I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
> I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware
I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.
More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension
As a slight tangent here, it's not just poetry. When you read something like 'The Republic', especially with regards to Plato's views on the cyclical nature of political systems and the end of democracy (and what it turns into), it reads a lot like an edgelord speaking with vaguely disguised metaphor with a rather large helping of hindsight bias. But the fact that it was written some 2400 years ago changes everything and emphasizes that history doesn't just repeat, it plagiarizes itself.
I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.
Welcome to the aesthetic world! In the western philosophical and certainly scientific discourse there has since centuries been this drive for objectivity and universals. This has led to great discoveries and thinking. But it’s not the only world, the aesthetic is all about the senses and your place as a subject. It usually invites relativism, sometimes nihilism if you can’t find your ground as an individual in a larger universe.
The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.
That’s one good welcome! Even I feel welcomed and I have been hanging out in the music section for ages. Other than the music though I can relate to being a logical/rational person.
Art in general, and things like massage, meaningful conversation, sex, etc. Quality human connection will be the last things that AI's will gain sufficient ability to replace.
I think Bladerunner 2049 explores what I think will be the key: for some reason authenticity matters to humans and even if the emulation is indistinguishable, people value the real thing.
Repetition of basic knowledge is actually a big part of a successful education, Even schoolkids in the earliest grades can actually learn surprisingly complex subjects by heart simply by blabbing everything back word-for-word. Problem solving skills can then be built up on these basics.
We used to have these questions about "What are the advantages and disadvantages of X?"
I used to think I was outsmarting "the system" by only learning a few key facts about X and then twisting them around to get advantages and disadvantages, but little did I know that was the whole point of the course — to see the same thing from different perspectives and realize there are both advantages and disadvantages to X.
I am not convinced by that. Kids tend to learn problem solving (and other) skills if given a chance. i do not think encourage huge amounts of rote learning is an optimal, or even, useful say of doing that.
My experience (with myself and my kids) has been the opposite.
Making music would suck if I hadn't spent years of (fought against every day) practice/rehearsal. We need to practice learning the tools, not just understanding we have them. So many rote things opened so many doors for me to explore later.
My creativity would be way less if I hadn't spent hours listening to others music. I think it applies to less fun/interesting things as well.
> It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
A person generally cannot effectively, fluently, convincingly regurgitate an argument without understanding it, and the act of memorizing a variety of different positions primes the brain to handle all of them with greater depth and adroitness. Mill greatly underestimates the power and benefits of memorization.
I think most people would agree that memorization and a standarized 'one-size-fits-all' approach are inferior to teaching methods that are (onstensibly) creative, 'active,' and individualized.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It's a false dichotomy. All learning -- all -- starts from and depends upon memorization. Is that its only the goal? Obviously not, but memorization gets a bad rap because it's viewed, incorrectly, as contrary to or in competition with more active, creative intellectual enterprises.
I once heard a lecture by a (famous) college professor who talked about the large numbers of students who failed (college) Algebra 1.
His argument was: you cannot memorize algebra, you have to understand. Students who are failing in college do so because they do not understand the fundamentals, and try to memorize enough to succeed - not realizing that the effort needs to go somewhere else.
Rule 1 of memorization is "do not [memorize] if you do not understand". [1] (Note: that source uses the word "learn" instead of "memorize", but to me the word learn means come to understand.)
There is a role for memorization and rote repetition, but it is not the foundation of understanding.
As a teacher, I feel this is wrong. A lot of students fail by trying too hard to understand.
They listen in class, then read the text and notes you posted, then watch a Youtube explaination, then ask Chat, then ask you questions ... anything to avoid trying to do a few practice questions where they might make a mistake.
It's like watching people try to learn to play basketball when they are afraid of shooting hoops in case they miss a shot. So they watch videos or read books to really understand how to shoot hoops. And then fail miserably when they are tested.
OK, you could argue that exercises build a type of understanding, and listening to explanations builds a different type of understanding, and the former is more useful, but people don't understand that.
