"I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students."
Thrun is an elite academic. He has most likely never even attended a university that had to teach remedial math courses, let alone taken or taught one. Thus, by extension, he has likely never had to deal with students who had anything but excellent preparation for studying the material he was teaching.
I sat through most of Thrun's AI lectures and I felt that he and Norvig were questionable teachers. They are clearly brilliant men, and their excitement was contagious. They would be tremendous guest-lecturers in any CS course (the particle filter lectures were Thrun's best because he was so excited, but he spent most of his time gushing about how cool the ideas were). But as far as teaching a course to non-Stanford students without the help of an army of TAs, they were uninspired.
The common vein is that education is fairly easy when the people you are educating are well-prepared and generally hail from the upper half of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Teaching poor kids, and kids who, for other reasons do not have adequate preparation is really something of a Sisyphean task. The problem is not in our schools, and it can't be fixed by fiddling with the curriculum or delivery method, it can only be truly fixed by fixing the underlying social problems, but that usually means talking about sticky issues like racism, sexism, ethno-centrism, and capitalism itself.
This sentiment seems reasonable, but it is has pernicious roots. Thrun was "led down the garden path" - he wasted time with a frivolous idea. And he did it because he was fooled by his elite background, and by implication his inability to see how that elite background biased his thinking.
In other words his failure is due to personal failings or shortcomings.
Another interpretation, one that I prefer, is that Thrun tried something bold and novel based on a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. It didn't work, he's learning and adapting. No garden paths or greek tragic flaws required.
I should say that I don't disagree with glesica's points about the difficulty of educating people who haven't been groomed for college since birth. I just think there's far too much unwarranted and barely-disguised smugness in much of the online commentary.
Another interpretation, one that I prefer, is that Thrun tried something bold and novel based on a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. It didn't work, he's learning and adapting. No garden paths or greek tragic flaws required.
The problem with this is that there are real (underprivileged) human beings used as guinea pigs for this "reasonable hypothesis".
Thrun can fail all he wants on his own dime and time.
The message from the link seems to be that failure is not acceptable for anybody trying to help less privileged kids. But what's the alternative? Don't try anything new?
The author, and Thrun's critics within the existing system, often have hypotheses of their own for ways to improve the situation, but don't those carry a risk of failure as well?
Say a sociologist were to provide a cadre of students with free housing and food and an allowance, to test the hypothesis that financial stress contributed to academic underperformance. And say it didn't work out: maybe those students underperformed even more, due to some confounding factor. Would Tressiemc accuse the sociologist of a war-crimes level ethical breach, as he has done Thrun?
I'm sure I'll be downmodded for pointing this out, but your post also suggests why these disparities persist even after college.
Via a sisyphean effort, colleges manage to graduate a group of unintelligent and unmotivated students. But after graduation those students are still unintelligent and unmotivated, they simply had knowledge of calculus forced into their heads for long enough to pass an exam.
As an employer, I need employees who will show up and start building shit. Walmart and McDonald's have time for heroic efforts in extracting value from employees, I don't. This is part of the reason why github is such a great hiring tool - pushing good code all by yourself is a strong indicator that you are intelligent and motivated. Graduating college, not such a good indicator.
Interestingly, if colleges didn't engage in heroic efforts to get their students to graduate, college would be a much better hiring filter.
I personally find this comment to be incredibly condescending. It smacks of misplaced elitism.
It comes across as though you are a bad manager who simply doesn't know how to nurture your new employees and you are trying to blame them.
If you don't want to nurture young people straight out of college, most of whom have simply been told exactly what to do at each stage, don't hire them. Hire experienced professionals.
I'm not trying to blame anyone and I have nothing against inexperienced people. I'm quite happy with the people I've managed in the past, most of whom have been fairly inexperienced. They were generally better employees than I was a manager [1].
There is a difference between nurturing and handholding. Nurturing is opening the door for them, handholding is pushing them through it.
A concrete example. I had a young college kid put in charge of a bunch of mechanical turks, most of whom were considerably older and more experienced than her. Her first few days of the job were rough - the older girls thought they deserved the job and gave her pushback and I was also unintentionally undermining her. Nurturing her involved asking what she needed, redirecting all work queries to her, and building a report to let her change the business process (she switched from time tracking to goal tracking).
Nurturing was simply telling her underlings "ask little boss lady" when they came to me and then going back to coding. That's exactly what she asked me to do. Handholding would have involved "hey everyone, I need you all to be nice to little boss lady and if you aren't I'm going to yell at you."
