Large language models (LLMs) use data to learn about the world in order to produce meaningful correlations and predictions. As such, the nature, scale, quality, and diversity of the datasets used to train these models, or to support their work at inference time, have a direct impact on their quality. The rapid development and adoption of LLMs of varying quality has brought into focus the scarcity of publicly available, high-quality training data and revealed an urgent need to ground the stewardship of these datasets in sustainable practices with clear provenance chains. To that end, this technical report introduces Institutional Books 1.0, a large collection of public domain books originally digitized through Harvard Library’s participation in the Google Books project, beginning in 2006. Working with Harvard Library, we extracted, analyzed, and processed these volumes into an extensively-documented dataset of historic texts. This analysis covers the entirety of Harvard Library’s collection scanned as part of that project, originally spanning 1,075,899 volumes written in over 250 different languages for a total of approximately 250 billion tokens. As part of this initial release, the OCR-extracted text (original and post-processed) as well as the metadata (bibliographic, source, and generated) of the 983,004 volumes, or 242B tokens, identified as being in the public domain have been made available. This report describes this project’s goals and methods as well as the results of the analyses we performed, all in service of making this historical collection more accessible and easier for humans and machines alike to filter, read and use.
At least one-third of school districts have faced funding cuts due to the increasing costs of pensions.
The latest issue brief from Equable Institute reveals that rising teacher retirement costs driven by pension debt are placing significant financial pressure on K–12 school districts across the country—resulting in cuts to educator compensation, support services, long-term savings, and more.
The analysis, based on a survey of over 1,000 school district leaders and board members nationwide, finds that at least one-third of school districts have cut or deferred spending due to rising pension costs over the past five years. In states where legislatures pay pension costs directly, half of school leaders believe those expenses have led to lower state funding for public education.
Scientific papers: innovation … or imitation?
Sometimes a paper comes out that has the seeds of a great idea that could lead to a whole new line of pioneering research. But, instead, nothing much happens, except imitative works that do not push the core idea forward at all.
For example the McCulloch Pitts paper from 1943 showed how neural networks could represent arbitrary logical or Boolean expressions of a certain class. The paper was well-received at the time, brilliantly executed by co-authors with diverse expertise in neuroscience, logic and computing. Had its signficance been fully grasped, this paper might have, at least notionally, formed a unifying conceptual bridge between the two nascent schools of connectionism and symbolic AI (one can at least hope). But instead, the heated conflict in viewpoints in the field has persisted, even to this day.
Another example is George Miller’s 7 +/- 2 paper. This famous result showed humans are able to hold only a small number of pieces of information in mind at the same time while reasoning. This paper was important not just for the specific result, but for the breakthrough in methodology using rigorous experimental noninvasive methods to discover how human thinking works—a topic we know so little about, even today. However, the followup papers by others, for the most part, only extended or expanded on the specific finding in very minor ways. [1] Thankfully, Miller’s approach did eventually gain influence in more subtle ways.
Discrete Math
This text aims to introduce select topics in discrete mathematics at a level appropriate for first- or second-year undergraduate math and computer science majors, especially those who intend to teach middle and high school mathematics. The book began as a set of notes for the Discrete Mathematics course at the University of Northern Colorado. This course serves both as a survey of the topics in discrete math and as the “bridge” course for math majors, as UNC does not offer a separate “introduction to proofs” course. As this course has evolved to support our computer science major, so has the text. The current version of the book is intended to support inquiry-based teaching for understanding that is so crucial for future teachers, while also providing the necessary mathematical foundation and application-based motivation for computer science students. While teaching the course in Spring 2024 using an early version of this edition, I was pleasantly surprised by how many students reported that they, for the first time, saw how useful math could be in the “real world.” I hope that this experience can be replicated in other classes using this text.
The Fulbright board has resigned, alleging political interference from the Trump administration
on process, which it states is “based on merit, not ideology” and has traditionally been insulated from political interference. The board said the integrity of that process was “now undermined”.
Political appointees at the state department had cancelled Fulbright scholarships for dozens of academics and students, mainly on the basis of their research topics, according to people familiar with the matter.
The prestigious Fulbright Program has long been considered one of the pillars of US cultural diplomacy. It has been widely seen as enhancing America’s relations with its allies, with many Fulbright alumni rising to leadership roles in government, the sciences and the arts.
Trump administration critics say the Fulbright is the latest victim of the White House’s assault on symbols of US soft power. President Donald Trump has terminated funding for the Voice of America broadcasting network; dismantled USAID, the country’s main agency for international aid; and withdrawn from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization.
A senior state department official said the 12 members of the Fulbright board were “partisan political appointees of the Biden administration”, and it was “ridiculous” to believe they would “continue to have final say over the application process”.
Is Harvard Worth Saving—and How?
Harvard is a well-chosen target—not only for its prestige and wealth but also because it has a lot to answer for. Its failure to control antisemitism on campus is only the most recent example. Harvard is the wellspring of DEI madness: Justice Lewis Powell’s controlling opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), which established “diversity” as an excuse for racial discrimination for the next 45 years, was based on what he called “the Harvard College program.”
Harvard’s defenders say that much of what the university does is worthwhile, and that is no doubt true. But what is the public interest in propping up the conglomerate known as Harvard Corp., which refuses to shut down or reform departments and subsidiaries that are a public menace?
The educational crisis of 2023-25 refreshes the lesson of the financial crisis of 2008-09: When we treat an institution as too big to fail, we invite moral hazard.
Bill proposes that the Department of Public Instruction provide virtual reality technology to 16,000 students for math
Students in Ohio saw an 11 percent improvement in their Algebra 1 assessments after using virtual reality for one year, according to the first randomized-control trial conducted from September 2022 to April 2023.
Shannon Cox is the superintendent who brought virtual reality to 16 school districts in southwestern Ohio.
Cox heads the Montgomery County Educational Service Center. In Ohio, there are more than 50 educational service centers that provide administrative, academic, fiscal and operational support services to schools and districts.
According to Cox, bringing virtual reality into the classroom gave students a kinesthetic connection, a real world connection and a career connection to math.
“We knew that we needed to teach differently, because students learn differently,” Cox said. “It’s a different world, and we needed to give teachers different resources to help them do that.”
Seventy-eight percent of students surveyed in Ohio said the technology helped them understand math, 83 percent said it made learning math more interesting and 84 percent said it helped them see how math is used in the real world.
Cox said the feedback from teachers, even veteran teachers, was also positive.
A history and social studies curriculum instructs students to replace the national anthem after critically examining race and racism
World history students in Philadelphia’s public high schools begin a unit about “The Gilded Age and Progressivism” with the question: “What do you need to overthrow oppression?”
The answer outlined in the class curriculum skirts any complexity about the era in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century when industrialization ushered in vast economic, political, and social change. Instead, here is what Philadelphia’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction said students should conclude: “ ‘New horizons of industry’ lead to ‘greed and exploitation.’ ”
The curriculum is recommended only to teachers, which means they have the power to decide whether to follow it in their classrooms. But some teachers said the curriculum’s mere existence shows that Philadelphia public schools are fixated on teaching history through an “oppressed versus oppressor” framework.
Civics: airlines sell customer data to US government
CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest’s air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts.
The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its ownpurchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.
Civics: Law, regulation and “DIE” policies
Attorney General Todd Rokita has sent letters to Butler and DePauw universities concerning their respective diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, which may violate federal and state civil rights laws and the terms of the universities’ nonprofit statuses.
The letters follow a similar inquiry sent by Attorney General Rokita to Notre Dame University on May 9.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that racial discrimination of any kind in our education system is repugnant to our civil rights laws, even if done supposedly to help groups claimed to be disadvantaged or underrepresented,” Attorney General Rokita said. “Hoosiers are rightfully concerned that some education institutions treat students, faculty, staff and others differently based on race under the guise of DEI. We are investigating to determine whether universities’ DEI programs are consistent with the law.”
