timelets

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:21:15 GMT

Now, before each class I give Claude a particular narrative I'd like to cover and ask it to generate jokes within the overall context of the lecture/course. Every time, it comes up with at least one or two good ones, which I wouldn't be able to make myself. That didn't work last year.

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Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:59:07 GMT

“Ultimately, the task of parenting hasn’t changed, despite the demoralization of AI. It’s still about: How can we raise adaptable, grounded humans, who can respond to disruption—and, even more important, who believe they can respond to disruption,” says Dr. Elkins.

Resiliency is the key to functioning in a world moving so quickly under their feet.

Dr. Elkins assures me this will be easier than I think. “If you see your kid is doing a great job tolerating frustration, say, the videogame console breaks and instead of throwing it against the wall they fix it, that’s an opportunity to be like, ‘Hey, you dealt with that really well,’” she says. “Or when you notice flexibility—they were supposed to go to a friend’s house and someone got sick, but they pivoted nicely. You can say, ‘I saw you rebounded really well.’”

She suggests encouraging your kids to take initiative rather than waiting for instructions, to take healthy risks and do things more independently. “These are core skills that research tells us over and over are related to long-term adaptability,” says Dr. Elkins.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/ai-parenting-anxiety-c054a54b

The school of hard knocks is back in favor. In education, it's a lot less about a specific skill than general adaptability. Everyone is an explorer now and from that perspective building a team of explorers is the key skill. Also, once you find something valuable, you should switch into the _exploit_ mode as fast as you can (per Alison Gopnik) and rebuild your team.

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Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:50:22 GMT

We asked Amodei and four other leaders in AI how they think about their own children’s futures and what advice they give them.
...
--There are two areas that I think will be vibrant in the short to medium term. One is energy. The other is healthcare.

-- In terms of what he should study in college... I’d rather it be something in the space of mathematics because logical thinking is something that will be required in any future role because of how AI works.

-- My kids are interested in broad careers like law and medicine, so I’m less worried. I think generalist jobs, where there are many different skills bundled together, are good jobs in an AI world. .. A liberal-arts education matters more than ever.

-- Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking.

For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important.

-- So, if anything—and this sounds funny to say about future teenagers—I might orient my kids toward more socializing and understanding how they relate to people in their own unique way.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/what-ai-executives-tell-their-own-kids-about-the-jobs-of-the-future-1ba43f65

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Tue, 27 Jan 2026 21:17:30 GMT

Yale University is going tuition-free for undergraduates from families with incomes of less than $200,000, following recent moves by peers including Harvard University to broaden access.

Enhanced financial aid will ensure that students from such families will “receive need-based scholarships that meet or exceed the cost of tuition,” Yale said in a statement Tuesday. The changes, which take effect in the 2026-2027 academic year, will also eliminate all expected costs for families with typical assets and incomes below $100,000.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-27/yale-to-offer-free-tuition-to-families-making-less-than-200-000

Median income in the US is less than $100K, which means a young talented American person can get free education from the Ivies, where typical full tuition is $100/year. Essentially, rich foreigners are paying for Americans and when Trump prevents them from entering the US he forces tuition fees on the middle class.

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Sat, 10 Jan 2026 20:00:11 GMT

“The school was in a sad state. Red Guards had trashed much of its equipment, which symbolized old ideas and old customs. Most of the desks and chairs had gone missing. Teachers had tried to hide cartloads of the school’s books, but these had been found and burned. Around half the teachers, some thirty instructors, had been denounced and persecuted. Two math teachers had been killed, and a history teacher had died of illness during forced labor.”

--- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

That was back in 1979, right after Mao's death which resulted in the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the end of the Cultural Revolution.

upd:

“Deng held the nation’s first National Science Conference in March 1978...
In a rousing speech, Deng told the scientists that they were not part of the bourgeoisie, as they had been previously labeled, but part of the working class. “Everyone who works, whether with his hands or with his brain, is part of the working people in a socialist society,” Deng declared".

ibid.

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Mon, 05 Jan 2026 04:06:05 GMT

Predictions for AI trends in 2026 by the IBM Tech channel

https://youtu.be/zt0JA5rxdfM?si=y1J28AmKk_WAFk75

We'll have to come back to it in 10-11 months.

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Sun, 04 Jan 2026 03:13:36 GMT

Back to the Allison Gopnik interview, she makes two good points about a) school education in general and b) science education in particular:

I think it’s not a coincidence, for instance, that so many kids really want to do music and sports, even though we all say, “No, learn how to code. That’s the thing that will actually be helpful to you.” Because music and sports are among the few examples where we actually do this kind of apprenticeship. You do the thing, you get feedback, you try and do the thing again.

One of the things I say is, imagine if we tried to teach baseball the way that we teach science. How do we teach science? What we would do is, we would tell everybody about great baseball games when they were little. Maybe when they were in high school, they could throw the ball a lot to second base. When they were in college, they could reproduce great baseball plays, but they wouldn’t actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school. If you taught baseball that way, you wouldn’t think that people would be as good at baseball.
...
I think the current way that we do schooling is a good example of Goodhart’s law. We teach kids — because kids are so good at wanting to be skilled — we teach them how to be good at school, which we think is going to be correlated with the ability to do a wide range of things as an adult. Then it ends up being a separate kind of skill.

There's another interesting spot in the conversation where she discusses ADHD, and to me her thoughts rhyme with the Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) story:

...we know and we just take for granted that little kids like two-year-olds — we say that they don’t pay attention, but what we really mean is that they don’t not pay attention. They’re paying attention to everything at once. That’s why two-year-olds are really distractible.

Then, as we get older, we get this more and more focused kind of attention. People vary in how much they end up within that state of focused attention. I think there’re lots of reasons to believe that an industrial schooled society really pushes people in the direction of having very focused attention. We really want people to have very focused attention.

