https://www.marginalia.nu/problems/Recent content in Problems on marginalia.nuHugoen-usWed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.marginalia.nu/problems/2sigma/Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://www.marginalia.nu/problems/2sigma/<p>It is a pretty well known fact that if you give kids one-on-one tutoring from experts, they outperform classroom-educated students by an absurd <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem">two standard deviations</a>. The effect size is absolutely mind-boggling, and a damning brand of indictment against the entire modern education system.</p> <p>The problem is that this stuff clearly doesn&rsquo;t scale, for two reasons; first of all there isn&rsquo;t enough experts to go around, as it would require a large chunk of the adult population to be experts dedicated to tutoring, and second of all, even if this was the case, having a dozen or more teachers per student would trivially be something like 300x more expensive than having 20-30 students per teacher.</p>