Publicly available materials and statements from university leaders suggest that various aspects of Butler’s and DePauw’s operations may be governed by policies that treat individuals — including students, prospective students, faculty, staff and job applicants — differently based on the individuals’ race or ethnicity; employ race in a negative manner when making admissions or hiring decisions; or utilize racial stereotyping.
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Notes on Foreign Students
The changes outlined by Edlow would effectively kill the OPT program, said Stuart Anderson, who now runs the National Foundation for American Policy, which supports high-skilled immigration. That would make it impossible for many foreigners to start U.S. businesses after they graduate and significantly dim the allure of American universities for international students, he said.
In a 2022 study, Anderson found that immigrants founded or co-founded 319 of 582 U.S. startup companies that had achieved valuations of $1 billion or more, including Stripe, Instacart and Epic Games. Nearly half of those had been founded by immigrants who attended U.S. universities as international students, the study said. Instagram was co-founded by a Brazilian, Mike Krieger, who studied at Stanford University.
Literacy and the UK
In this episode, Anna Stokke interviews The Right Honourable Sir Nick Gibb, former Minister of State for Schools in England. Nick discusses the bold, evidence-based reforms he led over a decade to reverse declining academic performance in English schools. From phonics-based reading instruction to math mastery, he explains how high expectations, rigorous curricula, and a focus on teacher training transformed outcomes—helping England rise to 4th in the world in reading on PIRLS and one of the highest-performing countries on TIMSS. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in meaningful education reform.
Notes on Teaching and Learning
I don’t particularly like the term science of learning. It implies a single cohesive entity with an agreed-upon, codified set of laws or prescriptions, when in reality it’s a loose and evolving body of interdisciplinary research, drawing from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education, and design. It offers probabilistic insights, not fixed rules.
However, those different disciplines often converge on similar instructional implications such as the importance of managing cognitive load, using retrieval practice to enhance memory, providing worked examples to reduce unnecessary problem-solving strain, spacing learning over time, and ensuring that novices receive explicit, guided instruction before being asked to solve problems independently.
I was five years into my career as a teacher working in an inner-city London school before I learned any of this, and it profoundly changed my practice. I later discovered that many teachers are in the same boat – they were never taught how learning happens, and like me, want to teach their students better, by using approaches grounded in evidence rather than fads, intuition or well-meaning but unproven methods.
However, despite the substantial empirical support underpinning the core elements of learning, there remains a persistent undercurrent of scepticism among some educators. This scepticism often manifests in critiques that systematically overlook the considerable evidence base supporting these methodologies.
The Naval Academy’s History Department is facing a predicament.
I have to remind myself to give a little grace to those who are stationed or work at the Naval Academy. Change is hard. Liberation can be difficult.
Not everyone there was marching down the yard with a bullhorn in one hand, and the Little Red Book in the other. No, as in most leftist takeovers, most just tried to keep their head down and survive. Do good where they can, and hopefully not be denounced and thrown to the baying crowd. Some decided to take advantage of the moment, and Viktor Komarovsky-like, made good for themselves by ingratiating themselves with the cadre.
Some, however, were true believers. Chasing either US News college rankings, virtue signaling to their peers in civilian institutions, or, at its worst, saw an opportunity to make radical cultural change in the U.S. military through its future leaders.
Being in a hard-left part of the country made it even easier, if not inevitable. If you think the political monoculture in DC is bad, it is even worse in Annapolis. Such intellectual terrariums can create some fragile creatures that have difficulty with any contact with the outside world. Throw in all the perils of going full-academic at the university level…well…without some careful self-care, things can get wobbly fast.
In the profession of arms, a solid understanding of history is essential, foundational knowledge. It isn’t an elective—it is an existential requirement.
Notes on Wisconsin’s K-12 Student Climate
Despite the generally positive overall picture, the foundation also notes that for six of the 15 measures for which data on race are available, “Wisconsin’s racial disparities are some of the largest in the country.”
Those measures are:
- Low birth weight: 16.6% of Black children, 6.5% of white children.
- Failure to graduate high school on time: 29% of Black children, 6% of white children.
- Eighth graders who don’t score proficient in math on national assessments: 93% of Black children, 55% of white children.
- Child and teen deaths: 79 deaths per 100,000 Black children, 24 deaths per 100,000 white children.
- Children living in families with a high housing cost burden, meaning more than 30% of income is spent on housing: 44% of Black children, 16% of white children.
- Children living in high poverty areas: 30% of Black children, 1% of white children.
For the first three measures, the gap between Black and white children was the largest in the country. For the last three, it was the second largest behind Kansas, Arkansas and Michigan, respectively.
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adison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Notes on k-12 per student $pending in government and choice schools
Property taxes most hated tax for fixed income families
About 1,153 students in the Green Bay Area Public School District use a voucher to attend a private school, amounting to $12 million in state aid. That’s just 3.8% of the district’s $311 million budget—even though those students represent over 6% of enrollment.
A similar story holds statewide. On average, Wisconsin school districts receive $15,569 in state and local revenue per student, while choice schools receive $10,798. Statewide, spending on choice students represents about 4.6% of total educational spending even though choice students are about 6.5% of total enrollment. Bottom line: taxpayers are getting more value per dollar.
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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average taxes – about $25k per student, along with long term, disastrous reading results.
“Don’t major in journalism”
In this episode of “Office Hours,” John J. Miller, director of the Dow Journalism Program, discusses why Hillsdale has a journalism minor (but no major!), how aspiring journalists can still make a living despite the decline of journalism, how to improve your own writing, and why no one should pursue a Ph.D. in journalism. This is the thirteenth in a series of virtual visits with Hillsdale faculty.
Jeopardy! Champion Skips LSAT for Dream Job for Young Men: Stay-At-Home Son
Liaw, 27, has a master’s degree in political science and, judging by his quiz-show performances, an expansive knowledge of everything from the Middle Ages to pop music. He won $59,398 in three contests that aired last week.
He is also unemployed and lives with his parents. At his request, “Jeopardy” host Ken Jennings introduced him at the beginning of each episode as a “recent graduate and stay-at-home son.”
“I figured even if I lost my first game, at least I could make people laugh,” he says.
It worked. Liaw’s self-deprecating humor made him an overnight legend on social media, where people say he is, like, pretty much living their dream, lol.
The phrase “stay-at-home son” was added to the Urban Dictionary in 2007 as an insult to be hurled at an unmotivated man-child. Lately, though, members of the generation that brought us “quiet quitting” and “lazy-girl jobs” have embraced the label as an ironic badge of honor. .
Where else would they go?
But according to a new report in the Journal, there is one respect in which Harvard is the top “party” school. It is the favorite academic institution of the Chinese Communist Party.
The story says the Chinese leadership regards Harvard as the best training ground for the many thousands of midcareer bureaucrats it sends for executive education and postgraduate studies at U.S. campuses. Alumni include a former vice-president and the country’s top U.S. trade-relations negotiator. Sons and daughters of prominent communist leaders have also studied there.
Readers of a certain mindset will smile inwardly when they hear that the college at the pinnacle of America’s higher education is also the place where the elite of America’s principal geopolitical adversary go to learn how to turn their country into the dominant superpower. Revolutionary Marxists committed to the ultimate destruction of Western civilization and American-led capitalism? At Harvard? Of course. Where else would they go?
I jest—a little. Harvard’s faculty—in economics, the hard sciences, medicine and mathematics especially—still comprises some of the greatest minds on the planet; the research conducted there remains world-beating, and even in some undergraduate humanities programs I am told it is still possible to get a proper education with a minimum of mandatory indoctrination about decolonization, intergenerational racial equity, exploitative capital or gender studies. Harvard’s status as a magnet for the world’s best and brightest is still beneficial for the U.S. While those communist princelings will mostly go back home and figure out how to destroy us, many of the finest international students attracted to U.S. universities will stay and contribute greatly to American prosperity and welfare.
