How to be a creative thinker | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh

People used to go to school to learn how to do homework and exams. Nowadays, everyone needs to learn how to grade homework. This is the big difference because one day, if you want to do something in the world, the first thing you will do is ask ChatGPT. A person's role in the world is going to be to solve problems. So what the world needs now is a large-scale way for everyone to learn to come up with their own way of thinking, not just solve problems. Hello, I'm Po-

shen

Loh. I am a mathematician. I am a professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University.

I am a social entrepreneur and I am also the national coach of the US International Mathematics Olympiad team. If you have six matches, how can you arrange them so that they form four triangles? Four triangles where the side of the triangle is the same length as the match. So if you have six, you can start putting three like this. But then you only have three more left. Now what? Well. It turns out that the answer is that you take the three matches like this, and then you use one more up here, and you lower it like a pyramid.

That's thinking outside the box. If you can call it that. Because this is no longer just on a piece of paper, it's still six matches or six toothpicks, but it's not what you were thinking. I have done many different types of teaching. I teach people from the International Mathematics Olympiad team. I will also go into schools and teach sixth grade in schools where, unfortunately, there may not even be any math teachers for the entire seventh grade. So I go and cover the whole gamut of education. I find this very interesting because it helps me learn what the challenges are.

The goal of a school math test is to see whether you listened and practiced or not. In fact, all math competition problems in the United States and also in many parts of the world are of this type. That's why today, the way I approach education and training is to try to help as many people as possible learn how to solve those questions that they won't have seen before. But I want to emphasize that the reason I've been working on this a lot today is because when I was doing math competitions in the 1980s, the way you got good at it was by thinking that every new problem was an opportunity to practice math. mental flexibility.

Nowadays, unfortunately, there is a huge industry around test prep and test prep where people try to help students get high scores on these weird math questions by showing them all the weird math questions they are likely to see. . And that means studying many, many, many, many hours, so the hope for parents is that when students see the test questions, they will never be surprised that they have done it all many, many, many times. By the way, as you know, this causes students to have to go to school and after school and many other things. In reality, it is very bad for the student, but even worse, it takes away the opportunity to invent.

Money doesn't buy you happiness, but money is important to generate impact and influence. In fact, it is very important that the things we build are able to generate enough money to create the impact. Turns out this is what motivates me. Ten years ago, I had this crazy idea that maybe if we created a website that compiled the ways people explain math and science topics, then maybe people would explain math and science topics and it would be free, and everyone could learn math and science. And I remember thinking, oh, that can't be too hard. We'll be done with that in a few months.

I'm glad I thought that because I'm still working. Then I had this whole thing called XP. We were creating a website with free explanations, but it didn't really have a business model of its own. I wasn't making any money, so I had to find some way to support all of that. In 2019 and April, we started creating our own version of that in the United States of America, where we took it upon ourselves to film me teaching, and then we had a product that was me teaching math that people could watch recordings of, and they would pay for it. .

And this, this generated a certain amount of money. But in this case we still discovered that there were weak points. And finally, about two years ago, I realized, you know what? What people really want is to have a live human experience with someone who is an expert. The only problem is that it is quite rare and difficult to find. And there's also another challenge, which is that ideally the person you're talking to is friendly. If the person knows a lot but is not friendly, that doesn't help either, right? This is the hardest thing to achieve in education because it is the least scalable.

Of course, in the world of entrepreneurship we always think about scalability. And yes, you can find a brilliant trainer who teaches ten students or maybe even 20, or maybe even 100. That's a small scale compared to the size of the world. And that's when I suddenly realized that I could create a giant win-win situation. So the main thing I do now is an ecosystem. It's actually an ecosystem that I invented, bringing together many different types of people to contribute in a way that everyone wins. A weak point, which was for people who learn mathematics. Then the second weak point was people who are already very, very good at math, from whom building CE would be even better.

Although I want to emphasize that this helps them end up being extraordinary. And what made me realize the key thing that made me realize that I could put it all together was an experience that I had about five or six years ago, and that is that I also took improv comedy classes, improv comedy classes, our acting classes. . And I did it because I was trying to learn to communicate better so that more people would be interested in mathematics. But I realized that even a math nerd like me can take those classes and then be able to talk to a few more people.

Then I realized, let me add that. And then I walked over to our drama department and discovered that there are actually many people who have extraordinary dramatic skills and who are actually very interested in part-time paying jobs to help train high school students. So that's the third weak point. The third weak point is that there are people who absolutely love what they do and are passionate about what they do in the world of acting and drama. But there is a practical need, which is, well, how to find a stable part-time job, with flexible hours that they can use to support their passions and suddenly win, win, win.

We have all three lined up. And that's why this escalates. Actually, everyone winning is very important because I work with high school students. And so, in our company, whenever someone wants to ask high school students to do something, my answer to my employees is always what they want to ask that high school student to do. Can we explain to your parents why? For a busy high school student, that's the best thing he can do with her time. If I can't explain that, they're not doing it. So this is the discipline in which we execute it. That's how we make it a win-win situation.

We will never have a high school student doing something unless I can explain it to his parents. We suggested her daughter do this because it's really good for her. The thing is, it used to be hard to imagine that there would be a way to do it until the answer was oh yes, because as you do this, you will learn from a quality Broadway or Hollywood actor or actress who will help you become extraordinarily successful now. But you see, this took eight years to achieve and two more years to scale. The speed at which we grow is based solely on the time it takes for people who have high school kids to realize that, oh, here are classes where the class looks as good as a Twitch game stream, and they teaches through mathematics. geniuses who are smiling.