I can't argue with this professor's argument because I don't know it, but I can only say that, intuitively, this sounds like an example of the false dichotomy I described in my previous comment.
I've never met a math student who tried to pass algebra by memorizing anything. I'm not even sure what a students would memorize in an effort to pass the class.
Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.
Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.
Chess Grand Masters have large repertoires of memorised openings. They do not play rote games with no understanding.
They run variations, twists and traps, on recalled openings and duel and fool by creating and breaking expectations.
In line with a number of other activities rote core skills and reflexes are foundational but not all, they're essential to practice and to dealing with situations where they don't fit but can be bent to purpose.
Chess960 was invented to shatter this disgusting debasement of chess. That's not just my opinion, that's Bobby Fischers! Opening books, endgame tablebases, piece square tables, etc heuristic hacks that both grand masters and chess engines use is evidence that Chess needs to be replaced with variants that are resistant to letting "strong memorizers" beat actually good tacticians and strategists.
This is why Stratego, or various grand/large chess variants, or Chess960 needs to have replaced standard chess yesterday.
There's that show "The 1% Club" that is reasoning-based, but trivia is a lot faster to come up with, lends itself to showing lots of pretty pictures and can make for good, but subtle product placement opportunities. Additionally, everyone knows at least a little trivia and can play along whereas some people will get stumped on the easiest of reasoning puzzles.
Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.
> accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important
I personally perceive a decoupling all over the board. Not just in language. You hear terms like "wage stagnation" or "degree inflation". Just choose an area. They're all detachments from the true thing they represented.
> I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come.
Confusion between words and reality has been an important aspect of all human cultures since there were words. It's one of two traditional forms of magic found everywhere. (The other being sympathetic magic.) Think about what it means to say "knock on wood".
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.
Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it.
There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.
I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.
I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.
It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc.
The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong.
I agree that memorization is a very useful skill, but I believe it’s over-used in some education systems.
There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.
I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.
Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.
If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.
The vast majority of people currently do not “ask the right questions and to make sense of the results” now because they are conditioned from early life on to only ask the approved “right questions”, which will always frame the sense they can make of any results; why would that change with AI that has clearly already been manipulated with the very same kind of dogmatic guardrails deliberately there to prevent “asking the right questions and make sense of the results”?
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
There's a livestream every Tues about house/landscape remodeling I've followed for years to fix my own property https://m.youtube.com/@PerfectGuyLife/streams and they talk about how any good contractor will never run out of work because it's all based on trust and local networking. Eventually these guys go into lumber yard sales because they've built up a huge network of trust that every other builder knows them and lumber sales commissions are enormous. Most yards are all locally owned family businesses too no faceless national corps.
There's a meme, "Why develop one's own expertise? It's a poor investment. When you need it, you can hire it." Does AI make us all trust-fund kids?
An intro-physics educator at a first-tier university, observes that their entering students, having attended such well-funded schools, with such highly-skilled teachers, presenting material so clearly... widely lack both the skills and inclination to wrestle with a body of knowledge to extract their own understanding. To the detriment of their early-college education. The sci-ed snark version is, raising all students to the level of these, would be both an unimaginably immense triumph, and an ongoing profound failing to teach well. Will AI give everyone material presented so clearly?
> More oral defense of arguments. [...] More [...] work in which students must explain not only what a result shows but what it does not.
More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?"
In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in a popular textbook, which despite years of use, and qc passes for multiple editions, has numbers for solid Argon. Reality checking, a feel for reasonable values, a "Is this approximation plausible here?", being pervasively "not on the exam".
Terrible word problems bug me. They seem to say, "this isn't actually useful in the real world, and we couldn't come up with even one realistic example."
I know some of it is the result of the incremental way we teach, such that there isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others. Still, students can only find the amount of fence required for a field before concluding that it does not in fact matter.
