Ciro Santilli
OurBigBook.comOne of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
Ciro Santilli's view of the ideal teaching method: how to teach.
A list of complaints against education: Section "Education is broken".
How to improve education? Simple:
- tax the fuck out of the rich people and companies: wealth tax and invest it in education
- invest intelligently as mentioned at what poor countries have to do to get richer:
- focus on fewer higher excellence schools that select the most promising poor students, rather than giving crappy average to everyone
- use OurBigBook.com
Once Ciro was at a University course practical session, and a graduate was around helping out. Ciro asked if what the graduate did anything specifically related to the course, and they replied they didn't. And they added that:Even though Ciro was already completely disillusioned by then, that still made an impression on him. Something is really wrong with this shit.
One has to put the bread on the table.
Other people that think that the educational system is currently bullshit as of 2020:
- Einstein, quoted in The New York Times, March 13 1949, p. 34:[ref]
It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.
- Ron Maimon
- Xavier Niel: fortune.com/2018/11/30/billionaire-xavier-niel/ "Want This Billionaire's Attention? Drop Out of School" (2018). He also created 42.
- Year On
- by Zach Caceres
- Anand Raja submission "Students and Universities": publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmdius/170/170ii.pdf, www.linkedin.com/in/anandraja/.
- xsrus.com/life-school-and-the-80-20-rule. Also GPA 2.0 linked from xsrus.com/ to xsrus.com/gpa-2.0 but down now
School rewards effort linearly [...]. Unlike school, the real world is nonlinear. By that, I mean most of what you do at work is a waste of time.
- A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
- www.learningforreal.org/ by Mary Ruth McGinn, a K12 teacher in the USA.www.learningforreal.org/quotes/ quotes Elbert Hubbard:She's somewhat focused on the performing arts, but what she says applies basically equally well to the natural sciences. A talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggYL9gQeVEk She talks about authentic learning.
School should not be preparation for life. School should BE life.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY Do schools kill creativity? by Sir Ken Robinson (2017)
- Erik Finman thinks school is broken
- sociable.co/technology/silicon-valley-education-students-entrepreneurs/ Bringing Silicon Valley into Schools: How to Make Students Entrepreneurs of Their Own Education (2016)
- hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education' by Audrey Watters (2015)
- www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/04/17/the-ai-fear-factor-why-leaders-resist-and-how-to-move-forward/ The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education by Steve Denning (2011)
Educational systems are carried by Indian YouTubers meme
. Source. Over a Dmitriy Khaladzhi carrying a horse over his shoulders meme template.Peter Gregory from Silicon Valley shows his hate for university in a fake TED talk
. Source. Key moment: someone from the crowd cries:The true value of a college education is intangible!
The true value of snake oil is intangible as well.
David Deutsch on Education interviewed by Aidan McCullen (2019)
Source. Key quote that hits the nail:
[...] the existing assumptions behind educational systems are that the purpose of education is to transmit valuable knowledge faithfully from on generation to the next. From people who already have that knowledge, to people who don't.So the knowledge is conceived of as a kind of valuable fluid, which you pour from one generation to the next, pour it into their brains.
So right... the purpose of education is not to teach facts. The purpose of education is to propose ways of thinking, which students themselves must try to apply and decide if it suits them! And use the patterns of thinking that are useful to reach their goals.
Like Noam Chomsky, he proposes education has been a system of indoctrination more than anything else e.g. twitter.com/daviddeutschoxf/status/1406374921748496386:At twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/1051475227476185089 another good quote by Churchill:
All compulsory education, "tough" or not, "love" or not, in camps or not, and whether it "traumatises" or not, is a violation of human rights.
Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.
The same video also mentions in passing that john Wheeler used to be Deutsch's boss, but I can't find a reference for it very easily.