You know, these are things that people couldn't imagine you would put together all at once. And when people discover this, they actually change. They start joining our classes. Then we can bring more high school students. And the escalating power we can draw on is us. I estimate that this number could easily reach 100,000 high school students in the United States. That's 1% of US high school students teaching about a million high school students. If you watch our live program, it seems a little strange because you'll see that the only subjects we teach are fairly small number algebra, geometry, combinatorics, and number theory.

Why do we cover them? We cover them because they are a curriculum that teaches you how to think. The only way to do this is to ask them questions they have never seen in school before. So I need to find a source of problems that you won't see at school. That actually turns out to be the high school math competition curriculum, because the people doing those problems were trying to do problems you don't see in school. But the difference between the way we do it and the way many training centers do it is that we're trying to use them as opportunities for you to practice thinking, rather than just showing you how to ask the question that way. enough times.

So the answer is the specifically chosen topics we cover, because that will be enough to teach the student how to generate their own idea of ​​it. Our philosophy is that if you finish all that, you will discover that you can learn anything. Our goal is not to ensure that we have classes for you for every year of your life. Our goal is to ensure that, as quickly as possible, you never need classes from anyone again. Today. Everyone needs to learn how to grade homework. This is the big difference because one day, if you want to do something in the world, the first thing you will do is ask ChatGPT.

Let me reinforce this analogy. If you look at any good software engineer, most good software engineers, if they are given a task that they have never done before, the first thing they do is think of some similar problems and search StackOverflow to see examples that they don't. do. I don't expect that to give them the complete code they need to write, but they use it to research what kinds of technologies might be useful. But as ChatGPT suggests, solutions need to be quick and analytical

thinker

s to understand whether what ChatGPT said is correct or not. So what the world needs now is a large-scale way for everyone to learn to grade assignments, for everyone to learn to come up with their own way of thinking, not just solve problems.

My general philosophy is that when you are learning, you should keep challenging and you should not repeat. In the real world, when you are performing a task. If it's repetitive, you should get ChatGPT to do it, or a calculator to do it, or a computer to do it. But to know how to control them well in the real world, you need to learn to think. And that is the purpose of the learning process. What I do for fun is meet and try to understand people whose origins I still don't fully understand. Actually, this is what I do for fun.

That is also why we are talking now. I happen to be talking to you in New York City. The way I got here overnight was by bus, the night bus. You know, some people don't take the night bus because who knows who you'll take it with. But that doesn't scare me. That's simply called the real world. You cannot understand the real world unless you start exploring various parts of the real world. I think my message about creating value is that you can't create value if you don't interact with people. You can't just think about value theoretically.

And the more people, the more you can understand. People from different backgrounds understand media, they have some idea of ​​how it works, what their needs are, what the limiting factors are. What do you want to do? The better you model this, the more effective you will be at finding a solution. I started going from city to city to city giving math talks in public parks. I actually set a schedule. I put a schedule on my website and said, I'm going to all these cities and people could just sign up to attend the talks. And at first people wondered: Will anyone show up?

But in reality there would be between 50 and 100 people attending these talks in the parks. And by the way, it was a fun trip because, to do it, I traveled from park to park with all the audiovisual equipment, speakers and everything necessary to be able to have a stage in the shelters of the parks throughout the United States. But by doing it without realizing it, it was a discovery for the client because suddenly I was able to interact and talk to thousands of parents and students, which started to make me realize the types of challenges people had.

And that's why probably about 1 or 2 months after that, the big idea came up of, oh, we can actuallyhaving all these high school students that I met. Everyone can learn to think at the same time. Whereas these people who are brilliant become extremely polished so that one day later in their careers they can be truly successful. So that was the idea. It was like, somehow, you can't find the weak points if you don't see the people. That's also why, with a lot of the work I do, I'll go to schools, right? I love working in education, and I do it in a way that even last night I was writing to someone who is involved with a large network of schools and their schools, I believe, serve students who are also disadvantaged.

Now, instead of just putting in money or putting in resources on my part, what I said is that I'm very interested. Can we arrange for me to go to some of your schools and teach sixth grade? What I'm explaining is that the way I do anything, if I want to work in a sector, I go in myself and start doing the work and see what happens. And that's how I came up with all these ideas, because actually the ideas that I'm doing are things that I've personally experienced. I have experienced being a math person, taking acting classes.

I have experienced being a person, learning to think, taught by someone who knows many things and who also smiles. So all the different parties gave me these ideas. Now I can understand why you identify as a social entrepreneur. Yes. We are not doing a very good job of maximizing customer lifetime value. If our goal is to solve the customer's problem as quickly as possible. But this is what we want to do, right? This is social entrepreneurship. That's also why, if you ask me, what is my definition of success? My definition of success is not just that we make a lot of money.

My definition of success is that if we can convince a large number of people in this world to enjoy being thoughtful, then I want it. I love the fact that entrepreneurship is about creating new things. So the message I've been sending my entire tour is that this new world of AI is going to be a Wild West. There will be many new opportunities. The people who will be most successful are those who are very good at creating value. In fact, in my public talks I tell everyone. Everyone should be a little entrepreneurial. They may be entrepreneurs, or they may even be entrepreneurs, which is an English word we sometimes use to describe creating new things within an organization.

But the whole concept of value creation is actually going to be central to helping society survive and everyone prosper as we move into this age of AI, into this new world.