5 comments

  • kmitz13 minutes ago
    <i>PISA data show that students who use AI for specific schoolwork tasks, such as summarising texts, drafting or conducting research, attain lower scores in science than students who do not use AI.</i><p>See graphs on PISA 2025 homepage : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oecd.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;publications&#x2F;pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oecd.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;publications&#x2F;pisa-2025-results-volum...</a><p>So much for all the EdTech startups that want you to use their AI teachers. Seriously, this should be a major signal to keep screens and AI solutions out of classrooms. That&#x27;s not solving everything but at least students would be given a few hours window of de-brainroting everyday. I&#x27;m open to accept that AI can have a positive impact on education but people and tools are apparently not ready and for the moment using it is a net negative.
  • lordnacho20 minutes ago
    The decline seems to have started in the 2010s. Makes me wonder if this is connected to Jon Haidt&#x27;s ideas about the impact of social media.
    • yorwba3 minutes ago
      If you&#x27;re referring to the few-point difference between 2012 and 2018 in the first chart here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oecd.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;publications&#x2F;pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oecd.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;publications&#x2F;pisa-2025-results-volum...</a> I think that&#x27;s more likely to be statistical noise. Keep in mind that PISA was originally normed to a mean 500 and standard deviation 100. Even the more obvious drop after 2018 (I blame the pandemic) down to a mean of 466 on the reading test in 2025 isn&#x27;t all that huge in absolute terms, though definitely statistically significant with the large sample they have.
    • andai17 minutes ago
      Last I heard it started in the 90s. Although a lot of horrifying graphs do have their inflection point the year the iPhone came out.
  • nntwozz27 minutes ago
    At Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg Sweden 80% of the students would pass the entrance exam in the 60s.<p>These days it&#x27;s reversed, only 20% pass.<p>I was told this was the case around 2005 when I studied there.<p>The exam has not changed in difficulty.
    • adrianN22 minutes ago
      What percentage of the population is expected to get university education today vs the sixties?
    • tsimionescu23 minutes ago
      What&#x27;s the difference in how many people apply?
  • tokai38 minutes ago
    Great. With later and later retirement dates, its important that the younger generations are easier to compete with. &#x2F;s
    • squishington27 minutes ago
      That&#x27;s quite funny, but the new recruits at my work place are super smart and full of piss and vinegar. Much more motivated than some of the older workers. The problem is that they will work lots of unpaid overtime, and they have no idea about work boundaries and being exploited by employers.
      • andai16 minutes ago
        Sounds like they&#x27;re trading excess energy for accelerated development. Where do I sign up?
      • myrmidon21 minutes ago
        Depending on the education&#x2F;age of new recruits, you might not have seen much of the, younger, lower scored cohort, because the sharp performance drop only really started after 2018 (so the oldest affected people are around 22).
  • a2ff6eeb034 minutes ago
    Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn&#x27;t really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.<p>AI already writes most of the articles I see posted here, is doing math at the level of the best mathematics, and is writing a ton of the code out there. Given another decade to develop, the kids will be hitting the workforce with very stiff competition. It&#x27;s not a shock they&#x27;re putting their energy elsewhere, and I can&#x27;t say they&#x27;re wrong.<p>They may be the first generation who grow up fully catered to by AI.
    • dumberquestions31 minutes ago
      The decline started in early to mid 2010&#x27;s, this has little to do with AI.
    • omnicognate24 minutes ago
      &gt; is doing math at the level of the best mathematics<p>Terence Tao a few days ago [1]:<p>&gt; When we point the AIs at really difficult problems where none of the standard techniques apply, they are still very, very bad, I mean they&#x27;re just randomly guessing.<p>Please don&#x27;t reply saying they&#x27;ll be proving the Collatz conjecture next week. It adds nothing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;svl_1upFpQo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;svl_1upFpQo</a> (worth watching on the role of LLMs in maths)
      • adrianN21 minutes ago
        The best mathematicians are also not very good at solving the hardest problems though. By definition.
        • Timon318 minutes ago
          Aren&#x27;t the best mathematicians the best at solving the hardest problems? I don&#x27;t see how you can argue this without assuming an arbitrary scale for being &quot;good&quot; at something.
      • a2ff6eeb022 minutes ago
        Let&#x27;s see you solve some open problems before you dismiss LLM capabilities. They&#x27;re working at a level far beyond all but the best of the best.<p>And we&#x27;re only a couple of years in. Their capabilities aren&#x27;t going to be getting worse over time. These kids will be hitting the workforce after AI has another decade of improvement put into it.
        • omnicognate15 minutes ago
          I quoted Terence Tao. Are you suggesting he hasn&#x27;t solved any open problems?
          • a2ff6eeb013 minutes ago
            Sure, if these kids can all perform at Tao&#x27;s level, they could likely be able to keep up with the AI capabilities from a decade before they would enter the workforce.
    • getnormality17 minutes ago
      &gt; Makes sense. The kids can see that education isn&#x27;t really going to be a sellable skill when AI ends up coming into full force.<p>If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.<p>I mean, what&#x27;s the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.
      • jcfrei7 minutes ago
        Just like kids eventually take over most of the daily tasks for their parents (for people in countries where you don&#x27;t have any kind of retirement fund and assisted living, etc.). Same will happen here - on one hand because the human population keeps growing older without any replacement and on the other because all the new tech will be too complicated for humans to understand.
      • js810 minutes ago
        It&#x27;s not clear if it is foolish.<p>The situation will probably be like with airline pilots. The plane is mostly an automated system, but we simply don&#x27;t let automation to work through exceptional situations, without human review. Therefore, lots of pilot training (and their presence) is still required.<p>But it&#x27;s also hard to guess what exactly skill should the pilots have. It&#x27;s clear that lots of things from manual aircraft do not translate well to automated.
      • bluecheese4528 minutes ago
        Most people do not have the ability to understand a domain at the deepest possible level.
      • a2ff6eeb015 minutes ago
        It seems unlikely that we&#x27;ll be able to keep up with AI in any capacity. Your alternative seems like the inevitable outcome of AI succeeding, and it doesn&#x27;t sound so bad.
    • GPerson23 minutes ago
      I hope people recognize this account doom posts what amounts to misanthropic propaganda at a very high rate. There’s never any question how the comment is going to be framed. It’s always, “give up little humans, your robot overlords are here.”
    • watwut27 minutes ago
      Yes, kids are the demographics known for long term thinking and rational decision making.
    • loloquwowndueo30 minutes ago
      Dunno man, the articles ai writes are empty cardboard crap, and the code it produces is hot garbage. “Cleaner upper of AI messes” might be a good future skill to have.
      • lordnacho23 minutes ago
        I don&#x27;t think you can dismiss the output quality so easily.<p>Give yourself a few hours to write out some code in the old way. Can you really tell me that you could not have done a better job with AI in the same time?<p>Eg, implement chess or poker games.<p>Or write a component like a Swiss table.<p>It&#x27;s not obvious to me that AI produces bad work at all.
      • AdamN28 minutes ago
        As has been said before we&#x27;ve been cleaning up garbage code for generations and that doesn&#x27;t look even close to changing anytime soon.
        • jahller20 minutes ago
          100%, does it matter if I cleanup the mess of another dev or of an AI? I don&#x27;t think so.
    • suddenlybananas29 minutes ago
      Where do you think they are putting their energy?