> and we couldn't come up with even one realistic example
This worries me about how we approach teaching rough-quantitative reasoning. It's widely thought of great importance for expertise. But even when there seems outlier opportunity (a first-tier institution emphasizing teaching, a dedicated class, for non-freshman, in physics), the questions... "Calculate how long to cook a turkey for, without reading the label or googling?" Really? Getting to a clear payoff may require a broader scope, or a different emphasis, or a reimagining.
> isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others
A kindergarten science educator suggests their students have a human right to understand their physical world then, not a lifetime (for them) later. Intriguing to think what that might look like as a goal... at any level.
Science education research, like teachers, is focused on the possible. Existing students, with existing resources, and constraints, and objective metrics. There's little incentive to stack counterfactuals: what if my incoming students had been taught A successfully, and B and C successfully, then done together, they enable D, and oh wow. Not when we're struggling to manage even one with any consistency. Disaster-triage chain-of-care doesn't encourage funding of population heath research. Especially when the possibility space is so little explored, that we don't even have a vision of what an E and F might look like. A incentive bootstrap challenge.
A lot of being Catholic is just receiving and producing words. Mass is basically an exchange of words. With a little music and a one-way flow of cash. Confession is, well, words. The profession of priesthood is basically one of words. Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
> They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
It was true. Probably started tilting back the other way after 2008. There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Healthcare is probably the new dependable, decent paying, blue collar work.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
> There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
>Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
Given that construction is THE ONLY INDUSTRY that's had significant productivity backsliding over the last 40 years, I hope we wage spiritual warfare against the current crop in the construction industry. It's currently ontologically bankrupt and needs to be cleaned out and replaced with a new crop/generation of workers who actually care about what they do.
The double problem, is that groups who historically were lower class, successfully realized they could grift by building really low quality houses nationwide. Now, the atrophy in skills in literally any kind of blue collar work means that even garbage shit "plumbers" or "electricians", etc are successfully charging at least 150+ an hour in rural west virgina just to do very basic work. I got quoted 500 USD to change an ANODE ROD in my water heater. Every single fucking contractor I get ALWAYS goes to home depot and finds illegal immigrants to do the labor THEY should be doing for peanuts, is verbally abusive to them while they are doing the real work, and exploits them. All because the market allows and radically rewards this.
So unironically most workers in construction and many other trades have been a significant part of the decline in QoL in this country, and especially in causing housing inflation.
Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response in the hopes that by parroting the language the associated psychological changes will follow. Language is a means of programming other humans.
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
> Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.
It’s not so much a matter of Latin versus vernacular, more the way it goes as a whole.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might
change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
Mass, music, confession etc. is supposed to have meaning. Just memorising and repeating the words is not supposed to be what happens. Mass is supposed to have real effects (transubstantiation) and like all prayer is supposed to encourage contemplation and the experience of God. Confession is supposed to give people a fresh start, and often helps people deal with problems and move on - you might as well say that therapy is just an exchange of words. What about things such as silent prayer?
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.
Ah I love this article. I'm now thinking about the idea of encouraging coworkers to orally defend their design documents which are using more AI generated content. People keep saying that we have to focus on what comes before and after code and I think this is a good place to apply friction and avoid building fragile systems.
For me real education happened when I had other stakeholders involved in that project and I was the sole person assigned to do it. From just school books I rarely learned a skill per say
During the industrial revolution, the purpose wasn't to enlighten the masses but to make sure they could work in factories and work with complex machinery. So that meant being able to read/write, work with numbers, etc. And there as a need for engineers, mechanics, etc. that could make all this machinery work, that could work in systematic ways, etc.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
> With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself.
I assure you, you cannot.
Go ahead and make a USB A-B cable from scratch. A 30-year-old product that retails for $2 so hardly 'advanced manufacturing'.
I admit that I'm just blown away by the metalwork in tiny little electrical connectors. To me it's as amazing as watchmaking, if not more so, because the connectors are multiple-nines reliable, dirt cheap, and probably have never been touched by human hands when you receive them.