Quote selection by Charles Bukowski (2016)
Source. Generally speaking, you're free until you're about 4 years old. Then you go to grammar school and then you start becoming... oriented and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have, if you have enough of course, you retain some of it... Then you work the 8 hour job with almost a feeling of goodness, like you're doing something. Then you get married like marriage is a victory, and you have children like children is a victory... Marriage, birth, children. It's something they have to do because there's nothing else to do. There's no glory in it, there's no steam, there's no fire. It's very, very flat... You get caught into the stricture of what you're supposed to be and you have no other choice. You're finally molded and melded into what you're supposed to be. I didn't like this.
I "Crashed Out" After Studying Physics In College by Alex Wei
. Source. A large part of his problem are High expectations Asian father issues. But society does absolutely nothing to help either, treating Education as an IQ test.The goal of our broken educational system is not to teach.
It is simply a test of who can learn the most in the least amount of time.
What is being learnt is of little importance. it doesn't matter if it is useful or beautiful things.
The useless exams are set exactly at a difficulty level that produces a normal distribution of grades:The difficulty is just set for your particular group of students.
- too hard and everyone gets 0, so you can't split people well
- too easy and everyone gets 100, so you can't split them well either
As Elon Musk put it:
I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they're not for learning
Whenever Ciro Santilli walks in front of a school and sees the tall gates it makes him sad. Maybe 8 year olds need gates. But do we need to protect 15 year olds like that? Students should be going out to see the world, both good and evil not hiding from it! We should instead be guiding them to the world. But instead, we are locking them up in brainwashing centers.
Video "The Purpose of Education by Noam Chomsky (2012)" puts it well, education can be either be:He has spoken about that infinitely, e.g. from when he was thin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo
- a brainwashing to make people comply with The Establishment
- a way to get people genuinely interested and help them to reach their life goals
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts7CEFQM2bE How Education Became Indoctrination: Dr Stephen Hicks (2021) Interview by www.youtube.com/c/KnowlandKnows Interesting channel. "Are you sick of woke-washing in education? Free speech distinguishes education from indoctrination" and "I taught at Eton College before I was fired because 'The Patriarchy Paradox' caused offence.".
- Joseph Priestley was employed as tutor to Lord Shelburne's children, which gave him much needed financial stability and allowed him to pursue some of his most important works
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See also: e-learning website.
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If school weren't bullshit, 99% of students would be in gifted education for what they truly love and are good at.
What is sad about many programs is that they are exclusivist and non scalable, selecting people some how and non scalably educating them. We need a more "here's some projects let's do them whoever can" approach to things, maybe like Google Summer of Code.
Related programs:
Found them through: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emissions_Spectra.webm Epic.
Basically the same remarks as for university, just 10 times more useless, see also: Section "Motivation".
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This actually happens in Winter. But they are so fucking euphemistic that winter has to be removed from the calendar.
This actually happens in spring. But because they are so euphemistic winter had to be removed from the calendar, it gets shifted a left.
Including notably schools that follows Ciro Santilli's ideas as shown at how to teach.
- The National Science Institute, The Geek Group: came to Ciro Santilli's attention due to their Bitcoin activity: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuIRvn89988
By Esther Wojcicki, Sergey Brin's ex-mother-in-law:So basically strong focus on self-directed learning.
A moonshot classroom is a fundamental shift to give students more autonomy and agency in the classroom and entrusts them with greater ownership of their learning outcomes.
Also:so along the lines of project-based learning. Ciro Santilli specifically likes the "authentic audience" part, related: Section "Projects must aim for novelty"
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
Infomercial: For-Profit Online University by Adult Swim
. www.mentava.com/
Mentava's software-based daily tutor gets students on track for college-level math and computer science before high school.
Login walls. Lol.
The school's model is to offer two hours of academic learning each day using "AI tutors", while the rest of the day is dedicated to developing life skills
The founding lady has several other interesting schools e.g. gt.school:Pretty awesome.
