Education
Frequently Asked Questions
We’re launching full-length, on demand practice exams for standardized tests in @GeminiApp, starting with the SAT, available now at no cost. Practice SATs are grounded in rigorously vetted content in partnership with @ThePrincetonRev, and Gemini will provide immediate feedback highlighting where you excelled and where you might need to study more. To try it out, tell Gemini, “I want to take a practice SAT test.”
We’re all racing to upskill right now. Whether it’s learning how to structure SKILL.md files, standing up local agents, or navigating entirely new frameworks - everyone is a beginner at something. I’m so grateful for the experts who take the time to help when I get stuck, but I’ve noticed a recurring hurdle: Expert Blindness. When you’re deep in a technical workflow, your "Step 1" is often someone else’s "Step 5." You skip the "obvious" middle steps because they’ve become invisible to you. The "One-Step-Back Rule": Before giving instructions or advice, start one level further back than you think is necessary. Expertise creates blind spots. State the obvious - it could just be the bridge your user didn't know they needed.
AI imposter syndrome slows more people down than lack of ability. Most beginners assume they’re behind. They’re not. Learning AI feels confusing at first. That’s part of the process. Skill comes from staying engaged long enough to improve. Stop doubting. Start building. Learn at https://hubs.la/Q045Xn8S0
I grew up reading Byomkesh Bakshi and Feluda: two legendary Bengali detective series that almost no one outside India knows. Now all ~70 novels are translated to English and free to read on http://grandoldbooks.com. My goal: build the world’s internet library. Every great book, in English, free forever. We shipped 10x more books in the last 48 hrs. Follow @grandoldbooks for more.
BREAKING: Google Research just dropped the textbook killer. Its called "Learn Your Way" and it uses LearnLM to transform any PDF into 5 personalized learning formats. Students using it scored 78% vs 67% on retention tests. The education revolution is here.
A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.
A lesson for me from this episode is that it’s just really hard to shape history in the specific way that you want to impact things. One of the most famous medieval scholars is this guy Petrarch. He survives the Black Death in the 1340s, watches his friends die to plague and bandits, and says: our leaders are selfish and terrible, we need to raise them on the Roman classics so they'll act like Cicero. So Europe pours money into finding ancient manuscripts, building libraries, and educating princes on classical virtues. Those princes grow up and fight bigger, nastier wars than ever before with new deadlier technology. And this, combined with greater urbanization and endemic plague, results in European life expectancy decreasing from 35 in the medieval period to 18 during the Renaissance (the period which we in retrospect think of as a golden age but which many people living through it thought of as the continuation of the dark ages that had persisted since the fall of Rome). Anyways, the libraries Petrarch inspires stick around, the printing press makes them accessible to everyone, and 200 years later a generation of medical students is reading Lucretius and asking "what if there are atoms and that's how diseases work?" which eventually leads to germ theory, vaccines, and a cure for the Black Death (Ada has longer more involved explanation of how cosplaying the Romans results through a series of many steps to the scientific revolution). Petrarch wanted to produce philosopher-kings that shared his values. Instead he created a world that doesn't share his values at all but can cure the disease that destroyed his.
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting w @Ada_Palmer about it. Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance: Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. This is because paper was still very expensive, and so you had to make this big upfront CAPEX decision to print a batch of 300 copies of a book - say the Bible. But he's in a small landlocked German town where only priests are allowed to read the Bible - so he sells maybe 7 copies. It’s only when this technology ends up in Venice, where you can hand 10 copies to each of 30 ship captains going to 30 different cities, that it starts taking off. Speaking of which, the printing revolution wasn’t just one single discrete event, just as the computer revolution has been this whole century of going from mainframes -> personal computers -> phones -> social media, each with different and accelerating social impact. Books came first, but they’re slow to print, and made in small batches. The real revolution is pamphlets - much faster, much harder to censor. Pamphlet runners are how you can have Luther's 95 Theses go from Wittenberg to London in 17 days. So much other wild stuff from this episode. For example, did you know that the largest and best-funded experimental laboratory in 17th century Europe was very likely the Roman one run by inquisitors? Ada jokes that the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review. The focus of the Inquisition is really misunderstood - it was obsessed with catching dangerous new heretics like Lutherans and Calvinists - it only executed one person for doing science. And this leads Ada to make an observation that I think is really wise: the authorities and censors are always worried about the exact wrong things given 20/20 hindsight. When Inquisition raids an underground bookshop during the French Enlightenment, they don’t mind the Rousseau, Voltaire, and Encyclopédie, but they lose their minds about some Jansenist treatises about the technical nature of the Trinity. More broadly, a lesson for me from this episode is that it’s just really hard to shape history in the specific way that you want to impact things. One of the most famous medieval scholars is this guy Petrarch. He survives the Black Death in the 1340s, watches his friends die to plague and bandits, and says: our leaders are selfish and terrible, we need to raise them on the Roman classics so they'll act like Cicero. So Europe pours money into finding ancient manuscripts, building libraries, and educating princes on classical virtues. Those princes grow up and fight bigger, nastier wars than ever before with new deadlier technology. And this, combined with greater urbanization and endemic plague, results in European life expectancy decreasing from 35 in the medieval period to 18 during the Renaissance (the period which we in retrospect think of as a golden age but which many people living through it thought of as the continuation of the dark ages that had persisted since the fall of Rome). Anyways, the libraries Petrarch inspires stick around, the printing press makes them accessible to everyone, and 200 years later a generation of medical students is reading Lucretius and asking "what if there are atoms and that's how diseases work?" which eventually leads to germ theory, vaccines, and a cure for the Black Death (Ada has longer more involved explanation of how cosplaying the Romans results through a series of many steps to the scientific revolution). Petrarch wanted to produce philosopher-kings that shared his values. Instead he created a world that doesn't share his values at all but can cure the disease that destroyed his. So much other interesting stuff in the full episode - hope you enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the Renaissance 0:28:49 - How Florence's weird republic worked 0:38:13 - How the Medicis took over Florence 0:58:12 - Why it was so hard for Gutenberg to make any money off the printing press 1:17:34 - Why the industrial revolution didn't happen in Italy 1:23:02 - The slow diffusion of paper through Europe 1:41:21 - The Inquisition accidentally invented peer review Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Did you know that the largest and best-funded experimental laboratory in 17th century Europe was very likely the Roman one run by inquisitors? Ada jokes that the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review. The focus of the Inquisition is really misunderstood - it was obsessed with catching dangerous new heretics like Lutherans and Calvinists - it only executed one person for doing science. And this leads Ada to make an observation that I think is really wise: the authorities and censors are always worried about the exact wrong things given 20/20 hindsight. When Inquisition raids an underground bookshop during the French Enlightenment, they don’t mind the Rousseau, Voltaire, and Encyclopédie, but they lose their minds about some Jansenist treatises about the technical nature of the Trinity.
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How Renaissance Florence ended up with a weird commoner merchant republic was unlike anything else in Europe at the time:
The $599 Macbook Neo is a big win for the web This thing is cheap, durable and a direct replacement for Chromebooks in schools. Most software used in schools are web apps and Apple has been upgrading their "web app in the dock" experience in Safari at 8gb of ram, you better hope they push for this over installing 8 electron apps Always bet on the web 💪🏻
