Exploring the Interesting

In "social media vs education" discourse, there is a tension between the macro data not really showing any large declines in student learning & minimal benefits from things like cell phone bans, and the more anecdotal/smaller survey data of people telling you the kids in the classroom have really changed. I don't actually think you should toss out the personal experiences, that is being naive, while I think "oh the test scores are all corrupted by declining standards" narrative is equally naive - so what is the story?

The squaring of this circle is that when people talk about their student learning changing, it is almost always about books. They aren't unable to understand instructions, they can do math fine (again mild declines sure), people are taking calculus and chemistry and playing piano just like they always did. What has shifted is that people's attention span for reading books is vanishing, to the point where school districts are giving up on even assigning summer reading and shifting assessments to short form reading assignments. This cycle is just extremely hard to break because books are the one thing you can't "internalize" into the classroom - you can't ask them to sit in the room and read a book during an exam - and cheating the assignment is universal and free. Kids always wanted to skim their summer reading, but skimming, Cliff Notes, "asking a friend", those were all work and sometimes just an approximation of doing the reading anyway.

Now you just google/claude the answer to any of your homework questions about a book, you don't need even crack the (pdf's) spine. And of course the entire backdrop culture has shifted to either short form text or fully audiovisual content, so you don't care much about the object-level skill anyway. The bottom has dropped out on the incentives & value for many students.

But the rub is that this hasn't impacted learning all that much. The Kids Can't Read Bleak House, yes, but they were never great at that and it wasn't that related to other skills. "The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone" concept was just too limited; there are a lot of different whetstones out there. The test scores are doing fine, people's skills in the workforce are holding up, none of the "breakpoints" of someone's personal trajectory are flashing red. And of course many people do still read books! We have no shortage of historians because they were always a particular type of person anyway. Books aren't going away; their market share of global attention is just shrinking.

Are there consequences for this beyond the personal, though? Yes, individuals can still learn to be nurse practitioners and marketing analysts just fine, but is the ~body politic of the nation~ or whatever suffering from an endemic shallowness in its comprehension of itself? Maybe! I don't think that idea is crazy, actually, though it is a much more complicated story with many moving parts. But it is one that sits primarily outside the education system; school was never a particularly effective vaccine against "disenlightenment", and if the internet has done anything it has neutered the power of formal institutions to be that force.

It is not necessary for every feminist statement to include a 'not all men do this' disclaimer. The criticism itself already expresses the possibility that men could choose not to behave in this way.

Unless someone states that men's behavior can't change or that there is inherent evil in being a man, accusing a feminist of 'manhating' because she criticizes men is usually nothing but an attempt to distract from the content of the criticism itself.

This is very similar to every debate about gerrymandering:

"Well sure the current system is nightmarish, but every first-past-the-post, single member district system disenfranchises some voters! Someone has to draw the borders, right? How can we really fix this?"

"Don't have first-past-the-post, single member district voting systems?"

But the people of the cities looked on them with scorn and confusion. This was no act of unnatural blasphemous magic, no craft of men. The poor starved, the sick died, that was the way of the world, the will of the Gods. Who were these strangers from this distant city to question that? They who were complicit in their own evil, which was after all just as great?

The current market and its sales pitches for AI/LLM’s is a hype bubble, and going to crash disastrously. Some day. I’m not wagering money when.

Most of the AI tools are a waste. We don’t see large orders from paying buyers who need what AI can do. We see large giveaways phrased as organic demand. I wouldn’t pay a dollar for any Ai from a company not named Anthropic.  a. Admission, I don’t know what’s going on with the US govt/Palintir, etc.

So disconnected from that that it feels like just a coincidence, Anthropic has created something I’d call AGI. The key letter there is G for General. Claude Opus 4.6 and above can do reasoning, conceptual work and across the full spectrum of domains, that I think denying it is an AGI is willful. a. This has been so random that I don't trust anything anyone said about AI coming from before late 2025.

That does not mean Opus is “as good as a human” in any of these domains, let alone all of them. But the difference is now of degree not kind, and I can’t think of a reason it won’t keep developing till it outpaces humans at all intellectual domains. a. Yes, its current writing style has a number of tics that are annoying (among other real limitations.) If you think that is some fundamental barrier that will prevent AI from ever writing better, I’ve got a Maginot Line to sell you.

We are not special. We do not have some spark of creativity or mental flexiblity that can’t be replicated by the machine one day soon. A lot of people who call themselves existentialists have a real problem handling this, which I find unfortunate.

This will fundamentally reshape human civilization. I don’t know how yet. You don’t either.

If our government and economic model do not respond to address the inequality this causes, it will be economically disastrous. It may be hard to believe now, but in the pasts governments actually have responded to their countries becoming entirely different economic models.

I have no idea about the moral nature of AI or it’s likelihood to ever rebel. 

Given 6 thru 8, we absolutely should not be doing this and it would be better if research into further AI is banned immediately. If China develops AI instead of us, I think China will pay the cost of a disrupted society, not have a military advantage.

But just like “you shouldn’t have a child when you’re a teenager” once the child is there, you do have to deal with it, not just ignore it. Studying what the AI tools can do in practice is good and useful.

There is one consistent area where AI is not as good as humans: reliability. The hallmark of Silicon Valley / startup tech development has been deciding “Much faster and cheaper than the thing we are disrupting, and 90% as reliable, is a good deal.” This is very often true but not always! Any sector where failing 1 out of 10 times, or even 1 out of 100, causes someone’s death or is destructive in a costly way, modern tech (including AI) is quite bad at. If you look at SV, the hardest work is done at companies where they actually need 100% reliability to beat a human.

So surgeons, pilots, train engineers, translators whose work has legal liability, cooks and dishwashers, are going to be around for a while.

This is ironic and depressing, that the creative realms are much more dominated by AI than the sort of low paid drudge work whose main skill is “never fuck up.” It will also come to represent more of the economy, though presumably some day AI’s will learn 100% reliability too.

LLM's are not "human" in any sense. Just because they can reason, does not mean their mental architecture is like ours. Just one example: time doesn't really exist for them. They only "exist" in the moment they are generating the next token. If you go years between queries, that time did not exist to them, it's like you never left. We can't even talk about that kind of existence with the same vocabulary we currently use for consciousness.

For movies, here is the beginner's list:

And the more advanced list:

Not all these movies are necessarily good, but the ones that gave me small pop culture epiphanies. It made me realize that 30%-40% of the jokes from modern sitcoms are references/parodies- and these movies are their source material.

^^ This is also true for socializing. So many people I thought were naturally funny were just doing movie bits.

Like in Percy Jackson, the Olympian gods are real, but are being forced to maintain a Masquerade to keep some greater threats down. Maybe elements of the Masquerade are forming the metaphysical bars to Tartarus. So, the Titans and their minions have obvious incentives to make a mess and make people believe in the gods again, so they can break free, and the Olympians are having to put down massive crises while pretending they're not divine.

The extension, then, is that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are total fakes. The Olympians picked a minor Levantine religion and elevated it to the point that it completely displaced their native faith. Jesus healing the sick? Asclepius. Jesus multiplying the fish? Poseidon.

There's been at least one Olympian in an organizational role at the Vatican since the very beginning. (And for a couple hundred years, Dionysus did the job, but it got kind of out of hand).