“the Kenyan government had granted full diplomatic immunity to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation”
The world of the 21st century is mystifyingly complex, but we at least have obscure bureaucratic documents, like Kenya’s Gazette Supplement 181 of 2024, to help us peer into the machinery through which the planet often works.
The document, dated Oct. 4, 2024, and carrying the name of Kenya’s minister of foreign affairs, announced that the Kenyan government had granted full diplomatic immunity to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. An organization must affirmatively ask Kenya’s highest leadership for such privileges, which they can only grant through a vote of the full cabinet and with the support of the country’s president and deputy president. The immunity announcement was a complete surprise to Kenyan political watchers, and did not say who at the foundation was being immunized or why. The government has never willingly disclosed any of the details of whatever agreement it reached with the Gates Foundation, then in the process of…..
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More.
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Was the $5 Billion Worth It? A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters–and regrets, Mea Culpa on Small Learning Communities; Does More Money Matter?
Notes on YouTube (Google) Censorship
Ann Althouse Summary:
For years, YouTube has removed videos with derogatory slurs, misinformation about Covid vaccines and election falsehoods, saying the content violated the platform’s rules. But since President Trump’s return to the White House, YouTube has encouraged its content moderators to leave up videos with content that may break the platform’s rules rather than remove them, as long as the videos are considered to be in the public interest. Those would include discussions of political, social and cultural issues….
Wisconsin FFA sets new membership record 
Agricultural education is expanding in schools, even though fewer young people are growing up on a farm.
Cheryl Zimmerman is the Executive Director for Wisconsin FFA, and also Secretary for the National FFA. She tells Brownfield this could be a record year for attendence with a large number of proficiency awards, FFA stars, and growing membership. “We have seen a record number. We are at 27,556 members. This is the highest membership in the history of our organization since 1929.”
Zimmerman says Wisconsin will present charters to two new chapters. “The La Crosse middle school chapter is going to receive a charter at the opening session, as well as the Algoma FFA. They’ve reactivated.”
LaCrosse is the only middle school FFA chapter in Wisconsin, and the state’s first in over 30 years.
“Red Flags for Education Research”
Teachers are expected to use evidence-based approaches and strategies- yet no one has ever trained us how to read and interpret research!
Huge thanks to @rastokke who, this past weekend at the @researchEDCan conference, shared this 1-page “red flags for education research” for teachers and, just as importantly, the literacy coaches and consultants who are telling us what to do! Find it here: annastokke.com/_files/ugd/596…
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When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That
Inside the Measles Crisis
At the turn of the twenty-first century, measles, a highly contagious respiratory illness, was declared eliminated from the United States, thanks to herd immunity achieved through a critical mass of vaccination. Yet at the beginning of this year, Katherine Wells, the public health director for the city and county of Lubbock, found herself in the midst of a measles resurgence. The disease, which most commonly affects children, found its way into a Mennonite community in nearby Gaines County, where vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) hover at around 82 percent, well below the national average of 93 percent. Two children from there died of the disease, in February and April. It wasn’t just the deaths that shook Wells, who has two young daughters. “Putting a child on a ventilator or having them be in the hospital for multiple days because of dehydration or they can’t breathe—it’s tough on those little bodies,” she said. Texas Monthly spoke with Wells by phone in April, when Lubbock was still at the heart of an outbreak in Texas that had sent more than sixty people to the hospital, then once again in May, when the reported number had exceeded eighty.
Your Kids Are Nothing More Than a Revenue Stream in a K-12 Jobs Program for Adults
With a captive audience, guaranteed revenue, and increased funding for poor performance, public schools have little incentive to ensure any child learns.
There’s an enormous disconnect between what parents think public schools do and what the system actually produces. People believe schools exist to educate kids.
They don’t.
Like so many other systems run by the government, public schools exist to perpetuate themselves and increase their power. They do this by employing people who will vote as a bloc to ensure their continued employment and, thus, the system’s growth.
I experienced twenty years of relentless and purposeful mission creep as a teacher in three large suburban school districts in densely-populated California metros.
The California Department of Education says it spent $16,881 per pupil
in the 2020-21 school year, 282% more than the $6,036 they spent per student in 2000.1
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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Commentary on vouchers
NPR summary
House Republicans’ reconciliation bill, which includes a first-of-its-kind national private school voucher program, is now heading to the Senate.
The proposal would use the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use to attend private secular or religious schools, even in states where voters have opposed such efforts.
Debates about voucher programs have raged on throughout the years. But what does the research say? NPR education correspondent Cory Turner unpacks it.
Walton Heirs To Start A New STEM-Focused University In Arkansas
The new university would focus on building a skilled STEM workforce, concentrating on globally competitive areas such as automation, logistics, biotech and computing. It would grant stackable credentials in those areas, which could be combined with other degrees a student might earn.
The school expects that its initial class, to be enrolled “in the coming years,” will consist of about 500 students, with projections that total enrollment could eventually grow to about 1,500 undergraduates and 500 non-degree learners over time. Initial plans call for students’ tuition to be fully covered in order to “attract enterprising candidates with entrepreneurial spirit.”
Today’s announcement was made at the Heartland Summit being held this year in Bentonville. The Summit is an annual event organized by Heartland Forward, a non-profit policy think tank that aims to to stimulate economic growth in the central region of the United States.
According to its website, Heartland Forward has a goal of generating $500 million of economic impact for the middle states by 2030 through a focus on four pillars: innovation and entrepreneurship, talent pipelines, health and wellness, and regional competitiveness.
Reconstitute Higher Education
The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.
The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).
The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth
Getting Past Procastination
Here’s the core idea that changed my perspective on productivity: Action leads to motivation, not the other way around. You should not check your email or scroll Instagram while you wait for motivation to “hit you.” Instead, just start doing something, anything, that makes progress toward your goal, and you’ll find that motivation will follow.
For example, if I have a high-priority, complex bug-fixing challenge at work, my approach is to decompose the problem into something much simpler. Could I simply add a log statement that prints the value of a relevant variable? My goal at this point is not to solve the bug, it’s simply to take a tiny step forward.
The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models in the Context of Problem Complexity
Parshin Shojaee*†, Iman Mirzadeh*, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar
Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scal- ing properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily fo- cus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. How- ever, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces’ structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of composi- tional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures. This setup enables the analysis of not only final answers but also the internal reasoning traces, offering insights into how LRMs “think”. Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter- intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs with their standard LLM counterparts under equivalent inference compute, we identify three performance regimes: (1) low- complexity tasks where standard models surprisingly outperform LRMs, (2) medium-complexity tasks where additional thinking in LRMs demonstrates advantage, and (3) high-complexity tasks where both models experience complete collapse.
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But anybody who thinks LLMs are a direct route to the sort AGI that could fundamentally transform society for the good is kidding themselves. This does not mean that the field of neural networks is dead, or that deep learning is dead. LLMs are just one form of deep learning, and maybe others — especially those that play nicer with symbols – will eventually thrive. Time will tell. But this particular approach has limits that are clearer by the day.
Math symbol frequencies
I checked out a copy of Raúl Rojas’s The Language of Mathematics: The Stories behind the Symbols at my local library this morning. As the subtitle says, it covers the history and eventual standardization of many many mathematical symbols. The book is several years old, but the English translation (by Eduardo Aparicio from the original Spanish) is new. I first read about it in this Scientific American article (that’s an Apple News link).
