Yang Wen-li's Flying Hugbox

I am becoming something of an education doomer, or at least for like 70% of students. I am really worried about the degree to which undergrads are dependent on LLMs in really fundamental ways. Even when they do not use AI to write the paper outright, they consult them heavily in the brainstorming process in incredibly obvious ways. As a result, they are not being forced to do the things that are hard that make you grow intellectually. Maybe this is just being a humanitiescuck, but I do think you're supposed to expand your own intellectual powers and that you're supposed to be able to develop your own ideas without a machine telling you how you can "articulate" them. "Oh but actually the machines are actually part of your cognition." Well I thought that was bullshit when people said it about phones and I think it's bullshit now. Importantly: articulating is the thinking. Part of the joy of philosophy is when a really difficult thought is brought into words in a bright flash and it's not the same thing it was before, but you can communicate it and put it into conversation with other people and your real life.

Ladies and gentlemen, we may have dethroned the "ancient civilizations weren't conscious" theory.

oh hey Fomenko's New Chronology, been years since I heard about that whacky conspiracy theory

This saga does also illustrate something I learned about in library school, which is: when management starts reducing your staffing (or other resources) to the point that it jeopardizes your ability to function, make visible cuts.

Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.

In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)

If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.

Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"

And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!

In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?

It can feel like sort of a dick move--to your immediate boss, your coworkers, your patrons/customers/clients/patients/whoever--to say no when it isn't technically absolutely impossible to say yes. But the doctor and the nanny in this story were both right to stick to their guns about this one well-planned and anticipated day off, and the rest was just a cascade of failure that ultimately stems from the decision to intentionally understaff the hospital, and to ignore warning signs of an impending staffing crisis.

And remember, "we can't find people to hire" almost always means "we're not offering a high enough paycheck".

K-12 schools fundamentally cannot teach:

...especially not as separate skills you learn once and apply later.

This makes these fundamentally different from:

You can only understand the news when you have practice and context. If I give you instructions on reading a scientific paper you will still be lost if your background is in animal behavior and the paper is from CERN. A computer literacy lesson about PowerPoint from 2005 won't help you with Blender.

I thought “the scientific method” was like, the concept of doing experiments with controls and documentation or something.

I didn't express my point well enough, and I made my life harder unnecessarily. I lumped together things that are true for different, overlapping reasons.

Computer Literacy

You cannot really teach computer literacy for a variety of reasons. The first is empirical. You evidently cannot. I have interacted with people who knew how to use computers in spite of school, and I have interacted with people who didn't.

The next reason is the rapid pace of change. If you had a "how to use computers" lesson in middle school in 2006, then almost none of that is useful 20 years later. You may have read things about modems and floppy disks in a textbook that was already outdated back then, and none of it would help you with an iPad. It gets worse. Modern UX is all about making computer literacy irrelevant. You don't have your files. You don't know what a program is.

Don't forget that many adults can't use computers, either. Boomer and gen-x people don't know how to use computers, but assumed new children were somehow born with knowledge of Windows Xp. For a brief moment, some millennials were considered "digital natives", but then the next generation grew up with iPads, and they didn't magically absorb knowledge about printers, projectors, VGA cables, ethernet, and Excel. Adults who didn't know how to use computers continued to assume that the zoomers were born with this knowledge.

Computer literacy is ill-defined anyway, and many skills and areas of knowledge that fall under "computer literacy" are not taught explicitly. You wouldn't think children will pick up basic stuff like percentages and triangles and sine waves, and then you can start maths class with the fun stuff like probability density functions. Hell, you start school with teaching children letters.

To really learn to use computers with confidence, you need an environment where you can fuck up, up to and including installing a virus or formatting your hard drive. You don't really actually need to format your hard drive, but you need an environment where you have the power to do this. At the very least, you need some kind of VirtualBox VM where you can do these things. In my high school's computer class, we had an extremely locked-down system that was clearly developed for Windows 3.1 and somehow ported to Windows NT, and it let is only run the programs the teacher explicitly allowed us to run, when he allowed it.

Critical Thinking

It's difficult to teach "critical thinking skills" when you're standing at the blackboard in a top-down classroom structure. When you tell children to critically evaluate what they read or watch, but the rest of the time you tell them the authoritative truth – and what you say WILL BE ON THE TEST – then they learn about critical thinking, but they get habituated into not thinking critically. They learn to listen, and they learn to regurgitate whatever you told them about critical thinking.

