Ask HN: How would you know if you have learned something?

I have been thinking about this while working on building my own AI-based tutoring platform Socratix.

AI made learning really easy, and that was the problem that made me worried. You can get an explanation anytime, nod, feel that you have understood it all, and in two days time fail to reconstruct it.

On top of that there are hallucinations, inconsistencies, and information overload. I got really tired of all this.

Thus, I decided to build my MVP based on one constraint only: nothing is "done" until it is defended.

It is going to be a dependency-based curriculum, AI-validated lessons, sandboxed coding challenges, and at some point a short oral defense to get to the next topic.

It is early and I might change the name. But I am sure that I am doing some things wrong that I would not do otherwise.

What bothers me the most is the oral defense. Is it a good indicator of your understanding or just another hard test that looks fancy?

Really appreciate your comments or discussions about the MVP if you are interested.

5 points | by rearview 13 hours ago

5 comments

  • xoshbin 20 minutes ago
    I close my eyes and recall what I have learned, If I did not need to look at the book or my PC or my phone, then I know I had learned it. some times I do this even after some days.
  • winter2 3 hours ago
    i use AI to study like ALOT. im a person who just cant read slides or watch long lectures i NEED to be actively questioning the AI and work on my weaknesses so yeah what you are working on seems pretty good. id probably try it once it done if i got to find it about the "oral defense" im gonna tell you from my experience (got a 3.8 GPA this sem just by using AI and im in engineering) the thing with AI was that you cant just jump in the topic or course unless you know where you stand. this is where i used to slides provided by the teacher and my course outline but i never myself studied from them id just send it to AI and ask it tell me where i stand and what the end goal is and then based on that id know how much ive learned. basically not blindly jumping in a lake but know how long it is, where are the curves, where id need to work on more... so its more of an active studying. if you know which goal you wanna accomplish ig on that base you can tell how much you have learned e.g you want to be able to solve a specific complex problem given at the end of the chapter, now you know what you need to understand and learn to be able to solve that problem and on that base you could evaluate "ok i can now solve THIS level of complex problem" so to tell on the bases of oral defense the user could himself/herself define the goal they wanna achieve hope that helps
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    • rearview 2 hours ago
      same here! using ai a lot lately for learning, understanding and most of all this questioning my knowledge. after a careful amount of thinking I really felt like we could have proper context and make it work in a structured manner rather than describing it everytime for everything. what I'm building is still in real early stages and would love to walk you through that. here's the link https://socratix-nine.vercel.app. you can reach out to me janduaditay@gmail.com for any feedback or any problem you're facing with the platform :)
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      • winter2 1 hour ago
        sure, imma use it and let you know via mail (aegira.dev@gmail.com)
  • AnimalMuppet 7 hours ago
    I'm not sure that an AI can truly evaluate an oral defense. My bias would be that it cannot, pending evidence.
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