YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe

40 points vinni2 42 minutes ago 36 comments

vincent-uden 40 minutes ago | parent

This very much echoes the region of critical slowing down present in a dynamical system after its equilibrium states have disappeared due to a change in the system (a bifurcation).

andsoitis 36 minutes ago | parent

restate in simple language please?

BobbyTables2 25 minutes ago | parent

Shit is about to hit the fan.

spockz 24 minutes ago | parent

“ a system can deteriorate slowly even after something fundamental has changed.”: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab7e7ca-7d54-83ed-931b-55300fa1f4...

So really it is not saying much at all.

vincent-uden 13 minutes ago | parent

A bifurcation is a non-continuous change to a system as a result of a continuous parameter changing.

For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.

In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.

I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.

apples_oranges 23 minutes ago | parent

Something changed and adjusting is slow

samudrijan 14 minutes ago | parent

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

vincent-uden 22 minutes ago | parent

I wanted to relate the result to well known phenomena in Dynamical systems. The value of the comment is in that relationship. But I guess I can try.

After a saddle-node bifurcation (for example) a system is left with a region of critical slowing down. It can be thought of as the ghost of the fix point that used to exist in that region. Thus observing local phenomena in the system can make it look like the system is still stable while in reality it isn't.

I guess the most famous example of this is global warning. As our emissions of greenhouse gases increased during the industrial revolution, the environment still seemed stable. But in reality we had already deleted the stable point around with our planets temperature oscillated.

andsoitis 15 minutes ago | parent

Is your point that earth is not at a "stable point" or "stable range" but it used to be?

Or are you talking about another system like "society" or "civilization"? Or something else altogether?

vincent-uden 11 minutes ago | parent

Society, education and white-collar work in this case. Not saying I believe this does mean the collapse of white-collar work of course. Moreso that if that was the case, the point of no return could have already been passed without us knowing.

misterchocolat 24 minutes ago | parent

Holy sentence... George Orwell must be turning in his grave right now.

vincent-uden 17 minutes ago | parent

A sentence isn't Orwellian just because you are unfamiliar with its terms. I though dynamical systems theory was quite common knowledge among engineers

andsoitis 12 minutes ago | parent

The issue is that you're talking in abstraction and it isn't clear what the concrete thing is you're thinking of. Bluntly: you're being obscure rather than illuminating.

For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?

johnfn 11 minutes ago | parent

> article is about reading scores plummeting

> guy writes sentence slightly above 6th grade reading level

> “I can’t read this”

Uh huh.

lelanthran 4 minutes ago | parent

What do you think Orwellian language means?

prescriptivist 16 minutes ago | parent

Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.

lbrito 8 minutes ago | parent

Jira, is that you? Have you become sentient?

ThrowawayR2 17 minutes ago | parent

Archive link: https://archive.ph/n8Akh

ProjectArcturis 17 minutes ago | parent

So many places to point our fingers:

-Everyone has screens.

-Education system broken.

-Covid disruptions

-Biological effects of Covid infections

K33P4D 16 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't this just shift the average and calibrate a new set of expectations for the coming youth to placate themselves in an age of all or nothing AI?

JohnMakin 15 minutes ago | parent

Whole word reading has been a disaster.

functionmouse 13 minutes ago | parent

something something the purpose of a system is what it does

themgt 14 minutes ago | parent

Seems highly plausible AI/robotics will lead a significant decline in public schooling in the near future. Kids honestly might learn better doing a few hours a day one-on-one with 2026 frontier AI than sitting in a classroom of 30 with a teacher. 2027, 2028, 2029?

Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?

Espressosaurus 11 minutes ago | parent

No, they think they learn, then when they need to use that knowledge it turns out they learned nothing.

gdulli 4 minutes ago | parent

Exactly. Calculators didn't make the typical person great at math. They obviated mastery of math.

niemandhier 13 minutes ago | parent

While kids practice the skills of the 21st century, testing got stuck in the 19 hundreds.

I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.

I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.

Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.

lelanthran 6 minutes ago | parent

This is a superficial take.

Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.

The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.

Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.

reedf1 6 minutes ago | parent

Kids are not training LoRas without a big budget. I fought for $5 from my parents, I could write C for free.

trey-jones 4 minutes ago | parent

Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.

The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.

So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?

anton-107 4 minutes ago | parent

According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.

So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.

cubefox 11 minutes ago | parent

There is a very high correlation between national IQ and PISA scores. We know that IQ is declining across the world, because fertility and IQ are negatively associated. It's likely that declining IQ is a nontrivial factor for why PISA scores are declining. It is unfortunately still taboo to talk about this. Which is bad, because we can't hope to do anything about it if we don't face the truth.

dumberquestions 11 minutes ago | parent

The drop from 2018 to 2022 is as big as the one from 2022 to 2026, so it's not obvious whether AI had a role at all, although it's highly plausible.

I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.

asutekku 7 minutes ago | parent

Between 2018 and 2022, we saw the widespread adoption of social media and the rapid digitalization of education. Focusing on these key shifts, it seems clear to me that any kind of electronic learning has had a negative impact on education :p

Avicebron 5 minutes ago | parent

You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus.

add-sub-mul-div 6 minutes ago | parent

AI, screen time, short form text/video, normalization of recreational drugs, post-truth, there's no one cause but there's lots of things that are not helping

password54321 9 minutes ago | parent

New York Times: “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”

“What has made the University of California exceptional is its commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence.”

Go woke...