Well, the above would be true if critical thinking were a primarily a skill and a habit. It isn't critical thinking is about 15% skill, 30% habit, and 55% background knowledge. Sure, some of it is to learn about patterns of scams, hoaxes, and misconceptions, but most is about learning what is true, and to think, when you hear some new information, if that jibes with the other true things you already know.

You don't learn the habit of critical thinking in a classroom environment, and you cannot employ it in a classroom environment, and a lot of critical thinking is predicated on a certain level of personal development and emotional maturity, but you cannot learn "thinking for yourself" and "standing up for yourself" in a classroom environment, either.

If emotional maturity is the result of an emotional maturation process, then you cannot really teach it. You just need to wait.

But politicians and activists and education reformers often say "teach critical thinking" as if it were a monolithic skill, as if you could teach critical thinking on its own, out of context.

You can teach some of it. You can teach common scams/scam awareness, common misconceptions, logical fallacies, rhetorical tricks, and so on. That alone just won't get you very far, because critical thinking is not just a skill.

News Media Literacy

This works the same way as critical thinking. It used to work different in the 90s. I remember lessons about newspapers and sensational TV news, and then English lessons on broadsheets and tabloids. I also remember story after story newspapers got wrong, because one newspaper mistranslated something exciting that supposedly had happened half a world away. The world has changed.

These days, there's a lot of research, often with ready-made teaching materials, ready to be crammed into 7th grade curricula, about "spotting fake news" or "Internet literacy".

As with general "critical thinking", I think this is a fool's errand, because it is too skills-focused. These materials teach heuristics to "spot fakes" or "spot photoshops". Some strategies or rules of thumb are genuinely useful. Instead of trusting your friend who shared something on facebook, you should ask yourself if your friend has any knowledge on the subject matter, and if not, you should examine the source. Is it a random web site, or a reliable source?

But that only takes you so far. You can't reliably determine that a web site is fake or unreliable, especially if you don't have any domain knowledge to begin with. There is, just a priori, no reliable syntactic way to distinguish real news from fake news, and you cannot with any confidence know that Mitch McConnell didn't drop dead just after I posted this and as you are reading it, unless you know from a trusted source that he is still alive, or already dead.

Certain schools of "news media literacy" just focus on things that don't work, and textbooks may still focus on outdated ideas about print media, but the main problem is that even mainstream journalists struggle with obvious stories, so you can bet your ass teachers will the story isn't aligned with their politics, like the Steele Dossier alleging the existence of a Trump Piss Tape (fake) or the Hunter Biden Laptop story (real) or the Clinton mails released by Russian hackers (real, but obviously ratfucking). I switched out my examples from REDACTED with American culture war stuff, so it's more relatable and I don't doxx myself.

Basically, you can't trust any screenshot of a supposedly reputable source, and you can't determine that a story is true or false by its content or syntactic features alone. Sometimes fake news are really obvious, and sometimes the only way to understand what is going on is to do a lot of research to determine the truth. Sometimes, a story is fake, but there is a lot of incidental truth in there, and you have to work hard to spot the lie in a sea of bullshit and truths taken straight from Wikipedia.

If you actually taught children to be appropriately skeptical of the news, that could turn into a net negative where they don't trust even true news as adults (because the even correct reporting is insufficiently transparent and rigorous), or it could result in a situation that is perceived as a net negative by the people in charge of the curriculum, even though they are appropriately skeptical of certain news stories.

My own pessimism is largely the result of my own experiences in school, plus my knowledge of new developments in education since I left. The teachers who were supposed to teach me how to read a newspaper in the 90s and 2000s would themselves often get their information (and outrage) from glossy women's magazines or tabloids (think The Sun or The Daily Mail).

I have personally grown a lot more pessimistic about this topic since then, especially in 2009, 2013, 2016, and 2021. In 2009, thinking critically about media fell out of fashion, because old media people felt increasing pressure from the Internet, and old media circled the wagons. It was a whole thing. Starting around 2013, a lot of research into falsehoods on social media (complete with "think before you share" teaching materials), was just completely omitting the ground truth. Researchers often took the "truth" for granted in their experiments, without explaining how they knew what is true and what is not. Then, in 2016, the phrase "Fake News" was coined to refer to spoofs/copies of reputable news sources, like phishing sites except they don't want your information, they give you bad information. Then the Trump camp took Fake News and made it his own, along with "alternative facts", which didn't originally mean lies, but bullshit. Finally, there was a renewed push in 2021 to "combat misinformation" about Covid, often lumping misinformation and disinformation with what some people called "malinformation": Information that is technically true, but misleading.