We believe that kids do not need 12 years to finish school — they can accomplish so much more when given the environment and resources to do so
At GT School we’ve revolutionized the classroom by replacing traditional teachers with dedicated guides who serve as mentors
Bibliography:
- www.forbes.com/sites/rayravaglia/2025/02/10/alpha-school-using-ai-to-unleash-students-and-transform-teaching/
Julian Stanley, a psychologist and pioneer in gifted education
Aprender em Comunidade by Prof. José Pacheco
. Source. In Portuguese. Title translation: "Learn in community".Amazing self-directed learning direction:
The pupils have a parents' evening coming up but instead of their teachers giving an account of their progress, it is a "student-led conference" at which they must present a portfolio of their work, explain what they are most proud of and discuss where they need to put in more effort.
world.hey.com/gwyn/no-excuses-bc4152fb mentions that the founder was inspired by other schools: High Tech High and Expeditionary Learning.
Lots of focus on showcase student work.
The founder Gwyn ap Harri is quite dirty mouthed, which is also cool.
Ciro Santilli tried to contact them in 2021 at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1448924419016036353 and on website contact form to see if we could do some project together, but no reply.
Dan, if you ever Google yourself here, please contact Ciro Santilli: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to do something with OurBigBook.com. Cheers.
This one has students must have a flexible choice of what to learn on the name! Sounds interesting!
Good Portuguese overview: www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172017000300301&lng=pt&tlng=pt
A fantastic sounding full time 4-year course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural science topics, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry and molecular biology.
Many past students Ciro talked to however share a common frustration with the course: in the first 2 years at least, the "basic cycle", you have infinitely many courses, and no time to study, and no choice of what to study, it is only in the latter 2 years (the advanced cycle) that you get the choices.
Also, if you get low grades in a single subject, your out. And exams are useless of course.
Here's a Quora question in Portuguese about the course: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP, the only decent answer so far being: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP/answer/Victor-Soares-31. Very disappointing to hear.
On the advanced cycle, you have a lot of academic freedom. You are basically supposed to pick a research project with an advisor and go for it, with a small amount of mandatory course hours. Ciro was told in 2022 that you can even have advisors from other universities or industry, and that it is perfectly feasible to take courses in another university and validate the course hours later on. Fantastic!!!
Students from the entire University of São Paulo can apply to transfer to it only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they don't adapt to the new course, which is great!
Not doing it is one of Ciro Santilli's regrets in life, see also: don't be a pussy.
Around 2007, they were in a really shady building of the University, but when Ciro checked in 2021, they had apparently moved to a shiny new entrepreneurship-focused building. Fantastic news!!!
One of the Brazilians who came to École Polytechnique together with Ciro was from this course. The fact that he is one of the most intelligent people Ciro knows gave further credit to that course in his eyes.
No teachers, no courses, no tuition fees. Yes please!!! By Xavier Niel.
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Sometimes Ciro Santilli regrets not having done a PhD. But this section makes him feel better about himself. To be fair, part of the merit is on him, part of the reason he didn't move on was the strong odour of bullshit oozing down to Masters level. A good PhH might have opened interesting job opportunities however, given that you don't really learn anything useful before that point in your education.
twitter.com/togelius/status/1584611702691483648:
The "real world" is full of people who couldn't make it in academia.
Rise to the Top: The Habits and Mindset of Top 0.1% PhD Students by Andy Stapleton (2023)
Source. 
Profzi scheme by PhD Comics
. A Ponzi scheme that trains people in new skills is not necessarily a terrible thing. It is a somewhat more useful version than standard exam based education.
Perhaps the problem is "forcing" 35 year olds to go down that path when they might also want to have boring stuff like families and security.
If people could get to the PhD level much, much sooner, it wouldn't be as obscene: Section "Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want".
2023: You can't apparently fire someone in academia!
One of the world’s most cited scientists, Rafael Luque, suspended without pay for 13 yearsThe prolific chemist, who has published a study every 37 hours this year
Rafael Luque, has been suspended without pay for the next 13 years
One is reminded of Nick Leeson.
One things must be said: the root cause of all of this is the replication crisis.
This is why he managed to go on for so long.