Civics: Domestic Surveillance
“Surveillance in the U.S. didn’t begin with Trump, nor will it end when he leaves the White House. The foundations for the current state of techno-surveillance were laid over decades, with bipartisan support for policies that normalized invasive practices in law enforcement, the military, and border control,” says the Bahraini civil rights activist Esra’a Al Shafei, who has been studying this issue for years, in a conversation with EL PAÍS. “This system is fueled by large budgets allocated to intelligence agencies, as well as private providers, all under the pretext of national security and crime prevention.” Companies like Palantir, Anduril, and GEO Group are providing Washington with digital tools to build this entire surveillance infrastructure.
Trump continues to add layers to this system. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed in April that it is using a tool called Babel X to collect social media information about travelers who may be subject to increased surveillance, according to the agency itself. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for its part, has acknowledged using another program, SocialNet, which aggregates data from more than 200 sources, including Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and dating apps.
The University of Michigan is employing undercover investigators to monitor student protesters in Gaza.
The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.
The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Civics: “A data-driven investigation into the way coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza surpasses actual genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, and beyond”
Concept creep describes the phenomenon in which morally potent terms expand beyond their original definitions into ever broader applications. As these terms become more diluted, they also become politically weaponized, shifting public perceptions, priorities, and policy.
In August 2020, I illustrated in these pages how terms like racism, white supremacy, and privilegesaw a dramatic surge in media usage, significantly reshaping public and political perceptions and discourse. The same dynamic, I feared, was beginning to reshape another crucial term: genocide.
Genocide is going the way of racism and white supremacy, I observed on Oct. 19, 2023. Israel hadn’t yet invaded Gaza, but the mainstream media template for response to Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 attacks was already set. Sure enough, by 2024, mentions of genocide in The New York Times (1.43% of all articles) had eclipsed the paper’s earlier peak for white supremacy (1.41% in 2020) and, though not matching the peak for racism/racist(s) (7.2% in 2020), still reflected a similar pattern of conceptual escalation.
civics: a look at the Presidential “autopen”
NEW SPREADSHEET DROP: Where Was Biden when he signed all his EOs? I’ve compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet tracking Biden’s physical location on 1,000+ exact dates of Executive Order and Pardon from his presidency — for the purpose of investigating autopen use.
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Face-to-face conflict has become an uncomfortable prospect for a generation, and this generation has turned to this solution as their go-to option
The “Notice of No Contact” order landed in May’s inbox on Feb. 15, 2022. It was stern and lawyerly and contained a bulleted list of prohibited behaviors between May, then a Tulane freshman, and her former roommate: No approaching each other at any time. No communicating through third parties. No social media interactions whatsoever.
The directive, which came from Tulane’s division of student affairs, was “based on the right of every Tulane community member to avoid contact with another community member if such contact may be harmful or detrimental.” Though the measure was purportedly “nondisciplinary,” it ended on an ominous note: “A violation of this Order could result in an immediate interim suspension and against [sic] conduct charges to you.”
Off-Campus Conservative-Backed Institute Says It Fills a Void at Harvard
Kate Selig and Simon J. Levien
A Harvard spokesman declined a request for an interview, noting the Abigail Adams Institute’s independence from the university. But Alan M. Garber, the university president, recently pledgedto speed up the creation of a campus initiative on viewpoint diversity, and in a May letter responding to the Trump administration, he said that the two have “common ground,” including in fostering “intellectual diversity.”
Some students and faculty members have criticized the administration for caving to right-wing demands. But students who participate in the institute said the campus needs more places open to heterodox opinions.
Shani Agarwal Hood, who earned a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2023, sought out the institute when she arrived at Harvard in search of a literary salon culture, friends and free inquiry.
She believes Harvard hasn’t always struck the right balance between fostering a respectful and inclusive environment and protecting free expression. As a Catholic, she said, her views have sometimes clashed with those of her peers.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: California’s Five Alarm Pension Fire
Before the reforms, public-safety workers could retire at age 50 and receive a pension credit of 3% of their final salary for every year they worked. That means a 50-year-old firefighter who earned $250,000 could retire with a $187,500 annual pension for life—and thereafter work a part-time job that qualifies him for Social Security.
The 2013 reforms reduced the maximum pension credit for new hires to 2.7% and required them to work until 57 to receive it. If they retire earlier, their credit is reduced. Workers are also required to contribute half of the actuarial “normal cost” of their pensions, which doesn’t include the tab for the unfunded liability caused by prior benefit increases.
Despite the 2013 reforms, governments are still drowning in pension debt, which has prompted repeated tax hikes. For every $10,000 that a state firefighter earns in compensation, the state pays $5,000 into the state pension fund. For highway patrol officers, the charge is $7,000. Private workers no doubt wished their employers chipped in 50% to 70% of their salaries to their 401(k)s.
Accountability Administrative Presentation
The DPI might have distanced itself from NAEP standards, but new MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius is blasting out the district’s abysmal NAEP scores.
Showing this slide in a budget presentation is a remarkable departure from what we’ve previously seen out of MPS
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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
Student reporters at Stanford University revealed China’s spying methods using Chinese nationals.
This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.
To understand how China uses its students as spies, read the stunning investigative report published last month by Stanford Review reporters Garret Molloy and Elsa Johnsonin which they documented the infiltration of Stanford University by the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP is orchestrating a widespread academic espionage campaign at Stanford,” Johnson told me and my co-host, Danielle Pletka, in a recent podcast interview. “Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she added, “and that’s a huge incentive for China.”
Harvard Law Review Retaliates Against Alleged Leaker—And Demands He Press Free Beacon To Destroy Documents
The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents to the Washington Free Beacon and demanded, as part of the journal’s disciplinary process, that he request their destruction, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. The demand came as the law review was under a document retention order stemming from multiple federal probes, raising questions about whether the journal was also trying to interfere with a government investigation.
The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 that it was investigating reports of racial discrimination at the journal, according to the New York Times. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the government in that investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.
“Millions of girls were aborted for being girls”
Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not want a large family—or, in China, were not allowed one—started routinely terminating females. Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.
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The Demographic Future of Humanity:
Credentialism and family formation.
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Choose Life
Dumbing down our public schools doesn’t promote ‘equity’
Such an absurd lowering of standards would do students a disservice. And not only is this approach wrong on the merits, it’s been shown to be ineffective in raising outcomes for students. In San Leandro, which implemented similar changes in 2016, lowering the standards for grading hasn’t led to a significant reduction in disparities. Recently, I spoke out against the Palo Alto Unified School District’s plan to take away honors biology after already cutting honors English — moves I fear will have negative long-term impacts on all students.
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more.
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“Grades” and the taxpayer funded Madison school District. Madison elected officials have generally been silent on our long term, disastrous reading results.
civics: Wisconsin Supreme Court 4-3 over ruled 9-0 by US Supreme Court
BREAKING: A 9-0 Supreme Court rules Wisconsin violated the First Amendment by denying a Catholic charity group an exemption to the state’s unemployment tax. #SCOTUS supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf…
more.
Sun Prairie High School staffers on leave amidst criminal probe
Officers are in the early stages of investigating “alleged criminal activity involving inappropriate relationships with staff,” according to a statement from Lt. Ray Thomson.
Thomson did not say how many staff members had been placed on leave, but said that investigators believe the allegations are solely within the high school.
In an email to parents signed by Superintendent Brad Saron, Principal Jen Ploeger and other district leaders, the district said the investigation involved “inappropriate communications and relationships between staff and students from Sun Prairie West High School. Any staff members currently involved in the investigation have been placed on administrative leave and no longer have access to school district facilities or resources.”
An “expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications”
And these problems are rife throughout the academy. A Smith College commencement speaker this year even had to surrender her honorary degree when it turned out her speech had been stolen.
It’s not just about copying. There’s also a widely acknowledged “replication crisis”: Scientists publish papers reporting results, but it’s increasingly impossible for others to reproduce those results, leading to what some have called an existential crisis for research.