The Scientific Method

I don't think there is such a thing as "the" scientific method. The demarcation between science and pseudoscience varies from field to field, and what counts as good method or sufficient evidence also varies. In order to teach "the scientific method", you have to teach broadly. There is a difference between lab experiments on animal behaviour and observing animals in the wild. There is a difference between geology and chemistry. There even is a place for vivid descriptions of case studies anecdotes, in the vein of Alexander Luria and Oliver Sacks, even though Sacks was a fabulist.

K-12 schools are ill-equipped to teach about the scientific process, not just materially, but structurally, because they teach the settled science, not the part that is still tentative. K-12 schools don't teach all the failed experiments, or those that went nowhere. Your physics textbook usually has a "clean" version of every experiment, constructed with the benefit of hindsight, and high schools usually don't teach that experiments can fail.

Now my own school was different, because I am a weirdo who went to a boarding school for weirdos, and my high school physics teacher was really scrupulous about experiments. We were supposed to write down our own observations, even if they disagreed with the textbook, and the point of the experiment was never to blindly replicate what our textbook said, and to tinker with the experimental apparatus until we get the "correct" results. Even so, our teacher had us set up experiments knowing what the result would be, and he confessed to us, upon our graduation, that he once faked the result of an experiment, because the actual effect was orders of magnitude too weak to actually produce a clear and measurable result, especially with the quality of equipment we had.

Universities teach the actual complexity of experiments, and the way things can fail, but K-12 schools usually don't.

As for epistemology, other pupils at the boarding school actually did Popper in their "philosophy and ethics" class (there was a lot of wiggle room in the curriculum), but I took theology and existentialism instead, purely because it was easier. Unfortunately, that teacher also taught arts and French and didn't understand the point of epistemology except as a philosophical exercise. Meanwhile, our teachers in physics and biology mentioned falsification, without ever connecting it to anything taught in other subjects on the humanities side of the building.

I know I am kind of contradicting my previous statements about science here. Science is a process, not a canon of authoritative facts. I stand by this. It is a process. The problem is that "science is a process" or "science is a verb" will not help you evaluate a claim about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, or desert-dwelling amphibia, or about whales being descended from ungulates. You need to have all this background knowledge so your knowledge of "scientific method" is actually useful.

In order to teach "the scientific method" in an actionable way, you need to touch upon topics like statistics, error propagation, blinding, control groups, lab safety and cleanliness, and so on, and you need to teach how messy a lot of scientific research is. If you want to do this, you need to do so starting in 3rd grade, and ramp up in 6th, and build on top of the previously learned knowledge. There is more to science than just experimenting and writing things down.

You just can't do a unit on "epistemology" in 10th grade, not matter whether it is taught by the guy who also teaches you the Bible, or the lady who also teaches you about frogs. You can't do a unit on "the scientific method" in 7th grade, and then assume

Even if you learn about Bacon, Popper, Kuhn, or Kolmogorov in school, it isn't connected to the lessons about animal behaviour or optics or or geology.

Science, Part II: Applied Science

Okay, the above sounds rather nitpicky. Imagine the following scenarios:

My contention is that you cannot teach "science" or "the scientific method" as a self-contained unit or lesson, or as a skill, in such a way that it would help the student (and the adult he or she grows into later in life) answer these questions. The answer to "What is the scientific method" is not by itself actionable.

The Big Picture

I. Education academia often teaches "critical thinking" or "computer literacy" or "poetry" as a skill you can learn and practice, and not as a habit, or as knowledge. If you have all the knowledge, then it is easy to see it that way, too. It is of course easy to err on the side of rote, and to teach "how to interpret the meaning of books and poems" by rote, so that your students will take away "blue curtains represent sadness, white flowers represent death, death is an important theme", when the actual importance of death in a story about a family over three generations is not symbolic, but following necessary from the events: When somebody dies, other people are thrust into positions of responsibility, have to manage the estate, have to deal with the fallout, will grieve the loss, will learn about family secrets. Similarly, you can go overboard and teach science as a canon of authoritative facts, but this will probably take much longer and be more useful than teaching "the scientific method" or science as a skill. In order to evaluate a news headline, or a TV show set during one historical era or another, you need a scaffolding of background knowledge. You need to be able to say "based on what I know, that doesn't sound right". Critical thinking as a skill is not that.

