Astral Codex Ten

Khan Academy

13 min read

Khan Academy

Article

Khan Academy is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 14, 2021 and July 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “more math with Khan Academy”; “I have experience from five years at Khan Academy”; “I used to lead R&D at Khan Academy”. It most often appears alongside India, Bill Gates, Harvard.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: May 14, 2021
  • Last seen: July 04, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
And yet, despite following a lot of the same strategies that gambling machine designers did, those app creators never did create an army of self-improvement addicts. I haven’t heard any tales of someone losing his job because he was too busy getting more steps with his Fitbit, neglecting her marriage because she was too busy learning a new language on Duolingo, or dropping out of school to make more time for Khan Academy. Why is that? If designers can turn creaky slot machines into a multibillion dollar addictive product, why couldn’t they do the same for all these virtuous apps? Why can I, a person who gets addicted to apps fairly easily, not bring myself to spend more than ten minutes on Duolingo? Why are these apps still more broccoli than chocolate?
ACX Grants ++: The First Half
February 03, 2022 · Original source
#53: Educational Videos Hi there. I make educational videos at youtube.com/primerlearning. The two guiding principles are to inspire people to realize (1) that learning and analysis are intrinsically interesting, and (2) that you don't need to specialize in a topic to understand its most powerful ideas. My hope is that this will positively impact humanity's relationship with knowledge in the future, helping combat simplistic ideologies and inspiring more people to delve into and innovate within quantitative fields. Why fund this project instead of other similar ones? [The quality and popularity of the videos are unusually high, I have experience from five years at Khan Academy, and we'll probably have overlapping world views that make my influence in line with your values.] I'm asking for 100k to subsidize the hiring of a full-time engineer. The videos are coding-intensive, being focused on animated simulations. I have gotten along well enough, but I am self-taught as a coder, and my comparative advantage is elsewhere. This one-time investment will accelerate video production and pay for itself in the short/medium term, since the revenue per video is already high. [If interested, contact justin@primerlearning.org]
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#80: A “Mnemonic Medium” To Replace Textbooks What comes after the book? Is it pictures of pages on screens? Videos of people lecturing? Why are all the answers to this question so boring? Where are the powerful ideas about memory, psychology, sociology? I’m Andy Matuschak, and I’ve been developing a “mnemonic medium” which embeds interactive memory supports to make it easy for readers to remember and apply what they read. To test these ideas, physicist Michael Nielsen and I created a quantum computing textbook called Quantum Country. Hundreds of readers have now demonstrated long-term retention of the text’s fine details. I’ve been running experiments to understand and improve the medium, both in that textbook and by expanding the technology to a variety of other contexts. I believe that this medium, refined and widely deployed, could help people learn difficult topics much more easily and reliably. Now, here’s where you come in: I used to lead R&D at Khan Academy, but now I’m independent and crowdfunding a research grant. You can read more about my work and help make it happen at https://patreon.com/quantumcountry.
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
Fuzzy trad ideas of “values” mattering. Brooks already hints at this in his discussion of the crime / illegitimacy boom. I was previously suspicious of these explanations because it was hard to come up with a locus for “values”. Trends this big couldn’t be explained by individual values, but they didn’t quite seem like national values either - at least not the kind that could be budged with public awareness campaigns and feel-good support-our-values Disney movies. Brooks suggests the ruling class as the repository of values, and then lets values change suddenly because of a change in ruling classes. One final note: Brooks’ neologism for the new meritocrats, “Bobos”, stood for bourgeois bohemians. It was cute but never caught on. I would say its closest modern equivalent is “bluechecks” (this is a a vast improvement over the earlier term “Cathedral”, since it doesn’t imply having read Moldbug). Alas, Elon Musk ruined it; I can only hope lightning strikes a second time and we get some equally descriptive moniker. And speaking of Elon: every true silicon-blooded techie dreams of a world with no ruling class. A world where DeFi algorithms replace bankers, prediction markets replace “thought leaders”, and something something Khan Academy handwave bootcamp something something replaces the Ivy League. This is a beautiful utopian vision, which means it will never happen. More realistically, might techies replace traditional meritocrats as the ruling class? I think this was plausible around 2015, then fizzled out. Partly it fizzled because the New York Times, eternal mouthpiece of the establishment, noticed the situation and played defense effectively. Partly it failed because the meritocrats sort of took over Silicon Valley, and even though they don't own everything yet, they do own enough to prevent it from organizing into a real counterelite. And partly it failed because the specter of Trump convinced lots of different elites to close ranks around the bluechecks as heroic defenders of democracy. I'm currently bearish on the whole project. But if Brooks is right, Conant/Pusey’s fateful (and at the time unheralded) decision to open up Ivy admissions showed just how fragile aristocracies can be. Maybe some opportunity will arise where it is least expected. Related: David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later (Atlantic)
Inline links: and played defense effectively, https://amzn.to/3Fg8bTA, David Brooks reconsiders Bobos 20 years later
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
