Why do Kindergartners consistently outperform CEOs, Lawyers, and MBAs in the famous design experiment? Does standardized education help or hurt? Will AI enhance or diminish creativity?
Tom Wujec conducted Peter Skillman’s marshmallow experiment across multiple groups over the years.
Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and a marshmallow. The marshmallow has to be on top.
The results were surprising and strikingly similar across different countries.
Kindergartners were clear winners they beat recent MBA more than 2x over.
1. Kindergartners : 26 inches
2. CEOs: 22 inches
3. Lawyers: 15 inches
4. MBAs: 10 inches
What is the pattern?
The winners were yet to enter the formal education system and societal status games. Losers were the recent MBA graduates who spent lot of years in standardized education.
Why?
MBAs want to apply theoretical lessons learned, establish a power structure, plan their way to an optimal outcome, and then execute the plan. Furthermore, adding incentives, like prizes or cash only makes the problem worse—planning goes up and average tower height goes down.
In contrast, kindergartners do something much different. Instead of wasting time trying to establish who is in charge or make a plan, they experiment over and over until they find a model that works.
Creativity emerges in the absence of anxiety, kindergartners nonchalantly work together to apply innate intelligence to win the competition. They don’t care about winning or who gets the credit, they enjoy the activity.
Formal standardized education applied the industrial revolution of mass production to education and treated everyone human as a standardized product and measured whether they passed QA.
It worked well to rapidly increase literacy through mass distribution but it is not fit for the future.
The early form of education was customized and practical, Aristotle taught Alexander and made him "Alexander the Great".
I wonder whether Alexander will achieve greatness by today's standard by getting admission into the Ivey League Universities or Oxbridge and then rising to lead a law firm, or founding a tech start-up, or a hedge fund.
Gen AI is akin to Aristotle which has the potential to deliver customized education to make our children the greatest version of themselves.
There is also a risk that LLMs (Large Language Models) in Gen AI products can indoctrinate future generations into pre-set ideologies i.e ChatGPT kid raised by Microsoft's Satya (Truth in Sanskrit) or Gemini kid raised by Google's Sundar (Beautiful in Sanskrit).
Parents of the current generation will have to choose between Truth and Beauty. It is not easy but who said being a parent is easy?
What do you think?
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