it.
u/Vebeltast [+2] You should have expected the bayesian inquisition! (a day later)
Right, I wasn't clear enough when I said "iterate". Did manage to say "seed", but that's not enough. Phone keyboard compelling terse output. "Recurse" would have been a better word.
And, yeah, bootstrapping a better BCI using nanobots is another good idea.
u/Kuratius [+1] (a day later)
The nice thing about the interface is that you can program any skillset that you want into it, simply by changing the repository that the nanobots have access to. There's going to be a small calibration period where the output/input of the interface is adjusted to fit the individual, but after that you can upload anything from languages to monocycle riding. Ofc, that is still problematic because you didn't teach their brain anything other than following the instructions of their implant(we installed an extension of it), but with a learning by doing approach where they get everything right on the first try, I imagine things like muscle memory etc. are going to develop really fast.
u/Nighzmarquls [+4] (23 hours later)
As one who teaches children (6 to 15 year olds. Mostly ten year olds) a seemingly advanced skill (computer programming) and also works with some one who found a clever teaching hack for getting math across.
I'm pretty sure at least 60% of the time spent in conventional lessons is making sure everyone is on the same page.
As a game designer one of the things I think about a lot is how to give the right learning curve and feedback loop.
So you might already see the way I'm going here but a super intelligence would know exactly what each child could be motivated by. How to hold all of their interest, how to inspire attention and exactly when to make breaks or changes of subject to keep attention and intake at maximum without overload. How to make learning not just fun but addictive and probably exactly how addictive is healthy.
The resulting kids probably would not necessarily know many facts and figures (they might) but I suspect they would by the end be some of the best self educators humanly possible to create.
They might also never quite relate the same way to normal educated humans again. But they probably won't mind helping their peers catch up.
u/derefr [+2] (2 days later)
How do you feel about the basic flipped-classroom model as a way to achieve this? It seems a lot easier to me to get everyone on the same page with a lecture-video watched at home that can be paused and replayed as needed, and maybe "folded out" to get extra optional examples at each step.
Going further and throwing in the simplest possible game elements, it's easy enough to have the lecture-video ask the kids questions during it and check the responses, which means every kid gets individually engaged with, something nobody has time for in a classroom setting.
A lecture-video app/site would also theoretically let you track engagement/attention with eye-tracking et al, so the video could actually pause itself upon noticing a lack of engagement, telling the child to go do whatever has them so distracted and then come back. Or you could just split the lesson into pomodoros, and have a warm-up ("mental stretches") before each one involving some IQ calibration task (e.g. dual N-back) that can tell the app whether the student is at their mental best at the moment.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (3 days later)
Sounds like a good idea in theory. We used a really shallow follow along video similar to this during summer camps and it's great as a way to make up for a lack of one on one instructor time.
However I think lecture systems in themselves are not necessarily the best way to educate in the first place, the degree to which children will 'master' game mechanics already suggests to me that you can probably construct excellent lessons if you can package them into a system that gives tight feedback loops as the most engaging and effective learning curve games do.
However I would say that to construct an 'ideal' lesson/teaching system in this way would require that the system itself (not just the content but the overarching game mechanic structure of rules) is created by the teachers/experts of those subjects. Or that a teacher and software developer work VERY CLOSELY with maximizing the really short reinforcement loop and longer term reinforcement loop on all of the topics involved.
Sadly I've not seen many cross disciplinary individuals like this or partnerships between software engineers and teachers that is sufficiently meshed to yield viable teaching tools that are also engaging games.
At present I do what I can as an instructor but at this point in my career I don't have the time or connections to work on educational systems like this that actually work.
u/derefr [+2] (3 days later)
Or that a teacher and software developer work VERY CLOSELY with maximizing the really short reinforcement loop and longer term reinforcement loop on all of the topics involved.
I've been thinking about "adaptation" as a method of creative expression lately.
For example, "screenplays" as a concept (i.e. sparse writing that doesn't communicate a vision, used basically as feedstock for a director to play with and override and "dress" in detail) seem to be increasingly outmoded. We instead see many of the biggest successes in movie-making coming from adaptations of other visual media (e.g. Marvel comics) where not just the story, but that particular telling of the story has been pre-validated by an audience, and the director's influence in re-shaping the story is diminished.
It's not hard to imagine that, to compete, screenplay writers would switch to something more like machinima production: all the same lines, but now with choreography (timing, expression, movement, body-language) and cinematography (movement of camera, lighting, cuts) built into the "script", and without the need to become proficient visual artists themselves. Basically, instead of outlining a movie, they'd be prototyping a movie, assuming far more of the directorial role themselves, making any resulting movie-adaptation much more an expression of their own vision.