The purpose of education has never been to teach specific skills. The purpose of education has always been to provide literacy — the ability to understand the world, process information, and learn. Yes, this is done through activities that are relevant in the world at that particular moment, but that is simply an inevitability. And the reason is very simple — we don’t know what skills the people currently in school will need. A child stepping through the school doors for the first time today will enter the workforce in about 20 years and will likely work there for 40+ years. Anyone who thinks they know what the world will be like in 20 years, let alone 60 years, is simply a charlatan.
Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced, and it’s also not its original stated goals, nor is today any better at literacy
> Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced
I can't find any data that supports this causal assertion, and I can find plenty that contradicts the premise that US literacy rates have reduced since compulsory education began.
As a European, I don’t know what a Public school means. But if it refers to the kind of school environment you can find on YouTube by searching for “gen alpha teachers,” then I’m surprised those schools still exist at all.
In the rest of the world "public school" vs "private school" is pretty clear, I think you guys in UK are the only one to call private schools "public school" and public schools "state school".
I think some other countries historically used British terminology and maybe some of its own (e.g. "government school").
The distinction between public and and private that British English historically had was useful too. State school is more accurate too (its distinguishing characteristic is state control and funding).
I also think the old (probably a century ago, or decades ago) "privately education" is a far more accurate description of what is now called "home education" in the UK and, even less accurately, "home schooling" in the US).
I see this take a lot, that education serves the economy and therefore bold changes are needed to curriculum to keep pace with the changing economy. Yes, the needs of the economy shape the incentives the state places on education, but the bureaucrats aren't personally doing the educating. Many teachers have no alternate employment history and the economy does not especially value teachers; I would argue it is inevitable that teachers would decouple the meaning of their work from serving the economy.
But I think this is a good thing.
Yes, the goal of shop class was manufacturing competency, but it was probably taught by someone that extolled craftsmanship and attention-to-detail rather than drilling efficiency. A hobbyist wood-worker, not a retired factory foreman. The former approach would clearly have been more transferrable and less brittle.
So I think instilling adaptability is already pretty well baked-in to how most teachers automatically push students towards higher-level skills and meaning instead of tightly coupling to policy mandates.
Yes it must go beyond the mere desire to have children produce economically valuable output. However this is easier said when the costs (to recipients and public taxpayers) are much smaller.
"[AI] tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty - it is substitution."
There are lots of HN commenters who dislike formal education. Many of them seem to admire people who dropped out of school but became wealthy without earning a degree, like Zuckerberg, Gates and so on
Greg Brockman of OpenAI is another college dropout
Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons.
I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
> I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware
I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.
More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension
As a slight tangent here, it's not just poetry. When you read something like 'The Republic', especially with regards to Plato's views on the cyclical nature of political systems and the end of democracy (and what it turns into), it reads a lot like an edgelord speaking with vaguely disguised metaphor with a rather large helping of hindsight bias. But the fact that it was written some 2400 years ago changes everything and emphasizes that history doesn't just repeat, it plagiarizes itself.
I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.
Welcome to the aesthetic world! In the western philosophical and certainly scientific discourse there has since centuries been this drive for objectivity and universals. This has led to great discoveries and thinking. But it’s not the only world, the aesthetic is all about the senses and your place as a subject. It usually invites relativism, sometimes nihilism if you can’t find your ground as an individual in a larger universe.
The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.
That’s one good welcome! Even I feel welcomed and I have been hanging out in the music section for ages. Other than the music though I can relate to being a logical/rational person.
Art in general, and things like massage, meaningful conversation, sex, etc. Quality human connection will be the last things that AI's will gain sufficient ability to replace.
I think Bladerunner 2049 explores what I think will be the key: for some reason authenticity matters to humans and even if the emulation is indistinguishable, people value the real thing.
The majority of poetry is the equivalent of slop created to get into someone's pants. And then there's Pessoa.
Repetition of basic knowledge is actually a big part of a successful education, Even schoolkids in the earliest grades can actually learn surprisingly complex subjects by heart simply by blabbing everything back word-for-word. Problem solving skills can then be built up on these basics.