People felt it was normal to have to try for one or two years to replicate a paper.
The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize by BobbyBroccoli (2021)
Source. Playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64&list=PLAB-wWbHL7Vsfl4PoQpNsGp61xaDDiZmh&index=1 Tagged
- Autonomous agents research group of the University of Edinburgh
- QMUL research group
- Research group of the Department of Engineering science of the University of Oxford
- Research group of the Department of physics of the University of Oxford
- Stanford University research group
- University of Bristol research group
- experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review The rise and fall of peer review by Adam Mastroianni (2022)
One of the most beautiful things is how they paywall even public domain works. E.g. here: www.nature.com/articles/119558a0 was published in 1927, and is therefore in the public domain as of 2023. But it is of course just paywalled as usual throughout 2023. There is zero incentive for them to open anything up.
The publishing scandal happening right now by Andy Stapleton (2023)
Source. TOOD get the name of the academic who quit.This metric is so dumb! It only helps maintain existing closed journals closed! Why not just do a PageRank on the articles themselve instead? Like the h-index does for authors? That would make so much more sense!
Ended up under Springer in 2015 after a massive merger.
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Publications by the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Links to their publications: de.wikisource.org/wiki/Sitzungsberichte_der_K%C3%B6niglich_Preu%C3%9Fischen_Akademie_der_Wissenschaften_zu_Berlin
Notable papers:
This was the God OG physics journal of the early 20th century, before the Nazis fucked German science back to the Middle Ages!
Notable papers:
Belongs to Springer, so you can still find papers under paywalls on their website.
Notable papers:
By "Academic paper database" we mean a database that collects paper metadata such as authors and citations, but not necessarily the full article content.
Academia is so broken that there isn't even one be-all and end-all database of:It's closed access academic journals are evil to the extreme.
- all papers by a given author
- all citations of a given paper
By "open" we also mean that you can download their database locally and that it has an open license, not just free access.
TODO evaluate:
- www.crossref.org/. No papers by author attempt unless they have ORCID: community.crossref.org/t/get-all-works-of-a-particular-author-without-orcid/3751 so what's the point of this project? www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/ this Funder registry thing sounds cool though.
This amazing data source contains both:
- all papers by author
- papers cited by papers
Full database download is described at: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/download/
The only problem with it is scope, being life sciences-only.
E.g. list of papers by Isidor Isaac Rabi which includes A New Method of Measuring Nuclear Magnetic Moment.
But unfortunately they don't have paper to paper citations.
neurotree.org/neurotree/faq.php explains that you have to contact an admin to download the database, kind of sad:
How can I export tree data for my own analysis?Registered users should contact the site administrator (admin at neurotree dot org) for instructions on how to export data from the tree database.
That page also explains how they disambiguate authors with the same name:
How do you identify researchers' publications?Publications data are drawn from two databases: Medline and Scopus. Because of the large number of researchers with the same name, a disambiguation algorithm is required to accurately link researchers to papers they have authored. We match authors to papers using a two-step process. First, we identify candidate publications based on a simple string match between researcher name and the author list. Second, we look for overlap between co-authors and other individuals in the researcher's mentor network (trainees, mentors, collaborators, etc), and label publications with overlap as high-probability matches. Thus a complete family tree is likely to produce more accurate publication matches.
These are free to query, but you can't download their database. For those that allow database download see: Open academic paper database.
Does this contain any structured data? E.g. can you list all papers by a given author besides just searching and hoping there are no homonyms?
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You are nothing but useless leeches in the Internet age.
You must go bankrupt all of you, ASAP.
Research paid with taxpayer money must be made available for free.
Researchers and reviewers all work for peanuts, while academic publishers get money for doing the work that an algorithm could do. OurBigBook.com.
When Ciro learned URLs such as www.nature.com/articles/181662a0 log you in automatically by IP, his mind blew! The level of institutionalization of this theft is off the charts! The institutionalization of theft is also clear from article prices, e.g. 32 dollars for a 5 page article.
Long live the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz (2008).