We’re told cuts to federal spending on higher education will imperil research, but such claims would be more troubling if the “research” were of more reliably high quality.
It’s an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, “data torture” and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.
The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking.
Of course, research isn’t the only justification for higher education; we had colleges and universities long before professors saw academic publication as the major goal of their jobs.
Harvard & International Students
Some U.S. politicians have said that China’s Communist Party is harvesting expertise in American academia to ultimately harm U.S. interests. The Trump administration has cited these criticisms among others to back its efforts to force a major cultural shift in U.S. colleges, which many conservatives regard as bastions of liberal and left-wing ideology.
American universities have played leading roles in shaping China’s overseas training programs for mid-career officials, which Beijing started arranging at scale in the 1990s as a way to improve governance by exposing its bureaucrats to Western public-policy ideas and practices.
Other U.S. colleges that have offered executive training to Chinese officials include Syracuse, Stanford, the University of Maryland and Rutgers, according to publicity materials and other disclosures. Syracuse’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, for instance, helped set up postgraduate programs in public administration at Chinese universities in the early 2000s.
The investigation at Madisom Southside Elementary has been completed; will be appointing new leaders
The two had nonetheless remained on the district’s payroll, although amid the investigation district leaders have refused to say what they were doing. Leading Southside have been an interim principal and assistant principal.
In the Wednesday email, district Superintendent Joe Gothard says Southside’s current leadership team “will select a group of staff, parents, teachers, and community members” to participate in a community panel that will work with district human resources to hire a new principal. Such a panel was not used when Terrell was hired as a principal in 2020, the district has said, because of complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Taxpayer funded School Boards and open meetings
St. Francis School District supt Deb Kerr, a former state superintendent candidate, kicks out a reporter for trying to cover a public school board meeting on camera. Here’s the full video: tiktok.com/t/ZP8MXbcNv/
More.
And.
How Cheating spreads in law school
When Noah Werksman began his first final exam in law school, the classroom was half-empty. “There were 60, maybe 70 people in our cohort,” he says in an interview. “At least 30 students were missing.”
Mr. Werksman, 27, came to Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in Malibu, Calif., in the summer of 2023. “It was what we call a racehorse exam,” he says of the final. “It’s pretty guaranteed you’re not going to finish, but you have to move as fast as possible and rack up as many points as you can.”

Civics: Privacy, The Courts and Openai chat logs
OpenAI is now fighting a court order to preserve all ChatGPT user logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering—after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.
“Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to ‘preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying),” OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.null
US immigration authorities collecting DNA information of children in criminal database
US immigration authorities are collecting and uploading the DNA information of migrants, including children, to a national criminal database, according to government documents released earlier this month.
The database includes the DNA of people who were either arrested or convicted of a crime, which law enforcement uses when seeking a match for DNA collected at a crime scene. However, most of the people whose DNA has been collected by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency that published the documents, were not listed as having been accused of any felonies. Regardless, CBP is now creating a detailed DNA profile on migrants that will be permanently searchable by law enforcement, which amounts to a “massive expansion of genetic surveillance”, one expert said.
The DNA information is stored in a database managed by the FBI called the Combined DNA Index System (Codis), which is used across the country by local, state and federal law enforcement to identify suspects of crimes using their DNA data.
k-12 curriculum
Hillsdale College’s K-12 curriculum is content-rich, balanced, and strong, and with emphasis upon the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history, with attention to music, art, physical education, and foreign languages.
Hillsdale College has written and published multiple curriculum products. These include a complete collection of lesson plans for teaching American history, civics, and government K-12, Literacy Essentials: The Journey from Spelling to Reading, and the K-12 Program Guide.
As northeastern universities decline, Florida picks up the slack
American higher education is in crisis. Pathologies that had been growing for decades and were catalyzed by Covid mania burst into the open after Hamas’s attack on Israel. As financier-activist and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote following Claudine Gay’s resignation, anti-Semitism tends to erupt where political cultures decay. At many “elite” universities, that decay has taken the form of ideological indoctrination, academic corruption, racial discrimination, and contempt for broader society. These institutions have compromised their basic pedagogical and research missions, along with core values like free speech, due process, and equality under law.
Yet while legacy universities dominate headlines, a transformation is taking place elsewhere, and it deserves more attention. Students are voting with their feet, abandoning the “colds and scolds” of the Northeast for more favorable climates—both intellectual and meteorological.
Notes on credentialism and family formation, continued
The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids.
Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.)
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The Demographic Future of Humanity:
Credentialism and family formation.
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Choose Life
Notes on University of Wisconsin-Madison DEI Administrators
After former UW-Madison chief diversity officer LaVar Charleston was demoted due to a pattern of “poor decision-making,” the Trump Administration started crackdowns on DEI in universities across the country, and a report released by the state legislature revealed that the Universities of Wisconsin failed to track spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, UW-Madison and UW Health have made changes to DEI on campus.
Charleston had served as the director of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement, so Provost Charles Isbell Jr. was named to temporarily lead the DDEEA until an interim director could be found. As of June 2nd, a replacement for Charleston still had not been hired.
However, UW-Madison created a new position called “special advisor for access and community” to “advise leadership in the development of the university’s overall plans regarding access and community.” Professor and associate dean Percival Matthews was appointed to the role and will “report directly to the chancellor and provost.”
Matthews leads the School of Education’s Center for Community and Well-Being, which was preceded by the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. The CCWB occupies the same office space as the OEDI did.
Recent headlines predict challenging times for higher education
Over a mere two days recently (May 14-15), the major daily news outlets serving higher education, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported the following:
- Data collected by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) reveals that state-government support of universities rose by a minuscule inflation-adjusted 0.8 percent in the last year, an actual decline after adjusting for enrollment or income growth;
- Penn State University has announced plans to close seven campuses;
- The U.S. House of Representatives appears poised to make sharp reductions in federally guaranteed student-loan support, for example capping support for graduate and professional students and forcing colleges to share in losses from students defaulting on their loans;
- Congress seems poised to sharply increase current federal endowment taxes for applicable private schools, expanding the number of affected schools beyond 50;
- A study reveals that inflation-adjusted compensation for faculty members fell over three percent over the decade 2013-2023, while rising by four percent for higher-education staff, further indicating the increased collegiate domination by bloated administrations and the downplaying of core academic functions;
- Financially shaky Bastyr University in Washington said it wanted to sell its main campus in order to get funds to operate.
Higher education is paying a very high price for allowing leftish ideological predilections to dominate policy decisions on college campuses, putting the achievement of certain perceived social-justice goals ahead of a merit-based promotion of the core mission of discovery and the dissemination of knowledge and ideas—truth and beauty.
k-12 Accountability and History Knowledge
Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, is putting pressure on the Virginia Board of Education to include social studies exam scores in the state’s new school accountability system, which is set to take effect this fall.
The new system will publicly rank each Virginia school in one of four performance categories: distinguished, on track, off track and needs intensive support. The criteria for each ranking include test scores in reading, writing math and science – but not social studies.
VanValkenburg sent a letter to the Virginia Board of Education on Monday, asking members to incorporate social studies exam scores into the school accountability system. The letter’s signers include leaders of the American Historical Association, National Council for the Social Studies and the Virginia Social Science Association, among other organizations.
Yale Students expressed frustration with grade inflation and disparities between subjects.
Grade point average cutoffs to graduate with Latin honors for the class of 2025 remained unchanged from their record high last year.
This year, a GPA of 3.98 or higher earned the distinction of summa cum laude, while at least 3.95 and 3.90 merited magna cum laude and cum laude distinctions, respectively, according to Paul McKinley DRA ’96, Yale College’s associate dean for communications. The class of 2023 was the first class for which the cutoff for summa cum laude was as high as 3.98.