We used to have these questions about "What are the advantages and disadvantages of X?"
I used to think I was outsmarting "the system" by only learning a few key facts about X and then twisting them around to get advantages and disadvantages, but little did I know that was the whole point of the course — to see the same thing from different perspectives and realize there are both advantages and disadvantages to X.
I am not convinced by that. Kids tend to learn problem solving (and other) skills if given a chance. i do not think encourage huge amounts of rote learning is an optimal, or even, useful say of doing that.
My experience (with myself and my kids) has been the opposite.
Making music would suck if I hadn't spent years of (fought against every day) practice/rehearsal. We need to practice learning the tools, not just understanding we have them. So many rote things opened so many doors for me to explore later.
My creativity would be way less if I hadn't spent hours listening to others music. I think it applies to less fun/interesting things as well.
Relating to music - it's actually so easy to remember a ton of words (information) if they're put into rhymes
I started out memorizing the times tables. I eventually discovered the pattern, and discarded memorizing.
> It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
A person generally cannot effectively, fluently, convincingly regurgitate an argument without understanding it, and the act of memorizing a variety of different positions primes the brain to handle all of them with greater depth and adroitness. Mill greatly underestimates the power and benefits of memorization.
I think most people would agree that memorization and a standarized 'one-size-fits-all' approach are inferior to teaching methods that are (onstensibly) creative, 'active,' and individualized.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It's a false dichotomy. All learning -- all -- starts from and depends upon memorization. Is that its only the goal? Obviously not, but memorization gets a bad rap because it's viewed, incorrectly, as contrary to or in competition with more active, creative intellectual enterprises.
I once heard a lecture by a (famous) college professor who talked about the large numbers of students who failed (college) Algebra 1.
His argument was: you cannot memorize algebra, you have to understand. Students who are failing in college do so because they do not understand the fundamentals, and try to memorize enough to succeed - not realizing that the effort needs to go somewhere else.
Rule 1 of memorization is "do not [memorize] if you do not understand". [1] (Note: that source uses the word "learn" instead of "memorize", but to me the word learn means come to understand.)
There is a role for memorization and rote repetition, but it is not the foundation of understanding.
[1]: https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm
As a teacher, I feel this is wrong. A lot of students fail by trying too hard to understand.
They listen in class, then read the text and notes you posted, then watch a Youtube explaination, then ask Chat, then ask you questions ... anything to avoid trying to do a few practice questions where they might make a mistake.
It's like watching people try to learn to play basketball when they are afraid of shooting hoops in case they miss a shot. So they watch videos or read books to really understand how to shoot hoops. And then fail miserably when they are tested.
OK, you could argue that exercises build a type of understanding, and listening to explanations builds a different type of understanding, and the former is more useful, but people don't understand that.
I can't argue with this professor's argument because I don't know it, but I can only say that, intuitively, this sounds like an example of the false dichotomy I described in my previous comment.
I've never met a math student who tried to pass algebra by memorizing anything. I'm not even sure what a students would memorize in an effort to pass the class.
Yeah, memorization is very underrated.
Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.
Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.
I never memorized the trig identities, but used them so much I knew them anyway.
so you memorized them, you just didn't explicitly do it.
Memorizing is an active activity. Simply remembering something you use frequently is not the same.
Chess Grand Masters have large repertoires of memorised openings. They do not play rote games with no understanding.
They run variations, twists and traps, on recalled openings and duel and fool by creating and breaking expectations.
In line with a number of other activities rote core skills and reflexes are foundational but not all, they're essential to practice and to dealing with situations where they don't fit but can be bent to purpose.
> Chess Grand Masters have large repertoires of memorised openings. They do not play rote games with no understanding.
This is a good example because a test of one's understanding is "do you know how to make the opponent pay for varying from the standard opening?"
For a beginner, the answer is no.