Key physics papers from the 50's are still copyright encumbered as of 2020, see e.g. Lamb-Retherford experiment. Authors and reviewers got nothing for it. Something is wrong.
Infinite list of other people:
- blog.machinezoo.com/public-domain-theft by Robert Važan:
Scientific journals are perhaps one of the most damaging IP rackets. Scientists are funded by governments to do research and publish papers. Reviews of these papers are done by other publicly funded scientists. Even paper selection and formatting for publication is done by scientists. So what do journals actually do? Nearly nothing.
Part of the motivation letter required by some American universities explaining how amazing of a teacher you are, e.g.: wstein.org/job/Teaching/index.html
Short for Doctor of Philosophy, it's how some weird places like the University of Oxford say PhD. In Oxford they also analogously say MPHil.
This section is about hardcore people who don't have a PhD.
Notably in STEM, not so interested in literature of course:
Here's a SPARQL sketch for Wikidata that can be run at query.wikidata.org/. It gathers all the relevant data, but TODO we don't know how to do the proper query yet:
# List of living Nobel Laureates sorted by date of birth
SELECT DISTINCT ?recipient ?recipientLabel $birthDate ?awardLabel ?nobelDate ?educatedAtLabel ?academicDegree ?academicDegreeLabel ?doctorateDate
WHERE {
?recipient wdt:P31 wd:Q5 ; # recepient is human (Peace prize can go to organizations)
wdt:P569 ?birthDate ;
p:P166 ?awardStat . # recepient was awarded something
?awardStat ps:P166 ?award .
?award wdt:P279* wd:Q7191 . # received any subclass of nobel prize (physics, chemistry, etc.)
?awardStat pq:P585 ?nobelDate .
?recipient p:P69 ?recipientEducatedAt .
?recipientEducatedAt ps:P69 ?educatedAt .
?recipientEducatedAt pq:P512 ?academicDegree .
?academicDegree wdt:P279* wd:Q849697 .
OPTIONAL{ ?recipientEducatedAt pq:P582 ?doctorateDate . }
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
ORDER BY ASC(?birthDate) ASC(?nobelDate) ASC(?awardLabel)Magazine of the Institute of Physics.
They do two things:
- make a closed source science journal with insanely high impact factor as of 2019
- gamify science by letting (mostly mostly British) dudes like Newton and Paul Dirac add some random letters after their real names to show off
One of Ciro Santilli's selfish desires.
Apparently there were biweekly reports, that were grouped and published biannually on January and July, each one with a sequential tome number.
For example, both Marie Curie's Polonium paper and Marie Curie's Radium paper were published in the second half of 1898 and fell in tome 127.
Public domain publication list: archive.org/search?query=comptes+rendus+academie+des+sciences&sort=-date&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22pub_comptes-rendus-hebdomadaires-academie-des-sciences%22 but some years are randomly missing like 1898?
OK from here you can find all of them more clearly: www.academie-sciences.fr/en/Transmettre-les-connaissances/comptes-rendus-de-l-academie-des-sciences-numerisees-sur-le-site-de-la-bibliotheque-nationale-de-france.html
TODO how to download a PDF from? I can't even turn the pages...
This one contains a PDF with OCR: archive.org/details/ComptesRendusAcademieDesSciences0127/page/n5/mode/2up
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Exams as a prerequisite for a degree are useless. Exams as part of a degree must be abolished. And degrees must be abolished. Ultimately the only metrics that really matter are money and fame. See also: motivation.
The only thing exams should matter for is as a screening tool to select people with specific abilities that you care about as an employer or principal investigator. If:then exams are useless for your purposes. then might as well just go by interviews (basically what all employers do already, though not PIs). Degrees are too course grained to mean anything to anybody. Employers and PIs likely only care about very few specific subjects.
- you have no idea about what the content of specific exams are (and you don't because they are all ad-hoc university secrets)
- or don't have a way to machine learn what grades correlate with your desired performance (you don't because where's the data?)
