A Few Links, 8/27/2025

Hollis Robins on AI, education, and employment; Lionel Page on friendship as a coalition; Gurwinder on the two cultures

Hollis Robbins writes,

Higher education has been selling to students “skills” at which AI will perform better. Students who complete their education online have demonstrated mastery of codified knowledge but without the human vouching that once helped them get a job afterward. There is no one to carry these learners across the final threshold into employment, no expert human to translate their skills into trust and opportunity.

…The problem is a breakdown in the social infrastructure that traditionally connected education to employment.

In the network-based university that I once sketched out, I had an approach for translating skills into trust and opportunity.

NBU will replace credentials (grades and degrees) with connections that the faculty have with employers and with other faculty. By providing students with letters of introduction and letters of recommendation, faculty will propel students forward along their career paths.

Letters of introduction and letters of recommendation must be based on closely understanding the capabilities and goals of the student. Lectures and tests would be unlikely to help faculty form a high-resolution picture of their students.

Lionel Page writes,

starting from the underlying reality of friendship groups: they are coalitions, and coalitions form because they are mutually beneficial. People are stronger when they are part of a group. They are less likely to be picked on, and they are more likely to find support and help in times of need.

…In his book The War of the Sexes (2012), economist Paul Seabright conjectured that women and men differ in the features of their social networks, with women having smaller networks with “strong ties” that require considerable investment to maintain and men having larger networks with “weak ties” that require less investment.

The available data supports key elements of this conjecture. In regards to the nature of friendship networks, women tend to include closer people, often family members, while men include more distant contact. In regards to activities with friends, women spend more time just talking with friends, while men are more likely to do practical things. The literature on gender differences in friendship also points to the greater willingness of women to share personal stories and emotional feelings with their friends.

…The evidence does not strongly suggest differences in the size of friendship groups or broader networks, as Seabright initially conjectured. But it does support his view that men’s ties tend to be weaker and require less maintenance, while women’s ties tend to be stronger and more demanding of investment.

Gurwinder writes,

All the political writers I follow, left or right, are pessimistic. All the scientific and startup writers I follow are optimistic. This is because the former focus on problems, and the latter on solutions.

Yes, you are more likely to feel upbeat after reading MIT Technology Review than Cato Regulation Magazine.

In 1959, C.P. Snow published The Two Cultures, on the cultural gap between literary intellectuals and scientists. He raised the concern that the literary intellectuals were too dismissive of scientists, who he argued contributed more to progress.

Some related notes:

• Dan Wang’s Breakneck, about China’s rise, points out that its political leadership comes from engineering backgrounds, while America’s come from legal backgrounds.

• The humanist/scientist difference had been noted in 1957 by Merle Kling in an essay in The New Republic called The Intellectual: Will He Wither Away

the contemporary intellectual has lost his claim on the future. It is my thesis (and one contrary to that which has been advanced in these pages recently) that the intellectual is isolated from the main currents of social change, and that he is incapable of comprehending or interpreting present directions of change. His predictions in the past were not always right, but they were plausible. Today, thanks to the wholly unprecedented transformations wrought by science and technology, he lacks the most elementary and indispensable prerequisites for making "league with the future."

When I conclude that the hook of intellectuals into the future has slipped, I of course employ the term "intellectuals" in a limited sense. … I am trying to identify primarily the conventional men of words who set themselves up as poets, philosophers, historians, teachers of literature--writers of what H. L. Mencken used to call beautiful letters, novelists, verbal interpreters of the social scene.

To this day, a major project of literary intellectuals is to assert their continued relevance and insist on their entitlement to high status. Some of the most strident criticism of the machine learning models comes from scholars who have made almost no effort to try to work with them.

I believe that the more valuable individuals have been those who could be fluent in the languages of humanism and the language of computers. As AI advances, the distance between those languages shrinks, and it becomes easier for a humanist to take advantage of what computers have to offer. But if a literary intellectual refuses to participate in the computer culture, he will just end up wailing and flailing. As my father put it,

if he is not in league with the future, can he be right?

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Friendship politics

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The Canary in the Classroom