Learning

A conversation that started with a question about courses vs mentors vs AI, and ended somewhere unexpected. The Question That Started It Can you compare buying a course and following a traditional top-down program versus working directly with a mentor—and more specifically, compare that to using AI as that mentor? Part 1: What the Research Actually Says Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem (1984) Students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations better than students in conventional classrooms. The average tutored student outperformed roughly 98% of students learning in a traditional class setting. ...

LLMs are amplifiers. They amplify your thinking. They amplify your prompts. They amplify your direction. But here’s what nobody tells you: if there’s nothing to amplify, you get nothing useful back. The Problem You ask the AI a question. It gives you a fluent, confident answer. But you have no idea if it’s right. You can’t evaluate it. You can’t tell if it’s missing something crucial. You can’t catch the subtle errors mixed in with accurate information. ...