“In my experience, grades are inflated pretty much across the board and A’s hardly mean anything anymore,” Andy Nilipour ’25 wrote to the News.
Nilipour is one of 12 seniors interviewed by the News who found the high Latin honors cutoffs unsurprising given the persistent grade inflation at Yale. Some said the Latin honors system disadvantages students in STEM disciplines that tend to award lower grades.
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Grade inflation at Yale College:
Top 5% GPA: 3.98 or higher
Top 15% GPA: 3.95 or higher
Top 30% GPA: 3.9 or higher
Watertown students total over $720,000 in scholarships
Watertown High School’s scholarship program Monday evening carried a hefty price tag. Not for the school district or the students, but the donors who endowed the funding for many of the area’s best to continue their academic studies.
$723,145 was announced at Monday evening’s ceremony, split among 76 graduating WHS seniors. Those receiving the funding have a wide range of future plans, including four-year universities, trade schools, and more.
In addition to the local scholarship money received by the students, many also received financial aid or scholarship packages from the universities or colleges they will be attending, increasing the total aid.
The top 14 earners as well as the full list of scholarships can be found on Page A4.
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government a “Party School”?
Can it really be that Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (KSG) teaches nothing about the fundamental principles of liberty and individual rights (especially free speech) at the heart of America’s constitutional order, which would be subversive to any Chinese student? Are there any courses that even expose students—any students, not just foreign students—to, say, the Federalist Papers?
It is hard to tell from the KSG’s website. Although it does have a complete course list and faculty descriptions, it does not provide either the syllabus or reading list for any specific course, but I don’t see any likely candidates. To the contrary, what you see from the course offerings are two main things: lots of technical instruction on advanced econometrics, finance, advanced managerial theory, and other quantitative skills, and a lot of courses clearly anchored in contemporary progressive fetishes, such as—wait for it!—climate change (eight courses on the issue); social justice; a three-course sequence on inequality and social policy, because you can’t possibly understand inequality from just one course, even at Harvard, and fifty courses related to gender. KSG’s curriculum includes a total of 35 coursesrelated to “racism & bias.”
I can only spot maybe three KSG faculty who aren’t conventional liberals or deep leftists, and no real conservatives to speak of. I can’t see a single course where someone might read the Federalist Papers, or any kind of serious exposure to the thought of the founding era. Instead, you can take “DPI-348: Progressive Alternatives: Institutional Reconstruction Now,” by noted radical Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The course description reads, in part:
Poor kids have a right to Shakespeare, Bach, Plato
There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.
Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”
School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”
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Personal Finance & High Schoolers
When people lament the state of financial education in America, they aren’t complaining about these kids.
More than 120 high-schoolers competed in the National Personal Finance Challenge in Atlanta that ended Monday. It was run by the Council for Economic Education, which brought together the top four-person teams among some 18,000 state-level competitors. Scripps Ranch High School in San Diego took the top prize.
The final round asked the remaining four teams to supply short answers to 20 questions about everything from mortgage discount points to 401(k) matches. We turned a selection of them into multiple-choice questions.
Rowan Ward, a sophomore who was on last year’s winning team at Severn School in Severna Park, Md., offers this advice on answering the questions: “Go with your gut and think logically. What makes sense to you?”
Notes on ‘International Students
Notably, few of America’s foreign students are westerners. No European nation even shows up in the top 10 countries for foreign students. The UK is in 15th place and France is only in the 20th. Only Canada, right across the border, is in the top 5, but accounts for only 2.6% of foreign students. Nigeria accounts for three times as many foreign students as France, Iran sends more foreign students than the UK and Pakistan far more than Spain. While most American students who study abroad go to Europe, European students are not going to America.
International students are mostly non-westerners and that’s by design. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, after extensive lobbying by Ivy League colleges, began bringing third world students to America to counter Communist influence. Beneficiaries included Barack Obama Sr and Shyamala Gopalan, the mother of Kamala Harris, along with other radicals, who found positions in the United States and left behind radical children who undermined America.
Whatever benefits we may gain from foreign students are more than outweighed by 8 years of Obama and by the destruction wreaked by the wayward children of other ‘international students’. And those benefits are at the heart of the debate taking place right now.
International Students and US University Finances
Shen Lu, Liyan Qi and Ming Li:
One in every four international students comes from China, and Chinese students form a particularly large share of the student body at top U.S. schools. After they graduate, many assume key roles in U.S. science and engineering endeavors.
A big decline in Chinese enrollment could severely cut into schools’ bottom line and damage U.S. competitiveness, say U.S. experts. “The economic costs are apparent,” said Yingyi Ma, a sociologist at Syracuse University who studies international students in the U.S. “The talent cost has even graver consequences.”
High Turnover with Low Accountability: Local School Board Elections in 16 States
Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz:
We analyze the most comprehensive dataset on U.S. school board elections. We find that nearly half of races go uncontested and that incumbents are reelected more than 80 percent of the time when they run. Because many incumbents retire instead of running for another term, however, turnover is high (with 53 percent of incumbents replaced in a typical election cycle). School board turnover is also only weakly related to student learning rates. These dynamics–high turnover disconnected from school performance challenges–occur across both urban and non-urban districts, regardless of student demographics and local media environments. Together, these results suggest that local democracy produces high leadership churn and minimal incentives to improve student learning, two findings that can inform debates regarding the benefits and costs of local democratic governance.
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more.
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Not Every College Deserves to Be Saved
Levine and Van Pelt compare the present moment to the Industrial Revolution. Colleges and universities, they argue, are facing a “Great Upheaval” as digital learning, shifting student demographics, and changing employer demands render the traditional model obsolete. Rosenberg critiques the sector’s paralysis—elite schools tinker around the edges while regional and small private colleges hemorrhage relevance, students, and money.
Vedder is more direct: Many of these institutions shouldn’t be saved. Their value proposition—skyrocketing tuition in exchange for middling outcomes—is no longer viable. And Shapiro’s Lawlessframes the decay as not just financial or operational, but legal and cultural: colleges and universities have abandoned the principles of due process, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry, and have instead become leftist echo chambers increasingly at odds with their civic mission.
Each author targets the economic dysfunctions plaguing the higher education sector. Tuition has soared even as the return on investment for many degrees has plummeted. Administrative bloat and lavish capital spending on non-academic amenities have widened the disconnect between costs and outcomes. Meanwhile, online platforms and nontraditional providers are undercutting traditional colleges and universities with more flexible, affordable, and often more relevant credentials.
k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: falling birth rates
I again emphasize that the falling birth rate is bad.
- 2024’s bad economy will be 2050’s good economy: 2% growth
- fewer young people taking care of more old people (me!) means huge entitlement expenses, societal resentment, less investment
- Get married and have children!
The Demographic Future of Humanity:
Credentialism and family formation.
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Choose Life
Harvard’s Rigor Problem
William Mao and Veronica Paulus
Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this ‘acclaimed university’?” McMahon wrote in reference to an introductory math course launched last year that she derided as “remedial.”
McMahon is not alone in criticizing Harvard’s academic rigor.
Her argument that the University has gone soft on academics echoes long-standing conservative criticisms that Harvard has become too easy — rooted in what they argue is a practice of accepting applicants and promoting faculty for the diversity they bring to campus, rather than their intellectual merit.
Even among Harvard faculty, most of whom are not inclined to sympathize with McMahon or the logic in her letter, separate but related concerns that some students are increasingly putting academics on the back burner are widespread. A January committee report on classroom norms found that students prioritize extracurricular commitments over their classes — a trend, the report’s authors wrote, that most faculty view “with alarm.”
More than a dozen students, faculty, and administrators told The Crimson that they disagreed with McMahon’s suggestion that Harvard students are intellectually weak. But many also conceded that student priorities have shifted.