In the LRRH story, the wolf initially takes advantage of the young girl because she's easily distractible. Ultimately, she overcomes her "distractibility" and develops focused attention skills, partially before and mostly after her resurrection, depending on the version. In essence, the fairy tale presents a recipe for modern education, which took off back in the Charles Perrault days. Is this a coincidence or confluence?

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Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:00:16 GMT

I want a whiteboard like that in my class!

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Tue, 04 Feb 2025 07:45:08 GMT

( Read more... )
However, this would require shifting incentives away from maximizing engagement and toward epistemic responsibility, which is difficult given current business models.

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It would be an interesting challenge to come with up a technology and a business model that solves the problem.

Also related https://youtu.be/qlPHGnChhI4?si=03mDoaAYAFJnEfCE&t=4004

truth conditions (theoretical intentionality) vs satisfaction conditions (practical intentionality)

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Tue, 24 Sep 2024 06:49:04 GMT

Company X invented a cancer diagnostics method that predicts with 100% accuracy cases where treatment is not necessary. It's a 50% improvement over previous methods. Clearly, company X created a lot of value because it enabled patients/insurance to save lots of money as well as hustle (pain and suffering). Nevertheless, capturing a portion of this value is a challenge because people don't want to pay for treatments they don't need.

Assignment: come up with at least three ways to monetize the new diagnostics method, based on the savings.

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Fri, 06 Sep 2024 07:17:57 GMT

Люди, обсуждающие американскую политику делятся на две части: 1) те, кто понимают, что законы (bills), касающиеся бюджетных денег, принимает Конгресс, а не президент и 2) те, кто не понимают.

Еще интересно, что в рассуждениях по п.2 Байден настолько выжил из ума, что коварно украл все деньги.

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Thu, 05 Sep 2024 20:02:10 GMT

According to the WSJ, best US colleges are mostly in CA or MA.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/wsj-best-colleges-2025-princeton-babson-stanford-52443de8

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Fri, 01 Mar 2024 06:05:43 GMT

Because the epistemic value of drawing in science is generally understood in terms of the drawing as an object and not, as is argued at various points in this volume, in the drawing process itself, the unique epistemological value of drawing has become increasingly under-appreciated (Anderson 2014; Tversky 2010; Wittmann 2011). Educationally, this has had costs in terms of student engagement, a deeper understanding of the conventions of scientific representations, and the development of ‘creative reasoning’ (Ainsworth et al. 2011).... A unique advantage of drawing is its double nature as a tool for deepening understanding and for communication. Drawing helps to consolidate ideas, clarify concepts and bring visibility to thought. Drawing can extract and highlight salient information from what is discussed, observed and witnessed, and can be used to communicate and analyze an idea or a concept within a research team or to the broader public.

Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

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Wed, 21 Feb 2024 02:51:14 GMT

emphasized communicability:

But a second, especially crucial role of models, drawings, and computer graphics is to make explicit a relationship that you have found, enabling other people to see it as well. This often can be done just by making the relevant part a heavier line or a brighter color, or by deleting most of everything else, but it always requires explicit effort.

Richardson, Jane and Richardson, David C. (1992), ‘looking at proteins’, Biophysics Journal, 63, pp. 1186–209.

quoted from Drawing Processes of Life: Molecules, Cells, Organisms. 2024.

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Fri, 09 Feb 2024 06:24:57 GMT

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Good riddance

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 19:21:22 GMT

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/

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ПЦ

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 03:01:59 GMT

https://x.com/RepStefanik/status/1732138663608271149

Presidents of harvard mit and penн REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.

Never thought I'd be on Stefanik's side in this election cycle.

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Sat, 28 Oct 2023 21:58:53 GMT

Duolingo founder talks about why and how the company works

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Thu, 06 Jul 2023 21:41:19 GMT

“A learning instinct, as he[Peter Marler] meant it, isn’t an indiscriminate disposition to learn anything; it is an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge, such as songs (for birds) or language (for humans). A learning instinct not only targets a specific learning goal, it also provides the instinctive learner with appropriate perceptual and inferential mechanisms to extract the right kind of knowledge from the right kind of evidence.”
...
“How do learning instincts take advantage of experience to produce mature cognitive mechanisms?”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”

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TIL: Dewey on the function of education

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 04:16:46 GMT

https://youtu.be/7knMB7YPVH4?t=3103

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9th grade math!

Tue, 30 May 2023 16:19:00 GMT

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Wed, 08 Mar 2023 05:32:49 GMT

What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitive success? For instance, why think that knowing the capital of Pakistan is a cognitive success, rather than just another cognitive state that an agent can occupy, like having 70% confidence that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan? Not every cognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes.

[e.g]...we describe a person as “knowing” something as a way of signaling that her testimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

Machines can now be trained to generate information traditionally associated with cognitive successes by humans. Today, we know relatively well what kind of cognitive success is achievable for a majority humans. We are still in the beginning of the process of building cognitively successful computers. We simply don't know what they are capable of when trained by a small number of highly successful humans.

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О войне и Красной Шапочке

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 23:43:26 GMT

Ответы волка на вопросы Красной Шапочки были новой информацией, но не новым знанием. Знание появилось только после того, как он ее съел.

После начала войны у нас не стало намного больше информации о России. Но прибавилось огромное знание о ней. Информацию можно было игнорировать, а знание - нет. The asymmetry between past and present knowledge is dramatic.

В определенной степени это относится к переходу from Google to the so-called generative AI.

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Kan't's philosophy and law

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 04:00:07 GMT

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TIL: Why isn't the world covered in poop?

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 02:20:05 GMT

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