I can see this same concept applying to educational game design: instead of having the teacher and the developer in the same body, or in the same room, you could just empower teachers (through education and software) to do game prototyping—not even necessarily of software-based games—and then their detailed prototypes could be adapted into polished software by developers, who can treat them as a very solid-and-clear fixed spec.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (3 days later)
Lovely sentiment, sadly most teachers seem dis-inclined to put in any extra work on these things. Their already overloaded and in the states grossly under paid.
On the screenplay side of things I'm a bit dubious of the impression your getting, a script is still written for most visual media, For example the Sandman comics have copies of the scripts written for them, then an artist makes progressive interpretations and composition.
I do something almost but not quite like comic production and I generally start with a rough script because it's so much cheaper in effort to produce and can be altered more fluidly then a finished visual piece.
Movie prototyping as you describe is already a major part of a lot of productions, especially animated works. This is called storyboarding and generally accepted as one of the stages of pre-production. It is pretty low impact still which is essentially the point of prototypes. In this analogy a script is a proposal of design, a storyboard is a prototype.
Machinima is probably a step up from storyboarding in skillset required so at best I could see it either as a stand in for storyboarding and at worst a second stage movie prototype often called an animatic (these were used rather extensively in LOTR for several shots where 3D models were moved with very little animation to find the ideal angles for things).
So not to reign in on your initial premise but ya most studios already are using all of that and it has not caused the dissolving of the script as a tool. I suppose in an ideal world some super tool would be nice. It is a good idea, but tool development is by no means a 'simple' endeavor and neither is it necessarily all that 'new' a problem space to be tackling.
For game dev, I've seen a lot of tools for game production that 'simplifies' access, and ultimately I'm not terribly impressed with any of the results that have been attempted. It's one of the tools we use to teach kids programming but ultimately the flexibility a teacher needs is still at present looking about as broad as any mature dev language.
Which gets us all the way back to the original problem. Which ultimately is a problem for a reason. These are skill sets that are very precisely honed and to replace the person in either half of the equation means distilling a lot of skills and capabilities down into some kind of specialist tool. Doing that without either simplifying the capabilities of the tool to the point of uselessness or effectively creating an entirely new profession of specialist in the mix is edging into a lot of Artificial intelligence territory.
Which we are ALSO getting into as well but comes with some of it's own challenges I'd expect most readers of this subreddit to be aware of.
u/derefr [+2] (3 days later)
most studios already are using all of that and it has not caused the dissolving of the script as a tool
But I'm not talking about what movie studios do or don't do internally. I'm talking about what is (or can be) done outside of the studios, before the studio gets their hands on the work, by an independent freelance creative working on their own and shopping around their work.
You don't need a studio to produce machinima; plenty of people do it as a hobby, putting the results on Youtube each week. If you're a freelance writer, there are only advantages in being able to more clearly communicate your vision.
To put it another way: machinima commoditizes Hollywood directors. You don't need a director if the writer already did all the directing before the screenplay even hit the studio. And given that, you can spend a lot less pre-production time with a bunch of expensive actors and crew sitting around having arguments about vision, and spend more time just producing the movie. The result should then require a far lower budget, because the development pipeline has been frontloaded.
For game dev [... talking about things like Scratch, Game Maker, etc.]
That is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what I was talking about, to the point that I have a feeling you didn't actually try to imagine what I was talking about but rather just pattern-matched on "what people usually talk about when they talk about making game development easier."
Look, I've done game development. I know that game development (as a kind of software development) cannot fundamentally be made any easier, for the simple reason that the craft of software is about making lots of hard explicit choices, and people (who aren't programmers) are generally averse and untrained in doing that.
I wasn't talking about game development, though. I was talking about game design. Game designs are medium-irrelevant. A game like, say, Puzzle Strike exists as both an action-puzzle computer game, and a turn-based card game. The mechanics, on an abstract level, have nothing to do with whether they exist in software or at a table, whether they happen in realtime or require deliberation, etc. Mechanics are about forced choices under information-sparsity, and when you're doing game design, you can think purely at that level without worrying about what form the resulting game is going to take.
You can educate a teacher in the art of game design—which, after all, is remarkably similar to the art of education itself—without having to teach them anything about game development. Just like a comic book author doesn't need to know anything about movies to write a comic book that can be adapted into a movie, a game designer doesn't need to know anything about software to write a game that can be adapted into software. It could be composed as a pen-and-paper RPG game, or a dice game, or even the kind of child-friendly "party game" that [Seven Up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Up_(game)) exemplifies.
You can involve technology in a teacher's game prototyping—but there's no need to develop custom tooling. You can prototype games using Powerpoint slides if you actually have an idea strong enough to stand up. It's not about creating something that is pleasing to play (just like machinima isn't fundamentally about creating something that's pleasing to watch); the point is rather that the result expresses enough of the intent of the author that succeeds as communication, and can therefore be used as a spec by an actual {movie studio, software developer, etc.}.
