YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Tabarrok

lines on the record: 61
first: 2020-10-19
most recent: 2020-10-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But in a place like George Mason, where I teach, has a decent reputation in the world. And we'd be very happy to expand our market. We'd be happy to have tens of thousands of students all over the world. Georgia Tech has done this probably, as you know, better than anybody. Georgia Tech has the largest computer science program in master's program in the world. It has something like out of 7,000 online students. The online students are treated exactly as the residential students. They're graded in exactly the same way. The professors don't even know which is online, which is not online. It is a hugely success. It graduates, I think, like 7% of all the computer science master's in the world. So it's a hugely successful program. And they're only able, it's a quarter of the price, less than a quarter of the price online than it is residential.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so this is why I think that the online, the MOOCs, as it were, you know, Coursera and things like that, they're not going to replace universities. But universities are going to go online, right? So you still need that stamp. You still need, we haven't cracked that nut. Maybe we will some ways of doing it in some fields right now like computer science. But you're right. We haven't cracked that nut. But that's why universities will be the ones who go online. They're not going to be, and not all of them are going to make the transition. We're seeing this right now with the pandemic. A lot of universities are falling by the wayside. But the ones which can have a reputation, a high reputation, they're going to be able to go online and they're going to be able to expand their market. Now, some of them you don't want to. Like Harvard does not want to expand its market.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We captioned all of our videos in English. And then we discovered that YouTube automatically takes the English captions and translates them into dozens, hundreds of other languages. And what this means is that every improvement in deep mind, right? Every improvement in artificial intelligence automatically turns into an improvement in our product because periodically the captions They get better without us having to do any work, right? Just the YouTube algorithms improves the captions over time. And so our product is becoming better even without us making any changes.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the music, the artificial intelligence, all of these things advancing, you kind of reach a threshold and then things boom. And I can tell you that my students, I teach a bunch of students online at George Mason University, a lot of them, surprising even to me, tell me that they prefer online. They prefer at least my class online. And, you know, this makes sense because students have different methods of learning and the kind of the classroom kind of sucks, right? I mean, you can't hear the professor. You know, you have to be there at a certain time, at a certain place. You can't pause. You feel you can't ask questions. So there's a huge number of advantages. And this idea of tying it to a progressive sector, I think it's important as well. This is an example I give, which we discovered purely by accident, is that”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A group of technologies come together which seemingly small differences can make big effects. So I think, for example, about the Apple Newton. So the Newton was basically a cell phone. It was basically a portable computer, but it was just, it wasn't quite fast enough. It wasn't connected to the internet enough. So Newton never took off. And yet really just it's really just a small step from the Newton to the iPhone. And yet the iPhone was huge. But technologically there's very little difference between the Newton and the iPhone. The Newton was a failure. The iPhone was a huge success. So I think just in kind of the speed at which things can be done online and just the quality of the animations.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're absolutely right. You would think that with books, right? Oh, you can get all this knowledge in this book, and then you can carry it around with you. You can read it at night whenever you want to. This is much better than having to talk with some professor guy. Yeah, the book has a lot of the advantages, which I claim for online education. So this makes me, I don't know, worried or humble or modest or I could be wrong. It's for sure. I do tend to think though that, so it's bad to say this time is different. But it is interesting how”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And direct the student exactly to that piece of knowledge, oh, you're using the quadratic formula incorrectly. This is what you need to know. It can direct them exactly to that piece of knowledge which they need to unlock the key to learning so the students can advance much more quickly. So I think there's huge, huge possibilities for artificial intelligence and for video online learning and so forth.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Labor intensive sector, you tie it to technology, which is a progressive sector, then all bets are off, everything can change really, really quickly. So artificial tutors. Artificial tutors are already as good in randomized controlled trials as real tutors. Homework assessment systems. I mean, so what a an AI can do is look at hundreds of thousands of student responses on a test, for example, and then it can figure out looking at you've written some tests and it'll see your pattern of errors. And it says aha. Okay, machine learning. I could see the machine will be able to see what concept you're not grasping. And so instead of just repeating, you know, the lesson, okay, the artificial tutor can pinpoint”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is education has always been difficult to scale, right? It's such a one-on-one kind of business. And if you're able to scale education, actually we're being forced to because of the pandemic. But if you're able to scale education, there are huge, huge, massive returns that are possible there. So whoever cracks that nut, I don't think it's been cracked entirely. You know, I think we've gone a long way. Marshall Revolution University, but we're only the beginning. Whoever cracks that nut is going to do incredibly well because you go from one person teaching 30 students at a time to literally you could teach the entire world and you tie, this goes back to the Bombel effect, if you could tie education to a progressive sector, right, instead of tying it to a labor sector.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think the long run is pretty bad for teachers. You know, we always complained that look how poorly we teach our teachers, we pay them less than our sports stars, right? You know, basketball or something like that. And what's going to happen is we're going to pay our teachers more like basketball stars and baseball stars. But there's just going to be a lot fewer of them, right? Because when you teach online, I said earlier I teach 30 students, but with Marjorie Revolution University, I can teach 300 students and I do. So hundreds of thousands of students. So why, you know, then there's, I mean, frankly, people like me, if not me, are going to drive a lot of people in the teaching business out of business. And that actually would be a good thing. Because, you know, why should you?”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I want a small government, but I want a government to be able to do what it's supposed to do at the time it's supposed to do it.”
2020-10-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source