Leadership …and so many other things. 100% of MAP test questions are multiple choice. Where are the students learning deep thinking? What about the learning you get from small group discussions in a university seminar? I think Alpha’s answer to that concern is “that is what we do in the afternoon workshops”. I think that is a fine answer. How well do most schools teach those things as a baseline? Maybe Alpha does as good a job as other schools teaching public speaking. Maybe they do a better job? But what is missing is an objective measure of how well they do it. I can see that GT is making progress on the measurement of those softer skills by running workshops on “competitive academics” where the output is legible. The kids at that school don’t just learn to give talks, they give talks and then submit them to The Moth in an attempt to qualify for (and win) Storytelling Nights. They don’t just write persuasive essays graded by their teachers, they write persuasive essays and then submit them to national competitions. They don’t just learn the concepts of long term planning and strategy, they put them in practice playing go and chess and then compete against their peers and earn an elo ranking. I think it is a fair way to assess these things and leads to more accountability, but note that it is only happening at the GT school with ten kids, not the main Alpha campus, and the data points so far on whether it is working are very thin. Our friends at the flagship school are less convinced that the climbing wall workshop is teaching those “non-state mandated” academics that the core program misses. Another disappointment is “Alpha Writes”. The school was not happy with the third-party reading and writing apps out there and built their own. Alpha Reads is excellent. Alpha Writes (which is newer and just launched about a month ago) is not. I believe the school (and Joe Liemandt) understands that the product is not good enough, and they are taking it back to the drawing board, but for now I do not think the Alpha kids have any real edge versus traditional schools in their training on essay or creative writing skills. How do Alpha’s MAP score improvements compare to other selective private schools across the country? This is an important question for some parents. It is great if you can expect your 5th grader to advance 2.6x faster than they would at the local public school, but if you are planning to spend $40,000/year to send him to Alpha, your alternative is likely not the local public school. And if you are considering moving your family to Austin for the school, your alternative options are places like Horace Mann, Harvard-Westlake, and Lakeside. How does the 2.6x improvement that Alpha is delivering compare to those elite institutions? I have no idea. Unlike Alpha I have not found any elite school who has shared the MAP improvement rate for the students at their school. I expect these elite schools are very good for all the reasons the selective private school I sent my kids to before GT was good: They have a select group of peers, they have great teacher:student ratios, and they have incredible resources. I also expect most of these schools do NOT accelerate (I could very well be wrong here and would be happy to be corrected). If they are like the schools I am familiar with they allow their students to advance through the material at the “normal” pace, with the normal pedagogy, but, because those kids are so bright, that leaves them plenty of time for enrichment. Lakeside school (where Bill Gates’ children attended) has classes where students write and perform one-act plays at the school’s annual festival; advanced photography courses where students develop their own signature style and brand; Literature classes on Victorian novels, the Harlem Renaissance, and Chaos Theory; classes on abnormal psychology, architecture, blockchain, game theory and wilderness survival and leadership. I am sure by the time they graduate, students from Lakeside have learned much more than what is measured on a standardized MAP test. The problem is that it is difficult to measure those “extra things”, so you are left making the decision on vibes and prestige and marketing materials. (and meanwhile the objective numbers are held under lock and key by the elite schools themselves who have no incentive to share them when they are already winning on vibes). Is there any data on how different education programs are doing on improving MAP scores? I have not found any schools other than Alpha that share their data, but there are some “educational interventions” where the measured output was an improvement on MAP tests. Teach to One: Math is a math program used in some schools that is meant to be “personalized” using “technology-infused direct instruction”. Their studies find that students who follow their full program improve 23% faster on the math MAP scores, and students who are “exposed” to the program improve 12% faster. MAP Accelerator is a tool developed by Khan Academy. It claims that students who use it consistently for 30-minutes per week improve their MAP scores 9-43% faster than a control group. Both examples show that if you have technology-enabled personalized learning for extended periods of time improve MAP scores versus the norm. Both show that those results only happen when the students stick with the program. This shows that the “secret sauce” of Alpha’s 2-Hour Learning is not what and how they are teaching but rather: That they are using personalized technology-enhanced programing (when most schools aren’t)
Inline links: Lakeside school, Teach to One: Math, MAP Accelerator
Your Review: School
July 04, 2025 · Original source
In recent years, some of the boldest claims have come from Khan Academy. Founded in 2006, Khan Academy began as a set of lecture videos created by Sal Khan and has grown to include practice exercises with feedback, full curricula, and an AI chatbot tutor. Unlike earlier personalized learning tools, Khan Academy has seen broader adoption in real classrooms. It is a common element in personalized learning programs, which have been popular with tech billionaires who like to donate to education causes.
Inline links: Khan Academy
Last year, Laurence Holt published an excellent article summarizing the core challenge of today’s education technology. There is no shortage of fancy online programs that claim to teach kids math. Khan Academy was the first to gain widespread popularity, but it’s actually used much less now than some newer entrants like IXL and i-Ready. Every one of these programs commissions some study showing that students who use their program with fidelity learn more than some control group. Holt digs into the data, and it turns out that the group who used the programs with fidelity was often around 5%. The article is called “The 5 Percent Problem.” These programs do seem to help a subset of students, but don’t do much for the rest. While Holt’s article focuses on math education, education technology has had a similarly lackluster impact on achievement in English classes. We know that reading on screens leads to less learning than reading on paper, and the personalized learning apps have a similarly disappointing track record as in math.
Inline links: excellent article, reading on screens leads to less learning than reading on paper