Here's a third example of what I'm talking about. "Cartooning" has a specific meaning, separately from "drawing" or "sketching"; a "cartoon" is a drawing done in order to record the intent one has for another piece of visual art, sometimes as a note to oneself, sometimes to others. When paintings were commissioned in the 1600s, the best thing one could hope to receive from one's patron was a cartoon of the requested work; it would save hours or days of painting and showing and arguing and re-painting. And by far the most efficient way to get your own visual imagination out into the world, was to learn to cartoon, and then hire a painter who you could pass cartoons, and in turn receive skilled paintings.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (3 days later)
AH I see what you mean, thank you for the clarification.
I apologize for the harsher interpretation, a combination of a lot of exposure to amateur game designers dictating questionable choices and an exposure to teachers and parents has put my pessimism a bit high. Apologies for that.
I think that your correct that cartoons of intent would be immensely valuable as a language for teachers to be able to pass to game developers over all.
And I see the example you mean now with the movie industry, again thanks for the clarification.
I think a creation of a method of game/lesson/material cartoons to record intent would be extremely valuable. I'm not sure if I'm aware of a particularly strong existing 'language' to do that in yet.
But If you know of one I'd love to hear it.
I'd still say that a cartoon is still an example of one individual having some selection of skills that is not necessarily uniform in the population. Not all people organize their thoughts or wants visually, I'd not be surprised if there is a similar thing with interactive system design and play. This is not a problem if we want game designers, it can be a serious problem when we need expert knowledge or skills that don't communicate ideas well as interactive media.
u/derefr [+1] (5 days later)
I'm not sure if I'm aware of a particularly strong existing 'language' to do that in yet.
My thought is that we don't need any particular language, but rather can hew toward "whatever the educator feels comfortable doing." That is, we don't need an abstract protocol that both the educator and programmer have to learn from scratch; we rather can just allow the designer to instantiate their idea as whatever kind of cartoon they do have the skill to create, and then the developer can work from that. You don't need a "standardized language interface" to communicate a spec to the developer—they've got a human mind, they're flexible, they can take whatever you give them as long as it fully expresses the idea.
Now, you're right, in that not everyone can even cartoon, in any form. This is one of those things that suggests to me we need to give a bit of a look-over to what we're doing in the education system. Cartooning—whether in visual media, audible media, textual media, or interactive media—seems to be a "fundamental skill" that every adult should come out of the public school system with: something less on the level of "doing calculus" and more on the level of "being able to write a letter in a form acceptable for professional communication."
Personally, I've felt frustrated to no end that, for any expressive medium I didn't actively pursue in school (for me, music and the visual arts), I've effectively been cut off from being able to communicate my own imagination when it happens to arrive in those forms. Since I did pursue the written word, I try to use that to describe visual or audial art I'd like to see exist—but that is in no way similar to being able to cartoon them, because the result does not exist on the page enough to test it, to evaluate it, to tinker with it.
If you'll forgive the analogy, it's a bit like magic in Dungeons and Dragons. While there are "schools of magic" that can be actively pursued, there are also cantrips: fully-developed introductory skills from all schools, that will be learned even by specialists from "schools" opposing the particular skill. Cartooning skills are, to me, like cantrips: a set of proto-skills that everyone should be taught, a broad-but-shallow survey in self-expression rather than merely appreciation or theory. Only then, once a student can actively communicate any idea they might have—whether it be a story, a melody, a landscape, an object†, or a game—should they be allowed to indulge in specific paths of self-expression, through skills like "learning to play piano" or "learning to paint."
† One of the only ways I can communicate visually is by leaving off any hope of expressionism and instead adopting the exacting rules of draftsmanship. I took one drafting class, in grade 11, and I would say it was one of the only true examples of a "cartooning course" I took: from start to finish, it was about enabling me to get the thing I'm imagining onto the page, or into a CAD program, in a way that doesn't actually miscommunicate my intent. Sure, the course I took could also be seen as an intro-level course for professional draftsmen—but intro-level courses far more often leave you with just the wheels or the engine of the art, rather than the ability to practice it fully on a small and simple scale.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (5 days later)
Hmm. In my experience there is a degree of prompting needed to get people to actually communicate a thing.
That said as you say that very prompting is probably the first step.
"Tell me what you want"
Or "tell me what is great about this subject"
Or "tell me what skill is most important"
That stuff is pretty basic stuff and completely doable. But starts falling into what I'd expect of any collaboration.
u/elevul [+3] Cyoria Observer (a day later)
You've read assassination classroom?
u/notmy2ndopinion [+3] Concent of Saunt Edhar (2 days later)
Since it sounds like you're a huge fan of the movie... do you know about the Broadway Musical and the School of Rock 10 Year Reunion (Concert) on YouTube?
Here's my quick take on the subject after watching a few youtube videos to re-acquaint myself with the movie.