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During its test optional phase (2020-2025), about one-quarter of admitted students didn’t submit either an SAT score or an ACT score
Notes on the lack of accountability in taxpayer funded k-12 systems
The biggest concern most of us have is the complete lack of oversight and no accountability in terms of civil rights violations. Oregon seems to be in a persistent state of lawsuits placed upon them regarding discriminatory practices against disabled students, and it looks like other discrimination suits are heading this way, too.
They misallocate SPED dollars, engage in and encourage restraint and seclusion of kids because of their “behaviors” instead of investing in paradigms parents and teachers are asking for.
So my questions are:
What would happen to the civil rights division of the Dept. of Education if this bill passes?
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more.
How do I learn Robotics in 2025?
Do this course https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2
Totally free, don’t need to buy anything just a computer.
I’ve been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow.
Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project.
If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper.
As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank.
An intellectual renaissance begins with memorizing the words that defined America
My foregoing comments might seem to strike a note of hopelessness, but nothing could be further from the truth. I am full of optimism. I see signs of intellectual renewal popping up all around me like saplings from the ashes of some great forest fire. In time, I hope — though I dare not trust — that we will again become a people who demand of our representatives both eloquence and truth, both classical erudition and Christian virtue.
One such sapling is the book I now hold in my hands, the inaugural volume in a series called Finding Our Words, under the editorship of Allison Ellis. This series collects, under various themes, foundational texts in the Western canon, what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” These editions are aimed at the middle or high school student looking to gain a classical education. The selections are accompanied by remarkably good introductions by Tracy Lee Simmons, author of Climbing Parnassus and On Being Civilized. Further, students are given memorization assignments following each reading, consisting of the most critical extracts.
Finding Our Words is right. Only by immersing ourselves in the best words of our forebears, savoring them on our tongues, reciting them over and over until they rest permanently in our hearts, feeling the sting of tears even after the thousandth recitation, only then will we recover something of the culture that made these words possible in the first place. Only by making their words our own will we be able to speak our own words with their command of language.
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Related: Read American Democracy.
The real threat to Higher Education comes from the internet and AI, not Donald Trump
The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.
The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).
The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth.
Part of the problem comes from government. It’s often said that we’re seeing the results of the left’s march through the institutions. But government policies, often based on twisted interpretations of civil-rights laws, accelerated ideological and administrative dominance.
Your role is to serve as their Aristotle
As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” It’s a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision.
The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You’re in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character.
I know, I know: Lots of students will say, “I don’t have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!”
It’s totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don’t fully see the value in it now.
All the evidence on the Wuhan lab leak, properly organised
As readers may know, I began by thinking a lab leak was unlikely, even impossible, as the source of the virus that emerged suddenly in Wuhan at the end of 2019. But during the late spring of 2020 I saw evidence that this hypothesis was in fact quite plausible and needed investigating at the very least. I teamed up with the molecular biologist Alina Chan to write Viral, our book about the search for evidence on both sides of that question. I remained unsure what happened at that stage. Then in the autumn of 2021 more startling evidence emerged to support the lab leak. I now think that is by far the most likely explanation.
Yet still the scientific establishment refused to take the hypothesis seriously, let alone investigate it. There are over 20 million people dead, and you don’t want to know why? Imagine if this were their reaction to a chemical spill that killed thousands of people, or a nuclear accident that killed tens of thousands. This killed millions. I tried to get the Royal Society and The Academy of Medical Sciences to debate it, but they refused: too controversial, they said!
Journals like Nature and Science barely touched the topic and even then only to dismiss the lab leak in condescending tones without bothering to engage with the evidence. Science journalists steered clear of the biggest story of their careers lest it annoy their sources. Yet the public, the world’s governments, and the intelligence community all soon came to the conclusion that a lab leak probably did cause the Wuhan outbreak. I found this institutional ostrich act by Big Science deeply disturbing.
In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The paper was rejected; I suspect that it was another case of not wanting to rock the scientific boat.
Universities Map Out New Investment Strategies to Deal With Tax Hike on Endowments
Several endowment officials said schools also might balk at locking up too much money in long-term investments. They will need cash on hand to pay chunky tax bills and fund capital calls they might have committed to years earlier. Capital calls require clients to fund investment commitments they previously made. Many schools also already have much of their money in long-term investments and might not want to add more.
Lobbyists for schools have spent months visiting Capitol Hill trying to soften the potential blow. The schools say they are modeling for various possibilities, but haven’t started making wholesale changes to their investment portfolios.
At least five schools are expected to be in the 21% tax bracket: Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all of which have endowments of about $25 billion or more. The rate would also apply to other schools with endowments of more than $2 million per U.S. student, potentially sweeping in other schools such as the California Institute of Technology, with an endowment of $4.3 billion.
Writing Skills in the “ai” age
While people who have spent years cultivating their writing skills might bemoan the arrival of AI-assisted writing, there is also a much more optimistic way to view these changes. Until now, the ability to write well was inherently elitist. People fortunate enough to have the time and financial capacity to pursue higher education were better positioned to produce excellent writing.
In the blink of an eye, that has changed. AI is enabling anyone, regardless of education level, to create well-written documents and do so in pretty much any language. It’s a profound change, and it’s also profoundly threatening to institutions such as colleges, which are collecting tuition used in part to teach traditional long-form writing skills to students who will rarely use them after they graduate.
But to lament that good writing will no longer be the exclusive province of elites is, well, elitist. A far better response is to celebrate the arrival of a technology with the promise of truly democratizing written communication.
What about hallucinations?
As documented by a growing list of newsstories, generative AI systems sometimes output false information. In fact, there is some evidencethat hallucinations are an inherent aspect of large language model (LLM) outputs. But hallucinations are an easily solvable problem.
First, anyone using AI to write can examine the resulting text and remove any assertions of fact that are not easily and reliably verifiable. The people who have ended up in hot water for inadvertently turning in documents containing AI hallucinations have failed to successfully do this checking.
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It feels like education is about to be overrun with this kind of thinking and a small number of classical schools will be the only places left where kids still read great books in full and learn to write well on their own.
More on Remedial Math at Harvard
As is often the case, this debate hinges on definitions.
- Is algebra “middle school math” as the White House asserts? Most students on track to go to Harvard take algebra in 8th grade. As Randazzo explains: “Students who were freshmen at Harvard last fall would have been finishing eighth grade when the pandemic hit.” So the timeline lines up as a deficiency that emerged for middle school students when schools were closed.
- Is this new introductory math course a “remedial math course”? Here is how Randazzo defines it: “Remedial math is generally thought of as basic instruction necessary before students can take college-level courses.” It seems like teaching students algebra so they handle the college-level calculus content in the traditional Harvard intro math course fits within that definition.
- Is the need for this course because Harvard admitted students without the math skills found in previous classes? Randazzo cites Harvard’s high average SAT math scores to refute this idea but neglects to mention that Harvard made the SAT optional in the years in which the students in these classes were admitted.
So Harvard’s pushback seems to boil down to: “We are not teaching a remedial math class, we are simply remediating math in a class.” Is that a distinction without a difference?
In the end, as I said to Randazzo, “You don’t get to choose what goes viral,” but hopefully in continuing to put a spotlight on the facts about what students lost during the pandemic, and the student journalism that brought these stories to life, we can gain some perspective on what we owe all our students to make things right.
How the Teachers Union Broke Public Education
On May 17, the Oakland, California, teachers union ended a two-week strike—the union’s third strike in five years. The district offered a substantial salary increase for teachers before the strike even began, but negotiations remained deadlocked for days over the union’s other demands. The Oakland Education Association (OEA) put forward several “common good” proposals that included drought-resistant shrubs, a Climate Justice Day, reparations for Black students, and converting unused school and office buildings into housing for homeless kids and their families.