(Incidentally, if anyone needs a great manager in Mumbai, let me know. I think she's on the market.)
[1] I failed to protect the people below me from the people above me and I can't blame that on anyone else.
It may have sounded harsh but most employers aren't right on the bleeding edge where they have the pick of graduates with Firsts from tier one universities.
Hint Google etc probably dont get many of the top Grads these days they get the layer below who put money over cool research.
"Thrun is an elite academic. He has most likely never even attended a university that had to teach remedial math courses..."
Thrun went to college at University of Bonn. I don't know how it ranked 25 years ago but today it's # 178 on Times list, around # 75 in Europe and only the 9th highest ranking in his native Germany:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...
Not that I give much for these rankings but University of Bonn is hardly an elite university. It's a good public university, just like so many other good European universities. But I would be surprised if not some students at University of Bonn take remedial math courses.
The difference of universities in Germany is far less than the difference of US universities (thus terms like "elite universities" are hardly used in Germany despite tries of the German Government to give some universities additional funding to become something officially called "elite universities").
There are really hardly any remedial math courses in German universities since vocational education is rather common in Germany if you don't want to make a general qualification for university entrance (Abitur). Additionally in Germany (that's very German) there are universities of applied science (Fachhochschulen) which give a very applied course of studies. There are even some more more exotic ways of getting higher education (vocational academy/university of cooperative education (Berufsakademie)). Thus in Germany you go to university since you want this kind of education, not because there are hardly any alternatives. Living and having studies in Germany I never heard of something like remedial math courses - they say if you aren't able to self-teach such material you should rather not go to a university or at least be a student in a different subject.
The Max Planck Institute of Mathematics is in Bonn - I'd imagine that it's influence extends to the university in terms of top-tier mathematics education.
I'm sure that most US elite universities (maybe not Stanford) have a goodly number of undistinguished legacy students and humanities-focused undergraduates who "hate math". They're just dealt with through the aforementioned armies of TAs, the drift into easier or less mathematical majors, and of course grade inflation before they'd start to bother someone at Thrun's level. A TA or associate professor at an elite university might have a much clearer view of what undergraduates everywhere are like than Thrun.
Comments
The key quote from this article is right here:
"I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students."
Thrun is an elite academic. He has most likely never even attended a university that had to teach remedial math courses, let alone taken or taught one. Thus, by extension, he has likely never had to deal with students who had anything but excellent preparation for studying the material he was teaching.
I sat through most of Thrun's AI lectures and I felt that he and Norvig were questionable teachers. They are clearly brilliant men, and their excitement was contagious. They would be tremendous guest-lecturers in any CS course (the particle filter lectures were Thrun's best because he was so excited, but he spent most of his time gushing about how cool the ideas were). But as far as teaching a course to non-Stanford students without the help of an army of TAs, they were uninspired.
Compare Thrun's experience with the sentiments in this article about Miami University in Ohio: http://www.propublica.org/article/on-country-club-campuses-a...
The common vein is that education is fairly easy when the people you are educating are well-prepared and generally hail from the upper half of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Teaching poor kids, and kids who, for other reasons do not have adequate preparation is really something of a Sisyphean task. The problem is not in our schools, and it can't be fixed by fiddling with the curriculum or delivery method, it can only be truly fixed by fixing the underlying social problems, but that usually means talking about sticky issues like racism, sexism, ethno-centrism, and capitalism itself.
This sentiment seems reasonable, but it is has pernicious roots. Thrun was "led down the garden path" - he wasted time with a frivolous idea. And he did it because he was fooled by his elite background, and by implication his inability to see how that elite background biased his thinking.
In other words his failure is due to personal failings or shortcomings.
Another interpretation, one that I prefer, is that Thrun tried something bold and novel based on a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. It didn't work, he's learning and adapting. No garden paths or greek tragic flaws required.
I should say that I don't disagree with glesica's points about the difficulty of educating people who haven't been groomed for college since birth. I just think there's far too much unwarranted and barely-disguised smugness in much of the online commentary.
The problem with this is that there are real (underprivileged) human beings used as guinea pigs for this "reasonable hypothesis".
Thrun can fail all he wants on his own dime and time.
http://tressiemc.com/2013/11/19/the-audacity-thrun-learns-a-...
The message from the link seems to be that failure is not acceptable for anybody trying to help less privileged kids. But what's the alternative? Don't try anything new?
The author, and Thrun's critics within the existing system, often have hypotheses of their own for ways to improve the situation, but don't those carry a risk of failure as well?