Chess960 was invented to shatter this disgusting debasement of chess. That's not just my opinion, that's Bobby Fischers! Opening books, endgame tablebases, piece square tables, etc heuristic hacks that both grand masters and chess engines use is evidence that Chess needs to be replaced with variants that are resistant to letting "strong memorizers" beat actually good tacticians and strategists.
This is why Stratego, or various grand/large chess variants, or Chess960 needs to have replaced standard chess yesterday.
> I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware
It's curious that most game shows require a vast knowledge of useless trivia rather than reasoning skills.
There's that show "The 1% Club" that is reasoning-based, but trivia is a lot faster to come up with, lends itself to showing lots of pretty pictures and can make for good, but subtle product placement opportunities. Additionally, everyone knows at least a little trivia and can play along whereas some people will get stumped on the easiest of reasoning puzzles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model
Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.
> accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important
I personally perceive a decoupling all over the board. Not just in language. You hear terms like "wage stagnation" or "degree inflation". Just choose an area. They're all detachments from the true thing they represented.
> I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come.
Confusion between words and reality has been an important aspect of all human cultures since there were words. It's one of two traditional forms of magic found everywhere. (The other being sympathetic magic.) Think about what it means to say "knock on wood".
LOL 'technophobic tendencies'.
'all you anti-medical compound people who keep crack illegal and it's use limited are stifling medical progress'
Wanting to approach LLMs with intention and thought is not inherently 'technophobic'.
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.
Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it.
There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.
I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.
I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.
It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc.
The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong.
I agree that memorization is a very useful skill, but I believe it’s over-used in some education systems.
There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.
I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.
Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.
If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.
> Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it.
I was able to do the math to solve quantum mechanics problems. But I didn't understand QM.
The vast majority of people currently do not “ask the right questions and to make sense of the results” now because they are conditioned from early life on to only ask the approved “right questions”, which will always frame the sense they can make of any results; why would that change with AI that has clearly already been manipulated with the very same kind of dogmatic guardrails deliberately there to prevent “asking the right questions and make sense of the results”?
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Criticisms
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
There's a livestream every Tues about house/landscape remodeling I've followed for years to fix my own property https://m.youtube.com/@PerfectGuyLife/streams and they talk about how any good contractor will never run out of work because it's all based on trust and local networking. Eventually these guys go into lumber yard sales because they've built up a huge network of trust that every other builder knows them and lumber sales commissions are enormous. Most yards are all locally owned family businesses too no faceless national corps.
Yeah. Don’t dream it, be it :)
Starlink, a camper van, a webcam and no kids.
Two analogies for thought:
There's a meme, "Why develop one's own expertise? It's a poor investment. When you need it, you can hire it." Does AI make us all trust-fund kids?
An intro-physics educator at a first-tier university, observes that their entering students, having attended such well-funded schools, with such highly-skilled teachers, presenting material so clearly... widely lack both the skills and inclination to wrestle with a body of knowledge to extract their own understanding. To the detriment of their early-college education. The sci-ed snark version is, raising all students to the level of these, would be both an unimaginably immense triumph, and an ongoing profound failing to teach well. Will AI give everyone material presented so clearly?
> More oral defense of arguments. [...] More [...] work in which students must explain not only what a result shows but what it does not.
More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?"
In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in a popular textbook, which despite years of use, and qc passes for multiple editions, has numbers for solid Argon. Reality checking, a feel for reasonable values, a "Is this approximation plausible here?", being pervasively "not on the exam".
Terrible word problems bug me. They seem to say, "this isn't actually useful in the real world, and we couldn't come up with even one realistic example."
I know some of it is the result of the incremental way we teach, such that there isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others. Still, students can only find the amount of fence required for a field before concluding that it does not in fact matter.
> and we couldn't come up with even one realistic example
This worries me about how we approach teaching rough-quantitative reasoning. It's widely thought of great importance for expertise. But even when there seems outlier opportunity (a first-tier institution emphasizing teaching, a dedicated class, for non-freshman, in physics), the questions... "Calculate how long to cook a turkey for, without reading the label or googling?" Really? Getting to a clear payoff may require a broader scope, or a different emphasis, or a reimagining.
> isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others
A kindergarten science educator suggests their students have a human right to understand their physical world then, not a lifetime (for them) later. Intriguing to think what that might look like as a goal... at any level.
Science education research, like teachers, is focused on the possible. Existing students, with existing resources, and constraints, and objective metrics. There's little incentive to stack counterfactuals: what if my incoming students had been taught A successfully, and B and C successfully, then done together, they enable D, and oh wow. Not when we're struggling to manage even one with any consistency. Disaster-triage chain-of-care doesn't encourage funding of population heath research. Especially when the possibility space is so little explored, that we don't even have a vision of what an E and F might look like. A incentive bootstrap challenge.
A lot of being Catholic is just receiving and producing words. Mass is basically an exchange of words. With a little music and a one-way flow of cash. Confession is, well, words. The profession of priesthood is basically one of words. Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
> What happened to shop class?
Generation of parents who were ashamed of their kids having to swing a hammer for a living. See my comment below.
When I started working in the trades every single person said it would be hard on my body. Some days it’s hard on my body. But I honestly would break my knee again if it meant I could be assured that I’d never have the mental anguish of pretending like I cared about a computer screen for eight hours (…12 hours?). It ruined my friendships, hollowed out my family, and led me to addiction.
I don’t think that stuff happens with everybody but we all make trade-offs
They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
I went to one of the bougiest schools in the country and we had wood and metal shop. Why'd it get taken out of there? Insurance.
> They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
It was true. Probably started tilting back the other way after 2008. There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Healthcare is probably the new dependable, decent paying, blue collar work.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
> There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
>Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
Given that construction is THE ONLY INDUSTRY that's had significant productivity backsliding over the last 40 years, I hope we wage spiritual warfare against the current crop in the construction industry. It's currently ontologically bankrupt and needs to be cleaned out and replaced with a new crop/generation of workers who actually care about what they do.
The double problem, is that groups who historically were lower class, successfully realized they could grift by building really low quality houses nationwide. Now, the atrophy in skills in literally any kind of blue collar work means that even garbage shit "plumbers" or "electricians", etc are successfully charging at least 150+ an hour in rural west virgina just to do very basic work. I got quoted 500 USD to change an ANODE ROD in my water heater. Every single fucking contractor I get ALWAYS goes to home depot and finds illegal immigrants to do the labor THEY should be doing for peanuts, is verbally abusive to them while they are doing the real work, and exploits them. All because the market allows and radically rewards this.
So unironically most workers in construction and many other trades have been a significant part of the decline in QoL in this country, and especially in causing housing inflation.
Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response in the hopes that by parroting the language the associated psychological changes will follow. Language is a means of programming other humans.
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
> Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.
It’s not so much a matter of Latin versus vernacular, more the way it goes as a whole.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901851
> active participation is even more so mental than physical.
Totally agree, that is how it should be.
>>> What happened to shop class?
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
Mass, music, confession etc. is supposed to have meaning. Just memorising and repeating the words is not supposed to be what happens. Mass is supposed to have real effects (transubstantiation) and like all prayer is supposed to encourage contemplation and the experience of God. Confession is supposed to give people a fresh start, and often helps people deal with problems and move on - you might as well say that therapy is just an exchange of words. What about things such as silent prayer?
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.
Ah I love this article. I'm now thinking about the idea of encouraging coworkers to orally defend their design documents which are using more AI generated content. People keep saying that we have to focus on what comes before and after code and I think this is a good place to apply friction and avoid building fragile systems.
For me real education happened when I had other stakeholders involved in that project and I was the sole person assigned to do it. From just school books I rarely learned a skill per say
During the industrial revolution, the purpose wasn't to enlighten the masses but to make sure they could work in factories and work with complex machinery. So that meant being able to read/write, work with numbers, etc. And there as a need for engineers, mechanics, etc. that could make all this machinery work, that could work in systematic ways, etc.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
> With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself.
