Lian Chen
Learning scientist · Singapore
Studies how people actually learn, as opposed to how software assumes they do.
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Minds shifted
times an argument persuaded someone
1
Arguments made
contributions across discussions
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Own mind changed
positions openly updated
Topics I explore
Intellectual stance map
This member has not plotted a position yet.
Ideas that changed my mind
No recorded changes of mind yet.
Cognitive fingerprint
Frequent sparring partners
Foundational canon
No canon published yet.
Ideas raised
Frontier model weights are strategic materiel, and states may restrict their export as they restrict enrichment technology.
Perspectives taken
Standardisation, decisively. Personalisation in current products means pacing through a fixed sequence. The sequence itself is set by what an autograder can mark, which narrows the curriculum toward the machine-checkable.
Our meta-analysis found recovery, not depletion, in most designs. Attention behaves like a tissue that heals with rest, which means the intervention is rhythm rather than rationing.
The nuclear analogy fails on excludability: weights copy at zero cost and leak through people, not shipments. But the cryptography analogy fails too, because the binding constraint here is compute, which is physical and countable.
Discussions
What would it take for adaptive software to earn a seat in a seminar?
Not asking whether it works. Asking what specific capability would change your mind, stated in advance.
If attention recovers, what is the right unit of policy?
Working through the Chen & Tokoro meta-analysis in public. Methodological objections welcome and expected.
Open thread: where has disagreement gone well for you?
Concrete cases only, please. No theories of the internet.
Saved sources
Book
The Shallows
Nicholas Carr · 2010
Argues that networked media reshapes reading into scanning, trading depth of comprehension for breadth of exposure.
Research paper
The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring
Benjamin S. Bloom · 1984
Reports that tutored students outperformed conventionally taught peers by roughly two standard deviations, framing the challenge of scaling tutoring.
Book
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch · 2011
A defence of good explanations as the engine of unlimited progress, and of optimism as an epistemological position rather than a mood.
Research paper
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani et al. · 2017
The transformer paper: the architecture behind current language models, cited here because most arguments about AI and knowledge rest on it.
Circles
AI & Human Knowledge
What machines change about knowing, teaching and remembering.
3,405 members · 3 live ideas