Say a sociologist were to provide a cadre of students with free housing and food and an allowance, to test the hypothesis that financial stress contributed to academic underperformance. And say it didn't work out: maybe those students underperformed even more, due to some confounding factor. Would Tressiemc accuse the sociologist of a war-crimes level ethical breach, as he has done Thrun?
I'm sure I'll be downmodded for pointing this out, but your post also suggests why these disparities persist even after college.
Via a sisyphean effort, colleges manage to graduate a group of unintelligent and unmotivated students. But after graduation those students are still unintelligent and unmotivated, they simply had knowledge of calculus forced into their heads for long enough to pass an exam.
As an employer, I need employees who will show up and start building shit. Walmart and McDonald's have time for heroic efforts in extracting value from employees, I don't. This is part of the reason why github is such a great hiring tool - pushing good code all by yourself is a strong indicator that you are intelligent and motivated. Graduating college, not such a good indicator.
Interestingly, if colleges didn't engage in heroic efforts to get their students to graduate, college would be a much better hiring filter.
I personally find this comment to be incredibly condescending. It smacks of misplaced elitism.
It comes across as though you are a bad manager who simply doesn't know how to nurture your new employees and you are trying to blame them.
If you don't want to nurture young people straight out of college, most of whom have simply been told exactly what to do at each stage, don't hire them. Hire experienced professionals.
That's why they cost more.
I'm not trying to blame anyone and I have nothing against inexperienced people. I'm quite happy with the people I've managed in the past, most of whom have been fairly inexperienced. They were generally better employees than I was a manager [1].
There is a difference between nurturing and handholding. Nurturing is opening the door for them, handholding is pushing them through it.
A concrete example. I had a young college kid put in charge of a bunch of mechanical turks, most of whom were considerably older and more experienced than her. Her first few days of the job were rough - the older girls thought they deserved the job and gave her pushback and I was also unintentionally undermining her. Nurturing her involved asking what she needed, redirecting all work queries to her, and building a report to let her change the business process (she switched from time tracking to goal tracking).
Nurturing was simply telling her underlings "ask little boss lady" when they came to me and then going back to coding. That's exactly what she asked me to do. Handholding would have involved "hey everyone, I need you all to be nice to little boss lady and if you aren't I'm going to yell at you."
(Incidentally, if anyone needs a great manager in Mumbai, let me know. I think she's on the market.)
[1] I failed to protect the people below me from the people above me and I can't blame that on anyone else.
It may have sounded harsh but most employers aren't right on the bleeding edge where they have the pick of graduates with Firsts from tier one universities.
Hint Google etc probably dont get many of the top Grads these days they get the layer below who put money over cool research.
Well, in your particular case, I guess just having a lot of shit on github would be sufficient :)
"Thrun is an elite academic. He has most likely never even attended a university that had to teach remedial math courses..."
Thrun went to college at University of Bonn. I don't know how it ranked 25 years ago but today it's # 178 on Times list, around # 75 in Europe and only the 9th highest ranking in his native Germany: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...
Not that I give much for these rankings but University of Bonn is hardly an elite university. It's a good public university, just like so many other good European universities. But I would be surprised if not some students at University of Bonn take remedial math courses.
The difference of universities in Germany is far less than the difference of US universities (thus terms like "elite universities" are hardly used in Germany despite tries of the German Government to give some universities additional funding to become something officially called "elite universities").
There are really hardly any remedial math courses in German universities since vocational education is rather common in Germany if you don't want to make a general qualification for university entrance (Abitur). Additionally in Germany (that's very German) there are universities of applied science (Fachhochschulen) which give a very applied course of studies. There are even some more more exotic ways of getting higher education (vocational academy/university of cooperative education (Berufsakademie)). Thus in Germany you go to university since you want this kind of education, not because there are hardly any alternatives. Living and having studies in Germany I never heard of something like remedial math courses - they say if you aren't able to self-teach such material you should rather not go to a university or at least be a student in a different subject.
The Max Planck Institute of Mathematics is in Bonn - I'd imagine that it's influence extends to the university in terms of top-tier mathematics education.
I'm sure that most US elite universities (maybe not Stanford) have a goodly number of undistinguished legacy students and humanities-focused undergraduates who "hate math". They're just dealt with through the aforementioned armies of TAs, the drift into easier or less mathematical majors, and of course grade inflation before they'd start to bother someone at Thrun's level. A TA or associate professor at an elite university might have a much clearer view of what undergraduates everywhere are like than Thrun.