Professor Jack Black had lost all respect for the current generation of students. Their music was bland and boring. How could he inculcate them with a glam Rock Star's emotional stance -- the pluck to take risks in their lives, to start a band, perhaps even several after the first efforts had failed? He had studied the biographies of several notable peers and found a few common threads between them.
He couldn't prevent the creme de la creme from enrolling in the very school for which he had lost all respect. But why not give a new class of students a gift that would supply the ingredient missing in school?
[If this sounds familiar, it's because I just adapted it from Neal Stephanson's Diamond Age.]
break
Professor Black tore his eyes away from the Mirror of Noitlov and developed his strategem. He scried on his students and selected a special class. He accessed their educational/psychological reports like the Kolb Learning Inventory and the VARK Inventory and developed the perfect learning plan suited to each individual students' needs.
He was almost ready. He had a list of different improv rock songs he could riff off of. He planned out the character development moments he would have with each student that would push them to the next step in achieving their potential for rock and roll.
He needed to get into the right character. Ah yes.
He would pretend to be a lazy and goofy substitute teacher. This would ally him with their interests and they would relax with him. Many of them lacked confidence and were cut down by their parents, by the school system, or by their peers. From the Mirror, he knew what was going on in their home and school lives, but it was important to build a genuine connection with students in order to get them to care.
Most importantly, he would be passionate about his subject matter. His exuberance would inspire the students. They would see him as a wild subversive element in the school, contrasted with the traditional, authoritarian figures of prep school. Through cognitive psychology, he would trick them into caring about the subject of rock and roll, tapping into their individual talents and unite them into a solid rock band.
He envisioned a loser who was kicked out of his own rock band. A character struggling to pay the rent that was way past due.
He was ready.
Professor Black raised his wand and cast his last magic spell, knowing that Rock and Roll was all the magic he needed. CONFUNDUS.
u/JanusTheDoorman [+2] (19 hours later)
I think you're underestimating a superintelligence by equating it with Path to Victory. Even with "conventional/non-invasive" methods, the superintelligence solution to this problem probably looks more like "Spend an appropriate amount of time (maybe an hour at most) revising all of modern physics, economics, psychology, etc. so that it simply and compactly contains all the accurate, "true" models for the universe, spend maybe another five minutes coming up with a curriculum that assesses the current state of mind and knowledge of each individual student determines the exact, minimum set of logical steps they'd have to make to come to grips with each of these truths, and present them in order."
Meanwhile, it will have naturally managed to assemble an appropriate enough fraction of the world's resources to ensure all the needs and learning-conducive wants of the children are met - enough money and construction crews to build an entirely new learning space by the end of the first week at the latest, and Secret Service-esque security forces to prevent any attempt to interfere with the education, full time medical staff to monitor the children's physiological condition, multiple individual counselors to assist in any psychological issues, and even if hiring actors or directly paying them would be awkward, I'm sure it would be able to assemble an emotional support network for each of them that would range from professional athletes, scientists, for inspiration, and encouraging, attractive peers for motivation, and rivals in competition for immediacy pressure.
I don't know nearly enough about learning rates to weigh to heavily the accuracy of this guess, but I estimate we'd be looking at at least the equivalent of ~2-4+ years of conventional education in the space of three weeks. The high end of that is based mostly on not knowing how much information would be condensed into the superintelligence's new knowledgebase after rewriting all of conventional knowledge - it might turn out that the grand unification theory of physics is actually really simple and easy to understand and apply, for instance. and in that case we're talking 7-10+ years of physics education crammed into an afternoon. If we're talking simply how much to I think of the current typical curriculum we could get them to pass a test on at the end of the three weeks, we're probably much closer to the two years.
u/None [+4] (23 hours later)
superintelligence by equating it with Path to Victory
The PtV is run by what is basically a superintelligence (with a weird, author imposed stipulation) tied to a human.
I mean, really, all the stuff you bring up here is well within its wheelhouse, the difference is just that the actions have to be funneled through a meatbag.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (5 days later)
Dunno are we positing that Neuro-linquistic programming as posited in snow crash is feasible? Has the superintendence developed a tipler oracle, and if so how often is it usable?
I'm not sure this question yields anything other than "indeterminate: insufficient information" without at least a qualitative if not a quantitative, definition of super-intellegence, and PtV.
Looking closer at your edit and not having watched the source I think you are looking at what the most valuable, highest impact lesson is.
On that front as a former teacher, and lifelong student instilling a love a learning and confidence that given enough information that a question can be answered.
u/philip1201 [+1] (6 days later)
There's a difference between PtV and omniscience of all spacelike events, and between that and omniscience of all timelike past events, and between that and the theoretical maximum of knowledge a superintelligence could collect.
Path to victory does not care for quantum uncertainty or chaos theory or thermodynamics. It just wins.