Once the question of an exam has been formulated, the usefulness of the problem is already been completely destroyed, because formulating the problem that matters is the most important part of things. And any problem with an answer, is useless to put effort into: give answers.
Furthermore, preventing people from searching for answers while answering an exam, AKA preventing "cheating", also makes absolutely no sense. In the real world, we want people to find answers as quickly as possible! We should be teaching people how to "cheat"! What we should teach them instead is what a fucking license is, and what you have to do to comply with it.
And if you must absolutely have exams, they must be open to anyone who wants to applies. Then people have to pay to take the exam, with subsidies for "official course takers", who are spending 100x more anyways due to not living with their parents.
And if you pass the exam, you pass the course, without any further time requirements.
And those exams must be applied by professional test application companies to ensure no cheating and to factor out the anti-cheat work, while still making the tests available to people anywhere.
A quote from Richard Feynman present in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
You cannot get educated by this self-propagating system in which people study to pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting.
The only metric that matters is "to feel that you've satisfied youre curiosity". When one studies for that, it can take a lot more time to actually learn everything, because it is sometimes not as clear when you should stop. But it is the only way to go deeper.
A person's understanding is the most illiquid asset that exists, to judge that based only on standardized exams, is a certain way to fail to identify top talent.
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This is Ciro Santilli's name for the idea that we should not have structured degrees at university that require entry exams, only tests that anybondy could take, likely for free, and then they would just have proof that they know the stuff for e.g. teachers that care about a subject while selecting students to work with them in research.
We just need control rooms where someone can watch students for cheating. Multiple different exams can be taken in the same room of course, students just have to sign up in advance. The exams should happen regularly depending on demand. E.g. extremelly common subjects should happen every month, and highly specialized ones every 6 months or 1 year.
Questions should be always taken from an open question pool which also contains answers, thus allowing anyone to effectively study for it.
How many questions can you actually come up with about a given non research subject, right?
We then make an API available, so that students can grant access to specific results to anyone they choose, or even make the results public for anyone to see. This way the people that care about the exams can just machine learn what exams correlate with their desired performance.
Bibliography:
See: exam.
Same remarks as Section "Exam".
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There are two types of people:
- those who are autodidacts
- those who didn't really learn
Some possible definitions:
- learning without a gun pointed at your head
- learning from an e-book or video rather than from a talking head 5 rows of chairs in front of youHow that is different from a video, you tell me.
Thus OurBigBook.com.
Inferior compared to self-directed learning, but better than the traditional "everyone gets the same" approach.
Project SOCRATES at Illinois University Urban-Champaign (1966)
Source. It is 2020, and we are not there yet. God!You know things are bad when the extracurricular activities are what studnets should actually be doing full time instead!
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Very focused on the International Mathematical Olympiad, notably they maintain all solutions at: artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/IMO_Problems_and_Solutions
This section is about organized groups of people doing extracurricular activities.
Some of them offer money prizes for all or some of the succesfull applicants.
Ciro Santilli approves of this one, related: Section "Free gifted education".
The downside of the Thiel Fellowship is that it is realistically impossible for its fellows to do anything in deep tech, only information science startups would be possible, as they would not have the labs, or lab skills required for any deep tech if they drop out before a PhD. Related: Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories".
The only solution is the harder process of actually remodelling our very broken educational system.
PROMYS logo
. The good:
- a bit of Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want. Though not fully as once you're in your stuck for 6 weeks in their rythm. Though there are research projects going on too which helps.
- peer tutoring-like: they seem to pick undergraduate students to serve as supervisors
The bad: everything else. Closed source learning materials + a university-like selection program. Such a waste of efforts that could benefit way more people with more open resources.
meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/4889/request-to-keep-an-eye-out-for-promys-admissions-problems asking to remove PROMYS problems from MathOverflow. And it seems to have been mostly accepted. Newbs. Any maths problem should be allowed to be askeable online. There are no fundamentally new problems, copyright takedown is just silly.