II. Trying to fix a deficit of "critical thinking" can make it worse, and will often make it worse. When you propose another "unit" or "lesson" or "module" on critical thinking, you're not really solving the problem, but research or activism will most likely produce a single item, a lesson, multiple lessons, or a collection of worksheets and lesson plans, but not a completely overhauled curriculum. Of course, sometimes reform is possible, and sometimes activist groups make a big deal out of integrating their demands into the curriculum instead of tacking them on. Even in the best case, you will end up with "critical thinking" in the English (or whatever your first language is) classroom, or the "scientific method" in the philosophy and ethics elective (or whatever it is called), and none of this spills over into biology. When you learn about owls, all the other stuff from English class goes out of the window. When you read about Herodotus in 6th grade history class, there is no connection to the 8th grade critical thinking module.

Even when critical thinking and skepticism are integrated into the curriculum, throughout the curriculum, when teachers try to get students to "think critically", students will usually stress out over what will be on the test, or what the teacher wants to hear, and will try to "guess the password".

III. The best teachers I had were not those who cared a lot about their students. The best teachers I had were those who were the most knowledgeable about their subjects, those who cared a lot about their subjects. I also had teachers who were knowledgeable but unpleasant, and teachers who were motivated but clueless, and young teachers who tried to be nice but got tired and jaded and aged 20 years before my own eyes. Anyway, the best teachers I had knew their stuff, but they also treated questions about their subjects as something you can look up or find out on your own, and as something you can think about. They didn't treat the textbook as gospel. To a good teacher, questions like "What if I put blue curtains on stage in a stage play?" or "When a tree grows, does its mass come from the soil?" have answers. A pupil can arrive at the right answer independently from the teacher, and reason about it. The worst teachers I ever had just didn't know about their subject, or didn't themselves believe that the subject they taught you was actually useful.

IV. Many teachers are quite gullible. They are horribly mired in woo, urban legends, conspiracy theories, astrology, palm reading, or alternative medicine. They read tabloids or believe something their uncle shared on facebook. They believe whatever thing they just heard about for self-serving or political reasons. Basically anything that isn't part of their designated subject is just up for grabs.

If someone tells you they're a great parent and don't fuck up a lot, they're almost certainly a shitty parent.

If someone tells you they fail a lot at parenting but they try hard, or says something like "I'm not perfect, but I'm pretty sure my kid knows that I love them unconditionally", they're probably doing a good job.

I think this is true of basically all human relationships. Everyone I know that's had successful or healthy relationships has, if asked, said that they fuck up sometimes and they have regrets and they want to do better. On the other hand, the seriously abusive people usually have a long list of stories of all the fucked-up people they've been involved with, and somehow, in those stories, the faults are almost always entirely the other party's.

It sorta rhymes with the thing about the town with two barbers, and one of them looks great and the other has a shitty haircut. The one that has the shitty haircut is the skilled barber, because they got their shitty haircut from the other one.

Seriously, talk to any good parent a bit about their parenting. They'll have so many regrets, and things they wish they'd done better at. And that's why they do better -- because they can admit they need to improve.

actually I want this on my main and out of tags. to be clear, I agree with most of this post, but the part of it that's wrong feels like it could be dangerous.

a parent who says they're trying hard but failing a lot is VERY LIKELY to also be a shit parent. depending on your definition of "probably", the statement that "they're probably doing a good job" might be straight up wrong.

it is true that the worst parents say they're good parents. however, parents that are bad but not the worst often also say they're trying hard but often failing.

I'm speaking from personal experience here. my mom was physically and emotionally abusive. obviously, I would call her a bad parent. I will admit that I know a lot of people who had even worse parents but that doesn't change the fact that my mom was a pretty bad one.

and yeah she would've said that she was trying very hard and often failing. (she thought it was admirable to be a parent that doesn't hit their children. she knew a couple like that and she told me she didn't understand how they do it.)

and yeah she would've said her kids know she loves them unconditionally. which, no the fuck we didn't. well, to be fair I'm not sure about my siblings, but I certainly didn't. to this day, at 25 years old, I still feel that her love for me was very much conditional when I was a child. she says otherwise.

(I don't think she's consciously lying. I think part of it is her making a narrative of her actions that put her in a good light, which we all tend to do to some extent, especially when the actions were long ago and your memory is spotty, and part of it is just the everyday discrepancy between your intentions and your actions as experienced by others who don't have the context of your intentions.)

so you've got a part of the logic wrong op. it is true that to be a good parent you need to recognize that you can and do fuck up. but! that alone will not make you a good parent.

and if you assume someone is a good parent because they respond to that question in a reasonable way, you might miss abuse happening under your nose.

huh! i guess i'll concede that could happen. of the parents i personally know, all the ones who think they're failing are actually doing way above average, anyway.

and i will definitely say: never assume that someone absolutely cannot be being abusive. always actually check your work on that.

some of my friends visited me a while back and have since mentioned in passing they were, in addition to visiting, doing a vibe check on whether my relationship with my housemate was abusive. this is great. i am not offended, i am not hurt, i am glad they are doing this!

