«Tрудные задачи» предшествуют не только браку, но и сирене царей, воцарению героя. Ниже мы увидим, что воцарение сопровождается умерщвление старого царя.
...
Причина насильственной замены старого царя новым кроется в том, что царь, который был одновременно жрецом, магом, от которого зависело благополучие полей и стад, при наступлении старости или незадолго до нее, как полагали, начинал терять свою магическую потенцию, что грозило бедствием всему народу. Поэтому он заменялся более сильным преемником.
Нам кажется, что фольклорный материал дает право на утверждeние, что этот преемник должен был дать доказательство своей магической силы, и что здесь также кроются корни «трудных задач».

-- В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.

As Vincent Wang reminded me, ChatGPT leapfrogged GPT3 in performance by introducing reinforcement learning (RL) to fine-tune its outputs as an interlocutor, and RL is the machine learning approach to “solving agency”. It is a form of agency never seen before, because it is successful and can “learn” and improve its behaviour without having to be intelligent to do so. It is a form of agency that is alien to any culture in any past, because humanity has always and everywhere seen this kind of agency — which is not that of a sea wave, which makes the difference, but can make nothing but that difference, without being able to “learn” to make a different or better difference —as a natural or even supernatural form of agency.
...

We have decoupled the ability to act successfully from the need to be intelligent, understand, reflect, consider or grasp anything. We have liberated agency from intelligence.

Luciano Floridi, 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00621-y

This paper considers some of the reasons why motivated students in suitable learning environments may fail to learn from competent teachers.

...the constructivist perspective that learning is a process of knowledge
construction in the mind of the learner (Pope 1982; von Glaserfeld 1989, Fensham, Gunstone &
White 1994), and assumes that we are concerned with ‘meaningful’ rather than ‘rote’ learning
(Ausubel 1961).



The primary distinction is between situations when the intended learning does not take place
because
(a) the learner can not make sense of the presented material in terms of existing ideas; or
(b) the learner interprets the new material in terms of existing, but alternative, ideas.
( Read more... )

Keith S. Taber, Homerton College, University of Cambridge, U.K. 2000.
https://science-education-research.com/downloads/publications/2001/Taber-2001-TheMismatchBetweenAssumedPriorKnowledge-AMV.pdf

"Pivoting requires gyroscopes,...

Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion. Such princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”

---- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

A certain merchant, who was addicted to jealousy, had a wife that was a model of beauty and loveliness; and of the excess of his fear and jealousy of her, he would not abide with her in any town, but built her a pavilion without the city, apart from all other buildings. And he raised its height and strengthened its doors and provided them with curious locks; and when he had occasion to go into the city, he locked the doors and hung the keys about his neck....

So he called up one of his pages, who brought him ink-case[203] and paper and wrote her a letter, setting forth his condition for love of her. Then he set 168it on the pile-point of an arrow and shot it at the pavilion, and it fell in the garden, where the lady was then walking with her maidens...
...
came under the window and said to her, “Let me down a thread, that I may send thee this key; which do thou take and keep by thee.” So she let down a thread and he tied the key to it.
...
So the Prince returned to his palace and fixing the padlock, the key whereof he had given the lady, on a chest he had by him, entered therein. Then the Wazir locked it upon him and setting it on a mule, carried it to the pavilion of the merchant.

...

she hurried the Prince back into the chest, but, in her confusion, forgot to lock it. .... So they took up the box by the lid, whereupon it flew open and lo! the Prince was lying within. When the merchant saw him and knew him for the King’s son....

“Go in, thou, and take the King’s son; for none of us may lay hands on him.” So the Minister went in and taking the Prince, went away with him. As soon as they were gone, the merchant put away his wife and swore that he would never marry again.

-- 591st & 592nd nights. The King's Son and the Merchant's Wife.

--- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54525/54525-h/54525-h.htm#c167