The structure seems to be: come every day for 6 weeks, one problem sheet per day. Go.
Strongly against giving answer to problem sets... sad, as of 2024: promys-europe.org/students/faq (archive):and:It does not seem to be the case for the American version however after a quick look: promys.org/programs/promys/for-students/faq/. Sad to see.
When do I get the solutions to the problems on the problem sets?When you discover them for yourself: on your own or collaborating with other students. Returning students and counsellors and faculty will support and encourage you, but not by giving you the answers (hint: they don't even give hints). What PROMYS Europe does is offer you the tools and structure to enable you to be a creative mathematician.
What rules are there at PROMYS Europe?They're mostly the ones you'd expect: don't do anything dangerous or illegal, don't divide by zero, don't even try to skip Friday Fun, and don't give anyone solutions to the problem sets (though collaboration is definitely OK).
Also participants are strongly forbidden from sharing the problem sheets with anyone from outside the program. Ciro Santilli asked a participant face to face if he could take a look, but was told that they are not allowed to share it. So it is a very clear and strict order. Truly sad.
TODO.
Ciro Santilli got his hands on this one. But he was unable to obtain the others. Solving them here would also pose a serious DMCA risk, so perhaps it's just not worth it.
Ciro Santilli's take on it: Section "Give answers".
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Bezos Academy is building a network of tuition-free, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire:OMG so nice.
During his childhood and adolescence, Freire ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick-up football with other poor children, from whom he claims to have learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. These experiences influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: "I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge"
Ciro Santilli's definition, key characteristics:
This is the most extreme and final form of peer tutoring, it's natural final consequence given the Internet Age.
Sample usage by Andy Matuschak (possible coiner): notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
Proponent of evergreen notes.
He's also curious about quantum computing: quantum.country/ like Ciro Santilli. Some crazy overlaps we get.
There is just one key gotcha: the project has to be useful.
www.quora.com/Is-MIT-the-only-place-where-homework-is-called-problem-sets
Terminology by location:
Places that say "problem set":Places that say "problem sheet":Places that say "example sheet":
Terminology by location:
Places that say "problem set":Places that say "problem sheet":Places that say "example sheet":
- University of Cambridge. Source: www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/teaching/corpus/
Mechanics/Molecules (Fall term) example sheets (Cambridge jargon for problem sets)
Plaintext file of An English translation by Barbara Foxley from 1911 on Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5427/pg5427.txt which is in the Public domain in the United States.
Can't find a French txt, fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Émile,_ou_De_l’éducation/Édition_1782 has a PDF though.
Good summary on the defunct Encyclopedia Britannica: www.britannica.com/topic/Emile-or-On-EducationAlso:
it is not specifically about schooling but about the upbringing of a rich man’s son, Émile, by a tutor who is given unlimited authority over him. Rousseau’s aim throughout Émile is to show how a natural education, unlike the artificial and formal education of society, enables Émile to become social, moral, and rational while remaining true to his original nature
He learns a trade, among other things. He studies science, not by receiving instruction in its facts but by making the instruments necessary to solve scientific problems of a practical sort.
Book 1:Source:
I do not consider these laughable establishments called Colleges as a public institution.There are in several schools, and especially in the University of Paris, Professors whom I like, whom I esteem very much, and whom I believe very capable of instructing young people well, if they were not forced to follow established usage. I urge one of them to publish the reform project he designed. We will perhaps finally be tempted to cure the illness by seeing that it is not without a remedy.
Je n’envisage pas comme une institution publique ces risibles établissements qu’on appelle CollegesIl y a dans plusieurs écoles, & surtout dans l’Université de Paris, des Professeurs que j’aime, que j’estime beaucoup, & que je crois très capables de bien instruire la jeunesse, s’ils n’étoient forcés de suivre l’usage établi. J’exhorte l’un d’entre eux à publier le projet de réforme qu’il a conçu. L’on sera peut-être enfin tenté de guérir le mal en voyant qu’il n’est pas sans remède.
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