Most of these “common good” issues were outside the legal scope of teachers’ contracts, but as The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out, OEA is not a rogue branch of the teachers union. The National Education Association (NEA)—the largest labor union in the U.S. representing teachers and other school faculty—explicitly tells teachers to bargain for the “common good,” advising union branches that, “When we expand the continuum of bargaining, we build power, and go on the offense in order to fight for social and racial justice.”
What makes the NEA’s bargaining approach so remarkable is the fact that this union and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have recently inflicted profound racial and social injustice on the country’s school children in the form of extended school closures.
As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of the teachers union and was a union representative at my school for three years. In 2020, however, I began to disagree with the union when it prevented me from returning to my classroom long after studies proved that school reopening was safe, even without COVID-19 mitigation measures. In my experience, the union’s actions were not motivated by sincere fears, but rather by a desire to virtue-signal and maintain comfortable work-from-home conditions.
Although union bosses like Randi Weingarten continue to obfuscate their role in school closures, the historical record is clear: The union repeatedly pushed to keep schools closed, and areas with greater union influence kept schools closed longer. Politicians, public health officials, and the media certainly had a hand in this fiasco, but the union egged ondramatic news stories, framed school reopening as a partisan issue, and directly interfered in CDC recommendations. Teachers saw firsthand that virtual learning was a farce and that children were suffering. While there may be plenty of blame to go around, teachers’ abandonment of their own students was a special kind of betrayal.
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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
But the district is not holding itself accountable where it matters: student performance. For whatever reason, Madison taxpayers have never demanded that the school board set goals for the results of all that investment. Last November voters overwhelmingly approved two referendums, totaling $607 million, the largest increase in MMSD history. And they did that on blind faith. The district never tried to trim costs to keep the numbers down and they never once offered to explain how all that new money would result in things like better test scores, lower truancy rates or a narrowing of the racial achievement gap.
The best of those investments is the focus on reading at an early age. I’m excited for that. But I’d like to see the district announce some specific goals with regard to reading scores in a few years.
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Balaji on accountability:
Tech fixes things, and journos destroy things. We can see this from Atlantic owner Laurene Powell Jobs’ career, as her life’s work involves destroying American cities:
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The #MississippiMiracle shows that effective education is possible, even on a tight budget.
With conservative reforms and a focus on phonics, Mississippi’s test scores are soaring, proving that the right approach can change lives.
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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
“Superbabies”
Polygenic testing startups are Silicon Valley at its most audacious: promising to make future generations healthier and smarter, while inviting deep controversy over the soundness of the science and its potential for harm. Studies have shown that assigning “risk scores” for polygenic diseases is still a crapshoot, the results “random” and “inconsistent,” while critics claim they over-rely on data from people of European descent and offer parents a dangerous illusion of control. Hank Greely, a bioethics and law professor at Stanford University who taught Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui, said polygenic risk scores are “unproven, unprovable, unclear,” and that couples who have used them to select embryos have “wasted money.” He told me his former student Siddiqui was “very smart” but had likely “gotten ahead of her skis.”
Trump Threatens to Redistribute $3 Billion in Harvard Grants to Trade Schools
“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” he posted on his Truth Social platform early on Memorial Day. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”
The announcement, which provided no further specifics, comes as Trump continues to apply pressure on Harvard as part of a broadside against what he calls “woke” ideology and antisemitism on college campuses. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it was cutting off Harvard’s ability to enroll international students before a federal judge temporarily halted the move.
Trump’s plan would likely face further legal scrutiny, especially if Congress appropriated the grant money in question for specific purposes.
Harvard has been locked in a battle with the Trump administration since March, when the government said it was reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding over antisemitism concerns. Harvard filed a federal lawsuit against the government, arguing the Trump administration has violated the university’s constitutional rights as well as due process.
KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).
The “AI Existential Risk” Industrial Complex
Funding
Their “AI Existential Risk” ideology had the financial backing of $1.6 billion from a few Effective Altruism billionaires, namely Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn, Vitalik Buterin, and Sam Bankman-Fried (yes, the convicted felon).
Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy is by far the largest donor to most of the “AI Existential Risk” organizations.
The “AI Existential Risk” Lobbying
Nowadays, the “AI Existential Risk” ecosystem encompasses hundreds of organizations. Many advocate extreme authoritarian measures to stop/pause AI. They include “requiring registration and verifying location of hardware,” “a strict licensing regime, clamp down on open-source models, and impose civil and criminal liability on developers.”
ControlAI even proposed a 20-year pause, because the “default” is human extinction by Godlike AI, and “two decades provide the minimum time frame to construct our defenses.”
Staying informed about this growing “AI existential risk” ecosystem is important. So, the information below aims to familiarize you with the various players involved.
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more:
All of this turned out to be profoundly wrong. Now, ironically, many of the Doomers — who prior to DeepSeek had tried to ban American models now currently in use — are trying to rebrand as “China Hawks.” If they had their way, the U.S. would have already lost the AI race!
Stop Occupying The Universities!
I want to focus on the ethics: why some students (and non-students) think they have a moral right – or even a duty – to disrupt universities to force them to do certain things.
Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations.
Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop
P2. If there is something I can do to make a terrible thing stop then I ought morally to do it
P3. This university in my city has a student exchange programme with some universities in Israel
P4. If I disrupt the operations of this university sufficiently, they may agree to end the exchange programme in exchange for ending the disruption [Intermediate goal]
P5. Ending the exchange programme would [by some mysterious means] make the Israeli government stop doing terrible things [Final goal]
Conclusion. Therefore, I ought to disrupt the university
I think there are three major ethical failures in this argument.
- Odious ends-means reasoning (P4)
- Lack of legitimacy (P2)
- Narcissistic causal reasoning (P5)
Note: Although I am focusing on the case of anti-Israel protestors, the same 3 general ethical failures will apply to other cases, such as the student protests demanding bans on cooperating with fossil fuel companies.
BUREAUCRACY would destroy Western civilization if left unchecked
The World War-era historians—Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley—operated at intellectual levels we can’t match today. Despite our “progress” myth, we’ve intellectually regressed. These giants accurately predicted our 21st century collapse: atheism, caesarism, social alienation, population decline. Their most urgent warning? BUREAUCRACY would destroy Western civilization if left unchecked. We ignored them, and now it’s devouring everything that made our civilization great, exactly as they predicted.
“Mississippi Can’t Possibly Have Good Schools”
This isn’t just wrong. It’s a problem. There are lessons for our education community and for both political parties.
Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All
• We miss opportunities to help kids. I’m not saying we should go “full Finland” and turn Mississippi into a junket destination and object of hero worship. It’s not perfect. As just one example, Mississippi’s 8th grade reading results are not as impressive as its 4th grade outcomes. But we need to celebrate their thoughtful statewide strategy that has dramatically improved results without a colossal increase in spending. Their progress is not a fluke. It’s a clue.
• Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for instance, what’s going on in Oregon. Or Vermont. Or Maryland. There’s a case to be made that their instructional quality is among the weakest in the country based on their performance trends over the past decade. And yet, when’s the last time you heard them being pressed to defend their poor outcomes? They’re getting a pass.
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“The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.”
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Mississippi’s Momentum for Improving Reading Achievement by Kymyona Burk
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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning
A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.
DIFFERENCES IN BRAIN ACTIVITY
The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study. That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking, says van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology at NTNU. “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she says. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.
The Surveilled Student
Along with wearing masks and social distancing, students living on campus would be expected to wear a coin-size “BioButton” attached to their chests with medical adhesive. It would continuously measure their temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate, and tell them whether they’d been in close contact with a button wearer who’d tested positive for Covid-19. In conjunction with a series of daily screening questions, the button would let them know if they were cleared for class.