I assure you, you cannot.
Go ahead and make a USB A-B cable from scratch. A 30-year-old product that retails for $2 so hardly 'advanced manufacturing'.
I admit that I'm just blown away by the metalwork in tiny little electrical connectors. To me it's as amazing as watchmaking, if not more so, because the connectors are multiple-nines reliable, dirt cheap, and probably have never been touched by human hands when you receive them.
The purpose of education has never been to teach specific skills. The purpose of education has always been to provide literacy — the ability to understand the world, process information, and learn. Yes, this is done through activities that are relevant in the world at that particular moment, but that is simply an inevitability. And the reason is very simple — we don’t know what skills the people currently in school will need. A child stepping through the school doors for the first time today will enter the workforce in about 20 years and will likely work there for 40+ years. Anyone who thinks they know what the world will be like in 20 years, let alone 60 years, is simply a charlatan.
Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced, and it’s also not its original stated goals, nor is today any better at literacy
54% of adults lack proficiency in literacy
Public schools have failed to “educate”
https://map.barbarabush.org/
> Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced
I can't find any data that supports this causal assertion, and I can find plenty that contradicts the premise that US literacy rates have reduced since compulsory education began.
Citation?
As a European, I don’t know what a Public school means. But if it refers to the kind of school environment you can find on YouTube by searching for “gen alpha teachers,” then I’m surprised those schools still exist at all.
> As a European, I don’t know what a Public school means
It means "school paid for by taxes", which, as a European is probably the sort of school you attended
Private school is a school you have to pay to attend
In the UK it means a type of (established, large, non-profit) what Americans call a private school. We call the latter in general independent schools.
In the rest of the world "public school" vs "private school" is pretty clear, I think you guys in UK are the only one to call private schools "public school" and public schools "state school".
I think some other countries historically used British terminology and maybe some of its own (e.g. "government school").
The distinction between public and and private that British English historically had was useful too. State school is more accurate too (its distinguishing characteristic is state control and funding).
I also think the old (probably a century ago, or decades ago) "privately education" is a far more accurate description of what is now called "home education" in the UK and, even less accurately, "home schooling" in the US).
As an American it means a public school.
I see this take a lot, that education serves the economy and therefore bold changes are needed to curriculum to keep pace with the changing economy. Yes, the needs of the economy shape the incentives the state places on education, but the bureaucrats aren't personally doing the educating. Many teachers have no alternate employment history and the economy does not especially value teachers; I would argue it is inevitable that teachers would decouple the meaning of their work from serving the economy.
But I think this is a good thing.
Yes, the goal of shop class was manufacturing competency, but it was probably taught by someone that extolled craftsmanship and attention-to-detail rather than drilling efficiency. A hobbyist wood-worker, not a retired factory foreman. The former approach would clearly have been more transferrable and less brittle.
So I think instilling adaptability is already pretty well baked-in to how most teachers automatically push students towards higher-level skills and meaning instead of tightly coupling to policy mandates.
School was, is, and will always be a filter to determine who should manage and access resources.
Yes it must go beyond the mere desire to have children produce economically valuable output. However this is easier said when the costs (to recipients and public taxpayers) are much smaller.
"[AI] tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty - it is substitution."
There are lots of HN commenters who dislike formal education. Many of them seem to admire people who dropped out of school but became wealthy without earning a degree, like Zuckerberg, Gates and so on
Greg Brockman of OpenAI is another college dropout
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The “normies”? What does that mean in this context?
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>If you're in solar, battery, power electronics — international buyers actively seek out American suppliers because of quality and supply reliability.
LOL. Not even american companies buy these from american companies.
Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons.
Also, Pangram says 100% AI generated (some sections with high confidence): https://www.pangram.com/history/af8d47c1-dcbd-48ed-83a8-eda6...
no idea why you were downvoted, but I stopped reading after the first few paragraphs thinking it's almost 100% AI constructed. Very strange article