Animal Crackers for Zoologists

in my little pony universe youd go to a job interview and theyd be like so how does your cutiemark reflect your dedication to this position. And every time youd have to spew some bullshit about how your cutiemark of two tennis rackets actually means youre a team player and good at multitasking and view the market like a playing field. or whatever. and you wouldnt even get the job

Thanks to Equestria v Sugar Sprinkle, cutie mark interview questions are considered hiring discrimination, so if anypony asks you any cutiemark related questions or even alludes to any questions about your cutiemark such as "In your own words, describe your life purpose" you can and should refuse to answer. Know your rights, ponies.

Equestrian case-law on this is pretty spotty though. Most decisions like Equestria vs Sugar Sprinkle, or Belle vs Glimmer, are slapdash additions to the legal code after the Saddle Arabian Oil Crisis ushered in the collapse of the command economy. Constitutional law clearly had no provisions for "cutie mark discrimination" given that the previous economic order was literally propping up empty nightclubs with subsidies just to generate jobs for all the ponies whose "true calling" was being a fucking DJ! And while the "Invisible Hoof" Faction did their best to throw together the series of bills to saddle the rough ride into a free market economy, it was absolutely a "results over proper procedure" affair. And they *certainly* never had the supermajority of the High Council they would have needed to enshrine any of those bills in the constitution!

Now that we are ~30 years out from those heady days, and "maintain the social order at all costs" is no longer the name of the game, do you really wanna be the poster child for the Discord Faction's brand new Celestia's Court petition to overturn precedent? Push this too far and we are gonna be back to the days of firing Earth Ponies from white collar jobs for "lacking cultural fit". Nopony wants that!

Keep it chill out there if it isn't egregious, is all I am saying.

Zvi's been having fun with his substack thumbnails as the details revealed around the Huggingface hack keep getting worse and worse.

listen. i am firmly pro-jaywalker. it is your god-given right as a pedestrian and as an American to place your body in the path of an oncoming car.

however. and i must stress that this is a request (under no circumstances am i going to hit you with my vehicle). if you are capable (young, able-bodied, etc). i do think it is prosocial to have a little bit of pep in your step. to adopt a canter and not a saunter. thank you for your attention to this matter.

I think it ought to be said explicitly that this is a promise you can't keep.

It's a mistake to talk about the etiquette and political implications of jaywalking without acknowledging the physical realities of human reaction time and vehicles' braking distance.

recently vancouver had a trans march and due to some planning fuckup(??) for 5 minutes before a police car arrived a busy intersection was held closed not by a police car but by volunteers holding signs like "road closed parade ahead pls wait 5 minutes and/or turn right and make a slight detour"

bc these were volunteers without visible guns no less than 5 drivers used the threat of vehicular manslaughter to push past into a block occupied with pedestrians, which wouldn't even get them where they wanted to go faster but got them temporarily 50m closer to where they wanted to go at risk to pedestrian lives.

this is the driver's psyche, the madness of the wheel and the gas pedal!

When sharks says they are not gonna hit you with their vehicle, they're recognizing that their class position as "motorist" has enculturated them into a system of values where "tap the gas to give the jaywalker a bit of pep in their step" is a verb accessible to them--one sharks would never reach for, but one that is within reach.

& two things are true.

"People driving cars" is not a fucking oppressor class jesus fucking christ what is WRONG with you

Anyway yeah whether or not jaywalking is morally defensible is an utterly irrelevant argument. Jaywalking is stupid. Jaywalking in a situation where there is more than zero traffic is putting your life at risk, and the circumstances where it is so absolutely vital that you get where you're going those few minutes faster that it is worth that risk to your life are few and far between. Just don't do it.

before you get mad at someone for holding a POV that seems ridiculous, it may be worthwhile to check their tags and see if they are, in fact, being ridiculous on purpose. kaiasky's tags:

done more serious reading/watching in the past 24 hours than i have in a while... i'm rusty

nostalgebraist's writing has a heft to it in a way that say, Zvi's doesn't. i might need to reread this one a couple times

platforms punishing users (eg removing icons on Tumblr) for not safe for work content or hiding posts behind id or facial rec walls (bluesky and discord now ig) makes for an interesting incentive to just never tag or provide warnings on any media you post with adult themes

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfoGGrJfuNzofpzWL/models-may-behave-differently-in-graded-episodes-a-tirade