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MattG comments on Stupid Questions January 2015 - Less Wrong
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I have a developing opinion that I'm not quite sure how to word.
It seems that schools all over the world are teaching the same lessons, but are all trying to recreate the wheel. I sense that it'd be more efficient if a bunch of effort and resources went in to each lesson, and that lesson was made available for everyone.
Elon Musk gave a good analogy (paraphrasing)
I sense that there is some sort of economic logic/terminology that applies here and that better articulates what I'm trying to say.
My attempt at explaining it a bit more formally. Consider a lesson on mitosis. Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it'd be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students. Given that the lesson can (largely) be delivered via software, it's non-rivalrous (my consumption doesn't take anything away from your consumption), and thus can be distributed to everyone at no marginal cost.
Anyway, I hope I did a good enough job explaining such that someone can recognize what I'm trying to say. I'd be really happy if anyone was able to help me further my understanding.
One issue with the chain of logic: The value proposition of school is NOT the lectures. It's other things:
I agree in large part with what you said, but the two issues above need to be solved.
I agree that other things like personalized attention and signaling matter. But I think the lessons and lectures do matter a lot (enough to be talked about anyway). And I think that getting into that other stuff now would be going down a deep enough rabbit hole such that it'd be unproductive for this conversation.